eReading

Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity

August 15, 2010

After seeing several months ago the movie “The Last Station,” by the director Michael Hoffman, based on Leo Tolstoy’s final year of life and his death at the train station of Astapovo in 1910, I found my thoughts often turning to him. I’ve had a long interest in Tolstoy and his work, having spent considerable time as a student reading large swaths of his journals and other more obscure books during the early 1970s and repeatedly going back to him during intervening years. While the acting of Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer was superb, the latter of whom I admire having seen Plummer perform live a couple of times at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, the movie left me with an uneasy feeling regarding the interpretation of Tolstoy. The film script was based on Jay Parini’s novel, The Last Station, which may be part of the problem, in turn perhaps tracing back to the unsympathetic biographies by Henry Troyat and R. N. Wilson, both derisively presenting Tolstoy as a religious crank and fanatic. Neither biography understands the full weight of who Tolstoy was and what he actually believed and why. Touching on the problem, fearing other biographers would repeat the errors of Troyat, Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra wrote in 1968, in The Real Tolstoy, that “Troyat . . . shows no respect for Tolstoy’s inner life. He speaks about it in vulgar, cynical expressions…. I fear that the errors in Troyat’s book will be repeated in other works.” Beyond the biographies, skewing also the movie, lies the pervasive nihilism and cynicism of modernity that has no respect or appreciation for any spiritual vision of life, including even a highly universal one, such as Tolstoy’s, for he had embraced, by the last decade of his life, the universal principles and teachings, not only of Christianity, but of all the great religions. To see or set him in a more limited context is to fail to understand him within his own stated terms and the plenitude and scope of his work.

Born of renowned aristocratic lineage, Tolstoy inherited his elite position in Russian society, along with the enormous estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow. At thirty-four in 1862, he married Sophia Behrs, when she was eighteen years old. By all accounts they lived a happy domestic life together for many years. After his crisis of faith, discussed in My Confessions (1878), while he found the answers for his spiritual and intellectual struggles in his religious studies and books, they began to experienced an increasingly strained relationship. Sophia’s personality was much given, as she described herself, to the lightness of the social world she had been born into, growing up in Moscow in the circles of the Tsar’s court. By her own recognition, Tolstoy had a much deeper inner life of the mind and sensibility. Their relationship was often strained for the rest of their lives. Torn between love and gratitude to her and a desire to bring his life and ideals in line with his beliefs, he and Sophia struggled on together. In a letter dated June 8, 1897, found concealed in his study after his death, published in Paris in Figaro, December 27, 1910, which Tolstoy apparently had never sent to Sophia, Tolstoy dreamed about leaving her and explained his motives better than he eventually did when he actually left her more than a decade later:

For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life or your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I felt that by my departure I should deprive the children, still very young, of the little influence I might be able to exert over them, and also that I should cause you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot continue to live as I have lived, during these last sixteen years, now struggling against you and irritating you, now succumbing myself to the influences and the seductions to which I am accustomed and which surround me. I have resolved now to do what I have wished to do for a long time: to go away. . . . Just as the Hindoos, when they arrive at the sixtieth year, go away into the forest; just as every aged and religious man , wishes to consecrate the last years of hislife to God and not to jesting, punning, family tittletattle, and lawn-tennis, so do I with all my strength desire peace and solitude, and if not an absolute harmony at least not this crying discord between my whole life and my conscience. (Tolstoy, Romain Rolland, p. 181)

Tolstoy similarly once wrote to his sister, who was a nun in the Russian Orthodox Church, “How fine for the Buddhist when he grows old—he goes off to the desert.” It was to his sister and the Shamardino monastery that Tolstoy first fled in 1910, though he quickly gave up on the notion of staying there and headed south towards his summer home in the Crimea. What is often lost sight of in our disbelieving age is that religious retreat in advanced years was an ideal that Tolstoy respected and wished to honor in fact and deed. Sophia, it should be noted, was diagnosed by more than one doctor as mentally ill, a fact recognized by his son Sergei in a letter to his father, after his flight in 1910, acknowledging that it would have been better had they separated many years earlier. The movie fails to do justice to this complexity, presenting Sophia as far too much the victimized realist of an impractical zealot of a husband. What has come to be a common interpretation of Tolstoy is completely false. That Tolstoy could continue to study and write under such conditions is a testament to the strength and integrity of his character and soul.

Like many writers, Tolstoy anguished, for years, over his inability to bring his life into balance with his ideals. Alexandra quotes from his private diary the following passage:

If I heard about myself from the outside, as of a person, living in luxury, with police guards, grabbing all he could from the peasants, putting them in the lockup, and professing and preaching Christianity, and handing out small coins, and hiding behind a sweet wife while I did all these base things—I could not but call him a scoundrel! And that is what I have had to submit to, so that I could free myself from human fame and live for the sake of my soul. (Tolstoy: A Life of My Father, 1953, p. 466)

On another occasion, he writes, “Help me, O Lord. Again I yearn to go away, and I dare not. Nor can I give up.” These passages demonstrate the extent to which he fought for years with the dilemmas of his own existence, seeking resolution, some way out and forward. His inheriting great wealth and position became for him a burden and contradiction of the sincerity of his religious beliefs, as they developed and evolved, and weighed heavily upon him. Eventually, seeking to free himself, he legally passed ownership of his estate and holdings to Sophia and the family. All his religious writings, several books and many pamphlets, plays, and short stories can be properly understood only when approached in the light of this struggle. It explains why he lived in such a simple way that many visitors to Yasnaya Polyana recorded their surprise upon actually meeting him and witnessing it for themselves. The only solution for Tolstoy was what it was and is for all great writers. He had to write his way through his dilemmas, create for himself the role and persona that resolved his deepest conflicts, and those of his time. That is what all the religious works are about. By the end of his last decade, he’s achieved it, and then, finally, he’s ready, to follow the way of the ancients, set an example, remind the world, in deed as well as word, of the spiritual journey of life, round out the fullness of his own life.

By Tolstoy’s own testimony, after the years of happiness with Sophia, after writing his early novels and stories, including War and Peace and most of Anna Karenina, he experienced a searing spiritual crisis, feeling his life had become meaningless, which impelled him on a search for meaning and purpose. As recounted in My Confessions (1878), during his early years prior to his marriage, he states,

I killed people in war and challenged to duels to kill; I lost money at cards, wasting the labour of the peasants ; I punished them, fornicated, and cheated. Lying, stealing, acts of lust of every description, drunkenness, violence, murder — There was not a crime which I did not commit, and for all that I was praised, and my contemporaries have regarded me as a comparatively moral man.

He further emphasizes that he reached a point where “life had no meaning at all.” Overwhelmed by the emptiness of his existence, he turned to the study of philosophy, but eventually came to believe that there must be more than reason:

From the beginning of the human race, wherever there is life, there is the faith which makes life possible and everywhere the leading characteristics of that faith are the same.

From his study of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, as early as 1879, Tolstoy arrives at the understanding that he is “a part of the infinite whole” and in “the answers given by faith was to be found the deepest source of human wisdom,” while rejecting “the unnecessary and unreasonable doctrines” that had crept into all of the great religions. Initially, he returns to the Russian Orthodox Church, but soon finds it suffered from many irrational doctrines, what he would call after his 1901 excommunication “sorcery,” leading to his quest for the truth of Christianity, and all religions, that lasted until the end of his life in 1910.

A hundred years later, part of the difficulty many people may have in understanding Tolstoy involves today the pervasive nihilism of the academic and cultural establishment, which since Tolstoy’s death, has continued to drain away all spiritual import and nuance, not merely from Tolstoy’s work, but from literature and life. Western civilization itself has become suffused with nihilism, identified with it, the ruling myth celebrated everywhere has become the ascendance and triumphalism of a gloriously secular nihilism, passing the disease around the world, to all countries and cultures, so that the remedy can now only be found and administered in a truly global context. Far beyond the confines of the literary, intellectual, academic milieu, East or West, the ethos of nihilism, inculcated into the young and the general culture, pervades, in its local variants, every region of the globe. Tolstoy himself was highly aware that the general direction of culture was set in a direction away from religious belief and understood his efforts as a response to it, as when he said of Nietzsche, “What savagery! It is terrible, so to drag down Christianity!” Similarly, Tolstoy rejected the applicability of a solely materialistic understanding of the human being, whether by Marx or Thomas Henry Huxley’s defense of Charles Darwin in his Romanes Lectures of 1894. Tolstoy states, “the law of evolution runs counter to the moral law: This was known to the ancient Greeks and Hindus. The philosophy and religion of both those peoples brought them to the doctrine of self-renunciation.” It was often against the decline of a spiritual and moral understanding of the human being that Tolstoy understood himself as writing and working, though even he underestimated the force of nihilism as manifested in 1917.

As recorded in an often-cited journal entry, the idea had already occurred to Tolstoy when he was twenty-seven years old that the world needed a new religion, one purged of the false doctrines of organized Christianity. After his religious crisis, as early as 1884, he took note of his intention of compiling the sayings of religious sages and thinkers into a single volume. During the last decade of his life, he finally began the compilation in earnest, resulting in several different versions of it, variously titled, Thoughts of Wise Men, A Calendar of Wisdom, A Circle of Reading, with the final edition in 1910, The Path of Life. Tolstoy spent much of his energy on the book, compiling and refining. He himself considered it as the most important work of his life, as he once wrote, “If it is granted me to finish this work, it will be a complete statement of my world outlook.” He continually simplified and revised the quotations and passages to the point that he advised translators not to look for the original pieces in Confucius, Buddhism, or wherever, but to base their translations on his own free-renderings. Near the end of his life, far ahead of his time, he couldn’t understand why people didn’t use The Circle of Reading more.

Throughout the last thirty years of his life, Tolstoy was opposed to the violence in Russia advanced by the radicals, Marxists, and socialists of his time. In a journal entry he writes,

Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The strongest and more intelligent will always make use of the weaker and the more stupid. Justice and equality in the good things of life will never be achieved by anything less than Christianity, i.e., by negating oneself and recognizing the meaning of one’s life in service to others.

His background in and experience of the ruling aristocratic class and ethos provided Tolstoy with an acute understanding of power and its endless corruptions. Far from being naive about power in society, he understood that human beings had to have a change of heart to influence society at the deepest level. The bombs and bullets of the revolutionaries were anathema to him and would produce only another tyranny, as they indeed did, one of the most horrible and blood-thirsty tyrannies in the history of humanity. Elsewhere, Tolstoy observed, “The object of socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his material well being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it recommends.” Similarly, in “An Appeal,” “Even if that should happen which Marx predicted, then the only thing that will happen is that despotism will be passed on. Now the capitalists are ruling, but then the directors of the working class will rule.” In 1905 in “The End of the Age,” he wrote, “Nothing demonstrates so clearly the increasing enslavement of nations as the growth, spread, and success of socialistic theories.” By the last decade of his life, he had long since concluded that only a deep spiritual change could truly ameliorate the condition of humanity.

Arguing always against the violence of socialism and the Marxists, Tolstoy, unfortunately, interpreted the New Testament in such a way that non-resistance to violence prevented him from being sufficiently practical enough to recognize the value of a more democratic order, causing him to advocate a type of Christian anarchism and to repudiate Russian efforts to create a democratic body, the Duma, in the early years of the twentieth century. He also, unfortunately, aligned himself with much of the thinking of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the anti-tax thinker Henry George. Like Dostoyevsky, he really didn’t understand the West. A few trips to Europe and England failed to take him deep enough into the social and political culture. Both he and Dostoevsky were too quick to resort to Catholicism as a whipping boy to explain every flaw of the West. I cannot but feel, given the subsequently bloody Soviet history, the country and people would have been better off had Tolstoy been more moderate and realistic about the necessities of life and government. Still, the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy was infinitely more gentle than what Lenin instituted in 1917. In the end, Russia has come full circle back to the inescapable issues Tolstoy represented and struggled with, as has the 21st Century.

Tolstoy significantly located what he believed the only way forward in universality—the recognition that the human being is a spiritual being, grounded in the necessity of moral choice and growth toward perfection, as in all the great religions. Our global, pluralistic age lives this truth even as it fails sufficiently to recognize and articulate it to the level required to help understand the nature of life in our time. Perhaps more than any other piece he wrote, published in 1902, Tolstoy explains the religious philosophy he came to hold in What Is Religion, and Wherein Lies Its Essence?

Religions differ in their external forms, but they are all alike in their fundamental principles. And it is these principles, that are fundamental to all religions, that form the true religion which alone at the present time is suitable for us all, and the adoption of which alone can save men from their ills….

Having by this time written several major books and numerous articles on religion, struggling with Christian history and doctrine, his own excommunication in 1901 by the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy was uniquely qualified by fiery experience and study to set forth his increasingly universal beliefs:

The principles of this true religion are so natural to men, that as soon as they are put before them they are accepted as something quite familiar and self-evident. For us the true religion is Christianity in those of its principles in which it agrees, not with the external forms, but with the basic principles of Brahmanism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hebraism, Buddhism, and even Mohammedanism. And just in the same way, for those who profess Brahmanism, Confucianism, etc.—true religion is that of which the basic principles agree with those of all other religions. And these principles are very simple, intelligible and clear.

In this sense, referring to the thinking of Tolstoy, as is often done, as Christian anarchism is a distortion of what the man really believed —spiritual universality, or Christianity universalized, might be better terms, represented best by the same universal spirit he labored to articulate in A Calendar of Wisdom (tr. Peter Sekirin, 1997). Defining universally held principles, he states,

These principles are that there is a God, the origin of all things; that in man dwells a spark from that Divine Origin, which man, by his way of living, can increase or decrease in himself; that to increase this divine spark man must suppress his passions and increase love in himself; and that the practical means to attain this result is to do to others as you would they should do to you. All these principles are common to Brahmanism, Hebraism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism. (If Buddhism supplies no definition of God, it nevertheless acknowledges That with which man commingles, and into Which he is absorbed when he attains to Nirvana. So, That with which man commingles, or into Which he is absorbed in Nirvana, is the same Origin that is called God in Hebraism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.)

Repeatedly and everywhere in Tolstoy’s writing, clearing away the debris of such ephemera as anarchism, one finds his emphasis on the Golden Rule as the essential teaching of all wisdom traditions and religions. Just as lucidly and consistently, Tolstoy understood the importance of reason and that true religion does not subvert it to “sorcery” and other irrationalities:

Religion is not a belief, settled once for all, in certain supernatural occurrences supposed to have taken place once upon a time, nor in the necessity for certain prayers and ceremonies; nor is it, as the scientists suppose, a survival of the superstitions of ancient ignorance, which in our time has no meaning or application to life ; but religion is a certain relation of man to eternal life and to God, a relation accordant with reason and contemporary knowledge, and it is the one thing that alone moves humanity forward towards its destined aim.

Tolstoy utterly opposed the caricatures of faith and religion by modern scientism, believing  as Ernest J. Simmons remarked that “one of the main calamities of modern life” was “the tendency to replace moral and spiritual progress by technical progress.” His trust and search for rational truth enabled him to see through both the irrationalities and blind-faith of organized religion and of modern science to the universality of the human spirit. He was, in a sense, an early modern seeker of the spiritual unity of the great religions, preceding and akin to the Perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley and others, but less given to the esoteric, closer to the approach of Huston Smith, superior even to him, I would say, though admittedly their gifts are different.

When I think of Tolstoy’s spiritual journey and of earlier times and cultures, of writers struggling with what is universal in the human being, I think of Dara Shikoh in Mughal India, seeking unity between Hinduism and Islam, as in his The Mingling of the Two Oceans (1657), the universality of the Sufi poets, or of the Dali Lama’s recent book Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together (2010). As reported by Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, almost his last gasping words were “To seek, always to seek.” In the sense of the psychiatrist Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he was one who never ceased searching for truth. Far from a religious organization and all that that implies, Tolstoy conceived of religious belief in rational, reasonable terms, opposed to organized Christianity, as when he wrote, “Men of our modern world who profess this perverted form of Christianity really believe in nothing at all. And that is the peculiar character of our time.” That is why he relentlessly argued against the distortions that he believed had come to exist in the doctrines of institutional Christianity, in favor of a more humanistic, open conception of faith. In “The End of the World,” putting aside “false Christianity,” Tolstoy looked forward to “true Christianity,” one freed from “sorcery,” universal in scope and outlook:

I think that at present—at this very time—the life of the Christian nations is near to the limit dividing the old epoch which is ending from the new which is beginning. I think that now at this very time that great revolution has begun which for almost 2000 years has been preparing in all Christendom; a revolution consisting in the replacing of false Christianity and the consequent power of one portion of mankind and the slavery of another, —by true Christianity and the consequent recognition of that equality and true liberty which are natural to all rational beings.

All the more reason why the caricature of Tolstoy in “The Last Station” jarred so incongruously against my understanding of who the man actually was, in and of himself, as articulated in his own writings, over the entire last half of his life, especially the last decade. It was also the real Tolstoy who meant so much to Ghandi, the one who emphasized spirituality, love, peace, and non-resistance to evil.

Now more than ever, after centuries of falling down into the bottomless pit of nihilism, the world needs to recover the vision of universality, what the great religions and people of the various countries and cultures have in common. For all too long, humanity has been obsessed with what distinguishes and separates, what divides people from one another, setting up our little racial, nationalistic gods and idols. Tolstoy was interested in what we have in common, what unifies our vision, hoping thereby to elevate and improve, to whatever degree possible, our actions. It is long past time that the world re-affirm human unity. Tolstoy provides a significant part of the perspective required to achieve it.

Alexandra reports in her book Tolstoy: A Life of My Father (1953) that he had a visitor in February of 1909 who was a Bahai, a member of a faith that emphasizes what is universal in all religions:

“Actually, when you think of it,” Father said, “you are always astonished that such a simple argument does not come to your mind. Take an Orthodox Christian, a Catholic, a Buddhist—all of them believing in what they hold to be the truth. Yet if I cross a certain boundary—I think that the one is a lie, the other the truth. What doubts that arouses, what need to search out the religion which would be common to all!” (472)

Alexandra continues that her father had worked unrelentingly on The Circle of Reading precisely because he was seeking “what was basic to all religions,” trying “to lay the foundation for one religion.” It is important to stress that the Bahai faith that Tolstoy responded to was not what is known to many today as the Baha’i Faith, the highly organized hierarchy located in Haifa, Israel, merely one of several Bahai denominations, which has become exactly the kind of exclusive religious organization that Tolstoy vehemently condemned in all his writings. Rather, Tolstoy responded to the open and inclusive association and movement that existed under Abdul-Baha, the son of the founder of the Bahai faith, Baha’u’llah, who died in 1892 in present-day Israel. Until his own death in 1921, Abdul-Baha brought his father’s vision into the Western, modern world, showing the way beyond its Islamic and Sufi heritage, emphasizing universality, “spiritual democracy,” the “oneness of religion,” and the freedom of the individual soul in self-less love and service to humanity, as in other persuasions. Tolstoy’s papers show that as early as 1894, he had heard of the Bahai movement, which traces its origin to 1863, with many Bahai contacts extending until the end of his life, including his receipt of books, letters, articles, and visitors familiar with the Bahai teachings, along with the droves of other people visiting Yasnaya Polyana. Reported by Tolstoy’s personal physician, Dushan Makovitsky, in his diary, for May 15, 1910, Tolstoy observed in his presence that the Bahai movement was “Very profound. I know of no other so profound” (Vol. 4, p. 255).

Many people today still commonly think in terms of “your” religion, and “my” religion, as in “the” religion, “the” exclusive truth, while the deepest meaning of universality is “our” religion, not, to be clear, even “my” own personal Bahai persuasion, which is but one form of universality, conceived of as neutral territory, or “yours,” whether any type of transcendence, atheism, nihilism or whatever. Universality embraces all persuasions. That is its great challenge. And it is not relativism. The tendency always is to think of religion in terms of organized or institutional religion, which isn’t religion at all. True religion can only be personal,  and as pluralistic as the Golden Rule. Take the person out of it and it is no longer religion. In the modern world, even throughout human history, true religion has never been organized. It is not the nature of spirituality to take over and dominate the communal, collective space. And it definitely can not ever be organized.  For it is, as Tolstoy understood so well, about the individual soul and his or her inmost relation to the Divine. The astonishing development of religious history, I want to say revelation, is that it is the Will of God that religion not be organized. Everywhere people are against organized religion for countless good reasons, as was Tolstoy. He and most people, if interested in religion, not the falsities and sophistries of exclusive institutional doctrine, want the true thing of the heart. That doesn’t mean oppressively organized religion, anathema to the soul.

The deepest insight of human experience remains, “Truth is One; sages call it by many names.” The Divine Being transcends all human conceptions. We truly need every human attempt to understand Him, Her, It, yet even then, in all humility, have the dimmest hope of fully understanding. It is precisely the defense-reaction of the cynicism of modernity, as Victor Frankl insightfully observes, that rejects the meaningfulness of life, believing all religions are false, delusional, contemptible fantasies. From Freud, Marx, sundry sociologists and many others, science debased to the substitute religion of scientism, the verdict and message is almost invariably condescension and contempt. As Julien Benda observed in The Betrayal of the Clerks (1927), modernity derides any spiritual vision, including Tolstoy’s. Benda, though, remained limited by the exclusivism of his own Catholic universalism, a limited form of universality. Far from such a limitation, Tolstoy arrived at the last station of modernity, universality, long before he arrived at the station of Astapovo, long before the rest of humanity began to catch up. Though we may still first blow up much of the world, global modernity has and is increasingly catching up with Tolstoy, pulling into the last station of humanity.

Frederick Glaysher

Note on eReading and eBooks.

Almost all of the books and articles mentioned in this essay on Tolstoy, and many unmentioned,  were read in ePub and PDF editions from Google Books or elsewhere online.  I was often struck by the fact that I could obtain obscure works on Tolstoy that few libraries even have copies of today, including excellent early biographies, such as Alymer Maud’s two volume work, and many other books and translations. With the click of the mouse, I found myself reading some pieces that I haven’t read in thirty-five years,  previously available only through a university library. It’s shocking that there are still some people who seem to think that’s not good for literature and culture . They seriously lag behind in understanding the Post-Gutenberg Age.

Original publication in ebooks will only assure that every book may very well become a lasting part of the intellectual and cultural heritage of humanity, or at least never go out of print.

Corporate and putatively literary publishing do not constitute some kind of privileged system or means for identifying and promoting the “best” writers; in fact, they are self-serving, commercial enterprises that shore up both the nihilistic vision of life that has become endemic during the last 150 years and the monetary bottom-lines based on such received wisdom.

Little beyond the most predictable, secular, despairing visions of life that have made up the cliched canned goods of modernity can be found coming from most of the publishing industry today.

I stopped looking to them, and the so-called literary magazines, for anything worthwhile in the early 1990s, went into my study, and closed the door. I believe it’s the best thing I could ever have done.

I would argue that the publishing industry intentionally cultivates the notion that they alone are NOT self-interested, a complete falsehood, especially when one realizes they’re taking 88% or more of the profit from the sale of a book! They have no special right to it. Only writers who are gullible fools would give it to them in this age when it is now so easy for authors to reach readers directly by themselves.

It’s not merely a matter of money for writers. It’s also about the freedom of ideas and communication, censorship, who receives a hearing and who doesn’t, the free exchange of ideas. The gatekeepers imagine they know who and what and how society should be influenced and shaped, but, in reality, the cynical, decadent publishing industry, along with the university, has destroyed culture, literature, and poetry, marginalized it by driving it ever further from life, into the pathetic games of deconstruction, “language,” and so on.

One part of the Post-Gutenberg Age is that it has provided the technological means to reach, develop, cultivate an entirely new stage of human civilization, purpose, and meaning. The pathetic executives of publishing corporations aren’t even remotely interested in exploring anything substantively challenging to the received bottom-line they inherited… figuratively and literally.

The real shift in culture I’m arguing for isn’t about me. It’s about life outside my head… that is what would constitute an aesthetic revolution today. The Internet, eBooks, and social networks make that a distinct possibility.

Here is what every writer on the planet can now do for under a hundred dollars: http://books.fglaysher.com

The publishing industry has been downhill for decades. Jason Epstein is an enlightening source in that regard. eBooks already constitute, by objective industry account, 5 to 8% of all book sales. Within a few years, at present growth, it will be over 50% of ALL BOOKS SOLD. The “big publishers” will only have left about 25% of printed book sales, so “big” isn’t a word they’re going to be hanging on to.

Many publishers are delusional about the value they bring to the art. Nada… The self-serving justifications of the NY publishers and their ilk are pathetic and laughable. They should be worrying about ebooks because they indeed do spell “the end” for many of them.

Faber, Carcanet, New Directions, et al… Add in all of the major magazines and journals… Every one of them dedicated to a small, narrow, exhausted vision of life and poetry… All they guarantee is that there will be NOTHING unexpected in their pages. That’s a major part of the reason why the art and the academy have lost the community. They’re no different from the community… The arguments defending publishers are all the usual, tiresome ones, cliches. Speaking about them as ideas, they’re weak ideas in the extreme. It’s painful letting go of icons that become senile and sully themselves…

Banding together into coteries is ALWAYS a sign in literary history of exhaustion, imaginative, spiritual, literary exhauuuussstion… That’s what much of the problem is with the art. eBooks and eReading offer a way to go around the decadent and worthless way in which the art has been manipulated and controlled for decades, often by publishers and the self-appointed cliques. It’s a tremendously exciting sign of HOPE for the future.

A book or poem is something other than the way it is printed, cuneiform tablet, papyrus, vellum, etc. Poetry and writing are ideas, consciousness codified, constituting the true Platonic Book.

Codex or scroll, poets today can have either… It’s merely a matter of *coding.* Aren’t there already remedial html workshops for poets springing up all over the country? Now there’s an idea that probably somebody could definitely cash in on…

The middlemen have changed, as have the incentives that drive them. Many are, and have clearly been, catering to transferring the vanity press business to POD and ebooks. Others are seriously OPEN to new relationships with writers… So, publishing, ePublishing and otherwise, has become a complex picture, as life is, but has definitely emerged into a Post-Gutenberg Age… leaving many behind.

Every age has its Luddities. There are plenty of eLuddites about, moaning and groaning, while time passes them by. I believe many of the writers, on the list at the following link, would have welcomed the sheer opportunity and excitement of ebooks and seized the day…
http://www.fglaysher.com/mission_of%20earthrise_press.html

Any writer or poet can now SURF across the lake and sell his or her books in the UK and almost anywhere else on the planet. Kobo Books

Any writer who can use a word processor ought to be able to create an ePub ebook, all of which will only become easier and easier…. Poets hawked their broadsides in the streets of London… There isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t on the information highway…

Poets need to get their heads out of the electronic sand on ebooks… before the entire younger generation is lost to the art.

Of True Religion and John Milton.

February 7, 2010

In 1673, a year before his death, John Milton published a pamphlet entitled “Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and what the best means may be used against the Growth of Popery.” His great poems were all behind him, death before him. Oddly, this pamphlet is little known to the general reader of Milton. After looking through a number of textbook collections of Milton for university courses, published during the last several decades, I was surprised to discover none of them contained “Of True Religion,” yet it was the last piece the man ever wrote. All the more startling is that “Of True Religion” presents a portrait of John Milton significantly at variance with the Puritan caricature of him that is often promoted by scholars in the university. All too often Milton is torn out of his historical time and not seen to be in fact the liberal that he was, clearly headed toward the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which further limited the monarchy and prepared the way for the modern efflorescence of individual liberty and freedom. To distort Milton into a one-dimensional Puritan suppresses the complexity of his actual thinking and life.

Since I visited last summer Milton’s home in Chalfont St. Giles, where he had lived fleeing the London plague of 1665, he was on my mind in the fall, and I was browsing online to see what I could turn up about him. I stumbled onto “Of True Religion” when I had downloaded a 19th Century edition of Milton’s prose, published in 1826, from Google Books. There it was in the table of contents. I suppose it was still possible back then for “true religion” to exist. How curious. I looked in my 1977 college edition of Merritt Y. Hughes’ Complete Poems and Major Prose, first published in 1957. Apparently, not major. In his opinion. After transferring it to my Sony Reader, to my surprise, I found Milton talking about toleration, leaving alone the “Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Socinians” and Arminians, instead of persecuting them, harrying them out of the land, emphasizing what is held in common, versus sectarian. And how far should they be tolerated? “Doubtless equally, as being all Protestants.” He further stressed they should be allowed to preach and argue in their assemblies, public writings and printing. From our perspective, one might say, of course, but Milton was progressive and on the advancing edge of his day. To fail to recognize that fact obscures who he was.

Milton’s qualification is Protestantism. It’s fair to say Milton does not have much warmth of feeling for “popery,” or Catholicism in general, tending to vehement and even feverish denunciation. He’s concerned, like many in his time, with the grasping for “usurped” ecclesiastical and political power. He calls to mind for his readers England’s history under Catholicism when he writes that the pope “was wont to drain away the greatest part of the wealth of this then miserable land . . . to maintain the pride and luxury of his court and prelates.” Milton was not the kind of man to take lightly the “Babylonish yoke” of popery, or anything else for that matter. My English genes cannot but thrill in agreement and admiration for his spirited defense of liberty. However, it’s safe to say, I suspect, that while Milton was willing to extend freedom of conscience to fellow Protestants, which many of the time were not, he probably would have thought differently when it came to Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and people of other persuasions, lumping them all in there somewhere with popery—“idolatrous.” The ruined abbeys all over England stand witness to both the extent of Catholic exploitation and the fierce backlash it inspired. Milton is tame by comparison. But no universality for him. Milton was convinced he had the exclusive truth in Protestantism.

Similarly, some today, trying to revive or return to Christianity, as a dominant social organization, celebrate Milton, thinking he is the way back to an idealized past. But the past is past because it is past. There’s no going back in that direction. Why would one want to? The democratic pluralism of our time is much more dynamic and exciting, and, here’s the important fact, true. True religion, in our time, must recognize the non-exclusivism of religious truth—that all peoples, religions, and traditions taught and held, still hold and teach, to the degree they’re not atrophied or undermined by the nihilism of modernity, the same universal, spiritual insights, ideals, virtues, and truths. Far from exclusivism, far from the historicism and nihilism that attempted to discredit all religions and wisdom traditions, I aver, not that all religions are false, but that they’re all true.

With a nod to the long line of both Croatian Catholics and persecuted Huguenots that I also come from, I would say the great religions all provide a vision and understanding of the purpose of life, what it means to be a human being, that is deeply profound, non-utopian, non-quixotic, when properly understood, of how and why one journeys through this world. We need to know as much about the Unknowable Essence as possible, from every angle, every insight into Divine Mystery, that we might come to understand Him or Her or It, just a little bit more. I’m not willing to settle for anything less than the fullness of Being, striving for It. To relinquish the thousands of years of human meditation on the Divine Being would be too great a loss. What then the point of life? The Exclusive Truth is beyond all attempts to understand Him. I also argue for retention of all the nay-sayers, atheists, agnostics, and nihilists. They have an important part of the truth to tell, while having no more the exclusive truth than anyone else. Relax, there’s no reason to burn them at the stake or blow them up. Nor anyone.

While Milton urges Protestants, “who agree in the main,” to show forth “forbearance and charity one towards the other,” I would urge forbearance and charity for all, all the great religions and traditions, for this is what the logical, rational, reasonable development of modern democratic pluralism has already done, though we do not, I think, recognize and celebrate it for the highly significant achievement that it is. Too often, global society continues, in a sense, to think and act in terms of exclusivism, whether religious or secular, while more often in its lived experience rightly recognizing and respecting the multifarious ways and paths through life. To make our achievement more conscious and acknowledged, indeed, more than mere toleration, celebrated, is one of the challenges and goals of the 21st Century, all times, and a path toward universal peace and understanding. Understandably, the countervailing fear is usually about organization. But in the modern world people have increasingly come to realize that true religion is merely an “attitude toward divinity,” a frame of mind, a reverence for life, not an organization, best manifested as a distinctive quality of the individual.

Putting aside organizations and institutions, Milton writes, “True religion is the true worship and service of God, learnt and believed from the word of God only.” Unfortunately drawing from Paul of Tarsus, Milton embraces some of Paul’s more personal ideas and interpretations, and of the early Christian church, “to reject all other traditions,” instead of universality. Similar to the harm Paul’s teachings on misogyny have caused throughout the centuries, Paul’s bifurcation of humanity, into the “elect” and the “wayward,” has caused incalculable suffering and misery, all in the name of putative truth. All of the various forms in various traditions that have approached human nature in a similar manner have resulted invariably in analogous distortions and social dislocations, though his many good acts and writings conducive to cultivating love and community are timeless. Milton is at his best when he’s following what is universal in the Christian tradition.

Milton’s other prose writings helped disenfranchise the church from the state. He and the time understood well the threat and result of fanatical exclusivity in power, or grasping for it, as we do living now, as a result of the fanatical exclusivism of Islamist terrorism, reminding us of how serious all these issues really are. Separation of church and state is one of the undeniably great achievements of civilization, even, I would say, the Will of God. From lived experience, life just goes better when matters of conscience and belief are balanced with different viewpoints, consultation, people of various religious outlooks, and no religious faith or belief, the full range of human thought and belief; the great pool of humanity, swirling around, trying to make sense of it all, no one shoving the exclusive truth down anyone else’s throat, over the barrel of a gun, or with a bomb. What could be more obvious about our actual experience of what works, what produces a peaceful, harmonious society, or, at least, as close as we can get to one in this world? Even for Milton, the great fear was slipping back into popery or anything oppressive and tyrannical. Not liberal by our standards today, but he was, by those of his own time, and headed in the right direction.

……

Postscript: eReading and the Post-Gutenberg Age

I am highly conscious that Google Books made my discovery of Milton’s “Of True Religion” possible. Without Google’s digitizing much of the intellectual heritage of humanity, now available from anywhere on earth, I would never have found this piece by Milton, since modern scholarly editors thought they knew better than Milton what was worth writing and reading. I feel, therefore, it is incumbent on me to give credit where credit is due. Literary, intellectual study and scholarship have and will continue to benefit from what is clearly a Post-Gutenberg Revolution. As a writer and poet, I am constantly now, even for years, finding one thing after another impacted by the exponential transformation in the availability of knowledge and information, the most nuanced, substantive dimensions of literary and aesthetic study, classic works, books, and publications. The world has truly entered into a new age, properly called the Post-Gutenberg Age.

Less recognized is the fact that the requisite spiritual vision appropriate to sustaining it has evolved and is manifesting itself in lived experience. In time, the world too will increasingly awaken to that transformative reality.

Frederick Glaysher

An often benighted view of ebooks from Peter Green’s review in The Times Literary Supplement July 15, 2009.  Google Books or Great Books? The enduring value of the Republic of Letters, in all its forms.

Anthony Grafton, WORLDS MADE BY WORDS: Scholarship and community in the modern west. 422pp. Harvard University Press. £22.95 (US $29.95). 978 0 674 03257 8

Why is there always this insecurity? Why must it always be one or the other? What is it about so many scholars and people of literary sensibility, speaking as a poet, if I may say so of myself, that they cannot see the profound cultural and intellectual value of digital books?

I have on my Sony Reader over 1,400 books and articles, hundreds of them from Google, Gutenberg.org, and elsewhere. The vast majority of them are GREAT BOOKS. I’m currently reading Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, an ebook from Gutenberg, not to be confused with a Harlequin romance, though tastes and temperament may differ.

I’ve been reading great books all my life and am emphatically not threatened by the bourgeoning online availability of much of the entire world cultural heritage. It’s a vast enrichment to be celebrated! Not merely so you can look up a hardcopy in a brick and mortar library.

Only insecure academicians seem to think otherwise. Begrudging recognition of what Google has accomplished falls very short of the mark of what it and others have achieved and deserve, as a result of the over-all computer revolution of the last three decades.

Who is seriously thinking of replacing traditional libraries entirely? I don’t believe it will happen or even can or should happen. There are distinctive virtues of the traditional, physical library that only it can accomplish.

Predictably, here’s the same old, out-dated conception of the role of the humanist, the calling of the sensitive, sophisticated, well-read, intellectual mind, according to Green, apparently Grafton, and so typical of the university today:

What, then, is the true legacy of the Republic of Letters in its pursuit of truth? For scholars, the answer has always been clear. The giants of Renaissance humanism retrieved, in the teeth of medieval opposition, that Graeco-Roman, essentially secular, world view, along with much of its literature, that was in danger of perishing altogether, or at the very least of surviving only as stunted religious allegory and misunderstood moral aphorisms.

This tenor is eventually followed up by the same tiresome, usual pieties, derision for “vocational training,” flourishes in the direction of St John’s College, the value of Latin, etc. The pathetic, endemic failure of imagination among scholars and academia is all it seems either Grafton or Green can come up with. No wonder so many young people have left the humanities and literature behind, in search of what they may not know, but clearly they won’t find it often, today, in a university.

Better to search and read online than in the dusty arguments of hundreds of years of repeated, near-sighted, and blind cliches. Pity, The Times Literary Supplement, a magazine I’ve read for decades, can’t come up with anything better than this either. But then, they’re part of the problem, not the search for the answer.

Frederick Glaysher

Papyrus, cuneiform clay tablets, rice paper, palm leaves, tree bark, vellum, deer skin, decorative gilt leather, chiseled marble, copper plates, silk scrolls for fastidious delectation, and so on…. ebooks will find their role and level, which I too think is inevitable.

One thing all these FORMS of reading demonstrate is that the nature and experience of reading has through the centuries assumed numerous physical shapes. Not everyone will want to make the transition, and not for every type of book. Literary and artistic, cultural works, especially, will continue to preserve and honor the exceptional qualities of high weight and exotic papers. Under all the forms, Platonic, the experience of the Archetype, if you will, prevails and will continue.

Those who worry about the demise of the book should take heart from history. But why waste so many trees on manuals, pulp fiction, the required textbooks that the overburdened backs of school children lug around, unread — and the ephemeral newspapers that more and more people read online!

Call me old fashioned and nostalgic, but I hope we’ll always think some books worthy of time-honored paper, linen, and vellum, as an art form, in its own right.

Last April I read Lucian of Samosata’s A True History or Trip to the Moon, circa 160 AD from a text on Gutenberg and a second one I found on Google. As a Journey, it was interesting to me, especially given its destination. I found it, though, a little tedious, too poorly structured and improbable with all its weird and fantastic beasts of war. The episodes of the journey are inharmonious, while the book lacks a coherent theme capable of resolving them. A great fragment, one that obviously influenced Rabelais and Jonathan Swift.

Lucian naturally led me to Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Voyage to the Moon (c. 1650). The text I read was from Google Books, the 1899 reprint of Samuel Derrick’s 18th century translation. It’s a much better structured work, but it too suffers from its very conception, for as Aristotle understood, it is in the selection and arrangement of the plot that the poet demonstrates his real ability. While Bergerac chooses incidents that are outlandish, properly fitting to his chosen genre, satire, it nevertheless is all too far fetched to ever get off the ground for me. There’s a charm and delight to the book, with much humor, but he makes the mistake of using a linear plot, and then just bails out at the end with an all too easy return to earth. Jonathan Swift was known to have read Bergerac, which readily makes sense, especially chapters VII – VIII.

Some science fiction fans apparently look to both books as antecedents of the genre. I don’t. Their Imaginations fly much higher and deeper in literary terms. Both books demonstrate the limitations of the genre.

I couldn’t have read either of them as easily without an etext making them accessible. They’re both fairly obscure books. The book by Bergerac is not to be confused with Ronstad’s play, an amusing farce in its own right, with some tragic overtones, but still not literature of the highest order.

I was very conscious at times that I was reading very old books, in a very contemporary format, with all the enjoyment and delight of a printed text. I’d have had to wait days, or a week or two, had I ordered them off Amazon or at a local bookstore.

At some point, I would say, scholarly standards must improve for ebooks, but that’s another matter, much commented on, yet unresolved. People worry about losing the Book, but I think the book can take may forms, and still deliver what’s essential.

Frederick Glaysher

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve now read books on a digital device for over a decade. I started with the original Palm PDA, the green one, a piece of ancient technology. I then progressed up the scale with two subsequent Palms and now have the Sony Reader PRS-5o5, which seems to me an incredible leap forward.

I’ve read everything on one device or another, including the following books, or large sections of them: Shakespeare’s King Lear, Macbeth, Chaucer, Cicero, Milton, numerous writings of Martin Luther, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and more than I can immediately remember over the years. Most recently, I’ve read D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, a book I always wanted to get around to reading, though he was never one of my literary heroes: “It is hard to hear a new voice… We just don’t listen.”

I think something like that has happened with eReaders, as it has with literature and poetry, but it’s changing as the technology has improved. The Kindle didn’t appeal to me given the required uploading of one’s own documents, and downloading them back to the device. I chose the Sony Reader because I believe it’s more flexible. I have an existing library of over a thousand books from Gutenberg.org and all over the net, including some I’ve scanned myself. I wanted more control over my library than I ultimately felt the Kindle and other eReaders would allow me.

Sony’s software, though, has problems that get in the way of the experience of reading, requiring far too much tinkering around to copy files already sorted on one’s hard drive into “collections.” They’ve been criticized too, perhaps justly, for trying to corner the market in their own way, similar to Amazon. I think Sony has a chance of beating the Kindle and other devices, if it allows readers to hear the voices, some new, of the writers they want, not just those on its propriatary bookstore site, and develops a better software package to support the eReading experience. Only one or two updates during the last few years just isn’t enough support for serious improvement to take place. Sony needs to listen to and to hear its users if it’s ever really going to improve, and not just the technically inclined, but those who are serious readers of real literature, not the predominantly popular schlock they’re pushing on their elibrary bookstore.

Or Sony’s Reader will go, I suppose, the way of the US car industry…. Another company will figure it out.

Frederick Glaysher

Reading and eReading are the same. But then….

I suppose what I was thinking of was that eReading can be as absorbing and imaginative as conventional reading, yet there are advantages to eReading. Often, we think in reverse. What is lost or diminished by a mechanical device. I don’t want one or the other, but both. I’ve been regularly using both for over a decade, like everybody else, or at least so many people now.

I can flip things off the net, into a reader, and take it with me for snatches, long or short, when I can. Having hundreds of books and articles with me at all times has advantages. Depending on the inspiration of the moment, there’s always something to read, something I *want* to read, not a soiled, wornout magazine at the doctor’s office, a newspaper at the restaurant that has been handled by dozens of people that day, over their eggs and toast, french fries, and other greasy fare. I find I actually can read that marginal article, which I wouldn’t otherwise, life being too busy since it’s a little lower on my list of priorities or interests. It’s easy to copy and paste it into my eReader to maybe get around to weeks or sometimes months later.

