Sarah Bakewell, "Humanly Possible"

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Sarah Bakewell, "Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of

Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope" (2023)

 

Sarah Bakewell의 책은 전에 읽은

"At The Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails" (2016)와

"How To Live, or A Life of Montaigne" (2010)에 이어 세 번째인데 다 재밌다.

 

휴머니즘은 자유(와 생명), 친절, 배려다.

 

New York Times 서평

 

위 서평에서:

 

But the particular charm and power of Bakewell’s writing, admirers say, is the way she focuses on “-ists” more than “-isms,” treating ideas as grounded in the idiosyncrasies of individual lives.

 

Montaigne pops up again in “Humanly Possible.” Bakewell describes how he “trashes all the humanistic pieties on the subject of reading,” defending, for example, the right to unapologetically toss a dull book aside. “What he looks for in a book is to make some kind of contact with the person who wrote it, that sense of the personality of the author,” Bakewell said. “I feel that too.”

 

While working on the book, she got involved with Humanists UK, founded in 1896, which advocates for “a tolerant world where rational thinking and kindness prevail.”

 

 

Sarah Bakewell *(사진: 위 서평에서)

 

 

책 본문에서:

 

Printing, both with and without moveable type, had been pioneered long before in China and Korea ... When the technology arrived in Europe, it would quickly be put to a similar use churning out papal indulgences -- that is, tickets reducing the amount of punishment to be expected in the afterlife. Up to ten thousand such indulgences were printed by Johannes Gutenberg. (p. 79)

 

He[Montaigne] had no time for the idea that "we gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions." (p. 155)

 

Frederick Douglass put the point with memorable force and clarity ... saying: "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him." That single line destroys whole volume of faulty argument -- beginning with Aristotle. (p. 209)

 

University education, Humboldt said, should mean "an emancipation from being actually taught." (p. 226)

 

The humanist cause, in the vastest and vaguest of phrases, is "life and freedom." (p. 357)

 

He[Vasily Grossman] was humanist in other ways, too. He did not like religious institutions, which he saw as tending to obstruct rather than encourge people's natural tendency toward kindness and fellow feeling. (p. 360)

 

Finally, as always, I am brought back to the creed of Robert G. Ingersoll:

 

happiness is the only good.

The time to be happy is now.

The place to be happy is here.

The way to be happy is to make others so.

 

(p. 368)

 

George Eliot's Middlemarch ... -- humanistic in several senses, intellectually sophisticated, and constantly surfing between characters -- was described by the psychologist William James as "fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written." (p. 161)

 

 

George Eliot에 대해서

 

이 책에 많이 언급된 걸 읽으면서 반가웠다. George Eliot가 David Strauss의 Life of Jesus (1835)를 영어로 번역했다는 것은 전에도 읽었겠지만 Ludwig Feuerbach의 The Essence of Christianity (1841)도 번역했다는 건 처음인 것 같다.

 

지금 보니, 7년도 더 전 포스팅 "George Eliot의 시 'Two Lovers'"에 이렇게 썼었다:

 

George Eliot의 시를 처음 읽은 거였는데 그녀의 시답다고 생각했다.

소설은 그녀의 소설만 한동안 대여섯 권 읽은 적이 있었다. 벌써 30년

전쯤 일이다. Silas Marner, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss가

특히 재밌었던 걸로 기억한다.

 

얼마 전에 Mona Simpson의 (NYT) 'By the Book' 인터뷰에서,

그녀의 약혼남이 Middlemarch를 읽기로 약속했고, 그 약속을

안 지킨 그는 이제는 'ex 전약혼자'다,라고 한 게 생각난다.