Mayflower - Nathaniel Philbrick

After the perilous crossing was over, after the initial exploration of a mysterious shore was begun, and the first winter survived, the self-styled Pilgrims still had to carve a new life out of a landscape they could have never imagined. With a lifetime of vast uncertainties ahead, these believers tried to make sense of their lives, community, and faith in this new, unknown, and at many times perilous, world. Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower looks at the story of this preeminent early American community - those who Americans would claim as their progenitors - and how they lived and died, made peace and war, settled and fought on this new continent.

Central to Philbrick's work is his claim that the story of the Mayflower doesn't simply end with the Pilgrim's settlement at Plymouth Rock. Without developing crucial relationships with native people, any hope of Pilgrim survival would have been little more than a dream. Though both Indians and settlers ran the gamut of emotions and positions concerning these foreign people, avenues of exchange were forged and each came to rely upon the other. However, as the years passed, and the English became more comfortable and assured in this new world, their younger generations could not but help take the Indians for granted. Often seeing these, so different, people as obstacles to more peaceable lives, and along with unfettered access to a land they coveted, it is little wonder that conflict would arise. Philbrick's work continues through the end of King Philip's War and argues that the conflict remade the American landscape and was central to securing this new English preeminence. Contrary to the American national mythos, Philbrick demonstrates the tenuous nature of English victory in the war - and the precarious advantages they were able to exploit. We are left believing that history could have been written very differently indeed - that the future of this new world balanced on a knife's edge. Yet, by the time sachem Philip was killed in battle, the Indian population had been decimated and their claims to land usurped. Their numbers were never to rebound - nor was their land to be reclaimed.

These early days preceding the United States ought to remind us all of the humble and uncertain beginnings. As we look at the uncertainty of days gone by, we cannot help but wonder how things could have been, and what opportunities were lost along the way.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris

All energy.

The power and enthusiasms of Theodore Roosevelt crackle off the page of Edmund Morris' first of a three-part biography. From his birth and family origins unto the very precipice of the presidency, we see the young Theodore Roosevelt as a man never satisfied. Ever striving, succeeding (and failing), ever looking at what's next, Roosevelt seems to imagine a world on the cusp of being. Out West freedom is waiting to be harnessed. On the floor of the New York Assembly are problems to solve, foes to vanquish. Corruption in government is rampant. The natural world is in need of taming, exploration and explanation. To sit, to stagnate, is to watch life pass before you. Keep moving, seems to be his credo.

Yet for all TR's breathless efforts, we are left uncertain as to his motivations. Though it is always fraught to ascribe contemporary moralities to past periods, Morris more so questions Roosevelt's lack of common humanity. Why Roosevelt was driven to a life of public service remains largely uncertain - perhaps the man himself could not say. In all its power as a character-study Morris does wonder greatly at the young behemoth. We are left with the subtle feeling that Roosevelt's energies were expended more with an eye towards contest and glory than for any other notion. That it was the cultivation of his own imagined aspects of character, more than his impact on others, that drove Roosevelt so incessantly. Though we may wonder at this, it is not clear that Roosevelt ever did. We are left pondering: was the young Theodore Roosevelt a careful man? A thoughtful one? Does this change our estimation of his (coming in later volumes) greatness? Do we like Theodore Roosevelt?

While we may stand in awe of his efforts, his energies and his results, in the balance it is difficult to revere Roosevelt. The human dynamo blasts beyond everything in his path, yet when the points are tallied his success seems to reside largely in self-promotion. Thought he may embody the truly American spirit, a prizing of victory and glory without a reflection upon motivation and broader impact remains a tricky proposition. While we applaud his personification of our boundless enthusiasms, we simultaneously are given pause by the display of our many darker lights. Our tightrope between the past and the future is one strung across a chasm of uncertainty. Action and reflection are the opposing tensions holding our rope aloft. Pay too little, or too much, heed to one or the other, and we are lost. Some plow forward unknowingly, while others are paralyzed. Yet both falter. History would seem to conclude that Roosevelt found a balance which propelled him, and the country, forward. That, in his colossal efforts, he brought the world into a new age. Perhaps this demands a reassessment of the proper tension between action and reflection. We will see.

Spillover - David Quammen

"We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out."

The notion, David Quammen writes, that the human world can ever be bracketed, separated, from the nonhuman world of animals, ecosystems, and the still undiscovered mysteries out there, is given lie by our susceptibility to the world's lesser understood aspects. Rampant population growth, exploding agricultural industry, and ecosystem destruction suggest that our relationship to the world around us is not what it once was. We have crossed a threshold. We no longer simply inhabit the world. As Michel Serres writes, we weigh upon it. It is not that our embeddedness within the world is something unique, rather, that the role of people in the biosphere has become outsized. Thus, we are confronted with novel challenges.

