Black Magic and Its Exposure

 ‘And now, citizens,’ Bengalsky began, smiling his baby smile, ‘there is about to come before you ...’ Here Bengalsky interrupted himself and spoke in a different tone: ‘I see the audience has grown for the third part. We’ve got half the city here! I met a friend the other day and said to him: “Why don’t you come to our show? Yesterday we had half the city.” And he says to me: “I live in the other half!” ’ Bengalsky paused, waiting for a burst of laughter, but as no one laughed, he went on: ‘... And so, now comes the famous foreign artiste, Monsieur Woland, with a seance of black magic. Well, both you and I know,’ here Bengalsky smiled a wise smile, ‘that there’s no such thing in the world, and that it’s all just superstition, and Maestro Woland is simply a perfect master of the technique of conjuring, as we shall see from the most interesting part, that is, the exposure of this technique, and since we’re all of us to a man both for technique and for its exposure, let’s bring on Mr Woland! ...’

After uttering all this claptrap, Bengalsky pressed his palms together and waved them in greeting through the slit of the curtain, which caused it to part with a soft rustle.

The entrance of the magician with his long assistant and the cat, who came on stage on his hind legs, pleased the audience greatly.

‘An armchair for me,’ Woland ordered in a low voice, and that same second an armchair appeared on stage, no one knew how or from where, in which the magician sat down. Tell me, my gentle Fagott,‘ Woland inquired of the checkered clown, who evidently had another appellation than Koroviev, ’what do you think, the Moscow populace has changed significantly, hasn’t it?‘

The magician looked out at the hushed audience, struck by the appearance of the armchair out of nowhere.

‘That it has, Messire,’ Fagott-Koroviev replied in a low voice.

‘You’re right. The city folk have changed greatly ... externally, that is ... as has the city itself, incidentally ... Not to mention their clothing, these ... what do you call them ... trams, automobiles ... have appeared ...’

‘Buses...’ Fagott prompted deferentially.

The audience listened attentively to this conversation, thinking it constituted a prelude to the magic tricks. The wings were packed with performers and stage-hands, and among their faces could be seen the tense, pale face of Rimsky.

The physiognomy of Bengalsky, who had retreated to the side of the stage, began to show some perplexity. He raised one eyebrow slightly and, taking advantage of a pause, spoke:

‘The foreign artiste is expressing his admiration for Moscow and its technological development, as well as for the Muscovites.’ Here Bengalsky smiled twice, first to the stalls, then to the gallery.

Woland, Fagott and the cat turned their heads in the direction of the master of ceremonies.

‘Did I express admiration?’ the magician asked the checkered Fagott.

‘By no means, Messire, you never expressed any admiration,’ came the reply.

‘Then what is the man saying?’

‘He quite simply lied!’ the checkered assistant declared sonorously, for the whole theatre to hear, and turning to Bengalsky, he added: ‘Congrats, citizen, you done lied!’

Tittering spattered from the gallery, but Bengalsky gave a start and goggled his eyes.

‘Of course, I’m not so much interested in buses, telephones and other...’

‘Apparatuses,’ the checkered one prompted.

‘Quite right, thank you,’ the magician spoke slowly in a heavy bass,

‘as in a question of much greater importance: have the city folk changed inwardly?’

‘Yes, that is the most important question, sir.’

There was shrugging and an exchanging of glances in the wings, Bengalsky stood all red, and Rimsky was pale. But here, as if sensing the nascent alarm, the magician said:

‘However, we’re talking away, my dear Fagott, and the audience is beginning to get bored. My gentle Fagott, show us some simple little thing to start with.’

The audience stirred. Fagott and the cat walked along the footlights to opposite sides of the stage. Fagott snapped his fingers, and with a rollicking Three, four!‘ snatched a deck of cards from the air, shuffled it, and sent it in a long ribbon to the cat. The cat intercepted it and sent it back. The satiny snake whiffled, Fagott opened his mouth like a nestling and swallowed it all card by card. After which the cat bowed, scraping his right hind paw, winning himself unbelievable applause.

‘Class! Real class!’ rapturous shouts came from the wings.

And Fagott jabbed his finger at the stalls and announced:

‘You’ll find that same deck, esteemed citizens, on citizen Parchevsky in the seventh row, just between a three-rouble bill and a summons to court in connection with the payment of alimony to citizen Zelkova.’

There was a stirring in the stalls, people began to get up, and finally some citizen whose name was indeed Parchevsky, all crimson with amazement, extracted the deck from his wallet and began sticking it up in the air, not knowing what to do with it.

‘You may keep it as a souvenir!’ cried Fagott. ‘Not for nothing did you say at dinner yesterday that if it weren’t for poker your life in Moscow would be utterly unbearable.’

‘An old trick!’ came from the gallery. The one in the stalls is from the same company.‘

‘You think so?’ shouted Fagott, squinting at the gallery. ‘In that case you’re also one of us, because the deck is now in your pocket!’

There was movement in the balcony, and a joyful voice said:

‘Right! He’s got it! Here, here! ... Wait! It’s ten-rouble bills!’ Those sitting in the stalls turned their heads. In the gallery a bewildered citizen found in his pocket a bank-wrapped packet with ‘One thousand roubles’ written on it. His neighbours hovered over him, and he, in amazement, picked at the wrapper with his fingernail, trying to find out if the bills were real or some sort of magic ones.

‘By God, they’re real! Ten-rouble bills!’ joyful cries came from the gallery.

‘I want to play with the same kind of deck,’ a fat man in the middle of the stalls requested merrily.

‘Avec playzeer!’ Fagott responded. ‘But why just you? Everyone will warmly participate!’ And he commanded: ‘Look up, please! ... One!’ There was a pistol in his hand. He shouted: ‘Two!’ The pistol was pointed up. He shouted: ‘Three!’ There was a flash, a bang, and all at once, from under the cupola, bobbing between the trapezes, white strips of paper began falling into the theatre.

They twirled, got blown aside, were drawn towards the gallery, bounced into the orchestra and on to the stage. In a few seconds, the rain of money, ever thickening, reached the seats, and the spectators began snatching at it.

Hundreds of arms were raised, the spectators held the bills up to the lighted stage and saw the most true and honest-to-God watermarks. The smell also left no doubts: it was the incomparably delightful smell of freshly printed money. The whole theatre was seized first with merriment and then with amazement. The word ‘money, money!’ hummed everywhere, there were gasps of ‘ah, ah!’ and merry laughter. One or two were already crawling in the aisles, feeling under the chairs. Many stood on the seats, trying to catch the flighty, capricious notes.

Bewilderment was gradually coming to the faces of the policemen, and performers unceremoniously began sticking their heads out from the wings.

In the dress circle a voice was heard: ‘What’re you grabbing at? It’s mine, it flew to me!’ and another voice: ‘Don’t shove me, or you’ll get shoved back!’ And suddenly there came the sound of a whack. At once a policeman’s helmet appeared in the dress circle, and someone from the dress circle was led away.

