Castration at the Battle of Adwa (1896)

May 25, 2026: After eleven years, I have moved this article to Medium. It's paywalled there. Thank you, thirty thousand people who have viewed this. If you pay $5/month to Medium, you can read my article (and millions more by everyone who writes there).

Detail of Ethiopian painting commemorating the Battle of Adwa, Catalogue No. E261845-0, Department of Anthropology, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by Joshua Sherurcij, 2007.

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My books

If you are interested in castrated villains in fiction, please check out Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains. If you are interested in the Western literary treatment of castration in history, please check out Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty. Both are by Tucker Lieberman.

‘Readers will like this book’: Highlight the book, not yourself, in a review

Like the blurb on a book's dust-jacket or a plot summary, a book review indicates the subject matter of the book being reviewed and the approach that the book takes, but it goes further by inserting the reviewer's personal opinion about whether the book was any good. Academic reviews demand a brief analysis and critique of a book's main arguments, while popular reviews might instead focus on the entertainment value of a sports anthology, the believability of a novel's plot line or the utility of a particular recipe collection as a holiday gift. Just because the reviewer should provide her opinion, however, doesn't mean she should use the first-person voice when writing the review.

First-, second- and third-person voice

First-person language includes pronouns like "I," "me," and "my." It also includes the plural forms "we," "us," and "our," especially where this is not intended to refer to humanity as a universalized whole, but to an exclusive sub-group such as English literature teachers, teenage fans of musical theater or members of Aunt Mabel's book club. Some publishers do not permit writers to refer to themselves and to their personal affiliations via the use of first-person language.

Book reviews for these publishers should use the third-person voice. Just as the book's author is a "he" or "she," potential readers should be considered as "they," rather than the "I" who was inspired to write the review or the "we" who gathered at Aunt Mabel's last Tuesday night to discuss it.

In some cases, the second-person voice, "you", may also be appropriate, as in: "You will like this book if you've liked the previous books by the same author."

A book review is not a journal entry

It's easy to write a book review almost as a diary entry about what it felt like to read the book. However, reviewers should not fall prey to this temptation. Many sentences in first-person can be rewritten to convey similar information in the third-person voice. The book review usually sounds better when this is done.

Below are some negative examples - that is, what not to do - regarding first-person language. Explanations are given about what falls short and how it can be corrected.

'My hot date at the movies'

"I read the book before (or after) I saw the movie."

The person consuming the book review doesn't care about the reviewer's hot date at the cinema. The reviewer will better serve the reader by providing information such as: "Many already have seen the movie, but the movie is no substitute for the book, as the book contains interesting dialogue that never made it into the screen adaptation."

'My speed-reading abilities'

"I read the book in one sitting."

The reviewer may intend to imply that the story holds his attention, but instead appears to be bragging about how quickly he reads. Would it matter if the reviewer needed three months to finish reading the book? Or if someone else wanted to read it while running on a treadmill? It shouldn't. So, instead, the reviewer might consider calling the book a "page-turner," a "riveting account" or an "absorbing story."

'I was absorbed in this book because my life is otherwise boring'

"I read the book in one sitting while flying across the country in an airplane."

This is a common variant of the above claim to speed-reading, but it's a less-than-ringing endorsement of a book. The simple fact is that air travelers engross themselves in books because it is more entertaining than staring at the backs of strangers' heads for six hours. Since most people fly rather infrequently and have few other opportunities to allow themselves such uninterrupted reading time, the experience of reading a book on an airplane may be personally transformative for the particular person locked in that situation at that time, but that in itself doesn't imply that the book is unique. The same goes for reading in a hammock on an island vacation or in a bed during a lengthy hospital recuperation. The circumstances that force a particular person to focus on reading material are not related to the book's content, nor to what others (who cannot be assumed to have airplane seats at their disposal to enhance their reading experience) are likely to gain from the book's message.

Incidentally, the author is unlikely to feel resoundingly complimented by the insinuation that it was at least easier to read their book than to sit in bored or miserable inactivity. If, on the other hand, one feels transported to another dimension while reading a book because of its inherently beautiful language (and does not feel "transported" merely because one's plane has just arrived in New Jersey), one should comment on that within the book review.

