The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

    While I thought The Swerve was going to be all about Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, it is actually much more about De Rerum Natura. Lucretius' book, published in the first century BC, is a scientific/philosophical text derived from the Epicurean field of philosophy. It asserts that everything is made of particles "atoms" from Greek, and that these elementary particles are eternal, infinite in number, but limited in shape and size. These particles move about in an infinite void, in a universe with no creator. But critically, their movements are not predetermined, but swerve. This swerve, or clinamen (or declinatio or inclinatio), is responsible for all life and creation, as the random, unpredictable movements of the atoms creates the capacity for all objects and living things. It is the source of free will as nature experiments with movements, sort of foreshadowing the theory of evolution. Lucretius asserted that the universe was not created for humans and that there was no soul outside of the body that could outlive the body, and no afterlife. He also included some Hobbesian ideas about human origins. Religions, for Lucretius, were cruel delusions, and superstitions at best. Rather than prayer, the better use of a person's time would be to seek pleasure and avoid delusion, as well as to try to learn the truth of the universe.

    What is ironic is that despite these ideas being so heretical to the Catholic Church, they were brought back into the world by Poggio, an apostolic secretary who worked personally for several Popes, discovering a ninth century copy of Lucretius in a monastery, likely in Fulda, Germany. The book gives you a real appreciation for how important book copying was and how difficult it was. Monks had to spend hours every day concentrating on writing on animal skin, vellum, and mistakes were costly. They even had a term, acediosus, which was a sort of illness in monastic communities in which a monk would find it impossible or difficult to read, and would try to distract himself with gossip, feeling that life was better somewhere else. Many students have dealt with this since. They enforced absolute silence, and when scribes wanted to ask for something they needed to use gestures. The scribes used twenty-six tiny pinholes on the ends of each sheet to fix the vellum steady for writing, and used score marks to form straight lines. Apparently Christian monks still copied classical works for centuries, but that copying declined between the sixth and eighth centuries, starting as an active campaign to attack pagan ideas, and then transforming into a true forgetting of those works.

    Reading this book was also significant for me since I think of it primarily as a book given to me by my grandmother many years ago, before she passed away in 2017. I read it way back when, but it was nice to re-read the book, and it brought back memories of her. She was intensely interested in the classics and read in Latin and Greek, and I think I got a lot of my love of history from her. I miss her.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Out of Aeschylus' 80 or 90 plays and Sophocles' 100, only seven of each have survived. Of those of Euripides and Aristophanes, the numbers are 18 out of 92 and 11 out of 43, respectively.
• "At the end of the fifth century CE, an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world's best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost."

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

     The Guns of August was a fantastic book. Tuchman does an amazing job of laying out the dramatic first month of World War One, starting with the invasion of Belgium and the Battle of the Frontiers and ending with the First Battle of the Marne, leaving the Race to the Sea and the rest of the war in epilogue, as a sort of anticlimax. This is a great book because it seamlessly travels from the generals in their headquarters to the politicians and diplomats in the European capitals, and then to the troops on the ground. There are diversions to the Eastern Front, but this book is mainly about the Western Front. Tuchman is a real master of her craft. My only complaint is that reading the details about all the generals can get a little tedious, but I think that is just because I'm not as interested. That's what Tuchman wanted to write about, and she did so very successfully.

    Early in the book, Tuchman explains in detail the significance of Belgium, which she writes was a creation of England as a neutral and independent country. It was on those plains that became Belgium that Wellington defeated Napoleon, and then England was determined, as the predominant power in the world, to create a neutral zone there that would prevent its use as a launching point for cross-channel invasions. But the original plan was to attach Belgium to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Catholic Belgians resisted this in a revolt in 1830, succeeding in becoming independent, recognized as such in Europe in 1839.

    The Germans and the French had sharply contrasting plans, but with one similar goal. Each country wanted to swing hard with their right hook, concentrating forces on a flank. For the French, this was to cross the Rhine at Mainz, northwest of Nancy, on the actual Franco-German border. This was known as Plan 17. The Germans, through the Schlieffen Plan, were determined to violate Belgium's neutrality and take the French at an area on the French left that would be less defended, although a longer route for the Germans. The French plan was very flexible, but maybe not in a good way. It contained no overall objective and no explicit timetables. Its intention was to attack, remain on the attack, and get back on the attack if temporarily pushed back. The German plan was much more rigid. It required hitting France hard and fast to eliminate France as a threat on their Western Front before Russia could mobilize in the east.

