The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To to waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than he
can understand.

The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick

One of the saddest legacies of the Twentieth Century was the invention, by necessity, of a new literature, the literature of the Holocaust. We find, next to the histories of the war in general and the liquidation of the Jews specifically, personal memoirs of survivors (an inadequate designation) and those who did not survive. We have the works and testimonies of Weisel, Levi, Appelfeld, and a nondescript girl from Amsterdam whose name is etched forever into the annals of human sorrow. Included in this literature are secondary works, echoes of the loss, which reveal the scars which have passed to second and third generations, and which continue to manifest themselves.



The author and artist Bruno Schultz lived 50 years before his life was ended by a bullet from the gun of a Gestapo officer. This death occurred not in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but on the streets of the Polish village of Drohobycz, where Schultz, carrying a luxurious loaf of bread and living on borrowed time, was under the apparently inadequate protection of another officer who admired his visual artistry. The author of Cinnamon Shops (aka The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, two surreal autobiographical works set on the streets of Drohobycz, died on one of those very same streets.


Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) is another of the echoes of loss. It concerns one Lars Andemening, a book reviewer for a mediocre Swedish newspaper, who has immersed himself in the literature of Central Europe and who had come to the conclusion that he is the son of Bruno Schultz, who died on a cold November day in 1942, killed by a nonchalant Gestapo officer and who, in addition to two published works, is rumored to have left the manuscript of an lost work entitled The Messiah.

Lars shares his obsession with the owner of a small bookshop, an elderly German refugee named Heidi. Heidi also claims to carry the scars of the Holocaust. As a girl, she lived near one of the camps, and would venture out on dark nights to lob packages of food over the barbed wire, listening for the sound of the Jews pouncing upon the packages like hungry dogs. Heidi is an irascible sort, with a rumored husband whom Lars never sees and who feeds him documents and letters pertaining to Schultz smuggled out of Poland. This is the totality of Lars’ life: reviewing the works of Kundera and Kis for an unappreciative public, sleeping through the afternoons, and meeting Heidi in the hopes of obtaining new relics of his “father”.

Soon enough, events occur which cause Lars to re-evaluate his paradigm, his lost childhood and his lost father. A woman has arrived in Stockholm, a Polish immigrant, and she carries with her, in a white plastic bag, a manuscript salvaged from an old tin box and old shoes. It is the last known work of her father, the writer and artist Bruno Schultz – the manuscript of The Messiah.*


The theme of Ozick’s short novel is the question of how one reconstructs one’s life and identity when true identity has been stolen. How do we claim a birthright, a personal history? How do we insert ourselves into that mystical flow of heredity when our unknown fathers and mothers have been obliterated from the face of the earth? And how do we react when our carefully constructed reality is challenged by that of another orphan?


Ozick’s novel takes some turns which it would be inappropriate to reveal. Questions remain, particularly regarding an agonizing decision for Lars, who, when faced with the dubious manuscript of The Messiah and what appears to be a cabal of swindlers, takes an irreversible action that necessitates the creation of an entirely new persona to mitigate the potentially devastating psychic effects of that action. While perhaps not a major addition to the canon of Holocaust literature, The Messiah of Stockholm is nevertheless worth a read as an echo of the loss, a testament to the memory of one man among millions who died a tragic and undeserved death.

*Ozick’s speculation regarding the theme and content of this work, revealed through Lars’ reading of it, is wonderfully imaginative.

Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire

You are weary at last of this ancient world
Shepherdess O Eiffel tower whose flock of bridges bleats at the morning

You have lived long enough with Greek and Roman antiquity

Here even automobiles look old
Only religion stays news religion
As simple as hangars at the airfield

Alone in Europe you Christianity are not antique
The one modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom windows watch what shame keeps you
From entering a church and confessing your sins this morning
Handbills catalogues advertisements that sing overhead
Furnish your morning's poetry for prose there are newspapers
Dime detective novels packed with adventure
Biographies of great men a thousand and one titles

This morning I saw a fine street whose name slips my mind
New and bright the sun's clarion
Where executives and workers sweet stenographers
Hurry every weekday dawn and dusk
Three times a morning sirens groan
A choleric bell barks at noon
Billboards posters and
Doorplates twitter like parakeets
There is charm to this Paris factory street
Between rue Aumont-Thiéville and the avenue des Ternes