'Imagination fails me'

"I can't think of a better book about gingerbread decoration."

Unless the reviewer is familiar with at least a dozen books on the subject, this sort of comment only highlights her unfamiliarity with the topic. It would be disingenuous to rephrase it into a declarative statement that this book is, objectively speaking, the best book, as long as the reader still has no expertise to back up this assertion. It would be more helpful to tell potential readers of the book that "this book contains all the information that a beginning cake decorator is likely to need, as well as some expert-level tips." Ultimately, it doesn't matter how the book stacks up in objective or subjective rankings against other books. Most people just want to know whether it's useful or beautiful as a stand-alone purchase.

'Other stuff I like to read' 

"I usually like (or don't like) books about steel imports."

This is often embedded within a lengthier comment about the reviewer's longstanding preferences about steel imports and a confirmation that this specific book is, indeed, about steel imports. Why should the reviewer's usual personal preferences be of interest to anyone? The prospective reader wants to know what they can expect to learn about steel imports and whether this book will be an enjoyable read, not about how the reviewer's tastes have evolved over time nor about how they read the book only to impress a teacher. The reviewer could instead advise: "This book encourages business owners to look at steel imports from a new perspective."

'Full of stuff I didn't get'

"I didn't agree with everything, but maybe I just didn't understand it."

If a reader isn't confident that he understood the core elements of a book, he shouldn't publish a review. An exception occurs when the failure definitively lies with the book itself, not with the reader. If the book is so poorly conceived or executed that it would be incomprehensible even to educated, patient people who make a good faith effort to read it, it is acceptable to say so. A reviewer might therefore legitimately complain: "The argument in the first half of the book is straightforward enough, but shockingly, the author contradicts himself in the final chapter." 

'All about my day, which happened to include this book'

"I went to the library for a book about ostriches, but I accidentally checked out this book about medieval swords, and at first I didn't enjoy it, but later I realized that was only because I had a headache, and after I took a pill, I decided the book wasn't half-bad, and I was even willing to pay an overdue fine so I could finish it."

The deficiencies of this tale should be obvious. The easiest solution is to delete this sentence entirely and to replace it with a sentence with a dramatically shifted emphasis that communicates useful information. The only thing that a stranger might care about within the narrative above is what library carried the book. The book reviewer could therefore write: "This book may be difficult to find at public libraries, but some academic libraries have it."

'All the good features of this book were pleasing to me'

"I liked the book."

This is all right, but technically, it's the first-person voice. Even if the publisher permits the first-person voice, using it at all — even sparingly — risks leading the reviewer further astray into irrelevant first-person narratives. The reviewer can instead make authoritative comments about what's good (or bad) about the book's objective characteristics. For example:

• "The characters' original antics and witty banter are entertaining."
• "The moral lesson about the importance of charity is heartwarming."
• "This book has sold millions of copies, and based on the deep truths it expresses so eloquently, it's easy to see why the author is a household name."

The reviewer's personal appreciation for the book is implicit in these statements. Obviously one endorses one's own declarative statements.

That's all there is to it

When these approaches are taken, it's clear that the review has been written from a particular person's point of view, without the reviewer ever having to use the pronoun "I."

If a book review has already been written in the first person, it can probably be converted into third person without too much effort and without significantly changing the meaning. It's worth a try! Doing so will make the piece eligible to be published for a broad audience.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 15, 2012.

Image: Toilette - Frau vor Spiegel (Woman in front of a mirror). Art by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) © public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Novelists on the mysteries of the passing of time

These novelists have questioned how we understand the passing of time.

Ismail Kadare:

Events had so stunned the city that it was hard to believe that this was still the same day. The very word ‘afternoon’ seemed not to fit any more. Should it be called the second part of the day? The last part? Perhaps the most treacherous part, harbouring a centuries-old grudge against the day as a whole, or rather its first part, which you might call fore-noon; forget the idea of morning. Its malice had rankled, to erupt suddenly that mid-September.

There was also a sense of gratitude to destiny for at least having preserved the city from other long-forgotten calamities such as the Double Night, a sort of calendrical monster that beggared the imagination, a stretch of time that was unlike anything else and came from no one knew where, from the bowels of the universe perhaps, a union of two nights in one, smothering the day between them as dishonored women once were smothered in the old houses of Gjirokastër.

