Patrick Hunt at Stanford University is a leading archaeologist and historian, and arguably the leading living scholar of Hannibal.

He has taken students to the Swiss Alps to figure out which pass Hannibal took. He has given a fantastic lecture series on iTunes U, which is in my bibliography. And he does much, much more, all of it fascinating.

So try to imagine my delight at the glowing review that Patrick has just written about Hannibal and Me.

As all of you know, I have never pretended to be ‘a historian’ — rather, I am (merely but proudly) a journalist and a storyteller who happens to love, and to reflect on, history. So I’m sure that I got some details wrong in the book, and Patrick could easily have pounced. But he looked at the big concept, at the story and the meditation, and he endorsed it. And that means so much to me.

From his review:

… Rarely do books mainly about history make such entertaining reading without diluting the complexities of world events that can turn on a literal moment from impending doom to brilliant success and vice versa. Surely Polybius, our best ancient source about Hannibal, would applaud Kluth’s book for psychological depth that matches its historical accuracy, like Polybius himself whose history is as much about why and how, the deeper analytics, as about what and when. Kluth deserves every kudo for this book that shows his new Hannibal research is not beating a dead horse but rather a startlingly fresh outlook on an old mystery.

Thank you, Patrick Hunt!

And thank you Christopher, for being even quicker than Google Alerts in pointing me to it.

Pascal

“I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” So Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher, allegedly excused himself once. Or perhaps it was Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw.

It’s witty, it’s ironic, it’s true: that’s why any of them might have said it.

Here is how I know that: I write for The Economist, and most of our articles are short. I’ve opined on the subject of optimal length in writing before, but in this context, let’s just say that it is the shortening that takes all of the time.

Because I have so little time, I got into the bad habit of not shortening, and not cleaning up, my emails. You see, there were too many emails, and I was too busy to take time for any one of them. (Bear with me. You’re supposed to find an irony building.)

But why were there so many emails in the first place? Oh yes, because all sorts of people (mainly PR people, but also others) are writing me emails. And those are all busy, busy, busy people, with very little time. So their emails are long and sloppy. They refer to an attachment that is missing. They invite me to an event on the wrong date, or omit the date, or the place, even as they somehow find paragraphs of other things to say.

So then, since we are all so very, very busy, we shoot the emails back and forth to clarify this and rectify that, and the threads grow and take more of our time, making us even busier and requiring us to write even faster, thus making our emails longer and sloppier….

So, for a few months, I’ve been trying an experiment. I respond less fast, and often not at all. When I do email, I take more time. I actually read through emails before I push Send. I check that phone numbers and dates are correct, and that all the information is there. I think about what is extraneous and what I can cut.

Lo, the threads are getting ever so slightly shorter, the iterations fewer, the decisions more decisive.

Fewer words → more meaning
Less activity → more action

To my surprise, I am finding that, by slowing down, I have more time. If, like Pascal, I need to write a letter, I might now be able to make it … shorter. I hope I can keep this up.

Three brothers — Danny, Ben and Sam Wood — are tracing the route that Hannibal took, from Spain through France and over the Alps into Italy, and thence to Tunisia and perhaps onward. (Here is a map of Hannibal’s lifetime path.)

They’re doing it by bike, instead of elephant.

What does this show? That Hannibal maintains his eerie ability to inspire us modern types today, just as he inspired me to write my book.

“So we also feel a certain sense of ‘Hannibal and Me’,” as Danny, also a journalist, emailed me this week.

If you’re in Britain, follow them on the BBC. And good luck, lads!

Here’s a taste:

Jason Kehe at Los Angeles Magazine  has chosen his four Critic’s Picks for January, and Hannibal and Me is “Best of the West”.

He’s also captured the same issue with “genre bending” that Andres Martinez noted the other day. Kehe calls it a “shelving” challenge. How true. I plan to reflect on this in due course.

Here is Kehe:

[...] Kluth, the West Coast correspondent for The Economist, mines a veritable who’s who of history’s winners and losers for life lessons, from Einstein to Steve Jobs, Cleopatra to Eleanor Roosevelt. Booksellers will have an interesting time shelving this one. What is it? Memoir? Bio? Self-help? Pop psych? Here’s a better question: Who cares? It’s fascinating.

Thank you, Jason Kehe!

After the Wall Street Journal’s review, also today, the Washington Post has now weighed in, with a very short but sweet take.

That’s now the 8th or 9th review, depending on how you count. (As a reminder, I’m keeping a list of everything here.)

Like the Journal, the Post also “grouped” me with two other books, but in this case two “self-improvement” books.

Here goes:

The author, a longtime correspondent for the Economist, will surely elicit comparisons to the work of Malcolm Gladwell and others with his new book, which deals with pressure, resilience and why some people (and companies) thrive while others don’t. Kluth’s originality lies in examining the successes and failures of the legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal in order to illuminate our own. One of Kluth’s tenets is that “part of success is adjusting your idea of what it is.” That can be true for failure, as well, he reasons, and it’s important to know the difference. For example, Hannibal’s miraculous crossing of the Alps was a triumph in the short run, but in the end his enemies, the Romans, endured.

OK, OK. Compared to … Gladwell, called “original”, …. I guess I’ll take it.

The review in the Wall Street Journal is now out, and it is the 7th or 8th review by my count. (I try to keep the list current here.)

Philip Delves Broughton is the reviewer, and he has grouped my book, Hannibal and Me, with two others:

• Julius Caesar: Lessons in Leadership From the Great Conqueror, by Bill Yenne; and
• Atatürk: Lessons in Leadership From the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire, by Austin Bay.

You can see why Delves Broughton would do that: All three books take a great figure from the past, and promise lessons for us today. The other two have the word “lessons” in the subtitle; mine has “lessons” in the title of the last chapter, and the word “teach” in the subtitle.

I’ve long been fascinated by both Caesar (Of course! He even appears in my book) and Ataturk. So I’ll be adding the other two books to my queue.

Delves Broughton begins his triple review with an extended anecdote about Hannibal (the Alpine prisoners fighting one another to the death, which I use to open Chapter 5, “The Art of Winning”). But he doesn’t explicitly mention my book until the end, after he has discussed the other two:

Andreas Kluth’s “Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Leader Can Teach Us About Success and Failure” is something quite different, a wide-ranging reflection in which the author takes that lonely figure high up in the Alps, surrounded by elephants, as a prism for understanding his own life….

Fortunately, the book quickly recovers [from a "bathetic" moment in the first chapter] and becomes a charming and fascinating inquiry into triumph, failure and that gnarliest of head-scratchers: What makes for a successful life? Mr. Kluth has the riveting Hannibal at the heart of his book, but there is nearly as much about other famous figures raised and dropped by fate: Eleanor Roosevelt, Meriwether Lewis, Albert Einstein and the author’s own great uncle, Ludwig Erhard, the chancellor of West Germany from 1963 to 1966.

With each of these lives, Mr. Kluth forces us to ask what we admire and what we would rather do without. He offers reflections rather than prescriptions. …

“Your struggles are likely to be less violent and to involve smaller stakes than Hannibal’s,” Mr. Kluth justly notes. But the themes will remain consistent. The good life, Mr. Kluth suggests, is not to be found by trying to imitate those we consider leaders and successes, who are rarely all they seem. It consists of doing what we must, as well as we are able, perceptions and consequences be damned.

I just finished the audio version of Hannibal and Me this morning, walking through a park in Bogota, Colombia.

I am in a transition period, now in my late 20′s. This book has helped me understand my current path and a general direction for the next 10-15 years.

Thanks for writing this!

-Matt

Thank you, Matt.

PS: I guess I should really get myself that audio version now, to hear what my book sounds like.

Andres Martinez

Andres Martinez is a great journalist, writer and now think-tanker. And he’s had a career of Sophoclean ups and downs that could have been a storyline in my book.

He and I had drinks the other day. Now Andres has penned a “Drinks With” column about me on Zocalo Public Square, an intellectual gathering point for the Los Angeles area.

It’s more about me than about the book. But Andres does use a phrase I will steal from now on when telling people what type of book it is:

genre-bending

Thank you, Andres!!

There are reviewers, and then there are reviewers. And then there is … Mr Crotchety.

Who is Mr Crotchety?, you ask.

He (and I am reasonably confident that he is indeed both human and male, as allegedly pictured above) first presented himself to me in 2008, when he wrote a reader letter to The Economist about a piece I had written (about “Slow Food”). Here is that letter:

Date: 16 September 2008

To: letters@economist.com

Subject: slow food

Regarding: (11 Sep 08) Revolutionaries by the Bay

Many years ago I sat down in a Slow Food restaurant in New England. It seems like only yesterday when I walked out. The food was not memorable, but the service was glacially slow and inattentive (this was before global warming). Does the service have to be European also?

Mr. Crotchety

That set the tone for all that was to follow. Mr Crotchety, possibly encouraged by me, poured himself into the blogosphere and, under his increasingly notorious nom de guerre, began spreading his wit more widely.

Here on The Hannibal Blog, for example, we were soon turning the epic tale of Hannibal the Carthaginian into its … limerick version. (Read through the comments in that post, too: We expanded the mission to Zen Senryus.) In retrospect, it is hard to believe that both Polybius and Livy overlooked such an obvious literary device.

