Welcome! Somehow this is already the fourth year of this book-list endeavor, and the first on its new Substack home.
Looking at my selection for this year, a uniting theme clearly emerged: the effort to understand the pre-modern worldview in contrast to the modern. Certainly we must cultivate some sense of gratitude for our highly unique position in the journey of the human story, but when I survey the landscape of our modern culture, it is difficult to ignore the profound sense of illness and alienation that pervades our thinking, so commonplace across all ages and political leanings that we cannot fail to take note of it in spite of our material plenty. This observation naturally leads me to ask, what then ought we be thankful for, what ought we rail against, and what can we learn from the past about how to think about life? Have we forgotten something worthwhile? Thus inadvertently, every book I selected seems related to pondering these conundrums.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Marshall McLuhan
I am a broken record on this subject, but McLuhan is one of the thinkers who appears to me best able to describe our society’s technological dependencies. It is in this book that his famous phrase “the medium is the message” appears.
I first encountered that phrase almost ten years ago in my college art history class. At the time, though I found McLuhan pedantic and obscure, but that phrase had a way of sticking in my mind. Over the years, I continued to find it a helpful way to condense some very complicated concepts, until I had to recognize that I had come into McLuhan’s debt. There is pretentiousness in the world, of course, but too often I fear my own ignorance leads me to this presumption when it is in fact only a sign that I am in a territory in which I lack the proper frame of reference.
In any case, McLuhan’s thinking extends far beyond that initial phrase. His work is not simply about mediums as in the medium of television, film, literature, or radio, but really all technologies and their relation to human society. On McLuhan’s view, these are complex relations that shape our society without our conscious will by the shifting landscape of our perception. Different mediums rely more or less heavily on different senses, consequentially our relation to our own inventions are not — as many would have you believe — that of a master craftsman wielding a simple hand-tool. We are in a far more complicated dance with our technological structures whereby these tools end up shaping us instead of us shaping them.
By now I expect many of us can accept this proposition, having lived through so much social change in one way or another, connected to our smartphone usage, social media, and the culture of the internet at large. All of these things have landed us on a veritable alien planet when compared to the lives of our ancestors of only several generations past.
Understanding Media, provides us an extremely useful guide to ponder the effects of these technologies upon our society. For these things have become as integrated into our landscape as the trees. Set aside the smartphone for a moment and consider the influence of, clocks, wheels, money, the alphabet, the combustion engine, the photograph. Each of these is far more than a mere tool, but a true extension of our being across the perceptual landscape. If we are to not be haplessly controlled by our technologies we had best start to understand how they effect us on the deepest levels.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, first published in 1961, was a groundbreaking work of pure observation of the character of American streets and city life. In it, Jacobs, a New Yorker, observes the characteristics that make one street feel safe and another dangerous; one park a gathering place for families and another a resting spot for vagrants. She was highly critical of the large-scale infrastructure and urban planning initiatives that characterized the 20th Century, and consequently, to this day shape the urban landscape of our existence.
One of Jacob’s fundamental claims is that a vital city street is defined by the diversity of its foot traffic. One needs not only the optimal balance of familiar faces, shops, and open windows, but also sufficient foot traffic passing through at any given time of day. It is passive eyes on the street that make a neighborhood feel safe – the baker with his open shop window who recognizes every kid on the block, even if he does not know them by name; the slightly too nosy neighbor who shouts helpful directions out from the balcony on the second floor, the passer-by who has stopped to read on a bench nearby. The greater the variety of purposes, the greater the feeling of vitality and communal security.
Parks for Jacob’s are not universal goods, but neutral spaces. They can curse a neighborhood if it means destroying vibrant shops to make space for an empty green field. Parks, unless they are of some exceptional beauty, are not draws in and of themselves, and only serve the community if they have that sense of vitality and safety which they themselves cannot provide. She points out the many vast lawns of corporate headquarters that feel safe only at lunch hour, when they are well frequented by employees on break, but at any other time are nothing but empty spaces lacking passive eyes to provide safety, and are thereby unused by the general public.
These and other practical and sensible observations resonated deeply with my own sentiments about cities that I had never been able to put words so well or so thoroughly. At the time, Jacobs was poo-pooed by the intelligentsia of urban planning. But the revelation of the intervening decades of urban decay has led to this book now being hailed almost universally as a classic. Almost frustratingly so, for despite the lionized status of this book in its requisite circles, so little of its message seems to be heeded or implemented in modern city life.
There is a point that Jacobs makes early on that I fear has been overlooked in the New Urbanism movement. The lessons of this book apply first and foremost to cities and not to suburbs. Jacobs asserts that suburbs have rules and principles all their own and cannot be designed like cities. Thus, increasing sidewalk space and prioritizing foot traffic over vehicles in suburban areas will do nothing to enhance the life of a suburb, while it could do wonders for a city block. In spite of these warnings, even in my own neighborhood, where mixed-use apartment complexes rise up in every open space, the town insists on building parks in places insufficiently dense, and narrowing roads to make room for sidewalks where no one will use them.
