Water Margin | Roundtable

Roundtable

Water Margin

Searching for the sources of China's great rivers.

By Philip Ball

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

 Ten Thousand Miles along the Yellow River (detail), by an unidentified Chinese artist, 1690–1722. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, W.M. Keck Foundation Gift, The Dillon Fund Gift, and gifts from various donors, in memory of Douglas Dillon, 2006.

When Confucius described water as "twisting around ten thousand times but always going eastward," he seemed to imply that the eastbound flow of rivers was tantamount to a law of nature, almost a moral precept. There is no clearer illustration of how a culture's geography may affect its worldview. Why would anyone who had never stepped foot outside China have any reason to doubt that this was how the world was made?

In China the symmetry of east and west is broken by tectonic forces. Westward lie the mountains, the great Tibetan plateau at the roof of the world, pushed upward where the Indo-Australian plate crashes into and plunges beneath the Eurasian. Eastward lies the ocean: only Taiwan and Japan block the way to the Pacific's expanse, which might as well be endless. The flow, the pull, the tilt of the world, is from mountains to water, from shan to shui.

This is the direction of the mighty waterways that have dominated the country's topographic consciousness. "A great man," wrote the Ming scholar and explorer Xu Xiake, "should in the morning be at the blue sea, and in the evening at Mount Cangwu," a sacred peak in southern Hunan province. To the perplexity of Western observers (not least when confronted with Chinese maps), the innate mental compass of the Chinese points not north–south, but east–west. The Chinese people articulate and imagine space differently from Westerners—and no wonder.

All of China's great rivers respect this axis. But two in particular are symbols of the nation and the keys to its fate: the Yangtze and the Yellow River. These great waterways orient China's efforts to comprehend itself, and they explain a great deal about the social, economic, and geographical organization of its culture and trade. The rivers are where Confucius and Lao Tzu went to think, where poets like Li Bai and Du Fu went to find words to fit their melancholy, where painters discerned in the many moods of water a language of political commentary, where China's pivotal battles were fought, where rulers from the first Qin Emperor to Mao and his successors demonstrated their authority. They are where life happens, and there is really nothing much to be said about China that does not start with a river.

The great rivers drove some of the earliest stirrings of an impulse to explore and understand the world. The Yü Ji Tu ("Tracks of Yü" Map), carved in stone sometime before the twelfth century, shows how Chinese cartography was far ahead of anything in Christendom or classical Greece. In medieval maps of Europe the rivers are schematic ribbons, serpents' tails encroaching from the coast in rather random wiggles. But the Yü Ji Tu could almost be the work of a Victorian surveyor, depicting the known extent of the kingdom with extraordinary fidelity and measured on a very modern-looking grid. It is dominated by the traceries of river networks, with the Yellow River and the Yangtze given bold prominence. These are the "tracks" defined by China's first great water hero, the legendary emperor Yü who conquered the Great Flood.

IMAGE:

Stone rubbing, c. 1933, of the Yü Ji Tu map, 1136. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

China has always been interested in—one might fairly say obsessed with—its rivers. The Shui jing (Classic of the Waterways) was the canonical text of hydrological geography, traditionally credited to Sang Qin of the Han dynasty, although later scholars have placed it in the third and fourth centuries (the Jin dynasty). We don't know quite what it contained, since it has been lost, but a commentary on the work, known as the Shui jing zhu by the scholar Li Daoyuan (427–527), ran to forty volumes and listed more than 1,200 rivers.

The impassioned searching for the source of the great rivers throughout Chinese history seems almost to betray a hope that it will reveal the occult wellspring of China itself, the fount of the country's spirit (qi). The source of the Yellow River was debated at least since the Tang dynasty of the seventh to the tenth century, and the Yuan emperor Khubilai Khan dispatched an expedition in 1280 that was supposed to clarify the matter. Yet the point was still being argued seven centuries later, when the China Exploration and Research Society declared that the Yellow River springs from the icy, crystal-clear waters of lakes Gyaring and Ngoring in the Bayan Har Mountains of remote Qinghai.

The source of the Yangtze is disputed even now. An expedition in the 1970s identified it as the Tuotuo, the "tearful" river in Qinghai, but several years later it was assigned to the Damqu instead. There's ultimately something arbitrary in conferring primacy on one of a river's several headwater sources, but for the Yangtze the symbolic significance of this choice is too strongly felt for the protagonists to brook any compromise. The classical answer, given in the Yu gong manuscript from the Warring States period of the fifth to the third century BC, was that the Yangtze begins as the Min River in Sichuan. But during the Ming era, iconoclastic Xu Xiake (1586–1641) argued otherwise. He found that the Jinsha River, which joins the Min in Sichuan, goes back much further than the Min: a full 2,000 kilometers, deep into the wilds of the Qinghai plateau. The Jinsha (Golden Sand, referring to the alluvial gold that may be found in the river's sediment) itself stems from the Dangtian, whose tributaries in Qinghai vie as the ultimate source of the Yangtze, flowing from the glacier lakes of that high and inhospitable land.

No one better personifies the Chinese devotion to its great rivers than Xu Xiake, who wandered for thirty years into remote places, suffering robberies, sickness, hunger, and all manner of hazards. "He would travel," one contemporary account relates,

with a servant, or sometimes with a monk and just a staff and cloth bundle, not worrying about carrying a traveling bag or supplies of food. He could endure hunger for several days, eating his fill when he found some food. He could keep walking for several hundred li, ascending sheer cliffs, braving bamboo thickets, scrambling up and down, hanging over precipices on a rope, as nimble as an ape and as sturdy as an ox. He used towering crags for his bed, streams and gullies for refreshment, and found companionship among fairies, trolls, apes, and baboons, with the result that he became unable to think logically and could not speak. However, as soon as we discussed mountain paths, investigated water sources or sought out superior geographical terrain, his mind suddenly became clear again.

From shui to shan: what more nourishment could the mind need? And to get there, Xu believed, one should not march like a soldier but wander like a poet.

In the person of Xu Xiake, Confucian rectitude meets Daoist instinctiveness and reverie. He was born in the city of Jiangyin, northwest of Shanghai on the Yangtze delta. For much of his travels Xu was attended by a long-suffering servant named Gu Xing. The pair often had to rely on the benevolence of local monasteries for food and shelter, where Xu might offer payment in kind by writing down the history of the institution. On one occasion they were attacked and robbed by bandits on the banks of the Xiang River in Hunan, left destitute but lucky to be alive. Perhaps we can forgive Gu for finally robbing and deserting his master.

Xu journeyed into snowy Sichuan and harsh, perilous Tibet, where rivers could freeze so fast that wandering cattle could get trapped and perish in the ice. He went deep into the steamy Yunnan jungle, then still a region alien, foreign, and wild, to determine that the Mekong (called the Lancang in China), Salween (Nu), and Red (Lishe) rivers were separate entities along their entire courses. But although he diligently recorded the local geology and mineralogy, there is little that is systematic in his itinerary: he was wandering more or less without plan or destination.

IMAGE:

Map of the Grand Canal from Beijing to the Yangzi River, by an unidentified Chinese artist, late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of Asian Art Gifts, 2003.

Still he deserves to be called a geographer. His methods of surveying were crude, but they rejected the local superstitions that until then supplied the usual rationale for natural phenomena. His notes, according to the great scholar of Chinese science and technology Joseph Needham, "read more like those of a twentieth-century field surveyor than of a seventeenth-century scholar." And like his contemporaries in Europe, he was prepared to risk censure by preferring the testimony of experience over that of classical authorities. There had been whispers ever since the Han era that the true headwaters of the Yangtze were not, as the classics insisted, the Min, but instead the Jinsha flowing from the Kunlun Mountains of Qinghai. Xu, however, was the first to dare make the claim openly. For this he was denounced as despicable.

