Creations that Last

by William H. Benson

September 7, 2017

     Isaac Asimov wrote 515 books over 75 years, until his passing in 1992. He wrote mainly science fiction, but he also wrote plenty of non-fiction books: on physics, chemistry, biology, and literature. People still buy and read his books today, a trend that will, most likely, extend far into the future.

     Cotton Mather, the Puritan clergyman in colonial Boston, wrote 437 books, mainly of a religious nature. Almost no one today reads any of Mather’s books, a trend that will, most likely, continue.

     One of Mather’s biographers said, “There is nothing in the enormous works of Cotton Mather that the world really treasures. There is nothing like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, or Jonathon Edwards’s relentless sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

     What determines a book’s fate, whether it lives forever or dies in a few weeks?

     Cyril Connelly, a twentieth-century author, asked that question in his 1948 book, Enemies of Promise. He wanted to write a book that would remain in publication for at least ten years. He achieved that goal, and then some. Publishers still print it today, and readers still buy it, 69 years later.

     The modern-day author, Ryan Holiday, said that, “Cyril Connelly made something that stood the test of time. The book has outlived him and almost everything else published around the same time.” The subject of Enemies of Promise is literary criticism, not an exciting subject. Connelly evaluated the novelists who wrote during the first half of the twentieth-century, and he noted certain things.

     He said, “Contemporary books do not keep. The quality in them which makes for their success is the first to go; they turn over night. Therefore one must look for some quality which improves with time.” He noted that many books “become best-sellers and then flop.”

     He said, “A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.”

     This year Ryan Holiday published his newest book, Perennial Seller, and in it he extends the quest for longevity into other arenas: into plays, scripts, movies, television, songs, apps, and even restaurants. What, he wonders, determines whether any creative work lives for ten years or dies in ten weeks?

     For example, Holiday tells of Stephen King’s short story, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. A film director named Frank Darabont converted that story into a 1994 film, starring Timothy Robbins and Morgan Freeman. At the box office it was a disappointment, and never made much money, but then audiences began to watch it on television.

     Holiday says, “There are minor actors in that movie, Shawshank Redemption, who receive $800-plus checks every month in residuals. Turn on your television this weekend, and you will probably find the movie playing somewhere on some channel.” It is worth watching, if you like prison escapes.

     In a strange turnabout, the Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan the 2016 prize for Literature for the lyrics to his songs, and he was a 1960’s contemporary of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Holiday says, “Dylan’s music holds true and has ‘transcended his time.’”

     Holiday’s favorite heavy metal band is “Iron Maiden.” Their songs receive very “little radio airplay, but they have sold more than 85 million albums over a four-decade-long career. They are one of the highest-earning acts in the world, and they travel from sold-out stadium to sold-out stadium in a Boeing 757 piloted by the lead singer,” Bruce Dickinson.

     Unknown to most, except to their fans, “Iron Maiden” has enjoyed success for forty years, an incredible statistic in a business that washes out most bands in less than five years. Lady Gaga says, “When people say to me that I am the next Madonna, I reply, ‘No, I’m the next Iron Maiden.’”

     According to Holiday, creativity at this level requires two things: a superb over-the-top product, and a decades-long marketing plan. Creating anything worthwhile, with lasting potential—a book, a movie, a song, a heavy metal concert, a business—is hard work. The creator cannot short its content.

     George Orwell, in his essay, “Why I Write,” said, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

     Cyril Connelly said, “We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there.”

     I know I am unusual, but I appreciate colonial American history as much, or even more, than science fiction. I estimate that I have read equal amounts of both Isaac Asimov and Cotton Mather, but nowhere near all, or even a fraction, of their books.

School is Boring

by William H. Benson

August 24, 2017

     Generations of students have said, “School is boring!” One person pointed out that school bores students because learning is difficult, and that “boredom” and “difficult” are one-in-the-same. When a serious student pushes aside all distractions, un-clutters his mind, and listens in quiet silence as the teacher explains a difficult concept, boredom can and will sneak in.

     A journalist named Manoush Zomorodi has started a campaign that calls for a “digital detox” program. In her two books—Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out, and Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self—she suggests that at least for an hour every day we should lay aside the tweets, text messages, e-mails, television, and social media, and experience sixty minutes of profound boredom.

     She argues that when we practice boredom, when we refuse to reach for the cell phone, it is then that our brains slip into the “default mode.” We day dream. We make connections. We set autobiographical goals. We give the unconscious part of our minds permission to think in new channels, to think of new and even brilliant ideas, and to jumpstart our creativity. Zomorodi says, “there is a connection between boredom and original thinking.”

