The Sarin Gas Attacks

I was oblivious to the historical event that is the Sarin Gas attacks before I started reading Underground. The book is a collection of interviews with survivors of the attacks, some only indirectly affected by it, as well as interviews with members of the cult that perpetrated the terrorist act.

Although I read some of it wanting to understand a little bit more about what happened, I feel like this is the most authentic way to write about such an important event in the Japanese psyche. Murakami makes only a few side-comments, concerning features of the individual he is interviewing rather than any commentary or judgment. I found some of the accounts terrifying (reading it, as I was, on the train), and some of them bizarre (admin workers dying of gas poisoning, just trying to get to work on time).

The book was released initially in Japanese without the accounts of cult-members, however I think the version published here, with these included, adds something important. Rather than detract from the victimhood of those involved, these latter interviews allow some kind of explanation to be cast over such a disturbing event - not explanation via excuse, but rather a deeper look into how things could go wrong.

I can't help but admire Murakami for collecting these essays. I don't know whether he has been criticised at all for glory-seeking or anything like that, but I think the book shows enough integrity to descredit any such attacks.

A History of mathematics

As part of a feeling that I "should" read more about the subject I seem to be dedicating my life to, I read A History of Mathematics. As there is a lot of history, the book is quite big and thick. It looks quite nice on my shelf - although I must admit that I did, in a way, steal it from the friend who I borrowed it from.

The telling of a mathematics story gives rise to a dilemma: how much maths does one need to explain? How interesting is a story about maths if you don't understand the maths? How uninteresting is a mathematics story when you remove any technical details?

I must say, that really getting into this book, for me, meant stopping every now and again to scribble some stuff down on the back of an envelope ("can that be right?"). Furthermore, some of the impressive achievements in mathematics are only impressive if you realise how difficult it was for them to come about (does it mean much to anyone that there's no general formula for solving cubics?). So whilst I found this book really interesting, widening my knowledge and allowing me to place myself in the mathematical realm, I do not think I will force anyone to read it. I do try, as often as I can, to retell the stories during my mathematics tutes - as you can imagine, this is often received with a standing applause.

Some of my favourite bits are the exceptional mathematics of the Babylonians, the romantic story of Galois (shot in a duel at age 21... cos of a girl... his theories were proved later), and the Alexandrian maps that didn't include the calculations of Eratosthenes.

The Outsider

The Outsider is often understood to encapsulate Camus's philosophical starting point. Sartre's essay, An explication of The Stranger, interprets the book's purpose as to portray the "feeling" of the Absurd – Camus's "point of departure". The novel, however, takes its place amongst a sea of ideas, reiterated and developed throughout a number of works from the same time period. Caligula, The Misunderstanding, A Happy Death and The Myth of Sisyphus were all written between 1936 and 1945. Camus's conception of Absurdity is manifested in each, however at the heart of all these works lies the unilateral pursuit of Ivan Fyodorovich's logic in The Brothers Karamazov: if God is dead, everything is permitted. Sagi perceives the works from a simpler point of view, believing them both to attempt an explication of the "experience of estrangement". This seems to reduce the explorations to a mediocre type of work, found in a vast category of books. It is my view that The Outsider goes much deeper in analysing and reflecting upon the time it is situated in.

What is essential for Camus, and hence what really constitutes the foundation of his philosophy, is the negation of immortality and God. The question is then asked: What is man left with? These works can all be interpreted with reference to this question, and it is perhaps in The Outsider that we find Camus's most lucid response.

Sartre's lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism also identifies the birth of existentialism in this logic. Without God, "man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to." It is this intangibility when confronting existence that Sartre explores in Nausea. While Sartre describes Camus's use of the absurd as "both a state of fact and the lucid awareness which certain people acquire of this state of fact", we can similarly understand his use of nausea. Nausea is both the fact of man's forlornness, and the heightened awareness resulting from the consciousness that ensues. It is important, however to note that both gain meaning from an individual subjectively confronting the world; not from an objectively absurd world confronting the individual . The similarities between The Outsider and Nausea can be traced to an undercurrent of Dostoevskian influence, however when considering their separate approaches to this anguish, it is the connexions to Nietzsche that are perhaps more significant.

