Good morning. I don’t keep up with the news much, but I have been following stories about the spread of the novel coronavirus. Two might be of interest to readers of this blog. In The New York Times, Alex Marshall writes about a British film crew making a short film set during the Plague in Italy as the country has been fighting the coronavirus outbreak: “Last Saturday, Nicholas Hulbert, a British film director, flew from London to Venice for his latest project. “It was to be a short film based on ‘The Decameron,’ a 14th-century classic of Italian literature in which 10 people hole up in a villa to try to escape the plague. On Monday, Mr. Hulbert, 26, was shooting at a similar villa in Lugo — a town 55 miles from Venice — when he received a text. It was from his mother. ‘I so hope everything is going well today,’ it started, cheerily. Then its tone changed somewhat. ‘I sent you an email about the coronavirus, which I really think you need to consider.’”

Also, the Louvre closed on Sunday to discuss sanitary measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. As of this writing, it remains closed.

In other news, my colleague Rod Dreher is starting an online reading group to discuss Camus’s The Plague. It starts on Tuesday. Why don’t you join him?

No theist himself, John Gray is impressed by John Cottingham’s new book on theism and the self: “Modestly described as an essay, Cottingham’s short study explores fundamental questions more fully than many much longer volumes. While it fails as an argument for theism, it is forceful and compelling in arguing that the idea of selfhood taken for granted in secular societies makes sense only in the context of a theistic world-view.”

Emily Dickinson’s white dress: “Dickinson’s white dress has become an emblem of the poet’s brilliance and mystery. When Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Dickinson’s hometown in the 1880s, she gushed about the poet’s attire. ‘I must tell you about the character of Amherst,’ she wrote her parents. ‘It is a lady whom the people call the Myth … She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.’”

Mike Cormack reviews a new book on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s visit to China in the 1960s: “This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored visit to China in October 1965 (just months before the Cultural Revolution got under way) and his efforts to find out who actually controlled and funded SACU. Having been induced to be a sponsor of the society on legitimate grounds of interest in China and its history, Trevor-Roper was a last-minute addition to a delegation visiting Beijing and Xian. He was promised freedom of movement and access, though the reality turned out quite differently. The China Journals thus comprises four sections: Trevor-Roper’s diary of his three-week visit; his diary of his time in Oxford and London two months later, when he tries to get to the bottom of SACU; his suppressed Encounter article on the episode; and a diary of a later visit to Taiwan and Cambodia. This last is tangential to the purpose of the book, but presumably included for balance on Trevor-Roper’s feelings about China. (He uses phrases such as ‘the worthless Chinese’ and others even less complimentary.) The first section is the most interesting.”

Essay of the Day:

In Standpoint, Jane O’Grady revisits the life and work of William James:

“William James was born in New York City in 1842, brother to the novelist Henry, and eldest son of an eccentric man (also Henry) of private means who belonged to the recherché Christian sect of Swedenborgianism. William and his four siblings were educated by travelling all over Europe, attending schools in Paris, Boulogne, Geneva, and Bonn, as well as on Rhode Island. They were given a great deal of freedom. Having wanted to be an artist and taken intensive lessons in painting, William decided to study chemistry, then biology and finally medicine, at Harvard; though he postponed medical studies for a year in order to go on a scientific expedition to the Amazon organised by Louis Agassiz, a then-preeminent zoologist and geologist. Sea-sick and wretched, James had an excuse to return to Boston after a minor bout of smallpox.

“He was always prone to eye problems, and to headaches, digestive disorders and undiagnosed back pain, which often prevented him from walking or even sitting upright—all symptoms which, as his mother constantly suggested, might have been psychosomatic. He was morbidly depressed. Exacerbating his sense of powerlessness was the dread that the theory of determinism might be true: that humans, like everything else, are subject to cause and effect, and that our apparent power to choose what we do is merely an illusion. Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species seemed to outlaw the notion of free will from any worldview. Reality must surely consist of inexorable chains of cause and effect, yet also be terrifyingly unpredictable, dependent on the haphazard fragility of survival.

“But on April 30 1870, James wrote in his diary: ‘I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essai and see no reason why his definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.’

“James’s salvation from despair and suicide was not, as he would have acknowledged, directly caused by reading an unknown French philosopher; Renouvier’s argument is anyway dubious. But ‘pure reason’, as James said, is rarely what settles our opinions; and ‘facts have hardly anything to do with making us either determinists or indeterminists’.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Maryland

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