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Lapham's Quarterly: Luck
Volume IX Number 3
221 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2016
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About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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September 7, 2016
As luck would have it I received this issue just a day after guessing I would receive it soon. How lucky is that?
What is luck? To the best of my knowledge it is not a solid, liquid, or gas. Is it a condition? Is it a situation, defined as “a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself”? Is it an explanation for what happens in the absence of a factual explanation? Not quite that.
I seems it is more like the good or bad fortune of something that has happened to someone or something. Fortune is a synonym as nebulous as luck. It is only really a thing of the past. You can say I will have good or bad luck in the future but it is just a guess. To say I am having good luck now in the present is only an observation of successive moments of now, each in the past before you’ve barely acknowledged it. (See L.Q. Time.) One is mostly looking back saying that was bad luck, or good luck. It needs a declarant or attributor too. If a tree falls in the forest does it have any luck if no one is there to observe it?
I trust Lapham’s Quarterly will enlighten.
When I receive a new issue I browse it. I look at the cover art, the IFC (inside front cover), and the Table of Contents. Who do I recognize? In addition to the usual suspects often present there are always people new, unknown to me, and brilliant. How have I never heard of them? I think I’m functionally illiterate. It is comforting that there are many great writers. If one looks at the daily news too often one might think that a dark cloud of ignorance is sweeping the globe like a mysterious fog in a horror story. It is comforting that some people think and write.
I leaf to the Among The Contributors page. Short, informative paragraphs of a seemingly random selection of the issue’s authors are here.
The graphic follows, most often by the inscrutable Haisam Hussein. The art is always exemplary. The text this issue is more informative than some other times. The random foibles of fortune are portrayed disguised as the game of Snakes and Ladders.
Contributors, Graphic, Preamble and more are available at LaphamsQuarterly dot Org. Gloriosky! (Little Annie Rooney, not Little Orphan Annie.) I just discovered dot Org has different contributors than the print edition. There is no end to it.
Next I peruse the piquant side quotes (pleasantly stimulating or exciting to the mind) (I had to look it up) and casually view the exquisite art reproductions, both generously distributed.
“I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not the bad luck of the early worm.” –Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1919 (p. 19) Good point.
“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.” –Mark Twain, 1897 (p. 62)
“Beware good luck: fattening hogs think themselves fortunate.” –German proverb (p. 72)
“You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the places and people you’re lucky you’re not.” –Dr. Seuss, 1973 (p. 110)
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” –Cormac McCarthy, 2005 (p. 158)
“The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence and merit.” –Jonathan Swift, 1706 (p. 208)
Editor Lewis H. Lapham’s waxes autobiographical again in his Preamble: Dame Fortune.
“At the age of eighty-one I still can’t say whether the vessel of my life is on or off course, but I do know that its design was none of my own doing.” (p. 15)
I find this surprising considering his success in publishing and his intelligent wisdom in writing. Does he think he’s a puppet on a string? Does he feel guilty coming into the world with the silver spoon of privilege?
“Born in San Francisco of sound mind and body to loving parents in a neighborhood under the protection of money, I understood before I was ten that I’d been dealt favorable cards…” (p. 15)
Does being born into favorable or unfavorable circumstances make it easy or hard to realize ones talents? Luck perhaps.
I like and agree with some of the references he cites in his preamble: (Strangely, I almost always like that with which I agree.)
“…the thought of Greek philosopher Epicurus, who in the third century BC taught that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else. No afterlife, no divine retribution or reward, nothing other than a vast turmoil of creation and destruction…” (p. 14) OMG.
“But what is chance? Nothing happens in this world without a cause. If we know the cause, we do not call it chance; but if we do not know it, we say it was produced by chance…” -Thomas Jefferson, 1826 (p. 14)
Earning my precious double-asterisk annotation is this quote from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King: “Learning “is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” (p. 17)
Mr. Lapham makes several references to the extreme randomness of there being a planet here at all, let alone inhabited with such a wide variety of creatures. He doesn’t make any reference to a supreme being responsible but it’s no wonder man invented religion to give this delicate and perfectly constructed world a purpose. It is too astounding to think it all just happened, but we have no proof otherwise.
