An Eternal Issue - about the desert island

Talks with my Doctor

An Interview with John B. Westerberg

Gore Vidal's Three Greatest Novels

The Most Important Authors of the 20th Century

The Finest Author of the 20th Century

An Orientation in Contemporary Literature

This query is not unusual among literary colleagues, but it is always impossible to answer. The problem is, that once you have got yourself involved with books, you just can't do without them. William Somerset Maugham solved his abstinential problem with literature on going on travels by simply stuffing a large sack full of books without distinguishing which, and thus be well stuffed with books for the journey, of which some would inevitably provide agreeable surprises, while others could be left on the way, thus providing space for purchase.

The problem with the first question is, that the better you know literature, the more vital it becomes not to go to a desert island without bringing at least a complete library. The question is generally modified with: "Well, if you were allowed ten books, which books would you choose?" whereupon ten books would certainly not be enough, growing to a number of twenty indispensable ones, demanding references of another 20 volumes, which would automatically increase the diet to a hundred, and then you easily reach two hundred, and before you can tell how you already have a thousand books which you simply can't do without, which demands another thousand for reference - in brief, sooner or later you arrive at the conclusion that you can't go anywhere without bringing with you a well assorted library.

But if you are compelled to concentrate on bringing with you only the most important items from world literature - what would you choose?

No matter how you try to limit your concentration to a minimum, the answer must become encyclopaedic.

In an independent project of history of literature, which for a start was enthusiastically encouraged by the Institution of Literary Science at the Gothenburg University, we tried 1984-88 to pinpoint what an everlasting classic really was. We proceeded from a basic material of just 40 selections from world literature, but in spite of this disciplined limitation, the project soon swelled out into a smaller history of all the world literature until 1942 and further on. When the project was concluded by an analysis of the circumstances and occurrence of the suicide of Stefan Zweig and was delivered to the University with Index and all, we had the sour reaction from the University that the work could never be published, since it was too voluminous and at the same time far too incomplete. So we were urged on to continue working on the limitless job forever, one of its countless descendants eventually emerging as The Free Thinker.

All the same it might perhaps do some good thus ten years after the beginning of that distant project commenced so long ago to make a review and attack the problem from a different side and thus turn the issue upside down:

"What books would you manage without?"

Of course the answer couldn't be generally acceptable but would have to be most personal.

Of course, every person could do without most of world literature and is usually compelled to do so, since he has to live and work and eat, which is more necessary than to read. All the same, there are classics which the history of literature simply can't dispose of no matter how many people gladly would do so. Here follows a personal recommendation of what books you could bring with you to a desert island without ever getting bored.

Of course, the Bible is a safe bet with everything it contains and even the apocrypha of the Old Testament. If you forget that book at home the excursion to the desert island is doomed to fail. Even if you don't read it, this book is better than any other for just turning up pages at random to find some stimulation from some loose sentences - and you never risk getting the same verse twice.

Homer is the second surest card with both the Iliad and the Odyssey including the Homeric hymn to Apollo. The other Homeric hymns are worthless in comparison, and Apollo was the only one of the Greek gods to be really original - he had the only interesting oracle (at Delphi) and was the only god not to betray Troy. Homer is the first must to all lovers of eternal feuilletons, as when you reach the end of Homer you realize that you have to read it all over again from the beginning - and slower each time, just as with Shakespeare.

Hesiod, though, you can do without. His two works are strangely heavier and duller than Homer, although they are so much shorter, and you don't even reread them willingly once you have come through.

You can never let go of Herodotus, though. Once you have made friends with him, you'll never let him out of sight, for not only has he embraced all the ancient history in a nutshell, but he is also the most entertaining and spiritual of professors of history ever.

Also you have to bring along all the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides - they are only 33 and much fewer and shorter than those of Shakespeare - and in addition all well versed from beginning to end, so they are easy to read. Here you find everything from shocking thrillers to exorbitant comedies, dire tragedies of destiny and sophisticated social debates, challenging women and the boldest of heroes storming against heaven, and always generous floods of blood. This is the most colourful and bloody literature before Shakespeare.

Then the problems begin. Plato goes on talking forever, and it becomes rather burdensome and painful as nothing ever happens, and we all know already what happened to Socrates. This only drama in the world of Plato is talked around most infinitely and bores most listeners into perfect sleep. All the same, my advice is to bring all the dialogues and letters of Plato. You never know when suddenly "Phaedo" or "Symposium" or "Timaeus" pop up again in conversation and you need the sources. Aristotle, though, you can safely leave at home. That dryness is not fit for a desert island.

You can also leave Aristophanes, Menander, Terence and Plautus at home without any greater risk of missing them. Possibly you could make allowances for Aristophanes' "The Frogs" and the works of Terence. You could also leave Cato, Titus Livius and Cicero at home but not Cicero's letters. That best pen friend in the world must never be overlooked.

You should also bring Virgil and Horace in complete editions - their works are not so voluminous and heavy, and you don't have to read the last six songs of the "Aeneid"; while Ovid is a matter of discussion. The risk in taking Ovid with you to a desert island is that the spleen of his "Tristia" and the less constructive morale of certain other arguable works could worsen your sentiment on that desert island instead of the contrary.

You could also do without Seneca, that old boring debauchee, the greatest advocate ever of double standards, but not the brilliant Lucanus nor Tacitus, whose complete works are unsurpassed in sardonic morbidity. You could bring Suetonius along as an appendix to Tacitus.

More difficult to come by are the complete works of Plutarch, which therefore are the more anxiously recommended. Besides being the greatest biographer of antiquity he was also the most brilliant essayist, and his "Moralia", which are as valuable as his comparative biographies if not more, constitute an excellent foretaste to the much heavier and slower Michel de Montaigne.

One of the handiest books to bring is the short collection of "Meditations" by the emperor Marcus Aurelius, more to the point and more replenished as a philosophy than the whole world of ideas of Plato. The tiny book could really last for years.

Those are the main items of Antiquity. Other books of the same age to remember are Lao-Tzu's indispensable "Tao Teh King", if possible even more invaluable than Marcus Aurelius, and the Indian "Bhagavad-Ghita", if possible even more invaluable than Lao-Tzu.

This basic list of ancient literature could be complemented with Xenophon's interesting books about Persia, "Anabasis" and "Kyropaedia", the account of "The Pelopponesian War" by Thucydides, a most sober work which takes time to read, the charming "Argonautica" by Apollonius Rhodius of the love story between Jason and Medaia, the sympathetic love poetry of Catullus, the love story of "Daphnis and Chloe" by Longos, and maybe in spite of their nastiness and simplicity the farces of Aristophanes although they are so base, and, if you really care for utter sobriety, Lucretius' "The Nature of the Universe". Anything less sensual about love has never been written in world literature, so you'll after all definitely need Ovid's exquisite works of love and poetry to balance up that wooden log.

Objections have risen to our last chapter. How can you omit Pindar? Or Sappho? Or Anacreon? Or some other dozen of Greek poets?

Of course, all these classical poets are utterly indispensable - if you can read them in Greek; since it is very difficult to do them justice in translations. So bring them all along to the desert island, the more of them the better, but only if you are able to study them or learn to study them in the original.

Many other candidates have been brought forth by opponents to our list; but the very purpose of our task was to make an effort to limit ourselves. So of course the excellent Sallust is unforfeitable in his acute historical annals, and also the invaluable biography of Alexander the Great by Arrian - including all other classics of antiquity, from Julius Caesar to Plotinus, from Herondas and Epictetus to Flavius Josephus and all the apocrypha of the New Testament; but then we have completely forgotten our purpose to instead start bringing the whole library of Alexandria to our desert island.

So let's be strict and really concentrate on the main thing. With the Christian era begin the awkward Middle Ages with their oceans of Christian and Moslem literature, both problematical from their bias. Almost all Christian and Moslem literature during the Middle Ages is partial and tendentious, which makes it very difficult in this jungle to find a flower suitable for our special garden. One of the most biassed and voluminous is St. Augustine, so leave his wild forest out in the jungle where it belongs; and the same accounts for St. Thomas Aquinas and all the established church leaders, with one brilliant exception: St. Francis of Assisi. His small flowers collected and preserved by his small brothers and sisters together with his poems and legends constitute the most precious pearl in Christian literature of edification, which also must be of universal value outside church. The same applies to the radiant conclusion of the Christian Middle Ages, "The Imitation of Christ" by the unknown Thomas à Kempis, the one book that the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, brought with him on his last journey as he was shot down.