George Orwell:

To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

Amor Towles:

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions – we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

Michael Ondaatje:

We follow each other into the future, as if now, at the last moment we try to memorize the face a movement we will never want to forget. As if everything in the world is the history of ice.

Sources

Ismail Kadare. The Fall of the Stone City. [Darka e Gabuar] (2008) Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (2011) New York: Grove Press, 2012. p. 19.

George Orwell. 1984. (Originally published 1949.) New York: The New American Library, 1961. p. 10.

Amor Towles. Rules of Civility (2011). New York: Penguin Books, 2012.

Michael Ondaatje. Coming Through Slaughter. (1976) New York: Vintage International, 1996. p. 87.

Literary references to low sexual libido

Some people (and fictional characters) admit to lack of sexual interest.

Andrei Platonov's fictional character Zakhar Pavlovich said, and the character Alexander reacted:

"every man has an entire imperialism down there, in the lower place...."

Alexander could not feel the imperialism within his own body, even though he deliberately imagined himself naked.

The mathematician Paul Erdos said:

Actually, I have an abnormality. I can't stand sexual pleasure. It's a curious abnormality. It's almost unique.

Nina FitzPatrick wrote a fictional character of a priest who initially does not feel sexual but then finds himself attracted to a woman:

Father Francis had never got an erection while listening to a beautiful woman. Or a man for that matter. It dawned on him, not for the first time, that he was born to indifference the way cuckoos are born to neglect their young.

* * *

It was odd to hear her addressing him as Francis rather than Father Francis. He felt it defrocked and re-penised him.

Alternatively, some people begin life with a strong sexual interest that wanes over time for various reasons. Evans D. Hopkins wrote:

Have I become a prude, in prison, you may ask? I don't think so. Rather, I have chosen celibacy as an exercise, as a means of withdrawing from the immediacy of the visceral world, in order to see things with greater clarity. Standing at some remove is almost a prerequisite for sanity in prison; the immediate world is one of clanking bars, piercing announcements, echoing shouts. The discipline of celibacy is a means of escape, of transcendence, of maintaining self-control. So no, I am hardly a prude. Sometimes I want a woman so bad I ache – longing not just for sex but for the feminine voice, the gentle touch or just the image of someone who cares for me to hang on my wall. But I have come to understand that human sexuality is a precious and powerful force that affects us both in its presence and its absence. ... The desire for sex, I have concluded, is often a guise of the broader need for human joy, and sex doesn't always satisfy that need. At the risk of sounding square, I think I have learned to satisfy my deepest needs through writing; I feel I've been able to call upon that emotional quality referred to by early philosophers as agape – love of truth, justice, beauty and humanity. I believe that my period of celibacy has helped me ground myself for this greater purpose. I no longer feel in danger of losing moral focus, or relying upon a relationship to define myself. I am by myself beneath these trees and great sky, but I am not alone. I turn to a fresh page from my notebook, and begin to draft an ad for the personals: Single Black Male, seeking special lady who wants something real this time...

Sources

Andrei Platonov. Chevengur. Translated by Anthony Olcott. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978 (written 1928). p 48.

Paul Erdos, interviewed in a 1993 documentary

Nina FitzPatrick. Daimons. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co, 2003. pp. 48-49, 143.

"Sex and the (Somewhat) Celibate Prisoner." Evans D. Hopkins. ©1997 Evans Hopkins and Nerve.com

'Uvatiarru': Past and future all around us

Authors on the past, present and future.

Charles Rowan Beye:

One wants to sort out the details of the past, but often it is like going through yesterday’s wardrobe, surprised by the irremediable damage and wastage of so much lying in those drawers next to undeniable treasures. It is not what one had expected.

Douwe Draaisma:

Thinking back about an event that has made a great impression on us, we tend to underestimate the time interval separating us from that event. Such illusions have their counterparts in psychiatry. Traumatic events are repeated in flashbacks, memories that penetrate the psychological present and that cannot be removed from it at will.

Rainer Maria Rilke:

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Carl Honoré:

In some philosophical traditions – Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist, to name three – time is cyclical. On Canada's Baffin Island, the Inuit use the same word – uvatiarru – to mean both "in the distant past" and "in the distant future." Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going. It is constantly around us, renewing itself, like the air we breathe.

