Thursday, August 11, 2022
Bertrand Russell's house
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Last spring my wife and I bought tickets for a flight to London for a walking tour of Wales in August with our son (who planned the trip) and daughter-in-law. As the months swept by, each with its own presaging of the apocalypse that most people are expecting, I wondered if this was the best time to fly overseas. The Friday before we left, LAX was closed for two hours, stranding thousands of people both inside and outside the terminal, because someone spotted a child's toy wrapped in a way that you might wrap a bomb. I'm claustrophobic anyway so additional time over the minimum trapped in a metal cylindar with two hundred other claustrophobics is not to be desired. However, several days before departure I found my solution by adopting, at last, a religion I can truly believe in: Fatalism, which suggests that since you can't do anything about anything, if things go wrong it's not your fault.
Once the terrifying and humiliating (though uneventful) flight and the three-hour schlep from Heathrow to the Welsh border were over, it was unearthly to be in Wales, or should I say it was quite earthly? As the National Museum in Cardiff makes clear, the land we call Wales is composed of parts plucked from an array of eons, having achieved their present forms via molten flows, or being blasted to smithereens, or squeezed by incredible pressures into very solid things. These footprints are spread across Wales in unusually unchanged forms, just as the elements of Welsh humanity, from Celts, the earliest arrivals of the modern British inhabitants, circa 1,000 BC (the current Welsh people are Celts, speaking a pre-Roman language devoid of Greek or Latin) or the Ango-Saxons or the Normans- significant portions of what each group created when they came to Wales are still standing, relatively unchanged, at least by Los Angeles standards (Wales offers a contrast to the San Fernando Valley- farmland when we moved there in the '50's, home to 1.7 million people now- where the one testament to the Chumash culture that once spread across a lovely plain is a grimy plaque fixed onto the asphalt of the parking lot of the Encino Pic 'n Save, under which are whatever atoms remain of a Chumash village).
Things are so well preserved in Wales that often their spirits can be felt. I was a bit unsettled, in fact, by the Norman castles. The solidity of the stone structures is fearsom. In particular, Tretower Castle in Brecon Beacon National Park seemed to fizzle with the Norman life-essence. This is the essence that created the United States, after all. The Normans were actually Vikings who, a generation before their invasion of Britain in 1066, had invaded Normandy- named for them, the "Northmen"- where they adopted the French language, bringing Greek and Latin across the Channel. They were able to defeat or at least subdue the warlike Celts, Anglo-Saxons et al, transforming Britain into an extension of the Roman order rather than the wild steppes. It took a strong and often destructive hand to dominate those fiercly autonomous tribes, and the Normans had it. Warfare, both physical and political- the manly arts- are where the Normans excelled, and then, to top it off, it turned out they were powerful at running governments too. They created modern England, which created the United States.
As it happened, my son, Andrew, picked the Welsh town of Penrhyndeudraeth (pronounced Pen-ren-die-druth) on the coast for one of our lunch stops (we ate at the wonderful Eating Gorilla vegan cafe). Andrew had not known that I visited Bertrand Russell in Penrhyndeudraeth in 1969, when Russell was a world famous philosopher, historian and mathematician. He was 97 and I was 23.
After discussion at the Eating Gorilla, we agreed to seek out Russell's house after lunch.
Russell was my hero when I visited him, a Gandalf-like figure of profound wisdom. Here are some Russell quotes showing the kinds of things that hooked me:
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
One thing I didn't appreciate at the time was the significance of Russell's aristocratic background to his ease with speaking his mind. It's a lot easier when you're the 3rd Earl Russell.
The Russells found their foothold in nobility in the 16th Century through crafty maneuvering in the Wars of the Roses, mainly betting on the right horse: the House of Tudor (Roger, the Lord of Tretower Castle mentioned above, was a Yorkist who was beheaded for this mistake). Bertrand was born well-connected; he had two Prime Ministers in his ancestry, his godfather was John Stuart Mill, etc., but he was a freethinker and something of a revolutionary who didn't want to be associated with aristocracy and privilege, so he did not use his titles.
I had wondered if there would be a statue commemorating Russell as we entered the town, but there was not. No one at the Eating Gorilla had heard of him. We found mention of his home, Plas Penrhyn, online, and googlemaps was able to lead us there, about a 30 minute walk from the cafe.
My family was in England the summer of my first visit to celebrate my dad's being able to afford the trip. With my parents' support, I visited Russell's secretary in his London office, a man named Ralph Schoenman- an anti-Vietnam War activist- and begged for a visit. He eyed me skeptically at first, but then called Russell, who assented to the visit.
It was a long, lonely train ride, full of anxiety. Why was I doing this? Here's another Russell quote:
There are two motives for reading a book; one that you enjoy it; the other that you can boast about it.
Did I just want to score a big point with everybody? Partly, I wanted to see what an idealized icon was like in person- was the icon really the person? How do idealized icons act when you're just sitting with them? Do they get quickly tired because they always have to be "on," at an expected level of excellence?
The house was a pleasant, two-story structure plastered white and surrounded by flowers and vines. An elderly housekeeper answered the door and led me into the library, which was huge, shelves up to the ceiling along every wall, seemingly housing every book Russell had ever read. Puzzlingly I did not see any paperbacks (what will be left of one's library in the age of the Kindle beyond a twisted bit of black plastic?). The tea was set. After about a minute Russell opened the door and came in. He seemed very tiny. He was not a tall man, and age had shrunken him more. He smiled at me and my mind went blank, except for a faint voice calling: "You idiot, you'd better have a plan for this!"
Russell asked me polite questions about where I was from, and I discovered that he was nearly deaf and that to be heard I needed to almost shout. This I could not bring myself to do, so it was difficult, when he asked me what my interests were, which I took as an opening for talking about his ideas, to reference complex passages he had written 40 years earlier, such as:
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Finally, in despair, I mentioned the Vietnam War, which I knew was on his mind, and something about Lyndon Johnson bombing Hanoi. Russell lit up and proclaimed that Johnson was a "war criminal." The rest of the conversation consisted of my keeping up my end of an anti-Vietnam War exchange, a terrible retreat from the meeting of minds I had hoped for. After about 15 minutes, Russell rose and walked me down to the gate, where he shook my hand. As I walked away, I turned and saw him still watching me. We waved. I had the idea that he understood my frustration, and that somehow we had connected anyway.
Russell died the following year.
These days I fault Russell for underestimating the role of biology in refashioning human society. He was versed in dictators, statesmen, academicians, pholosphers, not in the cloned uniformity of our probable replacements, who will buzz around us, loving us to death, with much more ease and "buy-in" than the peasants who toiled for the Russells. I don't blame Russell for that, of course. He saw more of the future than most, and told what he saw without hesitation. He went to jail for opposing World War I, then angered the pacifist community by supporting the allies in World War II. He said what he thought.
Thank you, Lord Russell, for sharing your aristocracy. The American experiment is to see if people can say what they think without being aristocrats. So far so good.
Plas Penrhyn, Wales, August, 2022
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