Edmund Hillary's awesome and humbling "High Adventure"

This book is Hillary's account of the exploratory and Everest summit trips of 1951-53. He writes in a matter-of-fact style that I imagine reflects his character. It certainly suits the character that comes through in the narrative -- an unassuming man of endurance, focus, and courage, not without a warm and funny side.

I am two thirds of the way through this book, and constantly impressed by the effort demanded of these men. Even exhausted from a day of clinging to icy handholds and near-death events slipping and falling into crevasses, they eat a small dinner and prepare to wake up at 3:30 AM so that they can hike to a new route. They do this day after day for months. Each mission to the Everest area took about three months.

I'm struck by the number of people involved -- it's not just Hillary up there. There are teams. Dozens of people. (Surprisingly, he freely uses the word "coolies" to describe hired porters, men and women villagers who are not necessarily mountaineers. Perhaps the word was not seen as derogatory in 1955, when Hillary wrote this account.) They make frequent exploratory trips searching for better, safer routes to Everest. The first two years were reconnaissance trips. It's a huge logistics effort within a finite amount of time. All the while, they work in freezing cold and wind or extreme heat, sometimes both within a few minutes. Their food seems to be barley gruel, potatoes, some chocolate, tea. I wish Hillary had written more about the details and logistics. He doesn't write much about the type of gear and clothes they wear, their training, the food, the reasons for choosing the spring or fall months.

It's the mental toughness that's truly impressive. Trying to sleep in a tent with a howling wind, wind chills of -50 F, exhausted, hungry, afraid of being blown off the mountain, and knowing that you'll be getting up in a few hours regardless to carry on -- because you have no choice, you'll die if you stay there -- it's awesome and humbling.

It's Not Just Google That's Making Us "Stoopid"

Nicholas Carr's essay in the July/August Atlantic Magazine, Is Google Making Us Stoopid?, attempts to make the point that using the Web and hopping from link to link has changed the way we think -- that we are now less able to concentrate on and finish longer pieces of writing or work of any kind, even written content on the Web itself. We now grab a snippet of info and jump to the next somewhat-related snippet. Carr contends that our brains are actually working differently as a result -- they are "wired" differently. The essay's title singles out the Google search engine and environment as the culprit, but that's just a handle for his main argument that the Web is at the bottom of this supposed change.

That a medium of a communication influences the message and shapes the audience as it interacts with it is not a new observation. Carr got 5-6 magazine pages and a cover story out of this point. He offered only a few weak bits of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

My sense is, he is not wrong. But I think that if it is harder for us to concentrate, it's because we simply have less time to do so. A number of changes have occurred in the last forty years to fragment our attention, with less and less time available to us for us to apply that attention:

1. In most families, both parents work. With both adults working, household tasks get pushed into the evenings, where they compete with everything else that has to happen in the evening.
   
   
2. There are more single-parent families than ever, and families with divorced parents. Life is complicated in these families, with parents and children dealing with multiple schedules and connections to family members inside and outside the house.
   
   
3. The proliferation of media, including cable channels, DVDs, games, the Web, mobile phones. All of it competes for our attention, so we have to give all of it smaller and smaller bits.
   
   
4. The technological unification of work. Corporations can now cram more and more disparate tasks onto individual workers, and thus employ fewer workers. A corporate worker with a computer has the tools of dozens of different professionals.

In each of these changes, don't we see the same pressures to fragment our attention that Carr writes about in his essay? We have more and more things to do in the twenty four hours of every day.

Judith Herrin's Wonderful Book about Byzantium

Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, by Judith Herrin

In 28 chapters, most of them 10-12 pages in length, Judith Herrin shows us how the Byzantine empire survived for over 1,100 years. The theme that runs throughout the book -- whether the topic is about life in Constantinople, the Moslem conquests of Christian lands, taxes, Venetian allies and enemies, monks, the crusades -- is that Byzantium articulated and defended a centralized governing system that was creative enough to modify itself, regroup, and endure repeated crises until the final siege in 1453.

A few years ago, I read John Julius Norwich's three volume History of Byzantium. I loved his story telling ability, but I remember thinking that the narrative was almost entirely on the big battle scenes, the ugly successions from one emperor to another, and one conquest after another, all of which was exciting to read, but did not tell me much about how people lived their lives.

