An underlying assumption in my entire thread on storytelling, not to mention the book I’m writing, is that stories are the fundamental thought structures of the human mind.
Storytelling is inevitable, in other words. We do not make sense of the world except by telling stories about it.
So I was intrigued to see this piece in Foreign Policy by George Akerlof (left), an economist at Berkeley, and Robert Shiller (right) at Yale. (Thanks once again to Jag Bhalla for the link.)
The two argue that stories also influence the optimism and pessimism of, and toward, entire nations and economies.
They give the fascinating example of José López Portillo (left), a Mexican president of the 70s and 80s, who presented his country, Mexico, in the context of an ancient story about the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl (also the title of a novel López Portillo had once written). The god was expected to reappear at a special time to make Mexico great again.
As it happened, this was during the oil shocks of the 70s and oil was being discovered in Mexico. Perhaps Quetzalcóatl’s time was now? It did not go unnoticed that the presidential jets were named Quetzalcóatl and Quetzalcóatl II. The country and foreign investors liked the story, and Mexico’s economy surged.
Until it stopped surging, of course. That’s when a different story took over.
The point, as Akerlof and Shiller put it, is this:
Great leaders are first and foremost creators of stories…
Indeed, the power of stories is such that
We might model the spread of a story in terms of an epidemic. Stories are like viruses. Their spread by word of mouth involves a sort of contagion.
The story of Theseus and the Minotaur (above) is, in my opinion, the classical storyline, the archetypal Ur-Story. I much prefer it to the story of Hercules as I described it recently. It has:
- unity
- direction and momentum, propelling us forward
- complexity, with characters male and female being fleshed out in a way that lets us empathize
- relevance, collectively and individually, to our own life stories.
It is, in short, far superior to the myth of Hercules as a story.
Part I: Identity
As I interpret the story, it has distinct parts, which we see re-used, like Lego blocks, in our stories today. (If any of the parts remind you of stories, let us know in the comments.)
First, there is the boy who needs to find a) his identity and b) his calling.
Theseus grows up with his mother at the court of Troezen, where his maternal grandfather is king. But he does not know who his father is (ie, he does not yet know his identity).
This he discovers when he lifts a huge boulder and finds under it a sword. The sword was hidden there for him by his father, who is, as Theseus’ mother now reveals, the King of Athens, Aegeus (as in: Aegean Sea). In fact, there will always be some uncertainty about even that, since Theseus mother was visited by both Aegeus and the god Poseidon on the night of Theseus’ conception.
Theseus now sets out to find his father (= his identity, in my reading), which is of course a difficult path. A bit as Hercules had to complete his twelve labors, Theseus has to overcome and kill a series of villains who have been making the road to Athens unsafe. Thereby he delivers a public good. I won’t dwell on each adventure, except one: I’ve already told you about Procrustes, who either stretched or amputated his guests so that they fit into his special bed. Well, Theseus forces him into his own bed, with deadly effect.
Having prevailed (and thus established himself as a promising hero), Theseus arrives in Athens, where nobody yet knows who he is. Only Medea (who will also feature in another hero story, Jason’s), who is the king’s wife, intuits that he is Aegeus’ natural and rightful heir, and thus a threat to her own son. Using her feminine weaponry–guile–she persuades Aegeus that Theseus is dangerous and must be poisoned.
Aegeus reclines at a banquet to see the stranger drink the poisoned wine. But just then Theseus draws his sword, the same sword that Aegeus had hidden long ago for his heir to find, to cut a slab of meat. It is a recognition scene: Aegeus knocks away the poisoned cup and they re-unite. Medea, knowing her game is up, flees.
Part II: Quest
The stage is now set for Theseus, having found his identity, to go on a quest, on the one big task that will define him (in contrast to Hercules, who had twelve tasks but none that was definitive). It so happens that Athens is suffering. Every nine years, the Athenians, having lost a war with Crete, have to send seven maidens and seven boys to Crete as human sacrifice for a monster, half man and half bull, the Minotaur. The Minotaur lives in a labyrinth built be the greatest architect of Greece, Daedalus, and nobody who enters finds his way out again.
Theseus volunteers to be one of the seven youths on the next ship, heeding his “call to action” in the language of the mono-myth theory. The ship sets off with a black sail, and Theseus tells his father that, if he succeeds in slaying the monster and survives, he will return with a white sail.
And how different he is from Hercules even now, as he approaches his biggest task. Hercules occasionally had helpers in his labors, but they were mere stage props in the background. Theseus, on the other hand, is capable of love. He meets Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, and they fall for each other.
Without this woman and her love, Theseus would fail. He is vulnerable. He needs an other, a woman, to complete him. And so Ariadne gives him her clew, telling Theseus to unravel its thread as he descends into the labyrinth in order to be able to follow it back out if he should survive his encounter with the Minotaur.
Theseus descends, finds the Minotaur and a ferocious fight ensues. This is his best moment (depicted above), his great act of heroism. He kills the Minotaur, follows Ariadne’s thread back out, and is ready to return home with the news that Athens has been liberated.
Part III: Return
But returns are never easy. Theseus elopes with Ariadne and they sail for Athens. But Theseus, now that the danger is past, falls out of love with her. She has done so much for him, and they have been so close. But now he abandons her on an island (where, in some versions, she will become the wife of Dionysus).
Did the Greeks think he was right to do so? Did they think he was bad? This is beside the point. Theseus, unlike Hercules, is complex. He is human. He gets confused, distracted, unsure. We can see ourselves in him. He makes mistakes.
He makes a big one, in fact. He promised his father to set a white sail if he succeeded in slaying the Minotaur but evidently forgets and appears on the horizon before Athens with the black sail. Aegeus sees it, assumes that his son has failed and died, and throws himself off a cliff to his death.
But this tragedy marks another rite of passage. Theseus is the heir to the throne, so, having liberated Athens, he now becomes its king.
The story as model
At some later point, we’ll have to take stock of how Theseus (and all subsequent heroes in this thread on Heroes) fits into our debate about heroism. But for now, let’s just think of his story as such: as a story.
It’s all there. A search (for identity), a recognition and reunion (with Aegeus), evil (the Minotaur), a quest and a journey, love and dependency (Ariadne), a peak moment (the slaying), a return, betrayal, tragedy, destiny.
Are these not the parts out of which we build all our stories?
Some of you may have noticed that my thread on Socrates was going strong all through the summer and then, seemingly, stopped. Something similar, you might have thought, occurred with my thread on America.
Well, no, the two threads did not stop. They went into overdrive, albeit in a different form. Indeed, they became a story–what we call a “Christmas Special”–in the new holiday issue of The Economist.
