Sticks and Stones

How often do we hear from know-nothing Christian pundits that the United States of America is founded on “Judaeo-Christian ethics” or “Christian morals”? In short, that the US is “a Christian country”? (I would supply a link, but I don’t really fancy trawling through Bill O’Reilly clips to come across one, thank you very much.)

Very well then. Let us explore some of the tenets of Christianity, as prescribed in that bible thingy they keep going on about, and see how familiar it is:

…that ye resist not evil… (Matthew 5:39)

The phrase “War on Terror” leaps immediately to mind. There are evil people in the world and, quite rightly, the United States has committed itself to doing everything within its power to combat them. What is more, under such a moral teaching the USA could do without a police force or even any justice system whatsoever.

…whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also (ibid.)

If the US followed this moral teaching, after 9/11 it would have invited al-Qaeda to take their pick of targets on the West Coast.

I was a stranger, and ye took me in (Matthew 25:35)

I was an immigrant, and I was deported.

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder (Mark 10:9)

Seems a small point, but the freedom to divorce from a spouse is integral to the concept of personal freedom, and the secular USA rejects any notion of a “religious contract” that cannot be undone by us mere mortals.

sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor (Mark 10:21)

I’m no expert, but I’m fairly sure that the US infrastructure is based on a rather different economic model.

Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more (John 8:11)

This again, along with many other such verses, would leave many current judges without a means of income, and many chuckling criminals free on the streets.

At the name of Jesus every knee should bow (Phillipians 2:10)

One of a number of such exclusive verses, this has no resonance in the United States, where there is no coercion of religious belief, no religious test for public office, etc.

Feel free to add your own.

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The second in a series in which Leo examines the modern uses and abuses of certain words from the Greek lexicon.

The Oxford English dictionary tells us:

/kyoodos/

• noun praise and honour.

— USAGE Despite appearances, kudos is not a plural form: there is no singular form kudo, and use as a plural, as in he received many kudos for his work, is incorrect.

— ORIGIN Greek.

The fact that it is singular is contained in the definition so I don’t need to say anything more about that.

The more significant abuse is the trivialised use of the word. In Greek, kudos is more than just honour. It is fame, undying glory. To better understand this one has to have a brief understanding of heroic culture.

One of the best examples of the heroic attitude is Achilles, who chose a short life with glory and fame over a long life at the end of which he would be unknown - almost a ‘Live Fast, Die Young’ sort of philosophy. The ancients believed that a man could achieve some degree of immortality by being remembered and talked about after their death. Compare these lines from the Roman poet Horace:

Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam

“I shall not wholly die, and a part of me will survive the grave”

Kudos refers to undying fame as acquired by the greatest men in the world. The greatest warrior of the Greeks in the Trojan War, Achilles, achieved it by killing the greatest warrior of the Trojans, Hector. Hector, meanwhile, before his death, told his wife that he had to risk death (which would result in the death of his son, father and brothers and the enslavement of his wife, mother and sisters, as well as the destruction of his city) in order to achieve kudos for himself and his father (Iliad VI).

Kudos is not even fame in the sense that we would think of it. Who will know Amy Winehouse’s name in a hundred years, let alone 2,500? Hector is still a boy’s name (albeit a somewhat unfashionable at the moment) although the man, if he ever existed, died around 3,000 years ago: that is kudos. That is undying glory. Very few can claim it in the last few years: Napoleon perhaps? Mozart, Shakespeare?

Whatever the case may be, kudos should not be used lightly to refer to getting something in the bin from across the room, or completing a level of Guitar Hero III. The fact that we still talk about Homer, Horace and Shakespeare is a great testament to their genius, and this form of immortality should be respected.

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Before his death, Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest writers in English of the 20th Century (as demonstrated by the fact that, like Joyce, Borges, Kafka and Proust, he never won a Nobel Prize, but that’s another post for another day), gave express wishes that the unfinished manuscript of his latest novel, ‘The Original of Laura’, be burned. Thankfully, as yet, these requests have not been carried out, and the decision now rests with his son Dmitri, who says he is “torn”. It is my belief that the manuscript should be published and distributed, and this is based on three main factors.

First, unlike Stoppard (who hasn’t won a Nobel Prize: a rarely correct decision from the Nobel jury), I feel that the author’s wishes are, quite frankly, irrelevant. To be blunt, he’s dead.

Kafka famously asked for his unpublished works - practically his entire corpus - to be burnt after his death, and his literary executor, Max Brod, unhesitatingly ignored his wishes, luckily for us.

Virgil likewise asked that his masterpiece, the Aeneid, possibly the finest work of extant Latin literature, be destroyed after his death; the Emperor Augustus himself stepped in to ensure that this did not happen - one of the few occasions on which we can be thankful for supreme autocratic power. I for one feel no guilt or compunction in reading such literature, which the author explicitly requested be burnt, nor would I in this case.

Second, from what I’ve read about the would-be novel, it looks truly fascinating. Even if the novel doesn’t quite live up to Nabokov best, a standard set by such works as Lolita and Pale Fire, it is always rewarding to read the work of a genius, and the premise of this novel is the proof. Dmitri, the son, who has the final say on this matter, described it as “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity”. That’s a pretty large claim to make, and even if it is only partly true, makes it a matter of critical importance that the book be published. As I have said, Nabokov is one of the most highly regarded and important writers of the last century, and if this last work lives up to even half of its promise, then burning it would be nothing short of a travesty.

And finally, I am just very uncomfortable with the whole idea of burning literature. It is a symbol of suppression and ignorance, and should be a practice restricted to religious fundamentalists and other fascists.

Who can compute the quantity and quality of the literature burned by the Christians and later the Muslims in the Great Library at Alexandria?

Modern day book burning tend, thankfully, to be restricted to copies, rather than unique versions, but in this case we are discussing snuffing out a work of literature entirely, never to be read by anyone, to be lost to posterity completely.

In the interests of full disclosure, I probably ought to mention that I have somewhat selfish motives in wanting this book, however incomplete, to be published: I really want to read it. But I want others to be able to read it too, and can merely express my heartfelt desire that Dmitri Nabokov not deprive the world of this work of literature.

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HarperCollins, following in the footsteps of one of its authors: Paulo Coelho, will begin making some of its books available for free online. These books are not downloadable, will only be available for one month, and can’t be printed out. DRM is not dead in all forms of digital media yet.

The New York Times reports that this will begin today. Books available:

“The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

I thoroughly applaud HarperCollins for making these books available online not because books need to be free but because books need to be available. Here in North London we have a library. It is somewhere in this area, although none of the residents seem to know where it is. It is small, and the one and only time I went in there, was stocked with Friends DVDs and racks of self-help books.

Harper Collins can spread the joy of high quality fiction by putting its content on what is slowly being recognised by ‘old media’ as the distribution mehanism of the future: the internet. The popularity of Audible, Sony’s eBook and the Kindle all demonstrate that digital distribution of books is not the far-off-future, but the present. It is good to see HarperCollins joining in.

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