But Mr Crotchety never over-indulged himself with his blog commentary. Sometimes he crotched, sometimes he didn’t. Over time, I became aware that an entire subculture of the blogosphere was secretly yearning for one of his ambushes. They bestowed the ultimate kudos.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that this same Mr Crotchety has now, via Sprezzatura, written his own and inimitable review of Hannibal and Me. Follow the link, and may the kvetching and crotching continue over there….

Jack Covert

Jack Covert, the founder of 800-CEO-READ (America’s leading direct supplier of business literature to companies and organizations) and a sort of bestseller-prophet, has “selected” (ie, recommended) Hannibal and Me. Thank you, Jack!

(The rest of you, remember: My book can be a business book, but need not be. It’s a life book.)

He says that I do

a fine job turning this adventure book into a personal development guide of sorts

and concludes:

[W]hat makes or breaks a book like this, with its uncommon structure and sometimes lofty subject matter, is the storytelling, and this book is one of the best in that regard that I have read in a long time.

Storytelling! One of my favorite subjects and highest aspirations. Great note to end on. Thanks again.

Fiammetta Rocco

Here is an 8-minute podcast of a chat between Fiammetta Rocco, our Books & Arts editor at The Economist, and me, about Hannibal and Me.

We were all over the place in our actual conversation, but our colleague Lucy Rohr did a Herculean job of editing it down to 8 minutes.

Topics covered: Tiger Woods and Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular, plus some Meriwether Lewis and the rest of the gang.

(And if you want an amusing visual of how I tape these interviews with London, go back to this old post.)

Howard Goldowsky

Some of the first reactions to my book are now streaming in, which is enormously suspenseful for me. You are each projecting yourself into the stories in my book, each finding completely new ways of looking at them and, yes, your own lessons to take away from them. This is just as I intended, so I’m feeling good.

Here, for instance, is an email I just got from one Howard Goldowsky, who happens to be a chess wizard, and thus a strategy connoisseur, as well as a chess writer. Check out his Amazon page.

(By the way, I will never post or publish your emails or other reactions without explicitly asking for permission. So never worry if you want to critique the book to me discreetly.)

Here is Howard:

I think that the last few paragraphs about equanimity sum up your entire book. In a way, what you present in “Hannibal and Me” is almost a Western interpretation of Taoist and some Buddhist philosophy. In my mind, it’s no accident that the book’s finale included a passage from the East. Is not the essence of self-actualization the monk’s daily routine of meditation, ‘chop wood and carry water?’

Chess expertise parallels life more ways than imagined. In chess there is a very distinct line between strategy and tactics. In chess, good players are always trying to level their emotions to equanimity. In chess, we often use our opponents’ aggressiveness against them. In chess, there is a constant balancing act between general principles and specific situations. Too many parallels to mention here….but these are universal truths we’re talking about, so it’s not such a wonder that these parallels exist.

One of you (Thank You!) texted in the picture above, taken in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble outlet. There it is, that bright orange jacket, hard to miss.

Unfortunately, I did not, yesterday, find any copies in my local Barnes & Noble outlet here in LA. The guy looked into his computer and said they were “on the way, could be tomorrow, could be in a week.” There’s modern logistics for you.

In any case, Bill Frank (“Billy the Brain”) of KKZZ radio has now posted our chat yesterday. It’s about ten minutes long.

I’m on my landline, and sounding somewhat distant, but it’s a good conversation.  Thank you, Bill!

The New York Journal of Books has now reviewed Hannibal and Me.

(Remember, the previous reviews were by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and Booklist)

I will quote some bits and then shut up.

Fight any urge to dismiss Hannibal and Me as boys-only self help. True, the book comes complete with warriors, military strategies, elephants, golf, and a seductress, but this book is a serious and fascinating exploration of issues many of us grapple with on a daily basis. Highly recommended.

When was the last time reading a book left you with a burning desire to read more books? Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure affects the reader in just this way. Having hung on to Mr. Kluth’s every word, this reviewer closed the book determined to read Jung again, revisit Maslow, and reacquaint herself with Eleanor Roosevelt….

And true to his word, he proceeds to beguile his readers with a series of charmingly rendered anecdotes, keeping us spellbound, and gently nudging us toward a deeper understanding of the triumphs and disasters of Hannibal (the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with his army in 218 BCE), Meriwether Lewis, Cleopatra, Tiger Woods, author Kluth’s own uncle (a key figure in postwar Germany), and ourselves.

Mr. Kluth tackles taboos, boldly reintroducing ideas banished from Western intellectual discourse since the 1960s. He dares, for example, to raise notions like duty—not the tired old just-say-no-back-to-basics-family-values platitudes The Right warms over each election cycle. This is something deeper…

In some ways Hannibal and Me is a synthesis of many the intellectual and spiritual movements since the sixties. As such it risks veering into the banal, or skirting New Age nonsense, but whenever Mr. Kluth approaches this precipice, he retreats in time, turning back to the stories of real heroes. …

I was surprised by the last bit, which we might find time here on this blog at some point to discuss:

Despite applying his considerable insight, charm and intellect to so many weighty questions, Mr. Kluth deftly avoids deep analysis of why male crisis so often involves betraying wife and family. … Mr. Kluth seems to hand cheating husbands and deadbeat dads the perfect justification for their behavior. One can almost hear everyday cheating husbands quoting Hannibal and Me to justify their bad behavior.

Hmmm. Really?

That’s for another time. For now: Jillian Abbott, Thank You!!

So here are my five minutes on MSNBC with Dylan Ratigan.

And here is the backstory:

I had made a beginner’s mistake: Yesterday, I got a bit of redness above my right eye, eczema or something, as I occasionally do. Normally, I ignore it, but today I remembered some cream that my mom had once sent me for exactly this purpose. I fished it out of the closet and rubbed it on. And apparently, I got some in my eye.

Just as I was arriving at the studio, my right eye started gushing tears. Great.

This is what wives are for. So I texted mine, and she texted back, while I was still in the parking lot:

think about Hannibal and his one conjunctivitis eye.

So that’s what I did. I was clutching a Kleenex during the clip, and kept wiping the tears away.

So, not that bad a performance, considering.

Dylan Ratigan

So tomorrow (January 5th) is the launch date, which means that you Kindlers and Nookers will get your book, and you Hard-copiers will get the Amazon or B&N shipping confirmation. And, of course, there are always those … whatchammacallit … book stores to walk into.

For me, it means I’ll be talking on radio and TV a bit. You can even call in to one show. See below.

1) Jiggy Jag

It actually started today, on a radio station called KJAG in Kansas, when I chatted with James Lowe, aka Jiggy Jaguar, formerly described as a “shock jock” (although I found him very meek). I was on Skype, so my voice quality is atrocious.

2) Billy the Brain

Gotta love these radio names. So tomorrow I’ll first be on a California radio station called KKZZ AM 1400 – Positive Talk Radio with, which also streams on BrainstorminOnline.com, with yes, Billy the Brain.

That’ll be at 1:40PM East Coast time, 10:40AM West Coast time. The Brain has asked me to tweet the call-in number, which is (805) 639-0008. Since I don’t have a Twitter account, let’s consider this hereby announced.

3) Dylan Ratigan, MSNBC

Then, at some point between 4PM and 5PM Eastern (1PM and 2PM Pacific), I’ll be on national television with Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC (pictured at the very top).

The important question here is obviously: shirt with tie, shirt without tie, turtleneck, or décolleté? (If you have an opinion on that, do offer it before I get dressed tomorrow morning.)

More as I find out about it…

Wow. Just read the Salon bit. Had me crying and laughing. (I was reading it over morning coffee before 7 am, when I am prone to be emotional.)

I have to admit, for these several years, I never quite “got” what Andreas was on about with this whole Hannibal thing. And now, in those Salon paragraphs, it has all become so damn clear. Through Andreas telling that individual, personal narrative, seeing it reflected in my own life, and then seeing up, with ever greater reverberations, expanding out to the great truths of all lives.

Been thinking a lot about the narratives of my own life these days. A lover of nature. A scientist. Successful conservationist. [...] Failed Buddhist. Living in the heart of a loving community of friends, even if it is a geographically dispersed community of friends. Me not maintaining that community of friends as much as I used to, as much as I should. Me craving romance, yet terrified of sex, terrified of intimacy. Neurotic, bordering on psychotic.

What are my successes? What are my failures? Has one come at the cost of the other?

Chogyam Trungpa once said something about how our brilliance, in that Buddhist, primal human sense, is the direct result of our neuroses. It is not despite our neuroses that our most beautiful and generous properties come, but because of them. In Kipling’s terms, “brilliance” and “neurosis” are two imposters, to be treated the same…

Shackleton

Chapter 7 in Hannibal and Me is titled “Dealing with disaster”. So, how does the Hannibalic story tell us to deal with it?

First, a reminder about the premise of my book: I use stories of real people to make universal points. Put differently, I use the people in the stories to personify lessons (but you, the reader, ultimately have to adapt the lessons to your own life.).

The first personification of responding to disaster in life is named Quintus Fabius Maximus. (From the picture above, you may have guessed that by the end of the chapter he will have a “twin” in Ernest Shackleton, as I explain below).