It is called “Socrates in America: Arguing to death“. Please think and smirk as you read it (which also, of course, goes for almost anything you read on The Hannibal Blog).
(A similar, though less pronounced, process led to my other piece in that issue, a sort of polemic against direct democracy. That idea occurred to me after amusing myself, here on The Hannibal Blog, in my thread on freedom, with posts such as this one on James Madison.)
Thank you!
But what am I saying! Nonsense. It was not I, amusing myself. It was we, amusing ourselves.
And that is the point of this post. It is, first, to say Thank You to you, who come here to comment, to teach me, challenge me, tease me.
Those of you who have been readers for a while will see yourselves in my story in The Economist. Cheri will recognize, in the ninth paragraph, the gem that she herself sent to me. Jag will spot, further down, his pun on the Greek word idiotes. Mr Crotchety, who offends the gods by not having his own blog, will see his own worldview–irreverent, humorous, incisive–throughout the piece, since he trained me well in it. Phillip S Phogg, with his deep erudition, subtly worn; Solid Gold Creativity, with her sensitivity and philosophy; Thomas Stazyk, Thecriticalline and the Village Gossip, with their almost poetic thought processes; Peter G, with his outrageous wit; Steve Block with his precision mind; Douglas with his forging inquiry; …. the list goes on and on and on.
Those of you who come sporadically, such as Vincent and Kempton; those of you have come recently, such as Man of Roma, Susan and Dafna; those of you who disappear for a while and resurface months later; and the many, many more who don’t comment at all but just read: all of you have enriched this blog and my mind and my writing.
You are all now co-authors of stories in The Economist and of a book in the making.
Academy 2.0
Which leads me to another insight: Socrates was wrong about one thing, as he himself would gladly concede if he were given a WordPress account: the written word is not inimical to good conversation; text is not necessarily dumb and dead.
What we do here is dialectic, defined as good conversations. What we have here is the Academy that Socrates’ student Plato founded in Athens. Where they ambled in circles and joked and teased and inquired and contested and thought, we do the same thing here on our blogs, minus the ambling.
And there is something new and special about these conversations. I have debated in many settings–the famous “Monday morning meetings” at The Economist in 25 St. James’s Square, London, being a notable one.
When you practice dialectic in those settings, in the flesh, you are always aware who is speaking as well as what is being said. Often this adds an impurity into the mental flow. Are we paying more attention to somebody of higher status or rank, less to somebody who is new? Are we distracted by a twitch, a snort, a sniffle? A curve, accentuated by a fabric, reminiscent of a …
Here there is none of that. With one single exception, I have met none of you in person. (And is that not amazing?) Here, the only thing that matters is what, not who.
Put differently, here in this modern and more pure academy, we all feel safe:
- safe to contradict ourselves,
- safe to take intellectual risks,
- safe to fail and advance,
- safe from embarrassment.
We exist on our blogs, between which we skip and link and flit like thoughts across neurons, through our words and associations, our minds and thoughts alone.
Here, we are each equal with Socrates.
Tiger, Tiger, Tiger. You’re making me … re-write my manuscript.
My book, as a reminder, is about success and failure and how the two can be, as Kipling put it so poetically, impostors. The main character is Hannibal, and his story introduces the various themes that come up in the course of a life, each of which is then illuminated with other lives, ancient or modern.
Here is how I went about it:
- Mainly I chose relatively obscure people for my characters studies, which is to say people who are interesting or known for a good reason but not ‘famous’.
- When I did include somebody conventionally famous (and there had to be a good reason!) I focused on an obscure or non-obvious aspect of that person’s life.
Well, Tiger falls into that latter category. I examined one aspect (I won’t say which) that he shared with Hannibal, and one that he didn’t, both of which made him unbelievably successful.
And now… the babes. So many of them. They’ve started keeping a cheat sheet to keep track of them. Plus: Wives swinging golf clubs after mid-night car crashes; cable-TV know-it-alls pontificating about morality; coy mea culpas and a career inter- and perhaps dis-rupted.
What can I say? I notice that everybody suddenly has a strong opinion about this young and immature genius. Tragic hero? Victim of hubris? Pervert?
Somebody from Pakistan informs us that it is entirely normal to have lots of women if you can. Somebody else explains why black women are not mad at Tiger. And so on.
My own default position in these matters is to be cavalier. But Tiger’s self-immolation now looks to be epic in scale. And tragic if the flames sear his children.
Among athletes, Diego Maradona comes to mind–the best in his sport, only to waste it all in decadence. Among politicians (well, where do you start?), perhaps Eliot Spitzer.
Yes, they were successful. Yes, their success was an impostor, by goading them, psychologically, into self-destruction. Is it simply the old Greek theme of hubris? Was it a character flaw? More subtle?
One thing is clear: I have to adjust my manuscript.
And one other thing should not be forgotten: Kipling said triumph and disaster are impostors. Tiger is young, as is his wife (not to mention their kids). As a great advertisement featuring Tiger (before his fall) once put it:
It’s what you do next that counts.
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook just “updated” its privacy settings, and I almost did not notice. That’s because I’m (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmare: I don’t “share” anything on Facebook to begin with, so my Facebook profile contains little to be private about.
But some of those who do share things on Facebook “came close to killing [their] account this week”, as Danny Sullivan did, when they paid attention to the details of the change.
A year ago I predicted in our (The Economist’s) sister publication, The World in 2009, that this brave new culture of “sharing” would cause discontent. Maybe that point is now nigh. For me personally, it arrived long ago.
Because I used to cover the internet in my previous beat at The Economist, I had to be one of the first to try new things like Facebook, and I usually was. But from the start I made a pact with myself:
- No pictures of, or (indexable, Googlable) information about, my loved ones.
- No names, birthdays, diaper photos etc.
- No drive-by shootings (photo, video, status update) of third parties
In particular, my wife and children should, in effect, not be on the internet at all unless they themselves later choose to put themselves there. You may have noticed that their names do not appear on The Hannibal Blog, even though I share my ideas here quite liberally. Yes, you may know me very intimately by now in an intellectual way–as I feel I know some of you quite intimately through your comments even though I only see your pseudonym and avatar. But you do not know me biographically beyond what I choose to divulge. I practice Platonic sharing.
So why am I Mark’s nightmare? Because getting people to share all that other sort of stuff–the biographical and, in particular, the intimate bits–is his mission, his strategy, his imperative, as he himself already told me two and a half years ago, before he was famous.
(Ironically, that was one of the hardest interviews I ever conducted, because Mark, well, would not share anything. In conversation, I mean. He gives short, linear, monosyllabic answers. Getting him to open up offline is like getting blood out of a stone.)
