Books into movies

The New Neo Posted on by

Norm Geras and Clive Davis both discuss the fact that most movies based on books seem to be not nearly as good as the books from which they’re taken.

They cite some rare exceptions, though; movies that equal the original books. For Norm, this consists of the movies “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Great Expectations,” “The Night of the Hunter,” “Spartacus,” “The 39 Steps,” “The Young Lions;” and he cites the movie “Shane” as the sole film that was even better than the book from which it drew its inspiration. Clive lists “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Goldfinger” in the latter category, movies that surpass the books on which they’re based.

I agree that the books from which movies are taken tend to be superior to the films. But then, I’m much more of a librophile in general than a movie fan. I like to picture things in my mind, and to read about the interior thoughts of characters and even of authors (a specialty of one of my oft-quoted favorites, Kundera). It’s not that I hate movies, but books are the medium I adore.

I also agree that there are indeed movies that are as good as the books on which they’re based. But these tend to be movies made from mediocre or decent-but-not-great books; or to be action movies; or to be based on classics I only think I’ve read but actually haven’t, such as Oliver Twist.

I know the story of Oliver Twist so well I figure I must have read it at some point. But no; when I really think about it, I realize my memory is fooling me, forming an amalgam of the David Lean film (a chiaroscuro masterpiece which gave me the shivers as a child when I watched it on a tiny TV) and the way-too-light and airy musical “Oliver.” As for Great Expectations, although it was a classic, I’ve never been a particular fan of either the book or the movie.

So, I’m wondering: has there ever been a case of a really excellent book, one I’ve read and loved– being made into an even better movie? I can’t think of one, so far.

But I can think of one excellent book I’ve actually read that was made into an equally excellent movie, although both are so very different from each other that they cannot really be compared. Usually a stickler for slavish adherence to the original plot, I decided to let that criterion –and just about everything else of a pedantic nature–go when I first viewed the 1939 “Wuthering Heights” in a New York movie theater way back in my teenage years.

What a movie! The book was a frightening tale of revenge and cruelty on the moors of England. It had exerted a strange and mesmerizing power nonetheless, a dark and gloomy one. But the movie, although shot in black and white, was an over-the-top romance. It dealt with only a fraction of the book’s convoluted plot, but it was the best fraction. Although hardly cheery, it had a more upbeat mood than the book, and the dominant note was passion.

Okay, I’ll cut to the chase: I fell in love with the almost unbearably young Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff. I knew that, at the time I saw the movie, he was actually an old man in his late fifties (ah, ancient!), so it was rather strange to fall in love with his long-ago self. Just watch it, though, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s a little schmorgasbord of Olivier/Heathcliff beefcake–

The young stableboy Heathcliff, before his fall from Cathy’s grace:

The older, hardened Heathcliff, returned from wanderings to wreak revenge on those who’d wronged him:

And an even older Heathcliff, flinging open a window to the snowy moors over which he thinks the ghost of Cathy wanders and is calling out to him to join her:

heathcliff

Deconstructing “nukular”

The New Neo Posted on by

At his ever-interesting blog Done With Mirrors, Callimachus offers the definitive explanation of why George W. Bush says “nukular” for “nuclear,” (as opposed to GW’s own father, who pronounces the word conventionally).

Apparently, GW is just following precedent for many Presidents, and even some nuclear (that is, nukular) scientists:

It’s not exactly correct to say the president mispronounces the word. He uses an alternate pronunciation — “nu-ku-lar” — that might be considered dialectal. It is commonly heard in the U.S. South, and in the U.S. military (which traditionally draws disproportionately from the old Confederacy states). Its use has been noted since the early 1960s among nuclear scientists themselves, including British and Canadian scientists.

Bush is not the only modern president to say it that way. Oddly, his father wasn’t among those who did (though he had his own grating way with Sa-a-addam). But Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both Southern men, said “nu-ku-lar.” So did John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, who perhaps picked it up during their military service.

The first U.S. president we know of to say “nu-ku-lar,” and the first to be widely scolded for it, was Eisenhower, as far back as his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the UN….

