Review: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse takes place by the sea, and Virgina Woolf’s prose is itself ocean-like, washing over you in waves, immersing you and buffeting you about. Her stream of consciousness perspectives allow you to explore the thought processes that make up our understanding of ourselves and of others.

One theme Woolf explores is our ability to relate to others. Sometimes we feel an aching loneliness that we can never be truly known by another person (“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.”). Other times, our loved ones show us they know exactly what we are thinking, what we need (“And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him.”). And at other times still, we think we are alone in feeling a certain way, when many share our same thoughts (“for each thought, ‘the others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fisherman. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.’”). Woolf presents her characters so intimately and details their relationships with others so meticulously that small gestures between them are imbued with as much meaning to us as they hold for the characters (“And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him.”).

Another theme Woolf explores is the linear passing of time, at odds with our much more circular examination of ourselves and our inner thoughts. The characters contemplate how they’ve spent their lives: Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay each consider how the demands of raising eight children impacted their abilities to pursue other sorts of fulfillment. Lily reflects on the happiness of married couples, and her decision to remain unmarried. In their introspections, each character bounces between the past, the present, and their dreams of the future. Time itself presses onwards unrelentingly (“as she … left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”).

How well can one know another person? Much of the novel occurs while Lily paints a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, and the novel itself is itself a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. We see Mrs. Ramsay through the eyes of each character (“Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with”), and she is someone different to each of these people. And yet, all these facets of Mrs. Ramsay are who she is. When James finally visits the titular lighthouse, he remarks that the Lighthouse seen from a distance, the “silvery, misty-looking tower,” and the Lighthouse seen up close, inhabited with “washing spread on the rocks to dry,” are both the Lighthouse: “For nothing was simply one thing. The other was the Lighthouse too.” Mrs. Ramsay is likewise the mother, the wife, the cheerleader, the beautiful woman, the warm woman who knows how to bring people together, the cold woman who cannot say “I love you.”

Lily perhaps knows Mrs. Ramsay best of all the others — maybe because she is also a woman, and therefore sees her as an equal and understands the many social pressures placed on women. Her grief at the loss of Mrs. Ramsay is beautifully written, exploring our changing relationships with those who are no longer with us (“It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness.”). Fittingly, when Lily’s portrait of Mrs. Ramsay is finished, the novel ends too.

Review: The Knowledge Economy and Socialism by Agustín Lage Dávila

Our current age is remarkable for the rapidity with which knowledge is produced and integrated into products. New technology, like CRISPR or LLMs, explode onto the scene and change the game in such a way that news and technology from 6 months prior is already out of date. A company’s competitiveness hinges on how fast they can produce, respond to, and apply knowledge. Capitalist competition on this battlefield has led to the increasing privatization of knowledge, such as through institutions like patents. For most of human history, science played a liberating role in helping humans meet their needs and overcome the challenges of nature. Under capitalism, scientific output is increasingly commodified. What does an alternative model for the role of science in society look like?

Agustín Lage Dávila is a Cuban immunologist who played a leading role in developing Cuba’s remarkable biotechnology sector. In this series of essays written between 1994 and 2013, Lage Dávila reflects on the role science plays in society, and the way Cuban leaders used their understanding of economics and science to create a successful biotech hub in the unlikely soils of an underdeveloped and heavily embargoed country.

One of Lage Dávila’s insights is that the Cuban high-tech sector benefited from a highly educated populace, in contrast with mainstream approaches to development that prioritize development goals over educational excellence. For Cuba, success in exportable high-tech goods is a matter of survival: it is a small island and so its market is too small to support the production of specialized goods nor is its labour market able to transform into a major manufacturing hub (like China’s approach). It is also poor in natural resources, and so its ability to trade for the things it needs necessarily comes from the export of high value-add products, like its vaccines and cancer drugs. 

Lage Dávila contrasts the path Cuba took with capitalist approaches to the knowledge economy, as well as to approaches taken by other socialist states, particularly the USSR and China. Some of his observations are a little dated: in particular, China’s world leadership in science and technology has only emerged in the last few years. Cuba has also struggled in recent years due to the US’s devastating illegal sanctions. Due to this book's origins as a series of individually published essays, it also becomes somewhat repetitive. Still, his account is clear-sighted and thoughtful, and as a scientist, I found it incredibly applicable to understanding my own role in society.