As I introduce Fabius on page 144 ff., he

came from one of the oldest and noblest families of Rome, the Fabii, who claimed they could trace their ancestry back to Hercules. But Hercules was not exactly the first image that came to mind when looking at Fabius himself. When he was a boy, one of his nicknames was Verrucosus — “Warty” — because he had a big wart on his lip. Another nickname in his youth was Ocivula, “Lamb,” because he had an unusually mild temper for an aristocratic Roman boy. He did everything slowly. He spoke slowly, walked slowly, learned slowly. He was bad at sports in a society that was all about athletic, virile, and martial games. Young Fabius was in almost every way the exact opposite of young Hannibal. …

And yet the Romans gradually changed their minds about the warty, lamblike Fabius. As the boy grew into a man, that same slowness began to look like steadiness and prudence…

He was already in his forties when [the Romans] first elected him consul. As senator or elder statesman, five times as consul and twice as elected “dictator,” Fabius remained one of the republic’s leaders for the rest of his life.

By the time the young and dashing Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy, Fabius was already in his sixties. … Fabius had never encountered such an enemy. What, Fabius reflected in his slow and methodical way, should he, and Rome, make of Hannibal?

And then, of course, the disasters began. Battle after battle in which Hannibal routed Roman armies that outnumbered him. Rout is the wrong word. Hannibal exterminated Roman armies, he depleted the Roman population of men, of senators, of sons, of fathers. From the Roman point of view, Hannibal represented the extinction of Rome.

How Hannibal did that — how he won those battles — I deal with in the preceding two chapters. But in Chapter 7, I’m looking at these events purely from Fabius’s side, so that we can understand how to deal with disaster.

And Fabius offers us a psychologically layered answer. Page 146:

… The younger Roman leaders found this hard to admit, but Fabius simply accepted that Hannibal was superior on the battlefield. That premise led Fabius to a simple but shocking conclusion: if going to battle against Hannibal meant losing, it was clearly not a good policy to go to battle against him at all. …

In these extreme circumstances, Fabius decided, the strategic definition of success was no longer victory but stalemate. In his slow and methodical way, Fabius thus determined that Hannibal’s stunning triumphs on the battlefield might yet lead to nothing. They might be impostors.

So what were the elements of his response, of “the Fabian response” in the language of my archetypes?

Page 153:

There are two aspects to a Fabian character that make it resilient and that you might remember if ever disaster should strike you. The first is the ability to accept reality for what it is. The second is the ability to stop resisting reality and instead to flow with it until circumstances begin to change.

1) Acceptance

From page 154:

Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance: these are the stages that make up the human “grief cycle” described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a twentieth-century Swiss doctor who spent her time caring for dying people…

Losing your job, losing your house to foreclosure, being diagnosed with cancer, getting divorced — any bereavement, failure, or other disaster triggers the psychological responses of the grief cycle. But people move through the grief cycle in different ways. Some progress swiftly, others get stuck at one stage, and yet others cycle back and forth through them. …

Page 157:

Eventually, however, some grief-stricken individuals will arrive at a state of acceptance. As Kübler-Ross puts it, “Acceptance should not be mistaken for a happy stage. It is almost devoid of feelings.” But it is the stage where the person is ready to move on…

I illustrate this wrenching process in this chapter by looking at Eleanor Roosevelt, who suffered through the grief-cycle after discovering the love letters between her husband and their secretary, Lucy Mercer. Roosevelt literally cried and raged it out, while sitting for hours and days and weeks in a park, gazing at the female face of a statue called … Grief.

2) Flowing (or “non-doing”)

As Fabius himself said (to a consul who would soon be killed because his co-commander refused to heed this advice): “Can you then doubt that inactivity is the way to defeat an enemy?”

Page 158:

One translation of Minucius’s [a Roman rival to Fabius] taunt about Fabius’s do-nothing tactics into Chinese is wu wei, which means “nondoing” or “doing by not doing.” Wu wei happens to be a central concept of “the way,” the Tao, in Chinese philosophy. This Taoist notion of wu wei, nondoing, is often mistaken for passivity, which it is not. Instead, nondoing is really a very active way of letting inevitable things happen without wasting energy resisting them, instead bringing one’s own position into harmony with this flow of nature. The principle of wu wei might say, for instance, that is is better to use a rushing stream to spin a wheel and transfer its energy than to block the stream and try to make it stop flowing. Or it might say that a skipper is better off tacking through the wind than trying to go against it, which would be futile. Indeed the best skippers often look, as Fabius did, as though they were “doing nothing”….

I then illustrate this point by looking at Ernest Shackleton, who (page 161),

decided to cross the entire Antarctic continent on foot. It was as daring in 1914 as it had been in 218 BCE for Hannibal to Cross the Alps…

But, as you all know, Shackleton failed at his quest, when his ship, the Endurance, got stuck in the ice.

Page 162:

Shackleton’s first reaction was to order his crew to do what heroes normally do: fight. The men climbed onto the ice and hacked away at it with picks, trying to open a sea-lane. But it was useless…

They now spent the Antarctic winter on their ship, which was frozen into its ice pack. No light, eternal darkness. All the stages of Kübler-Ross’s Grief Cycle.

Then the ice crushed the Endurance, and the men watched as their ship sank. Page 164:

Suddenly, the men were all alone, floating on ice somewhere near the South Pole.

Shackleton announced new plans of daring and heroic resistance: they would march, while dragging their own life boats, across the ice toward an islet, covering roughly the distance from San Francisco to Loas Angeles. Page 164-165:

After three hours of hard toil, they had moved one mile. It began to snow. The next day they tried again, but the snow was like glue. … The next morning they tried again. Shackleton went ahead and scanned the ice. He saw pressure ridges where colliding ice floes had formed mountains that looked as forbidding as the Alps.

Shackleton turned around and walked back to the group. He took deep breaths of the icy air and prepared to announce his decision, which he knew was probably the weightiest of his entire life. At first, he had thought that attacking the enemy was the best thing to do, both for morale and for their chances of survival. But he now thought that he might have been in denial. During the night, he had accepted reality, and seeing the endless ice mountains around them had confirmed it. Instead of attacking and wasting caloric energy to make at most a mile  a day toward who knew where, they would instead … do nothing.

And to understand why this saved him, why this turned his disaster into one of the greatest triumphs in human history, you have to know something about the ice. For that, you’ll have to read the book.

The ice … the Tao.

Fabius, Roosevelt, Shackleton … you. 

To be continued.

Los Angeles Magazine, a sophisticated West-Coast glossy, has just put Hannibal and Me on its “reading list” for January.

I’m in the non-fiction category, obviously. More interesting is perhaps the one-line description they’ve given me. I still struggle to say in one breath what my book is; so I’m endlessly curious how other people do it in one breath.

The editors at LA Mag went with:

Hannibal—remember the guy who invaded Rome on elephants two thousand-plus years ago?—is the starting point for this sort-of memoir from the West Coast correspondent of The Economist.

A sort-of-memoir. Hmmm. Why not?

Let’s see what the next one kicks up.

For the holidays, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which is by Benjamin Franklin:

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

And because all grand thoughts are timeless, they must re-appear in an eternal return.

So this quote, too, must have antecedents. Let’s work backwards in time, to savor even more of the same wisdom:

First stop: Song Dynasty

From my daughter, who is currently reciting the 13th-century Sanzi Jing (the Three-character Classic, a Confucian poem-treatise), I hear the beautifully rhythmic:

Which means (Number 7 here):

Jade that has not been polished

cannot be used.

[a] Person who has not studied

cannot know righteousness.

Second stop: Rome

By Rome I mean Latin. Let’s see: to educate = ex-ducere = to lead out

Lead out? As in: get out what is already there, as in silver or jade? Where might that idea have come from?

Third stop: Socrates

We haven’t talked about Socrates for a while here on The Hannibal Blog. (Here are all my old posts about him. He is not in my book, by the way).

The old man had his own silver/jade/education theory: He called it (in the Meno and Phaedo) “anamnesis”. And he demonstrated it by … helping a slave to remember (= “teaching”) that the blue square below has twice the area of the yellow square:

The lesson

And now for Kluthian axiom number whatchammacallit:

It’s in there. Get it out.

Happy holidays.

And now: something completely different, and much more important — indeed, rather uplifting, in the spirit of the season.

We are, obviously, talking about … yogurt.

Way back in May, I wrote a story in The Economist called Red Tape in California: Beware of the yogurt. The title says it all, really. But if you need additional context, my favorite line from the article is:

The tale thus went from Kafka to Catch-22.

In a nutshell, it is the tale of a Zoroastrian father-daughter team (pictured above) in Orange County who make fantastically good “artisinal” yoghurt — or would make it, if it weren’t for California’s bureaucrats. Go read the rest.

Why do I bring this up now? Because there has been an epilogue, which is unfolding still.

A few weeks after the article appeared, Homa (the daughter) emailed me that

… we were requested by two news sources a Chilean newspaper “Las Ultimas Noticias” (a conservative daily based in Santiago), and Fox Business News “America’s Nightly Scoreboard” to give an interview…. We were written up in HaAretz, an Israeli paper, which was basically a translation of your article, except with the headline: “U.S. against Iran– now the scene of yogurt”… A film-maker has asked us for the movie rights, he wants to call the documentary: “The Curdled Crusaders” — Catchy. Tons of people have commented on our FB page and send individual e-mails of support. A few consultants who want to help us more to other states (Tennessee, Texas, Mexico). Some wanting to know where to buy the yogurt (clearly, they didn’t pay attention to the article).

Pretty good, don’t you think?

And now, just the other day, Homa emailed again:

Dear Andreas,

I hope this letter finds you well. There have been quite a few developments for us (specifically in the last three weeks) which most definitely relate back to the piece you wrote on us. Most pleasantly, Secretary of State for Oregon Kate Brown read The Economist piece in November and thought “This shouldn’t happen. Let’s get her to make it up in Oregon.” And so she invited me up, introduced me to regulators and business recruiters and even though their regulations are similar to California, their attitude has been: How can we make this happen for you?” It has been such a nice change.

