thinking out loud

My current reading and TBR lists

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:46:00 -0500

Books I’m currently reading

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai. Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation of this book from the original Hungarian received the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019.
This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee. This one has been on my radar for a while. I’m digging into it now in large part because of Joanna Kavenna’s review in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement and comments by Andreas at 82mhz.
Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World, by Anne Enright. I think that this selection from the book, published in The Guardian last fall, is so powerful. Happy to see that the book has finally been released in the United States.

Books completed, but notes pending

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan. I saw this book when it first came out and decided not to read it just now. But last week I saw this conversation with Pollan in the Guardian and decided it fits well with my current attempts to reclaim my attention.
The Last Intellectuals, by Russell Jacoby. Recommended by George Scialabba.
Envisioning Real Utopias, by Erik Olin Wright. Recommended by Jathan Sadowski in The Mechanic and the Luddite. (Crooked Timber hosted an online seminar about the book in 2013.
Happiness in Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life, by Adam Adatto Sandel. Notes pending. A gift from my wife. How could I not read it?
All That Man Is, by David Szalay. After reading Flesh, Szalay’s latest book, I decided to stay in his world for a while, so I retrieved this book from our local libary. I read most of it before deciding that I didn’t need to live in Szalay’s world any more.
In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I read one of the volumes of Knausgaard’s autobiographical quartet about ten years ago. I don’t remember many specific details, but I do remember how he created a world that enveloped me while I was reading it and haunted me for months after finishing it. Much more recently, I heard Zadie Smith offer an insight she gained from one of his essays. Shortly after that, I found this collection on the shelves of my local independent bookstore. I’m working through it slowly, one essay at a time. I should admit that I didn’t read all the essays in this collection. I’m leaving some of them for another time.

Books I’m thinking I might read next

One of my biggest takeaways from reading Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals was this bit of advice:

… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by (p. 29).

I’m thinking I might read these some day soon. I have to admit that it’s difficult for me to stay with this list — I’m much too easily distracted by new discoveries of books both old and new.

The Price of our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life, by Augustin Landier & David Thesmar. I don’t remember how/when I discovered this new book — perhaps in a blog post? But my interest in it is captured very well by Rebecca Henderson’s blurb on the back cover: “The authors highlight the deep flaws inherent in consequentialism and utilitarianism that are fundamental to most neoclassical economics, and they offer ideas as to how and why a broader sense of morality must become fundamental to economics analysis.”
A Democratic Theory of Judgment, by Linda M. G. Zerilli. Strongly recommended to me by a young scholar working with Zerilli and currently writing a dissertation on Hannah Arendt.
The Story Paradox, by Jonathan Gottschall. I heard a selection from this book as the reading in a Sunday service at a Unitarian Universalist church recently. My interest in this book and the next one is grounded in my growing appreciation of the importance of narrative in forming our sense of self and our understanding of the world around us.
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, by David Graeber. I’ve been intrigued by this since reading Rebecca Solnit’s forward while standing in a bookstore several months ago, and also inspired by the occasional quotations from Graeber’s work posted by the David Graeber Institute on Mastodon.
The Democratic Marketplace: How a More Equal Economy can Save our Democratic Ideals, by Lisa Herzog. Highly recommended by one of the contributors to Crooked Timber: “If you want to know more about how the current form of capitalism is undermining (a thick conception of) democracy, and what can be done about this, then you should read Lisa Herzog’s latest book The Democratic Marketplace.”
Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, by Isaac, Jeffrey C. From a 1995 review by Seyla Benabib published in the Journal of Modern History.

Books already downstream, but tagged for possible retrieval later

99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, by Adam Chandler. I’m not sure, but I think it was this review that brought this book to my attention.
You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier.
Joyride, by Susan Orlean. I was intrigued by the review of this book in the print edition of the New York Times. The following day I came across it while browsing the new arrivals shelves at my local library. (When I checked it out, the woman at the desk told me that I was the first to check it out.) It seemed like serendipity, and I wanted a slightly lighter book to take with me to the family gathering over the holiday weekend. So this one jumped the queue. (And now, as indicated by its position in these lists, it jumped off. Just couldn’t get into it.
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian. Another discovery from someone’s blog. I requested it from the local library weeks ago. It’s now arrived, so this is my window for reading. I’m intrigued by Slobodian’s contention that neoliberals, in need a new enemy after the fall of Communism, decided that feminism and democratic socialism are bringing society down. He argues further that neoliberals hope — or, rather, are firmly convinced — that scientific research will soon show that there really are intrinsic differences between men and women and between races that count against the validity of efforts to bring about more equity in the world. Abandoned about a third of the way in.

March 2026

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:07:00 -0400

Some notes about books I finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

by Luke Kemp.

This is a massive book, and I’m not going to attempt to describe the whole of his project. However, I think the basic story is relatively straightforward and can be told in several steps:

Human beings evolved to be cooperative creatures. I find some of this to be rather speculative but still credible. For example, he argues that changes in the human shoulder joint allowed humans to throw objects like rocks or spheres more accurately, which made it easier for groups to resist the efforts of the biggest humans to achieve alpha status. “Even the largest, most imposing fighter could easily be killed by a spear or poison arrow during an ambush or while they slept” (pp. 38f). Kemp, like others, suggests that the need to navigate complex social environments was one of the factors driving the increase in brain size. Babies with larger brains couldn’t make it through the birth canal, which meant that babies were less developed at birth and therefore dependent on adults for much longer than other animals’ offspring. More cooperative communities who parented collectively had a survival advantage.
This began to change with the development of what Kemp calls lootable resources:

Lootable resources allowed for individuals and groups to become not just rich but also powerful. The four fundamental ways to gain power over others is [sic] to control valuable information (information power), to control by threat or force (violent power), to control the decision making (political power), or to control the critical resources (economic power). In an egalitarian forager group with few status differences, an ambitious status seeker could pursue one of these, but it was difficult if not impossible to achieve all of them. … What changed between the egalitarian ice age and the rise of inequality in the Holocene was the use of lootable resources. Once you had resources that others depended on, you could leverage them for other forms of power (p. 65).

And this development, Kemp suggests, lead to an evolutionary backsliding from the cooperative (and civilized) world of early humans to a world of “dominance hierarchies organized primarily through authority and violence” (p. 6).

However, these Goliaths are cursed — they contain within themselves the seeds of their demise. Inequality increases because those who have resources find it easy to accumulate even more resources by “extracting more wealth, energy, and labor from the rest of society” (p. 136). The inequality and extractive measures made a society less reliant and more likely to fall, whether by revolution from within or destructive forces from without.

Kemp develops these points in excruciating detail by surveying many Goliaths that have emerged and collapsed over the millennia since the last ice age.
Finally, Kemp argues that we are now living in an age of a global Goliath that could well be heading toward collapse, and collapse even more devastating than those that have come before because this Goliath is global. He closes the book with some advice on how we might avoid and/or respond to this collapse:
- Avoiding the collapse (if it’s not too late)
  - Stay within planetary boundaries
  - Control AI
    - Limits on power grid
    - Price carbon
    - Whistle-blower protections
  - Eliminate/reduce nuclear weapons
  - Decreasing power is feasible
- If we fail to avoid the collapse, those who survive will face the challenge of recreating civilization.
  - Democratize political power, and not just in government
  - Increase equality
  - Control both information and the military democratically
  - Control technology and production democratically
- Finally, he has advice for those who feel helpless in the face of current challenges:
  - “Don’t be a dick” — “This is a pledge to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk. Don’t work for an Agent of Doom, whether it is an AGI lab, a fossil-fuel company, or an arms manufacturer” (442)
  - Be a democrat – i.e., practice democracy as a citizen and not just an occasional voter
  - Vote against the apocalypse – “you are first and foremost a citizen, not a consumer” (p. 443).
  - Don’t be dominated

What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan.

I’ve read most of McEwan’s books, and I began reading this one with high hopes. This wasn’t only because I found his earlier novels to be very good; it was also because early reviewers praised this one. (Consider the title of Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times: Ian McEwan’s Latest Is the Best Novel He’s Written in Ages [gift link]). Simply put, the book more than met my expectations.

The book begins in the year 2119, and the world is something like a world that many of us today fear. Great Britain, now an island, in 2119 is an archipelago of islands because of rising seas. The political world as we know it, both within many countries and internationally, has more or less collapsed. I can’t say much about the book without revealing some significant spoilers. But I will say that the book’s title is particularly apt. What might scholars a century from now know about our day-to-day lives, especially since so much of our lives are recorded in digital databases? What might a person in an intimate relationship really know about the other person in that relationship? What might a person suffering from cognitive decline know about the world as it fades away? To what extent those of us living in privilege today continue to pretend we don’t know the disaster that we’re creating for those who follow us?

These are very pressing questions; as I read this book I was living in all of them.

The Gutenberg Elegies

by Sven Birkerts.

This book has three major sections. The first is an extended reflection on the reading self — a celebration of the practice of deep reading and of the different ways in which reading enriches and changes the self. “The books that matter to me,” Birkerts writes, “are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself” (p. 102). Here Birkerts pushed me to think more deeply about the power of reading and also about the relationship between reading and writing. I especially appreciate several observations:

“knowledge was less a means to an end than a matter of self-cultivation, a way of transforming the experience of the daily. To be curious, to study, to find out — this was the path to the world. Knowledge exposed connections, imparting significance to the incidental” (p. 60).

“true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitements of film. But if we do read perseveringly we make available to ourselves, in a most portable form, an ulterior existence. We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times. We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment” (p. 76).

“The books that matter to me — and they are books of all descriptions — are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself” (p. 102).

