In search of windmills
The intent of this series is thinking through and with China, meant in an essayistic sense. As such, it is not just about the country, but also the observations emerging from the experience of being there. Admittedly, doing so moves me into Said’s target range, but so be it. Cognisant of the missteps that might ensue, this note continues to consider the consequences of moving online, but does so somewhat obliquely, reflecting on the experience of stepping offline, albeit briefly. Previous notes in the series: here, here and here.
Earlier this year, like the good white collar professional seeking productivity that I am, I dutifully read and reread my Cal Newport books, Slow Productivity and Digital Minimalism. In the ensuing months I have once again confirmed that I am not capable of slow pumping like Cal. The logic of his arguments might be strong, but as with much of the life optimization genre, attempts are realisation are much more quixotic. To go online means engaging in a deeply uneven contest: effectively doing battle with teams of highly skilled people paid by massive corporations trying to frack your attention. Invariably, the most likely outcome is succumbing, at best perhaps engaging in some rearguard action to protect one’s headspace.
And so, when going to China and faced with the need to leap over the ‘great firewall’ in order to be online, I chose not to. As I was with people that could handle all of my digital needs, I could spend a week offline. Cognisant of my tendency to indulge in the immediacy of news, magazine articles and podcasts, I decided to focus on long-form. The books I chose to accompany me were: Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, and as an audiobook, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Subsequently reflecting on the choices, it struck me all were about the loss and disappearance of lifeworlds, and with it, remembrance and respect for beauty. Hardly incidental themes.
Engaging with these wonderful works, it was hard to also not feel a sense of sadness, for we now have access to so much of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements through the internet, and yet most of the time the technology distracts and moves our attention away from what is eternal and rich with meaning. With it, the constant assertion of difference and the self has entailed a forgetting of what binds and bridges.
Unsurprisingly, it was Cervantes’ great tale that most captured my attention. Reflecting the affordances that technology provides, I listened to the Naxos audiobook version, read with flair by Roy McMillan. At 36 hours in length, it is a serious undertaking, but a worthwhile one, a chance to encounter a text that remains present and part of a common lexicon, even if it is probably not as widely read as once was the case.
In his lectures on Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov spoke of how the novel has travelled across time:
We should, therefore, imagine Don Quixote and his squire as two little silhouettes ambling in the distance against an ample flaming sunset, and their two huge black shadows, one of them especially elongated, stretching across the open country of centuries and reaching us here.
Placing the text back in context, Simon Leys offered the reminder that:
Since Don Quixote was rightly hailed as one of the greatest works of fiction of any age, in any language, it is interesting to note that it was also—quite literally—a potboiler concocted by a hopeless old hack, at the very end of his tether.
I find this observation strangely reassuring. Given the beautiful language deployed by Nabokov above, what is remarkable is that he regarded it as ‘a cruel and crude old book’ and savoured ‘tearing [it] apart’. Despite this, Nabokov treated the task of teaching Don Quixote with the upmost seriousness, providing a chapter by chapter summary, which included a drawing for the famed windmill episode:
Nabokov went even further, tallying up a scorecard of Don Quixote’s victories and defeats, leading him to the conclusion:
In terms of encounters the score is even: twenty victories against twenty defeats. Moreover, in each of the two parts of the book the score is also even: 13 to 13 and 7 to 7, respectively. This perfect balance of victory and defeat is very amazing in what seems such a disjointed haphazard book. It is due to a secret sense of writing, the harmonizing intuition of the artist.
Reflecting on the hardships and failures that Don Quixote endured, Leys judged:
In his quest for immortal fame, Don Quixote suffered repeated defeats. Because he obstinately refused to adjust “the hugeness of his desire” to “the smallness of reality,” he was doomed to perpetual failure. Only a culture based upon “a religion of losers” could produce such a hero.
What we should remember, however, is this (if I may thus paraphrase Bernard Shaw): The successful man adapts himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the loser.
Moving forward, one failure at a time. There is something to that.
Don Quixote is a deeply human and humane book, flawed and imperfect, all of which has surely contributed to its enduring legacy. Certainly ‘the canon’ needs to be revised and expanded, but we would do well not to forgo and forget such achievements. Unfortunately the great promise that the internet would make learning more easily available has manifested in a distorted and uneven manner, much more directly contributing to ‘banality’s deadly and expanding realm’, to quote from Mann’s Faust.
Returning to Nabokov’s engagement with a work he had regarded as crude and cruel, the final conclusion he reached was nuanced and sympathetic:
Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant.
Values that still need remembering and defending, likewise the artistry and erudition present in Nabokov’s remarkable engagement with Cervantes’ monumental work. Indeed, in his meticulous readings and research, his intellectual dexterity and daring, the traits embodied in Nabokov feel almost as lost and distant as that of Don Quitoxte and knight-errantry.
What does all this reveal about China? Not much, it would seem. Finishing with Simon Leys, who was also a famed Sinologist and defender of beauty. Another source of inspiration, formerly a professor at my current place of work, and someone who held onto a vision of the university that is now as quaint as chivalry: ‘where scholars seek truth, pursue and transmit knowledge for knowledge’s sake — irrespective of the consequences, implications and utility of this endeavour’. Reflecting this belief, the title of a wonderful collection of Leys’ essays published by NYRB is The Hall of Uselessness, which was inspired by this quote:
Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, but few know the usefulness of what is useless.
Zhuang Zi