American Black Utopia: Fire on the Mountain, by Terry Bisson
Lincoln was a Whig, backed by US capital, who had organized a fifth column of Southern whites to support an invasion of Nova Africa in 1870, right after the Independence War. If the whites couldn't keep the slaves, they at least wanted the land back. Though the invaders had been routed at the battle of Shoat's Bend without crossing the Cumberland river, "One nation, indivisible" had become a rallying cry for white nationalists on both sides of the border. The next five years, 1870-75, were as close to a civil war as Nova Africa was to see. When it began, the new nation south of the Tennessee River was 42 percent white; when it ended, it was 81 percent black. In the US, veterans and descendants of the "Exitus" formed the racist backbone of the rightist movements for years; in the Bible Wars of the 1920s, the Homestead Rebellion, even the Second Revolutionary War of '48. In Nova Africa the whites who embraced (or made their peace with) socialism were called "comebacks", even if they had never left, and Lincoln was no hero to them; but before his body had even been cut down in 1871, he had become a legend among the border whites in Kentucky, Virginia, and parts of Missouri.
Omigosh this is the best WHAT IF THE SOUTH HAD WON books I've ever seen. In fact, it's maybe the only good one.
You see, other than the usual Confederate wank-job stories that feature a separate nation in which slavery still exists ("It's a cultural thing. You have no right to judge us, you n******-loving busybodies!") even though everyone knows slavery was just bad business and they would surely have abolished it all on their own right after leaving and going to war to preserve it because something something garbanzo.....other than all that, this one is different.
This book has former slaves setting up the nation of Nova Africa.
Starting with the premise that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry succeeded and established an armed resistance in the mountains of western Virginia, the plot goes into three different timelines involving a young slave with one of the "good" masters, making the decision to take up arms for freedom in the months immediately after Harper's Ferry; a recounting of how the insurrection turned into a full revolution supported by several international rebel forces; and a young woman in 1959 as the hundredth anniversary is celebrated.
It's plausible, and a compelling read that took me under a day to finish. I particularly liked the nice touch where the young woman rolls her eyes at the racist "alternative history novel" where the white nationalist aggressors had been fighting their own people just trying to keep the land.
Hating on Pleasure: The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy
“A terrible thing is that sonata, especially the presto! And a terrible thing is music in general. What is it? Why does it do what it does? They say that music stirs the soul. Stupidity! A lie! It acts, it acts frightfully (I speak for myself), but not in an ennobling way. It acts neither in an ennobling nor a debasing way, but in an irritating way. How shall I say it? Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. I become confounded with his soul, and with him I pass from one condition to another. But why that? I know nothing about it? But he who wrote Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ knew well why he found himself in a certain condition. That condition led him to certain actions, and for that reason to him had a meaning, but to me none, none whatever. And that is why music provokes an excitement which it does not bring to a conclusion. For instance, a military march is played; the soldier passes to the sound of this march, and the music is finished. A dance is played; I have finished dancing, and the music is finished. A mass is sung; I receive the sacrament, and again the music is finished. But any other music provokes an excitement, and this excitement is not accompanied by the thing that needs properly to be done, and that is why music is so dangerous, and sometimes acts so frightfully"
I had to go back and check that I was not reading Dostoevsky by mistake; Tolstoy's short novel about the morbid psychology of a murderer seems a lot more like something that other great Russian would produce.
The book starts with a collection of Russian stock characters on a train, discussing marriage, divorce, and love. The narration quickly shifts from an unnamed passenger to the main character, who tells him his story. This man, in an unhappy marriage, catches his wife with another man, and kills her, and is acquitted, but continues to spend his days having a sad about his crime. Tolstoy seems to extrapolate from this narrative that all marriages are as unhappy as this man's (the opposite of what he says in the opening to Anna Karenina), and that people, to be happy, should abstain from sex...and music...and pleasure in general.
YeahNope. I'm out.
