Ten books meme

[fpb]

A book that changed your life. May I have two? Karl R.Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies; and Georges Dumezil, Archaic Roman Religion. The former grounded my instinctive love for liberty on a solid foundation of articulate thought, and the latter introduced me to the man from whom I learned everything I know about interpretation. Two that would have, if I had read them earlier, would have been Ernst Gombrich's History of Art and Art and Illusion.
A book that you've read more than once. Many, many... Lord of the Rings. The Father Brown Stories. C.S.Lewis' books of Christian essays. Robert Fagles' translation of The Oresteia. All the Harry Potter books.
A book that you'd want on a desert island. The complete works of William Shakespeare.
A book that made you laugh. Anything by Wodehouse. Or the Don Camillo stories.
A book that made you cry. Dee Brown, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
A book that you wish had never been written. The Kinsey Report - but if he had not, someone else would have. Margaret Mead, for instance, had already unleashed her concoction of lies and misrepresentations upon the world.
A book that you hope someone will write. Epic and Myth: The Indo-European cultural heritage. I hope I will write it myself.
A book that you wish you had written. G.K.Chesterton's History of England. And his astounding passage - in a booklet of war propaganda, yet! - on Frederick II of Prussia.
A book that you're currently reading. I am busy re-examining the Four Branches of the Mabinogi.
A book that you've been meaning to read. Filippo Coarelli, Il Foro Boario, an in-depth study of an important archaeological area of archaic Rome.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I've never read Chesterton's History of england, and now I am most curious about the Frederic of Prussia excerpt.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That comment was slightly double-edged. If I had written GKC's History - and the book which inspired a good deal of it, Cobbett's Protestant Reformation - I would have made sure that they were more like proper history and less like extended essays. And I would have removed some of the crankery from Cobbett. But I would not have changed the basic contentions of either, because I think they not only are right, but that unless they are expressed with all the force of indignation and revolt, we will never understand what happened in the history of England, and what forces, still today, underlie its irrational politics and its still more irrational attitudes. I will send you an e-copy of it via e-mail, with some annotations of mine.

As for the passage on Frederick II, it comes from Chesterton's The crimes of England, and, again, it is rather unfair to call it a wartime pamphlet. In some ways, it is like a dry run for his History, that was to come a couple of years later, and a testimony of the impact of Belloc and Cobbett on his views. It is of course strongly anti-German, but GKC's detestation of Prussianism was perfectly genuine and he was capable of attacking it with a perfectly clear conscience.

Here is the passage on Frederick II

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. It is not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII, a far less reputable person, was in his early days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.

Re: Here is the passage on Frederick II

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Wow that's good. And an astounding psychological insight into a pathological man from a pathological family.