I've finished two books recently. I listened to Breed by Owl Goingback, and I read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Breed, a novel, was good, though I didn't care for Mr Goingback killing off the detective at the end. I noticed something else about the story, or the writing rather, something I've been noticing in many of the fiction I've been through. The story is about a girl struggling through life as a tour guide in Florida that is chosen by a good spirit to fight a bad spirit. Circumstances get her paired with a detective investigating the deaths caused by the bad spirit, of course. What I noticed was the way the author gets the hero and heroine together, and how they start having thoughts that lead, supposedly naturally, to a relationship. I find myself wondering at how the author develops this sideline in the stories I read. Some make it so obvious you feel hit on the head with a hammer, others are more subtle. But it has become too easy to pick it out, where the sideline in the story is going to end up. I always end up hoping it doesn't ruin the story for me, by making things too obvious and predictable.

Anyway, there is also On Liberty. I was able to finish this one, and actually got a lot more out of it than most older books of this kind I've tried to read. It isn't a book per se, but an essay Mill wrote, but long enough to be published as a small book. His introduction conveys much of what is needed, and a lot of the rest is rambling. Not so rambling that it was hard to follow though, as I said. A lot of the writing is run on sentences, (I am, after all, a product of my environment, and prefer conciseness) but what held my interest was that for the most part what he says is still applicable today. I found a lot of it very compelling, so much so that I read more than a few passages to my wife. A few days ago I was describing to her some of his final words, and she remarked that she was taken with how much she could relate to the ideas.

Since, I've started listening to Day of the Triffids. I've heard it is a great story, but being published in 1951, I had the notion it would be a little dated. I found it in audio though, so I started listening to it. Very well done. The man is a genius. The story line is way ahead of its time. I'm almost done with it, but I came across a passage that I want to put here. First of all, a lot of the book reminded me of that book about the ape that could speak, and the guy that started a philosophical conversation with him. Can't remember the name of the book, but there are some passages in Triffids written like that, though not enough to ruin the story. This one caught my eye as I said. The hero is talking to a girl doing trying to do sewing in the dark, when the lights come on. The guy that got the lights working comes in and starts chiding the girl for just sitting there waiting for someone else to do something. Anyway, here it is...

“If you had just taken the trouble to start the engine,” Coker said, looking at her. “If you wanted light, why didn’t you try to start it?”
“I didn’t know it was there; besides, I don’t know anything about engines or electricity.”
Coker continued to look at her, thoughtfully.
“So you just went on sitting in the dark,” he remarked. “And how long do you think you are likely to survive if you just go on sitting in the dark when things need doing?”
She was stung by his tone.
“it’s not my fault if I’m not any good at things like that.”
“I’ll differ there,” Coker told her. “It’s not only your fault— it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him—and even her—brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised; even in women it is a gap to be deplored.”
She looked understandably annoyed. Coker himself had been annoyed from the time he came in. She said:
“I don’t see why you need to pour all your contempt for women onto me—just because of one dirty old engine.”
Coker raised his eyes.
“Great God! And here have I been explaining that women have as many brains as anyone else, if they’d only take the trouble to use them.”
“You said we were all petty and vain. That wasn’t at all a nice thing to say.”
“I’m not trying to say nice things. And what I meant was that in the world that has vanished women had a vested interest in acting the part of parasites.”
“And all that just because I don’t happen to know anything about a smelly, noisy engine.”
“Hell!” said Coker. “Just drop that engine a minute, will you.”
“Then why---“
“Listen,” said Coker patiently. “If you have a baby, do you want him to grow up to be a savage or a civilized man?”
“A civilized man, of course.”
“Well, then, you have to see to it that he has civilized surroundings to do it in. The standards he’ll learn, he’ll learn from us. We’ve all got to understand as much as we can, and live as intelligently as we can, in order to give him the most we can. It’s going to mean hard work and more thinking for all of us. Changed conditions must mean changed outlooks.”
The girl gathered up her mending. She regarded Cokes critically for a few moments.
“With views like yours I should think you’d find Mr. Beadley’s party more congenial,” she said. “Here we have no intention of changing our outlook—or of giving up our principles. That’s why we separated from the other party. So if the ways of decent, respectable people are not good enough for you, I should think you’d better go somewhere else.” And with a sound very like a sniff, she walked away.
Coker watched her leave. When the door closed he expressed his feelings with a fish porter’s fluency. I laughed.
“What did you expect?” I said. “You prance in and address the girl as if she were a reactionary debating society—and responsible for the whole western social system as well. And then you’re surprised when she’s huffed.”
“You’d think she’d be reasonable,” he muttered.
“Most people aren’t, even though they’d protest that they are. They prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake: if there is one, it’s at’ ways due to something or somebody else. This going headlong for things is a mechanistic view, and people in general aren’t machines. They have minds of their own—mostly peasant minds, at their easiest when they are in the familiar furrow.”
“That doesn’t sound as if you’d give Beadley much chance of making a go of it. He’s all plan.”
“He’ll have his troubles. But his party did choose,. This lot is negative,” I pointed out. “It is simply here on account of its resistance to any kind of plan.” I paused. Then I added:
“That girl was right about one thing, you know. You would k better off with his lot. Her reaction is a sample of what you’d get all round if you were to try to handle this lot your way. You can’t drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting ‘em there.”
“You’re being unusually cynical, as well as very metaphorical, this evening,” Coker observed.
I objected to that.
“It isn’t cynical to have noticed how a shepherd handles his sheep.”
“To regard human beings as sheep might be thought so by some.”
“But less cynical and much more rewarding than regarding them as a lot of chassis fitted for remote-thought control.”
“H’m,” said Coker, “I’ll have to consider the implications of that.”


I love it. It is clear what he thinks, the author, of people that sit around waiting for things to happen. Now that I think about it, it's very similar to some of the concepts in Atlas Shrugged.