     That, I say, is an interesting idea.

     The writer Ann Lamont pointed out in a recent TED talk that “every single electronic device will work better if on occasion you turn it off, let it rest, and then reboot it, including yourself.”

     In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, he suggests that it is e-mail and social media that prevent us from experiencing moments of “deep work.”

     Newport offers four rules. Build deep work rituals. Embrace boredom. Quit social media. Drain the shallows, the duties that are routine and trivial. He says, “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, and what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

     Most reviewers glow with enthusiasm for Newport’s book and give it five out of five stars, but the few nay-sayers criticize its length. One critic says, “Not worth reading—spent a lot of time. Would be absolutely sufficient to read an article on the topic. Maybe two. I like the idea, but it is repeated all over again without adding anything useful.”

     Another says, “Boring and a waste of money.” A third says, “Surprisingly shallow. Can be summed up with ‘focus’ and ‘limit distractions.’ I just saved you 270 pages and three hours.” In other words, to the critical readers, Deep Work is not as deep as it is shallow.

     A remedy for difficult and boring: engage in constructive criticism, like Newport’s critics did. A good student will ask herself certain questions often: Do I agree with the writer? Do I agree with the professor? Do I disagree with this concept? How can I improve this?” Students can learn much if they step onto the path of serious criticism, rather than follow the road of passive acceptance.

     The dialectic philosophers, Marx and Engels, labelled their formal criticism as “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” The Chinese call it “yin and yang,” two forces that complement and interconnect with each other. Students can simplify the process by listing on paper the “pro’s and con’s” of a decision.

     When we question everything that we see and hear and read, when we invert ideas on top of their heads, when we think and act and talk like a critic, it is then that we might learn something useful.

     David Denby, the film critic, points out in his book, Great Books, that Homer and the other ancient Greek authors worked “anagnorisis” into their works. That is the moment in a literary work when a character recognizes another person, and sees what that person represents. For example, in Homer’s Odyssey, anagnorisis happens when Odysseus sees Penelope, his wife, after years of separation. Denby says “these are tortuous scenes of shame and love and recognition.”

     On occasion, in a classroom, a student will wake up, hear the teacher’s words, and recognize something that he or she is saying. The thought resonates inside that student. Difficulty is conquered. Boredom flies out the window. Alas, those precious moments are fleeting. 

     A determined student was asked if a class she had already taken was difficult. She, in turn, asked, “By what terms are you defining difficult—by frequency, intensity, or duration?”

     Benjamin Franklin said, “When a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” He also said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

SETI

by William H. Benson

August 10, 2017

     One day in the 1940’s, a group of atomic scientists were discussing the possibility of intelligent life on planets outside our solar system, when one of them, Enrico Fermi, asked a blunt question, “So? Where is everybody?”

     Now known as the Fermi Paradox, what he asked was, “If there are billions of planets in the universe capable of generating and supporting life, and millions of intelligent species out there, then how come none of them have ever visited Earth, or even contacted Earth?”

     His question stumped his friends then and all those who have considered the question since then. We have no hard evidence, and no one yet has detected radio waves that originated on a distant planet. Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact,” and the 1997 film of the same name, starring Jodie Foster, considered the events that would transpire if an astronomer ever did detect a message.   

     Members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence institute look and listen for life elsewhere. Two prominent American astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake founded SETI in November 1984. Based in Mountain Home, California, its members have, so far, discovered no evidence that indicates intelligent life on a planet, other than Earth.

     If they did, the announcement would astound everyone. We would admit that we are not alone.

     In 1988, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star different than our sun. By 2003, astronomers listed seventy exoplanets, and by last month, that number had increased to 3,621. The possibility that one exoplanet has intelligent life increases as the numbers increase.

     The physicist Stephen Hawking considers one exoplanet, Gliese 832c, most promising.

     Why did life begin here on Earth? One suggestion is that it began elsewhere and was brought here.

     Back in 1871, the British scientist Lord Kelvin suggested that “the germs of life might have been brought to the earth by some meteorite.”  Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, suggested that Earth was “deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens,” an idea more science fiction than science.

     Still, one idea that has gathered momentum is that life originated on Mars. The theory suggests that an asteroid or a comet struck Mars in the distant past, and that ejected a Martian rock into outer space, that then struck Earth. Inside that rock were the assembled amino acids needed to start life here.