    The war was triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on June 28, 1914. The Serbian nationalists who killed him wanted Austria out of Serbia. The result was an Austrian occupation of Serbia, and a German pledge on July 5 to give Austria its "faithful support." Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, and then rejected the Serbian reply on July 26 (even though Serbia met almost all Austrian demands) and declared war on Serbia on July 28. On July 29, Austria began bombarding Belgrade, and the Russians began mobilizing on their Austrian border to defend Serbia on July 30. On July 31, Germany issued an ultimatum to Russia to demobilize within twelve hours. At the same time, Germany made the same ultimatum to France, also demanding surrender of French forts at Toul and Verdun, a ridiculous proposition. Many have criticized this since Germany should have just induced France to remain neutral, but it seems clear that Germany had no trust in France to do that, as France would have much to gain by attacking Germany while its forces were in the east. When Germany went to war with France, Britain joined France as an ally, seeing Germany as the bigger threat. Most thought the war would be quick and decisive, with few, like Lord Kitchener, predicting a multi-year war ("We must be prepared to put armies of millions in the field and maintain them for several years.").

    Admiral Wilhelm Souchon was commanding the German fleet in the Mediterranean at 6pm on August 3 when he learned war was declared. He commanded the Goeben and the Breslau and immediately set sail for the Western Mediterranean to try to escape from the Adriatic Sea. Initially, he sought to intercept three French ships on their way south to Algeria, and continued despite receiving an order from Admiral Tirpitz to turn around and make for Constantinople. He steamed ahead at full speed until he saw the Algerian coast, where he ran up a Russian flag and opened fire. According the Kriegsbrauch, the manual issued by German General Staff, "The putting on of enemy uniforms and the use of enemy or neutral flags or insignia with the aim of deception are declared permissible," even though this was directly contrary to the German-signed Hague convention. After that shelling of at least one French ship and the city of Philippeville, Souchon turned back to Messina in Sicily to coal there from German steamers before setting coarse for Constantinople 1,200 miles away. Below is the route taken.

By MartinD - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3683178

On the morning of August 4, the British ships Indomitable and Indefatigable encountered the Goeben and Breslau heading east back to Messina. But because of the timing of the ultimatums going back and forth, Britain and Germany weren't yet at war. If the British ultimatum was sent to Germany one night before, they would have been at war. But instead, the ships passed within 8,000 yards of each other in silence. See below.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 134-C2320 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5337867

    Souchon made it to Messina where two messages reached him. One told him to actually not go to Constantinople, due to divided counsel in the Ottoman capital. Passage of the German ships would violate Turkish neutrality. The second informed Souchon that the Austrians could give him no naval help in the Mediterranean, and that Souchon was essentially on his own. Knowing he didn't have the speed to make a run through Gibraltar, and "rebell[ing] against holing himself up in Pola, dependent on the Austrians," Souchon decided to make for Constantinople anyway, with a political instead of a military goal: to bring the Ottomans into the war. The Germans were surrounded on either side of the Strait of Messina, with the stronger British ships protecting the western side, anticipating a breakout in that direction. But after recoaling, the Germans moved east, chased by a smaller ship, the Gloucester, that wouldn't get in range because the Germans would blow it out of the water. Captain Kelly telegraphed Admiral Milne and Troubridge, and the British ships gave chase. Some shots were exchanged, with no damage taken on either side, and the British ships withdrew, expecting the Germans to turn West, which they never did. At that time, a small Italian ship happened to pass by, which happened to have a two-year-old Barbara Tuchman on it, and she and her family witnessed the action.

    Upon reaching Constantinople, the plan transformed into "selling" the ships to the Ottomans, transforming them into the Jawus and the Midilli, flying the Turkish flag. By the end of October, Souchon, still commanding the now-Ottoman ships, entered the Black Sea and shelled Odessa, Sevastopol, and Feodosia, killing civilians and sinking a Russian gunboat, bringing Russia into the war on November 4.

