On the Road

Augustine of Hippo refuting a heretic. 13th-century manuscript in the collections of the Morgan Library. Via.

Brooksy's book is coming out after all, as you may have heard. It is called The Road to Character. I believe Character is a colorful fishing village in Rhode Island where he meets a crusty but kind-hearted old codger who helps him with the plumbing and whatnot and teaches him the true meaning of humility.

His I-have-a-book-coming-out debriefing in the Times is all about literary name-dropping, which is not his fault, except to the extent that almost all the authors he cites are people he's devoted columns to in the past year or so. It informs us that he likes Burke (of whom he is currently reading an "intellectual life"), and that he'd like to have a dinner for Dr. Johnson, George Eliot (also here), and Isaiah Berlin. His favorite writer is Tolstoy (cites, of course, the ball scene from Anna Karenina finishing on page 83 of an 817-page text in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation).

There are also Christian Wiman, Michael Oakeshott, George Orwell, Robert Penn Warren, and Saint Augustine. And he cites Anthony Trollope (previously noted only for his working methods) for Phineas Finn, a lovely book in fact, but you need to read it in conjunction with the other five Palliser novels if you want to grasp how it "captures what legislative life actually feels like".

 The bit that made me inexpressibly Schadenfreudig:

Q.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

A.

I’ve never been able to penetrate Dickens or get through “Moby Dick.”

I put down almost every book without finishing it. Like most readers. I do that even with books I enjoy and treasure. I loved reading Dante, but there’s no way I could finish him.

No, he wouldn't get Dickens or Melville, would he? Or even think he got them the way he imagines (wrongly) he's got Eliot. And he admits to never finishing anything, just as I've always said he doesn't! though he doesn't actually confirm my hypothesis that he rarely he gets beyond chapter 1, or in the case of Tolstoy page 82 (I doubt he got beyond page 82 in Middlemarch either).

Is that Paul of Tarsus or Paul of Tsuris? There's a Theodoros Tsartsis selling airconditioning in Greek Macedonia, but I don't think he's written much.

Or maybe a treatment for a Hope-Crosby vehicle.

Then there's the latest teevee appearance of the Yale Professor of Humility, Friday's PBS Newshour, where he said, with reference to the kind of foreign policy advice that possible presidential candidate J.E.B. Bush is seeking,

I think what’s heartening is that — we can have different views about Paul Wolfowitz. I think he’s a much more complicated character than sometimes he’s portrayed. But most of the people that Bush went to are people like Bob Zoellick, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations. It was pretty much the A-team on the Republican side. They’re very responsible. And we would feel safe with men and women like that at the helm. 

See Driftglass, and Crooks&Liars for a straight rundown and my comment at the latter spot,

Andrew Bacevich had what I think should be the last word on Paul Wolfowitz, which everybody who hasn't read it already should read. As the best educated of the people who pushed the US into war in Iraq, Wolfowitz has the heaviest responsibility for the disaster and is in a way the most morally reprehensible of all of them. I wouldn't trust him to drop a letter in the mailbox for me, let alone to give me foreign policy advice. Brooks was only an ignorant cheerleader at the time, but I'm just sickened the way he insists now that he's just a dispassionate observer of the scene and forgets that he played a role himself. His advice isn't needed either.