Review: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

How should you read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations? One option is to peer into it for hints of how it has shaped thinking in the 1900 years since its writing — this collection of disconnected aphorisms is one of the most famous texts of the Roman Empire. In this reading, you might reflect on the author’s views on cosmic order and nature and on the cyclical flow of time, and how philosophers as diverse as Isaac Newton and Friedrich Nietzsche might have approached his writing on these themes. Or perhaps you might do more of a feminist critique: how has Marcus Aurelius’s stoicism shaped what it means to be a man? To be unbothered by other people’s opinions of you, to prize rationality, to be principled and purposeful and not caught up in frivolities — these commandments continue to shape social expectations of masculinity. I like this reading, and if you’re interested in the development of human thought it’s a worthwhile reason to read this book.

Another reading would take Marcus Aurelius’s writing as normative life advice. This is a reading I don’t care for. Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy teeters on nihilistic individuality, and therefore reinforces the status quo: time is cyclic and your life is short so you shouldn’t strive to change society; forget about what other people think, follow your own nature. It is also only a partial picture of morality: he has relatively little to say about community, about our social obligation to each other, or about resolving conflicting perspectives (we could call these feminine virtues). That said, it is a philosophy more compassionate about accepting the shortcomings of others than some individualistic worldviews (“If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.” (Book X)). But to approach this work as a source of guidance is to invite cherry-picking of poignant quotes: it is not a systematic, rigorously developed worldview, but a scattering of sometimes contradictory thoughts.

A third reading — and this is where my mind kept going as I read the work — is to read it metatextually: why did Marcus Aurelius write these particular thoughts down? The work was never meant to be published: he wrote it for himself. What personal struggles was he grappling with as he penned these meditations? Death, surely, was one: he emphasizes over and over the fleetingness of life. Other anxieties appear to trouble him too; when he writes lines like

What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power. (Book III)

does he speak from a self-chastising position, as someone still trying to care less about what some other person is thinking of? Is he thinking of a particular example, but cloaking it as a general conclusion? (If so, Marcus, you would have loved the invention of the subtweet.)

I like this metatextual reading best for a few reasons. First, it explains his contradictory and repetitive writing: he is trying an idea on for size to see how it fits, or working through a difficult idea. While many of his aphorisms are expressed as confident exhortations, others are tentative explorations of a thought:

If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state. (Book IV)

I think we should read these statements — the confident and the tentative — as more in continuity than a superficial reading might suggest (“To read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book.” (Book I)). These meditations are not battle-tested wisdoms the author hopes to disseminate broadly, but pep talks he gives to himself (“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil." (Book II)), or records of his deliberations for himself.

Second, this reading explains the incompleteness of the morality presented here. Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher-king, his views on man-as-citizen or man-as-shaper-of-society he would have debated extensively and applied as part of his imperial duties. The views scribbled here, just for him, naturally cover what remains: how to handle day-to-day emotional challenges in the right way.

Finally, there is a comfort in recognizing that even the literal Emperor of Rome struggled with navigating the complex waters of his internal life.
 

A few favourite lines not woven into the above:

• “We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker’s art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.” (Book III)
• “Men quarrel with that with which they are most constantly in communion.” (Book IV)
• “First, do nothing inconsiderately, nor without a purpose. Second, make thy acts refer to nothing else than to a social end.” (Book XII)
• “How close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence.” (Book XII)
• “If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state.” (Book IV)
• “By remembering, then, that I am a part of such a whole, I shall be content with everything that happens. And inasmuch as I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself, I shall do nothing unsocial, but I shall rather direct myself to the things which are of the same kind with myself, and I shall turn an my efforts to the common interest, and divert them from the contrary. Now, if these things are done so, life must flow on happily, just as thou mayest observe that the life of a citizen is happy, who continues a course of action which is advantageous to his fellow-citizens, and is content with whatever the state may assign to him.” (Book X)
• “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. But thou art thinking only of seeds which are cast into the earth or into a womb: but this is a very vulgar notion.” (Book IV)

Review: Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

“It is hideous, is it not, to speak in a breath of money and affection.”
— Delphine to Eugène, Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Love and capital are the questions this novel pre-occupies itself with, like so many other novels of the nineteenth century. Let’s start with the topic of capital, leaving love to the end.

