Books and Ideas (37)

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

Yankee from Olympus: Oliver Wendell Holmes. Catherine Drinker Bowen.
Why read it? Although this book concerns primarily Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., i.e., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author, Catherine Drinker Bowen, spends time in the first quarter of the book describing in colorful detail the grandfather, called Abiel, and Junior’s father, called Oliver or Dr. Holmes. The grandfather, Abiel, was a lawyer and Junior’s father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Autocrat at the Breakfast Table fame, a physician.
It is a good thing that Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote this book. If the book had been written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., its contents would have been as obscure as his legal opinions and dissents.
Although Justice Holmes was a student of law, he was also a student of life. He thought deeply about it and his words are often memorable.
I think my overall impression of Holmes’s life is that of his sense of purpose throughout his life. He appears not to have intentionally wasted a single day.
Quote. Holmes’s attitude toward death: "At the grave of a hero, we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.”
Quote: “Time, events, history itself, would prove his dissents. One by one they became law.”
Quote: “There was indeed a great contagion in this courage—a courage not born with Holmes but handed down with all the accumulated force, the deep spiritual persuasion, of the generations behind him."

Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. Elizabeth D. Samet. Why read it? The title of the book, Soldier’s Heart, refers to the symptoms of heart disease that appear in soldiers with post-traumatic disorders. They do not have physical heart disease. They do have a disease of the feeling human heart. The author, a female English teacher at West Point, who obviously has a close relationship with the institution and its students, reveals much of what it is like to attend West Point—the rituals, the language, the culture of the military. Many of these details make fascinating reading.
Her subject, English, is out of keeping with the rest of the military training that makes up the cadets’ day. But the cadets’ interaction with the literature and the films to which she exposes them, is thoughtful, relating their lives and careers to the ideas of what they read and view. And it is a wide and varied range of literature and film that she uses.
In the last chapter she reflects on how young the cadets are and the contrast with what waits for them after they graduate. But she has helped them to think about life and war through her reading literature with them.
Quote: “My ongoing conversations with students, some of which began when men and women who are now lieutenants and captains were plebes, reveal the ways in which literature helps them to understand their own increasingly complicated lives.”

Travels with Charley (In Search of America). John Steinbeck.
Why read it? I found out when I read the novel East of Eden, that John Steinbeck likes to philosophize and he does it well. He does it by the sentence. Brief. Concise. To the point. That makes Travels with Charley, a travelogue, the perfect vehicle for Steinbeck who can cross America and comment on what he finds: the people, the speech, the unforgettable characters and scenes. I thought of some other “travelogues” as I was reading it: Lolita (a novel by Nabokov) and On the Road (Kerouac). Both of those books conveyed impressions of Americans and American culture at a particular time.
For three-fourths of the book, I enjoyed the narrative of Steinbeck’s experience, his impressions and reflections. But it ends with the South—and then the book turns nasty. It’s the South I discovered when I made a trip across the country at approximately the same time as Steinbeck (1962), in 1960, the South that hates blacks with a vehemence and rage that stunned me and stunned Steinbeck, too.
Steinbeck offers a few ideas that are thought-provoking. Otherwise, the narrative isn’t deep. But it is entertaining—until he reaches the South. He says he is not drawing conclusions about the nature of the people in the South. But it is hard not to. A very disturbing finish to an otherwise idyllic trip across America.
Quote: “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”