To make people feel secure enough to share more, Facebook subsequently introduced increasingly complex (“granular” was Mark’s word) privacy settings. By fiddling around with dials and such, you could determine how public/private your photos, updates, contact info etc were.
I never bothered, because I hate fiddling and, well, I had made that pact, so I didn’t care. There was nothing to keep private.
But I watched, with curiosity verging on shock, what information I began to see, in my peripheral Facebook vision, about my Facebook contacts. If I may generalize: The men shared thoughts and opinions, intended to be public, and the women shared baby photos and such that used to be considered intimate. (The differences between men and women on Facebook go a lot further.) I occasionally felt like a voyeur, and became bashful. Surely I was not meant to see all of this? Or perhaps I was? Perhaps I just belong to a different era, such as Hannibal’s.
But, based on my conversation with Mark all those (internet) eons ago, I always knew that Facebook was a pair of scissors that would sooner or later cut. The two blades are these:
- For Facebook to stay interesting to its users, Mark needs people to share ever more of this stuff.
- For Facebook to stay interesting to Mark and his investors, he needs to start doing things with that information, things that go beyond just showing the information to your friends.
A lot of people will be cut by the “transition tool” that Facebook is now providing as part of its privacy changes. Danny in his post went through it, so read his analysis there. Just one hint: Online, everything is about the “default” option, because that is the one most people will use. You notice that the default setting in the “tool” for who may see most kinds of information is ….
Everyone
Heracles, or more commonly Hercules (the Roman version), is the quintessential and archetypal hero, the one the Greeks considered their greatest and, more importantly, the one my four-year-old daughter names when I ask her who her favorite hero is.
So Hercules must, of necessity, open this thread on heroes and any investigation of heroism.
Which is interesting because I put it to you that the myth of Hercules is one of the worst stories of antiquity when you consider the storytelling per se. We today would consider Hercules a brute, a meathead, a boor. He is one-dimensional as opposed to complex. His story is in essence a repetitive list of triumphs that leaves no room for suspense, surprise or sympathy. (I meant empathy, really, but why not alliterate?).
And yet, Hercules is the one my daughter picks. So there must be something primal there. And that’s what this post wants to establish.
The man and his dilemma
Hera (Juno)
Hercules was, like many other Greco-Roman heroes, half god, half human. His father was Zeus, which meant that Hera, Zeus’s sister and wife, was jealous and would forever hate Hercules (some say that she is the Hera in Hera-cles) and make his life difficult. If there is tension in the story at all, it is this fight among the gods (some goddesses, such as Athena, helped Hercules) and between a goddess and a mortal. We’ll encounter this theme all throughout ancient mythology (Hera also fought against Aeneas, for instance).
Hera is thus how the Greeks, in this story, personified adversity and even what we would call our dark side. If things go wrong, even if Hercules himself does wrong, we will blame Hera. She is the Ur-bitch, you might say.
Just so this is clear, the story starts when Hera sends two venomous snakes into the crib of baby Hercules to kill him off. Poor snakes. Baby Hercules strangles them, one in each cute fist.
And thus you have the only other piece of information you need about Hercules, the thing that he is known for, the only thing we can really say about him: He is …. strong.
Strength is probably the first trait of a hero, as Jens has already pointed out. But strength against or for what?
Combine the malign influence of Hera and this awe-inspiring strength and you get a combustible cocktail.
Indeed, we need an explosion to get started: Hera causes Hercules to go temporarily mad. He rages with blood lust, destroying and killing not just anybody but … his own children! (Ask yourself: Could Hercules be a modern hero? Do heroes have to be “good”?)
This sets up a rather complicated and unconvincing double rationale for what must come next–ie, the ostensible “story”. Hercules has sinned and must atone, by doing certain labors of penance.
But penance did not work for the Greeks as a story line, so there is another, simpler layer: a good old power struggle. Hercules was supposed to have been a prince, but Hera (who else?) had played with Zeus’ mind and given the throne to Hercules’ cousin Eurystheus, a caricature of mediocrity. The deal is that Hercules can get his throne back if he completes the tasks that Eurystheus gives him. (Ask yourself how plausible that is. Why wouldn’t Hercules just bash his cousin’s head in?)
I’ve been dwelling on all this only to show you what a “bad” story this is. It should be entirely clear by now that the ancients were not the least bit interested in the why of Hercules’ labors, and arguably only modestly interested in the how. They were interested in the that. Namely, Hercules accomplished twelve amazing feats because … he could.
The labors
I won’t, as it were, belabor the labors, even though they are the myth, because you know them and, frankly, I consider them rather predictable and thus dull. (Compare any one of them to the fiendish complexity and uncertainty of, say, Jason having to get that fleece.) To jog your memory, here is the list:
- Hercules kills a monstrous lion and henceforth wears its skull and fur as hat and cape, which is how we picture him.
- He kills the Hydra, a monster with many heads. Every time he cuts off a head, two more grow in its place. (Compare this with the monster that Siegfried confronts in Norse myth).
- He captures a golden-horned deer that is the favorite of the goddess Artemis. (I think this task was included to show that Hercules also had Fingerspitzengefühl, finesse. He could not kill the doe, lest he piss off yet another goddess, so he aimed an arrow so carefully that it immobilized the doe without killing her. But ask yourself: Why did he have to use an arrow at all?)
- Next: a boar. Hercules runs it down in the snow, where the boar can’t run fast.
- He cleans the famous Augean stables. The cattle of King Augeas had been pooping uninterrupted for eternity and the entire Peloponnesus was reeking. Instead of shoveling shit, Hercules diverts two rivers to flush out the mess. (An import from the river cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt? Meant to show that Hercules could not be humiliated?)
- Next, Hercules kills some terrifying birds who shot brass feathers into people.
- Next, Hercules carries the Minotaur from Crete to the mainland. (Yes, the same Minotaur that Theseus will later deal with, which theoretically locates Hercules in time as slightly older than Theseus. Probably included to establish a link between the two heroes, the greatest, respectively, of the Greeks and the Athenians.)
- Next, Hercules deals with the mares of Diomedes, horses that tear apart and devour any guest of their king. Hercules somehow turns the tables and feeds Diomedes himself to his mares, and they lose their appetite.
- Next, the belt of Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons. We need some sex in the story and this is it. Hippolyte falls in love with Hercules and wants to give him her belt, but Hera interferes again, making the other Amazons think that Hercules is about to kill their queen, and causing a battle in which Hercules and his men kill the Amazons. (Every time he kills children or women, you see, it’s really Hera’s fault.)