    On land, Germany entered Belgium first, and on August 4, with German columns marching on Liege, the King of Belgium pleaded for help from France, Britain, or anyone. No one was ready to oppose the Germans in Belgium, as the British wanted to be the last ones in (so they wouldn't lose their entire army immediately), and the French were planning to attack in a totally different direction. The Germans were shocked (although they shouldn't have been) that the British chose to side with the French. The Germans conquered the country by August 15. Although the world celebrated Belgium's heroism at delaying the invader, the Germans had already planned some time to be delayed in Belgium, so the delay was only two days, not two weeks as many thought. In Belgium, the Germans had taken severe measures against civilians, taking leaders hostage (and sometimes killing them), burning towns and cities (including a major library), and killing civilians to punish cities for resisting. The German thinker Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, since it would force the population to submit. But the opposite effect occurred, building resentment and resistance against the German occupation.

    Critically, Germany's commander, Moltke, changed the inflexible Schlieffen plan to make it something it was not. The plan called for total commitment on the right side to sweep through Belgium and hit France. But Moltke was tempted by successes on Germany's left, on the actual French border. Initially, the plan was to make a strategic retreat, to capture the French in a sack in the east. But in the face of real war, the Germans advanced in the east too. It turns out that the French were unprepared on all fronts, even the east, where they planned their attack. It couldn't have helped that they wore red trousers, and it couldn't have helped that French Field Regulations calculated that in 20 seconds the infantry could cover 50 meters before the enemy could fire, but that with machine guns it only took the Germans 8 seconds. By August 23, it was clear that the French had broken against the smaller portion of the German forces in the east and the center, not to mention the massive force coming from the north/west. But the one thing that could be said of the French is that they were learning and started a strategic retreat to catch the Germans in a "sack" of their own. This fooled the Germans into a sense of complacency, although some were attuned enough to ask that, if the French were routed, why have we taken no prisoners? But the German advances already decided that the Germans could not be defeated easily. By taking Belgium and northern France, the Germans were in control of the industrial power of both countries, massive coal fields, iron mines, rivers, railroads, and agriculture. This would feed the German war machine for the rest of the war. Luckily for the French, the Germans were forced to send two corps east. The Russians had mobilized far faster than expected in support of their French allies. But they were also defeated far faster than expected at the Battle of Tannenberg. But in this defeat, the Russians bought the French valuable time.

    In those early days of the war, German war aims included control of the European continent, which would require abolition of neutral states at Germany's borders, the end of England's hegemony in world affairs, and the breaking up of Russia. The nations Germany defeated would have to pay massive reparations for direct war costs, veterans funds, public housing, gifts for generals and statesmen, and all of Germany's national debt.  These aims ironically foreshadowed the reparations that would go in the other direction at the end of the war.

    Meanwhile in the North Sea and Baltic, Germany kept its fleet in a defensive posture. The fleet, which had so threatened Britain enough to create permanent enmity between the two countries and drive Britain into France's arms, was now useless in an actual fight. Instead, the Kaiser wanted to keep the fleet for bargaining purposes after the war, plus, it was still weaker than the British fleet it would need to fight to break out of the North Sea. Britain was therefore able to blockade Germany throughout the war, which helped bring America in on the Allies' side, as US trade with the Central Powers diminished from $169 million in 1914 to $1 million in 1916, while trade with the Allies in the same period rose from $824 million to $3 billion. The German fleet was to remain a "fleet-in-being," as the Germans hoped for an early victory on land that never came.

    In the final days of August, Joffre, who had mismanaged the first weeks of the war, became focused on his counter-attack. Tuchman praises him in this period and writes that

What went on behind that opaque exterior he never showed. If he owed his composure to a failure of imagination, that was fortunate for France. Ordinary men, Clausewitz wrote, become depressed by a sense of danger and responsibility; if these conditions are to "lend wings to strengthen the judgment, there must be present unusual greatness of soul." If danger did not strengthen Joffre's judgment in any way, it did call forth a certain strength of character. When ruin was all around him, he maintained an even tenor, a solid control, what Foch, who saw him on August 29, called a "wonderful calm" which held the French Army together in an hour when it most needed the cement of confidence.

