&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061â€�
Like a children’s picture book, this has six iterations of a scenario, repeated with small changes each time. Even the progression of the characters� names tells a story: of humanity’s - and computers� - development on earth and far beyond, over billions of years. There’s also something rather childlike about the successive generations of humans with their pedantic disputes and repeated questioning.

However, the ideas require a more adult mindset: mortality, immortality, predestination, extinction, eternity, faith (religion?) versus science, AI and beyond, finite fossil fuels, and infinite solar power.
Well, the last one isn’t quite infinite; it will last �Till the sun runs down�.
But what then - can entropy be reversed?

�INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER�

The ending is to die for, even though you’ll probably divine it before you read the last line.


Image: Stunning illustration for the story, by Fran Fdez ()

See also

� Read the story . It’s about a dozen pages and was published in 1959.

� If you want to understand entropy more than is explained in the story, see Wikipedia , or the simple English version, . However, there’s no need to.

� Transhumanism is nothing to do with gender, and although Asimov doesn’t use the term, he does portray it. See Wikipedia .

� This story has more belief in Malthus� 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population than I have. See my review HERE

� In the 1940s or 50s, Flanders and Swann penned a comic song about entropy, First and Second Laws (of thermodynamics). My review of their songbook, HERE, has has links to the lyrics and to a recording.

� The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams started as a radio drama in 1978. He pioneered comedy sci-fi, but the story is not quite as original as I’d previously believed. See my review HERE.

� Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut in 1985, features Madarax, which is very like The Hitchhiker’s Guide. See my review HERE.

� Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is a very different sort of novel, but uses a narrative device of second changes/changes at life, and alternate paths. See my review HERE.


Image: xkcd 1448, “Question�. Mouseover text is: “The universe long dead, IsaAC surveyed the formless chaos. At last, he had arrived at an answer. 'I like you,' he declared to the void, 'but I don't LIKE like you.'� ()"

"I was reading some Hemingway novels and something reminded me of Boy Scouts and I thought, hmm, Papa was handy dude (as well as a rolling stone), where did he learn all of his crafty knowledge?

His father was a physician and young Ernest reveled in hours and hours of unprogrammed time learning woodcraft in the Michigan woods along with how to hunt, fish and live in the outdoors. Being born in 1899, the boy would have been 12 when the Boy Scout Handbook was first published in 1911 and while I don’t think there is evidence that he attended any Boy Scout events, the same crafts taught to the young scouts would have been readily available to an outdoorsy lad intent on adventures.

Reading this, organized into easy to follow chapters that would be the template for the handbook for decades (including the one I had as a scout in the late 70s and early 80s), I also considered how much of an inspiration this must have been to generations of young men who not only learned outdoor crafts, but also morals and work ethic. This must also have been an influence on our culture as honesty, integrity, leadership and hard work were instilled in young men who would later become integral parts of our society.

"

&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital - shallow, cratered, extinct.â€�
No bombs on such a bright night, but no privacy either.
�A girl and her soldier who, by their way of walking, seem to have no destination but each other and not to be quite certain even of that.�

As they wander, she quotes a poem (see Metafiction, below):
�Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand,
Thy lonely towers beneath the lonely moon�

She conflates the poem, bomb damage, and their own private realm. He disagrees, but she asserts:
�What it tries to say doesn’t matter: I see what it makes me see.�

Different interpretations are one of the joys of stories such as this, especially when discussed with others.

From dreaming of other lives and other worlds, reality calls. It’s late, and they return to the one-bedroom flat Pepita shares with Callie. Tonight, Arthur will sleep on Pepita’s fold-out divan, and she’ll share Callie’s bed, but first, chaste, awkward conversation over cups of cocoa. Mysterious Kôr, and mysterious moonlight seep into dreams: what is real, and what is not?
�A game’s a game, but what’s a hallucination?�


Image: Silhouette of a man and a woman in front of the moon. ()

Names

I wondered about the startlingly different names: Arthur (traditional, English, solid, regal, mythical) and Pepita, which I guessed was Spanish and for which Google gave “interesting� results (shell-less pumpkin seed, and slang for clitoris). I’m not sure what to make of that. And then Callie: somewhere between the two, like the gooseberry she is.

