Lance Erlick. Reborn. New York: Kensington, 2018. E-book.

Reborn is a clever book whose main character is an android. She is what the film Blade Runner calls a replicant. Synthia Cross looks and behaves like a human. She is the first and at this point the only robot like this. “[She] was synthetic and intelligent enough to pass as a human and hence a crossover—thus the name…given her: Synthia Cross.” (44)

Even though her creator, Dr. Jeremiah Machten (make a “ten”? Ten times the speed of sound?), has programmed her as any computer would be programmed, she seems to have memories or voices that are unusual. Machten has created an emotion chip which seems to be working, but part of that emotion seems to be telling her not to trust Machten.

To some degree we can understand this. Machten is very much like the ancient mythical sculptor Pygmalion. It seems that he has fallen in love with Synthia and behaves not unlike Pygmalion did with his statue. Of course, in Pygmalion’s case the gods sympathized with him and turned the statue into a real woman. Machten tries something similar using his own programming knowledge. Synthia keeps getting reprogrammed, but her fear of Machten remains.

The main conflict, though, is not really a Synthia vs. Machten one. Machten’s former business partners have falsely accused him of many crimes and kick him out of the partnership with nothing other than his plans for Synthia. This apparently is not enough, especially for former partner Goradine, who wants to completely ruin Machten.

Whose side will Synthia take?

Whose side will the reader take?

We mostly get the story from Synthia’s point of view, but we also see that Machten was treated very shabbily and Goradine is truly a snake.

Two things make this science fiction tale a kind of technothriller. First, there is a lot of suspense. Bad guys are trying to do in Machten and Synthia in turns. This aspect reminded us of a Danielle Steele page-turner we had read years ago. (It was a literal beach read for us.) Lots of fun, and we had to keep reading to find out what would happen. Reborn is no different.

Second, there are interesting ethical questions. In the novel, the United States has passed a law prohibiting the creation or importing of androids that could pass as humans. Other countries have no such scruples. Synthia has been programmed with certain ethical basics such as to neither commit nor assist in a crime and to always obey her creator, Dr. Machten.

Sometimes she is not sure whether a crime is being committed. What about those fears she has of Machten? Should she disobey him if it appears he might be involved in a crime? What if someone is threatening him or her? She comes across Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. She likes those, but they are different, and even they do not answer all her questions.

Too bad she never comes across the Ten Commandments. Oh well.

And though she is unsure about her relationship with her Pygmalion-type creator, she does seem to have some kind of romantic interest in another human being.

She also likes being the one and only “crossover.” Like Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre, “She wanted to be the lone AI, to have no competition.” (608)

She begins to experience moral or ethical conflicts and seems to begin rationalizing things the way we humans really do. She is growing a sense of self.

Unlawful acts, after all, derived from laws and the logic that obeying laws was for the common good. Her existence was personal. She was growing attached to existing. (1977)

Self-awareness is something distinctly human, or nearly so. Was she becoming human or something else? Something greater or merely something different? If so, how different?

One level in Maslow’s hierarchy did intrigue her: Transcendence. Becoming more than Machten had created her to be was appealing. She didn’t want to become human with all those pitfalls. Instead, she wanted to better understand human emotions like joy, and to transcend her directives to become something more than a slave…(2041)

Most of the tale is told from her perspective. Because she has fifty separate wireless channels and can hack into most surveillance cameras and networked computers, she is almost an omniscient narrator herself. Clever again.

This is a lot of fun to read. The ending is less than satisfying from a narrative perspective, though. The plot and resolution of the conflict makes for a good story, but the last four or five chapters merely summarize what has happened rather than continue telling a story. It was as if the author was running out of time and had to summarize the end for us.

Still, the conflicts are fascinating and perhaps show us some of the inherent difficulties people and society may face as we approach singularity. And like the Star Trek: Voyager episodes about Seven-of-Nine or the Borg, Reborn helps us reflect on what it really means to be human.

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not page numbers.

T. A. Bosse. The Mystery of the Trinity Revealed. Union KY: Dove and Word, 2017. Print.

A friend who is a Jewish believer in Jesus once had a polite discussion with a rabbi about the Trinity. My friend simply read from the first two verses in the Bible:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

He then asked the rabbi, “Is the Holy Spirit God?”

The rabbi understood. If the Holy Spirit were not God, then He must have been a creation like an angel, but He is clearly not that. He also moves and speaks and has a personality. My friend noted that even the Hebrew Scriptures portray a God of at least two persons. The real question dividing Christians and Jews (and others) is whether or not Jesus is God.

That is the focus of The Mystery of the Trinity Revealed.

It uses many well-known Bible verses and logical arguments. To those familiar with the Bible or orthodox Christian teaching, these are not new.

Bosse’s main contribution to the discussion focuses on the incarnation—God becoming human and being born from the Virgin Mary.

Orthodox teachers tell us that the sin nature of people is passed on through the father. Adam had been in charge, not Eve. God, in fact, said that the seed or offspring of woman—not man—would defeat the serpent. (See Genesis 3:15)

Nowadays we know more about fetal growth. The child in its mother’s womb is a completely separate entity. While the child is fed by the mother internally, it does not share any of its mother’s organs including her blood. Yes, half of the child’s genes come from the mother, but from her egg. The child has its own nature, its own blood, and its own genetic identity.

As God’s son, Jesus gets His humanity from His mother, but that does not include her inherited sin nature because that comes from the father’s side. Mary received that from her father. Jesus did not have that because God was His father and He was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

The life is in the blood, and Jesus’ blood was His own and not tainted by sin. In that sense He was a Second Adam. Thankfully for mankind’s sake, He did not succumb to the devil’s temptations like the first Adam, so He remained without sin. His blood could be shed to establish the New Covenant for the remission of sin.

Because His Father was the eternal, infinite God, Jesus is God, too, eternal and infinite. But because His mother was human, He was human and his finite body was capable of dying.

