Reading Notes

Jack London. "The People of the Abyss"

London Novels and Social Writings. ISBN 0-940450-06-2. 1982. Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. New York, NY.

Jack London goes to the ghettos of East London to understand and chronicle the existence of the impoverished, as well as to see humanity more clearly at the fringes of society.

Quotes and responses:

p18. "This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red cheeks, as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able to discern under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged."

The daughters are toadies. Looking to get on the good side of whoever is richer, above them. Dismissing of people below them to keep themselves up.

p17. "His two daughters beat him home from church"

They want their father to come home quickly because there was the prospect of money, a business opportunity.

Actually, no. I thought the hyperbole image was of daughters hitting their father with their purses, as one might a beast of burden like a carriage horse, to go faster. London just meant that the daughters got home before the father did. But were that line used in my way, I feel it would be a better 'turn of phrase'.

p17. "It was the certain weak and delicate prettiness which is no more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade quickly away like the color from a sunset sky."

A nice description of an age-old cliche about beauty-cum -youth of young ladies fading with time. Also, I like the redness of the sunset. Red symbolic of sexuality, lips, lipstick, virginity. And the grotesque bloodiness of the act of deflowering a virgin. Or the draining of blood from a pale face. IDK. Getting morbid here.

p14. "The fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it. The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it."

Fear is of the unknown, and of the different. Becoming one of them you realize there is nothing dangerous. The fear is irrational, it is the fear of becoming them. When you accept giving up the things you own, the comfort, and the security that creates this fear, you have no danger.

London's friends made the East end of London out to be this unspeakable place that one could not step foot in without risk of losing one's life. Actually, London was quite fine. He choose to forgo his comforts and had nothing to lose. Here I'm talking about the narrator to his fictional story as London. I just realized the city and the author share their name. It can be difficult to disambiguate.

"with the one exception of the stoker's singlet."

I don't think he's trying to be foreshadowing any impending doom brought on by a coat. Rather he is trying to be funny, unsuccessfully I feel, about the aforementioned itchiness of his scratchy coat on his nubile skin.

The book I'm reading has vocabulary words underlined. On average there is an underlying every page. People used to have rich diversity in vocabulary. Now people be keepin' it real. The word on the street is striation. Rockrimmon', y'all.

So sarcasm. Much satire.

p19. 

"Not one empty house could I find... It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms, unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and chattels."

LOL, London. You're housing your family in storage space, and so you write that you store your wife and babies as you would possessions! Clever. I feel like I do this all the time with other actions. Take an action on an object that one would not expect, and then rename  the action by the object. Like if you categorize yourself as something (baseball player, let's hypothetical example), I'll interpret for fun's sake all your thoughts and actions and words in this light, in this perspective. Or treat you differently based on the image you project with your self-assertions. To support your statements in jest, although if it happens to be truthful, so be it.

"Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family, but I learned that families, occupying single rooms, had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two... Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of lodgers suffering from the too-great spaciousness of one room, taking a bath in a tin wash basin would be an unfeasible undertaking."

p21. Rich people feeling their having more is a consequence of their indispensable and natural, thus justifiable need to have more. And their reproach towards the poor people who 'take what they have' unfairly.

"The others have driven our kind out. Those on this street are the only ones left. It's shocking, sir!'

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental value of a neighborhood went up while its tone went down.

'You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get one."

Total disregard of the wretched, inequitable living conditions these people are forced to suffer; instead, talking of it as the poor are using an unfair advantage against the rich by their 'ability' to cram into one room.

"So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It is shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this neighborhood was just as nice as it could be."

p22. I am not my brother's keeper. 'A syllogism. Other men die. I am not other men, therefore I will not die.' - Pale Fire. Nabokov.

Other people's problems are not my own. When people live in wretched misery, I am glad to distance myself from them and glory in my own well-off conditions; feeling discomfort in them intruding upon my well-being, rather than feel disconcerting urge to take action to remedy a common societal malaise. I push away the negative parts of what is common when it is doled out, denying that it is mine. I keep all the positive parts of what is common to myself, claiming ownership in the name of virtue, personal greatness.

(Aside: 48 Laws for Power. Robert Greene. "Get others to do the work for you." Don't do the work, but claim credit for it. Be a douche-fag. Get what's coming to you in hell. Or when the pitchforks and torches come looking for the owner. Actually, real power is invisible. Power when no one know who you are, you take no credit yet you reap all the harvests is the ultimate form of power. You are nowhere, you are everywhere. Kaiser Sose. Mob boss. Your identity is hidden, actually, no one is even aware you exist, but your influence is directed everywhere, by subordinates who think they are in charge and powerful. You are puppet master pulling strings. Those insecure of their own power need to be seen and feared. Those with untouchable control prefer to let their puppets be seen and feared. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings!)