Ancient scholarly study of China's rivers and waters reveals how far ahead of the West Chinese theory and practice were, not only in cartography but in an understanding of natural phenomena. While the Shan hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas, probably written in the Warring States period) was content to ascribe the tides to the comings and goings of a massive leviathan-like creature in the oceans, the Han scholar Wang Chong argued in the first century that tides are related to the moon. "The rise of the wave follows the waxing and waning moon," he wrote, "smaller and larger, fuller or lesser, never the same." Wang Chong championed a rationalistic explanation of the world over the rather superstitious Daoism and formulaic Confucianism of his time, and his meteorological and astronomical observations were particularly astute. He described the essence of the hydrological cycle (even if his belief in the link between the moon and water extended to a lunar influence on rainfall): "Clouds and rain are really the same thing. Water evaporating upwards becomes clouds, which condense into rain, or still further into dew." Wang Chong perceived the same correspondences between the movements and forms of river water and of blood circulation that were noted by Leonardo da Vinci a millennium and a half later. He wrote:

Now the rivers in the earth are like the pulsating blood vessels of a man. As the blood flows through them they throb or are still in accordance with their own times and measures. So it is with the rivers. Their rise and fall, their going and coming are like human respiration, like breath coming in and out.

The value of such beliefs, as many historians of science have noted, is not so much a matter of whether or not they are true, as of their capacity to stimulate further observation and to explain the world in naturalistic terms. The importance of the waterways created an imperative for such speculations, just as it drove the development of technologies and systems for making careful measurements and records, for example so that water levels could be determined during dredging operations. Cartography was so far advanced in China from the Han to the Ming eras partly because water management was accorded such priority.

One seems to have little choice but to retain the outmoded name for the Yangtze when discussing it in English; the modern Pinyin transliteration Yangzi feels somehow pedantically perverse. The name is in any event only a local one, derived from the ancient and now mostly forgotten fiefdom of Yang and strictly applying only to the last 300 kilometers. This was the entire "Yangtze" to the first Western travelers, since they rarely got much further upriver.

IMAGE:

"The Qianlong Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Four: The Confluence of the Huai and Yellow Rivers," by Xu Yang, 1770. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1984.

The Chinese people do not use those names. There are local names for each stretch of the river, but the full channel, cutting the country in half geographically, climatically and culturally, is simply the Chang Jiang, the Long River. It is the longest in all of China, 6,380 kilometers from the source in a glacier lake to the great delta on the coast beyond Shanghai, where the alluvium pushes out into the sea and adds steadily to China's vast surface area. "A China without such an immense torrent at its heart is almost impossible to contemplate," says the writer Simon Winchester. Even this understates the matter. Without the Yangtze, China would not be the nation it is today. Time and again, the river has determined the nation's fate, whether that is by presenting a barrier to barbarian conquest, or a transport network, or a conduit for foreign invasion, or a source of fertility, flood, and revolutionary fervor. Many pivotal battles in Chinese history took place on the middle reaches. The Yangtze cliffs provide the backdrop to the classic Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) from the early Ming period, one of Mao Zedong's favorite books, in which the river hosts allegedly the biggest naval battle in history. The Yangtze was the artery of conquest and dominance when the British gunships humiliated the Qing emperor in the mid-nineteenth century, and again when the Japanese invaded in the 1930s: steadily pushing upriver from Shanghai to Nanjing and then Wuhan, they forced Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists to relocate the government right back beyond the Three Gorges in Chongqing.

China is cloven in two by the Long River, and the two halves could seem like separate nations: the north cold and dry, the south hot and wet. In the north you eat wheat noodles; in the south, rice. Northerners, it is said, are tall and haughty, whether eastern Manchurian stock or Islamic Uyghurs to the west. The southerners, in contrast, are earthy, pragmatic, always on the make, a patchwork of minority races and mutually incomprehensible dialects. That division—decreed by nature, patrolled by the Yangtze—establishes the defining tension within the nation, in which the question is how unity can persist in the face of such a disparity of the most fundamental resource, water. Such stereotypical polarities do scant justice to the bewildering variety of China, of course, but they serve as crude shorthand for the contrasts that you find once you cross the Yangtze.

Reprinted with permission from The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China by Philip Ball. Published by the University of Chicago Press in the United States/The Bodley Head in the United Kingdom. Copyright © 2016 by Philip Ball. All rights reserved.

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Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense - Issue 48: Chaos - Nautilus

Shakespeare's Genius Is Nonsense

What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind.

By Jillian Hinchliffe & Seth Frey May 25, 2017

You'd be forgiven if, settling into the fall 2003 "Literature of the 16th Century" course at University of California, Berkeley,…By Jillian Hinchliffe & Seth Frey

You'd be forgiven if, settling into the fall 2003 "Literature of the 16th Century" course at University of California, Berkeley, you found the unassuming 70-year-old man standing at the front of the lecture hall a bit eccentric. For one thing, the class syllabus, which was printed on the back of a rumpled flyer promoting bicycle safety, seemed to be preparing you for the fact that some readings may feel toilsome. "Don't worry," it read on the two weeks to be spent with a notoriously long allegorical poem; it's "only drudgery if you're reading it for school." Phew! you thought, then, Wait a second... You might have wondered what you had gotten yourself into. Then again, if you had enrolled in Stephen Booth's class, chances are that you already knew.

By this time, Booth had been teaching Shakespeare to Berkeley undergraduates for decades and had earned the adulation of thousands of students. A cynic might say that this was because he issued virtually no assignments. But that was because he wanted the work to be a labor of love. His goal was that students engage meaningfully with the readings rather than "going thoughtlessly, dutifully through institutionally approved motions" in search of a good grade.

Even if you'd taken a Shakespeare class from someone else, you'd be likely to encounter Booth. His prizewinning 1977 edition of Shakespeare's sonnets accompanies the 154 poems with over 400 pages of virtuosic commentary exploring the ambiguity and polysemy of Shakespeare's verse. It's nearly as dazzling an artifact as the sonnets themselves, an achievement so extraordinary that Booth has continued to win acclaim for decades, despite what some might see as his best efforts to distance himself from the inner circle of academia.

Although Booth is now retired, his work couldn't be more relevant. In the study of the human mind, old disciplinary boundaries have begun to dissolve and fruitful new relationships between the sciences and humanities have sprung up in their place. When it comes to the cognitive science of language, Booth may be the most prescient literary critic who ever put pen to paper. In his fieldwork in poetic experience, he unwittingly anticipated several language-processing phenomena that cognitive scientists have only recently begun to study. Booth's work not only provides one of the most original and penetrating looks into the nature of Shakespeare's genius, it has profound implications for understanding the processes that shape how we think.

The play's his thing: Stephen Booth at the Blackfriars Conference, 2011. The literary critic's analysis of Shakespeare's "substantive nonsense" could be a model for cognitive science.Photo by Eric Roffman - QPORIT

Also in Linguistics  

Shakespeare's Genius Is Nonsense

By Jillian Hinchliffe & Seth Frey

You'd be forgiven if, settling into the fall 2003 "Literature of the 16th Century" course at University of California, Berkeley, you found the unassuming 70-year-old man standing at the front of the lecture hall a bit eccentric. For one thing,...READ MORE

Until the early decades of the 20th century, Shakespeare criticism fell primarily into two areas: textual, which grapples with the numerous variants of published works in order to produce an edition as close as possible to the original, and biographical. Scholarship took a more political turn beginning in the 1960s, providing new perspectives from various strains of feminist, Marxist, structuralist, and queer theory. Booth is resolutely dismissive of most of these modes of study. What he cares about is poetics. Specifically, how poetic language operates on and in audiences of a literary work.

Close reading, the school that flourished mid-century and with which Booth's work is most nearly affiliated, has never gone completely out of style. But Booth's approach is even more minute—microscopic reading, according to fellow Shakespeare scholar Russ McDonald. And as the microscope opens up new worlds, so does Booth's critical lens. What makes him radically different from his predecessors is that he doesn't try to resolve or collapse his readings into any single interpretation. That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, Booth maintains, is "no more than habit." Instead, he revels in the uncertainty caused by the myriad currents of phonetic, semantic, and ideational patterns at play.

What does that look like? Here's an example from Antony and Cleopatra, where one Roman describes to another the sight of Cleopatra's ships fleeing battle:

ENOBARBUS
How appears the fight?

SCARUS
On our side like the tokened pestilence
Where death is sure. Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt—
Whom leprosy o'ertake—i' th' midst o' th' fight,
When vantage like a pair of twins appeared,
Both as the same, or rather ours the elder,
The breese upon her, like a cow in June,
Hoists sails and flies.

