Sunshine Recorder

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is infrequent. What is certain is that the grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the bank with pushing aside (probably, without feeling) the blades which were lacerating his flesh, and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to the circular enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse, which sometimes was the color of flame and now was that of ashes. This circle was a temple which had been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched himself out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high overhead. He was not astonished to find that his wounds had healed; he closed his pallid eyes and slept, not through weakness of flesh but through determination of will. He knew that this temple was the place required for his invincible intent; he knew that the incessant trees had not succeeded in strangling the ruins of another propitious temple downstream which had once belonged to gods now burned and dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to dream. Toward midnight he was awakened by the inconsolable shriek of a bird. Tracks of bare feet, some figs and a jug warned him that the men of the region had been spying respectfully on his sleep, soliciting his protection or afraid of his magic. He felt a chill of fear, and sought out a sepulchral niche in the dilapidated wall where he concealed himself among unfamiliar leaves.

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple suited him, for it is contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One afternoon (now afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was only awake for a couple hours at daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy, at times intractable, and whose sharp features resembled of those of his dreamer. The brusque elimination of his fellow students did not disconcert him for long; after a few private lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher. Nevertheless, a catastrophe took place. One day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him. He tried exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock he barely succeeded in experiencing several short snatchs of sleep, veined with fleeting, rudimentary visions that were useless. He tried to assemble the student body but scarcely had he articulated a few brief words of exhortation when it became deformed and was then erased. In his almost perpetual vigil, tears of anger burned his old eyes.

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. He swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him off at first, and he sought another method of work. Before putting it into execution, he spent a month recovering his strength, which had been squandered by his delirium. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost immediately succeeded in sleeping a reasonable part of each day. The few times that he had dreams during this period, he paid no attention to them. Before resuming his task, he waited until the moon’s disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods, pronounced the prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and went to sleep. He dreamed almost immediately, with his heart throbbing.

He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color within the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love. Every night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination. He deliberately did not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs. Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man—a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep.

In the Gnostic cosmosgonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as a clumsy, crude and elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged by the wizard’s nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his entire work, but then changed his mind. (It would have been better had he destroyed it.) When he had exhausted all supplications to the deities of earth, he threw himself at the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt and implored its unknown help. That evening, at twilight, he dreamt of the statue. He dreamt it was alive, tremulous: it was not an atrocious bastard of a tiger and a colt, but at the same time these two firey creatures and also a bull, a rose, and a storm. This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular temple (and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood. He commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted edifice. In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.

The wizard carried out the orders he had been given. He devoted a certain length of time (which finally proved to be two years) to instructing him in the mysteries of the universe and the cult of fire. Secretly, he was pained at the idea of being separated from him. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he increased the number of hours dedicated to dreaming. He also remade the right shoulder, which was somewhat defective. At times, he was disturbed by the impression that all this had already happened … In general, his days were happy; when he closed his eyes, he thought: Now I will be with my son. Or, more rarely: The son I have engendered is waiting for me and will not exist if I do not go to him.

Gradually, he began accustoming him to reality. Once he ordered him to place a flag on a faraway peak. The next day the flag was fluttering on the peak. He tried other analogous experiments, each time more audacious. With a certain bitterness, he understood that his son was ready to be born—and perhaps impatient. That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple whose remains were turning white downstream, across many miles of inextricable jungle and marshes. Before doing this (and so that his son should never know that he was a phantom, so that he should think himself a man like any other) he destroyed in him all memory of his years of apprenticeship.

His victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining his unreal son carrying out identical rites in other circular ruins downstream; at night he no longer dreamed, or dreamed as any man does. His perceptions of the sounds and forms of the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was being nourished by these diminution of his soul. The purpose of his life had been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of ecstasy. After a certain time, which some chronicles prefer to compute in years and others in decades, two oarsmen awoke him at midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a charmed man in a temple of the North, capable of walking on fire without burning himself. The wizard suddenly remembered the words of the god. He remembered that of all the creatures that people the earth, Fire was the only one who knew his son to be a phantom. This memory, which at first calmed him, ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man’s dreams—what an incomparable humiliation, what madness! Any father is interested in the sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness; it was natural that the wizard should fear for the future of that son whom he had thought out entrail by entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights.

His misgivings ended abruptly, but not without certain forewarnings. First (after a long drought) a remote cloud, as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South, the sky took on the rose color of leopard’s gums; then came clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards came the panic-stricken flight of wild animals. For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

… If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place. What I remember most about Malamud’s short-story collection “The Magic Barrel,” is the warm sunlight in the coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before high school. That is missing the more important points, but it is something. Reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism—a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text? Perhaps thinking of that book later, a trace of whatever admixture moved you while reading it will spark out of the brain’s dark places.

Memory, however, is capricious and deeply unfair. It is why I can recall nothing about how a cell divides, or very little about “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but can sing any number of television theme songs in the shower. (“Touch has a memory,” Keats wrote—but I can’t find my copy of his complete poems to test the theory, and, anyway, I found that quote on Goodreads.) The words that researchers use about forgetting are all psychically hurtful for the lay person: interference, confusion, decay—they seem sinister and remind us of all the sad limitations of the human brain, and of an inevitable march toward another kind of forgetting, which comes with age, and what may be final forgetting, which is death. Yet those same researchers are also quick to reassure us. Everybody forgets. And forgetting may even be a key to memory itself—a psychobiological necessity rather than a character flaw. That could be, but I still wish I could remember who did what to whom in D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love”—and the actual, rather than pompous and pretend, reasons why I’ve told people that I preferred “Sons and Lovers.” Or is it the other way around?