What about Islamic literature, then? Are there no equal exceptions there? At least the Quran does not belong to them, the angriest book ever written, where 60% of its contents were taken from the Old Testament in Arabic transformation and 8% from the New Testament, a most controversial book mainly because of its "holy wars" commandment and its promise of "houris" in Paradise to all successful fighters in the holy wars who die as martyrs to the only proper faith - for these reasons an extremely doubtful book to found a world religion on. Mahomet can not side with Buddha and Christ as a holy religion founder since he had wives. Fortunately religions like this never fail to bring forth heretics. One of the prohibitions of the Prophet was against telling fables, wherefore fables became extremely popular. Some were collected into "Arabian Nights", which is to be preferred for a proper reading for a long stay in a desert island to the much more arid Quran, although most of the tales are merely repetitions of the same phenomena of mainly magic, sex and djinns; but gems like "Sinbad the Sailor" and "Ali Baba" fit very well into the context of other superb story-tellers like father Perrault, the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen.

Another work from the Moslem world must be brought, and that is the wonderful chronicle of the Persian poet Firdausi called "Shah Nameh", the ancient Persian story of kings, a work of the same stature as the Indian "Mahabharata"; and the wonderful Danish masterpiece in Latin by Saxo Grammaticus, "Gesta Danorum", containing among other titbits the original story of prince Hamlet.

This brings us into the problem of handling the vastest body of literature in the Middle Ages: the Icelandic sagas. You can't just bring any number of trunks of literature to a desert island. So my advice is: bring at least "The Saga of Burnt Niall" and of "Grette Asmundson", the two greatest sagas, together with "Gunnlaug Ormstunga", the most idyllic one, for a change, and you have the best portion out of the unique Icelandic contributions to the world of letters.

Then we reach the highlight of the Middle Ages and the first somewhat objective Christian poet Dante Alighieri from Florence. Of course you have to bring his Comedy, which he never claimed to be divine himself, and the first and best collection of love poetry in the new age, "Vita Nuova", about how his great love affair with Beatrice really started never to end; because in writing so beautifully about it, he fulfilled his ambitions in documenting his love in such a form that it would never die.

The art of Dante opens the gate to all the great Italian renaissance poets: the Sonnets of Petrarca, the wonderfully entertaining "Decameron" of Boccaccio, Ariosto's fantastic visions of what really happened to the furious Orlando, Macchiavelli's controversial originality and political ambiguities - it is still argued about whether he was in earnest or not - and the high-strung Torquato Tasso's devoted homage to the idealistic supreme effort of the Middle Ages - although it failed just like Torquato Tasso - the First Crusade, ardently celebrated in "Gerusalemme liberata".

Two names have appeared that shouldn't have been left out, according to certain complaints: the venerable Bede and Snorre Sturluson. Bede's chronicle contains wonderful stories and exciting phenomena that are interesting to read about also outside Britain; and considering the proportions which English literature later acquired, Bede becomes prominent as the first person to try writing in English.

If we include Snorre Sturluson's Scandinavian chronicles, we must also include Egil Skallagrimson, the only humorist in Icelandic literature.

Then it is also opportune to include the old Spanish songs of "El Cid" and like the cathedral of Cologne imposing dome of thought imposed by the excommunicated but the more interesting Meister Eckhart.

The problem about the Renaissance is that suddenly there are classics galore. Three stand out, however: Michel de Montaigne, Miguel de Cervantes, and Shakespeare, whoever he was. All three are uneven, why it is safest to include all their works so as not to forget something. Especially "Don Quixote" is very unstable and really overestimated, but you can't do without it.

Then we have an avalanche of philosophers like Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, John Locke, Descartes, Pascal and others, who all produced massive works without end. My advice is to leave them all behind. On a desert island infinitely sophisticated philosophy easily becomes too much soporific.

French literature of the 17th century offers many costly pearls, such as Jean de la Bruyère's extremely astute observations of his times, all the dramatic works of Racine and some of Corneille, the maxims of la Rochefoucauld, a selection of Molière with at least "Don Juan" and "The Misanthrope", la Fontaine's alluring fables and as many works of Marivaux as possible, since they are difficult to come across. If we continue in France we soon stumble over endless sets of volumes by Voltaire and Rousseau. Bring as much Voltaire as possible and as little Rousseau as possible. Also Choderlos de Laclos' "Dangerous Liaisons" is a must especially for a desert island.

Among the dramatists of the Renaissance we also find the Spaniards Calderón and Lope de Vega, but the latter is too petty and provincial while Calderón is more enduring. His "Life is a Dream" is a definite must, but it's worth while taking on more of him.

If we then approach Germany with care we are surprised by the splendour of the sumptuous work of Grimmelshausen's called "Simplicissimus", apart from Münchhausen and Wilhelm Busch perhaps the only German instance of any sense of humour. We can also survive without German baroque philosophers like Leibniz and Kant, but with the age of enlightenment things begin to happen in Germany. A literary and philosophic friendship and co-operation like that between Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing is almost an even more significant flower for all times than that between Goethe and Schiller, and the result of that friendship was above all the unsurpassed play of tolerance "Nathan the Wise" by Lessing, which evidently the Nazis later on overlooked in their education. It is advised that it should never again be overlooked by anyone.

Goethe and Schiller by all means, but they also wrote a lot of dead-weight, especially Goethe. You can bring all the dramatic works of Schiller along without hesitating and give them together with his poems a place of honour, and few poems are more outstanding than the whole production of Goethe's. "Faust" and "Werther" you should of course also bring along with Goethe's other plays, "Die Wahlverwandtschaften", the epic poem "Hermann und Dorothea" and perhaps his autobiography "Dichtung und Wahrheit", although that fiction and truth hardly can be separated as they are both his versions about himself.

Thereby we reach the shore of the romantic age, and that stormy ocean of overwhelming sentiments is rather too precarious as yet to embark on, as a good sailor always waits for the right weather. Meanwhile we could rest among some precursors.

On both sides of Shakespeare we find Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Marlowe didn't have time to write much, but it is all interesting stuff written in good language, so bring him all with you. Ben Jonson though was a duller pedant, so spare him your attention. Just bring "Volpone", because he was never better.

Samuel Pepys' description of the fire of London in 1666 is an exciting curiosity, so bring at least those chapters out of his endless diary. John Dryden is agreeable for his polished style but rather without sting: you miss Shakespeare's sharper but sincerer tongue. More interesting topics are then being displayed by Daniel Defoe (all of his works and not just the most indispensable of all for a desert island: "Robinson Crusoe",) and Jonathan Swift (ditto), the former as a bold and controversial documentary, and the latter as a most irresistible humorist.

Laurence Sterne could be discussed along many other over-valued English 18th century authors, (fuck Richardson!) but not Henry Fielding, whose complete works must be included, the only worthy successor to Shakespeare's liberality of mind. The idyllic Oliver Goldsmith is more doubtful like Doctor Johnson, but not that most priceless book about all that glorious bunch written by James Boswell.

Also the sentimental masterpiece "Manon Lescaut" by Abbé Prevost is worth a place in the list but not "Gil Blas", a dilettante work of stylish balderdash. But now it's time to embark on that vast stormy sea of Romanticism.

Before proceeding we should remember a few extra renaissance artists, first of all Benvenuto Cellini for his personal moral victory against all the popes, but also others, like the Spanish soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo with his authentic documentary of the Spanish conquests in Mexico with the annihilation of the Aztec Indians and their unique capital Tenochtitlan, built like an Indian Venice on islands in a lake, which the Spaniards dried out after having levelled the city with the ground. In this context we should also remember the anonymous "Lazarillo de Tormes", Spanish black humour at its best and in a way preferable to Don Quixote's acrid ridicule of all ideals.

Someone reminded us of John Milton's famous characterization of Satan. Of course all Milton's poetry is recommended even for company on desert islands, no matter how puzzling his fantasies and speculations occasionally may seem.

More convincing then is the mammoth piece of Edward Gibbon "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", a meticulous chronicle of all the political turns within the Roman and Byzantine empires from the golden age of Augustus to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, most entertaining in its constantly increasing decadence.