Booth follows editorial convention in pointing out the two potential meanings of breese ("light wind" and "gadfly"). Meanwhile, he observes, the second, quieter effect of flies (denoting both "retreating" and "insects") has been passed over—but not without effect. While both senses of breese or flies pertain, Booth notes that "in calling the effect a pun, we both exaggerate and underestimate its effect"—exaggerate because it's less self-conscious than a pun, and underestimate because it achieves much more than one. An explicit pun is a momentary flash, and then it's over. More valuable for Booth are the links that spread out from each word based on "its sound, sounds that resemble it, its sense, its potential senses, their homonyms, their cognates, their synonyms, and their antonyms." Unexploded puns conserve their energy and preserve these links, creating rich, multilayered, imbricating patterns throughout a work.

What's essential to Booth is that for readers and audiences—for everyone but the professional critic—these patterns usually remain below the threshold of our attention. What he calls the "physics" of the verse are available to general readers, but not obtrusive. In his 1998 book Precious Nonsense, Booth argues that the experiences that Shakespeare's poetic language evokes with such verve and subtlety are intensifications of everyday language experiences. Shakespeare achieves this by weaving incredibly rich networks from the same kinds of "substantive nonsense and nonimporting patterns" that pop up in slang, jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes. Those dense networks of patterns, Booth posits, are "the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare's work."

A cognitive scientist looking at Booth's explanation of Shakespearean effects would spot many concepts from her own discipline. Those include priming—when, after hearing a word, we tend more readily to recognize words that are related to it; expectation—the influence of higher-level reasoning on word recognition; and depth of processing—how varying levels of attention affect the extent of our engagement with a statement. (Shallow processing explains our predisposition to miss the problem of whether a man should be allowed to marry his widow's sister.)

The consonances are surprising, considering that when Booth established his method of criticism, the prevailing school of linguistics had no room for such ideas. Cognitive linguistics, a sympathetic approach that established the fundamental importance of metaphor in the structuring of human thought, didn't start to gain ground until the 1970s and '80s. Before that, the norm was generative linguistics, which deemed non-standard speech acts aberrations unworthy of further scrutiny. This left lots of language unexplained: just think of the things that you read, hear, or say every day that, despite not adhering to the formal and logical rules of the language, you understand perfectly.

Cognitive linguistics offered a step forward in the sense that it embraces the complexity and ungrammaticality of everyday language. In earlier days, language processing was regarded as a black box: language goes in, comprehension comes out. More recently, dynamical cognitive linguists began to use tools from physics and calculus to get inside the black box, explaining shifting ambiguous meanings in terms of interacting equations. These mathematical tools allow dynamicists to emphasize that language interpretation happens in time, a point that Booth also emphasizes. What is so important about the actual moment-to-moment nature of reading? One clean illustration from cognitive science is in the conflict between the psychological processes of priming and expectation.

That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, is no more than habit. Better to revel in uncertainty.

Our brains are structured such that if you hear an animal word (cat), it becomes easier to process another animal word (dog) when it's presented about half a second later. In the jargon, this is called priming: cat primes dog, and it happens quickly. Expectations describe a slower, more arbitrary type of connection. There is no fundamental relationship between animal words and office words. But if I put you in a psychology lab and present you with a series of animal words followed by office words (like desk), then you will learn an expectational relationship between them. Expectations take longer to kick in, about one to two seconds. So following cat with desk after only half a second won't help you process desk, but giving cat another second to sink in before presenting desk will link cat and desk as strongly as cat and dog.

Association and expectation are different processes occurring on different timescales, and they can interact in complex ways. Most strikingly, expectations can overpower associations. If you have come to expect an office word after an animal word, then cat will still prime dog after a half-second interval. But after a two-second interval, cat suppresses dog, making it harder to process. Authors who are sensitive to these effects, and careful about the linkages that they create, may be able to use the interactions of priming and expectation to create intricate experiences of time, language, and meaning.

Certain types of sentences are especially good at demonstrating the unfolding of meaning over time. Garden-path sentences ("The child rushed through the doorway fell") got their name because they lead their audiences into a syntactical dead end—down the garden path, so to speak. Although they've been remarked on for decades, they've been taken up more recently by dynamicists because they're especially useful for exploring questions of moment-to-moment language experience. Michael Spivey, professor of cognitive and information sciences at the University of California, Merced, and author of The Continuity of Mind, uses garden-path sentences to describe the unfolding of sentence understanding as a contest between every possible interpretation of that sentence, one in which revealing each subsequent word disqualifies more contenders until just one remains standing. What may first appear to be a statement about a running child ends up making more sense if it's about a child who, hurried across a threshold by his caretaker, loses his balance. Spivey's research shows that, until we arrive at a conclusion, we are capable of holding both meanings in mind simultaneously.

Booth claims that garden-path phenomena and similar ambiguities in Shakespeare's sonnets are essential to create in the reader the same unsettling mental states that they describe. His style of approaching these "substantially gratuitous journeys in the mind" aligns neatly with modern cognitive scientific approaches in that he not only tolerates but celebrates uncertainty. For Booth, the idea that readers manage continually shifting provisional interpretations—and that they don't notice themselves doing it—is an essential component of poetic richness. The sonnets are full of these "plays on momentary confusions." Take the following lines from Sonnet 79:

I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen

The first of these lines could be a complete sentence, using the vocabulary of debate invoked earlier in the poem to concede to the lover (or, adding another layer of uncertainty, to the speaker's own affection). While the next line "makes it clear that thy lovely argument means 'the theme of thy loveliness,' " Booth writes, "the process of reading this particular statement in this particular diction and syntax will have been such as to make the reader's state of mind as a reader similar to the speaker's state of mind as a lover. They have both experienced a sense that something is wrong."

Philip Davis, professor of psychological sciences at University of Liverpool and author of two books on Shakespeare and the brain, conducts research in reading and literary thinking. In one well-publicized study, Davis used EEG and other electrophysiological techniques to look at the moment-to-moment effects on readers of functional shifts in Shakespeare's verse.

Functional shifts occur when parts of speech are switched unexpectedly. They're a favorite Shakespearean device, but noun-to-verb conversions are especially common: Edgar's "He childed as I fathered" in King Lear, for example, or the hero's lament in Antony and Cleopatra about "The hearts that spanieled me at heels." According to Davis, the changes in EEG measurements between Shakespearean functional shifts and various control sentences demonstrate that "while the Shakespearean functional shift was semantically integrated with ease, it triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process likely to raise attention and extra emergent consciousness." In other words, the brain noticed something odd about the use of a noun as a verb, quickly made sense of it, and was put on high alert for more unusual activity.

To understand how we can accommodate to the shifting roles of nouns and verbs in real time, we need to appreciate the brain as constantly managing and integrating a deluge of information from many sources. Traditional approaches to language treated sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and meanings as essentially separable, and choked on language that relied on the multi-level interactions that characterize Shakespeare's verse. That our brains are continually bombarded by information from all sides, though, is a basic tenet of modern approaches to cognition. And, rather than overwhelming us with "information overload," this complexity can help us navigate the mess of real-world language. Researchers like Spivey argue that a heavier flow of information can actually smooth the activity of neural processes, much in the way that a circle, represented by infinite points, maps a smoother circuit than a hexagon, represented by only six.

One scientist used EEG and other electrophysiological techniques to look at the effects of Shakespeare's verse on readers.

Similarly, the integration of language over multiple mental systems—cognitive, perceptual, and sensory-motor—makes how we process it susceptible to even very subtle syntactic and semantic cues. Teenie Matlock, also at UC Merced, has demonstrated that the content of text can influence the act of reading it in surprisingly literal ways. Matlock's experiments with fictive motion—when we use motion verbs to describe things that cannot move, like "the road runs through the desert"—found that people read fictive motion sentences more slowly when they were preceded by sentences about difficult terrain ("The valley was bumpy and uneven") vs. easy ("The valley was flat and smooth"). This effect disappeared for sentences without fictive motion, as when the road was merely "in" the desert.

