So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

This book is the fourth in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, Arthur Dent winds up somehow back on Earth, where he meets a young woman called Fenchurch (who turns out to be the person who worked out the meaning of life shortly before being destroyed by the Vogons - or at least, this happened on the previous iteration of Earth). Most of the book is a not-so-sci-fi pretty standard issue English comedy love story between Arthur and Fenchurch, as they try flying together, meet a rain god, win a raffle, and go in search of a madman (Wonko the Sane) who claims to know what happened to all the dolphins (who, I hasten to add, all disappeared - the title is their last message to humanity), before Ford Prefect rocks up in the last chapter with a giant space robot, shoplifts a load of films he'd never got round to finishing before Earth got blown up last time round, and the three of them go in search of God's final message to his creation, which is a tad anticlimactic, although the actual scene is very touching and has Marvin in it.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This book is the third in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, having been trapped on prehistoric Earth for about five years, Arthur and Ford escape through an eddy in the space-time continuum (on a sofa, no less) and find themselves at Lord's Cricket Ground, only for evil robots left over from an ancient galactic war to disrupt things - they are rescued by a friend with a spaceship/bistro, and go on to rejoin their Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin to avert the robots from rekindling the enormous galaxy-threatening war. During the course of all this, Arthur also meets his archnemesis and learns to fly. It's pretty zarking hoopy.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

selected poems 1923 - 1958

This book, a collection of poems by e. e. cummings, was just gorgeous. I mean, if you like a good poem then (well there's no shortage of them but) dive right in - cummings's work is modernistic and incredibly inventive in places, but his style is so polished and honed that they are immediately accessible too (perhaps on second or third reading for some of the more experimental ones); you will be swollen with feelings from perfectly-constructed abstractions; you will come to learn the truly immaculate power of well-chosen/placed punctuation; some of the simpler ones are like drinking a warm mugful of springtime sunbeams blended with honey and rosepetals and lovers' embraces. There is blazing romance and raw human joy and natural beauty in these poems, and sword-sharp satire in some of them too. As with it seems most of the poetry books I've done posts about, I don't have any particularly strong reflective thoughts about the book overall, as these like all true and great poems are transcendent, and thus resist being directly digestible by mere intellect: they are to be felt, not made into some ingredient for a hodgepodge mishmash whimwham of ideas none of which could possibly grasp the elusive core of meaning upon which a body of poetic work ultimately rests. And so, to that end, I will conclude this post by copying one out.

no man,if men are gods;but if gods must

be men,the sometimes only man is this

(most common,for each anguish is his grief;

and,for his joy is more than joy,most rare)

a fiend,if fiends speak truth;if angels burn

by their own generous completely light,

an angel;or(as various worlds he'll spurn

rather than fail immeasurable fate)

coward,clown,traitor,idiot,dreamer,beast-

such was a poet and shall be and is

-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend

a sunbeam's architecture with his life:

and carve immortal jungles of despair

to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand

the Dave Walker Guide to the Church

This book is a collection of cartoons by Dave Walker making very Church-of-England jokes about the Church of England and those who are part of it. Though I am not one of those such people, most of the gags are either recognisable enough from watching shows like Vicar of Dibley or Rev or otherwise recognisable enough from general aspects of English church culture and organisation. It was mildly amusing; I would go so far as to say that perhaps a dozen or so did actually prompt me to emit an audible quasi-laughter-noise. But overall, to me the book highlighted (whether unintentionally or not is utterly indiscernable) the crushing depraved stiltedness of English culture, and how poorly this translates into the development of grace-abundant church environments that are properly outgoing, diverse, inclusive, engaging, and generally just good at facilitating basic human community. I mean, fortunately we have the gospel and that arguably offsets the Englishness to a considerable degree but still - I'm not gonna say it's no laughing matter, it just meant that the book doesn't read as particularly funny because lots of the things it's satirising are legitimately endemic cultural aspects of how organised Christianity in this country is clinging to institutions and traditions and whatnot that, bluntly, alienate the average majority in this our post-Christendom era.* The best use I can think of for this book is as a toilet book in a church office loo (tbh I read most of it on the loo anyway); it may bring one or two smiles and prompt three or four vague concerns about missional efficacy or entrenched legalism.

* I write this as one who is not a member of the Church of England,** and despite my devout faith, am strongly of the opinion that the church in this country should sever its historical-institutional ties to the state, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explicate in the asterisk-footnote to a post about a cartoon book even though I usually wouldn't hesitate at all before doing something like that but Giles Fraser basically makes the best case for it here, and links are easier.

