Three at a Time

 Many years ago I heard someone explaining that if you have two pairs of shoes and wear them on alternate days they will last longer than if you wore one pair everyday until they wore out and then the other. I can see how that might apply to athletes needing recovery days in their training schedules but not so much how it preserves shoe leather. I'm not sure either what effect reading three books at a time has compared to reading them one after the other.The inestimable Portsmouth Library Service had my next two reservations ready when I was only halfway through Some Tame Gazelle. What happens is that one book grabs you ahead of the others and takes precedence, the second fills in after a big slice of the first and the third choice does well to stay in contention, doesn't get much of a look in and hopes to be returned to later like the abandoned lover in Dusty Springfield's I Just Don't Know What To Do with Myself.

Sarah Bakewell is doing a fine job on the philosophy cool kids in At the Existentialist Cafe. Much better than one might expect of someone who dropped out of Essex University but maybe that's the point and a requisite qualification. I wasn't sure if I'd read it but upstairs it's Agnes Poirier on similar ground. Sarah pitches her discussion of the philosophy just right, for me at least. Although Sartre is reasonably accessible in translation, the likes of Hegel, Derrida and all are often better accessed through critiques or summariesIf Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir didn't understand Husserl then, frankly, what chance do the likes of me have.

Sartre is a brilliant writer and already it's looking less than jollity over Christmas for me as I'll go back to Nausea for another look. But Camus is the preferred option. Camus thinks it's all absurd, Sartre thinks everything has meaning and believes in action. It's a crucial difference and, much though there is to admire in Sartre's analysis and his way of setting it out, I can't see it his way. One example cited is football, in that if it looks absurd to you then you aren't engaged in watching it 'as football' but surely that's the point of his concept of 'bad faith'. You need to suspend your perception of absurdity in order for it to matter what happens.

Sartre's Roquentin knows batter when,

Lacking the routine or family which lend structure to most people's lives, he spends his days in the library or wandering about, or drinking beer in a cafe that plays ragtime music on the record player.

It sounds to me like he's got it right.

Sartre's biggest problem is his belief in 'freedom' which is admittedly better thought out than the vacuous use of the word by our current Prime Minister and means nothing at all once examined.  

For me 'freedom' has always been an illusion caused by the fact we believe ourselves to be always making choices. That 'freedom' causes 'Anguish' and I can see all that follows but he's closer to something useful in his other big idea, 'Nothingness'. 

If we were in a position to know all the factors impingeing on us when we make our choices - such things as personality traits, circumstances, economic and social pressures - then it would be possible to calculate which decision we'd come to. But we can't do that any more than I could forsee that Allmankind would fade innocuously well below the distance at Huntingdon today. We aren't as free as we'd like to think we are and, more in the spirit of Camus, it's better to adapt to our limitations.

There's plenty more to come, I'm sure, and with rain forecast for tomorrow and Tuesday, it's likely to be finished by Wednesday and then I'll be free to read A.N. Barbara Pym or somethging else. It will seem to me that I'm making the choice, not realizing that it's already decided for me and any volition I credit myself with is illusory.

A.N. Wilson, after so much praise for his immense scholarship has gathered here, especially in recent weeks, is jumping less well in Our Times, his big survey of the second Elizabethan period. He has always been vaguely suspected of being suspect but given free rein, as it were, on contemporary issues, he is revealed as what one always thought he was, a disgruntled Telegraph reader with an erroneous belief that at some time in the past things were preferable.

He detects a 'malaise' that he can't extricate from Britain loss of empire and post war reduction to less than a major world power. In previous books he has acknowledged that such status had been built on piracy, tyranny, indistrialisation, colonisation and the slave trade. Those important points don't seem to bother him when he lauds the likes of belligerent, chippy old right-wingers like Pergrine Worsthorne who found their sense of entitlement threatened by 'socialism'. It's not a pretty sight to see such a fine mind floundering on ethical issues.

Many of those of us who once had at least some sympathy for Socialism might by now have accepted its shortcomings but that is not to say that unrestrained Capitalism and all that comes with Donald Trump is at all preferable. At least Socialism meant well. And Wilson is big enough to admit that post-war rationing fed poor people better than they'd been fed before, compared to rich people, and it was ironically a Socialist principle.

I've peeped ahead to see Wilson mischieviously suggesting that Margaret Thatcher and the Sex Pistols were doing similar things, iconoclastic and motivated by, apparently, deep frustrations. It's a brilliant comparison in as far as both sides would find themselves unflattered by it. What Wilson seems to miss, with his limited appreciation of pop music, is how brilliantly contrived- by Malcolm McLaren - the Sex Pistols were, like a real life cartoon, as subversive from within the system as Salvador Dali. Whether Margaret Thatcher was that or not, I wouldn't like to say.

Meanwhile Barbara Pym waits patiently, like the sort of unrequited type that might appear in one of her novels. I will go back to her after my involvement with sexier types and the challenge of arguing with Wilson. She is less concerned about the tree-ness of a tree or bemoaning that our country no longer bullies the world for the benefit of its own enrichment. That alone makes her in many ways a more likeable writer.