Here is the young street and you still a baby
Dressed by your mother only in blue and white
A pious child with your oldest friend René Dalize
You like nothing so much as church ceremonies
Nine o'clock the gas turns blue you slip out of bed
To pray all night in the school chapel
While an eternal adorable amethyst depth
Christ's flaming halo revolves forever
He is the lovely lily we all worship
He is the red-haired torch no wind may blow out
Pale and scarlet son of the sorrowful mother
Tree hung with prayer
Twofold gallows of honor and eternity
Six-pointed star
God who dies Friday and rises on Sunday
Christ who flies higher than the aviators
And holds the world's record

Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows his business
And changed to a bird this century ascends like Jesus
Devils in hell raise their heads to stare
They say it imitates Simon Magus in Judea
They say if it lifts to call it a lifter
Angels soar past the young trapeze artist
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Hover near the original airplane
Or give place to those whom the Eucharist elevates
Priests rising continuously as they raise the Host
At last the plane lands with wings outspread
Through heaven come flying a million swallows
At full speed crows owls falcons
Ibises flamingoes storks from Africa
Roc so celebrated in song and story
Clutching Adam's skull the original head
Eagle from the horizon pounces screaming
Hummingbird arrives from America
From China long supple phis
Who have only one wing and fly in couples
Here comes the dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by lyrebird and ocellated peacock
That funeral pyre the phoenix engendering himself
Momentarily veils all with his ardent ash
Sirens quit their perilous perches
And arrive each singing beautifully
Everyone eagle phoenix phis
Fraternizes with the flying machine

Now you stride alone through the Paris crowds
Busses in bellowing herds roll by
Anguish clutches your throat
As if you would never again be loved
In the old days you would have turned monk
With shame you catch yourself praying
And jeer your laughter crackles like hellfire
Its sparks gild the depths of your life
Which like a painting in a dark museum
You approach sometimes to peer at closely

Today in Paris the women are bloodstained
It was as I would rather forget it was during beauty's decline

From fervent flames Our Lady gazed down on me in Chartres
Your Sacred Heart's blood drowned me in Montmartre
I am sick of hearing blessed words
My love is a shameful disease
You are sleepless anguished but possessed by an image
Which hovers never distant

By the Mediterranean
Under lemon trees that flower the year long
You take ship with friends
One from Nice one from Menton two from La Turbie
Terrified we see in the depths giant squid
And fish the Savior's symbols gliding through seaweed

In a tavern garden near Prague
You are content instead of writing your stories
To watch a rose on the table and
A rosebug asleep in the rose's heart

Agahst you trace your likeness in the mosaics at Saint Vitus
And that day almost died of grief to see yourself portrayed
As Lazarus distracted by daylight
The hands of the ghetto clock run backward
You also creep slowly backward through life
Climbing to the hradchen listening at twilight
To Czech songs from the taverns

You in Marseilles among piles of watermelons

You in Coblenz at the Giant's hotel

In Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree

In Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty but who is ugly
And engaged to a student from Leyden
One can rent rooms there in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember three days there and three at Gouda

You are in Paris arrainged before the judge
Arrested like a criminal

You went on sad and merry journeys
Before growing aware of lies and old age
Love made you unhappy at twenty again at thirty
I have lived like a fool and wasted my youth
You no longer dare examine your hands and at any moment I could weep
Over you over her whom I love over all that has frightened you

With tears in your eyes you see the shabby refugees
Who have faith in God and pray the mothers nurse their children
Their smell fills the waiting room at the gare St. Lazare
Like the three kings they believe in a star
Hoping to strike it rich in Argentina
And return home wealthy
One family carries a crimson quilt as you your heart
Quilt and our dreams are equally unreal
Some of these refugees stay on and lodge
In slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Écouffes
They keep close to home like chessmen
And are mostly Jewish their wives wear wigs
Pallid they sit at the back of little shops

You stand at the counter of a dirty bar
Taking a café for two sous among the wretched

You are in a huge restaurant at night
These women are not evil only careworn
Each has tortured her lover even the ugliest

