Category Archives: Books Fiction

Dreams

3 May 2026 By in Short Stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Anton Chekhov is considered the seminal force behind modern theater, penning two of the most honest accounts in the genre of Realism: The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, both probing life’s basic desires and finding them an elusive force in his protagonists’ lives. The Cherry Orchard anticipates Hemingway’s “slowly, then suddenly”; the Ranevskaya‑Gaev family drifts toward ruin not through catastrophe but through inertia. Unable to adapt, the play is a tragedy of pathological unwillingness. In The Three Sisters siblings Masha, Irina, and Olga dreams fail to ignite any transformation, all talk of a better, brighter future but no action towards that new beginning. The sisters are caught up in eternal desire but no ability to reach for it.

Chekhov’s genius in both of these plays is to keep dreams of the future just out of reach leaving everyone frozen in their past. The true tragedy is not that the characters explode in catastrophe, but they just slowly fade away into their past. Life inexorably slipping from their grasp, like old photographs losing their color, the outlines of their lives fading into the bygone era that holds them fast.

Chekhov first developed his theatrical themes with the short story. All of which are partially autobiographical and truly analytical of the human condition and their dreams. He wrote to sustain himself, sometimes financially, but always psychologically as not so much a need but a release, stating, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress: when I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.” After 17 plays and more than 500 stories one suspects that he never really got fed up with the latter, but his stories suggest that he did with the former, frequently.

To understand why Chekhov wrote the way he did; with such clarity about humiliation, inertia, and the erosion of possibility, one must understand the life that shaped him.

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in the small port town of Taganrog, the third child of a grocer whose piety was matched only by his cruelty. His childhood was marked by poverty, debt, and the constant threat of his father’s bankruptcy; with the family eventually fleeing to Moscow to escape creditors and debtor’s prison. Chekhov, then sixteen, was left behind to tidy up the business mess and finish school alone, tutoring younger students to pay for food and rent. This early apprenticeship in hardship shaped the clarity with which he later wrote about poverty, humiliation, want, and the quiet heroism of endurance. In his twenties, as a medical student supporting his entire family through magazine sketches, he contracted tuberculosis that would shadow him the rest of his life. Yet it was during this same period that he experienced his brief season of happiness: a deep, tentative love for Lika Mizinova, a friend of the family whose warmth and volatility left a lasting imprint on his stories. The relationship dissolved under the strain of his illness, his obligations, and his own emotional reticence, but its memory forever haunted him. By the time he achieved literary fame, the disease had already begun to hollow him out. His later years, split between Moscow and his beloved estate at Melikhovo, were a race between artistic maturity and physical decline, a life lived with the knowledge that time was running out.

That same sense of dwindling time permeates his fiction, where characters are trapped in systems; social, economic, bureaucratic, that grind them down long before death arrives. Yet he was never overtly polemical, nor was he didactic.

In the introduction to The Greatest Short Stories of Chekhov, translator Constance Garnett repeats the claim that Chekhov “held no fixed political or social views.” But the only way to reach that conclusion is never to have read him.

Chekhov writes of poverty with a doctor’s precision and a patient’s pain. His contempt for the idle rich is unmistakable. Serfs, bureaucrats, and petty tyrants appear again and again, not as caricatures but as symptoms of a society drifting toward moral exhaustion. His work is not overtly political because it refuses the cheap clarity of slogans. Instead, it offers something far more radical: an unflinching, cold account of a world in which people are crushed not by oppression but by inertia, habit, and the slow suffocation of possibility; the lack of imagination and drive. Critics mistook this subtlety for neutrality, his refusal to preach for a refusal to see what everyone else saw. But his stories are saturated with social vision, but rather than openly ideological he settles triumphantly for the diagnostic with surgical precision. This is Chekhov’s most devastating political insight.

Chekhov returns again and again to the question of human purpose, usually finding his characters unequal to the task of rising to higher ideals. In 1889, after losing his older brother Nikolay to tuberculosis at only thirty‑one, he wrote A Dreary Story, a novella that confronts the terror that death renders all human effort meaningless.

The narrator of the story; an aging, clinically depressed professor at the end of a brilliant medical career, examines his life and finds it hollow. He watches his family suffer and feels nothing. He listens to his closest friend and cannot understand his glee, his optimism. Speaking to his adopted daughter, Katya, he delivers a confession that is part lament, part self‑indictment:

“Something is happening to me that is only excusable in a slave… I am full of hatred, and contempt, and indignation, and loathing, and dread… What is the meaning of it?”

He calls these feelings shameful, but he is past shame. He is simply exhausted. When Katya finally leaves him, his last thought is not regret or memory, but a small, mournful stab of self‑pity: “Then, you won’t be at my funeral?”

Depression and the meaning of life enter again into one of my favorite and most psychologically penetrating Chekhov stories: Ward No. 6, a psych ward in a small provincial hospital; if it can even be called a psych ward, more like a containment room for lost causes. Most critics read Ward No. 6 as a parable of moral collapse, institutional cruelty, or the slow degeneration of a complacent doctor. But this interpretation misses the deeper, more unsettling truth Chekhov, as a practicing physician, was actually dramatizing: the plight of medicine at the close of the nineteenth century. The story is not about a man who loses his mental hold on reason. It is about a doctor who realizes, with devastating acuity, the futility of medicine as it was practiced in his world.

Chekhov knew this intimately. As a provincial doctor, he treated thousands of patients he could not cure, including his brother’s tuberculosis and eventually his own. He understood that much of medicine consists of gestures; reassurance, ritual, placebo, the performance of care in the absence of real efficacy. The doctor in Ward No. 6 comes to the same realization. He sees that the best he can offer is comfort, not cure; that his diagnoses change nothing; that his authority is largely symbolic. And once he sees this, he cannot unsee it. He turns inward, looking for an escape.

At one point he describes his dilemma to his after‑work companion: “You know of course…that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind…Consequently the intellect is the only possible source of enjoyment.” But he finds none, not at home, not in the hospital, not in himself. Nowhere in his world.