On the eve of battle, he heard the news that the Russians had been crushed at Tannenberg, but with the consolation that the two German corps had been diverted to the east (and had been diverted unnecessarily, as they arrived after the battle). And the French, with Paris blacked out and the government fleeing to Bordeaux, caught a lucky break. Instead of going to Paris, the Germans swung east of the city, presenting their flank to the French army garrisoned in the city. The Germans were flanked at the First Battle of the Marne just outside Paris, and were forced to retreat, both sides racing to the sea to try to (unsuccessfully) outflank the other. The Germans had been exhausted from forced marches on the way to Paris, and many were captured sleeping or unable to take another step in the early September heat. The German general Alexander von Kluck gave the reason for the German failure at the Marne:

The reason that transcends all others was the extraordinary and peculiar aptitude of the French soldier to recover quickly. That men will let themselves be killed where they stand, that is a well-known thing and counted on in every plan of battle. But that men who have retreated for ten days, sleeping on the ground and half dead with fatigue, should be able to take up their rifles and attack when the bugle sounds, is a thing upon which we never counted. It was a possibility not studied in our war academy.

Had the Germans not withdrawn two corps to face the Russians, there might not have been a hole in the line to Kluck's left, and there might have been no space to flank on his right.

    All in all, this was a great book and totally a classic of its genre. Very heavy on politicking among the generals, but that's the point.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=188665

Miscellaneous Facts:

• A good quote from Tuchman: "nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great general."
• There was a whole issue years before the war in France when it was proposed that France get rid of the red trousers in its uniform, because they were so visible. But conservatives protested it, and succeeded in keeping the "iconic" red trousers, which caused more casualties in the early days of WWI, when it became obvious that a change was needed.
• The French Commander-In-Chief Joffre was driven around in a car by Georges Bouillot, the three time winner of the Grand Prix.
• The Russian state, worried about drunkenness, banned the sale of vodka during the war, which had the negative effect of diminishing state finances, since the Russian government had a monopoly over vodka sales, which made up a third of government income.

The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid

     This is an interesting book that deals with Zionism, post-Zionism, counter-Zionism, exile, diaspora, postmodernism, and everything in between. At some points it was very esoteric and sort of beyond my comprehension, but it was still thought provoking when I was able to understand it. It reads like a literature review, since Magid basically structures each chapter as a response to other authors or an analysis/synthesis of other thinkers. 

    Magid identifies a crisis in liberal Zionism in that the desire for Jews to own or control the land of Israel conflicts with the rights of Palestinians to live there, as well as with the desire for a plural democracy. Magid essentially says that Israel should dispose with Zionism and accept victory in the Jews having arrived, and now implement a true democracy, the only legitimate way forward. But I remain unconvinced after reading the book that this idea is any better than Israelis throwing themselves at the mercy of more numerous Palestinians/Arabs who would outvote Jews in elections. And since the two communities have no trust between each other, this doesn't seem like a very functional state.

The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History by Ruth Mostern

    This book by Ruth Mostern was a great study of hydrological history. Mostern's writing is a little dry, but it's a work of scholarship that really taught me a lot about a river I knew nothing about. The Yellow River is China's second-longest river, after the Yangtze (meaning Long River), and is the sixth longest river in the world. It is also the birthplace of Chinese civilization. It feeds a floodplain in northeastern China that is extremely rich agriculturally, but it also causes massive floods that kill and displace millions in the worst events. Here is a map below.

By Shannon1 - Created using Natural Earth and NASA SRTM data, both public domain., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9617583

    The most interesting thing I've learned is that the Yellow River was not always yellow. It is called the Yellow River because of the color of the river after it picks up sediment in the Loess Plateau (see below).

But originally, sediment didn't run with the river. In fact, the sediment comes from erosion caused by human activities: felling trees, grazing animals, and clearing land for agriculture. All of these activities removed plant life, causing more erosion, which washed sediment into the river until it reached the flat floodplain (see below).