     The idea may have some merit. Of the 61,000 identified meteorites that have struck Earth, scientists have concluded that, as of March 3, 2014, 132 originated on Mars. For example, on September 28, 1969, a meteorite from Mars 4.5 billion years old, rained down upon Murchison, Victoria, in Australia, and once chemists peered into its structure, they identified seventy-four assembled amino acids.

     But then the idea begs the question, “How did life begin on Mars?”

     On November 16, 1974, at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the astronomer Frank Drake aimed the giant radio telescope there toward M13, a cluster of about 300,000 stars in the Hercules constellation, and blasted 1,679 pulses, over 168 seconds. He chose the number 1,679, because it is a semi-prime number, the product of two prime numbers, 73 and 23.

     “Nature never uses prime numbers,” Drake says. “But mathematicians do.”

     By x’s and o’s, in binary language, on a grid, Drake transmitted “the numbers one through ten, the atomic numbers of the five most important elements, a pixelated image of a human body, a sketch of the solar system, and another sketch of the telescope.”

     For his efforts Drake received a scathing condemnation from Britain’s Royal Astronomer, Martin Ryle, who said, “any creatures out there [might be] malevolent or hungry.”

     Stephen Hawking has since urged caution also, saying that “we should be wary of sending out messages or answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like the Native Americans who encountered Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”

     A thing to consider is how merciless Mother Nature can act. One species evolves, and another slaughters it off. The old die off, and the new live on. Darwin’s theory of “the survival of the fittest” leaves little room for pity. Aliens may not feel any compassion for planet Earth’s current rulers.

     The cartoonist Bill Watterson said, “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”

Heroes

by William H. Benson

July 27, 2017

     The 50’s and 60’s presented me with a wonderful set of heroes: Roy Rogers, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Perry Mason, Neil Armstrong, Mickey Mantle, and Bart Starr. Some were real, others fictional.

     When young, the public librarians saw me often. I read most of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, and Earl Stanley Gardner, and came to admire Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Perry Mason, for their resourcefulness, intuitive wisdom, and skill at detection.

     I enjoyed watching television: cowboys and westerns, detectives and mysteries, football and basketball games. The stories and the games pulled me in, just as video games entice the young today.

     George Will, the columnist, pointed out how the western converted into the mystery. “The closing of the frontier drove the cowboy to town where he became a detective.”

     The first hero worship that I witnessed occurred on August 13, 1969, when I watched on television as the three Apollo 11 astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—rode in a convertible, down Broadway and Park Avenue in New York City during a ticker tape parade.

     When in my twenties, during the 1980 presidential election, a majority of Americans voted for Ronald Reagan, a former sports announcer, cowboy movie star, and California governor. The writer Paul Johnson called Reagan “a happy hero, who tried to communicate this happiness, and succeeded.”

     Heroes and hero worship. Over the centuries, thinkers have wondered about the hero’s role in civilization’s progress. In ancient Greece, Plato argued for a philosopher-king. He believed citizens would enjoy the best government when philosophers ruled the nation. To achieve an ideal community, he said, “philosophers must become kings, or those now called kings must philosophize.”

     Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish thinker, listed his heroes in his book, Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History: the gods of mythology, Thor and Odin; the poets, Dante and Shakespeare; the prophet Muhammed; the priests Luther and Knox; the men of letters Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, and Robert Burns; and the kings, Cromwell and Napoleon; some real, and some fictional.

     Carlyle insisted that great people—those gifted with supreme power, vision, and action—should lead the masses, because “only then would humanity achieve true progress.” He looked around him and could find no one great who dared to lead. Europe lacked will and leadership, and so the people were lost in commercialism and self-gratification, and could not convert their lives into something great.

     Carlyle went so far as to suggest that citizens should worship their heroes, but not so far as to create a set of rituals for worship, or a set of scriptures and texts.

     The German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, took Plato and Carlyle’s ideas and arrived at the idea of a superior man, an overman, or in German, an Übermensch, who would guide his followers toward new values that would satisfy people now, while they lived, and not in heaven after they pass on.

     Paul Johnson wrote in his book Heroes that one can determine who are a society’s heroes by the number of times that a person or character appears in the movies. By the year 2000, Sherlock Holmes was first with 211 times. Following him, in order, were Napoleon, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Lincoln.