The age of Romanticism really started in Germany with the Sturm und Drang period of Goethe and Schiller but soon spread as an epidemic all over the world, to France (never forget Chateaubriand's "Atala"!), to Italy (the exquisite poetry of Leopardi), to Russia (Pushkin's and Lermontov's fantastic masterpieces: their collected works are definite musts!) to find its strongest vent in England, though. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are all qualified poets but alas! How vulnerable, unreliable and susceptible! The only one of these five whose complete works will do is John Keats, who died youngest of them all. Shelley is difficult to understand even on a desert island, but his collected works will not occupy much space in your luggage. Lord Byron was more a colourful personality than a qualified poet, and you can find vexing anomalies in all his poems. For those who like being irritated by a poet's vanity, Byron will be their idol. In Wordsworth you can sort out most of it all, since he is almost completely provincial (like Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and other such by English local patriots overestimated Englishmen) while the output of Coleridge is so rare that you must save it all. Even America has a poet closely related to all these emotionally possessed romantic poets: Edgar Allan Poe, whose complete works is almost as treasurable a collection as the Bible.

The romantic flagship however is Sir Walter Scott, in later ages sadly neglected. His production is more than vast, but everything is worth taking care of, especially his verse, the most neglected of all his writings. A poem like "The Lady of the Lake" outshines all of Lord Byron's poems, but Lord Byron was all the same given a higher esteem for his more demoniacal and theatrical gestures. Byron is more dramatic, but there is always gold glittering in the calmer and wider waters of Walter Scott, if you only care to wash the sands carefully. He was rumoured to become duller and weaker in his later novels and that only those he wrote with a pseudonym are worth reading, but we must disagree. Such a late story as "A Highland Widow" is one of his most poignant works, and the eminent Balzac's favourite was such a late novel as "The Fair Maid of Perth". Even an odd end like "Castle Dangerous" has its own worth for its toweringly gothic style.

Behind the flagship of Walter Scott appears a ghostly fleet of the most wondrous ships that ever sailed in literature, crowding in chaos into a crammed but previously well ordered harbour. The strangest of these vessels should be identified. We find the first horror novel Matthew Lewis' "The Monk", Mary Shelley's wonderfully romantic "Frankenstein", the highstrung sea novels of Captain Marryat with "The Phantom Ship" leading, the fantastic production of Ernst Theodor Hoffmann with madness prevalent everywhere in glorious ebullience with "The Devil's Elixir" as a supreme masterpiece of its kind, all the horrible tales of the Grimm brothers and H.C.Andersen to frighten small children out of their wits with, the unbalanced Nikolay Gogol of Russia with his weird tales of witches and magicians, martyrs and heroes of Ukraine and St. Petersburg with "Taras Bulba" as an unforgettable masterpiece, and the most absurd of them all: Victor Hugo, with his poems, dramas and novels of monsters and hunchbacks, convicts and suicides, the expert on victims of fate and the supreme master of supreme exaggerations. His first novels are so ridiculous that his reputation was unfairly tainted with the mark of his first absurdities. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", "Les Misérables", "Workers of the Sea" and "The Laughing Man" all belong to the most fascinating masterpieces of world literature, and the least consummate of these is actually the most popular, "Les Misérables", while "The Laughing Man", the most notorious, is his most intelligent and splendid composition.

On the other side we find the most overvalued Balzac with his boring bourgeois novels about mostly bored, petty, quarrelsome and greedy people of narrow minds, who never see a world outside their small vicious circles. "César Birotteau" is first recommended, his overwhelming account of a simple bankruptcy, and we could add "Eugenie Grandet", "Papa Goriot", "La recherche de l'absolu" and a few more of his best known novels, but certainly not "Life of the Courtesans" or "Lost Illusions" - boring mastodon pieces without life or meaning. Maybe his supreme masterpiece is "Cousin Pons" about the meanness of ignorance and human blindness - nowhere in French literature is the narrowness of human nature more bitterly exposed.

More vivid and interesting is then Stendhal in all his works and even Alexandre Dumas in his best novels like "The Three Musketeers", "The Count of Monte Christo", that part of "Vicomte de Bragelonne" which recounts the story of the man with the iron mask, "The Black Tulip", "The Corsican Brothers", "Joseph Balsamo", "The Werewolf" and "The Cavalier of Maison-Rouge". Dealing with novels of some weight we must not forget to bring an extra coffer for the complete works of Charles Dickens, always impossible to do without especially on desert islands, but then we are already well into the new world of realism.

Balzac has been given prominence as the greatest pioneer of realism, and of course he is nothing but a realist. But the greatest realist of all should rather be considered the Russian Leo Tolstoy, the most sober of writers, who mercilessly sees through everything and everyone and who can't be fooled by anything or anyone.

Also the naturalists are great realists, like Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen and others, and like the ways of Ibsen are related to the ways of Tolstoy in regard to people, so Zola is a continuation of Balzac. All these are superb material for our luggage to the desert island. Still there is another category of realists who are to be preferred.

Dickens is the foremost of them, but many others belong to the same kind, in the first row the Brontë sisters and William Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle and Wilkie Collins. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle comes later but is of the same highest society. They are not only realists but observe something else than just palpable reality. Their characterizations are not just cold literary photographs but fine psychological portraits painted with care and nuances, and they leave some space for metaphysical imagination and speculation. "Jane Eyre" (Charlotte Brontë) and "Wuthering Heights" (Emily Brontë) are both precise realistic novels which have their chief interest though in the unfathomable psyche of man and especially its abyss. Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" is a dreadfully cynical novel with only mean egoists, but the whole novel is built on one sole too benevolent person: Dobbin, who is completely outside reality with his Amelia. No one has depicted the French Revolution more realistically than Thomas Carlyle, but his whole revolutionary pathos is coloured by a personal temperament constituting an intensive empathy in a historical past which must be considered a marvel of artistic ingenuity. To the same category of realists with extra dimensions belongs the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

All his novels are completely almost exaggeratedly subjective to such a degree that they almost appear psychic or expressionistic, and in this overwhelming ocean of intuitive feelings and passions you easily lose sight of that knife-sharp realism which is always there at the bottom. Dostoyevsky never commits a casual error, an inconsequence or anything that doesn't fit. His personages always blindly follow their own ways and create their own ruthless destinies in terribly logical consequence of how oddly they are fashioned from the beginning in their souls. His saints never step down from being saints, and his more demoniacal characters never cease to become more demoniacal. Probably never has any author succeeded in achieving such a thorough psychological realism as Dostoyevsky.

Also Anton Chekhov is a realist but adds to his realism a unique extra temperament of melancholy and sadness. His fine infinity of subtle nuances is perhaps the finest literary filigree-work of all.

To the same category of extra tempered realists belong John Lewis Runeberg in Finland, Henryk Sienkiewicz in Poland, Jules Verne in France, (his extra dimension to realism is the invention of science fiction,) Herman Melville in America and the exotic story-teller Selma Lagerlof in Sweden, who miraculously makes the most supernatural thinkable tales appear as utterly real. Oscar Wilde is less effective, for all his wit can not disguise the fact that he is not at all a realist.

That leaves us not much left for our catalogue to the desert island. After the outstanding century of realism followed the two world wars with only disastrous effects on literature, and the world conquest of mass media almost finished it. The art of writing a great novel has almost completely vanished in our century and been forgotten together with true poetic feeling and the Homeric-Shakespearean ideal view of man. Few authors have in our century been able to continue this great tradition.

Two who made efforts were Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. The former died too young to succeed completely, and the latter lost his son in the First World War without young John Kipling's grave even ever having been located, which broke the vein of the most constructive of imperialists. Instead the bleak pessimist Joseph Conrad survived with his Polish fatalism, while the great tradition in England was chiefly carried on by such first class B-writers as Somerset Maugham, James Hilton, Henry Rider Haggard's late and decadent romanticism, Nevil Shute's flying novels and the broodings of Graham Greene.

In France the first writing generation of the new century was instantly broken in the person of Henri Alain-Fournier. His one novel before the war that killed him cries out painfully about what wonderful possibilities were buried in futility. He was like a direct heir to the fine arts of story-telling as advocated and mastered by Gustave Flaubert and Maupassant but much brighter. The other Frenchmen to survive promise less and usually end up as dry old academic bores and duffers excelling only in insolence, but Jean-Paul Sartre's plays after the Second World War are a magnificent exception. And then we have Romain Rolland.

He wrote best and most about music, but his enduring biographies also contain for instance Michelangelo, Tolstoy, Gandhi and other Hindus. He introduced Hinduism in Europe so successfully that it became fashionable in the 20s, and he himself converted to Hinduism. In this connection we should also remember Rabindranath Tagore, but above all the closest friend and heir to Romain Rolland's frame of mind was Stefan Zweig.