Who is the daughter of a Jersey policeman

Her hands which I had not noticed are calloused and cracked

Pity fills me for the scars on her belly

Now I humble my mouth to a poor creature with a horrible laugh

You are alone morning comes
Milkmen clink bottles along the street

Night leaves like a lovely Métive
Ferdine the false or watchful Lea

You sip a liquor as burning as your life
Your life you drain like an eau-de-vie

And stride home to Auteil
To sleep among your fetish from Oceania or Guinea
Other forms of Christ and other faiths
Lesser Christs of dim aspirations

Farewell Farewell

Sun slit throat











Guillaume Apollinaire
1880-1918

Accumulated Wisdom

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.

Letter from Niccolo Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 1513

Tun-Huang by Yasushi Inoue

In his classic travelogue The Ruins of Desert Cathay, the archaeo-adventurer Aurel Stein describes his first visit to Tun-huang (Dunhuang) in 1908, lured by stories of cartloads of ancient Buddhist manuscripts hidden away in secret niches in the sacred “Caves of A Thousand Buddhas”. This richly decorated shrine was carved out of the low hillsides amidst a freezing, windswept desert along one of the most inhospitable stretches of the famed Silk Road. One thousand years ago, this desolate country – the topography of which is as central to this novel as anything – boasted two particularly significant aspects. For one, it lay along the main east-west trade route connecting the great civilizations of East and West, and for another it was in close proximity to the steppe region in which the prized thoroughbred horses of Liang-chou, essential to the Asian cavalries, were bred. It was for these reasons that the area was of importance to the Sung Empire of China, and it was in the potential for glory and riches that the ethnic peoples of the region engaged in seemingly endless wars for autonomy and vassalage.

It is by the most accidental of circumstances that Inoue’s protagonist, Hsing-te, comes to the inhospitable lands of extreme western China. An educated young man, he has but one more interview to go in China’s infamous examination hell to complete in order to enter into a highly desirable civil service career. He is confident of his success, having passed all previous examinations brilliantly, but on this day, fate intervenes. He dozes off under the courtyard elms as he waits for his name to be called and dreams of a meeting with the Emperor, who quizzes him on the best means of subduing the upstart peoples of the Central Asian steppes. By the time he awakens, the courtyard is empty, and the interviews are complete. He has lost his opportunity to sit for the coveted Palace Examination. He wanders despondently through the town, until his attention is caught by a spectacle at the marketplace: a barbarian from the west has an exotic woman, a naked His-hsia, whom he is selling. He is, however, selling her piecemeal, and as the crowd watches, he severs two of her fingertips to prove the seriousness of his proposal. Hsing-te is intrigued by the woman, with her dark and vaguely Caucasian appearance and intense stoicism. He purchases her. She is leery of his intentions, but when he assures her that she is free to go, she leaves him with the only real possession she has, a strip of silk with strange, undecipherable writing on it. It is, she tells him, the newly conceived script of the His-hsia. It is the combined effect of this remarkable woman (whom he never sees again, but whose numerous avatars he sees in the mud-brick towns of the His-hsia) and the strange script that pulls him to a new life among the warring peoples of the Inner Asian desert.

I shall not enumerate Hsing-te’s adventures in detail. A not particularly adept soldier, he survives, with his new commander Wang-li, waves of brutal battles on the steppes as part of the mercenary Chinese vanguard in service to the His-hsia. As they take one particular town, Hsing-te discovers a woman hiding in an unsearched watchtower. He is awed by her regal beauty, and seeks to protect her from the ravaging troops by sequestering her in a storeroom, where he visits her and nourishes her, and where, overwhelmed by her beauty, he aggressively makes love to her. Hsing-te’s facility with words and language lead to his reassignment to a distant city in order that he may learn the language of the His-hsia and compile a useful Chinese/His-hsia dictionary. He is suited to the task, but his reassignment requires that he reveal the woman to Wang-li, placing her under his protection. The woman, who is in fact a Uighur princess, has but a brief role in the narrative, but she is the Helen figure which binds four men and leads not only to a civil war in Central Asia but the preservation of one of the world’s great cultural treasures.