This may be a minor existential drama—and it might simply be resolved with practical application and a renewed sense of studiousness. There is ongoing dispute as to the ways in which memory might, in a general sense, be improvable. But certainly there are things that we can do to better remember the books we read—especially the ones that we want to remember (some novels, like some moments in life, are best forgotten).

A simple remedy to forgetfulness is to read novels more than once. A professor I had in college would often, to the point of irony, cite Nabokov’s statement that there is no reading, only rereading. Yet he was teaching a class in modern fiction, and assigned books that are generally known as “slim” contemporary classics. They were short, and we were being tested on them—we’d be foolish to read them only once. I read them at least twice, and now remember them. But what about in real life, set loose from comprehension examinations and left mostly to our own devices and standards? Should we reread when there is a nearly endless shelf of books out there to read and a certainly not-endless amount of time in which to do it? Should I pull out my copy of Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter” to relearn its charms—or more truthfully, learn them for the first time—or should I accept the loss, and move on?

Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of committing something from the experience, whether it be mood or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how a book really works. Maybe, then, for a forgetful reader like me, the great task, and the greatest enjoyment, would be to read a single novel over and over again. At some point, then, I would truly and honestly know it.

I picked up Blood Meridian as my first introduction to McCarthy. I remember, at that moment when there’s thunder on the horizon and a cloud of dusk and the horde of Apaches dressed in the blood-stained wedding garb as they thunder towards Glanton and his men, being completely overwhelmed by both the language and the horror and the beauty of the situation. I actually set the book aside after I read that passage and felt as though I’d been rewired aesthetically.

McCarthy’s is an elemental voice. In his voice I hear stone shifting, glaciers cracking open, trees moaning in the wind. The ancient cadences of his prose take on an almost otherworldly quality, a quality that transports you. I’m constantly in awe of the language and recognizing how he’s putting together his sentences so exquisitely.

And maybe this is the only time this has ever happened to me—but what is revealed is even more terrifying that what I could have imagined.

As many have pointed out before me, he’s unafraid to stare into the abyss. He’s peering into the darkest corners of human existence, using a lamp with blood.

I’ve read The Road several times now, but the first time I read it was soon after my son was born. I was especially emotionally vulnerable in that moment because he was having some issues with his breathing: He ended up getting a severe case of croup that closed his throat. He was transported to the hospital by ambulance and was in the ICU for three days. They pricked him full of steroids and put him in an oxygen mask. I’ve never felt more protective, or helpless, or scraped out emotionally than I did then.

Reading this book around that time put me in a mindset that made me particularly vulnerable to the subject matter. The Road is ultimately about a father sacrificing everything for his son—keeping on and surviving despite a nightmare landscape, and only for his son’s sake. I felt plugged into that current in a way that I don’t know I would have if not a father.

The most terrifying moment in any horror story is when a noise is heard—a noise behind a closet door; a noise heard in an attic, or the basement; a noise heard in a thicket of bushes; a noise heard deep in a cave—and a person pursues the sound. We always want to yell out: Don’t go there. It’s that moment of suspense, the second before the bogeyman is revealed, that is the most gripping. After the door opens, after we shine a flashlight on whatever awaits, the audience might laugh or scream but ultimately they feel relief. Because whatever is provided by the author or filmmaker is never as bad as what we imagine ourselves.

In this particular passage, as soon as the father spots a house on the hill, we know something terrible waits inside. It takes a long time for him to approach the house, to explore its many rooms, and finally descend into the basement.

He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light.

The whole time we’re yelling: Don’t go in there. But he does, of course.

Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. 

Jesus, he whispered. 

Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

And maybe this is the only time this has ever happened to me—but what is revealed is even more terrifying that what I could have imagined. Humans are harvesting each other in order to survive. These pale, chewed-up creatures emerge from the dark and rattle their chains and moan and reach for the father. We’re afraid of them, but we’re afraid more of what might await the father upstairs—the people responsible for this.

I. The majority of mortals, Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live. Nor is it merely the common herd and the unthinking crowd that bemoan what is, as men deem it, an universal ill; the same feeling has called forth complaint also from men who were famous. It was this that made the greatest of physicians exclaim that “life is short, art is long;” it was this that led Aristotle, while expostulating with Nature, to enter an indictment most unbecoming to a wise man - that, in point of age, she has shown such favour to animals that they drag out five or ten lifetimes, but that a much shorter limit is fixed for man, though he is born for so many and such great achievements. It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is - the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.