Surprisingly shying from politics again in this tumultuous election year he expounds on chance intervening in the American Revolution circa 1776:
“If a heavy fog doesn’t drift into New York Harbor on the morning of August 30, George Washington’s retreating army trapped by the British in Brooklyn Heights, doesn’t make good on its escape in rowboats across the East River to Manhattan; if that army doesn’t survive, neither does the American Revolution. Nor does the revolution succeed without the assistance of France, which wasn’t a gift from Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The Treaty of Alliance followed from the particular quality of Benjamin Franklin’s intelligence that allowed him to persuade an absolute monarch to bankrupt his kingdom in order to finance a democratic rebellion.” (p. 19)
No one knows what else might have happened instead. It’s all imagining. Is this the issue about ‘nothing’? We shall see.
Voices in Time (the main body of L.Q.) is in three sections:
Strokes of Luck
Wheels of Fortune
Twists of Fate
Luck, Fortune, and Fate.
Chance.
Happenstance (courtesy Mirriam-Webster online):
..Simple Definition of happenstance: something that happens by chance.
..Full Definition of happenstance: a circumstance especially that is due to chance.
Occurrence.
Now that I’ve read the main body has my perspective on luck changed? No. I’m sticking with ‘an explanation for what happens in the absence of a factual explanation’.
We don’t want to be alone. Yet we are. So very alone. We invent. It’s much easier to be part of some great plan. If it’s not the will of Allah then it’s just luck. Plain good or bad luck.
Somewhere along the line of time and history we made up the concept of luck. Perhaps it was about the same time we conceived of gawd, gods, and God. That is our nature. We evolve, invent, evolve, and invent.
It is much easier to believe the concept of a universe created and controlled by a superior intelligence than it is to believe the universe, Earth, and conscious Man are the result of the random mingling of matter.
Richard Dawkins addresses that in the very first extract, receiving my near-blanket annotation of text and coveted double-asterisk in importance symbol.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”
“In the teeth of the stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” (p. 21)
“We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered: a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise…” (p. 23)
Dawkins likens the inhabitance of Earth with that of a spaceship of sleeping explorers searching for a place for millions of years and finally finding one.
“As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds.”
“Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the hosts. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall, and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed… …we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.” (p. 24)
Life is problem solving. If you don’t solve you’re dead. This issue of L.Q. (like every issue) has really made me think. Occurrences have pelted me recently. What else could go wrong? Oh, that… and that… and that. Still, it’s not as bad as living in a Middle Eastern refugee camp or a Syrian city battleground. You have to deal with it.
It seems quite a few of the extracts are fictional. Not enough factual examples extant? Some are amusing, such as Graham Greene’s piece from “A Shocking Accident”. (Pigs can fly, just don’t let one fall on you.) James Thurber too, The Luck of Jad Peters. ‘…somethin’ must have told Jad to turn around.’ Dostoevsky plays roulette with Grandmother. Damon Runyon entertains on horse racing and love’s labors lost. Iris Murdoch, yet another great writer with whom I am not familiar, is literate on a luckless woman living a mundane life due to jumping the net. Iris was reputedly a lover of Elias Canetti, who you recall aphorized eloquently in the L.Q. Spring 2016: Disaster issue.
Does anything pique your interest? Unfortunately none of these fine pieces are online at laphamsquarterly.org. There you can find Twain, Jefferson, Hamilton (Alexander), Keynes and Schopenhauer. They too know how to think and write. Perhaps they will pique or satisfy.
John Maynard Keynes discusses confidence in mid-Depression 1936:
“It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters that are very uncertain…”
“…The state of long-term expectation, upon which our decisions are based, does not solely depend, therefore, on the most probable forecast we can make. It also depends on the confidence with which we make this forecast—on how highly we rate the likelihood of our best forecast turning out quite wrong. If we expect large changes but are very uncertain as to what precise form these changes will take, then our confidence will be weak.” (p. 107)
Thomas Nagel, Dependent on Circumstance (p. 32) is very analytical of circumstance. For example we’ve heard of people accidentally driving onto a sidewalk and into people, causing injury and death. What if there is no one on the sidewalk. No injury, death, or crime. Catastrophe avoided. Such is fate or luck. It is circumstance or occurrence. There but for the Grace might anyone’s life have been different if the circumstance was different. This one is thought-provoking.