Stoic and beset by loss and weariness, Hsing-te becomes over the years attracted to the Buddhist doctrine (particularly the Diamond Sutra, with its theme of non-attachment), and leads an effort under the aegis of a studious local potentate to translate the scriptures into the His-hsia script. But as the civil war initiated (for reasons significant to the narrative) by Wang-li rages, it becomes imperative that the texts be saved from the ravages of war and fire. He must enlist the aid of a caravan leader, a proud and temperamental man of royal blood, whom he must trick into protecting his “treasure”, and it is with this man that Hsing-te must face his destiny…

It is a strange matter of fate that Yasushi Inoue, the Japanese author of Tun-Huang, did not visit the Central Asian locale of his adventurous tale until almost 20 years after the 1959 publication of his novel, and even then he did not have the opportunity to visit the caves themselves. His story was born of his curiosity as to how the priceless manuscripts came to be sequestered and hidden for centuries in the Thousand Buddha Caves, how there are stories in history that we cannot know, and which we must fabricate to the best of our abilities given stark historical facts, the vagaries of human nature, and the inventiveness of the human imagination. Inoue’s fabrication is as good as fact, for it rings true in its epic scope and its fine characterizations and motivations. It is a story that takes to a distant place and time outside of ourselves, that gives flesh to the bones of history, and passion to the shades of the nameless dead.

Malpertuis by Jean Ray

I read Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis (1943) over the course of two evenings, and each night I experienced strange dreams of forgotten identity. (I also became reacquainted with an ancient structure riddled with hidden passageways that has haunted my dreams since childhood.) Characterized by the publisher as a “modern Gothic novel”, this book does indeed reflect the conventions of that genre: a sprawling house exuding evil, a cast of strange characters, a naïve protagonist, and a sense of overpowering malignancy casting its shadow over the proceedings.

The narrative is epistolary, with four or five persons contributing to the arc of the story. A prologue describes the discovery by a thief of a collection of manuscripts hidden away in an ancient Belgian abbey. The proper story begins with a ship seemingly lost at sea, in search of a mysterious Aegean island that appears on no charts. There is a storm worthy of Poe, Coleridge, or Lautremont, and an ancient mariner glimpses, above the rocks of the island, gigantic and repulsive corpses. His ship lost, the mariner in his delirium relates his vision to his rescuers, one of whom, a malignant priest, repays the information the sailor provides by having him strangled and cast into the stormy froth.

We then come to Malpertuis itself, inhabited by a dying magus who holds various relatives and acquaintances in his thrall. He is a repugnant presence, and in his dying days reveals, in the contents of his will, that his unimaginably vast fortune will go to the luxurious maintenance of his heirs (with the balance going to the last survivors) under the stipulation that they must remain in residence in the old man’s sprawling and decrepit house. The house is the namesake of the abode of the evil and perhaps Satanic fox Goupil in the medieval romance of Reynard the Fox. As a primary character itself in the drama, the house is described at length. The overwhelming atmosphere is one of decrepitude and darkness. The grounds are grey and seemingly perpetually stormy, and the house is inadequately lit by meager candlelight.

The inhabitants are a queer and motley lot. The narrator is young Jean-Jacques, and it is his cruel and sensual sister Nancy who largely runs the house. The others are strange and in some cases pathetic “cousins” with various obsessions that run the gamut from an unhealthy interest in taxidermy to an overweening obsession with ensuring that some degree of illumination remains in the house as protection from an ominous dark shadow. There are, in addition, small strange daemonic creatures scuttling about in the attic and currents of sexual desire and meticulously kept antipathies passing among some of the inhabitants.

Along the way, Ray drops enough clues to point the attentive reader towards an assessment of the true nature and identities of the doomed souls occupying Malpertuis. The novel is heavy on atmosphere, a delicious atmosphere that pervades the bulk of the novel. For the thick-witted, each chapter contains a relevant epigraph or two from the likes of Hawthorne (no stranger to tales of doomed houses) and others which light the path towards the ultimate revelations. For me, the narrative begins to fragment towards the end, losing momentum as poor Jean-Jacques has to suffer through a number of swoons as Satanic powers pursue him and the inevitable explanations are painstakingly revealed. But this is a minor complaint. Malpertuis, while it may not be a high water mark in world literature, is original, creepy, and compellingly atmospheric enough, with a peculiar hallucinatory power and sense of melancholy earning it a place of honor as an obvious touchstone of the latter-day gothic romance. I am aware of one recent fantasy novel that exploits Ray’s particular conceit of the existence of the old gods, whose power waxes and wanes in accordance to the degree that mortals believe in them. Were I more conversant with that genre, I could no doubt identify others.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