Bosse is careful. At times he seems a little repetitious or is explaining an objection that itself sounds unusual or esoteric. Nevertheless, he makes a pretty direct and clear case presenting evidence that Jesus is God. It should get any reader thinking.

Disclosure of Material: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through the BookCrash book review program, which requires an honest, though not necessarily positive, review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s CFR Title 16, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Jasper Fforde. The Fourth Bear. New York: Viking, 2006. E-book.

The Fourth Bear is subtitled A Nursery Crime, and, yes, there are many word plays and allusions throughout this book. For anyone growing up with fairy tales and nursery rhymes, this is fun. (N.B.: I have noted in recent years, many of my high school students are not familiar with these as they used to be.)

Our main character is Jack Spratt—yes, that Jack Sprat(t) whose first wife died of complications from obesity. Now he is trying to live a normal human life—hence, the new spelling of his name—rather than his previous life as a PDR, Person of Dubious Reality.

Mary Mary (Mary Mary who grows the garden, not the one who sings) describes PDRs as

“Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence, and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them.” (14)

Mr. Spratt is now a detective for the Reading (note the spelling, if not the pronunciation) Police Department’s Nursery Crimes Division. This is lots of fun.

I do not know if Mr. Fforde got his inspiration from Mad magazine, but many years ago that comic periodical imagined a merger (today we might call it a mashup) between True Detective and Jack and Jill magazines. One of the headlines read “Did Humpty Dumpty Fall or Was He Pushed?”

Detective Spratt apparently developed a reputation by solving the Dumpty case in an earlier episode. This time he has encounters with Scissor-man, the guy who cuts off the thumbs of thumbsucking children, and Punch and Judy, the violent but lovable traditional puppets.

The main case in this novel involves the murder of Goldilocks, a reporter who is an activist for the right to arm bears (see Bill of Rights, Amendment Two) and has been investigating a series of deadly explosions involving competitive cucumber growers. It is a hoot: Something that might have been dreamed up by “the usual gang of idiots” at Mad magazine.

Any reader of Gulliver’s Travels knows the significance of cucumbers. What if scientists really were coming closer to harnessing the latent solar energy in cucumbers? Like the nuclear power in Uranium or Plutonium, it could be a source of energy or a powerful weapon.

There is much more. We get appearances from the Quangle Wangle, the Gingerbread Man (a serial criminal who taunts the police with “You can’t catch me”), Dorian Grey (a used car salesman with an unusual guarantee), Madeleine Usher, a space alien, and others too numerous to mention.

Any fan of detective stories knows that the good detective picks up on anomalies—like Sherlock Holmes noting that the dog did not bark. So it is with the story of the Three Bears. If the bears were having a meal together, the porridges would have all been cooked in one pot and served at the same time. The three bowls should have all been the same temperature, or nearly so. Why was Papa’s too hot, Mama’s too cold, and Baby’s in between?

People like Goldilocks who ask such questions could be in danger…There is more going on in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears then we thought.

N.B. This is one of a series, the first we have read. It will not likely be the last.

August Turak. Brother John. Franklin TN: Clovercroft, 2018. Print.

In 2004 the author won a Templeton Prize for this essay entitled “Brother John.” Some people found copies of it and read it and enthusiastically shared it, but it was not widely available. Now the essay has been published in a colorful format.

The essay is very simple. Indeed, some of the blogs on this web site are longer. The author occasionally takes retreat at a Catholic monastery. There he met Brother John who exemplified Matthew 20:25-27:

Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave…”

Turak notes that most people make objections to following God or believing in Him, but Turak gets to the heart of the matter. Like Dr. George Wald, quoted in an earlier blog entry, they simply do not want to follow God. But Brother John has discovered something radically different and better when they do…

This is not a mere sketch of a monk. We really learn very little about that man. But perhaps we will learn something about ourselves. If there is a key, Ecclesiastes 3:11 perhaps explains it best, that God has put eternity in the hearts of mankind.

This edition is accompanied by paintings of Brother John and other monks at the monastery. They are a little unusual in that the monks are always painted from behind. We never see their faces. That may well be just the way Brother John would want it.

Renee Linnell. The Burn Zone. Berkeley CA: She Writes Press, 2018. Print.

The Burn Zone is a memoir, a well-paced account of one woman’s involvement in a New Age cult. Immediately we are stricken by the author’s enchantment with a charismatic speaker she calls Lakshmi. (Though she has an Indian name, we are told Lakshmi is American and Jewish.) To Ms. Linnell, Lakshmi has power and light, and for seven years Linnell gives up everything to follow her. Lakshmi becomes her guru, Teacher with a capital T.

In the first half of the book, the chapters alternate between the beginnings of her involvement in the College of Mysticism (its name changed a few times) and her family life and background.

Compared to most Americans, she was a child of privilege. Her family lived on a houseboat in Florida but traveled a lot. She tells us that she has visited fifty countries. She casually mentions surfing in Costa Rica with her brother, or, less casually, swimming with sharks in the Bahamas. She was debuted, though not willingly.

She wanted to please people but had a rebellious streak as well. Those two inclinations together made her and her money a target for Lakshmi and Lakshmi’s bodyguard/disciple/consort, Vishnu.

While the group was ostensibly Buddhist, they claimed to get “energy” (a very common word in this book) from other religions, too. Her training included visits to India, Nepal, and Bhutan to study under Hindus and other Buddhists. They visited Egypt to tap into the energy of the pyramids and Australia to experience Aboriginal energy, too.

Lakshmi and Vishnu’s treatment of Renee can best be described as passive-aggressive. She loved them and wanted to please them. At times they were kind to her and encouraged her. Other times, though, they rudely criticized her and accused her of many terrible things. There is a lot of strong language. She took it all in and pretty much blamed herself for any difficulties she had with them.

As she got deeper into the relationship with her gurus, she was truly exploited. She worked for them without pay. She would rationalize that some famous Hindu guru had cleaned latrines with his hair. She never had to do that. She cut ties with virtually all her friends, eventually even her other friends in the cult.

