Vintage Reading (14 page)

Selye first saw the effects of stress in rats he’d injected with various ovarian and placental extracts. Autopsy revealed heightened adrenal activity, shrinkage of the thymus and other immune system organs, and ulcers in the stomach lining. Surely, something in the extract he was injecting had done it.
Discovery of some new sex hormone, he felt confident, was just around the corner.

Then, he found he could inject the rats with a toxic substance called formalin and get the same response—only stronger.

Scratch the sex hormone idea. “I do not think I had ever been more profoundly disappointed!” Selye writes. “Suddenly all my dreams of discovering a new hormone were shattered. All the time and all the materials that went into this long study were wasted.”

But later he remembered his “syndrome of just being sick” from medical school. Were the symptoms he’d seen in the rats a general response to assault on the body akin to the general syndrome he’d seen back in medical school? He thought they were, and called it the “general adaptation syndrome.” His first paper on it appeared in 1936.

Years of research followed, confirming the essentials of his theory and leaving Selye, the acknowledged father of a field in which, by the mid-1970s, more than 100,000 scientific papers had been written. Selye himself is the author of more than 1,500 articles and 30 books. But it’s
The Stress of Life
that’s brought the stress concept out from the medical libraries and onto the lay public’s bookshelf; that’s helped make laments about “the stress of modern life” and worry about “all the stress he’s under lately” part of popular culture.

What’s unusual about Selye’s book is its catholicity of form.

It is, first, quite personal. We’re there with the young Selye for key experiments, both failed and successful, that led him to the stress concept.

It is also an exercise in science popularization. We learn how an infection, say, triggers release of corticotrophin releasing factor from the hypothalamus, which releases ACTH from the pituitary, which in turn orders the adrenal glands to secrete corticoids, which act on the immune system, and so on. Some readers, despite Selye’s best efforts, may find this tough going. But in idiosyncratic Selye fashion, he warns the reader as much in a part of the preface duly labeled “Readability.”

Other parts of the book explain the scientific method, look into why
scientists often disagree, consider the role of animals in research, list signs of excessive stress, and survey the medical literature for how stress afflicts various occupations from clerks to executives.

Apologizing in advance to the reader—appropriately, given the sketchiness of his ideas— Selye indulges in some philosophizing at the end. The individual must seek, he says, a balance between an overly stressful life that runs the body down and one marked by effort unexpended and dreams unfulfilled.

Even the index, of all things, bears the author’s stamp. It uses a notation system, of Selye’s design, that replaces words like “relationship between” and “effect on” with graphic symbols.

A curious book that made the name Selye synonymous with stress.

to Western Civilization

____________

By Edith Hamilton.
First published in 1930

Ever get your Thucydides mixed up with your Pericles? Do Aeschylus and Agathon and Aristophanes run together in your mind like a blur? Then this is the book for you.

The Greek Way
renders the ancient Greek mind accessible to the modern reader. It serves up a delectable appetizer of Greek civilization that leaves you begging for the rest of the meal. It is a work of popularization of the highest order.

Hamilton goes to almost any length to ignite in her readers Greece’s glory. For example: There she is, faced with the task of making the great Greek poet Pindar—“hard, severe, passionless, remote, with a kind of haughty indifference”—comprehensible. The peculiar quality of austere literalmindedness that marked his work translates poorly, into English, Hamilton tells us. “One might almost as well try to put a symphony into words as try to give any impression of Pindar’s odes by an English transcription.”

What to do? How to convey this “great sweep of song” so resistant to translation? For starters, she tell us about Pindar—his aristocratic breeding, the “exacting discipline of the gentleman” to which he conformed, his celebration of the heroic in sport. But—and here is her achievement—it is a modern English poet, not Pindar himself, whose lines she reads to evoke in us a sense of the Greek’s rhythms; rather than botch Pindar, she quotes from Kipling! “What Kipling’s poetry says “is not of especial consequence,” Hamilton explains. It is its “great movement [that] holds the attention. The
lines stay in the mind as music, not thoughts, and that is even truer of Pindar’s poetry.”

Hamilton takes similar leaps with the great Greek tragedians. Aeschylus evokes the same sense of exalted pain as Shakespeare; so she quotes MacBeth as much as Agamemnon. Sophocles—that “quintessence of the Greek”— reminds her of Milton; she reads a passage from the blind poet and concludes: “It is hard to believe that Sophocles did not write that.”

The Greek Way
sets out with firm and overriding purpose to impress on the modern mind the Greek achievement, and never wanders from it. Hamilton doesn’t worry about nit-picky buts and maybes, sacrifices scholarly nuance. Indeed, when the book came out in 1930, she took her critical lumps for bulldozing important distinctions in her rush to get across the message.
New Statesman
declared that her excesses of enthusiasm would “make the ordinary reader thankful that his son is on the science side at school. The style is that of the direct statement with 75 percent of the statements unsupported by documentation.”

Such carping, though, was buried in praise for what the book so ably achieved. Wrote one reviewer: “We do not know a book which we prefer to this, if we were asked to recommend an introduction to the peculiar quality of Greek thought which gives it value to ordinary people.”

What was that “peculiar quality?” Taking us on a whirlwind tour of other ancient civilizations—India, Rome, Egypt—Hamilton approaches it by contrast to what it was not. The Egyptians, for example, were preoccupied with death, while “Greece resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life.” The Egyptians built Pyramids and underground burial vaults; the Greeks played. “The Greeks were the first people in the world to play ...If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like ...the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life.”