As the water reached the floodplain, it deposited the silt, which would then block its own path, causing the river to wind across the plain, continually changing course, forming oxbow lakes, and gradually rising above the land surrounding it as it travelled on its own silt beds. Being higher than the other land, when the river did spill its banks, the floods were more dramatic, as the river couldn't connect back to its old course, which was higher than the surrounding land due to the silt deposits.

    Until the ninth century CE, relatively few people lived upstream on the Yellow River, and there were a far smaller number of flooding events downstream than would occur later. It was then that the Chinese state sponsored major frontier colonization up into the middle reaches of the river, doubling the rate of erosion (today, the rate of erosion is ten times natural levels). Before that, as recently as 2,500 years ago, historical documents, pollen records, and archaeological sources show large areas of shrubs and grassland, which today cover only 3% of the Plateau. The Loess Plateau receives less than twenty inches of annual rainfall, and 90% of the river's sediment comes from there, as almost all of the Yellow River's middle-course tributaries funnel into the plateau region. The erosion has grown exponentially: between eleven thousand and six thousand years ago, the river deposited about .54 centimeters of sediment annually; between six thousand and three thousand years ago, .75 centimeters; and today it deposits 8.2 centimeters per year, fifty-eight times the rate of the early period. The smaller numbers were already enough for the river to overflow its banks, but during the beginning of greater human intervention 1,000 years ago, the river started to rise by about a meter a century.

    The first major state-sponsored colonization of the frontier began under the bureaucrat Shang Yang during the Qin dynast in the fourth century BCE. First, Qin laborers built a wall, staffed with soldier-farmers to keep out the horse-riding raiders and to demarcate the area of agricultural activity; then, they surveyed and subdivided the kingdom, assigning new land uses, intending to farm in areas where they probably shouldn't have, very similar to the US in the Great Plains in the 19th century. Agriculture intensified south of the wall, and the Qin forbade the older system of migratory, interlocking subsistence farming. The Qin dynasty would end up unifying China as its first modern empire, and the Qin regime sponsored as many as eleven forced migrations to the northwest onto the Loess Plateau.

    Within a few centuries, contemporary scholars and bureaucrats were already noticing that there was an erosion problem. Zhang Rong, commander in chief at the Han imperial court, observed in 4 CE that state sponsored colonization caused erosion and flooding. Unfortunately, changes were not made, and it was probably already too late. A catastrophic flood broke through the levies in 14 CE, and the river was not rerouted until 70CE. Mostern observes that between the census counts of 2 and 140 CE, the total population of the Han empire declined from 58 to 48 million, and there was a massive exodus out of the Yellow River floodplain: in 2 CE, 44 million people lived in north China and 14 million in the south; but in 140, 26 million lived in the north, with 22 million in the south. But even so, this was a more stable system than the shock that would come in the tenth century.

    Flooding got really bad during the very wet 920s, in which heavy rains caused more sediment wash. Every year between 924 and 954 saw at least one flood or breach, and then beginning in 958, there were annual disasters, usually more than one. Only seven years between 958 and 1029 didn't have a massive flood, and in three years, there were double digit numbers of floods. Here is a graph below made by Mostern of the flooding. You can see that things get really bad in the tenth century and then periodically hit bad levels for centuries after.

This period in the tenth century, coinciding with the transition from Tang to Song rule, is considered by historians to be a major watershed in imperial Chinese history, in which there was access to new strains of faster-ripening rice, population doubled (and urbanized), and Chinese civilization became more oriented toward the Yangtze River than the Yellow River. Until the eighth century, less than half of China's population lived south of the Yellow River basin, but by 1550, over two-thirds did. The shift probably came around the tenth century, according to Mostern. She doesn't say it directly, but it would seem to be the implication that poor river management caused catastrophe after catastrophe and drove people away.
    It's crazy to read how many people knew exactly what was going on with flood management and were ignored. Liu Tianhe (1479-1545), a minister who served as a military officer in Shaanxi, wrote A Compendium of Questions About Water (Wenshuiji), and identified that

[Silt] comes down from the gullies that have come to exist in the high-altitude places in the northwest, from whence the water rushes with extreme violence that levees are unable to resist. Second, the silt raises the riverbed higher, so today, if one surveys the middle of the stream as it flows through Kaifeng, [one discovers that] in winter and spring, it has a depth of only a bit more than one zhang, while even in summer and fall it does not exceed more than two zhang. Its bed is high, unlike the abyss of the Changjiang [Yangtze] course ... Fourth, downstream, the land is extremely flat and there are no mountains to control and confine [the river]. Fifth, in all of the former northern and southern courses of the [river] through the central prefectures, the earth is mixed with mud and sand. Sixth, this perfectly causes [riverbank] collapse through susceptibility to breaches.