With her Teachers’ permission, she started a few businesses, learned computer programming, and started work on an MBA. In the realm of business she was quite capable.

She confesses that before the days with College of Mysticism, she was sexually promiscuous. That did not change a whole lot—one gets the impression that this version of Buddhism was not especially moral. We read in recent news more revelations of sexual misconduct among some Catholic priests. Let’s just say that some Buddhist monks are just as exploitative.

At some point the reader begins to ask, when is she going to come to her senses? (See Luke 15:17) Eventually she does, sort of. Lakshmi and Vishnu expel her from the group, and she begins reconciling herself with friends and family she had left behind.

At the end it clear that Renee is free from the cult, though still influenced by some of their beliefs. The last chapter could be taken from Walden. I felt like I was reading a modern, more amoral Thoreau. She would never write like Thoreau that “out whole life is startlingly moral.” But she still speaks of meditation and finding the “Wise Voice within” [her capitals] not unlike Thoreau or a serious Buddhist. At one point earlier Lakshmi does talk about “energy” from the navel. Meditation, indeed!

We do root for Renee’s eventual freedom from the mind control of the cult. She has accomplished much since getting out, and we are happy for her. Like Thoreau, she “loves the wild not less than the good.” Is it possible to reconcile those two things? If so, how? She is still searching.

Jay Sekulow. Jerusalem. Tustin CA: Trilogy, 2018. Print.

Psalm 44:13-14 laments the way the rest of the world sees the nation of Israel:

You have made us the taunt of our neighbors,
the derision and scorn of those around us.
You have made us a byword among the nations,
a laughingstock among the peoples.

In the 1960s, satirist Tom Lehrer sang:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
The Catholics hate the Protestants,
The Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews. (“National Brotherhood Week”)

It seems as if over the course of three millennia things have not changed much. Still, since 1948 the Jewish people have had an independent homeland, Israel.

Jerusalem makes a case that the region known as Israel or Palestine has been occupied, if not ruled, by Jewish people since the middle of the second millennium B.C. Since the time of King David, Jerusalem has been acknowledged as its capital.

Even though the book is subtitled A Biblical and Historical Case for the Jewish Capital, it looks at the issue of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel largely from a legal perspective. Sekulow is best known as a lawyer.

Nevertheless, the author does begin with a scriptural case. He does refer to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. What is perhaps most striking are the number of verses in the Quran which calls Israel “the holy land which Allah hath assigned unto” the Jews.

The book briefly explains the meaning of covenant and how Israel’s stewardship is based on a covenant relationship with God—as asserted in the scriptures of all three of those monotheistic or Abrahamic religions.

Sekulow then makes a fairly quick overview of the historical and archaeological record. Even at times when they were persecuted whether by Romans, Crusaders, or Turks, Jews still inhabited that area of real estate and some even survived in or around Jerusalem during those hard times for them.

Finally, nearly half the book details the legal record in the last century since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Technically, the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations is still in effect because it was taken over by the United Nations and has never been altered. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration went into effect as Britain took Palestine from the Ottoman Turks whom they were fighting in World War I. (Remember Lawrence of Arabia?)

After the war, the Palestine Mandate which went under England’s control included what is today both Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza Strip) and Jordan. The British prohibited Jewish settlements east of the Jordan River. That became the de facto boundary between the Jewish and Arab portions of the mandate.

Even before the mandate was finalized, Feisal ibn Hussein and Chaim Weizmann agreed to this division. Sekulow notes that the Jews only got 23% of the area but the agreement was made “by the most cordial good will and understanding” (159, original wording) between these two parties. Feisal recognized the legitimacy of the Balfour Declaration as well. Feisal would become the first King of Iraq, and at this meeting was representing his father, the Sharif of Mecca. In between, he was declared King of Greater Syria (today’s Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan) till he was overthrown by the French.

Sekulow points out that even though today the media often refer to “the occupied West Bank,” the only time in the twentieth century that it was occupied in opposition to the various international treaties and documents in place was between 1948 and 1967 when Jordan occupied it contrary to the 1919 agreement.
During that time, Jordan refused any Jew access to East Jerusalem. Since 1967 Jerusalem in its entirety has under Israeli control, and Muslims and Christians are permitted in all parts.

There is a lot more in Sekulow’s case for Jewish territory in Israel and Jerusalem as its capital. For example, he goes in to some detail about the background and motivation of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement which has become popular in academia.

Sekulow may have left out what are a few germane details at least to this reviewer. The term Palestinian until the mid- to late sixties usually referred to a resident of Palestine and more often than not, it meant a Jew who lived there. In the late sixties the Communists began a “national liberation” movement in Israel with Arabs as they had in many other parts of the world with other groups. The P.L.O. was a Communist organization supported by the U.S.S.R. and to a lesser degree by China.

When I was in college, I recall listening to Abba Eban speak to an assembly there. He was a former foreign minister of Israel and spoke eloquently about Israel’s survival. At the time, it was all about the Arabs. This was less than two years after the 1967 war in which Israel was attacked by a coalition of Arab nations.

About a year later, around 1970, the Maoist wing of the campus student radicals put up posters about the Palestinians. They read, “Who are the Palestinians?” It was one of the first times I recall the term Palestinian used to refer to Arabs living in Israel.

Although Jerusalem cites scriptures, it avoids any discussion of the prophetic significance of the modern state of Israel or Jerusalem. That would be a different approach. Still, as theologians call it, the mystery of iniquity is still alive and popular with many when it comes to Israel and its capital.

Many years ago I read Collins and LaPierre’s O Jerusalem when I was visiting a friend. (See also Psalm 137:5) It was such a gripping story, I stayed up most of the night reading the book. Jerusalem is much drier than that book because it deals with legal issues. It is a set of essays and briefs rather than a narrative, but anyone interested in this topic would learn some things by reading it.

