The Sixty-Five Years of Washington Book

One of my philosophy professors in college said this idea he threw out in class on day that in any philosophy book if you can understand one sentence in the book you will understand the whole book. This is an almost Hermetic idea, as is above is as it is below. That the whole cosmos is contained in each person. This sounds deceptively simple. To really understand that one sentence and to really unpack it you might need to read the book it's in over and over again, read a thousand other books and ponder that sentence for a few lifetimes he didn't say that but I'm just extrapolating a little bit. His style of 'teaching' a term I use loosely here was to open up the book we were supposed to be discussing and start talking about it and spend the next hour just rambling about whatever came to his mind. He was old and looked a lot like a decrepit Sartre. He'd talk about all kinds of things, a little bit about the book but mostly about how he hated having to teach anymore, how he would like to just be left to die, how he hoped he never had to come teach another class because of death. Uplifting stuff, especially at 9 in the morning. His classes were packed though, mostly because he just gave out A's if you showed up and wrote the two papers he asked for. He didn't expect much from anyone, and I don't think anyone expected anything from him. Most people stopped showing up after a few weeks. I think they still got a B for just registering for the class. He wasn't a good teacher, but that one thing he said stuck with me, which is more than what stuck with me from other teachers.

What he said came back to me while reading this book. In literature there is the famous example of Joyce's Ulysses where one ordinary day of an ordinary man is extrapolated to be epic and much greater than the day itself. There are lots of other examples too I'm sure. I'm not thinking of any right now, but that is my deficiency. Well, I lied. This book is another example of this.

Here two men meet on the street. They know each other casually. One has just gotten back from a trip to Europe, the other is skipping a day at work to walk around the downtown area of a city in Argentina. They meet and walk 20 blocks or so together and discuss the 65th birthday of Noriega Washington, a man both of them know but neither of them attended the party. The one man because he was in Frankfurt at the time, the other because he wasn't invited.

In discussing what happened at the party the entire life of both of these two men is exposed through what they say, what they don't say, what they think and who they know or don't know. The history of Argentina in the 20th century is also laid out with it's political upheavals and the tragedies of history that the country suffered. The short walk becomes a microcosm that contains the whole world these two characters exist in. Their entire totality manifests itself to the reader in their leisurely stroll and at the end of their walk nothing has changed for either character. The walk itself could be something neither character will remember in the future but the reader gets to see how by looking the right way at this chance encounter the lives of each character are illuminated and if the characters could see this they would be able to possibly change their future and see what is really important and what isn't.

This is the kind of book that if I was more knowledgeable about the country being written about I'd be much more interested in. There is a universality to what happens in the book but too much of the details are so specific to the recent history of Argentina, something I know little about, that I didn't get nearly as involved in the story as I could have. Now if this had been two men in 1930 walking through one of the Platz's of Berlin, talking about the 65th birthday of Hans Von Something-or-other I would have probably thought this was the cat's meow.

I chalk up my relative lack of enjoyment of this book to myself.