Amor Mundi 8/10/14

08-11-2014

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Through the Looking Glass

Fantasy novelist Lev Grossman discusses why he loves the work of C.S. Lewis, who as opposed to most contemporary fantasy fiction wasn't particularly interested in the way that his world worked: "People talk a lot about the ecology of [George R. R. Martin's] Westeros, for instance-how do the seasons work? What are the climate patterns? How does it function as an ecosphere? You have to think about the economy, too-have I got a working feudal model? It's gotten so extreme that when characters do magic, it's very common to see fantasy writers talk about thermodynamics-okay, he's lighting a candle with magic, can he draw the heat from somewhere else in the room so that equilibrium gets preserved?  This is the school of thought that extends from Tolkien and his scrupulously-crafted Middle Earth. Lewis was of a different school from that. Magic, to him, was a much wilder, stranger thing. It was much less domesticated. And when I re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I feel as though we've wandered too far from the true magic, the kind Lewis wrote. Maybe we want to worry less about thermodynamics and work harder to get that sense of wonder he achieves with such apparent effortlessness. And then, there are things that he does that are simply not replicable. The lamppost in the woods: there's something indescribably strange and romantic about that image, which recurs at the end of the book. In some ways, you read Lewis and think: I can learn from this guy. But sometimes you have to sit back and think, I'll never know how he did that. You know, I've seen the lamppost in Oxford which is alleged to be the Narnia lamppost. To me, it looked like an ordinary lamppost. I would not have seen that lamppost and gone home to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. You had to be Lewis to see it for what it was."

Soul Time

The statistical and technological mania has reached the soul. Casey N. Cep reports that a pastor, John Ortberg, has teamed up with a sociologist to market "a simpler way of measuring a soul: SoulPulse, a technology project that captures real-time data on the spirituality of Americans. SoulPulse attempts to quantify the soul, an unbodied version of what FitBit, the exercise-tracking device, has done for the body. After filling in a brief intake survey on your age, race, ethnicity, education, income, and religious affiliation, SoulPulse contacts you twice a day with questions about your physical health, spiritual disciplines, and religious experiences. Each of the surveys takes less than five minutes to complete.... Ortberg, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, listened to my concerns, and said, 'On the one hand, not everything can be put in a test tube or seen with a microscope. The most important dimensions of life have to do with the spirit, and those aren't always quantifiable. But using the best tools and methods available seems like a worthwhile thing.' He also stressed that, while SoulPulse is using new tools, it is answering old questions. Describing Brother Lawrence's 'The Practice of the Presence of God,' a seventeenth-century text that linked God's presence to daily tasks like doing the dishes and cooking meals, Ortberg said that believers across the centuries have tried to cultivate a mindfulness of the holy."

The Search for Falafel

There are so many opinions about Gaza, so it is worthwhile to read a diary of the everyday there, from bombs and scares to the search for falafel. Atef Abu Saif published his diary of eight days during the war in the New York Times: "When I wake up I don't want to listen to the radio or phone a friend to ask about the latest developments. I want the morning to be like a normal morning, before the war. To start my day with a cup of coffee, to sip it in private for an hour. To look down from my window and watch the people in the street, to feel the pulse of the city around me. I suggest to Hanna that we have a proper breakfast: hummus, foul, falafel. But after an hour of visiting all the restaurants in the neighborhood, my son Mostafa returns with the news that falafel can no longer be bought in Jabaliya camp. My father-in-law explains that this might be because falafel requires a lot of boiled oil, which in turn requires lots of gas. As there is still no clue when the war might end, everyone is saving every gas cylinder they have. Hanna suggests that the lack of parsley in the market might be another cause; parsley is essential for making good falafel. My mother-in-law is watering her plants despite the shortage of water in the tanks. She keeps her plants in the living room in different pots arranged around the room. They make the house calmer, greener. There are 13 kinds of plants in this garden. Every morning she waters them and checks each leaf, remembers each one, and notices whenever a new leaf buds into life. She knows their length and their sheen. She always finds water for them. A minute later she is complaining that our oldest child, Talal, is taking too much time in the shower."