Booth seems once again to have an intuitive grasp of this relationship, not least because of the exuberant mobility with which he describes what Shakespeare does to us. It may look like we're sitting quietly in our chairs as we read a sonnet or watch one of the plays, he writes, but we're really making great leaps from one association to the next, performing "mental aerobatics." Yet it's in Booth's understanding of how specific verses propel or impede dramatic action that the connection between language and motion becomes most clear.

According to Booth, the greatest tragedy in Macbeth occurs in the audience, in the failure of moral categories that leaves us identifying with the title character despite his repugnant actions. He points out that later scenes repeatedly offer Malcolm to the audience as a potential way out, giving us several chances to switch our moral allegiance.

So why don't we? The answer, Booth says, is because Shakespeare doesn't want us to. To begin with, Malcolm's responses to the unfolding drama never seem quite appropriate. On learning that his father has been murdered, for example, he answers "O, by whom?"—"a response from which," Booth notes, "no amount of gasping and mimed horror can remove the tone of small talk."

By padding Malcolm's later speeches with an abundance of "syntactical stuffing," Shakespeare ensures that Malcolm comes off as plodding, bloviating, dramatically weak. "Malcolm's style is grating in its lack of economy," Booth explains; his "syntax is maddeningly contorted, and his pace tortuous…no quantity of alternative adjectives and nouns can fill up the cistern of Malcolm's lust to dilate upon particulars."

Here, if ever, Shakespeare lays out bumpy verbal terrain. Even if we wanted to like Malcolm, the play encourages us not to simply because the way he speaks is so impedimentary. Malcolm slows things down. We never leave Macbeth; linguistically and otherwise, things are much more exciting when he's around.

"In the theatre, speed is good and slowness is bad," Booth writes. "In the story of Macbeth as staged by Shakespeare, virtuous characters and virtuous actions move slowly; speed is characteristic of the play's evil actions and their actors. What an audience approves in one dimension of its experience is at perfect odds with what it approves in another." This, Booth maintains, is why we keep going to see Macbeth. And for him, the three-hour respite from the constraints of ordinary logical and moral systems is "an effectively miraculous experience."

Cognitive scientists have examined many of the elements that Booth discusses—wordplay, poetics, figurative language—but they haven't yet managed to integrate them fully into their theories of language. In some crucial areas, the scientists have yet to catch up with Booth.

In general, cognitive scientists tend to treat consciousness as a torch for illuminating language: pay closer attention, have a richer experience. Davis writes about the effects of Shakespeare mostly in terms of neurons and brains rather than humans and minds. But when he extends the terms of the discussion to include consciousness, he invokes a framework in which more neural activation in response to art implies more conscious awareness of its effects on us, and therefore a more meaningful poetic experience. And it makes sense to imagine engagement with art as involving lots of active, self-aware deliberation, with correspondingly high levels of neural activity…doesn't it?

Yet Booth argues strenuously against this portrayal. His case for muted wordplay and unexploited paradoxes poses a more counterintuitive relationship between consciousness and language experience. Being too self-aware, he claims, can disrupt the experience of an unfolding verse and blind us to more subdued phenomena. (In recent years, neuroscientists have found that hyper-awareness can curtail subtle, subconscious activities, like reflecting on our surroundings and ourselves.) Returning to the example of Macbeth, Booth maintains that the subtle effects created by the dialogue, and the fact that their workings remain below threshold, are crucial to the experience of the play. The "miraculous experience" is attainable for audience members "only because they are oblivious to the logical conflict in their responses and to their achievement in tolerating its irresolution." We are provided with so much activity from so many overlapping and interacting relationships between words that we do not notice the jags and hiccups, nor our own proficiency in accommodating for them.

As a playwright and businessman, of course, Shakespeare had a serious interest in shielding his audiences from the mechanics of his verse. In addition to its concordance with the 16th-century concept of sprezzatura—lightness, ease, the ability to make even the most difficult things look effortless—a play crafted to maximize delight helped Shakespeare fill theatres in a way that a lot of visible sweating over the lines might not have. For every ingenious device that Booth describes in the verse, he brings as much attention to the effort that went into keeping it unobtrusive. His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention.

What Booth so elegantly shows us is how Shakespeare can free us from ourselves. His lush, prismatic verse grants us "a small but metaphysically glorious holiday" from how we usually comprehend language, a holiday that is in turn "a brief and trivial but effectively real holiday from the inherent limitation of the human mind." Rather than plunging into the abyss of not-knowing, we soar above it. We are not falling, but flying.

Jillian Hinchliffe is a writer living in Zürich, Switzerland. Seth Frey is a cognitive scientist. He works as a postdoc in behavioral economics at Disney Research. This article is not connected to his work there.

Additional Reading

Booth, S. Shakespeare's Sonnets: Edited with Analytic Commentary Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (1977).

Booth, S. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (1983).

Booth, S. Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night University of California Press, Oakland, CA (1998).

Cook, A. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science Palgrave Macmillan (2010).

Davis, P. The Shakespeared Brain. Literary Review 356, 30-31 (2008).

Anderson, F., Cargill, S.A., & Spivey, M.J.  Gradiency and visual context in syntactic garden-paths. Journal of Memory and Language 57, 570-595 (2007).

Matlock, T. Fictive motion as cognitive simulation. Memory & Cognition 32, 1389-1400 (2004).

McDonald, R., Nace, N.D., & Williams, T.D. eds. Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, New York, NY (2012).

Phillips, C., Wagers, M.W., & Lau, E.F. Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. Experiments at the Interfaces, Syntax & Semantics 37, 153-186 (2011).

Turner, M., & Lakoff, G. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor University of Chicago Press (1989).

This article was originally published in our "Genius" issue in October, 2014.

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How the Midwest went from the idealized to the derided

Last week I was reading The Washington Post's obituary of conservative power broker Roger Ailes and paused at this sentence about the disgraced head of Fox News: "He told a biographer that his dream for America was that it be allowed to return to its best self, which he put in the Midwest in about 1955." As it happens, Ailes grew up in blue-collar Warren, Ohio, not far from my own home town of Lorain. This is classic Rust Belt territory, where a lot of folks share the same nostalgia for a better America, now lost. Even if this is a false memory, it drives much of the desperation and acrimony of our current national politics.

"From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965," by Jon K. Lauck (Univ. of Iowa)

Jon K. Lauck's "From Warm Center to Ragged Edge" surveys "the erosion of Midwestern literary and historical regionalism" between 1920 and 1965. This may sound dull as ditch water to those who believe that the "flyover" states are inhabited largely by clodhoppers, fundamentalist zealots and loudmouthed Babbitts. In fact, Lauck's aim is to examine "how the Midwest as a region faded from our collective imagination" and "became an object of derision." In particular, the heartland's traditional values of hard work, personal dignity and loyalty, the centrality it grants to family, community and church, and even the Jeffersonian ideal of a democracy based on farms and small land-holdings — all these came to be deemed insufferably provincial by the metropolitan sophisticates of the Eastern Seaboard and the lotus-eaters of the West Coast.

[Roger Ailes, architect of conservative TV juggernaut Fox News, is dead at 77]

Lauck traces the birth of this condescension to the 1920s, when writers and critics began to attack life in the Midwest as narrow-minded and repressive. Books such as Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology," Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" and Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street" quickly exemplified what has been called "the revolt from the village." City slickers like H.L. Mencken and magazines such as the New Yorker further ridiculed the Midwest as a backward, second-class culture of yokels and rednecks who lacked a dedication to the intellect, let alone sensitivity to the arts.

A few critics, such as Bernard DeVoto, argued against these simplistic orthodoxies. As Nebraska writer Bess Streeter Aldrich movingly declared, "A writer may portray some of the decent things of life around him and reserve the privilege to call that real life too." Many writers, as well as artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, found "succor and support in the social institutions of the rural and small-town Midwest." In general, Midwesterners tended to reject what North Dakota historian James Malin called the "literature of satire, sneer, and smear" and stood up for "the typical American, the common man, and his institutions."

From an early date, the proponents of regionalism recognized two powerful enemies: mass media and federalism. The first led to a bland homogenization of culture and what Josiah Royce called a "monotonously uniform triviality of mind." The latter, starting with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, lessened the ability of localities to govern themselves. After World War II, international fears of communism and atomic war further strengthened the power of Washington, as federal institutions assumed more and more control over American civic life.