In the second section of the book he offers his caution about the way that the move to electronic media is changing the world, and not in a good way. I found him less helpful here, in part because the book was published in 1994. Times have changed. In addition, in this section he paints with a broad brush, lumping all electronic media into the same bucket. He did, however, offer this prediction that is not very far off the mark:

Software codes are a sorting hopper; they determine what flies through the circuits and what doesn’t. We will see how the movement and control, the shaping of data will become a more central occupation. We will all (except the poor and the refuseniks) spend more and more of our time in the cybersphere producing, sending, receiving, and responding, and necessarily less time interacting in a ‘hands-on’ way with the old material order. Similarly, we will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time that our sustained face-to-face encounters diminish. It will be harder and harder — we know this already — to step free of our mediating devices. There will be people who will never in their lives have the experience that was, until our time, the norm — who will never stand in isolated silence among trees and stones, out of shouting distance of any other person, with no communication implement, forced to confront the slow, grainy momentum of time passing. The ways of being that ruled individuals since individuals first evolved are suddenly, with a finger-snap, largely irrelevant” (p. 215).

The third major section of the book is a set of three essays. The first is a discussion of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. The second is a discussion of Alvin Kernan’s Death of Literature; here Birkerts appends a note of hope to the demise suggested in Kernan’s title. The final essay, “The Narrowing Ledge,” offers a challenge to those who would be novelists:

If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous. That is, it must throw up a serious challenge to the emergent status quo; it must shake and provoke people even as it leads them back toward a reconnaissance of selfhood. The novel will not endure because it can entertain (although certainly it can), but because it offers an essential experience available nowhere else. Through language, which makes of the page a place of focus and immersion, the writer gives the reader the deeper picture of things, the picture he might assemble for himself if only he had the time, the concentration, and the imaginative penetration (p. 209).

The first section of the book is very much worth a careful read. I gather he published a second edition in 2006 with a new introduction and afterword. Perhaps I’ll find that someday. My library has only the first edition.

Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature

by Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong

This is a relatively short book, but it’s also as bold as it is short. The authors propose a new law of nature that both counters and complements the second law of thermodynamics. They recognize the boldness of their proposal, and acknowledge that they could well be wrong. In a sense, the book is an invitation to others to engage in debate and further research. If they’re wrong, they say that they’ll accept that. I’m not a scientist, but I’m inclined to think that they have something well worth considering here. (I rather suspect that many with more training in science than I am would change the “but” in that previous sentence to “and.”)

Hazen and Wong begin the book with an overview of the currently held laws of nature, moving through Newton’s three laws of motion, the laws of gravity and electromagnetism, and the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is particularly important in their discussion. This law, they say, can be expressed in several different ways. The form that’s most relevant to their proposal states that “the entropy of an isolated system tends to remain constant or increase” (p. 31). And here’s their initial statement of their proposal:

…the breathtaking transformations from atoms to stars to planets to life — what has been called cosmic evolution — are manifestations of a universal imperative that has been at play since the Big Bang. Increased order is fully consistent with all the other natural laws, but it does not automatically follow from those laws. What is missing from our canon is a natural law of evolution — a second arrow of time related to increasing order that balances the well-documented first arrow of increasing disorder (p. 34).

Following this initial statement, they offer a brief overview of the evolution of the universe, beginning with the Big Bang, moving through the development and destruction of the first stars, leading finally to the emergence of many stars like our sun and then to the development and evolution of both non-living elements and life on earth. They argue that at each stage of development, the process is shaped by a preference for what they call “increasing functional information.”

In an evolving system subject to selection for function, it is functional information, not entropy, that describes adn explains how the system will change. And here we glimpse a possible path forward in our quest for a missing law of evolution: What if evolution obeys a law of increasing functional information? That increase would represent a second arrow of time — and arrow of increasing localized order and complexity. If our conjecture is correct, then time’s second arrow is completely consistent with entropy’s increasing universal disorder, but it is a different and independent phenomenon (p. 91).

They conclude this section of the book with a succinct statement of their proposed law:

The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system are subjected to selection for one or more functions (p. 94).

Again, Hazen and Wong don’t insist that they are certainly right about this. But they explore possible tests for the law’s validity that they think offer some reason to think that it’s valid.

I’ll admit again that I’m not a scientist, but I’m intrigued by this work. I’ll be interested to see how other scientists respond.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, the authors take up the question why someone else hasn’t come up with this proposal or one like it. They offer several possible reasons, but I wish that I had found there a discussion of Whitehead’s The Function of Reason. I think they would find there a kindred spirit if not a clear premonition of what they’re proposing here.

Hot Chocolate on Thursday

by Michiko Aoyama

I think of this short novel as a comfort novel. It’s a series of seemingly independent sketches of encounters between different people, each offered from the perspective of different narrators. As the book develops one sees interconnections between the characters; together these characters and interconnections make up a world.

Arithmetic

by Paul Lockhart

Lockhart begins by offering a straightforward definition of arithmetic. “Arithmetic is the skillful arrangement of numerical information for ease of communication and comparison.” He then fleshes out this definition by offering examples of different strategies for depicting and arranging numerical information — some of them factual examples from different cultures and others fanciful examples developed to flesh things out. After making his way through all of these examples, he provides informative analyses of different arithmetical operations like multiplication and division and discussions of the inventions of fractions and negative numbers. He does all of this with a light touch and a sense of humor.

I knew pretty much all of this, though I learned some of it so long ago that my knowledge was more implicit than explicit — I appreciated being reminded of these things. My favorite chapter in the book, entitled “The Art of Counting,” is far and away my favorite. Here Lockhart describes strategies for counting that rely on the identification of patterns and structures among the items counted. Here I learned some strategies, and I hope that I’ll still remember these strategies if and when I’m in a position to use them. Did you know, for example, that if one is asked to select 2 items out of a group of 6, there are 15 different pairs? And if one is asked to select 3 items out of a group of 6, there are 20 possible groupings?

My current reading and TBR lists.

Asceticism and sensuousness

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:36:00 -0400

Susan Sontag:

I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realized that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness. The only kind of sensuousness I have understood entails love of luxury + comfort.

Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963, p. 280 (13 August 1961)

The irony of purposeful arguments against the existence of purpose

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:29:00 -0400

Alfred North Whitehead:

Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that “purpose” is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

The Function of Reason, p. 16

You do not have my ideas!

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:01:00 -0400

Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, he announced that he would like to have a pickle on his cereal. “That’s not a great idea,” I said. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to face me, planting his feet solidly on the kitchen floor. “You do not have my ideas!” It dawned on me that my relationship with my son had changed rather significantly. “You’re right,” I stammered. “I do not have your ideas. You can put a pickle on your cereal if you like.”

I’ve told that story in a variety of settings over the last few decades — most recently at our son’s wedding reception — usually concluding with something like “When he was 3 years old, this was rather funny. When he was 17, not so much.” I thought of it today as I read Michael Pollan’s account of the implications of emerging episodic memory in a child’s development.

With the arrival of episodic [or autobiographical] memory comes the emergence of executive function — the ability to exert a measure of control over one’s own mind, a capability located in the prefrontal cortex. “Put a muffin in front of a four-year-old,” [psychologist Alison] Gopnik said, describing one of her own experiments, “and tell them their mother said it was okay to eat it. If you then ask if they can decide not to eat it, they will tell you no, they can’t. You want it, so you have to eat it. But a six-year-old will tell you that of course you can decide not to eat it. Why? They’ll say, ‘Because I’m the boss of me’” (A World Appears, p. 183).

That’s interesting, I thought. “I’m the boss of me, and you do not have my ideas!” But Gopnik suggests that this strong sense of self emerges around the age of six. I’m sure that our son was not yet four when he announced that he was the boss of his own ideas. After turning to the next page of Pollan’s book, I found an explanation.

Enter the volitional self, exhibiting a newfound degree of self-control and free will, or at least the illusion of it. But unlike the earlier stages, the timing of which appears to be hardwired in humans, this one seems to be culturally conditioned. Perhaps not surprising, the self that proclaims “I’m the boss of me” emerges earlier in American children than it does in, say, children in Asia.

I’m not sure what to make of the differing developmental timelines in the U.S. and Asia. But I fear that it has something to do with the wild west metaphor, the idea that each one of us is radically independent and has little need for the help of others. If I had another go at fatherhood I think I might find ways to talk about how much I’ve relied on others as I develop the ideas that I call my own.

An ordinary mind on an ordinary day

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:07:00 -0400

Virginia Woolf:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and simplicity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

“Modern Fiction,” republished in The Common Reader, First Series.

The violence of climate change

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:54:00 -0400

Rebecca Solnit:

Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food. But the single biggest one is: get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Climate change is itself violence as fires, floods, extreme heat, drought, famine, sea level rise and other catastrophes that both take human life and devastate the natural world. (Environmental historian Rob Nixon published a book in 2011, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, about the way we need to see these undramatic forces that poison, contaminate, undermine, force relocation as violence.) It is violence caused by the powerful minority that has delayed and derailed the decades of efforts to do what the climate requires of us. People die of stuff like the current heat wave (and heat-wave deaths are one of the most undercounted ways we die of climate chaos).

If Fossil Fuels Are War, Renewables Can Bring Peace

No time to understand, but plenty of time for righteous wrath

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:40:00 -0400

Lionel Trilling:

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

“Reality in America,” in The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, pp. 83f

Tribology and phone screen time

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:21:00 -0400

This past week I added another word to my vocabulary: tribology. According to the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, tribology is “the study of surfaces moving relative to one another.” They go on to explain that such study focuses on three related factors in the world: friction, lubrication, and wear. Though I offer this information from the STLE website, that’s not where I learned the term tribology. I learned that word when I picked up Jennifer Vail’s book Friction: A Biography as I was browsing the local independent bookstore. I skimmed a few pages and thought it was very interesting, but resisted the temptation of yet another distraction from the books that I’m currently reading. With some reluctance, I put the book back down on the recent arrivals table.