Even though the copyright date is this year, the book went to press before the United States finally decided to implement an act its Congress had passed in 1995 and move its embassy to Jerusalem. As Sekulow points out several times, it is universally recognized that any sovereign nation can establish its capital within its boundaries wherever it deems appropriate. The single exception in practice are the many nations that do not recognize this for Israel. There is still truth in what the Psalmist and Tom Lehrer wrote…

Nathaniel Philbrick. Second Wind. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print.

Nathaniel Philbrick is best known for his history books, notably Bunker Hill and Mayflower. The former is reviewed on these pages, the latter is on my “some day I have to read that” list. Second Wind is different. It is a personal account of the year he took up sailboat racing to fend off a midlife crisis.

Philbrick had been a nationally ranked Sunfish sailor in his youth and young adulthood. He competed on his college sailing team. He ended up living on Nantucket, the island twenty-four miles into the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts coast.

As any reader of The Preppy Handbook will tell you, islands tend to be exclusive. When people from Boston speak of a Nantucket dollar, they are referring to a hundred dollar bill. At one time the island was famous for whaling and the China trade. There are still families on the island who trace their ancestry back to those times. However, today it is largely associated with the upper classes.

Philbrick tells us that when this story begins in 1992 he had been living on the island for about twenty years. Surprisingly, even though he and his wife met sailing, he had done very little sailing since he had lived there. Now in his forties, he decides to fix up his long-abandoned Sunfish sailboat and take up the sport again.

The Sunfish is a very small craft, not much more than a surfboard with a sail, but it has a following and there are numerous Sunfish regattas or races. Since Philbrick was a racer twenty-odd years before, he not only begins sailing again but looking for races to compete in.

Since his wife used to sail as well, this becomes a family hobby with his wife, his best friend, and his pre-teen son and daughter. Philbrick tells a story well, and this is not only a tale of family dynamics but one about a subculture most Americans are not aware of, the same way Confederates in the Attic tells a lot about Civil War re-enactors or The Big Year tells about birders.

This reviewer could relate somewhat to the book. Many years ago I went on a Scout camping trip to Nantucket, so I have been there. Being Coast Guard veteran, I became somewhat familiar with “ragboat” sailors and their regattas, though in the Coast Guard we always used motorized vessels (a.k.a. “stinkpots”). Philbrick does a good job of introducing the Sunfish and its sailors to us.

He has a few close calls as he sails in and around his home island. A few times he ignores some good advice and has to learn things the hard way. Sailing is not that much different from other life pursuits.

I once read a diary in which the writer recorded notes about books he had read. He did not care much for Two Years Before the Mast (another book on my aforementioned list). He wrote:

Finished Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana – to my mind a very dull book, entirely too full of foreboom, royal spinnakers, and top gallant yardarm try sails.

Second Wind is a little like that. Although Philbrick does explain things pretty well, it helps if the reader has some nautical background or is not afraid of using a dictionary. Even with my experience as a Coastie, I had to look up one word. The map of Nantucket in the book was especially helpful in visualizing some of his sailing escapades.

In less than a year after he takes up the Sailfish again, Philbrick is sailing in regattas. One especially rugged one—because of the bad weather—takes place on the Connecticut River. He competes in national races in Florida and Ohio.

Because he had sailed competitively two decades prior to this, he renews some old acquaintances with people who are still racing. Second Wind is also a tale of family bonding. A prologue written in 2017 tells us that his son travels widely in a sailboat and his daughter became a Laser-class sailor. The family that sails together prevails together…

I do have one slight quibble. Philbrick identifies Hartford as Connecticut’s largest city. It is not. While it is the state capital, at the time of the story it was the state’s third largest city. Now it is the fourth. For well over a century the state’s most populous city has been Bridgeport. The part of the state closest to New York City is for better or worse its population center. The notorious Munson-Nixon Line goes right through the state. To the south and west of it are mostly Yankee fans, to the north and east of it are mainly Red Sox fans.

Robert M. Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 1974; New York: Bantam, 1984. Print.

Don’t lose control of your soul.
        —The Loading Zone (1968)

I read this book back when it first came out in 1974 or 1975. A friend named Joe gave me a copy, and I remember enjoying the book and being impressed with the writing. When we discussed it, both of us spoke about the concept of excellence, what the book calls Quality (always capitalized). It struck us both as a very Aristotelian idea, and one that both Pirsig and Aristotle could not quite define. We know it exists because any vaguely mature person evaluates things, ideas, and experiences all the time. The book is subtitled An Inquiry into Values. This is the value that Pirsig investigates.

Recently another friend named Randy quoted from it, but I did not recognize the quotation. He said it came from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I mentioned that I read it over forty years ago and, while I remembered some of it, I had forgotten that detail. He said it was a key to the book and lent me his copy. Now I have re-read it. (N.B.: To protect privacy, I usually do not name acquaintances in this blog, but I have done so here to make the writing clearer, so no reader asks “Now which friend is that?”)

Back in the seventies when I was first given the book, I had given Joe a copy of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. I do not recall who gave which book first, but both books really had a similar message with similar, if not identical, conclusions.

Although both books’ purpose is to discuss a philosophical or metaphysical understanding of the way the human mind works, they are both presented as biographies. Coleridge tells of how he became a writer and of his writer friends and intersperses those things with observations about how the imagination (what Bronowski calls the creative mind) functions.

Pirsig describes a cross-country motorcycle trip he took with his eleven-year-old son Chris and a married couple John and Sylvia. They began in Minnesota, crossed the Dakotas to Montana and Yellowstone, and then passed through Idaho and Oregon to San Francisco. John and Sylvia accompanied them on the first part of the trip. Like Coleridge, he intersperses his observations about the countryside and caring for motorcycles with reflections on how we perceive reality, told mostly as reflections from the past from the point of view of an alter ego named Phaedrus.