Quotes

� “The futility of the black-out became laughable.�

� “If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it.�

� “Below the moon, the houses opposite her window blazed in transparent shadow�

� “Callie, so sedate, waxy, and tall - an unlit candle.�

� “You might say he had not seen Pepita coming: their love had been a collision in the dark.�

� “The moon’s power over London and the imagination had now declined. The siege of light had relaxed�

Metafiction

In 1887, H Rider Haggard wrote She. I've not read it, but I’ve seen the film starring Ursula Andress and Peter Cushing. See imdb see .

Andrew Lang (famous for his Fairy Books, each named after a colour) was also a literary critic and said, “I think 'She' is one of the most astonishing romances I ever read. The more impossible it is, the better you do it, till it seems like a story from the literature of another planet�.

He immediately wrote a parody in verse, dedicated to Haggard, which includes “Mysterious Kor thy walls forsaken stand / Thy lonely towers beneath the lonely moon�. You can read the whole poem .

In 1944, Elizabeth Bowen used the idea of Mysterious Kôr in her fantastical short story, in which Arthur and Pepita discuss the meaning of the poem. I enjoyed several of her novels, a few years back, and wrote brief reviews HERE. I don't recall any fantastical elements, but the sumptuous descriptions, and the delicately drawn awkwardness of relationships, rang bells for me. More specifically, wartime London, in slightly spooky light, features in this short story and also in The Heat of the Day.

I kept thinking of Jorge Luis Borges, particularly The Circular Ruins, which I reviewed in his collection The Garden of Forking Paths HERE.


Image: Abstract photo, like a circular inkspill, with the suggestion of a head. “Kusho 26� by Shinichi Maruyama. ()

Escapism

My choice of novels is often related to how much I’m seeking escapism (dystopias can make real life seem better than it feels), and I often try to imagine myself in the world I'm currently reading about, especially if it's unlike mine, but that's more about immersion in the book than escape from the real world.

I also escape into the woods, a long bubbly bath, sleep (consciously conjuring particularly fond memories) and, sometimes, wine. But unlike Pepita, I don't have a single poem or literary place I escape to. What about you?

Short story club

I read this in Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 24 March 2025.

You can read this story .

You can join the group here."

"On December 4, 2024 Luigi Mangione On Ivy League graduate has shot dead a CEO of a health insurance company. What has this to do with Princess Casamassima and Henry James? The public reaction to this event as well as the current state in the “revolutionary� United States has influenced my reading experience of this 19th century novel. We will come back to how and why. But let’s travel to the 19th century for a time being. James seemingly was inspired by Turgenev’s Virgin Soil. "Inspiration" went as far as the skeleton of the plot, the characterisation and even some scenes. Nevertheless, It is an original psychologically astute and elegantly written work.

The social wondering of the main protagonist has also reminded me of Sentimental Education. Like Flaubert’s Paris, James’s London is much more than a backdrop of the novel. Having arrived in London to settle down, James walked miles in many different areas of the big city not ignoring its squalid sites. And his perspective was uniquely fresh: it was not a view of a seasoned Londoner who might not have noticed the peculiarities of her daily backdrop rushing somewhere; but also it was not an impression of a casual visitor who would not venture beyond Oxford street. James has successfully lent his observations to his characters, predominantly to the main one, Hyacinth Robinson. In the introduction he mentioned: I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.