There is an overwhelming number of German-speaking writers who all came to grief because of the Second World War, since most of them were Jewish. But Erich Maria Remarque was not, whose novels are still interesting, and neither was Thomas Mann, although he wrote four bulky novels about Joseph and his brothers. The novels by Thomas Mann of everlasting interest are almost only the late "Doctor Faustus" and "The Holy Sinner". His other novels are almost all interminably and unbearably dry.

All the works of Stefan Zweig are valid though for all times. This unhappy Austrian refugee, who committed suicide in exile in Brazil when he could bear the world no longer after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, is perhaps the most indispensable of all during a refuge on a desert island, so he is apt to conclude this list of recommendations. You could still add names like Boris Pasternak, Mika Waltari, Mark Twain, Jack London, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, the colleagues Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, Robert Graves, Karen Blixen and some more, but not Hemingway (except "The Old Man and the Sea") not James Joyce (except "Dubliners"), not Freud or Jung, certainly not Nietzsche and not even Maurois, Malraux or Mauriac.

We have to admit though, that there are always many authors left to discover.

The man who set him on an unavoidable course towards the imperial office was the emperor Hadrian, who during a long reign secured the frontiers of the Roman Empire and staked everything on maintaining peace within the realm. He adopted his successor Antoninus Pius, the wealthiest man in Rome, on condition that he already then (138 A.D.) adopted the seventeen-year-old Marcus Aurelius, who was already a philosopher, for his successor. Marguerite Yourcenar's famous book "The Memoirs of Hadrian" about the old emperor Hadrian's fictional letters to Marcus Aurelius is not a fantasy but in the highest degree an illustration of reality.

Antoninus Pius sustained world peace during the whole of his reign of 23 years, and Marcus Aurelius married his daughter. The only war enterprise during this reign was the advancement of the frontier against Scotland from Hadrian's Wall (by Newcastle) to the Antonine Wall, which went through Glasgow. But this new frontier had to be abandoned later on from the land of the wild Picts and moved back to Hadrian's Wall, which was longer but safer.

Marcus Aurelius, who after the reign of Antoninus became an emperor at the age of 40, had up till then almost never left Rome. Thus he had been able to always live in peace and harmony with his philosophy. Almost directly after his installation a very long war with the Persians in the far east broke out, by which the plague was brought to Rome, which inflicted the whole empire. The epidemic is comparable to the Black Death of Europe in the 14th century, which reduced the population of Europe by about the same percentage. As soon as the Persian war was over and the plague had ceased, the Germans invaded the north-east provinces by Vienna and Budapest (Vindobona and Aquincum). This compelled Marcus Aurelius to a soldier's life in the cold north-east for the rest of his life. During these interminably dreary years at the front he wrote his "Meditations", a kind of summing-up of the whole world of thought of classical philosophy but well refined and with a profound touch of pessimism. For the first time in classical antiquity death becomes a more interesting theme than life. To the constant harassment of the imperial philosopher was added a painful rebellion in the east instigated by one of his most trusted generals, the victor in the Persian war Avidius Cassius, in which turmoil also the empress Faustina, Antonine's only daughter, was implicated. She bore twelve children during her lifetime of 46 years in her one matrimony with Marcus Aurelius, but only six survived and only one son. This was Commodus, so different in his vulgar pleasures and vices from his father, that doubts occurred whether the children of Marcus Aurelius really could be his own, since he was so long away at the front. These speculations go on still today.

Marcus Aurelius has been criticized for two things: an augmented persecution against Christians, and the fact that he allowed Commodus to succeed him. Marcus Aurelius never persecuted Christians personally, and the fact that those persecutions increased during his reign was a result of the frontier threats against the empire. The Christians refused to acknowledge the emperor and to obey Roman laws. They were the conscientious objectors of their day and this during a time when the barbarians started to threaten the existence of Roman civilization. As the result of the economic world crisis which the wars brought on, it became too expensive to have professional gladiators at the public festivals, which was why cheaper victims on the arenas came in demand. The only way to solve this problem was to allow enemies of the state on the arenas. According to the law, in times of war conscientious objectors were enemies to the state. The Christian conscientious objectors were innumerable, and many of them wouldn't even defend their lives on the arenas. For that reason the performances became extremely boring, awkward and painful, no one liked gladiators who wouldn't fight, and an age of fiascos was introduced, which eventually brought on the end of such public festivals.

That Commodus was allowed to succeed Marcus Aurelius had more serious consequences. Since the days of Trajan, all Roman emperors had been the adopted sons of their predecessors, since neither Trajan, Hadrian nor Antonine had sons of their own. Marcus Aurelius happened to have one, and even though he from Commodus' manners and immature ways had reasons to doubt his legitimacy, he never could find out the truth, since Faustina died rather prematurely. And when Marcus Aurelius found reason to question Commodus' fitness as an emperor, it was too late to change the course of things. Laws could not be violated, Commodus had already been thoroughly established, and, most serious of all, Marcus Aurelius passed away too early and too suddenly.

Commodus was worthless as an emperor, he preferred playing the gladiator in the Coliseum, he ruined the imperial finances and allowed the barbarians to overrun the frontiers with nothing checking them. He was murdered 31 years old after 12 years on the throne, after which followed the gradual disintegration of the empire. A few decent and valiant emperors tried to repair the damages, like Pertinax, Septimius Severus and Aurelian, but the dissolution had already gone too far, and gradually Christian pacifism prevailed against military rule by force.

The greatest enterprise of Marcus Aurelius was the long tedious war against the Germans north of Vienna and east of Budapest, which Marcomannic and Quadian countries today constitute the whole of Czechia and half of Slovakia. Marcus Aurelius tried to transform these countries into Roman provinces and thereby remove the frontier from the rivers and valleys around the Danube to the mountains and hills which constitute the natural northern border of Czechoslovakia. This would have been a much more favourable frontier on the Germans. Commodus abandoned this new frontier, the Germans immediately started to overwhelm the borders, and Christian victory in Rome was a poor comfort for the loss of a universal civilization, which was allowed to be raped and utterly destroyed by those northern barbarians who Marcus Aurelius was the last one to make a firm stand against.

Not until 600 years later the Roman Empire was resurrected by the coronation of the German king Charlemagne in Rome 800 A.D. He reunited western Europe, which gradually continued to form the medieval Roman Empire of the German Nation, which lasted until 1806, when Napoleon finished it off. Its chief heir was the Habsburg empire of Austria and Hungary, which was completely dissolved after the first world war. Then the idea of the United States of Europe was born and introduced by president Woodrow Wilson of America, and the idea was adopted by most of the new democracies of Europe. One of its greatest advocates was Stefan Zweig, who in 1932 gave an important lecture in Florence, Italy, on the subject ("The European Idea in its Historical Development"). All these idealistic efforts were brought to nothing by the ravages of Hitler-Germany.

Another of its advocates was Otto von Habsburg in exile in Switzerland, heir to the Austrian throne. In the organization and development of EC he found the great possibility for the ideal to materialize, and so far things seem to have developed accordingly. This year Austria, Sweden and Finland became members, and negotiations are proceeding with Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and the three Baltic states.

The philosopher Marcus Aurelius died in Vienna defending the great idea of universal political unity, and in Vienna this idea has never vanished but always been carried on. The ECU-coin carries Charlemagne as a symbol, and never since Marcus Aurelius has Europe been more united than it is today, even if it may take some time until the international monetary system of co-operation starts to work - the preliminaries to the painful birth travails seem to be endless.

Talks with my Doctor. (March '98)

"Honestly, I don't think the Aids crisis will be as serious in the next few years as the great political crisis in the Muslim world, when the idea of God gradually will collapse most infernally, going down like a rusty old ship which never should have been launched in the first place."

"It has already begun," he said. "Islam will fall. The fundamentalists are themselves leading the enterprise of scrapping their own religion. Algeria leads the way. God will not survive next century, neither in Islam, Jewry, Christianity or Hinduism. The idea of a personal god determining man's life is the most monstrous abortive foetus that any man ever fertilized. Confronted with the facts of political reality it just falls flat. Islam has made God its political ideology. Consequently Islam and all Muslim countries must politically go down."

Still I was not satisfied. "You'll see for yourself. Suharto will fall. The Syrian dictator will fall. Iran will dissolve. Saddam Hussein will fall. Khadaffi will fall. Sudan will be dissolved. The dictatorship of Burma will fall. The economy and running party of China will dissolve and collapse."

"But Burma and China are not Muslim states."