The general agitation was increasing, and no one knows where it all would have ended if Fagott had not stopped the rain of money by suddenly blowing into the air.

Two young men, exchanging significant and merry glances, took off from their seats and made straight for the buffet. There was a hum in the theatre, all the spectators’ eyes glittered excitedly. Yes, yes, no one knows where it all would have ended if Bengalsky had not summoned his strength and acted. Trying to gain better control of himself, he rubbed his hands, as was his custom, and in his most resounding voice spoke thus:

‘Here, citizens, you and I have just beheld a case of so-called mass hypnosis. A purely scientific experiment, proving in the best way possible that there are no miracles in magic. Let us ask Maestro Woland to expose this experiment for us. Presently, citizens, you will see these supposed banknotes disappear as suddenly as they appeared.’

Here he applauded, but quite alone, while a confident smile played on his face, yet in his eyes there was no such confidence, but rather an expression of entreaty.

The audience did not like Bengalsky’s speech. Total silence fell, which was broken by the checkered Fagott.

‘And this is a case of so-called lying,’ he announced in a loud, goatish tenor. ‘The notes, citizens, are genuine.’

‘Bravo!’ a bass barked from somewhere on high.

This one, incidentally,‘ here Fagott pointed to Bengalsky, ’annoys me. Keeps poking his nose where nobody’s asked him, spoils the seance with false observations! What’re we going to do with him?‘

Tear his head off!‘ someone up in the gallery said severely.

‘What’s that you said? Eh?’ Fagott responded at once to this outrageous suggestion. Tear his head off? There’s an idea! Behemoth!‘ he shouted to the cat. ’Go to it! Ein, zwei, drei!!‘

And an unheard-of thing occurred. The fur bristled on the cat’s back, and he gave a rending miaow. Then he compressed himself into a ball and shot like a panther straight at Bengalsky’s chest, and from there on to his head. Growling, the cat sank his plump paws into the skimpy chevelure of the master of ceremonies and in two twists tore the head from the thick neck with a savage howl.

The two and a half thousand people in the theatre cried out as one. Blood spurted in fountains from the torn neck arteries and poured over the shirt-front and tailcoat. The headless body paddled its feet somehow absurdly and sat down on the floor. Hysterical women’s cries came from the audience. The cat handed the head to Fagott, who lifted it up by the hair and showed it to the audience, and the head cried desperately for all the theatre to hear:

‘A doctor!’

‘Will you pour out such drivel in the future?’ Fagott asked the weeping head menacingly.

‘Never again!’ croaked the head.

‘For God’s sake, don’t torture him!’ a woman’s voice from a box seat suddenly rose above the clamour, and the magician turned in the direction of that voice.

‘So, what then, citizens, shall we forgive him?’ Fagott asked, addressing the audience.

‘Forgive him, forgive him!’ separate voices, mostly women‘s, spoke first, then merged into one chorus with the men’s.

‘What are your orders, Messire?’ Fagott asked the masked man.

‘Well, now,’ the latter replied pensively, ‘they’re people like any other people ... They love money, but that has always been so ... Mankind loves money, whatever it’s made of — leather, paper, bronze, gold. Well, they’re light-minded ... well, what of it ... mercy sometimes knocks at their hearts ... ordinary people ... In general, reminiscent of the former ones ... only the housing problem has corrupted them...’ And he ordered loudly: Tut the head on.‘

The cat, aiming accurately, planted the head on the neck, and it sat exactly in its place, as if it had never gone anywhere. Above all, there was not even any scar left on the neck. The cat brushed Bengalsky’s tailcoat and shirt-front with his paws, and all traces of blood disappeared from them. Fagott got the sitting Bengalsky to his feet, stuck a packet of money into his coat pocket, and sent him from the stage with the words:

‘Buzz off, it’s more fun without you!’

Staggering and looking around senselessly, the master of ceremonies had plodded no farther than the fire post when he felt sick. He cried out pitifully:

‘My head, my head! ...’

Among those who rushed to him was Rimsky. The master of ceremonies wept, snatched at something in the air with his hands, and muttered:

‘Give me my head, give me back my head ... Take my apartment, take my paintings, only give me back my head! ...’

A messenger ran for a doctor. They tried to lie Bengalsky down on a sofa in the dressing room, but he began to struggle, became violent. They had to call an ambulance. When the unfortunate master of ceremonies was taken away, Rimsky ran back to the stage and saw that new wonders were taking place on it. Ah, yes, incidentally, either then or a little earlier, the magician disappeared from the stage together with his faded armchair, and it must be said that the public took absolutely no notice of it, carried away as it was by the extraordinary things Fagott was unfolding on stage.

And Fagott, having packed off the punished master of ceremonies, addressed the public thus:

‘All righty, now that we’ve kicked that nuisance out, let’s open a ladies’ shop!’

And all at once the floor of the stage was covered with Persian carpets, huge mirrors appeared, lit by greenish tubes at the sides, and between the mirrors — display windows, and in them the merrily astonished spectators saw Parisian ladies’ dresses of various colours and cuts. In some of the windows, that is, while in others there appeared hundreds of ladies’ hats, with feathers and without feathers, and — with buckles or without - hundreds of shoes, black, white, yellow, leather, satin, suede, with straps, with stones. Among the shoes there appeared cases of perfume, mountains of handbags of antelope hide, suede, silk, and among these, whole heaps of little elongated cases of gold metal such as usually contain lipstick.

A red-headed girl appeared from devil knows where in a black evening dress — a girl nice in all respects, had she not been marred by a queer scar on her neck — smiling a proprietary smile by the display windows.

Fagott, grinning sweetly, announced that the firm was offering perfectly gratis an exchange of the ladies’ old dresses and shoes for Parisian models and Parisian shoes. The same held, he added, for the handbags and other things.

The cat began scraping with his hind paw, while his front paw performed the gestures appropriate to a doorman opening a door.

The girl sang out sweetly, though with some hoarseness, rolling her r‘s, something not quite comprehensible but, judging by the women’s faces in the stalls, very tempting:

‘Guérlain, Chanel, Mitsouko, Narcisse Noir, Chanel No. 5, evening gowns, cocktail dresses ...’

Fagott wriggled, the cat bowed, the girl opened the glass windows.

‘Welcome!’ yelled Fagott. ‘With no embarrassment or ceremony!’

The audience was excited, but as yet no one ventured on stage. Finally some brunette stood up in the tenth row of the stalls and, smiling as if to say it was all the same to her and she did not give a hoot, went and climbed on stage by the side stairs.

‘Bravo!’ Fagott shouted. ‘Greetings to the first customer! Behemoth, a chair! Let’s start with the shoes, madame.’

The brunette sat in the chair, and Fagott at once poured a whole heap of shoes on the rug in front of her. The brunette removed her right shoe, tried a lilac one, stamped on the rug, examined the heel.

They won’t pinch?‘ she asked pensively.

To this Fagott exclaimed with a hurt air:

‘Come, come!’ and the cat miaowed resentfully.