And that is how we eventually getting to know Hyacinth through his extensive walks: sometimes with the other characters, but often alone looking around and contemplating numerous dilemmas in his mind. Just to give you a feeling of this side of the novel, here is a view from the window:

Hyacinth, after a moment, placed himself beside her, looking out with her at the dusky multitude of chimney-pots and the small black houses, roofed with grimy tiles. The thick, warm air of a London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness, but again became a mighty voice, as soon as one listened for it; here and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a clearer, smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver star looked down.

Living in London a century and half later, i still intimately know this view with its raws of little chimneys like broken teeth on the roofs; and experience first hand of this feeling of everything “sunk into quietness� on July evening after a hot day.

In some of my previous experiences with James, i felt occasionally that he forced his authorial will on a character or created an artificial situation testing the limits of reader’s suspension of disbelief. I could not for example believe in motivation of Isabel Archer. However, i did not face this problem here. You might blame James for certain sentimentality. But all the characters in this novel seemed alive to me: as a bonus, none was created as "a villain", and none was "a hero" either. Refreshingly there were no perfect “types�. To a large extent, the novel has managed to maintain this delicious ambiguity that i love so much in a good realistic piece of fiction, when not everything is spelled out and the reader is left free to develop her own ideas; make additional assumptions or plainly loudly argue with the characters. I cannot say i could not occasionally hear an acerbic and witty voices of James himself behind his characters. But he did not dominate them; nothing seemed shoehorned into the novel for the benefit of the writer’s argument or at least not obviously so.

Apart from “tormented�, “finely aware� Hyacinth, the cast was very strong with women. Christina Light, the Princess Casamassima of the title is interesting if slightly vogue creation. In the introduction, James tells of her story:

Nothing would doubtless beckon us on further, with a large leisure, than such a chance to study the obscure law under which certain of a novelist’s characters, more or less honourably buried, revive for him by a force or a whim of their own and “walk� round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling for the old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted windows.

Apparently James has already written about the Princess in Roderick Hudson. But this wondrous description of his inspiration has reminded me of a brilliant contemporary author Gerald Murnane, especially his novel Inland. For Murnane the characters are creatures as real as people in everyday life. And when he writes he just meets them in his imagination. In Inland, his protagonist was visited by a “personage� of a very young woman. The closest person to this girl from “this world� has died a century before. I thought such a concept of a character was pretty unique. But now i am sure that its precursor has to be Henry James. Even more fascinating, in Inland Murnane mentioned an episode from the beginning of Wuthering Heights when a ghost of Cathy Earnshaw appeared to the narrator exactly “pressing her pale face, in the other dark, to lighted windows.� Did James think of Emily Bronte? Did Murnane think of James? Who knows. However, such serendipitous parallels between the texts are always very stimulating and a delight to "catch".

On the surface, Christina Light cannot be further from Cathy Earnshaw. When Hyacinth meets her, she is a princess estranged from her aristocratic Italian husband bored by the life of luxury and looking for a new distraction from it. This distraction is appeared to be an interest in the lower classes and the project of improving their lives. Hyacinth for her is the one of the first representatives of these “exotic� people. However, as book progresses the Princess’s resemblance to Cathy has become somewhat more likely as she becomes more impulsive, radicalised with underground politics seemingly blinded by passions and loosing any ability of rational thought.

Another charismatic female presence in Hyacinth’s life is the young working class childhood friend of his, Millicent Henning. She is outgoing, generous and kind-hearted. She enjoyed the relationship with Hyacinth, but at the same time he cannot be quite sure she is totally honest with him. The Hyacinth’s view of her as a representative of “the masses� is somewhat ambivalent:

She summed up the sociable, humorous, ignorant chatter of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it; and as much as any of this, their ideal of something smug and prosperous, where washed hands, and plates in rows on dressers, and stuffed birds under glass, and family photographs, would symbolize success.