Also, nine months of begging for an audience, Karen Ross of The CDFA has finally agreed to meet with us (today!) and tell us what exactly the public risk is of using already pasteurized milk.

Ironically, I’ve only made yogurt twice in this whole time. An ideal time, I figured, to experiment with the paleo diet.

Best,

Homa

What a very, very strange experience it is to see an excerpt of my own book on a famous website.

Salon.com has just posted exactly that.

Thank you, Salon!

Do you remember our little debate seven months ago (that long!), about the design on my book’s jacket cover?

As usual, you didn’t hold back. (And may that never change!) Thus dafna, for example:

… it has the right parts, but they are not in the right place nor in the right proportions for the reasons listed. a few tweaks and you might have had a more memorable cover…

And then, in a follow-up comment:

as a first time author, you were probably assigned to a designer, perhaps “junior designer” who was over-worked and under paid.

Well, as a connoisseur of irony, I can’t help but delight in the one I’ve just discovered. The first hardcover copies of Hannibal and Me are out now, and my agent and I were holding them in our hands for our first look at the real thing (a feeling you e-bookers will never know. )

And there, on the back flap, we saw it:

Jacket design by Devin Washburn/Rodrigo Corral design

Wow, said my agent, Rodrigo Corral is huge.

I wouldn’t know anything about this, but in the world of book design, that agency might be the Apple, or the Ferrari, or the Le Corbusier, or whatever might be the appropriate analogy. And I actually do see a certain visual DNA inheritance in my cover, compared to some of the others you see here, wouldn’t you say?

So Riverhead actually had shelled out for the best. I wonder how that might have influenced my own reaction, and yours, if we had known. Do weigh in.

The only puzzle remains: why did Riverhead not simply tell us?

I’m not the only one at The Economist to launch a book “this” year.

(As you know, my launch is technically on January 5th, but Hannibal and Me is already available for pre-order, so that counts as 2011.)

Here is a list of the books my colleagues and I wrote this year. A pretty broad range of genres and topics, wouldn’t you say?

1) Thesis

I was talking to my boss the other day about my imminent book launch. After a few glasses of wine, and in the company of other writers, he, an accomplished serial author with a very British sense of humor, told me, claiming to speak from experience, that

the only thing you’ll ever regret is that you didn’t prostitute yourself more.

He meant, of course, that I (and all authors) should, at least this once, get over the discretion that is native to people of manners, and just … market (verb). Because if we authors don’t, nobody else will, and we authors will be angry with ourselves later.

2) Antithesis

On the other hand, I have been around some authors who, for a period lasting months, turn into book-marketing robots, to the point where I can no longer have a normal conversation with them.

And so I understand fully the humanitarian need for limits.

3) Synthesis

So, in the spirit of mutual empathy between Authors and Friends of Authors, I (pictured above, seated) hereby promulgate a Bill of Rights — nay, a Magna Carta — to protect … you.

(Whoever you might be. But especially if you happen to be somebody I know, like, owe, am married to, have fathered, have been friends with…..)

Rights:

1. There shall continue to be, as there have been since time immemorial, topics of conversation that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Author’s Book, and the Author shall respect said topics as such — ie, as inviolable.
2. If the Author happens to moderate a panel about an interesting (or even a boring) topic unrelated to his Book, the Author shall refrain from name-dropping his Book in introducing the Panelists or while moderating their debate. If the Author violates this rule, the Audience shall be within its rights to boo Him off the stage, with the physical assistance of the Panelists.
3. If thou had, in thy previous dealings with the Author, the sort of relationship in which thou could call Him a wanker, or to cast other aspersion upon Him with impunity and to humorous effect, thou shalt retain said privileges in perpetuity, whether that friggin’ Book of His is a hit or a flop, because that’s really not thy problem.
4. When meeting the Author socially, especially if the meeting involves a Honig Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa, thou mayest, with impunity, assert thy right to have a pleasant evening without being reminded of the darned Book at all.
5. Thou shalt not blame, loathe or disdain the Author merely for marketing His Book to Others, being mindful that the Author is a prostitute only temporarily and on good advice, as wouldst thou be in His stead.
6. Finally, thou hast the right, should thou find the Author’s presence insufferable nonetheless, physically to evade the Author for a period not exceeding the two months around the launch date, provided thou welcome the Author back into human society after the whole silly spectacle passeth into oblivion (which, remember, is a lot sooner than the Author thinks).

I have a Google Alert set for “Hannibal and Me”, which is how I discovered that you can soon (5 days after publication of the hardcover version on January 5th) buy the audiobook. Here it is.

The company is called Tantor audio. Did you notice its logo, above? How utterly appropriate. Let us decide to call him (the pachyderm) Surus, in honor of Hannibal’s favorite.

FYI, I have not listened to the audiobook and have no idea how it will sound. (Indeed, I have not listened to any audiobook. I do like listening to lectures on my iPhone, but books? I never grokked that one. Why not read them?)

The narrator is one Sean Runnette. Has anybody heard him reading anything?

Sean Runnette

The third review is now out, and also very good. The previous two (the one in Publishers Weekly  and the one in Kirkus Reviews) were perhaps a bit more gushy.

It appears in Booklist, which, as my publisher tells me, is a publication for the American Library Association — in other words, something that influences what librarians buy and stock. That makes it, like the other two, a “pre-pub” review. (I am learning a lot of jargon in this process. Pre-pub reviews when I lived in London meant checking your breath and hair before heading out to the … pub.)

Unfortunately, you need a subscription, and I don’t have one, to get the link. But I was sent a transcript, and here are excerpts (emphasis mine):

Here’s an intriguing premise: show, through the life and career of the Carthaginian military genius Hannibal (and other history-makers), how the line between success and failure can sometimes be blurry, not to mention how success can turn into failure when least expected, and vice versa. … Kluth’s main thesis seems to be that triumph and tragedy, success and failure, are merely points on a line, and that we make our way in life by cultivating the ability to turn failure into success and recognizing that success can breed failure, if we’re not careful. This isn’t the first book to tackle this subject, but its historical perspective, drawing on the life of a warrior who lived more than two millennia ago, gives it fresh appeal.

“Points on a line”. I don’t believe I used that metaphor anywhere in the book. I like it!

See? I’m already learning from my reviewers.

Here is my table of contents, which gives you a sense of the structure of the book: For the most part we “age with” Hannibal, and also with Scipio, in the main storyline, so that we face the issues that arise at each stage of life.

In bullet points, I’ve put some of the people that come up in each chapter. You can try to figure out the context in which they appear, and why.

One. HANNIBAL AND ME

• Hannibal
• Me
• (A bit of Carl Jung, tiny bit of Scipio and Fabius)

Two. THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTS

• Hamilcar, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, Mago
• Theseus
• Barack Obama
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Amy Tan
• (Gerhard Kluth)

Three. DO YOU NEED A GOAL?

• Hannibal
• Meriwether Lewis (and Thomas Jefferson, William Clark)
• Harry Truman
• Ludwig Erhard

Four. TOWERING PEAKS

• Hannibal
• Pablo Picasso
• Paul Cézanne
• Meriwether Lewis

Five. THE ART OF WINNING

• Hannibal
• Morihei Ueshiba
• Cleopatra (and Julius Caesar

)

Six. TACTICS AND STRATEGY IN LIFE

• Hannibal (and Sosylus)
• Carl von Clausewitz
• Steve Miller and Tiger Woods
• Cleopatra
• Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman
• Pyrrhus and Cineas

Seven. DEALING WITH DISASTER

• Quintus Fabius Maximus
• Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
• Lance Armstrong
• Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Ernest Shackleton

Eight. THE PRISON OF SUCCESS

• Hannibal
• Tennessee Williams
• Amy Tan
• Eliot Spitzer
• Albert Einstein

Nine. THE LIBERATION OF FAILURE

• Publius Cornelius Scipio
• Steve Jobs
• Eleanor Roosevelt

Ten. THE THRESHOLD OF MIDDLE AGE

• Hannibal and Scipio
• Carl Jung (and Sigmund Freud)
• Ernest Shackleton

Eleven. POLITICAL DEATH

• Scipio and Marcus Porcius Cato
• Ludwig Erhard (and Konrad Adenauer)
• Liu Shaoqi (and Mao Zedong)

Twelve. AGING AND TRANSCENDING

• Hannibal and Scipio
• Abraham Maslow
• Ludwig Erhard
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Albert Einstein

Thirteen. THE LESSONS OF HANNIBAL

• All of the above
• (plus Arjuna)

Here is how that came about: About a year ago, my publisher asked me to meditate, in less than 500 words total, on people in the news at that time, in the style of Hannibal and Me. The idea was not to regurgitate anything from the book, but to extend the approach as one might in casual conversation. The exercise was meant as a teaser for book professionals.

So I banged out three haikus, each with a theme, a person in the news, and a person from the book:

• Audacity – Sarah Palin – Sempronius/Flaminius/Varro
• Freedom – Hillary Clinton – Eleanor Roosevelt
• Captivity – Larry Page – Albert Einstein

(Just to be completely clear: Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and Larry Page are not in the book. My publisher and I were just having a bit of fun.)

