Forty Books: A Writer’S Co-Conspirators

By Peter Michael Cox

It all started out in pre-adolescence in the mid-1960s. Stuck in the house during those lazy hazy summer days I read Illustrated Classics comic books inside the backyard screened porch. While slurping on a Popsicle those wondrous images and suspenseful narratives whisked me away to worlds of adventure (The Three Musketeers), terror (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and glory (Camelot). And walking back from the general store to our seaside cottage in Green Harbor, I used to read the latest baseball news from Sports Illustrated. Reading was my way of combating boredom and loneliness."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503563223

Peter Michael Cox

Peter Cox is the author of several novels including Donuts, Missing Faith, On the Run with Jack Frost, and Blended Borders, as well as a memoir, Grunt: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of a Working Class Stiff (Xlibris.com) He presently lives in Salem, Massachusetts with his wonderful wife, and is currently working on a book of poetry.

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Copyright © 2015 by Peter Michael Cox.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015906614

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-6324-7

                Softcover        978-1-5035-6323-0

                eBook             978-1-5035-6322-3

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Rev. date: 04/30/2015

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CONTENTS

In the Beginning were the Words

1. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

2. The Plague – Albert Camus

3. Travels with Charley: In Search of America – John Steinbeck

4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

5. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike

6. The Story of Philosophy – Will Durant

7. The High Cost of Living – Marge Piercy

8. Along the Gringo Trail – Jack Epstein

9. The Conquest of the Incas – John Hemming

10. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told by Alex Haley

11. The Color Purple – Alice Walker

12. Report to Greco – Nikos Kazantzakis

13. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann

14. Crime and Punishment – Fydor Dostoyevesky

15. Light in August – William Faulkner

16. The World According to Garp – John Irving

17. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

18. Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

19. Working – Studs Terkel

20. Passages – Gail Sheehy

21. Capital – Karl Marx

22. The Rebel – Albert Camus

23. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

24. I’m OK-You’re Ok – Dr. Thomas A. Harris

25. The Culture of Narcissism – Christopher Lasch

26. Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors – Piers Paul Reed

27. The Journey to Ixtlan – Carlos Castaneda

28. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of three American Families – Anthony Lukas

29. Lust for Life – Irvine Stone

30. The Novel – James A. Michener

31. Guerrilla Warfare – Che Guervara

32. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered – E.F. Schumacher

33. The Deindustrialization of America – Bluestone and Harrison

34. The Doctor and the Soul – Viktor Frankl, M.D.

35. Eden Express – Mark Vonnegut

36. On the Road – Jack Kerouac

37. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta – Mario Vargas Llosa

38. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

39. O’Neill – Arthur and Barbara Gelb

40. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing

AfterWord

IN THE BEGINNING WERE THE WORDS

I T ALL STARTED out in pre-adolescence in the mid-1960s. Stuck in the house during those lazy hazy summer days I read Illustrated Classics comic books inside the backyard screened porch. While slurping on a Popsicle those wondrous images and suspenseful narratives whisked me away to worlds of adventure ( The Three Musketeers ), terror ( Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), and glory ( Camelot ). And walking back from the general store to our seaside cottage in Green Harbor, I used to read the latest baseball news from Sports Illustrated . Reading was my way of combating boredom and loneli ness.

Then came the biographies on my sports heroes – Hank Aaron, Carl Yaz Yastremski and Babe Ruth. Reading about their lives fueled my hopes and dreams of becoming a professional ball player; a big baseball star where, at Moulton Ball Field in Wakefield, I’d make diving catches and hit home runs as if I was playing at Fenway Park. Mom would admonish me for only taking out sports bios from the library but, hey, these books fed my addiction to read as a means to escape my sheltered, boring, and insignificant life.

Finally, starting at Cape Cod Community College at age 19, I developed a mature reading taste. I began to read classic literature, but not in the comic book format. My first year at the community college reminded me in a weird way of the thrill of window-shopping at Armstrong Toy Store in Wakefield. Instead of making a mental list of the model battleship kits, miniature racecars, and tiny toy soldiers for Christmas, I was selecting courses in sociology, literature, philosophy, political science, history, and psychology for the fall semester. After a couple of weeks taking these classes I soon lost my shyness. I spoke up in class (Me!). I actually engaged the professor and classmates in heated discussions.

These courses plowed a fertile ground for sowing my mind. They lit a fuse to an explosive imagination waiting to be ignited. The interpersonal communication class floored me. We read a book on body language. I learned to decipher (so I believed) how to read women and figure out by the way they touched their hair and tilted their head whether or not the girl – oops – the woman liked me. In psychology class we were reading a book, I’m OK. You’re OK, on transactional analysis, the same type of therapy my shrink was using with me. The course on western philosophy introduced me to existentialism and the existential writers Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Their philosophy deeply influenced me on the meaning of life, which the shrink also used in our therapy sessions.

But the most inspiring material I studied was the modern novel. In that class I learned to read and comprehend what literature was all about: character, plot, theme, tone, symbolism, scene, setting, narration, drama, and moral of the story. We read, discussed, wrote papers and were tested on Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway, Camus’ The Plague, Faulkner’s Light in August, John Updike’s Rabbit Run, Joyce Carol Oats’ Them, Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Whoa. What a world they opened up with astute guidance from the bow-tie professor for me. Sitting in the 3rd floor of he library, where I could see the distant blue horizon of Cape Cod bay, I envisioned Hemingway’s old man, Santiago, battling the great barracuda as he mutters I guess it’s because I went out too far conceding defeat that he won’t be able to reel in the big fish ashore. It’s Hemingway’s statement, the professor explained, "on life, and how we are bound to be defeated in the end. We all shall die because we are too far from shore to be rescued. But, the struggle to live, to survive, is what ennobles us, makes us human." Wow. That’s heavy.