‘I’ll take this pair, m’sieur,‘ the brunette said with dignity, putting on the second shoe as well.

The brunette’s old shoes were tossed behind a curtain, and she proceeded there herself, accompanied by the red-headed girl and Fagott, who was carrying several fashionable dresses on hangers. The cat bustled about, helped, and for greater importance hung a measuring tape around his neck.

A minute later the brunette came from behind the curtain in such a dress that the stalls all let out a gasp. The brave woman, who had become astonishingly prettier, stopped at the mirror, moved her bare shoulders, touched the hair on her nape and, twisting, tried to peek at her back.

The firm asks you to accept this as a souvenir,‘ said Fagott, and he offered the brunette an open case with a flacon in it.

‘Merci,’ the brunette said haughtily and went down the steps to the stalls. As she walked, the spectators jumped up and touched the case.

And here there came a clean breakthrough, and from all sides women marched on to the stage. Amid the general agitation of talk, chuckles and gasps, a man’s voice was heard: ‘I won’t allow it!’ and a woman’s: ‘Despot and philistine! Don’t break my arm!’ Women disappeared behind the curtain, leaving their dresses there and coming out in new ones. A whole row of ladies sat on stools with gilded legs, stamping the carpet energetically with newly shod feet. Fagott was on his knees, working away with a metal shoehorn; the cat, fainting under piles of purses and shoes, plodded back and forth between the display windows and the stools; the girl with the disfigured neck appeared and disappeared, and reached the point where she started rattling away entirely in French, and, surprisingly, the women all understood her from half a word, even those who did not know a single word of French.

General amazement was aroused by a man edging his way on-stage. He announced that his wife had the flu, and he therefore asked that something be sent to her through him. As proof that he was indeed married, the citizen was prepared to show his passport. The solicitous husband’s announcement was met with guffaws. Fagott shouted that he believed him like his own self, even without the passport, and handed the citizen two pairs of silk stockings, and the cat for his part added a little tube of lipstick.

Late-coming women tore on to the stage, and off the stage the lucky ones came pouring down in ball gowns, pyjamas with dragons, sober formal outfits, little hats tipped over one eyebrow.

Then Fagott announced that owing to the lateness of the hour, the shop would close in exactly one minute until the next evening, and an unbelievable scramble arose on-stage. Women hastily grabbed shoes without trying them on. One burst behind the curtain like a storm, got out of her dress there, took possession of the first thing that came to hand - a silk dressing-gown covered with huge bouquets — and managed to pick up two cases of perfume besides.

Exactly a minute later a pistol shot rang out, the mirrors disappeared, the display windows and stools dropped away, the carpet melted into air, as did the curtain. Last to disappear was the high mountain of old dresses and shoes, and the stage was again severe, empty and bare.

And it was here that a new character mixed into the affair. A pleasant, sonorous, and very insistent baritone came from box no. 2:

‘All the same it is desirable, citizen artiste, that you expose the technique of your tricks to the spectators without delay, especially the trick with the paper money. It is also desirable that the master of ceremonies return to the stage. The spectators are concerned about his fate.’

The baritone belonged to none other than that evening’s guest of honour, Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, chairman of the Acoustics Commission of the Moscow theatres.

Arkady Apollonovich was in his box with two ladies: the older one dressed expensively and fashionably, the other one, young and pretty, dressed in a simpler way. The first, as was soon discovered during the drawing up of the report, was Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, and the second was his distant relation, a promising debutante, who had come from Saratov and was living in the apartment of Arkady Apollonovich and his wife.

‘Pardone!’ Fagott replied. ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing here to expose, it’s all clear.’

‘No, excuse me! The exposure is absolutely necessary. Without it your brilliant numbers will leave a painful impression. The mass of spectators demands an explanation.’

The mass of spectators,‘ the impudent clown interrupted Sempleyarov, ’doesn’t seem to be saying anything. But, in consideration of your most esteemed desire, Arkady Apollonovich, so be it - I will perform an exposure. But, to that end, will you allow me one more tiny number?‘

‘Why not?’ Arkady Apollonovich replied patronizingly. ‘But there must be an exposure.’

‘Very well, very well, sir. And so, allow me to ask, where were you last evening, Arkady Apollonovich?’

At this inappropriate and perhaps even boorish question, Arkady Apollonovich’s countenance changed, and changed quite drastically.

‘Last evening Arkady Apollonovich was at a meeting of the Acoustics Commission,’ Arkady Apollonovich’s wife declared very haughtily, ‘but I don’t understand what that has got to do with magic.’

‘Ouee, madame!’ Fagott agreed. ‘Naturally you don’t understand. As for the meeting, you are totally deluded. After driving off to the said meeting, which incidentally was not even scheduled for last night, Arkady Apollonovich dismissed his chauffeur at the Acoustics Commission building on Clean Ponds’ (the whole theatre became hushed), ’and went by bus to Yelokhovskaya Street to visit an actress from the regional itinerant theatre, Militsa Andreevna Pokobatko, with whom he spent some four hours.‘

‘Aie!’ someone cried out painfully in the total silence.

Arkady Apollonovich’s young relation suddenly broke into a low and terrible laugh.

‘It’s all clear!’ she exclaimed. ‘And I’ve long suspected it. Now I see why that giftless thing got the role of Louisa!’1

And, swinging suddenly, she struck Arkady Apollonovich on the head with her short and fat violet umbrella.

Meanwhile, the scoundrelly Fagott, alias Koroviev, was shouting:

‘Here, honourable citizens, is one case of the exposure Arkady Apollonovich so importunately insisted on!’

‘How dare you touch Arkady Apollonovich, you vile creature!’ Arkady Apollonovich’s wife asked threateningly, rising in the box to all her gigantic height.

A second brief wave of satanic laughter seized the young relation.

‘Who else should dare touch him,’ she answered, guffawing, ‘if not me!’ And for the second time there came the dry, crackling sound of the umbrella bouncing off the head of Arkady Apollonovich.

‘Police! Seize her!!’ Sempleyarov’s wife shouted in such a terrible voice that many hearts went cold.

And here the cat also leaped out to the footlights and suddenly barked in a human voice for all the theatre to hear:

The seance is over! Maestro! Hack out a march!‘

The half-crazed conductor, unaware of what he was doing, waved his baton, and the orchestra did not play, or even strike up, or even bang away at, but precisely, in the cat’s loathsome expression, hacked out some incredible march of an unheard-of brashness.

For a moment there was an illusion of having heard once upon a time, under southern stars, in a café-chantant, some barely intelligible, half-blind, but rollicking words to this march:

His Excellency reached the stage 

Of liking barnyard fowl. 

He took under his patronage 

Three young girls and an owl!!!

Or maybe these were not the words at all, but there were others to the same music, extremely indecent ones. That is not the important thing, the important thing is that, after all this, something like babel broke loose in the Variety. The police went running to Sempleyarov’s box, people were climbing over the barriers, there were bursts of infernal guffawing and furious shouts, drowned in the golden clash of the orchestra’s cymbals.