But I want to say a few things about tribology or, more to the point, the topics of friction, lubrication, and wear. I’m thinking of those topics in light of my recent project to track the amount of time I spend on my phone in hopes of reducing that time. If you’ve not seen my posts about that, look through the recent history. I’ll wait for you here.

I think my biggest takeaway from that project is the interplay of lubrication and friction. My use of the phone had become ingrained in my subconscious mental state and even in my muscle memory. As I said in at least one of those posts, it wasn’t at all unusual – in fact, it was typical — for me to notice that my hand was reaching in my pocket for my phone only after the phone was already in my hand and I was looking at the screen. The movement was so smooth that it was undetectable. All I had to do was look up from the book I was reading, or step away from the coffee I was brewing, and I would find my phone in front of my face. I learned pretty quickly that the best, and perhaps the only, way to interrupt that flow of events was to introduce friction. No, I didn’t throw sand into the inner workings of the phone. But I left the phone in another room. The additional effort required to pick up the phone made it possible for me to take a brief break from a book, or step back from the chemex, and simply think.

So the friction introduced by requiring the extra effort cut down on the phone use: my subconscious and my hand couldn’t put the phone in front of my face so easily. But friction can enable action just as effectively as it can frustrate it — after all, it’s the friction between by bicycle’s tire and the pavement that allows me to propel myself forward on my rides. I know I’m stretching the metaphor here, but I found over the four weeks that the lack of easy access to the phone made it easier for me to move forward in my reading, to stay focused on the reading I was trying to do. And that, I think, is a good thing.

There’s still more to the story, and that is that I find that spending less time on the phone — mostly, spending less time doomscrolling the miserably depressing news of the day — put less wear on my mind and my spirit. I’ve long bemoaned the power of cable news to control the public mind with its relentless chasing and sensationalizing of news about the world. But what I realize now is that even if I limit my online feed to responsible news organizations and, as is more and more the case, independent journalists who have escaped the shackles of corporate journalism, too much time on the phone is too much wear and tear on my consciousness.

The little experiment is over — I’m not planning to post my weekly screen time this coming Sunday. But so far, at least, I’m holding on to the practice of leaving my phone elsewhere at least some of the day. My hand and subconscious are still more in control of my behavior than I’d like, so I continue to depend on the friction.

February 2026

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:03:00 -0400

Some notes about books I finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Into the Weeds: Why I Write

by Lydia Davis.

I came across this book only a week before the day that I’m writing this note, and I finished reading it several days ago. Yes, it’s a short book (only 139 pages), but I finished reading it so quickly in large part because I simply couldn’t put it down. It’s an adaptation (and surely an expansion) of the keynote lecture Davis offered at the 2024 Windham Campbell Festival. The book is published as part of the Windham Campbell series entitled “Why I write.”

Davis begins by saying that her initial thoughts about why she writes led pretty quickly, first, to the question why other authors write and then to the question about her own reading. “I do so much reading, I am so often in the company of other writers, and contending with how they write. My reading is my reaction to the writing of other people. I may think that my reading, or anyone’s reading, completes their writing. They write something and then I either read it with pleasure, or read it without pleasure, or decide not to continue reading it” (p. 2).

Only two pages in, and I was hooked. Davis helped me to understand more deeply a conviction I’ve held for a long time — writing and reading are strongly interrelated. In the ever more distant past, I would often tell students that writing about a book they’d read was really an element in reading the book. (I thought this would counter their protest that I required too much writing in my classes; many of them weren’t convinced.) Davis makes both points: writing is part of reading, but reading is also part of writing.

The book is an exploration of what and how she reads, and also of what and how she writes. Her discussion of what she reads has added to the too long list of books that I think I might read. So far, I’m resisting the urge to add George Stuart’s 1923 book The Wheelwright’s Shop to my list (why do I need to know about how wagons were once made?), though even that is a temptation. I no longer shop at Amazon, but even if I did, I prefer the sort of reading advice Davis offers to Amazon’s “since you liked this book, you will probably like that book” algorithm. Her discussions of different authors and books invite me into worlds I didn’t know existed. (Regrettably, in passing she both identifies and intensifies my desire to bring still more books into the house when I already have many books I’ve not yet read.)

If you’re a writer and want to think more deeply about reading, or a reader and want to think more deeply about writing, I encourage you to read this book.

Living in the Present with John Prine

by Tom Piazza

I don’t remember when I discovered John Prine’s music. I’m pretty sure Kris Kristofferson had something to do with it, though I could be thinking that because Kristofferson played a major role in bringing Prine to the rest of the world. I was playing some of his songs as early as the mid-1970s. I started with “Paradise” and “Angel from Montgomery.”

I don’t remember when I first heard the recordings, but I do remember clearly the only time I saw Prine in concert. His stepson graduated from a Nashville high school while we lived there and Prine gave a benefit concert in a small Nashville club. It was just Prine and a sideman (playing guitar and harmonica) on stage for at least two hours. We sat about 20 feet from the stage. It felt like we were sitting in our living room listening to a good friend play his songs. It was a magical night.

Piazza heard Prine sing in New Orleans in 2016 and shortly after that spent a few days with him. That short visit led to an essay in the Oxford American with the same title as the book. It also was the start of a close but brief friendship, brought to an end by Prine’s death two years later. Only months before Prine died, he asked Piazza to write his memoir. The two of them met a couple of times when Piazza recorded John talking about his life. Piazza didn’t get enough in those aborted conversations to write a complete memoir, but he did get enough to flesh out his account of the John Prine he knew. After Prine died, Piazza had conversations with Prine’s brother and others who knew him well. The book isn’t the memoir that Piazza and Prine envisioned, but it’s a moving introduction to the man and his music.

I suppose it’s significant that I’ve had to resist referring to the musician by his first name as I’ve written these notes. I feel like we’ve met. Reading this book brings back that powerful memory of the time John sat in our living room, playing his songs and telling his stories.

Frog and other Essays

by Anne Fadiman.

A bookstore discovery. I’ve not read anything else by Fadiman, and I think that’s definitely my loss. She writes so well. This collection of seven essays runs the gamut from silliness to the seriously sad. Just a comment on the title essay: If I were part of a family that had a pet frog for 16 or 17 years and then after its death kept its body in the kitchen freezer for years waiting for a time when the adult children were visiting so they could attend the funeral, I surely wouldn’t write about it for the world. But if I wrote about it for the world, there’s no way I could invite the reader so charmingly into the frog’s life and death. Other essays include an account of a magazine published by a group of explorers visiting the Antarctic and a discussion of changes in pronouns. The latter was a good challenge to someone (like me) who has resisted the use of “they” and “them” as singular pronouns: I’m embarrassed to say that it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why I don’t say “you is” when I’m addressing only one person. Why do I say “you are”? Now I know. The book is not a difficult read, but it’s a rewarding one. I’m glad that I picked it up.

Flesh

by David Szalay.

I picked this one up after it received last year’s Booker Prize. I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed reading it. It was a difficult read. But I will say that Szalay had me thinking about the nature of male toxicity these days — both the toxic environment that shapes men and the toxic behaviors of many men. The word spoken more than any other by the male protagonist was “OK,” as he repeatedly follows the initiative of those around him.

The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia

by George Scialabba.

Found prominently displayed on the new arrivals shelf of a local bookstore. The point intrigues me: acknowledging that anything like a utopia is generations and generations away does not mean we shouldn’t work toward it.

The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans.

As she introduces her discussion of the intimate relationship of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, a long-distance relationship nurtured almost entirely by letter writing, Janna Malumud Smith observes, “You cannot write a letter any more than you can paint a self-portrait without choosing a profile. You might not think about it much as you rearrange your head until it seems right, but you do it” (An Absorbing Errand, p. 139). I read Smith’s book before reading Virginia Evans’s novel The Correspondent; this novel is as powerful a confirmation of Smith’s observation as one is likely to find. The Correspondent of the novel’s title is Sybil Van Antwerp. Sybil is nearing the end of her life, a life in which she has expressed herself in letters to a wide variety of people — family, close friends, noted authors like Joan Dideon and Larry McMurtry, and others. The portraits she paints in these letters, together with the portraits reflected in letters written to her, are of a woman with a strong and gruff veneer that disguises a woman dealing with the tragedy in her life.

When encouraging me to read this book, my wife said that I would be charmed. I was charmed, but the impact was deeper than that. I was moved. At times I laughed out loud. At other times I was on the verge of tears. Sybil’s coming to terms with herself and her past, solidified near the end of the book, left me thinking about my own life. It was a good read.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Screen time report #4

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:42:00 -0400

I’m wrapping up this four-week project with today’s report. It’s a little — but only a little — frustrating to see that my phone use crept up a bit in this final week. I have what I think is a good excuse: my wife and I were both traveling to different places. I was out and about on my own in the city a good bit, and needed to stay in touch. I say that I’m only a little frustrated by this because, as I said last week, I have a different sense of the value of this project now than I had when I began. Though I’m impressed by how much others have lowered the time they spend on their phone — looking at you, Manuel! — I’m really more interested in becoming more deliberate and intentional about when and how I use my phone. Living out such intentions has lowered the amount of time I’ve been on my phone; I’m happy about that, but I see that as a side effect rather than the primary goal.

I’ll say more about what I’ve learned in this project later this week. Right now, though, I really want to pick up a book and read for a while.

Reports from others along for the ride in this project:

Time change and changing times

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:34:00 -0500

As I was reading this morning I quite suddenly remembered that time will jump ahead early tomorrow morning, borrowing an hour of my life that will be returned sometime next fall. Knowing that the lost hour will materialize as if out of nothing next fall is little comfort as I contemplate the lost hour of sleep tonight. I remind myself, though, that it’s only an hour of sleep. There was a spring season years ago when the change seemed much more cataclysmic.