Looking around me in the college library, I was surrounded by books. More novels by Hemingway. Sartre’s 800-page philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness. History books beginning with Will Durant’s humongous The Story of Civilization, Volumes I – XI, written from 1932 to 1975; which I read over a two-year span. There were shelves and shelves on politics and political theory, literature, anthropology, and so on; a freakin’ goldmine of knowledge. Glancing at one title after another the books mesmerized me until my eyes were excitedly distracted by a cutie from psychology class. Hmm. Let’s see what she’s reading.

Ernest Hemingway left a permanent mark on my psyche. Beside his novels he wrote a non-fiction account of bullfighting in Spain called Death in the Afternoon. Our bow-tie professor lectured class on the book. Taking advantage of an Indian summer afternoon, like Plato and his students, he led us outside to a foliage-shrouded plaza. There, he read a passage. The great thing is to last. To see and hear and learn and understand, and write, when there’s something you know, and not before, and too damn much afterwards.

I don’t know why but that quote then and now moved me to the core of my being. It and the deceptively easy way Hemingway wrote – those short, declarative sentences – inspired me to become a writer. Writing was going to be my mission in life, my career. If Freud’s adage was true, the key happiness was love and work, that is work you love to do, then I had found one of the variables to the equation. From that point on books led me, for better and for worse, to who I am today – whoever that might be.

1

The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

M Y ADDICTION TO literature began in 1975 during my freshman year at Cape Cod Community College. Ever since adolescence I had been an avid reader but not for literature. Even when I tried to read fiction (novels like Treasure Island ) – or rather was required to read them in 7 th grade – I couldn’t grasp the meaning of the plot, characters, dialogue, symbolism, and theme, basically the moral of the story. In high school English class literature in the form of novels, short stories, poetry and drama was forced upon me, however my mind refused to submit to fiction, to give it a chance. Books on history, travel and biographies I could easily digest. Conversely a change of menu such as Shakespeare, Robert Frost or Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose text was the like reading Greek, made me want to puke. Considering none of these classics meant anything to me, why then should I have opened my mind to this stuff if I didn’t care? So I didn’t, and, consequently, took a C in Eng lish.

That all changed in the spring of ’75. I signed up for a course titled ‘Modern Novel’. Taught by a nerdy professor with curly thinning hair and who wore wire rim glasses, the syllabus included such classics as Light in August by William Faulkner, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf, Camus’ The Plague, Rabbit Redux, by John Updike, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea.

On the first day of glass Professor Wilkie lectured in general about the cultural significance of the novel as an art form (not merely for entertainment). He stated how, for his generation in the early Fifties, reading literature, especially banned books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, was akin to listening to rebellious rock music in the Sixties (Albert Camus was our Bob Dylan). Becoming a Dylan disciple a few years back, I was enlightened by the goofy-looking professor because he revealed that good fiction could be as deep and moving as a Dylan song. Indeed ‘Mister Tambourine Man’ was included in my American Anthology of Poetry textbook.

When we started in with Hemingway, one particular passage from The Old Man and the Sea where the main character, Santiago tells the marlin he couldn’t turn back after snaring the big fish because he was too far off shore. I shouldn’t have gone so far out, fish. I don’t know why but that line stirred something inside me. Maybe it was a statement, as the professor explained, that to really live one must have the courage to lead an authentic life beyond the safe boundaries of, let’s say, the middle class like the existentialists did in the Forties, the beatniks in the Fifties and the hippies in the Sixties. I could definitely dig that.

Hemingway’s novella simply put as the back cover states ". . . is a superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the great marlin he kills and loses." This book of fiction was a perfect starter for me; easy to understand and follow, and with guidance from Professor Wilkie and class discussion, not too difficult to grasp its meaning. Hemingway’s apparent simplicity in language, for some critics, overrides the subtlety and power of the novella’s theme. That seemingly simplistic style, according to Wilkie, was the source of his genius.

Rereading the book I spot the first underline note on page one, "The old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky." This section was in reference to the boy, Santiago’s helper, whose parents told him that the old fisherman was unlucky for having gone 84 days without catching a fish. They were probably warning the kid to stay away from Santiago otherwise his bad luck (salao) will rub off on him.

I think I underlined this sentence because Wilkie had mentioned that the term lucky was a big theme in Hemingway’s writing. I guess it – salao – had something to do with fate, and how most times human beings have little control over what happens to them. Kind of like shit happens.

On the next page in the first chapter I underlined the following sentence, "Everything about him was old except his eyes, and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. The word undefeated" appealed to me because such an attitude required courage (another big theme for Hemingway), the courage of a tragic hero the professor asserted. As a lonely, loser at the age of 20, I needed heroes to emulate even if they were tragic heroes doomed to fail liked Santiago. Upon reading The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway joined Bob Dylan as a major influence in my life.

Considering Santiago is indeed an old man, thoughts of his mortality continually cross his mind. This theme – mortality – is another primary motif in Hemingway’s fiction and non-fiction. Santiago tells the boy, in regards to waking him up in the morning before he heads out to sea, Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do men wake so early? Is it to have one longer days?

Further on in the middle of the book, once he’s out fishing, Santiago laments in regards to the marlin he has hooked, This will kill him the old man thought. He can’t do this forever. But four hours later the fish was still swimming steadily out to sea, towing the skiff, and the old man was still braced solidly with the line across his back.