Before learning more about him in Wikipedia the first lines of the 1870 extract from Jacob Burckhardt caught my attention:
“In our private lives, we are won’t to regard our personal fate under the categories “fortunate” and “unfortunate”,…” (p. 87)
Back in the est seminar days one often modestly referred to one’s successes as being fortunate, though they were generally considered so due to one’s contribution and resolve.
As I understand Burckhardt we judge history based on observations through the prisms of the present.
“But who is, as a rule, responsible for such judgments?”
“They arise from a kind of literary consensus that has gradually taken shape out of the desires and arguments of the age of reason and the real or imagined conclusions of a number of widely read historians.”
They are turned to journalistic uses as arguments for or against certain trends of the time.”
“They are the deadly enemies of true historical insight.” (p. 88)
The author info at the end of the extract quotes: “Our task,” he wrote “is to free ourselves as much as possible from foolish joys and fears and to apply ourselves above all to the understanding of historical development.” It says he influenced a young Friedrich Nietzsche.
In Wikipedia another Swiss historian describes Burckhardt as “The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well.”
I’m lucky to have read this.
So many extracts, so little time. I’m running out of paper. Ralph Ellison, Thomas Jefferson, Machiavelli, all noteworthy. Cervantes from Don Quixote, Tom Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. S’kia Mphahlele from The Suitcase.
Check those side quotes again, this time online: http://laphamsquarterly.org/luck#quotes
Excellent issue. Do ya’ feel lucky? Read.
The Further Remarks: Essays section, Conversations, Miscellany, and Glossary remain after the main body Voices in Time. There are six essays this issue. All are currently available online at LaphamsQuarterly.org under the Issue page for Luck. That’s lucky!
First is a short piece by Pushkin Prize winner Ludmilla Petrushevskaya about her efforts to help her son avoid conscription to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Definitely a stroke of luck.
Voltaire’s Luck by Roger Pearson gives a brief but informative history of lotteries and how they enriched this French Enlightenment writer of more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Wikipedia enlightens at length on Monsieur François-Marie Arouet.
“As he approached his sixties, Voltaire began to care more about income than capital growth, and he entered into a number of loan arrangements that were tantamount to life annuities and therefore depended on their long-term profitability on living to old age.
In truth, it mattered little if he lost–what does a dead man care how much capital he has left?–but nevertheless he did what he could to tilt the odds in his own favor.” (p. 193)
You can’t take it with you indeed.
“ln his Mémoires (1759), Voltaire recalled how in his youth he had come across so many writers who were “penniless and held in contempt” that “he had long since decided not to add to their number.” Thanks to his fortune he was indeed free to pursue his writerly life more or less as he chose and later in particular to conduct his vigorous campaign against despotism and intolerance from the comfort of his “safe house” at Femey. Money allowed him to become one of the great heroes ofthe Enlightenment and arguably the world’s first champion of human rights. While not quite the charitable purpose that Jean Leclerc might have had in mind back in 1696, this outcome is nevertheless one for which today we may count ourselves lucky.” (p. 193)
Free thy selves from indebtedness to patrons and subsidy. Go forth and express.
La Soledad by Robert Coover is a superb essay I rank right up there with Richard Dawkins’ extract from Unweaving The Rainbow, the very first in Voices In Time I mentioned previously. Being of neither hispanic or catholic origins the subtle intro escapes me for a short while:
“We’re in Catalonia on a certain Friday during the celebration of the execution of an accused Middle East terrorist, one of millions over the centuries, though by chance one more famous than most.”
As it quickly unfolds I catch that this a reference to Jesus I haven’t quite heard put this way. Was Jesus a terrorist of his time (if so, then certainly kinder and gentler than those today) or are terrorists just Jesus-like in their own way? I have a hard time with that.