And one could see that the stage was suddenly empty, and that the hoodwinker Fagott, as well as the brazen tom-cat Behemoth, had melted into air, vanished as the magician had vanished earlier in his armchair with the faded upholstery.

The Master and Margarita,

Mikhail Bulgakov

While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

 If the Cinderella story had been written by someone much grimmer than the Brothers Grimm, the star could well be the author of the current book. After escaping from the utter prison of North Korea; after surviving the sex slavery imposed on her (and her mother, simultaneously) in China; after educating herself in an absolutely unlikely manner in South Korea, she made her way to the United States, and enrolled in Columbia University, a once-great beacon of Western freedom. To say that this was the dream of a lifetime is to radically overstate the case; this was something undreamed of, something outside the realm of all reasonable possibility. Ms. Park, guided by the spirit of her entrepreneurial father, truly valued education—had endeavoured in all ways to educate herself as thoroughly as possible, in the traditional sense, when she managed to make her way to South Korea, where she pored over, among other works, the books of the great George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984.

And what happened when she entered the hallowed halls of that august institution of higher education?

She encountered the same ideology that had corrupted her homeland and doomed its inhabitants to a life in hell. Of course, it was America: it was Totalitarianism Lite, offered, as all such things are in this over-coddled and narcissistic time, as a convenient fashion statement; a faux identity; a means of parading unearned moral virtue while biding time as an oppressor-in-training—the inevitable and truly desired fate of every virtue-signaling Ivy League graduate. She was upbraided by her pathetic professors for daring to admire Jane Austen, whose books “promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy” and “propagate the idea that women are inferior to men; that only white males are fully evolved and capable of higher-level thinking; that salvation is only achievable through the dogma of Christianity” (of course; or else). And Yeonmi learned that she better think and feel that way—even when listening to “Western” classical music (or else). There was nothing more unacceptable at Columbia than to be a “SIX HIRB”: a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.

Yeonmi Park grew up in a totalitarian nightmare. As a child, she roasted and consumed insects to survive, when she could find them. As someone from a poor family (and that genuinely meant poor in North Korea) she had to bring five rabbit pelts to class and hand them over to maintain any social standing whatsoever with the propagandists who passed as teachers. She grew up among people whose dying wish was meat stew and rice. She was subject to the worst dictatorship on the planet—maybe the worst dictatorship ever promulgated, although the competition for that vaunted position is very fierce. She came to the US, miraculously, and encountered fools dallying with the same ideas that had made her life something almost unbelievably harsh—certainly that, by Western standards. She attempted with all her heart, as she is doing in the present volume, to warn us here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptations that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that country’s beleaguered citizens and the rest of the world. Who led the rush to lockdown? China. Who copied the actions of that terrible state?

The cowardly fools of the West.

Park is warning us not to continue to do so.

Will we listen?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

—JORDAN B. PETERSON

Read what gives you delight ...

 While I agree with Harold Bloom about many things and am thankful for his long advocacy for the greatest of stories and poems, in these matters I am firmly on the side of Lewis and Chesterton. Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed. The poet W. H. Auden once wrote, “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit”—for our own personal Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.

It’s noteworthy that what someone like the young Richard Rodriguez thought of as true and high seriousness—reading masterpieces and masterpieces only—Auden sees as “frivolous.” This is not so paradoxical as it seems. What’s frivolous is not the masterpiece itself, but the idea that at any given time I the reader am prepared to meet its standards, to rise to its challenges. Those challenges wear heavily upon the unprepared reader (at age ten or twenty or sixty) and as a result the reading, which in anticipation promised such riches of meaning, proves in fact to be that dread appointment with the elliptical trainer I mentioned earlier. And who needs that?

At the end of his memoir Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, Walter Kirn recalls a time when, as a recent graduate of Princeton, he read a book. All his life he had read only to impress others, primarily his teachers: he had been a kind of cynical doppelgänger of Richard Rodriguez, seeing reading only as an instrument by which some other kind of good might be achieved. (“I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. … What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?”) But having succeeded at this game, he discerns its emptiness, and the unraveling of all his ambitions leads to a near-complete breakdown: “My education was running in reverse as my mind shed its outermost layer of signs and symbols and shrank back to its dumb, preliterate state.” But it’s at this moment, with no one ordering him or expecting him to do any such thing, he randomly picks up and decides to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then he moves on to Great Expectations.

And so, belatedly, haltingly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn’t sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren’t my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.

He concludes, “I wanted to find out what others thought.” For the first time in his life, Walter Kirn was reading at whim.

And it’s never too late to begin this new life as a free reader. Not long after Kirn’s book came out, Cathleen Schine wrote a wonderful essay for the New York Times about being a “teenage illiterate”—that is, having been turned off reading, especially literary reading, as a teenager and coming back to it only as an adult. At one point, frustrated with her inability to find books she liked and to stick with them, “I remembered a bag in the closet with stuff my ex-boyfriend had left behind, including a paperback copy of Our Mutual Friend, his favorite novel. A few days later I emerged from that exquisite book and cursed myself for wasting so much of my life doing things other than what God in all his wisdom clearly meant for me to do for the rest of my life: read Dickens.” For Schine this discovery “was a defining moment,” and “it could never have happened if I had not been blessedly illiterate.”

That is to say, she came upon a world of wonderful books when she was ready for them—when she could receive what they have to offer. “I got to read Huckleberry Finn for the first time when I was 35 years old. I read My Antonia for the first time last month. That is a kind of grace. If … I had read Huckleberry Finn at 14, would I have reread it at 35? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been the same transcendent experience as discovering it as an adult.”

So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.

From: The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction

Alan Jacobs

Books You Have Forgotten

 [Chapter]

(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read) 

AS WE HAVE NOW SEEN, there is not much between a book that has been “read”—if that category still has a meaning— and one that has been skimmed. But Valéry has even better grounds than this for merely flipping through the works he discusses, and Baskerville, likewise, for commenting on books without opening them, which is that the most serious and thorough reading quickly metamorphoses after the fact into summary. To appreciate this, we must take into account a dimension of reading neglected by many theorists: that of time. Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.

Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, rearranged as a function of current circumstances.

No reader is safe from this process of forgetting, not even the most voracious. Such was the case for Montaigne, who is fundamentally associated with ancient culture and libraries and who nevertheless presents himself, with a frankness that anticipates Valéry, as an eminently forgetful reader.

The flaws of memory are, in fact, a persistent theme in the Essais,1 if not the best known. Montaigne complains endlessly about his memory trouble and the unpleasantness it causes him. He tells us, for example, that he is incapable of going to look for a piece of information in his library without forgetting on the way what he is looking for. When speaking, he finds it necessary to maintain a tightly ordered discourse so as not to lose his train of thought. And he is so unable to remember names that he resolves to refer to his servants according to their jobs or countries of origin.

