Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal

 Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal

A book titled Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal, during fifteen years captivity on that Island was published in England in 1729. In it, Robert Drury described how, almost forty years earlier, he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar, survived the slaughter of his shipmates by hostile islanders, and then spent the next fifteen years living as a slave, fighting in local wars, taking a wife, and eventually escaping on a slave ship back to England.

The story was accepted as true during the eighteenth century. In fact, it served as one of Europe’s main sources of information about the faraway island of Madagascar. But during the nineteenth century scholars started to question almost everything about it. In particular, there were suspicions that the book was actually a fictional account written by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinsin Crusoe, and that Robert Drury didn’t even exist.

However, the controversy has come full circle, because modern scholars suspect the work may not be a hoax after all. In 1996, Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at Sheffield University, published evidence suggesting not only that Drury had lived, but that his description of early 18th century Madagascar was highly accurate... far too accurate to have been invented by Defoe.

Therefore, while it’s impossible to say for sure, Robert Drury’s Journal may be a case of a factual narrative mistaken for a hoax.

The Electric Kite Hoax

On October 19, 1752, the Pennsylvania Gazette published a brief description of an experiment recently conducted by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, the article said, had flown a kite in a thunderstorm, causing electricity to be conducted down the line of the kite and electrifying a key tied to it. This demonstrated that lightning, as many had speculated, was a form of electricity.

Franklin’s electric kite became the most famous experiment of the eighteenth century, helping to make Franklin famous throughout Europe and America. And yet, some historians argue that it probably never happened.

They point to a curious lack of details about the experiment. It is not known exactly when the experiment occurred. Sometime in June, 1752 was the closest Franklin ever came to an exact date. Nor did Franklin ever write a formal report about it. The only witness to the event was Franklin’s son, who never said a word about it. Finally, such an experiment would have been extremely dangerous, possibly fatal, as Franklin knew.

Historian Tom Tucker suggests that Franklin originally proposed the idea for the experiment as a joke. Frustrated because the British Royal Society had been ignoring his letters to them about his earlier electrical research, he might have proposed the deadly experiment as a subtle joke. It was his way of saying, Go fly a kite in a storm! But when his suggestion reached France, where people took it seriously, Franklin decided to play along and claimed he really had conducted the experiment.

Tucker’s theory remains controversial. Other historians argue that Franklin would never have risked being exposed as a liar by the scientific community.

(...)

The Turk

Enlightenment thinkers were fascinated by machines called automata whose sole purpose was to mimic living objects, and they built some amazing examples of them. The frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical duck that quacked, ate food, and defecated just like the real thing. But no automaton was more praised or more famous than the Great Chess Automaton of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.

The Great Chess Automaton consisted of a wooden figure dressed in Turkish clothes (and usually referred to as the ‘Turk’) whose trunk emerged out of a large wooden box filled with gears and wires. When wound up, the figure played chess against human opponents.

But this wasn’t a machine that simply mimicked the movements of a man playing chess. The Great Chess Automaton actually moved pieces on its own, planned strategy, and responded to the actions of its opponent. To top it all off, it was an excellent player. It almost always won. In other words, this was not a mere mechanical contraption, such as Vaucanson’s duck. This, in the words of its inventor, was an actual ‘thinking machine.’

Kempelen, who was a Hungarian nobleman, built the chess automaton in 1769 and toured throughout Europe with it, exhibiting it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. He typically invited audience members to challenge his automaton to a match, and these challengers invariably lost. The automaton even defeated Benjamin Franklin.

In 1790 Kempelen finally dismantled the machine and stored it away. But this was not the end of its career, because in 1805, after Kempelen had died, his family sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German university student.

Maelzel reconstructed the automaton and toured with it throughout Europe before bringing it to America in 1826. There it again entertained and fascinated audiences, while regularly beating challengers.

The means by which the automaton operated was a source of constant speculation. Before each show, Kempelen made a point of opening sliding doors on the side of the box to prove that it was occupied only by clockwork gears, and each time the automaton moved the noise of grinding machinery could be heard. Still, most people suspected that there had to be someone hidden in there, somehow. They just couldn’t figure out how. Perhaps, they theorized, it was a dwarf. But there were also many who were convinced that the automaton was an actual thinking machine.

While it was touring America, Edgar Allan Poe had a chance to watch it in action, and he wrote an article in which he tried to use strict logic to solve its mystery. He theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the turk itself. He was almost right, but not quite.

The real secret was revealed on February 6, 1837, almost seventy years after the automaton’s creation, in a tell-all article published by the Philadelphia National Gazette Literary Register. Hidden inside the box out of which the body of the Turk emerged (not in the body of the Turk, as Poe thought) was a full-sized man. The identity of the hidden man varied, but Kempelen and Maelzel tried to use chess champions, one of whom wrote the exposé. Among the chess masters who served as the automaton’s hidden operator were Johann Allgaier and Aaron Alexandre.

A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton’s operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a ‘pantograph’ device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.

So the Great Chess Automaton was not sentient after all, but only a hoax. This disclosure proved its undoing. Its mystery snatched away, it was relegated to a warehouse, where a few years later, in 1854, it perished in a fire.

(...)

The Prince of Abyssinia

On February 7, 1910 the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were received with full ceremonial pomp on the deck of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the British Navy’s most powerful battleship. Although the Commander-in-Chief of the Dreadnought had only received a last-minute warning of the Prince’s arrival, he had the sailors standing at attention when the Prince arrived. The Abyssinian party acknowledged the greeting with bows as they shuffled onto the ship, dressed in their long, flowing robes, and for the next forty minutes the Commander gave them a guided tour of the vessel. The Abyssinians paused at each new marvel while murmuring the appreciative phrase “Bunga, Bunga!” in their native tongue. Finally the royal visitors departed as “God Save the King!” played in the background.

The next day the Navy was mortified to learn that the party they had escorted around the warship had not been Abyssinian dignitaries at all. Instead it had been a group of young, upper class pranksters who had blackened their faces, donned elaborate theatrical costumes, and then forged an official telegram in order to gain access to the ship. Their ringleader was a man named Horace de Vere Cole, but the entourage also included a young woman called Virginia Stephen who would later be better known as the writer Virginia Woolf.

By February 12 the British newspapers were full of the story of the stunt. “Bunga Bungle!” the Western Daily Mercury trumpeted. For a few days the Navy was the laughingstock of Britain. Sailors were greeted with cries of “Bunga, Bunga” wherever they went. One newspaper suggested that the Dreadnought change its name to the Abyssinian.

Humiliated and furious, the Navy sent the warship out to sea until the episode blew over. It wanted to bring formal charges against the pranksters, but dropped the idea for fear that it would simply attract more publicity to the case. Finally it settled on a more informal punishment. In the style of British boarding-schools, the participants (though not Virginia Stephen) were each symbolically tapped on their buttocks with a cane. None of the participants went on to perpetrate any more hoaxes except for Cole, who was known throughout his life as an inveterate prankster.

(...)

Naked Came the Stranger

In 1969, Newsday’s Mike McGrady conspired with twenty-three fellow writers and literature critics to produce a work that reflected the poorly written texts that were quickly becoming favourites among American audiences. Each of the contributors penned a single chapter and combined them together under the title, “Naked Came the Stranger”, with the writing credit given to imaginary author ‘Penelope Ashe.’ The book describes the erotic adventures of Gillian Blake, following the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. For publicity purposes, McGrady’s sister-in-law acted as Penelope Ashe, thereby furthering the hoax’s execution.

The book quickly became a widespread hit, earning itself the number one spot on the New York Times Bestseller list for a week. The authors, having each made a good-deal of money from the book’s sales, eventually decided to expose the hoax on the David Frost Show, thereby ending the ruse. The book continued to sell, and was eventually adapted into a pornographic film of the same name.

(...)

The Real Rampa

The Third Eye, by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was first published in 1956. It purported to be his autobiographical account of growing up in Tibet and studying Tibetan Buddhism.

Rampa claimed he had been born into a wealthy Tibetan family and at the age of seven had joined the Chakpori Lamasery in Lhasa where he studied medicine, astrology, Tibetan history, telepathy, hypnotism, and the theory of reincarnation. He also underwent a painful operation to open up the “third eye” in the middle of his forehead. This operation had bestowed upon him amazing psychic powers.