The Outsider presents an antagonism towards Christianity that is more prominent than in Camus's preceding works. This is perhaps where we find the most obvious similarity linking Camus and Nietzsche. The asymmetrical dialogues put faith and the Absurd face to face, as Mersault's indifference contends with the Magistrate's compassion, his anger with the priest's promises of salvation. There is thus a strong focus on the disparity between Mersault's apathy and the pre-conceived societal values that others attempt to impose. Mersault is the absurd man, wishing to "live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is and to bring in nothing that is not certain." It is by negating all that is founded upon a belief in God, that all else follows. Like Nietzsche, Mersault's incense is directed against the priest's passive acceptance of values derived from a God that has been killed by man, "none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman's hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn't even be sure of being alive." For Mersault, death is the only certainty.

The logic is followed through more ruthlessly in Caligula. Camus's own commentary upon the work summarises the hero's attempt to practice liberty "through murder and the systematic perversion of values." Caligula, in his denial of a higher principle, puts all values on an equal footing, refusing the logic of his subject Cherea who believes that some actions are more "praiseworthy" than others. This is alluded to in The Outsider when Mersault reflects on his friendship with Raymond - "What did it matter if Raymond was as much my pal as Celeste, who was a far worthier man?"

The Outsider can be seen as another Nietzschean experiment, which also practices the subversion of values and embraces perspectivism. Indeed, although Mersault's apparent passive indifference distinguishes him from Caligula, he is consumed by physical sensations. Even his name, a conjunction of the sea and the sun, brings together the rejuvenation he feels in the water, and his ambivalence towards the heat and beauty of the sun (recall Aristotle's conception of the sun as an enlightening force and contrast with Mersault's frustration at the glare as he fires bullet after bullet into someone he is indifferent to). Although not actively seeking to pervert social values, he is a realisation of Nietzsche's imperative to live passionately and this is what leaves him happy at the end of the novel. To affirm himself, Mersault's final words call for a consummation of the hatred against him.

Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus which is commonly correlated to The Outsider reveals a key difference to Nietzsche in his articulation of the Absurd. The two fundamental elements at the heart of the absurd are: humankind's innate desire for order, and "the unreasonable silence of the world" – which can be related to the conflicting Apollonian and Dionysian ways of perceiving existence. Consciousness occurs when we refuse to reconcile these diametrically opposed forces. The simultaneous recognition and rejection of our situation, that life is limited only by our individual subjectivity and death, holds these poles in equilibrium. Camus then describes an "existential leap" which escapes the absurd; however what he seeks to do is "remain on that dizzying crest".

Nietzchean Perspectivism

For Nietzsche, contradictions are implicitly essential to life – while paradoxically – the downfall of every contemporary ideology. At moments throughout his work, it seems as if Nietzsche were trying to escape the necessary truth of perspectivism – as he delightedly employs reason to subvert reason and the pre-conceived notions of virtue to undermine prevailing and static moralities. The methodical, sometimes even Cartesian, discourse Nietzsche pursues to arrive at this celebrated insight into truth is a recurring theme in passages such as Origin of knowledge (The Gay Science) and How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth (Twilight of the Idols).

Essentially, humankind's natural desires and perceptions of the world (to Nietzsche: man's passions and senses) are what, up until the Socratic era, constituted our very being – "The Real World". At this point, Nietzsche applies a Darwinian model to the evolution of our reason in that a belief, whether "true" or erroneous, will persevere among the species only to the extent that it is life-preserving. A belief in "free will" and that 'reason' overcomes the folly of the senses would eventually culminate in the works of Descartes and Kant, where all bodily passions and sense perceptions are subverted.