The most important lesson from this book is that we ought not to accept the tyranny of the urban planners who would lord over their designs on us to our collective detriment. This is true whether in cities or suburbs. We ultimately cannot design the perfect city absent of its people.
Architecture and design are still haunted by the hubris of the designers and their scale models of utopian fantasies, though there does seem to be marginal improvement in this with the new trends in mixed use development. What the designer cannot fix is the community that ultimately must build the livable neighborhood it both desires and deserves for itself. No efforts to “solve housing” or “solve traffic” can ever succeed when they are the mere plans of intellectuals. Plans are too often formed by looking at charts and maps, and not by sitting on a bench and observing the life of a street.
The Wisdom of the Sands
Antoine de-Saint Exupéry
Amedeo Modigliani once remarked to Anna Akhmatova that he was for a time interested in aviators but then he lost interest because he realized that a pilot is really just an athlete. If only he could have met Antoine de-Saint Exupéry, the “winged poet.”
A pilot and writer from the heroic era of flight, with countless daring flights over the mountains of Argentina, the Sahara Desert, and reconnaissance missions in World War 2, perhaps Exupéry was the lofty mind of the air that Modigliani was looking for. As legend has it, Exupéry somehow managed to read and write while flying, even circling a runway for an hour in order to finish a novel. Perhaps he felt he thought best in the air.
Though his book “The Little Prince” is considered a classic, far more obscure is The Wisdom of the Sands, a book of wisdom writings loosely connected and compiled from notes after his mysterious death by a crash landing during a reconnaissance mission in southern France during World War 2.
Existing somewhere between novel, essay, poem, philosophy, and personal journal, Exupéry’s reflections take the form of a wise king giving advice to his son on how best to rule his kingdom. Each chapter stands on its own, a kingly reflection on the facets of life, the complexities of human nature, love, art, culture, leadership, government, faith, and death; equal in both depth and scope with brevity and precision to which I can make few comparisons. The book has a timeless quality to it, making no reference to any specific region, era, the writings of any other author, or culture. Originally titled Citadelle in French, I prefer the English title, which lends to the feeling that this book might indeed have been pulled out of sandy dunes now enveloping the ruins of some forgotten kingdom.
Some modern readers may have difficulty with his characterization of women, which though not a negative view, tends toward the symbolic feminine rather than toward a specific woman herself, which is quite at odds with the modern sentiment which prefers to emphasize agency. Wherever we encounter metaphors we desire to make them material and as explicit as possible, that Exupéry does not always indulge us in this makes his writing feel at times quite medieval.
Also noteworthy is his use both of ‘god’ in the lower case and “God” in the uppercase, which is in every instance an important distinction between lower passions that nonetheless can dominate our will like a deity, and that eternal mind which presides over all creation.
As I read and found on each page a sentiment more profound than the last, I slowly realized I have encountered what might be a new favorite book, or very near so. In its pages are some of the strongest rebukes of flat materialism I have ever encountered, and I can only say if only French thinking in the 20th Century went the way of Exupéry and not Sartre and Foucault, the Humanities would be in a far better place today. I can only attribute its obscurity to how out of step it is with the thinking of the 20th Century. But with the rule of that mechanical era now slowly giving way, perhaps one can hope for the well-deserved rediscovery of this book.
The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name
Brian C Muraresku
The Immortality Key is one of the most often mentioned books on the subject of what we might call the Mushroom Cult. By way of summary, we can say that the mushroom cult centers around the belief that some number of the most important ancient religions of the world have at their center a psychedelic experience, perhaps hidden from view by religious language, or obscured by centuries of repression; or more broadly, that religious experience is fundamentally psychedelic experience.
It is quite a claim and one that I think we will continue to hear more of as this century progresses. That is why I wanted to investigate Muraresku’s book, even though I must admit, I am rather predisposed to skepticism on this matter.
One position Muraresku takes appears fairly well argued and plausible: that an ancient Greek religious rite called the Eleusinian Mysteries involved the consumption of a fermented barley psychedelic ergot drink, and furthermore, that many of the great Greek writers and thinkers whose names we still know today participated in these rituals and saw them as central to their own development.
That claim is sufficiently far reaching to warrant its own consideration, but the real purpose of Muraresku is to argue that this mystery covertly makes its way into early Christianity in the form of the Eucharist, only to be suppressed centuries later. This is where the problems start. While I am not that equipped to evaluate his ideas with respect to classical Greece, concerning Christianity, I at least know what questions to ask.