A hefty (almost 700 page) epistolary novel set in Restoration Oxford. The dual plot involves shadowy political intrigue and the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of a young woman purported to be, by turns, a witch and a whore. The four narratives are, by necessity, somewhat contradictory, giving the novel a Rashomon quality as we attempt to fit together a true picture of what happened during that brief period in the midst of a bitterly cold English winter.

Pears' characterizations are finely drawn, with some individuals standing out quite vividly. A couple of the narrators are rather repugnant, however, most of the motivations and circumstances are clarified in the final narrative, that of an Oxford antiquarian. For me, the narrative did tend to drag in a few places, but not enough to abandon the effort. It helps to have some understanding of the English Commonwealth period and the circumstances surrounding the restoration of Charles II. While I wouldn't describe this as a philosophical novel, the currents of discovery relating to physiology and empiricism do play their parts, with cameo appearances by Robert Boyle and John Locke.

I will admit to being somewhat dissatisfied with the conclusion, which veers into a somewhat heavy handed mysticism. I would have no problem with a metaphysical gloss on the chain of events, but Pears' clarification of the identity of Sarah Blundy, one of the best drawn personalities in the narrative, strains credibility. Still, an enjoyable and well written tome for a winter's night reading.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus

The Basement Tapes, recorded in the summer of 1967, was a loose collection of material born of Bob Dylan’s seclusion following the burst of manic creativity that produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. It was also the product of exhaustion and a self-imposed exile following a motorcycle accident and/or a bout with drug addiction. The songs turn away from surrealism and psychedelia, finding their wellspring in what we would now characterize as roots music – the country blues, hillbilly tunes, and murder ballads recorded in the 1920’s and 30’s, but which reach back beyond the advent of the phonograph.

The Basement Tapes trickled out on publishers’ demos and bootlegs before being officially (and only partially) released on a double album in 1975, an album for which Marcus wrote the liner notes. Some of the material such as the gnomic and dirge-like “I’m Not There” have only recently seen the light of day on official releases. A definitive release of these sessions is long overdue.


Invisible Republic includes analyses of individual songs from the Dylan album wrapped up in an almost impenetrable mythologizing prose. There is also a fascinating long digression on the Virginia coal miner Dock Boggs, who abandoned his short musical career during the Depression when record sales slumped and his God-fearing wife gave him an ultimatum to put aside the Devil’s music, only to pick it up again 30 years later in the heyday of the folk revival. The centerpiece of the book, however, is a chapter on the magico-illuminatus Harry Smith, who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music as if he were preparing an alchemical treatise, complete with Renaissance woodcuts and a numerologically significant ordering of tunes. Smith’s Anthology remains, as it was in Dylan’s youth, a powerful talisman, a unique undertaking for its time which rescued dozens of country blues and murder ballads from oblivion just as upstart rock and roll was gaining its first footing as the latest iteration of Satan’s music. Anyone paying attention to Dylan’s output, especially over the last 15 years or so, will find the source of many of his best lines and imagery in the Anthology. To put it bluntly, Dylan has sampled those old 78s to a fairly astounding degree, weaving new cloth from old, and preserving therein the vernacular of a fascinating, bygone era of American folk tradition.

Marcus’s first book, Mystery Train, although a bit dated at this point, was a thoughtful and readable placement of rock and roll into its American context. (I still have a photocopy of the Robert Johnson chapter tucked into my King of the Delta Blues LP.) The great weakness of the present text is that Marcus over contextualizes the material, laying a too heavy burden on both Dylan’s Basement Tapes and their antecedent folk tunes by pushing them too hard into a mold of Americanism going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the sermons of Jonathan Edwards. His writing is maddeningly oblique and top-heavy by turns, sacrificing clarity in pursuit of a grand idea. Still for fans of old-time Appalachian mountain music and the soundtrack of (in Marcus’ memorable if overexposed phrase) “the old, weird America”, this is essential reading.