Mr. Coover even more quickly segues to the modern day:
“If they’d had drones, his executioners might well have skipped the uncertainties of trial and the messiness of hands-on killing by taking him out remotely with one of those flying death machines instead, though it’s not story material easily converted into wooden statuary. The odds of nailing him wouldn’t have been as good either, and the unavoidable collateral damage would have created the nuisance of more resistance, more executions. But drones are quicker and cleaner and there’s almost no risk for the shooter, only for those unlucky enough to be in the immediate neighborhood of the strike, persons mostly invisible and probably also guilty of one unforgivable crime or another like everyone else.”
“There’s not much room for luck in the terrorists’ deterministic universe.”
In a deterministic universe, religions, responding to human desire, offer a local game of choice and chance, sin and redemption, a subsystem illusion of meaningful human interaction with destiny, temporarily ignoring their own beliefs in their god’s implacable will, against which luck and human interventions are not options.” [Emphasis mine-JH.]
“Faced with oblivion and its erasure of meaning, humans make up wild stories as a buffer against despair.”
“If one is born into poverty in an inhospitable part of the world, there’s not much one can do except throw rocks at the power elite, or else form a procession and emigrate to a better place.”
“It’s just not fair. Strife arises. Gods get into it and make things worse.”
“If religion didn’t exist, rage and resentment still would. Paranoid would. Fear. Cruelty. Greed. Ignorance. Despair before the void.”
“There is no obvious reason, other than fairy-tale ones, why humans should exist at all, and, lacking such a reason, people look for it in the lives and deaths of superpeople, like these oversized wooden characters of the Good Friday procession.”
“As far as we know, she [Virgin Mary, the Virgin of Solitude] and we are utterly alone in a meaningless universe on a floating rock, doomed for extinction.” (pp. 194-198)
Isn’t he the optimist! This is quite the noteworthy bookend to Dawkins’ piece at the beginning which is equally fatalistic on our creation but otherwise brimming with enthusiasm for our good fortune. Perhaps the juxtaposition is intended.
If you read nothing else in this issue then shame on you (not YOU, I’m referring to that other person). At least read Dawkins and Coover. Coover can be read at the Lapham’s website, Dawkins’ extract can be found in Chp. 1 of the ‘Look Inside’ of Unweaving The Rainbow on Amazon. Read the chapter up through “…we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.”
Such is my intention. Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley” not withstanding of course. Fill the data banks until the electricity is turned off and the memories wink out. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” –Bladerunner
READ.
The rest of Further Remarks is good too. Oil In The Can comments on pari-mutuel betting and ‘reading the sheets’ for horse races with the intent of divining the results. Dream Reading is another take on the numbers racket, assigning numbers based on dreams. It’s all made up. The Gorgon’s Head relates the tale of Perseus and how circumstance fulfills a prophecy.
What is luck? To the best of my knowledge it is not a solid, liquid, or gas. Is it a condition? Is it a situation, defined as “a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself”? Is it an explanation for what happens in the absence of a factual explanation? Not quite that.
I seems it is more like the good or bad fortune of something that has happened to someone or something. Fortune is a synonym as nebulous as luck. It is only really a thing of the past. You can say I will have good or bad luck in the future but it is just a guess. To say I am having good luck now in the present is only an observation of successive moments of now, each in the past before you’ve barely acknowledged it. (See L.Q. Time.) One is mostly looking back saying that was bad luck, or good luck. It needs a declarant or attributor too. If a tree falls in the forest does it have any luck if no one is there to observe it?
I trust Lapham’s Quarterly will enlighten.
When I receive a new issue I browse it. I look at the cover art, the IFC (inside front cover), and the Table of Contents. Who do I recognize? In addition to the usual suspects often present there are always people new, unknown to me, and brilliant. How have I never heard of them? I think I’m functionally illiterate. It is comforting that there are many great writers. If one looks at the daily news too often one might think that a dark cloud of ignorance is sweeping the globe like a mysterious fog in a horror story. It is comforting that some people think and write.