Symbolically the big fish pulls Santiago farther out to sea, and farther away from the safety of land. This scene re-enforces Hemingway’s philosophy that to be engaged in living, and not be merely a passive participant, one must let life lead you beyond the blue horizon to where a person’s full potential (destiny or calling) awaits him. This journey, freely chosen, towards the unknown takes courage. Will I, or will I not, survive? Moreover the journey to uncharted waters, so to speak, is not without pain both physical and emotional. After hours of exhausting battle with the marlin Santiago succumbs to a brief rest. He rested on the un-stepped mast and sail, and tried not to think but only endure.

Hemingway often addresses the fear of the unknown (i.e. death). On this sojourn the brave ones, such as Santiago undertaking the battle to catch the elusive marlin, persevere even if they don’t know what they’re up against. Will I succeed? Will I fail? I wish I could see him only once to know what I have against me … I wonder if he has any plans or is he as desperate as me?

Not surprisingly, this being a Hemingway book, there is much machismo in The Old Man and the Sea. The predominance of excessively strong male characters (the Hemingway hero) and, conversely, the paucity of realistic and sympathetic female characters are one of the major knocks on the novelist. Although I generally agreed with this criticism then (by Professor Wilkie and the women in class) and now, and I don’t believe, however, the Hemingway hero is a contrived and shallow character that you find, for example, in the Rambo movies. Part of the hero’s (i.e. Santiago) code is to withstand suffering, an inevitable part of life, which is the dues you pay on the road of self-discovery and truth. Then and now I have always identified with the physic wounds the Hemingway character typical endures (Robert Jordan’s war injuries in A Farewell to Arms) for life’s travails. Santiago looks at his hands bloodied from pulling on the line that the marlin is dragging. It is not bad. he said. And pain does not matter to a man.

Towards the end of the novella the inevitable tragedy strikes. After Santiago finally and triumphantly catches the marlin, and latches him to the side of the boat, a shark attacks his prey. Talk about devastation. What a bummer! Nevertheless, Hemmingway’s old man remains stoic, and philosophizes, But man is not made for defeat, he said. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

There’s a lot more good stuff in The Old Man and the Sea; Santiago reflection on religion, God, the Catholic Church, faith, man versus nature, sport heroes (i.e. Joe DiMaggio) and so on. Yet, for me, that great statement – Man is not made for defeat – said it all. Back then, as a young man not knowing what, if anything, good the future might hold out for me, I needed inspiration and courage to persevere. Hemingway (among many others) showed me the way on how to conquer my pain and fear.

2

The Plague – Albert Camus

W HILE STUDYING AT Cape Cod Community College existentialism shaped my life big time. Still does. It became a personal philosophy, a code, similar to that of the Hemingway hero, to live by. Although Hemingway was not an existentialist writer, the code of conduct his male characters lived by reflected the existential notion of human authenticity. They were alienated men of action, engaged in life’s struggles, and in search of truth; and in doing so forged meaning and values on their own terms independent of society’s norms. The Hemingway hero depicted the human condition, according to existentialism, where man perseveres in an indifferent universe without God, absolute values, morals, and meaning. As such, man is alone, and, therefore, he freely chooses how to define the meaning and purpose of his life. For a 20-year-old lonely loser struggling to find my way in the world this was pretty heavy s tuff.

Hemingway’s novel set the groundwork for me to learn about and understand existentialism. Subsequent to taking Professor Wilkie’s Modern Novel course, I signed up for a class, Western Philosophy. In that course I developed an academic knowledge (not just a casual reading) of classical and modern philosophers from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through Kant, Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Hegel and Marx, to the existentialists Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. Studying these guys was like learning a foreign language, one in which their ideas were a set of keys opening a new world for me to explore; a world where I would become my true self.

Considering Camus was a novelist, dramatist, and essayist (and journalist) rather than a philosopher who developed an organized system of thought, he was akin to Hemingway, and thus his existential ideas were easier to understand than, for example, Sartre’s. Having rejected Catholicism and questioned the existence of God, Camus’ atheistic focus on ethical and moral ideas appealed to me. In particular, I was struck by his statement in reference to life’s absurdity where there is no God or meaning, Why not suicide? in response to the human condition. Intriguing. Why not, indeed I sometimes asked myself.

All of which brings me to Camus’ classic novel, The Plague published in 1948. The novel is about an Algerian town on the Mediterranean coast afflicted by a mysterious plague in the 1940s. Camus purposely leaves it vague when exactly in the 1940s the tale takes place, which leads the critics to presume that the plague symbolically functions as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation and oppression of France and North Africa during World War II.

The story begins with the unnamed narrator describing the town, Oran, and its townspeople. They go about their banal lives without much passion or purpose other than to get on the business of modern life. "The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens’ work, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is commerce, and their chief aim in life as they call it is doing business."

Beyond a mere indictment of pre-war capitalism, I think what Camus was getting at was how people generally suppress the absurdity of life (i.e. the absence of God and absolute values, morals and meaning) by obsessing over making money, obtaining material possessions and keeping up with the Jones. As a college kid searching for freedom and truth I didn’t want to settle down (as my dad preached) doing business. That path was a dead end, an absurd direction for me to take.

Part I of the novel centers on the main character, Dr. Rieux who treats the patients dying from the plague. After several days of an increasing death toll he convinces town officials to declare the presence of a plague and order public health measures to combat it. The narrator focuses on how the townspeople go about their daily lives attempting to ignore the rising number of deaths. The mayor initially hesitates to declare a state of emergency in order to avoid panicking the public. He wants certainty from Dr. Rieux that people’s deaths are actually caused by the plague, and not a disease more manageable like cholera. The doctor himself has trouble accepting that the plague that had wiped out half of Europe in the 14th Century could afflict this ordinary, modern and civilized town.

