Reader's Digest: Best Books

Looking back at the past year and at years previous, it occurred to me that I could disaggregate my nascently traditional “Year in Review” from “The Best Books of 202x.” Instead of burying my book recommendations at the end of a post about myself—in a vain attempt to balance the karma of vanity—I could give the books I most admired their own proprietary newsletter. So here it is.

In 2022, my favourite novels were Pure Color by Sheila Heti and The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund. My analysis was appropriately pithy, if not illuminating: “Both short, funny, and philosophical.” I’ve been meaning to reread and write about The Delivery some time. Maybe next year?

In 2023, I loved Kate Briggs on translation and Laura Beatty’s Looking for Theophrastus. Having written about both, I took the opportunity for self-promotion, linking to my own posts, thereby nullifying any karmic benefit.

I’ll do the same, this year, with Ali Smith’s lecture-novel, Artful, and Lara Pawson’s equally trans-generic essay-memoir, Spent Light. Both are phenomenal and best read without preconceptions.

This leaves a final book that I adored but haven’t managed to post about: a collection of ironic microfictions by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Inherited Disorders.¹

The book comprises one hundred and seventeen variations on a theme: the inescapably overbearing influence of fathers on their sons. The stories are often funny, sometimes bleak, always compressed. They read like elevator pitches for films that will never be made. Wes Anderson would scan them with a wistful, shaking head: a touch too stylized and a little too arch.

My predictable favourite, “The Chimney Sweep,” was one of nine that were published first in n+1. You can read it as a riff on Wittgenstein’s aphorism, in Philosophical Investigations:

What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

If your reaction is to speculate—“Was Wittgenstein’s father in pest control? Is the metaphor a legacy of filial resentment, long suppressed?”—you share the spirit of Adam Ehrlich Sachs, whose hero, “Henry Hobson Fowler, the only son of a London chimney sweep, was named Wykeham Professor of Logic” in 1919.

While “his colleagues marveled openly at his improbable escape from the chimneys of his fathers into the rarefied air of logic and language,” the escape turns out to have been temporary.

[Fowler] began around 1922 or 1923 to speak of his approach to philosophy “as a kind of logico-linguistic chimney sweeping,” and over time construed this metaphor in an increasingly literal fashion. … “Our task,” he told students on the first day of his fall 1923 seminar, according to notes taken by one of them, “is to shimmy up the flue of logic and language and clear it out.”

Fall 1925: “With our brush we sweep away the loose soot, and with our scraper we chip away at the solid soot.” According to the seminar notes, a student asked whether Fowler was referring to “a real chimney or a logico-linguistic chimney,” and Fowler replied: “A logico-linguistic chimney. The philosophical flue.”

There is a joke in this about interpretive charity: how freely we find truth in metaphor. Yes, one thinks, logic and language are a chimney: when the flue is clean, the flame of thought burns bright. But our thinking is impure and soot builds up, ideas sputter out, and we are forced to crawl the fuliginous gloom of words, to scrape and brush the lampblack from the chimney walls until the oxygen of truth flows free. Or something like that…

Starting in the fall term of 1928, Fowler distributed to his seminar students a brush and a scraper and asked them to raise, whenever they were arguing a philosophical point, either the brush, if they were dislodging loose logico-linguistic soot, or the scraper, if they were chipping away at solid logico-linguistic soot. … He fielded from a student the usual question—are you talking about regular chimneys or logico-linguistic chimneys?—but replied this time that he did not understand the distinction the student was trying to draw.

When is a metaphor not a metaphor?

In late autumn of 1930, a number of Fowler’s students complained to the head of the department that most of their seminars were now spent clearing out chimneys around Oxford, work that was dirty, dangerous, and not conspicuously philosophical in nature.

Wittgenstein discouraged his students from becoming philosophers, urging them to go into manual labour. Are the builders who populate the opening of the Investigations, bringing one another slabs, counting slabs, sorting slabs by shape and colour—are they tools by which to make a point about the functional diversity of language? Or role models for would-be academics? Forget about philosophy—bring us slabs!

Sophisticates that we are, we are unable to relinquish metaphor, unable not to see one thing as another—a philosophical chimney, a logico-linguistic flue.

From our modern vantage point we understand both perspectives on Fowler. Both were right. He did sweep out some 19th-century nonsense from our understanding of logic and language, and he did cause the death by suffocation of numerous undergraduates and graduate students.

“How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing?” Wittgenstein asks in the Investigations. “One might as well ascribe it to a number!”

And now look at a wriggling fly, and at once these difficulties vanish, and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.

Sometimes a fly is just a fly, enduring agony: open the fly-bottle and let the fly go free!

1. Thanks to Abe Mathew for the gift of this book.