This recognition does not make him immoral; it makes him despair. His inability to help the people who come to him, combined with the professional obligation to pretend otherwise, corrodes him from within. The depression that follows is not a personal flaw but the natural consequence of witnessing suffering he cannot alleviate. Chekhov understood this emotional collapse with painful precision.

In this state of disillusionment, the doctor finds an unexpected mirror in a patient in Ward No. 6. This man is not simply “mad”; he is the doctor’s alter ego: the part of him that refuses comforting illusions, the part that speaks honestly about pain, the part that sees the world without anesthetic. Their conversations are not the doctor’s descent into madness but his first encounter with truth. He is drawn to the patient because he recognizes himself.

But in Chekhov’s world the clarity of medicinal limits is dangerous. The doctor’s colleagues, committed to the rituals and hierarchies of their profession, interpret his honesty as emotional instability. His refusal to maintain the performance of medical omnipotence becomes, in their eyes, a symptom of disease. His attention to the mad patient; the only person who speaks to him without pretense, is labeled “unhealthy.” And so, the institution does what institutions do: it protects itself by diagnosing dissent as madness.

The tragedy of Ward No. 6 is not that the doctor goes insane. It is that the system cannot tolerate a doctor who stops keeping up with pretense. His final confinement is not a moral punishment but a professional one. He is destroyed not because he collapses, but because he stops pretending to have answers.

Seen against the backdrop of late‑nineteenth‑century medicine, Ward No. 6 becomes not merely a story about madness but a diagnosis of an entire profession. The doctor’s despair, his attraction to the patient who speaks without illusion, and his final misdiagnosis by his own colleagues all point to the same conclusion: the real sickness lies not in the individual but in the medical culture that cannot admit its own impotence. By ending the story with a stroke, a clinical event that was misdiagnosed as psychological collapse, Chekhov underscores that the tragedy was never moral degeneracy but the catastrophic failure of a profession unable to tell illusion from reality, or performance from truth. In this sense, Ward No. 6 is Chekhov’s most radical indictment: a recognition that when medicine cannot heal, it must at least see clearly, and that clarity itself may be the one thing the system lacks.

Chekhov only rarely lifts the veil of universal futility that hangs over his work, but when he does, he finds solace in the human need for connection. In The Lady with the Dog, love arrives unbidden, and once found, must be seized and held with the tenacity of a vow. Yet the most surprising Chekhovian uplift comes from The Student, an early story that stands against the pervasive loss of meaning and purpose in Chekhov’s world. Here a young seminarian suddenly senses that the past is not dead but vibrantly present; “an unbroken chain of events, one flowing out of another,” and that touching one end makes the other tremble. That the full arc of time and history provides “the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness.”

In that moment Chekhov anticipates both Bergson and Proust: the endurance of duration, the trembling continuity of memory, the way a present emotion can awaken ancient sorrow. After the despair of A Dreary Story and the clinical futility of Ward No. 6, The Student offers Chekhov’s final insight: that meaning does not arise from certainty or cure, but from the continuity of human experience itself. Time endures. Memory binds. The chain of humanity holds. And for Chekhov, that is enough.

Graphic: Anton Chekhov by Osipp Braz. Oil on Canvas. 1898. Source: The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, 2023.

Literary Plots

31 March 2026 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Note: This is an updated version of the original post from March of 2026. It now includes a Chowder reference that I recently stumbled across in Heinlein’s juvenile novels.)

“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”  “What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?”

So begins the story of the Chowder Society nightmare. Five men bound since their youth, destined purposefully together by life and consequence, later joined by the main protagonist Don Wanderley, drawn into an A.M. horror with no single name and a thousand shifting labels. Their lives become a tangle of stories within stories, the past bleeding into the present, each tale circling a separate Dantean ring of terror.

Peter Straub (1943–2022) builds “Ghost Story” out of the shadows of man’s dreams of dread and death. Drawing on a century of horror in literature, visual arts, and psychology to create a world of insinuation, illusion, and fear; where nothing is ever said just once, nothing is ever said plainly, and nothing settles. Straub’s references to books, photos, and films, often through Wanderley, but not exclusively, are not decorative touches or character shading. They are physical clues. Each reference is a lens through which the plot becomes clearer.

Don Wanderley’s name is the novel in miniature: this is a tale about a man who wanders through illusions and a town that wanders through its own lies. As the heir to the Chowder Society’s buried horror, Wanderley carries the past into the present, through his criticism of art and letters, through his misreadings of life, and through belief in the oldest self‑deception of all, the belief that the women who charm you are the ones who love you.

As a lecturer at Berkeley, Wanderley teaches Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables” and encounters R.P. Blackmur’s essay on the novel, which argues: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” Wanderley finds that this idea radiates throughout Hawthorne’s work, and he “could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity,” an impulse or more directly, a desire for nightmares. Hawthorne himself writes that he sometimes achieved a “singular and not unpleasing effect” by imagining incidents in which “the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend” is fused with “the characters and manners of everyday life.”

In modern terms: the ghost and the haunted are part of the same mechanism. Straub uses this to signal that Don and the Chowder Society are haunted not by an external force, but by themselves.

Wanderley extends this line of thought through D.H. Lawrence’s critique of Hawthorne, which ties Blackmur’s concept of sin to lust, and to the New England lineage of Hawthorne, Poe, James, Lovecraft, and King:

And the first thing she does is seduce him.
And the first thing he does is to be seduced.
And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.
Which is the myth of New England.

Although Straub never states it outright, Stephen King does so in his introduction to “Ghost Story:” this lineage leads directly to Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” which asks whether the supernatural is real or a projection of the psyche. James refuses to resolve the question. Straub resolves it by refusing to choose. His haunting functions like a double‑slit experiment: both interpretations are true simultaneously. The horror is real and psychological. It exists because the Chowder Society created the conditions for it.

Hawthorne fused the supernatural with everyday life. James separated them and let the reader decide. Straub makes them inseparable, a melding of spirit and mind, a duality of horror.

