Six Other Books That Will Save Civilization

Thanks to Aaron for suggesting this topic. Before I discuss the six books I have chosen, I would like to make two preliminary remarks.

First, any time a bibliophile is asked to present a list of superlative books, it is a difficult task. But when the criterion for inclusion is not just his personal favorites, or even the most important books in a certain field, but something as grandiose as “books that will save civilization,” he naturally looks back at his own intellectual development to search for the books that were most crucial or enlightening in his own life. But when I reviewed my own intellectual development, I was surprised that what stood out in my memory were not primarily certain books but certain people and certain conversations. The books I did remember were often connected to those people and the conversations I had with them; strangely enough, I also associated a few books with people with whom I have never even discussed them. What this suggests to me is that the preservation of civilization will not depend so much on safeguarding certain texts, but on passing down to future generations the spirit that animates these texts. “For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

Second, the scenario Aaron has presented us with is that of a dictatorship. If America ever descends into such a state, I do not expect a brutal fascist or Communist dictatorship but something more akin to A Brave New World. Surveillance of the citizenry will be all-pervasive, but for the most part it will be superfluous, for this dictatorship will deaden the soul through subtle propaganda so that the citizenry will not know that there is more to life than what the state has to offer. As Cardinal Ratzinger stated at his last public Mass before he was elected pope, what threatens the modern world most is the dictatorship of relativism. Relativism, though, does not mean that the dictatorship would never forbid or command certain actions or thoughts in an “absolute” way. Rather, relativism in this sense means what Nicolás Gómez Dávila termed terrenismo, or “earthliness”: the denial of transcendence, of any measure beyond a man's own whims. So, the spirit I aim to keep alive with all these books is a certain Sehnsucht, a yearning for transcendence. They are not systematic, and they are not generally concerned with doctrine, though I would never deny the importance of doctrine. The books I have chosen, then, are books that I think will keep this spirit alive while hopefully escaping censorship. They therefore do not include explicitly religious books, such as the Bible or the writings of the saints; I assume the underground Church would preserve these.

Joseph von Eichendorff, Poems. Joseph von Eichendorff is the archetypal Romantic. Indeed, he is so archetypal that some of his less distinguished poems can come across as mere clichés of Romanticism. But, in an age when the only thing that seems to interest people is sex, von Eichendorff understood that romantic love pointed to something greater than just sex. He understood the restlessness of true love.

Du hast mir wohl gegeben 
Ein Herz, das hat nicht Ruh. 
Und mitten im Leben 
                                         Sehnt es sich immerzu.

                                         Ich weiß nicht, was im Herzen
                                         Mich so lebendig rührt,
                                         In tausend Lust und Schmerzen
                                        Mich ewig nun verführt. 

Joseph von Eichendorff also understood that true love is often accompanied by pain. Indeed, pain is sometimes inseparable from true love; one cannot be had without the other:

Der stirbt vor Liebe nicht, ein Halbgetreuer,
Wer von der Liebe mehr verlangt als Pein.

And finally, there runs throughout his love poems a sense that the whole cosmos is somehow involved in each individual love story. Eichendorff conveys the lover’s feeling that the entire world revolves around his love for his beloved. Even the birds, the forests, the mountains, and the stars play roles within the love story. Love is something so important that it involves the whole universe. However, whereas with some Romantics this leads to a narcissistic solipsism, with von Eichendorff there is a sense that the lover is caught up in something greater beyond himself.

Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker. On the surface, this novella’s plot sounds like the story of just another homeless drunk who dies prematurely because of his vice. In Roth’s telling, though, the drinker’s death is holy because it is permeated with a profound longing for the Lord. Andres Kartak (the holy drinker) loses his way in life because of his excessive zeal for justice: he defends his landlord’s wife against her husband’s abuse, but ends up killing the man and landing in prison. Once released, he winds up living under the bridges over the Seine in Paris, spending every penny that falls into his hands on drink. But one day he is given 200 francs by an anonymous gentleman who asks only that he repay the sum to the shrine of St. Therese of Lisieux at St. Marie des Batignolles. Kartak tries again and again to make it to the shrine but is always distracted by friends and alcohol. And then, on the Sunday when he makes it as far as a bar across the street from the church, he collapses in the bar and is taken to the sacristy, where he dies reaching into his pocket to give the 200 francs to the priests who are custodians of the shrine of St. Therese. Sadly, but significantly, it is only in this death that Roth finds a way to transfigure Kartak’s utter failure on earth into a holy and touching death. Like von Eichendorff, Roth conceives of Sehnsucht as a kind of melancholy love. It is this melancholy that helps the reader to understand the transcendent quality of love—even in the love that makes us happy on earth, there is a sad quality that makes our hearts restless and impels us to search for something beyond this earth to satisfy our hearts.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s outlook on life perplexes many people today. He was a man who wrote a story depicting in heroic fashion the little hobbits who resist evil against all odds, but who privately called this life “a long defeat,” a man for whom even the ultimate victory against Sauron was tinged with melancholy, by the scouring of the Shire and Frodo’s departure from the Grey Havens for the Undying Lands. He was a man who wrote humorous poems for his children and merry drinking songs for his friends, but who was also given to brooding and perhaps even suffered a nervous breakdown while trying to work on The Lord of the Rings. It is the juxtaposition of these two qualities that perplexes so many today.

But, it is precisely the juxtaposition of the joyous with the melancholy that makes up life for Tolkien. Tolkien enjoyed a pipe and a mug of ale as much as any hobbit; the comforts of this earth were a blessing for which he continually gave thanks. But, for the homely hobbits, and for many men today, the elves are a strange but necessary presence, an uncomfortable reminder that there is more to life than the bourgeois desire for a warm seat by the family hearth. The elves are the most beautiful people in Middle Earth, and the most ethereal, most sublime beauty any of the hobbits ever beholds always comes from the elves. They also have the longest, most dramatic history of any of the peoples of Middle Earth (a fact constantly alluded to in The Lord of the Rings but not explained except in The Silmarillion). And yet they do not quite belong in Middle Earth. There is a certain sadness about the elves. They are always mindful that they are but pilgrims on this earth, and that there is true home is over the sea. This sad longing makes the elves even more beautiful than they would be. Beauty and melancholy belong together in the elves.

Despite this melancholy knowledge that the present age will pass and despite the fragility of their beauty, the elves can be a stout, courageous people. The Silmarillion is full of their exploits in war. Even in the later age depicted in The Lord of the Rings, the elves have retained something of the mythical Germanic heroes whom Tolkien studied in his professional life, those heroes who were determined to fight the good fight until the end despite the certainty of failure. Of course, Tolkien was a Catholic who confessed God’s ultimate victory over evil; but that victory is a long way off, and only comes after we pass through the veil of death.

Tolkien teaches us that beauty and melancholy have a mysterious affinity in this life, but also that one who reveres beauty can be courageous.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Scholia to an Implicit Text. “The most subversive book in our time would be a compendium of old proverbs.” What exactly Gómez meant by this aphorism—as with so many others—is a bit unclear at first glance, especially outside the context of his other aphorisms. But again, as with so many of his other aphorisms, this one grabs the reader’s attention with its apparent paradox: How could a proverb be subversive? But, as Gómez grasped so clearly, we live in a world that is upside down, politically, aesthetically, and religiously. Our chief task today is simply to recover as much of the wisdom of our fathers as possible and to pass it on to our own children. According to Gómez, we have rejected the old commonplaces only to be ruined by our own attempt to “be as gods.”

The heart of Gómez’s own message is that man must renounce his aspiration to be master of the universe. He calls on his readers to recognize God’s absolute sovereignty, acknowledge their own status as creatures, and then to live out this truth in their own lives. As a being created by God, man finds himself “immersed in religious experiences” from the first moment of his existence; the universe is fundamentally a mystery to man. It is man’s unbreakable desire to find the source of the universe that gives birth to Sehnsucht. Gómez Dávila views this persistent longing for the transcendent as grounds for hope that this world will not surrender completely to terrenismo, the belief that there is nothing beyond this life.

