An Interesting Week

For starters, I had a more personal interest in Hurricane Ike than most of the people up here considering I've got parents, an uncle, a brother, nephews and nieces in Houston. While it will still be quite a while before any true "normalcy" returns to the area fortunately everyone is safe with little to no damage to their homes. And also fortunately, there were two silver linings that came out of all this. There was a huge worry that the storm would devastate the pizza biz. Overall, the place has been doing decent but "decent" in the sense of a new business in its first year; meaning that they have been making enough to clear expenses and haven't had to dump any more money into it but they have yet to really turn a profit. The worry was that a potential couple weeks of being shut down could really turn the screws on them. They even stayed open late on Friday night before the storm hit to make some extra cash since everyone else closed early. Well, they finally got a stroke of luck. For some unexplainable reason they got power back on at the restaurant on Saturday night (even though everyone's house and most of the 3 million people in the Houston area still don't have it). So once again they are pretty much the business open and people have been flocking. As a consequence, they have pretty much sold out all of their food every day since then. This is good news for them not only because it means they will be able to make it through the storm relatively unscathed, but now there are a whole lot of people that have tried them that probably never would have and hopefully that will lead to more repeat business. That was one silver lining . . .

The second one has to do with the Cubs! When the hurricane hit, it forced the postponement of the Cubs-Astros series that was scheduled for that weekend in Houston. Imagine my surprise when I got on the net Saturday night to find out that they would be playing one of the make-up games on Sunday night in Milwaukee. Even though we already had people coming over for the Bears game on Sunday, I couldn't resist going. After all, the Cubs game that was supposed to be my last of the year was the one in Cincy that they blew in the 9th, and who wants to go out like that? Well, I'm certainly going out on a much, much better note as I got to witness Carlos Zambrano throw a no-hitter (the 257th ever thrown and the first in 36 years for the Cubs). The word for the entire night was surreal. Surreal to be in someone else's ballpark with nothing but Cubs fans. Surreal to hear the crowd cheering when it was announced that the normal "home" team (the Brewers) had lost. Surreal to see Cubs fans who, starting with about the 6th inning, just wanted to see the Cubs batting half of each inning get over as quickly as possible. And surreal to see such a dominating pitching performance that featured a grand total of 2 hard hit balls the entire game. I said a few years ago after witnessing Illinois come back from 13 points down to Arizona in the last 2 minutes to win that you watch sports your entire life in the hope that you get maybe 10 "moments" that are truly special and take your breath away. Where it seems perfectly natural to see people around you crying and strangers hugging each other and "perfect" is the only way to describe it. That was one such moment, and this was another. Not to be greedy, but I'm hoping to get another one around the end of October this year.

On another note, last Tuesday I finally finished War and Peace and a part of me wants to now list that accomplishment on my resume. My reaction? Well, it's one of those where I could easily spend about 3 hours talking to someone about it but I am almost at a loss to try to give a 2-minute version. Nevertheless, here are some of of the most frequent questions I've been asked about it:

Q: How long was it?
A: 1358 glorious pages

Q: How long did it take you to finish?
A: A little over 2 months

Q: Why would anyone read a book that long? What the hell is wrong with you?
A: I don't know. I like to think of it as reading 13 100-page books, then it doesn't seem so bad. Or you can view it like watching a season of Lost or Heroes (or whatever tv show you like). It would be pretty intimidating if someone said "here watch this, it's 16 hours long" but when it's spread out over 9 months it doesn't seem that long at all.

Q: So, uh, what's it about?
A: Well, it's about war and peace [rimshot]. Plot wise, it's about the Napoleonic wars in Europe from 1805 - 1813 as viewed (mainly) from the perspective of the Russian aristocracy. I haven't fact-checked him, but I believe most of the historical references to battles and such to be historically accurate. I believe this mainly due to the footnotes in the back which corroborate his accounts and just the fact that it was published in 1869 and Tolstoy was a former general in the Russian army. That would be like today someone publishing a historical fiction about WWII. You certainly could take liberties with the characters but it's doubtful you'd get critical acclaim if you completely changed the facts of the war. But, again, I haven't confirmed this (nor do I plan to).

Q: So what else is it about?
A: On the philosophical side of things, it's an exploration of what it means to have free will. Tolstoy says that the closer we are (time wise) to an event which has happened, the more we attribute it to the decisions and actions of a specific person or people. But the farther away we get, the more we are able to get the "big picture" and the more it looks like those actions were inevitable and can't be specifically attributed. For instance, look at the American Revolution. I'm sure at the time the cause of the war was attributed to the "shot heard round the world" at Lexington and Concord. But through the prism of history, we are now able to see that event as a culmination of tensions which had been rising for years and which surely would have boiled over somewhere else if they didn't happen there. I don't think anyone would argue that if that showdown hadn't occurred, there never would have been a war.

So, he takes this as his base and argues that we can never determine the true "cause" of anything, because every cause itself has another proximate cause and another and another until we are irretrievably far away from the event we are attempting to explain. This leads him to conclude, basically, that things "happen because they happen" (which is actually quite similar to the Buddhist expression "everything is as it should be.") This passage explains it pretty succinctly:

"It may seem to be a matter of indifference whether we understand the meaning of historical events this way or that; yet there is the same difference between a man who says that the people of the West moved on the East because Napoleon wished it, and a man who says that this happened because it had to happen, as there is between those who declared that the earth was stationary and that the planets moved round it, and those who admitted that they did not know what upheld the earth, but knew there were laws directing its movement and that of other planets. There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event except the one cause of all causes. But there are laws directing events, and some of these laws are known to us while we are conscious of others we cannot comprehend. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we have quite abandoned the attempt to find the cause in the will of some one man, just as the discovery of the laws of the motion of the planets was possible only when men abandoned the conception of the fixity of the earth."

So, basically it is his position that absolutely everything is subject to and governed by physical laws; nothing is random. This is a concept that became more popular about 75 years later with Einstein's famous statement "God does not play dice with the universe." And since everything is subject to law and nothing is random, there is no room for free will. I may think that I am making a conscious decision to write these words, and you may think that you are making a conscious decision to read them, but in reality the "decision" is a product of all the neurons in your brain acting in a rigid, predictable way to determine what action you will take. You are not in control; you're just along for the ride. That's his theory anyway. Kind of a bummer huh? As a final note, I'd like to add that I actually do largely agree with him. Neverthless, I will continue to blame Bush for the Iraq War.

Q: So, was it worth reading?
A: Absolutely! For a book that's 140 years old, it is surprisingly easy to read (no doubt a good translation helps immensely). It has some beautifully fleshed out, 3 dimensional characters that you come to care about. It will also force you to think and puts old historical (and even more recent) events in a new context, even if you don't completely agree with his philosophical take. Ultimately though, probably the best thing I can say about it was that when I got to the end I wanted it to keep going. Of course, the bottom line is that you're either someone who is horrified at the thought of a 1000+ page book (in which case you will never, ever pick this thing up) or you are intrigued. If you are in the latter category, then I absolutely would recommend picking this up and can guarantee that you won't be sorry.

Q: So is it the best novel ever written?
A: I really don't know how to answer that question, mainly because my reading of "classic" literature is extremely limited. I can say this, though. I've never read any novel that I would definitively say is better, although I'd probably put Atlas Shrugged right up there with it.

That's all I'm gonna say for now, but rest assured that I do like talking about it so if you want to know anything more about it feel free to ask some questions in the comment section or the next time we get together for a beer!