According to Callimachus, it turns out the Bush isn’t stupid, he’s lazy–lazy of tongue, that is. This type of laziness has been common to vast numbers of human beings throughout time, and has contributed greatly to the growth and evolution of language. The process by which nuclear becomes nukular even has a name; it’s called metathesis by linguists. The same process has given us such tried and true favorites as “dirt” and “fright.”

So, George Bush’s pronunciation may really be progressive–although don’t tell that to any actual self-labeled “progressives.” In fact, it may even be evolutionary.

Lies and the lying liars who hear them

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s said all the time on the left, and even by many liberals: Bush lied. Bush lied through his teeth, especially about WMDs in Saddam’s Iraq.

I don’t even have to provide the links; we all know what a recurrent refrain it is. Thread after thread, on this blog and others–even when Bush and WMDs aren’t really the issue at hand–have been taken up with the argument.

But this post isn’t about the issue of WMDs and lying. That’s been hashed over time and again, to no avail, so often that I’m convinced it’s an argument that goes beyond logic and beyond facts. I’m more interested in what’s behind the argument; what drives it.

So, why “Bush lied?” Wouldn’t it be enough to say that Bush was mistaken, misinformed, stupid, duped, misled, lazy, deluded–oh, any number of other criticisms of Bush that could so much more easily be argued than lied?

After all, “Bush lied” is fairly easy to refute. The usual counterargument goes like this: almost everyone on earth, including most of the intelligence operatives in the US and Europe, believed that Saddam had WMDs. In fact, there’s a theory that perhaps even Saddam himself was fooled into thinking he actually had WMDs.

But no matter; Bush lied.

I’ve become convinced that the key to this assertion is a relatively new and fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “lied,” an error that has its genesis in the growth of narcissism (please see Dr. Sanity’s fine series on the affliction).

In truth, the hallmark of a lie is that its locus is in the speaker. To be lying, the speaker must be aware of the falsehood of the utterances. So whether or not something is a lie has nothing to do with the listener, and everything to do with the teller.

But many listeners in our day and age have lost sight–not just of truth vs. relative truth, or objective vs. subjective truth–but of any truth-falsehood distinction outside of their own perceptions. So the new definition of a lie has become: something that fooled me. Something that I heard and thought was true, and then discovered wasn’t true. It made me angry to be jerked around like that. So it’s a lie.

Such a listener lacks awareness of any need to ascertain the state of mind of the speaker in order to define an utterance as a lie–it is simply irrelevant; it does not compute in the equation. In fact, the so-called liar is actually often either mistaken, misinformed by others, in denial, or deluded. But that doesn’t matter to a listener who hears everything only in terms of him/herself and how something makes him/her feel.

Thus, a lie is born.

Another intelligence leak–of a different sort

The New Neo Posted on by

I was surprised to see this story in Wednesday’s Guardian.

It’s about another intelligence leak–they seem to be quite popular nowadays, don’t they? But this one, unlike the others, isn’t about a failure of the Bush or Blair administrations, and doesn’t reflect poorly on them. Actually, it’s about something that plays into their hands, by undermining the hopes of those who believe that reasoning and negotiation with Iran can effectively keep its nuclear ambitions in check.

The leak consists of a report that has amassed evidence that Iran is planning a nuclear future that includes nuclear weapons, and not just a peaceful reactor. Is there anyone naive enough to have doubted that, even before this report? Well, my guess is the answer is “yes;”probably much of the Guardian’s readership would have fallen into that camp, which is why the publication of this leak in that particular venue is quite stunning:

The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western intelligence assessment of the country’s weapons programmes.

Scientists in Tehran are also shopping for parts for a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, with “import requests and acquisitions … registered almost daily”, the report seen by the Guardian concludes.

The warning came as Iran raised the stakes in its dispute with the United States and the European Union yesterday by notifying the International Atomic Energy Authority that it intended to resume nuclear fuel research next week. Tehran has refused to rule out a return to attempts at uranium enrichment, the key to the development of a nuclear weapon.