Note: Link below is to the more recent edition of the Marcus book, retitled The Old Weird America. Dock Boggs trading card by R. Crumb.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

As he reminds us with almost comic regularity, Hanta has been operating an antiquated wastepaper compactor on the outskirts of Prague for thirty-five years. He has some acquaintances in the town, but for most of his time he shares his solitude with his compactor, and with the mice that swarm the cellar in which he works. He works at a Sisyphean labor, taking time out only to go fill his pail with beer, because he truly loves his beer. He passes his days in greasy clothes and a state of inebriated equilibrium.

Amongst the newsprint and bloody butcher paper that Hanta compacts are books - beautiful old, leather bound volumes that have no use in a totalitarian society. Hrabal's book is a memoir from Hanta's point of view. He seems a simpleton, but one with an eye for books, and the ability to recall quotations from Hegel, Erasmus, and Schopenhauer. And he does more: he blesses each bale of compacted paper with a carefully chosen book or art print, often open to a particularly significant passage. When he can, he rescues books from the brink of oblivion. Some he gives to furtive acquaintances, a churchman interested in the history of aviation, a professor with a passion for old theatre reviews. He takes books home and fills every available space with them; he sleeps under a precarious platform upon which he has stacked two tons of books, and which could crush him instantly should he make an unfortunate shift in his sleep. He clearly has a mania. It is only late in the book that we will find out if there is a purpose to his madness.

As he performs his assigned role, his holy calling, Hanta recalls his life. He relates the tragicomical story of a love found and lost in two scatalogical episodes, with a denouement that is told with perfection. He remembers the strange gypsy girl who followed him home and waited at his door every night, who fed his meager fire and warmed his bed, whose name he does not recall and who disappeared when the Nazis occupied Prague. (He takes particular pleasure in compacting Nazi propaganda.) In the present, he sees the future in the form of a huge, state of the art, compactor manned by efficient young men in immaculate uniforms who eat their lunch with bottles of milk and who cast nary a glance at the volumes of humanity’s intellectual heritage riding the conveyor belt into oblivion.

His goal is to retire and move his faithful compactor to a spot on his uncle’s property, where he can give artistic expression to the memory of the sorry task he has spent his life performing. He has visions of young Jesus and old Lao-Tzu, and armies of rats fighting it out in the sewers. When his boss peers down at him and calls him an imbecile, and hires two uniformed young milk-drinkers to work the compactor, he beings to see the writing on the wall. Tense dualities abound in this book, particularly the progressus ad futurum and the regressus ad originem, but dualities yearn for integration, a state of completeness. Hrabal’s book is itself simple in execution, yet enormous in its implications, both sad and hopeful. In its brevity, it approaches a state of perfection.

A Reader's Delight by Noel Perrin

When I started this blog a few years ago, it was for the vague purpose of making note of books that were by and large obscure and forgotten, yet deserving of wider acquaintance. Little did I know that Noel Perrin (among, I am sure, others) had had a similar idea many years before. He had published dozens of short reviews of such books in the Washington Post, and it is these that are collected in A Reader’s Delight.

I consider myself fairly well read, but Perrin has noted many worthwhile books that I have never heard of, but which I will no doubt be tracking down in the months and years ahead. His list, I am glad to note, also overlaps my own somewhat, and we find in it such treasures as Lord Dunsany’s The Blessings of Pan, Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and Charles Williams supernatural thriller All Hallow’s Eve. He also includes works by James Branch Cabell, Stendhal, and Herbert Read. Many of Perrin’s titles I recognize from having passed over them on the shelves of used bookstores. Thanks to his enthusiastic endorsements and the knowledge that his judgments ring true, I now know to stop and give them a second look. I’m happy to recommend A Reader’s Delight to all my fellow bibliophiles.

Tales of the Inquisition, or, You Can't Torquemada Anything!

The Inquisition: A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church by E. Vacandard


This work, published in English translation in 1907, was apparently an attempt to rebut the perceived anti-Catholicism of the 19th century chronicler of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea. In a short work, the author traces the Church attitudes towards heresy from the earliest Church Fathers through the 14th century. One has to give some grudging admiration to the author’s perseverance in asserting, in the face of the most heinous evidence, that although the Inquisition was bad, it wasn’t quite as bad as some would make it out to be. His is a decidedly uphill battle.