- Next, Hercules has to steal some cattle from a three-headed monster named Geryon. What’s interesting here is the location: Geryon is in Spain, and Hercules travels back to Greece via Italy (thus allowing the Romans to link him with their locales). Also, he has to cross the Alps along the way, and this was, in the Roman mind, not done again “at scale” until … Hannibal did it. I digress.
- Next, Hercules has to get the apples of the Hesperides, in today’s Morocco. He persuades Atlas, a Titan who is holding up the sky on his shoulders, to fetch the Apples for him, holding the sky (strength!) while Atlas obliges. When Atlas returns, he doesn’t want to take the burden of the sky back. Hercules says “Fine, I’ll keep carrying it, just take it for one second so that I can put a pillow on my shoulders.” As Atlas helps him out, Hercules makes off with the apples. (I think this is included to show that Hercules also had wit, besides strength. But that qualifies?)
- Last, Hercules must fetch Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld of the dead. This is de rigueur for heroes: Odysseus and Aeneas will also visit Hades and return. I think it is meant to symbolize a brush with death, a transcendence of mortality.
Death and meaning
And that’s it, a smooth ride from one triumph to the next. If there is a twist, it is only in Hercules’ death.
Hercules and his wife crossed a river once and Hercules let a centaur, half man and half horse, carry his wife across (why did Hercules himself not carry her?). The centaur tried to elope with her, so Hercules shot him. As the centaur lay dying, the beast whispered to Hercules’ wife that she should keep his blood and soak Hercules’ clothes in it, which would prevent him from straying with other women. She did as told, but the blood was really venom. And thus she inadvertently killed her husband.
And yet, Hercules, alone among heroes, did not totally die. Zeus, his father, made him immortal and brought him to Mount Olymp. Another indication that Hercules was special.
So what is Hercules to us?
He represents the idea, once universal and now arguably fading, that heroes are somehow beyond morality and the law, beyond ordinary standards, “beyond good and evil”. That happens to be the title of a book by Nietzsche, and I think Hercules might have fit Nietzsche’s idea of an Übermensch. It is what Dostoyevsky examined in Crime and Punishment: Can the hero be beyond morality? The ancients believed Yes. We have opted for No. Today, we would lock Hercules up or, if he happened to be president, appoint a special prosecutor.
But back to the point: Hercules may have got rid of some nuisances for his fellow men–a boar here, a monster there–but that was not why he did his labors.
Hercules was simply a strong man at a time when nature was ever-threatening and as arbitrary as a jealous woman (Hera), when our frightened ancestors yearned for one among them, whatever else his flaws, to stand by at the gate with a bludgeon and brawn.
And the manuscript is back again. Five months after I received his comments on my first draft, and three months after I sent him my second draft, my editor at Riverhead has now sent me his comments for the third (and perhaps final?) draft.
They’re very good comments, once again. We’re now trying to figure out two things:
- How to make the tone consistent throughout the entire 100,000-word story. Right now, as my editor puts it, the book reads “overly serious in some passages, too informal in others.”
- How explicit to make the “moral” of each chapter. Not enough, and you sacrifice oomph and clarity. Too much, and you dumb down the story or make it corny and banal.
Both are points that all writers struggle with, I stipulate.
Number 1, in particular, is interesting: In my day job at The Economist, I write short articles in a single day at a time, and always in the same tone and voice. But my book was written over many, many days, and I felt different on each one (and was using my personal voice). Some days, I had my tongue in my cheek; others, I was doing deep thinking.
You see that on this blog, of course. Its tone has changed a lot over the 17 months or so that I’ve been writing it, and each post has its own mood. On a blog, that’s allowed, and even fun.
My book, however, should not be like that. It should have variety, but one steady and reassuring voice. As it turns out, that’s surprisingly hard to achieve.
When seven young ski climbers from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and France decide to cross the Alps in only three days, using only their touring skis to climb up and down 13,500 vertical meters for 210 kilometers, what do they call their trip?
But it’s obvious:
Hannibal
(Thanks to Mr Crotchety, a fellow ski enthusiast, for the link.)
It hardly matters that this team, representing Dynafit (a ski maker), made the crossing in the eastern (Austrian) Alps, right around the mountains and valleys where I spent my youth. Hannibal made his crossing, with elephants but without Dynafit skis, in the western (French) Alps, near their highest point. Here is the map of his trip and life (as well as in the masthead above).
We’re not sure exactly where he crossed, so teams from Stanford and other universities are trying to follow in his footsteps to find them (ie, the steps).
But it hardly matters. Daring crossings of the Alps, eastern or western, still evoke, and forever will, the most daring crossing of them all.
I mentioned en passant in the previous post that the Sanskrit word vira, hero, is related to the Latin vir, man, and thus to our virtue and virility. And, of course, to the Modern Hindi vir, brave. (Thank you, Susan.)
Well, that sort of thing brings out the language geek in me, and I can’t help myself. There is something beautifully mysterious in this common Indo-European heritage (pictured above just after the fall of the Western Roman Empire) of our Western languages and this Eastern Ur-language, Sanskrit. It is like visiting very distant relatives and suddenly seeing a nose, a toe, a tilt of the head or an allergic sneeze that is exactly like your own and makes you imagine the stories of the past that unite you.
So indulge me in some word play.
The easiest way to compare languages is by counting to ten in them. Look how incredibly similar most of these word roots have stayed across millenia and continents:
|
Sanskrit
|
Latin | French | German | English |
|
ekam
|
unus | un | eins | one |
|
dve
|
duo | deux | zwei | two |
|
trini
|
tres | trois | drei | three |
|
catvari
|
quattuor | quatre | vier | four |
|
panca
|
quinque | cinq | fünf | five |
|
sat
|
sex | six | sechs | six |
|
sapta
|
septem | sept | sieben | seven |
|
astau
|
octo | huit | acht | eight |
|
nava
|
novem | neuf | neun | nine |
| dasa | decem | dix | zehn | ten |
But the real magic starts when you compare more meaningful words, because then you see not only their etymology but the genealogy of concepts and meanings (this used to be a hot field, called philology, and is how Nietzsche arrived at his philosophy about the evolution of morals).
Maya
Since I used the word magic, let’s start there. It “comes from” the Sanskrit word maya, whence the Latin magicus, French magique, German Magie.
Of all these, the Sanskrit word is by far the most interesting and nuanced and deep. It points to a philosophical and religious concept. Maya means magic in the sense of cosmic illusion, the metaphysical head-fake that our senses play on us. We think we exist in our mortal bodies in this changing world, but if we pierce the magic (maya) by making our minds completely still, we realize that there is only pure energy (Brahman) and our soul (Atman) merges into this void.
Bonus: Compare that last word, Atman (soul) with the German atmen (breathe).