"No, but they are autocracies, and that's exactly the same thing. What is the idea of God if not a justification and legalization of pure autocracy?"

He also implied that Castro and North Korea would fall soon. "You'll see," he said. "All autocracies will fall maybe within this very year."

And he was never more serious than when he stated this and at the same time solemnly raised his glass of white wine to his mouth without considering the pipe that already stuck in it. He was so cock-sure about the certainty of his visions that he already took them for facts with the same ease as he thought he could smoke and drink wine simultaneously. A good doctor like mine always knows indeed what he is talking about.

"Is there nothing more for you to execute while you are at it?" I tried to tease him.

He laughed. "I'll be delighted! What's your wish? What authorities come next to the religious ones? Politics belong to the gutter snipes. But what about the great humbug philosophers?"

"But doesn't philosophy rank higher than religion?"

"You are right, that the most religious and wisest of the founders of religions stand above all criticism. Both Buddha and Jesus are irreproachable as philosophers, and the one thing contaminating them is their founded religions. But there are others. Zoroaster, for instance, was no philosopher but just an unreasonable fanatic, and let's say nothing of all the Jewish prophets - bigots all of them and worse than puritans. But the price goes to Mohammed. Beside him Zoroaster appears as a holy ghost of peace. Mohammed definitely ruined all religious sanctity by starting a world religion on the dogma of violence, war, and women oppression. For that he deserved to be the most criminalized person in the world since he actually created a religion of violence in the name of God. There is nothing wrong in the faith in God, but to use the faith in God to establish a rogue power based on violence is worse than any ordinary autocracy. He was such a failure as a thinker that he couldn't even philosophize. The only real philosophers were in Greece."

"So you can respect them at least?"

"Not Socrates. He was a sophist. Plato used his name just to legitimize his own dubious ideas, while Xenophon was a realist who depicted Socrates as he was: a mean old grumbler who wanted to ruin Greek society and tried to do so by undermining the Attic spirit. That's why the Athenians found it necessary to silence him for good. He hurt their feelings on purpose. He was a very dirty old man. No, the real impeccable philosopher, perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time, was Pythagoras. He was wise enough not to leave a single written word behind. Socrates was stupid enough to let Plato write a lot of nonsense in his name that never passed his lips, but Pythagoras was not that dumb. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and maybe Epicure - there you have the great canon of Greek philosophers. Epicure was also wise enough not to let one written word of his survive him. All later philosophers in history have committed the disastrous mistake of leaving all their follies in writing behind, so that generations after their deaths could read for themselves in black and white what perfect fools they all were without one single exception."

"So you dismiss all philosophers after Epicure?"

"Unrelentingly. All that nonsense they left in writing has brought philosophy into lasting dishonour and the more so by each new philosopher in each new century. Philosophy means 'love of wisdom', but all those humbug philosophers after the completion of Greek philosophy did not love wisdom. They used philosophy for a means to enforce their own egoistic ideas on humanity, from the holy fathers of the church with St. Augustine as the worst humbug of them all down to that preacher of violence, the lunatic Karl Marx."

"So the entire church history with its high scholasticism and profound ascetic thinkers is all just humbug?"

"Yes, principally. There is not one oasis in that desert until Dante liberates the word from philosophy and transforms it into literature and poetry. But even in Dante you still have all the high scholastical dross of church dogma."

"But there are other philosophers who went further, like for instance Giordano Bruno."

"There, you said it! That man is worth all respect of all times and more than any philosopher of that age, for he died a martyr to the freedom of thought. You have there a brilliant exception from the rule that all modern philosophy is rubbish. Contrary to all others, he had a most important meaning with his philosophy."

"And then we have the enlightenment philosophers beginning with Francis Bacon and Spinoza..."

"Francis Bacon is not without interest, but he was a very green dilettante. He thought clear enough but didn't reach very far. Spinoza was the first modern flummer. He thought and speculated most profoundly in bottomless depth but never came to any conclusions. Descartes at least found out that he himself undoubtedly existed. Not everybody reach that far. He died by the way in your own country of Sweden. There he ceased to exist, but his philosophy still exists and manages somewhat and might even be underrated."

"What about Hobbes and Locke?"

"Hobbes is the first in the line of dreadfully boring pedants and prigs using the name of philosophy to establish their unbearable complacency. Leibniz was another of those, introducing a row of hard thinking Germans, who all just went from bad to worse to reach the bottom of the line by the complete maniacs Karl Marx and Nietzsche."

"Not so fast. In between we have the French philosophers of the enlightenment."

"Voltaire has my full respect and admiration. He made his art serve the cause of tolerance in a most heroic and admirable way. He never boasted himself as a philosopher. He was a plain writer and preferred being a dramatist. But he was the only real one among the enlightenment philosophers. All the others - Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot and the rest - dwelt in his shadow. Rousseau unfortunately brought the positive and constructive renaissance philosophy down by degrading and dishonouring it although he was such a wise man. He knew what he was thinking, but he thought destructively."

"But wasn't Lessing also part of the enlightenment philosophy?"

"Definitely, and there you have another positive aspect of that philosophy. But he was a poet. He never passed for a philosopher, and Goethe and Schiller followed his course with honour. They never were dictating philosophers. They only wanted to be poets."

"Well, what about Schopenhauer?"

"Schopenhauer is the outsider in the great muddle of German romantic nonsense. You have to take Schopenhauer seriously, for he was the only realist in that context."

"You haven't said anything about John Locke."

"A gaga prattler, who committed the mistake of taking himself seriously, like so many other so called philosophers."

"Kant?"

"The worst strayer of them all."

"Hegel?"

"A populist fool, who put some vain effort in making all the worst maniacs in the world his disciples."

"Rudolf Steiner?"

"That turns us into another field, namely the teosophic disorder. Steiner started a theosophist but was sorted out of the company, so he called his Christian theosophy anthropology instead. He was a great idealist with many good ideas and perhaps the only sound 19th century philosopher."

"The other theosophists?"

"Allow me to execute them all. Madame Blavatsky was a blue-stocking with a most shamelessly superior physical constitution, which made her believe that she could achieve any degree of hubris and get away with it without any opposition. But wise people opposed her. They dared wonder how she could claim so many unheard of truths without one single reference. She took all her material out of the air and claimed that everything she thought had to be infallible truths since she was the one to construe them. Her successor Annie Besant was of the same sort - an intolerant fanatic dogmatist without any detachment or dualism or any place in her heart for dialectics and alternatives and constructive views of other people. God save us from such megalomaniac and over-emancipated dames!"

"Do you prefer Bertrand Russell?"

"A chatterer. Well, he could be sensible sometimes and occasionally brought important arguments into public debate. And he was at least sympathetic. You can't say that of many philosophers. To a certain degree he achieved the most commendable task of restoring the name of philosophy from that dishonourable swamp of nonsense into which all those imbecile humbug philosophers during the centuries brought it down. I presume you could say about him that he was OK. He belongs to that 5-10% of philosophy which could be regarded as not entirely absurd."

"Well, what about music? Would you like to execute all music as well?"

"Not quite. Music could in fact be regarded as the only untouchable philosophic system, since music never can do any harm, as long as it remains founded on its three components: melody, harmony and rhythm. As long as music sticks to these three elements, and most music does, from the greatest oratorio down to the basest common shanty, it remains edifying to people. On the other hand, I would like to deal with the great peril of music: superiority.

Most professional musicians fall into that trap. When they really bale out they become divine in their own eyes. But even a common crooner could fall into that trap, that music bestows on him a mentality which in his eyes separates him from ordinary mortal human beings, so that he looks down on them more or less with contempt. When you meet or talk with a musician you often get the feeling that his presumptive view of you is that you are not musical and consequently worthless as a human being. This mentality also leads to some difficulty for musicians to open themselves to other people. They can even appear to be loveless."

"I just read a book by Cyril Scott wherein he presents the theory that the power of music is so transcending that it indirectly and imperceptibly can influence the course of history. What do you think about that?"

"I know nothing about that, for I am no musician. But you should know something about it. What do you think?"

"It's a fact that at least Handel, Beethoven and Wagner believed themselves capable of and wanted to influence humanity with their music. At least Haydn, Chopin, Verdi and Sibelius did influence the course of history with their music whether they themselves desired to do so or not."

"So you suggest that music can have that power?"

"Yes, but only constructively. Unlike Cyril Scott I don't think that music could have a destructive influence on humanity and history."

"All the same Joshua blew down the walls of Jericho with trumpets."