Rampa’s book sold well, but soon questions began to be raised about his identity. People wondered why he spoke English like a native-born speaker if he had, as he claimed, learned the language in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Scholars also pointed out numerous errors in his book. For instance, they noted that in Tibetan culture the “third eye” was understood to be a psychical centre that was supposed to be opened by meditation, never by surgery.

Keen to debunk what he was sure was a fraud, the Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer hired a private detective, Clifford Burgess, to determine the validity of Rampa’s tale.

Burgess published the results of his investigation in February, 1958 in the Daily Mail. He revealed that Rampa had never been to Tibet, nor had he ever had any operation done to his forehead. Instead Rampa was actually Cyril Henry Hoskins, born in Devon, England, and son of a plumber. He had worked first as an assistant to his father, then as an employee of a surgical-implements firm, and later as a clerk in a correspondence school.

But Cyril, it turned out, had always been interested in the study of the occult. He had studied it as much as he could in his spare time. And one day he had taken his interest a step further by growing a beard, shaving his head, and changing his name to “Dr. Kuan-suo.” He later changed it again to Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.

When his true identity was exposed, Hoskins was initially nowhere to be found. But reporters eventually tracked him down to Ireland, where he said he was too ill to receive visitors. Eventually he offered an explanation for his dual identity. He said that it was true he was born Cyril Henry Hoskins, but that the soul of Rampa had transmigrated into his body. Therefore, according to him, all the information in his book was true.

Despite having been proven to be a phony – a plumber’s son posing as a Tibetan monk – a market still existed for Rampa’s writings. So he continued on with his career as Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, authoring numerous books before his death in 1981. However, none of them sold as well as The Third Eye.

(...)

The Sokal Affair

The Sokal affair was a hoax by Alan Sokal (a physicist) perpetrated on the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, he submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon to see if the journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in “Science Wars” that year. On the day of publication, Sokal announced (in a different paper,) that the article was a hoax. He said that Social Text was “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”. Much heated debate followed, especially regarding academic ethics.

Another recent example of this same situation is the 2005 Rooter Paper; this was a paper randomly generated by a computer which was submitted – and consequently approved as legitimate – to a scientific conference.

61 True Stories of Gereat Hoaxes & Pranks 

Vikas Khatri 

Nabokov - quotes selected from interviews

 Do you still feel in Exile?

Art is exile. I felt an exile when I was a child in Russia among other children. I kept goal on the soccer field, and all goalkeepers are exiles.

Does being a refugee mean being rootless?
Rootlessness is less important than a confirmed refugee’s capacity to branch and blossom in a complete—and very pleasant—void.

In which language do you think, count, and dream?
I do not think in any language, I think in images, with some brief verbal surfacing of a utilitarian sort in any of the three tongues that I know, such as “damn those trucks” or “espéce de crétin.” I dream and count mostly in Russian.

How far do you get involved with your characters while writing? Do you think of them after the book has been published?
I suspect that the Almighty’s interest in Adam and Eve was neither very sincere nor very enduring, despite the success, on the whole, of a really marvelous job. I, too, am completely detached from my characters, while making them and after making them.

What is your opinion of the hippies and the student revolts?
I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate drug-dazed hoodlums I have happened to observe, but I do not assume that all hippies are violent cretins. Many of them are young conformists following an American fad, and some are intelligent political agents disguised as students.

What do you think of efforts to enlarge the field of our sensibility and experi- ence’ What do you think of drugs?
Drugs are as degrading as drunkenness. The hallucinations that they arouse ruin health while remaining at the level of the hypnagogic kaleidoscope too well known to the healthy but overworked brain, or of these insipid mirages of mystical neurosis that go back to the Middle Ages. One must be very stupid to follow a fashion which only those whose task is to destroy the mental resistance of still-free nations could approve.

Whom do you write for?
I must say, I have never been interested in commercial success; in other words, I’ve never sought to push my books. I’ve never written except for a single reader, Mr. Nabokov, for him alone. I have a vague impression that my first English books, written and published in the United States—books like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the story of Professor Pnin—found readers here and there, for intellectual life in America has an incomparable intensity and variety, but I didn’t pay much attention to this little plashing of gray glory. Then, when I published my Lolita (almost ten years ago), I was at first surprised by its success. To tell the truth, I sometimes think that people buy this book for reasons not artistic, but, how shall I put it, erotic, but all this doesn’t concern me, although I’m very comfortable that this lovely child is made so much of.

Do you feel that your novels are larger than life?
I’m not sure this isn’t an illusion. For me, life is not an independent, objective entity. Its image depends on the observer. And there are too many observers—coming and going, and turning away, and looking again, and shading their eyes again—too many changing observers and changing lights, too many of them to enable one to establish an average picture of life. If you find I see life larger than life, this implies only a difference between you and me—not between life and my vision of life. We all are the makers of reality, and there are as many makers of reality as there are men. The real unreality is the conventional and the common.

Sartre explains your distance from your characters in Despair in terms of your uprootedness, your émigré status.
I think he’s wrong. I’m not rootless. Even if the Revolution hadn’t happened in Russia, I would have lived in France or Italy. My family, which was politically liberal and cosmopolitan, had me live in an international climate where French and German took the same place as Russian. I am not, as Bunin was, a representative of traditional Russia. I feel much closer to Kafka, for example. And after all I am very close to French literature, and I’m not the first Russian writer to say that!

On his new wealth

Now I don’t need to earn a living, I have a girl called Lolita who earns it for me. In short I’m an old pimp and I have a girl who’s on the game... . Oh, don’t write that. ... What do you think, Véra? All right, do as you like.

Should there be co-education at high school?
Young girls mature so much faster than boys. They become voluptuous and get into the habit of wearing tight woollen sweaters that make for enormous distraction. That just defeats the whole process of education.

Pornography?
Have you read the Marquis de Sade? The orgies? Things start with one person, then five, then fifty, then they invite the gardener! (Enormous laugh.) ‘There’s your pornography: quantity without quality. It’s banal, it’s not literature. The intention of art is always pure, always moral. ...
I hate the Marquis de Sade.
**
Psychoanalysis?
A disgusting racket. Psychoanalysis has something Bolshevik: internal police. And the symbols: those umbrellas, those staircases! Good for the Viennese, perhaps. But for an American of our time, who has no umbrella and uses only elevators? .. . Let’s be serious: Freudianism is dangerous for art: symbols kill the thing, the individual dream. And sexuality! But this depends on art, not the other way around, you see: it’s poetry that has refined love, over the centuries.
**
“Freudian voodoo!” Nabokov replied vehemently. “That's my béte noire. I think he has been one of the most pernicious influences on literature, children and schools. It’s a medieval mind dealing in medieval symbols.

The initial witch doctor and all the little witch doctors. The rather complicated question on which I will write later. A craze that’s passing ..

And why do you object to Freud so strongly?
For the same reason that I object to kitsch and astrology.
**
When did you start learning English?
English was the fashionable language in the kind of Russian family to which I happen to belong. We had English nurses, English governesses, English tutors; and my first books—the books that were read to me—were English books. In the morning Miss Sheldon would read to me Little Lord Fauntleroy; in the afternoon Mademoiselle Miauton, [my French] governess would read to me Les Misérables. And of course I remember all the pictures in Chums or in the Boys’ Own Paper, and later on there was my father’s library, which was full of English and French books; and I just read and read and read.

“I read English before I read Russian. I spoke English with my mother and my nurse—with my brother, I remember, I always spoke French. That was typical. The children would speak one language together and another language at table and another with their father and mother. Sometimes as many as four languages would be spoken.

“After I started going to school, at 11, my tutor stayed on and would tutor me at night for the next day. You learned a great deal that way.

“And we had wonderful courses in French literature. The French governess would read to us three hours a day—the English governess, too. We had all the English magazines and some of the American ones—Little Folks and St. Nicholas.

"I started reading Turgenev and Tolstoy when I was very small. My wife read Anna Karenina at 6. Her nurse said, ‘Come, come, Ill tell that to you in my own words.’ “Even then she knew to beware of condensations,” Nabokov added, laughing.