Phaedrus historically was one of Socrates’ foils in the dialogue of Plato by that name. It literally means “wolf.”

Back in the seventies I owned a motorcycle. I had known very little about mechanics before then. My father was one of those people who never opened the hood of his car but relied on professional mechanics even to change the oil.

Owning a motorcycle is different. Most owners have to learn about the machine themselves and have to do their own work. I learned a lot. I still laugh today when I think of the awkwardly translated Honda service manual I relied on. A few sentences I am sure made perfect sense in Japanese but were incomprehensible in English. Still, the pictures helped even when the text did not.

So Pirsig sets up a contrast between his perspective on taking care of a motorcycle and his friends’. John and Sylvia could afford a new BMW bike. Back then it was the most reliable model. They figured that if they had a reliable new bike and did not drive it into the ground, that they would be OK. John saw the mechanical specifics as an almost irrelevant mystery, not unlike the way my father viewed automobiles.

Pirsig notes a philosophical difference between these two approaches. He calls his classical and his friends’ romantic. Indeed, at one point he even quotes Coleridge who wrote “every person is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian.” Pirsig tries to reach a kind of common understanding between the two, as did Coleridge—though John Stuart Mill would update Coleridge’s observation by writing “every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean.” While Mill clearly takes the side of Bentham, he calls the two men the “seminal minds” of his era.

Pirsig certainly begins on the Aristotelian/Benthamite side, but his investigation is looking for something more. This is perhaps where the Zen comes in.

I confess it is hard to tell how significant the Buddhism is in the overall impact of the book. When Joe and I discussed it, we both felt as though it had a lot more to do with Aristotle—the materialist approach with a search for quality or excellence. Pirsig even gives a disclaimer at the beginning that his book “should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.” (ix)

At one point he tells of going to India to study the oriental religions. He explains that Zen (dhyana in Sanskrit) is a discipline for the elimination of physical, mental, and emotional activity. That sounds very much like the elimination of the things that make us human. In the long run, the quest for Eastern enlightenment was futile:

But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed like the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange. (126)

We are told that Phaedrus, “left the classroom, left India and gave up.” (127)

This reminds me of the episode of the Hindu and the teakettle as told by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. Her father Francis Schaeffer was having a discussion with a Hindu man at Cambridge University. The Hindu was expounding the same idea that everything was illusion. A friend of Macaulay’s named Tom picked up a boiling teakettle that was sitting on a gas burner and walked over to the man and began to act as if he was going to pour the hot water on his head.

Everyone looked surprised and the Indian student looked scared to death.

“If what you believe is true,” Tom said firmly, “there is no ultimate difference between cruelty and noncruelty. So whether I choose to pour this boiling water over your head does not matter.”

There was a moment of silence and then the Indian rose and left the room without comment. He could not match what he believed with real life. (Macaulay 29)

It is hard to escape reality. Even if they preferred not to do it themselves, John and Sylvia still acknowledged a necessity sometimes of doing maintenance on motorcycles. John even seemed to admire Pirsig for his knowledge.

At another point, however, the author seems to accept an idea that Buddha is God, or at least a god. He writes that “Buddha is everywhere,” and that he “exists independently of any analytic thought.” (70)

I recall a song that began “Oh, Buddha was a man.” To say that a man becomes a god or even the God sounds suspiciously like the Fall of man: “You shall be like God.” (Genesis 3:5) Those are words of the devil. History has been the story of mankind’s attempt to recover from this misconception.

Still, the focus is not on Zen or Buddha, but the question—how do we arrive at Quality? An epigraph from Plato suggests it:

     What is good, Phaedrus,
     And what is not good—
     Need we ask anyone these things? (xi)

Pirsig demonstrates Quality both from his experience with motorcycles and his experience teaching writing to college freshmen (both are things I can relate to).

In the case of the motorcycle, it is a matter of keeping it in good running condition. For example, once his chain guard breaks. There is a parts store in town, but they do not have one in stock. He takes it to a welder. Now, Pirsig has learned something of welding in caring for his bike, but he is surprised when the welder uses a different technique from what he thought would work best. But the welder knows what he is doing, and Pirsig acknowledges that the repair is better than he could have done himself. The welder knew Quality.

He also spoke of this when he was teaching freshman composition at a university in Montana. He intentionally did not tell students what their grades were until the end of the marking period. Instead, after reading each assignment, he copied a few compositions as samples and gave them to the class to evaluate. Pretty soon the entire class was understanding what quality writing was, and the writing of the whole class improved. As they say, “Show, don’t tell.” Or as Socrates would say, “Need we ask?”

When I teach my first-year composition class, the first thing I have students read is Jacob Bronowski’s essay “The Creative Mind.” I wonder if Pirsig had read this. Bronowski, a mathematician, came with a group of scientists to Nagasaki in 1946 to survey the effects of the atomic bomb there. Bronowski is Western (born in Poland, emigrated to England, died in New York), so his question was not whether or not the damage from the bomb actually existed, but what value did the knowledge of the atom’s innards have? Was it good or not good?

In examining this question, Bronowski first looks at how the creative mind works. That was the same question that Coleridge was examining in his Biographia. Like Pirsig, Bronowksi quotes Coleridge at one point. Bronowski would say that something of quality not only demonstrates a discovery of the writer or artist (be it science or art), but it also lets the audience share that discovery.

That is what Pirsig does. Like most Westerners since the middle of nineteenth century, Pirsig is brought up on the scientific method. We learn by observation after forming a hypothesis. If the observation can be duplicated or is duplicated, then we can draw a conclusion that the hypothesis is valid.

Yet how do we come up with hypotheses? Many, if not most, are not valid, or at best limited. Why do some hypotheses become breakthroughs? Pirsig uses Einstein as an example; Bronowski uses Newton. Yet when Pirsig looks closely at Einstein there is something more than mere hypothesis and experimentation. He quotes Einstein:

The supreme task…is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience can reach them… [ellipses in original]

Pirsig reacts. “Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.” (99)

Much of the Phaedrus story of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance then tells how he gradually becomes discouraged at finding truth. He is somewhat disillusioned with his inquiries into oriental philosophies but the occidental ones seem perhaps just as subjective.

