CROSSED the Red Sea with Moses; joined Joshua in Jericho; played the harp and sang the psalms by the banks of Babylon pining for Zion.
In another instance, I stormed the Bastille with the Jacobins and watched Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lose their heads at the guillotine on orders of Robespierre. Later, I joined Napoleon from Austerlitz to the very gates of Moscow at the height of the Russian winter, went with him on exile in Elba, marched back to Paris and ultimately met his Waterloo, and on to St. Helena.
On the side, I had chats with the Prussian Clausewitz on the basic principle of krieg as “nothing more than the continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.” The same subject of my conversations with Sun Tzu from whom I learned that the revered Mao was no more than his copycat in the art of war. Mao though put into definitive praxis Sun Tzu’s exegeses.
Of course, Old Niccolo is a constant traveling companion whose nuggets of wisdom are a guidepost in my political consultancies. A sampler: “The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains is from seeing the men he has about him.” And my favorite: “It is better to be impetuous than cautious, for Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary…to conquer her by force.”
Oh, how can I ever forget Nietzsche? He who declared that “God is dead.” He whose treatise on the ubermensch — “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and not a down-going” – inspired Hitler’s aspiration to Aryan supremacy and spurred his final solution to his Jewish problem.
On the level of my nodding acquaintances are Santayana – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – Kierkegaard, Keats, Locke, Hobbs and Rosseau, and of course, the ancients: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and Seneca, the younger.
Marx, I met in high school. Das Kapital, I did not fully understand then. But the Manifesto was clear as day in its quest to create the workers’ Eden.
Marx always came along with Engels, and earlier on, there was Hegel – “The basis of the State is the power of Reason actualizing itself as Will.” Kind of heavy, di ba?
In high school too I met, heard and never quite forgot Cicero in his anti-Catiline discourses; rode with the Roman legions of my namesake Gaius Julius Caesar in the Gallic Wars; learned from Horace the art of poetry; and played a Trojan warrior in Virgil’s Aeneid. All these in Latin yet.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives instilled in me the nosiness to poke into the lives of people, famous and notorious. Hitler, I knew from his father’s name Schicklgruber down to his single ball. And for a time too, I entertained the notion that he could have been a son of Jose Rizal, for his height and for the fact that his mother Klara Polzl was a chambermaid in some boarding houses in the Germany that Rizal visited. No, Rizal was not Hitler’s son, so the eminent historian Ambeth Ocampo wrote in one of his columns.
Ataturk, I joined in his battles for the hearts and minds of various tribes to nurse the birth of Turkey. Then onto contemporary American plane were Chicago Bossman Daley; the rich, famous and notoriously spendthrift Ford; the reclusive Hughes; and the miserly Getty. Even the much-maligned Quayle, Bush’s veep, had a life of redeeming social value too.
From the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf paid the greatest tribute to foot soldiers as the real heroes of war. This same sentiment is echoed in the accounts of the soldiers themselves from the Solomons to Iwo Jima, and onto Korea and ‘Nam.
Wars and remembrances of its horrors, poignancies and heroism and betrayals I all lived in Toland’s Hitler and The Rising Sun, as well as in individual battles from El Alamein to Normandy, to Remagen and the Battle of the Bulge, and that is only for WW II.
There can be no full appreciation of the Palestinian problem unless one has immersed himself in the works of Wouk (The Hope), Uris (Hajj), and Lapierre (O Jerusalem).
It is in the last book that I learned of the pivotal role the Philippines played in the partition of Palestine in 1947 that ultimately birthed the state of Israel and spurred the hegira of the Palestinian Arabs.
The armchair revolutionary in me finds greatest fulfillment in living the American Revolution in Langguth’s Patriots, in the French Revolution via A Tale of Two Cities of Dickens, and the definitive History of Europe. Of course, I’ve just come back from the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Renewal, re-living of American History studied in high school yet I found in the American chronicles of Vidal – Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire and Washington, DC. Doctorow also opened a window to America in his Ragtime, Welcome to Hard Times, and Billy Bathgate. Part of American history is the sexual revolution. And what could have captured it better than Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
In crime, Puzo’s best-selling The Godfather pales – for sheer impact – in comparison with Talese’s Honor Thy Father on the subject of the Mafia.
My passion for the printed page reaches the proportion of a conflagration with Citizen Hearst, the bio of the founding proponent of yellow journalism; The Kingdom and the Power, the history of the New York Times; Milton’s Areopagitica; Lippman’s Liberty and News; and some works of Marx too.
Yes, Marx, from 1842 to 1847 considered himself primarily as a journalist, here’s Marx’s take on press freedom: “…the intellectual mirror in which a people sees itself, and self-viewing is the first condition of wisdom.”
Any journalist worth his name in ink should have made reading a lifelong passion. It does not take a journalist though to enjoy this, the most pleasant of all pastimes. For where else can one travel through time, assume multiple identities, explore the unknown, return to the past, zoom to the future – all in an instant, without any effort at all? And get the added bonus of increased knowledge, deeper understanding and heightened intellect. There is sheer joy in reading. Reading, ‘tis clichéd, is its own reward.
So true, so very true. So, what have you been reading lately? Me? It’s the Koran, Holy Bible, Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita for daily spiritual nutrient; the bios of Gandhi and Stalin for pleasure.
(First published in Zona Libre, The Voice, April 18-24, 1999 – over 20 years ago, and still as fresh and relevant. Its reprinting here inspired by the horde of book lovers who trooped, and still troop, to the Big Bad Wolf Sale at the LGC Event Center from July 12-22).