Judith Herrin's book is different. She writes interesting portraits of individuals: emperors, scholars, patriarchs, solders. She quotes from their letters. I can practically hear the one emperor, scolding his son in Greek, that he must closely follow the advice he leaves him in his autobiography about when to start a war and when not. I can see him thumping the table with his finger while the boy stares back, bewildered.

A number of points in the book stuck with me, and are worth remembering.

• The iconoclast movement that banished icons from religious observance was deeply influenced by the Arab invasions of the 8th century. The empire suffered a number of major defeats to Arab Islamic armies bent on spreading Islam. The Byzantines lost Jerusalem, and much of Syria. The defeats shocked them -- if they were Christians, and anointed by God, why did they lose so badly to infidels? Some, many from the eastern provinces, who had long established connections with Arabs and Islam, felt that God was punishing Christian Byzantium for an obvious heresy -- the veneration of icons in their worship. Islam forbids any human images in worship. To them, this was proof that God was unhappy with the Christian eastern Roman empire. The iconoclast movement among the Byzantines lasted over a hundred years, and many icons and mosaics were destroyed, until the empress Theodora finally established icons in the religious life of Byzantium and the Orthodox church in 843.

• The empire recovered from the Arab invasions, and even reclaimed some territory. The overall decline of Byzantine power began later, with the devaluation of the nomisma, the gold coin that emperors had maintained for seven hundred years, and had not permitted to fall below 90% gold content. In 1048, the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, because of pressing military campaigns on all sides -- Pechenegs, Normans, Seljuk Turks -- raised money and paid for his campaigns by devaluing the gold nomisma. He undermined internal and foreign faith in Byzantine money, and signaling the weakness of the empire. Which of course encouraged the empire's enemies further. (Obviously, something to think about in modern times.)

• Byzantium was unjustly derided by Western classical historians as corrupt, weak, and morally cowardly in part because the derision provided justification for the West after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the fourth crusade. The West's view of the Constantinopolitan Greek emperors was contemptuous: the Greeks were willing to compromise and negotiate with Arabs, Turks, and other infidels; the Greeks were untrustworthy allies; the Greeks refused to follow the pope; the Byzantine court employed eunuchs; the Byzantines dressed like Asiatics; and the Byzantines spoke Greek instead of Latin. It all went into justifying the destruction and looting of the city, from which the Byzantines never fully recovered.
  

• The tenacious ability of Byzantium to survive, even fragmented, and flourish in times of crisis. After the 1204 loss of Constantinople, it wasn't until 1261 when Michael VIII Palaiologos regained the city and re-established Byzantine rule. Yet, even in that interim period, the empire continued, forming autonomous despotates in Asia Minor and the Greek mainland. They not only managed to carry on, but the artistic and scholarly achievements of this period were among the greatest in Byzantium's history.
  

Throughout, Judith Herrin's love of her subject and sympathetic, fair treatment of the heroes and villains makes this a wonderful book. I was sorry to finish it.

Two Beethoven Sonatas and a Trio -- yet, the music wasn't enough

At the Boston Chamber Music Society concert (all Beethoven) Saturday night at Longy, no one from the BCMS got up to introduce the concert, to talk about the other three August concerts, or to urge people to attend the coming season. The two performers of the first piece, the Cello Sonata in C major (Wilhelmina Smith, cello, and Pedja Murzijevic, piano), simply marched onto the stage from the side door. Their shoes boomed loudly through the hall for a few steps until the audience of mostly retired professors realized the concert was about to begin, and began clapping.

To me, that's no way to start a concert or a recital. I want somebody to say something.

The second piece was theViolin Sonata in C minor (with Steve Copes, violin), and the third was the Piano Trio in D major.

I usually like the heavy, not to say morbid, sound of the cello in sonatas and trios. But Wilhelmina's playing, while obviously accomplished, didn't seem to me to have enough emotional range. The level of intensity in the Cello Sonata was so unvarying that it sounded...boring. The violin sonata had a little more color and feeling. The trio was okay.

I felt disgruntled. We could have just played CDs at home. A concert or recital has to have some element, something, I'm not sure what, that makes the music seem important, that we're here for a purpose. I think just baldly presenting the music is not enough.

Marilyn thinks that sonatas and trios in general just don't have enough range and color to keep her interest. I don't think that's true for me, but in this case, there was something hollow to the experience. (Maybe it has something to do with this being the last year for the main cellist and artistic director of the BCMS, Ronald Thomas. At the end of last season, he had announced he's leaving at the end of this coming season.)