#4 – Great Books (part 1)
Weekly Review #4 – Books that split life into two parts: Nietzsche, Baltasar Gracián, La Rochefoucauld, Camus, Machiavelli
Anyone who reads a lot has at least one book that has split their personal history into two parts.
There was your life before it, and life after it.
Here are five of mine.
1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
January 1883. Nietzsche was holed up in Rapallo, on the west coast of Italy near Genoa. The winter winds had crept into every crevice of his tiny seaside lodging. Outside, blizzardous downpours pummelled the coastline.
Vicious migraines and bouts of vomiting battered his senses. His sick health had brought back the darkness: anguish, embarrassment, indignity. Shame had snatched his sleep and sold him to insomnia. Humiliated, he had been strung along, led astray, and then rejected by a woman who, it now seemed, had treated him merely as intellectual entertainment.
Without warning the clouds parted and the air was red.
“Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!”
He wrote to his friend in Venice telling him that the fierce sun had resuscitated his spirit. For the next 10 days, Nietzsche walked the coast each morning and scrawled out his most internal ideas into a notebook.
And it was here, through a volcano of imagery and a whirlpool of metaphor, that the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra took shape.
On the surface, the book is about a prophet who comes down from the mountains after 10 years of self-imposed exile. He seeks to teach the herd about his vision of the future. He wants man to evolve, to become "superman" – but the herd don't care.
Beneath the surface, the book is about Nietzsche coming to terms with himself, conquering his past, grappling with his abysmal health, and clamouring for the strength to say "Yes" to life, in spite of all the suffering. It is a book that seeks ‘to defend life against pain.’ Every great philosophy is an unconscious autobiography, Nietzsche later said. Perhaps he recognised that his was no exception.
I read this book when I too was holed up, crippled, in a dire state of rotting health, reeling after an operation, in agony. It is the book you ought to be drilled with when down and out. Amidst its tangle of parable and allegory, it disciplines you to acknowledge the necessity of pain; to admit that even the deepest depression teaches a lesson, and that those who find themselves longing for death haven't yet earned the right to it.
2. The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence
Many have read Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power but few have gone back to his sources. The least known of them is Baltasar Gracián.
The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence is a 17th century masterpiece of pragmatism. This is probably the most useful book I have ever read. It can be read in a day or two, but will be pulled from the shelf time and time again.
More than any other ‘self-help’ book, this treatise forced me to reflect on my own past follies, and gave practical ideas about how to correct or fine-tune my behaviour in future (it still needs some work). The book contains hundreds of gobbets of what might be called ‘common sense’. But common sense is never as common as is often supposed. Gracián pinpoints and points out all the common errors, mistakes, and follies we commit when making any sort of decision.
Here’s a selection of the things it offers, contained in sharp aphoristic commands:
When angry, do not let it affect your office, least of all when this is important.
Never show all your cards – create suspense in your affairs.
Make friends your teachers – attach yourself to the wise and prudent.
Don’t arouse expectations which you can’t meet.
Sharp players never move the piece their opponents are expecting.
Have a store of witty sayings and gallant deeds – know when to use them.
Iron out your blemishes and defects – it only takes one cloud to blot out the sun.
Do not let your imagination become a tyrant.
The truths which matter most are always only half-spoken.
Know which cards to throw away: the lowest card that wins the current game is worth more than the highest that won earlier.
A good falconer releases only as many birds as are needed for the chase.
In wanting to deal with everything, you deal with nothing.
All fools become lost through not thinking.
Some pay most attention to what matters little, and little attention to what matters most.
Know your key quality, your outstanding gift – cultivate it.
Never allow your misfortune to be doubled – withdraw when necessary.
Don’t continually flaunt your qualities or there will be nothing left to admire.
He who leaves nothing until tomorrow achieves many things.
An august motto: make haste slowly.
You can achieve more with a hint than with verbosity.
What’s well said, is swiftly said.
3. La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims
This book is a neglected gem, first published in 1665. It ranks alongside Gracián’s Pocket Oracle for its brevity and shrewdness. In France it has a robust reputation. Voltaire said it had done more than any other book to cultivate the taste of the French nation. It is rammed with hundreds of witty, pithy remarks that unveil the motives behind a certain emotion, behaviour, habit, or practice.
The theme that runs throughout is the idea that most of the things we take to be our virtues are really vices in disguise. A person with an excessively friendly demeanour is careering for gain. Business swindlers on Twitter with their smiley avatars and avalanche of emojis are animated by avarice. Justice crusaders who talk much of their goodness are motivated chiefly by the urge to punish.
La Rochefoucauld punctures all of these exploits in his maxims. He deals with envy, love, self-interest, hatred, vanity, pride, wisdom, and much more. His outlook on human duplicity and double-dealing was shaped by The Fronde, the series of civil wars that raged in France in the mid-17th century.