“I started writing Russian verse very early—when I was 13—and published a little book of verse when I was 15.”
***
Which are your favorite contemporary writers?
Shakespeare.
We said “contemporary.”
Always Shakespeare.

And which Italian writers do you like most?
I know only three languages, Russian, English and French, and hardly ever read translations. In any period of, say, twenty-five years, there is a very small number of absolutely first-rate living novelists, three or four, with that je ne sais quoi about them which designates them as certain to survive.

On D’Annunzio
I read him as a young man, I liked “The Rain in the Pine Forest”. I never knew a man whose head so surprisingly resembled an egg as that of D’Annunzio. .. . I read little, and almost nothing of modern literature. | read a D’Annunzio book in a French translation, but I do not know if the translation was good or bad. So I can’t express an opinion.

Have you read Marcuse?
I have seen excerpts. I wonder if anywhere—perhaps in some African or Asiatic tongue—“Marcuse” is a diminutive of “Marx.” Perhaps the youngest Marx Brother. What I read was intolerably trivial.

Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint?
It is a ridiculous book. It has no literary worth whatever. It is so obvious and not at all funny—a ridiculous book.

Pasternak?
Pasternak is a poet, not a prose writer. Dr: Zhivago, as a novel, is nowhere—though quite in line with the Soviet conservative literary style. It wanders like Gone with the Wind and is filled with all kinds of blunders and melodramatic situations. Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.

Doctor Zhivago?
A mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies. It is an antiliberal work, undoubtedly pro-Bolshevik, even if anti-Stalinist. The book is badly written, very badly. Pasternak was never a good prose writer. He is, of course, a good poet. Not as great, of course, as Blok, but good.

Pasternak?
Doctor Zhivago is false, melodramatic, badly written. It is false to history and false to art. The people are dummies. That awful girl is absurd. It reminds me very much of novels written by Russians, of, I am ashamed to say, the gentler sex. Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar. Simple. If you take his beautiful metaphors there is nothing behind them. Even in his poems: what is that line, Véra? “To be a woman is a big step.” It is ridiculous.

This kind of thing recurs. Very typical of poems written in the Soviet era. A person of Zhivago’s class and his set, he wouldn’t stand in the snow and read about the Bolshevist regime and feel a tremendous glow.

There was a /iberal revolution at that time. Kerensky. If Kerensky had had more luck—but he was a liberal, you see, and he couldn’t just clap the Bolsheviks into jail. It was not done. He was a very average man, I should say. The kind of person you might find in the Cabinet of any democratic country. He spoke very well, with his hand in his bosom like Napoleon, because it had almost been broken by handshakes.

Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they give her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her.

He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy in one of his novels gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them.

And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say “as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel” (he said, looking out at the rain), it would be a beautiful metaphor.

But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress.

As a translator of Shakespeare he is very poor. He is considered great only by people who don’t know Russian. An example. (His wife helped him to remember a line of a Pasternak translation.) What he has turned it into in Russian is this: “all covered with grease and keeps wiping the pig-iron.” You see. It is ridiculous. What would be the original?

GILLIATT: “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?” Yes. “Keeps wiping the pig-iron”!

Pasternak himself has been very much helped by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliché—you know, a cloud has a silver lining—it can sound like Milton because it is in another language.

***
Switzerland?
It is the most pleasant and poetical country in Europe. Gogol, Tolstoy, Byron, Dostoevsky walked here. Gogol wrote Dead Souls here. Dos- toevsky found himself penniless here. Tolstoy caught a good case of venereal disease here. As I say, it is a poetical country.

What do you think of Switzerland?
It’s perfect, but I don’t like the cows much. They drive off the butterflies.

***
Helen Lawrenson’s article, “The Man Who Scandalized the World,” in your issue of August 1960, contains some absurd misstatements: (...)
Finally, let me quote this incredible passage: “He . . . of course, feels that in the good old days of the Czar, ‘a freedom-loving Russian had more freedom than under Lenin,’ without, however, specifying whether he meant freedom-loving aristocrats or freedom-loving serfs.” Irony, of course, is all right, but when starved by ignorance it chokes on its own tail; for surely any schoolgirl should know that no serfs existed in Russia since 1861, one year before the liberation of slaves in this country, and all lovers of freedom certainly realize that it was Lenin who restored serfdom in Russia.

I’m afraid I must ask you to print the following correction to the article published in her memory in Russkaya mysl’ (no. 2048).' The article contains a phrase (supposedly said by me to Princess Shakhovskoy) foisted on me by Mr. Berezov’s imagination: “But what am I to do, Aunt, if American readers are only interested in such themes?” I could not have said this, not only because I never called Princess Shakhovskoy “Aunt,” or discussed Lolita with her, but, most important, because I consider Lolita my best book. Only buoyant blockheads who haven’t actually read the work they’re criticizing could explain away its composition as a vulgar calculation to please some vulgar taste. I doubt that Mr. Berezov was consciously trying to join their number.

Think, Write, Speak
Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV 

Sex Differences in Intelligence The Developmental Theory

 Introduction  A number of books and many thousands of papers have been published during the last century and a half on sex differences in intelligence as defined by Johnson, Carothers and Deary (2009) “to mean the ability to use combinations of pre-existing knowledge and abstract reasoning to solve any of a variety of problems designed to assess the extent to which individuals can benefit from instruction or the amount of instruction that will be necessary to attain a given level of competence” and measured as the IQ derived as the average of cognitive abilities obtained in tests like the Wechsler, the Stanford-Binet, the Cattell Culture Fair and numerous others. From the early twentieth century, virtually all authorities have contended that males and females have the same average intelligence. This book disputes this position and presents the developmental theory which states that in infants aged up to 4 years, girls have a higher average intelligence than boys, from the age of 6 to 15 there is little or no sex differences in intelligence, while from the age of 16 males begin to have higher average intelligence than females reaching an advantage of 4 to 5 IQ points in adults aged 21 and older.

The Nineteenth Century  In the nineteenth century, several authorities contended that men have a larger average brain size than women, that brain size is a determinant of intelligence and consequently that men have a higher average intelligence than women. This contention was advanced by Paul Broca (1861), the French physician and professor of medicine at the University of Paris, who is best known for his discovery that language is normally located toward the front of the brain’s left hemisphere, a region that is known as Broca’s area. A decade later, the same contention was asserted by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man: “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain — whether requiring deep thought, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands” (Darwin, 1871). In the next decade, George Romanes, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, took the same view: “Seeing that the average brain weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former… In actual fact, we find the inferiority displays itself most conspicuously in a comparative absence of originality, and this more especially in the higher levels of intellectual work” (Romanes, 1887).

The Twentieth Century  With the invention of the intelligence test in the early twentieth century in France by Binet & Simon (1905a, 1905b), studies began to be published on sex differences in intelligence in which most authorities asserted that there is no difference between males and females. One of the first to advance this conclusion was Thorndike (1910, p. 35), who wrote of “the trivial difference between the central tendency of men and women which is the common finding of psychological tests”. This contention was also advanced in early studies in the United States by Terman (1916), who wrote that in the American standardisation sample of the Stanford-Binet test on 4–16 year-olds “the superiority of girls over boys is so slight … that for practical purposes it would seem negligible”, and in England by Burt & Moore (1912).

In 1932, this contention was confirmed in the survey of the intelligence of all 11-year-olds in Scotland, in which boys (N=44,210) obtained a score of 34.506 and girls (N=43,288) obtained an almost identical score of 34.411 (Scottish Council, 1933). This study also found that the range of IQs was significantly greater in boys than in girls, given as IQ standard deviations of 14.9 for boys and 14.1 for girls by Deary (2020, p. 41). The effect of this is that 58.6 per cent with IQs below 60 were boys and 57.7 per cent with IQs above 130 were boys. Many later studies have confirmed that males have greater variance of intelligence than that of females, e.g., Lohman & Lakin (2009). 

