thetravelingminstrel

Rebecca Solnit

The Faraway Nearby

March 2, 2022

The sound of sirens woke me up. Whose witty idea was it to celebrate Women’s Month with Fire Prevention Month in the Philippines? Woman is a fire you cannot prevent. Sirens are also women.

These were my tangled thoughts as I got up on the first day of March, a month I look forward to as a reading woman. It’s when I devote most of my reading time to women authors.

Rebecca had to be the first choice, because maybe my mind treats literature like medicine and it cyclically hankers for a more potent dose to achieve efficacy, and she lives up to this promise — this sort of writing that painfully confronts the hurts and pinpoints the ills but becomes the balm through impeccable information-giving and matchless storytelling, all administered with strength and grace.

The title is an acknowledgement to how the artist Georgia O’Keefe signed her letters for the people she loved, “from the faraway nearby.” A way to measure physical and psychic geography together, Rebecca observes. “We’re close, we say, to mean that we’re emotionally connected, that we are not separate… emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby…” We can be distant from the person next to us but be hopelessly attached to another who is hundreds of miles away. Was it Ondaatje who asked, “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” It seems Rebecca understands and she holds your hand through this sadness.

But that is only one of the myriads of things meaningful to me that she weaves artfully into this narrative. The curious format of this book is a nod to the Arabian Nights. It was only recently when I remarked how Latin American and Eastern European literature are under Scheherazade’s spell, but this book makes me ask, “Who isn’t?”

“The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the treasury of stories prevents her wedding to any of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day… By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.”

“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them…” This is the line with which Rebecca opens this book.

And this is how she ends. “Who drinks your tears? Who has your wings? Who hears your story?”

“Who has your wings?” Who else can ask such a poignant question?

This mastery is, indeed, feminine. Happy Women’s Month!

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

January 25, 2022

Life is unpredictable, but nothing highlights this fact more than the pandemic. If we care to admit it, everyone feels a little lost in the midst of this all.

This beauty of a book is the fresh perspective on being lost that I did not know I needed, for Solnit invites you to be at home with being lost and to be comfortable with it. She encourages you to “leave the door open for the unknown” and calls it art.

“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the Old Norse ‘los,’ meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home…”

The first two chapters took possession of me, the rest of it was simply a bonus. There are passages that are painful to read but in a cathartic way.

Sometimes, in our arrogance as readers, we approach a book as confident as Alexander on a Persian conquest; and in our confidence, we allow ourselves and others to believe that we have conquered it. Only to learn and be humbled, again and again, that the ones that matter, are those that conquer us.

Orwell’s Roses

March 11, 2022

When you turn to a book for solace and get chills instead.

Yes, this has got to be the most beautiful literary criticism of Nineteen Eighty-Four: It rethinks the man that was George Orwell, it guides us to reassess beauty, and it reviews Nineteen Eighty-Four in a light that is distinctly hers. But with Rebecca Solnit, you never know where she will take you next; it is only guaranteed to be a place of startling insight and perspective.

Written and published amid the Covid-19 pandemic, it surprisingly mentions and describes Putin as an admirer and rehabilitator of Stalin’s reputation; even calling to mind the Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine, recognized by 16 nations as a genocide carried out by the Soviet government that killed 3-5 million Ukrainians from 1932-1933… and it seems like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will not be the only prescient book in question here.

What is chilling is the reminder that, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to be in a totalitarian country.” Orwell set Nineteen Eighty-Four in England, “To emphasize that totalitarianism could triumph anywhere.”

And what buttresses totalitarianism? Lies. “Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect… Lies are integral to totalitarianism… demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes. The first victim of war is truth.”

And yet, despite these ominous warnings for which Orwell is known, Solnit asks us to reconsider the word “Orwellian” and look at the man who, in the spring of 1936, planted roses. Beautiful is far from the first word that comes to mind when confronted with his writings, but there is a definition of beauty, Solnit emphasizes, that does not have to do with prettiness. “Another kind of beauty, of a toughness that is life…” The beauty to which Orwell was most committed and for which he strove was “this beauty in which ethics and aesthetics are inseparable, this linguistic beauty of truth and of integrity as a kind of wholeness and connectedness, between language and what it describes, between one person and another, or between members of a community or society.”

What was beautiful to him was truth, clarity, honesty — and roses. “Orwell was passionate about the beauty and gestures and intentions, ideals and idealism when he encountered them, and it was to defend them that he spent much of his life facing their opposites.”

“Orwell’s work was about ugliness of various kinds, but what he found hideous serves as a negative image of what he found beautiful.”

