Religion among People: Essays on Religions and Politics

By Kees W. Bolle and Jennifer Reid

"At the deepest level religious traditions determine what goes on between one human being and another, between one community and another, and between human beings and whoever holds power over them."

Kees Bolle's original, passionate scholarship veered away from things handed down and standard in our thought about religions. In this his final book, he explores how religious paradigms have given rise to particular structures of power, and how religious myths compel particular human actions: the possibility of interpretation, the necessity for recognizing religious forms where they appear, the relationship of secularization and sacredness.

And at every turn, Bolle examines the notion that Western intellectuals are nonreligious. He confronts the responsibility "mere" scholarship bears for events--sometimes terrible events--in the real world. We move from David and Nathan to Antigone, from Brahmanism and Buddhism to the familial struggle between Christianity and Islam. The book concludes with Bolle's striking reflections on how "modern man" has become inherently religious in concurrence with modern manifestations of power.

Bolle is a fascinating figure. He loved the immediacy of lessons found in Hasidic stories, and his own thought may be said to approach the wholeness, the immediacy, of religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532604515

Kees W. Bolle

Kees W. Bolle (1927–2012), a native of the Netherlands, studied at the University of Leiden and the University of Chicago. He taught at Brown University, UCLA, Reed College, and the University of New England. He is the author of The Persistence of Religion (1965), The Freedom of Man in Myth (1968; Wipf & Stock, 2010), and The Enticement of Religion (2002).

Book preview

9781532604508.kindle.jpg

Religion among People

essays on religions and politics

Kees W. Bolle

7654.png

RELIGION AMONG PEOPLE

Essays on Religions and Politics

Copyright © 2017 Kees W. Bolle. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn:

978-1-5326-0450-8

hardcover isbn:

978-1-5326-0452-2

ebook isbn:

978-1-5326-0451-5

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Bolle, Kees W., author.

Title: Religion among people : essays on religions and politics / Kees W. Bolle.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-5326-0450-8

(paperback). | ISBN:

978-1-5326-0452-2

(hardcover). | ISBN:

978-1-5326-0451-5

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSC: Religions. | Religions and politics.

Classification: BL48 B5851 2017 | BL48 (ebook).