Yoga
Yoga not only means, but is the root of, union. But it gets more interesting. Yoga is also related to the Latin junctio, French joindre, English join.
Its Germanic descendants resemble it even more closely: German Joch, English yoke. (English, as is its wont, gets the root twice, once via Saxon and once via Norman French.)
A yoke at first does not seem very yogic. But if you think about it, that’s a matter of technological connotation. We yoke an ox to a cart, thereby imprisoning him. But in yoga, you yoke (connect, join, unite) your breath to your mind, thence to your soul (Atman), and thence to one-ness or union (Brahman), thereby liberating yourself.
Maharaja
Maharaja means great king in Sanskrit. So it has two words: maha (great) and raja (king). Now recognize:
- maha → Latin magnus (great), French majeur, German macht (might), English might & major
- raja → Latin rex/regina (king/queen), French roi, German Reich/reich/reichen (empire/rich/reach), English rich, reach, regal, royal
And so it goes on and on and on…
Hercules
I’m announcing a new “thread” on The Hannibal Blog: Heroes.
I’ve already written lots about heroes, of course:
- mythological and ancient (such as Odysseus, Achilles or Arjuna),
- mythological and modern (such as Heidi, Hänsel and Gretel, or Little Red Riding Hood),
- real and ancient (such as Hannibal, Scipio or Alexander),
- real and modern (such as Hans and Sophie Scholl), and so forth.
And I’ve discussed how the hero or heroine is an archetype at the heart of almost any story, and thus crucial to storytelling. (This is why the new thread will overlap a lot with that on storytelling.)
Why a new thread on heroes?
Because I think there is a lot to say about them. As always with my threads, I have no idea where we will end up, but I’m quite curious to find out. I have a vague sense that I will discover quite a bit, from you more than from myself, as we get deeper into the thread.
A very tentative outline of future posts in this thread might run as follows:
Perseus
First, the classical heroes of antiquity:
- Hercules
- Theseus
- Perseus
- Jason
- Achilles
- Odysseus
- Aeneas
Then, some non-Western heroes, including my favorite:
- Arjuna
(For the yogis among you, did you know that the Sanskrit word for hero is vira, as in the yoga poses virasana and virabhadrasana? It is related to Latin vir, man, and thus virile, virtue…)
Then some fictional heroes and heroines from our folk-tales, our movies, modern literature. Then some real-life heroes. And eventually, some anti-heroes, who are really modern heroes. (Albert Camus’ Meursault in The Stranger jumps to mind.)
Feel free to nominate heroes in the comments that you’d like to have discussed.
I’m interested in what makes these various heroes and heroines heroic, what makes them timeless. Why did some heroes enter our collective unconscious, and others not?
About threads
For those of you who are new to The Hannibal Blog, a thread is simply a mini-series of blog posts, not necessarily sequential or coherent, united by a common tag or category on the right. By clicking on the tag of a thread you get a list of all the posts in it, in reverse order.
And threads never really end. So all the previous threads–such as those on the great thinkers, storytelling, Socrates, Hellenism, Carthage, stuff, America, freedom, et cetera–will go on.
Well, this should be fun.
An amicable, edifying and ultimately futile debate (the sort The Hannibal Blog loves) in January, between, on one side:
- Kevin Starr, the preeminent historian of California (and a preferred source of mine), and (see Update below).
- Sharon Waxman, distinguished journalist and author,
- Bobby Shriver, Renaissance man and Kennedy/Schwarzenegger clan member, and
- me
and, on the other side,
- Gray Davis, the former governor of California, and
- Van Jones, Obama’s former “green czar”, and
- Lawrence O’Donnell, cable-TV analyst and, more importantly, father of The West Wing, the most intelligent TV series ever.
My team will argue that, yes,
California is the first failed state.
The other guys will argue the opposite.
Then the audience will annoint the winners.
Feel free to suggest debate strategies/arguments (for either side!) in the comments.
That stud on the vase is supposed to be Theseus, the Athenian hero who went on to slay the Minotaur, dealing with a ruffian named Procrustes.
Procrustes was famous for his bed. He invited passers-by to spend the night and to lie* in his bed. The bed was always too short or too long. So Procrustes “adjusted”, not the bed, but the guest as he was sleeping. He either stretched the guest (Procrustes = ‘the stretcher’) or cut off his legs.
Theseus eventually dealt with Procrustes by making him, Procrustes, fit his own bed. So there.
But from this myth we have the great term Procrustean bed. It applies whenever we force something into a size or a result (as with statistics) that is not natural and thus incorrect or inelegant.
I was thinking of the Procrustean bed once again while writing my piece for The Economist this week.
You recall my musings on the subject of a text’s optimal length, and how important it is neither to go under or over it. Well, in most print media, and certainly in The Economist, lengths are fixed in advance. What determines wordcount is the line count in the page layout of the print edition, which is done before the editor even has the “copy” (article) in question.
In my 12 years at The Economist I have, as you might expect, become very good at writing ‘to length’–ie, at delivering copy that fits exactly (thus evading any Procrustean tendencies by editors). Often I even enjoy the discipline of that constraint.
But it increasingly strikes me as bizarre, indeed unsustainable: We invariably cut good stuff out of articles, add unnecessary words to ‘turn lines’, or even entire paragraphs to fill a page when a chart shrinks. Sometimes this means sacrificing color and detail, or even logical connectors. Other times it means adding noise to signal.
And what happens next? People read the print edition, then pulp it. So much for the beautiful page layout.
But the same text survives forever online, where it faces no obvious layout constraints. Thus, all posterity reads a suboptimal text, stretched or amputated as Procrustes’ guests were.
The ancients (Homer, Virgil, etc) did not have this problem. They (or rather, their slaves) wrote on scrolls, which scroll as our web pages do, into infinity if necessary. Perhaps our evolving media habits will take us back to that future.
Henry VIII
I’m reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel right now. It’s a historical novel about the efforts by Henry VIII of England and Anne Boleyn to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, so that he and Anne could marry instead and–so it was hoped–produce male heirs.
The rest, you might say, is history. What stood in Henry and Anne’s way was the Catholic Church, ie the pope, so Henry had to “fire” the church and start a new one, the Church of England, whence sprang Anglicanism and its offshoot, Episcopalianism.
The new marriage, however, was not, ahem, ideal and Henry went on to have a few more wives, while Anne, and an awful lot of other people, lost their heads.
In short, it is a fantastic topic, a fantastic story! The sort I love, because it is simultaneously:
- grand and important, and
- riveting and engrossing.
If it were entertaining but trivial, I probably would not bother, because life is short and I want to spend it on important things. If it were important but boring, I also might not bother, because, well, life is short and I want to minimize my pain.