Rake's Progress: The Drunkard, by Emile Zola
Gervaise bent herself like a gun-trigger on the heap of straw, with her clothes on and her feet drawn up under her rag of a skirt, so as to keep them warm. And huddled up, with her eyes wide open, she turned some scarcely amusing ideas over in her mind that morning. Ah! no, they couldn't continue living without food. She no longer felt her hunger, only she had a leaden weight on her chest and her brain seemed empty. Certainly there was nothing gay to look at in the four corners of the hovel. A perfect kennel now, where greyhounds, who wear wrappers in the streets, would not even have lived in effigy. Her pale eyes stared at the bare walls. Everything had long since gone to "uncle's." All that remained were the chest of drawers, the table and a chair. Even the marble top of the chest of drawers and the drawers themselves, had evaporated in the same direction as the bedstead. A fire could not have cleaned them out more completely; the little knick-knacks had melted, beginning with the ticker, a twelve franc watch, down to the family photos, the frames of which had been bought by a woman keeping a second-hand store; a very obliging woman, by the way, to whom Gervaise carried a saucepan, an iron, a comb and who gave her five, three or two sous in exchange, according to the article; enough, at all events to go upstairs again with a bit of bread. But now there only remained a broken pair of candle snuffers, which the woman refused to give her even a sou for.
Following on the heels of Tolstoy's Russian gloom, the French gloom of Zola is almost unbearable. The story follows a couple, mostly the wife, through a long process of degradation in which the husband, a successful roofer and teetotaler, falls off a roof and becomes addicted to alcohol during his long recovery from the severe injury. He ends up, extremely slowly, devolving into a domestic violence brute, incapable of useful work or love. His wife, Gervais, seeing the money go to alcohol, figures she might as well indulge herself in gluttony while the money lasts.
And so, between their incontenences, they spend the last half of the book descending into the most squalid poverty and degradation that a skilled author can describe. Their eldest child becomes a feral runaway; the younger children die of neglect. And then he dies raving, and she dies alone in the most squalid space in Paris, and is not discovered until the neighbors notice the smell, and that's how it ends.
I've found a lot of this in 19th century French naturalism, including the deaths of Madame Boary and Zola's Nana (who happens to be the feral child of The Drunkard and whose novel in her own name leaves her destroying countless men with her beauty before her perfect body rots into filth, in painstakingly given detail, of STD). Human beings with potentially great minds and souls are reduced to base appetites and collections of foul chemicals and bodily waste.
And of course, when I feel the urge to protest this sick presentation of humanity, I have to reflect that my own nation of millions has annointed a diseased collection of base appetites and bodily waste to be its President. So maybe Zola had a point.
The Victorian Murders: A Study in scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle; Children of Cain, by Miriam Grace Monfredo; Peril on the Royal train; Signal for Vengeance, by Robert Marsdon; Half Moon Street; Whitechapel Conspiracy; Southampton Row, by Anne Perry
Before asking to see McClellan, she should have made certain pinkerton was not in camp, but given the events of her ride here with Seth, it hadn't even crossed her mind. It could be a costly mistake, but it was her mistake, and not one for which Union soldiers should have to suffer.
--from Children of Cain
Because no churchyard would accept it, the grave was hidden behind some bushes in unconsecrated ground. Someone stepped silently forward to place a posy of wild flowers on the mound of earth before reflecting on how sweet vengeance could be.
--from Signal for Vengeance
Pitt's shoulders slumped. he felt bruised and weary. How would he tell charlotte? She would be furious for him, outraged at the unfairness of it. she would want to fight, but there was nothing to do. He knew that, he was only arguing with Cornwallis because the shock had not passed, the rage at the injustice of it. He had really believed his position, at least, was safe, after the Queen's acknowledgement of his worth."
--from Southampton row
There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
---from A Study in Scarlet
Here marks the point at which my mystery-reading enrichment begins to include mysteries actually written during the period. Sherlock Holmes may not count among the "great books", but his works are studied as thoroughly as any classic, and Sherlock fandom is one of the most fanatical and longstanding geek clubs ever established. To join the original Baker Street Irregulars, one had to complete a Holmes crossword puzzle and only applicants who were 100% correct were admitted. How's that for calling "Fake geek"?....It may be that i read these books long enough ago to take them for granted, and have encountered much better detective fiction since then, but this first Holmes adventure did not excite me. Out of a 14 chapter short novel, the first two chapters are introduction, and the crime is discovered, investigated, and solved in the next five, halfway through, with most of the remainder being the murderer's melodramatic backstory. Further, the very clever murderer, having been alerted by a false advertisement that 222-B Baker Street is a trap, unsuspiciously goes there for a follow-up visit, where his capture takes him completely by surprise. And what are we to make of the man dressed up as an old woman, who completely fools Holmes?
The last of the Seneca falls books attributes General McLellan's disastrous failure to advance on Richmond in 1862 to the army's refusal to listen to a woman who tries to report that Lee had left the city virtually defenseless. Typical.