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright ©

1973, 1978, 1984, 2011

by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright ©

1946, 1952

, and

1971

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Apologia

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One: Change in Religion

Chapter 1: Religion: The Troubling Subject

The Confusion Concerning Religion

Piety and Psychology and the Inner Life

Shortcomings of Our Terminology

Religion as an Institution

Being Aware of Real Differences

Chapter 2: Interpretation

Pseudo-religion

Persistence of Religion

Interpretation

The Significance of the Particular

Traditions

Chapter 3: Secularization and Sanctification: Euhemerism

Secularizations

Euhemerism

The Euhemerizing Mentality

Euhemerismus Inversus

Euhemerism’s Power of Preservation

Popular Secularizations as Religious Structures

Euhemerism Later

Secularization

Chapter 4: Secularization in Modern History

The Problem of Losing the Sacred

The Sacred and The Profane

Secularization and Sanctificationat the Present Moment

Secularization as a Concealed Process

The Choice of Words

Fundamentalism

Secularization Is Inevitable

Secularization and Mythification

The Surpassing of Authority

A Role for the History of Religions

Part Two: Religion and Politics

Chapter 5: Early Kingship

Spirit and Power

The Ancient City

The Hittite Kings, Alexander the Great, Egypt

Chapter 6: Israel, Early Christianity, Greece

Biblical Kingship

David and Nathan

Religious Imagery of Israel

Sophocles’ Antigone

Categorical Imagery

Chapter 7: Brahmanism: The Balance of All and Everything

The Brahmanic Texts

A Case from Ancient India: The Rājasūya

The Ritual Events

Spiritual Certainty

Ananda Coomaraswamy:Politics as Part of a Total Unity

Coomaraswamy: Remarks of Caution

Chapter 8: Buddhism

Buddhism and Kingship

Aśoka

Caṇḍāśoka

The Sense in Other Structures

Structure of Buddhism

Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Edict

Buddhism within a Worldwide Discourse

Chapter 9: The Monotheism of Islam

The Threat of Islam

Discrimination

Monotheism and Prophecy

Authority

Absolute Power and Consensus:Ruler over the Faithful

Power and Consensus Enacted

Fear of Theocracy

Chapter 10: The Religious Structure of Modern Man

Religious Types

Ourselves

Modern Religious Man

The Modern State

Recent Times

A Religious Symbolism of Modern Man

Immediacy of Religion

Bibliography

Sharp and never satisfied with the obvious, Kees Bolle handles key subjects like secularization, fundamentalism, and the religious structure of modern man. Listening to him when he is speaking in-depth about politics and religion that are inevitably intertwined, whether in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity, opens our eyes to all those easy statements of today that commonly spring from what the author aptly calls ‘knowledge-cum-ignorance.’ This book will last, and encourage us for a long time.

—

Karel R. van Kooij

, Professor Emeritus, University of Leiden, The Netherlands

This book, like Kees’ other ones, compels us to confront the role of religion in the lives of both individual and social bodies. By exploring the religion of ancient cities (Egyptian and Greek), Near Eastern high god traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and Indian and Buddhist traditions, he is actually inviting us to better understand ourselves.

—

Jennifer Reid

, from the foreword

Apologia

Religion among People (RELAMP as Kees abbreviated it in his computer) is a volume that was virtually completed by its author. Unfortunately, Kees was unable to participate in its final editing and he passed away before the manuscript was submitted for publication. As we move toward publication, I find that several caveats are in order, an apologia in its original sense of defense.

Kees was renowned for his passionate involvement in his work and was rarely shy about expressing an opinion. Consequently, he could excite a great deal of consternation in an audience and, often, ungovernable disgruntlement. He belonged to an age in scholarship where personal opinions were accepted as part of scholarly writing. Kees applied the linguistic dictum to know one language is to know none to the field of the history of religions, declaring that to know one religion is to know none. He also believed that, in order to be an effective student of religion, one needed to be fully and consciously rooted in a particular religious culture, without apologies.

The tone in these pages is vintage Kees: full of fire, humor, and an inimitable sense of irony, all the while fighting against solemnity in favor of the truly serious. His is a style no longer easily acceptable in academic circles. For all these reasons, there are numerous details in this volume that are not fixable in order to make it more palatable to modern scholastic tastes. No effort has been made to tone down the decidedly personal stance Kees often assumes. To do so would be to betray him. I am infinitely grateful to Dr. K. C. Hanson, editor-in-chief at Cascade Books, that he has been willing to let Kees be, well, Kees.

I think it fair to say that this book would not have existed without the work of Ellen Kaplan, who has edited Kees’ writing since she was his student at Brown University in the early 1960s. Her enduring zeal for this particular manuscript and her concern for the presentation of its themes have been crucial to the volume’s form and expression. No matter how obstinate Kees could be at times, the one person he inevitably deferred to when it came to written expression, was Ellen.

Tim Copeland, my former Maine neighbor, has been indispensable in pulling this manuscript together in its final form. His electronic wizardry and, like Ellen, his sense of detail, have made a computerized manuscript possible. When Kees started his teaching career, it was not unheard of for a scholar to hand over his handwritten pages to the publisher—a far cry from current requirements! Thanks to Tim’s artistry, this volume assumed the digital form that was needed. He and Ellen conferred by telephone and mail (not e-mail!) to produce this final form.

Two dear friends have helped out with specific linguistic details. Professor John Hayes of the University of California at Berkeley read through all the Islamic material to ensure that Arabic terms and names are rendered in up-to-date transcriptions. Professor Karel R. van Kooij, Professor emeritus, Leiden University, The Netherlands, with whom Kees and I lived during our first year in Holland in 1980 and himself an Indologist, was kind enough to check all the diacritical marks on Sanskrit words and phrases, as well as reading through the entire manuscript. In 2014, he and his wife visited me in our home in Maine, and he spent several days organizing the Indological books in Kees’ library. As a result, he also unearthed a number of much-sought-after books that Kees used and which I was in dire need of locating to confirm numerous footnotes; for his help I’m deeply appreciative.