Anne Boleyn
So by being important and riveting, Mantel’s topic is exactly like the events that I chose as the main storyline in my own forthcoming book, ie the Punic Wars that led to the rise of Rome and the fall of Carthage. And this is one reason why I chose to read Wolf Hall. I wanted to see Mantel’s storytelling.
The other reason is that the book won the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the English-speaking world. I distrust prizes, but at the same time they do promise to make our lives easier by pre-winnowing some of the wheat from the chaff. Others have taken their cue from the prize and are heaping more praise. So I started reading.
What a disappointment
I’m half-way through the book now, at page 200-and-something, and boy, is it hard work.
I read, I get confused, I go a few pages back to see if I missed something, discover that I did not, struggle on, get tired, fall asleep, try again the next day.
Thomas Cromwell
Here are the problems, as I see them:
- Who the heck is speaking? Dialogue is difficult to write and separates great writers from mediocre ones. Mantel tells the story through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, an influential lawyer and wheeler-dealer behind the scenes. She therefore makes him a default he in the story. The problem is that there are lots of other hes (ie, men), and when several men are talking, we don’t know which he is thinking, talking, doing whatever he is doing. This sounds banal, but it is annoying. It does not help that everybody is named Thomas (that’s not Mantel’s fault, of course).
- Who are all the people and why should I care? Mantel assumes that I already know all the characters, the chief ones being Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, Jane Seymour, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and so forth. As it happens, I love history and have indeed heard of most of them before, but my knowledge of this era has got rusty. I wanted it to be Mantel’s job to re-introduce me to these people so that I don’t have to make an effort.
- What is the historical context, ie the import? Mantel assumes that we already know the interrelationships and geopolitical constellations between the Holy Roman Empire; the papacy; the French, Spanish and English kingdoms; and so forth. As it happens I do, sort of, know about these matters–at least more so than Mantel can expect from most readers–and it still does not suffice.
Thomas Wolsey
So I took time out and resorted to … Wikipedia. Yes, I did. I spent a good hour last night reading all the main characters’ entries, as well as brushing up on why, say, the Archbishop of York had less power than the Archbishop of Canterbury or who the heck a “Lord Chancellor” was again, and other matters that Mantel does not deign to make clear.
Hilary: Is that what you want your readers to do–go to… Wikipedia????
As it happens, it worked and Wikipedia did give me the context I need. But what an indictment of Mantel’s storytelling technique. The whole premise of books like this is that you get the history and the humanity, the importance and the drama, at the same time.
Hilary, you seem to be too busy being ‘literary’–with complex points of view, revisionist interpretations and what not–to hold me by the hand. You were supposed to make it easy for me. You did not.
Virgil
Virgil, the great poet of the Aeneid, has already appeared on The Hannibal Blog for his amazing capacity to inspire authors ancient, medieval and modern. And he will appear a lot more anon.
But today let me simply relate to you a little anecdote about Virgil’s method of writing. It comes from Lecture I, Minute 45, of this excellent iTunes U course on the Aeneid.
Virgil worked, as all ancient poets (eg Homer) would have done, by speaking verse out loud while a slave or two transcribed his words.
His style was to come up with perhaps 20 or so lines a day, but then to edit, cut, change those lines relentlessly until only about 3 lines were left at the end of the day.
Some ancient literary critic commenting on this self-editing said that Virgil was like
a she-bear licking her cubs.
To those of you who are writers: Isn’t that a great metaphor?
Now excuse me. I have some cub-licking to do.
I began the previous post with a parenthetical slur on Americans (of which I am half-one), propping myself up on two creaky stereotypes:
- that Americans can’t (really) speak English, and
- that political correctness is in part to blame.
Specifically, the issue was which of these two words was correct in the specific context:
- Sex, or
- Gender
Well, I thought I might regale you once again with the opinion of Johnny Grimond, our (The Economist’s) doyen of usage and author of our official Style Guide, in which style quite often becomes a window into a very British, ironic and sophisticated worldview. Here is Johnny on the matter:
Gender is nowadays used in several ways. One is common in feminist writing, where the term has a technical meaning. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” argued Simone de Beauvoir: in other words, one chooses one’s gender. In such a context it would be absurd to use the word sex; the term must be gender. But, in using it thus, try to explain what you mean by it. Even feminists do not agree on a definition.
The primary use of gender, though, is in grammar, where it applies to words, not people. If someone is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.) So do not use gender as a synonym for sex. Gender studies probably means feminism.
See also Political correctness
That said, I seem to remember reading somewhere–and I wish I knew where–that Sandra Day O’Connor started using gender instead of sex when she got to the Supreme Court, because she was worried that the word sex would conjure up all the wrong images in her (male) colleagues’ minds during deliberations.
Down under in Melbourne, Solid Gold Creativity has embarked on an intriguing investigation into sex (or “gender”, as the Americans among you might prefer in this context) in journalism.
She found that only 27% of the articles in The Monthly, an Australian magazine, were written by women. Counting only “major” articles, defined as those longer than 3,000 words, 20% were written by women.
With a research assist from Phillip S Phogg, she then turned her attention to America, where she found that women wrote:
- 27% of the articles in The Atlantic Monthly, and
- 30% of the articles in the New Yorker.
(Both of those are five-issue averages.)
So, naturally, I offered to supply the relevant metrics for The Economist.
At first, I started counting the articles in our current issue by author’s sex. (You out there cannot know who the authors are, of course, because we don’t have bylines, but I have an internal list to aid me.) Then I realized that this doesn’t give a good picture, because we are too small. If one or two people are on holiday, that skews the numbers. Then a freelancer writes the odd piece; or somebody writes a big piece and a box to go with it; or several people collaborate on one story, and on and on.
So instead I counted the editorial staff, both total journalists (ie, correspondents + editors) and editors. (I defined as editors only colleagues who actually edit a section in the magazine or a part of the website, not those who have editor as part of their title on their business card.)
Here is what I found:
Of the 84 journalists (I tried to correct for those on sabbatical, those half-retired, and so forth) 19, or 23%, are women.
Perhaps more interesting: Of the 21 editors, 8 are women, or 38%.
In other words, those women who do work at The Economist have twice the chance to become an editor that men at The Economist have. Innaresting, ain’t it?
And if I had excluded the website from the numbers and counted only the magazine, the share of women would have gone up both among total journalists and editors.
That said, the percentages are still well below 50%.
Now, I quite like something that Solid Gold Creativity said in her comments:
… I’m not so interested in the “reasons” for this absence of female thinkers/writers. I can always think up a hundred reasons why something is one way or another. My interest is not “why”; my interest is what’s so…
In that spirit, let’s find out more…
The World in 2010, our (ie, The Economist’s) annual sister publication, is now out. This is a magazine in which we and our invited guests take shots at prognosticating the coming year.