Obviously there is a corollary, as critics have written, between Oran and the rise of the Nazis in modern and civilized Germany in the 1930s. Just as good Germans ignored the warnings of Hitler in Mien Kampf in their support of him and later looked the other way as the Nazis began persecuting the Jews, so too do the townspeople ignore the oncoming plague, hoping it will go away on its own without them having to do anything about the pestilence. "Hitherto, the people had merely grumbled at a stupid, rather obnoxious visitation; they now realized that this strange phenomenon whose scope could not be measured and whose origins escaped detection, had something vaguely menacing."

The narrator further notes, "Our townsfolk realized they had never dreamed it possible that our little town should be chosen out for the scene of such grotesque happenings as the wholesale death of rats in broad daylight or the disease of concierge through exotic maladies."

To underscore the correlation between the plague in Oran and the world war that quite recently plagued Europe, Camus writes "When a war breaks out people say ‘It’s too stupid. It can’t last long’. But though a war may be ‘too stupid’, that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not so wrapped up in ourselves."

That phrase so wrapped up in ourselves, rang true for me. With so much oppression, poverty, war, famine and injustice in world then (i.e. South Africa, Cambodia, Latin America and America’s ghettos) – and now – I increasingly saw my mission in life was to become a non-violent revolutionary fighting for human rights. Therefore, I despised the Seventies’ disco me generation era. Americans, it seemed, generally didn’t care about the suffering of poor people. They were just in to doing (snorting coke, casual sex, making money, or getting in touch with their feelings) their own thing. I related to Camus’ moral stance because he frequently criticized terrorism be it from the Left or the Right, whether or not the movements were anti-colonial, military dictatorships communist governments.

Comparable to the Hemingway hero, Dr. Rieux is a man of action. He fights the plague (the disease of injustice which spreads when good people do nothing), warns the townspeople about the public health menace (the Nazis), and tries to heal them even though he realizes his mission is futile (absurd) because they all will die sooner (from the plague) or later (from natural causes). Like Dr. Rieux, I planned to do my bit to save the world beginning with joining the Peace Corps a few years later.

In Part II the public officials quarantine the residents of Oran. No one was allowed to leave for fear of contagion and spreading the disease beyond the town. Subsequently, the town authorities implement a rationing plan due to the stoppage of shipping activity in the port and commercial traffic on the roadways leading into Oran. Apparently, Camus is drawing parallels between the besieged town and Jewish ghettoes under Nazi occupied Europe, specifically the round up of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

The narrator describes this period in the story as the exile. The townspeople can’t leave and reunite with their loved ones, and they, in turn, can’t visit them for fear that they too will succumb to the plague. "Therefore they forced themselves to never think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always keep, so to speak, their eyes on the ground."

The plague forced the people of Oran, therefore, to think of themselves as trapped together rather than pursuing their individual lives indifferent to how other people lived (and suffered) as they did prior to the arrival of the epidemic. The narrator states one of the fundamental existential beliefs in the novel. "Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifferent sky."

As Dr. Rieux assumes an increasingly central role in fighting the plague, an acquaintance (a visiting journalist named Rambert) asks the doctor to find a way for him to be granted permission to leave Oran.

"But I don’t belong here."

Dr. Rieux replies, "Unfortunately, from now on you belong here like everybody else does."

"No," Rambert said bitterly. "You can’t understand. You’re using the language of reasoning, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstraction."

Interestingly, Camus places the doctor in a conundrum, forcing him to choose between following orders (complying with the quarantine) or his heart. After all, Dr. Rieux (whose own wife is in a sanatorium outside of Oran), who is also not allowed to leave, could have assumed Rambert was free of the plague and recommend to the authorities he be given a free pass. But the doctor didn’t because he could not be sure if the journalist was afflicted with the plague or not. It seems like Camus is making Dr. Rieux a symbol of the good German, those (i.e. a lowly bureaucrat or soldier) with a conscience who were conflicted between following orders or following their moral instincts of distinguishing between right and wrong. "Rieux was silent for a moment then he understood it perfectly. Only the law was the law … The plague had broken out and he could only do what had to be done."

One of the chapters in The Plague is devoted to a sermon in the church by the town priest, Fr. Paneloux. Predictably he plays a guilt trip on the townspeople. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, God has punished Oran because they have turned away from Him to worship false idols (materialism?). But, he preached, there was hope for salvation. "He (the priest) hoped against hope that despite all the horrors of these dark days, despite the groans of men and women in agony, our fellow citizens would offer up to heaven that one prayer which is truly Christian. And God would see to the rest."

In response to the sermon the narrator notes, "To some the sermon brought home the fact they had been sentenced for an unknown crime, for an indeterminate period of punishment. And while many people passively accepted their fate, he adds, There were others who rebelled and whose one idea was to break loose from the prison house."

Towards the end of Part II Camus touches on the two major themes of his philosophy: the absence of God and living without ideology in a world where there is no God. One of the key characters, a writer named Tarrou, asks Dr. Rieux this:

"Do you believe in God, doctor?"

"No – but what does that really mean? I’m stumbling in the dark trying to make something out."

The making something out response is the doctor’s declaration of his devotion to his career (the Hippocratic oath to do no harm) by fighting the plague. The writer continues to probe Dr. Rieux. "‘My question is this,’ said Tarrou. ‘Why do you, yourself, show so much devotion, considering you don’t believe in God?’".

"His face, still in the shadow (the narrator states), Rieux said that he had already answered: that if he believed in an all-powerful God, he would cease curing the sick and leave that up to Him. But no one of the world believed in God of that sort, no, not even the priest, who would believe in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely. Anyhow, in this respect Rieux believed himself on the right road – in fighting against creation as he found it."

"‘Ah,’ Tarrou remarked, ‘So that’s the idea you have of your profession?’"