Finally, I’m endlessly indebted to Professor Jennifer Reid of the University of Maine at Farmington, who composed the foreword to this volume. Kees and I met her our first year in Maine when she invited Kees to participate in an annual conference she assembled, that also included Professors David Carrasco and Charles Long. Over the years, she invited Kees to present lectures to the Farmington students. She knows and understands Kees’ work better than most anyone I know, and I think she’s captured the essence of Kees’ thought and purpose most succinctly. I am grateful beyond words for her friendship and the innumerable nocturnal discussions that the three of us shared for many years, and which she and I continue to have. Kees would have been proud to find her name on the foreword.

Again, my warm thanks to Dr. K. C. Hanson for being a friend to me and admirer of Kees’ work. Without him, the impetus to publish this manuscript with Wipf and Stock Publishers could not have happened.

It’s most unfortunate that Kees is unable to address criticisms that may arise after the publication of RELAMP. He would have whole-heartedly welcomed them, eager, as always, to initiate new rounds of discussions on topics he felt were at the essence of human experience. He was fond of quoting an old Frisian expression, itself filled with the sort of irony he lived by, here slightly modified, that I know he’d agree with once again: het had nog erger kunnen zijn (it could have been worse).

Sara J. Denning-Bolle, PhD, DO

Biddeford, Maine

Foreword

I met Kees Bolle for the first time in the spring of 2001. I was living in Maine, and Kees and his wife, Sara (and their Maine Coon cat Ragatz—named for a nineteenth-century Swiss theologian), had moved to Biddeford from Portland, Oregon, the previous year. Sara was making a dramatic career shift from teaching ancient New Eastern Studies to studying medicine at the University of New England. While I had met neither of them prior to this, I knew them well through my mentor, Charles H. Long. Both Charles Long and Kees Bolle had studied the history of religions at the University of Chicago in a department and program that had been defined by Joachim Wach in the 1940s and 1950s. That tradition was continued by the two of them alongside Mircea Eliade, Joe Kitagawa, and others. Chicago was a formative time and space for all of them (as well as for the field itself), and when I mentioned to Charles Long that I was planning on hosting a conference at my campus in April of 2001, he insisted that I reach out to Kees and invite him to participate in it.

When we met, Kees was a diminutive seventy-four-year-old man with intense, animated (almost mischievous) eyes. My first glimpse of him was actually only of his eyes and the top of his head—all that was visible above the dashboard of their massive, heavy-duty royal blue truck as they pulled into my driveway the day the conference began.

My second introduction to Kees occurred a few minutes later. It was a short exchange of words as he and Sara walked into the house.

I’m Jennifer, I said, as I reached my hand out to take his.

Ah, he replied. So good to meet you. You look very different in person than you do over e-mail.

I didn’t ask him what he meant. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever did at any point later on either. Kees was so full of pregnant one-liners that one rarely had the opportunity or inclination to go back. Now that he’s gone, my friend Randal Cummings (Kees was his doctoral advisor) and I often pass e-mails back and forth across the continent reminding ourselves of some of those one-liners: things like Equality is a great idea. There are just no examples of it. Or, That’s an interesting theory I’d like you to pursue, but of course to do so you would actually have to read the text.

My third first-impression followed in short order. I discovered that Kees could savor a glass of single malt scotch with more esprit than most anyone I knew, and in quick turn he sidled up to the piano in my living room and played Debussy flawlessly. Sara and I were already talking like old cronies as he began to play.

A venerable historian of religions who could hardly see over the dashboard of the truck he was driving, who spoke in riddles, who had a soft spot for scotch, who was an accomplished musician, and whose wife instantly seemed like someone I had met years before—it wasn’t hard for me to see that the three of us were going to become fast friends.

After that first meeting, Kees and Sara and I would share many long wonderful evenings over food and wine (well, technically Sara and I drank wine; Kees always drank single malt) and disputation. Kees also spoke at my school many times. Even as his health began to fail, somehow his fifty years of intellectual life overrode the illness, and he was easily able to maintain the rapt attention of an audience of colleagues and students for as long as he wanted (often an hour or more, no mean feat for even the sturdiest and most engaging of scholars). For all these reasons and more, it is a distinct honor for me to have been asked to write a few words of introduction to this posthumous book. And to situate the book within Kees’ big life, of which I was blessed to share a small part.