Finally, Nicolás Gómez Dávila is a particularly apt author for this thought experiment since he has already passed through the censorship of political correctness in the modern West. Martin Mosebach tells how in West Germany in the 1980’s bad carbon copies of his aphorisms were passed around from one sympathizer to the next like samizdat literature in the Soviet Union. He was a practically unknown author, but his German readers were certain that he would be widely condemned. And, indeed, some segments of the German press have equated interest in Gómez with neo-Nazi tendencies. It is the mere specter of being on the right politically, rather than expressing any actually despicable opinions, that leads the politically correct authorities to condemn a writer today.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. At first glance, the idea that Tocqueville could inspire any feeling resembling yearning or Sehnsucht is an odd one. Tocqueville was an expert historian and political analyst, whose precise prose is a model of French clarté; he was not a poet. Nevertheless, in all of his writings (both on America and on France) Tocqueville’s passion for his subject shines through; the reader always knows that Tocqueville believes the subject he is examining—the advent of democracy in modern society—is central to the fate of the world for the next several centuries.

It was his remarkable grasp of the central drama of modern history allowed Tocqueville to foresee the danger for the soul lurking in American democracy: “soft” despotism. According to Tocqueville, the soft despotism which democratic societies must fear will rarely torment citizens; it will instead “degrade” or “enervate” them, keeping them in “perpetual childhood.” Men will look to the administrative state to “entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

The ancient tyrants tortured the bodies of their enemies, but in doing so they provoked great acts of courage. Tarquinius Superbus’ cruelty inspired Mucius Scaevola to burn his right hand; the early Roman’s status as a citizen meant that he was called upon to sacrifice for the city in battle. The later Roman emperors’ persecution of the early Christian martyrs only increased the number of converts who marveled at their courage. In the modern world, on the other hand, politicians for the last hundred years or so, when not waging wars on one another, have labored to dull the pains of life for their citizenry and thus preempt rebellion by making the citizenry too comfortable to risk their well-being. Bismarck, for example, was one of the first politicians to realize the effectiveness of this tactic: he attempted to head off his socialist opposition by adopting some of their programs, such as workman’s compensation. Catholics he found to be more intractable, hence the necessity of open persecution in the Kulturkampf. Later on, after the second world war, it was a common complaint of the West German left in the 1950’s and 1960’s that the Wirtschaftswunder had made Germans too preoccupied with wealth to examine the horrors of their recent past or attend to the injustices of the present. Comfort dulls consciences. Tocqueville understood that the modern preoccupation with comfort presaged the deadening of the democratic soul, which would no longer be capable of any great actions once it lost any sense of transcendent justice.

Tacitus, Annals. I hesitate to include among these more poetic books any of Tacitus’ works, for his tone is often biting and sarcastic, rather than yearning or sehnsuchtsvoll. Where he does achieve his stated objective and writes “sine ira et studio,” Tacitus’ Annals are a sober, and sobering, account of the Roman Empire from the end of Augustus’s reign to the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD). But where he does write with emotion, what comes through most clearly is his scorn for the emperors whose reigns he chronicled.

The danger of Tacitus, though, is also his greatest virtue: he teaches us to be discontented with the present. Even mankind’s greatest ages can be marked by utter degradation; even the glory and splendor of the Roman Empire are marred by corruption and decay. Even before he reaches Nero, he depicts in detail the pettiness of Tiberius, a man too weak to do what he knew was right. Tiberius originally recognized the sycophancy of his many flatterers and the opportunism of the legions of informants, but he had a deplorable lack of forthrightness in both speech and action. He could not rule except through subterfuge. No longer was it possible for two men in public office to express open, manly disagreement with each other; the ancient republican virtues of virtus and παρρησία were no more. Tiberius’ longing was for the days of the old republic.

Implicit in discontent with the present is a tendency to cynicism. Tacitus must have experienced this temptation in his own life. He rose to the consulship at a time when the consulship did not carry much importance with it. He knew that the supreme political virtues under the emperors were no longer virtus and παρρησία but deceit and cunning. However, Tacitus resisted the temptation to cynicism. He revered his father-in-law as a man striving to live an upright life in a corrupt political system, leaving a monument to him for posterity in his Agricola. Tacitus also gives many examples of men who remained true to the old ways in spite of great pressure, even to the point of death, thus giving us an idea of the courage a man requires if he is going to live a virtuous life in a corrupt age.