To what do we owe this possible change of heart on the part of the Guardian’s editors? Could it be the case that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad may have actually overplayed his hand in such a way that even European leftists can no longer deny that the man is a dangerous madman with the destruction of Israel on his mind? According to the Guardian:

Governments in the west and elsewhere have also been dismayed by recent pronouncements from the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said that Holocaust denial is a “scientific debate” and that Israel should be “wiped off the map”.

I’ve written about Iran’s plans and about Holocaust denial before. These days there’s no denying that overt anti-Semitism, or anti-Semitism cloaked in the guise of a certain sort of mindless and virulent anti-Zionism, are both very popular in Europe.

Can it be, though, that something about the nakedness of Ahmadinejad’s statements has caused at least a certain number of Europeans who are not flagrantly anti-Semitic to stop and think about what’s actually happening in Iran today, and to relate it to the Holocaust? I would like to think that the bold outrageousness of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic rhetoric has touched a nerve, and that most Europeans who don’t actively desire a second Holocaust can recognize the emanations coming from Iran from previous bitter and shameful experience, closer to home.

More about the reporting of the Munich Massacre of 1972

The New Neo Posted on by

In my previous post, I recalled hearing the “good news, bad news” reports of the Munich Massacre:

Those of you who, like me, are of a certain age, may recall that when the shootout and botched rescue attempt occurred at the airport the first reports–widely disseminated–were that all the athletes were safe. Then, just a few hours later, the news was reversed.

Do you remember? I do, only too well. It was exquisitely painful, and the pain was somehow even greater because of the initial false reports. How did they get it so wrong back then? I’ve never read an explanation; if anyone has one, please feel free to offer it.

I still don’t have an explanation, but I found some interesting links via this post by Yehudit of Keshertalk. In one, Roone Arledge, who was the head of ABC sports at the time, tells the story of waiting for a report on how the airport rescue attempt had gone:

The console phone rang five minutes later; it was Marvin. He’d just seen his friend Otto Kentsch, assistant to the chief Olympics spokesman, coming out of a meeting, eyes watery. Kentsch wouldn’t go on the record, but he told him: The hostages were dead. All of them.

I found myself suddenly faced with the oldest dilemma of the news producer. If I put the story on right now, we’d have a worldwide scoop. But what if, by some long chance, Kentsch was wrong and the whole world heard ABC blow it?

I decided to wait for confirmation. Better right than first. I had what I needed to hold the network, though, and I wanted Jim to prepare our listeners.

“Looks very dark for hostages,” I whispered into his earpiece. “Announcement soon. Don’t get their hopes up.”

We kept waiting for word. Fifteen minutes … 30 … 45. At Olympic headquarters, they were reviewing the day for the media in half-hour increments, halting between each one for French, then English translation. German thoroughness, God almighty!

Finally, at 3:17 a.m., Reuters removed all our doubts.

“FLASH! ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES SEIZED BY ARAB GUERRILLAS KILLED.”

We could go with it.

“Official,” I whispered to Jim. “All hostages dead.”

He turned to look straight into the camera. For the first time that day, he appeared truly tired.

“I’ve just gotten the final word,” he said. “When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears were realized tonight….” He paused. Then, “They’re all gone.”

Roone Arledge was correct, although I wonder how often his words are heeded today: better right than first.

Getting the story straight: misreporting on the miners (and the Munich Massacre)

The New Neo Posted on by

The sad news of the deaths of the trapped miners is the most important part of this story, not the media problems inherent in its reporting. My heart goes out to the families and friends of the miners. Mining (like commercial fishing in my part of the world) is an inherently dangerous activity, and all who work in the field are inherently brave, as are their families.

But the media issues are still of importance. By now just about everyone is familiar with the fact that an error was made by the media in reporting the twelve trapped West Virginia miners as rescued and safe, when in fact the tragic truth was that they had died. The mistaken reporting was quite widespread, and seems to have been the result of a combination of wishful thinking and the reporting of rumor without careful and insistent disclaimers to that effect.

Here was someone from one paper, at least, who didn’t jump the gun on this story (via Antimedia). How is it that this editor avoided the pitfalls into which the others fell? It’s pretty simple; she waited for an official announcement:

“I feel lucky that we are an afternoon paper and we have the staff that we do,” said editor Linda Skidmore, who has run the 21-person newsroom for three years. “We had a reporter there all night at the scene and I was on the phone with her the whole time.”

