Reading more Ingersoll

I've been hopping around between books kind of restlessly. I was on a Sherlock Holmes bender for awhile, but I kind of got tired of the pattern of the novels, which all proceed as follows:

1. A mystery is presented
2. Holmes ridicules the police and disappears
3. Watson bumbles around
4. Somebody dies
5. Holmes re-appears and curses himself because he had all the information to make a case and prevent the murder but was waiting for better confirmation of the perpetrator's favorite color.
6. The criminal is caught
7. The criminal tells a long story which takes the form of an adventure novel in an exotic location

So I might have to jump over to the shorter stories.

I've also been reading the collected writings of Robert Ingersoll, a American Freethinker from the late 19th century. Many of his ideas were radical for the times. The latest stuff I've been reading has been addressing rights, particularly those of women and children. He said that women should have all the rights of men, plus one more, the right to be protected. In some ways, he is very paternalistic- he painted the domestic scene as the women as cooks and housekeepers, and glorified the institution of marriage as the highest aspiration of mankind. But he advocated for a democratic household vs the man as the 'boss', and he thought children should be allowed to do and eat whatever they wanted. He was violently opposed to any kind of corporeal punishment, and said quite movingly (something my own parents told me) that you should tell your children that there is nothing they can do, no crime so heinous, that they would not be welcomed back to them with loving arms.

He had some interesting urbanistic ideas. He lamented the fact that so many people were leaving the farms of their fathers to go work in the cities. He saw so much misery in the cities, so he thought that happiness could really only be attained by living and working the land you owned. His proposal was to make farm life more attractive by making it less miserable (why do you rise at 3am? makes no sense), making it more beautiful with trees and paint and plants, and making it more sociable. He wanted villages of intelligent, literate farmers with plenty of leisure time afforded by technology and the abundantly fertile soil (especially in Illinois "The best state in the country and the best country in the world").

Still, it's hard to fault someone who really believes that the purpose of life is happiness and the way to get there is to make others happy.

Along similar philosophical lines, I re-read Moominvalley in November, which is a Finnish children's story about a group of somewhat antisocial characters who grow to find the pleasure of each others company and qualities despite their failings and selfishness.