Continuing this duality, Wanderley describes a sudden vision of Alma: “Then suddenly and shockingly, she [Alma] lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer’s legs drawn up, her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision.”  A vision of Alma or from Alma?

Alma as a “1910 Storyville prostitute” is not a literary allusion but a visual one. Straub is invoking the E.J. Bellocq photographs of New Orleans prostitutes in Storyville around 1910: stark, intimate portraits rediscovered in the 1970s and now held in major museums such as MoMA. These images show women posed in small, bare rooms, sometimes clothed, sometimes nude, their expressions shifting between defiance and vulnerability. They carry an aura of theatrical melancholy: present yet absent, exposed yet unknowable.

It is a perfect portrait of Alma. And Wanderley misses the meaning entirely. The vision is not “professional detachment.” It is the novel’s gears revealing itself: Alma appears as a figure who is both real and unreal, historical and spectral, seductive and annihilating; the very embodiment of Straub’s fused supernatural psychology of mind and ghost.

Enhancing the contradictions Straub has Don Wanderley bring Alama to a showing of Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion.” The film is about the collapse of the structures that once defined Europe: class, nation, aristocratic codes, the belief that enemies and friends can be cleanly separated. Straub’s novel is about the collapse of the structures that once defined the Chowder Society: honor, memory, guilt, the belief that the past can be buried. It’s not a casual reference; it’s Straub subtly telling the reader how to understand the plot of “Ghost Story.”

In La Grande Illusion, friends are enemies and enemies are friends. A French aristocrat and a German aristocrat share more with each other than with the men they command. Working‑class soldiers form bonds that ignore borders. The “grand illusion” isn’t war; it’s the belief that the old hierarchies still matter in the face of modernity. Renoir uses the prison‑camp setting not for escape‑movie suspense (though there is an escape), but to dissect a social order already dying.

Straub mirrors this logic. “Ghost Story” is a deadly illusion of its own: heroes and villains circle one another, and to know one is to find the other. Evil is a ghost from the past, a supernatural entity and a moral consequence brought to the present. The men who see themselves as honorable are the ones who committed the original sin. The woman they loved is the monster they created and honored. The past they buried is the thing hunting them.

Like Renoir’s war film without battles, Straub builds a ghost story without medieval props of vampires and werewolves, although there is that. The real haunting is psychological. The real prison is memory. The real war is the struggle between the stories the men tell about themselves, the truth they refuse to face, and the nightmares that consume them.

Both works, the film and the novel, strip away the expected genre scaffolding, war without battles, society without walls; ghosts without haunted houses, horror without the supernatural. What remains is the same core revelation: the structures we trust to define us are illusions, and when they collapse, the truth steps forward. “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.”

Alma tells Waverley everything and he misses it entirely. “I (Alma) know some people who are interested in the occult.”…It can’t be…Ordo Templi Orientis.” …They were known to be cruel, even savage.” …”I saw a ghost” …[or] did Alma actually say, “I am a ghost?”

Then the mists begin to dissipate. Don begins to see. “…my second lecture was a disaster. I brought out secondhand ideas unsuccessfully, tried to relate them and got lost in my notes: I contradicted myself. …I said that “The Red Badge of Courage” was a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears. He begins to see ghosts. But Waverley misreads the book just as Henry Fleming in Badge of Courage misreads himself. Fleming was a coward and courageous, he lied and acted with honor, and he was neither hero nor villain. Straub tells the reader that Wanderley is tactically brilliant in seeing ghosts but strategically misreading Alma, and his fears, and his courage, and his guilt. He misses the moral and ocular truth in front of him.

Then Straub moves the deception from Wanderley to the weakest link in the original Chowder Society: Dr. Jaffery. Straub begins Jaffery’s end with a normal scene morphing into the long hidden truth: “The fading wallpaper…the table bearing neat piles of coins, a library book (The Making of a Surgeon) and a lamp…In this room, at once familiar and unreal, he could not stay…Jesus she moved.” This is the moment the author moves beyond Wanderley’s thematic deception onto Jaffrey and the entire Chowder Society’s moral deception.

And “The Making of a Surgeon” is all about moral clarity, facing consequences, and accepting responsibility. It’s a memoir of professional responsibility and moral courage. And the Chowder Society is finally reaching across the abyss of denial and confronting the horror or their past.

Now working backwards, Edward Wanderley, Don Wanderley’s uncle, an original Chowder, enters the story mostly as a memory, but he is the caretaker of all those haunting memories. He is unwitting biographer of their past, recording moments of truth that reveal nothing, saving no one. Edward preserved the past in perfect detail, and like his nephew, it all remained unexamined, redeeming no one.

Finally, if Straub’s novel teaches anything, it is that every circle eventually closes. The Chowder Society’s memories loop back on themselves, and so does the novel’s architecture. Even the name of the Society carries its own literary origin, one that reaches not into the gothic of Hawthorne or James but into the sci-fi literature of Straub’s youth. In Robert Heinlein’s first juvenile novella Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), a trio of boys form a self‑styled “Marching‑and‑Chowder Society.” The phrase is unusual enough that its reappearance is unlikely to be accidental, even if the influence operated subconsciously. In Heinlein the Chowder Society is an exclusive action‑club of boys whose bond is forged through shared adventure and forward‑moving purpose. Straub begins his Chowder Society by inverting this structure: his Chowder Society is a literary circle of elderly men whose bond originates in a youthful action and persists as a lifelong burden. Where Heinlein presents the bright formation of a pact, Straub presents its long shadow, the adult reckoning that follows the kind of formative event boys’ adventure fiction treats as uncomplicated. This possible allusion subtly reinforces Ghost Story’s central concern with how male bonds, once formed, harden into narrative, secrecy, and fate.

Readers often describe Ghost Story as wandering, uneven, or prone to detours, a criticism echoed in contemporary reviews that note Straub’s tendency to drift away from the main plot or indulge in seemingly irrelevant texture. But what looks like narrative drift on the surface is, on a deeper reading, the novel’s strongest logic. Straub isn’t losing the thread; he’s showing us what a haunting feels like. He shows that the lies we tell ourselves are the horrors that destroy us.