The health risks of the time shift of the spring are well documented. The risk of heart attacks is something like 25% higher on the Monday after the time change than on the typical Monday. Traffic accidents and workplace injuries go up as well. And apparently there’s a significant and negative impact on many people’s mental health.

My maternal grandfather, a farmer, dealt with the change straightforwardly. He simply didn’t change his clock, but instead lived on the schedule that he thought should be unchanging. Such a move was easier for him than it would be for many — the land that he tilled was waiting for him at the appropriate time; his work was guided by the rising and setting of the sun rather than by the clock on his living room table.

I suppose my life is like his these days in that respect. If I were stubborn (I trust you’ll not tell my wife that I implied there that I’m not stubborn), I could leave my clocks unchanged and even force the internet-connected clocks to display the “normal” time. Speaking of my wife, that wouldn’t work for her because she’s still subject to the time demands of the world outside our home.

But I digress. I should return to that cataclysmic time I mentioned above before I was distracted by health risks and memories of my grandfather. It was about 40 years ago. I was in graduate school. My degree program had a rather intense and demanding collection of written examinations. After a year in the program we had to complete four qualifying exams. In each of these qualifying exams, we had four and a half hours to respond in writing to the examiner’s questions. After clearing that hurdle, we had a couple of years to prepare for five field exams. These were even more demanding — for each exam, we had seven and a half hours to write answers to the examiner’s questions. To make matters worse, there were three two-week exam periods each calendar year, and we were required to complete each set of exams — the qualifying exams and the field exams — in two consecutive exam periods. After making my way through the four qualifying exams and two of the field exams, I was scheduled one spring to take three field exams in a two week period. As I recall, I scheduled exams on Monday and Friday of the first week and on Friday of the second week. The time change came on the Sunday morning eight days before the exam period began. When I realized that I was going to lose an hour of study time, I was irrationally furious. I’m more than a little embarrassed to write that sentence now — it was only an hour, and I knew that it was coming — but I felt that it was horribly unfair. Why, I thought — or, rather, felt — is the world picking on me?

I don’t remember this every year that we lose this hour of sleep, but remembering it now helps me deal with the shorter night I’m facing along with many others. I can take comfort in the thought that my real and reasonable concern is about those health issues.

Reading a book: the burdens of commitment

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:17:00 -0500

Lydia Davis:

…reading a book is a considerable commitment of not only time but also thought and even emotion, especially when you have so many books you have brought into the house, when you seem to buy books even compulsively, out of a hunger for yet another book, and haven’t yet read most of them, when you have acquired so many that although you have many bookcases, in many rooms, there are still books piled on the floor.

Into the Weeds, p. 77

Screen time report #3

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Another week of watching my screen time, and I’m happy to say that it dropped a bit more this past week — to an average of just over 2 hours a day. About an hour of that time is my exercise and meditation time, when I use the phone to track time spent. I’m even happier to say that I believe that I’m breaking the deeply ingrained habit of reaching for my phone whenever there’s what might be called down time in my life. I’d rather think of that time as mind-wandering or day-dreaming time.

I’m taking a further step in phone use this week. I’m going to spend a few days in New York City. This time I’m by myself, and have very few hard-stop appointments where I have to be somewhere at a definite time. I’m going to try making my way about the city without using my phone. There was a time when I was unduly proud of my sense of direction, but I’ve lost that over the last few years. I’m wondering if I can regain a bit of the earlier skill, and I think that NYC is a great place to practice, especially in the part of Manhattan where there’s a regular street grid. Perhaps by the end of my time there I’ll have at least a vague sense of which way is uptown when I emerge from a subway station! It’s worth a try.

I don’t know how long I’ll pay such close attention to phone screen time. As I’ve said before, I really don’t think that screen time is what most concerns me. Instead, what concerns me is the outsourcing of my thinking to a device. I’d rather use it as a tool that helps me do my thinking tasks. If and when I get to that point, then screen time might be an indicator of the thinking and work that I’m doing, rather than of the thinking and work that I’m avoiding.

Week three reports for others in this project:

Emacs Carnival: Completion in Beancount Plain Text Accounting

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:07:00 -0500

This is my submission for the February 2026 Emacs Carnival; Sacha has proposed the theme of completion in emacs.

I manage our household finances using a Plain Text Accounting app called Beancount. I really like having all of our records in plain text rather than in a proprietary accounting system. And, by “all of our records,” I mean a pretty long history of earning and spending. The first entry in the ledger is dated 1 July 1988. I didn’t start out in plain text. I don’t remember the name of the first program I used. I moved from that forgotten program to quicken, then to Gnu Cash, then (moving into plain text) to Ledger, and finally, to Beancount. I use emacs with beancount-mode enabled to manage our ledger.

Many of the users of Beancount (or other plain text accounting programs) download and import financial records from their financial institutions, celebrating the ability to avoid the rather tedious process of entering transactions one by one. I suppose I’m a dinosaur (ok, boomer!); I like to be more hands-on with our records so that I actually see and think about each transaction. But I’m not opposed to saving time; I set up a few yasnippet snippets several years ago to enter some of the more standard transactions. When Sacha announced that the topic of this month’s carnival would be completion in emacs, I decided to re-think my use of yasnippet. I assumed that I would add more snippets to my collection, and I did that. But I also realized that I could eliminate some of the snippets I was using and replace them with one multi-purpose snippet. What I have here is decidedly not very sophisticated. I have some ideas for how I could improve it, and I know just enough about yasnippet to know that there are many strategies that haven’t occurred to me yet. But it’s near the end of the month, and I think the very basic system I have is worth writing about. Perhaps it will help others who’ve not done much with it yet. Even better, perhaps someone who knows much more about this than I do will offer some enhancements. I’m all ears!

Speaking of people who know more about completion in emacs than I do, I have to give a shout-out to Sacha for her detailed and informative account of what might emerge in this carnival. There’s so much information there. It’s much more than I can absorb on first reading; I’ve flagged it so that I can consult it as I think about incorporating more of the different completion tools available in emacs.

First, a bit of beancount information. Each transaction in the financial ledger is in a specified format that beancount’s reporting feature expects. The format is straightfoward. Here’s an example:

2025-02-28 * “Grocery Store” “Something to fix for supper”
  Expenses:Groceries           15.00 USD
  Liabilities:CreditCards:CredCardA

The first line has the date, the payee, and an optional description or narration of the transaction. The second line has the destination account of the transaction and the third line has the source account. The transaction amount can be in either the second or third line.

I have examples of my different snippets below, but here’s a preliminary note: all of my snippets begin with a custom function called “org-insert-date.” This function presents the org-mode date-picker set to default to the current date. I can either accept the default or use the calendar to easily select the earlier date. Here’s this function:

  (defun org-insert-date ()
"Insert a date at point using `org-read-date' with its optional argument
of TO-TIME so that the user can customize the date format more easily."
(interactive)
  (require 'org)
  (let ((time (org-read-date nil 'to-time nil "Date:  ")))
    (insert (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" time))))

And now, the list of example templates. Obviously, you would need to substitute your own list of destination and source accounts.

A general multi-purpose template

Many of our transactions are one-offs in which at least several of the different elements change from one transaction to the next: a different date, payee, narration, destination account, transaction amount, and/or source account. For these transactions, beancount-mode can be set up to complete the source and destination accounts while entering the transaction directly into the ledger. That’s what I usually do, but to set the stage for later examples here’s a snippet that would generate the transaction in the proper format:

# name: beancount
# type: snippet
# key: /bc
# binding: direct-keybinding
# --
`(org-insert-date)`$1 * "`(read-string "Payee: ")`$2" "`(read-string "Description: ")`$3"
  `(yas-choose-value '("Expenses:Books" "Expenses:Charity:Cash" "Expenses:Christmas" "Expenses:Computer" "Expenses:Entertainment" "Expenses:Dining" "Expenses:Groceries" "Expenses:Gifts" "Expenses:HomeMaintenance" "Expenses:Medical" "Expenses:Misc" "Expenses:Transportation:CarShare" "Expenses:Transportation:MassTransit" "Expenses:Transportation:Taxi" "Expenses:Utilities:Electric" "Expenses:Utilities:Phone" "Expenses:Vacation:Lodging" "Expenses:Vacation:Travel"))`$4  `(read-string "Amount: ")`$5 USD
  `(yas-choose-value '("Liabilities:CredCard:CC1" "Liabilities:CredCard:CC2" "Liabilities:CredCard:CC3"	 ))`$6

At the beginning of the appropriate line in my ledger file, I type the key (/bc) followed by tab. I’m asked to confirm the date, supply the payee and description, the destination account (selected by regex), the transaction amount, and the source account (again, selected by regex). The snippet generates the appropriately formatted transaction.

A template in which most elements are the same from one transaction to the next

We have a few favorite local grocery stores from whom we purchase things regularly, using the same credit card. In these transactions, the only changing elements are the date and the amount spent. So the template is much simpler:

# name: favorite grocery
# type: snippet
# key: /fg
# binding: direct-keybinding
# --
`(org-insert-date)`$1 * "Favorite grocery" "favorite food"
  Expenses:Groceries  `(read-string "Amount: ")`$2 USD
  Liabilities:CredCard:CC1

In this case, I’m asked only to confirm the date and provide the amount of the transaction.

A special template for those old-fashioned paper bank checks

Click here if you don’t know what a bank check is.

A check is a special piece of paper that Person A gives to Person B. The paper stands in for a particular amount of money, e.g. 5.00 USD. It also has a numerical code that’s a unique number in Person A’s bank records. Person B takes the piece of paper to their bank. That bank takes the piece of paper and gives Person B 5.00 USD. Person B’s bank then gives the piece of paper to Person A’s bank in exchange for 5.00 USD. Finally, Person A’s bank takes 5.00 USD from Person A, and the process comes to an end. Whew.