** Although on the 24th I will start a job at the Church Army - which is kind of part of the Church of England, but yeh, whatever, dunno.

Ethics

This book (available from that link as a complete ebook from Project Gutenberg) is the best-known work by rationalist philosopher Baruch [a.k.a. Benedict de] Spinoza, and represents perhaps one of the most singularly ambitious acts of holistic thinking in the history of the western modernist tradition: to devise a completely cohesive logical explanation of basic metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics and ethics based on axioms (like Euclid did for geometry, a field widely known for its similar level of complexity to All Of Philosophy). Parts of this book were core readings for a module on the rationalists I took in second-year of undergraduate (wow that was a long time ago now), and something about Spinoza seemed more endearing and/or accessible than the other rationalists whose books I acquired cheaply (in the days before I became wholly reliant on the university library and only bought books I wanted for personal use) - so I kept reading it after the module finished, but it's fairly dense and there were lots of other things I was reading so it fell by the wayside; until September 2016, when I went in pursuit of meaty things to read alongside my [then]-new writing project and this fit the bill - only for my bag containing this book to be stolen from a house party in Manchester that same month when I was only thirty or so pages in (it was a whole ordeal); fortunately, it showed up the next day discarded in a cupboard as apparently the party-crashing thieves had only needed a bag to chuck people's phones left on charge in and were happy to leave behind a classic work of holistic rationalist philosophy. Crazy, huh?
   Anyway - onto the book itself.
   Spinoza lays out his axiomatic philosophy in five sections: on God (which explores the metaphysical nature of all reality and considers how this operates in component parts, including humans), on the mind (which explores from these metaphysical standpoints how self-awareness must be made possible and what the nature of its being is, as in humans), on the human mind's being intrinsically connected to physical existence and therefore subject to all manner of 'affects' (emotional-mental micro-reactions that underlie and inform rational agency) and what these are, how this plays out psychologically, and finally how individuals can transcend their affects to live by reason and find true freedom.
   Now, the intricate detail arguments of how effectively comprehensively cohesive a system of philosophical thought this all is is a question far beyond me, and if you want an answer (probably read this first anyway) then google John Cottingham or just read some of the Stanford commentaries about Spinoza's work and how it stood up to later criticism but basically, while it may be riddled with slight twinges of illogic and feature occasional propositions that do not clearly follow from previous axioms or propositions and seem to spring 'rationally' out of nowhere, likewise the explanations and corollaries and scholiums in each point often seem to harbour nested presumptions that certainly haven't been justified by the previous work - and fair enough, as it was a gargantuan task, attempting to literally distill the nature of reality and the good life into a provable, axiomatic, impenetrably logical system - and the sheer sincerity with which Spinoza goes about this effort is testament to the (in my opinion) incredibly strong ethical centre, and therefore transcendent moral drive, of his work. Cynical readers may think I'm just starting to slap words together willy-nilly with no regard for whether it's a tangibly-meaningful phrase, and well, they'd be half-right. What I was trying to say is that Spinoza inevitably gets a lot of the details and mechanics not-quite-spot-on, presumably because he's not omniscient (although, if you take his metaphysical arguments seriously, there is a case to be made for his being God, at least a bit*); however the general thrust of Ethics elucidates a world that is ordered, rational, explicable, where unity and humility and togetherness and reason are implicitly better than assuming one is already right regardless of psychological context - and these basic thrusts form the heart of his work, axioms and propositions and syllogisms devised and twisted around these to try to form as cohesive and self-supporting system of rational explanation as possible but never quite succeeding because he was, as I am, as you are, a finite being, intrinsically incapable of grasping the nature of the infinite or eternal, let alone penning comprehensive descriptions of its function and nature, but let the tautological nature of some basic truths preclude their being taken by faith as irrationality: that reason and compassion and joy and freedom are good things to be sought in our own and others' lives, and that these facts have some cosmic significance for, at the very least, us, who knows them.
   My edition's text was translated by Edwin Curley and, in prose if notsomuch argument, was actually extremely readable (and it gets easier as it goes along): if you love mindblowing hypotheticals but never even actually read a philosophy book before, Spinoza's Ethics could be an interesting and weird but manageable and inspiringly nice ride.



* I could do a whole post on religious nitpicking with Spinoza - he was denounced as a heretic by his contemporaries, and while there is much of interest and much to like in his philosophy, it certainly does not reflect stable Christian theology, and is more like quasi-humanist transcendental pantheism if anything.