Some books I've been reading

That night I bathed in a large tin tub and went into what in any other hotel would have been called a lounge, for what anywhere else would have been called a quick drink, before what in most other places would have been dinner. In no single particular was this purpose accomplished; rather, in every aspect did it materialize some ten times life-size. To call this room a lounge would have been ridiculous; it was a salon, a caravanserai, a large room crowded, as we saw with surprise, with a multitude of striking and picturesque people in richly-coloured costume and exceptional hairdressings; they were occupied not, as one might have thought, in being photographed for the National Geographic Magazine, but in a variety of pleasantly domestic occupations such as pouring tots of rum and knitting socks, and discussing questions of mutual interest in an animated and formal way. Most of them were Tibetans; there were also several people who might have been economics lecturers on vacation, refuges from Cheltenham Ladies College, and at least one who was quite evidently a Benedictine monk in disguise. Before our entry we had considered dubiously whether our appearance - unshaven, khaki-shirted, carpet-slippered - might have been thought indecorous. We need not have worried.

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March to Quebec, compiled and annotated by Kenneth Roberts

March to Quebec, Journals of the Members of Arnold's Expedition, Compiled and Annotated by Kenneth Roberts During the Writing of Arundel. Roberts foreword begins: During the writing of Arundel I was obliged to consult all known journals written by members of Arnold's Expedition to Quebec. Many were difficult to locate; some almost impossible to obtain. In order to simplify the work of those wishing to consult these records, they have been brought together in this book for the first time.

The forward to March to Quebec continues:

A magnificent study of the journals of the Arnold Expedition was published by Professor Justin H. Smith of Dartmouth in his Arnold's March from Cambridge to Quebec - a book essential to a complete understanding of the subject. Another study was made by John Codman in his Arnold's Expedition to Canada. Codman's book is easier to read than Smith's, but Smith's is more accurate. Codman accepted hearsay evidence and local tradition, and occasionally went astray on his facts, whereas Smith worked with the meticulous accuracy of the historian. An amusing aspect of a study of source books of the Arnold Expedition is the irritation shown throughout Smith's volume at Codman's carelessness. Some of Smith's irritation is probably due to the fact that Codman's less scholarly work appeared while Smith's was being written, and any author is resentful when he thinks his thunder has been stolen.

Neither Smith's book nor Codman's, essential as they are as sources, show the peculiarities of the participants in Arnold's great march. Only from the journals themselves can the student gain an understanding of the ability of Arnold as a leader, the pomposity and painful nobility that descended on sixteen-year-old John Joseph Henry in the later years of his life; the distressing sanctimony of Abner Stocking; the bogus elegance and spurious philosophy of Morison; the popeyed gullibility of James Melvin in the matter of army rumors; the youthful erudition of Dr. Isaac Senter; the increasing faint-heartedness of John Pierce and his fellow New Englanders; the contemptible pettiness of those who, in the light of later events, wrote into their journals unjustifiable slurs on their brave and indomitable leader. ...

Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society included food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives - to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death - and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the modern Soviet Union): the declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. It the worst cases of complete collapse, everybody in the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajectory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while some societies didn't collapse at all.