We deal with one vendor who requires that we write a paper check. Each transaction is the same except for the date and the numerical code. Here’s a snippet that generates this transaction:

# name: PaperCheck
# type: snippet
# key: /pc
# binding: direct-keybinding
# --
`(org-insert-date)`$1 * "Write me a check" "for my services"
  code: `(read-string "Code: ")`$2
  Expenses:Services    75.00 USD
  Assets:Current:Checking

This template works as before, but this time asks only that I confirm the date and add the code from my check.

Transactions for reimbursable expenses

Some of our transactions record professional expenses to be reimbursed. I need to generate a monthly report of these transactions for reimbursement. Here I make use of additional features in beancount: tags and links. Here’s the example template:

# name: prof
# type: snippet
# key: /prof
# binding: direct-keybinding
# --
`(org-insert-date)`$1 * "`(read-string "Payee: ")`$2" "`(read-string "Description: ")`$3"  #vendor ^`(downcase (format-time-string "%b%Y"))`$4
  Assets:Current:Reimbursable:Professional    `(read-string "Amount: ")`$5 USD
  `(yas-choose-value '("Liabilities:CredCard:CC1" "Liabilities:CredCard:CC2" "Liabilities:CredCard:CC3"	 ))`$6

The additional elements here are the name of the vendor (prefaced with #) and the month and year in which the expenses are incurred (prefaced with “^” and generated with the current date formatted as “feb2026”). The template works as before, asking for payee, description, amount, and source account. At the end of each month I generate a report that includes all expenses tagged for “vendor” and dated for that month.

Regular monthly transactions, paid on the same date and for the same amount each month

Examples of these transactions include a mortgage or rent payment and regular charity donations. Here I don’t use yasnippet. Instead I put them a special section of my ledger, organized by month. Near the end of each month, I copy the entire list, create a heading for the following month, paste the transactions under that new heading, and do a quick search and replace to change the month number in each transaction. Primitive, admittedly, but it works for me.

Screen time report #2a

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:08:00 -0500

Another week in my attempt to lower my attachment to my phone. I’ve been at this for three weeks now, but at the end of the first week I joined Manuel, Thomas, Kevin and others. They’ve just now finished week 2, so I’m numbering this entry 2a so that I can get in sync with them.

I’m a little late posting this because last week was a bit different from the previous weeks. There are a couple of factors here. First, I had a busy week before leaving early Friday morning for a weekend in NYC. The traveling meant that I relied on phone mapping much more than I usually do. Second, over the course of the day Saturday the weather forecast for both NYC and Boston got more and more dire, culminating in a blizzard warning throughout much of the northeastern US. Late Saturday afternoon we spent a good bit of time on our phones working through the details of changing our train reservations. It didn’t help that many other people were doing the same — the Amtrak app responded very slowly, and available seats were disappearing. It all worked out — we arrived home at noon yesterday instead of 5:00p, leaving us plenty of time to restock the refrigerator and settle in for the storm. But there were some harried moments.

Despite the turmoil, my phone use was still slightly lower this past week than it was the week before.

That’s good, even though it doesn’t come close to matching the impressive drops in screen time recorded by others in this small-scale project. What became even clearer to me this week, though, is that the amount of time I spend on my phone is more a symptom of the problem I want to address than the problem itself. Yes, I want to spend less time on my phone. Even more, though, I want my time on my phone to be time that I’ve deliberately and explicitly chosen to spend there.

There’s no shortage of news reports these days about the impact of phones on our attention spans. I found this comparison of pigeons and humans to be rather interesting. Researchers found that if they put pigeons in a long box and used a flashing light at one end of the box to signal the availability of food at the other end, the pigeons would eventually be more interested in the light than they were in the food.

“The birds would spend so much time pecking at the light that they had no time to get the food.” Mr. Boakes [one of the scientists who did this research] called this behavior “sign tracking” because the animals chased after the sign of the reward. Peck, peck, peck.

Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of the forthcoming book Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods, suggests that the phone in my pocket is a lot like the light in that box.

Phones, tablets and apps provide a cornucopia of sights and sounds that signal the possibility of belonging, much as the light signaled food in the pigeon’s box. These signals include the colorful icons of apps, the red notification dots on top of them and the bells, chirps, buzzes and dings that accompany them all. Even the device itself morphs into a potent signal for people.

Neuroscientists have found that the brain chemical dopamine draws us to these signals. Dopamine was once believed to encode pleasure, but a vast amount of evidence accumulated over recent decades suggests that’s not quite right. Instead, it plays several roles. It triggers motivation for and wanting of fundamental needs. It makes you want the cake in front of you, says the neuroscientist Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan. But it doesn’t make you like the cake or feel satisfied afterward. Dopamine isn’t about gratification. Wanting and liking are, in a way, separable components in the brain, he adds.

I was put off by those paragraphs the first time I read them. But I’m struggling to come up with a better explanation for why I find myself reaching for my phone without thinking about it. As I think about my mindlessly reaching for my phone it seems I’m more like a pigeon pecking at a light instead of one who is eating the nourishing food at the other end of the box. Despite the fact that at some level I obviously want to look at my phone, I wouldn’t say that I usually find there is particularly pleasing. I’m beginning to see that what I’m gaining from this exercise is aligning my subconscious wants more closely with my conscious desires, with the things that I like to do. And that those likes are worth pursuing.

On with the project.

Authors and Books: Intersections on the outside, drawing me in

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:54:00 -0500

Here’s my entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival. The topic proposed by Zachary Kai is intersecting interests. When I saw the topic, I immediately thought of my reading interests. Since my retirement, I suspect that I spend more time reading than I spend doing anything else, though I suppose if one bundles washing the clothes, washing the dishes, and paying the bills together under the heading of household management, I might spend more time there. But household management isn’t all that interesting. So when I think about intersecting interests, I think about the reading. And it’s not just the interests as reflected in my mind. It’s also the interests reflected in the books and essays that I’m reading.

So as I thought about the topic I decided to focus on intersections between the different books and their authors. I typically read several books at a time, usually representing different topics and genres. I appreciate the connections or intersections between books of similar topics or themes, but I appreciate even more the random and sometimes surprising connections that emerge when I’m reading apparently unrelated books. The intersections of authors and themes in the books create connections in my mind that shape my thinking and my future reading. Occasionally these connections build on each other, creating what might be called a reading trail through a variety of intersections. I’m writing now about a trail — or is it a set of trails? — that emerged over the last couple of weeks.

I’ll start with a visit to our local independent bookstore a couple of weeks ago. One of the books featured on their new arrivals table was George Scialabba’s The Sealed Envelope. It’s a collection of essays about a variety of cultural topics and thinkers. I knew nothing about Sicalabba’s work, but my skimming of a few pages led me to think I would find it interesting and even inspiring. So I brought it home. My wife and I also purchased Flesh by David Szalay, the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize. She was the first to read Flesh; I began to read Scialabba’s essays. I was entranced. His writing about thinkers whose books I had read reminded me of what I appreciated (or didn’t appreciate) when I read them, some of them years ago. His writing about thinkers I knew nothing about opened up new interests and how they might intersect with existing interests. I sought to learn more about him, and discovered that he is (or at least was) a contributor to Crooked Timber, one of my favorite blogs. I didn’t expect that connection, and was pleasantly surprised that they even had an online seminar discussion of his What are Intellectuals Good For? back in 2009. Given the strength and focus of his writing, I suppose it’s no surprise that he wrote for Crooked Timber.

One of the authors Scialabba mentions is Sven Birkerts, and what I found most interesting about this is the reference to Birkerts’s discussion of “the ‘deep time’ of fully engaged reading” in his book The Gutenberg Elegies. I found Birkerts’s book in the local library and have now finished most of it. His discussion of reading and writing and the relationships between them, how each bleeds into the other as the reader collaborates with the writer to create a fictional world, shaped my reading of Szalay’s novel Flesh. Szalay only hints at the inner turmoil of István, his protagonist, as he is buffeted by events in his world, and yet I found myself stepping into what I imagined to be István’s mind as I read. I struggled to put István’s inner life, as I imagined it, together with and his understanding of his larger world. Things came together for me when I read Birkerts’s account of his reading of The Catcher in the Rye, and in particular of his coming to understand Holden Caulfield: “we must use what we know of our world to create his. His can only exist at the expense of ours, though — this is the law of fiction.” A connection that I hadn’t anticipated, and it helped me to understand why I felt myself identifying so strongly with István.

Such connections usually keep me going, almost as if I’m enjoying a journey that I don’t plan out in advance. But there are days — like yesterday — when I feel unfocused, bouncing from one book to the next, some on my reading list and others not. I managed to get through one of Chekhov’s short stories, which was on my list. But then I was distracted by another book, seemingly unrelated, that I started months ago but then set aside: The Genius of Trees, by Harriet Rix. It’s a fascinating account of how trees evolved and also about their intersections with other parts of the world. I don’t remember why I set it aside, but yesterday I couldn’t resist the urge to pick it up again. “It’s not on the list!” I said to myself (reminding myself of that Frog and Toad story we read to our son many years ago). But I picked it up anyway, and what did I encounter in Rix’s book? A reference to a short story by Anton Chekhov. The reading list that I had set aside for the moment was following me around.

Unfocused. Easily distracted. Reminded that I was avoiding what I said I would be reading. It was the end of the day, and I was wishing that I had had been more successful in my reading. But this wishing led me to wonder what counts as success. After all, I’m retired. No one tells me that I should be reading. Besides that, I had done the dishes and the laundry. I’d even paid a few bills. Doesn’t that count as a success? What would it mean to be successful?, I wondered. And this reminded me of an essay by Peter Handke that I’d read years ago called Who has ever experienced a successful day? That link will take you to an excerpt from the beginning of that essay, posted to the blog yesterday as a commonplace. “Well, at least I put something up on the blog,” I thought to myself.

