From .. Kingdom of God, by Tolstoy

Read a chapter of Kingdom of God by Tolstoy. Had got the book from list of books that Gandhi was inspired by. The book was written when Tolstoy was around 50 and facing a spiritual crisis. Had achieved all he could have wanted materially and artistically is what the prefaces typically say. And was asking the question what for and what more? He turned to Christianity and church but was soon dillusioned by it and came out with a series of books and essays damming the church and detailing his spiritual thoughts.. Anyways this book is considered amongst his most influential books on the subject. It is not an easy book to read since it is not just religious in nature but more specifically Christianity focussed. As I usually do when faced with such writings, I was browsing different chapters and settled for no obvious reason on the final chapter, which is about 30 odd pages atleast in itself. I have not completed it yet. But read about half of it. It is an aggrieved, gut wrenching potrayal of the exploitation of the peasants in Russia at the time by the army/govt, all the same, and how it was so against the doctrines of Christ. The narrative thus far is dominated by 2/3 events which detail the domination and torture/murder of the poor, famished, landless peasants by the landlords, govt and army. BUt its the fundamental questions that are weaved in the narrative, which anchor them.

The first question asked is why do the judge, govt and soldier support the torture/murder of these peasants when they all seem to be reasonable people who in private life would not even think of harming or stealing.. But then what made them do these hideous acts without so much as a flutter of the conscience?

The reason given in his experience by each level of individual involved in this crime, is that it is to protect and maintain the status quo of the goverment structure.. My words here are not quite right, but as I understood, it meant; keeping the status quo of the situation, what was right/wrong as government was espousing. So if the Govt. driven social structure was that whoever did not support the Tzar shoudl be punished by death or that the peasants did not have rights versus the higher classses of society adn their supression was essential in order to keep them in check, that had to be maintained.

Tolstoy's argument is two fold. His primary consideration is Why people are believing this? His first reason is that for the judges, landowners and senior govt officials it is their self preservation which makes thme need to maintain the status quo. Those who are in power by supressing teh masses and know that if they are not in power they would be in danger, will have the need to not have the structure challenge it and do everything to keep it. They also know that their current luxuries are built upon the exploitation of the people and attached to the positiosn they hold, not because of whats in them as people. And if they are out of these positions, what work woudl they get? So the reasons for those in power to maintain the status quo is quite obvious.

But then the question is why does the lowest level in that chain who actually perpetuate the crimer and the torture do it? He has rises from the peasant people himself. And those he kills and murders are his companions. Why does he do it? He also does not have greate benefits accruing to him because of the current structure. He is paid poorly. And there is immense dehumanization of his lot. So why does he do it? Tolstoy's experience of speakign to soldiers about how they see their acts consistent with their beliefs as religious Christians, is that they believe that 1) if the Govt is saying this needs to happen, the Govt, all these senior people cannot be wrong, there must be a reason. It is my ignorance. 2) There must be something in Christianity which allows this seeming inconsistency to co-exist. Again it is my ignorance that I dont know it.

But he adds that there is something very distinct that the military does with and to these soldiers to make them kill without a second glance at their conscience. And that is the military code of conduct which says that the soldier shall at all times carry out the orders of his superior without any questions or challenges. And also tha his allegience shall at all times be towards the Tzar and his interests should not be compromised. Tolstoy believes that these aspects of the soldier's training has played a big part in their brainwashing.

He goes on to the argument that this whole business of torture and murder happens because the lowest level of soldier is there as the tool to be used for these acts. The judges and others in Govt who play a role in this act finally taking place never see the consequences of their action or decision. If the soldier refused to act and commit the crime, these higher level officers would not be able to get it executed.

His narrations of the scenes of poor peasants getting flogged, murdered are vivid in their descriptions. That it has affected Tolstoy greatly is evident from the focus and detail these descriptions have in the chapter.

The Art of Fiction - Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. He has a special workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing to the tower room only when “characters” drive him up there.

The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the main room of the house. The door between the two is kept ajar by a heavy volume listing and describing The World’s Aircraft Engines. The bedroom is large, sunny, the windows facing east and south letting in the day’s light on white walls and a yellow-tinged tile floor.

The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls. A large and low double bed dominates one section, oversized slippers and loafers neatly arranged at the foot, the two bedside tables at the head piled seven-high with books. In the other alcove stands a massive flat-top desk with a chair at either side, its surface an ordered clutter of papers and mementos. Beyond it, at the far end of the room, is an armoire with a leopard skin draped across the top. The other walls are lined with white-painted bookcases from which books overflow to the floor, and are piled on top among old newspapers, bullfight journals, and stacks of letters bound together by rubber bands.

It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed—that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets. There is just enough space left on top of the bookcase for a typewriter, surmounted by a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east window.

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

A man of habit, Hemingway does not use the perfectly suitable desk in the other alcove. Though it allows more space for writing, it too has its miscellany: stacks of letters; a stuffed toy lion of the type sold in Broadway nighteries; a small burlap bag full of carnivore teeth; shotgun shells; a shoehorn; wood carvings of lion, rhino, two zebras, and a wart-hog—these last set in a neat row across the surface of the desk—and, of course, books: piled on the desk, beside tables, jamming the shelves in indiscriminate order— novels, histories, collections of poetry, drama, essays. A look at their titles shows their variety. On the shelf opposite Hemingway’s knee as he stands up to his “work desk” are Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, Ben Ames Williams’s House Divided, The Partisan Reader, Charles A. Beard’s The Republic, Tarle’s Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, How Young You Look by Peggy Wood, Alden Brooks’s Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand, Baldwin’s African Hunting, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, and two books on General Custer’s fall at the battle of the Little Big Horn.

The room, however, for all the disorder sensed at first sight, indicates on inspection an owner who is basically neat but cannot bear to throw anything away—especially if sentimental value is attached. One bookcase top has an odd assortment of mementos: a giraffe made of wood beads; a little cast-iron turtle; tiny models of a locomotive; two jeeps and a Venetian gondola; a toy bear with a key in its back; a monkey carrying a pair of cymbals; a miniature guitar; and a little tin model of a U.S. Navy biplane (one wheel missing) resting awry on a circular straw place mat—the quality of the collection that of the odds and ends which turn up in a shoebox at the back of a small boy’s closet. It is evident, though, that these tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the bush, yet ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at them,” he says.

Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

As a result, though a wonderful raconteur, a man of rich humor, and possessed of an amazing fund of knowledge on subjects that interest him, Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing—not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, that to be asked questions on them “spooks” him (to use one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost inarticulate. Many of the replies in this interview he preferred to work out on his reading board. The occasional waspish tone of the answers is also part of this strong feeling that writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done.

This dedication to his art may suggest a personality at odds with the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling Hemingway-at-play of popular conception. The fact is that Hemingway, while obviously enjoying life, brings an equivalent dedication to everything he does —an outlook that is essentially serious, with a horror of the inaccurate, the fraudulent, the deceptive, the half-baked.

Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom where early in the morning Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline, which lasts until about noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.

George Plimpton, 1958

From the Paris Review interview of Hemingway