Initially i found this observation a bit condensing, but after finishing the novel and learning the whole story, I've reconsidered my view. I think this ambivalence and the ambiguity of the total impression does underscore the complexity of her character. The element of generalisation James allows himself through Hyacinth in the paragraph above is more nuanced than simply making fun of the working class people. This is true especially considering Hyacinth's own peculiar background. Unusually for himself, James has populated this novel with quite a few characters from the poorer strata of the society. And like their richer counterparts or even more so they could not be classified into “good� and “bad� people here. That was quite refreshing as i expected him to get himself into a trap of easy categorisation, especially with his love for the “types�.

I felt even more comfortable with my view when i’ve read an essay by Lionell Trilling penned in 1948 about this novel:

That James should create poor people so proud and intelligent as to make it impossible for anyone, even the reader who has paid for the privilege, to condescend to them, so proud and intelligent indeed that it is not wholly easy for them to be “good,� is, one ventures to guess, an unexpressed, a never-to-be-expressed reason for finding him “impotent in matters sociological.� We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

Coming back to Millicent, for what it’s worth, she was my favourite character in the novel in spite of her evident weaknesses for good dresses and her general view what good life was all about. She, the Princess and Hyacinth form a romantic triangle of a sorts, however seemingly platonic and fragile. Still it brings the one of the delicious axis of tension in the novel.

Unusually for James, it seems this novel was designed to be politically zeitgeisty. Among other issues the society of the last half of the 19th centuries was preoccupied with the “social question�, the dire state of living/working conditions for the poor and how to improve it, including by political rights and representations but also by the revolutionary means. These concerns were quite widely reflected in the realistic tradition of the literature. Certainly both of James’s older friends Flaubert and Turgenev in different ways addressed these ideas in their novels. Very likely this inspired James. But the reality of the 70s and 80s was also quite turbulent in terms of radical politics and plain terrorism. There were new social movements. Marxism has started to get a fraction. The defenders of working class has got some political representation. However also there was a widespread network of conspiratorial secret societies devoted to the radical acts of destroying current institutions across Europe and Russia. Many of them were inspired by anarchism in its most radical terror form. According to Trilling:

Of the many assassinations or attempts at assassination that fill the annals of the late years of the century, not all were anarchist, but those that were not were influenced by anarchist example. In 1878 there were two attempts on the life of the Kaiser, one on the King of Spain, one on the King of Italy; in 1880 another attempt on the King of Spain; in 1881 Alexander II of Russia was killed after many attempts; in 1882 the Phoenix Park murders were committed, Lord Frederick Cavendish, Secretary for Ireland, and Undersecretary Thomas Burke being killed by extreme Irish nationalists; in 1883 there were several dynamite conspiracies in Great Britain and in 1885 there was an explosion in the House of Commons; in 1883 there was an anarchist plot to blow up, all at once, the Emperor Wilhelm, the Crown Prince, Bismarck, and Moltke. These are but a few of the terroristic events of which James would have been aware in the years just before he began The Princess Casamassima, and later years brought many more.

James novel deals with this kind of radical underground “politics�. Hyacinth and the Princess have become entangled in the one of these societies with unsurprisingly consequential results. There is also a whole bunch of important smaller characters involved with this side of the story. The novel also touches upon the charitable activities by the representatives the higher classes, but it limits “social question� to these two elements without trying to deal with the wider picture of the labour movement, budding marxism or ideological debates in the society, etc. Some blamed James for that. I thought focusing on a radical fringe with its uncompromisingly ruthless “black&whiteness� the novel gave enough scope for thoughts. The one of the ideologue of this was Bakunin who did not believe in mass politics and considered that about a hundred of true revolutionaries is enough to destroy the system. They just need to destroy key individuals representing hateful institutions, bomb some properties and this “rehearsal� would instigate the real change towards equality without the state as an instrument of persecution of the masses.

James’s main character has found himself trapped between the conflicting observations and tormented by thoughts and urges that he was not able to reconcile or act upon. On the one hand he saw suffering and injustice:

People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and suspect nothing and think of nothing; and iniquities flourish, and the misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary evil,� and generations rot away and starve, in the midst of it, and day follows day, and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds.