II. Why do we complain of Nature? She has shown herself kindly; life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men’s fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn - so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: “The part of life we really live is small.” For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time. Vices beset us and surround us on every side, and they do not permit us to rise anew and lift up our eyes for the discernment of truth, but they keep us down when once they have overwhelmed us and we are chained to lust. Their victims are never allowed to return to their true selves; if ever they chance to find some release, like the waters of the deep sea which continue to heave even after the storm is past, they are tossed about, and no rest from their lusts abides. Think you that I am speaking of the wretches whose evils are admitted? Look at those whose prosperity men flock to behold; they are smothered by their blessings. To how many are riches a burden! From how many do eloquence and the daily straining to display their powers draw forth blood! How many are pale from constant pleasures! To how many does the throng of clients that crowd about them leave no freedom! In short, run through the list of all these men from the lowest to the highest - this man desires an advocate, this one answers the call, that one is on trial, that one defends him, that one gives sentence; no one asserts his claim to himself, everyone is wasted for the sake of another. Ask about the men whose names are known by heart, and you will see that these are the marks that distinguish them: A cultivates B and B cultivates C; no one is his own master. And then certain men show the most senseless indignation - they complain of the insolence of their superiors, because they were too busy to see them when they wished an audience! But can anyone have the hardihood to complain of the pride of another when he himself has no time to attend to himself? After all, no matter who you are, the great man does sometimes look toward you even if his face is insolent, he does sometimes condescend to listen to your words, he permits you to appear at his side; but you never deign to look upon yourself, to give ear to yourself. There is no reason, therefore, to count anyone in debt for such services, seeing that, when you performed them, you had no wish for another’s company, but could not endure your own.

III. Though all the brilliant intellects of the ages were to concentrate upon this one theme, never could they adequately express their wonder at this dense darkness of the human mind. Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life - nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: “I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count. Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!” What, then, is the reason of this? You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

On “Algerian Chronicles” by Albert Camus.

Albert Camus was that rare writer who enjoyed a celebrity usually reserved for rock stars, even while being taken very seriously as an artist and a public intellectual. His first novel, “The Stranger,” published in 1942 when he was 29, made him famous; after that came more novels, plays, lyrical essays, short stories, two major philosophical works (“The Myth of Sisyphus” and “The Rebel”), and countless newspaper articles, editorials and political commentaries. In 1957, at age 44, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the second-youngest writer ever to receive the prize (after Rud­yard Kipling). Less than three years later, in January 1960, he was killed in a car crash; people the world over mourned.

Camus was born in Algeria in 1913, into a poor French family that had settled in the colony generations earlier. His father, an employee at a winery, was drafted at the outbreak of World War I and died soon after. His mother, deaf and illiterate, supported her two sons by cleaning houses. (Camus draws a loving portrait of her in his unfinished autobiographical novel, “The First Man,” published in 1994.) Although he never lived in Algeria after 1942, he returned there regularly to visit his family. He maintained warm friendships with childhood friends and cordial relations with a number of Arab intellectuals.

When the Algerian war for independence broke out in 1954, Camus was devastated. For years he had voiced strong criticism of French colonial policy in Algeria, and was forced to leave the country in 1940 after the authorities shut down the newspaper where he had published his most critical articles. He considered himself Algerian. In 1954, one million French citizens lived in Algeria, three-quarters of them born there. Even the poorest of them enjoyed privileges not extended to the nine million Arabs and Berbers who also lived there, often in horrifying poverty, as Camus had shown in his 1939 series of articles on “The Misery of Kabylia.” With other left-leaning intellectuals, Camus argued for economic and political reforms; in the 1940s he supported the Arab leader Ferhat Abbas, who called for political representation for Algeria’s Muslims in a federation with France. When even such modest proposals were scuttled by hard-line French settlers and the French government, power among Arabs shifted to the independence movement, which had concluded that only violence could make the French budge. The bloody war that ensued lasted eight years; terrorism and brutal repression — including the torture of militants by the French Army — reinforced each other in a deadly cycle. Even a regime change in France, with Charles de Gaulle returning as president of the Fifth Republic in 1958, could not stop the bleeding for another four years.

Camus was caught in the middle: a passionate believer in justice for all, he supported Arab aspirations for political rights but could not give up his own love of, and claim to, Algeria. Above all, he felt outrage and horror at the blood being shed on both sides. In 1955, when Arab moderates were still calling for dialogue, Camus’s friend Aziz Kessous, a socialist close to Ferhat Abbas, asked him to write in support of a newspaper he had founded. Camus responded with his “Letter to an Algerian Militant,” printed on the front page of the first issue. This text, heartbreaking in many ways, shows both Camus’s hopeful vision for the country and his growing awareness that it was becoming unrealizable.

Just weeks before, on Aug. 20, a new ­escalation had occurred: Arab guerrillas in the north attacked and killed French settlers, along with some Muslim civilians; the army responded by massacring thousands of Arabs. Camus begins his letter by roundly condemning the massacre, which has put him “on the edge of despair.” He continues, “You and I, who are so alike, who share the same culture and the same hopes, who have been brothers for so long … know that we are not enemies.” Yet this hopeful note is soon followed by a negative one: “I know from experience that to say these things today is to venture into a no man’s land between hostile armies. It is to preach the folly of war as bullets fly.”

This letter was included in Camus’s “Chroniques algériennes,” a selection of texts, mostly newspaper articles, written over a period of 20 years and published in 1958, shortly after de Gaulle’s return to power. It was the last book Camus published in his lifetime, and it appears now in its entirety for the first time in English, expertly translated by Arthur Goldhammer. The editor, Alice Kaplan, has added six texts to Camus’s original selection in an appendix, to further illuminate Camus’s relation to Algeria. (I wish, though, there were a few more editorial notes to give readers background information. Camus’s allusions to contemporary events like the August 1955 massacre were obvious to most of his French readers in 1958 but not to English speakers today.)

As the writings in “Algerian Chronicles” make clear, Camus’s position in “no man’s land” left him increasingly isolated: hated by the right for his condemnation of government policies, scorned by the left for his inability to imagine an independent Algeria from which the French would be absent.