Many subsequent studies repeated the contention that males and females have equal intelligence. Thus Roberts (1945, p. 727): “It is a striking fact that in mean performance on intelligence-test scales there should be no difference between boys and girls”; Cattell (1971, p. 131): “It is now demonstrated by countless and large samples that on the two main general cognitive abilities — fluid and crystallized intelligence — men and women, boys and girls, show no significant differences”; Hutt (1972, p. 88): “There is little evidence that men and women differ in average intelligence”; Maccoby & Jacklin (1974, p. 65): “It is still a reliable generalisation that the sexes do not differ consistently in tests of total (or composite) abilities”; Brody (1992, p. 323): “Gender differences in general intelligence are small and virtually non-existent”; Eysenck (1981, p. 40): “Men and women average pretty much the same IQ”; Herrnstein & Murray (1994, p. 275): “The consistent story has been that men and women have nearly identical IQs”; Jensen & Johnson (1994, p. 330): “It remains a major unresolved puzzle in differential psychology and neuroscience that the large sex difference in head and brain size is not reflected by the mean IQ difference between males and females, which is virtually nil”; Mackintosh (1996): “There is no sex difference in general intelligence worth speaking of”; Geary (1998, p. 310): “The overall pattern suggests there are no sex differences, or only a small and unimportant advantage of boys and men, in average IQ scores”. 

The assertions that males and females have the same average IQ continued to be made in the twenty-first century. Thus: Lubinski (2000): “Most investigators concur on the conclusion that the sexes manifest comparable means on general intelligence”; Colom et al. (2000): “We can conclude that there is no sex difference in general intelligence”; Loehlin (2000, p. 177): “There are no consistent and dependable male-female differences in general intelligence”; Lippa (2002): “There are no meaningful sex differences in general intelligence”; Jorm et al. (2004): “There are negligible differences in general intelligence”; Bartholomew (2004, p. 91): “Men on average have larger brains than women but display no significant advantage in cognitive performance”; Anderson (2004, p. 829): “The evidence that there is no sex difference in general ability is overwhelming”; Haier, Jung, Head & Alkire (2004, p. 1): “Comparisons of general intelligence assessed with standard measures like the WAIS show essentially no differences between men and women”; Camarata & Woodcock (2006, p. 231): “There appears to be general consensus for the view that males and females are not different in terms of general intellectual ability”; Spelke & Grace (2007, p. 65): “Men and women have equal cognitive capacity”; Hines (2007, p. 103): “There appears to be no sex difference in general intelligence; claims that men are more intelligent than women are not supported by existing data”; Haier (2007): “General intelligence does not differ between men and women”; Halpern (2007, p. 123):“There is no difference in intelligence between males and females…overall, the sexes are equally smart”; Pinker (2008, p. 13): “The two sexes are well matched in most areas, including intelligence”; Mackintosh (2011, p. 380): “The two sexes do not differ consistently in average IQ”; Halpern (2012, p. 233): “Females and males score identically on IQ tests”; Lakin (2013, p. 263): “Research indicates that men and women have equal or nearly equal ability in general intelligence”; Dunst, Benedek, Koschutnig, Jauk & Neubauer (2014): “There are no sex differences in general intelligence”; Sternberg (2014, p. 178): “There is no evidence, overall, of sex differences in levels of intelligence”; Ritchie (2015, p. 105): “Women tend to do better than men on verbal measures, and men tend to outperform women on tests of spatial ability; these small differences balance out so that the average general score is the same”; Saini (2017, p. 85): “When it comes to intelligence, it has been convincingly established that there are no differences between the average woman and man”; Halpern & Kanaya (2017): “There are no overall differences in female and male intelligence”; Toivainen, Papageorgiou, Tosto & Kovas (2017, p. 81): “Sex differences in general cognitive ability are overall small, if not negligible”; Ackerman (2018, p. 8):“There are negligible gender differences in omnibus IQ assessments”; Warne (2020, p. 245): “Males and females are equal in average intelligence”; Halpern & Wai (2020, p. 335): “Data showing differences between men and women in intelligence do not support the notion of a smarter sex”; Deary, Cox & Hill (2021): “There are very small or no sex differences in mean intelligence”. 

Despite the contention of all these numerous experts that there is no sex difference in intelligence, there remains the problem noted by Paul Broca, Charles Darwin and George Romanes that males have a larger average brain size than females, that there is a positive association between brain size and intelligence, and that it appears to follow from this that the larger average brain size of men should give them a higher average IQ than that of women. 

Subsequent work has confirmed these associations. The positive association between brain size and cognitive ability was first shown quantitatively by Galton (1888) in a study of students at Cambridge University that reported a correlation of .11 between head size and examination results. Although this correlation is positive, it is quite low because examination results are only a moderately good measure of intelligence and the restriction of range of the sample. Subsequent studies have reported higher correlations. A review of studies of head circumference and IQ giving a correlation of .30 was reported by Van Valen (1974). Brain size is measured more accurately by MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and the first study of the association of this with intelligence was carried out by Willerman, Shultz, Rutledge & Bigler (1991) and reported the correlation as .35. This association has been confirmed in subsequent studies, e.g. at r = .43 (Raz, Torres, Spencer et al., 1993), at r =.40 for college students in Turkey (Tan, Tan et al., 1999), at r = .43 (Gignac, Vernon & Wickett, 2003) and at r =.33 in a meta-analysis of 37 studies (McDaniel, 2005). In a more recent meta-analysis, a lower correlation of r = .24 was reported by Pietschnig, Penke, Wicherts, Zeiler & Vorocek (2015) but Gignac & Bates (2017) showed that this result needs to be corrected for restriction of range and data quality to r = .31. These results have been further confirmed in a study by Van der Linden, Dunkel & Madison (2017) that reported partial correlations (controlling for body height) of brain size with the g factor of .245 for men and .265 for women. It has also been shown that cortical thickness is positively correlated with intelligence (Karama, Ad-Dab’bagh, Haier & Deary, 2009; Karama, Colom, Johnson & Deary, 2011). 

The larger average brain size of males than of females is also well-established. It is present in the fetus (Wheelock, Hect, Hassan et al., 2019) and at birth, when the average male brain is approximately 12 percent heavier than that of females (Swaab & Hoffman, 1984). The larger average brain size of adult males was shown when controlled for body size by Ankney (1992) and Rushton (1992). It was confirmed in a meta-analysis of 77 studies of sex differences in human brain structure by Ruigrok, Salimi-Khorshidib, Laia, Baron-Cohen et al. (2014), who concluded that men have a 12 percent greater average brain volume than women. These results have been further confirmed in a study by Ritchie, Cox, Shen et al. (2018) that compared 2,750 females (mean age = 61.12 years, SD = 7.42, range = 44.64–77.12) and 2,466 males (mean age = 62.39 years, SD = 7.56, range = 44.23–76.99) and reported that average male brains were larger with a 1.4d effect size, meaning that 92% of men have a brain size above the mean for women. 

Thus, the problem remains that brain size is positively associated with intelligence, and that males have a larger average brain size than females. It appears to follow that males should have a higher average IQ than females, yet numerous experts have asserted that males and females have the same average intelligence. There has been some acknowledgement of this problem. Butterworth (1999, p. 293) noted the problem, writing that “[w]omen’s brains are 10% smaller than men’s, but their IQ is on average the same” but he did not offer a solution. Halpern (2012, p. 233) also noted that women have a smaller average brain size than men but asserted that “[t]here is no evidence that larger brains are, in any way, better than smaller brains”. This is a remarkable contention in view of the results of the numerous studies noted above, including the meta-analysis of 37 studies by McDaniel (2005) concluding that brain size is positively correlated with intelligence at .33. 

An attempt to resolve the problem was made by Jensen (1998), who suggested that females have the same number of neurons in the brain as males but these are smaller and more closely packed. This is an improbable hypothesis and has been shown to be incorrect by Pakkenberg & Gundersen (1997), who reported that men have an average of four billion more neurons in the brain than have women, a difference of 16 percent. Further data showing that men have more neurons than have women have been given by Pelvig et al. (2008) and by Escorial, Roman, Martinez et al. (2015). Deary, Cox & Hill (2021) have also noted the problem, writing that “[t]he fact that there are substantial sex differences in brain size but very small or no sex differences in mean intelligence is likely to be because multiple aspects of the brain’s structure, function, and connectivity are compensatory for any apparent brain size difference”. They do not elaborate this suggestion.