Intending to study theology and to become an ordained minister, Kees traveled from his home in Holland to the University of Chicago in the early 1950s as part of the University’s World Church Fellowship program. Through the Fellowship, young scholars were given an opportunity to study for a year at the University. It would turn out to be a decisive year for Kees, as he was introduced to the work of Joachim Wach. He returned home to Holland when his Fellowship expired, but it wasn’t long before he decided to apply to the University of Chicago for admission as a regular graduate student to study under Wach. Unfortunately Wach passed away just before Kees returned. As he considered his options (returning to Holland was not among them, since he didn’t have the money for the fare), it was suggested to him that the newly hired Mircea Eliade could serve as his doctoral advisor. He completed his PhD, thus making himself Eliade’s first doctoral student. While his primary area of specialization was, and remained, the religious traditions of India (he spent two years in India while writing his dissertation), he was trained as a general historian of religions and so he never shied away from asking tough theoretical questions. His approach to the study of religion was firmly hermeneutical, something that had been of critical significance to Joachim Wach as he drew a community of young scholars to him in the 1950s and 1960s.

In some ways this book could be regarded as a kind of apogee of Kees’ publishing career. In its pages we find numerous themes that were present in his earlier work, many reappearing in a more developed and thorough way. Because he was unable to fully prepare the manuscript for publication before his passing, it fell upon his longtime editor, Ellen Kaplan, and his computer-savvy friend Tim Copeland to do so. It was a time-intensive task, and Ellen and Tim threw themselves into it out of their deep regard for Kees and his work—a true labor of love.

And that work was substantial. His first book, The Persistence of Religion (1965), was a study of the role of tantrism in the development of Indian religion from Vedic ritualism to the rise of Brahmanism. This was followed by The Freedom of Man in Myth (1968), in which he explored the relationship between mysticism and the creation of myth. His translation of Perspectives in the History of Religions was his next project (1977), Jan De Vries’ survey of writing about religion ranging from antiquity to the twentieth century. Kees followed this with significant translations of the Bhagavad-Gita (1979) and Jean Bottéro’s The Birth of God: The Bible and the Historian (2000), a classic text on the cultural, social, historical and religious construction of the Tanach, as well as the impact of ancient Israel on modern Western culture. Kees’ next book seemed like a bit of a departure in some ways. Ben’s Story (2001) was based on his translations of both the letters of a young man, Ben Wessels, who died at Bergen-Belsen and other pieces that appeared in the Dutch underground press during the same period. Kees’ last completed book was The Enticement of Religion (2002), a book-length hermeneutical essay on the nature of the study of religion that grounded the field in a long tradition of hermeneutics and steered well clear of contemporary trends (i.e. postmodernism) in interpretation.

In a sense, Religion among People is a complement to The Enticement of Religion, picking up on methodological and historical threads that were left loose in the earlier book. In fact, one could go so far as to say that here we find, in one book, a kind of aggregate of the concerns that drove his earlier work: concerns with methodology, hermeneutics, the terror of history (Eliade’s phrase), modern alienation, and the role and responsibility of scholarship on religion.

In all his work Kees confronts the mixed legacy not only of religion but also of the study of religion, which he believed bears a level of culpability in adversely affecting modern events. He reminds us here, for example, that academic discussions helped to precipitate modern racism. Thus, he argues that given the nature of their subject matter, historians of religion bear a good deal of moral responsibility in doing their research and scholarship. Ultimately, we must never lose sight of the fact that human lives are at stake.

Religion among People is divided into two parts. The first is methodological and the second explores specific situations of interplay between religion and political power. The book ends in a way that is somehow reminiscent of Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return where Eliade set modern man in his desire for autonomy against archaic man, who lives in continual symbolic reconnection with a collective primordium. Kees, too, concludes his discussion with modern humans. Unlike Eliade, however, he finds no disconnect between us and the people of the ancient and premodern societies he has explored throughout part 2 of the book. In fact, by subjecting ourselves (and himself, more on this presently) to the same critical perspectives used previously in the text, Kees discerns a very religious character to Western modernity.