Satisfied with my “accomplishment,” I put Handke’s book face down on my desk, and then happened to notice the blurb on the back:

[Peter Handke] is widening the frontier of personal narrative. Shuttling between fiction and essay, he is making what feels like a new form, a kind of associative philosophical meditation that both maps and manifests the movements of mind. … Each [essay] is a contained language event.

— Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book review

Birkerts again. This trail took me from Scialabba to Crooked Timber to Birkerts to Szalay, then a brief detour to Chekhov to Rix and back to Chekhov, then to Handke and back to Birkerts. At each stage, the intersecting interests of the authors brought new connections into my mind, some intersections through which I’ve already traveled and others laid out for future journeys. Something to look forward to.

Screen time report #2

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:42:00 -0500

Another week down, and time to think about the time I spend on my phone. I decided a couple of weeks ago that I was going to lessen my attachment to my phone. Serendipitously, I stumbled on Manuel’s post indicating that he and a friend were doing the same. Following their lead, I committed to posting a screen shot of my phone screen time each Sunday for four weeks. This is my second installment.

The main point — my average daily screen time this past week is down 14% from the week before – 2’27“, down from 2’51”. Following the rule (or cheat?) that I set last week, I’m subtracting my exercise and meditation time from that total, which drops my daily average down to just over an hour and a half. I’ll take it.

One other point — not to be too defensive about this, but I’m embarrassed by the jump in time on Monday. That gray area in the top of the bar is when I accidentally left the localsend app open for an hour. I’m just starting to use that app, and I didn’t realize it would remain open and on the screen after uploading a file.

It’s good to see the lower screen time. But I’m feeling even better about the fact that I’m toning down the reflexive urge to pull my phone out of my pocket whenever I have a spare moment. That’s not to say the urge has disappeared, but it’s less intense. In my mind, that’s the real value of this experiment.

Manuel’s report of his screen time includes links to others’ engaged in this exercise. Their week one corresponds to my week 2 since I started this exercise before they did. They’re doing better than I am — perhaps I should push harder? (How is the urge to compete related to the urge to pull the phone out of my pocket??)

The cleaving in Dickinson's mind, and the role of a teacher

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:07:00 -0500

I wrote earlier this week about the cleaving in Emily Dickenson’s mind and followed that up with a rant about my frustration with end notes. For some reason, as I was thinking about both of those posts this morning I quite suddenly remembered a brief conversation I had with my favorite philosophy teacher. Joe (the philosophy professor) was one of the most intelligent people I ever spent time with. Moreover, He read more broadly and more deeply than any other person I’ve known.

I remember chatting with him in the hallway one day when a young English instructor finishing his dissertation on a poet whose name I don’t remember approached us. Actually, I should say that he approached Joe. He really didn’t want or need anything from me. He asked Joe if he happened to have a rather obscure book about the poet he was writing about. Joe said that he’d read the book, but didn’t own a copy; he asked the instructor what he was hoping to find in that book. The instructor described what he was working on, and Joe said something like “Oh, you really don’t need that book, but I can loan you two other books that I think would be very helpful.”

I described that conversation only to illustrate the depth and breadth of Joe’s reading. The conversation that came to mind this morning was one in which I ranted about endnotes vs footnotes. I was, shall we say, rather more passionate when I was talking to Joe than I was in the blog post earlier this week. Joe was rather calm and said that he really didn’t have a problem with that. “I just read all of the end notes before I start reading the book itself.” I was stunned. Recalling Dickinson’s poem, I’m thinking that he really didn’t have much trouble keeping thoughts joined together, even when these thoughts were separated by both space and time. Did he really remember a note he’d read days before when he encountered the reference in the actual text?

That’s a good illustration of Joe’s mind. He was a thinker in the strongest sense of that term. He was also an excellent teacher. What I remember best about his teaching is how he responded to student questions. I said something about this in my earlier post about him; I’ll say a bit more now. In my last semester as an undergraduate, I sat in on his introductory history of philosophy class. I wanted to get a better sense of the historical development of philosophy, and I also wanted to observe him as a teacher. Most of the students in the class were first-year students who knew next to nothing about philosophy. It wasn’t at all unusual — in fact it was rather common – for a student to ask a question in class that led me to think that the student had no clear idea of what the question was, let alone any sense for what might be an answer to it. Time and time again, Joe would reframe the question in a way that not only grounded it in the text we were reading but also — and this is what amazed me — helped the student see that this really was the question he or she was attempting to ask.

The power in this went beyond clarifying questions. Joe was modeling the practice of a thinker rather than merely reciting in lecture the results of his earlier thinking. I think he’s one reason I eventually came to the metaphor that teaching is thinking in public. Thinking of Dickenson’s poem again, Joe was able not only to keep his own thoughts together. He was also skilled at helping students, both novice and advanced, find connections between their reading and their thoughts. I studied under some very good teachers and thinkers in college and graduate school, and in my career I worked with very good professors at good universities as they worked to improve their teaching practice. I never saw anyone respond to students as well as Joe did.

Who has ever experienced a successful day?

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:40:00 -0500

Peter Handke:

Who has ever experienced a successful day? Most people will say without thinking that they have. But then it will be necessary to ask: Do you mean “successful” or only “happy”? Are you thinking of a successful day or only of a “carefree” one, which admittedly is just as unusual. If a day goes by without confronting you with problems, does that, in your opinion, suffice to make it a successful day? Do you see a distinction between a happy day and a successful one? Is it essentially different to speak of some successful day in the past, with the help of memory, and right now after the day, which no intervening time has transfigured, to say not that a day has been “dealt with” or “got out of the way,” but that it has been “successful”? To your mind, is a successful day basically different from a carefree or happy day, from a full or busy day, a day struggled through, or a day transfigured by the distant past — one particular suffices, and a whole day rises up in glory — perhaps even some Great Day for Science, your country, our people, the peoples of the earth, mankind? … Yes, to me a successful day is not the same as any other; it means more. A successful day is more. It is more than a “successful remark,” more than a “successful chess move” (or even a whole successful game), more than a “successful first winter ascent,” than a “successful flight,” a “successful operation,” a “successful relationship,” or any “successful piece of business”; it is independent of a successful brushstroke or sentence, nor should it be confused with some “poem, which after a lifetime of waiting achieved success in a single hour.” The successful day is incomparable. It is unique.

Quiet Places: Collected Essays, p. 254f

Serious reading: deep engagement is self-fulfilling

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:40:00 -0500

Sven Birkerts:

Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake [serious reading]. And true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitements of film. But if we do read perseveringly we make available to ourselves, in a most portable form, an ulterior existence. We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times. We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment.

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, p. 76

Live into a new way of thinking

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:14:00 -0500

Claude Anshin Thomas:

We cannot think ourselves into a new way of living, we have to live ourselves into a new way of thinking. Pay attention to everything, to the smallest particle. It is in attending to the smallest particle that we discover the largest space, the fullness of a life thoroughly lived.

Bringing Meditation to Life: 108 Teachings on the Path of Zen Practice, p. 223

Thoughts on reading and the world I experience

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:48:00 -0500

In her book An Absorbing Errand, Janna Malamud Smith writes poignantly about the long and rich relationship between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I’ve already admitted that I’m tone deaf regarding poetry; what really struck me while reading Smith’s account of the poets’ relationship is how they cultivated and nurtured this relationship almost totally in letters. They visited occasionally, but they were never in the same place for any length of time. And yet, as Smith has it, they were very, very close. It’s a moving story.

This afternoon I began reading Sven Birkerts’s collection of essays called The Gutenberg Elegies. Birkerts is a new discovery for me — introduced to me by George Scialabba, yet another new discovery. In the opening essay, Birkerts illustrates a point with “Crusoe in England,” a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Reading his introduction of the poem, which happened to fall at the bottom of the page, I had a jolt of recognition. “Hey,” I thought, “I know something about Elizabeth Bishop!” I turned the page.

Now I live here, another island,
that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I’m old.
I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf —
It reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle…
Now it won’t look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.

Birkerts quotes the poem to illustrate his point that the meaning of something depends in part on its context; if the context passes, the meaning dissipates. “The densities of meaning once conferred, since leached out.” I see the power of that observation.

But my having read Smith’s account of Bishop’s relationship with Lowell set the poem in an altogether different context for me. I thought of her writing letters to Lowell and reading his letters to her. I thought of how words exchanged at a distance nurtured a profound relationship. I asked myself whether the physical distance between her and Lowell might have informed her thoughts about Crusoe’s distance from the island where the knife was so relevant to his survival. In her relationship with Lowell, did their occasional visits set the context for the understanding of the letters? Or was it the converse? Or both? I wondered how the shift from relationships forged in written letters to relationships shaped by ephemeral emails and terse texts might affect our sense of identity.

I acknowledge that the thoughts are jumbled. Perhaps something more coherent and organized will emerge. What strikes me now, though, is how the world in which I live is shaped by such coincidences as the fact that I happened to read one book a couple of weeks before reading another. Of course, I realize that it’s not the books that I’m reading that shape my world. It’s also my broader experience — the routes that I walk, the people I encounter on the street, the podcasts I listen to.

And also, I’m only beginning to think, the poems that I read.

A quibble about notes: could we please put them at the bottom of the page?

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:14:00 -0500

Reading more than one book at a time means that it takes me longer to finish a particular book, but I find that that disadvantage, such as it is, is usually outweighed by the insights gained by the sometimes serendipitous and sometimes planned connections between the books that I’m reading. I developed this practice while teaching at a small liberal arts college, when it was common for me to be teaching three or four different courses in a semester.