Richard Lynn

Nabokov on the pleasure of being knocked out

 Play (Breitenstrater—Paolino) (Essay, 1925)

(...)
Nabokov—who had been taught boxing at home as a child and was ready to use it at school to defend victims from bullies, and was an occasional boxing coach in the mid-1920s—here exults in boxing, its traditions, its champions, its artistry, its courage. He exults even in the pleasure of being knocked out. Most surprisingly of all, this non-crowd-lover, this resolute individualist, exalts the crowds who come to watch boxing in a spirit very much like his.
**
Everything in the world plays: the blood in a lover’s veins, the sun on water, and a musician on a violin.

Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and homespun puns—is play. And when we actually play—whether we’re knocking down a tin battalion with a pea or meeting over the barrier of a tennis net—what we feel in our very muscles is the essence of the play engaged in by the marvelous juggler who tosses from hand to hand, in an unbroken sparkling parabola, the planets of the universe.

People have played as long as they have existed. There are eras— humanity’s holidays—when people particularly take to games. So it was in bygone Greece, in bygone Rome, and so it is in the Europe of our own day.

A child well knows that in order to play to his heart’s content he must play with someone else or at least imagine somebody, he must become two. Or, to put it another way, there is no play without competition; which is why some kinds of play, such as those gymnastic festivals in which fifty-odd men or women, moving as one, form patterns across a parade ground, seem insipid, since they lack the main thing which gives play its ravishing, thrilling charm. That’s why the communist system is so ridiculous, since it condemns everyone to performing the same tedious drills, not allowing that anyone should be fitter than his neighbor.

Not for nothing did Nelson say that the Battle of Trafalgar was won on the football and tennis grounds of Eton.' And the Germans, too, have lately realized that the goose step won’t take you far, and that boxing, football, and hockey are more valuable than military or any other drills. Boxing is especially valuable, and there are few sights healthier or finer than a boxing match. A highly strung gent, who dislikes washing stark naked in the mornings and inclines to surprise that a poet working for two and a half connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who works for a crowd of many thousands (a crowd which, by the way, has nothing in common with the so-called masses and is filled with a delight far more pure, sincere, and good-natured than that of the crowd welcoming home its civic heroes), this highly strung gent will feel indignation and disgust toward a fistfight, just as in Rome, probably, there were people who frowned at the sight of two huge gladiators demonstrating the very best in the gladiatorial arts, slugging each other with such iron blows that not even the pollice verso” was necessary, they’d finish each other off anyway.

What matters, of course, is not at all that a heavyweight boxer is a little bloodied after two or three rounds or that the white waistcoat of the referee looks as though red ink has leaked out of a fountain pen.

What matters is, first, the beauty of the very art of boxing, the perfect accuracy of the attacks, the side jumps, the dives, the range of blows— hooks, straights, haymakers—and, second, that fine manly excitement this art arouses. Many writers have depicted the beauty and the romance of boxing. Bernard Shaw has a whole novel about a professional boxer.’ Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Kuprin have all written on the subject. Byron, that darling of all Europe, except exacting England, eagerly befriended boxers and loved to watch their fights, just as Pushkin and Lermontov would have loved it, had they lived in England. Portraits have survived of the professional boxers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The famous Figg, Corbett, Cribb’ fought without gloves and fought skillfully, honorably, tenaciously, more often to utter exhaustion than to a knockout.

And it was not at all the commonplace of humaneness that led to the appearance of boxing gloves in the middle of last century, but, rather, a desire to protect the fist, which could otherwise be too easily broken in the course of a two-hour bout. They have all long since stepped down from the ring, those famous, champion pugilists, having won their supporters quite a few pounds sterling, and lived to a ripe old age, and in the evenings, in taverns, over a pint of beer, they would talk with pride of their former exploits. They were followed by others, the teachers of today’s boxers: the massive Sullivan, Burns, with his looks of a London dandy, and Jeffries, the son of a blacksmith, “the white hope,” as they called him, a hint that black boxers were already becoming unbeatable.

Those who had hoped that Jeffries would beat the black giant Johnson lost their money. The two races followed this fight closely. But despite the furious enmity between the white and black camps (the event took place in America twenty-five or more years ago), not a single boxing rule was broken, even though Jeffries, with every one of his blows, kept repeating, “Yellow dog ... yellow dog.” Finally, after a long, splendid fight, the enormous Negro struck his opponent so hard that Jeffries flew backward from the ring, over the surrounding ropes, and, as they say, “fell asleep.” Poor Johnson! He rested on his laurels, gained weight, married a beautiful white woman, began appearing as a living advertisement on the music-hall stage, and then, apparently, ended up in jail, and only briefly did his black face and white smile flash out from the illustrated magazines.

I was lucky enough to see Smith, and Bombardier Wells, and Goddard, and Wilde, and Beckett, and the wonderful Carpentier, who beat Beckett. That fight, which paid the winner five thousand, and the runner-up three thousand pounds, lasted exactly fifty-six seconds, so that someone who had paid twenty pounds for his seat had only enough time to light a cigarette, and when he looked up at the ring, Beckett was already lying on the boards in the touching pose of a sleeping baby.

I hasten to add that in such a blow, which brings on an instantaneous blackout, there is nothing terrible. On the contrary. I have experienced it myself, and can attest that such a sleep is rather pleasant. At the very tip of the chin there is a bone, like the one in the elbow which in English is called “the funny bone,” and in German “the musical bone.” As everyone knows, if you hit the corner of your elbow hard, you immediately feel a faint ringing in the hand and a momentary numbing of the muscles. The same thing happens if you are hit very hard on the end of the chin.

There is no pain. Only the peal of a faint ringing and then pleasant instantaneous sleep (the so-called knockout), lasting from ten seconds to half an hour. A blow to the solar plexus is less pleasant, but a good boxer knows just how to tense his abdomen so that he won’t flinch even if a horse kicks him in the pit of the stomach.

I saw Carpentier this week, on Tuesday evening. He was there as trainer to the heavyweight Paolino, and the spectators seemed not to recognize immediately, in that modest, fair-haired young man, a recent world champion. His fame has faded now. They say that after his fearsome fight with Dempsey he sobbed like a woman.

Paolino appeared in the ring first and sat down, as is customary, on a stool in the corner. Huge, with a square dark head, and wearing a magnificent robe down to his heels, this Basque resembled an Oriental idol.

Only the ring itself was lit, and in the white cone of light falling on him from above, the platform looked like silver. This silvered cube, amid a gigantic dark oval, where the dense rows of countless human faces called to mind kernels of ripe corn strewn against a black background— this silvered cube seemed lit up not by electricity, but by the concen- trated force of all the gazes fixed on it out of the darkness. And when the Basque’s opponent, the German champion Breitenstriter,  stepped onto the bright platform, fair-haired, in a mouse-colored robe (and for some reason in gray trousers, which he immediately began to pull off), the enormous darkness trembled with a joyful roar. The roar did not die down when the photographers, jumping onto the edge of the platform, pointed their “monkey-boxes” (as my German neighbor called them) at the fighters, at the referee, at the seconds, nor when the champions “pulled on their boxing gloves” (which reminds me of “the young oprichnik and the valiant merchant”). And when both opponents threw off their robes (and not “velvety furs”) from their mighty shoulders and rushed toward each other in the white gleam of the ring, a slight moan went through the dark abyss, through the rows of corn kernels and the misty upper tiers, for everyone saw how much bigger and stockier the Basque was than their favorite.

Breitenstrater attacked first, and the moan turned into a rumble of delight. But Paolino, hunching his head into his shoulders, answered him with short uppercuts, and from almost the first minute the German’s face glistened with blood.

With every blow that Breitenstrater took, my neighbor took in air with a whistle, as if he himself were taking the blows, and all the darkness, all the tiers croaked a kind of enormous supernatural croak. By the third round it became noticeable that the German had weakened, that his punches could not push off the hunched orange hill moving toward him. But he fought with extraordinary courage, trying to make up with his speed for the fifteen pounds by which the Basque outweighed him.