Lauck's last chapter looks at how historians have studied the heartland. Initially, many academics at regional universities were born in the Midwest and viewed themselves as legatees of its values, but over time an increased professionalization led younger teachers to emphasize scholarly success among their peers rather than commitment to the intellectual well-being of their communities. In this section, Lauck looks hard at the opposing ideas of Richard Hofstadter, author of "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," and Michigan State's Russell Kirk, author of "The Conservative Mind." He also implicitly endorses the view — of historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Christopher Lasch — that smaller communities and neighborhoods, not large cities, encourage a vigorous engagement in politics. As Lasch noted, conversation lies at the foundation of civic life. Not surprisingly, Lauck's own previous book, "The Lost Region " called for a revival of Midwest-oriented history.

[Is there a cure for Rust Belt rhetoric? This witty little novel might be a start.]

"From Warm Center to Ragged Edge" is scholarly — there are as many pages of notes as of text — and Lauck does favor long sentences, which may take getting used to. But this is an important book and these days, especially, deserves to be read and debated.

"The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt," by Mark Athitakis (Belt Publishing)

One might say the same about the publications from Belt Publishing. While "How to Speak Midwestern," by Edward McClelland, is mainly an amusing glossary to the lingo of the region's more industrial states, Mark Athitakis's "The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt" is more serious. It rightly praises the Midwestern novels of Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Toni Morrison and Jonathan Franzen, but also points out works of comparable merit that warrant rediscovery. These include the science fictional "On Wings of Song," by Thomas M. Disch; William McPherson's elegant portrait of a Michigan childhood, "Testing the Current"; Nancy Willard's "Things Invisible to See ," which features "an Ann Arbor man pitting his earthbound baseball team against one led by Death"; and "Divine Days ," Leon Forrest's magisterial attempt to write not just the great African American novel, but the Great American Novel period.

To these books about the Midwest, let me end by adding a related one about the South: "Land: The Case for an Agrarian Economy" was written in the 1930s by the distinguished poet and critic John Crowe Ransom and only recently rediscovered and edited by Jason Peters for Notre Dame Press. In it Ransom joins Lauck in championing the values fostered by rural and small-town America. Is this just wishful thinking? Perhaps, and yet don't we sometimes need to step back before we can leap forward?

Michael Dirda reviews books on Thursday for Style.

FROM WARM CENTER TO RAGGED EDGE

The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965

By Jon K. Lauck

Univ. of Iowa. 252 pp. Paperback, $27.50

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Lines of Spines

What is a library?

By Tim Gorichanaz

If you ask Google Images what a library is, you'll get a very clear answer: books on shelves in a column-faced building.

Like Google, most of us think of the library as a storehouse for books. We can be forgiven for thinking so. Our word library comes from the Latin librarium, meaning bookcase. It's the same for the Latin and Greek equivalents for library — bibliotheca and bibliothiki, respectively — which led to the word for library in most modern Indo-European languages. It's also notable that the Latin word for book, liber, originally referred to the kind of bark that was used in book construction. All this is to say that, through and through, we have conceptualized the library in terms of physical objects. Bark, books, shelves, buildings.

This being the case, we tend to paint libraries as havens for book lovers. Take, for example, the novel Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, in which young Kafka Tamura runs away from home on his 15th birthday. Kafka is muscular and good-looking, but also introverted and bookish. As he says, "Ever since I was little I've loved to spend time in the reading rooms of libraries . . . Even on holidays that's where you'd find me. I'd devour anything and everything — novels, biographies, histories, whatever was lying around. Once I'd gone through all the children's books, I went on to the general stacks and books for adults." Naturally, then, as a runaway, Kafka took refuge in a library. (Perhaps it's worth noting that in Japanese, too, the word for library, toshokan, amounts to a building for books.)

If a library is just where a society keeps its books, then it's easy to see why many people no longer perceive libraries as relevant. In the days of yore, a building full of books was a clear metaphor for collective knowledge. But today, knowledge is no longer bound to the printed page, and electronic and non-textual forms of media proliferate. Our cultural knowledge is no longer represented primarily as text within books. Moreover, with the internet, we can access our multimedia cultural knowledge from virtually anywhere.

It's no secret that libraries are struggling. Funding is down in many public library systems across the country as the public no longer has much use for centralized storehouses of books. People say things like, "Why do we need libraries anymore when we've got Google?" Even the academic discipline dedicated to studying libraries seems to be backing away: A century ago, it was called library science; after World War II, it became better known as library and information science; over the past few decades, it's been sloughing the L word (and often picking up words like computer and data). At my institution, for instance, the School of Library and Information Science was renamed to the College of Information Studies in 1985 — and today it's the College of Computing and Informatics. Today, it houses a much wider range of degree programs than in previous decades, threatening to obfuscate the fact that the master's of library and information science program is still one of the college's core offerings.

But libraries are still important, and that's because they are not fundamentally storehouses for books — despite the name and our longstanding cultural assumptions. We can begin to see this in the example of Kafka on the Shore, if we look beyond the surface. It's not just that Kafka wound up in the library because he liked books. He wound up in the library because he had no other home, and the library provided a free, safe space. Indeed, over the course of the book, Kafka comes to know the proprietors of the library, and he ends up living there in a spare room. A library is not just a refuge for the intellect, but for the whole person.

As a culture, we seem reluctant to admit the breadth and depth of what libraries offer. For instance, last year I attended the play Spine, by Clare Brennan, which seeks to expose the unseen value of libraries. Following the show was a question-and-answer session with constituents from the theater company and the public library system. At one point in the conversation, a man in the audience scoffed at the idea that the library should provide bathrooms for homeless people. Libraries are about books!

We have undervalued the library all this time, I think, in part because we have overvalued the written word. Since our Judeo-Christian roots, we have ascribed mythic power to books. God Himself, it is said, is the Torah. And though popular culture has lost some of this mystical veneer since the Enlightenment, the fetishization of books has not abated: In the modern scientific tradition, we have come to consider knowledge to be only that which is communicable via text. But that is a terribly impoverished view of what human knowing can be.

Part of the reason for this is the way we conceptualize reading. We tend to think of books as things that hold information, and we think that when you read, the information jumps into your brain. If that were really how it worked, how could two people read the same text and get different information from it? It happens all the time, both in science and in life. Clearly there's more to knowing than just getting information. As Emilio says in the novel The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, reflecting on a failed mission to space, "We had all the information, really. It was all there. We just didn't understand."

In the age of print we have been held sway to what books can do and forgotten what they cannot do. To the extent that information from texts equates to knowledge, it is only knowledge-that, not knowledge-how or knowledge-of-what-it-is-like. For information to unfold as these ways of knowing, to lead to understanding, we must think of information as a process rather than a thing, and certainly not a process that is bound up in any particular object.

In Kafka on the Shore, there are many scenes where we find Kafka reading. As we experience reading along with Kafka, it is clearly not a simple matter of information transfer. Kafka's reading material — The Arabian Nights is a favorite — stirs up meanings from Kafka's past and future, and through reading he comes to better understand his present. Reading, then, is a process of transformation of a person with a past, present, and future through an experiential engagement with a book which also has a past, present, and future.

But even allowing for this evocative power of text, Kafka learns that the written word has its limitations. Towards the end of the novel, Kafka finds himself slipping back and forth between the world of literacy and the world of whole being. In trying to describe his experience, Kafka concludes: "Neither one of us can put it into words. Putting it into words will destroy any meaning . . . Words have no life in them." We all know this, intuitively: Not everything can be put into words. But at the same time, as every poet knows, words can express more than they seem to say.

What is fundamental about the library is not that it holds objects, or even the nature of those objects, but rather how those objects are used. And though books are the first objects that come to mind, libraries hold far more than just books. To be sure, libraries also have objects like CDs, DVDs, magazines, newspapers, maps, artwork, electronic databases, computers, and printers. But they also offer things we're less quick to identify as objects: space, relationships, trust, understanding, and opportunities. We must recognize that libraries speak to the whole person, not just the intellect.