Alan Watts:

The partisans of historical culture seem to congratulate themselves on having escaped from cyclic into linear time, from a static into a dynamic and "on-going" world order — failing to see that nothing is so cyclic as a vicious circle. A world where one can go more and more easily and rapidly to places that are less and less worth visiting, and produce an ever-growing volume of ever-less-nourishing food, is, to cite only the mildest examples, a vicious circle. ... The sudden outburst of history in the last five hundred years might strike one as more of a cancer than an orderly growth.

Sam Keen:

The second mode of time, kairos, is organic, rhythmic, cyclical, intimate, and bodily. In the right moment, in the kairos, a woman gives birth, a man dies in the fullness of his years, winter yields its icy grip to the soft breezes of spring, grief gives way to gratitude, anger runs its course, and forgiveness blossoms.

* * *

It is within the leisurely movement of kairos that we learn the lessons of dreams, mark the passages from one stage of life to another, and measure the growth of faith, hope, and love. In the New Testament, kairos refers to the moments in which God breaks into history, making an appearance through the prophets or Jesus. In a wider sense, it is any moment when an ordinary event becomes an epiphany.

Erik Davis:

"But as Giorgio Agamben argues in The Time That Remains, his illuminating treatment of Paul's letters, parousia is better read as presence—a presence that is yet to come, and so beyond the clutches of representation, including the calendar. As Agamben explains, Paul uses the term parousia [second coming] to underscore the notion that messianic time is made up of two heterogeneous times: the chronos of everyday, historical time — like February 20, 1974 — and the eruptive, immanent Now of kairos.

Messianic time is out of joint; it is dislodged from ordinary chronology but has not yet arrived at the end of time. Using one of Dick’s most memorable metaphysical terms, we might say that messianic time is orthogonal to ordinary history.”

* * *

At the same time, we miss the power of messianic time by only understanding it in terms of waiting and deferral. As Agamben explains, the parousia yet to come paradoxically makes messianic time available across time. ‘The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable.’ The parousiais not just the original event or the future fullness; it is also something in between, the fragment or bit of realized time we face in the otherwise mundane moment. Paul (and Dick) capture this quality through the image of twinkling—a term that refers not only to an evanescent moment, but to an almost diamond-like play of light.”

Eric Rhode:

Intuitions in the consulting room recall these birds. They are tokens of a new life. The ancient Greeks had no category for time. Cyclical time is a modern concept. It is we, and not they, who believe in a return of the seasons. In their thought there was return in space and not in time: there is an eleusis, an anados, seasons come “from below” and not from “yesterday.” The perpetual movement of the universe depends on rhythm and not time, as in a dance [...]. The rhythm is always one-two, one-two (Daraki, p. 166).

Sources

Charles Rowan Beye. My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. [Kindle Edition] p. 4.

Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 205.

Rainer Maria Rilke. Quoted in Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989. p. 74. (This is a revised version of Telling Your Story, originally published 1973.)

Carl Honoré. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. p. 29.

Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman. (1958) New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 19.

Sam Keen. In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred. New York: Harmony Books, 2010. p. 38.

Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019.

Eric Rhode. On Hallucination, Intuition, and the Becoming of O. (ESF, 1997) Amazon Digital Services, 2014. Posición 653.

Monotony and excitement: Perceptions of time

Elizabeth Gilbert mused on the monotony of a long marriage, specifically on how the monotony builds intimacy and might be essential to the marriage. She wrote:

The poet Jack Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens "between the memorable." He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies" – the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody – so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Yet another Gilbert, on the difficulty of achieving momentum to make significant change:

The problem, [Daniel] Gilbert points out, is that we humans are constrained by ‘presentism’: ‘Most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today.’

Fernando Pessoa wrote of how a life made deliberately monotonous will find excitement in the smallest things. One might interpret this as deliberately lowering one's standards. Regardless, as a trick of the mind, it might be effective.