Kaplan’s introduction traces the evolution of Camus’s positions on the Algerian conflict, as well as the ups and downs of critics’ judgments of them. While Camus’s first readers saw him as a philosopher concerned with universal questions of human existence, some influential critics writing after the 1970s considered him a typical pied noir (the usual, sometimes pejorative designation for French people from Algeria), whose works present a colonialist perspective. In recent years, however, the pendulum has swung back; Kaplan notes that the bloody civil war of the 1990s in Algeria has made many Algerian intellectuals appreciate Camus’s steadfast rejection of violence, even when it is committed in the name of high principles. Obviously, this does not apply only to Algeria.

Some of the most memorable pages here restate an argument Camus had already developed at length in “The Rebel”: not all means are acceptable, even when employed for noble ends; terrorism and torture destroy the very goals they are supposed to serve. This position was criticized as “idealist” (it was the reason for the famous break with Sartre), but Camus sticks to it — admirably, in my opinion: “Although it is historically true that values such as the nation and humanity cannot survive unless one fights for them, fighting alone cannot justify them (nor can force). The fight must itself be justified, and explained, in terms of values.”

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Icelandic Sagas. First written down in the 13th century, the sagas tell the stories of the Norse settlers of Iceland, who began to arrive on the island in the late 9th century. They contain some of the richest and most extraordinary writing of the Middle Ages, and often depict events known to have happened in the early years of Icelandic history, although there is much debate as to how much of their content is factual and how much imaginative. Full of heroes, feuds and outlaws, with a smattering of ghosts and trolls, the sagas inspired later writers including Sir Walter Scott, William Morris and WH Auden.

With:Carolyne Larrington, Fellow and Tutor in Medieval English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford; Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, University Lecturer in Scandinavian History at the University of Cambridge; Emily Lethbridge, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Árni Magnússon Manuscripts Institute in Reykjavík.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy—for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas.

In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong. It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth’s rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true.

To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Any one else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is ‘really’ of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected.

For most practical purposes these differences are unimportant, but to the painter they are all-important: the painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the colour which common sense says they ‘really’ have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy—the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, between what things seem to be and what they are. The painter wants to know what things seem to be, the practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are; but the philosopher’s wish to know this is stronger than the practical man’s, and is more troubled by knowledge as to the difficulties of answering the question.

To return to the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be _the_ colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table—it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others. And we know that even from a given point of view the colour will seem different by artificial light, or to a colour-blind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be no colour at all, though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged. This colour is not something which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the spectator and the way the light falls on the table. When, in ordinary life, we speak of _the_ colour of the table, we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real; and therefore, to avoid favouritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular colour.

The same thing applies to the texture. With the naked eye one can see the grain, but otherwise the table looks smooth and even. If we looked at it through a microscope, we should see roughnesses and hills and valleys, and all sorts of differences that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Which of these is the ‘real’ table? We are naturally tempted to say that what we see through the microscope is more real, but that in turn would be changed by a still more powerful microscope. If, then, we cannot trust what we see with the naked eye, why should we trust what we see through a microscope? Thus, again, the confidence in our senses with which we began deserts us. 

The shape of the table is no better. We are all in the habit of judging as to the ‘real’ shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is ‘really’ rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience has taught us to construct the ‘real’ shape from the apparent shape, and the ‘real’ shape is what interests us as practical men. But the ‘real’ shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table. 

Similar difficulties arise when we consider the sense of touch. It is true that the table always gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel that it resists pressure. But the sensation we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table and also upon what part of the body we press with; thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the body cannot be supposed to reveal _directly_ any definite property of the table, but at most to be _signs_ of some property which perhaps _causes_ all the sensations, but is not actually apparent in any of them. And the same applies still more obviously to the sounds which can be elicited by rapping the table. 

Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not _immediately_ known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be?

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.” Sophocles’ Edipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What!—-by such narrow ways—?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

[One evening in Paris in 1879, The Stomach Club, a society of American writers and artists, gathered to drink well, to eat a good dinner and hear an address by Mark Twain.  He was among friends and, according to the custom of the club, he delivered a humorous talk on a subject hardly ever mentioned in public in that day and age.  After the meeting, he preserved the manuscript among his papers.  It was finally printed in a pamphlet limited to 50 copies 64 years later.]

My gifted predecessor has warned you against the “social evil—adultery.”  In his able paper he exhausted that subject; he left absolutely nothing more to be said on it.  But I will continue his good work in the cause of morality by cautioning you against that species of recreation called self-abuse to which I perceive you are much addicted.  All great writers on health and morals, both ancient and modern, have struggled with this stately subject; this shows its dignity and importance.  Some of these writers have taken one side, some the other.

Homer, in the second book of the Iliad says with fine enthusiasm, “Give me masturbation or give me death.”  Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, “To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor.  They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion.”  In another place this experienced observer has said, “There are times when I prefer it to sodomy.”

Robinson Crusoe says, “I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art.”  Queen Elizabeth said, “It is the bulwark of virginity.”  Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, “A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush.”  The immortal Franklin has said, ”Masturbation is the best policy.”

Michelangelo and all of the other old masters—“old masters,” I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction—have used similar language.  Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, “Self- negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse.”  Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time—“None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise.”