To begin with, while Muraresku’s love for Ancient Greece comes through every page, so too does an apparent disdain of early Christianity, in spite of his own professed Catholicism. He relies on Catherine Nixey’s “The Darkening Age” to perpetuate the “dark ages” myth of a brilliant, enlightened pagan world destroyed, suppressed, and forgotten by the ignorant, zealous early Christians. Nixey’s book is reviewed at length by Tim O’Neil, a rationalist atheist historian and medievalist who nonetheless has encountered so much irresponsible history by those looking to score points against Christianity that he has dedicated an entire blog to addressing some of the common myths he encounters, of which he finds Nixey’s book a particularly bad offender.
That Muraresku frames his journey with this kind of irresponsible narrative was not assuring to me. It began to appear that he would grasp at any thread no matter how tepid or poorly attested it is if it would make a traditional view of Christianity look bad. A number of his claims warrant further investigation like his allegation that suppression in 1400s of witches by the Catholic church was in essence a proto-war on drugs, yet I found myself unwilling to give my trust over to his narrative, so clearly biased and so constantly full of important omissions. The more one ventures into unfamiliar territory, the more one feels vulnerable to being mislead with the too-compelling-narrative.
In this I realized I am not well read enough to make a fair evaluation of his work, but what things I do know made me suspicious. I began to spend more time reading and cross-referencing his claims on google and less time reading his book until I at some point set it down and did not finish it, for I was everywhere encountering misleading framing and reliance on fringe theories seriously lacking context. Regarding his central claim of a psychedelic Eucharist, Muraresku at least admits on page 255, that “the smoking gun remains elusive.”
It would take a book length analysis to make a full evaluation of Muraresku’s claims. It is something I cannot attempt to undertake here. I will instead list some of the details I noticed that raised red flags for me:
We already mentioned Nixey’s book the Darkening Age, discussed on page 56 to argue that early Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria, a popular and centuries long myth.
On page 244, argues that the gnostic, undiscovered until the 19th Century, “Gospel of Mary” was excluded from the New Testament because it “didn’t fit the Church Father’s agenda.” Not because the text can be dated, at very earliest to the second century, later than every other canonical gospel, nor because it clearly fits better within the body of apocryphal literature by genre and style than the four canonical gospels. Perhaps mentioning that wouldn’t suit his agenda?
On Page 38 and 46, when discussing the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, brings up the controversial figure Timothy Leary only to excoriate anti-drug movements without any reference to his excesses. In general, while not a user himself, Muraresku is surprisingly uncritical of the negative effects of drug/psychedelic culture at large, preferring to lambast reactionary forces against it.
Ignores the Jewish influence on the New Testament both in terms of style, and the cultural setting and milieu of the persons involved, preferring the Greco-Roman context, which is certainly significant, but hardly the entire picture.
To end on a positive note, I can say that this book does help highlight one of the key problems in Biblical scholarship, namely that there is a proliferation of experts of deep, but narrow knowledge, and far too few thinkers with a wider basis of reading, who can thereby contextualize the New Testament in relation to other ancient texts. Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People, which we mentioned several years ago was another such study along these lines painting quite a different picture of Greek life, and I hope we will see more efforts like this to better integrate our understanding of Antiquity. On that note, Muraresku provided this quotation by Roy J Deferrari, early 20th Century Philologist, which I found illuminating:
“Men of the church have always pored over Greek and Latin Christian literature, but only as the source of their theology. Classicists, on the other hand, have thrown them hastily aside as containing nothing but information for the theologian. The result has been that the literature and civilization of a very extensive part of the world’s history has been very much neglected by the very ones best able to investigate it.”
Lives of the Artists
Giorgio Vasari
First published in 1550, it was Giorgio Vasari who first thought it worthwhile to document the lives of artists. Prior to Vasari, and his renaissance milieu, history remembers less the identity of the artist. The striking medieval works instead appear to us as the accomplishments of anonymous teams of dedicated craftsmen and artisans rather than individuals struck by profundity. Granted, had Vasari not pioneered this genre of literature, doubtless, someone else might have laid claim to that distinction, but without him we would not have such colorful profiles of Michelangelo, Donatello and their numerous contemporaries as detailed in Lives of the Artists.
Vasari was himself an artist and makes for a colorful commentator, happy to supply his own opinions and drastically favoring his own era over those which preceded him. For many of his subjects, Vasari’s writings are the only biographical accounts we have, and thus his stories are difficult to verify, but he everywhere makes vivid the passions and sentiments of his era and the forces which drove men to make wonders.
This book would make for exceptional reading prior to a visit to Vasari’s Florence Italy, providing rich context for many of the iconic sights and works of art, which now form a significant polarity in the bedrock of Western art. Much of that canon has its basis in the stories told by Vasari in this book.
