Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Since I am on a quest to read the Great Books, I decided to download the audio version of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I think because it's audio, it got a bit confusing, plus there are characters with the same name and it goes back and forth in time. Certainly a recipe for confusion.

After looking up a summary in order to get everyone straight, I got the gist of it. There are three children being raised together by the Earnshaw family. Two, Hindley and Catherine are biological brother and sister. Heathcliff is adopted as a young lad. Hindley becomes bitterly jealous of the new addition, while Catherine and Heathcliff grow very close. There is another family that lives nearby, the Lintons. They have two children, Edgar and Isabella. Eventually Hindley marries and his wife dies giving birth to Hareton. Catherine marries Edgar, much to Heathcliff's enduring disappointment, yet she also dies in childbirth with Catherine (called Cathy). Heathcliff marries Isabella to spite Edgar who hates him. While she doesn't die in childbirth, she leaves Heathcliff shortly after giving birth to a son, Linton. When she dies about 15 years later, he is sent to live with the father he never knew. Heathcliff is now more bitter than ever, abusively raising Hindley's son, Hareton, after Hindley dies as a form of long-term revenge. When a pale, sickly Linton comes to live with him, Heathcliff only cares so that he may marry the boy off to Cathy and thereby inherit for himself the Linton property.

Everyone in the novel is a pretty unimpressive human being. The entire story is told by the housekeeper to a visitor. No one looks good. Even the housekeeper has fallen victim to the selfish mentality. All are narcissistic and extreme versions of awful, selfish people. I suppose this is what "love" looks like when there is absolutely no thought of another. Even Cathy, who seems untainted by the drama of her parents, eventually falls prey to Heathcliff's bitterness after going to live with him upon her marriage to Linton. It's two in-bred generations of self-centered self-pity. It's not unusual for the cause of death to be a broken and embittered heart. Odd.

I guess I didn't really identify with any of the characters, except as a cautionary tale. What not to do. No one is happy. Everyone lives their entire lives full of anger, bitterness, and regret. The book ends with Heathcliff being buried in the same grave as Catherine, literally on top of her so he can be with her in eternity.

Really.

Maybe it's me, but I really did not like the book. I'm not sure of the point. I'm sure better minds than I can get far more out of it.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Looking for something lighter than usual, I suggested Wodehouse's Jeeves books to my book club. Since there are so many, we decided we would each choose whichever one we wanted. I decided on Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. I'd already read Right Ho, Jeeves, (my post here) and although Carry On was written before, it refers to events from the latter book as having already happened. Hmmmm.No matter, the book was delightful. This time, it is up to Bertram Wooster, the young playboy, to patch up the engagement of Gussie Fink-Nottle to Madeline Basset lest the young woman come after Wooster. Of course Bertie makes a mess of all and Jeeves swoops in to rescue him as only Jeeves, the "gentlemen's gentleman" can.

I love the subtle and not-so-subtle humor of the books. I love Wooster's inner monologue and self-awareness while having lack of self-awareness. I love Jeeves, while being always agreeable, manages to finesse events to his will. Wodehouse is a genius and his books, although light-hearted and very funny, are so well-written they deserve the accolades given him.

One particularly clever bit after Wooster has narrowly avoided being seen by Plank, a man who has it out for him:

Wooster: You may be happy, but I haven't been for the last quarter of an hour or so, nestling behind the sofa and expecting Plank at any moment to unmask me. It didn't occur to you to envisage what would happen if he met me?
Jeeves: I was sure that your keen intelligence would enable you to find a means of avoiding him, sir, as indeed it did. You concealed yourself behind the sofa?
Wooster: On all fours
Jeeves: A very shrew manoeuvre on your part, if I may say so, sir. It showed a resource and swiftness of thought which it would be difficult to overpraise.

Gotta love that Jeeves!

Manalive by G.K. Chesterton

I've never read anything by G.K. Chesterton. I know Orthodoxy is a favorite of Regan's, but for some reason I decided to start with his fiction. What a strange, unexpected, little book is Manalive by G.K. Chesterton.

The setting is a boarding house in London (I believe), with its requisite odd group of characters. As they are standing out in the garden one day, discussing the day's news and philosophizing, a strange man bursts over the fence and changes their lives. His strange, child-like behavior proves very off-putting at first, but within a short time, he grows on them. When he, however, desires to propose to one of the group's friends, they are thrown into a conundrum. How can their sweet, innocent friend possibly marry a man as silly and guileless as Mr. Innocent Smith. 

To simply consider the possibility of living a simple, care-free life, throwing caution to the wind and taking a chance suddenly begins to open up new ways of living that they had never imagined. Just as they are considering the implications, a doctor and an officer show up looking for Mr. Smith who appears to be quite the conman and criminal. 

The group commences an in-house trial and the prosecution gets to work. Yet every single example, be it of burglary or even adultery, can be explained by the defense. 