Around the luminous cube, across which the boxers danced with the referee twisting between them, the black darkness froze, and in the silence the glove, shiny with sweat, smacked juicily on the live naked body. At the start of the seventh round Breitenstriter fell, but after five or six seconds, jerking forward like a horse on black ice, he stood up.

The Basque fell upon him immediately, knowing that in such situations you must act decisively and swiftly, put all your strength into your punches, for sometimes a blow that is stinging but not firm will, instead of finishing off your weakened opponent, enliven him, wake him up.

The German bent away, clinging to the Basque, trying to win time, to make it to the end of the round. And when once more he went down, the gong did in fact save him: on the eighth count, he got up with great difficulty, and dragged himself to his stool. By some sort of miracle he had survived the eighth round, to mounting peals of applause. But at the start of the ninth round Paolino, striking him beneath the jaw, hit him just the way he wanted. Breitenstriter collapsed. The darkness roared furiously, chaotically. Breitenstrater lay twisted like a pretzel.

The referee counted down the fateful seconds. He kept lying there." So the match ended, and when we had all emptied out onto the street, into the frosty biueness of a snowy night, I was certain that in the flabbiest family man, in the humblest youth, in the souls and muscles of all this crowd, which tomorrow, early in the morning, would disperse to offices, shops, factories, there would be one and the same grand feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two excellent boxers, a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, courage, inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more valuable and purer than many so-called higher pleasures.

***
A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine (Review, 1927) Lovers of the art of chess will find this small book a most entertaining novel, or, rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only now really clashed, and the future holds no shortage of entrancing tussles. Znosko-Borovsky, a talented player himself, writes about chess in a masterly way. The book begins with the story of how the bright, intoxicating combination play of former years (Anderssen, Pillsbury, et al.) turned into positional play under the influence of Steinitz, Schlechter, Rubinstein, Lasker, cold masters, admirers of rigor and dryness in chess.

“Capablanca,” the author writes, “brought chess back from the province of severe science to the sphere of jolly and joyful art,” and goes on to describe his wonderful career, his defeat of Lasker, triumphs, triumphs, an unexpected period of weakness, and again triumphs.

There’s “play in space,” characterized by a concern for the safety and strength of every position, and “play in time”—1.e., a play of motion, of development. And this is Capablanca, a dynamic player, the “knight of fast-flowing time.” Znosko-Borovsky is just as accurate in describing Alekhine’s game. Comparing him with Capablanca, he refers to the latter as classical and technical, and Alekhine as romantic and tactical.

Capablanca is calm, and in his play there’s the harmony of genius; Alekhine is fiery, his imagination knows no limits, his combinations are fantastical. “His game spreads out like a fan, which will snap shut only at the moment of the final blow.”

The text comes furnished with some interesting diagrams, and at the end of the book there are fourteen selected chess Capablanca-Alekhine games with splendid brief commentaries.

I would like to mention the unusual vividness of some of the author’s expressions, and the brisk, heady pace of the whole narrative. Znosko-Borovsky writes about chess with gusto, juicily and aptly, just as a mas- ter should write about his art. The undersigned, a humble but ardent admirer of Caissa,' welcomes the appearance of this thrilling book.

***
Although Nabokov’s reviews of other émigré writers in the mid- 1920s are sporadic and mostly negative, in the late 1920s he began to review frequently and mostly enthusiastically. He reported with glee on another sport or game with which we associate him much more than we do boxing, in his review of a chess book on Alekhine and Capablanca. Two weeks before Alekhine became world champion, Sirin recommended this “thrilling” book as “a most entertaining novel, or rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only ” He particularly relished the characterization of now really clashed, the contrasting styles of the two grandmasters. About fifteen months later, he would conceive of and rapidly compose his own chess novel, The Luzhin Defense, named perhaps with a nod to the famously bold Alekhine Defense, just as the beginning and end of Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin’s name, if not his chess style, also seem a nod to Alekhine.

Like the nonfiction chess reporting that Nabokov extols as a “novel,” his own novel would reach a high point in the description of the final tussle between the styles of a Russian master and his Latin opponent (the fictional Turati replacing the real-life Capablanca).

Think, Write, Speak

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV

What connection do you see between chess and the work of art?

There’s no connection between literature and the game of chess. But there’s certainly a connection between the art of literature and the art of chess problems. Problems and games are two different things. It’s not easy to speak of these two things, because not everybody, not even all chess players, can appreciate the difference between the game of chess, which is journalism, and the chess problem, which is poetry.

The link between the composition of a chess problem and that of a novel lies in the originality of the combinations and the economy of their realization.

It’s a magnificent, complex, and sterile art, akin to the ordinary form of the game only to the extent, for example, that a juggler, in inventing the interlacings of a new sleight-of-hand trick, draws on something in the properties of a sphere. In fact, most chess players, masters and amateurs, take only a moderate interest in these refined enigmas, purely invented and requiring great specialization, and although they appreci- ate a problem with a trap inside, they would be absolutely disconcerted if they were asked to compose one.

In common there are themes, stratagems, ambushes, sacrifices, pinning and unpinning, and all sorts of maneuvers, but combined in a certain way. Because it’s the combination of the different themes that makes a problem. Deceit pushed to the point of diabolism. In this sense, I think one can find a certain parallelism between the chess problem and the problem of literary compositions.

And on the level of characters’ strategies?

No, that’s something else. This is becoming allegory. One thinks of those chess figurines.

(...)

When a chess problem comes into my mind I don’t see the chessboard, I don’t see squares as they are, I see perhaps little abysses, not holes, but different tensions, positive, negative. It’s not a question of form. It seems to me that in literary art there’s no privileged form, at the com- positional level. One could speak of a spiral, of a certain structure, but these are metaphors.

In terms of form, it would be, rather, “anything goes,” everything works, doesn’t it, all is allowed. I always have an interesting combination, complicated and with a certain form, but not each part of the combination.

Vladimir Nabokov

SPEAK, MEMORY

An Autobiography Revisited

The Brāhmaṇa is not to be traced through virtue and practice, gone to the far shore he does not relate, being such.

1. SENSUAL PLEASURES [766–771]

1. If when a man is lusting for a sensual pleasure
he succeeds in [getting] it,
all joyful indeed he becomes
having got what he wanted.

2. If while a person is lusting
and full of desire
those sensual pleasures fall away from him
he gets afflicted as if pierced by a barb.

3. Whoever avoids sensual pleasures
as if the head of a snake with his foot,
the sticky nature of the world
he mindfully passes over.

4. Fields and land, or gold,
cows and horses, slaves and servants,
women and relations, various sensual pleasures,
if for these a man has greed,

5. they, though being powerless, overpower him.
His surroundings crush him.
Then misery enters into him
like water into a broken boat.

6. Therefore a person always mindful
should avoid sensual pleasures.
Having abandoned them he would cross the flood
like one who has gone to the far shore after bailing out the boat.

2. THE OCTAD ON THE CAVE [772–779]

1. Imprisoned in a cave, covered over by much, the man stands who is immersed in delusion.
Such a one is far indeed from seclusion for sensual pleasures in the world are not easy to abandon.

2. Tied down to want, bound to the pleasure of existing,
they are hard to free, not freeable by others.
Now looking behind, now looking ahead,
they hanker now after these, now after the former pleasures.

3. Greedy, engrossed, infatuated with pleasures they are incorrigible,¹ entered upon an uneven path.
Brought into misery they lament:
“What shall we become when we fall away from this.”

4. Therefore a person should train himself in this way:
whatever he would come to know as uneven in the world not for the sake of that should he practice unevenly;
for short indeed is this life, the wise say.

5. I see in the world the trembling humankind
involved with craving for repeated existences,
poor people who wail in the face of death
not freed of craving for various existences.

6. See how they tremble in what they made “mine”
like fish in a pool after the flow has ceased.
Having seen that one should live without ‘mine-making’
not forming attachment for existences.

7 . Dispelling desire for both extremes,
fully understanding contact, without becoming greedy,
?not doing that for which he would blame himself, a wise man does not get stuck in the seen and the heard.

8. Fully understanding perception he would cross the flood, the Muni who is not stuck in possessions.
With the barb pulled out, practising diligently he does not long for this world or the other.