     The trouble with hero worship is that heroes grow old or die. Micky Mantle is gone, as is Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin is 87, Michael Collins is 86, and Bart Starr is 83. Roy Rogers died in 1998 at 86. George Reeves, Superman on television, died of a gunshot wound, and Christopher Reeve, Superman in the 1978 movie, died of complications from paralysis caused by a fall from a horse.

     The fictional but timeless characters—James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Frankenstein—still live on.

     Paul Johnson made a good point in Heroes when he said that the real heroes are the wives of famous men. “History,” he wrote, “is crowded with unsung heroines, wives of celebrated but difficult men, who promoted their husbands’ interests, put up with their rages, depressions, and vanities, comforted them in bad times, and remained in the background during moments of glory.”

     Question: “What is the wife of a saint called?” Answer: “A martyr.”

     Paul Johnson asked another question: “’How many more people would Julius Caesar have killed, if his assassins had failed?’ Napoleon killed five times as many as Caesar’s total, perhaps five million. Mao Tse-tung, another admirer of Caesar, killed seventy million. These things need to be weighed when we tell stories of heroes.”

Flattery and Shakespeare

by William H. Benson

June 29, 2017

     On July 9, 1850, Millard Fillmore, the Vice-President, became the thirteenth President of the United States, after the twelfth President, Zachary Taylor, died of cholera. On the day Fillmore took the oath of office, he fired every member of Taylor’s Cabinet because he “resented the way that they had ignored him when he was vice-president. Two months passed before he approved a new cabinet.”

     Last February, Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote that Fillmore “plunged the White House and the Whig Party into turmoil,” because he was attracted “to oddball political movements, conspiracy theories, and ethnic hatred.” He displayed open hostility toward free trade and Irish immigrants, but supported slavery, although he was from New York, a northern state.

     Fillmore’s most appalling decision was to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that allowed federal officials “to hunt escaped slaves and return them to bondage. In a Pennsylvania case, the President charged forty-one Americans with treason because they refused to join a slave-catching posse.”

     In the 1852 presidential election, the Whigs lost by a landslide, and the fractured Whig Party collapsed and was extinguished from American politics forever. In 1856, Fillmore ran for president as  the Know-Nothing party’s candidate. Their slogan, “Americans must rule America.” He lost.

     Jacoby began his column, “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it has an unnerving tendency to rhyme.” Jacoby suggests that our current president is governing as Millard Fillmore did.

     One can remember though that as time moves forward, the issues, ideas, personalities, laws, and cultures change. What was the case in 1850 is not the same as in 2017. No one can step into the same water in the same river twice. History may rhyme or resonate rather than repeat itself.

     To equate a living person with a historical character—who once lived and is now departed—is one thing, but it is more difficult to equate a living person with a fictional character, even one based upon a historical figure.

     At Trump’s recent full cabinet meeting, while the cameras were rolling, each secretary, plus the vice-president, spoke of their over-the-top loyalty to the president. A Toronto citizen commented on Twitter, “This is actually the start of King Lear.”

     Indeed, Shakespeare’s King Lear asked each of his three daughters to tell him how much they loved him, so that he could decide how much of his estate he would give to each. Two daughters, Goneril and Regan, flatter him and profess their devotion, but the youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses and says, “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond; no more nor less.” Cordelia’s honest answer so shocks Lear that he banishes her.

     He then divides his estate between Goneril and Regan, who then take all that their father owns and drive him out onto the heath on a stormy night, where he shouts at the wind.

     A writer for the Economist said, “No secretary quite filled the role of Cordelia, the princess who refused to flatter King Lear,” and “Lear confuses flowery words with love,” and “Mr. Trump is no King Lear, whose choleric old age was preceded by a long and fruitful reign.”

     On the same day that Trump conducted his televised cabinet meeting, Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar opened at “Shakespeare in the Park” in New York City’s Central Park. Instead of a Roman toga, this Julius Caesar “sports a blond wig and a suit and too-long [red] tie, sends tweets from a golden bathtub, and is brutally stabbed to death by a group of women and minorities.” The blood on the stage dismayed the corporate sponsors, who then reconsidered their support.

     One critic insisted that “portraying the assassination of the American president as a righteous blow for justice is an offense to decency,” and it was. The Economist‘s writer said, “Donald Trump is not a Julius Caesar. Instead he is a boastful, thin-skinned praise-addict. He knew full well that his cabinet officials were flattering him, and he relished their humiliation. He is more bully than tragic hero.”