The problem grows so serious that Montaigne, always on the brink of an identity crisis, occasionally fears that he will forget his own name. He even goes so far as to ponder how he will navigate daily life on the inevitable day that such a misadventure occurs.

This general faultiness of memory plainly affects the books he has read. Toward the beginning of his essay on his reading, Montaigne unhesitatingly acknowledges his difficulty in keeping track of what he has read: “And if I am a man of some reading,” he declares, “I am a man of no retentiveness.”2

Montaigne experiences a progressive and systematic erasure that attacks every component of the book from the author to the text itself, each vanishing one after the other from his memory as quickly as it entered:

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.3This effacement, in other words, is the flip side of an enrichment. Having made the text his own, Montaigne rushes to forget it, as though a book were no more than a temporary delivery system for some general form of wisdom and, its mission accomplished, might as well disappear. But the fact that the implications of forgetting are not altogether negative does not solve all its associated problems, especially the psychological ones. Nor does it dispel the anguish, intensified by the daily obligation of speaking to others, of not being able to fix anything in one’s memory.

It is true that we all experience mishaps of this sort, and that all literature ends up providing us only a fragile and temporary kind of knowledge. What seems particular to the case of Montaigne, however, and indicates the breadth of his problems with memory, is his inability to recall whether he has read a specific book:

To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.4

The memory deficit is revealed as even more acute in this case, since it is no longer just the book but the experience of reading that is forgotten. Here, the forgetting erases not just the contents of the object—whose general shape, at least, can still be called to mind—but the act of reading itself, as though the radical nature of the erasure had ended up affecting everything related to the object. We would be justified in such circumstances in wondering whether reading that we cannot even remember performing still deserves to be called reading.

Curiously, Montaigne displays a relatively precise memory of certain books he dislikes; he is, for instance, capable of distinguishing different kinds of texts by Cicero or even the different books of the Aeneid.5 One gets the impression that these texts in particular—conceivably because they made a deeper impression than the others—have escaped oblivion. Here, too, the affective factor proves decisive in the substitution of a screen book for the hypothetical real book.

Montaigne finds a solution to his memory problem through an ingenious system of notations at the end of each volume. Once forgetfulness has set in, he can use these notes to rediscover his opinion of the author and his work at the time of his original reading. We can assume that another function of the notes is to assure him that he has indeed read the works in which they were inscribed, like blazes on a trail that are intended to show the way during future periods of amnesia.

What follows in this essay about reading is even more astonishing. After explaining the principle behind his notational system, Montaigne unflappably presents the reader with a few excerpts. In doing so, he tells the reader about books that it is hard to say whether he has read, since he has forgotten their contents and must rely on his own notations—writing, for example, “Here is what I put some ten years ago in my Guicciardini (for whatever language my books speak, I speak to them in my own).”6The first author “discussed” is indeed the Renaissance historian Guicciardini, whom Montaigne deems to be a “diligent historiographer,” and all the more trustworthy in that he was himself an actor in the events he recounts and seems little inclined to flatter those in power. His second example is Philippe de Commines, for whom Montaigne has unstinting praise, admiring his simplicity of language, narrative purity, and absence of vanity. Third, he evokes the Memoirs7 of du Bellay, an author whose work in public office he admires, but who, he fears, is too much in the service of the king.8

In reading his notes in order to comment on these texts— which he may not remember reading, and even if he does, whose contents he may have forgotten—Montaigne finds himself in a contradictory position. The commentary he is reading is not exactly his, without its being foreign to him either. He conveys to his reader the reaction he had to these books on an earlier occasion, without taking the trouble to verify whether that reaction coincides with what he might experience today.

For Montaigne, an inveterate practitioner of the art of quotation, this is an unprecedented situation: instead of citing other writers, he cites himself. Indeed, at this extreme the distinction between quotation and self-quotation vanishes. Having forgotten what he said about these authors and even that he said anything at all, Montaigne has become other to himself. He is separated from the earlier incarnation of himself by the defects of his memory, and his readings of his notes represent so many attempts at reunification.

However surprising we may find Montaigne’s reliance on this system of notes, he is, after all, only drawing out the logical consequence of something known to anyone familiar with books, whatever the state of his memory. What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion.

The reader of Montaigne has still more surprises ahead of him. The author goes on to reveal that as forgetful as he may be of other people’s books, to the point where he cannot even recall whether he has read them, he is no more capable of remembering his own:

It is no great wonder if my book follows the fate of other books, and if my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read, and of what I give as of what I receive.9Incapable of remembering what he has written, Montaigne finds himself confronted with the fear of all those losing their memory: repeating yourself without realizing it, and knowing the anguish of losing mastery over your own writing only to remain unwittingly all too faithful to yourself. His fear is all the more justified in that the Essais address not topical subjects, but timeless questions. These may be broached on any occasion, and a writer without memory is thus vulnerable to treating them again without knowing it, and in identical terms:

Now I am bringing in here nothing newly learned. These are common ideas; having perhaps thought of them a hundred times, I am afraid I have already set them down.10

These “repetitions,” which Montaigne finds regrettable in an author like Homer, seem to him even more “ruinous” in texts like his own, “which attract only superficial and passing attention,”11 and which he risks rewriting word by word, from one chapter to the next, without even perceiving it.

But fear of repeating himself is not the only embarrassing consequence of forgetting his own books. Another is that Montaigne does not even recognize his own texts when they are quoted in his presence, leaving him to speak about texts he hasn’t read even though he has written them.

For Montaigne, therefore, reading is related not only to defective memory, but also, given the contradictions that arise from it, to the anguish of madness. While reading is enriching in the moment it occurs, it is at the same time a source of depersonalization, since, in our inability to stabilize the smallest snippet of text, it leaves us incapable of coinciding with ourselves.

With his repeated sense that his self is being eclipsed, Montaigne, more than any of the other authors we have thus far encountered, seems to erase any distinction between reading and non-reading. Indeed, if after being read a book immediately begins to disappear from consciousness, to the point where it becomes impossible to remember whether we have read it, the very notion of reading loses its relevance, since any book, read or unread, will end up the equivalent of any other. 

However extreme his case may be, Montaigne’s relationship with books reveals the true nature of the relationship we all have with them. We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. In the end we are left with falsified remnants of books, analogous to the screen memories discussed by Freud, whose principal function is to conceal others.

Following Montaigne, we should perhaps use the term unreading rather than reading to characterize the unceasing sweep of our forgetfulness. This process involves both the disappearance and the blurring of references, and transforms books, often reduced to their titles or to a few approximate pages, into dim shadows gliding along the surface of our consciousness. 

In every consideration of reading, we should remain mindful that books are linked not only to knowledge, but also to loss of memory and even identity. To read is not only to inform ourselves, but also, and perhaps above all, to forget, and thus to confront our capacity for oblivion.

The reading subject that emerges in this essay of Montaigne’s is not a unified and self-assured figure but an uncertain one, lost among fragments of texts he can barely identify. For this figure, no longer able to distinguish his own texts from those of others, each encounter with a book becomes terrifying, for it threatens to bring him face-to-face with his own madness.