Straub’s haunting is not linear. It circles and returns. Like Asimov’s hidden Earth — the point “as far away as possible” that turns out to be the origin — Straub’s details repeat endlessly, drift, and seem meaningless until the moment the circle closes back to the beginning and the truth stands revealed. Straub builds his novel out of these arcs, fragments of a circumference that seem disconnected until the circle closes. He hides this map inside the tangents, and once you see the pattern: Heinlein’s bonding, Hawthorne’s nightmare impulse, Lawrence’s seduction‑and‑sin pattern, Crane’s “ghost story without a ghost,” James’s ambiguity, Renoir’s collapsing social order. Don Wanderley’s literary misreadings are not digressions but the novel’s diagnostic tools. Each failed interpretation reveals the flaw that defines him: he wanders through texts the way he wanders through life, intelligent but unanchored, perceptive but myopic.

Straub refuses to lead the reader by the hand. He insists that you find your own way through the misty, musty traces of arts and letters. He trusts us to assemble meaning the way the Chowder Society must: by piecing together fragments, memories, misreadings, and half‑buried truths. What appears astray is actually ghostly context; the white space in which the novel’s real shape emerges. The wandering is the haunting. The arcs of irrelevances are the clues. The men believe they buried the past, but Straub shows that nothing buried stays buried; it simply waits at the farthest point of the circle to be met again.

The worst thing is the horror circling your mind.

Graphic: 1910 Storyville Photographs by Bellocq. Source: Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Copyright 1979.

Dreams

20 December 2025 By in Novel, Philosophy Tags: , , Leave a comment

“To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.” Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho’s (1947-Present) The Alchemist transcends from the pages of folklore through the dreams of all men of adventure, wrapped into a magical fantasy inhabiting the realm of know thy self, heal thy self, and be true to your heart. A timeless effort instructing all to follow your dreams. Desires anchored in your heart with magic flowing from believing in yourself.

The Alchemist is more than a tale of shepherds, mystics, prophets, treasure, and love, although it is all of that. It is also a parable of craft, trial, and vision. Craft in the tending of flocks, the learning of alchemy, the reading of omens. Trial in the setbacks, the labor, the desert’s unforgiving silence; struggles in the hunger, the fear, the wars of men, and the scourging, scorching winds of sand. Vision in the glimpses of truth, the covenant whispered by the soul, the horizon that calls him onward.

This parable echoes older tales, such as the Arabian fable of the Treasure in Cairo, where a man journeys far in search of riches only to discover that the treasure lies buried at home. Coelho reimagines this motif: Santiago’s pilgrimage across deserts and omens ends with the revelation that the treasure was waiting where his journey began. The outward quest becomes necessary not to find treasure elsewhere, but to transform the seeker so he can recognize the treasure within. Home is where the heart is and the heart decides the home.

A pilgrimage not only to follow one’s heart but to listen to it, to understand it. Santiago’s (the story’s protagonist) journey becomes a sermon on judgment, where each liturgical encounter; whether with King Melchizedek, the master Alchemist, or the desert itself; becomes a sacrament of revelation and growth. Coelho’s prose insists that destiny is assisted from without and whispered from within, but only for those who listen. A supernatural covenant between the soul and the cosmos.

The book’s theology is subtle yet insistent: faith is not blind obedience but a fundamental, obliging trust in the language of the world and the heart. The omens, the desert winds, the alchemy of metals; all are metaphors for the divine grammar that sustains not only existence but fulfillment. To heed them is to participate in a liturgy of creation, where every step toward one’s “Personal Legend” is an act of worship and belonging.

In this sense, The Alchemist becomes a catechism of freedom. It teaches that the sacred is not confined to temple walls but discovered in the marketplace, the caravan, the oasis. Santiago’s quest is a Eucharist of life’s experience, where the bread and wine are transmuted into courage and vision. The philosopher’s stone is not a literal artifact but the realization that the heart, when listened to, is itself the vessel of transformation. And beneath it all runs the mystery of time: not a chain of hours but a circle of presence. As Kahlil Gibran writes, “The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” Coelho’s desert is the same; its silence holds eternity; its winds carry both memory and dream. To walk through it is to learn that destiny is not deferred but always unfolding in the eternal now: Kairos versus Chronos.

Coelho plays with the Greek distinction: Chronos, the measured tick of the clock, and Kairos, the opportune, sacred moment: the right time. The novel privileges Kairos: destiny arrives when the seeker is attuned, not when the calendar commands. Dalí’s Persistence of Memory becomes a visual echo of Coelho’s dreamtime: clocks melting into landscape, recurring dreams blurring past, present, and future. Time becomes slippery because the Personal Legend is already inscribed in the Soul of the World; Santiago is not inventing destiny but uncovering what has always been written. Time is not only a circle but a marker of decisions. And Melchizedek, the King of Salem (Jerusalem) in the book says: “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Gaia unbound.

Coelho echoes James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis; the idea that Earth functions as a self-regulating organism. In The Alchemist, this appears as the “Soul of the World,” a spiritual force binding all beings together. Alchemy is ecology: The transformation of lead into gold becomes a metaphor for aligning with this living system. To know the Soul of the World is to participate in its balance, much like Gaia theory’s emphasis on the interconnection of all matter.

Where Lovelock is scientific and Coelho mythic, both insist that life is woven into a larger order. Yet literature also reminds us that this order is fragile: innocence fades, dreams are tested, and the heart must decide whether to yield or to pursue.

Rawlings’ The Yearling reminds us that innocence is fragile, and the loss of romantic but impractical childhood dreams is inevitable. Growing up means carrying grief with dignity, letting go, and accepting life’s new paradigm. In The Alchemist, by contrast, dreams of destiny are not relinquished but pursued. The omens and visions are invitations to act, to listen to the heart, and to follow its call. For the young in flesh, this means courage to begin; for the old in spirit, it means reflection on what was or what might have been.