When Kafka realizes this, the texture of the library changes for him. "The most important thing about life here," a young woman tells him, "is that people let themselves be absorbed into things. As long as you do that, there won't be any problems . . . It's like when you're in the forest, you become a seamless part of it. When you're in the rain, you're a part of the rain. When you're in the morning, you're a seamless part of the morning. When you're with me, you become a part of me."

What is a library? In the 21st century, more than ever, a library is a place that helps us realize that we are all part of each other. •

All images created by Shannon Sands.

Tim Gorichanaz is a PhD candidate in information studies at Drexel. His research explores the historical and philosophical aspects of libraries and information technology. His work appears in Straight Forward, Sinkhole and numerous academic journals. He enjoys running long distances and practicing classical guitar.

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Knowing the Score by David Papineau review – sport meets philosophy

David Papineau is an eminent philosopher and a passionate lover of sport. For much of his life, he has kept the two spheres separate, fearing that to mix them would produce a double diminishment: philosophy robbed of its seriousness and sport of its excitement. Then, in 2012, a colleague invited him to contribute to a lecture series titled "Philosophy and Sport", organised to coincide with that year's Olympics. "I couldn't really refuse," Papineau recalls. "I had an extensive knowledge of both philosophy and sport. If I wasn't going to say yes, who would?"

For his topic, he chose the role of conscious thought in fast-reaction sports, such as tennis, cricket and baseball. How, he wondered, does Rafael Nadal use anything other than "automatic reflexes" in the half-second (or less) he has to return Roger Federer's serve? How does he choose to hit the ball this way or that, to apply topspin or slice? Thinking about this not only proved "great fun", but allowed Papineau to come away with a series of "substantial philosophical conclusions" about the relationship between intentions and action.

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After this, the floodgates were open. Having breached his self-imposed apartheid, Papineau set about applying his philosopher's brain to a range of other sporting topics. Five years on, those inquiries have resulted in a book. Knowing the Score is essentially a collection of essays on whatever sporting questions happen to interest its author. It isn't comprehensive, nor does it advance an overarching argument. The tone – informal, anecdotal, contrarian – is more bar-room than high table. What unifies the book is the consistency of its approach: he isn't interested only in applying philosophical ideas and principles to sport. More importantly – and more originally – he wants to use arguments about sport as a launching pad into philosophy.

A good example comes in a chapter dealing with rule-breaking. Papineau begins by pointing out that what is acceptable in sport isn't defined by the rules alone. Sometimes it's usual to ignore them – as footballers do when they steal yards on throw-ins, or tug at opponents as corners come in. Other actions are unequivocally "wrong" – such as carrying on playing when an opponent is lying injured – despite there being no rules to prohibit them. Rules are just one constraint on behaviour; all sports also have codes of fair play, which operate alongside the rules, and which, in some cases, override them. Complicating matters further is the fact that official authority ultimately has a force that is greater than both. Whatever a sport's rules or codes stipulate, the referee's decision – as the saying goes – is final. (Everyone knew, at the 1986 World Cup, that Maradona was a cheat who had violated one of football's most basic rules, but because the referee didn't blow his whistle, his "hand of God" goal still stood.)

Papineau next argues that there's a "remarkably close" analogy between sport's multi-tiered structure of authority and the factors that constrain us in ordinary life. Just as, in sport, you can ignore the rules and still play fairly, or obey the law while being thought a cheat, so citizens in a society can break the law and still do the right thing, or comply with the law while being immoral. A sport's codes aren't the same as its rules; likewise, in life, we draw a distinction between moral virtue and legal compliance. Papineau argues that we have no general obligation to obey the law; only to do what we think is right. Yet, at the same time, saying that we're not obliged to obey the law isn't the same as saying that we don't have a duty to respect the state's authority. If people didn't accept that police officers are, for the most part, entitled to tell them what to do, society might well descend into chaos. Likewise, if footballers stopped listening when a referee blows his whistle, the game would degenerate into a free-for-all.

A prospective basketball player's height is a critical factor in determining whether he makes it to the NBA. Photograph: MONICA M DAVEY/EPA

Another chapter addresses the phenomenon of sporting dynasties. In some sports, Papineau points out, excellence runs in families. Cricket is the most obvious example: dynastic surnames – the Khans, the Waughs, the Broads, the Stewarts – run through its history. The same is true of motor racing and ice hockey. Yet in soccer, basketball and American football, "sporting families are thin on the ground". Why? You'd intuitively think, Papineau says, that the more dynastic a sport is, the more important genes would be – that there would be more of a genetic disposition, say, towards cricket than football. But that would be exactly wrong. Sports that run in families, he shows, tend to be the least gene-dependent: it is precisely because genes aren't really important that environmental advantages come to the fore. By contrast, it is in non-dynastic sports that genes generally trump environment: you can throw all the resources you like at a prospective basketball player, but his height will remain a critical factor in determining whether he makes it to the NBA.

For a shortish book, Knowing the Score covers an impressive amount of ground. In other chapters, Papineau examines race and ethnicity (arguing, provocatively, that everyone should be free to define their ethnicities as they choose) and shows how a road-cycling peloton – the main body of racers – is a sort of testing ground for ideas about mutualism and self-interest. The book could do with a more sustained examination of gender, however. I'd have liked to have read Papineau teasing out the philosophical implications posed by a case like that of the intersex South African runner Caster Semenya.

At a time when data analysis dominates "serious" discussion of sport, Papineau's faith in the power of pure reasoning is refreshing. Statistics clearly don't interest him much – instead, his book is full of anecdotes. I loved learning about the 1994 Caribbean Cup football match in which one of the teams realised, with minutes to go, that it would qualify for the next round if it scored at either end. (This surreal situation came about because of an oversight by the tournament's organisers: Papineau has fun lambasting the "incompetence" of administrators.) The author can at times seem a bit self-satisfied – the sort of person who knows he's the cleverest in the room. And he ought to have taken greater care to double check the speed of Federer's serve. For the most part, however, he barely puts a foot wrong in what is, as he would be unlikely to say, a blinder of a performance.

• Knowing the Score is published by Constable & Robinson. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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Czeslaw Milosz's Battle for Truth

Having experienced both Nazi and Communist rule, Poland's great exile poet arrived at a unique blend of skepticism and sincerity.

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Milosz wrote that creativity came from an "inner command" to express the truth.CreditIllustration by Andrea Ventura

In July, 1950, Czeslaw Milosz, the cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., received a letter from Jerzy Putrament, the general secretary of the Polish Writers' Union. The two men had known each other for many years—they had been contributors to the same student magazine in college, in the early nineteen-thirties—but their paths had diverged widely. Now the arch-commissar of Polish literature told the poet, "I heard that you are to be moved to Paris. . . . I am happy that you will be coming here, because I have been worried about you a little: whether the splendor of material goods in America has overshadowed poverty in other aspects of life."

The language was polite, even confiding, but the message could not have been clearer. Milosz, who had been working as a diplomat in the United States for four years, was no longer considered trustworthy by his superiors. He was being transferred to Paris so that he would be within reach of Warsaw. Sure enough, a few days before Christmas, Milosz was summoned back to Poland, and his passport was confiscated. "He is deeply detached from us," Putrament observed, after meeting with Milosz in person. There was "no other option" than to keep him in the country, lest he end up defecting to the West.

This scenario had played out countless times in Communist countries. In the Soviet Union, under Stalin, it often ended with the summoned party being sent to prison or shot. And the Communist regime in Poland, which had been installed by Stalin at the end of the Second World War, had reasons to be concerned about Milosz. For one thing, he had left his pregnant wife and their son in the United States, giving him a strong incentive to return. For another, he had never joined the Communist Party. He was allowed to serve the Polish government without a Party card, largely because his reputation—he had been a leading light of Polish poetry since the mid-thirties—was considered valuable to the new regime.

Far more damning evidence of Milosz's disaffection with the regime lay in notebooks, full of poems that were not published until years later. What would Putrament have thought if he had read "Child of Europe," written in New York in 1946?

Do not mention force, or you will be accused

Of upholding fallen doctrines in secret.

He who has power, has it by historical logic.

Respectfully bow to that logic . . .

Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision.

Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.