There is, after all, solace through the roses telling us that stopping to smell them does not necessarily distract us from the seemingly more important things in life, but strengthens us instead. Through Rebecca Solnit, and through the man who made my birth year significant in literary history, we are spurred to recalibrate what we deem beautiful, to acknowledge our need for beauty, and to always strive to pursue it.

Hope in the Dark

July 4, 2022

If it were not Rebecca Solnit who wrote this, I would have dismissed the title as another one of those inspirational books that I do not gravitate towards so much. But having experienced four Solnits this year prior to this, which all proved to be books I needed at the exact time I read them, I seized this as soon as it arrived. And once again, she delivered.

I felt it was written for me, who, upon returning from an exhilarating trip, returned to my country with a new president whom I did not vote for. Solnit’s books are extremely political, but she wrote this to make the case for hope, especially for those who, on the surface, seemingly lost:

To point out that just because my side did not win the election, does not mean we are not victorious in many things. To challenge myself to live the same way with the leadership I did not choose as I would have had my candidate won, and to continue being a responsible citizen and human being — because being victorious and seemingly right is small comfort when, around the world, and around the country, there is still injustice and there are still people dying and living horribly.

“Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the twenty-first century has brought, including movements, heroes, and shifts in consciousness that address these things now.”

“The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative.”

Consider reading this if you, like me, paid your taxes dutifully and was called “self-righteous” when you pointed out that our new president failed to pay his; if you campaigned for your candidate without insulting anyone but the many enjoyed branding everyone on your side as toxic, even though poisonous ones were actually present on both sides if we care to admit (I have screenshots); if you were maligned and called names because of who you supported while the same people demanded respect but has been disrespecting your candidate for six years; if you, hopefully, like some of them, just wished for a better country. Consider reading this if you are frustrated and you think hope is lost, because it just made me realize that it isn’t.

This book reminded me that hope and action feed each other, and that every action and inaction have more impact than we know; to not merely demand change but to embody it.

Hope, above all, is action; and as long as we do our part and, if possible, do more than what’s required of us, there is hope.

Wanderlust

June 19, 2022

…with a title perfect for a trip, Solnit shared an Eskimo custom of offering an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system by going in a line across the landscape; “The point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.”

Full entry here.

Hamid Ismailov: The Devils’ Dance

Old Uzbek language has one hundred words for different manners of crying, and special verbs for gestures like gazing imploringly into a lover’s face.

Elif Batuman writes about this in The Possessed, and I reacted to this information as a reader would and thought, “How rich Uzbek literature must be!”

So here I am. Few things are more appealing to this reader than a scarcely-translated and relatively scarcely-read novel by an author whose works are banned in his own country.

It is intense in both intellectual and emotional degrees, and probably not too easy for those who are unacquainted with the Arabian Nights fashion of telling stories within stories within stories. This is one of those jealous novels that demand your full attention, but also one of the most masterful I have read for my Silk Route Reading Project.

The characters are real figures from Uzbek history. It chronicles the arrest of the nation’s prominent writer, Abdulla Qodiriy, by the Soviet secret police in the 1930s. His abduction interrupted the work on what he himself believed would be his greatest masterpiece, a novel about 19th-century poet-queen Oyxon. Abdulla Qodiriy’s manuscripts were subsequently burned and his last novel remained unwritten, but this is where Hamid Ismailov spins an imagined tale of Abdulla Qodiriy who, despite being in prison and enduring its horrors, continues to write the novel in his mind.

In this book we have Hamid Ismailov telling a story about Abdulla Qodiriy who is telling a story about Queen Oyxon.

“Wasn’t the concoction of endless misfortunes that made up Oyxon’s life a reflection of the nation? …when and how had Oyxon’s tragic life-story turned into Abdulla’s own?” Concerning betrayals or intellectual persecution, perhaps Ismailov’s, too.

Yes, it is absolutely political, but how the Uzbek character is laid bare, their superstitions, their literary traditions, the exceptionally moving ending that had a cinematic quality which inspired a soundtrack in my mind, and most of all the tormenting pleasure of a writer’s thought process and how it is like a dance with jinns; these are the reasons why I think this is the perfect initiation to Uzbek literature — albeit complete with figurative hazing.

Expect no less from a people who has a hundred words for crying.

Benjamin Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World

“What was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past,
but the present itself.”

It is a mistake to suspect that this book will help one make sense of the world.

I fell victim to this assumption that I even intended this to be my first read of 2022 if not for delayed shipments caused by Typhoon Odette/Rai.

Read from cover to cover within 24 hours, partly because the web Labatut weaves is sheer genius and the subject of quantum mechanics is so fascinating, but also partly because of a panicked speed when what I sought to find — comfort and hope — was still nowhere to be found even as I approached the final pages.