It turns out that Mr. Innocent Smith has decided that he will LIVE as long as he is alive. To the unsuspecting world who spends most of their time just waiting to die, this can look quite unorthodox. (Ironic for the man best known for Orthodoxy.) 

At the end of this delightful book, Chesterton says, “There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't like it. If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons. If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love letter was like a song—at least, not a comic song.” (p. 183)

It's a sweet book with a sweet (however probably highly impracticable) lesson.

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

There are a few book that those interested in Classical Education are told they HAVE to read. Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper is one of them. For such an impactful book, it is surprisingly short: only about 50 pages. Yet every word is packed with insight and wisdom. It is one of those very rare books in which I was marking just about every paragraph for further reflection.

His thesis is simply that without intentional leisure, culture withers and dies. He worries that in our too-hurried and work-focused world, leisure will be lost and culture along with it. He returns to the ancients, as so many of us do for wisdom. For while leisure is decidedly not work, it is in fact its opposite, it is not sloth either. It is divine contemplation. It is knowing God. This the ancients understood.

“It should, however, be added that even the philosophers of antiquity (which here and elsewhere always means the philosophers of Greece and the Middle Ages) looked upon the active effort of discursive thought as the properly human element in our knowledge; it is the ratio, they held, which is distinctively human; the intellectus they regarded as being already beyond the sphere allotted to man. And yet it belonged to man, though in one sense ‘superhuman’; the ‘purely human’ by itself could not satiate man's powers of comprehension, for man, of his very nature, reaches out beyond the sphere of the ‘human’, touching on the order of pure spirits. ‘Although the knowledge which is most characteristic of the human soul occurs in the mode of ratio, nevertheless there is in it a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings, of whom it is therefore said that they possess the faculty of spiritual vision.’ That is how the matter is put by Aquinas in the Quaestiones disputate de veritate. It means to say that man participates in the angelic faculty of non-discursive vision, which is the capacity to apprehend the spiritual in the same manner that our eye apprehends light or our ear sound. Our knowledge in fact includes an element of non-activity, of purely receptive vision—though it is certainly not essentially human; it is, rather, the fulfilment of the highest promise in man, and thus, again, truly human (just as Aquinas calls the vita contemplativa ‘non proprie humana sed super humana’, not really human but superhuman, although it is the noblest way of life).” (p. 10)

Pieper gives a wonderful example of the beauty that results when we no longer have to work hard to do the right thing, when our contemplation simply becomes who we are.

“The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one's enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility one might almost say, of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty. And therefore, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether—it would be more meritorious still.’” (p. 15)

Yet we are so defined by work.

“This implies nothing against training and nothing against the official. Of course specialized and professional work is normal, the normal way in which men play their part in the world; ‘work’ is the normal, the working day is the ordinary day. But the question is: whether the world, defined as the world of work, is exhaustively defined; can man develop to the full as a functionary and a ‘worker’ and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence?” (p. 20) 

No, Pieper answers. There is more to being human than working.

“In the Middle Ages the same view prevailed. ‘It is necessary for the perfection of human society’, Aquinas writes, ‘that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation—nota bene, necessary not only for the good of the individual who so devotes himself, but for the good of human society.’” (p. 23)  

Yet, as stated earlier, Pieper is definitely not advocating for sloth or laziness.

“Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man prefers to forgo the rights, or if you prefer the claims, that belong to his nature. In a word, he does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally, is. Acedia is the ‘despair from weakness’ which Kierkegaard analysed as the ‘despairing refusal to be oneself’. Metaphysically and theologically, the notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being; that behind or beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not at one with himself, or, as the medieval writers would have said, face to face with the divine good within him; he is a prey to sadness (and that sadness is the tristitia saeculi of Holy Scripture).” (p. 24) 

And what is behind this all-pervasive desire to truncate humans into simple workers? Pieper sees an insidious intent to enslave humanity to the power of the state by depriving them of the very means to be free.

“This inner constraint, the inner chains which fetter us to ‘work’, prompts a further question: ‘proletarianism’ thus understood, is perhaps a symptomatic state of mind common to all levels of society and by no means confined to the ‘proletariat’, to the ‘worker’, a general symptom that is merely found isolated in unusually acute form in the proletariat; so that it might be asked whether we are not all of us proletarians and all of us, consequently, ripe and ready to fall into the hands of some collective labour State and be at its disposal as functionaries—even though explicitly of the contrary political opinion.” (p. 39) 

Therefore, leisure is no luxury or superfluous pursuit. It is the very essence of a fully-formed human.
It is, in fact, a gift from God.

“All this is true too of leisure: its possibility, its ultimate justification derive from its roots in divine worship. That is not a conceptual abstraction, but the simple truth as may be seen from the history of religion. What does a ‘day of rest’ mean in the Bible, and for that matter in Greece and Rome? To rest from work means that time is reserved for divine worship: certain days and times are set aside and transferred to ‘the exclusive property of the Gods’. (p. 45) ... cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.” (p. 48)