Harkening back to his long-term interest in mysticism, he concludes here that concern for the inner life is the defining property of religion in modernity, and that a desire to preserve and nurture the inner life has been fueled by the rise of rationality and bureaucracy. By bureaucracy he doesn’t mean the relatively benign—but annoying—systems that tie us up for hours on the phone struggling to get something done. (Anyone who attempted to sign on for ‘Obamacare’ in its first months knows this frustration all too well.) What Kees means by bureaucracy is racial categorizing, deportations, concentration camps, saturation bombings—all of which, he notes, are reasoned acts intended to break the spirit.

We hear echoes not only of Eliade in this book, but also of Wach and even F. Max Müller (the nineteenth-century founder of the comparative study of religion). Kees spent his career grappling with the meaning of religion as both otherness and intimacy—the ambiguity of religious experience versus the lived reality of religious expression. In this we see the legacy of Wach, whose work bridged the divide between experience and expression without ever giving primacy to either. Like his colleagues from Chicago, Kees inherited this antireductionist tendency from Wach that has marked out a modest but powerful space in the field. Like his fellow Chicago-ites, Kees also remained true throughout his career to Wach’s deep concern for hermeneutics. As he writes in these pages, I care more for the honesty of our mutual approach to the problem of ourselves than for the technical accuracy of our religiohistorical vocabulary.¹

Another focus throughout his career was Kees’ concern with the role of the study of religion as an academic discipline. In this respect he has channeled the best contributions of Max Müller to our discipline (that’s not to say that Müller didn’t also saddle us with some rather unsavory baggage). But Müller’s best basic question was also Kees’: how can, and why should, we study religious data that are substantially removed from us in terms of time and place? Müller’s answer was to set out a trifold method whereby religion should be studied comparatively, cross-culturally, and historically. Religion among People does just that and, further, demonstrates why this must be our best approach. Studying others’ traditions, writes Kees, is the mode by which we can arrive at some understanding of both religion as a universal phenomenon and religion as situationally specific. And that, he shows us, is a fruitful way of coming to understand ourselves.

This book, like Kees’ other ones, compels us to confront the role of religion in the lives of both individual and social bodies. By exploring the religion of ancient cities (Egyptian and Greek), Near Eastern high god traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and Indian and Buddhist traditions, he is actually inviting us to better understand ourselves. But this book (and the others, I believe) also helps us to understand the man behind the curtain. Ben’s Story, for example, was a moment of turning an expatriate’s critical skills inward and grappling with the meaning of home—in this case the Dutch coastal village of Oostvoorne (where Kees did much of his growing up) and his high school friendship with Ben Wessels. Insinuated in this were the German occupation of Oostvoorne from 1940 until the end of the war, Ben’s death in a concentration camp, and the broader place of Holland in the German project. For a scholar trained to scrutinize tangled human actions, allegiances, alliances, and turmoil, it made sense that Kees would ultimately cast a critical eye on his own ambiguous story.

But even a text like Religion among People, ostensibly a purely academic work, provides a glimpse into the man himself. As I noted above, he writes at length about modernity and the modern concern for the inner life. This, he tells us, is a response to state brutality and the sterility of pure reason; and it can often generate a kind of pacifism. Perhaps this is a more personal statement that it might seem at first glance. Perhaps this was why Quakerism held a special place in Kees’ heart, and why he became a practicing Quaker for the last decade of his life, essentially from the time he wrote Ben’s Story.

Kees once said that becoming a scholar and teacher was his second choice for a career. What he really wanted to be was a clown. I’d like to think that those mischievous trickster eyes that I first saw peering over the dashboard of his truck in 2001 are also peeking through this text at us, affably inviting us all to sit back, sip a little single malt, and try to cultivate something strong and peaceable and joyous within ourselves that will counter the sterility and brutality that too often defines our modern world.

Jennifer Reid

University of Maine Farmington

1

.

See p. 217 below.

Preface

The essays in this book attempt to show that religion is more than the stirrings in an individual’s heart, and that at the deepest level religious traditions determine what goes on between one human being and another, between one community and another, and between human beings and whoever holds power over them.

