Choosing a tribe

Divergent - Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books, 2011)

I could NOT put this book down. I'm not sure whether those will prove to be empty calories, but I just wanted to be reading all the time. The day after I finished, after talking myself out of going down to the bookstore to buy Insurgent, I started it again. Lovely.

Blah blah YA dystopia. And love story. Young woman discovering she is stronger and more important than she ever imagined. So this world is a future Chicago, and society is split among five factions. At age sixteen, young people take a test that will tell them to which faction they are inclined, and then they get to choose one. That choice, determines the rest of their lives.

"Decades ago, our ancestors [...] divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world's disarray. [...] Those who blamed aggression formed Amity. [...] Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite. [...] Those who blamed duplicity created Candor. [...] Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation. [...] And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless."

Beatrice, raised in Abnegation, has her test results covered up: she is what they call Divergent, with equal inclination toward more than one faction. (Or, you know, what we call being normal and human.) This is dangerous, and she must keep it a secret. And then she chooses her faction, and ... well, you know the drill. Exciting stuff happens.

But since I'm already doing a bad job of making this book sound as compelling as I found it, let me switch to why I found it so philosophically interesting. The end matter includes an interview with the author, where she mentions that she hadn't meant to create a dystopia, and makes the (obvious but sometimes overlooked) point that dystopias arise from the utopian systems put in place to make a better world. And her utopia is a little like the world she's created here. And I get it, because how cool to be trained to really amp up your natural inclination toward friendliness, knowledge, selflessness, straight-forwardness, and courage. Except the division seems so much like the way our current society is self-segregating by politics and socioeconomic status. The latter has always been a problem, but the way we congregate so much with those who share our world view... it's dangerous. And then suddenly I was tweaking Roth's creation, and imagining a world where you rotate through the "factions," honing your abilities in each one and creating a more well-rounded personality, and interacting with people much different from you.

And since our main character is Divergent, maybe that's sort of what we'll see happen in the next two books.

BTW, I am definitely Amity, with a strong undercurrent of Erudite. Which is to say, almost exactly Beatrice's opposite.

Decluttering never stops

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life - Gail Blanke (Springboard Press, 2009)

Over the summer I went through a fairly massive uncluttering project. There were a bunch of boxes that I packed up when I moved out of my 1 BR and had sat in a garage for almost 3 years. And if you are like me, you know that at some point in the packing process, things start getting a little jumbled up -- office supplies, decorations, sentimental knick knacks, etc. I did a pretty decent job at getting rid of things, including letting go of some harder things, like gifts that I appreciated but knew I would never use.

But I didn't feel done, and when I heard about Blanke's book, the concept of an assignment (50 things, seems like a SMART goal to me - aside: I prefer action-oriented for A) really appealed to me. I needed someone to walk me through my house and force me to make a list. (List!) So while decluttering phase one was about trying to weed out some of the boxes of stuff, this phase was going to be about going through all of the unpacked items.

So far, so good. What I really needed was a reminder that holding on to something because of its history isn't a good idea if it comes along with too many (or any really) negative associations. There were items that I realized were too linked to times and people from which/whom I wanted to move on. Some of them I kept, but several I let go. Or at least tried to gather in a single place so there would just be one box of yucky memories. This was great. But my list had trouble, because I had already tossed so much stuff just a few months ago. And for a variety of reasons, I wasn't willing to deal with clothes in this go-round.

So I lost momentum. And then I got to the second half of the book, which is about letting go of the mental clutter and discovering your empowered self. None of this was bad, especially, and if you sit and journal and count each piece of defeatist self-talk that you promise to let go of as a thing, you can get to 50 much more quickly. But I found myself a little unmoved. I don't want to say it wasn't valuable, but I think it didn't come at the right time for me.

And that's really the thing about books like this (well, and most books, probably): they need to show up at the right time. If they appear when you need them, they are amazing. If you're not ready for them, they won't penetrate. So I'll take the good parts and let go of the parts that didn't work for me. And maybe I'll come back to this later and it will be a totally different part of the book that speaks to me.

Ideas that kill

Trotsky in Exile - Peter Weiss (trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Pocket Books, 1973)

I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.

Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.

I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.

Or maybe I just don't get plays.

And it really felt like 27 years

History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin Books, 1972 sorta)

Ten years ago, in my first week of grad school as a doctoral student in history, I was assigned both Thucydides and the Histories of Herodotus. For one class. Maybe I could have done that by the following semester, but it was essentially a non-starter. I got some ways into Thucydides, realized I could either finish it or start Herodotus, and so switched over.

And just like Sparta and Athens took a break of about eight years in the middle of their war, I took a nice long break before coming back to it. (And of course, re-starting from the beginning.)

This book is a beast. In short, starting in 431 B.C. the Greeks had their own World War. The Athenian and Spartan "empires" went at each other, often using proxy armies and invading/fomenting revolution in various other cities. They "laid waste the land" pretty much all the time. And there were lots of pretty speeches laying out reasons for and against various actions.

Eventually, Athens loses their upper hand by deciding it's a bang-up idea to go invade Sicily. This turns out to be a very bad idea, and eventually (although the work is unfinished and actually ends with an Athenian victory at sea) they fall entirely. But lots of detail in between.

Thucydides wrote essentially contemporaneously, although over the course of 27 years he had time to clean things up and insert additional information. Fortunately, his goal was to write an enduring work, so he really took time in crafting it (and hopefully in getting the details correct).

There are so many cities and politicians and generals and most of the time I couldn't remember who was on which side. Which makes for poor work in really understanding the ins and outs of the war, but was fine for providing a general arc of the brutal and complicated war and the set of shifting allegiances that brought Athens down. It took forever to read -- and required lots of stops and desires for lighter fare (I actually picked up Breaking Dawn last night) -- but I'm glad I finally did it. Now onto the next challenge.