My piece is this one on the Constitutional Convention that California is all but certain to call in 2010.
For you regular readers, this (ie, other constitutional conventions) is what I was researching in September when I eulogized James Madison.
On a more general note: Those of you who go to The Economist’s website a lot might already have started noticing some changes. There will be more over the coming month or so. These changes have been long in the making and were partially cooked up at our powwow last year.
One great thing is that, even though much of the site will be behind a subscriber wall, all incoming links will in future take you directly to the article, whether or not you are a paying subscriber. This means I can keep sending you there. 
David Williams, 1970s
That’s David Williams, who went to India in the 1970s and met Pattabhi Jois, becoming the first non-Indian to learn Jois’ entire system of asanas (postures), now called Ashtanga.
Today he lives in Maui, halfway up to its spectacular volcanic crater, and that’s where my wife and I caught up with him a few years ago. We were in Maui and called him. He said ‘come over’. We went to his house. He showed us some pictures of himself in pretzel positions during the 1970s and 80s.
Then he chased out his three Bernese mountain dogs and we threw down our mats in his garage, where he taught us Ashtanga yoga for the next couple of hours. Later, we went to get some Vietnamese food and heard his yarns from yonder.
He told us a lot that day that my wife and I still talk about. With his thick Carolinian drawl, David is simultaneously wise and funny. One issue that he has strong opinions about is hurting yourself.
Western yogis today–the kind you see with tight Prana pants stretched around their firm buttocks, mat under one arm, Starbucks Venti Latte in the other–hurt themselves a lot. All the time, in fact. I have hurt myself.
‘Of course,’ you say. ‘Yoga is stretching, so sometimes you overdo it and hurt yourself.’
Wrong!
As David put it to us: If you went to a ‘real’ yogi on some Himalayan mountain top and told him that you had injured yourself, he would not understand. He would look at you as though you were crazy. It would sound as stupid to him as it would sound to your pastor if you told him that you had hurt yourself praying.
The dumbest and most dangerous “yogi” in the world
Which brings me to this article in the New York Times about “yoga competitions” and to a man named Bikram Choudhury. I wrote about Bikram in The Economist a few years ago, but that was in the Business section and I had to give it that kind of slant. Today, let’s talk about something more important.
Bikram is an extremely smart businessman–he has made Bikram, a specific series of asanas in a hot room, into a big brand.
He is also an unbelievably stupid and dangerous “yogi”. He’s not a Yogi at all, really. And you need look no further than this nonsense about ‘yoga competitions’, which–surprise!–was his idea. He and his wife want to make yoga an Olympic sport, in fact.
Introducing: Satya and Ahimsa
As regular readers of The Hannibal Blog may remember, yoga is really about stilling your mind, as Patanjali described it.
Yes, in order to do that, you might want to prepare yourself physically–ie, with asanas–because, as the Roman poet Juvenal said, mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. But you want to spend just as much time and effort on the other seven of the eight limbs (= Asht-anga) of yoga.
The first, and most urgent, of these limbs is yama, or ethical guidelines. And two of these are:
- satya, truthfulness, and
- ahimsa, non-violence.
Now let me explain to you what, for most people, happens in the first five minutes in a Western yoga studio:
- They look around at all the other, fitter, slimmer, lither bodies and get competitive. Their ego (one of the naughty things that Patanjali warned us about) flares up. They lie to themselves: ‘I can do what he can do; I can get into Lotus.’ By lying, they have already dropped satya, and are thus no longer eligible to move on to a higher limb such as asana. They should really leave the room.
- Having lied to themselves (and the others in the room), they now become violent toward their own bodies. They pull, push … and hurt. Thus they have dropped ahimsa as well. Now they really should leave the room. But they never do, because everyone else is doing the same thing.
Back to David…
So save yourself some time, money and above all hurt and ignore Bikram. Please.
Instead, find yourself a real yogi, such as David.
When my wife and I met David, he no longer looked like the dude in the 1970s picture above. He looks like a middle-aged guy with long hair–less boring but otherwise as physically imperfect as the average guy his age. And yet (why “yet”?), he loves yoga as much as ever. That’s because he decided years ago that stretching is not what yoga is about.
He wrote an open letter about it. He begins:
… First, and foremost, I hope you can learn from me that in your practice, “If it hurts, you are doing it wrong.”…
Eventually, he gets to this issue of competition (or even comparison):
…I am occasionally asked if someone is “good at Yoga.” I quickly respond that the best Yogi is not the one who is most flexible, but the one who is most focused on what he or she is doing… It is with some sadness that I have observed people “competing with their Yoga practice.”…
After all, he continues, what good is yoga is you only do it while you’re young and fit–ie, “good”–and then stop when you get older and stiffer?
… The key is being able to continue practicing Yoga for the rest of your life. … those who continue are the ones who are able to figure out how to make it enjoyable… The others, consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, quit practicing. It is my goal to do everything I can to inspire you to establish your Yoga practice not just for the few days we are together, but for the rest of your life….
…My goal is to convey the idea that the greatest Yogi is the one who enjoys his or her Yoga practice the most, not the one who can achieve the ultimate pretzel position… what is really important is what is invisible to the observer, what is within each of you….
… and onward to life
Now take everything that David and I have said above and replace the word yoga with … whatever you please.
How about sex? Do you ruin your enjoyment of it by competing or comparing yourself? Do you sacrifice satya and ahimsa to pretend that you’re a superwoman/superman? Do you “quit”, or want to quit, when you get older and less responsive?
How about friendship? Are you competing with others and comparing yourself based on how popular you are? Are you investing in acquaintances merely to nurse your “network”, even at the expense of other, real, friendships?
How about… [insert whatever is on your mind]
If that sounds familiar, you have sacrificed satya and ahimsa and are not ready to move on to the higher stages of being alive (= yoga). When you rediscover satya and ahimsa, in a garage in Maui or wherever else, you remember what you’ve been missing.
In a recent conversation, I brought up the White Rose–die Weiße Rose–and was reminded that most of you (being Anglophone) have probably never heard of them. But you must know them. Now you will.
They were a smallish group of students and one professor at the University of Munich during the Nazi era who defied and spoke out against the Nazi horrors. The middle petals of the Rose were Hans Scholl (above left) and his sister Sophie (middle) and their friend Christoph Probst (right). The group lasted less than a year until, in 1943, they were caught, “tried” and beheaded.
This summary does not do justice to them, however. They are, to me and to all post-war Germans, synonyms for goodness, courage, humanity. They are romantic, having lived Bohemian lives of pipes and poetry. They saw crimes against humanity and resisted, knowing that this would cost them their lives. At a time when conformity turned an entire nation into a murderous mob, they remained individualists, becoming heroes of all mankind.