 

As in Villette (1853) and Persuasion (1817), Père Goriot (1835) reflects the tumult as the bourgeoisie overtakes the aristocracy in fits and bursts. The novel takes place during the first few years of the Bourbon restoration: aristocracy is back, baby. Goriot, a doting father and wealthy vermicelli merchant, thought himself lucky to have married his daughters to a Baron and a Comte during the Napoleonic era, when the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with the landed gentry. With a Louis back on a throne, Goriot is considered too gauche to grace the parlours of his now-genteel daughters. Showing remarkable composure, Goriot bids farewell to the dreams he had of spending his final years lounging in the well-appointed homes of his daughters — he gifted them nearly all his wealth as dowries — and retires to a humble boarding house, where we meet him. The first third of the novel is driven by the mystery of who this solitary old man is, who are the fancy women who visit him, and what caused his successive moves from the well-appointed room at 1200 francs a year to the drafty and threadbare room at 45 francs per month? (Like in David Copperfield, prices are detailed at every opportunity; the reader can never forget how very expensive it is to go on living.) We find out it is his daughters bleeding him dry — but I get ahead of myself. We are still discussing themes of capital, not love.

 

One of the other boarders is Eugène De Rastignac, a well-born but not well-off aristocratic lad. His family scrapes together just enough money to keep him in respectable quarters while he studies at the university in Paris. Granted a taste of life among the cream of society, he starts looking for get-rich-quick schemes. A fellow boarder, Veltran, teaches him the hard truths of the world: he can toil his way through school and the ranks of the bureaucracy, never earning more than a mediocre salary, or he can scheme his way into marriage with an heiress, and live a life of luxury. Veltran offers him a Faustian bargain: the hand of the wealthy heiress requires assassinating a man. Eugène quickly finds that high society has low morals — when everyone cheats, exploits, and lies, are his own minor transgressions really so bad? Besides, the moral road of the bourgeoisie is just as ruthless; Goriot is implied to have founded his fortune “selling flour for ten times its cost” during the Revolution of 1789. To gain entry to the class born to leisure, Eugène needs to raise funds for fashionable finery, so he begs his mother and sisters, bleeding them dry. Here, Eugène parallels both Goriot in his entrepreneurial mind as well as Goriot’s daughters in their exploitation of familial affection for personal gain. Perhaps it is not possible to discuss capital without also dealing with love?

 

Père Goriot is a tragic love story about not romantic but paternal love. Goriot’s affection for his daughters is obsessive, idolizing. It is an obscure form of love — infatuation without romance or eroticism. Every day, he walks to the Champs d'Elysees to watch their coaches go by, hoping to catch a glimpse of their visages as they pass him by. He spends his days in his damp and cramped quarters daydreaming about how they spend their evenings.

I love the very horses that draw them; I envy the little lap-dog on their knees. Their happiness is my life. Every one loves after his own fashion, and mine does no one any harm; why should people trouble their heads about me?

Goriot is delighted to discover Eugène and his (married) daughter Delphine have fallen in love. He lives vicariously through Eugène, and schemes to create a secret apartment for the couple to use to carry out their affair — including nearby quarters for himself. He basks in her reacquired company: “He lay at his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress; in short, no young lover could have been more extravagant or more tender.” Goriot’s sheer happiness is plain to see, but also uncomfortable to read: we see how little the daughters’ affections are returned, how self-centered they are, how blindly consuming Goriot's love for them is, and how poorly he understands the women his little girls have grown into.

 

Goriot’s daughters find themselves in dire financial straits and so he sells every last asset and trinket to address their pleas. Their tribulations cause him such distress that he falls ill, but with not a franc left for medicine or firewood. Goriot’s daughters do not visit his sickbed, too caught up in the dramas of their own lives. Instead, Eugène and another student boarder nurse Goriot as they listen to his dying ravings about the wonders and treacheries of the two women. Had he not given them his fortunes, they would have still showered him with affection, he deplores. He daydreams about how he will rebuild his wealth and buy back his daughters’ love by importing processed wheat goods — he remains to his deathbed a capitalist. It is heartbreaking to read Goriot discover his daughters are not coming to visit him, when just seeing their faces and hearing their voices would mean so much to him, and equally wrenching to see him finally come to terms with their natures. 

 

The daughters are just as uninvolved with his funeral, turning away requests for help with the dismissal that they are “in deep grief over their loss.” His gravestone thus bears the words “Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students.” Like living, the reader is reminded that dying is frightfully expensive. 