Such are the utterances of the most illustrious of the masters of this renowned science, and apologists for it.  The name of those who decry it and oppose it is legion; they have made strong arguments and uttered bitter speeches against it—but there is not room to repeat them here in much detail. Brigham Young, an expert of incontestable authority, said, “As compared with the other thing, it is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”  Solomon said, “There is nothing to recommend it but its cheapness.”  Galen said, “It is shameful to degrade to such bestial uses that grand limb, that formidable member, which we votaries of Science dub the Major Maxillary—when they dub it at all—which is seldom,  It would be better to amputate the os frontis than to put it to such use.”

The great statistician Smith, in his report to Parliament, says, “In my opinion, more children have been wasted in this way than any other.”  It cannot be denied that the high antiquity of this art entitles it to our respect; but at the same time, I think its harmfulness demands our condemnation.  Mr. Darwin was grieved to feel obliged to give up his theory that the monkey was the connecting link between man and the lower animals.  I think he was too hasty.  The monkey is the only animal, except man, that practices this science; hence, he is our brother; there is a bond of sympathy and relationship between us.  Give this ingenuous animal an audience of the proper kind and he will straightway put aside his other affairs and take a whet; and you will see by his contortions and his ecstatic expression that he takes an intelligent and human interest in his performance.

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable.  They are these: a disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke and tell indelicate stories—and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.  The results of the habit are: loss of memory, loss of virility, loss of cheerfulness and loss of progeny.

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it.  As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it.  It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board.  It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence.  Among the best bred, these two arts are now indulged in only private—though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.

My illustrious predecessor has taught you that all forms of the “social evil” are bad.  I would teach you that some of these forms are more to be avoided than others.  So, in concluding, I say, “If you must gamble your lives sexually, don’t play a lone hand too much.”  When you feel a revolutionary uprising in your system, get your Vendome Column down some other way—don’t jerk it down. 

It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.

Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett’s edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.

Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches …. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

The idea for this book was spurred by the fate of a pioneering course on ho- mosexuality I helped organize as long ago as 1970. The undertaking served as a reminder that homosexuality was indeed the peccatum mutum—the silent sin—for it prompted a legislator to draft a law banning such academic efforts. The legislative bill, which would have forbidden discussion of the subject at state institutions other than the state medical school, failed to pass, but the course was not repeated. Though it had focused on civil disabilities and then-popular psychiatric theories, the opposition it aroused convinced me that historical research was needed to understand the strength of the taboo homosexuality had inspired.

My original plan was to trace the religious beliefs that shaped European opinion in the Middle Ages and their punitive consequences. But first it seemed appropriate to begin with Greece and Rome, if only to demonstrate that such negative views were not the universal judgments of mankind. It came as a surprise to find how much literature on homosexuality had sur- vived in the form of Greek poetry, biography, history, and philosophical de- bate. This plenitude made Kenneth Dover’s ground-breaking study (1978), valuable though it was, seem narrow in its focus on archaic vases and such classical authors as Plato and Aristophanes. The material soon filled two chapters and spilled over into two more—on Rome and early Christianity— since Greek documents, far from being limited to the classical age, turned out to be abundant well into the Common Era.

Beert Verstraete’s work on homosexuality and slavery in Rome provided a valuable clue to that culture, but John Boswell’s reading of early Christian at- titudes appeared open to question. Boswell’s thesis, briefly stated, was that the Christian church did not develop markedly hostile views of same-sex re- lations until the twelfth century. But a candid examination of the evidence soon indicated that, from the very birth of Christianity, a hatred existed fully comparable to the hatred directed at pagans and Jews in the first millennium and at heretics, Jews, and witches in the first seven centuries of the second. Certainly, the resulting deaths were in this case fewer, but the rhetorical condemnations were violent in the extreme and chillingly insistent on the need for the death penalty. Boswell’s book, with its impressive scholarship, did good service in legitimizing gay history, and his work with the Roman Catholic group Dignity was admirably courageous, but his relentless discounting of evidence that went counter to his thesis, though an intellectual tour de force, failed ultimately to convince.

David Greenberg’s wide-ranging sociological analysis extends from ar- chaic civilizations to the age of AIDS. But Greenberg, though not sharing Boswell’s views on early Christianity, also chose not to deal with persecu- tions. The result has been a hiatus in the historical consciousness of our times. The modern world is aware of the wrongs committed in the name of Christianity by crusaders and inquisitors, of the horrific effects, in times past and present, of clerical anti-Semitism, and of the atrocities committed by Catholics and Protestants alike in the wars of religion. But campaigns against homosexuals, which, though sporadic, could also be ferocious, have received little notice. Invisibility and silence may have provided some protection, but inevitably they have left a void in the record. To take a modern example: the relegation of thousands of homosexuals to Nazi death camps went all but un- publicized in the English-speaking world until some thirty years after the fall of Hitler. Today, the Roman Catholic Church, to its credit, seeks “reconcilia- tion” with groups who have in the past suffered under “those who have borne or bear the name of Christians” and has called upon historians to uncover the truth as a necessary first step.1 This book attempts, among other things, to provide documentation of how religious organizations have, in the past, treated men and women accused of homosexual behavior.

In the Middle Ages fierce laws were passed, at clerical prompting, that led to the burning, beheading, drowning, hanging, and castration of male “sod- omites” who, through the broadest possible interpretation of the Sodom story and other biblical texts, were blamed for such disasters as plagues, earthquakes, floods, famines, and even defeat in battle. Lesbian acts, too, were condemned, and women were executed. It is a relief to turn from these atrocities and the intense fear and hatred that bred them to the contempora- neous civilizations of China and Japan, which demonstrate that, beyond the domain of the three Abrahamic religions, same-sex relations could be recog- nized and on occasion honored in the post-classical world.