Each short aphorism was chiselled away at for years, revised and refined, to encapsulate a particular aspect of human self-deceit. There is more psychological acumen in this one book than there are in 100 others.
Some examples selected at random:
People too much taken up with little things become incapable of big ones.
In the human heart new passions are for ever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.
We cannot get over being deceived by our enemies and betrayed by our friends, yet we are often content to be so treated by ourselves.
The cleverest subtlety of all is knowing how to appear to fall into traps set for us; people are never caught so easily as when they are out to catch others.
We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves.
It is easier to be wise for others than for oneself.
As the stamp of great minds is to suggest much in few words, so, contrariwise, little minds have the gift of talking a great deal and saying nothing.
It is not enough to have great qualities; one must know how to manage them.
It is impossible to love for a second time anything you have really ceased to love.
We own up to minor failings, but only so as to convince others that we have no major ones.
4. The Rebel
At the close of the second world war, Albert Camus wrote The Rebel – “an attempt to understand the time I live in.” It is his best book – a philosophical history of rebellion and its consequences. Beneath all the sporadic, individual acts of rebellion, Camus diagnosed a great rebellion that had been rumbling in Europe’s underbelly for 2 centuries.
It first appears in art, with the rebellion against moral norms in the works of Marquis de Sade. Sadism becomes the animating drive of European revolt, which was no longer the mere mutiny of the slave against the oppressor. It had transformed into a desire to purposefully inflict pain upon the very structures that had underpinned the continent for a millenium.
The French Revolution gives political form to this urge. The Divine Right of Kings is overthrown. Even the concept of divinity itself soon finds itself facing the guillotine. The 19th century unravels this logic further, leading to and through Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the death of God and Marx’s insurgence against the economic system. The groundwork is here laid for the totalitarian creeds of Communism and Fascism. The state is transfigured into the new master of life and death, culminating in the Gulag Archipelago and the Final Solution.
When I first read it this book unfurled a new horizon in me, a distinct perspective on history. All the things we’d been partially taught in school, things we read about regarding the so-called ‘progress’ of Europe across the ages, were here cast in a very different light.
5. The Prince
The framework of a CV is a good way to think about Machiavelli’s great book The Prince. He wrote the book when he was down and out and trying to curry favour once more with the Medici, who had returned to power by that time in Florence. The book is a distillation of the wisdom he had accumulated over the years on diplomatic dispatches to various republics and monarchies throughout Italy. His objective in writing the book was to sell his skills and secure work.
The Prince has been peddled as a manual for tyrants, dictators, and duplicitous authoritarians. Stalin and Mussolini both studied it. It is clear that Putin has internalised it. Spinoza said that The Prince ought to be read as satire – a caricature of Renaissance Italy’s sanctimonious power politics. Both of these views are wrong. Machiavelli was serious about the work.
It must be stressed that the book deals specifically with only one type of state, and much of its advice is irrelevant to anything other than this one type. Some assume the book is applicable to any state. The type of states Machiavelli was talking about were princedoms that are newly minted, that are not established nor clearly defined, that have been seized either through force or have been brought into being unexpectedly. In other words: a revolutionary state, that has only just been created, that must secure and bolster its status in the face of more powerful, longer established states that encircle it, all whilst ensuring that entrenched interests are kept in check. The advice it propounds is to this purpose. It seeks to instruct the new Prince on how to behave, what must be taken into consideration, what to avoid, what to watch out for.
It is applicable to new businesses. In effect, start-up companies are similar to the revolutionary princedoms that Machiavelli was addressing. A start-up is surrounded by bigger, more well-known competitors, that have at their disposal much greater resources, that are established in the public mind and have reputations to maintain. Start-ups have reputations to make, and making one is difficult. Machiavelli was talking to upstarts, not well-established giants.
The term ‘Machiavellian’ was born from the book’s mendacious reputation. It was held to be a book that preached deceit and applauded cruelty, but to think that’s what it teaches is to advertise that you haven’t read it. Its image is simply the result of the fear it instilled and still instills in established regimes and institutions that do not want their power challenged by new and hungry upstarts.
It contains the basic principles and psychological facts that are to be leveraged whenever you want to achieve something. Its advice has been useful for me recently when it came to developing a release strategy for music. Without the backing of any labels, nor the money to throw at advertising, alternate methods had to be devised to ensure our songs circulated and found an audience. I imagine Machiavelli’s advice for upstarts is applicable in numerous other realms.
If you haven’t read any of these five books, I highly recommend them.
Not only was Machiavelli writing about a specific kind of state in a specific region and era, he did so in the moment that a military revolution was happening there. From my perspective, Art of War is his most interesting work, not The Prince. I mean to read his histories in translation.