3. THE OCTAD ON THE CORRUPT [780–787]

1. Though some will speak with a corrupt mind
some others will speak with an honest mind.
But the debate thus arisen the Muni does not engage in, therefore, for the Muni there is no barrenness anywhere.

2. How could one go beyond one’s own view
if one is led by desire and preoccupied with one’s likes?
Making one’s own assumptions as one knows so would one speak.

3. The person who tells his own virtue and practice
to others even if unasked for,
skillful ones will call “one of ignoble nature”
— the one who by himself declares himself.

4. But the calm monk, cool in his heart,
not boasting “Thus am I” regarding virtues,
skillful ones will call “one of noble nature”
— the one for whom there are no prominences.²

5. He whose ideas are formed, constructed, and preferred, not having become purified,
whatever he sees as an advantage in himself
he relies on that—a peace dependent on the shakeable.

6. View-resorts are not easily overcome
assumed³ after evaluation of ideas.
Therefore a man among those resorts
will reject an idea as he takes hold of another.

7. For the cleansed one there is nowhere in the world
a formed view about various existences.
Having abandoned deceit and conceit, being cleansed, by what would he go? He is not an approacher.

8. The one who approaches engages in debate regarding ideas— the non approacher by what, how, could you tell him?Taking up or rejecting—such things are not for him.
He has shaken off all views here itself.

4. THE OCTAD ON THE PURE [788–795]

1. “I see the pure, the highest, the disease free.
From the seen a man’s purity comes.”
Understanding this, having known it as the highest,
he refers to knowledge through seeing the pure.⁵

2. If from the seen a man’s purity comes
or through knowledge he abandons suffering,
then he is purified by something other, being with appendages.
His view betrays him as he speaks like that.

3. The Brāhmaṇa does not speak of purity through something other,
the seen, the heard, the thought, or virtue and practice.
In both good and evil he remains unstuck,
letting go of what was taken up he does not make up anything.

4. Leaving the former, attached to the next,
they are always on the move and do not cross attachment.
They keep taking up and rejecting
like a monkey leaving the old branch as it takes hold of a new one.

5. A person by himself undertaking various practices
goes high and low, attached to perceptions.
But the knowing one who through knowledge has understood the Dhamma
does not go high and low, being of broad wisdom.

6. Unopposed to all things he has become
whether those seen and heard or those thought about.
The one seeing just that, faring openly,
by what in the world could you make him out?

7. They do not make up, they do not prefer,
“This is the highest purity” they do not say.
Having undone the tied knot of holding,
they do not form a desire for anything in the world.

8. The Brāhmaṇa has gone beyond limits, for him there is not
anything that could be grasped through knowing and seeing.
He does not attach to attachment, and is not attached to detachment.
For him there is nothing grasped as the highest.

5. THE OCTAD ON THE HIGHEST [796–803]

1. “It is the highest”—if a person thus abides in views,
then whatever it is he takes as the best
in comparison with that he will call all others inferior.
Therefore he has not passed beyond disputes.

2. Whatever he sees as an advantage in himself
in regard to the seen, the heard, the thought, or virtue and practice,
taking hold of just that in that regard
he sees all others as inferiors.⁶

3. But just that is a knot, skillful ones say,
dependent upon which he sees another as inferior.
Therefore upon the seen, the heard, or the thought
or upon virtue and practice a monk should not rely.

4. No view at all should he form in the world
whether through knowledge or through virtue and practice.
He should not refer to himself as equal,
nor think of himself as inferior or superior.

5. Giving up the taken-up, not taking anything up,
even on knowledge he makes no reliance.
He does not take sides among the disunited,
for he does not relate to any view.

6. He who towards both ends has no inclination,
which would lead to any sort of existence here or yonder,
for him there are no resorts
assumed after evaluations of ideas.

7. For him regarding the seen, the heard or the thought
not the slightest notion has been made up.
That Brāhmaṇa who does not take up a view
by what in the world could you make him out?

8. They do not make up, they do not prefer,
even ‘ideals’ are not accepted by them.
The Brāhmaṇa is not to be traced through virtue and practice,
gone to the far shore he does not relate, being such.

Translation from Sutta Nipata

Venerable Nanadipa 

Nabokov on chess problems

 In the course of my twenty years of exile I devoted a prodigious amount of time to the composing of chess problems. A certain position is elaborated on the board, and the problem to be solved is how to mate Black in a given number of moves, generally two or three. It is a beautiful, complex and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by a juggler in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tournament. Most chess players, in fact, amateurs and masters alike, are only mildly interested in these highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles, and though appreciative of a catchy problem would be utterly baffled if asked to compose one.

Inspiration of a quasi-musical, quasi-poetical, or to be quite exact, poetico-mathematical type, attends the process of thinking up a chess composition of that sort. Frequently, in the friendly middle of the day, on the fringe of some trivial occupation, in the idle wake of a passing thought, I would experience, without warning, a twinge of mental pleasure as the bud of a chess problem burst open in my brain, promising me a night of labor and felicity. It might be a new way of blending an unusual strategic device with an unusual line of defense; it might be a glimpse of the actual configuration of men that would render at last, with humor and grace, a difficult theme that I had despaired of expressing before; or it might be a mere gesture made in the mist of my mind by the various units of force represented by chessmen – a kind of swift dumb show, suggesting new harmonies and new conflicts; whatever it was, it belonged to an especially exhilarating order of sensation, and my only quarrel with it today is that the maniacal manipulation of carved figures, or of their mental counterparts, during my most ebullient and prolific years engulfed so much of the time I could have devoted to verbal adventure.

Experts distinguish several schools of the chess-problem art: the Anglo-American one that combines accurate construction with dazzling thematic patterns, and refuses to be bound by any conventional rules; the rugged splendor of the Teutonic school; the highly finished but unpleasantly slick and insipid products of the Czech style with its strict adherence to certain artificial conditions; the old Russian end-game studies, which attain the sparkling summits of the art, and the mechanical Soviet problem of the so-called ‘task’ type, which replaces artistic strategy by the ponderous working of themes to their utmost capacity. Themes in chess, it may be explained, are such devices as forelaying, withdrawing, pinning, unpinning and so forth; but it is only when they are combined in a certain way that a problem is satisfying. Deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy; and although in matters of construction I tried to conform, whenever possible, to classical rules, such as economy of force, unity, weeding out of loose ends, I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil.

It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often I have struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’ – delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connexion with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients – rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings. In the case of problem composition, the event is accompanied by a mellow physical satisfaction, especially when the chessmen are beginning to enact adequately, in a penultimate rehearsal, the composer’s dream. There is a feeling of snugness (which goes back to one’s childhood, to play-planning in bed, with parts of toys fitting into corners of one’s brain); there is the nice way one piece is ambushed behind another, within the comfort and warmth of an out-of-the-way square; and there is the smooth motion of a well-oiled and polished machine that runs sweetly at the touch of two forked fingers lightly lifting and lightly lowering a piece.

I remember one particular problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, ‘thetic’ solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White’s King to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to ‘plant’ (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this ‘antithetic’ inferno the by now ultra-sophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (Bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight.

I remember slowly emerging from a swoon of concentrated chess thought, and there, on a great English board of cream and cardinal leather, the flawless position was at last balanced like a constellation. It worked. It lived. My Staunton chessmen (a twenty-year-old set given to me by my father’s Englished brother, Konstantin), splendidly massive pieces, of tawny or black wood, up to four and a quarter inches tall, displayed their shiny contours as if conscious of the part they played. Alas, if examined closely, some of the men were seen to be chipped (after traveling in their box through the fifty or sixty lodgings I had changed during those years); but the top of the king’s rook and the brow of the king’s knight still showed a small crimson crown painted upon them, recalling the round mark on a happy Hindu’s forehead.

A brooklet of time in comparison to its frozen lake on the chessboard, my watch showed half-past three. The season was May – mid-May, 1940. The day before, after months of soliciting and cursing, the emetic of a bribe had been administered to the right rat at the right office and had resulted finally in a visa de sortie which, in its turn, conditioned the permission to cross the Atlantic. All of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close. Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality of my relief. Sleeping in the next room were you and our child. The lamp on my table was bonneted with blue sugar-loaf paper (an amusing military precaution) and the resulting light lent a lunar tinge to the voluted air heavy with tobacco smoke. Opaque curtains separated me from blacked-out Paris. The headline of a newspaper drooping from the seat of a chair spoke of Hitler’s striking at the Low Countries.

