 Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of Roman's book report. Hopefully it'll be the first of many. So I want to talk about a book that I just finished reading. This is my heavily tapped copy of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. The reason I want to start with this book harkens all the way back to an episode a few years ago when I was a writing student. And I remember I was at a panel of three writers. I was in the audience and someone else in the audience asked are there any writers who are not leftists, who aren't politically leftists. And the panel of three writers, they all kind of asked each other and talked about it and none of them could think of any writers who weren't leftists. They asked the audience, nobody in the audience mentioned anything. Of course back then I was not as wise and learned as I am today. I've since discovered quite a few. There's a wonderful essay by William Faulkner called The Duty to Be Free which I encourage everyone to find online and read. There is the writer Garrett Garrett who I haven't read yet but he's high on my list. You can look up what recent Nobel laureate Mario Vargas-Losa said about the Tea Party movement in America. He said basically that it's nice that there's at least one country in the world where people ask the government to do less just to get out of the way instead of asking the government to solve all their problems. And there is this wonderful novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. So let's get started. The Secret Agent is largely the story of Mr. Verlach who carried on his business of a cellar of shady wares and exercised his vocation of a protector of society. It was his hobby to protect society. And it opens with him going to meet Mr. Vladimir at the embassy who's going to encourage him that after all these years of paying him he needs him to start blowing stuff up. But it's not enough just being a communist, just thinking communist thoughts. Incidentally if you read the Wikipedia entry about this book it says that it's about anarchists and I don't disagree with that but they were Marxist anarchists, they were communists. So that's how I'm going to describe it. And the communist propaganda is very evident in this book. There's the idea that communism is the inevitable outcome of capitalism and one of Ludwig von Mises' many criticisms, one of the many contradictions that he pointed out is if indeed communism or socialism rather, communism is like 500 years down the road, utopia, if socialism is the inevitable outcome of capitalism then capitalists should be praised as its heralds. They're ushering in the new era and this is evident in Mr. Verlach's observation as he goes to meet Mr. Vladimir. He surveyed through the park railings the evidence of the town's opulence and luxury within a proving eye. All these people had to be protected. Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury. They had to be protected and their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected and their source of wealth had to be protected in the heart of the city and the heart of the country. The whole social order favorable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labor. It had to and Mr. Verlach would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion. His idleness was not hygienic but it suited him very well. He was in a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism or perhaps rather a fanatical inertness. It goes on. He was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human endeavor. Such a form of indolence requires, implies a certain amount of intelligence. If you're lazy in a particular way and if you hate the world in a particular way it can reflect your intelligence. Does this sound like anyone you know? His big prominent eyes were not well adapted to winking. They were rather the sort that closes solemnly in slumber with majestic effect. Down on the bottom of the page, Mr. Verlach, steady as a rock, a soft kind of rock, marched now along a street. The jokes in here are very subtle and they're almost continuous so you have to pay really close attention. I'd say it was a challenging read but a very, very good one. Here's another observation of Mr. Verlach, a man devoted to Marxism who does not believe in property. Keep that in mind. Mr. Verlach loved his wife as a wife should be loved that is maritaly with the regard one has for one's chief possession.