I leaf to the Among The Contributors page. Short, informative paragraphs of a seemingly random selection of the issue’s authors are here.
The graphic follows, most often by the inscrutable Haisam Hussein. The art is always exemplary. The text this issue is more informative than some other times. The random foibles of fortune are portrayed disguised as the game of Snakes and Ladders.
Contributors, Graphic, Preamble and more are available at LaphamsQuarterly dot Org. Gloriosky! (Little Annie Rooney, not Little Orphan Annie.) I just discovered dot Org has different contributors than the print edition. There is no end to it.
Next I peruse the piquant side quotes (pleasantly stimulating or exciting to the mind) (I had to look it up) and casually view the exquisite art reproductions, both generously distributed.
“I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not the bad luck of the early worm.” –Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1919 (p. 19) Good point.
“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.” –Mark Twain, 1897 (p. 62)
“Beware good luck: fattening hogs think themselves fortunate.” –German proverb (p. 72)
“You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the places and people you’re lucky you’re not.” –Dr. Seuss, 1973 (p. 110)
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” –Cormac McCarthy, 2005 (p. 158)
“The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence and merit.” –Jonathan Swift, 1706 (p. 208)
Editor Lewis H. Lapham’s waxes autobiographical again in his Preamble: Dame Fortune.
“At the age of eighty-one I still can’t say whether the vessel of my life is on or off course, but I do know that its design was none of my own doing.” (p. 15)
I find this surprising considering his success in publishing and his intelligent wisdom in writing. Does he think he’s a puppet on a string? Does he feel guilty coming into the world with the silver spoon of privilege?
“Born in San Francisco of sound mind and body to loving parents in a neighborhood under the protection of money, I understood before I was ten that I’d been dealt favorable cards…” (p. 15)
Does being born into favorable or unfavorable circumstances make it easy or hard to realize ones talents? Luck perhaps.
I like and agree with some of the references he cites in his preamble: (Strangely, I almost always like that with which I agree.)
“…the thought of Greek philosopher Epicurus, who in the third century BC taught that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else. No afterlife, no divine retribution or reward, nothing other than a vast turmoil of creation and destruction…” (p. 14) OMG.
“But what is chance? Nothing happens in this world without a cause. If we know the cause, we do not call it chance; but if we do not know it, we say it was produced by chance…” -Thomas Jefferson, 1826 (p. 14)
Earning my precious double-asterisk annotation is this quote from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King: “Learning “is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” (p. 17)
Mr. Lapham makes several references to the extreme randomness of there being a planet here at all, let alone inhabited with such a wide variety of creatures. He doesn’t make any reference to a supreme being responsible but it’s no wonder man invented religion to give this delicate and perfectly constructed world a purpose. It is too astounding to think it all just happened, but we have no proof otherwise.
Surprisingly shying from politics again in this tumultuous election year he expounds on chance intervening in the American Revolution circa 1776:
“If a heavy fog doesn’t drift into New York Harbor on the morning of August 30, George Washington’s retreating army trapped by the British in Brooklyn Heights, doesn’t make good on its escape in rowboats across the East River to Manhattan; if that army doesn’t survive, neither does the American Revolution. Nor does the revolution succeed without the assistance of France, which wasn’t a gift from Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The Treaty of Alliance followed from the particular quality of Benjamin Franklin’s intelligence that allowed him to persuade an absolute monarch to bankrupt his kingdom in order to finance a democratic rebellion.” (p. 19)
No one knows what else might have happened instead. It’s all imagining. Is this the issue about ‘nothing’? We shall see.
Voices in Time (the main body of L.Q.) is in three sections:
Strokes of Luck
Wheels of Fortune
Twists of Fate
Luck, Fortune, and Fate.
Chance.
Happenstance (courtesy Mirriam-Webster online):
..Simple Definition of happenstance: something that happens by chance.
..Full Definition of happenstance: a circumstance especially that is due to chance.
Occurrence.
Now that I’ve read the main body has my perspective on luck changed? No. I’m sticking with ‘an explanation for what happens in the absence of a factual explanation’.