I have before me the sheet of paper upon which, that night in Paris, I drew the diagram of the problem’s position. White: King on a7 (meaning first file, seventh rank), Queen on b6, Rooks on f4 and h5, Bishops on e4 and h8, Knights on d8 and e6, Pawns on b7 and g3; Black: King on e5, Rook on g7, Bishop on h6, Knights on e2 and g5, Pawns on c3, c6 and d7. White begins and mates in two moves. The false scent, the irresistible ‘try’ is: Pawn to b8, becoming a knight, with three beautiful mates following in answer to disclosed checks by Black; but Black can defeat the whole brilliant affair by not checking White and making instead a modest dilatory move elsewhere on the board. In one corner of the sheet with the diagram, I notice a certain stamped mark that also adorns other papers and books I took out of France to America in May 1940. It is a circular imprint, in the ultimate tint of the spectrum – violet de bureau. In its center there are two capital letters of pica size, R.F., meaning of course République Française. Other letters in lesser type, running peripherally, spell Contrôle des Informations. However, it is only now, many years later, that the information concealed in my chess symbols, which that control permitted to pass, may be, and in fact is, divulged.

Vladimir Nabokov

SPEAK, MEMORY

An Autobiography Revisited

Unending Mystery

 INTRODUCTION

“Be Like the Fox . . .”

EVEN THE NEWEST LABYRINTH HAS A PAST. Labyrinths are painted on the walls of ancient caves and carved onto Neolithic rock outcroppings. They appear in some of the oldest legends in lands as different as the Greek Isles and the American Southwest, but were also the stuff of myths even older than the stories as we now know them. They have represented the birth of a single child and the annual rebirth of an entire season, even of the earth itself. They have at different times symbolized the descent into hell and the fiery underworld, the ascent to the heavenly City of God and the more mundane route to Jerusalem. They have served as the hallmark of architects and may have been used as mathematical devices to calibrate a working lunar calendar.

The labyrinth has played a role in divine worship in cathedrals, and its more worldly cousin, the high-walled maze, has provided effective trysting spots for lovers in many a garden. The semantic difference between the words labyrinth and maze is a new one. For most of their histories the terms have been interchangeable. But the new distinction—which has yet to make it into some dictionaries—is useful. Nowadays, a labyrinth is a single circuitous path that leads uninterrupted to a center, while a maze is a puzzle with many forks in the road that demand choices. More detailed distinctions will emerge later on in this book, but for now it is good enough to think in terms of the single-path, nonjudgmental labyrinth versus the tricky, perhaps entrapping maze. A labyrinth appears on one of the oldest minted coins, and it might be useful to think of the labyrinth and the maze as the heads and tails of a coin, the rather solemn labyrinth (heads, of course) and the raffish, devil-may-care maze. It would be a mistake not to consider them together. To maintain, as some have, that the maze is a frivolous distraction from a more serious subject is to miss the complexity—and the ambiguity—of a labyrinth. And it seems equally fruitless to debate whether the maze, as it is now defined, is a subdivision of labyrinths or if the labyrinth is actually just an especially tidy maze.

The names themselves, divorced from any particular image, play active roles in our everyday vocabulary as synonyms for chaos, disorder and confusion. The New York Public Library computer lists 344 titles that contain the word labyrinth, 204 with maze. (The cautious librarian who so helpfully provided these figures, however, insisted that I warn you that some may be different editions of the same books.) Almost none of them deal with the subject of this book; they range, instead, from modern political history (The Turkish Labyrinth) to medical studies of the inner ear. Mountain climbers call alpine ice fields labyrinths. A cab driver threading his way to a midtown railroad station complains about the maze of one-way streets. A New York Times headline reads, “The Labyrinthine Morass of Spying in the Cold War.” What editorial writer commenting on cities or city government could survive without the words, usually accompanied by the adjective bureaucratic? Everyone knows what those words mean, even when they are wrong.

But the labyrinth is one of mankind’s oldest artistic creations, an image drawn or carved or scratched by a human hand that does not copy something seen in nature. It is one of the first images— maybe the first—to be inspired by the human imagination. And very early in its history, the image and the name both became closely associated with that most human of creations, the city. Throughout its long history, the labyrinth (and later the maze) has been associated either symbolically or actually with many different ideas or concepts, but the connection with the city is almost always there.

Over the centuries, the seductive image of the labyrinth has become a glorious magpie’s nest that can be stolen or borrowed or adapted for almost any purpose. The claims are staggering. A labyrinth can induce pregnancy, revive virility, ease childbirth, cure cancer, restore eyesight, heal the lame, free souls from purgatory. You can win the hand of a beautiful girl by running the path faster than any other boy in town. You can learn the wisdom of King Solomon by decoding its meaning. It’s an athletic field. It’s a dance floor, a place to thresh grain, a sacrificial site. The diameter of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral is one-millionth the diameter of the earth exactly (or is it one-billionth?), and in its geometry are hidden the secrets of the universe’s building blocks. All this is worth hearing because it has all been so devoutly believed. We can only ask, What is there about this image that inspires such belief?

The end of the twentieth century saw a great revival of interest in labyrinths and mazes. (Jeff Saward, a British labyrinth expert, has pointed out that the same thing happened at the end of the nineteenth.) On a practical level, the maze craze—the building of puzzle mazes as tourist attractions and the carving of cornfields into maize mazes—has saved many stately homes in England and family farms in North America from falling into financial ruin. Spiritually, the discovery, or rediscovery, of the labyrinth as an aid to meditation has had a profound effect. Religious institutions from the so-called New Age to the profoundly conservative have installed permanent or temporary labyrinths for their worshippers. And like the stately homes that added a maze or two to draw a paying crowd, churches are finding new visitors (some of whom join as members) walking their paths. Medical facilities are the new growth sectors, with hospitals and clinics adding labyrinths for their patients, their patients’ families and the medical staff itself. Lap-sized labyrinths made of wood, plastic or just an image printed on cloth or a piece of paper are now common sights at bedsides, where patients follow the ancient pathways with their fingers to seek the peace and comfort some walkers find. And the trendiest health spas now often have labyrinths on their well-manicured grounds.

I should make a personal statement concerning how I feel about labyrinths. I have walked hundreds of them in France, Britain and the United States, ones in cathedrals, fields, public parks, woods, playgrounds, Renaissance fairs, backyards, just about anywhere. They have been made of stone or turf or brick or canvas, been lined with hedges or marked out with chalk, flags, seashells, tree stumps, masking tape or—once—Christmas tree lights. I have never had a profound flash of insight or a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus revelation, as some have reported. I have never been cured of any medical affliction. Yet I believe that walking a full-sized medieval or Chartres Cathedral–style labyrinth can be a deeply moving experience, that it can have a truly calming effect and that every now and then, it can be an occasion of joy. The happy moments need not be profound. I once found myself happily remembering the stations not of the cross, but of stops on a suburban railway line. I have sensed that the way to the center can be introspective and the way out as upbeat as what I imagine the way back from the cemetery must be like at a New Orleans jazz funeral. Sometimes, that is, not always. With me, what is triggered most often by walking those twisting, curving paths is memory, good memories and bad ones, and now and then a sense of moving through a design as old as the human imagination, one that’s blessedly free of dogma and judgment.

At the conclusion of “Little Gidding,” the last of his “Four Quartets,” T. S. Eliot writes:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

 And know the place for the first time.

It is a popular quotation with labyrinth enthusiasts in that it suggests a feeling they know well. Apt as Eliot is, I prefer the concluding lines of Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”:

Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary, 

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection. 

But perhaps it’s best to consider the words of a working labyrinth builder. Ariane Burgess is a Scot who now lives in New York City and continues to rally children of the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx to help her construct labyrinths in the shadows of their neighborhood’s high-rise housing projects. She says, “When volunteers look at a labyrinth and say, ‘Nothing’s in the center,’ I say, ‘You are.’ ”

Unending Mystery 

David Willis McCullough