“…it was mathematics — not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon — which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did… but things are getting worse… But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”

I fell in love with mathematics later in life and even though my dabbling in the subject is nowhere close to the mathematical heights mentioned in the book, I wondered at every morsel. But mathematics, as wondrous and beautiful as it is, has not always been wielded for the good and has often passed through the hands and minds of the eccentric and the disturbed.

Labatut draws us to this dark side. To say that this book is unsettling is an understatement. And reviewing it through my distilled notes highlights the irony and alarm:

Mary Shelley, recalled to have warned us through her monstrous masterpiece of “the risk of the blind advancement of science.”

Fritz Haber, first to obtain nitrogen, recipient of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, accused by his wife of “perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale.”

Albert Einstein, who sensed that following one of quantum mechanics’ pioneers Werner Heisenberg’s line of thinking would lead to a darkness that would infect the soul of physics.

Karl Schwarzschild, contributed greatly to the general theory of relativity, said to have possessed a “peculiar form of a fear that physics would be incapable of… finding an order in the universe.” “…the most frightful thing about mass at its most extreme degree of concentration was not the way it altered the form of space, or the strange effects it exerted on time: the true horror, he said, was that the singularity was a blind spot, fundamentally unknowable. Light could never escape from it, so our eyes were incapable of seeing it. Nor could our minds grasp it, because at the singularity the laws of general relativity simply broke down. Physics no longer had meaning… If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche?”

“Don’t they understand that we are rising up only to fall?”

“We have reached the highest point of civilization. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.”

Alexander Grothendieck, leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry, withdrew from the world not because he hated human beings but for the protection of mankind. “Grothendieck said that no one should suffer from his discovery, but he refused to explain what he meant when he spoke of ‘the shadow of a new horror.’”

Shinichi Mochizuki, awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a mathematician, who, after publishing six hundred pages that contained a proof of an important conjecture in number theory, deleted his blog and announced that “in mathematics, certain things should remain hidden, ‘for the good of all of us.’”

Benjamin Labatut, you go to such great lengths if only to say, in this strange and brilliant way, that innocence is bliss?

Elif Shafak: Black Milk

This is my ninth book by Elif Shafak, and I admit that I sometimes have qualms with her metaphors. Here, she personifies each of her personalities into tiny little women that argue among themselves and with whom she convenes, and it is comical at times. But this may have been necessary to lighten the mood, otherwise it would have been too weighty to read, especially for a woman. Besides, Shafak must always have her whimsy despite the gravity of her topics.

The best parts for me are the contemplations on the lives of other literary women and their differing views on motherhood; from Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, Countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy, Louisa May Alcott, to Sylvia Plath of whom Elif Shafak writes so beautifully — “She was the mother to not only two children but to a thousand poems.”

All these women who either struggled or dealt with, longed for, or resisted motherhood.

“After all, as even the smallest glimpse into the lives of women writers — East and West, past and present — keenly shows, every case is different. There is no single formula for motherhood and writing that suits us all. Instead, there are many paths on the literary journey, all leading to the same destination, each equally valuable. Just as every writer learns to develop his or her own unique style and is yet inspired by the works of others, as women, as human beings, we all elaborate our personal answers to universal questions and needs, heartened by one another’s courage.”

This book was closed with a lump in my throat. At times it felt like it was attacking me, and sometimes it felt like it comforted me. But it is a gift that came to me at the right time in my life.

Disclaimer: I am not with child. Haha! But being of a certain age, my many selves are warring against each other about the things discussed in this book. Summed up, it is mainly a witness to a journey of being at peace with all of who you are, including the conflicting voices in your head.

On the other hand, we see that maintaining a healthy sense of democracy among our many selves cannot be achieved without putting in the necessary work.

Leonora Carrington: The Hearing Trumpet

Because I heard about this book through Bjork, my mind immediately appointed her as the protagonist’s voice in my head. If you don’t know how oddly endearing that is, search for that video of Bjork talking about her TV.

So although our main character is a nonagenarian, the whimsical nature of the book had no problem merging with my brain’s choice of voice.

The author was unknown to me, but I soon learned that I am acquainted with her former lover’s art — that of Max Ernst. Apparently, Leonora Carrington herself was also a surrealist painter; and yes, that is her work on the cover of this NYRB edition.

And as it is with art, it overflows through different channels of your being and explores different media, but it stems from the same soul. Needless to say, this is also a surrealist novel.