Two of the books I’m currently reading — Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse and Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias — are rather large and ambitious. I’m only about a third of the way into each of them, but I’m really glad that I’m reading them together. Kemp’s discussion of how states (which he calls Goliaths) are born and then decay overlaps very nicely with Wright’s criticisms of capitalism.

But I’m not here now to write about those ideas. I’ll do that later. I’m here to vent. Reading these two books together reminds me — as if I needed to be reminded! — of the value of having notes at the bottom of a text’s pages instead of collected at the back. Wright’s book does it the way it should be done — notes at the bottom of the page. Kemp’s book has me constantly flipping between the page that I’m reading and a page near the back of the book. It’s frustrating, especially when I judge that I really don’t need to read a particular note.

A small thing, I know. But I wonder how much more time it takes to read Kemp’s book simply because I have to keep bouncing back and forth.

And don’t get me started on the fact that so many books these days are published without an index!

Authoritarianism as a response to external threats

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:43:00 -0500

Luke Kemp:

Authoritarianism — obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers — increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security. Some percentage of a population appears always to harbor stronger authoritarianism, and studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across eight modern high-income countries found that around 10-25 per cent ranked as highly authoritarian (with the US scoring the highest). These authoritarians tend to become more politically active and aggressive when they are activated by a social challenge, most commonly the emergence of a threat. Threats triggering authoritarian behavior don’t just happen to those with underlying authoritarian tendencies. They happen to those who generally see the world as a dangerous place and affect even the most devoted peacenik (albeit to a lesser extent).

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, p. 165

A cleaving in my mind

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:54:00 -0500

I’ve claimed for years to be absolutely tone-deaf regarding poetry. I suspect I’ve even said something about this in a blog post. It’s not at all unusual for my wife (who loves poetry) to come to me, excited to read a poem that she’s just discovered, hoping that it will finally inspire the poetry-appreciating brain cells lying dormant in my brain. So far, not so much.

But I recently heard and then read a poem by Emily Dickenson that has had an impact on me. It’s called “I felt a cleaving in my mind,” and it goes like this:

I felt a cleaving in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.

Perhaps you stumbled on the verb “ravelled.” I did. I would have expected “unraveled,” though I use that more often in its adjectival form. But here’s this from etymonline:

Ravel – 1580s, “to entangle, become entwined confusedly,” also “to untangle, disentangle, unwind” (originally with out), from Dutch ravelen “to tangle, fray,” rafelen “to unweave,” from rafel “frayed thread,” which is of uncertain origin. The seemingly contradictory senses of this word (ravel and unravel are both synonyms and antonyms) might be reconciled by its roots in weaving and sewing: as threads become unwoven, they get tangled. The “entangling” meaning is the “more original” sense according to OED. From 1590s in the figurative sense of “make plain or clear;” 1610s as “make a minute and careful investigation.” The intransitive sense, of fabric, “become untwisted or disjointed thread from thread” is by 1610s.

Isn’t language great?

But the poem captures so well how I feel sometimes when I’m trying to write. The feeling comes most often when I sit down at the computer thinking I’ll write out a thought — or even a blog post — that occurred to me sometime when I was away from the computer. So often, a thought or post that seemed so clear in my mind basically evaporates as I sit down at the keyboard. I try to put the thoughts back together, but they’ve “ravelled out of reach.”

But obviously (I think) the thoughts must not have been as clear as you thought they were. It’s not that they’ve disappeared. Rather, it’s that the attempt to write exposes a lack of clarity that was there all along. Perhaps. But I wish I had some way of saving the actual contents of my mind efficiently while I’m away from the computer. (Some will say the obvious — I should carry a small notebook with me. Alas, I have some sort of inherited nerve condition that makes it impossible for me to write by hand — the hand simply doesn’t obey the commands sent from my brain. There’s some sort of cleaving there as well.)

An aside in closing — I happened to hear this poem recited in a podcast discussion of the em dash. Perhaps you’ve heard that many would say that the use of an em dash in a piece of writing is a clear indication that the writing was done by artificial intelligence rather than by a human. Apparently Dickenson used dashes rather often and enthusiastically. I’m here to say that I’ve been using the em dash for decades, and one of the things I really like about emacs is that I can input one very easily merely by hitting the hyphen key three times in quick succession. (I suspect, though I don’t know, that something like this is possible in other editors as well.) In any case, despite the cleaving in my mind, I can at least do that.

Screen time report

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 10:53:00 -0500

Time to pay the piper. When I wrote yesterday about my commitment to reduce the time spent on my phone, I didn’t realize that I’d have to come clean so soon. (One thing I’ve noticed in retirement is that weekends tend to disappear. One weekday is pretty much the same as the next, so it’s hard to keep track. I’m aware of the privilege reflected there.) But here it is: my report of phone screen time for last week. I’m happy to say that it’s lower than the week before, and a good bit lower than the 4-5 hours I was spending. So the commitment I’d already made has had an impact. I’ll also say that I’m discounting the time in Fitness (timing my workouts) and Insight Timer (timing my meditation). Perhaps that’s cheating, but I’d argue that I’m not really engaging with my phone while those are open. I spent just over 7½ hours with those apps open last week. Call that an average of 1:04 each day, which lowers my daily average for last week to 1:47. I’ve not yet worked up the courage to delete the Proton Mail app from my phone. I’m pondering that.

It occurred to me last night that both Manuel and Kevin offered some thoughts about how they’d spend the time released when they avoid the phone. They both say that they’ll read more. That’s definitely a laudable goal, but I’m already doing a lot of that. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about dipping my toe into the world of tiny experiments. I’ve been contemplating starting another such experiment, and I think I settled on one this morning. That’s where I think I’ll be spending the time I’ve freed up; I’ll write more about that soon.

Stemming the tide, cutting the cordless

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:20:00 -0500

Last week I finally decided to push myself really, really hard to cure myself of phone attachment. For months I’d noticed the seemingly automatic behavior of reaching for my pocket whenever I had the slightest amount of time in which I was not explicitly focused on doing something else. Sometimes the urge came when I was doing something else – I’d be in the middle of a paragraph of a very interesting book and I’d suddenly find myself reaching into my pocket for my phone. Sometimes I managed to resist the urge — to stop my hand — but even when I did that I felt as though I was really in a stand-off with someone else — call him Johnny.

Mind you, there’s not all that much to look at on my phone. I once had a twitter account, but I wasn’t there much, and I deleted the account long before the days of X. I was once moderately active on Facebook, but I stopped posting there (and deleted the app from my phone) in November 2016 and finally deleted my account just over a year ago. I’m retired, and I get very few personal emails and have the luxury of not having to attend carefully to a calendar. But I still felt the urge to look at my phone — perhaps I’ll find an email from a friend, or a response to a blog post. Perhaps I’ll learn about some earth-shattering news event that hadn’t been reported when I read the news earlier in the day. Perhaps I’ll read a really interesting and informative post on Mastodon. (I’ll interrupt myself to say that at least I’ve avoided putting a feed-reader on my phone. That’s something.)

Last week, though, I started leaving my phone in another room some of the time while I read or did other things. I’m happy to say that it made a difference. I’m unhappy to say that the difference it made was more in the realm of changing my overt behavior than it was of changing my mindset. Instead of reaching mindlessly for my phone I was wondering what I would see if I had my phone with me. A few minutes ago, I finished a chapter in one of the books I’m reading. I was reflecting on what I’d read. But Johnny interrupted my reflections suggesting that I might have received an email. However, I resisted at least a bit: instead of reaching for my phone (which, I should admit, was actually in my pocket), I could walk to my desk to check email on my computer. This led me to the thought that I might even delete my email client from my phone. That seemed a bridge too far — how would I check email when I’m away from my home?

In any case, I came to the computer. No email worth reading, but I opened up elfeed to check for RSS postings. At the top of the elfeed inbox was this entry from Manuel:

I was chatting with Kevin earlier today, and since he’s unhappy with his mindless phone usage, I proposed a challenge to him: for the next 4 weeks, each Sunday, we’re gonna publish screenshots of our screen time usage as well as some reflections and notes on how the week went. If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts.

That led me to Kevin’s post, where I read this:

For the next month, I will dial down all the teleporting to zero. I deleted all social media apps from my phone, as well as all apps with an infinite inbox (email, RSS feeds, Reddit). If it has pull to refresh, it’s gone too (except the browser, but I may ask the dev of Quiche if there is a way to kill that feature).

It seems the universe is conspiring against me. Or, better, perhaps the universe is conspiring against Johnny. Thanks for the invitation (or is it a challenge), Manuel. I’m in, and I’m bringing Johnny with me.

Tagging the blog

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 11:09:00 -0500

Anyone looking carefully at my blog (as if!) might have noticed that I’ve used very few tags. I decided very early to tag the commonplace entries, simply because those are clearly in a category by themselves. And I realized yesterday that I used two other tags (software and economics) in the first month, but used them only one time each. This is a brief post to say that I’m going to try adding tags to many of my posts.

I’ve been pondering this move for a while. I’m starting rather slowly, primarily because my experience tagging my reading notes makes it clear to me that I tend to use way too many tags, despite my having read Karl Voit’s excellent guide to the practice. I’ve now re-read his guide, and I’ve added tags to some of my posts. I’ve also deleted the two tags I started with. I have other tags in mind, but I’m holding off on those. I think it’s a decent start — happy to read comments from readers.

The cost of the decay of literacy

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 14:40:00 -0500

George Scialabba:

The attrition of civic memory and craft knowledge, a reduced attention span and loss of discrimination, the attenuation of nuance and the homogenization of vocabulary — in all these ways the decay of literacy currently serves both the manufacture of consent and the accumulation of capital. A populace that cannot recognize rhetorical devices, make moderately subtle verbal distinctions, or remember back beyond the last election or ad campaign is defenseless against official propaganda and commercial hype. Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan — state, corporations, and media — possible. And an important form of rootedness is our internalization of the Word in one form or another: sacred scripture or poetic tradition or civic mythology or family lore.