As agonizing as it may be, Montaigne’s experience may nonetheless have the salutary effect of reassuring those to whom cultural literacy seems unattainable. It is vital to keep in mind that the most conscientious readers we might speak to are also, just like Montaigne, involuntary non-readers, and that their forgetfulness extends even to books that in all good faith they believe themselves to have mastered.

To conceive of reading as loss—whether it occurs after we skim a book, in absorbing a book by hearsay, or through the gradual process of forgetting—rather than as gain is a psychological resource essential to anyone seeking effective strategies for surviving awkward literary confrontations. Having defined the different kinds of non-reading, it is to these social situations that we now turn our attention.

How to Talk About 

Books You Haven’t Read 

PIERRE BAYARD

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

 Foreword 

PIERRE BAYARD PUTSHIS readers—this reader—in a uniquely paradoxical position. Having just read his witty How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I have now discovered that there was no reason for me to have read it in the first place. But without having read it, how would I have known that I could just as well have skimmed it, or perhaps heard about it somewhere, or possibly formed a sense of the book based entirely on what other readers have said about it, on the sort of received opinions about a work that float around in the culture? In addition, not having read the book shouldn’t—or so Pierre Bayard has assured me—prevent me from talking confidently and learnedly about it, or even from writing these brief, introductory words of appreciation. But how would I have known that without Bayard’s sage advice, which I could only have found in his wise and original volume?

In any case, the fact remains that I am very glad I did read Bayard’s book. Had I skimmed it too rapidly, I might have missed the chapter in which he gives us the thrilling examples of literary doublespeak with which Paul Valéry eulogized Marcel Proust and Anatole France while making it quite clear that he had hardly read a word of their work. Had I not read Bayard, I would not have found myself determined not only to read—but to reread—Graham Greene’s The Third Man, as well as the essay in which Montaigne lamented his failing memory and its effect on his ability to read and retain what he had read. I would not have been so thoroughly entertained by Laura Bohannan’s attempt to discuss Hamlet with a group of West African tribesmen whose responses were hilariously and informatively out of synch with the instant, cross-cultural recognition of Shakespeare’s universality that she expected. Nor would I have been so pleased to discover that Bayard’s advice to those who meet writers of books they have not read confirms, so very gratifyingly, my own observation and experience: “Praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book, and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.”

Having read such passages, I can only hope that I am not being insufficiently ambiguous when I say that what I liked best about Pierre Bayard’s sly meditation on the permissibility, the importance, and the sheer necessity of not reading is how, without our quite being aware of it, it becomes a study of the psychology of reading and of the purposes of literature, and a hymn to the pleasures of reading and to all the reasons why we cannot live without it.

—Francine Prose

The word 'education' means 'leading out'. To execution, perhaps.

 Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

Astonishment is the only realistic emotion.

The fact that something is far-fetched is no reason why it should not be true; it cannot be as far-fetched as the fact that something exists.

It is axiomatic that the importance of a given thing cannot be determined by the number of people who are prepared to admit that it is important.

In the light of absolute uncertainty, possibilities are facts and emotions are actions.

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get.

The depth of human suffering is the measure of the aversion which the human mind has for reality.

It is inconceivable that anything should be existing. It is not inconceivable that a lot of people should also be existing who are not interested in the fact that they exist. But it is certainly very odd.

There is nothing so relaxing as responsibility; nor any relief from strain so great as that which comes of recognising one's own importance.

All the prisoners are so sensible. They wouldn't use a file in case they cut themselves.

No one says: The infinite is infinitely important; nothing in the world is more than finite, therefore it is easy to act uncompromisingly. The nearest they get to this is: Nothing is very important, so there is no point in being uncompromising.

The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

The object of modern science is to make all aspects of reality equally boring, so that no one will be tempted to think about them.

If you say to a theoretical physicist that something is inconceivable, he will reply: 'It only appears inconceivable because you are naively trying to conceive it. Stop thinking and all will be well.'

The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.

Philosophy should not teach you to be mistrustful of meta-physical questions, but of metaphysical answers. The unjustified assumptions which underlie the procedures of commonsense are at least as suspect as those which tell you how many angels can be placed on the point of a needle.

Philosophy thinks it has discovered that there are no absolutes.
It has actually discovered that human beings have no way of being sure what is absolute.

What everyone has against Ludwig of Bavaria is not that he ruined Bavaria but that he supported a genius in the process.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

If you stand up to the human race you lose something called their 'goodwill'; if you kowtow to them you gain . . . their per-mission to continue kowtowing.

Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.

It is very easy to make someone into a failure; you have only to prevent them from being a success.

It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one.

If the human race would take death seriously there would be no more of it.

Equality: It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them appear equally clever.

In the days of patronage by individuals you had to be dishonest to your patron; in the days of patronage by committees you have to be dishonest to everybody.

Democracy: everyone should have an equal opportunity to obstruct everybody else.

When people talk about 'the sanctity of the individual' they mean 'the sanctity of the statistical norm'.

The difference between an earned and unearned income—an unearned income might enable someone to do something; an earned income is a guarantee that he is wasting his time.

In an unenlightened society some people are forced to play degrading social roles; in an enlightened society, everyone is.

Only a hereditary aristocrat can be expected to recognise the confidence of genius; a plebeian or another genius would be too jealous.

The socially-disapproved attitudes are attitudes which it is possible to get wrong; the socially-approved attitudes are attitudes which it is impossible to get right.

I wouldn't expect society to recognise ability, but it might leave a few loop-holes for it.

In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.

You may despise fame; but if you do, you must despise the opinions of your neighbours.

Society is everybody's way of punishing one another because they daren't take it out on the universe.

'The Sabbath was made for man. And the universe too.' •

'Social justice'—the expression of universal hatred.

'Society is for man and man for society.'

War is a very good way of lowering the standard of living so that everyone has to concentrate on keeping alive. If they do have thoughts about reality, they won't have time to write them down.

Society is a self-regulating mechanism for preventing the fulfilment of its members.

I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say.

The mature person never tells the truth when a lie will do.
The human race is so megalomaniac; they think you're being conceited if you say you're better than everybody else.

Human nature: vindictiveness lightly coated with dishonesty.

A human relationship is what happens when you know you can rely on the other person to be as dishonest as you are.

Psychotics frequently invert the truth about themselves. E.g.: 'It's love that makes the world go round.' (It's hatred that makes the world stay put.)

It is not so much that people don't want other people to have advantages; they want them not to have advantages.

The human race does not have much imagination, or (what comes to the same thing) much appreciation of reality.

It is impossible to be certain that any part of your experience is not a hallucination, or that any step in your thinking is not erroneous.

The human race believes in not taking its problems seriously enough to solve them.

If anyone says ethical values are supremely important, you may be sure he hasn't any.

People having religions is an insult to the universe.

The desire to maintain an uncritical belief in the reality of the external world is a source of emotional disturbance which leads to irrationality and restriction of function.