The Railway Detective has taken to a formula where they present a parade of four or five suspects, spend most of the last half of the book having the detectives arrest one after another of them and discover why they didn't do it, before having the final chapter descend on someone you might not even have noticed during the story. so the challenge is to spot the only character they're not pointing at and find a far-fetched motive, while looking for clues as to what the other suspects were really up to. Which is a problem to me, when half a town ends up in jail for something or other each episode, and the so-called "compassionate" detective comes off looking like Judge Dredd. I'm almost at the end of this series, or I might be tempted not to continue.
And Anne Perry's series about the Pitts has gone about where her Monk series was when every book reflected the sinister ring of people blackmailed by so-and-so the child pornographer, only with this series, it's a shadowy conspiracy cult called the Inner Circle, which keeps getting Thomas Pitt demoted to working undercover in the shittiest neighborhoods of London and any tradesman or aristocrat might just be one of them. The Whitechapel Conspiracy, one of the few books not named after a street or neighborhood, is a decent contribution to the theories about Jack the Ripper.
Bourgeoies Twits of the Year: Bouvard and Pecuchet, by Gustav Flaubert
The evidence of their own superiority caused them pain. As they maintained immoral propositions, they must needs be immoral: calumnies were invented about them. Then a pitiable faculty developed itself in their minds, that of observing stupidity and no longer tolerating it. Trifling things made them feel sad: the advertisements in the newspapers, the profile of a shopkeeper, an idiotic remark overheard by chance. Thinking over what was said in their own village, and on the fact that there were even as far as the Antipodes other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus, they felt, as it were, the heaviness of all the earth weighing down upon them.
Flaubert's last, mercifully unfinished novel is supposed to be a satire. It's about two sophomoric BFF clerks who inherit a small fortune, move into the country, and squander everything through foolish mismanagement and frequent midstream horse-changing. They get involved in one "popular" hobby or academic discipline after another, become obsessed and learn just enough of each to be dangerous to themselves (such as setting up a still without knowing you're supposed to leave a vent for the steam when boiling fluids). I usually hate this kind of humor, and Flaubert is no exception.
The best part of the book is an appendix in the form of a dictionary supposedly compiled by the friends referencing what to say when a given topic comes up in conversation ("Spice: The plural of spouse, ha-ha"). Sinclair Lewis referenced something like this when writing Babbit.
The Manafort of Magdala: Flashman on the March(Flashman #12), by George MacDonald Fraser
I couldn't foresee, as i stood content in the bow, watching the green fir foaming up from the forefront, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew--I couldn't foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonizing bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void, or imagine the ghastly transformation of an urbane, cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims.
There is a little more Flashman to be read, in historical order, but Flashman on the March is the last novel Fraser wrote. It begins with tantalizing glimpses of the antihero's Civil War and Mexican War adventures that were never written, and continues with the British Abyssinian expedition--almost a dress parade, the victory was so thorough and quick--where, to make it frightening, Flashy does not march with the army, but goes undercover to transport treasure and recruit mercenary Africans to the cause--and to wench, and quake with fear, and be an all-around racist, imperialist, colonialist jerk, as usual. The torture, the escapes, the women, the war atrocities, and the stolid generals are different people, but the structure is the same. I got the impression that, at the end, Fraser was getting bored and phoning it in.
Today's Tom Sawyer Mean Mean Drive: Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzche
OUR Virtues?—It is probable that we, too, have still our virtues, although naturally they are not those sincere and massive virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem and also at a little distance from us. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and spirit—we shall presumably, IF we must have virtues, have those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements: well, then, let us look for them in our labyrinths!—where, as we know, so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite lost! And is there anything finer than to SEARCH for one's own virtues? Is it not almost to BELIEVE in one's own virtues? But this "believing in one's own virtues"—is it not practically the same as what was formerly called one's "good conscience," that long, respectable pigtail of an idea, which our grandfathers used to hang behind their heads, and often enough also behind their understandings? It seems, therefore, that however little we may imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned and grandfatherly respectable in other respects, in one thing we are nevertheless the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers, we last Europeans with good consciences: we also still wear their pigtail.—Ah! if you only knew how soon, so very soon—it will be different!