Foremost among these emergent concerns, Quammen writes, are the role that zoonotic diseases play in the present, and future, of the human prospect. The animal kingdom, both through our husbandry of domestics and our increasingly inescapable closeness to the wild, is now brought into more direct contact with people. Often these interactions take place in circumstances that are patently unsanitary and unhealthy for both man and beast. New phenomena arise from novel circumstances, and we can never fully prepare ourselves for the next big thing.

As coyotes and rabbits, hawks and deer, have become forcibly acclimated to life alongside and within human society, with fewer ecosystems to exploit, and as cattle and pigs, chicken and game meat are more widely slaughtered and traded, viruses, once confined to obscure existences in relatively untouched corners of the geographical and microbial world, are adapting to the human sphere and to human hosts. If the thrust of evolution is adapt or perish, then we must expect our tangled world of things to exploit the breadth of possibility. These tentative forays into a brave new viral world are bound to catch populations of people unawares. As our global interpenetration increasingly connects all people to all places, the risk of being caught unprepared is broadcast. The illness of Singapore quickly becomes the outbreak of Toronto, Lagos and Rio.

As we reach our fingers across the globe and into the depths of unexplored realms, is it any wonder that we have loosed phenomena which outstrip even our most scientific and modern epistemologies? Encountering more of the world means that we must develop our own understandings. Ways of knowing continually evolve, not only to meet the unexplained within ourselves, but to make sense of the heretofore unknown. As our envelopment of the world grows we will continue to be confronted with uncertainty, with the previously unimaginable. How this uncertainty informs our decisions and our actions is of crucial importance. We are left to wonder: will humans ever be adequately prepared to meet the world in all its complexity and awesomeness? Will we ever be able to forecast the next big thing?

The Parasite - Michel Serres

Whether we speak of identities or relationships, our selective vision is inevitably exclusionary. Speaking meaningfully to one another entails ignoring all that pervades a setting; the extraneous; noise. Yet such a willful dismissal does not render the excluded unimportant. As Latour writes: Things strike back.  While relation may produce being, there will always be another/others who benefit from, or feed off of, action and intention.

Michel Serres' The Parasite explores the world of the ignored; the third in a two-way interaction. When the banquet is over and the guests have departed, it is the mouse who will feast on the surfeit. The unexpected guest; the beneficiary of lost excess. Surplus creates an unexploited niche, ready to be filled. Serres writes that the introduction of the parasite is analogous to the introduction of noise: it frustrates mechanistic and deterministic relationships; it yields unexpected outcomes.

Such unexpected outcomes can be seen as creative novelty - the knife-edge of history. With only a priori delineated relationships uncertainty remains absent entirely. Inspiration, revelation, epiphany, all initially strike us as unwanted noise until categorized or related to other phenomena or concepts. Lacking the unexpected and, sometimes, inconvenient, we may never view things afresh. The parasite, the unwanted, forces a reexamination of accepted  understandings; "it is the location and the subject of transformation." Awakening new possibility, the parasite, when viewed narrowly, may be seen as an encumbrance - an unwanted effluent.

But only the unexpected is truly novel. Any time the whole is transcendent it will force a redefinition (an expansion?) of the system. The whole is always a negotiation of internal mechanisms, each at various times subsuming and being subsumed by the others. No thing can obstinately cling to its past identity if it is to move forward. While the parasite draws upon energy and time, it also demands change in unexpected ways. It is here that novelty emerges, and the world is constantly remade afresh.

The Searchers - Alan LeMay

The story from which Alan LeMay's The Searchers takes its inspiration was shrouded in myth before LeMay wrote his novel. With real-life blood, fear and destruction on the Texas High Plains as it source material and a film adaptation to-follow, the story of LeMay's work may be variously known to many - though the specificities, grasped by few.

Getting back to LeMay's work uncovers various nuances to the story. It is interesting to view the tale as an evolving mythology of competing source material. Allowing the recorded history, LeMay's work, and John Ford's movie to speak in-light of one another enables a multidisciplinary look at the intersection of mytho-reality and how the two become enmeshed in our conceptions of self and experience. While Amos (alternately Ethan) Edwards and Martin Pauley may have never walked the Earth in a traditionally western (cultural, not genre) sense, we can compare their characterizations between novel and film with one another. Though it may seem mistaken to compare the two, in attempts to find the true Amos/Ethan Edwards, how we make sense of such competing personas can offer insights into ourselves and competing mediums of art (among other issues). The characters' descent from a historical account of the search for Cynthia Parker only complicates, and enriches our sense of their place and actions.