Here goes:

Audacity

The best defense is a good offense, and Sarah Palin has adopted this principle as her own. Wherever she appears, she attacks. When she feels cornered, she attacks harder. Palin might want to study the Roman generals Sempronius, Flaminius, and Varro. Each was ruined by this strategy when he met a shrewder opponent, the Carthaginian Hannibal. All three had only one approach: audacious attack. All had a history of success. But this made them inflexible. Hannibal turned this inflexibility against them. In three separate battles, Hannibal goaded them into attacking, then waited until their forces, through their own momentum, lost their balance. When they did, Hannibal fell upon them.

Freedom

In one of her debates with then-candidate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton said, “Everyone here knows I’ve lived through some crises.” She could only have been referring to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That humiliation could have shattered her marriage to Bill Clinton, his presidency, and her own life. That it didn’t and instead helped launch her onto a new path suggests that Clinton’s psychological journey paralleled that of another former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1918, Mrs. Roosevelt discovered love letters between her husband, Franklin, and her secretary, Lucy Mercer. She plunged into a deep depression. But in her rage and sorrow, she discovered a feeling of liberation. The Mercer affair freed her to redefine her life’s meaning and her options. It also freed her to view her husband honestly, and the two formed a new, very different but ultimately stable bond.

(Click for credits)

Captivity

At age thirty-eight, Larry Page takes over as chief executive of Google. He cofounded it with Sergey Brin when they were both twenty-five and students at Stanford, after Page invented his revolutionary PageRank search algorithm. In 2001 they hired an older man to be CEO, but ten years later the apprenticeship is over: It is Page’s turn to run the company. He might want to review what happened to Albert Einstein at the equivalent juncture in life: At twenty-six, Einstein had produced four short but revolutionary papers that transformed physics. Einstein then kept refining his insights until he was thirty-eight, when he discovered general relativity. Although he did not know it then, this was a turning point. His imagination became a prisoner of its very success. A perplexing conservatism seized Einstein’s mind and never let go. Page must make sure that this does not happen to him—or to Google.

But now there is one about my book. It might be the first press release I read all the way through. And I discovered that it is … well written.

The author is Jynne Martin, a great publishing talent recently arrived at Riverhead/Penguin.

One new twist for regular readers of this blog may be the list of six lessons in my final chapter which she paraphrased and included at the bottom.

___________

FOR INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Jynne Dilling Martin, Director of Publicity

212-366-2947 / Jynne.Martin@us.penguingroup.com

“Kluth, the West Coast correspondent for the Economist, brings a contemporary slant to Hannibal’s military successes…Kluth does superior work in spelling out the elusive values of success and failure… Realistic and timely, Kluth’s book uses historic truths to move us past the frequent traps of success and failure to mold practical, productive lives.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Hannibal and Me is a rare blend of military strategy and emotional intelligence that offers a more mature solution for winning life’s battles.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Andreas Kluth’s absorbing exploration of the life of the great military commander Hannibal will inspire you to look beyond simplistic notions of success toward a deeper understanding of what it is to live the good life. This is a book full of lessons both profound and practical.” —DANIEL H. PINK, AUTHOR OF DRIVE

HANNIBAL AND ME

What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure

________

ANDREAS KLUTH

Andreas Kluth, a correspondent for The Economist, presents a fascinating new way to think about winning and losing, and draws powerful life lessons from the story of one of the ancient world’s most famous and enduring figures in HANNIBAL AND ME: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure (Riverhead Books; On sale January 5, 2012; ISBN: 978-1-59448-812-2).

Hannibal’s story is one of action, suspense, and romance. After crossing the ice-bound Alps with 50,000 men and 30 elephants, Hannibal decimated Rome’s armies in a series of brilliant battles and seemed poised to dethrone the world’s leading power. Yet at the heart of Hannibal’s tale lies a great mystery. How was it possible, Kluth asks, that this apparently invincible hero ultimately lost everything and, trapped by his enemies, committed suicide?

Kluth plumbs the mystery of this tragic reversal of fortune, providing readers with thought-provoking and useful insights about the seeds of success and failure from the lives of Hannibal and other notable people from the past and present.

A key part of Kluth’s explanation comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which says to “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” Using Hannibal as his central example, Kluth shines a light on each aspect of the lifelong journey that we take with these “impostors,” which we often mistake for one another. He explores youth, when parents influence how we view success and failure; young adulthood, when we pursue our dreams, when we dare, win, or lose; middle age, when we need to reexamine our dreams and identities and our successes and failures; and old age, when success and failure take on altogether different meanings.

As Kluth investigated the paradox of the great general’s life, he discovered an important, and lesser known, piece of Hannibal’s story: two Roman leaders emerged who were his major opponents. Fabius was the cautious elder statesman who enabled the Romans to accept the disaster that had befallen them, to overcome their paralyzing fear of Hannibal, and to wait him out for fourteen long years until they could determine how to fight him effectively. Scipio was the dashing young military genius who studied Hannibal from afar with the appreciative mind of a disciple, felt strangely liberated by Hannibal’s crushing of the Roman army, and ultimately turned it into a dazzling triumph. Taken together, the stories of these men provide valuable lessons about success and failure.

Throughout Hannibal’s narrative, Kluth interweaves the stories of other famous figures, from Pablo Picasso to Tiger Woods to Carl Jung to Steve Jobs to Cleopatra. To help readers draw lessons from the lives of his historical subjects, Kluth presents nine overarching principles that have served men and women well since ancient times:

1. Stay balanced when others lose their balance. Outnumbered by the Romans, Hannibal knew that the most immediate kind of success—winning—is not about being stronger than others but about being more balanced and calm, and then letting opponents defeat themselves.
2. Never confuse means with ends, tactics with strategy. Hannibal’s most subtle lessons teach us how to think simultaneously large and small so that we can align life tactics with life strategy.
3. Have “young” ideas when you’re young and when you’re old. For many people, freshness wilts with age, as it did for Hannibal, Picasso, and Einstein. But it is possible to stay or become fresh in later years, as Carl Jung did after a major crisis led to his greatest successes.
4. Start maintaining an “old” self-discipline even while you’re young. To avoid the loss of self-control that young heroes like Meriwether Lewis and Tiger Woods experienced, seek the company and counsel of older mentors, study those who came before you, and take the long view of your success.
5. When disaster strikes, try to do nothing at first until you see that the situation has changed and renewed action makes sense. When that occurs, you may, like Scipio, feel a paradoxical and energizing sense of liberation that leads to new heights of achievement.
6. Part of success is adjusting your idea of what it is. Over the course of a life, success and failure will mean different things at different times, and it may become necessary to update, refine, or even scrap old definitions.
7. See the best in people but protect yourself against the worst in them. Both Hannibal and Scipio were noble personalities who never felt personal animosity toward one another and generally saw the best in others, but each was harassed and damaged by petty and vindictive personalities, whose threat they did not adequately guard against.
8. Success means becoming a mensch—a whole, integrated, self-actualizing human being. People who do so, like Eleanor Roosevelt, are the most likely to transcend conventional success and failure by achieving a separate peace with themselves and their world.
9. Do your duty with equanimity—the fear of failure will seem less overwhelming and the yearning for success less consuming. You will know it is your duty not by how large or small it is, but by perceiving it to be bigger than you, and beyond you.

Kluth’s unifying insight in HANNIBAL AND ME is that triumph and disaster, success and failure, are not necessarily what they seem—whether in the lives of the great figures of history or in the lives of ordinary people. Thus they show up in their disguises, the ups and downs of life, the turns of good and bad fortune, the whims of the goddess the Romans called Fortuna. “Perhaps they disguise themselves,” Kluth writes, “to bring something out of us and that something is character, our true self, who we really are. This book is about those moments of impact, when triumph or disaster strikes, and about the aftermath, when the shock fades and lives change forever and character reveals itself.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andreas Kluth has been writing for The Economist since 1997. He is currently the magazine’s U.S. West Coast correspondent, covering politics, society, and the economy in California and the western states. A graduate of Williams College and the London School of Economics, he is a dual citizen of the United States and Germany. He lives in Los Angeles with his family. HANNIBAL AND ME is his first book. His website is www.AndreasKluth.org.

HANNIBAL AND ME RIVERHEAD BOOKS ISBN 9781594488122 ON SALE 1/5/12 ISBN: 978-1-59448-812-2 $26.95

How bittersweet. My first book, of narrative nonfiction, is about to be published, and I should be thinking only about that.

And yet, about 2 years ago, I had a great idea for a novel. I ignored it, but the idea kept coming back. (As it happens, that is how I winnow idea wheat from idea chaff: I pay serious attention to ideas only once they reassert themselves.)

So yesterday, I was in Sirsasana (headstand) when the entire novel arrived. In my head, as though shaken down by gravity. All at once, fully formed, with idea, characters, plot and twists. Title. Beginning. End. The whole dang thing.

I like it. Love it, actually. And I reckon, now that it has presented itself, I could write the thing in a few good weekends.

But as I said: I should be talking only about Hannibal and Me. And yet, my imagination really wants to go that new place already….

The other day, my publisher and I had a conversation about some of the ideas. I’ve put a transcript of that chat up on this page.

We were just scratching the surface in that conversation. And that is becoming my chief difficulty in this process: Whenever anybody asks me anything about the book (such as: “What is it about?”), I want to answer with the whole book. Can’t do that.

So, if you feel so inclined, you might do me a favor: Tell me which bits of the conversation hit, move, stimulate, enrage or otherwise interest you.