"That's not proved."

"No, we don't know exactly how it was done. But bad music could have a very destructive influence on me."

"Yes, but then it's bad music, and bad music exists only in order to vanish."

"There speaks a musician."

 An Interview with John B. Westerberg.

(Excerpts. He was clandestinely educated in underground Russian orthodox monasteries during the 50s and 60s.)

- What kind of schooling did you get from the Russian orthodox monks?

- My education was extremely scant except within one area. All my education was centred around the written word and thereby became exclusively humanistic. My language education in first Swedish, Finnish and Russian and then within Russia in other languages was the best and most thorough imaginable. Of course, much literature was liturgic and religious, extreme significance was given to Church Slavic, but there was also great importance attached to my education in history. To them the most important chapter in world history was the conflict between Czar Peter I and the Raskolniks, the old-believers, since they considered that all the problems of Russia had emanated from there. What was grossly disregarded was all the natural scientific subjects like physics and chemistry, mathematics were not considered very important, and even biology was much neglected. Instead I was given all the major languages and the whole world literature. My tutor professed that the only really important knowledge in life was the knowledge of human nature, and that knowledge could only be mastered through what was written and by experience through life.

- Do you regret that you had no education in natural sciences?

- On the contrary. I had the best possible education. What do you need natural sciences for unless you are to become an engineer or scientist? Of course you have to know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and calculate with percent together with other such mathematical aids of practical usefulness which also can be of sound logical training, but the higher mathematics are to me like abstract music with no meaning so far as I can see. Biology can of course be very useful especially if you travel much, while for my part physics and chemistry are closed areas of locked up laboratories with unsound chemicals. And is it not the scientists and the engineers that have ruined our earth and turned it ugly by their destruction of the environment, the cultivation of the population explosion, the unhuman industrial deserts, the sterile modern architecture, the lethal monster urbanizations, the asphalt jungles of criminality, social problems and environmental disasters? The brave new world of universal destruction of the environment was not developed by humanists but by scientists, engineers and profiteers.

- You mention that your tutor was 80 years old when he died. He must then have been born in the 1880s. Leo Tolstoy didn't die until 1910, and he had much to do with the Orthodox Church. Did your tutor ever tell you anything about Leo Tolstoy?

- It will delight me to answer this question. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest of Russians, was deeply disappointed with the Orthodox Church for its uncritical bias towards all the Czar's policies. He therefore denounced his own church. The result was that the church banned him and warned all Russia against him. Still Leo Tolstoy's own sister was a nun if not even an abbess, and spiritually he never abandoned the Church. He went on pilgrimages to holy sites and monasteries still as a very old man. My tutor was especially engaged in the Tolstoy controversy since he once met him as a young man. He described him most vividly to me. He offered a strange mixture of all the most Russian inconsistencies, grand aristocratic airs combined with tasteless coarseness, awe-inspiring wisdom with a peasant's stupidity, universal love and philantropy with devastating indiscretions and the highest altruistic visions with fatal irresponsibility. Leo Tolstoy was the human ideal and at the same time everything a human being should not be supposed to be.

My tutor deprecated very much the fall of Tolstoy. Perhaps he went too far when he put the blame on Tolstoy for not only the bolshevik revolution, (Lenin was an ardent admirer of Tolstoy,) but even for both the world wars, the rise of stalinism and even the German holocaust against the Jews. That last thesis he defended by advocating, that it was Tolstoy who opened the door for the bolsheviks and that the bolsheviks gave Hitler his reasons for acting accordingly.

"But wasn't Tolstoy engaged in the cause of the Jews?" I then could object.

"He was indeed. He studied himself with a Rabbi in Moscow. But many Jews were bolsheviks, above all Leon Trotsky. And in the same way that Tolstoy partly made himself responsible for the two world wars and the holocaust, his engagemanent in the cause of the Jews also partly resulted in the establishment of Zionism and in the state of Israel in 1948."

I really should write a whole book only about my tutor (who was a Russian monk).

-----

As we met in the Himalayas in October, John provoked me for not engaging myself well enough in the cause of Tibetan Buddhism. I then had to answer him by making my position clear in relation to the world religions. I told him straight, that my moral support of Buddhism was 99%, granting it 99% credibility, mostly because at the moment it was the most persecuted and endangered religion in the world, being at the same time the most reasonable and constructive one. Second I gave 75% support to Jewry, since we all regrettably must admit, that Jewry by the establishment of the state of Israel has acquired political power, which must have negative consequences for its morale. Just watch how the Jews flirt with the Turks as their only Moslem friends and keep quiet when the Turks still assert that the genocide on the Armenians never happened, (which involved at least 1,5 million victims in a Turkish holocaust which Hitler considered a paragon example). I support Christianity by 60%, I can only grant it 60% credibility, since by its establishment 1700 years ago it corrupted itself by dogmas and intolerance, besides that it still goes dragging on immense burdens of superstition. Hinduism I support with 50% for its irresistibly dynamic and incredibly positive vitality which through its imaginative freedom at the same time is so revolting by its lack of discipline, want of order, inclination towards recklessness and its erotical exaggerations. Islam, finally, I only grant 10% credibility, since it is the most corrupt religion in the world and by its fanaticism the only really destructive, hostile and unhuman one.

At the same time as I give Buddhism 99% support, I am aware of its weaknesses. It can not survive being corrupted, getting too rich or becoming too well established, for by its own basic character it can only survive as itself if it remains clinically free from dogmas, intolerance and earthly power. Buddhism is really the religion of the poor more than any other religion, for it's the only one that always defends and supports life in all its forms and especially in its more vulnerable forms: poverty, suffering, illness and death. Only Christianity has preached the same compassion as Buddhism, but Buddhism has never fallen into the same trap as Christianity, when it became an established state religion with dogmas and intolerance as weapons for a church autocracy, which must run off the rails, since that was the very contrary of what had been Jesus' intentions and preachings.

Thereby John had to defend his Moslem engagements. He explained them to be more political than religious. He explained, that Allah really from the beginning was a local god confined to certain tribes in Arabia, and that Mahomet got the idea that this local god was identical with the universal God of the Jews. In the same manner some Greek could have instituted Zeus, or some Roman could have turned Jupiter, or some Viking could have established Woden as identical with the severe monotheistic Godhead of the Jews. Mahomet then more or less forced the Arabs to accept his idea to blow up a local deity into a universal divinity, which he couldn't have achieved without a certain amount of fanaticism and applying the formula that ' the end justifies the means'.

At the same time as John senses the necessity that Islam must be cleansed from all fanaticism, injustice and autocratic tendencies, he feels it important to defend Islam against the established atheism of the Chinese, which is worse and more destructive. Therefore he supports and encourages the resistance among the Uiguris and other Muslims within the borders of China against the Chinese autocracy. We also agreed that the Kurds were right against the Turks and eventual other regimes in Iraq, Iran and Syria suppressing them. The Kurds were the greatest people in the Orient that were left without a country of their own when Britain and France split up the Orient into Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine after the first world war, and they were perhaps greater than any other people in the Orient after only the Arabs and the Turks.

On the other hand, John does not support the Chechenians or any other Moslem people within the borders of the new Russia, since he, being born within the Orthodox Church, always at heart remains a champion to this church and other branches of it in the east, not least in the Orient and Egypt.

The teller of the story, the ego of the book, is John Cave's originally first collaborator and the only one who really understands what John Cave means and what his religion is all about. He becomes John Cave's private secretary and prime "evangelist" of the religion and its chief editor, the one who provides the religion with its basic literature. But when he becomes aware of how power thinking takes over the management of the religion he leaves it, is banned as a heretic and is persecuted until he dies, so that he must live incognito in the deserts of southern Egypt in order to survive. His name is Eugene Luther, but his name is eradicated from all the literature which he himself has provided the religion with, and "lutherans" becomes synonymous with heretics. This lonely man is the only one who understands and sees through the religion, and he is at the same time its actual founder and greatest doubter.

Such an interesting novel naturally leads you to think of several of those world sects, which spread aroung the world in the 60's, and above all of those suicidal sects of which the most prominent ones were the Jim Jones movement in Guyana and the inferno of David Koresh in Waco, Texas, both ending in mass suicides. Beholding these actual apocalypses and others of the same kind, you have to admit that Gore Vidal was right in his divination.