In Europe the unity of the Middle Ages gave way to the national variety of the Renaissance, but prejudice remained strong. In Catholic states, execu- tions now reached their peak. In Italy, cities like Venice and Florence inaugu- rated “sodomy police” to hunt down victims; in Spain, the Inquisitions of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia energetically aided the civic authorities; and in France, men and women who did not enjoy aristocratic privileges were routinely burned or hanged. Nevertheless, despite its legal and ecclesiastical reign of terror, in this age we are able, for the first time since antiquity, to trace in some detail the intimate emotional life of individuals who loved their own sex—in Italy, of artists who left letters and notebooks or attracted biographers, and in France of prominent noblemen, clergy, and military leaders whose amours were described with scandalous relish in a plethora of diaries and memoirs. This new possibility of observing these relationships exists especially for reigning royalty, whose every word and act might be noted, and whose most personal correspondence might be preserved as state papers.

Some of these men and women—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Queen Christina, William III, Thomas Gray, Frederick the Great—were individuals whose achievements were remarkable by any standards. For others, such as Edward II and Henry III, their positions at the center of national affairs brought fates that were ultimately tragic. Some, like Louis XIII and Queen Anne, were mediocrities whom history would have ignored had they not worn crowns. But modern research now makes us able to understand in some detail the role homosexuality played in their varied destinies and, when they were rulers, in the politics of their reigns. At last we can move beyond silence and obfuscation.

Anyone who attempts to tell the story of homosexuality faces a frustrat- ing reality, however. Apart from Sappho and some brief references in Lucian and Martial, lesbians hardly appear in the literature of the classical world. Though they become objects of theological opprobrium in the Middle Ages, only in the seventeenth century are full-length portraits possible, as in the case of Queen Christina, and not until the end of the eighteenth century do social groups come into view. Indeed, only in the last three decades have les- bians occupied the stage in numbers approximating those of their male counterparts. Though their relative invisibility before 1800 has relegated them to a minor space in this history, it seemed to me they should not be excluded, if only to show that they suffered the same religious abuse, harsh laws, and social ostracism as homosexual males.

The history of civilization reveals, above all, how differently homosexuality has been perceived and judged at different times in different cultures. In classical Greece male love carried associations very much at odds with those in republican Rome. Among the Greeks it was associated with courage in battle, philosophical mentorship, and the defense of democracy; among the Romans, with handsome slave boys and the disgraceful loss of manhood. In Arab Spain and medieval France perceptions diverged just as radically. In the former, love between men was a romantic possibility constrained by a strict religious code; in the latter, sodomy was a filthy and unmentionable vice punishable at the stake. In China, the “southern fashion” called to mind the loves of emperors, Fujian “marriages,” and Mandarin scholars paired with opera stars; in Japan, nanshoku (male love) was associated with Buddhist saints, samurai warriors, and the kabuki theater. To the English in Tudor and early Stuart times, “devilish” sodomy was a Catholic sin unknown to Protestant lands. In eighteenth-century France it was le beau vice, le vice ultramontain, or le vice philosophique, that is, it was associated with the fashionable world, with Italy, and with Greek philosophers and modern skeptics. In the Netherlands, in the same age, it was a threat to national survival, to be extirpated by a national pogrom.

Yet behind these varied and conflicting views was a commonalty. What- ever the vocabulary, two elements are present—the sexual fact and the possi- bility of human love and devotion. For many centuries in Europe, homosex- uality was conceived principally as certain sexual acts. This was because it was viewed theologically and in the light of the legal system this theology spawned—that is, as a sin and a capital crime. But we must not be complicit in this dehumanization. These “sodomites” were human beings with whom the modern gay man may claim brotherhood and the modern lesbian recognize as sisters. To divide history in two in 1869 at the moment when the word “homosexual” was coined is to deny this bond. To adopt Michel Foucault’s view that the homosexual did not exist “as a person” until this time is to reject a rich and terrible past.

Nor does this theory of a “cognitive rupture” make sense historiographically. In the secular world of the late nineteenth century, theology gave way to psychiatry, the priest to the doctor. But flesh and blood homosexuals did not spring magically into being as at the wave of a wand; they were only perceived differently. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, in a dozen books published be- tween 1864 and 1879 under the title Researches into the Mystery of the Love be- tween Men, developed the idea of sexual orientation not only through intro- spection and contact with others of his “kind” but also by drawing on his knowledge of the classical and post-classical past. Contemporaries like John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter had a similarly keen historical and cross-cultural awareness which we are challenged to reclaim.

But even the idea of a sexual identity is not uniquely modern. Aristophanes expressed it plainly enough in the Symposium, and the Romans used it, in a limited sense, in their concept of the cinaedus (“faggot”), who was certainly a distinct sort of person. In Plutarch’s philosophical debate, half the speakers share an identity as lovers of youths and the other half as heterosexuals, though they lacked the term, and the same dichotomy appears in a brilliant dialogue from seventeenth-century Japan. Even in medieval times, when the view of same-sex relations as sins and crimes predominated, a French poet could make his heroine speak of “men of that sort” (de ce métier), that is, of a certain kind of individual.