Skidmore adds that her staff never believed the miners had been found alive because no official word was ever given. She said no update about miners being found alive ever appeared on the paper’s Web site, either.

“I was on the phone with her and I was hearing things on CNN and FOX that she was not hearing there,” Skidmore said about reporter Becky Wagoner. “She heard that the miners were alive just before it was broadcast, around midnight. She talked about hearing church bells ringing and people yelling in jubilation–but nothing official.”

Another editor, Sherry Chisenhall of the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, didn’t get it right. But she didn’t mince words, and for that I respect her:

…it won’t excuse the blunt truth that we violated a basic tenet of journalism today in our printed edition: Report what you know and how you know it.”

So, what happened? It seems that “sources” said the miners were alive, but who those sources were and what information they were relying on is still unclear. One thing is clear: there was no official announcement by those in charge of rescue operations, and the AP was heavily involved in pushing the premature story into many newspapers via the wire service.

The failure appears to have been one of attribution:

Certainly we should do our professional best to give readers, listeners and viewers substantive and specific attribution in our stories. Attribution supports both accuracy and authenticity. Ideally, strong and clear attribution heightens the credibility of the stories.

To be sure, the attribution within stories is reflective of the rigor of the newsgathering process. As reporters, we should be respectfully pushing our sources by asking, “How do you know that?” As editors and producers, we should be prosecuting the reporters’ work, asking, “Do we have a high level of confidence in that information? Is it verifiable?”

It appears that no one was really asking those questions. Maybe it’s only human to want the story to be a happy one, especially when families are rejoicing and citing a miracle. It would take a curmudgeon to question whether the information on which they were relying was true. But reporters are supposed to be skeptics who do not report rumors, and if they do choose to report them, they need to label them as such.

The Anchoress has a thoughtful discussion, relating this to press mistakes during Katrina.

This article is the best description of the confusion; it is itself confused and confusing.

Michelle Malkin has a thorough rundown.

A further note: when I first heard that the miners were alive, I felt joy and relief. Like so many, I felt especially letdown when the later corrected reports came through with the news that they had died. It sparked a memory in me, one I haven’t seen anyone else mention, but on a topic that’s been much in the news lately because of Spielberg’s movie “Munich”–the Munich Olympics massacre of the Israeli athletes.

Those of you who, like me, are of a certain age, may recall that when the shootout and botched rescue attempt occurred at the airport the first reports–widely disseminated–were that all the athletes were safe. Then, just a few hours later, the news was reversed.

Do you remember? I do, only too well. It was exquisitely painful, and the pain was somehow even greater because of the initial false reports. How did they get it so wrong back then? I’ve never read an explanation; if anyone has one, please feel free to offer it. But the entire operation was so mishandled by the German government that it’s no real surprise that the reporting on what happened was mishandled, too.

This, from Wikipedia, is the only reference I’ve been able to find so far to the misleading news from Munich:

Initial news reports, published all over the world, indicated that all the hostages were alive, and that all the terrorists had been killed. Only later did a representative for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggest that “initial reports were overly optimistic.”

I well remember the sorrow and bitterness in Jim McKay’s voice and on his face when he made the later, corrected, announcement:

Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were 11 hostages; 2 were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, 9 were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.

“They’re all gone.” Sad words then, sad words today, although the situations behind the deaths are so different.

Sharon has massive cerebral hemorrhage

The New Neo Posted on by

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suffered an extremely massive cerebral hemorrhage. It sounds as though it might not be survivable, or, if it is, he is likely to be profoundly disabled.

The AP article describes the stroke as the type caused by a bleed, rather than the more common clot type, the latter being the variety of stroke that Sharon had (in a very mild version) a few weeks ago.

So it turns out that, in this case, the cure may have been far worse than the original disease. Like most stroke victims, Sharon was taking anti-coagulants to forestall the chance of the occurrence of another clot-type stroke–in his case, until a heart defect that had contributed to his first stroke was repaired. This latest and far more severe cerebral event occurred just hours before the heart surgery was due to begin.