Near the end of what remains of the Annals (XVI.35), Tacitus recounts the death of the noble senator Thrasea, who was attacked by senators loyal to Nero for persisting in his “perverse vanity,” their term for his refusal to flatter the emperor. Before he dies, Thrasea speaks to his son-in-law Helvidius words that we would all do well to remember ourselves: “We pour out a libation to Jupiter the Deliverer. Behold young man, and may the gods avert the omen, but you have been born into times in which it is well to fortify the spirit with examples of courage.”

Sehnsucht without courage is nothing.

Review of Joseph Roth's Letters in the Wall Street Journal

This weekend's Wall Street Journal features a review of a new English translation of a selection of Joseph Roth's letters. The review does a good job of conveying how tenuous Roth's hold on life and reality sometimes was. For example, the review mentions that Roth asked for money from Stefan Zweig for several years in the 1930's but would then berate him for interfering in his writing. But unfortunately (from my point of view), it concentrates on the purely political aspect of Roth's writing. While there is no doubt that politics meant a great deal to Roth, and that much of his oeuvre is concerned with politics in one way or another, the elegiac quality of his greatest works points to something more important than politics.

Anyone whose interest is piqued by the review may want to read three earlier posts about Roth (parts 1, 2, and 3). Maybe someday I'll finally get around to writing something about The Radetzky March as I've been planning for some time.

Joseph Roth, Part 3

Today I will discuss Joseph Roth’s last novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker. In this work, published only months before his own untimely death, Roth again devotes his attention, and sympathy, to the loser. This time, though, the story is even more personal, because it eerily foreshadows Roth’s own death. In fact, Roth himself called it his last testament.

The holy drinker in question is a homeless man in Paris named Andreas Kartak. At the beginning of the story the only thing Roth tells the reader is that he lives under the bridges over the Seine. Later on, Roth fills in Andreas’ background. Andreas originally left his native village of Olschowice in Polish Silesia to work in the French coal mines. But he soon ran into trouble. When one day he sees his landlord savagely beating his wife, Caroline, with whom he had become friends, Andreas steps in to protect her and kills his landlord. This is the act that lands him in jail. Since his release he has wandered around Paris during the day and slept under bridges at night. The only other shelter Andreas found was in cafés.

Andreas has been doing this for some while when Roth begins his narration. In the first chapter, a genteel-looking man approaches Andreas and offers him 200 francs. The stranger’s only condition is that Andreas pay the money back to the shrine of the “little St. Therese of Lisieux” in the chapel of St. Marie des Batignolles. It turns out that this gentleman has recently become a Christian and given up his well-furnished home for the bridges over the Seine. He then walks back into the shadows.

From this point onwards, the novella portrays Andreas’ attempts to do something worthwhile with this gift and his struggle to repay “little Therese,” as he calls her. He starts out well. He buys a new suit and briefcase and persuades a wealthy man to hire him for a temporary job. But once the job is over, he spends the money he earned on liquor. Andreas then starts running into a series of old acquaintances. Some want to help him out, others are only interested in his 200 francs, while others discard him as just an old memory. Andreas just searches for wine, women, and song, while remembering episodes from his life.

Every Sunday, however, Andreas is resolved to pay back his debt to “little Therese.” He hears church bells ringing and, stuck in sin as he is, he knows where his duty lies. But getting to the church is never as easy as deciding to go there. Sunday after Sunday he somehow fails to make it to “little Therese.” On the last Sunday, Andreas makes it all the way to the church square, but again he runs into an old acquaintance, a drunkard just like him, who coaxes him, despite his protests that he needs to go to Mass, into a nearby café. There they drink their Pernod, until a little girl enters and walks past them. When Andreas finds out that her name is Therese, he immediately offers her the money, but she won’t take it. She does tell him, however, that her parents are attending Mass; this reminds Andreas of his duty, and his own desire. Unfortunately, as he is thinking of leaving, he collapses in the café. Since there is no doctor there, the waiters carry him into the nearby sacristy to see if the priests can help. There Andreas breathes his last, reaching into his pocket for the 200 francs.

Andreas had not been able to find a roof to sleep under, to stay sober, to hold down a job for a long time. He had been a loser for a long time. Yet in the end he succeeds; he brings the money to “little Therese” and dies, hopefully, at peace with with God. Andreas was right to persevere in hope.