That would be enormously helpful: From your reactions, I will try to figure out what the various “elevator pitches” might be. You know: my 10-second answer when some radio host interviews me about the book. As in:

Host: So, Andrew, you wrote a book about success and Caesar, is that right?

Andreas: Both success and failure, actually, and the main character is Hannibal.

Host: Lecter?

Andreas: No, the other one….

Copyright David Lindroth

Look at this beautiful map. It depicts the dramatically simplified life path that Hannibal probably took. And you’ll find it in the beginning of my book.

The mapmaker and copyright owner is David Lindroth, a cartographer who seems to specialize in historical, educational, fictional and other unusually interesting maps.

I first came across David’s name when I saw a different version of this map by him in The Ghosts of Cannae, a great book about Hannibal by Robert O’Connell. (It came out last year, after I finished my manuscript, so it was unfortunately too late to be one of my sources.)

So I called David and he made this map for me. We put in some of the battle sites and other places of interest in the book, including Hannibal’s sketchy meanderings in the eastern Mediterranean in his final years.

Anyway, you know I like maps. Enjoy.

Here is the link.

Unfortunately, it’s behind a subscriber wall (although articles become free a few weeks before publication of the books reviewed in them).

Excerpts:

… The author narrates Hannibal’s story with precision, but his analysis extends beyond the highlights of the battlefield. In this retelling of the ancient drama, the major players become archetypes whose motivations, triumphs and failures mirror those of more recent historical figures. The influence of Carl Jung pervades as the narrative as Kluth digs into their psyches—examples include author Amy Tan’s teenage rebellion, Eleanor Roosevelt’s loneliness and Albert Einstein’s dark side—to create a plausible formula for surviving disaster or even sudden, explosive success. Though brief, the contemporary examples bridge the gap between modern readers and the ancient world. …

I especially liked this passage:

[Kluth's] desire for a balanced life (and European disdain for ostentation) makes his voice unique among others who analyze the nuances of greatness. Kluth follows each character beyond the key moments that defined their places in history to determine the value of their lives as a whole, from the rise and fall of their careers to their evolving relationships with families and friends. The result is a study of the ephemeral nature of power that grapples, often very effectively, with the meaning of true happiness.

Meatier than the average self-help book, Hannibal and Me is a rare blend of military strategy and emotional intelligence that offers a more mature solution for winning life’s battles.

Also, I’m very intrigued indeed by the “Books Similar to Hannibal and Me” they have chosen. (Follow the link and look.) The first one: “Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl.

Frankl is not in my book (he was at one point, but I had to cut). But Frankl has, of course, featured prominently here on The Hannibal Blog:

• Meaning in suffering: Frankl on Auschwitz
• He who has a WHY can bear any HOW
• Death in Tehran: A story about fear

What excellent company to be in. Thank you, Kirkus!

Here it is. Excerpts:

Several books on the legendary achievements of Hannibal have dwelled on one or two aspects of the ingenious general’s life, but none has tackled the tricky mix of the impact of his life choices on and off the battlefield as well as this new analysis. Kluth, the West Coast correspondent for the Economist, brings a contemporary slant to Hannibal’s military successes.

Here is the middle:

… Kluth does superior work in spelling out the elusive values of success and failure …

And here is the end:

Realistic and timely, Kluth’s book uses historic truths to move us past the frequent traps of success and failure to mold practical, productive lives.

I can’t argue with that.

Thanks, PW.

The other day, I was reading to my kids from a children’s book about Alexander the Great, which caused much merriment and took much time because, as you would expect, I had to embellish every sentence with the real or the full story.

But honestly, what inadequate storytelling! Here is how that book delivered the famous anecdote about Alexander taming his horse Bucephalus:

There is a story about a black stallion that one day started running wildly through the courtyard. Five trainers chased it but were unable to mount it. All of a sudden the horse stopped short. Not a soul dared to approach except young Alexander, who moved swiftly, mounting and mastering the steed. Henceforth the proud horse belonged to Alexander and was called Bucephalos, which means “The One with the Head of an Ox.”

I had to intervene. So I closed the book and said, “OK, kids, here is what really happened, and it is much more interesting.” (And the next day, I checked my memory against Plutarch, as you can do here.)

The real story, and the lesson

Alexander was only 12 or 13 at the time, and he had quite a tense relationship with his father, a bit as Hannibal and Hamilcar later did, and as most successful sons and fathers do.

In any case, Alexander’s father, Philip, was given a splendid horse. But nobody could tame it, and everybody, including Philip, was making rather a fool of himself.

Alexander, meanwhile, was just watching. Really observing. Because that’s what the adults were not doing. They were too busy being brave to observe the horse.

And so Alexander noticed that the horse was not angry, and was not even fighting against the Macedonian men. No, the horse was afraid and panicking. It was scared of its own shadow.*

So Alexander stepped up and dared his dad to let him try to tame the horse. He looked precocious and arrogant, and the men had a good laugh.

Alexander then took the stallion by its bridle (much more gently than the painting above suggests) and turned him to face into the sun, so that their shadows were now behind them. At this, the stallion calmed down a bit. Alexander then (and I quote from Plutarch now), let

him go forward a little, still keeping the reins in his hands, and stroking him gently when he found him begin to grow eager and fiery, he let fall his upper garment softly, and with one nimble leap securely mounted him, and when he was seated, by little and little drew in the bridle, and curbed him without either striking or spurring him.

Philip and his friends

all burst out into acclamations of applause; and his father shedding tears, it is said, for joy, kissed him as he came down from his horse, and in his transport said, ‘O my son, look thee out a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself, for Macedonia is too little for thee.’

So, you see, the story is really about Alexander’s finesse and, more, about his genius of observation. (And kids get that! They can handle the real story.)

In this sense, I believe Plutarch chose this anecdote for the same reason he chose the other famous vignette about Alexander: his untying of the Gordian Knot. As I argued in this post, that story, too, was proof of Alexander’s superior powers of observation. In that case, Alexander espied a simple solution to a complex situation.

But we can, as Plutarch would urge us to do, extend this much further. What made Alexander so great?

In his major battles, Alexander was usually the last to arrive at the battlefield. His enemy was already waiting, and had prepared his army for a particular battleplan. Alexander, by arriving late and keeping his mind supple, could observe that situation and infer his enemy’s plan, thereby devising his own, superior, plan on the fly.

In his administration of the conquered lands, from Egypt to Mesopotamia, he again observed the locals and their customs. He observed how they differed from Macedonian and Greek customs. And he observed how the Macedonians and Greeks were reacting to his observation. So Alexander ruled Egypt as a divine Pharaoh, the former Persian Empire as a Persian king, the Greek city states as a Philhellenic “first among equals”, and his own Macedonians as a brother in arms.

The man’s greatness — and the lesson in all these anecdotes — is found in his powers of observation.

Oh, and Bucephalus became Alexander’s beloved charger. When the stallion died from battle wounds (in what is today Pakistan), Alexander named a city after him, Bucephala, and died three years later.

___

* A famous autistic woman, Temple Grandin, has vividly described how cows and other animals, like autistic people, do sometimes get frightened by such things, whether a colored piece of plastic or a moving shadow.

My other posts about Alexander so far:

• The Alexandrian Solution
• Alexander meets a Yogi: Who’s the Hero?
• It was all Greek to them. No, literally
• The view west from Alexander’s death bed

It’s a nonprofit, currently in “alpha” (ie, not yet fully released), that wants to improve public discourse by making it less truthy and more fact-based. The idea, as one of the creators, David Joerg, explained it to me, is

1. that you make interactive, rather than static, charts on your blog,
2. that readers can click on the underlying data and play around with it,
3. that anybody can share the chart, as you might share a YouTube video, so that it can go viral.

As David emailed me,

The linkage to underlying data is especially nice because it allows curious readers to play with the data in new ways — making their own charts, verifying a chart’s correctness, pointing out alternative / better data sources, and so on.

And David has an offer:

We are in a private alpha at this point, which means that if you or a friend would like some charts, we’ll happily take your data or your research requests and make a bespoke chart. Later on, we’ll make a website where you can make your own charts.

I just devoured Robert Harris’s Imperium, the first book in what will be a trilogy of historical fiction, or fictional biography, about Cicero. I read it in a couple of sittings, hardly able to put it down. It may be the best way to learn about that great man and that fascinating time, a turning point in world history. I’ve just ordered the second book in the trilogy, and I can’t wait for the third to come out.

In terms of themes that show up a lot here on this blog:

1. Storytelling: Wow. Harris has Cicero’s slave and confidante Tiro tell the story from his point of view, which works well. All the details of Roman life and of the characters (Crassus, Pompey, Caesar etc etc) come to life.
2. The “impostors triumph and disaster”: Cicero embodies them (though not quite as perfectly as Hannibal and Scipio do, which is why I myself chose them to tell my own story. )
3. The tension between mobs and elites, republican and democratic power sharing, what ought to be and what is.

Among other things.

In any case, if you like The Hannibal Blog, you’re likely to like not only Hannibal and Me in January but also Imperium right now.

We Westerners have traditionally viewed mind as separate from matter, spirit as separate from body. This assumption started with Plato and culminated in Descartes, who drew the sketch above. And the notion trickled down from the various philosophers into what we consider “common sense”. In the Graeco-Roman “leg” of our heritage, spirit and body were seen as equal in stature (hence Juvenal: “mens sana in corpore sano“). In the Judeo-Christian leg, body was seen as inferior. But the essential dualism between the two was mostly taken for granted.