Whether we may properly speak of homosexual subcultures before modern times has been another point of controversy. In England a subculture, much maligned, becomes visible and an object of attack at the start of the eighteenth century. Michael Rocke in his richly documented study of Renaissance Florence argues that the term is not generally applicable to that milieu. But Guido Ruggiero, writing of Venice during the same period, Rafael Carrasco, analyzing the social life of sodomites in early modern Valencia, and Luiz Mott, tracing the voluminous records of the Inquisition in Lisbon, all perceive bonds between men that seem to them to justify the label. Details in the Compendium of Don Pedro León, who recorded the experiences of sodomites condemned to death in Seville between 1578 and 1616, suggest the same interpretation.

In attempting to catch the distinctive tones of different times and cultures and avoid homogenization, I have tried to quote rather than to paraphrase texts and to keep as close as possible to the language of the historian, poet, biographer, or theologian cited. Since, however, the vast majority of quotations are translations from foreign languages, a certain amount of modernization has been necessary. Until we are all polyglots commanding the histor- ical vocabularies of a dozen languages, this seems unavoidable.

Any work which aspires, however inadequately, to the mode of universal history must necessarily depend on the efforts of predecessors who have researched specialized subjects in various periods. While gratefully acknowledging these debts, I have tried, wherever feasible, to go back to primary sources, not just to give immediacy but also to reassess earlier interpretations. Many gaps in our knowledge remain. Some I have tried to fill with research of my own, an effort that inevitably made for slow progress. In a field of study still in its infancy, many current judgments will be open to revision. This is especially true in the case of non-Western cultures, as well as some Western fields, such as papal history and the literature of the Italian Renaissance.

On one issue, however, research now presents an inescapable conclusion—the dire consequences of officially sanctioned prejudice. To illuminate this record, I have added a Conclusion that summarizes acts of cruelty and oppression that the most powerful and pervasive civilization known to his- tory has committed under the banner of morality and religion. 

The Marquis de Sade wrote the world’s most cynical satires. His pornographic works belong in the Horror section of bookstores, because they illustrate some grave truths as well as presenting a daunting challenge to modern secularists. If you wonder why Christians associate atheism and freethinking with immorality, you might look beyond the Cold War for the source of that connection, when the atheistic Soviets were demonized by God-fearing Americans. But in the modern period you’d need to look no further than Sade’s scandalous advocacy of libertinism. Contemporary Americans who speak endlessly of the need for freedom seem oblivious to the fact that they shackle themselves by adhering to cultural norms, including moral and even legal regulations. The freest individual is, of course, the fictional character Satan. Lord Satan is the true hero of those whose highest ideal is personal liberty. (For example, every one of the Nine Satanic Statements in LaVey’s Satanic Bible is consistent with Sade’s libertinism.) Sade understood this diabolical end-game of freedom, and so his satires push freedom of thought and naturalistic philosophy to their furthest reaches. If you’re a critic of freethinking and naturalism, you’ll happily interpret Sade’s works as reducing those assumptions to absurdity. By contrast, if you’re an advocate of liberty in thought and in action, but you reject Sade’s contention that you should therefore be, in effect, a rabid Satanist and sadist, you have to explain why secular postmodern liberalism doesn’t reduce to libertinism. What follows is my critique of Sade’s inversion of morality.

Let’s look first at Sade’s philosophical assumptions and at libertinism itself. Sade was a rationalist not in the technical Western philosophical sense that he believed there are innate ideas—although he did emphasize our instinctive side—but in the broader, progressive sense that he favoured reason over faith and tradition. Thus, he accepted a science-centered, naturalistic worldview, according to which the world is made up of ordered patterns of matter and energy. There are no immaterial spirits, afterlives, miracles, or gods. In short, Sade was a materialist, a naturalist, a vehement atheist, and a respecter of science. So how does he derive sadism from those assumptions?

Here’s my charitable reconstruction of his reasoning. Sade argues, implicitly or otherwise, not just that everything is natural, but that we ought to be natural, and here “natural” must be used in two different senses. Metaphysically, miracles are impossible on his view, but morally speaking, unnatural behaviour is possible and bad, according to him. As far as I can tell, natural and thus moral behaviour, for Sade, is that which copies as much of the natural world as possible and which therefore gives the lie to the conceit that our species is unique. Thus, what we ought to do is follow our gut instincts, especially the instinct to seek pleasure by any means. Pleasure is our highest good, for Sade, and so he was also a hedonist. But the reason pleasure should be our ultimate value is that animals in general are concerned mainly with their own gain, and we should avoid the dualistic delusion that we’re substantially different from the other species. Moreover, egoism follows from mechanistic atomism, according to which an atom is independent of all other atoms and collides violently with others like a billiard ball.

The horrible twist in Sade’s hedonism is that someone who seeks mainly personal pleasure should offer no apology for taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering. Again, the reasoning is starkly naturalistic: moral constraints on egoism are based on dualistic delusions; fundamentally, we are beasts and so our highest good is to behave as beasts. Moreover, we learn from biology that species divide into the weak and the strong; the strong prey on the weak, both between and within species. Thus, there are both predator species as well as alpha leaders of smaller groups. This is a broad natural pattern and so not only do we tend to emulate it, but we ought to do so. And so there are strong, wealthy classes of people that prey on the poor masses. In addition, predatory behaviour is natural and thus good for theMalthusian reason, which is that predators are needed to thin the herd, maintain biological variety, and prevent mass starvation from overpopulation. Predatory people may be diagnosed with sociopathy, but they can appeal to libertinism and say that their egoistic mastery of vice and their wholesale contempt for altruistic morality follow from the modern, Enlightenment assumptions (rationalism, materialism, and so on).

