I picked up a free book!

Before one suspects that I’ve forgotten I’m in Paris, a Paris update. Shakespeare and Co. had a basket of free books at the front of the store 🙂  That really is such a lovely store–the free FUSAC in front of Shakespeare helped me find this apartment! I’m quite fortunate, too. My Japanese friend has been on the apartment-search for three weeks now.

As mentioned, I picked up The Invasion Handbook by Tom Paulin from Shakespeare and Co. It’s shows just how little I know about the origins of World War II. Paulin covers the events leading up to World War II, starting from the Versailles Treaty in 1919–all in 200 pages. How? Comme ça:

Context.

I tend to think that my experiences/feelings/thoughts are unique. The details certainly are. But I often need to remind myself that it’s really not singular. That many, many people have the same experiences/feelings/thoughts. When its something positive, something that makes me really happy, I could care less about whether anyone is experiencing the same (I’m terribly selfish). When its something less positive, however, I like to know that I’m not unique.

What I mean to say is that people have been feeling these same emotions for centuries! millenia! And most of them muddle through. Some of these individuals have even left behind their ideas, experiences, and emotions in tangible works–music, literature, paintings…movies, TV shows, magazine articles, blogs.

In History Boys, Mr. Hector explains how poetry becomes our own expression:

Timms: Sir, I don’t always understand poetry!
Mr. Hector: You don’t always understand it. Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now, and you will understand it…whenever.
Timms: I don’t see how we can understand it! Most of the stuff poetry’s about hasn’t happened to us yet.
Mr. Hector: But it will, Timms, it will. And when it does, you’ll have the antidote ready. Grief, happiness–even when you’re dying.

For the same reason, I love Before Sunset. Each time I watch the film is a unique experience. I watched it again recently and as always, I discovered things about myself.

The Book of Psalms kind of works like that as well. Some passages are really lovely, but only at the right time.

Psalms 16

Keep me safe, O God, for in you I take refuge. I said to the Lord, “You are my Lord; apart from you I have no good thing.” Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance. I will praise the Lord, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me. I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure. You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Love.

On history.

I have very little (and nothing new) to say about history. But I do appreciate it more and more. I’ve always loved studying history because it was fun and really not that difficult. The unique elation one feels from getting a superb grade for a paper submitted with three minutes to spare is fantastic! Clearly I’m pleased, but at the same time, I’ve lately wondered why the humanities are important. I suspect that part of the difficulty rests with a society that focuses on making profits and measurable progress. But I’ll save my views on capitalism for another time. And each time I return home and meet the med school friends (congrats!), bme people, engineers, even architects, I wonder whether I’m wasting time and talent on fluff. Yes, fluff. The less-gifted study history and art, the more-gifted take on the STEM fields, right? At least that’s the mindset of many Asians.

But back to history. I’m reading The Embarrassment of Riches by Simon Schama. Schama discusses the founding myth of the Netherlands as a land and people set apart; sounds familiar, yeah? Also, I read an article the other day in the Atlantic about the Mugwumps and the state of politics in the 1880s. David Frum puts the current political discourse in perspective thusly:

You think Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann talks harshly? Listen to this campaign speech from 1880:

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers, every keeper of Libby, Andersonville and Salisbury, every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the back were a legal tender for labor performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child—every solitary one was a Democrat.

That was Robert Ingersoll, one of the most famous orators of his day, stumping for the Republicans. Think of him when people tell you that today’s political discourse has sunk below the standards of the hallowed past.

The point itself has been made again and again. We all probably knew at some point that Charles Sumner (Ma) was rather severely beaten by Preston Brooks (Sc) in 1856 (yay Wikipedia for names/dates). And the Brooks-Sumner affair was recently resurrected courtesy of Congressman Joe Wilson (thanks to TNC for the point), also of South Carolina.

So that’s what history does, I think. Again, the point has been pounded to near-oblivion, but still, I find it true. History, in a big sense, gives context and keeps us level-headed.

But there’s also the personal side of history. Again, I must reference TNC. Two things. First, in December (?) there was an article about hair cuts for black men and one on history, white guilt, civil rights, and racism. I was pretty lost in both conversations (I spent more time reading the comments section than the article itself. Unlike most comments sections, TNC’s commenters are insightful and well-written. No trolls.) I have never in my life thought about where black men (and women) get their hair cut. I have also never felt justified in saying anything about civil rights/slavery in the US because I feel so disconnected from that history. History is emotional. That’s willy-nilly, touchy-feely, but I’m not sure how best to describe it. I cannot study Mao Zedong’s policies, listen to Joan Baez sing about Tiananmen Square (though I disagree with her to some extent), read about the Cultural Revolution objectively or passively. I hold strong opinions about these issues. I imagine that it’s the same for Americans and civil rights/slavery. Knowing little to nothing, I cannot jump into this issue, though many people who seem to know little to nothing about China throw out their ideas on highly-public forums, which is terribly irritating to me. Thank goodness for level-headed observers like James Fallows (also of the Atlantic :)).

Be it history, general, or history, personal, people must be aware of it for it to have any import. Yet humanities departments continue to atrophy.

I got a good, nerdy laugh out of this:

Courtesy of the inimitable James Fallows:

As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way — or you could write this:

“Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy — a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton — that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to ‘earmarking’ the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain’s gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d’Abernon, Britain’s ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, ‘This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.’ “

This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the “small rubber tires” detail and mot juste “trundling” term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.