DISCOVERIES
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How to Cure a Fanatic
Amos Oz
Princeton University Press:
96 pp., $12.95
AMOS OZ is a practical man. He is not a pacifist; he fought with the Israeli army against Arabs on two battlefields, in 1967 and in 1973.
The Middle East situation boils down to a matter of real estate, Oz says repeatedly in “How to Cure a Fanatic,” which comprises two lectures he delivered in Germany in 2002.
There may never be love between the Israelis and Palestinians, writes the Israeli journalist, novelist and professor of literature. But there can, at least, be “a fair divorce,” by which he means separate nations with borders drawn along pre-1967 lines.
This will hurt, Oz admits, but once it’s done, the two sides must erect a monument to their own stupidity: the Palestinians for their pig-headedness after 1948 and the Israeli Jews for their pig-headedness after 1967. Oz describes himself in 1948 as “a stone-throwing kid” standing in the streets shouting “British go home.”
There are two things fanatics lack, Oz writes -- humor and imagination. This is where literature comes in. He recommends that fanatics read Shakespeare, Gogol, Faulkner and Kafka.
“Imagining the other,” he says of his lifetime devotion to politics and literature, is the work of writers.
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Seeing Red
A Study in Consciousness
Nicholas Humphrey
Harvard University Press:
128 pp., $19.95
THERE has never been, Nicholas Humphrey writes in “Seeing Red,” a satisfactory definition of consciousness.
What is it? What is it made of? Why does it matter?
Humphrey, in this slim volume exploring the question, resists the increasingly popular notion that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, an easily explained relationship between sensation and response. That explanation might work for certain phenomena but not, for example, in the case of “redding,” seeing and responding to the color red.
Although sensation does help create a sense of self, a personal interaction with the outside world, Humprey writes that the mind is all too vulnerable -- to mood and the influence of drugs, among other things -- to be the sole conduit to consciousness.
Humphrey prefers Nietzsche’s hypothesis that consciousness is “a net of communication between beings.”
In other words, we don’t create it all on our own. There is something in the rose, in the color red, in the world of things, living and nonliving, that generates response.
Watch out! More power taken from the human mind! First Darwin, now Humphrey! Where will it end?
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Explorers of the New Century
A Novel
Magnus Mills
Harvest Books: 192 pp., $14 paper
HUMAN beings are inherently funny creatures. And they are at their funniest when they take themselves most seriously.
Former London bus driver Magnus Mills, king of deadpan, is the author of the novel “The Restraint of Beasts.” It was lauded as “demented” by none other than Thomas Pynchon.
For the new novel, “Explorers of the New Century,” Mills sets his cast of characters in the age of the great polar explorers. This group of humans and animals is determined to win the race to discover the AFP -- the Agreed Furthest Point from civilization.
Eleven men and 23 mules, led by Mr. Johns, are a supremely efficient hierarchical team. (Think pocket tents and cube meals.) The expedition chief is the intrepid Tostig.
Their mission? To find a new world, far from humankind, a place where the mules can live. (Though mules are, by all accounts, an inferior race, they are also, Mr. Johns admits, “capable of some wonderful creations in paint and clay.” But on the whole, “they are strangers to industry.”)
There are disputes (woolly helmets versus peaked caps), paranoia and conspiracy in both the human and mule camps. Mills writes like a raven: keen, mischievous, plain and lofty.
