William T. Vollmann's abridgment of his 3,500-page, seven-volumemagnum opus An odyssey through the history of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down combines William T. Vollmann's voracious appetite for the details of history with a disregard for his own safety, examines the actions of historical figures, scrutinizes the thinking of philosophers and finds Vollmann posting personal dispatches from some of the most dangerous and war-torn places on earth. The result is his Moral Calculus, a structured decision-making system designed to help the reader decide when violence is justifiable and when it is not.

William T. Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of, among others, The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, and a series of novels entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, about the collision between the native populations of North America and their colonizers and oppressors. In addition, Vollmann's nonfiction includes An Afghanistan Picture Show, which describes his crossing into Afghanistan with a group of Islamic commandos in 1982, and Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume treatise on violence that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, and Granta. In 1999, The New Yorker named Vollmann "one of the twenty best writers in America under forty." He lives in California with his wife and daughter.

Rising Up and Rising Down
Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

Three Meditations on Death

Catacomb Thoughts

Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons fromthose of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue willshow what violence is. With this in mind, I walked the long tunnels of theParis catacombs. Walls of earth and stone encompassed walls of mortalitya femur's-length thick: long yellow and brown bones all stacked in parallels,their sockets pointing outward like melted bricks whose ends draggeddown, like downturned bony smiles, like stale yellow snails of macaroni -- joints of bones, heads of bones, promiscuously touching, darkness in thecenter of each, between those twin knucklespurs which had once helpedanother bone to pivot, thereby guiding and supporting flesh in its passionateand sometimes intelligent motion toward the death it inevitably found -- femurs in rows, then, and humeri, bones upon bones, and every few rowsthere'd be a shelf of bone to shore death up, a line of humeri and femurslaid down laterally to achieve an almost pleasing masonry effect, indeed,done by masonry's maxims, as interpreted by Napoleon's engineersand brickmen of death, who at the nouveau-royal command had elaboratedand organized death's jetsam according to a sanitary aesthetic.(Did the Emperor ever visit that place? He was not afraid of death -- noteven of causing it.) Then there were side chambers walled with boneslikewise crossed upon bone beams; from these the occasional skull looked uselessly out; and every now and then some spiritual types had ornamentedthe facade with a cross made of femurs. There had been laiddown in that place, I was told, the remains of about six million persons -- our conventional total for the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust.The crime which the Nazis accomplished with immense effort in half adozen years, nature had done here without effort or recourse, and wasdoing.

I had paid my money aboveground; I had come to look upon my future.But when after walking the long arid angles of prior underground alleysI first encountered my brothers and sisters, calcified appurtenances ofhuman beings now otherwise gone to be dirt, and rat flesh, and root flesh,and green leaves soon to die again, I felt nothing but a mildly melancholycuriosity. One expects to die; one has seen skeletons and death's-heads onHalloween masks, in anatomy halls, cartoons, warning signs, forensicphotographs, photographs of old S.S. insignia, and meanwhile the skullsbulged and gleamed from walls like wet river boulders, until curiosity became,as usual, numbness. But one did not come out of the ground then.Bonewalls curled around wells, drainage sockets in those tunnels; sometimeswater dripped from the ceiling and struck the tourists' foreheads -- water which had probably leached out of corpses. A choking, sickeningdust irritated our eyes and throats, for in no way except in the abstract,and perhaps not even then, is the presence of the dead salutary to the living.Some skulls dated to 1792. Darkened, but still not decayed, they oppressedme with their continued existence. The engineers would have donebetter to let them transubstantiate. They might have been part of majestictrees by now, or delicious vegetables made over into young children's bloodand growing bones. Instead they were as stale and stubborn as old arguments,molds for long-dissolved souls, churlish hoardings of useless matter.Thus, I believed, the reason for my resentment. The real sore point wasthat, in Eliot's phrase, “I had not thought death had undone so many”;numbness was giving way to qualmishness, to a nauseated, claustrophobicrealization of my biological entrapment. Yes, of course I'd known that Imust die, and a number of times had had my nose rubbed in the fact; thiswas one of them, and in between those episodes my tongue glibly admittedwhat my heart secretly denied; for why should life have to bear in itsflesh the dissolving, poisonous faith of its own unescapable defeat? Atopbony driftwood, skulls slept, eyeholes downward, like the shells of dead hermitcrabs amidst those wracked corpse timbers. This was the necrophile's beach, but there was no ocean except the ocean of earth overhead fromwhich those clammy drops oozed and dripped. Another cross of bone, andthen the inscription -- SILENCE, MORTAL BEINGS -- VAIN GRANDEURS, SILENCE -- words even more imperious in French than I have given them here, but nomore necessary, for the calcified myriads said that better than all poets orcommanders. In superstition the carcass is something to be feared, dreadedand hated; in fact it deserves no emotion whatsoever in and of itself, unlessit happens to constitute a souvenir of somebody other than a stranger;but time spent in the company of death is time wasted. Life trickles away,like the water falling down into the catacombs, and in the end we will besilent as our ancestors are silent, so better to indulge our vain grandeurswhile we can. Moment by moment, our time bleeds away. Shout, scream orrun, it makes no difference, so why not forget what can't be avoided? Onand on twisted death's alleys. Sometimes there was a smell, a cheesy, vinegarysmell which I knew from having visited a field morgue or two; therewas no getting away from it, and the dust of death dried out my throat. Icame to a sort of cavern piled up to my neck with heaps of bones not usedin construction: pelvic bones and ribs (the vertebrae and other small bonesmust have all gone to discard or decay). These relics were almost translucent,like seashells, so thin had death nibbled them. That smell, that vinegarvomitsmell, burned my throat, but perhaps I was more sensitive to it thanI should have been, for the other tourists did not appear to be disgusted;indeed, some were laughing, either out of bravado or because to them itwas as unreal as a horror movie ...

Rising Up and Rising Down
Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means. Copyright © by William Vollmann. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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