art--and life

It seems I'm more dedicated to doing this blog than I am to my darned book. Well, so be it.

Morning notes, as ever: Rubicon, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (finished this volume off), and a bit of Alexander the Great.

Tom Holland's Rubicon is very much to the point for me. I'm nearing the end (I keyed pages 324-331 out of 378 today), and it's been heavy keying since I find myself consistently highlighting material on every page--my Word document is 70 single-spaced pages long. An example: today I was keying from chapter 10, "World War", from a section called "Anti-Cato". The first paragraph of this section, in the book, reads thus:

April 46 BC. The sun was setting beyond the walls of Utica. Twenty miles down the shore the ruins of what had once been Carthage were shrouded in the haze of twilight, while off the coast, where ships filled with fugitives dotted the African sea, night had already come. And soon Caesar would be coming too. Despite being vastly outnumbered, he had fought a great battle and been victorious yet again. Metellus Scipio's army, recruited during the long months of Caesar's absence in Egypt and Asia, had been routed with terrible slaughter. Africa was in Caesar's hands. There could be no hope of holding Utica against him. Cato, who was responsible for the city's defense, knew now for sure that the Republic was doomed.

After highlighting, my compressed version, as typed into my Word document, reads thus:

April 46 BC: Utica. Metellus Scipio's army, recruited during the long months of Caesar's absence in Egypt and Asia, had been routed with terrible slaughter. Africa was in Caesar's hands. There could be no hope of holding Utica against him. Cato, responsible for the city's defense, knew now that the Republic was doomed.

Not all topics in Rubicon are of equal interest to me, in terms of my own project. But the antagonism between Marcus Portius Cato, who came to symbolize the ideals of the Roman Republic, and Julius Caesar, who ushered in the end of that Republic--arguably, in part, for the sake of a vision bigger yet: a united world living as a single commonwealth--I feel is important. Caesar seems to have wanted to put an end to nation-states, to erase borders between countries except as administrative units in a vast, single political entity. He didn't know how an empire of equal, enfranchised citizens was going to function--no one had theorized about such a thing as yet--and he wasn't going to wait to figure that out. He was going to create the thing and work it out in practice.

This is the problem that Europe is still grappling with today, 2,000 years later. Except for a few deranged megalomaniacs and some people who have never fought one, nobody likes war. The question is: what replaces it? How is it surpassed as a way of changing political and economic structures? Nobody knows for sure, because it's never been done. The global policeman needs to be stronger than the malcontents who want to subvert the rules-based approach in order to get their own way. This is essentially what Caesar would have been.

These things are thematically important for my Age of Pisces: the age of humanity's desire to merge in a greater whole. So I pay attention, and highlight more, as I pass through these sections of Holland's book.

Kimmie and I went to Stanley Park to walk the seawall, a 7-mile circuit around the perimeter of the forested near-island of the city park. It's a gorgeous walk, since one is exposed to stunning prospects in every direction as one makes one's way around it, with lean-thighed rollerbladers and tandem-cyclists rumbling past on their own paved path.

Our counterclockwise walk led us first along Coal Harbour, facing the bristling highrises of downtown. This stretch of seawall always has special significance for me, since it is part of the setting for "The Hermit", a short story I wrote in 1979 when I was 20. It was a conscious effort to create an artistic literary work, and I poured strained effort into it. I began writing the story in September, at the same time I started first-year Arts at UBC. My character, an introspective loner also starting his university career, feeling alienated from the mass of his fellow students, meets an attractive girl who stirs deep, mystical feelings in him. He doesn't hook up with the girl, who moves out of town, but he does decide to quit school to lead an unknown life, following his own inner promptings.

And I, following the lead of my own fictional character, also quit school, finishing my career there at about the same time that I finished writing the story. I knew it was a decisive moment of my life--a turning-point. Abandoning your education is a career-limiting move, unless you're an entrepreneur--or an artist. I was proclaiming my allegiance to that path, and staking my future and my life on it.

It has not especially made my life easy, but I'm proud of that moment. Even now I seek to live up to the decision I made 26 years ago. I mustn't let down that idealistic 20-year-old. He was counting on me.