Books and Ideas (36)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

The God That Failed. Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer.
Why read it? The accounts in this book are by idealists who thought Communism would create a classless society to replace a capitalist society built on social class, greed and competition, a society that created poverty, inhumanity and injustice for the lowest class, the proletariat, the poorest people in society. Some of these men joined the Communist Party. Others were considering it. All were disillusioned by the actual experience in the Communist Party and in the Soviet Union.
Three topics addressed by these writers were the Communist theory of “truth,” the Communist theory of art, and the Communists’ primary method of achieving their ends by using any means necessary.
The classless society would have an interregnum called the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” that would “wither away” to produce a classless society. The men in this book concluded that such a dictatorship would never wither away because, as Stephen Spender, one of the six authors in the book said, the Communist dictatorship in Russia and in the Communist Party consisted of too much power in the hands of too few people. People like Stalin do not ”wither away.”
The writers in this book were too accustomed to freedom, the freedom to interpret reality as they saw it and the freedom to criticize. The Communist Party wanted nothing to do with criticism.
Quote: “The highest mark of culture is the ability to live in peace with persons who are different from ourselves.”
Quote: “Although I never have agreed with the views of such as Aldous Huxley that all power corrupts, I think that power is only saved from corruption if it is humanized with humility. Without humility, power is turned to persecutions and executions….”
Quote: “The freedom of art speaks to the individuality of each human being.”

Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann.
Why read it? Novel. The study of how a middle-class prosperous family of businessmen declines in prosperity: the origin, causes and progression of decadence in the family, a transformation of the male heirs from the hard-headed spirit of business and reality to the spirit of escape from the world into beauty through art.
Thomas Buddenbrook’s career is the history of everyman, from youthful energy, to hard-working businessman, to community servant, to enervated, dejected, dispirited, conscious of failure in life, old age. The code of the Buddenbrooks is to do one’s duty to the family and to sacrifice one’s individual happiness to the prosperity of the family.
Quote. Nietzsche: “Every good book that is written against life is still an enticement to life.”
Quote: “…a study of the psychology of decadence.”
Quote: “But a man chooses to rest beside the wide simplicity of external things [the ocean] because he is weary from the chaos within.”
Quote: “God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness. I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith.”

Watch and Ward. Henry James.
Why read it? Novel. Why read Henry James? For many reasons. His subtle expression of the intricacies of relationships is revealing of how people think and feel in relation to others. His character studies reveal the complexity of personality. He throws off ideas and memorable words almost as afterthoughts. One will find many a mot juste in his novels. And he works mainly with the relationships of unsubtle, honest and straightforward Americans against the subtle devious, cultured Europeans. However, Watch and Ward deals only with America and is an early novel.
The idea behind the novel is bizarre. Roger Lawrence adopts a little girl and brings her up to be his perfect wife. Only he doesn’t tell her that that has been his reason until she is fully grown and then she rebels. Two young men who have courted her turn out to be complete jerks and she finally realizes that Roger is the only man she knows who has a heart and, it is assumed, she marries him.