    It seems like, according to Mostern, the CCP made the most progress at flood control. By the 1950s, they basically understood what was going on, and began to restore forests and grasslands on the Loess Plateau while also building new concrete embankments with steel foundations on the floodplain that were far stronger than anything built before. But problems aren't over. The Yellow River has experienced desiccation (drying up) multiple times since the 1970s, and the rate of desiccation has increased with time. What water remains is polluted with fertilizers, pesticides, and industrial chemicals. This is surely a big issue for the future.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Great Bend in the Yellow River, which turns north, then east, and then south before turning east again, is a result of a shift in continental plates long after the Yellow River first formed 56-34 million years ago. It had drained due east until India crashed into Asia five million years ago and caused the "Ordos Block" to fold and uplift into place.
• The Yellow River did not originally take one clear path to the sea, but just sort of petered out on the floodplain. It had to be channelized to actually clearly make it to the sea.
• The major turning points in soil erosion occurred about 7,000 years ago, with the emergence of neolithic agriculture; 300 BCE to 0 CE, as a result of state-directed Iron Age agriculture; between 800 and 1100 CE, the most abrupt change due to population growth, military activity, and timber commodification; and in the 17th and 18th centuries, when people began intensive dryland farming of maize and tubers with a population boom.
• Around the eighth century BCE, pastoralists started riding horses, which introduced the horse population to the landscape, eating up lots of grass and causing more erosion.
• Kublai Khan commissioned the first scientific expedition to the headwaters of the Yellow River in 1279, which resulted in a short book titled Monograph of the River's Origin (Heyuan zhi).

Cien años de soledad por Gabriel García Márquez

    Quería leer algo en español y pensé en este libro por su reconocimiento global y también porque lo había leído en inglés hace muchos años en el colegio. Al terminar, entendí porque se considera una obra maestra de la literatura, pero no conecté con la novela tanto que quería. Me confundía con los nombres y me enredaba con vocabulario nuevo. Pero fue una buena experiencia desafiarme con este meta de leer un libro entero en español. Creo que es el libro más largo que he leído en español, y si no, es uno entre los más largos. La novela trata mucho con el olvido, el egoísmo, la obsesión, y la familia.

1587: A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline by Ray Huang

    This is a book I wanted to read mainly for its title. The idea of the book is that Huang will explore a single year that is not known for being particularly impactful, but actually illustrates and reveals much about the end of the Ming Dynasty, which fell by 1644. Knowing so little about China and the Ming Dynasty, I mainly just learned the wavetops of how the top of the government worked in that period. The big "events" of the year 1587 (the year of the Pig) include the emperor's withdrawal from public ceremonies, the deaths of some major officials and thinkers, and ...

    One thing I learned from this was how weak the role of the emperor could be and how it could differ significantly under different rulers. The Wanli emperor was nine years old when he came to the throne, and as a result was controlled by his advisors as a child, a role he never broke out of. So while other emperors went out hunting and led armies, the Wanli emperor almost never left the Forbidden City. He took like four visits outside the city into Beijing and nearby tombs of ancestors in his entire life. Otherwise, he was surrounded by women and eunuchs mostly in the Forbidden City. Moreover, he was expected to refrain from influencing policy very much at all. His main role was ceremonial and neutral. As a child, he wasn't allowed to develop any talents--despite being a talented young calligrapher, calligraphy was eliminated from Wanli's curriculum once it was determined that he was enjoying it too much, since "harmless hobbies could develop into undesirable distractions that sent rulers to their ruin." The Ming Dynasty differed from other Chinese Dynasties because it required the ruler to rule without a regent, so there was no official person other than the young emperor controlling the state in his childhood. This gave his tutor, Chang Chu-Cheng, a lot of influence. Chang amassed a huge amount of power, but when he died, other bureaucrats turned against his legacy. This led to Wanli going on strike against his ceremonial duties, also vengeful against the courtiers who tried to get him to name his first son heir instead of the third son, whose mother he was in love with. This had practical effects, since his sons would not be educated properly without being named heirs. Without a formal way to resolve the conflict, it simmered for years and years. The Wanli emperor became very cynical about his role as emperor, which kept him as prisoner with the ability to remove or punish bureaucrats, but no ability to affirmatively push policy.