Unfortunately, Sharon appears to be among that small percentage of patients in whom the blood thinners turn out to be terribly counter-productive. Of course, we’ll never know, since the medications might have prevented another clot-type stroke, which could have caused a similar effect. Perhaps the truth is that Sharon just ran out of time.

Very unsettling news, although no doubt there are those who are celebrating. I am not among them; Sharon has been a far better Prime Minister than I ever expected him to be.

I would expect that Yehudit at Kesher Talk will have many updates on the matter. My guess is that Little Green Footballs will, as well.

Life imitates art: “The Mikado” comes to India

The New Neo Posted on by

In a public park in the small town of Meerut in northern India (named, ironically enough, after Gandhi, famous advocate of nonviolence) the police went on a rampage against–of all things–necking couples, for what in my youth used to call PDA’s (public displays of affection).

And, as was hyperbolically said in my youth–in 1968, during a Chicago police action against a different sort of public display–“the whole world is watching,” since the entire episode appears to have been purposely televised. Well, maybe not the whole world watching, in the present case (or, for that matter, in the earlier one). But a goodly portion of it: the population of India–and the readers of the New York Times, via this article:

Apparently intended to clamp down on what the police consider indecent public displays of affection among unmarried couples, the nationally televised tableau in Gandhi Park backfired terribly. It set off a firestorm of criticism against police brutality, prompted at least one young unmarried pair to run away from home for a couple of days, and revealed a yawning divide on notions of social mores and individual rights in a tradition-bound swath of India where the younger generation is nudging for change…

Meerut police officials conceded that some officers overreacted. But they also defended their actions. Couples sat in “objectionable poses,” said a defiant Mamta Gautam, a police officer accused in the beatings, including some with their heads in their partners’ laps. Yes, Ms. Gautam went on, she had slapped those who tried to run away when the police asked for names and addresses. “If they were not doing anything illegal, why they wanted to run away?” the policewoman demanded in an interview. “I do not consider that what we did was wrong.”

By the end of the week, as public outrage piled on, Ms. Gautam and three other police officers, including the city police superintendent, were suspended pending an internal investigation.

In a society where dating is frowned upon, public parks remain among the only places where couples can avail themselves of intimacy, from talking to necking and petting with abandon under the arms of a shady tree. Even if it is in broad daylight in a public park, romance before marriage remains taboo in small-town India, which is why the spectacle in Gandhi Park turned out to be such a big deal: to be outed in this way, on national television, is to bring terrible shame and recrimination on yourself and your family.

It’s hard to fathom just what the police were thinking. Perhaps they’d recently attended a particularly inspiring performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, the operetta in which a mythical Japanese ruler fashions Draconian laws against flirting, making romance a capital offense:

Our great Mikado, virtuous man,
When he to rule our land began,
Resolved to try
A plan whereby
Young men might best be steadied.
So he decreed, in words succinct,
That all who flirted, leered or winked
(Unless connubially linked),
Should forthwith be beheaded.

And I expect you’ll all agree
That he was right to so decree.
And I am right,
And you are right,
And all is right as right can be!

This stem decree, you’ll understand,
Caused great dismay throughout the land!
For young and old
And shy and bold
Were equally affected.
The youth who winked a roving eye,
Or breathed a non-connubial sigh,
Was thereupon condemned to die–
He usually objected.

And you’ll allow, as I expect,
That he was right to so object.
And I am right,
And you are right,
And everything is quite correct!

To paraphrase another playwright, the course of love–true or otherwise–never did run smooth. At least here, the Meerut police drew the line at beheading.

But actually, this is no joking matter, no comic operetta. From so-called “honor killings” and stonings for adultery (Gates of Vienna is a good blog for information about such things), to this milder clamping down on youthful fraternizing, it’s stunning to think that what was parody way back in 1885, when Gilbert and Sullivan wrote “The Mikado,” is close to being a grim reality in some parts of the world–in 2006.