After two prior Nietzche books, this feels like more of the same-old, but Beyond Good and Evil is probably the culmination of what passes for his "philosophy". It is included in the second edition of the Great Books series and is the most frequently quoted of his works, along with last month's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is more poetic and dramatic, but explores pretty much the same theme: modern society shrinks the soul by imposing artificial restraints, while the truly free spirit does not need no wussy-ass 'morality"; men of action who have the courage to assert their will are what makes progress possible; true wisdom is achieved by turning conventional wisdom upside down.
As said before, I have a visceral negative reaction to what boils down to assertion of brute force as the highest good, advocated by a man who was personally a dork, to other men (and if there exists a woman who admires Nietzche, let her speak. I doubt that such a woman exists, as his writings went out of their way to insult women, and those brave female adventurers who dare to assert their will to power would, it seems to me, likely stomp his sac) who are personally dorks, who seek an excuse to assert dominance out of a sense of superiority they haven't earned.
Pretty much everyone I know who praises Nietzche is an overentitled gamergate-puppy-8chan-dark side of the geekverse twerp who talks when we want him to listen, or even worse, an incompetent Republican/Libertarian bully who thinks he's favored by social/economic Darwinism, and who destroys when he discovers he cannot create. See also; Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Donald Fucking Trump. They think they are the next stage in evolution, a whole new advanced species, when in reality they are assholes. And i hate him all the more because my 20-year old self lapped him right up and ended up causing himself a whole lot of unnecessary misery. Do not be like me.
There are better ways to let one's spirit soar and to feel powerful. They involve joining forces with other great souls instead of asserting dominance, and cooperating to make a great world rather than blowing shit up.
Going with the Flow: The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi
Cardenia couldn't help it. She was exhilarated not because she was a fatalist or a misanthrope, happy that humanity was finally getting its comeuppance. She was exhilarated because finally the hazy nebulous shape of her reign, one whose meager main accomplishment was keeping parliament and the guilds from stomping on the unsuspecting planet of End with an influx of military boots, had suddenly snapped into focus. Cardenia now knew three things: One, she would be the very last emperox of the Interdependency. Two, the whole of her reign would be about saving as many human lives as possible, by any and every means possible. Three, that meant the end of the lie of the Interdependency.
Holy. Fucking Shit.
Scalzi's newest (which, thankfully, is part one of a whole new series, because I wanted more--not least because the major plot development only really comes to play in the final chapters) is both delightful to read and thought provoking in an end-of-civilization sort of way. Lots of powerful, wonderful women, including the supreme ruler of the system; lots of clever plot twists; lots of accessible language and fun science and laughter and treachery and apocalypse.
The given crisis is that the macguffin that enables faster than light travel (in this case a field of might-as-well-be wormholes) is about to collapse, leaving the planetary systems that comprise this empire stranded and alone, after the central government has gone to great lengths to make the systems "interdependent" by ensuring that none have the resources to make it without help--and profitable trade--from the others. In Collapsing Empire, this circumstance is COMING; it hasn't happened yet, and when it begins to happen, the commercial interests will have a vested interest in declaring it to be "fake news" because to acknowledge it would interfere with profit. And so the government will helplessly watch it happen because Not Politically Viable. Unless a few plucky protagonists who spend the book gradually coming together with each other, can make it different.
And they probably will, in subsequent books.
I fucking had a great time reading this, as i tend to do with Scalzi. I ranked the book second in the Hugo novel list, mostly giving Kim Stanley Robinson extra points for New York 2140's gripping ecological relevance compared to Scalzi's fanciful alternative end of the world. Very Highest recommendations.
Light Drama: The Hand of Ethelberta, by Thomas Hardy
He had learnt by this time her occupation, which was that of pupil-teacher at one of the schools in the town, whither she walked daily from a village near. If he had not been poor and the little teacher humble, Christopher might possibly have been tempted to inquire more briskly about her, and who knows how such a pursuit might have ended? But hard externals rule volatile sentiment, and under these untoward influences the girl and the book and the truth about its author were matters upon which he could not afford to expend much time. All Christopher did was to think now and then of the pretty innocent face and the round deep eyes, not once wondering if the mind which enlivened them ever thought of him.
Ethelberta's hand is noteworthy, as it both writes good stories and is sought after by young and old men in the book. The rest of Ethelberta fails for want of description.
I was taken aback to find that this light romance came from the same hand that wrote such gut-wrenching tragedies as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude The Obscure. There's a reason that, if you've looked at Hardy lightly, you know four or five of his titles, and The Hand of Ethelberta is not one of them.