To follow one’s heart is not merely to dream but to enter a covenant with the cosmos. Craft, trial, vision, and time converge into transformation, and Santiago’s pilgrimage becomes our own. The treasure is both within and without, memory and dream, Chronos and Kairos. To listen is to live, and to live is to worship. Reality becomes divinity. Amen.

Graphic: Paul Coelho by Ricardo Stuckert, 2024. Public Domain.

Curse of the Estranged

4 December 2025 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927–2014) One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of magical realism; at once stoic, uplifting, comically despondent, and burdened by the fatigue of generational inheritance. Yet the novel is less an invention of imagination than a genealogical metaphor of memory, familial hope, and civilizational rise and fall. It rises like a sanctuary built from familiar tablets: the Bible, Cervantes, Voltaire, Tolstoy, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Steinbeck, and Borges. Each echo resounds through the Colombian fictional town of Macondo, transforming it into a mythic stage where memory, estrangement, and loneliness endlessly repeat.

From the very first pages, Márquez threads this cycle with solitude: literally. Including the title, the word appears fifty‑two times in the century‑long history of Macondo and the Buendías. This repetition carries a biblical resonance, binding the family of protagonists and antagonists alike to a penitential tether, chained to their founding dynasty.

In Spanish, soledad is semantically broader than its English counterpart. It signifies estrangement and alienation, being cut off from community, intimacy, or history, even exiled. Yet it also carries the weight of aloneness and solitude: quiet, contemplative, existential. Both registers coexist, and the Spanish reader does not have to choose.

For the English reader, however, the word disconnects, pulling them towards a definition that resists the narrative. The translator, and likely Márquez himself, kept this tension to force meditation not only on the word but on the characters’ purgatory. The Buendías are lost in their obsessions, unable to connect to those around them. In the first half of the book, solitude leans toward estrangement and alienation; by the latter half, it transforms into aloneness, as the Buendías begin to accept their fate. The family lives together in their sanctuary but they live their lives separate and alone. In its final use, the meaning retreats back to estrangement and collective dissolution, a history erased, trapped in a myth of their own making: “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Márquez saturates the Buendía saga with biblical archetypes, weaving Genesis, Exodus, Revelation, and Marian purity into the fabric of Macondo: an Eden where death was alien, maturing into purgatory, then the Flood, and finally apocalypse. José Arcadio Buendía, the founder, is Adam and Noah at once, naming the world yet cursed by forbidden knowledge. “The earth is round, like an orange,” he declares, signaling a lifelong obsession with the metaphysical and the scientific. His wife, Úrsula Iguarán, is Eve and Sarah, burdened by genealogy and the fear of incest as original sin, a fear that culminates in the pig’s tail. Melquíades, the gypsy prophet, is Elijah and Daniel, his parchments the scripture of Macondo. The saga culminates in apocalyptic imagery: four years of rain, a final wind of destruction, Revelation retold as estrangement and erasure: endless solitude.

But Márquez’s tablets of echoes reach further, extending beyond scripture into the canon of world literature. The novel from the first pages breeds familiarity with the reader. One Hundred Years of Solitude is less a solitary invention than a refracting of the great books through Macondo’s myth. Its pages carry the shadows of Ovid’s transformations, Homer’s wanderings, Cervantes’ absurd quests, Kafka’s fate, Borges’ magic, and Proust’s memory; a literary inheritance reborn in Macondo’s myth.

These echoes form the very foundations of the narrative, opening into critiques of power, class, and the absurdity of the human condition. They expose an overreliance on human appetites; sexuality, incest, adultery, compulsion; that drive the fate of the family. The Buendías cannot conquer their world or their desires. Noble beginnings collapse into a fated Sartrian No Exit. And in the end, the Buendías’ saga dissolves into futility, their century of solitude reduced to the bitter irony that “wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chickpeas.”

Graphic: Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Jose Lara, 2002. Flickr

The Long Way

19 November 2025 By in Novel, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

By 1881, literature was shifting, Realism’s clarity giving way to Modernism’s psychological fog. Henry James pioneered the transformation, publishing what many hailed as his masterpiece and others found nearly unreadable. He moved from the crisp windows of Daisy Miller and Washington Square, where social dilemmas are transparent, into the labyrinth of The Portrait of a Lady, a slow, meandering narrative that tested patience to the point of exasperation. James stretched his scenes into long psychological dramas, shadowed by melancholy, lingering on minutiae rather than decisive events. To admirers, this was a profound exploration of consciousness, to detractors, a soporific feast of abstraction.

Where James’s Portrait is a punishing fugue of memory and angst, a darkness at the edge of noon, Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913) offers a sensual slow dance of lush detail, playful childhood games, and adult desire. In Combray, the family had two ways to take their walks: the short way and the long way. The short way was familiar, contained, offering scenery but little transformation. The long way was expansive, expressive, full of detours and revelations. In Swann in Love, the same pattern unfolds: the first half is Swann’s descent into desire, the short way of immediacy; the second half is his struggle to free himself, the long way of disillusionment and reflection. For Proust, the long way is where life’s lessons are held. Meaning is not found in shortcuts but in detours, delays, and the endurance of memory. The long way is the design of his art: winding detours that illuminate the search for lost time.

Wilde enters here as counterpoint. Where Proust lingers in digressive glow, Wilde sharpens language into bite. His wit distills the same metaphysical concerns: beauty, desire, memory, decay, into crystalline aphorisms. Wilde’s sentences are daggers wrapped in velvet, each polished to a point. If Proust is the cathedral of memory, Wilde is the mirror that cuts as it reflects. The Picture of Dorian Gray dramatizes the peril of desire and the corruption of beauty; themes Proust refracts through memory and longing. But Wilde compresses the ineffable into epigram: glow against bite, long way against short.