This incisively expressed and sadly still universal sentiment has reminded me of W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) that was also penned in the turbulent times:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

Realising this, Hyacinth got himself pledged to the course of revolutionary violence. But later he has started to have doubts about the methods and even the parts of philosophy of total destruction propagated by his revolutionary bosses. Through his eyes, James juxtaposes the benefits of social progress versus destroying “high achievements of the civilisation�:

They seem to me inestimably precious and beautiful, the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will, upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies, and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the world is less impracticable and life more tolerable... Hoffendahl (the chief conspirator-philosopher) wouldn’t have the least feeling for this ...He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything, and I have a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of a redistribution.

Hoffendahl also would send his emissaries to physically destroy and terrorise individuals, the representatives of the institutions such as heads of the states, judges, the aristocracy etc. Of course to our modern eyes, this image of dividing the palaces into little pieces might sound as an exaggeration in order to win the argument. Also I would think that huge inequality of opportunities not “jealousy� might be the underlying cause for necessary redistribution. However, Hyacinth’s fears in this respect are not totally baseless. James’s generation has witnessed Paris Commune as well as earlier revolutions. In Sentimental Education Flaubert gave a portrait of rampage that was taking place in a Palace during the Commune. Later it was the time of Russian revolution that in many ways confirmed what Hyacinth anticipated about literal “cut up the ceilings into strips�.

Eventually, confused disillusioned and powerless, Hyacinth gave a bleak indictment to the whole situation akin A plague o' both your houses! :

The populace of London were scattered upon his path, and he asked himself by what wizardry they could ever be raised to high participations. There were nights when every one he met appeared to reek with gin and filth, and he found himself elbowed by figures as foul as lepers. Some of the women and girls, in particular, were appalling � saturated with alcohol and vice, brutal, bedraggled, obscene. “What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?� he asked himself, as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what fate but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich, who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference, and only shifted the shame; for the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effect.

He seemed again to be coming back to the idea of total cleansing act of “deluge or annihilation�. It is not clear by this stage of his thinking which forces would make it happen and to which affect. He is disillusioned with his anarchist friends. But this act of romantic and full destruction seemed to him the only possibility of the new beginning or a deserved final ending. His thoughts seem to achieve almost religious apocalyptic height.

It is probably not surprising that James has rendered the vision of such an individual in the last few decades of the 19th century. Is it more surprising though that similar flavour of ideas seem to gain fraction nowadays. Anarchism ideology in its different forms is gaining the ground again both from the left and from the right. The majority of the discourse is much more nuanced. David Graeber and James C Scott are popular thinkers inclining towards a sophisticated vision of anarchism. But some more destructive ideas penetrate into the collective conscience from powerful fringes. When Luigi Mangione has assassinated the UnitedHealthcare CEO, he gained a huge fan base on-line who justified his actions on the basis of unfairness of the US healthcare system the CEO represented in their eyes. Some of them assigned to Luigi a status of saint: “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All�. That is a left wing fringe. On the right of the political spectrum the current US administration is actively involved in the rapid destruction of existing system of government on many fronts. I do not need to go deep into this here. I just say one name: Elon Musk. But he is far from being alone. Often these efforts are logically incoherent akin the best revolutionary romanticism:

The appetite for romantic destruction is the flip side of the desire for authoritarian order, and, like the Joker’s merry grin and sadistic grimace, one comes right after the other so quickly that they can’t be told apart. (It is also significant that steampunk, the projection of today’s concerns into an imaginary world of late-nineteenth-century technology, is the signature surrealism of our time.

Writes Adam Gopnik in his in The New Yorker.

But let’s come back to “Princess Casimassima�. Weirdly, if you want a distraction from news scrolling, this novel offers quite good opportunity: big and credible cast of characters, engrossing flowing narrative and the atmosphere - all at your disposal."