"Far, far out, on the fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and successful clerks. They dwell in the cottages and the semidetached villas, with bits of flower garden, and elbow room , and breathing space. They inflate themselves with pride and throw chests when they contemplate the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God that they are not as other men. And lo! down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the monster city at his heels. Tenements spring up like magic, gardens are built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, and the black night of London settles down in a greasy pall."

p24. Cold hard cash is a lonely existence.

"Here was this man, a steady and reliable man, never missing a night's work, frugal and honest, lodging in one room with two other men, paying two dollars and a half per month for it, and out of his experience adjudging it to be the best he could do! And here was I, on the strength of the ten shilling in my pocket, able to enter in with my rags and take up my bed with him. The human soul is a lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes when there are three beds to a room, and casuals with ten shillings are admitted."

Look all this labor, responsibility, character and ethics of the worker. The whole of his existence, all his value and worth he puts into providing for himself. What does it amount to? No more than the ten shillings that any stranger on the street in possession of could buy and acquire with no more effort than producing a coin from his pocket. It is a lonely existence that none of these hard-earned human character virtues are worth more than a coin. That his character is not what grants him his stay, that these are not the criteria by which he is permitted shelter and granted his place in this establishment, but the indifferent evaluation of how much coin he can briefly lay his calloused fingers upon before forking it over for permission to live. That is the lonely condition of the human soul. That his place in this establishment, after six years of stay and diligent loyalty to his job, could be substituted for with a ten shilling piece possessed by a no-name, a no-reputation person of unknown character or virtue, a complete and total stranger.

p24

"The while she talked she was shuffling ponderously about the small kitchen... When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had she let up once throughout the conversation... And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deeper truth underlying that very wise old maxim: 'Virtue is its own reward.'

"

The cynical underbelly of that maxim is: you will not get paid at all for being a virtuous person. Rather, you are more apt to suffer and toil for nothing in the name of virtue.

p25

"By the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole shilling's worth of beer... I knew him pretty fairly for what he was. And that in one respect he was representative of a large body of the lower-class London workman... his father a fireman and a drinker before him. As a child, his home was the streets and the docks. He had never learned to read, and had never felt the need for it - a vain and useless accomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station in life."

'Read' here I immediately read as 'aspire' or 'dream' or 'imagine' or 'better himself' or 'think beyond himself'.

p26. "He had hammered out a philosophy of life, an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical and sensible one from his point of view. When I asked him what he lived for, he immediately answered, 'Booze'. A voyage to the sea (for a man must live and get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and the big drunk at the end... another trip to sea and a repetition of the beastly cycle"

Pretty much what working class people do. Make money to spend money for temporary fleeting pleasures, to feel like 'damn hell ass kings'. Take vacations, upgrade their cars, televisions, phones, houses, wives, subscriptions, memberships, go to concerts and events, eat out at fancy restaurants, dress in alternative clothes... pay for a taste of the lives of the owning class for a day, before they go back to being slaves.

A voyage to sea for this seaman is not a pleasure cruise, but it means working for a stint.

Except the American worker also wants kids. This guy doesn't have a family. He swears off women because he is too disillusioned in the 'American Dream' of raising a family. 

"But a wife and children,' I insisted. 'A home of your own, and all that. Think of it, back from a voyage, little children climbing on your knee, and the wife happy and smiling, and a kiss for you when she lays the table, and a kiss all around from the babies when they go to bed...'

'I'll tell you wot I'd get on four poun' ten [meager salary] - a missus rowin', kids squallin', no coal t' make the kettle sing, an' the kettle up the spout, that's wot I'd get... A missus! Wot for? T' make you mis'rable? Kids? Jest take my counsel, matey, an' don't 'ave 'em. Look at me! I can 'ave my beer w'en I like, an' no blessed missus an' kids a-cryin' for bread. I'm 'appy, I am, with my beer."

All that shit is a trap. A pointless cycle of giving away your happiness for a false hope of happiness. A enticing bait that sucks you in, and then you can't get out with all your debt, and responsibilities, and commitments from an endless toiling freedom-less existence. The lie is you can get out, because straw men are propped up with the trappings of freedom and wealth and success, implied borne out of the same stuff as you minimum wage working dead-end jobs, but never addressed directly. Paid actors who show you how good their life is, that the American Dream is alive and 'it could happen for you! keep buying Capitalism bonds!'  People whose purpose is to enjoy wealth ostensibly to preserve the lie.

That it is a land of freedom and opportunity where any hard-working, god-fearing, family man with a song in his heart, a wish in his dreams, and a pail and a bucket in his hands can become an owner, a member of the happy clique who send their legacies to Harvard and switch houses in the Summer and one day retire in comfort and security knowing his country repays his honest work with a share of the nation's profits in his Golden years.

That dream is no dream, but a reality for the owners at the top, who admit no new members and restrict their enrollment with each growing wave of prosperity to become more and more exclusive. The rest is a lie, fed to the slaves of the nation who keep that American Reality alive, not for themselves, but their masters in the deluded belief that it is their dream. Theirs is a lie, nothing more. There is no dream. There is reality at the top and a lie everywhere below.