Cinema, now, becomes the continuance of these styles. Wilde’s paradox and Proust’s memory echo in films as diverse as Spectre (2015), No Time to Die (2021), and Gosford Park (2001). In Spectre, Madeleine Swann, a psychologist whose very name invokes Madeleine tea cakes and Swann’s Way, probes Bond’s past like Proust probing consciousness, turning trauma into narrative. In No Time to Die, desire and mortality entwine, echoing Proust’s meditation that “life has taken us round it, led us beyond it.” And in Gosford Park, Sir William McCordle brushing crumbs from a breast, Swann brushing flowers from a bosom, gestures lifted from Proust’s sensual triggers, collapse time into desire, while Altman’s upstairs-downstairs satire mirrors Wilde’s social wit. These films remind us that both the glow and the bite, the long way and the short, remain inexhaustible. The short as overture, the long as movement. One as a flash of life, the other as the light of experience.

James stretches narrative into labyrinthine difficulty. Proust redeems patience with memory’s illumination. Wilde polishes language into paradoxical brilliance. Chaplin, in Modern Times (1936), adds another metaphor: the gears of industry grinding human life into repetition. Yet even here, the Tramp and the Gamin walk off together, the long way, not the shortcut; suggesting resilience and hope. Between them, Modernism oscillates: fog and clarity, glow and bite, labyrinth and mirror, machine and memory. Meaning is elusive but never absent. It waits in the folds of memory, in the flash of wit, in the shadows of desire, in the detours of the long way, ready to be revealed.

Through memory’s fragments, along the winding road of joy and grace, we taste again the sweetness of love, the timelessness of innocence, and life’s inexhaustible richness.

Graphic: Marcel Proust, Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Consequence of Coincidence

22 June 2025 By in Novel, Poetry Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Russian poet and novelist, spent a decade creating his singular opus, Doctor Zhivago, completed in 1956. More than a historical narrative, it is a philosophical cathedral, a novel constructed of haunted Romanticism, moral reckoning, and symbolic renewal. Set against the dissolution of Tsarist Russia and the disillusionment of revolutionary aftermath, the book crosses the bridge from imperial decay into the intoxicating dream of collective transformation, only to watch that dream unravel into a black hole of exile, violence, and starvation.

This arc of collapse recalls the spiritual bargain Thomas Mann dramatizes in Doctor Faustus, but where Mann’s protagonist descends into metaphysical madness, Doctor Zhivago journeys through the quiet but unrelenting erosion of the soul. He does not perish; he endures, but with dimming strength and drive. The rails he rides are not toward damnation but disillusionment. And still, beams of light pierce the fog: rays of love, recollection, and art that suggest the possibility of meaning and rebirth.

As Nikolai Nikolaievich says early in the novel, “the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.” In this way, the prose becomes Pasternak’s metaphorical terrain, thick with fog, fractured history, and spiritual yearning. The appended poetry, by contrast, is a sudden clearing. Here, the truth is not narrated but sung as parables: psalms.

Pasternak stands in conversation with his literary ancestors, not in imitation but in integration. Tolstoy’s presence is unmistakable, the historical sweep as personal crisis, the aching attention to moral choice. But where Tolstoy moves with structural precision, Pasternak drifts with mystical defiance. His narrative resists symmetry. His characters do not seek ideology, they search for grace.

Symbolist in sensibility if not in allegiance, Pasternak paints with metaphysical hues. As Nikolai Nikolaievich reflects, it is not commandments but parables that endure, not doctrine but symbol. Life, for Pasternak, is sacred not by design but because of its trembling unpredictability.

It is no accident that Hamlet opens Zhivago’s verse collection. The parallels run deep: both Hamlet and Zhivago move through time like exiles from history itself, cast adrift in worlds too cruel for their contemplative souls. When Pasternak writes, “I consent to play this part therein,” he evokes both the tragedy and transcendence of bearing witness. Zhivago performs his role, but lives another life, internal, poetic, unreachable: above the fray, but corrupted by the psychosis below.

His poems chart this existential divide: March, an ode to ugliness and beauty; Holy Week, a quiet redemption; Parting, remembrance caught in an unfinished gesture. In Garden of Gethsemane, Pasternak, born Jewish, philosophically Christian, offers the novel’s spiritual heartbeat and epitaph: “To live is to sin, / But light will pierce the Darkness.”

Perhaps nowhere is Pasternak more intentional, and more misunderstood, than in his use of coincidence. Critics have dismissed the improbabilities: chance meetings, reappearances, entwined fates that strain believability. Yet, viewed symbolically, they form a system. These moments are not narrative indulgences; they are metaphysical punctuation marks, appearing when a character risks dissolution and irrelevance, summoning memory, recognition, or spiritual breath.

These recurring events hint at resurrection, not just personal but societal. Pasternak suggests life moves not in straight lines but in spirals and cycles. Coincidence becomes a kind of syntax for recurrence, for unfinished conversations rekindled in new voices. Meaning doesn’t unfold; it echoes amplified.

Again and again, children appear, observers, inheritors, blank slates. In them lies the novel’s quiet eschatology: renewal not through revolution, but through the uncorrupted eye. These youths do not argue ideology. They carry memory unwittingly. They are the future poets whose truths will be elemental and free, like wind through the trees.

If Doctor Zhivago is a Passion, then its resurrection comes not in fire, but in continuity. Not in triumph, but in scattered verses, remembered, revived. Pasternak’s salvation is lived: grace through endurance, beauty through suffering, renewal through remembrance.

Banned in the Soviet Union upon completion, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Italy and published in 1957, igniting an international phenomenon. The CIA distributed the book behind the Iron Curtain as a weapon of quiet revolt. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958, then compelled to decline it under state pressure. And still, by 2003, the novel had found its way into Russian classrooms.

This was not just a novel. It was a voice buried and reborn.

Pasternak’s opus is not a chronicle of a man or an era, but a symbolic landscape of what it means to remain human in the machinery of history. A tale not of revolution’s glory, but of the soul’s refusal to be mechanized. It rejects dogma in favor of parable, certainty in favor of consequence, ideology in favor of grace.

Doctor Zhivago teaches us that life may be coincidence, but not accident. That beauty may falter, but goodness moves quietly. And that sometimes, when all else falls away, it is poetry that remains, whispering its eternal truths into the trembling heart of history.

Source: Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, 1957. Graphic: Boris Pasternak, 1959. Public Domain.