"More or less."

Having left the Catholic Church in my late teens, I was not necessarily an atheist. Instead, I preferred to view myself as agnostic given there was no proof that God did or did not exist. Thus, I turned the focus of my faith elsewhere, to a place where I could do some good in the world free of the doctrine of organized religion. Gradually, after reading The Plague, I chose humanism as formalized in Camus’ philosophical ethics as my guiding light.

With respect to his other great theme, ideology, Camus makes a connection between it and evil and ignorance. The narrator states, "The evil that’s in the world always comes from ignorance; and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding. On the whole men … are more or less ignorant, and it is this we call vice or virtue, the most incorrigible vice being that of ignorance that fancies that it knows everything and therefore claims the right to kill."

In the section where Rambert, the journalist, is plotting his escape, he responds to Dr. Rieux and Tarrou who question his motives (to reunite with his wife in Paris). They believe he has a duty to stay and fight the plague. Rambert asks, "Tell me, Tarruo, are you capable of dying for love?"

"I couldn’t say, but I hardly think so – as I am now."

"You see. But you are capable of dying for an idea; one can see that right away. Well personally I’ve seen enough of people dying for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism. I know it’s easy and I’ve learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves."

Dr. Rieux interjects. "Man isn’t an idea, Rambert."

"Man is an idea, and a precious small one once he turns his back on love. And that’s my point; we – mankind – have lost the capacity for love. We must face the fact, doctor. Let’s wait to acquire that capacity or, if it’s really beyond us, wait for the deliverance that will come to each of us anyway, without his playing the hero."

Dr. Rieux agrees with Rambert but adds, "However, there is one thing I must tell you: there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea that may make people smile, but that’s the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency."

How profound. Reading and comprehending this passage I realized I could not replace religious dogma with ideological dogma (i.e. Marxism) in order to live a good moral life. Keep it simple stupid. Live a life of common decency. Follow the golden rule. That was what humanism meant to me.

The description of events in Part III by the narrator clearly is a metaphor of the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps. As the quantity of the plague victims mount, the authorities must do something about the corpses. They are running out of land to bury them all in individual graves. First they decide to reuse the coffins.

"Meanwhile the empty coffins, after being sprayed with antiseptic fluid, were rushed back to the hospital, and the process was repeated as often as necessary. This system worked perfectly and won the approval of the Prefect (mayor)."

"Yes", Rieux said "And though the burials are much the same, we keep careful records of them. That, you will agree, is progress."

No longer able to bury the victims in separate plots and provide them with a proper (religious) funeral, the hospital officials resort to mass burials in open pits.

"When the ambulance finished its trip, the stretchers were carried to the pits in Indian file. The naked, somewhat contorted bodies were slid into a pit almost side-by-side then covered with a layer of quicklime and another of earth, the latter of only a few inches deep, so as to leave space for the subsequent consignment."

The narrator recounts the process as though he was a Nazi guard filing a report to his superiors. Camus’ point here is that once you distance yourself from evil – be it disease, war, torture, massacres, whatever – by distancing yourself from your humanity (i.e. mass corpses are consignment), you dehumanize yourself, and thus are able to commit evil with no feeling of empathy or remorse.

Still as the death toll mounted, mass burials are no longer sufficient in disposing the corpses. Because of the public health hazard of decaying bodies the town officials decide to cremate the corpses.

"Then a public employee had an idea … to employ the streetcar line running along the coastal road which was now unused. So the interior of the streetcars and trailers were adapted to this new purpose, a branch line was laid down to the crematorium, which thus became its terminus."

This, of course, is an obvious description of the operation of Auschwitz. "During the first few days an oily, foul-smelling cloud of smoke hung low upon the eastern district of the town." As such, the townspeople clearly could see what was happening to their fellow residents after they had died.

Dr. Rieux ponders his role in this gruesome process, given that something had to be done to remove the dead in order to avoid harming the living. "It was all about a shrewd unflagging adversary (the plague) and a skilled organizer (Dr. Rieux) doing his work thoroughly and well."

With regard to the living, Camus describes them as though were death camp prisoners who could be led to the gas chamber at any moment and, thus, live each day accordingly as though it could be their last.

"Our fellow citizens had fallen into living, adapted themselves, as people say, to the situation because there was no way of doing otherwise. Without memory or hope they lived for the moment only."

I’m not sure what to make of this section. I doubt Camus was comparing Dr. Rieux to Dr. Mengele. His profile of the doctor is one of a good man, a humanist, doing the best he can under bad circumstances. And yet the comparison between Oran and Auschwitz is clear, except there’s one basic distinction. The Nazi death camps were created by man’s evil deeds. Conversely, Oran was afflicted by a plague through no fault of the townspeople – in spite of the priest’s sermon. Maybe what Camus is suggesting whether people face a calamity of either natural or man-made causes, they (we) have choices: to run (Rambert) or stay (Dr. Rieux), to give up hope and lose your humanity or fight the good fight, and to live and die with dignity.

In Part IV, the narrator recounts the words and actions of four key characters in the story: Rambert (the journalist), Fr. Paneloux (the priest), Tarrou (the writer) and Cottard (the old man who tried to commit suicide prior to the onset of the plague). Each character serves as a spokesperson for Camus concerning his questions about duty (Rambert), faith (Fr. Paneloux), capital punishment (Tarrou) and the will to live (Cottard).

