Fragmenta Philosophica

Memento Mori

Seriously.  My time is limited - and so is yours.

What are we waiting for?

"Alas, Victor Hugo"

I'm re-reading Les Misérables (Penguin Classics Ed., trans. by Norman Denny), and am thoroughly enjoying it.

There's a certain kind of Hugo-ian passage which will be immediately recognizable to those who know his work. I find it difficult to articulate precisely the character of such a passage; perhaps it is a flow of evocative prose which explicitly draws the universal out of the particular scene or setting, to powerful dramatic effect; or a brief aside which deploys a striking simile to illumine a character's feelings or motivation; and there's nearly always the promise of an epigram in the making. My execrable French wouldn't be up to the task of reading the great man in the original, but I've read a sufficient variety of translations of his various works to recognize his cachet, no matter who is rendering him into English. A few examples will show what I mean.

In one of his shorter digressions, describing the first dwelling (Château du Gorbeau) in which Jean Valjean lives with the newly-liberated Cosette, Hugo writes,

A part of this building has recently been demolished, but enough remains to show what it was originally like. The whole was probably not more than a century old - youth in the case of a church, but old age in the case of an ordinary house. It would seem that man's dwellings share his brevity and those of God His eternity. (p. 386)

Describing the subsequent pursuit of the pair by Javert, whose vigilance had chased the two out of the abode, we are told,

There is a kind of thrill known only to two creatures on earth - the mother who recovers her child and the tiger who recovers its prey. This was Javert's sensation at that moment. But simultaneously, being now assured that it was the formidable Jean Valjean, he realized that he had only two men with him, and he therefore applied to the police-post in the Rue Pontoise for assistance. Before grasping a stick of thorn we put on gloves. (p. 422)

At the close of Book Five, with Valjean having eluded Javert by absconding into the Benedictine-Bernardine convent in Petite Rue Picpus, No. 62, the narrator reflects on Javert's setback:

But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, 'That is all there was!' But twist them all together and you have something tremendous - Attila hesitating between Marcians in the east and Valentinians in the west, Hannibal delaying too long at Capua, Danton slumbering in Arcis-sur-Aube. (p. 424)

p.s. I still find the last chapter of Notre Dame de Paris  - when Quasimodo takes his bride - to contain some of the most hauntingly beautiful writing with which I'm acquainted.

Iraq - disillusionment

The dreaded Daniel Pipes has penned an interesting article on the parlous socio-political conditions in Iraq at present. With the usual caveat that I don't commend the entire article uncritically, some observations strike me as creditable, or at least plausible :

"When Washington and its allies toppled the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein ... they bestowed a historic benefit on Iraqis, a population that had been wantonly oppressed by the Stalinist dictator.

"Unsurprisingly, his regime quickly fell to outside attack ... That six-week victory remains a glory of American foreign policy and of the coalition forces. It also represents a personal achievement for President Bush, who made the key decisions.

"But the president decided that this mission was not enough. Dazzled by the examples of post-World War II Germany and Japan – whose transformations in retrospect increasingly appear to have been one-time achievements – he committed troops in the pursuit of creating a 'free and democratic Iraq.' This noble aim was inspired by the best of America's idealism.

"But nobility of purpose did not suffice for rehabilitating Iraq ... Iraqis, a predominantly Muslim population newly liberated from their totalitarian dungeon, were disinclined to follow the American example; for their part, the American people lacked a deep interest in the welfare of Iraq. This combination of forces guarantees the coalition cannot impose its will on 26 million Iraqis.

"... Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility nor its burden. The damage done by Saddam will take many years to repair. Americans, Britons, and others cannot be tasked with resolving Sunni-Shiite differences, an abiding Iraqi problem that only Iraqis themselves can address.

"... Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one."

I find the question of coalition "responsibilities" interesting. While I'm sure that those who defend the extremes that we either owe the Iraqis nearly everything, or hardly anything, are mistaken, it's not easy to stake out an advised position of where such obligations lie. I possess no expertise particularly relevant to the question of the strategic dimension of a full-fledged civil war; on the human level it certainly makes me shudder.

While I don't know, I wonder whether we're on the verge of heeding the (in)famous call for a little rhetorical-existential legerdemain: declare a "victory" - and leave.