We don’t want to be alone. Yet we are. So very alone. We invent. It’s much easier to be part of some great plan. If it’s not the will of Allah then it’s just luck. Plain good or bad luck.
Somewhere along the line of time and history we made up the concept of luck. Perhaps it was about the same time we conceived of gawd, gods, and God. That is our nature. We evolve, invent, evolve, and invent.
It is much easier to believe the concept of a universe created and controlled by a superior intelligence than it is to believe the universe, Earth, and conscious Man are the result of the random mingling of matter.
Richard Dawkins addresses that in the very first extract, receiving my near-blanket annotation of text and coveted double-asterisk in importance symbol.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”
“In the teeth of the stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” (p. 21)
“We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered: a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise…” (p. 23)
Dawkins likens the inhabitance of Earth with that of a spaceship of sleeping explorers searching for a place for millions of years and finally finding one.
“As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds.”
“Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the hosts. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall, and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed… …we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.” (p. 24)
Life is problem solving. If you don’t solve you’re dead. This issue of L.Q. (like every issue) has really made me think. Occurrences have pelted me recently. What else could go wrong? Oh, that… and that… and that. Still, it’s not as bad as living in a Middle Eastern refugee camp or a Syrian city battleground. You have to deal with it.
It seems quite a few of the extracts are fictional. Not enough factual examples extant? Some are amusing, such as Graham Greene’s piece from “A Shocking Accident”. (Pigs can fly, just don’t let one fall on you.) James Thurber too, The Luck of Jad Peters. ‘…somethin’ must have told Jad to turn around.’ Dostoevsky plays roulette with Grandmother. Damon Runyon entertains on horse racing and love’s labors lost. Iris Murdoch, yet another great writer with whom I am not familiar, is literate on a luckless woman living a mundane life due to jumping the net. Iris was reputedly a lover of Elias Canetti, who you recall aphorized eloquently in the L.Q. Spring 2016: Disaster issue.
Does anything pique your interest? Unfortunately none of these fine pieces are online at laphamsquarterly.org. There you can find Twain, Jefferson, Hamilton (Alexander), Keynes and Schopenhauer. They too know how to think and write. Perhaps they will pique or satisfy.
John Maynard Keynes discusses confidence in mid-Depression 1936:
“It would be foolish, in forming our expectations, to attach great weight to matters that are very uncertain…”
“…The state of long-term expectation, upon which our decisions are based, does not solely depend, therefore, on the most probable forecast we can make. It also depends on the confidence with which we make this forecast—on how highly we rate the likelihood of our best forecast turning out quite wrong. If we expect large changes but are very uncertain as to what precise form these changes will take, then our confidence will be weak.” (p. 107)
Thomas Nagel, Dependent on Circumstance (p. 32) is very analytical of circumstance. For example we’ve heard of people accidentally driving onto a sidewalk and into people, causing injury and death. What if there is no one on the sidewalk. No injury, death, or crime. Catastrophe avoided. Such is fate or luck. It is circumstance or occurrence. There but for the Grace might anyone’s life have been different if the circumstance was different. This one is thought-provoking.
Before learning more about him in Wikipedia the first lines of the 1870 extract from Jacob Burckhardt caught my attention:
“In our private lives, we are won’t to regard our personal fate under the categories “fortunate” and “unfortunate”,…” (p. 87)
Back in the est seminar days one often modestly referred to one’s successes as being fortunate, though they were generally considered so due to one’s contribution and resolve.
As I understand Burckhardt we judge history based on observations through the prisms of the present.
“But who is, as a rule, responsible for such judgments?”
“They arise from a kind of literary consensus that has gradually taken shape out of the desires and arguments of the age of reason and the real or imagined conclusions of a number of widely read historians.”
They are turned to journalistic uses as arguments for or against certain trends of the time.”
“They are the deadly enemies of true historical insight.” (p. 88)
The author info at the end of the extract quotes: “Our task,” he wrote “is to free ourselves as much as possible from foolish joys and fears and to apply ourselves above all to the understanding of historical development.” It says he influenced a young Friedrich Nietzsche.