These lines mocked the Communist claim to rule, which was based on the theory of history as formulated by Marx. According to the concept of dialectical materialism—"diamat," as its adherents often abbreviated it—the triumph of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was not a contingent event but the necessary result of an age-old process of class conflict. Milosz turned this presumption of "historical logic" upside down: if Communism now ruled Eastern Europe, it was not because of the laws of history but because the Russians had burned the house down. "Diamat is a tank," Milosz confided to a friend in 1951. "I feel like a fly which wants to stand up against that tank."

Andrzej Franaszek's "Milosz: A Biography" (Harvard), edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker—a longer version appeared in Polish in 2011—tells the story of what happened next. Stuck in Warsaw, unsure if he would ever be allowed to leave or to see his family again, Milosz was despondent. A friend, Natalia Modzelewska, recalled that he "became mentally unstable [and] suffered from bouts of depression, which gradually got worse. . . . It was easy to discern that he was close to a nervous breakdown." It wasn't just his own fate that frightened him. Milosz had mostly been away from Poland since 1946, and had not witnessed the worsening climate of repression in the country. Now he could see. "I came across astronomical changes," he wrote in a letter to another exile. "Peasants go mad with despair, and in the intellectual world state control is deeply entrenched and it is necessary to be a 100% Stalinist, or not at all. The so-called Marxists are highly depressed."

It was thanks to Modzelewska that he had the chance to leave Poland and save himself. Her husband was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and she urged him to take up Milosz's case with the President of Poland, Boleslaw Bierut. "Can you vouch that he will return?" Bierut asked. The minister could not, but replied, "I am deeply convinced that he ought to be allowed to go." Whether this was a gesture of mercy, or of respect for a great writer, or even of contempt—if Milosz couldn't serve the state, why should the state keep him?—it meant freedom. On January 15, 1951, Milosz was back in Paris. On February 1st, he slipped out of the Polish Embassy and headed for the offices of Kultura, an émigré publishing house, where he remained in hiding for the next three and a half months. He did not return to Poland until 1981, the year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The summons to Warsaw in 1950 was one of many hinges of fate in Milosz's life—moments when he could have become an entirely different person, or simply disappeared. Franaszek's richly detailed, dramatic, and melancholy book is full of such close calls. Born in 1911 to an aristocratic Polish family in Lithuania, which was part of the Russian Empire at the time, Milosz was swept up in the maelstrom of the twentieth century from the beginning. When he was three, the First World War made him a refugee, as his family fled the advancing German Army. His father, an engineer, served first the tsarist and then the Bolshevik government, and the family spent the war years crisscrossing the region—Belarus, Russia, Latvia, Estonia. In a late poem, Milosz recalled an episode from 1918, when they were trying to get home to Lithuania during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. At one train station, he was separated from his parents:

. . . the repatriation train was starting, about to leave me behind,

Forever. As if I grasped that I would have been somebody else,

A poet of another language, of a different fate.

At the last minute, a stranger reunited them. But a sense of the caprice of fate never left Milosz. "The things that surround us in childhood need no justification, they are self-evident," he wrote in "Native Realm," a memoir. "If, however, they whirl about like particles in a kaleidoscope, ceaselessly changing position, it takes no small amount of energy simply to plant one's feet on solid ground without falling."

After the war, the family settled in Wilno—now Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, but at the time a majority-Polish city. Even as a boy, Milosz was passionate and ambitious, with an intense seriousness that made it hard for him to accept the conventional routines of church and school. A childhood friend compared him to "a tomcat, constantly tense and grumpy"; later in life he acquired the nickname Gniewosz, which blended his name with the Polish word for "anger." In his teens, he was capable of gestures of melodramatic despair. On one occasion, edged out in a romantic rivalry, he put a single bullet into a revolver and, Franaszek writes, "spun the barrel, put it against his head and pulled the trigger." He lost—or maybe won—this game of Russian roulette; but, in Franaszek's telling, it's clear that any kind of calm or satisfaction remained elusive to the end of his life.

Such a condition is hardly surprising for anyone of Milosz's generation, in that part of the world. Millions of his contemporaries lived through, or died in, the First World War; the Lithuanian Wars of Independence; the Polish-Soviet War; the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R., in 1939; the Holocaust; the Eastern Front of the Second World War, which passed back and forth across the country from 1941 to 1945; and the postwar occupation by the Soviet Union. Milosz's course was complicated by the fact that his class and national allegiances were anything but straightforward. He grew up speaking at least four languages, and, although his family belonged to the Polish gentry—and still owned a country estate in Lithuania, where he spent the happiest days of his childhood—they were, like most of their class at the time, quite poor. "My material existence was so primitive that it would have startled proletarians in Western countries," Milosz reflected later.

As an aristocrat without money, and a Pole whose homeland was Lithuania, Milosz could not wholeheartedly embrace any of the political identities swirling around him. Postwar Poland, newly independent after more than a century of tsarist rule, experienced a sudden surge of chauvinist pride and annexed much of Lithuania, including Wilno. Milosz was repelled by the Poles' religiosity and nationalism—their growing hostility to Lithuanian, Jewish, and Belarusan minorities. In 1931, Wilno University, where he was a student, was convulsed by anti-Jewish riots. Milosz, Franaszek writes, was "among the few defending the Jewish students." (Jerzy Putrament, not yet a Communist, took part in the riots, beating Jews with a heavy cane.)

Milosz was at the university from 1929 to 1934, and he published his first collection of poems in 1933. He drew close to several left-wing student groups, but, although his anti-nationalism made the left a natural home for him, he could never bring himself to become a full-fledged Marxist, much less a member of the Communist Party. His sense of truth was too individual, too much a matter of poetic perception, to submit to the dictates of a party, even one that claimed to be acting according to the laws of history. "Reading articles by young Polish Marxists, one suspects that they really wish for this period to herald a future which sees the total demise of art and artistry," Milosz observed in a 1936 essay. "They are preoccupied solely with sniffing out betrayal and class desertion."

In 1937, Milosz moved to Warsaw to work for Polish Radio. There he fell in love with a colleague, Janina Cekalska. Janka, as she was known, was unhappily married to another man, a film director. She aspired to become a director herself, and had founded an organization to promote leftist filmmaking. But she soon put her ambitions aside, seeing her mission as the development of Milosz's talent, and she became a crucial reader of his work. Milosz, who had already been through several stormy and bruising love affairs, worried that committing himself to Janka might compromise his artistic calling, but they soon started living together, and they married some years later. It proved to be a difficult marriage. "She was a rational person, but made a mistake choosing me," he said late in life. He was, he realized, "not at all material to be a husband and father."

By the end of the thirties, Milosz's intellectual position was becoming intolerable. He was opposed to everything the Communists opposed, yet he suspected that a Communist takeover would be disastrous. At the same time, anyone could see that Poland's future held war or revolution, or both. Contemplating the fate of his country, he wrote, years later, "I had a kind of horror, some basic dread."

"I see by your résumé that you're a billionaire."

It is only against this background that one can make sense of the decisions Milosz made after Germany's invasion of Poland, in September, 1939. In the initial chaos, he fled Warsaw and took a circuitous route back to Wilno, which was momentarily free, because Lithuania was still independent. But, in 1940, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, leaving Milosz with two equally dire choices: remain, and live under Stalinism; or return to Warsaw, and live under Nazism. Either path would be extremely dangerous. The Soviets were purging and deporting Polish intellectuals; the Nazis were indiscriminately killing Poles, and herding Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto. In July, 1940, Milosz decided that Warsaw was the better choice, and he managed to smuggle himself across the border and into the General Government, as Nazi-occupied Poland was called.

Recounting this episode, Franaszek emphasizes Milosz's desire to return to Janka, who had remained in Warsaw. But Milosz, in "Native Realm," dwells less on love and more on his political and intellectual motives. "I had run from Stalin's state to be able to think things over for myself instead of succumbing to a world view imposed from without," he explains. "There was complete freedom here, precisely because National Socialism was an intellectual zero." Communism, by contrast, exerted a terrible moral pressure, because it claimed to embody historical truth and justice, so that dissenting from it turned one into a sinner or a heretic. Nazism threatened the body, whereas Communism demanded the surrender of the soul. For a poet like Milosz, the latter seemed like the greater sacrifice.