And as it is with surrealist art, we find ourselves wading through allusions, symbolisms; reality becomes warped, and rules are contorted, and it certainly gets weird. But as it is with paintings, there are only certain people you would gift with surrealist art, those are the same people to whom you would recommend this book.

But why do we read novels in the first place? Olga Tokarczuk asks and answers in the afterword — an afterword which, I believe, is already a ratification of her Nobel: “To gain a broader perspective on everything that happens to people on Earth. Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless, to make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existence of others… we are seeking a communal order, each of us a stitch in a piece of knitted fabric. In short, we expect novels to put forward a certain hypotheses that might tell us what’s what. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate?” She continues to write that a nongenre novel like this “passes disturbing comment on things we never stop to question.” As it is with Bjork’s music, so it is with this novel.

There is an act that the protagonist commits close to the end that seemed most monumental to me (a potential spoiler, so I will refrain from mentioning it, although I am up for a discussion with those who have read this) but which Tokarczuk does not mention in the afterword. It is possible that she left it out to urge us to develop our own thoughts. Besides, what is the point of all this art if we don’t?

Tamim Ansary: West of Kabul, East of New York

I finished reading this book the day an article from the New York Times came into my inbox: “Afghanistan Has Become the World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.”

A passage from page 59 immediately came to mind: “We just shared the towering profundity of our loss, tasting that resignation to fate that came to us from our Afghan soil, for even as children, we knew that loss would deepen us. That’s what it means to be an Afghan.”

Published after 9/11 when it was Osama bin Laden and the Taliban that put Afghanistan on the map of the majority of Western consciousness, and during a time when the world was angry and calling for the bombing of Afghanistan as retribution, Ansary felt an urgency to let the world know that the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan.

“It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators… Some say, Why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, They’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering… There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets.”

“We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already.”

Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did that.”

And yet, this memoir gave room to a heart-warming aspect of Ansary’s writing. From his childhood in Kabul and Lashkargah to adulthood in the United States, there was still space for life, love, friendship, and even for travel.

Unfortunately, 20 years after this book’s publication, the dam is breaking in Afghanistan once more.

“History is like a river, except people can only live in lakes, so they dam the current and build villages by still waters — but the dam always breaks.”

Tamim Ansary: Destiny Disrupted

“Destiny Disrupted is neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis,” goes the preface. “It’s more what I’d tell you in a coffee house.”

Isn’t that how we’d rather have history presented to us anyway? Wasn’t it just days ago when supposedly smarter people bashed a purported Nadine Lustre account for tweeting a derogatory remark about history as a subject in school? “Stupid. Go back to being an actress,” they said.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that history is “a waste of time,” but don’t you agree to some extent that most teaching methods and a majority of the curricula need some overhauling for the study of history to become more engaging and internalized? To be so effective that hardly anyone becomes apologists for an evident human rights violator? To have a healthy amount of eastern perspective to balance the overwhelming eurocentrism?

For most students, history has been reduced to a series of unfortunate dates and names that they have to memorize for an exam. So, yeah. Don’t coffee house conversations stay with us longer and give space for our own thoughts? More space to consider one view alongside another?

If the answer is yes, there is a huge possibility that you will find this book well-organized, entertaining, and illuminating. Perhaps not all-encompassing, but that is why it is accessible. Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is a panoramic view, Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes focuses on a specific sequence of events, Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted zooms in and out so that it does not only provide particulars but also a bird’s eye view. All eye-openers, but among the three, I find this to be the most well-written.

I started 2021 with The Silk Roads, 2022 with Destiny Disrupted. This will make a good reading tradition — new year, new eyes. We can use a pair every now and then.

Happy new eyes, everyone!

2021 Book Tower

In case the Philippine IATF needs further proof of how much social distancing I’ve done, the plan was to build a tower out of the books I read this year (minus the e-books and several that are currently being lent to friends).

So what have we here? A ziggurat? Pyramid? Pagoda? Babel? I am not sure anymore, that’s why I refrained from posting this when I took the photo the other day. But it is 2021, after all. A year of things not turning out the way you envisioned them in your head. And apparently, I won’t make such a good architect. Haha

But here is a pile of my closest companions at a time when physical interaction was discouraged and I could not be with people I wanted to be with; fragment of a reply to Camus’ “It is because the world is, in its essence, unhappy, that we need to create some joy,” and partial answer to his “because the world is absurd, we must provide it with all its meaning.”

Yesterday, I got on a plane for the first time since the pandemic started, and suddenly I was flooded with a bright and warm clarity that translated everything I felt and thought — and I realized, this is reading. This beauty. Even without opening the book in my hand, this is reading. This beauty, when, at last, everything worth keeping from all those pages blossoms into something that transcends language inside of you.

