by Brett Yates
posted
May 12, 2011
I'm traveling in Europe this spring and summer. I'm very
fortunate to be doing this, and I want to make the most of the
opportunity. By this I mean that I'd like to understand, to some
degree, the sights I'm taking in - to have a sense of the
significance of these grand old buildings and priceless works of
art. Europe, as we all know, is the place of history and culture,
and while here I want to understand why one palace was built in the
fashion it was built in, why a sculpture was sculpted in one manner
instead of another. In every country, I want to know who lived here
and what they were like. I don't want to come back to the United
States, as so many kids do, feeling that the only European
experiences that meant something to me were the ones that took
place in bars.
It's really embarrassing for me to admit to myself how little I
know about the Western world that I inhabit. I've reached the point
where, occasionally, I actively avoid learning about it so as not
to call my attention to the paltriness of the information I already
possess. But before leaving for Europe, I felt I had to admit to
unworldliness and start educating myself. It was a big step for me.
I hadn't read a nonfiction book in quite a while.
It was unfortunate, however, that I didn't begin my quest for
understanding until about a week before the trip. Here are the
books that I read in preparation for my voyage:
1. "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from
Prehistoric to Postmodern" by Carol Strickland: I read this book
over a span of two days, and it seemed quite illuminating at the
time. I found out not only which movements various artists belonged
to but, in the book's better sections, why those movements sprung
up in the first place. Sometimes, Strickland's descriptions of the
painters are banal - everyone was a pioneer and a rule-breaker, but
the author doesn't devote enough time to the (presumably) banal art
whose rules were being broken to understand why. A few days after
reading this, I felt I'd forgotten most of the facts I'd learned,
but I'm hoping that, as I visit some art museums, they'll return to
me and inform my impressions of the paintings.
2. "Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century" by
Patrik Ou?edník: I felt I didn't know enough about WWI or WWII, but
really this is more a work of literature than of straight
nonfiction. That's not to say that its contents are untruthful; I
mean that it uses a poetic style - a kind of reverberant deadpan,
humorously clinical and yet very affecting - to induce an emotional
understanding of a century marked not only by incredible horrors
but also by a lot of other stuff, and it's less interested in
communicating facts designed to be memorized. Ou?edník is a Czech
novelist. He's really good.
3. "A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of
Lisbon" by Gordon Kerr: The sad truth is that I read this book
simply because it covered the longest stretch of European history
(1250 years) in the fewest pages (150). Much of it reads as though
it was copied and pasted from Wikipedia. You learn about a million
wars (when they started, when they ended), but you learn about the
causes of only a few of them. (The fact is that Europe simply had
way too many.) Some of the stuff about the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation was educational for me, but I'd forgotten
almost everything in this book by the time I'd turned the final
page, and I'm fairly certain that it's gone for good.
4. "A Very Short Introduction to Economics" by Partha Dasgupta:
Economics doesn't have anything more to do with Europe than it does
with anywhere else, but I felt that in attempting to bolster my
understanding of the world in general it would be useful to pick up
a book on the subject. Writing for the Oxford University Press's
extensive "Very Short Introductions" series, Dasgupta does a good
job of explaining how economic analysis is applied to explain why
life is the way it is in various parts of the world, and this - to
have a totally logical explanation for why Africa is different from
India, which is different from the United States, and so on -
seemed kind of awesome to me, although I was lost whenever he
employed any math. His worldview also seemed kind of depressing,
though, in that he seemed to reduce the entire human destiny to
producing and consuming, as though every source of happiness and
every impediment to it were a result of economics. In any case, I
think I have a general sense now of what economists do, so I guess
the book was successful.
5. "Experiencing Architecture" by Steen Eiler Rasmussen: There's
very little architectural history in this book (fortunately, "The
Annotated Mona Lisa" contained some), and it won't help you
classify a building you see into any particular school or movement.
Rather, it deals with ways of looking at buildings and of
understanding them. It describes philosophies of architecture and
tries to convey what architects are thinking about when they design
structures. The idea that architecture is not so much the art of
constructing solid forms but of creating spaces - that is, the idea
that the most significant shapes in a building are not the ones you
can see but the shapes comprised of air, within the solid
structures - was novel to me, yet I feel right now that I won't
experience great architecture much differently than I did before
reading this (i.e., with a kind of awed indifference). Written in
1959 and translated from the Danish, Rasmussen's book manages to be
both quite lucid and, somehow, quite beyond me.
Tagged:
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