Ah, the Book of Life.  If only it were like other books.

I'm not, by nature, the kind of guy to finish a book on principle, but there are things (life being one) that you have to finish once you start.  Part of the pleasure of reading is that books aren't one of them.  They're a little like relationships in that respect.  If by chapter three they haven't grabbed you, well, time to move on. 

I don't usually judge a book by its cover.  I rarely get past the spine.  There are certain fonts I stear clear of.  Captiva (too wet), FF Scala Sans (too dry), and so on. 

Occasionally a Minion or ITC New Baskerville slips in under the radar, but it doesn't take long to discover the truth.  A bad book is like a bad conversation.  As anyone who's ever been on a blind date knows too well, it only takes a sentence or two before you realize what you're in for.   Dates, you usually have to stick out until a member of your designated blind-date rescue team calls with a pre-arranged pretend emergency.  A book, you can just toss. 

There's no time to waste.  There's so much in this world — this big, glorious coffee table book of a world of ours — that is intriguing.  And we — we are creatures that hunger for knowledge, energized by an insatiable curiosity about the world, about life, about each other.  All beauty comes from deep attention to this bounty and deep affection for the world that brings it forth. 

As Elaine Scarry, an always trenchant observer who has written brilliantly on things as diverse as torture and beauty wrote in her contribution to the Tanner Lecture Series on Human Values, "Beauty brings copies of itself into being."   

It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable. A beautiful face drawn by Verrocchio suddenly glides into the perceptual field of a young boy named Leonardo. The boy copies the face, then copies the face again. Then again and again and again. He does the same thing when a beautiful living plant—a violet, a wild rose—glides into his field of vision, or a living face: he makes a first copy, a second copy, a third, a fourth, a fifth. He draws it over and over, just as Walter Pater (who tells us all this about Leonardo) replicates— now in sentences—Leonardo’s acts, so that the essay reenacts its subject, becoming a sequence of faces: an angel, a Medusa, a woman and child, a Madonna, John the Baptist, St. Anne, La Gioconda. Before long the means are found to replicate, thousands of times over, both the sentences and the faces, so that traces of Pater’s paragraphs and Leonardo’s drawings inhabit all the pockets of the world (as pieces of them float in the paragraph now before you).

By now we are all familiar with memes.  Our media culture is predicated on them.  Everything from viral videos to flash mobs.  We obsessively replicate verbal ticks and dance moves, first with admiration, then with irony. 

But bloodlust and violence follow the same pattern (substitute cynicism for irony).  "Hate begets hate; violence begets violence," as The Reverend Martin Luther King said.

Memes coagulate in Mass displays — the individual is lost entirely in them.  For me, mass gatherings of any sort seem to give the lie to the idea of real individuality.  Many people don't seem to be bothered at all by losing themselves in a mob scene, and indeed it seems to connect them powerfully to something sometimes described as "greater than themselves". 

I don't object to that bit.  I'm a big fan of the Universal Mind.  I especially like that it is disembodied.  Part of the problem with masses is their mass.

So I've never found solace in crowds.  There is always an inherent  instability in them and I have always, as long as I can remember, felt even the most ostensibly celebratory gatherings concealed rumblings of malevolence beneath.  (This may have been partly due to childhood exposure to adults who spent the drive to and from every gathering complaining bitterly about everyone in attendance, as adults do.)

I was thinking of the madness of crowds as the Hollywood action narrative of the past ten years reached its thriling climax with the death of its arch villain and dancing in the streets.  We know the story by heart.  We know there will be a sequel (this is a franchise we're dealing with here, after all) with the same plot, we'll get another chance to play expendables in the next installment, and it'll be a blockbuster. 

I don't object to Hollywood movies that follow this formula, but I have a sense still that somehow reality's different.  It's not a comic book universe, not wholly, not yet.  But ten years of blunt, soul-deadening stories, of cynical lies cynically told and more cynically believed, because we don't want to believe the truth — it's starting to feel like one.

It's hard to see the world turning.  Right now they own the narrative.  That's what history is, after all.  But you and I remember it before it was history.  When there was no narrative — the faces, mouths gaping, no words.  That's what the truth looks like.  They don't own that.  It's still there right where we left it, in that empty space it left in us.

And that's the truth we've been running from ever since.  The truth that  "Hate begets hate; violence begets violence".  

Our "evil selves" often seem to us to have the best intentions.  The road to that sad truth runs through Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.  It's strewn with a million corpses — women, children, young men and old — and it doesn't end in some compound in Pakistan with one more. 

And here I am in my Candide season.  Let me close this book for now and tend my garden.