You find in this novel already the seed to the great novel about the emperor Julian, a very ambitious neo-classical effort in the style of Robert Graves, which treats the subject of Julian the Apostate with careful and profound pregnancy and even love. The subject has been the interest of many great authors, Gore Vidal himself mentions Henrik Ibsen and Lorenzo de' Medici, but also the Swede Viktor Rydberg's great achievement "The Last Athenian" is a notable idealistic novel about Julian.

The emperor Julian was nephew to Constantine the Great, whose three sons divided the empire between them in order to fight about it until only one was left alive, who finally died without an heir. There was no other relative left than Julian, who was a philosopher trained in the old heathen ideals and who regarded Christianity as a world plague and superstition. During his short reign he did everything possible to re-establish the old religion, the Greek gods and their temples with their rites and ceremonies, mysteries and oracles, and fought Christianity with logic and common sense as a superstition. Like Marcus Aurelius, he regarded the Christians as unreasonable and biassed fanatics, and he is throughout the novel compared with Marcus Aurelius. However, Julian died only 32 years old during an invasion in Persia, according to Gore Vidal assassinated by a Christian fanatic, who thought he did right in the name of Christianity.

The tragic end is, that when Christianity completely took over the old world and stamped out all the remains of the ancient culture (including the famous oracle in Delphi), the barbarians got the upper hand, as no Christian army could stop the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns or the Arabs from barbarizing the entire world, burn its libraries, destroy its architecture, ruin its statues and works of art and replace its culture with the opposite. It would take a thousand years before Dante resurrected the classical ideals again from that hell into which Christianity had thrown a world and civilization of beauty.

The culture of the ancient world with its ceremonies and traditions, rites and tolerance is described with considerable melancholy, as Julian is the last one in history to defend the ideals of the ancient world for a thousand years. It's a dying religion described in its last phase, and you see frightening parallels today in the condition of Christianity, where protestant churches stand more and more empty, where the Pope in this world of swamping over-population wants to forbid abortions and preaches against Buddhism, (the only religion except Christianity propagating celibacy,) while he flirts with Islam, which more than any other religion supports the over-population explosion, and where the only church with some continuity seems to be the Orthodox Church. Will Christianity perish like the ancient classical world (which it killed), and, in that case, what will come instead?

But Gore Vidal's greatest novel will probably appear to be "Creation", which excels "Julian" in richness of imagination and genius. It's a historical novel from the fifth century B.C. telling the story of Cyrus Spitama, Persian ambassador in the Great King's service on missions in Hellas, India and China. He is the grandson of Zoroaster and a real Zoroastrian or fire worshipper, of the ancient Persian religion which was deeply influenced by Jewry and perhaps the real progenitor of Islam - the use of veils to hide the beauty of women from other men than their own was originally a Persian custom. As a believer in the proper faith, Cyrus Spitama is very critical against both Greek, Indian and Chinese ways of life. He meets Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Confucius with whom he discusses the problems of creation, but he never really understands Buddha, he finds Lao-Tzu somewhat ambiguous and sly, while he is completely charmed by the bourgeois Confucius. Here Gore Vidal's own tendency shines through: to defend and support the established order of things. Gore Vidal is not only a politician but even an imperialist. He may be faithful and stalwart as such, but we find the order of eternity more reliable as it was explained through the very Buddha and Lao-Tzu, whom the Cyrus Spitama of Gore Vidal finds unpleasant and almost uncanny - probably since they obviously knew too much.

Also the Greeks are very vividly depicted in Vidal's excellent fabulations, but none of them holds water in his opinion, neither Herodotus, Pericles, Socrates, Themistocles, Cimon or anyone else. Themistocles, the glorious victor of Salamis, is the one he admires most, but neither Aristides nor Homer are hardly more than mentioned. For a pupil, Cyrus Spitama wins the "happy philosopher" Democritus, who also was the favourite ancient philosopher of the great learned theologician Robert Burton's (in the 17th century, by some believed to have written the works of Shakespeare).

Considering everything you might find to object against in Gore Vidal's assessment of all the deepest thinkers of that age, "Creation" remains none the less his philosophically most rewarding, his humanly most entertaining and the most ingeniously composed of all his novels.

We wish to present a proposition of the most important authors of this century with motivations.

1. Leo Tolstoy. Although he more belongs to the 19th century, his importance to the 20th has been unsurveyable mostly because he was the first demonstrative pacifist and dared challenge his contemporary world by this for a man of world fame extremely brave principle. All the foremost men of the 20th century have been his followers.

2. Stefan Zweig, perhaps the most sincere follower of Tolstoy, who by his broad universal humanism became the most influential writer between the wars through his ability to embrace different mentalities and unite them internationally in a most unique idealistic constructivism.

3. Henrik Ibsen, the greatest of all dramatists after Shakespeare, whose plays never have ceased to remain irritatingly concerning and revolutionary through above all their sensational way of treating women, with which quality he has combined an impressingly deep and warm knowledge of the human heart.

4. August Strindberg, the second great Nordic dramatist, whose plays remain as concerning as Ibsen's although he lacked Ibsen's deep humanity but managed to replace this with other qualities and productions in prose and poetry, experimental writings and indefatigable debates.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, another great dramatist, who also indefatigably produced interesting prose and never ceased to stand in the centre of world intellectualism by his constantly energetic interest in everything that went on. Albert Camus would have surpassed him, though, if he had been permitted to live.

6. Selma Lagerlöf, the wonderful fairy tale lady, whose inexhaustible stories continue to fascinate a world by their deep human concern and wisdom and which even raise a greater international interest than the works of Strindberg.

7. John Ruel Tolkien, who by his trilogy about the Ring created a completely new literary genre which has proved volcanically and explosively fertile: fantasy is today a concept as well-known as science fiction, cartoon figures, cowboy literature and the historical romances a hundred years ago. At the same time, the Ring is a vast symbolic allegory of our own horrible time.

8. Ernest Hemingway, the overwhelming macho American, who also introduced a completely new literary style, which has almost found too many followers: chauvinistic manhood with hard-boiled unconquerable superiority as a criterion.

9. John Steinbeck, who remains loved by a world of readers for his sympathetic compassion with above all ordinary and simple people, often loafers and drunkards, while at the same time he has an epic force with an impressing sense of form which Hemingway lacked.

10. Erich Maria Remarque, the German pacifist, who remained steadfast as such in the midst of the cataclysmic war convulsions of his home country. His almost documentary novels of his own war experiences remain unsurpassed as human documents and eternally valid protests against war.

11. Joseph Conrad, the great Polish pessimist and sailor, who searched the depth of human hearts and found a life philosophy of detachment, who became an Englishman and created a new kind of literary English forming a school. His novels remain unsurpassed as deeply psychological investigations of the modern human conditions of life.

12. Romain Rolland, the teacher and colleague of Stefan Zweig in a pacifistic crusade against the first world war, at the same time perhaps the greatest literary investigator of music and a portal figure to the international interest in Hinduism, having introduced Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Tagore to the western world.

13. Conan Doyle, who brought the detective novel into the limelight and made the genre the most popular of the century through his unsurpassed sharpness of mind. Unfortunately his equally outstanding historical and science fiction novels came unjustly in the background thereof.

14. Jules Verne, the greatest and most important of all science fiction writers, the only pioneer and creator of the genre, who also adorned it with human qualities which none of his followers had the power to embrace.

15. Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), whose broad human repertoire and ingenious sense of humour is still unsurpassed today. He was not only perhaps the best writer of boy's books of all times but also pioneered the detective novel and wrote a serious book about Joan of Arc, which was hardly to be expected of such a downright and total humorist.

16. Bernard Shaw, the great satirist and socialistic philanthropist, who with his wit and sense of humour made his challenging social plays totally irresistible and irresistibly popular. His star has been sinking, however, following the decline of world socialism.

17. Bertrand Russell, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the century, an indefatigable fighter for common sense and human values against injustice and power abuse, who has almost served as the world conscience of the century.

18. Jack London, whose adventure stories out of the wilderness remain unsurpassed in their category. All his books from Alaska will always remain outstanding as samples of extreme realism and as documentaries of the heroism of life under the extremest possible conditions.

19. Somerset Maugham, whose manifold short stories and novels almost dominated the first half of the century. They will continue to stand out by their brilliant exposure of the oddest circumstances of life.

20. James Hilton, the Cambridge student who gave us Mr Chips and Shangri La among other unforgettably charming stories, a profoundly human analyst of life who has been grossly underestimated, and whose novels about the Russian revolution, the far-reaching human side-effects of the first world war and the making of the atom bomb, will remain classics.