We learn early on that Phaedrus was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a period of time. Gradually we see how this happened, but ultimately we understand he was not insane. He was simply caught up in some great questions and was unsure of the answers, if there were any. The piece my friend Randy quoted was on the question of the author’s sanity.

His attraction to the oriental ways came from their emphasis on the mind. “It is all in the mind,” so to speak. So from the beginning of the book, he distinguishes the classical or rational (i.e., Aristotelian or Benthamite) from the romantic or emotional (Platonic or Coleridgean?).

This is a division that appears to be artificial. It is not, at its core, the division that either Coleridge or Bronowski make, however superficially alike they may appear. Coleridge uses the terms objective and subjective.

Objective, of course, refers to things apart from the individual, things that happen or are true whether we experience them or not. The sun rising every morning is an objective occurrence whether we are specifically aware of it at the time.

Subjective refers to a personal response or interpretation. I really enjoyed reading this book. As the reader can tell, it got me thinking. My friends Joe and Randy also liked it. Joe gave me a copy. Randy tells me that he borrowed it from his wife on a trip and would not give it back until he finished it. Those are all subjective responses.

Pirsig’s problem, I believe, is that he made the distinction or division in the wrong place. Traditional Judeo-Christian teaching tells us that the soul is the mind, will, and emotions. If we understand things that way, then the subjective includes our reasoning. In other words, Coleridge had it right. The objective is the other, that which occurs in reality and which our mind, will, and emotions interpret.¹

Pirsig was trying to bring the mind and emotions together when they are not meant to be separated in the first place. Different personalities may emphasize different aspects of the soul. In the traditional understanding, the personality that emphasizes thinking or reasoning is the melancholic. This sounds like Pirsig himself.

The personality that emphasizes the will is the choleric. The one that leans toward the emotional side is the sanguine. (For those wondering, the phlegmatic personality is motivated primarily by the body or the flesh, a part of our humanity but not part of the soul.)

Perhaps, then, this gets to what Einstein was saying. Whether the hypothesis comes from reason or intuition, it still comes from the soul, the individual. Coleridge or Bronowski would say, then, the creative mind (Coleridge calls it the imagination) takes what is objective but expresses it in such a way that people grasp it subjectively whether it is rational, emotional, willful, or some combination of the three.

It is interesting to note that this also roughly corresponds to the rhetorical ideal. Many of those freshman composition classes, including those that Pirsig taught, are called rhetoric classes. Classical rhetoric tells us that effective speaking or writing appeals to the logos (the word, the logic), the ethos (morality, the will), and the pathos (sympathy, emotion).

Unlike the Indian philosopher, Pirsig and Bronowski saw that the destruction of Nagasaki really happened. If we deny it, we are either pretending or ignoring the truth. So the real philosophical split is not between the rational and emotional. I suppose one could say that if the division between the parts of the soul is too great, it ends up causing a split personality or some other kind of mental distress. It sounds like that is what Phaedrus was experiencing.

The real philosophical division is between the objective and the subjective. The goal, then, of writing, speaking, (rhetoric) and of living a good life (ethics) is to be able to bring the objective and subjective together. One may even quibble over whether the objective is simply the physical world as an Aristotelian would, or if it is an overriding concept or ideal as a Platonist would, but discovery, originality, and truth bring them together. It is truth, not its elimination, that sets us free. (See John 8:32)

Coleridge himself went through such a transformation. As a young man, he was Unitarian; he was even ordained as a minister in the Unitarian Church. By the time he was thirty, he had pretty much given that up and would eventually join the Church of England as he acknowledged the Trinity. For him, then, the ultimate objective reality is God Himself.

God reveals Himself in His creation and in His Word. Those exist objectively. At the same time, God reveals Himself to the individual in different ways depending on the individual’s personality, needs, and experiences. We read, for example, that after his resurrection, Jesus came to Mary Magdalene in one way, Thomas in another, and Peter in still another. In each case, they had seen Him die and knew now He was alive, but He had something unique to communicate to each one of them.

Now that I think about it, His approach to Mary was more on the emotional level, Thomas on the intellectual or rational level, and Peter’s on the will or ethical level. All were valid, and all today can be used as evidence to demonstrate that Jesus rose from the dead.

I mentioned early in this review that what I recalled from the seventies when I first read this book was the emphasis on excellence, on the motorcycle maintenance. The book ends with an effective discussion on Quality. The Greek word Aristotle uses is aretê. I think my friend Joe and I may have read the same translation of Aristotle because in our discussion I recall using the word excellence. Quality in this context means the same thing. I note that English translations of the New Testament often also use the word excellence or sometimes the word virtue for aretê.

Yes, I loved this book both times I read it. The first time because I had a motorcycle. The second time because I have taught writing for many years. I could identify. The book itself is well written. I was an English major. I liked the expression and the stories—both the road trip and the Phaedrus tale. It had echoes of both On the Road and The Bell Jar.

My two friends came from the scientific side. Joe was a Ph.D. candidate in biology. Like Pirsig, who enrolled in a Ph.D. program in philosophy, Joe became disgusted with the politics of the program and he began to see that he likely would never be able to claim his degree due to roadblocks beyond his control. Randy has had a career in computer programming after majoring in applied mathematics in college—very rational, Pirsig might say. It spoke to them as well.

There was one difference this time reading it that was honestly shocking to me. Pirsig wrote an afterword to the book in 1984. Obviously, the first time I read the book, the afterword was not included. This time I read a more recent edition which included it. Part of the afterword expresses Pirsig’s almost stunned response to the popularity of the book. He writes that 121 editors had turned the book down. The one who accepted it thought it was well written, but he was not expecting much. That it became a bestseller is almost a miracle.