Practical Solutions

15 June 2025 By in Novel, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century stated that population growth proceeds at an exponential pace while growth in the food supply is arithmetic (linear) leading to inevitable periods of disease and starvation. Malthus argued, or more accurately, preached, that there were only two ways to prevent inevitable famine: actively curtail population growth or let nature take its course. He advocated tariffs to spur local agricultural production and moral restraint. Modern day adherents of Malthusian theories coupled with climate, environmental, and social catastrophes include Paul Ehrlich author of The Population Bomb, and Garrett Hardin author Tragedy of the Commons, both who were concerned that resources could not keep pace with population growth. John Maynard Keynes, not necessarily a Malthusian, initially feared overpopulation would result in poverty. Later, he grew concerned that insufficient population growth would lead to labor shortages and economic stagnation. All Malthusian predictions fail because they underestimated human ingenuity: agricultural innovations, industrial advances, and the energy revolution continually expanded resources. While Malthusian thinkers predicted collapse, human ingenuity reshaped the future, standing on the shoulders of giants, we brought the sky closer instead of watching it fall.

Early in his career, Robert A. Heinlein acknowledged Malthusian concerns about overpopulation, but rather than advocating population control, he envisioned technological solutions to expand humanity’s reach. This idea provided the foundation for his 1956 juvenile novel, Time for the Stars, which explores interstellar colonization as a means of alleviating Earth’s burden. Faced with mounting population pressures, Earth launches an interstellar program to search for habitable worlds. The explorations will take place aboard spaceships that can accelerate up to but not beyond the speed of light. As the ships venture deeper into space at relativistic speeds, conventional communication with Earth suffers increasing delays, making real-time coordination nearly impossible. If the ships are lost or destroyed their discoveries will be delayed or lost completely. To solve this problem, Heinlein introduces the literary fictional concept of telepathic twins and triplets, individuals capable of instantaneous communication, unaffected by distance or time dilation.

Twins are recruited to maintain real-time communication with the ships, with one twin remaining on Earth while the other travels aboard the spacecraft. The twin on Earth ages much faster than the spacefaring twin traveling at near-light speeds. As the time gap widens, their telepathic link weakens, forcing the ship-bound twin to communicate with younger generations of their family on Earth.

This adventure becomes the sci-fi narrative for the concept of the twin paradox first proposed by Paul Langevin. In 1911 Langevin showed that a traveler moving close to the speed of light for two years would return to an Earth that had aged 200 years since his departure. At first, the paradox seemed to suggest that each twin should perceive the other as older, an apparent contradiction. Einstein resolved this by showing that time dilation is a fundamental consequence of special relativity, not an actual paradox. In special relativity, time dilation arises due to velocity, whereas in general relativity, it extends to curved spacetime via the equivalence principle. The traveler ages slower than his Earth-bound twin.

In Time for the Stars, Heinlein does more than illustrate relativistic physics, he champions the optimism that human ingenuity will always outweigh natural pessimism. It serves not only as a rebuttal to Malthusian gloom but also as a direct rejection of William Golding’s dystopian vision in Lord of the Flies, which Heinlein previously wrote in his 1955 utopian novel ‘Tunnel in the Sky’. Lord of the Flies in semitic languages translates directly to Beelzebub. In Indo-European languages Beelzebub, according to some, translates to ‘lord of the jungle’ a phrase with much less negativity than the semitic translation. Heinlein further expands on the lord of the jungle by introducing the German 20th century concept of Lebensraum in chapter 3 of Time for the Stars titled Project Lebensraum. Lebensraum in his novel parallels the German concept in that it means territorial expansion as a pragmatic solution to overpopulation. Given the post-WWII connotations of Lebensraum, Heinlein’s use of the term is provocative, perhaps deliberately so, prompting reflection on whether space colonization is an ethical necessity or simply another form of expansionist imperialism. Heinlein believed in the problems of overpopulation, but he wanted a positive solution to that rather than a disturbing reach into limiting fertility. Project Lebensraum to Heinlein was likely a repurpose of Lebensraum as a brilliant solution to overpopulation and continued survival of the species.

Ultimately, Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky counters the pessimistic view of human nature, demonstrating that young people can build a functional society rather than descend into chaos, contrasting Lord of the Flies and reinforcing the themes of Project Lebensraum in Time for the Stars. As an extension of that logic, humanity must expand beyond Earth to secure its future.

Time for the Stars is more than a literary exploration of Einstein’s time dilation, it is a direct refutation of fear-driven pessimism, a celebration of humanity, and a testament to our quest for an enduring future among the stars.

Source: Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein, 1956. Graphic: Robert A. Heinlein.

The Many Colors of Slavery

27 May 2025 By in Art, Novel, Philosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln

“Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

As the great continental glaciers receded at the end of the Pleistocene, fertile land emerged, allowing for the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Farming was labor-intensive, and with the rise of permanent settlements came the demand for constrained and controlled labor. Slavery, likely with first roots in Mesopotamia, though independent manifestation by the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt and other early civilizations, made it ubiquitous, and it has never disappeared.

From the bonded laborers of the Pharaohs to the structured servitude in Greece and Rome, from the transatlantic trade that brutalized African populations to the modern exploitation of migrant workers in sweatshops and the sex trades, slavery has evolved rather than vanished. Each era refines its own form of servitude; forced labor, insurmountable debt, bureaucratic entrapment, or corporate exploitation. It is a practice as ancient as prostitution and taxation, deeply embedded in human society, yet constantly shifting into less visible but equally insidious forms. As long as slavery remains profitable its existence will continue to indelibly stain humanities’ collective soul.

Slavery, and its ultimate contrast, freedom, was a persistent theme in the works of sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein. With a piercing social awareness, Heinlein, who, in his early years, was described by Isaac Asimov as a ‘flaming liberal’—picked up the theme and horrors of slavery with his 1957 juvenile novel “Citizen of the Galaxy”; bringing the many forms of servitude into the personal history of a precocious kidnapped boy named Thorby. Citizen of the Galaxy is a planet-hopping, spacefaring critique of oppression, class structure, and the nebulous concept of freedom. Heinlein crafts a future where contrasting societies across the galaxy reflect varying degrees of servitude and autonomy, if not necessarily total freedom. Man rarely allows himself complete independence.