This beauty, is why we read.

Negar Djavadi: Disoriental

“Freedom is an illusion. The only thing that changes is the size of your prison.”

Disoriental. We know what the prefix implies. But the clever wordplay refers to more than something that is non-oriental. It alludes to the disorienting, the experience of being uprooted abruptly from an oriental into an entirely contrasting and unfamiliar culture — the tragedy of exile.

“I can tell you that you have to disintegrate first, at least partially, from your own. You have to separate, detach, disassociate. No one who demands that immigrants make ‘an effort at integration’ would dare look them in the face and ask them to start making the necessary ‘effort at disintegration.’ They’re asking people to stand atop the mountain without climbing it up first.”

Although this novel has the familiar background of a young person having to flee Iran during the Islamic Revolution, this takes a step further. The main character dispenses her own unique commentary on Iran’s political events in fragments, but this delves more into its aftereffects on the internal climate of an exile.

“To be honest, nothing is more like exile than birth. Being torn, out of survival instinct or necessity, with violence and hope, from your first home, your protective cocoon, only to be propelled into an unknown world where you constantly have to deal with curious stares. Every exile knows that path, like the one from the uterine canal, that dark hyphen between the past and future which, once crossed, closes again and condemns you to wander.”

Hers was a personality I could not initially relate to, and so I shelved this a while ago. Returning to it weeks later and reading a little bit more, the dissonant feeling turned to empathy, and by the time I got to the last page, I was crying for this character who had nothing in common with me.

“After so much time and distance, it’s not their world that flows in my veins anymore, or their languages or traditions or beliefs, or even their fears, but their stories.”

And so I’ve learned that stories are written for the sake of the writer and stories are read for the sake of the reader; so the first may pursue connection and the latter empathy.

Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

It is not for nothing that Rodin sculpted a dramatic monument of this writer; not for nothing that a statue of him with a lion stands imposingly in the gardens of Villa Borghese in Rome; and not for nothing that I chose this as my 100th book this year.

Because there are authors we outgrow, there are those we resonate with during a particular stage in life, there are those who deliver exciting information to the mind but barely leave imprints on the soul, and then there are those timeless ones like Victor Hugo who, throughout the years, endure to disclose beauty and depth commensurate with a reader’s growth.

Everyone probably knows by now that the novel is degrees darker, more tragic, and ends nothing like the Disney film. Although it tells of love that transforms, contemplations on fate, there is also lust, obsession, loss, betrayal, death — but had I known the original French title beforehand, Notre-Dame de Paris, perhaps I would have realized sooner that this is, in fact, a gigantic novel about architecture.

After its publication 190 years ago, it launched a movement to preserve French Gothic architecture. A first-time reader of the preface will focus on that fateful Greek word engraved on the wall upon which Hugo stumbled in one of Notre Dame’s towers, and which would inspire him to write the novel. But listening more keenly will reveal that even on the first page of the preface, there are lines that already set the tone for his architectural odes and intentions.

Of the structures from the Middle Ages, he writes in passing, “Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well as from without… What has time, what have men done with these marvels?” But a few dozen pages deeper, he elegantly declares, “Time has bestowed upon the church perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the facade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes the old age of monuments the period of their beauty. Who has brutally swept them away? It is not time… time’s share would be the least, the share of men the most.”

“On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior (time is a devourer; man, more so); which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.”

By the time I read a quarter of the book, I was convinced that this is more about Notre Dame than it is about the Hunchback. “Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the history of the country, but of the history of science and art as well.”

There are chapters and chapters devoted to detailed descriptions and beautiful thoughts on architecture. He believes architecture to be “the great handwriting of the human race” and how, throughout the ages, it is “developed in proportion to human thought”.

Of the great edifices he writes, “They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating that the greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society…the deposit left by a whole people… the residue of successive evaporations of human society… Each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.”

However, I have also recently learned that some architects strongly disagree with a particular chapter where Hugo holds that architecture was dethroned and ceased to be the sovereign art upon the arrival of Gutenberg and the flourishing of literature. He laments this “death”— “no longer the social art, the collective art, the dominating art.”

Perhaps it is the fact that I am not an architect that I did not react so disapprovingly towards the passage (even though the architect with whom I shared some beautiful lines the moment I read them prove the statement wrong with the work that he’s been involved in for the past several years), and perhaps it is because I considered the historical context in which Hugo wrote.

But I am absolutely certain that those who immediately oppose the disputed chapter did not finish reading this giant. On a closing note in this edition, Hugo clearly expresses that he hopes to be put in the wrong about this exact view!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you craft the most beautiful architectural challenge ever written.

It is not for nothing.