In Wikipedia another Swiss historian describes Burckhardt as “The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well.”
I’m lucky to have read this.
So many extracts, so little time. I’m running out of paper. Ralph Ellison, Thomas Jefferson, Machiavelli, all noteworthy. Cervantes from Don Quixote, Tom Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. S’kia Mphahlele from The Suitcase.
Check those side quotes again, this time online: http://laphamsquarterly.org/luck#quotes
Excellent issue. Do ya’ feel lucky? Read.
The Further Remarks: Essays section, Conversations, Miscellany, and Glossary remain after the main body Voices in Time. There are six essays this issue. All are currently available online at LaphamsQuarterly.org under the Issue page for Luck. That’s lucky!
First is a short piece by Pushkin Prize winner Ludmilla Petrushevskaya about her efforts to help her son avoid conscription to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Definitely a stroke of luck.
Voltaire’s Luck by Roger Pearson gives a brief but informative history of lotteries and how they enriched this French Enlightenment writer of more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Wikipedia enlightens at length on Monsieur François-Marie Arouet.
“As he approached his sixties, Voltaire began to care more about income than capital growth, and he entered into a number of loan arrangements that were tantamount to life annuities and therefore depended on their long-term profitability on living to old age.
In truth, it mattered little if he lost–what does a dead man care how much capital he has left?–but nevertheless he did what he could to tilt the odds in his own favor.” (p. 193)
You can’t take it with you indeed.
“ln his Mémoires (1759), Voltaire recalled how in his youth he had come across so many writers who were “penniless and held in contempt” that “he had long since decided not to add to their number.” Thanks to his fortune he was indeed free to pursue his writerly life more or less as he chose and later in particular to conduct his vigorous campaign against despotism and intolerance from the comfort of his “safe house” at Femey. Money allowed him to become one of the great heroes ofthe Enlightenment and arguably the world’s first champion of human rights. While not quite the charitable purpose that Jean Leclerc might have had in mind back in 1696, this outcome is nevertheless one for which today we may count ourselves lucky.” (p. 193)
Free thy selves from indebtedness to patrons and subsidy. Go forth and express.
La Soledad by Robert Coover is a superb essay I rank right up there with Richard Dawkins’ extract from Unweaving The Rainbow, the very first in Voices In Time I mentioned previously. Being of neither hispanic or catholic origins the subtle intro escapes me for a short while:
“We’re in Catalonia on a certain Friday during the celebration of the execution of an accused Middle East terrorist, one of millions over the centuries, though by chance one more famous than most.”
As it quickly unfolds I catch that this a reference to Jesus I haven’t quite heard put this way. Was Jesus a terrorist of his time (if so, then certainly kinder and gentler than those today) or are terrorists just Jesus-like in their own way? I have a hard time with that.
Mr. Coover even more quickly segues to the modern day:
“If they’d had drones, his executioners might well have skipped the uncertainties of trial and the messiness of hands-on killing by taking him out remotely with one of those flying death machines instead, though it’s not story material easily converted into wooden statuary. The odds of nailing him wouldn’t have been as good either, and the unavoidable collateral damage would have created the nuisance of more resistance, more executions. But drones are quicker and cleaner and there’s almost no risk for the shooter, only for those unlucky enough to be in the immediate neighborhood of the strike, persons mostly invisible and probably also guilty of one unforgivable crime or another like everyone else.”
“There’s not much room for luck in the terrorists’ deterministic universe.”
In a deterministic universe, religions, responding to human desire, offer a local game of choice and chance, sin and redemption, a subsystem illusion of meaningful human interaction with destiny, temporarily ignoring their own beliefs in their god’s implacable will, against which luck and human interventions are not options.” [Emphasis mine-JH.]
“Faced with oblivion and its erasure of meaning, humans make up wild stories as a buffer against despair.”
“If one is born into poverty in an inhospitable part of the world, there’s not much one can do except throw rocks at the power elite, or else form a procession and emigrate to a better place.”