We begin with the assumption that religion in general is a dimension of all human existence—an assumption that can be made without undue speculation, given the significance of religion in all human societies. At the same time, we will keep in mind that only the specific religious traditions give us the documentation we need for our study.

Our topic is religion among people, for the function of religion is not and has never been limited to the inner reflections of the individual. And it is among people that the traditions have been handed down, kept alive, and given constantly changing forms. A special focus of this discussion will be the many ways in which, in various ages and traditions, the dictates of sacred authority were reflected, followed, or contradicted in the ordinary world of power and conflict. Yes, occasionally they were also contradicted, or even fought. But what we, moderns, need to be told is that they were never ignored.

•

Religion is poorly understood among those of us who like to consider ourselves readers. We know of the religious right and we speak of liberals in religion. There are many such terms we hear and use, yet could not adequately explain. We know of problems concerning church and state, yet as a rule have no understanding about how religion and state relate to each other elsewhere in the world. And even with the best intentions, by what method do we hope to arrive at a fair understanding of religious orientations in cultures distant from us in place or time? An inadequate understanding of religion and religions is rampant among the journalists who inform us, among educators in grade schools and high schools, and among college professors in the humanities and social studies.

Experts on religion are often reticent about the fact that religions have something to do with truth. And yet everyone else knows it! I hope that my book is welcome and useful for people with open minds, with ordinary interests in others as they think and behave, like and dislike each other, in social life and in our struggles for power. I have been told that sometimes I appear rude when I discuss my topic. Nevertheless, I am convinced calling things by their name is not resented so much by normal inquisitive readers as it is by academic experts who wrap themselves in blankets of thick prose. Not only evil scientists hide behind the irrefutability of their formulations when concocting poisons; the study of human beings has its parallels here. Therefore very simple questions are worth asking again.

•

I am grateful to the Academic Senate of the University of California, Los Angeles for grants that helped me in my work. I am grateful also to the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for providing a research assistant, Rhona Zaid, who rendered invaluable bibliographical help, especially in matters concerning Islam. I owe many thanks to her, as well as to the UCLA graduate students who helped me in this project.

This book reflects the fruit of conversations that took place over a good many years. Next to my students in graduate seminars, I wish to remember here with warmth the names of some UCLA colleagues who have passed on: Gerhart Ladner, the remarkable medievalist, art historian, and historian of ideas; Lynn White, best known as historian of medieval technology, but most vivid in my memory as a man sparkling in discussion, always positive and encouraging; Truesdell Brown, the classical historian, whose work first alerted me to the entwining of religion and secularization, even in antiquity.

The chapter on Hinduism is for me inseparable from hospitable colleagues in the Triangle South Asia Consortium in North Carolina: Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Carl W. Ernst, John F. Richards, Satti Khanna, and many others. I express my thanks no less for questions raised by audiences in many places, including Franklin and Marshall College, Penn State University, and campuses of the University of California system. Casual discussions often turned out to be of the highest value, as was so with Hans Rogger and Amos Funkenstein—now too no longer among us. Many, many thanks go to Peter Loewenberg; Annette Aronowicz; Fr. John Hilary Martin, OP; Noel Q. King; Gary Lease; and my old friend and colleague Jerome Long of Wesleyan University, who continues to keep me alert.

At the end of this list of helpful friends, I gladly follow the standard pattern of accepting all blame for remaining errors. At the same time, however, how many more there would have been if not for the attentiveness of my marvelous wife, Sara!

Whatever has been expressed here is well expressed thanks to Ellen Kaplan, who went over the book many times to clarify its themes. Finally, without the generous work of Tim Copeland, who would deny that he knows more about computers than just about anybody, nothing on all these pages would have materialized.

A most unexpected blessing was bestowed on me when I settled in Biddeford, Maine—a place far away from the major libraries I had gotten used to, beginning with those of the University of Chicago and the Research Library at UCLA. In Biddeford I found the splendid bibliographical services of the McArthur Public Library. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Lynn Bivens, Assistant Director, to Peter Howell, Reference/Technical Coordinator, and to Sally Leahey—all of whom located and provided much information I needed, including some of the most far-fetched writings.

Kees W. Bolle

Acknowledgments

In some of the essays in this book I have made use of my earlier writings. Even though in virtually all