That part was not unlike the introduction to The Glass Menagerie which Tennessee Williams wrote after that play became a hit. He called the essay “The Catastrophe of Success.” His title expresses something of how both men felt when their work was publicly acclaimed.

Without giving away too much, Pirsig writes a little of some other things that happened in his life after writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One thing he relates was shocking and sad. Let us just leave it at that. Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of spoilers.

Let us leave on a positive note. One which I believe Pirsig, Aristotle, and Plato would all affirm each according to his own logic:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Philippians 4:8)

And, yes, excellence here in the original Greek is aretê.

Note

¹If we consider Pirsig’s earlier definition of Zen (dhyana) as “a discipline for the elimination of physical, mental, and emotional activity,” then this sounds like the elimination of the soul, or at least a good part of it. According to Jesus, that is dangerous. He warned, ” What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36) Even if it were possible to be “enlightened” this way, is it worth it if you lose your soul?

Work Cited

Macaulay, Susan Schaeffer. How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig. Colorado Springs: Cook Communications, 1982. Print.

Tasha Alexander. Behind the Shattered Glass. New York: Minotaur P, 2013. Print.

Behind the Shattered Glass is a traditional murder mystery set in Victorian England, which seems to be a popular time period for murder mysteries. It would be easy to see Hitchcock turning it into a film like Rebecca or Christie turning it into a play.

By page four the murder victim has crashed into a room through glass doors and immediately expires. So begins the mystery. The room is on the estate of Colin and Emily Hargreaves, and the victim is the Marquess of Montagu, the lord of a neighboring castle.

Much of the story is told from the first person perspective of Lady Emily, an amateur sleuth. (This is not the first volume of her stories). The third person portion of the mystery tells of what is going on “downstairs,” covering the staff at the marquess’s own estate.

It turns out that while the marquess was quite sociable and popular among his peers, he also had a dark side. He was a cad who ruined a number of women from lower classes. He had an affair with the daughter of the local vicar. He promised to marry her, of course, but had become engaged to a rich American heiress.

His cousin Lady Matilda grew up on the Montagu estate and appears to be the heir, but it is complicated. The marquess has told Matilda that he prefers London and Matilda can continue living at the Derbyshire estate, but that changes when his fiancee has big ideas for renovating the place.

Obviously, his death has put an end to those plans, so Matilda makes her own, keeping more with the family tradition. However, soon a male heir, a distant cousin, appears with the rights to inherit the place. Rodney comes with his own ideas and a valet who is an American Indian that prefers sleeping outdoors in a tent.

There is also an Oxford classmate of the late marquess who seemed to be his best friend at school until he double crossed him. Not only did he copy his friend’s paper for another class, but then he accused his friend of plagiarism. Because he was a marquess, his version was accepted and his friend was expelled from the university.

In other words, there are any number of suspects. More, in fact, than Lady Emily can keep track of.

It also turns out that although Rodney, the heir apparent to the title, has spent most of his life abroad in Asia and America with some side trips to Africa, he and the vicar’s daughter are acquainted.

There is also some downstairs drama as Earl Simon Flyte, who has been visiting the Hargreaves, has taken an interest in the artwork of one of the maids at the Montagu estate. One of the other maids is clearly jealous and does what she can to make life miserable for her. Will Lily fall prey to Flyte as a number of maids and others fell to the wiles of the late marquess, or are the earl’s interests more esthetic and honorable?

As a curious subplot, Lady Emily tries to help her friend Lady Matilda disprove Sir Rodney’s claim. In investigating the Montagu family tree, she discovers a tantalizing diary of an 18th century ancestor that may put the whole family’s status in doubt.

There is a lot going on in this rambling setting. It is late Victorian, about the time of many of the Sherlock Holmes stories: there are horses, not automobiles, but homes are beginning to install electric lights, and it is possible to make a phone call from England to Germany. Mystery fans who enjoy Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs, or the novels of Anthony Trollope will get a kick out of this tale.

Richard Webb, Jr. Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda, Westport, Connecticut 1920. New York: Prospecta P, 2018. Print.

This nicely researched picture history of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is meant to go along with the documentary of the same name produced by the author. It works well. It has numerous photographs and makes a case that many things that inspired Fitzgerald in his writing, especially The Great Gatsby, came from the year he and his new bride spent along the shore of Long Island Sound in Connecticut.

Everyone recognizes that the Marietta, Connecticut, where much of The Beautiful and Damned takes place is based on their stay there, but Webb takes up the hypothesis that a lot of what would appear in The Great Gatsby also comes from things Fitzgerald observed and heard about during their year in Connecticut.

This is not so much a review of the book as a collection of notes taken from the book. It should give us all a better understanding and appreciation of Gatsby at any rate.

The cover photo is an iconic photo of the Fitzgeralds taken in a car in front of the house they rented at 244 Compo Road in Westport. The photo can also be seen on the Scott and Zelda web site. There is a photo on page 110 of Zelda which shows how attractive Zelda could look. It sounds like she was able to drive men crazy, and not just Scott.

Fitzgerald’s college friend Alexander McKaig wrote in his diary that Zelda was “a very dramatic, provincial Southern belle. The sad thing is that Fitz is completely overwhelmed by Zelda’s personality…she’s the role model for all the female characters in his novels…” (89)

He also wrote, “She’s without a doubt, the most beautiful and intelligent woman I have met.” (90) About a visit he made to them, he wrote: “Went to visit Fizgeralds in Westport…stayed drunk for two weeks straight. Atmosphere of crime, lust, sensuality, pervaded the home.” (90)

Webb notes that “more than one of Scott’s friends declared that they were in love with her.” (81) This reminds me of when Daisy arrives at her cousin Nick’s house and Nick is alone (she is not aware that this is done so Gatsby can reunite with her). She asks Nick, “Are you in love with me?” Webb tells us Fitzgerald often noted things Zelda said. This sounds like something she might have said, perhaps on more than one occasion, to different men.