Looking for an absolute grounded, tangible center for this conception of an evolving reality will inevitably come up short. However, our sense of discussion amongst texts enables for differing modes of truth to revolve around a central place, which itself must be empty. This is not a denigration of such an arrival: how do we delineate the absolute central aspect of any entity's identity, without which all the surrounding phenomena would be something different? The discussion which takes place within our interpretations will likely never be entirely settled. Edwards and Pauley can continue to live, grow and change in our minds and with ourselves. If the observer co-creates the world s/he inhabits, then this fluid discussion allows for the continual re-creation of the world, and the subsequent novel generation of opportunity and contingency. The frontier of the Texas High Plains is now - and not what it was before Ford's movie, or LeMay's work. How it is interpreted implicates a real change in the here and now. What is done will be owned, reinterpreted, appropriated, understood and misunderstood; to each his own. Faulkner was right: "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

The Ladder of Divine Ascent - St. John Climacus

At more than 1400 years old, St. John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent has become a part of the Christian, particularly Catholic, liturgy and scholarship. Derivative of the parable of Jacob's Ladder, and speaking of the steps required in one's journey towards a life in service to the Lord God and his only begotten Son, The Ladder gives insight into some of the most nuanced and influential thinking concerning Christian belief during the Dark Ages.

Of particular interest to me was the work as the efforts of an eminently rational mind. While the writings of a 6th century monk, directed specifically towards his brethren, may smack the modern ear as outmoded religiosity, what struck me was the rational tone of St. John's arguments and approach. Here is a case for fealty to God, carefully constructed and based upon the founding premise that he is not unjust, and will not close the door to those who knock with humility.

Such a rational, and indeed, one might argue, logical, argument, proceeds to place the would-be adherent within a world of uncertainty. While the world may be a multiple and changing place, the divine is eternal and changeless. If we are to believe as St. John does, creation, as emanating from God, is a manifestation of his love. If love is the central guiding principle then the eternal must be good, and it is only within the fleeting veil of change in the world that evil arises. Thus, we must discard our worldly concerns, which occur for but a blink in the eyes of the divine, and enter into a life whereby we wish only for what is transcendent of our time and place. While this may strike the modern as specifically escapist or even savage, we may imagine a time and place in which such understandings would have been a radical invention within the history of human thought. In a world of recurrent season and ceaseless change, positing an eternal and unchanging principle must challenge our conceptions of our place in creation. The possibility of such permanence potentially gives rise to countless pursuits - not the least of which is that of permanent knowledge itself. The conceptual shift from the latent uncertainty of a complex and evolving world within which we are subsumed, to a creation which we can grasp and potentially meaningfully understand and, possibly, even alter, is a bold and great conceptual leap. We do well to remember the foundations upon which we have built our own castles in the sky.

Dutch - Edmund Morris

After years of all-access privileges to the Reagan White House, Edmund Morris seems to have concluded that, to honestly write a biography of the 40th President, he would have to re-imagination what is meant by reality. Operating from the premise that Ronald Reagan lived within his own arrived upon conception of reality, Morris too attempts to inhabit such a reality as he would have created; one running parallel to the President's.

Such an accomplishment - Morris' approach - probably says more about Reagan than any historical recounting could. If we are interested in knowing Ronald Reagan as a man, how he thought, how he grew and how changed to understand, and eventually, how he would come to shape the world, then Morris' approach comes highly recommended. This is, first and foremost, a study of character. The ambitiousness of his work, the sheer gall to flaunt such convention is surely worthy of high praise. If the central short-coming of Ambrose's work on Nixon is a failure to learn about the man himself, then Morris' work suffers from a lack of historically situating Reagan's grand personage.

Perhaps Morris - and Reagan - are right in their estimation of the actor-cum-President's role in the American psyche. Reagan has always existed more in our imaginations than the reality of his actions have formed our opinion of him. The casting of such a character adds a weight of meaning to the performance of Reagan's public life and Presidency. It helps us better understand the world-as-stage ethos that can infuse the biggest of lives. It gives the onset of Reagan's dimentia and alzheimer's a more potent reality and, eventually, allows us to agree that we can never really know him. Morris' analogizes Reagan to the planet Jupiter: a large mass of extreme gravitational force, inexorably altering all objects around it, looming large in the sky, and, eventually, revealed as without center. Ronald Reagan was a point of arrival; a creative novelty of performance at every moment drawing all of us towards him and the world of his creation; whether we wished it or not. Morris seems to think that Reagan never cared to realize this; was never much for introspection. Maybe it all really is just a big picture show.