With memory fresh from its own brutal suppression under the Roman Empire prior to Constantine, the early doctors of the Church adopted a rather gentle approach to heresy. In his Divinae Institutiones (308 AD), Lactantius wrote: “If you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, by tortures and by crime, you no longer defend it, but pollute and profane it. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion.” While Tertullian wrote harshly of the Gnostic heresies, he likewise declared that “(i)t is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his convictions. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion.” The preferred method of dealing with heretics and apostates was that which could be traced back to St. Paul: simple excommunication. Augustine, a former Manichean who also dealt with the Donatist schism in North Africa, began with a policy of absolute tolerance which ultimately evolved into a reasoning that errant sheep must be goaded back into the fold, sometimes with firm measures (flogging is acceptable, as was exile), but that the death penalty was contrary to the ideal of Christian charity. His is an interesting evolution, inasmuch as he had to contend with secular authorities for whom the death penalty was justified in cases of groups fomenting civil unrest, a perspective which Augustine ultimately noted had some justification.

Over the next few centuries, as the corpus of canon law grew, the Church found ways (albeit with some dissention) of utilizing the powers of the civil authorities as a means of punishing heretics, which meant that although the Church could identify and condemn heretics, their hands stayed “clean” as the guilty parties were handed over to the State for punishment. The condemnation and execution of the heretic Priscillian in the late 4th century was an early instance of this procedure, although it was a controversial one at the time. It was during the years from 1000 to 1250 that a great leap towards the classic model of the Inquisition took place. The irruption into Western Europe of the Manichean (later Cathar) sect shook the Church hierarchy, which saw in the sect a strong vehicle for undermining Church authority, and a rival ideology in its own right. (A threat that may seem rather odd to our eyes, as the Cathars condemned equally marriage and procreation, hardly a model for exponential growth.) The logic, which echoed earlier formulations, was that heresies such as this represented nothing less than treason against God. As it was long established that the punishment for treason against the State was death, how could treason against the Creator be any less serious? The suppression of the Cathars was intense and brutal, and increasingly went well beyond the more humane punishments of imprisonment and/or confiscation of property. Taking a cue from Germany and northern France, the authorities of which more often than not prescribed the stake for “anti-social” activities, the Ecclesiastical authorities did not long dwell on the theological aspects of the Cathar errors. It is in the chapters dealing with the “anti-social” and “anti-Catholic” aspects of the Cathar/Albigensian heresy that Vacandard is most vehement in his assertions, asserting with no small level of hyperbole that if the rigorous ideal of chastity promulgated by the Cathars was allowed to be realized, “the human race would have disappeared from the earth in a few years.” He concludes with the breathtaking statement that “(i)n bitterly prosecuting the Cathari, the Church truly acted for the public good.”

The next portion of the book deals with the establishment of what we have come to know as the classic model of coercion in the Church, the monastic (i.e. Dominican and Franciscan) Inquisition. Vacandard notes that the true beginning of the Inquisition dates to the Sicilian Code of Frederic II, prepared in response to Gregory IX’s request that heretics be prosecuted with utmost severity. It became codified that all suspected heretics were to be tried by an ecclesiastical tribunal, with the guilty and unrepentant being condemned to the stake. The persecution was an active one, with bishops and archbishops being directed to visit once a year or more any parish where heresy was thought to exist. One or two “trustworthy” men were then compelled to denounce any citizen whose mode of thought or living deviated from that of the “ordinary Catholic”. It was the reluctance or ineptness of the bishops to engage in such practices, with such latitude for abuse that compelled the Pope to put the real power of the Inquisition in the hands of the mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The procedures established under the Inquisition were, to our sensibilities, atrocious. Suspected heretics were not informed of who might have given their names to the authorities, they were not allowed counsel, and witnesses in their defense were rarely given the opportunity to appear (and most likely wouldn’t have, given the risk of associative guilt). All these were considered by the Inquisitors to be adequate “safeguards” against abuse, although we find them tragically laughable today. The accused had a simple choice: abjure his heresy and repent, or deny heresy and suffer the consequences. Penance might range from (among other minor humiliations) having to wear the yellow cross for a period of time to confiscation of property and imprisonment. Quoting Lea, Vacandard notes that the “Inquisitor never condemned to death, but merely withdrew the protection of the Church from the hardened and impenitent sinner who afforded no hope of conversion, or from him who showed by relapse that there was no trust to be placed in his pretended repentance.” In other words, there was no appeal to individual conscience in the face of the authority of the Church.