“It’s just not fair. Strife arises. Gods get into it and make things worse.”
“If religion didn’t exist, rage and resentment still would. Paranoid would. Fear. Cruelty. Greed. Ignorance. Despair before the void.”
“There is no obvious reason, other than fairy-tale ones, why humans should exist at all, and, lacking such a reason, people look for it in the lives and deaths of superpeople, like these oversized wooden characters of the Good Friday procession.”
“As far as we know, she [Virgin Mary, the Virgin of Solitude] and we are utterly alone in a meaningless universe on a floating rock, doomed for extinction.” (pp. 194-198)
Isn’t he the optimist! This is quite the noteworthy bookend to Dawkins’ piece at the beginning which is equally fatalistic on our creation but otherwise brimming with enthusiasm for our good fortune. Perhaps the juxtaposition is intended.
If you read nothing else in this issue then shame on you (not YOU, I’m referring to that other person). At least read Dawkins and Coover. Coover can be read at the Lapham’s website, Dawkins’ extract can be found in Chp. 1 of the ‘Look Inside’ of Unweaving The Rainbow on Amazon. Read the chapter up through “…we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.”
Such is my intention. Robert Burns: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley” not withstanding of course. Fill the data banks until the electricity is turned off and the memories wink out. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” –Bladerunner
READ.
The rest of Further Remarks is good too. Oil In The Can comments on pari-mutuel betting and ‘reading the sheets’ for horse races with the intent of divining the results. Dream Reading is another take on the numbers racket, assigning numbers based on dreams. It’s all made up. The Gorgon’s Head relates the tale of Perseus and how circumstance fulfills a prophecy.
March 22, 2017
This collection was a little tedious compared to other Lapham's, but still a worthwhile exploration.
February 6, 2017
A bit of a mixed bag as always, but did well on the topic. The conversations part and the essays are usually my favorite bit and it was the same on Luck. Interesting to see the diverse thoughts of people throughout recorded history.
November 14, 2021
It was through luck that I discovered Lapham’s Quarterly.
I was staying at a cottage near the town of Burk’s Falls in northern Ontario. The cottage lacked tea mugs so we went looking for some in a curio shop called The Emporium. While paying for the mugs, I looked to my left and spied a stack of magazines, each issue stamped with a single word or phrase on its stark white spine. I was intrigued, began to browse… and ten minutes later I left with the whole lot, 25 back issues.
Fittingly, Luck is the first issue I’ve finished. Love the concept, love the design and love the editorial choices. So much goodness, but here are some of my favourite passages…
1. James Thurber’s Luck of Jad Peters
2. Ralph Ellison’s King of Bingo
3. Graham Greene’s Shocking Accident
4. Luisa Valenzuela’s The Censors
5. Thomas Angel’s Moral Luck
6. Geoff Dyer’s Something Didn’t Happen
7. Christine de Pisan’s Vision
I was staying at a cottage near the town of Burk’s Falls in northern Ontario. The cottage lacked tea mugs so we went looking for some in a curio shop called The Emporium. While paying for the mugs, I looked to my left and spied a stack of magazines, each issue stamped with a single word or phrase on its stark white spine. I was intrigued, began to browse… and ten minutes later I left with the whole lot, 25 back issues.
Fittingly, Luck is the first issue I’ve finished. Love the concept, love the design and love the editorial choices. So much goodness, but here are some of my favourite passages…
1. James Thurber’s Luck of Jad Peters
2. Ralph Ellison’s King of Bingo
3. Graham Greene’s Shocking Accident
4. Luisa Valenzuela’s The Censors
5. Thomas Angel’s Moral Luck
6. Geoff Dyer’s Something Didn’t Happen
7. Christine de Pisan’s Vision
September 14, 2016
Another very satisfying 225 page read, this one on a lot of different views of luck. Or, in particular, how chance really does occurs in so many instances in the life that we observe.
The Lapham's Quarterly is a very well constructed compilation of a lot of varying authors from a lot of different time periods, all short articles about some aspect of the theme for the volume. and, no advertising included!
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