Cat call

The New Neo Posted on by

This Boston Globe AP article tells a story that would have been hard to believe, even if it had been about a dog. But a cat, making a 9/11 call to save its owner? And yet that seems to have been just what transpired in the case of one Ohio man and his faithful feline, Tommy.

Police aren’t sure how else to explain it. But when an officer walked into an apartment Thursday night to answer a 911 call, an orange-and-tan striped cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor. The cat’s owner, Gary Rosheisen, was on the ground near his bed having fallen out of his wheelchair.

Rosheisen said his cat, Tommy, must have hit the right buttons to call 911.

“I know it sounds kind of weird,” Officer Patrick Daugherty said, unsuccessfully searching for some other explanation.

Rosheisen said he couldn’t get up because of pain from osteoporosis and ministrokes that disrupt his balance. He also wasn’t wearing his medical-alert necklace and couldn’t reach a cord above his pillow that alerts paramedics that he needs help.

Daugherty said police received a 911 call from Rosheisen’s apartment, but there was no one on the phone. Police called back to make sure everything was OK, and when no one answered, they decided to check things out.

That’s when Daugherty found Tommy next to the phone.

I was thinking this was some sort of strange fluky coincidence, trying to picture the chain of circumstances. Let’s see: the cat accidentally knocks the receiver off the hook, walks over the phone and by chance happens to press a speed dial that happens to have been programmed to call 9/11.

But then, towards the very end of the text, the article divulges that this was no fluke at all: the owner had originally trained the cat to call 9/11.

I think that this fact is just as astonishing (maybe even more so) as my original assumption that the cat called 9/11 by accident.

Marine Corps art

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve added a new blog to my blogroll (via Dr. Sanity). It’s called “Fire and Ice,” and it’s the blog of Michael Fay, the artist in residence for the US Marine Corps.

You may say, as I did, wha??? There’s a Marine Corps artist in residence? Who knew? It’s not an oxymoron, it’s a fact; there is–and he’s got a blog, and it’s worth a look.

Not only that, but in one of those small coincidences that so often occur, his blog bears the name of one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, in keeping with some of the recent discussions here.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

A look at Fay’s Blogger Profile evinces a man of wide-ranging talents and interests, including the literary. And I’m glad to see that, like me, he’s a fan of the movie “Groundhog Day,” which, if you follow Kundera, makes him an optimist.

The return of the eternal return of the…

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s post about “The Road Not Taken,” the first commenter, “anonymous,” related the poem to the second-guessing of political and military decisions.

Anonymous writes:

Frost’s poem reminds me once again why I get so annoyed with those who demand that President Bush acknowledge and apologize for mistakes made in Iraq. How can he or we know if more troops would have made a difference, or perhaps fewer troops. How can we know if different plans would be better or worse.

I keep imagining Bush critics, when facing a major decision, running first down one road one hundred yards and then running back to go three hundred yards down the other. Finally, exhausted, they collapse at the Y with nothing accomplished.

World leaders have to make decisions; the image of being stuck at the fork in the road and collapsing, exhausted, doesn’t inspire confidence. And yet, once decisions are made, we have to at least try to evaluate them in order to learn from them. But the task is complicated, not just by political partisanship (on both sides), but by the difficulty of ever knowing what the proposed alternative actions might have led to instead.

Interestingly enough, in the Kundera novel I quoted in that Frost post–The Unbearable Lightness of Being–Kundera himself relates the idea of the non-repeatability of human life to the process of political and national decision-making. He writes:

Several days later, [Tomas] was struck by another thought, which I record here as an addendum to the preceding chapter: Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here.

And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives,

And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.

That was Tomas’s version of eternal return.

Of course we are here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repitition?

Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

Or, to look at it from the perspective of a moviegoer: the optimist enjoys “Groundhog Day” (preferably, over and over); the pessimist prefers “Peggy Sue Got Married.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (made into a movie that I, for one, considered unbearable, especially compared to the book that inspired it) was written in 1984, when Kundera’s native Czechslovakia was still under Soviet domination. Kundera could not see past the curve in the road to a future that was not even so very distant; he did not imagine that a Communist collapse was imminent (of course, in that lack of foresight, he had plenty of company).