Nietzsche's age is one presented with the limits of this truth. Recognition of this history – that our reason is as much built on the values we bring to it and our pre-conceived notions of certainty – would destabilise its very foundations and allow a shift towards the age of the overman, where a "plurality of truths" are embraced.

Life and art, saturated necessarily with contradictions, are destroyed and sterilised by reason, morality and ideology. These systems, where human reality is denied, are what Nietzsche hopes to undermine.

Einstein vs Winterson

I had to read Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson for a literature class, and I took great issue with it! I can safely say that I did not prejudge the book, I was ready to love it. As I began reading and was introduced to the characters I wanted to read up on their significance - i.e. perhaps the Alice was a reference to Alice in wonderland, one of the guys is called a Don Juan, so i wanted to read up on him too, and then I thought about looking into the meanings of the astrological signs etc that are in it. I'm glad I didn't - that all would have been a waste of time.

Some people like this book, and I don't know why. It reminds me of a person who just rubs you up the wrong way - goes on about him/her-self, thinks they have it worked out, have strange ideas that you are embarrassed even to talk about because they're so ridiculous, and just an indulgence in their own art - even though they don't know anything about artists... something like this.

The book tells the story of Alice, the son of a conservative jew (i've read that she doesn't even get the Jewish culture down very well, but i know nothing of it) who is married to a scientist (a time-travel scientist... ?). Unfortunately for her, he ends up having an affair, so she throws his stuff out the window, and sleeps with the woman who took her husband... and Alice has a diamond at the bottom of her spine, which got there because her mum swallowed it while she was pregnant.

So the themes of the story (just to illustrate that I didn't miss the point) are: 1) the unconventional love triangle, and 2) the inability of science to sufficiently explain and justify human experience. I understand well the significance of these ideas, and they are good.

However, the unconventional love triangle isn't expressed too well in Winterson's writing because it seems a bit overborne by her apparent hatred of men. So the man is a 2-dimensional pig: unapologetic, unfaithful and condescending. The Alice character doesn't get heaps of sympathy because she is too vague and lacks integrity. She can throw her husband's junk out the window, and say she's upset, but you would never quite believe her.

Throughout Winterson's writing she can't help but throw in sentence fragments, references to masturbation (in walking down the street, one has to notice that a cement mixer is "jacking its load"... because that's just what one notices??) and other various unnecessary vulgarities.

Now, to what I really disliked - her use of Science. It's a good idea to talk about science and its relationship to the human experience, but if you are going to talk about science, please at least read something. In the world of Winterson, people considered the world flat until the 1600s (so why did Columbus try to find a west route to the indies... why then did Eratosthenes estimate the "circumference" of the earth around 200 BC???? - interesting story here... Columbus used a map that didn't use Eratosthenes predictions, as a result severely underestimating the size of the earth, maths is great). Also, she talks quite a lot about Einstein's theory of relativity, about time-travel and clocks, but she has absolutely no idea about it. I may as well write a story that rejects the practices of modern day schools because students are made to hang upside down and eat apples.

The fortunate upshot of this, was that it prompted me to read Einstein's Relativity since I couldn't understand how Winterson could possibly be right. Einstein's nice little book is merely an introduction, with very little mathematics. It contains the Lorenz transformation, which looks at time experienced in relation to the speed of light (it's this function that is used to make the prediction that passing the speed of light is impossible, as once speed > c, you have the square root of a negative number). Einstein is a very accessible writer, and if you're not too interested in reading Relativity and seeing what all the fuss is about, you could read his Ideas and Opinions - he's quite funny.

So my problem with Winterson, is that she's pretentious and just generally unlikeable. One of those writers who equates writing something controversial with writing something profound. She leads her readers up an unorthodox stairway to nowhere and says "see! I told you", and the less resilient will say "ah yes, you're right" rather than "i think you've confused yourself". In this way, I think post-modernism is sometimes reminiscent of The Emperor's New Clothes, they're all trying to trick us into thinking they're geniuses!

my first murakami

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, is probably the most sci-fi oriented of Murakami's novels. Like all good sci-fi, Murakami begins with an idea and explores it within the well established rules of the world - i.e. things still need to make sense, there is a difference between sci-fi and a far-fetched plot... that is my belief anyway.