Edith Hamilton, who died in 1963, was a world renowned classicist. She was born in Dresden, Germany. She grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind. She served as headmistress of a Baltimore girl’s school from 1896 to 1922. But her soul
was always elsewhere, in the distant past, and far away. On her 90th birthday, King Paul of Greece made her an honorary citizens of Athens.

“Five-hundred years before Christ in a little town on the far western border of the settled and civilized world, a strange new power was at work.” So begins
The Greek Way
.

“Something had awakened in the minds and spirits of the men there which so influenced the world that the slow passage of long time, of century upon century and the shattering changes they brought, would be powerless to wear away that deep impress. Athens had entered upon her brief and magnificent flowering of genius.”

Lesser Known Classics

A Journal of the Plague Year
— Daniel Defoe

The Doors of Perception
— Alduous Huxley

Elective Affinities
— John Wolfgang von Goethe

Homage to Catalonia
— George Orwell

Civilization and Its Discontents
— Sigmund Freud

Arrowsmith
— Sinclair Lewis

Roughing It
— Mark Twain

_________________________________

These days, winners and losers split ever further apart. Publishers abjure “midlist” books and concentrate on a few blockbusters. Books, movies, and rock bands must score big, or not at all; “modest success” verges on oxymoron. So today, when we hear Aldous Huxley, we think
Brave New World
. Sinclair Lewis?
Main Street
. Goethe?
Faust
. The selections here, however, remind us that these and other authors wrote more than the one or two books of their
ouevre
for which they’re most famous.

____________

By Daniel Defoe
First published in 1722

A leather purse lying in the street bulges with money. For an hour, it lies there, no one drawing near. Finally, one enterprising man scatters some gunpowder over the purse and ignites it, filling the air with heavy smoke. Then, with a pair of tongs, red hot at the tips, he holds the singed purse and shakes free, into a pail of water, the 13 shillings it contains. Such was the care one took, in the terrible year of 1665, to avoid infection by the plague.

At the height of it, 20,000 Londoners died in a week. Each night, carts carried off the corpses to pits into which they were flung. During the day, once-thronged streets went largely deserted, quiet except for the wailing cries of the dying and their families locked inside. The whole story is told in
A Journal of the Plague Year
by, the original title page has it,
a Citizen who continued all the while in London.

The “citizen” tells of a group of women he finds ransacking an abandoned warehouse, “fitting themselves with hats as unconcerned and quiet as if they had been at a hatter’s shop.” He tells how a band of Londoners fled the city, squatting in abandoned houses or building rude lean-tos in the countryside, evading by one ruse or another local townsmen who wanted them gone.

He credits the city fathers with never allowing the dead to accumulate on the street. Of course, he adds, they had little trouble recruiting laborers to cart off the corpses, a dangerous and unsavory job, thanks to many impoverished by the economic desolation wrought by the plague.

From this presumably straightforward account, a surprisingly vivid picture of its author emerges. He feels compassion for the victims, gratitude that he is not among them, outrage at the frauds and quacks who peddle amulets and
cures to the desperate and the unsuspecting. He is slow to condemn those fleeing the city and their responsibilities as physicians or clergy, quick to laud the mayor for insuring an uninterrupted flow of food to the poor. He is a scrupulously careful observer, often qualifying his report with “or so I heard it said” or “I did not see this for myself, but believe it true.” And while he fears God, frequently invoking His name, he never succumbs to zealotry. God’s will is done well enough through nature’s customary workings, he assures us, that we need not invoke supernatural powers.

Of course whether any of this actually describes the man whom history records as the author of
A Journal of the Plague Year
, Daniel Defoe, who also wrote
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders,
we do not know. Because Defoe was, in fact, five years old when the plague struck London.
A Journal of the Plague Year
is fiction.

Scholars tell us that Defoe’s library was stocked with books like
Necessary Directions for the Preventions and Cure of the Plague
and
London’s Dreadful Visitation,
both published in the plague’s immediate wake. And while growing up, he certainly heard about it from family, friends and neighbors. In any event, Defoe inspires supreme confidence, and his account is probably at least as true as any with a greater formal claim to historical accuracy.

(Though called a “journal,” Defoe’s is not a diary or daily account of the kind familiar to us today. Nor is the text divided into chapters. Nor is it broken up in any other way. Instead, the paragraphs arrive without let-up for almost 300 pages, leaving the modern reader, at least, groping for the work’s shape and structure. It is an instructive lesson in the virtues of breaking text into manageable morsels.)

One day, readers learn, the “bills,” or weekly death listings, abruptly drop by 2,000 over the previous week. “It is impossible to express the change that appeared in the very countenances of the people that Thursday morning when the weekly bill came out,” writes Defoe. “A secret surprise and smile of joy sat on everybody’s face. They shook one another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same side of the way with one another before. When the streets were not too broad they would open their windows and call
from one house to another, and ask ... if they had heard the good news.”

Having endured, in these pages, the deaths of a hundred thousand Londoners, the reader can scarcely fail to share the elation and gratitude felt by the survivors.

____________

By Aldous Huxley
First published in 1954

One May morning almost half a century ago, the English novelist, essayist, and critic Aldous Huxley swallowed four tenths of a gram of mescaline, the active ingredient in the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote, used ritually by certain Indian tribes.

Then, he sat down “to wait for the results.”

The Doors of Perception
—the title is from a line by the poet William Blake—is an account of his experience. “Visions of many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation.” Which of these most moved the author? None. They never happened. They are what he
expected
would happen.

It was not his inner universe that Huxley found enriched by the drug but the everyday world around him. “The other world to which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions,” he stresses. “It existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open.”