To be clear, for Sade the predator’s license to prey on the weak prescribes not just rough sex with a lower class individual, but every conceivable vice and “crime”—deception, theft, rape, incest, bestiality, and murder are all encouraged by Sade as long as these acts are accomplished for libertine ends. Predators have elite wisdom, given their modern insight into the horrific nature of reality. The real world is materialistic, whereas fanciful notions about a human’s special worth and otherworldly destiny are fantastic and thus immoral. Sade thus reverses traditional notions of virtue and vice. What mass society regards as virtues—asceticism, altruism, mercy, cooperation, empathy, civility—are actually vices, from the esoteric perspective. For the libertine, the wise individual is what an ignorant or deluded person might regard as an evil genius, a sort of corrupted Batman, someone who not only acts on all of his lusts without pity or remorse, but who has the power and the social connections with likeminded predators, to escape the wrath of the masses. In the US, for example, the Wall Street plutocrats who seem too big to fail and who thus threaten to destroy the global economic system should their Ponzi schemes be regulated and their oligopolies be broken up in the name of fair competition, would be the best and the brightest in the moral sense—as would all the amoral math and computer whizzes who flock to Harvard Business School to become multimillionaires by exploiting the broken economic system.

For Sade’s libertine, anything that curbs private pleasure is bad, but not everyone can be happy in nature. On the contrary, the atomic interactions that are at the bottom of all natural processes are indifferent to moral inequalities; indeed, the gaps between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, and the happy and the miserable may be required by a broader and thus a normatively higher pattern. Nature is full of inequalities, and so the more unequal a society may be, the better. The upshot is that libertinism isn’t fit for everyone, but only for the elite, for the aristocrats, oligarchs, or autocrats who are strong enough to follow their unbridled impulses with impunity. If you lack the power to evade, bribe, or otherwise control the police, for example, you’re better off following herd morality, but this morality for the weak is, according to the libertine, nothing but a procedure for being bad. According to Sade, then, selfless people who sacrifice their lusts to get along with others, because they lack the power to live above the law, are the unhappiest, while the libertine who is the most free just by being the most independent is the one who enjoys the most pleasure. 

Our highest natural purpose is to be pleased with life, but since only a minority can fulfill that purpose in a sustained, heroic way, the masses must settle for second place, by living as means for the predators’ fulfillment of that end. And here we see the mechanistic, instrumental side of libertinism. Currently, sadists in the sexual sphere are infamous for their black leather outfits which are meant to dehumanize the practitioners and their masochistic partners so that they can be treated as functionaries in our most natural, beastly game of being masters or slaves. Again, from the materialistic viewpoint, people are soulless robots carrying out our programming, just as atoms are forced to play their part in some natural process. Human societies are mainly games for two classes of robots: slaves serve at the pleasure of masters, by suffering in the masters’ cruel schemes. All else is superstitious folly.

The obvious question, then, is how even the masters can be free if we’re all just slaves to our impulses. Indeed, for Sade there’s no miraculous self-control, but our actions can be more or less out of line with broader natural patterns. When we act naturally in that sense, we fulfill our biological and physical purpose and we live the good life, which is just the most selfishly pleasurable one. When we act unnaturally, by pretending that we’re above nature, that we don’t fit into larger biological and physical patterns, nature punishes us for our error, namely for the effrontery that deluded people call virtue. Liberty here is a matter of lacking restraint, of having the courage and the power to do what you really want to do, if not the power to supernaturally choose your own desires in violation of natural law. And just as God is supposed to use even evil-doers to fulfill his grand design, so too nature uses unnatural, “saintly” people in the furtherance of the game in which we play our roles: again, altruists serve as sheeple, as slaves whose suffering pleases the sadistic masters. For the libertine, this is a mechanistic means-end relationship that’s fundamentally the same as any purely physical process. Just as we hunt weaker or dumber animals for food or sport, for example, so too the most powerful people should kill weaker folk for fun or profit. This is because powerful people ought to have predatory impulses, which means they ought to be sadistic, to derive pleasure from lesser people’s suffering, to delight in this natural game that’s played out all around the world throughout our history, including the Age of Reason.

One other curiosity is how Sade can be a rationalist if he thinks we’re all just primitive animals or robots. Once again, I think this is only a superficial inconsistency. Sade is a rationalist with regard to his philosophical principles, discussed above, but he follows reason up to the point that reason undermines itself. Reason (the scientific explanation of evidence) shows that we’re just animals, that we have no immortal essence or supernatural home, just as science shows we’re part of larger natural processes. So once Enlightenment reason (freethinking) undermines all religious delusions, cowardice and cheap vanity, the libertine says reason has played its part in the drama, and our task is to behave as the beasts we really are. Thus, Sade is a rationalist when it comes to learning how the real world works, but he’s an irrationalist with regard to morality. More precisely, Sade implies that reasoning has only instrumental value, that a wise person will think logically if that’s what’s needed to bring his fiendish plan to fruition.

When evaluating libertinism, we should distinguish between two separate but equally interesting questions. First, is libertinism the best philosophical outlook? Second, do powerful people tend to be libertines as a matter of fact? I suspect the answer to the second question is that yes, indeed, powerful people tend to adopt the libertine viewpoint—even if only to justify their preexisting sociopathy. But whether their sadism or their philosophical defense comes first is yet another interesting question I won’t pursue here. Instead, I want to focus on the first question.