The Language of Creation
Matthieu Pageau
If I say that this book attempts to lay out the contents of a Biblical cosmology, it may conjure to your mind a cartoonish image of a flat circle of the earth, and a firmament dome hanging in the sky, holding all the water back from falling on that flat earth. It is true that Matthieu Pageau uses simple, ancient categories like Heaven and Earth to describe reality. But he is not describing reality at all in the way that the flat-earth theorist wants to, for this view — like the mainstream science it claims to reject — is ultimately an effort equally dedicated to describing reality in purely material terms. Pageau alleges that the ancient person means something entirely different by the very concept of heaven and earth and describing this worldview is the effort of this book.
Clearly many systems that govern our world are of such complexity that they exceed our capacity to understand them scientifically. This especially includes those human systems of our societies, cultures, social hierarchies, norms, values, and the ways in which we actually live in the world. Science only touches these huge questions in fields like economics, psychology, and sociology, and in many cases, these fields are more philosophies than dispassionate scientific endeavors, for they involve extensive reliance on theoretical models of behavior that are more qualitative than quantitative and are thus only partially susceptible to scientific method. The pre-modern worldview then, is an effort to understand how systems like these work with a far more intuitive method of searching for patterning and fractal repetition of ideas at multiple levels of reality, more grounded in the base intuition and direct apprehension of the world through the five senses. Pageau’s focus is especially on Genesis and ancient Hebrew thinking, yet we will find it has much in common with all pre-modern cosmologies, and while this book is certainly of interest to the believer in understanding the symbology of the Old Testament, it may be of equal interest to the uninitiated, just wondering what all the centuries of fuss is about.
Pageau’s method and writing is refreshingly direct and clear headed. An independent scholar, not connected to any university, his approach is uniquely his own, not crowded with academic language or heavily reliant on other expert commentary. He simply presents his ideas in short, concise paragraphs often with diagrams and visual aids to help convey his ideas.
The Alchemy of Paint
Spike Bucklow
I did not set out to find in The Alchemy of Paint a sister book to The Language of Creation, but Spike Bucklow’s far more embodied study of the development of paints and dyes and the cryptic writings of artists wanting to hide the secrets of their recipes from the uninitiated, has more than a little in common with Pageau, though Bucklow arrives there by completely different journey. The Alchemy of Paint is equally a study of the pre-modern worldview and makes cogent some of the thinking behind that ancient discipline of alchemy which captured the imagination of brilliant minds for centuries, yet seems to the modern person, utterly silly. Alchemical thinking, we might equally call pre-chemical thinking. The important thing was something that even Richard Feynman could appreciate – it actually worked, in the right contexts it made a number of accurate predictions. Astonishingly, using alchemical principles based on the four elementals — earth, water, air, and fire — artists could perform real chemistry necessary to extract brilliant colors of ultramarine and vermilion red from complex recipes without any true knowledge of the chemical composition or atomic structure of their substances.
Although the methods of alchemy have been rightly superseded by modern chemistry, its language of metaphor and symbol undoubtedly remain with us today. The Alchemy of Paint is equally a commentary on color itself and its symbolic significance. I found when I looked up from this book, that colors popped out at me more brightly in my awareness, so dulled are we to be sensitive to the psychological power of color by advertising and branding, that I found it refreshing to be able to look at color anew and see the intent and symbolic weight behind it.
Color cinematography as well is an easy thing to take for granted and wield without intentionality, and this book is of great value to the artist who might want to reclaim some level of authorship over the power of color, such was my initial interest in this subject.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake
This brief work by William Blake can be read in one sitting, yet it must be pondered for many. Blake is one of those subtle, yet powerful influences whose name you hear whispered across many domains of culture, when you least expect it. He is equally renowned for his striking and unsettling watercolors, yet his style is consistent across mediums — something we might call neo-prophetic, for lack of a better word. Writing in 1790 he critiques the direction of the enlightenment that surrounds him, its spiritual vapidity, and also – a familiar theme today – the hypocrisy of the religious establishment. He anticipates the illnesses in Western thought decades before anyone else. Like Jeremiah prophesying the end of the kingdom of Israel, Blake prophesied the end of the enlightenment, even at its height.
I confess I cannot really make left or right of him yet, this reading being my first foray into his work. I do not know whether to embrace him or to caution against him, probably some measure of both is necessary for such an original thinker. Yet I feel some affinity for his searing directness that cuts through so many paragraphs of lesser philosophy in a simple aphorism.
Milton, Swedenborg, and other writers more obscure to the modern reader are referenced frequently, some knowledge of their works would provide a stronger frame of reference than I presently have. There is also a significant body of critical analysis of Blake, which I expect would be of great help; Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye is considered one of the most significant studies of Blake by many, but I have not undertaken to read it. Literature is an interconnected thing, a dialogue unfolding over centuries, where from one perspective you may be an expert, from another you must be forever willing to become again a neophyte.