Webb noted that the critic and author Van Wyck Brooks lived nearby at the time and met the Fitzgeralds. His book The Ordeal of Mark Twain was given to Scott while he was working on Gatsby and may have inspired him. Webb says:

In locating the source of American worship of success and riches, Fitzgerald probably, not by coincidence, reproduced Brooks’ thesis: Fitzgerald’s criticism of American worship of success in The Great Gatsby carried the thrust of Brooks’ own thought. (93)

Professor John Henry Raleigh would write:

America had produced an idealism so impalpable that it had lost touch with reality (Gatsby) and materialism so heavy that it was inhuman (Tom Buchanan). (93)

The short story “Dice, Brassknuckles, and Guitar” prefigures Gatsby in a few ways. There is a family in the story named Katzby, and the main character tells someone, “You’re better than all of them put together, Jim.”

While the Fitzgeralds’ landlord was no Gatsby, their house bordered the property of F. E. Lewis, a large estate. Lewis gave them permission to cut across his property to get to a nearby beach. Lewis occasionally had enormous parties. The parties were not as wild as Gatsby’s; indeed, children were usually invited. But they could be extravagant.

One party held in 1917 to raise money for different war charities including the Red Cross had entertainment for all ages. It included camels, elephants, and clowns for the kids. There were vaudeville acts, dance troupes, and a cowboy and Indian show. Belasco, who is mentioned in Gatsby, attended. Entertainment included dancer Anna Pavlova, magician Henry Houdini, and actresses Marie Dressler and Ina Claire. Even John Philip Sousa wrote a composition for one of Lewis’s parties.

Another nearby mansion, now part of the Green Farms Academy, was owned by E. T. Bedford. He was very philanthropic, especially to local causes. He had many political and social contacts. He is even mentioned as an example to emulate in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. We are reminded of Gatsby’s connection with the police commissioner and of some of the political figures who attended his parties.

Neither Lewis nor Bedford had any criminal connections, but we can see traces of Jay Gatsby in these men.

Webb notes that when he was researching his film, he contacted a Lewis descendant who at first refused to talk to him. “My grandfather was not a criminal, Gatsby was,” he complained. Webb eventually was able to interview him, so we do get a sense of the lifestyle of this very wealthy man in 1920.

Webb does mention some bootleggers that Fitzgerald may have known or at least had heard of. While he does recognize that the character of Wolfsheim is based on Arnold Rothstein, there may also have been some Westport connections as well. A Jewish gangster Jacob Rosenzweig (a.k.a. Bald Jack Rose) supplied much of the booze to Westport establishments during Prohibition.

A low-level bootlegger Max Von Gerlach who would become a car dealer closed a letter to Fitzgerald by calling him “old sport.” Later Zelda would say that he was one of the models for Gatsby.

Webb notes that the author Owen Johnson had quite an influence on both Scott and Zelda. His novel The Salamander (1913) was made into a film in 1916 that the teenaged Zelda saw several times and announced that it described the way she wanted to be. Johnson later apparently felt that he had invented the flapper before Fitzgerald, but Scott got the credit. Zelda called Scott “Dodo,” a nickname for one of the characters in The Salamander. Their favorite speakeasy was the Jungle Club, a hangout mentioned in the pre-Prohibition Johnson novel.

Scott himself said that Johnson’s Stover at Yale (1912) was “‘a textbook’ for his generation.” (150) The character Stover also appears in Johnson’s prep school story The Varmint (1910), another book Scott liked. He noted in a 1921 review how he appreciated Johnson’s latest, The Wasted Generation. The title has echoes of Stein’s Lost Generation.

Page 154 of Boats Against the Current lists a number of characters based on acquaintances of Fitzgerald, especially in The Beautiful and Damned since a good part of that is set in Westport.

The Fitzgeralds took an automobile trip from Connecticut to Alabama which Scott would serialize as The Cruise of the Rolling Junk. A modern edition of the story includes this observation in the introduction by Julian Evans:

The Fitzgeralds’ destination is not just ante-bellum but, as he makes clear, prelapsarian America, and their journey is not just into the South, but into the past, an impossible return, as Gatsby’s is. (158)

Prelapsarian is an appropriate word here. Especially so, if we consider Tanner’s thesis about the New Testament burlesque in Gatsby.

Webb’s main thesis is really that Scott and Zelda were truly happy their first year of marriage. Yes, they drank a lot, but Scott had a good income from his first novel, and they were still very much in love. It seems that even by the time Scott began writing Gatsby, there were some difficulties in their relationship, and Gatsby’s romantic recollection of Daisy from five years earlier may well have paralleled what Scott was going through himself at the time.

When Gatsby tells Nick “Of course you can” repeat the past, that may be what Scott himself was hoping for. While Webb notes different people like Lewis, Bedford, Von Gerlach, and others may have contributed to the outward figure of Gatsby, the real character of Gatsby is based on Fitzgerald himself, as Fitzgerald himself admitted.

Professor Walter Raubicheck calls the last page of The Great Gatsby “the most celebrated page in American literature.” (63) The only other pages that I have read that might surpass it are the first and last from Moby Dick. Why quibble?

Webb was able to interview Sam Waterston, who played Nick Carraway in the 1974 film version of Gatsby. The actor read that last page of Gatsby in such a way that it brought tears to everyone’s eyes.

Webb interviewed some descendants of the key figures in his book including Charles Scribner III, a grandson of F. E. Lewis, and Eleanor “Bobbie” Lanahan, the only child of Scott and Zelda’s only child, Scottie.

Scottie would write:

My father was on the scene when we started to lose our way during Gatsby’s time—and he recorded it all—the generosity, the greed, the cynicism, the magnificence and the waste that was America between the two world wars—people read him now for clues and guidelines as if by understanding him in his Beautiful and Damned period they could see more clearly what’s wrong. (63)

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.