The misery continues. After my last post on despair - on the withdrawal from reading life, or the duplicity that is Amazon’s recommendations - I embarked on Robert Fisk’s monumental The war on Civilisation, its 1283 pages traversing the life of Bill Fisk and the modern Middle East that was bequeathed to us by his father’s generation. Pulled into journalistic light are accounts of Western government connivance with the regime of pre-liberated Iraq and the systematic extermination of the Armenian Christians in Turkey in the midst of the First World War.

Fisk has a touch of the Solzhenitsyn in him, as when Oliver Myers points out that

sharp-focus reporting is submerged as horror is piled on horror

True enough, the wave of “atrocity witnessing” is unrelenting. One wonders how this journalist maintains his sense of self, if at all.

So the misery continues. Not in the failure of reading that forced me on this journey with Fisk, but in the lack of redemptive coming together of the whole, a trace of which is evident in his previous Pity the Nation. Perhaps it is Fisk’s integrity that prevents him from making that leap; perhaps it is the vacuous nature of this (and a hundred-fold books’) reception. It is a different kind of despair now.

For two successive days this weekend, I wandered around Kinokuniya determined and a little anxious to make a purchase; not just any purchase, of course, but a “something” that will restore some semblance of balance between the forces of light and darkness, wisdom and ignorance. A tall order, and no doubt a reflection of recent decisions, of choices passed over or badly taken. I left the store with only Marley & Me, a gift for my brother and his Labrador, and the realisation that good books have a time of their own, and come before us only when they wish to be found.

Philosophical Myths of the Fall, by Stephen Mulhall, is my 15th purchase of 2006. It is a fine book, and follows his earlier effort On Film. Stephen taught at Essex’s Philosophy department during my time in the mid-1990s; he lectured in an always clear and exhilirating manner, free from the ego-dramatics that consumed Mark Sacks (for example). Now a Fellow at New College, Oxford, Stephen also appeared on the BBC’s In Our Time series as one of the guests on the Redemption episode.

In the meantime, the Essex Philosophy implosion continues apace. Simon Critchley - sometime lecturer, sometime philosopher - has re-invented himself as a pop star. (link courtesy of infinite thought).

Blake and I were first brought together by a shared fondness for books. He was joint-owner of the now-defunct “Blake’s Books”, an online store specialising in used scholarly books. What is startling is that our relationship has lasted the best part of 9 years, and survived (on my part) several job changes, shifts in learning focus and reading interest. And three relocations. Nine years. It is difficult to imagine.

Beginning with a copy of Jay Bernstein’s The philosophy of the novel, he has fed my appetite for books with gems such as Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical culture, G. B. Ladner’s The idea of Reform, Harold Berman’s Law & Revolution, countless hard-bound Lowith and Weber books, commentaries on Machiavelli, medieval philosophy & history, and long neglected, if not forgotten, writings by Zumkeller, Momigliano and Duby.

Blake is now sole propreitor of The Montana Book Company (named after his daughter) and, although we sometimes inevitably view the industry from differing vantage points, we will still get carried away by books. Today arrived the latest gem unearthed from his regular mailing list: Brian Tierney’s Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: the contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism, a book I’ve been hunting down for the best part of 5 years - a mere nothing in the life of a book.

We’ve agreed to meet the next time I’m in his part of the world, for a cup of coffee and conversation. I look forward to that, even if it will be a lengthy millisecond in the future.