     Our current president does not match one hundred percent Millard Fillmore’s performance, nor does he match Shakespeare’s dramatic characters, King Lear or Julius Caesar. There is no allegory, typology, or symbolism here. The president is what he is, does what he does, and tweets what he tweets, and in that, he needs no help from history or literature, neither of which he reads.

     The historical past fails to foretell the future, and the same is often true of centuries-old literature, including Shakespeare’s plays. As for cabinet secretaries who humiliate themselves by flattering the president with questionable adulation, it reminds me of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s attitude, that when flattery is required, there is no excess.

The Bloody American Revolution

by William H. Benson

June 15, 2017

     On the morning of June 17, 1775, in Boston, British army officers stared up in amazement across the Charles River to Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, north of Charlestown. “The night before, Charlestown peninsula had been a green, unpeopled knob. Now it swarmed with men.” During the night, New England’s colonial militia had dug into the two hills and were ready to fight.

     The British general, Thomas Gage, chose force, a frontal attack “to storm the rebel entrenchments,” so that all of Boston would witness in action England’s army, Europe’s most powerful.

      That hot afternoon, General William Howe and three thousand British regulars crossed the Charles River and landed on the peninsula. Howe addressed his Redcoats, “You must drive these farmers from the hill or it will be impossible for us to remain in Boston.”

     With Howe in front, the Redcoats advanced up Breed’s Hill, until they were within fifty yards of the rebels. Then, “A hail of buck-shot from ancient hunting guns struck the attackers.” The British fell back to the river, reformed their lines, and advanced up the hill a second time. Again, the rebels fired, and the Redcoats fell back. A third time they reformed their lines, and climbed the hill. By then, the rebels had run out of ammunition and were forced to retreat from Breed’s Hill.

     A century and a half later, Winston Churchill wrote, “The rebels had become heroes. They had stood up to trained troops. The British had captured the hill, but the Americans had won the glory. On both sides of the Atlantic, men perceived that a mortal struggle impended.”

     The casualties appalled everyone: 226 British soldiers and officers killed, 828 wounded; and 115 colonists killed, 305 wounded. On a single afternoon. “John Adams’s friend, Joseph Warren, was shot through the face, his body horribly mutilated by British bayonets.” “Throughout that night carriages and chaises bore the English casualties into Boston.”

     One historian said, “Something intangible died in the British command on that June afternoon. No officer who witnessed the slaughter could ever get the memory out it out of his mind.”

     A year passed. On June 28, 1776, in South Carolina’s harbor at Charleston, ten British warships and thirty transports, all commanded by Sir Henry Clinton, launched an attack on the colonists, who were positioned behind earthworks on the beach. The unhurried colonists aimed their cannon balls at one ship after another, and when ammunition ran low, the colonists rushed in with fresh supplies.

     The British returned fire, but their shots slammed into the earthworks. Soon, the ships’ “hulls showed ragged gaps; masts splintered and crashed overboard; decks were swept by cannon balls and small-arms fire; gun crews and their officers were struck down at their posts.”

     One officer on the H.M.S. Bristol said, “No slaughterhouse could present so bad a sight with blood and entrails lying about, as did our ship.”

     Breed’s Hill in Boston and Charleston harbor in South Carolina sobered the British. They realized that the rag-tag militia, the so-called “farmers” that they had scorned, had the will and means to fight.

     Holger Hoock, the British historian at the University of Pittsburgh, published last month his book, “Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth.” In it, he focused on the carnage, violence, and “blood-soaked fields” that the American Revolutionary War unleashed. Breed’s Hill and Charleston’s harbor were not unusual, according to Hoock, who recounts numerous other “Narratives of atrocity.”

     King George III and his troops believed that Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and the others were not American patriots, but Englishmen who had committed treason. As a result, “Captured rebels were not treated as prisoners of war, whose care was governed by established international norms, but rather as traitors ‘destined to the cord,’” and a hanging.

     Benjamin Franklin said, “We must indeed all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.”

     The Patriots drove out the Loyalists, who lost their farms, houses, and businesses, and were forced to flee to Canada. The rebellion divided communities and families. For example, Benjamin Franklin never forgave his Loyalist son, William Franklin. The two were estranged, their relations embittered.

     By Ben’s will, he left William some land in Nova Scotia and his books and papers, and said, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavo[u]red to deprive me of.”

     The American Revolutionary War. The Patriots shed their bled and died, and they seized Loyalists’ property. It was a chaotic, frenzied time. It was an all-out war, with no room for neutrality. The Patriots fought this bloody war for the right to govern and tax themselves, to create a new nation, and to declare their independence.