Next, the establishment of the use of torture in 1252 under the papacy of Innocent IV is discussed. Vacandard makes some objection that the heinous activities of the Inquisitors did not necessarily echo the directives of the Popes, who “exercised a supervision which was always just and at times most kindly.” I need not go into the details of the cruel procedures inflicted by secular authorities under the “direction” of the Inquisitors, but suffice it to say that they do not bear out Vacandard’s summation that “we must at least give [the Church] credit of insisting that torture ‘should never imperil life and limb’”. It is interesting to note that he admits that, although they did utilize hideously cruel means of extracting confessions, the Inquisitors did in fact realize “so well that forced confessions were valueless, and that they required the prisoner to confirm them after he had left the torture chamber.” It was the fact that it was the confession taken outside the torture chamber that counted as “official” that allowed the preceding torture to be downplayed, a tactic that plays right into Vacandard’s hands as an apologist for the Church.

The remainder of the book is largely a summation of what was discussed before, with emphasis on the thinking of theologians and canonists on the purpose and methods of the Inquisition, which saw heresy first and foremost as an offense against God. By the end, Vacandard’s attempts to mitigate the worst excesses of the Inquisition as being subsequently exaggerated, or being prosecuted with a cruelty beyond that prescribed by the Papacy, or being simply reflective of the harsh times in which they occurred ring hollow. The Inquisition was symptomatic of a pervasive mindset in which deviation from a dominant ideology was simply not allowed, and could be punishable by anything ranging from confiscation of property to imprisonment to death. It was the evolving political situation in Europe, and the rise of the Protestant reformation, quite bloody in its own right (John Calvin’s condemnation and execution of Michael Servetus was hardly more humane than the persecutions of the Catholic Church) that slowly reined in the Church’s coercive authority, not any great humanistic awakening on its own part.

If one reads Vacandard’s apologetics with a critical eye, this is not (considering its age) a bad short summary of the history of the Inquisition. For the gruesome, gothic details, Lea’s work remains entertaining. For another perspective, we have Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, which treats in exhaustive detail the persecution of converted Jews in Catholic Spain, an area ignored in this study.

This work is available through Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/inquisitionacri01vacagoog), and in a reprint edition as linked below.

City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems by James Thomson

My LibraryThing friend and Master of the Chapel of the Abyss ben waugh recently led me to a consideration of Thomson’s work. Of the poems in this volume (available on Internet Archive), most of which I have admittedly only skimmed, none carries the force of the title piece (although “Sunday Up the River” contains a nice tribute to my beloved Jameson’s whiskey). “City of Dreadful Night” is an extended night wanderer’s meditation on the vanity of life and the comforts of the grave’s dreamless sleep. It is a kind of British cousin to the more exquisitely constructed - but thematically similar - German masterpiece Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura.

Atheistic at heart, the wanderer cannot help a knife thrust at the great deceiver, the absent God, author of this deficient world, who created man in a spirit of mockery –

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

There is, in a litany of circumstances, a refrain that speaks of the vanity of human wishes in a meaningless existence -

I wake from daydreams to this real night.

And yet there is some comfort in the void, in the liberation from the fear of God and the monotony of eternal life-

Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
.
.
.
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again

The wanderer views the corpse of a dead beauty on a bier before ending up in a dark and gloomy cathedral, in which a preacher, announcing the nonexistence of God, gives absolution to all who seek relief from the vale of tears and presents the holy sacrament of suicide -

Lo, you are free to end it when you will-
Without the fear of waking after death.

The gloomy odyssey continues on to the River of Suicides before ending before a colossal statue representing Durer’s Melancholia, the guardian spirit of the City of Dreadful Night. Thomson’s verse may not be a high poetic achievement, but it is an impressive statement of a subterreanean current of existential despair in the Victorian era.