1.
Even more lists!

The last Book notes took in the Australians' contribution to the recent list-making mania. After that, the Kiwis had a go. I'm incredibly embarrassed to say I have read NONE of these... True, The Luminaries awaits in my Audible list, as I recently read and enjoyed Birnam Wood (and a while ago watched the TV adaptation of The Luminaries, although frankly that left me bewildered...). So... Must Do Better.


The Routeburn Track, 1992. Quintessential New Zealand

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2.
A bit more from Nick Cave, whose Faith, Hope and Carnage I found both moving and inspiring.

a.
First, I came across an interview where he reads his incredibly beautiful letter to Valerio: "It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope... Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

b.
After that, Maria Popova pointed me to Joy, a song from Cave's new album, Wild God. It brings us a comforting ghost, and a message of hope. This is no cheap joy, no uncomprehending jolliness. This is a joy that has sprung from the caverns of suffering, a joy that recognizes our vulnerability, and yet still insists on being present:

All across the world they shout out their angry words
About the end of love, yet the stars stand above the earth
Bright, triumphant metaphors of love...

And I jumped up like a rabbit and fell down to my knees
I called all around me, have mercy on me please
Joy...

That page of Popova's also includes Cave's reading of a poem by Lisel Mueller, itself called Joy:

Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.

c.
Shortly afterwards, I came across this reflection by John Harris on the nature of belief: "It is telling that the militant atheism that peaked 20 years ago with the publication of such books as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great now seems passe."

Harris concludes: "I am a devout agnostic. But as I get older, there are experiences and aspects of living that often open the way to a sense of the ineffable and mystical, and the need for something that may help me make sense of an increasingly chaotic world, and life’s ruptures and crises that seem to arrive with alarming regularity."


Nothing does hard-won, clear-eyed joy quite like untrammelled nature

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3.
An addendum to the anti-vaccination story mentioned by Zadie Smith in The Fraud.

Smith's panoramic story includes interesting references to popular opposition to the smallpox vaccination in the 19th century. And guess who else threw his hat in the anti-vaxxer ring back then? None other than Alfred Russel Wallace, who's a big name in our part of the world.

But, as Valdecasas and Marquez explain, Wallace's opposition stemmed from a lack of verified evidence -- a lack that has now been remedied: "It was not until the beginning of the 20th century, with the introduction of the chi-squared test by Karl Pearson, that a significant statistical difference could be assessed between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the acquisition of immunity or mortality from smallpox...If there were times when [Wallace] was wrong, it was largely because of a lack of solid data or the inadequacy of the evidence available at the time." In Wallace's era, then, evidence about the efficacy of vaccination was still partial, and difficult to evaluate. Which is not the case any more.



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4.
Ernest Hemingway on government responses to hurricanes.

The first recorded Category 5 hurricane in the US hit the Florida Keys on 2-3 September 1935. Many of the massive number of casualties were war veterans employed on a government construction project. Later that month, Hemingway wrote a searing article criticizing the authorities for not evacuating the workers. "'Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans … to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months?' Hemingway asks... Skeptical of the various government programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hemingway saw the Federal Emergency Relief Administration work camps as a way for Washington to conveniently rid itself of hundreds of down-on-their-luck veterans, many of whom were experiencing what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder." The veterans "were practically murdered", Hemingway had previously written to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and that sentiment eventually informed the title given to his article: Who Murdered the Vets? It's passionate, powerful stuff. Trademark Hemingway in a good cause.