This novel threads two stories, one which takes place in a future world, the other in the unconscious of the protagonist. The End of the World component is rife with Jungian symbols and archetypes: the wall, the shadow, the gate-keeper - each developed according to Murakami's own ideas. In the Hard-boiled wonderland, the protagonist is getting a little confused and persued for what a code that is in his head (he is a human encryption device... lovely idea). Murakami's talent here is to describe interesting details of the worlds he creates as if he were writing a "normal" novel. The opening scene describes a simultaneous counting process where coins are counted and backwards and forwards simultaneously. In the End of the World, the dream-reader is given a riddling description of a song as "some words spoken quickly, others stretched out", which i also found quite beautiful in its own way.

As with all of Murakami's novels, he likes to give a couple of nods to his favourite authors, in this one we hear about Mersault from the Outsider (coming to mind because he apologized all the time) which adds another dimension to Murakami's work that makes him interesting beyond the telling of a good story.

This was a nice introduction to Murakami. It's an interesting and well-executed story. It is one that I would perhaps recommend to others as it is not as depressing as something like Norwegian Wood (not my interpretation of depressing anyway... i guess there is The end of the world to consider). The book ends with one of Murakami's trademork ambiguous drop-offs. One is reading, feeling that everything is coming together and then a final sentence forces a reinterpretation of everything just mentioned. All stars.

Camus plays

Camus' plays are harder to obtain than his fiction - obviously they are not viewed to be as literarily important. I am still looking for a copy of his play-version of The Possessed, although I will probably read the big book before I get too serious about this search.

Of the plays in this collection, Caligula and The Just Assassins are the most important to his philosophy and indeed, the better written. Caligula represents a perversion of unquestioned Christian values. He operates alongside Mersault in Camus' philosophy of the Absurd. For some reason, I feel like there is something quite admirable about this Caligula. Despite all he does, it seems like he really does just want "the moon" (contrast to Mersault's Sun), and the inauthenticity of the characters around him draws little sympathy for all he puts them through. There is a resemblance between the way Caligula and Hamlet approach their destinies. In light of a modernist anguish, a deprivation of meaning, they manipulate the world around them in an attempt to find something tangible.

Here is a poster I have framed and in my room - was done in poland I think to advertise a performance of Caligula.



The Just Assassins consumates the philosophy presented in The Rebel. It retells the (true) story of the assassination of a Duke, the perpetrators failing in a prior attempt because they refused to attack while he was around his niece and nephew. For Camus, the refusal to sacrifice innocents is important for the Rebel - who wants all or nothing. As a french-algerian, Camus believed in the rights of the native Algerians, however refused that it was necessary to attack innocent settlers in order to gain their independence.

The misunderstanding is an attempt by Camus to write a tragedy in the style of Oedipus. As a result, it reads more like a literary experiment - frankly, something that might be written as a text response by a Year 12 student. A son returns home only to be killed by his sister and mother, because he neglects to tell them who he is. There is a very nice sentiment conveyed here which I think is worthwhile, something which comes through in Kafka stories like Metamorphosis, The Trial and the Castle.

We hold onto a naive belief that many of the problems we face arise as a result of misunderstanding. If we can just express ourselves clearly enough, get in contact with the right people, then our problems will be resolved.

This is certainly a trap I find myself falling into, it's hard just to accept that some things cannot be communicated, and it's better to shut-up than to dig yourself into more and more misconceptions. Sometimes it's a sad thing to realise.

State of Seige is somewhat similar to The Plague. Camus liked to write A Novel, an Essay and a Play to explore the same idea. In this play, a plague is used as an excuse to implement a totalitarian regime. It is reasonably unremarkable - perhaps not refined as was the case with The Plague.