The novel then ends with this line, which Roth obviously meant to apply to himself: “God grant all us drinkers such an easy, beautiful death!”

Joseph Roth, part 2

Yesterday I sketched some of the most important details of Joseph Roth’s life, as they affected his view of what I have not so charitably termed “losers.” Now I will examine one of his works, Job, to demonstrate how Roth wove those themes into his literary work.

In Job Roth chronicles the life of a typical Russian Jew named Mendel Singer, such as he grew up among in Brody. Mendel Singer’s world changed, and the world did not want to help him. Mendel begins as a Bible-teacher, an ordinary, God-fearing Jew. His wife Deborah, though, is a shrew. His oldest son, Schemarja, leaves Brody, sails to America and becomes Sam. His next son, Jonas, voluntarily joins the Russian army. His daughter, Mirjam, sleeps around with Cossacks. And his youngest son, Menuchim—his Benjamin—is born crippled and dumb, probably epileptic. The only hope to which Mendel and his wife can cling to is the prophecy made by a local rabbi that Menuchim would one day be healed. Years later, Menuchim is still not well, and Mendel, Deborah, and Mirjam leave him in Russia to join Sam in America. In America Mendel feels deprived of purpose and unsure of this new world. The rest of his family loves America, but Mendel does not. Why should he assimilate?

Then, Mendel’s already fragile world simply breaks apart. Upon the news of Sam’s death as an American soldier and Jonas’ disappearance as a Russian soldier in the First World War, Deborah herself dies of grief. Soon afterwards, Mirjam, who brought her old habits with her to America, goes insane after sleeping with Herr Glück—Mr. Happiness. At this point, Mendel cannot comprehend why God is punishing him, and tries to burn his prayer book until his neighbors stop him. He tells them he is trying to burn God. However, after months of living only in order to hate God, Mendel is brought something unexpected: his youngest son. At a Passover meal with his neighbors, at the point in the ceremony when the Jews await the coming of the Prophet, Menuchim knocks at the door. He has been healed of his epilepsy (at a Russian hospital),and is now a famous composer whose work Mendel already admires. This miracle—for that is what it is—ends the book. What was impossible has been accomplished; God loves Mendel.

Roth shows his affection for losers quite clearly at two other points in the novel. First, after coming to America, Mendel does not see the point of assimilating, and seems rather lazy compared to all his Jewish neighbors who go to night school to learn English. Mendel’s stubbornness in following strict moral laws makes his wife reproach him for “behaving like a Russian Jew.” Mendel’s only response: “I am a Russian Jew.” Mendel cannot change his identity, and does not see the desirability of even trying. He does not like America, and if that makes him a loser, so be it. Unfortunately, Mendel is rather inarticulate; he relies completely on his actions. Mendel simply cannot find words to express what he is thinking and feeling, even at key junctures in the story when the reader expects him to justify his actions. Mendel the loser cannot communicate. He has come to a country he does not understand. Yet, even in his Jewish enclave in New York City, he is surrounded by fellow Jews who do not understand him either. They have settled in America, and have ceased practicing their ancestral religion with any true fervor. They neglect mandatory prayers, and they work on the Sabbath. Their devotions are quickly becoming mere taboos, and their beliefs nothing more than old wives’ tales. There is a wall of silence separating Mendel from the entire world, even his fellow Jews, even his own family. No amount of rhetoric will break it down. Mendel can only call upon God. And when God refuses His help, what good is success for Mendel? How can he continue?

The second point is Roth’s short discourse on hope and miracles. Shortly before emigrating from Russia, Mendel reflects on the promise the rabbi made concerning Menuchim. What he needs is a miracle, but Mendel acknowledges that he has no right to demand one from God. And yet, Mendel’s only hope is for a miracle. It is here that Roth inserts the most important line in the book: “He who has no unhappiness does not believe in miracles.” In context Roth seems to cast doubt on this maxim, by speculating on why God has not performed any miracles since the time when Israel dwelt in Palestine. In reality, though, the novel’s ending demonstrates that this is the lesson Roth wished to impart to his readers. If we were all successful in God’s eyes, why should we need His grace?

In Mendel Singer we see the loser who refuses to change with the world, but who ultimately keeps on hoping.

Joseph Roth & Sympathy for Losers

“He who has no unhappiness does not believe in miracles.”