Riding in Boats With Boys: The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstance of an active imagination. Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful instinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage; and so it happened, that though he was much more wilful and inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him naughty. But if Tom did make a mistake of that sort, he espoused it, and stood by it: he "didn't mind." If he broke the lash of his father's gigwhip by lashing the gate, he couldn't help it,–the whip shouldn't have got caught in the hinge. If Tom Tulliver whipped a gate, he was convinced, not that the whipping of gates by all boys was a justifiable act, but that he, Tom Tulliver, was justifiable in whipping that particular gate, and he wasn't going to be sorry. But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom and Lucy, and Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her; for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie–perhaps it was even more bitter–than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. "Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by," is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfullness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that "half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.
This book is included in the Harvard Classics shelf of fiction. It is masterfully written literature, and I can't stand it because of the plot.
It's like Laura Ingalls in Britain, gone horribly wrong. We have an idyllic, pastoral country setting where the miller's family has old fashioned values, the son works hard to advance himself and the daughter is a tender sweet young thing with a swarm of beaus competing for her attention...and then the father manages to get ruined, loses his will to live, and dies...the son goes into commerce and thrives in it, and makes much of the family fortune back again....and the daughter goes out into society, makes a favorable impression...and then falls victim to a life-ending scandal, merely for going on a boat ride with a gentleman suitor, fends off his whiny advances, and comes home having neither had sex nor eloped for riches, and the whole town, including her own brother, treats her like a harlot for this.
As an afterthought, brother and sister die young in a river-flooding incident.
And I'm like, WTF just happened. Was this a story with a moral, like maybe "Head off to the city if you love yourself, for county people will wreck you."
Black Lives Matter: Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adayemi
The shock travels through every pore in my skin, igniting my being, catching my breath. Time seems to freeze as I look down, locking eyes with the young captain. An unknown force burns behind his amber gaze, a prison I can't escape. Something in his spirit seems to draw onto mine. But before I can spend another second locked in his eyes, Nailah flies over the gate, severing our connection.
Adayemi seems to be a new author, whose book here is (yay!) part one of an exciting series set in a well-constructed world with a handy map for reference as the characters quest their way across it.
In essence, there is a race that once had several kinds of powerful magic, now gone, and another race that has seized the chance to enslave them, calling them filthy names and killing them without consequence. A chance arises to restore the magic, during which the son of the ruling warlord and the daughter who saw her powerful mage mother murdered by the authorities have a mind-meld and it becomes unclear whether one will kill the other or whether they will eventually become allies.
By the time the first part of the ritual is attempted and various plot twists happen, it is still not yet clear. I found it fast paced and gripping. The author admits in an afternote that the story was inspired by Black Lives Matter, just in case it isn't obvious.
A World of Pure Determination: Time and Free Will, by Henri Bergson
To say that a certain friend, under certain circumstances, will very probably act in a certain way, is not so much to predict the future conduct of our friend as to pass a judgment on his present character, that is to say, on his past. Although our feelings, our ideas, our character, are constantly altering, a sudden change is seldom observed; and it is still more seldom that we cannot say of a person whom we know that certain actions seem to accord fairly well with his nature and that certain others are absolutely inconsistent with it. All philosophers will agree on this point; for to say that a given action is consistent or inconsistent with the present character of a person whom one knows is not to bind the future to the present. But the determinist goes much further: he asserts that our solution is provisional simply because we never know all the conditions of the problem: that our forecast would gain in probability in proportion as we were provided with a larger number of these conditions; that, therefore, complete and perfect knowledge of all the antecedents without any exception would make our forecast infallibly true. Such, then, is the hypothesis which we have to examine.
There are times when I decide to define every action I take as either "empowerment" or "therapy". I begin my day with what I call "Getting Up Therapy", during which I empower myself my sonorously intoning the word AWAKEN, until my wife kicks me out of bed. I then further empower myself in the bathroom with Cleansing Empowerment Therapy, during which I purge my body of toxins, and so on.
I bring this up because Henri Bergson, who is thankfully both very readable and brief, has essentially proved the existence of free will by pointing out that the past is set immutably while the future is fluid and cannot be predicted with absolute certainty due to having many, many variables....and in order to maintain his academic cred, he has to cloak his thoughts by talking about "dynamic concepts" and "static concepts", and extended, unextended, qualitative, quantitative, etc., constructs, when what he really means, it seems to me, is the distinction between the past and the future.
