Year's Reading

I omit some books I didn't care for. By category, fiction first:

• House Full of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday. Worth reading, though it has on it the marks of the first novel.
• Changing Places and Small World by David Lodge, the first two of a trilogy set in the academic world. Both are very funny, with much of the fun being of the boys behaving badly type, academic division. I suppose that I should go on and read Nice Work.
• A Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I liked this novel better forty years ago.
  
• The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.
  
• The Bell by Iris Murdoch.

Philosophy:

• Of Human Freedom and The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794-1796) by F.W.J. Schelling. These helped me with the next,
• The Science of Knowledge by Fichte, a book I had attempted to read at intervals over almost forty-five years.
• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno.
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls.
•  On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. I don't know that I agree with her argument that exposure to beauty increases our tendency to work for justice; but I greatly enjoyed the book.
• Natural Goodness and Virtues and Vices by Philippa Foot.
• On Man and Citizen by Thomas Hobbes.
  
• Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzche.
• From Parmenides to Wittgenstein (essays) by G.E.M. Anscombe.

 History:

• The War of the Running Dogs by Noel Barber, a history of the Malaysian insurgency.
• The Ukrainian Night by Marci Shore, essentially an oral history of the Maidan in 2014 and the events around it.
• To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne.
  
• Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization.
• The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 by Frank Dikötter.

Miscellaneous:

• The Walls Around Us by David Owen--most amusing for anyone who has ever worked on an old house.
• The Flight to Italy by Goethe, a travel diary and selected letters from his visit to Italy in 1786 through 1788.
  

This Ideal Activity

 Noticed in the Zusatz to section 396 in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind:

At first, however, the [newly born] child is much more dependent and in much more need than the animal. Yet in this, too, the child already manifests its higher nature. It at once makes known its wants in unruly, stormy, and peremptory fashion. Whereas the animal is silent or expresses its pain only by groaning, the child makes known its wants by screaming. By this ideal activity, the child shows that it is straightaway imbued with the certainty that it has a right to demand from the outer world the satisfaction of its needs, that the independence of the outer world is non-existent where man is concerned.

 

Carpaccio at the National Gallery of Art

 On Tuesday, we drove down to see the Carpaccio exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. It seems to me that we had previously seen one of the paintings, "The Lion of St. Mark" at the Doge's Palace; but that was more than twenty years ago. The rest of the paintings and drawings were all new to me. The exhibition was worth the trip.

The most spectacular painting was probably of a martyrdom of ten thousand at Mt. Ararat. It recalled Goethe's strictures on paintings with martyrdoms in The Flight to Italy. Yet here it was not that the tortures were gruesome, it was that they were extravagant. Ten men crucified makes for an appalling picture; dozens crucified is just odd. And none of the martyrs seemed much troubled by his condition. I say "his" condition, for my wife remarked that there were no women in the picture. According to information on-line, the martyrs are all said to have been legionaries, which would explain this.

The most interesting painting to my eye was "St. Augustine in His Study." You can see a images of a selection from the exhibition at the National Gallery's website.