 

The three young people around Goriot lie at different points along the axis of moral corruption. Daughter Anastasie is cold, calculating and most aware of how much she exploits her father’s deluded love. It is ironic that she is just as deluded about her affair partner as her father is about her: she pours hundreds of thousands of francs into funding his gambling addiction. Passionate and romantic Delphine deceives herself into not seeing her abuse of her father’s love or finds ways to rationalize it (“Why did he allow us to marry when we did? Was it not his duty to think for us and foresee for us? Today I know he suffers as much as we do, but how can it be helped?”). Her outbursts are so spirited that it is tempting to dismiss her flaws and fall in love with her like Eugène does.

At this moment I have but one fear left, but one misery to dread—to lose the love that has made me feel glad to live. Everything is as nothing to me compared with our love; I care for nothing else, for you are all the world to me.

While Eugène cares tenderly for Goriot, he is easily distracted by the luxury of a ball, and derelict towards his own family. Like Delphine, he also finds ways to rationalize or ignore the immorality of his actions (“Eugène did not wish to see too clearly; he was ready to sacrifice his conscience to his mistress.”).

 

Balzac’s characters are flawed, but understandable. He shows us how each character’s decisions are shaped by social forces. It is Parisian culture that is skewered: its dazzling splendor is an artifice concealing a cut-throat, turbulent, and unhappy core. Characters like Delphine understand this but see no escape — “Half the women in Paris lead such lives as mine; they live in apparent luxury, and in their souls are tormented by anxiety” — despite the high price of playing the game. Lives are wasted on ingenuine relationships. It’s a beautifully written book, and though the Bourbon era is long gone its themes remain poignant: financial pressures, social pressures, and a culture of individuality still trouble the development of genuine love.

Review: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Decades-old highly-influential books are typically difficult to assess because their reach dulls the brilliance of their original argument. With 130,000 citations on Google Scholar, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most cited works from the 20th century. Most educators who have shaped me likely encountered Freire’s ideas during their own training, or as practicing teachers. But this work stands apart from other oft-quoted magnum opuses whose astute remarks now seem obvious: this book is so radical in its advocacy and instruction in revolution that its reach seems surprising. Rather than being dulled by time and spread, its polemic blazes brightly.

Perhaps most people who encounter his work don’t read the book in full? Chapter 2 compares the status-quo, oppressor model of education (the “banking model of education”) to liberatory, dialogue-based education (“problem-posing” education). The banking model of education teaches students to be passive components in an existing world, to adapt themselves to its tyrannies rather than try to change it:

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. … The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

Students may encounter Freire’s ideas summarized in textbooks, stripped of some of the polemic arguments for the need for revolution (Chapter 1) and the instructions for revolutionaries on how to organize the people and anticipate their foe’s blows (Chapter 4). Freire’s fire might also be diluted by his obfuscatory language: terms like “oppressor” and “oppressed” are vague enough that they can easily apply to any group that restricts you, without clearly delineating many of its readers as part of the oppressor class.

In many ways, this book is a repackaging of ideas found elsewhere for Freire’s own context of Latin American peasants. There’s nothing wrong with that — in fact I think it is essential work that requires considerable skill. But it makes for a more challenging read as someone in the West in the 21st century. Freire’s political persuasion was Christian Socialist, and his Christian influences shine through, particularly in some of the language he uses around love and the relationship between the leaders and the masses. Christianity is far less dominant here — at least in terms of faith given that its value system is endemic. Freire’s influences include some of the Frankfurt School of thought, and read somewhat dated 57 years later. He writes from a humanist angle, and his beliefs about what separates humans and animals are not born out by what we know about animal psychology. Freire presents ideas found in Mao, Fanon, Lenin and Hegel, but often without the same careful and thorough development (and often without clear attribution). His most unique contribution is indeed the one he is most cited for — the banking versus problem-posing modes of education (or perhaps I simply haven’t read his sources…). As a result, I think it’s a valuable read but not an essential read. Both in terms of content and in terms of form, the most important lesson to pick up from this book is how to communicate big, complex ideas to the people you want to organize with.

Postscript: On a personal note, I discovered my father really enjoyed this work when he read it in the late sixties or early seventies. Liberation theology has been an lifetime interest for my father. It was fun to share this book together.

Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

It’s been a year of re-reads, and this book I have re-read many times. Journeying through its pages is always part self-discovery: how did these characters and their surreal banter shape my view of the world?

I can try to remove myself from the reading experience, and assess its themes and messaging from a cool distance. I played around with the idea of Through The Looking Glass as a metaphor for the rise of the bourgeoisie. Alice is a commoner — a privileged one, with servants and a nanny, but a commoner — and she starts her journey in the looking glass world serving the aristocracy, lifting the red and white royalty (chess pieces, but a possible nod to the Tudors?) out of the ashes and tidying them up. Alice expresses her desire to be a queen, and the red queen promises her that she, too, can be a queen if she gets to the eighth square (after all, the aristocracy promised/permitted some wealth and power to the bourgeoisie in their ascent). Alice makes her way through a series of odd holdovers from the feudal days: a king, napping against a tree, uselessly, while his kingdom is a flurry of activity; a duel between two brothers, to settle a silly dispute, but fought with blunt swords and a gentleman’s agreement to end by dinner-time; a knight, who can neither stay seated on his horse nor invent useful products. The world is strange: it is filled with old, familiar nursery rhymes but none of the logic makes sense any more (perhaps a revolution is in order?). Alice reaches the eighth square and finds a golden crown on her head, but she is still subordinated to the red and white queen. She starts to assert herself over a battle of wits and of table manners, and eventually leads a revolution:

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

The white queen is shrunk down into a doll, while Alice shakes the red queen into a kitten. The power is all Alice's.

While I think this is a fun lens through which to enjoy the book, I can’t argue that this is the reading Carroll intended. The scenes are not crafted with the through-lines such a grand theme would need to pull it together. The sole commonality between each of her adventures that Alice remarks upon is the unexpected frequency of fish in the poetry of the looking glass world. Instead, the chapters are episodic — like an absurd version of The Odyssey — with each encounter playing on different expectations Alice has of the workings of the world, language and customs. But even if Carroll did not intend to tell the story of the bourgeoisie superseding the feudal system, that was the zeitgeist of the time (see, for example, Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens). It’s unsurprising that the strangeness of the new world order would find its way subconsciously into delightful children’s books.

Review: Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec

The Canadian and American states were founded on centuries of genocide. Now what? This is the question Krawec explores in Becoming Kin. Reconciliation requires understanding the harm done and proactive righting of wrongs. Appropriately, this essay collection starts with telling the story of the wrongs of settler colonialism (Chapters 1-5). To do so, Krawec weaves together personal stories, linguistics, history and myth — Anishnaabe and Christian peoples both come to understand themselves and their values through their myths. With these stories imparted, Krawec shifts towards the future, towards becoming kin — a relationship that comes with reciprocal responsibilities to each other. She explores kinship with the land (Chapter 6), the interrelatedness of people (Chapter 7), and practical considerations for rebuilding kinship (Chapter 8).

Krawec’s essays come with homework: each finishes in an aambe, an Anishnaabe term meaning “let’s go!” These sections ask the reader to participate by learning about the treaties that govern the relationships with the Indigenous peoples they share a home with, observing the absence of Indigenous stories in the media they consume, or finding a way to insist on Indigenous representation in your community in whatever form that might be. As the book progresses, her homework problems increasingly involve community building and outreach. 

At the outset, Krawec insists the reader read her book with a friend. Learning and doing are best done in community: “Reading books in solitude may alter our individual relationship with the world around us. But like our histories, our lives do not unfold in isolation. We exist collectively: as neighbours and community groups, as workplaces and sports teams, as book groups and families.” It is from this community that your ability to change the world grows: “Organizing is a scary word. We hear it, and we think about large-scale events and mass mobilizations, but it begins with finding one person you can disrupt with.”

It is this emphasis on practical steps via community and education that makes this book special. Indigenous history is told more completely elsewhere (see, for example, works by Dunbar-Ortiz or Nick Estes). Indigenous philosophy is told more compellingly for a popular audience in Braiding Sweetgrass. Krawec’s writing meanders, and sometimes takes on a lecturing tone. Her perspective is more spiritual than what resonates with me. But her book, particularly Chapter 8, is forward-looking and community-oriented. It urges you to act and also makes you realize those first few steps aren’t so hard after all. That’s rarely found in a book.