A reasonably healthy addiction, as habits go, I impulse buy books, far more readily here in the U.S. than I ever did back in China. Amazon’s the culprit. For a while you could order Penguin Classics and the like, on Amazon.cn. But recently, when I thought to send such a book to a friend in Beijing it proved impossible. The two worlds draw further apart, dangerously.
A friend shared the link of a CUNY professor who was an expert on “Das Kapital.” I’ve never read it. Have you? It was always touted as unbelievably long and though it does seem to expand beyond two thousand pages, I’ve surmounted steeper things. The cover of the Penguin Classics (that series again) Volume I is ominous scene from Adolph Von Menzel’s “The Forge” and I suggested to my friend that we should read it together, knowing that while he’d be intrigued his joining me for the journey was unlikely.
It was sitting there by my bed stand and I read the first few pages of the introduction, before dozing off to sleep for a nap this afternoon. Later, when I was back up, and on a call I drew reference to 'Das Kapital', apropos of nothing, with a colleague, in Beijing. He hadn’t read it either, but he suggested his tastes erred on the side of Peter Kropotkin, which stopped me in my tracks. Prince Kropotkin was and remains one of my greatest heroes.
And we talked about “Mutual Aid’ and his critique of Social Darwinism. I told him about my adult reread of “Memories of a Revolutionist” a few summers back on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, considering the Amur River and Kropotkin’s own visit to the Siberia as a geologist in the mid nineteenth century. I even dug up the photos I’d taken at his prison cell in St. Peter and Paul’s Prison, there in Saint Petersburg. What a refreshing detour from whatever else it was we had intended to discuss. I don’t think I’ll ever consider him the same way again.
Wednesday, 4/21/21
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