Monday, March 18, 2013

"A Canticle for Leibowitz" - Walter Miller (book)

"A Canticle for Leibowitz" is a book by Walter Miller that I have read three times in my life, once when I was young, again in the curious Middle Age, and now as a doddering old fool.  With any luck at all, I will read it again but once every twenty years seems sufficient despite the enormous weight the book carries with me.

This is a story of a post-apocalyptic world in which Mankind slowly recovers from the nuclear devastation ... and then blows up the world again.  This motif was covered, perhaps for the first time, in "Things to Come," a science-fiction movie made in about 1938 and starring Raymond Massey.  While the movie is very powerful in its own right and it was extraordinary in its visualisation, it doesn't match the philosophical depth of "A Canticle for Leibowitz."

Isaac Leibowitz was an engineer involved in the production of war tools prior to the apocalypse.  He survived the war and strove to gather as much of Mankind's knowledge to preserve it for a time when Man might know better how to use it.  However, after the war came The Simplification in which the people revolted against all leaders, people with knowledge, and anyone else or anything else that might have contributed to the disaster.  Leibowitz was burned at the stake for his part as any attempt to preserve knowledge was clear evidence of his heresy.  The simpletons, as they proudly called themselves, burned him with diesel fuel and they said he asked for a cup of it before they burned him.  Some say he then turned it into wine but assuredly he drank it and shortly after they started the fire.

The story tells the history of the Leibowitzian Order that came to follow him and ultimately saw him canonised in New Rome.  Told from this perspective, Miller gives us a philosophical / religious perspective that went far beyond the scope of "Things to Come."  This perspective may be attractive to some and repugnant to others but he makes no judgments, he is a much better writer than that.

To tell you any more of the story would deprive you of the pleasure of reading it and I strongly recommend you consider it.  "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is vividly anti-war but not in a tiresome, pedantic kind of way.  The conclusions are obvious and there is no need for him to spell them.

I once said to a manager in an IT department where I worked that I enjoyed watching movies, sometimes over and over.  He was puzzled and asked, "Why would you watch a movie more than once?"

Something I had learned long before was do not engage in throwing rhetorical questions at managers as they can do it all day and no illumination will come.  If not for that lesson, I would have asked, "Why would you assume you had seen everything the first time you looked at something."

A conclusion once drawn may not be permanent and perspectives can change with time.  However, my perspective has not changed on "A Canticle for Leibowitz" but rather the illumination has become brighter.  It remains timely as we thought the Vietnam War was so stupid that it would not be repeated but instead it has been repeated multiple times.  In the hope, dear Reader, that you are not a manager, please permit me to throw a rhetorical question at you:  "Why do we not learn from our mistakes?"

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