Early in the novel, the old man, Cottard, is arrested for trying to hang himself due to the guilt he felt after committing an unnamed crime. Once the plague began to afflict Oran he was no longer under arrest because of the quarantine. Paradoxically, he seemed to welcome the plague. This new- found freedom gave him a new lease on life. Devoting himself to fighting the plague, it provides him with a reason to live. "In short the epidemic had done him proud. A lonely man who hated loneliness it (the plague) has made an accomplice. He is happy with all those around him … with their abject terror of the earliest symptom of the plague." The absurdity (one of Camus’ favorite themes) of the situation is that Cottard’s life now has meaning in the midst of the meaningless suffering brought on by the plague.

Moving on to Rambert, he informs Dr. Rieux that he has abandon his plan to escape in order to be reunite with his wife. "Until now, I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with people. But now I’ve seen what I have seen, I know I belong here whether I want it or not."

Seeing all the suffering around him the journalist makes an existential and moral choice. He chooses to sacrifice his health, perhaps never seeing his wife again (the same choice Dr. Rieux makes) for the sake of serving humanity (the plague victims). Even though his efforts may be futile (townspeople continue to die), Rambert discovers his own humanity and, therefore, uncovers the meaning of life for him.

After giving last rites to a dying child, Fr. Paneloux has second thoughts about his earlier sermon, the one in which he blamed the plague on the townspeople’s wicked ways. In his subsequent sermon the priest tries to explain why God allows evil in the world. "It is wrong for the Christian to say this I understand but that I cannot accept. We must go straight to the heart of what is unacceptable, precisely because it is this that we are constrained to make our choice. The suffering of children were the bread of our afflictions but without this bread our souls would die of spiritual hunger."

The priest concludes his sermon. "My brothers the love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender and disdain of our personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to the suffering and deaths of children, it alone can justify them since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours."

For those readers familiar with Kierkegaard’s treatise on ethics, Fear and Loathing, this passage echoes his account of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son. Alas, according to the Old Testament, faith supersedes reason and emotion (love).

Tassou shares a story with Dr. Rieux how his father, a judge who condemned a man to death, impacted the journalist’s life. "But personally, I’ve never been able to sleep well since then. And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow had had the plague through all these long years in which, paradoxically enough, I believed with all my soul I was fighting it. I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the death of thousands of people, that I had brought about their deaths by approving acts and principals which only could end that way."

Through this character Camus voices his stance against capital punishment and state-sponsored killing (war). By remaining silent we are complicit in society sanctioning murder. Camus’ moral imperative, in Tarrou’s words, is as follows, "So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which … brings death to anyone or justifies others to put him to death. The journalist concludes, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to exile that can never end. I leave it to others to make history."

In the final part of the novel, Part V, the plague at last, through a combination of a serum used by Dr. Rieux to inoculate his patients along with the return of the cold rainy winter, has ended. The quarantine is over and the town gates are open. Free to come and go as they please, as well as reunite with their loved ones, the townspeople celebrate. However, the last victim of the plague, tragically, is Tarrou, who Dr. Rieux assists him at his deathbed. Tragic, too, Dr. Rieux’s wife dies at the sanitarium. The doctor tries to make sense of all of this tragedy after Tarrou had lost the match and the news about his wife’s death. "But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known the plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of having known affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories."

It turns out that Dr. Rieux was, indeed, the unnamed narrator. His purpose, he explained, was to provide an objective account for posterity what had happened in Oran during the year of the plague. "Following the dictates of his heart he (Dr. Rieux) has deliberately taken the victims’ side and tried to share with his fellow citizens they only certitude they had in common – love, exile and suffering."

The doctor/narrator sums up what he has learned from the plague. "He knew the tale he had to tell could not be the final victory. It was only a record of what had had to be done, and assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts by all who … strive their utmost to be healers."

In the last scene, while Dr. Rieux watches the jubilant crowd celebrating from his apartment balcony, he knew what they did not know, ". . . but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good, that it can be dormant for years and years … and that perhaps the day would come when … it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

I’ve nothing else to say and write except: PURE GENIUS.

3

Travels with Charley: In Search of America – John Steinbeck

I N 1961 JOHN Steinbeck criss-crossed the USA in a customized pick-up camper with his dog Charley. 1961. A few short years before the assassinations, the Viet Nam war, the civil rights demonstrations, integration, riots in the ghettoes, the anti-war movement, the hippies, Woodstock, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the landing on the moon – the crazy Sixties. The author, age 59 at the time, lamented that being an American writer who he hadn’t visited nor gotten to know the heartland of American over the past 25 years – since the late 1930s, around the time he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. Even in late middle age with all his physical ailments Steinbeck still had the urge to be someplace else. He describes himself as once a bum always a bum.

The following passage in Part I of Travels with Charley defines what it means to be a traveler – not a tourist – a seeker of experience, knowledge and wisdom. "A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, the trip takes us."

I read Travels with Charley when I was around seventeen or eighteen years old, a year or two before I hitched hike across the United States and Canada in the summer of 1974 – a dozen years after Steinbeck had published his travelogue. So much had changed in those twelve years. And yet a lot had not, particularly on the road. We both had to prepare for the trip; what to pack, what to plan for, money, supplies (he had a camper while I had a backpack and tent), places to visit, people to see, while picking the best roadways to get there. Besides these contingencies, the main purpose of the trip for him and me was to see the sights, hear the sounds, feel the mood, and get to know (party with!) the folks you would meet on the road.

By June 1974 I had quit my job installing carpet after having made plans to venture out to Colorado, San Francisco, and up to Banff and Lake Louise in British Colombia. Hitching on the Interstate through America’s heartland, strolling the streets of San Fran, paddling a canoe on a lake reflecting the pine forest, snowcapped Canadian Rockies, hopping a freight train across the Canadian plains, and inhaling the Quebec’s French culture, this trip, I imagined, would be an adventure of a lifetime. Choosing to not start a career or learn a trade, this journey was the fruit of my labor. Although I knew I would probably attend college in the near future, furthering my education wasn’t about necessarily pursuing a degree in order to settle down. Nope. Not for me. Instead, I was into fun, freedom, and finding exotic places to travel to – and learning about life along the way.

