Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God Paperback – December 22, 2015

This is a very unusual book. First of all it is published more than thirty years after the death of the author. It is a short book - less than 200 pages. On the other hand, it is almost encyclopedic in its treatment of subjects. In 1978, as he was still putting it together, Will Durant described it as a “little book of stray thoughts on everything.” “I am anxious to get it done,” said Durant, “The pep is petering out.” And so we have “Fallen Leaves,” Durant’s last words on “Life, Love, War and God.”I can only scratch the surface in mining my own favorite “pearls of wisdom” which are copiously scattered throughout twenty-two short chapters.On Youth. The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait - “If youth knew how, and old age could.”On Middle Age. We forget our radicalism then in a gentle liberalism - which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.On death. Only one thing is certain in history and that is decadence; only one thing is certain in life and that is death.Our Souls. I am quite content with mortality; I should be appalled at the thought of living forever in whatever paradise. As I move on into my nineties my ambitions moderate, my zest in life wanes; soon I shall echo Caesar’s Jam satis vixi- I have already lived enough.Our Gods. I am prepared to have you put me down as an atheist, since I have reluctanty abandoned belief in a personal and loving God. There is so much suffering in the world and so much of it apparently undeserved, so much war, destruction, crime,corruption and savagery, even in religious organizations like the medieval church, that one finds it hard to believe that all this exists by permission of an all-powerful and beneficent deity.Darwin furthered the transformation that Copernicus had begun. As the astronomer had lost the earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature’s interminable odyssey.So, while I myself cling to the old code, I do not expect it of the young. I shudder at the convulsions and bumps that make up their dances; I flee from their music and art as relics of the chaos that preceded creation; and I wait impatiently for them to discover that Bohemian, too, is a convention and a pose and that their proud deviations from accepted manners reveal a secret doubt of their own inner worth.No one will believe me when I claim that I have ofter been aroused by the beauty of a woman without desiring her in any physical sense or degree; according to me my excitement was purely esthetic. Perhaps I deceive myself, and I will make no oath as to the lusts hiding in my unconscious or in my blood. But I insist that time and again I have longed to approach a woman timidly and thank her for being such a joy to behold, and that in this longing I felt no ambition to possess her, or even to touch her hand.On Vietnam. But we had a right to expect that our government would sign the Geneva Agreements of 1954, guaranteeing a neutral Vietnam; and that our economic interests there would be left to negotiation rather that to escalated interference and war. I would rather have America lose her empire than have her forfeit all the inspiration that she has meant to mankind.In 1932 I voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I rank him among our greatest presidents. He rescued democracy abroad by coming to the aid of France and England in 1941; he rescued democracy at home by making government the instrument of the common weal instead of the instrument of capital. Because of him and his successors the American system was so chastened and strengthened that it has been able to meet every challenge and comparison.Since 1921 I have inveighed against the absurdities of psychoanalysis. I laughed at Freud’s dream theories as soon as I read them. I had had sexual dreams, but never disguised them as cutting a cake. Freud’s resort to symbolism in interpreting dreams seemed to me merely the bizarre and unconvincing feat of a diseased imagination. I felt that he had exaggerated sex and had underrated economic troubles in generating neurosis. . . I had no memory - and had given no reported sign- of having hated my father or of having desired my mother sexually.“History,” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization - history as the record of lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills - history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religion, literature, science, and government - history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future - that kind of history is not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.

This delightful book sums up a lifetime of work by a very wise man who adroitly studied and recorded the follies, faults, faiths and fantasies of many civilizations.Three conclusions are obvious: (1) history reflects the era in which it was written, and thus is never objective; and (2) no one has the wisdom or insight to predict the future; and (3) you will be amazed at the progress we've made since the 1970s.That said, it is easier to predict the future than to be sure about the past. The future deals with hopes and fears, the past is filled with debates, insults and rebuttals. Some writers comfort or scare people about the future, which generally sets minds at ease by promising readers that their lives have meaning. Others recall old stories, which often sets everyone's mind at unease by explaining how the past could have been better.In essence, this book boldly asserts, "I have studied the past, now here's what you must do for the future."Good luck. Those willing to abandon individuality for any moral certainty are already Jesuits or slaves. Durant offers eugenics as a hope for the future and at least a semi-nativist answer to "unsuitable" immigration.He doesn't seem to understand that today's marvelous world was created by people, flawed as they were in his judgment, who made good choices in response to irrational and unpredictable events. Somehow, despite the pessimism of the wise, slowly but surely, people and society improves.So what are the benefits of this almost half-a-century old review? Several: the writing is elegant, clear and concise. It is packed with quotable wisdom based on his observations, summaries and ideas which created his wisdom.In that it is a gem, a book never to be read with a highlighter in hand - - for if so, almost every page will shine with lines of bright colours to emphasize ideas to remember, massage and modify as times change. It's how Durant wrote this book, a decade or more to collect and create a concise summary of the best of his decades of scholarship.The book expresses the long lifetime of ideas of a wise man. Good readers will use his observations to nake sense of events as they happen; great readers will stand on the shoulders of his wisdom for insight into the future.