Eastern traditions such as Hinduism, by contrast, have traditionally viewed body as arising out of spirit. So pure energy or collective spirit, Brahman, might take the form of individual spirit, Atman, and become the body of something, through the magic process of Maya. (Recall that the Sanskrit word Maya is the root of magic.) That magic could work in both directions, but the essential monism of spirit and body were and are mostly taken for granted.

Modern neuroscience lets us correct and refine both of these views. And this is the first of my tentative conclusions after studying the brain for the past year. We now understand that something as simple as a thought or an emotion or as complex as “consciousness” is an emergent phenomenon from a pattern of physical events.

Those events are action potentials, electrochemical signals that propagate through one neuron and jump across synapses to other neurons. The mechanics of such propagation inside each individual neuron and of the “hop” (or the non-hop) across the synapses are fascinating. But the magic, the Maya, arises — or emerges — when those patterns of action potentials become self-aware. And not just self-aware but “happy”, “aroused”, “aggressive” and so forth.

Dualism, in other words, is wrong. Monism is right, but runs in the opposite direction. Not from spirit to matter and back, as in the Vedantic model, but from matter to spirit and back again to matter.

This insight, once one gets used to it, is merely the beginning of a cascade of radical questions. Such as:

• What is “personality”? Why and how is your emergent magic different than mine?
• Do we have “free will”? When, and how much?

Those have to wait for their own posts.

(I should say that the topic of conversation at the table was “meritocracy”, and whether the Chinese Communist Party might, surprisingly, be better at fostering it in its internal ranks than America’s allegedly transparent and hyper-democratic electoral systems.)

In any case, Gaddafi junior (I don’t know which one), said something like:

Do you want to know why Israel wins all the wars against Arabs? Because the Israeli army is meritocratic: they pick the generals that will win wars. In our armies, we pick the generals that will be the smallest threat to the boss.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it? And is applicable to a lot else, isn’t it?

Recall that I placed Andrew Jackson near the “populist” (as opposed to “elitist”) pole in the spectrum. Here, from Jon Meacham’s excellent biography of Jackson, is a little anecdote that shows how easily such populism veers into mob rule.

I) Background

The seventh president, six foot one but only 140 pounds — “gaunt but striking, with a formidable head of white hair, a nearly constant cough, a bullet lodged in his chest,” according to Meacham — was orphaned at 14 and never knew his father (rather, if not quite, like Hamilton,  Obama/McCain, Clinton/Newsom, Villaraigosa and other presidents).

He also never had biological children of his own. In this respect, he was similar to George Washington. Both Jackson and Washington, in the popular mind, made good “fathers of the nation” because, childless, they regarded the people as their children.

But above all, Jackson was the first president to come from “the common people,” from what we would call the lower classes. The six presidents before him had all been members of an educated, classically trained elite. This contrast became Jackson’s salient feature. He would spend his two terms fighting against what he perceived as elites.

As Meacham puts it (emphasis mine):

Before Jackson, power tended toward the elites, whether political or financial. After Jackson, power was more diffuse, and government, for better and worse, was more attuned to the popular will….

The [debates among the Founders had] largely concerned how the new nation might most effectively check the popular will. Hence the Electoral College, the election of senators by state legislatures, and limited suffrage. The prevailing term for America’s governing philosophy was republicanism–an elegant Enlightenment-era system of balances and counterweights that tended to put decisive power in the hands of elites elected, at least in theory, by a country of landowning yeomen. The people, broadly defined, were not to be trusted with too much power. This creed, best articulated by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, lay at the heart of presidential politics in the first decades of the nineteenth century, years in which a small establishment in the capital essentially decided on its own who would have the chance to live in the White House.

Jackson had reason to regard this elitism as his personal enemy. In the election of 1824 he won the popular vote but was tied in the electoral college and lost in the House of Representatives. In his mind, the people had chosen him, but the elites had robbed him of the office. So in the next two rounds, which he won, he took his fight directly to the people, even going on the first presidential campaign tour.

Meacham:

The force driving Jackson after 1824: a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful, with himself as the chief interpreter and enactor of that will…. “the republic is safe, and its main pillars — virtue, religion and morality — will be fostered by a majority of the people”… Democracy was in; elitism was out.

(Notice his explicit mention of virtue as residing in the common people — that, ie the putative location of virtue, was what I attempted to trace across time in that diagram post.)

II) Inauguration Day

On the day in 1829 he was sworn in, Jackson (apparently without prior planning) opened the White House to “the people”. They gladly obliged by piling in. As one contemporary lady of letters described it:

no police officers placed on duty and the whole house [was] inundated by the rabble mob…. The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping [replaced it] …. the carpets and furniture are ruined …. The armies of democracy were pitching their tents in Andrew Jackson’s White House. …

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who was at the White House that day, declared the “the reign of King Mob.”

So, given that my own brain is now teeming with newly-acquired insights into the brain and — much more importantly — with newly acquired insights into what is not yet known about the brain, I might amuse myself with a few posts here on the subject.

Just to be clear: This has nothing whatsoever to do with my forthcoming book, nor with my day job at The Economist (where I cover very different things). It’s just one of my little intellectual hobbies.

In this post, I’d simply like to tell you about some of my main sources. The two big ones are:

Robert Sapolsky

1) Robert Sapolsky: Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality

This is a great course in 24 lectures by a very entertaining character, whom you’ve already met on this blog here and here.

Sam Wang

2) Sam Wang: Neuroscience of Everyday Life

Another good course, in 36 lectures, organized totally differently from Sapolsky’s (as you can easily see by glancing at the lecture titles). The two are very complementary.

I also seem to be reading about specific aspects of neuroscience everywhere these days. The articles are too numerous to link to.

Here is one, by David Eagleman in The Atlantic, on how understanding the brain might or might not affect our notions about criminal justice.

Here is another, by John Tierney in the New York Times, on “decision fatigue”. Like Eagleman’s, it looks at one of many, many topics covered in the lectures by Sapolsky and Wang.

That should give you enough infrastructure to hold me to account as I pen my indubitably outrageous and provocative posts on the brain. Bye for now.

ON SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001, I had already been a correspondent for The Economist for four years and, as we are wont, had moved around for the publication, just then finding myself living in Hong Kong and covering Asia. It was already evening in Hong Kong and I had just returned, somewhat tired from a long day, to my flat on the 25th floor of a skyscraper in “Mid-Levels”, with a view of Hong Kong, the harbour and Kowloon. Just then my assistant called and said simply: “Turn on the TV.” For the rest of my night, which for America was that endlessly long morning and day, I watched.

The next morning, I walked to my office and stopped by my usual coffee bar in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong’s expat playground. All the regulars were there, and in each conversation, people of various nationalities were trying to make sense of what this world was now to become—now, as of September 12th, as of the day after. Anger, worry, confusion, fear—all these emotions were mixed together. I knew right away that the main significance of this dreadful event lay in what would happen next, not in what had already happened. How would America react? China? Muslims? Everybody?

There was a lot of nonsense said in those early days, as always when people must talk about something but have little new to say. I was suddenly getting lots of eager advice to cancel a trip to Indonesia. A Muslim country, you see. I went, and it was my favourite trip ever to that mystical place, easier for the lack of other travelers and just as welcoming as ever. The Schadenfreude of many mainland Chinese was harder to stomach. The unfocused jingoism of some Americans (“nuke’em back to the stone age”) even harder.

The first casualty of war is truth, it is often said. Instead, it is nuance. Every individual flees to his in-group and becomes susceptible to its caricatures of the respective out-group, to what the Germans call a Feindbild, a perception of The Other as enemy. This is already an act of de-humanisation. Bad laws, more oppressive bureaucracy (at borders, in courts, in daily life), distrust in interpersonal relations invariably follow, just as one apocalyptic horseman inevitably rides close behind the one before.

Did September 11th teach us about the risks of terrorism? It should not have. The existential threat of a suitcase bomb, a rogue nuclear event, already existed before and exists still. On the other hand, September 11th itself killed about as many Americans as die each year as a result of texting while driving. Homo sapiens are bad at understanding risks relative to one another, and worse at responding proportionately. The world became a worse place on that day. In part because the terrorists made it that way. In part, because the rest of us then did the same.

__

For the regulars here, some of these thoughts might strike you as “in-character”, such as those on

• in- and out-groups, and telling “The Single Story” versus “The Other Story”; and
• our tragically flawed human risk perception

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

These words by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow popped into my mind this week, as I read an internal email from The Economist‘s “brand communications manager” that landed in my inbox. It began:

As more and more of you are doing broadcast interviews now, I thought it might be useful to re-circulate these hints and tips…

I have indeed, over the past 14 years, been doing more and more broadcast interviews, and made more than my share of mistakes. So I began perusing these tips with an open mind. Many were about the mechanics (wear plain shirts on TV, no patterns, no black; don’t fiddle with your hands; etc). But the important ones were about content. And, as I kept reading, I grew somewhat pensive.

That’s because, as I see it, the tips were simultaneously

1. good — ie, anybody doing media interviews is well advised to heed them — and
2. awful — ie, heeding them is what makes our political, public and personal conversations increasingly pointless and frustrating.