I stuffed my backpack with all the necessities for a cross continental two to three month journey – tent, sleeping bag, tarp, padding, sterno stove and fuel cans, packaged food, water bottle, eating utensils, matches, books, Rand McNally road atlas, clothes, boots, flash light, tooth brush and tooth paste, and so on. Everything else I could buy at campgrounds and service stations along the highway.

There’s something about carrying all you need to survive on your back that is so cool. That something is called freedom. Like the romantic image of a hobo in the Great Depression. The tramp’s meager belongings are wrapped up in a ball at the end of a walking stick over his shoulder as he tracks down a boxcar to jump on to.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose

- Janis Joplin/Kris Kristofferson

So there I was leaning against the highway guardrail, my trusty backpack next to me, holding a cardboard sign WEST, with nothing left to lose. And a lot to gain. By that I mean, more than this young wanderer looking for love/lust on the road, he wanted to discover and experience a whole new world out there beyond the horizon a la Jack Kerouac. You see, unlike running away from home or running back to my hometown a few years ago, I wasn’t escaping from anything such as intolerable D-Y Regional High. Instead, I was running towards something. Free love? Life on a hippie commune? Living as a street bum in San Fran? I didn’t know exactly what back then. But whatever it was I had taken a big bite out of the forbidden fruit while backpacking through Europe the previous summer.

In Part II of Travels with Charley, Steinbeck begins his journey. He meets a sailor on a ferry crossing Long Island Sound. They chat about the submarines docked at the naval station. It turns out that the sailor is actually a submariner on leave. Steinbeck asks him "Do you like to serve on them?"

"Sure I do. The pay is good and there’s all kinds of – future."

Fretting about the nuclear missiles on the subs (this is two years before the Cuban missile crisis) along with his fast-approaching old age, Steinbeck laments, "Its his world not mine anymore."

The novelist describes the daily chores, so to speak, of traveling on the road. Preparing breakfast over a butane stove at a campsite. Eating at a greasy spoon roadside diner. Small-talking with surly waitresses, local farmers, and weary truckers. Listening to the same top forty pop songs whether he was traveling through Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. Occasionally staying at a motel for a shower and a good night sleep. Many of Steinbeck’s experiences were similar to mine. Sometimes I felt as though I was following his footsteps – or rather his tire tracks – across the USA, discovering America on my terms (hitch hiking) just as he had on his (camper). Indeed, he describes watching the Northern Lights in Maine just I had seen them in Canada.

"And the Aurora Borealis was out. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in infinite theatre. In colors of rose and lavender and purple, it moved and pulsed against the night and the frost sharpened stars shone threw it."

Here’s my impression of the same spectacular cosmic phenomenon as written in my journal.

In Banff I hung out with some Canadian backpackers. We pitched our tents by a creek that flowed into Lake Louise. We drank beer, smoked pot and watched the Northern Lights wave blue and green and purple across the starry night. We paddled canoes down stream. We strolled through the Banff Springs Hotel like we belonged to an exclusive hunting lodge. We shot photos of the lake – the steep sloped forest reflecting on its placid, sky blue waters – from the hotel veranda. We didn’t give a shit about the snobby tourists and the bellhops giving us dirty looks. We were young, carefree and joyful.

Traveling through the Maine woods during hunting season was quite an adventure for Steinbeck and Charley. With gunshots fired frequently near campgrounds and highway rest stops, he comments "It is not hunting that drives millions of American males to forest and hills … Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity." And I would add, gun ownership, too. So true then and so true now (2013).

Avoiding the recently built (mid-1950’s) interstate highways (I-10, I-80, I-90) – "When we get these thruways across the country it’ll be possible to travel from California to New York without seeing a single thing – Steinbeck stayed on the blue highways, those squiggly lines on a map that have connected villages to towns and towns to cities since colonial times. Along these single lane roads he was able to see up close Main Street" America and the post-war changes small towns and big cities were going through.

"The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither and die."

Keenly observing the destructive ecological conditions that lead to the environmental movement Steinbeck adds, "I found this as true in Texas as in Maine, where logs are ground up, the air smells of chemicals, the rivers are choked and poisoned, and the streets swarm with this happy hurrying breed (Americans). And I am sure that as all pendulums swing in reverse, so eventually with the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside (suburbs). Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to."

Twelve years later, in 1974, I wrote this passage in my diary: These thoughts, these images, these flights of fancy passed through me as the traffic on the Interstate passed me by whipping up roadside debris in my face. Along the rain-slicked I-90 kind drivers – truckers, yuppie commuters, hippies in VW vans – drove me about ten to twenty miles per ride. We’d small talk on the usual topics (Where are you heading? I wish I was young again like you. Wanna get high?). Then they’d turn up the radio to ward off the ensuing awkward silence (I was never much of a talker) while I stared out the window watching the farms, suburban subdivisions, office parks and retail centers pass on by.

We crossed the Connecticut River and got stuck in Springfield’s bummer-to-bummer commuter traffic. The bucolic scene a few miles back – trees, pasture, farmland – was replaced by the mill city’s broken-window warehouses, graffiti splattered tenements (Viva la Raza!), factories made from brick and shattered dreams, corner bars, and empty lots. Once upon a time they made shoes and textiles there, just like they used to in Lawrence, Lowell, Pittsfield, Fall River and New Bedford. Now they turned these 19th Century fortresses into condos and computer start-up businesses, or wait for Urban Renewal – or the arsonists – to knock them down. Fuckin’ Nixon and the Republicans. It’s all their fault.