The Leaflets
Alexander Schmorell
The Geschwister Scholl (siblings Scholl) and their friends watched with increasing horror what the Nazis said and did in the 1930s and early 40s. Then Hans Scholl and his friends Alexander Schmorell und Willi Graf were sent (nobody had a choice) to the eastern front in 1942 where they witnessed German atrocities in Poland and either saw or heard about the Warsaw Ghetto. Many Germans soldiers did, but these three were different: They decided not to stay silent but to fight the evil, which was their own regime.
Hans Scholl
They returned to Munich, where Sophie, Hans’ younger sister had moved to study biology and philosophy. She became friends with Hans’ friends. Never knowing whom they could trust, they formed their group, printing leaflets in secret back rooms and sending them by mail all over Germany.
They managed to print only about 100 copies of the first leaflet. (You can read an English translation of all six leaflets here, but I’ve chosen excerpts from the German and translated them in my words. Pictures courtesy of the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand):
Willi Graf
… Is it not true that every honest German today is ashamed of his government? And who among us can even guess the extent …?
… If the Germans, without any remaining individuality, have indeed become a heartless and cowardly mob, yes, then they deserve to perish…
Goethe talks about the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and Greeks, but today it seems that the Germans are a shallow, mindless herd of followers (Mitläufern) whose marrow has been sucked out and who, bereft of their core, allow themselves to be led into their extinction. It seems so, but it is not so; instead, each individual–after slow, insidious, and systematic rape–has been put into a moral prison, and only once he was captive did he become aware of his dilemma. Few understood the the menace, and their reward was death….
Each individual, as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must therefore rise up in this final hour and resist, as much as he can, against this scourge on humanity, against Fascism and every system like it. Resist passively, resist, resist wherever you are … Never forget that each people gets the government it deserves…
Christoph Probst
They then quoted Friedrich Schiller talking about Lycurgus and Solon (ie, ancient Greece) and Goethe, clearly reminding their readers of the previous heights of their civilization, the starker to contrast it with its present lows.
In the second leaflet, they begin to inform the Germans of what they had seen on the eastern front, so that none might later say (as many would) that they “didn’t know”:
… the fact that, since the conquest of Poland, three-hundred-thousand Jews have been murdered in a bestial way. Here we see the most dreadful crime against the dignity of man, a crime that compares to no other in the entire history of mankind…
… Nobody can pretend he was not guilty. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty! But it is not yet too late to wipe this ugliest monstrosity of a government off the face of the earth, in order not to become even more guilty….
.. the only and highest duty, indeed the holiest duty, of each German is to eradicate these [Nazi] beasts….
They then quoted Laozi and closed with an exhortation to copy the flyer as many times as possible and to distribute it (in effect, demanding martyrdom from each reader).
In the third leaflet, they exhort:
… The foremost concern of every German must not be the military victory over Bolshevism but the defeat of the National Socialists ….
before describing how people should resist:
… Sabotage of the military-industrial complex; sabotage in all Nazi gatherings, rallies, festivities, organizations…. Sabotage of all scientific pursuits to further the war, whether in universities, laboratories, research institutes … Sabotage of all Fascist cultural events…. Sabotage of all the arts that serve National Socialism. Sabotage of all writings and newspapers in league with National Socialism….
They ended by quoting Aristotle on the subject of tyranny and again exhorted readers to copy and distribute.
Sophie Scholl
From the fourth leaflet:
… Every word that comes out of Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace he means war, when he says the name of the almighty he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the stinking throat of hell…
They also assured readers that they took addresses randomly from phone books and did not write them down anywhere, then ended with:
… We will not be silent, we are your bad conscience; the White Rose will not leave you alone! Please copy and spread.
… Are we to be a people forever hated and outcast by the world? No! Therefore resist these Nazi subhumans! Prove with your deeds that you think different!
They end with an amazingly prescient vision of post-war Germany and Europe, predicting a federalist Germany, a unified and peaceful Europe, and freedoms of association, speech and press.
In early 1943, after the German army was wiped out at Stalingrad, they produced their sixth and final leaflet, with their biggest print run yet–about 3,000 copies. They again mailed it all over Germany.
… Freedom and Honor! For ten years, Hitler and his thugs have twisted, raped, perverted these two beautiful German words…. They have shown what freedom and honor mean to them by destroying, throughout the past ten years, all material and spiritual freedom, all morality in the German people….
This time they went further. For three nights, they stealthily went out and painted the walls of the university quarter: “Down with Hitler!” “Freedom!”
Then Hans and Sophie (whom Hans had tried to keep out of the group in order to protect her but who had become passionately involved) decided to carry stacks of leaflets into the university to distribute them while lectures were in progress. This was reckless and the other members did not know about it.
Hans and Sophie stuffed a big suitcase full of leaflets, took it to the university and put stacks on window sills and in front of lecture halls. Just as the bell rang and students were about to spill out, they threw a big pile from the very top of a staircase into the light-filled atrium (where they are immortalized today, see left). A janitor saw them and alerted the Gestapo.
The guillotine
Four days later, Hans, Sophie and Christoph were “tried”. Hans and Sophie asked that Christoph be spared because he was married. The request was denied. On the same day the guillotine fell on their young necks.
Hans was 24 years old; Christoph 23; Sophie 21.
Their houses were searched and letters and addresses discovered. Soon after, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf, as well as their professor, Kurt Huber, were also caught and beheaded. Alexander and Willi were 25; Professor Huber almost 50.
Just before Hans was brought to the guillotine, he yelled out of his cell, echoing through the walls of the prison:
Long live freedom!
By the way, if The Hannibal Blog’s intellect has seemed to you a bit less incisive than usual in the past week, it’s because its author is on holiday. Really on holiday, for the first time in two years or so.
(Lately, I’ve taken “vacations” mainly to write my book, so they were not “real”.)
A German word comes to mind:
Erholung
It’s one of those words that have no direct translation. Er- is a syllable that can mean re-; holen means bring. So Erholen means something like bring back. It contains re-juvenation, re-laxation, re-generation and a few other re’s.
Usually, I restrict myself to an average of 30 minutes a day on this blog (writing and/or answering comments). But during this vacation I’ve cut that to 15 minutes a day, giving my wee’uns dibs on my time (or just staring at palms trees, which have a magical effect on me.)
My mind has become temporarily empty, as during deep sleep or coma. I choose to assume that this is prologue to a sort of rapid-eye-movement response as I re-emerge, and then to energetic, take-no-prisoners mental ferocity.
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