1) The tips

I was slightly suspicious of the Powerpoint-style pseudo-acronyms (this email came from the “business side”, after all), but could not argue with the advice:

Prepare beforehand – decide what it is you really want to get across, having stats to hand will usually be useful. Know your:

• Audience
• Messages (focus on three key things to say)
• Evidence (third party endorsement is good e.g. quotes or research)
• Negatives (what’s the “worst” question they could ask?)

(AMEN, get it? Oh dear.)

Then:

Get in early with your messages/evidence – don’t wait for the perfect question, it may never come

Translation: Ignore the question, just say whatever the heck you want to say, which is probably whatever you said in your last article in The Economist.

More tips:

Avoid being question-led so the interviewer gets a neat segment that fits their preconceptions but you don’t get to say anything really interesting or useful.

Add value. Don’t feel forced to answer a question at length that you feel is unclear or irrelevant. You are the expert, talk about what you think is most significant.

If you are asked a difficult question:

1. Acknowledge it (“I understand that view…” / “we need to look at this issue in the light of..”)

2. Bridge back and communicate what you want to say.

3. Don’t repeat any negative language – if the audience is only half-listening, that’s all they will hear.

4. Don’t fake it if you don’t know, bring the conversation back to where you feel comfortable.

Translation: In case you didn’t get the first translation, ignore the question (but be suave about it) and say whatever the heck you want to say….

2) The consequences

I did say, right up front, that I had contradictory reactions to this advice. I know too well how utterly demoralizing it is to be on the radio or on TV, and to go off on that tangent that might become so very sophisticated in just a few minutes but dies suddenly and ignominiously when the interview is … over.

‘Wait, you mean, you don’t want to hear all my complex thoughts on this issue?’

No, they don’t.

If you don’t seize the conversation, they, or it, will seize you.

On the other hand, what kind of “conversations” are we talking about?

The worst kind: the eristic kind, as Socrates would say, the kind that obstructs communication and discovery of truth.

And so we all — journalists, politicians, consultants, pundits — become “media-trained”, talking right past one another, just like ships that pass in the night.

As you know, I love maps, especially historical maps, and I like to play with them to make points.

For instance, in this post, I turned a map of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy upside down to illustrate the arc of his and his enemy’s lives.

And in this post I paid my respects to Charles Minard, a Frenchman who, in the 19th century, launched the field of data visualization by producing a new kind of map — one that graphically as well as geographically shows Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

Now I get an email from one Jonnie Lappen, a senior at Arizona State University who is studying geography and considering doing his honors thesis on a different map by Minard.

I didn’t even know about that map until Jonnie showed it to me. Which is shocking: On it, Minard depicts Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps.

If it’s not famous, that’s probably because it is not nearly as good as the Napoleonic map: Minard gives us an angle of the Riviera we’re not used to seeing, and the shrinking line of the Carthaginian army is not as striking as in the Napoleonic map. (Still, look at that Alpine crossing: suddenly the line shrinks by half. That’s a lot of human beings dropping into gorges, slipping off ice sheets, dying of dysentery…)

Anyway, Jonnie is now engrossed in Livy to improve upon this map and give it its proper drama. A great idea. Good luck, Jonnie!

That the hiatus occurred during the dog days of August was pure coincidence. It was neither heat nor languor (in excess of the usual dose) that kept me from logging on. Instead, it was that larger category of reasons which we might call “life happens”. When life does happen offline, it’s sometimes best to stay there (ie, offline).

Only twice in the past month was I tempted to break this online fast by posting:

Once, when I read something that so outraged and offended and mystified me that I at once unsheathed my blogging sword to slice and stab and slay. This resulted in a long draft saved in my WordPress account that will probably never see the light of day. For I showed it to a family member or two, and these confidants — though agreeing with, and liking, my polemic — asked sensibly whether I needed to pick this particular battle just now, just so, or indeed at all. No, I didn’t, I realized. After all, picking one’s battles well is the secret to strategy as opposed to tactics (which, in a way, is the thesis of my book in one nugget.) So this particular battle will not be fought. (Except perhaps posthumously, as Twain might say.)

The second instance when I was tempted, I produced another draft, less controversial and quite entertaining. But I now felt that it was — in comparison to the polemic just left unpublished — banal. Why bother? Back to life.

So here I am again. The break allowed me to reflect where I want to take this blog in the coming months.

Recall: I started the blog rather prematurely three years ago, to write about my book. My editor subsequently urged me rather passionately not to divulge much from the book before publication. That left my blog without a purpose. So I began goofing off intellectually, with threads on:

• great thinkers,
• Socrates,
• heroism,
• yoga,
• freedom,

and so forth. None of those had much to do with my book at all. I was just amusing myself.

So, in a couple of months, I’d like to return to this blog’s original purpose: as a journal in support of, and about, the stories in my book.

In the meantime, I might just tie up a few of the loose “threads” from the past three years. And I might just indulge myself with one new one.

(That’s because, for the past year or so, my new hobby has been to study the brain – human and animal, male and female, old and young, happy and depressed, criminal and healthy, et cetera. So the new thread would be about brain science and its implications for life, justice, love and everything else.)

But then, at the latest in December, it’s all book, all the time, for any of you who will still be around for the fun.

• isolationist ↔ interventionist (in foreign policy)
• prudish/puritan ↔ permissive/liberal (sex)
• progressive ↔ conservative (attitudes toward change)

But perhaps the most striking and consequential cycle is the one between elitism and populism.

The question here is about virtue. Who is most likely to be virtuous/corruptible? The common people, or the elites?

This question has an ancient pedigree. The answer a society gives at any given time in effect determines the kind of democracy it will practice and the kind of institutions it will build: It will shift power (or pretend to shift power) to the pole it considers more capable of virtue.

I’ll say more about all this in future posts (especially in response to a great biography of Andrew Jackson I just finished reading). But for now I just wanted to amuse myself with another little diagram. As ever, I’m not taking it too seriously, just trying to order my thoughts and invite yours.

Below, I’ve placed some of the figures that have appeared here on The Hannibal Blog over the past two years (each one has a Tag, or you can search for his name) along a spectrum.

Classical thinkers are in normal font, American ones in bold italics.

(Notice the centrality of James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution. His answer was, in effect, to be agnostic on the question. Therein lies his genius and the strength of the constitution. So he represents the neutral value, 0)

So weigh in. You can also suggest where to place other thinkers, such as John Locke or Montesquieu, or modern pols such as presidential candidates, or foreign politicians.

I was sitting in a cafe on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica when, diagonally across the intersection, the firetrucks, police cars and ambulances pulled up from all sides, sirens ablaze.

Another accident, said a customer near me.

One of my children goes to a little school on Wilshire, not far.

Often, as I sit in this cafe, I look up from my book and just look at the drivers zipping by. About half of them, maybe more, seem to be on their phones as they propel their heavy metal killing machines through this human hive. It’s so booooring to have to drive. Must talk or text to pass the time.

Later I walked to the ATM, then home. The ambulances were gone now. Only some clothes and slippers and what looked like a pair of sunglasses were left in the intersection, now guarded by cops.

Why did they not clean it up? I don’t know. Evidence, perhaps. The paramedics had cut the clothes from the two bodies, the better to try to save the lives.

I learned that a driver, aged 28, had plowed through two people, a man aged 61 and a woman aged 62 — perhaps a couple — at a crosswalk. They were walking on the zebra stripes, and the driver simply did not stop.

Was he texting or on the phone? I asked the cop. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say.

Did that matter? I wondered. Perhaps only insofar as the answer might, just might, make others change their behavior (ie, put their phones away in the car) and save lives not yet lost or shattered.

More than two lives had just been lost or shattered right here, while I was drinking a double latte across the street. Not just the two whose clothes I was seeing. All the lives they had touched. I walked home to my kids.

One of my favorite quotes is by Arthur Schopenhauer. In German:

Man gebrauche gewöhnliche Worte und sage ungewöhnliche Dinge.

That could be translated several ways:

Take common words and say uncommon things.

Or:

One should take usual words and say unusual things.

Or:

Use ordinary words and say extraordinary things.

Doesn’t this say it all, for us writers and storytellers?

_________

PS: This could become a motto for The Hannibal Blog, especially in conjunction with Walt Whitman’s quote and Albert Einstein’s quote:

1. Whitman gives us license to let our intellect roam freely without fear of the (inevitable) contradictions we bump into along the way;
2. Einstein reminds us to search for the simplicity hiding beneath all that bewildering complexity, (as Alexander the Great and Carl Friedrich Gauss do, too);
3. Schopenhauer reminds us to express what we found on Whitman’s journey with words of Einsteinian simplicity.

PPS: Schopenhauer is famous but not widely read anymore. I once had a little Schopenhauer phase. And since I did the work, you shouldn’t have to: All Schopenhauer did was to translate what we would consider Buddhism or Upanishadic Hinduism into German. So now you, too, know Schopenhauer.

PPPS: I can’t help but wonder what feedback my own publisher would have given Schopenhauer apropos of … his author photo!

The resulting email exchange (which has been edifying and hilarious but must remain private, at least until publication) made me reflect on some larger issues:

• identity,
• image,
• authenticity,
• message,
• style etc.

In meditating on these, it helps that the stakes are low — very, very low.

Suffice it to say that my publisher made us go three rounds (“us” = my wife, who took the photos, and me).

I will show you all three, but in no particular order. And I won’t say (yet) which one the publisher chose. (Yes, it’s the publisher, not I, who did the choosing.)

And then, at the bottom of this post, you get to vote. And if you’re so inclined, you can comment more fully below.

Herewith:

Now vote: