Madeline Miller’s second book, Circe, is a book I really liked. I blew through it in a single day, because it was one of those books I just could not put down. I liked the ethereal, aloof, otherworldly character of Circe, whom I thought was very well-written as a character not-quite-of-this-earth. The whole thing felt strange, foreign, peculiar, which seemed appropriate. In The Song of Achilles, I learn that this is just how Madeline Miller writes her protagonists. And although very appropriate for a half-goddess recluse mystic, it’s less appropriate for an ancient twink. There is some good gay longing in this book, though. From Chapter 5:
“He was like a flame himself. He glittered, drew eyes. There was a glamour to him, even on waking, with his hair tousled and his face still muddied with sleep. Up close, his feet looked almost unearthly: the perfectly formed pads of the toes, the tendons that flickered like lyre strings.”
I have respect for the boldness of spirit and enterprising nature that it takes for a NYT best-selling book about Ancient Greek fan-fiction to give Patroclus from the Illiad a foot fetish. Like Cirice and Lavinia, this is a feminist re-telling of something plucked out of the world of classical antiquity, re-writing Achilles and Patroclus as kind of sympathetic pre-allies for their treatment of Briseis and their burgeoning throuple status. Despite some highlights and some genuinely emotionally charged moments, I generally didn’t like this book. It’s written to be so flighty, so aloof, and so unearthly. It feels too light.
This book is divided into four parts. The first part has the structure of an anthology, telling several different stories of unrelated characters, whose stories are all thematically intertwined in the way by which their relationship with the natural world typified by the presence, use, and destruction specifically of trees, affects their lives. The subsequent two parts of the novel weave all of these disparate characters together, and creates a unitary narrative in which they become eco-terrorists, which is totally awesome. The final section has them again coming apart, with a healthy dose of commentary on the disparity in their lives and the outcomes of their actions bases on their past and status. When reading the first section, it wasn’t clear to me what structure the book would settle on. I thought it would continue to be structured like an anthology, which to me, assuaged the risks of setting the book down for a long period to focus on other tasks. A fatal error. When I returned to the book, and it expected me suddenly to remember all the characters I had supposedly just read about, I was in a deplorable stupor. This might explain why I loved the first 1/4th of this book, but struggled through the following 3/4ths. Allow this quote to serve as a thesis statement:
“Stand your ground. The Castle Doctrine. Self-Help.
If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to….
He has no other way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The Law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm...
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook the seas will rise. The plants lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge Imminent at the speed of trees.”
When this argument is proffered, near the end of the novel, the concept of “the speed of trees” has been being slowly constructed under your nose. The speed of trees spans generations of families and society, tying them together in surprising ways, tearing them apart in others. It recalls the Overview effect, a shift in worldview reported by some astronauts after viewing the blue marble of the Earth from a figuratively bird’s-eye view. That we are temporary members of nature contextually embedded in an ecosystem, for which we are responsible, is well-known and uncontroversial. The Overstory effectively imbues that somber reflective overview with charged human emotion, tying our whole society as intimately as it ties our individual life with the natural world. The Overstory is far from a perfect book. The irritants in its lofty writing style are munificent. It’s not even really a vital or pivotal book: Only the most benighted among us need any convincing at this point that the environment is like, good, dude, and only the most fervently mawkish among us need a narrative involving specific characters to come to that realization emotionally. It would be like someone suddenly thinking that the Vietnam War is bad because they just watched Star Wars. Still, the book is filled with passions and paeans that are likely to speak to you if you, like me, quake in the night with apprehensive vexation for the fate of the Earth.
Your experience with the Odyssey will hinge on the translation you read. Here is the criteria I advise you to use.
1. Do you want florid, archaic, antiquated language, or modern, simple vernacular?
2. Do you want to lean into translation-as-adaption, or do you prefer the author remain very close to the original Greek?
If you want a florid adaptation, I recommend Pope's translation. If you want a florid translation, I recommend Fitzgerald. If you want a simple adaptation, I recommend Wilson. If you want a simple translation, I recommend Fagels.
I preface with a quote from E.P Thompson, a historian of early modern Britain, from his work The Making of the English Working Class:
“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”
I read Walden as a primarily historical document, channeling the worldview and cultural outlook of a particular person in a particular place in history, rather than as the quietest and contemplative treatise on the philosophical value of solitude prima facie. In reading any historical document, our goal is principally to have some conversation with the past, to accept their premise and to our best to subordinate ourselves to their expression. I find the words of E.P. Thompson to partial to a twin interpretation with regards to Thoreau – on the one hand, I must resist any Whiggish or Presentist tendencies in the reading of this document, and to reserve my judgment of the overall themes of Walden in the light of modern fact. Yet on another hand, Thoreau himself seems committed to condescension toward the common man in the light of his present. He abides in a chauvinistic arms-length attitude about the civilization which produced him. I will quote him thus:
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph between Maine and Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as a man who is earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main action was to talk fast, but not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic, and bring the Old World some weeks neared to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American Ear is that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
While this passage reeks of a sort of holier than thou pretension about whatever pre-modern TMZ proclivity for gossip inhabits the mind of primordial and civilized men, the general spirit of the comment cannot help but recall an oft-quoted and infamous claim from our own Paul Krugman:
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s Law” […] becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
Damning phraseology deservedly parodied and lampooned often, though if you dress it up in the fatigues of a critique from outside modernist meliorism, it acquires some kind of respectability. The people of our civilization just fail to value to the correct things, Thoreau might say, communicated well in a strange passage about his distaste for news and newspapers. This worldview puts the reader of a historical document in an interesting situation; I’m charged with evaluating what amounts to a critique of Thoreau's contemporaries. That critique can be criticized from my own worldview, where I happen to believe that things like electricity, modern medicine, and wicked-sick video games are actually tight as fuck, but to do so would fail to engage with the book on its own terms. But to avoid doing as much might count as accepting the book uncritically. It’s a puzzling thing, from my point of view.
Yet there is much to appreciate about the simplicity of Thoreau’s prose, replete with rustic and bucolic descriptions, as he finds himself “neighbor to the birds, not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.” I have a great deal of affection for the passage in which he describes a war between red and black ants, referring to them as “vast legions of myrmidons.” One gets the impression that no less than Jacques Cousteau may have been deeply inspired by the following descriptions of the Pickerel of Walden Pond:
“They posses a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky, but they have […] yet rarer colors, like flowers or precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden Water.”
Ultimately, the worldview in Walden is, perhaps not equally, constructive to and reflective of a particular American cultural judgment, echoed from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Overstory: what you want to do is to get away from society, to retreat from civilization. Only therein can spiritual or philosophical awakening and purity be attained, or perhaps, most easily there. I do not deign to approach such admonitions through the lens of any modern scientific views on socialization or human sociability. Why, after all, should socialization be restricted to human beings?
“What space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. I have a great deal of company in my house […] I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond, that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself […] I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean-leaf, or sorrel, or a horsefly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the North Star, or the south Wind, or an April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house.”
Stirring stuff. Ultimately, what I find Walden stoking is my second-order desires, quickening the hunger for my ego death. I wish I was the kind of person who found mystical union with the natural world possible, or that I was the kind of person from whom a first reading of Walden awakens one from their dogmatic slumber.