Concerning decision-making in Czech history, Kundera wrote:

There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end, as surely as Tomas’s life, never to be repeated.

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czech’s country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In countrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. What should they have done?

If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to check the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses…

The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of all of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe are a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience.

We remain trapped in “mankind’s fateful inexperience,” I’m afraid. Human life and history contain too much complexity, too many unpredictabilities and uncertainties, for us to ever really know whether the best decision was made. We can only try to apply the lessons of the past, knowing full well that we can never learn them quite well enough.

The other Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s happening in this photo? Actually, it’s a photo of me, walking in the woods on a chilly day in early spring—that’s why I’m wearing a fairly bulky jacket.

The place? The grounds of the Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH, on a visit there about two years ago.

What am I doing? Well, I’m caught in the act of unconsciously illustrating his famous poem “The Road Not Taken.”

When I came upon these two paths diverging in the Frost woods (not “a yellow wood,” but hey, that’s poetic license) I don’t recall which one I took. But I’m pretty certain it didn’t make a particle of difference.

You probably all know the poem. Maybe you studied it in college, as I did. Maybe you first encountered it even earlier, as I had (in junior high; my brother read it to me), and loved it even at that young age. Maybe you think you know what it’s about, as I did then.

Robert Frost is one of the most popular American poets, one of the few whose poems are known to more than just a handful of poetry aficionados. He carefully cultivated his public image as the crusty old New Englander, he of the simple declarative words and the keen nature observations. He even looked like the grandfatherly type:

Those of you who read this blog regularly may know that I’m a fan of Robert Frost. A big fan, actually. I consider him a poet of surface simplicity and great underlying complexity, a complexity I neither saw nor understood when young. But perhaps I felt it and sensed it.

I think Frost can be appreciated on both levels, actually. But it’s the second I’m interested in writing about today.

Here’s the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” to refresh your memory:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Like much of Frost, it seems to say one thing—it even does say that one thing—and yet on further study it also is saying something else, something more difficult to discern. It’s that second “something,” combined with the first, that gives the poem its great resonance and power.

On the surface, of course, it’s a lovely poetic expression of an obvious and perhaps even cliched thought: we come to a crossroads in life, make a decision, and that decision affects our entire future.

Or does it?

The poem is also about the speaker, an older person looking back and telling a tale—“constructing a reality” as it were—in reminiscence. The poem contains a set of lines that the casual reader can ignore or think unimportant, but good poets such as Frost rarely waste words.

Why does he initially describe the road he takes as less traveled (“it was grassy and wanted wear”) and then immediately contradict himself (“Though as for that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same”)? Earlier, too, he has said the other road was “just as fair”—another sign of equality. And then, just to make sure we haven’t missed it, he adds “And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black.” Different, or equal? What gives here?

Well, as Frost himself said, “It’s a trick poem—very tricky.” But it’s more than tricky, and more than a joke or a puzzle, because it contains both thoughts at once, and the juxtaposition makes it even more profound. How can we ever know the result of the decisions we make? We can’t, because the road not taken—the one we don’t choose—has consequences we can’t see. We can only guess at any of this, and then later sit back and reflect and tell tales that sound like an explanation. And perhaps the explanation is even true—who knows?

I’m reminded—as I so often am—of one of my very favorite authors, Milan Kundera. He begins The Unbearable Lightness of Being with a reflection on Nietzsche’s strange notion of eternal return—that in some dimension, our lives repeat again and again:

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that this recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum? What does this mad myth signify?…

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

Kundera describes his vacillating hero, Tomas, in the throes of making a decision about whether or not he is in love with a certain woman:

He remained annoyed with himself [for not knowing what he should do] until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live our lives without warning, like an actor going on cold.

We come to that proverbial fork in the road and a decision must be made. We make it, sometimes after a great deal of vacillation. And then we tell ourselves—with either satisfaction, regret, or ambivalence—that our decision, the road we took, “has made all the difference.”

And perhaps, indeed, it has. Or perhaps we’re just fooling ourselves if we think so. The poet doesn’t have the answer. But he’s awfully good at stating the question, and presenting the paradox in words and images that speak to the heart as well as the mind.

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