Hassled by the U.S. Immigration Service at the Canadian border near Niagara Falls because Charley doesn’t have proof of his rabies shots, the novelist gripes, "He (the customs official) wasn’t government, you see. But government can make you feel so small and mean that it takes some doing to build back up a sense of self-importance. I guess this is why I hate government, all governments. It’s always the rules, the fine print carried out by the fine-print men."

I could certainly relate to that. After all I was breaking the law by thumbing on the interstate. State police occasionally would wave me off the highway. The cops would warn me not to go back or else they’d arrest me. Rules. Rules like records, I figured at the time, were made to be broken.

All of us who travel alone, either as hitch hikers or campers, truckers or motorists, riding in a bus or on a train, we daydream our loneliness away, letting our thoughts drift. Steinbeck writes, "If one has driven over many years … one doesn’t have to think about what to do. This being so, a large area of consciousness is left free for thinking. And what do people think about when they drive? I can only suspect that the lonely man people’s his driving dreams with friends, and that the loveless man surrounds himself with lovely loving women. And how about areas of regret? If I had only done so-and-so … my God the damn thing might not have happened."

Such are the psychic hazards of traveling alone on the road. Your subconscious thoughts surface to fill in the void of the vast vacuum of the wide-open spaces. In my journal I recount a wild ride with a trucker barreling through the Rocky Mountains.

Temporarily lost in my thoughts, the trucker blasted me out of my daydream. Apparently spotting a kid riding in a car parallel to us, who, I imagined, waved at the trucker to beep his horn, he pulled down on the lever. A foghorn nearly blew out my eardrums. He chuckled. Kids. They crack me up.

So it went all the way to Colorado.

The Rocky Mountains blew me away just as the Swiss Alps did last summer. The hazy ridgeline rose above Eastern Colorado’s pasture horizon. Awesome. Ascending beyond the foothills, patches of snow lingered underneath the pine trees and ravines along the roadside. Snow in the summertime? So fuckin’ cool!

And later on traveling in a van with a bunch of hippies in Northern California, I would watch the world fly by as if I was seated in a movie theatre.

With the passenger window wide opened, how I loved that gush of freedom’s wind as it hammered my face. I was alive, in control, and free. Like the rest of the manic drivers in sprawling Marin County the trucker raced along side BMW’s, Mercedes and exhaust-spewing 18-wheelers. Computer companies and defense firms nestled along the dry foothills bordering Interstate 5. Occasionally, roadside powers lines raised their hideous heads. But all that urban blight shrunk in the side view mirror. The road was my domain. Beyond the bay area’s smog, we headed north past endless rows of cabbage and groves of citrus trees dangling oranges, lemons, and limes that hugged the highway. Migrant-transporters in packed pickup trucks drove the mostly Mexican laborers to their destination; the fields of shame. There, the undocumented workers hauled produce-packed crates on their shoulders for – what? – a buck an hour, just so us middle class folks could eat fresh and fruits and veggies everyday.

Steinbeck is amazed at the new phenomenon of mobile homes; they’re everywhere he travels. Trailer parks have sprouted all along the highways to accommodate the RV owners. He marvels at all of the modern conveniences of these homes on wheels such as bathrooms, TV sets, refrigerators, sinks, ovens and stoves, as well as comfy beds. America on the move in the 1960’s. Right before his highway eyes, the novelist was witnessing the great demographic and geopolitical shift of the U.S. population from the cold, grimy Midwest and Northeast cities to the new sunny manufactured suburbs of the South and Southwest. It’s quaint his reaction (after 25 years off the road) to the trend of mobile homeowners traveling across the country and resettling where they want for as long as they want. At a trailer park he dines with a family living in mobile home and asks the father, "How do you feel about raising your kids without roots? Don’t you miss some kind of permanence?"

"Who’s got permanence? Factory closes down, you move on. Good times and things opening up, you move on to where it’s better. You got roots, you sit and starve. How many kids in America stay in place where they were born, if they can get out?"

Lastly, in Part II, Steinbeck comments on change and progress, and how the country’s regional dialect and culture have morphed into a national language and homogenized culture (McDonalds was established in 1955) through network TV and top forty radio. He protests, "the assembly line production of our food, our songs, our language and eventually our souls. The writer realizes that you can’t stop progress. He’s no fool. What I’m mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless."

Refreshed from several days of R and R spent with his wife in Chicago, Steinbeck and Charley set out for the next phase of their trip. In Part III they drive through the north central states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana) to the Pacific Northwest, and down to California to Salinas, his hometown, and the Monterey Peninsula where some of his greatest novels (Tortilla Flats) took place. There in Salinas he reunites with siblings and relatives, and old friends in Monterey. He continues trucking all the way through the Mojave Dessert, and onto Arizona and New Mexico. Some of the major themes that Steinbeck contends with in this section of Travels with Charley include political apathy, getting back to nature, individualism versus conformism, inner city decline, and perceptions of the past.

It surprised me that, a mere two years before the march on Washington and the subsequent political upheaval of the Sixties, Steinbeck encountered few people who expressed strong political beliefs. "I had been keen to hear what people thought politically. Those of whom I met did not want to talk about the subject. It seemed to me partly caution and partly a lack of interest, but strong opinions were just not stated."

Perhaps these Americans, mostly rural folks, were those people who later came to be known as Nixon’s silent majority. Nevertheless, once the turmoil of the decade ended, which had deeply affected their – and all Americans’ – lives, they were no longer silent or apolitical.

At a campsite in Montana, there was a touching scene between the novelist and a struggling actor who was also traveling with a dog. It seemed the actor did