On marriage: I can think of less painful ways of committing suicide.

If you think of women as human, they are exasperating on account of their incredible feebleness; of course, it's all right if you don't think of them as human at all.

People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

A girls' school is a school for domestic servants.

Women are like sane people in general—you can't imagine how they can bear to be like it but the last thing they want is to be told how to stop.

The object of the educational system is to make the child feel suitably guilty for the harm that has been done to him.

Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society.

The word 'education' means 'leading out'. To execution, perhaps.

Women are the last people to be trusted with children. Those who have repressed their own aspirations will scarcely be tolerant of the aspirations of others.

If my education taught me one thing it was this: that if you are ever in a tight corner you can expect everybody to ton on you with all they've got. This is an infallible law of sane psychology. 

There are some things that are sure to go wrong as soon as they stop going right.

The human race appears to cultivate feeble-mindedness. But this feeble-mindedness is not applied indiscriminately.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is lucky to escape with his life.

I decided to postulate infinitely many dimensions on grounds of economy of hypotheses.

A committee may be less likely than an individual to misuse funds; the question is whether it is equally likely to use them.

What is scandalous is not that stupid people should sometimes inherit private incomes; but that clever people should sometimes not.

The human race knows enough about thinking to prevent it.

Modern Definitions: 'Thinking is words, consciousness is behaviour, experiment is measurement.'

One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none.

Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.

A hundred trained people will never add up to one motivated one.

When you point out things which the human race has been carefully ignoring for centuries, on account of deep-seated emotional resistances, the expected outcome is not instant acclamation.

It is one of the major achievements of the human race that as its control of its environment increases, everyone becomes more— not less—immersed in the material.

That society exists to frustrate the individual may be seen from its attitude to work. It is only morally acceptable if you do not want to do it. If you do want to, it becomes a personal pleasure.

The most I ask of society is that it should express the will of the majority in a blind and imperfect manner. That would at least give one a sporting chance of survival.

Earning a living is regarded as moral. This is because a person who is answerable only to himself may or may not be wasting his time; an employed person is certain to be.

When the French Revolution decided to guillotine Lavoisier, he asked for a fortnight's grace to finish some experiments. The reply was that the Republic had no need of such things. The guillotining of Lavoisier was the true objective of the Revolution. It desired to destroy him so much that it was prepared incidentally to destroy any number of less intellectual persons en route.

We five in an age when humanity believes in itself. It believes in itself very thoroughly indeed. It is the beginning and the end to itself, its own solution to every problem. Humanity knows that philosophy was made by it, and religion was made by it, and society was made by it. In fact, reality was made by it. For (thus runs the reasoning) the agreement of a multiplicity of persons is the cri-terion we adopt for reality. There is no other criterion for deter-mining reality. There is no other sense in which the word 'reality' can be used. Therefore reality is what a collection of people agree to call by this name.

Thus Newton: 'It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact. . . . That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act on another, at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who in philosophical matters has a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.' It is, if you give it a little thought, equally inconceivable that brute matter should operate upon and affect other matter with mutual contact. It does not seem so simply be-cause, in the course of your life, you have become familiar with certain strange ways of affecting your environment called 'pulling' and 'pushing' things.

Adler once said that a genius is a person who contributes the most to the welfare of the human race. An unrecognised genius is impossible. So much for the compassion of Adler. There are no prisoners in the Bastille. Prisoners in the Bastille do not exist.
So much, also, for Adler's powers of analytical thought. Re-defining a word does not annihilate its original meaning. You could define geniuses as people of high ability who wanted to use it (for example). If you say a crow is not a large black bird, but a small white animal that says baa, the species originally known as crows goes on living in the world with all their problems intact, even if these problems are quite different from those of woolly lambs.

Psychology used to deal with introspection. We have decided that introspective reports are unreliable. (So they are—sane people don't practise introspection hard enough to become accurate.) The conclusion was that we would abandon the study of introspection and study only 'behaviour'. It is easier to study the 'behaviour' of rats than people, because rats are smaller and have fewer outside commitments. So modern psychology is mostly about rats.

Adler suggested that the best guide to what a person was actually motivated to bring about was provided by a study of his life-style—i.e. a study of the situations that recurred in his life— rather than of what he said he was aiming at.
This principle might be applied to collective entities such as organisations, societies, and the human race in toto. There is no need to postulate a group subconscious in order to do this. The combined subconscious motivation of the individual members is quite sufficient to produce a resultant nexus of forces which will permit certain developments and not others.
It is then clear that the history of the human race is to be under-stood as a prolonged effort not to gain control of its environment.

Tugging hard at its boodaces, the human race resists with moral indignation any suggestion that it might walk instead. 'Want us to stay here for ever, don't you,' it says, puffing away.

Celia Green

from the book The decline and fall of science 

Eva Vlaardingerbroek - The Forbidden Truth

Full Speech at CPAC Hungary

[In this video Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch political commentator, gives a speech at the CPAC Hungary event held on April 25-26, 2024, with over 3,000 participants, and 80 speakers.

Here message is that the European “elites” have betrayed their people through their agenda of implementing the “Great Replacement” flooding Europe with hordes of non-Whites, and that it is time to fight back by replacing the EU, else European civilisation will be destroyed.

– KATANA]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYUMZ4fh7o8&t=318s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYRjaQxpDsA

Here it is! The full speech I gave at #CPACHungary that the establishment is currently losing its absolute mind over.

I spoke the forbidden truth: The Great Replacement is no longer a theory – it’s reality. White Europeans are being replaced in their own countries at an ever accelerating rate and it will mean the end of our civilization as we know it if we don’t turn things around.

Transcript

CPAC HUNGARY 2024: AN INTERNATIONAL COALITION OF NATIONAL FORCES HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED

The Center for Fundamental Rights has concluded a more successful CPAC Hungary than ever before. A coalition of pro-peace, anti-globalist forces was formed at the third conservative jamboree, and now the international right from Europe to America is joining forces for the elections.

This year’s CPAC Hungary attracted an unprecedented three thousand participants. The event was attended by nearly 500 foreign guests from six continents and featured a total of 80 speakers, including two sitting prime ministers, Viktor Orbán and Irakli Kobakhidze, and three former Prime Ministers, including Tony Abbott, Mateusz Moriawecki and Janez Janša, seven ministers (five Hungarians and two Israelis), ten political party leaders, including Santiago Abascal, Geert Wilders and Tom van Grieken, three US Congressman (Andy Harris, Paul Gosar, Keith Self) and seven Polish political leaders. There was no shortage of video messages, with Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, Vivek Ramaswamy fourthermore André Ventura, founder of the Portuguese Chega! party, encouraging the Hungarian audience to stand up for their struggles.

The real media, the real news media network, was represented by 36 media brands from 13 countries, with 140 press representatives. There were also 50 exhibiting partners, including think tanks from the US and Central Europe, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy and Poland.

TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 1,562 – 12:40 mins)

Hello, Hungary. Hello, Budapest. Hello, fellow Europeans and American friends.

Thank you so much for having me. Allow me to skip formalities for a moment and dive right into a subject that is not so cheerful, but very, very necessary to discuss.

Let me walk you through the past seven days in Europe.

This week in Stockholm, three elderly women in their seventies were stabbed in broad daylight on the streets. In London, four people were stabbed in a time span of just 42 hours. In Paris, hundreds of African migrants took to the street to riot. And in Brigolo, also in France, yet another church was burned down to the ground.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just a few incidents in just a couple of days on our beautiful continent. But we all know that these incidents aren’t “incidents” anymore.

If there’s one thing that’s for sure, is that we know, and our governments also know, that there is a link between mass migration and crime.

In the Dutch city of Dordrecht, something interesting happened the other day. They announced, and this is a small city in the Netherlands, in my home country, that a new asylum centre will be put in that little town. And what did the municipality do? They said:

“We are going to offer citizens who live in the vicinity of this centre €1,000 to take extra safety measures.”

Our new reality in Europe consists of frequent rapes, stabbings, killings, murders, shootings, even beheadings. But let me be clear about one thing. This did not used to happen before. This is a newly imported problem!

Samuel P. Huntington predicted this over 25 years ago when he wrote, and I quote:

“In the new world of mass migration, the most pervasive, important and dangerous conflicts will not be between the social classes. They will not be between the rich and the poor. They will be between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilisations.”

Well, boy, was he right! And the worst part is we as a society seem to have become indifferent to it. When another White boy, or a White girl dies at the hands of an immigrant, we might shake our head, we might let out a sigh. We might even get angry for a minute or two. And then we go on with our lives. We offer the family thoughts and prayers, but nothing ever changes!

Ladies and gentlemen, what does that say about us? This is a response of a society that has already given up. A society that has already accepted it’s defeat.

But is this true? Have we given up? Do we really accept the new reality that our globalist leaders have in mind for us?

I know one thing for sure, and that is that if nothing changes, if we don’t start to seriously fight for our continent, for our religion, for our people, our countries, then this time that we live in will go down in history as the time in which Western nations no longer had to get invaded by hostile armies in order to be conquered. This time will then go down in history as the period in which the invader was actively invited in by a corrupt elite! And not only did this corrupt elite invite the enemy in, they made the native population pay for it, too!

Everyone who has eyes can see it. The native, White, Christian European population is being replaced at an ever accelerating rate.

Let me back this up for you with some statistics from my home country. Let’s take Amsterdam, the capital. Amsterdam currently consists of 56% migrants. The Hague, 58% migrants. Rotterdam, almost 60% migrants.

And of course, most of these immigrants come from non-Christian, non-Western African and Middle Eastern countries. Conclusion; the Dutch population is already outnumbered in the majority of our cities.

But let’s look onwards. London, 54% migrants. Again, conclusion; native population outnumbered. Brussels, colour me shocked! 70% migrants. Conclusion; native population majorly outnumbered. And other Europeans will, of course, follow suit soon, if they haven’t already.

So I’m going to draw the forbidden conclusion here. The Great Replacement Theory is no longer a theory, it’s reality!

And what’s interesting about “replacement” is that the establishment will either deny its existence, or when they admit to it, they say that it’s a good thing that the native European population is soon no longer a majority on its own continent.

Dutch national disgrace and dubbed climate Pope, Frans Timmermans already stated in 2015 that:

“Diversity is humanity’s destiny! And that Europe will be diverse!”

And of course, by now, I think we all know what they mean with the word “diversity”. It means less White people, less of you!

Imagine this in an Asian or an African country. Imagine their leaders rejoicing in the fact that their people will soon no longer be a majority in their own country. Absolutely unthinkable! Unimaginable!

So what in the world is wrong with our leaders?

The underlying sentiment of what they say is always the same. Our establishment claims that White people are evil and that our history is somehow fundamentally different from that of others. Consciously or unconsciously, they have sucked up the lies and the anti-White dogmas of the neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory.

That’s why the totalitarians in Brussels are trying to force you, the Hungarian people, a sovereign nation, to accept immigrants, despite the fact that the population has said no, and so has the government.

But make no mistake, the majority of the Dutch people haven’t asked for this either. Just like Brussels is forcing Hungary to accept these hordes of immigrants, they are doing the same now, even in the smallest of towns in the Netherlands. No part may remain Dutch in the traditional sense of the word. No part of Europe may remain European.

And it’s not difficult to understand why. If the old Europe still exists in certain places, then people will be able to compare the new Europe to the old. And news-flash, they will prefer the old. That’s why the Eurocrats hate Hungary so much!

And their message is clear:

“Our way of life, our Christian religion, our nations, they have to go. Without exception!”

Their vision of the future is the neo-liberal, unrecognizable Europe, where every city becomes kind of like Brussels. Ugly, dirty, unsafe, zero social cohesion, where the buildings are constantly under construction and they never, ever seem to finish. And even when they do, the end result is uglier somehow than what they started with and what are we left with? A permanent state of isolation, confusion and disorientation! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the New [Jew] World Order!

[applause]

So what’s the antidote? A strong Christian Europe of sovereign nation states!

That’s why we need to outright reject the lie that nationalism causes war. It’s not nationalism or national sovereignty that causes war. It’s expansionism. And where in Europe do we find that nowadays? In one place and one place only. Brussels!

[applause]

Isn’t it funny how the same people who erode our national sovereignty and love to do it, give it all up to the Eurocrats there, that those people are now telling us that we need to spend billions and billions of Euros on the national sovereignty of Ukraine? It’s a joke, honestly! And it’s a pretty sick, expensive and dangerous joke.

During a recent interview, I got asked by an interviewer:

“Do you think that you ever go too far? Do you think that you’re ever too radical?”

I thought about it for a second and I said:

“No, no, I don’t think I go too far.

[applause]

Truth be told, ladies and gentlemen, I think we in Europe do not go far enough! I think that if we really think about the organised structural attack on our civilisation, that we don’t do enough. Do we do enough to stop the attack on our families, on our continent, on our countries and our religion? When we hear about another murder, another stabbing of a young, innocent child, do we do enough? When we know that our national sovereignty has been given up in less than a century to Brussels, do we do enough? When we hear that Christian kids in Germany are now converting to Islam to fit in, do we do enough! I don’t think so!

The totalitarian institute of the European Union needs to come down. Let me be clear. I don’t believe in reforms when the foundation of your institution is rotten. And that is the case in Brussels. You can rebuild the house on top of it all you want, but it’s still going to crumble! So the only answer is the Tower of Babel needs to be destroyed.!"

[applause].

Ladies and gentlemen, we are the daughters and sons of the greatest nations on earth!

[applause].

And we need to ask ourselves, what has happened to us? Where do we come from? And more importantly, where are we going? Our elites have declared a war on us! And now it is time for us to put on the full armour of God, fight back and win! Thank you so much!

[loud applause]

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