Heinlein through the lens of Thorby explores the various shades of slavery, beginning with the brutal, controlling enslavement and continuing to more subtle forms that the individual may not even recognize as confinement. (Partial plot giveaways beyond this point.) Escaping his initial enslavement by the graces of a kindly, strict, but loveable old cripple named Baslim, Thorby moves into a hierarchical, structured existence of spacefaring traders then onto a self-imposed, due to a thirst for justice, straitjacket of a corporate bureaucracy on his birth planet of Terra. A life story of how control can be imposed by others or by ourselves.

As Heinlein’s social perspectives evolved, his libertarian leanings took greater prominence in Citizen of the Galaxy. Through Thorby’s life journey, Heinlein emphasizes personal autonomy, resistance to tyranny, and the moral duty to fight injustice. Baslim, Thorby’s first mentor, symbolizes the idea that one person can stand against oppression and make a difference, even if it takes many miles and years to materialize.

This theme runs through much of Heinlein’s work, but here, it’s especially poignant because Thorby is powerless for much of the novel, making his eventual triumph all the more meaningful. Heinlein’s novels, Farnham’s Freehold, Friday, and Time Enough for Love, explore slavery and control, reinforcing humanity’s inherent need for freedom, or at the very least, breathing space.

Source: Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein, 1957. Graphic: Joseph Sold into Slavery by Friedrich Overbeck, 1816. Vanderbilt University. Public Domain.

Beelzebub Retold

19 May 2025 By in Novel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

 “No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers.” Heinlein: Time Enough for Love, 1973.

William Golding’s 1954 dystopian novel Lord of the Flies follows a group of stranded schoolboys who, without adult supervision, descend into savagery. Their initial attempt at cooperative survival deteriorates as fear and power struggles drive the strong to dominate the weak; order gives way to chaos, smothering courage beneath a blanket of terror.

While Lord of the Flies initially struggled in sales, Heinlein, perhaps one of its few early readers, found its premise of boys descending into barbarity overnight to be an absurd fiction. In response, he swiftly crafted Tunnel in the Sky, a sci-fi adventure that presents a striking contrast with a parallel plot: instead of chaos and savagery, his young survivors rise to heroic heights, confronting their primal fears with resilience and camaraderie.

The ninth of Heinlein’s thirteen juvenile novels (1947–1963), Tunnel in the Sky is framed as sci-fi but at its core,it’s an adventure story rooted in the conceptual school of literary romanticism. A story of survival wrapped in the timeless cloak of human values and existence. The novel uses sci-fi primarily as a means to transport young student survivalists to an uninhabited planet for their final class exam: surviving 5–10 days in a primitive, dangerous setting. After depositing the students on the planet, the novel’s sci-fi categorization reverts to Call of the Wild. A passing grade is assigned to those that were able to walk or crawl out alive.

After sending the students to the planet the transport mechanism malfunctioned and they are trapped alone on the planet with only a few provisions, maybe forever. With a few knives, limited medical supplies, and other paraphernalia that would fit in packs and pockets they are forced to search out each other to put together a workable society to provide food, shelter, and defense against the elements and native man-eating fauna. With expected fits and starts the kids put together a workable society that provides for their needs and a few wants eventually raising the question of whether they would even accept a rescue.

Heinlein was an incorrigible optimist and humanist. He believed humanity could and will solve all existential problems. To him Lord of the Flies was an impossibility. Humans want to live and self-interest eventually embraces “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” (Spock-The Wrath of Khan).

In semitic languages such as Hebrew, Lord of the Flies is a literal translation of Beezlebub, who was initially a minor Philistine god that expelled flies, believed to be a source of sickness. Over time the Jews referred to him as a major demon and eventually Christianity elevated him to Satan himself. In Indo-European languages Beezlebub literally translates to Lord of the Jungle, one who conquers for the good of humanity: lebensraum. Golding’s Beelzebub represents dystopian destruction; Heinlein’s brings forth the utopian Lord of the Jungle.

Source: Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein, 1955.  Graphic: Heinlein in Amazing Stories, 1953. Public Domain.

Ignoble Realism

14 May 2025 By in Novel Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

During the late 18th century French Revolution, the peasants laid their grievances at the feet of the nobles and took their heads in lieu of apology and retribution. As the years passed the revolutionary fervor subsided, Napoleon’s reign was brief yet transformative, and finally Louis XVIII, replacing Napoleon, restored the French nobility which brought peace to the land but also returned the country to the immoral customs of yore, not that they really went away, of avarice, promiscuity, and vice. Themes that Honoré de Balzac vividly paints in Old Goriot (Gor-e-u or Gor-e-ot), his greatest novel, first published in serial form in 1834; a fearless reflection of the Realist artistic movement taking shape in his time.

In this forlorn, unflattering critique of French society he uses a fine brush to sketch the uncomfortable and unseemly details of a decayed culture like a faded relic of indulgence, stripped of its former grandeur, except now the lower classes join the upper crust in a race to the dishonorable depths of unprincipled shame.

Honoré de Balzac’s Old Goriot tells the tale of unrequited, selfless paternal love thoroughly blind to the selfish indifference of his two young daughters, Delphine and Anastasie who have forsaken their father for wealth and prestige. Eugene de Rastignac, a young but poor law student, pursues the married Delphine with the blessings of her father with little thought about the moral implications of his ambitious desires or the Faustian struggles they entail. Vautrin, a criminal mastermind, enters the scene to put an exclamation point on the plot’s everything is inbounds, nothing is forbidden in early 19th century Parisian life. As Goriot dies alone, broke and broken, Eugene must decide his path in a city of corruption, indifference, and immorality. To succumb to the ruthless ambition of Parisian society or fight for a moral existence to save his soul.

Source: Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac’s, 1834. Graphic: The Stone Breakers by Gustave Courbet, 1849 (Realism art movement).