I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those lives and, just as I'm about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

In the end, everything is relative. A tiny incident in the street, which draws the restaurant cook to the door, affords him more entertainment than any I might get from the contemplation of the most original idea, from reading the best book or from the most pleasant of useless dreams. And, if life is essentially monotonous, the truth is that he has escaped from that monotony better and more easily than I. He is no more the possessor of the truth than I am, because the truth doesn't belong to anyone; but what he does possess is happiness.<>BR
The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance. After his third lion the lionhunter loses interest in the adventure of the hunt. For my monotonous cook there is something modestly apocalyptic about every streetfight he witnesses. To someone who has never been out of Lisbon the tram ride to Benfica is like a trip to the infinite and if one day he were to visit Sintra, he would feel as if he had journeyed to Mars. On the other hand, the traveller who has covered the globe can find nothing new for 5,000 miles around, because he's always seeing new things; there's novelty and there's the boredom of the eternally new and the latter brings about the death of the former.

The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair; he wouldn't need to talk to anyone or to know how to read, just how to make use of his five senses and a soul innocent of sadness.

One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony.

Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888) had a contrary recommendation. In the passage below, he is interested not in the excitement value of any single new thing, but in how to create the impression of a long, full life overall.

If you want to lengthen the perspective of time, then fill it, if you have the chance, with a thousand new things. Go on an exciting journey, rejuvenate yourself by breathing new life into the world around you. When you look back you will notice that the incidents along the way and the distance you have travelled have heaped up in your imagination, all these fragments of the visible world will form up in a long row, and that, as people say so fittingly, presents you with a long stretch of time.

Cicero looked at old age more purely as a chronological fact, something that would have been attractive per se in the ancient world especially because it was more difficult to attain then. Logically, he says, if it is desirable to live long, then those who are old should be happier on this count than those who are young, since they have achieved the goal. In his writings, he argues against hedonism, and in this passage, he suggests that in old age one finds joy in the remembrance and the rewards of a life virtuously lived.

An old man indeed has nothing to hope for; yet he is in so much the happier state than a young one; since he has already attained what the other is only hoping for. The one is wishing to live long, the other has lived long. And yet, good gods! what is there in man’s life that can be called long? ... For when that [old age] arrives, then the time which has passed has flowed away; that only remains which you have secured by virtue and right conduct. Hours indeed depart from us and days and months and years; nor does past time ever return, nor can it be discovered what is to follow.

Sources

Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 196.

Daniel Gilbert's idea described by Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 19.

Jean-Marie Guyau, quoted in Douwe Draaisma. Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past. (2001) Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans in 2004. Cambridge University Press, 2005. p 207.

“Cicero on Old Age.” Chapter XIX. Printed in Cicero’s Three Books of Offices, and Other Moral Works. Translated by Cyrus R. Edmonds. Bohn’s Classical Library. London: George Bell & Sons, York St, Covent Garden, 1890. p. 248.

When 'nature' symbolizes life itself and human existence

"Nature is the common, universal language, understood by all," said Kathleen Raine.

Rene Dubos:

Sophisticated and civilized as we may be, we have retained from our distant ancestors the ability to derive profound satisfactions from the small happenings of daily life – when we eat, drink, and love; sing, dance, and laugh; dream, tell stories, or illustrate them in pictures, participate in events where we can be at the same time author, actor, and spectator. ... I also long for these simple but fundamental satisfactions which reflect what was best in the biological and social past of humankind.

* * *

The present world-wide effort to save the quality of the environment transcends the problems posed by pollution and by the depletion of natural resources. It constitutes rather the beginning of a crusade to recapture certain sensory and emotional values, the need for which is universal and immutable because it is inscribed in the genetic code of the human species.

The writer Edward Abbey – wrote Wendell Berry about him – "understands that to defend and conserve oneself as a human being in the fullest, truest sense, one must defend and conserve many others and much else."

John McPhee: "The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers."

Petrus Severinus said: "Go, my sons, burn your books and buy yourselves stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth...Observe and experiment without ceasing, for in this way and no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the true nature of things."

Sources

Rene Dubos, Beast Or Angel?: Choices That Make Us Human, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. pp 7, 149

Wendell Berry, introducing a collection of Edward Abbey's writings, The Serpents of Paradise, ed. John Macrae. New York: Henry Holt and Co., Inc., 1995. p xi.

John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1971, 1992, p 159.