Ironically, as Franaszek writes, the war years were a time of flourishing for Milosz. Although, like all Poles under Nazi rule, he faced grave risks—on several occasions, he narrowly escaped German patrols and roundups—the arrival of the apocalypse he had long dreaded also set something free within him. He was active in the underground literary scene, compiling an anthology of wartime poetry and translating Shakespeare into Polish. His poetry acquired a new simplicity, directness, and pathos—several of his masterworks date from these years—and his stature among Polish readers grew.

Still, the horrors that he witnessed and experienced permanently shaped his view of humanity and history. Living in proximity to the Warsaw Ghetto, he wrote two of the earliest poems about the Holocaust, "Campo dei Fiori" and "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto." After the war, Milosz tried to describe the effect of disaster on his world view:

When gold paint flakes from the arms of sculptures,

When the letter falls out of the book of laws,

Then consciousness is naked as an eye.

When the pages of books fall in fiery scraps

Onto smashed leaves and twisted metal,

The tree of good and evil is stripped bare.

These lines capture one of the central characteristics of Milosz's art: the instinct to strip away the inessential, to zero in on the heart of the matter. He could see "the skull beneath the skin," in the words of T. S. Eliot, whose work he knew well. But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound. Instead, he sought a poetry that was truthful and perceptive enough to be trustworthy even when annihilation seemed imminent. In "The Captive Mind," a prose work written in 1953, just after his defection, in which he tried to make sense of his experience of Communism, Milosz recalled a moment from Nazi-occupied Warsaw that became a touchstone:

A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers.

Milosz wanted to write poems that could survive such a judgment. Even before 1939, Franaszek shows, he was obsessed with the idea of the poet's responsibility—his duty to write in a way that not only was beautiful and true but also offered sustenance. "Before you print a poem, you should reflect on whether this verse could be of use to at least one person in the struggle with himself and the world," he wrote in a 1938 essay. Nothing disgusted him more than aestheticism, which he associated with the Polish poets popular in his youth, who produced wan imitations of French fin-de-siècle poetry. Their "transformed choir did not much resemble / The disorderly choir of ordinary things," Milosz complains in "A Treatise on Poetry," his 1957 sequence, which combines personal memoir with ethical reflection to create an ars poetica. "At least poetry, philosophy, action were not, / For us, separated," he writes of his own generation. "We needed to be of use."

The need to be of use guided Milosz's choices after the war, when he agreed to take up a diplomatic post under the new Communist government of Poland. In "The Captive Mind," the book that first made Milosz's name known to Western readers, he emphasizes that he and most other Polish intellectuals thought that the Communists were right about many things: the injustice of feudal and capitalist Poland, the rottenness of Polish nationalism, the need to modernize society and politics. All of this made it very easy to conclude that Communism was, as it claimed to be, the philosophy—even the religion—of the future, to which everyone had to bow down.

Milosz offers four case studies of writers he knew, showing how each had reasoned himself into submission. One of these was Putrament, whom Milosz writes about in the chapter titled "Gamma, the Slave of History." Gamma rose to become one of the rulers of Poland because of his fanatical devotion to Communist doctrine: "This was the reward for those who knew how to think correctly, who understood the logic of History, who did not surrender to senseless sentimentality!"

But Gamma could make this submission, Milosz suggests, only because he was not truly a poet. To be a poet involves hearing the voice of conscience, which precludes lying, even in the service of a good cause. "The creative act is associated with a feeling of freedom that is, in its turn, born in the struggle against an apparently invisible resistance. Whoever truly creates is alone. . . . The creative man has no choice but to trust his inner command and place everything at stake in order to express what seems to him to be true," Milosz writes. The people around him in the twentieth century worshipped history, which is to say, power; but the artist worships truth, which is what allows him to save his soul.

This statement has a lofty sound, and it would be easy to be scornful of it if Milosz's life and work didn't so clearly demonstrate the utter sincerity of his belief. Few intellectuals today speak of "the truth" without a certain embarrassment. Isn't the truth merely an ideological construction, always determined by the power relations prevailing in a given time and place? When truth is invoked, we always have to ask, Whose truth? Milosz knew the reasons for skepticism as well as anyone. One of his poems begins:

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

But the title of the poem is "Incantation." In other words, these humane formulas are a spell, a chant we utter to give ourselves the illusion of potency. The belief in reason, the title implies, is unreasonable, and Milosz's experiences gave ample support for this idea.

Certainly, there is no ground for believing that truth or reason will ultimately prevail in human life. As Franaszek shows, they never quite did for Milosz. Though his biography seems, in retrospect, to follow a redemptive arc, his life from year to year was bitter. After escaping from Poland, in 1951, he was a penniless, friendless exile, and faced the arduous task of rebuilding his world. There was a prolonged conflict with Janka over whether she and their sons should join him in France, as Milosz wanted, or remain in the United States, where she felt safer. In the end, he persuaded her, but their marriage continued to be marked by numerous separations and trials, including chronic infidelities on his part.

For the rest of the nineteen-fifties, Milosz supported his family by working as a journalist; among other things, he wrote scripts for the Polish service of the BBC. By 1960, his reputation had spread widely enough that he was offered a position teaching Polish literature at Berkeley, and he remained there until he retired, in 1978. The university was a needed refuge, and Milosz wrote some of his most important work in these years. But, in Franaszek's telling, he mostly hated life in California; the pleasure he found in the natural setting was offset by his feelings of alienation and disdain for the culture. "The only entertainment of the locals is to stare at passing cars for hours on end, drinking or shooting from their cars at road signs they pass by," he observed in a 1964 letter.

The fundamental source of his anger was the feeling of being cut off from his language and his readers, without which his life as a poet made no sense. Poland's Communist government banned his works after his defection, and, though Kultura faithfully published his books in Polish, some of which circulated secretly in Poland, the editions were small: of his 1953 volume "Daylight," Franaszek writes, "a thousand copies were printed, but four years later . . . 320 remained unsold." It wasn't until 1973 that the first volume of his poems in English translation appeared. Until shortly before he won the Nobel Prize, he had barely any readers in the United States, where, if he was known at all, it was as the translator of the poet Zbigniew Herbert. Having enjoyed early fame as a poet, he spent his best years in near-total eclipse.

Even when recognition finally came, personal sorrows made it impossible for Milosz to enjoy it. In the mid-seventies, Janka became bedridden with what was eventually diagnosed as A.L.S., and Milosz became her caretaker until her death, in 1986. In a poem written after she died, "On Parting with My Wife, Janina," he wrote:

I loved her, without knowing who she really was.

I inflicted pain on her, chasing my illusion.

During the same period, his younger son, Piotr, developed severe manic depression and paranoia, and spent time in prison after firing a gun out of a motel window at an imaginary persecutor. Milosz blamed himself for not having been a better parent and described feeling "a terrible guilt about my existence, partly justified, partly pathological." When it was clear that he was in contention to win the Nobel Prize, he told a close friend, a Catholic priest, that he was praying for the restoration of Piotr's sanity instead. This section of Franaszek's biography is titled "Job." "I only bow and smile like a puppet, maintain a mask, while inside me there is suffering and great distress," Milosz wrote in 1978. "I can't say whether there are any people who would know what I feel and realize how much it costs to press this button, to shut away the pain, when I begin a lecture or a talk."

The last phase of Milosz's life brought new sources of happiness. Poland's ban on his work began to lift, and his triumphal visit, in 1981, made him realize that, to many Poles, he had become a national hero, a symbol of cultural resistance. Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, told Milosz that the poet had inspired his own work: "I think I went to prison twice for what you wrote!" In 1993, Milosz moved back, settling in Kraków, with his second wife, Carol Thigpen, an American; it was a homecoming that, for half his life, had seemed like an impossibility. He kept writing right up to his death, in 2004, at the age of ninety-three.

Yet it was his lifelong, intimate knowledge of suffering, both private and public, that did the most to shape Milosz's work. Unlike many great twentieth-century writers, who saw truth in despair, Milosz's experiences convinced him that poetry must not darken the world but illuminate it: "Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument." That decision for goodness is what makes Milosz a figure of such rare literary and moral authority. As we enter what looks like our own time of troubles, his poetry and his life offer a reminder of what it meant, and what it took, to survive the twentieth century. ♦

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