21. Graham Greene, the brooding introverted Catholic, who continued on the experimentally psychological way opened by Joseph Conrad to efforts of solving life's most difficult and impossible problems.

22. Anton Chekhov, probably the finest writer of short stories in world literature, whose warm humanity and delicate aestheticism beautifully coloured in a melancholy view of life never has been matched. In his sublimely sensitive art he stands alone.

23. Henryk Sienkiewicz, the great epic Pole, whose novel "Quo Vadis?" has had a tremendous influence and to some degree resulted in a rebirth of Christianity.

24. Boris Pasternak, the first one who dared shed some light on the dark side of the Soviet Union and who had to stand some fire alone for his civil courage. But others followed, and gradually the avalanche began.

25. Bertolt Brecht, a dramatist who can't be ignored whatever you may with good reasons have against him. His harsh expressionism and poetical realism constitute a dramatic art which always will remain alive and actual.

26. Thor Heyerdahl, the controversial but splendid voyager, who never gave up, and whose travel books and example have had an enormously positive influence on all thinkable primitive sport initiatives, especially sailing.

27. Robert Graves, who never has been enough rewarded for his magnificent efforts to restore and bring Antiquity back to life.

28. Karen Blixen, the exotic story-teller, who proved that romanticism certainly still can exist in our time, and whose autobiographical novel "Out of Africa" was commended by Charles Chaplin as the only novel of our time which you really had to read.

Thereafter could be mentioned Herbert George Wells, Dr Axel Munthe, Rabindranath Tagore, Rudyard Kipling, Nevil Shute and P.G.Wodehouse.

Marcel Proust is a border line case. Eugene O'Neill and even more Tennessee Williams are excellent playwrights but do not reach the European level. The influence of Ian Fleming is of course unoverestimable, but so is that of Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Phyllis D. James, Dashiell Hammett, Alistair MacLean, C.S.Forester, Victoria Holt, Mickey Spillane and dozens of others of that category. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are both interesting, but like the equally inhuman science fiction writer H.G.Wells their visions have failed more often than not. Aldous Huxley is the more interesting one of them, but his remarkable intelligence suffers from an unsympathetic trait of coldness and inhumanity.

Franz Kafka and James Joyce are probably the most controversial authors of the century. Both are bold experimentators, but both speculated in making themselves as artificially difficult as possible, as if they wanted to cloak their insufficiency and dilettantism in unintelligible artificiality.

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse are both highly appreciated Nobel Prize winners but in our view hopelessly overestimated. Hesse is more durable with his fine stylistic qualities, and his masterpiece "Siddhartha" will be read and loved in all times.

Stefan Zweig was a Jewish writer of Vienna who early made his debut with some poetry, which so charmed his publishers, that they promised to publish whatever he would write. Instead of using this opportunity he turned so severely self-critical, that it took many years before he appeared again. His international break-through was his pacifist play "Jeremias" under the shadow of the first world war, which made way for him into the heart of the greatest pacifist of his age, Romain Rolland. From Switzerland they worked together for their pacifist movement as long as the war problem remained.

During the 20's his long list of biographies started to appear. At first he dealt only with well-known authors like Dickens, Balzac and Dostoyevsky, but he soon broadened his investigations to also fathom characters like Nietzsche, Mary Baker Eddy, Napoleon's favourite policeman Joseph Fouché, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart and Maghellan among others. His "Sternstunden der Menschheit" is a vast kaleidoscope of biographies concentrating on decisive historical moments, concluding with a dramatization of the escape of Leo Tolstoy from home at the age of 82. Stefan Zweig's psychological insight and careful empathy is universally acknowledged, and Sigmund Freud was one of his close friends.

His good days lasted until 1934, when nazism started to ruin everything. Until then he was at times the most widely read author in the world, and he counted all his greatest contemporaries in music and literature for his friends, who frequently visited him up on Kapuzinerberg above Salzburg, where his 'Villa Europa' still remains. But already in 1934 nazism became such a threat even in Austria that he found no option but to leave, and his exile was for life.

He found a new home in England and lived in Bath until 1939, when the new war broke out. He was then sequestered as a war prisoner, being a citizen of Austria. As soon as he had got his British citizenship he left England for good. He escaped to America, never liked it there and continued to South America and Brazil. There he chose to voluntarily end his life at the age of 60 in the very darkest moment of the Second World War, a few weeks after the Wannsee conference, where 'the final solution to the Jewish problem' was resolved, and one week after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, the final blow to allied control of Asia. All his books had then already been banned in all German-speaking countries since eleven years. What good did it do that he was the finest stylist in the German language, when he was a Jew?

He was not forgotten right away, although he immediately disappeared in the new age deluge of mass media culture of vulgarity and cheap nonsense, since all those who had read him never forgot him. But the new readers found no meaning in reading a writer of the 30's after the 40's. They preferred stranger originals without too much clarity and difficult messages of conscience, which compelled you to think, as for instance Franz Kafka and James Joyce, one more queer and weird than the other. It became à la mode to claim to understand what no one could understand. The same cult status was offered to Mayakovsky, who committed suicide protesting his disappointment in the bolsheviks, who nevertheless continued to boast him, since they had no one else. I am sure the day will come, when people at last recognize those three, Mayakovsky, Franz Kafka and James Joyce, as the three greatest humbugs of 20th century literature. Some have dared to express that opinion already long ago but were reduced to silence, forcibly forgotten and deported to that same rubbish heap where other scrapped great stylists have been sorted out as disqualified for a rotten age, like Dimitri Mereshkovsky and Stefan Zweig.

Gothenburg, August 1999.

(The Darjeeling Lecture.)

These are the four corner stones of world literature and civilization: the Bible as foundation for the three monotheistic world religions, Homer as the firm ground of the whole classical civilization, Dante as the originator of the Renaissance, and Shakespeare as the maker of modern man. These four authorities almost make up half of the history of literature.

These are the four literary giants dominating the 19th century, Victor Hugo by his romantic spirit, Dickens with his humanitarian pathos, Dostoyevsky by his psychology and Leo Tolstoy by his realism.

  Then comes the 20th century, but why don't we have giants like that in that age? The First World War destroyed an entire generation of hopes and talents, such a brilliant and promising novelist as Henri Alain-Fournier fell on the western front, many were the poets that shared his fate, and the Second World War was even worse. The disasters of the first half of the century made it almost impossible for creative writers of classical literature to exist.

Among the most typical examples are the collaborating couple Romain Rolland - Stefan Zweig, pacifists who detached themselves from the mundane world and almost completely dedicated themselves to writing only biographies, to preserve for the future the lives of real artists and writers, the existence of which a new unhuman age had made impossible. Romain Rolland ended up as a Hinduist, and Stefan Zweig, after perhaps the most brilliant literary career of the 19th century, committed suicide in the third year of the Second World War, being an Austrian and a Jew. He found it impossible to exist in a world which could have brought one Adolf Hitler to power.

All the same, there have been writers in the 20th century, but what kind has dominated it? Affected modernists and posing humbugs like T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and other freaks and frauds of unintelligible language distortions. Classical literature has almost completely disappeared, like classical art and music, to be replaced by nonsense, ugliness and noise.

Fortunately there have been exceptions though, and a few examples are worth keeping in mind. In America there are but very few, since vulgarity seems to dominate everything produced there, but in England we have several interesting examples.

Let's also remember a few authors outside England. By the epoch-making "Doctor Zhivago", Boris Pasternak continues the great Russian tradition from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre are completely original and very effective, while at the same time he continues the tradition of the ancient Greek drama. Another very important modern novel is the Italian Elsa Morante's "History" in its deep neo-realistic settlement with the times of Mussolini and Fascism.

Although the great romantic-realistic story-telling tradition has had its hardest set-backs since the darkest medieval ages it has survived and is continuing. But the same rule applies as ever: we have nothing else to build on but tradition. We have our great universal examples in the Bible, Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, and we have the great 19th century novelists to look up to, and even if the first half of the 20th century was almost only disastrous adversities we still have the old examples to keep in mind, continue to learn from and keep up for the future.

Why, then, finally, is that tradition so important? Why bother about reading books? Because in those great immortal sacred books we have all the humanity there is. We have to look to them to find the sources of humanity, humanitarianism, the very identity of civilized man. The great classical writers are those who best understood and knew about man and thus could improve him by setting new examples. That's why I call the writer behind Shakepeare's dramas 'the maker of modern man', for so far no one has understood human nature better and improved it more than he.