Wars and Pictures

Gabriel Winslow-Yost considers the World War I comics of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi: "For his WWI books he restricts himself almost exclusively to three horizontal panels per page. These unusually wide, large panels fit the trenches and barren battlefields, and give him room to balance his careful renditions of tanks, guns, soiled uniforms, and exhausted faces against the emptiness of washed-out sky or devastated ground. The three-panel page also gives the action a slow, stuttering rhythm-a series of frozen moments, rather than any sort of continuous movement. This suits the mournful anecdotes of It Was the War perfectly. A pointless French infantry charge early in the book is agonizing, monumental. The soldiers are running, stumbling, bleeding, but with an eerie, almost sadistic slowness; Tardi draws them just at the moment they fall, in one case right as the bullet hits. The fundamental trick of comics is to convince us that a series of still images, all visible at once, are in fact depicting the passage of time. At its best, It Was the War manages to do the reverse: we see furious action stilled, the final horrible moments of these men prolonged indefinitely. The captions offer us a taste of contemporary jingoism: 'Joyful, despite their grief, are those families whose blood flows for their country.'"

Modernity and the University

Noting that the essay is conspicuously anti-modern, Joshua Rothman answers William Deresiewicz's "Don't Send Your Kids To The Ivy League": "Deresiewicz believes that colleges can push the modern world out, that the proper role of a college is to be anti-modern. On today's élite campuses, Deresiewicz writes, 'everything is technocratic,' centered on 'the development of expertise'; wouldn't it be better, he wonders, if colleges replaced expertise with soulfulness? 'The job of college,' he proposes, is 'to help you become an individual, a unique being-a soul.' By this measure, religious colleges 'deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word,' than do Ivy League schools. The implication is that, by rearranging their priorities, colleges could recapture the purity of purpose they once had. They could bring the past into the present. But this both underestimates the power of modernity and overestimates the power of colleges.... Colleges aren't monasteries. They can't give their students spiritual sustenance; they can't provide an escape from modernity. And they shouldn't be faulted, or punished, for that. There are good ways of responding to the modern world, but they don't have much to do with college. In 'Ulysses,' we admire Bloom's attitude of curious acceptance, which seems to be rooted in his disposition. In Proust, we learn to take solace in memory (Proust is hard to teach, in part, because twenty-one-year-olds have barely had time to forget anything). In 'Anna Karenina,' the answer seems to be patience and the passage of time. Levin flirts with the Deresiewiczian idea of escaping from modernity; maybe, he thinks, he should marry into a farming family, forget about writing his book, and cultivate a mode of life that allows him to live cheaply, simply, and away from the striving, citified world. In the end, he recognizes that he cannot pry himself loose from his own era. He marries the woman he loves-an upper-crust girl from Moscow-and admits to himself that, when it comes to the purpose of life, 'nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.... He was in the position of a man looking for food in a toymaker's or a gunsmith's shop.' In the end, Levin does the best he can; he nurtures a tentative faith, muddles through, tries to live a good life, and only occasionally despairs. Could a better college education have helped him avoid that? Not really." Let's hope Bard students would answer differently.

Eichmann, Von Mildenstein, and Arnon Goldfinger

At the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the accused was asked who the initiators were of the program of forced Jewish emigration from 1933-1939. He was asked if Heydrich was involved. Yes, he replied, but he did not initiate it. Pressed, Eichmann admitted that he himself was one of the initiators. Pressed further, he answers that the intellectual father of the German policy of Jewish emigration was Baron Leopold von Mildenstein. Mildenstein is the person who recruited Eichmann into the SS office on Jewish Affairs. Imagine the surprise of Arnon Goldfinger, living in Tel Aviv, when he learns that his Zionist grandparents were best friends with von Mildenstein and his wife. "I found much more about [von Mildenstein] than what is in the film. It was important to say that he did not l[ea]ve the Nazi party. He was involved in anti-Semitic propaganda. But he wanted to stay in contact with Jews. I found all kinds of other things about him, nothing that would change your mind, no smoking gun, but you could ask yourself, 'Did he have an alternative?' The way to describe what happened was this. Nobody knew what Hitler wanted, but everybody knew if they did something Hitler did not want, it's the end. It was a classic regime of terror. There's a book called Alone in Berlin that described life in the war. It's horrible. I am a Jew; I don't so much identify with them, but still I can understand and ask the question, 'Could he do something?' If you look at his career, you won't find him in the concentration camps. He is in the headquarters, spying, thinking. For me, it's enough. One of the most shocking moments for me was when Edda told me that she knew my family had lost someone in the concentration camps. She did not have the details right. She thought it was my grandfather's mother, not my grandmother's mother. She's a little mistaken with the details but it shows that she and therefore her parents knew some of what happened. That means my grandparents were sitting over there in the garden where we were, discussing the death of someone from their family with a man who was a Nazi. Did they ask him if he received their letter asking for help? Did he tell them he could not help them? There were a lot of lies over there." "The Flat," the movie he made about the discovery, is absolutely worth viewing.

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