I can’t carry hundreds of physical books, but I can my Palm or Sony Reader anywhere I go.

And then the experience, I still believe, being tugged in both directions, isn’t quite the same. It can even seem better. Or right with the right book. The quality is as deep and engaging.

Frederick Glaysher

Reading is reading is eReading. And then I have afterthoughts. It is different. I “access” it in a different way. It feels different. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t want to read every book in digital format. Cover and paper weight have an aesthetic feel to them that steel and aluminum can’t provide. The leather case for the Sony Reader helps, but it’s still different.

Yet I found myself fully immerse in Cervantes’ imaginative world. The allegory took over and pulled me into it, as I eagerly suspended my disbelief. All the cliches about reading were just as true. I escaped from the harshness of reality into the perfection of an ideal world, relishing the delights of his intellect and humor.

Since I’ve done so more times now on electronic devices than I can recall, I continue to be surprised when I come across protestations against ereading. Even educated readers can be resistant to the idea that there is “no difference.” Which is to say, reading is JUST AS intellectually exciting, rewarding, invigorating, etc., capable of changing my consciousness.

Is all that self-evident? There are a lot of people resisting the notion… the experience.

I suppose my point is that the quality of the reading experience is or can be every bit as deep and reflective as with a physical book. One needn’t feel one has betrayed books and letters by admitting as much. Far from it, it is the experience that counts and the cultivation of the consciousness that only reading can provide.

Physically, there’s a qualitative difference; intellectually, reading is reading is eReading. 

Frederick Glaysher

Author of Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote Journey to Parnassus in 1614, about four years before he died. I’ve wanted to read this book for the last year or more. I had search antiquarian bookstores online but discovered the only translation of it was in 1883, and they wanted, if memory serves, about $200 for it. But I kept thinking about it and searching for it once in a while. To my surprise, about a month ago, I stumbled on it on Google Books. They had scanned it in from the library at the University of Michigan, where I was a student, long, long ago! What a thrill finding it. I’ve had to process the copy a little to get it to load on the 4×6 inch screen, but better than my laptop. And worth the effort. It allowed me really to be drawn much deeper into his imaginative world….

Cervantes uses the journey motif in a fascinating, humorous way to survey and lambast or applaud Spanish poets of his day or earlier. Somewhat similar to Czeslaw Milosz’s A Treatise on Poetry and other such works. Ultimately, though, it’s a self-serving work, as the genre is, and therefore of a lesser order. Nevertheless, it’s a fine work that ought to be better known in the English reading world.

The text is bilingual which allowed me to dip into the Spanish a little, which I enjoyed. 

Frederick Glaysher

Probably about 80% of the over 1200 ebooks I have are from Gutenberg.org, from where I’ve been collecting books since at least about the early 1990s, mostly in ascii text format.

The Sony Reader handles Gutenberg files very well. Since I read a lot of poetry, I don’t even have to format them in any way, just load them on. Some of the prose, fiction, etc., word wraps weirdly, as you may be familiar with. I’ve never understood why all the computer people can’t get that fixed…. Anyway, if you copy and paste the book into a word processor and then save it as an RTF file, the generic format that all word processors have available, the Reader will handle them just fine. It’s an easy fix. There are several formats too that work well on different devices.

The frustration I’ve had with Gutenberg.org over the years is with the quality of the text. On a scholarly, editorial level, I don’t feel comfortable with their policy of sometimes using two or three sources to “produce” the “best” text. That leaves too much latitude, to say the least, for people with little or no literary or textual sophistication to “create” and misedit the classics and other books of essential importance. It seems to me too that it’s a problem that the academic community ought to confront and help educate the public about. Unless one believes it’s not important to have the book as the author wrote it, but a conflation….

Frederick Glaysher

I use a Sony Reader PRS-505. In March of 2007, I saw one at Barnes & Noble on display and sat down and played with it for half an hour, and that was it! I had to get one. (I don’t have any affiliation with Sony or B&N.) It’s a very comfortable device to read books on. I found myself FORGETTING I was on an electronic thing, and was just drawn into reading one morning in my favorite chair by a sunny window….

New users might find it harder to make that transition, but I’ve been reading books for years on my Palm PDAs. Actually, I remember now that the first time, and only time, I’ve ever read Huckleberry Finn was on the first Palm I had, a much more primitive device than Sony’s Reader. That experience was much more frustrating for a number of reasons: a very small screen, colored green, and a very sloppy text from the University of Virginia’s early etext database. And yet, I knew a threshold had been crossed, one that made me think and look to the future….

Frederick Glaysher

I’ve created this blog to reflect on the qualitative nature of reading on digital devices. This is something I’ve thought about for nearly a decade. I want to record my thoughts and chat with people who might similarly be interested in serious literary books, and what it’s like to read them digitally, if you will.

I’d be happy to hear from people and eReading aficionados, on all types of devices, e.g., Sony Reader, Kindle, Palm, Phones, etc.

I’ve read and *experienced* reading etext from various sources and in numerous formats for books, from Gutenberg.org, Archive.org, Google, and so forth.

Again, “eReading,” for me,  is about the *experience* of reading on electronic devices. Is the quality of the experience the same, different, richly imaginative and fulfilling, informative, as with a traditional book?

What do you like or prefer about eReading? Dislikes, difficulties? If the hardware is interfering in your reading, how would you like the devices improved?

Provocations:

Does eReading complement and augment the traditional book and library or replace them? What of the Luddite mentality that seems to be working against the acceptance and inclusion of eReading into the realm of legitimate ways of reading? Is that a tiresome question? Have things not moved already beyond that debate? It seems to me that eReading makes some very significant improvements on the experience of reading…. Form follows content, content follows form? I would agrue for a new synergy.

Several months ago I created a discussion group on LibraryThing, but no one there seemed interested in discussing the *experience* of reading, but rather the gadgets, which is fine to a degree but doesn’t really touch on, as I’ve tried to convey, what I’m actually trying to probe and understand more.

All points of view are invited: eReading

Frederick Glaysher