    Huang was interesting in distinguishing Wanli from the Cheng-te emperor, who was far more independent several decades earlier. He had no family ties and didn't care for any of the palace ladies. He was able to basically rule like I would have thought emperors could rule, doing whatever they wanted. He died childless, and his brother, Wanli's grandfather inherited the throne. This was the situation that bureaucrats wanted to avoid.

    Also interesting in 1587 is that a northeastern governor noticed that a tribal leader was building strength and eliminating rivals on the northern frontier. He sent forces out against him, but was defeated. It became a controversy whether or not to eliminate the officials who failed to defeat the tribesmen, and the bureaucrats eventually decided to retain them. This rewarding of failure was surely to the benefit of the Jurchen leader Nurhaci, who would eventually topple the Ming and found the Qing Dynasty. While 1587 was still a long way from the end of Ming, from that point on, Nurhaci had full reign.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• "Geomancy" was a kind of divination that figured out where to build state structures in a quasi-religious way.
• Almost all military officers in the Ming Dynasty inherited their positions from their fathers, with junior officers inheriting ranks exactly as they were, and generals' sons getting ranks only slightly lower.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

     I can't exactly remember where I heard of this book. I think it was in something I read by Francis Fukuyama. But whatever I read, it referenced The Leopard's refrain, that "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change." The line is spoken by the young and liberal aristocrat Tancredi in the midst of Risorgimento, the Italian unification. The book deals with this issue, of how the aristocrats dealt with the changing world of the mid to late 19th century, but it has application to all times of great change. The book is especially interesting because the author, writing in the 1950s, was the descendant of the individual characters of the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last of his line of minor Sicilian princes, which ended when Italy abolished titles in 1946. He never published during his lifetime, authoring this one book, which was published posthumously. The book is significant for its depiction of Sicily and for its deep themes of decay and change. It has a nostalgic feel to it, although not necessarily Conservative.

    And politics pass the aristocrats of the story by, more like a force of nature than a force of man. The comparison becomes explicit: "The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects' barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint." We never get a direct action by any of the characters on the politics of the world. Instead, the world constantly acts on them, remaining passive. 

    Sicily itself also features as a character in the book. Tomasi di Lampedusa describes summers of obliterating heat, glassy seas pounded by the sun, and people baking in their clothes. Little towns disappear into folds in the land, and the whole earth is the yellowed color of dead grass, with trees few and far between. And there is a slowness, very stereotypical of southern Italy, and really pretty offensive. 

"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogenous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's all our fault." 

    There is always a feeling of some impending doom in The Leopard. It feels like an inevitable wave is washing over Sicilian aristocracy, ending their way of life. It is symbolized in the life and death of the strong, muscular Fabrizio, who is a massive man in 1860, but a shell of his former self in 1880. And there are lines like this one, that Fabrizio the Prince directs towards the priest, Father Pirrone:

"We're not blind, my dear Father, we're just human. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like an eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, she must worry for she is not destined to die..." [emphasis is mine]

 And here's another good example:

The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943. [emphasis is mine]

A big "ending" in the book comes in the final chapter, set 30 years after the Prince Fabrizio's 1880 death in 1910. In it, Fabrizio's daughters discover that the relics they believed to be genuine in their family chapel are mostly fake, and, in the words of a priest "have no value whatsoever." I think this is meant to imply that the traditions that aristocrats maintained had lost all value, if not in truth, at least in the perception of the world. The aristocrats themselves lost any societal value. And the book ends with one of Fabrizio's daughters ordering her maid to toss the taxidermized corps of his dog, Bendico, out the window. It briefly resembles the leopard on their coat of arms before landing in a trash heap.