Reading log, no. 3

This month I read only one book. But it was a fat book. But it wasn't as fat as the Bible. But it may as well have been the Bible -- my bible -- for how much I've been quoting from it and paraphrasing it these last few weeks. I call it proselytizing.

In 1977, I wrote my autobiography. Since I was dealing with my favorite subject, I wrote at length and I ended with 640,000 words. Since Doubleday is always overwhelmingly kind to me, they published it all--but in two volumes. The first was In Memory Still Green (1979), the second In Joy Still Felt (1980). Together, they described the first fifty-seven years of my life in considerable detail.

Isaac Asimov
I. Asimov

I. Asimov was an impulse read. The Phoenix Public Library System didn't have a working holds system this month, and so we patrons had to walk among the stacks, the rows and rows of book-stuffed shelves, to obtain our books. I happened to be on the top floor of the Central Branch purposelessly looking for literary criticism on Margaret Atwood when I saw Asimov's name in enormous letters on a thick spine. It was his third autobiography. It takes a guy like Isaac Asimov to write no fewer than three autobiographies.

Asimov's name had then already been swimming in my head. He came up in my meandering research of Malthusianism. Here at Just Enough Craig I had posted a link to his short story titled The Last Question, which I suspect none of you read. (Shame on you!) I had become increasingly intrigued by and impressed with his philosophical views, especially regarding theism. Coworker Shafik directed me to his Wikiquote page, which is chock-full of delicious, humorous eloquence.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

And, in the back of my head, I've been wanting to reread his Azazel stories since reading half a dozen or so of them several years ago.

Now, after reading I. Asimov, I'm wanting to read many, many more of his stories.

* * *

Isaac Asimov was a writer of staggering prolificity. He published more than 470 books, which amounted to about one book per month for the forty years starting in the 1950s and ending at the time of his death in 1992. In addition to being his own book-of-the-month club, he wrote numerous short stories, essays, and articles.

In his time there was no good way to write for the world audience except by being published, and the publisher acted as a filter between the writer and the reader by possessing the power to reject an author's work or demand modifications. Writers therefore had to exercise judgment as to whether an idea for a book was a good one and also as to how the book should be written, for otherwise the writer could waste time and resources on a fruitless effort destined for rejection.

Asimov claimed to revise only about five percent of a typical work between the composition of the first draft and the work's final published form. Once he was established as an author sometime during the 1950s, he rarely wrote anything that wasn't published.

Money has, for a long time, ceased being an issue with me. I have enough. There are other things I want more and the chief of these is the gift of being able to write what I want to write in the way I want to write it, and do it with the comfortable certainty that it would be published. This Doubleday made possible for me quite early on.

(from I. Asimov)

Asimov enjoyed having almost no filter between him and his audience. Other authors have enjoyed, once established, a similar situation of having everything they write published, but such authors are typically pigeonholed into a particular genre or style or field of expertise. Asimov's uniqueness was that he enjoyed the status without such limitations. He wrote about anything and everything that interested him, and no matter how unprofitable the work may seem, eventually his words ended up in the bookstore or a periodical. His books are scattered throughout the library. According to Wikipedia, he has at least one work in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except the 100s (philosophy and psychology).

He told stories; he entertained; he expressed viewpoints; and he taught. His readership was loyal, although I can't imagine anyone reading everything he wrote. In this way, Isaac Asimov was the world's first blogger and, to this day, the most successful.

* * *

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from I. Asimov:

On death:

But it is my opinion that we all achieve Nirvana at once, at the moment of the death that ends a single life. Since I have had a good life, I'll accept death as cheerfully as I can when it comes, although I would be glad to have that death painless. I would also be glad to have my survivors--relatives, friends, and readers--refrain from wasting their time and poisoning their lives in useless mourning and unhappiness. They should be happy instead, in my behalf, that my life has been so good.

Was Asimov a simplicitist? On money:

I appreciated all that but I didn't want the side effects that come with affluence. I dreaded the thought that I would be expected to throw fancy parties, that it would be necessary for me to attend social functions in glittering array, that it would be taken for granted that I ought to have my apartment littered with the latest technological advances, that I ought to have a housekeeper, and a fancy office, and a posh automobile, and a boat, and a summer home, and whatever else fancy might suggest.

I didn't want such things. I wanted to live quietly and simply, and every time I indulged in an outward manifestation of being well off, I feared that the world would not allow me my penchant for simplicity.

On religion, humanism and Malthusianism:

I also take a kind of perverse pleasure in the thought that the most important and influential book ever written is the product of Jewish thought. (No, I don't think it was written down at God's dictation any more than the Iliad was.) I call it "perverse" because it is an instance of national pride which I don't want to feel and which I fight against constantly. I refuse to consider myself to be anything more sharply defined than "human being," and I feel that aside from over-population the most intractable problem we face in trying to avoid the destruction of civilization and humanity is the diabolical habit of people dividing themselves into tiny groups, with each group extolling itself and denouncing its neighbors.

A limerick:

There is something about satyriasis
That arouses psychiatrists' biases.
But we're both of us pleased
We're in this way diseased,
As the damsel who's waiting to try us is.

More on death:

There may be some morbid satisfaction to being a last survivor, but is it so much better than death to be the last leaf on the tree, to find yourself alone in a strange and hostile world where no one remembers you as a boy, and where no one can share with you the memory of that long-gone world that glowed all about you when you were young?

* * *

The last Asimov novel I read was Forward the Foundation, which I read sometime in high school, long before I quit science fiction. I remember enjoying the book a good deal but discovering about halfway through that each chapter was titled after a character who, in that chapter, would die or otherwise exit the story. That instilled within me both a sense of sadness and dread as I realized I was saying goodbye to each character in turn.

If you'll pardon my drama, I read I. Asimov with a similar sense of dread. Knowing that Asimov wrote the book shortly before his death while suffering major health problems (and indeed, the book was published after his death), I knew it was going to be a book without a happy ending. And indeed it is. Isaac Asimov was a spectacular human being and his full and productive life was much too short.

Gertrude once said, bitterly, as I was closing in on my hundredth book, "What good is all this anyway? When you are dying, you will realize all you missed in life, all the good things you could have afforded with the money you make and that you ignored in your mad pursuit of more and more books. What will a hundred books do for you?"

And I said, "When I am dying, lean close over me to get my dying words. They are going to be: 'Too bad! Only a hundred!'"

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.")