“God grant all us drinkers such an easy, beautiful death!”

This summer I read two books by Joseph Roth, Job and The Legend of the Holy Drinker. Because I enjoyed these books so much, I wanted to bring them to your attention. Today I am only offering some information about Joseph Roth. Tomorrow and the next day I will take a look at these two books in more detail. I apologize beforehand that some parts of this essay are not quite as fully thought out as they should be; I thought it better to post it now or else risk never finishing it. (Spoiler warning: I will be giving away the endings of both stories.)

Joseph Roth is not very well known in America, though he is well-regarded in the German-speaking world. If an American has heard of him, it is probably on account of The Radetzky March, his fictionalized telling of the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nevertheless, Americans should study Roth more closely because he makes us ask ourselves a certain fundamental question we usually try to evade: In a society driven by success, what do we do with “the loser”? Roth’s writing poses this question so poignantly for at least two reasons. First, Roth himself was a loser. Geopolitics are certainly one part of the reason why Roth was a loser: He grew up in a turbulent world and into an age-old way of life that disappeared when he was barely reaching maturity. But, he was also a loser on a more personal level: He lied about himself compulsively, and died a homeless alcoholic. Secondly, Roth had the rare gift to be able to narrate a novel about a person’s entire fate with great sympathy in a deceptively simple style.
Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, East Galicia. Until the end of World War I, East Galicia belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was then annexed by Russia; it is now located in western Ukraine. More importantly for Roth’s outlook on life, Brody was a sizeable Jewish shtetl. Roth was not raised speaking one of the local Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian), but rather German and Yiddish; he later attended the only German-language high school in the nearby city of Lemberg, as he would have called it, or Lviv, as it is now known in Ukrainian. As a result, he was something of an outsider in his own native region, and always felt attracted by the wider German-speaking world outside the shtetl. This attraction drew him to Vienna for university studies. Shortly after this move World War I broke out and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the principle of unity in Roth’s life, was dismembered, with Brody and Lviv falling to the Bolsheviks.

With no home to return to after the war, Roth started work as a journalist, first in Vienna and later in Berlin. At the beginning of his career Roth was most concerned with social and political questions, displaying a generally socialist attitude. Nevertheless, his roots in the Jewish shtetl always shone through. Perhaps his most famous collection of articles from that period is entitled “The Wandering Jews” (Juden auf Wanderschaft).

The second stage of Roth’s career is marked not by an abandonment of social and political themes—they continued to play a role in his novels and short stories—but by a new emphasis on the fates of individuals. It is this stage that saw Roth produce the works for which he is still remembered, most especially The Radetzky March. It is also this same period—probably not coincidentally—that saw Roth’s personal life fall apart. His wife went insane, and he sought love from various paramours, with predictably poor results. He often lied to others about his childhood to cover up unpleasant details, such as his father’s insanity. But, he also told conflicting stories about his own religious views; some days he told people he was a proud Jew, other days he was a Catholic or an agnostic. He wanted to make a grand tale out of his own life. If personal problems were not enough for him, Roth had to flee Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. In the end, though, it was his drinking that caught up with him, and in 1939 he died, homeless and penniless, in a Parisian café.

This would be the life of just another unhappy artist—not at all worthy of the appellation “tragic”—if it were not for the fact that Roth was a man who had engaged with the world. Roth was a journalist who was deeply involved in the world around him. Yes, Roth was weak—he was an alcoholic, and he turned to other women when his wife became insane. He also had a narcissistic streak—thus, the many lies about his own life. But I cannot help but sense something greater than a plain old deluded alcoholic. He knew that life was a grand story, but as far as I can tell, he also knew that he could not deny his sins. And most importantly, he always kept his hope alive.

Joseph Roth loved a certain type of loser. It was not the loser who tried to blame all his own personal faults on other people. Even if Roth himself could legitimately blame circumstances beyond his control (World War I, the October Revolution, the Nazi rise to power) for his misfortunes, he always admitted that his drinking was a problem that he had to control. Roth loved the loser who could not understand the world and whom the world could not understand. He had nothing but sympathy for the man who truly struggled to discern his purpose in the world, but simply could not find it.

But for Roth, even a loser’s life was worth telling. Even a loser had to keep hoping.