The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia, p. 244

Time passes, but the ephemeral survives

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:46:00 -0500

Time is on my mind these days. It occurred to me recently that I’ve now lived over a third of my life since my mother died; in less than two years I’ll be as old as she was when she died. She was such a significant figure in my life for so many years that it’s a bit unsettling to realize I’ve lived this much of my life without her. I’m not sure why, but realizing this makes the sense of my mortality more vivid somehow.

Actually, mortality doesn’t quite capture what’s on my mind. I think ephemerality (is that a word?) comes closer. (I’ll pause here to note that my spellchecker didn’t like “ephemerality”; it suggested both immorality and amorality as corrections. I don’t mean either of those words either.)

An old song by Paul Simon comes to mind.

Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Simon seems to suggest that not realizing those possibilities, being so hard to please, was somehow a waste. I can remember many roads not taken in my life — times when I considered doing something and decided it wasn’t quite right. In many of those cases, I spent a good bit of time agonizing over the question whether to take this road or that. I can also remember roads that I’ve taken, only to abandon them when I realized they were taking me places that I really didn’t want to go. Again, I spent time trying out possible lives, only to decide that those were really lives that I didn’t want to live.

Was I wasting all that time? Would I be a better version of the person I am now if I’d taken a more direct route to the life that I’m living and the person that I am?

My use of the term “waste” is not accidental. This is where I introduce another bit that sparked this line of thinking. It comes from Janna Malamud Smith:

…I observed to a colleague that one always wastes one’s life. How can we do otherwise when time is relentless, and as E. M. Forster once observed, we are performing on stage even as we are learning the instrument on which we perform? (An Absorbing Errand, p. 239).

Etymonline offers this etymology for the verb “waste”:

1200, wasten, “devastate, ravage, ruin,” from Anglo-French and Old North French waster “to waste, squander, spoil, ruin” (Old French gaster; Modern French gâter), altered (by influence of Frankish *wostjan) from Latin vastare “lay waste,” from vastus “empty, desolate.”

That’s pretty grim. I’ll grant that some of those wrong roads I took (I remember one in particular, but I’ll not pursue that here) were rather devastating. But “rehearsal” fits better than “waste”: I simply wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t taken, or considered taking, those roads. The roads and the experiences I had shaped me, and I carry them with me in the person that I am now. “See what’s become of me,” indeed.

If I were more literary, I’d introduce Faulkner here:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Many of the webs in which I live and labor were spun before I was born; others were spun by me and those around me. That brings me full circle, back to thinking about my mother and the impact that she had on me. The impact is still there; it’s really not all that ephemeral.

The compromised freedom of intellectuals

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:27:00 -0500

George Scialabba:

Imagine a society in which intellectuals are free to write anything they want but it is forbidden to sell magazines or books. Under these peculiar circumstances, intellectuals would technically be free, but their freedom wouldn’t be worth much. Now imagine a society in which intellectuals are still free but the overwhelming majority of the society’s members — their intended readers, who desperately need the truths the intellectuals have to offer — are tired and stressed, have very little spare money for books or free time to read, are continually distracted by gaudy and often sexualized advertisements in every medium, did not receive a high-quality education, and have internalized the society’s dominant ethic of competitive individualism rather that cooperative solidarity. These are not, unfortunately, peculiar circumstances but pretty much they way things are in the United States and have been for the last forty years. Under these circumstances the freedom of intellectuals is, again, not worth much.

Only a Voice: Essays, pp. xivf

January 2026

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:59:00 -0500

Some notes about books I finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

The Birth of Love

by Joanna Kavenna.

In this novel, Kavenna weaves together four tales on motherhood. The weaving of the four is both explicit and implicit. The first tale is a semi-fictional account of the last days of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th century Viennese doctor who theorized that the deaths of many women just after giving birth was caused by an infection introduced by doctors who moved directly from performing autopsies on women who had died to assisting other women in the birth of their children. The women were dying of postpartum infection introduced by the doctors’ unwashed hands. Semmelweis conducted his own experiment, washing his hands in a chlorinated lime solution before assisting in a birth, and lowered the mortality rate of his patients dramatically. However, he had no explanation for why hand washing was effective — germ theory came later — and his medical colleagues refused to follow his advice. They ridiculed him and said he had no business instructing them about personal hygiene. Semmelweis didn’t deal with this rejection very well — he suffered a nervous breakdown, and died in an asylum after his colleagues had him committed.

In order to avoid spoliers, I’ll describe the other threads in this novel much more briefly. One describes the experience of an early 21st century woman giving birth to her second child. The birth is complicated, the woman’s husband and mother, though well intentioned, aren’t fully there. Another is a description of a contemporary author’s release of his book about Semmelweis. The author struggles both with the expectations placed on him by his publicist and also with his estrangement from his dying mother. Finally, there’s an account of life in post-apocalyptic world in which giving birth and almost other elements of life have been “cleansed” of all emotional content. Here young women are sterilized after their eggs are harvested. Everyone lives — actually, is interred — in high-rise buildings in densely populated cities so that remaining land can be mechanically cultivated for food. Survival is not just the ultimate value — it’s the only value.

These stories together had me thinking not only about my own relationship with my parents (both as a child and as an adult), and also about my relationships with my wife and our adult son. Even more, I’ve been contemplating the medicalization of the birthing process, with both its benefits (lower mortality rates) and its drawbacks. I wouldn’t say that this is a great novel, but it’s definitely a thought-provoking one.

An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

by Janna Malamud Smith.

I’ll begin with a note I wrote as I began to read this book: “I’m fascinated by the quotation from Henry James from which Smith takes her title: ‘True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. … Do you know I sometimes think I am a man of genius half-finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door‘ (p. 22). Like James’s character, I’m looking for my absorbing errand.”

There were moments while reading this book when I felt like I was in a very productive therapy session. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that — after all, Smith is a practicing psychotherapist. But I want to emphasize the “very procuctive” qualifier in the previous sentence. This is not a superficial self-help book for writers and other creative types. It’s a solid discussion not only of creative work but also of the mental and emotional challenges aspiring creatives face. I, for one, find it to be very helpful, in large part because I’m challenged.

In her introduction, Smith introduces a metaphor built on the practice of gardening. I don’t remember her using the term “digital garden” (and the term isn’t in the index). Maggie Appleton suggests that this term was in use before 2012, when Smith’s book was published. Appleton includes a screenshot from Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay called “Hypertext Gardens” that includes the observation that “Gardens are farmland that delights the senses; parks are wilderness, tamed for our enjoyment. large hypertexts and Web sites must often contain both parks and gardens.” Appleton also links to the long and rich The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield, which is worth reading (he says, having only skimmed the very long essay rather quickly).

What I find really helpful in Smith’s book is her emphasis in the metaphor on the life and work of the gardener rather than on the garden itself. This take is implicit and occasionally explicit in Appleton’s piece; it’s the main show in Smith’s book.

The good life is lived best by those with gardens — a truth that was already a gnarled old vine in ancient Rome, but a sturdy one that still bears fruit. I don’t mean one must garden qua garden …. I mean rather the moral equivalent of a garden — the virtual garden. I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create — and, by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own. … As with the literal act of gardening, pursuing any practice seriously is a generative, hardy way to live in the world. You are in charge (as much as we can ever pretend to be — sometimes like a sea captain hugging the rail in a hurricane); you plan; you design; you labor; you struggle. And your reward is that in some seasons you create a gratifying bounty (p. 3).

The work of the gardener — and the artist or writer — is challenging, but can also be very rewarding.

One must work hard to learn technique and form, and equally hard to learn how to bear the angst of creativity itself.… The effort brings with it a whole herd of psychological obstacles — rather like a wooly mass of obdurate sheep settled on the road blocking your car. For you to move forward, these creatures must be outwitted, dispersed, befriended, or herded, their impeding genius somehow overcome or co-opted. Otherwise the would-be art-maker gives up the outing without accruing enough skill, without staying with the effort long enough, to build a body of work and/or gain her own or a public’s esteem. These sheep are my subject. Perhaps you want to work at creating something challenging (something that may require a commitment of years for you to become technically adept, and that may often seem dreadfully difficult) like poems, ceramics, sculptures, photographs, paintings, performance art, or woven tapestries. But you find yourself putting off the attempt, or quitting as soon as you start, or midway through deciding you are talentless and it’s useless to try, or if you are actually working, feeling intermittently too discouraged and too alone. What is happening? Well, you may be asking the wrong questions or placing mistaken expectations on yourself. Particularly, you may be unaware of how the necessary struggles of your own unconscious mind, if misunderstood, will bruise your heart, arrest your efforts prematurely, and prevent your staying absorbed in your errand. Yet, the same struggles, appreciated, will enable your creativity and the larger processes of mastery (pp. 4f).

I don’t want to offer many details of the quasi therapy sessions I mentioned above, but I will say that I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Smith’s list of three sorts of tension, each grounded in one fear in opposition to another. First, there’s the fear that one will die without even attempting to realize a dream vs the fear of trying but failing to realize that dream. Second, there’s the fear of changing in a way that disrupts habits and surfaces new feelings vs the “fear of retreating into deadening custom.” Finally, there’s the fear of seeing one’s creative work, with all its risks, as expressive of the self that one is vs the fear of a life spent avoiding creative expression.

I’ll close with one more extensive quotation about the ruthlessness of time’s demands faced by anyone who wants both to invest significant time in creative activity while also living a life in rich relationships with family and friends. Smith is writing rather personally here about her experience with her father, the novelist Bernard Malamud:

Once he married, he felt responsible to support his family and so he taught full-time as well as wrote. Furthermore, he wanted to be a good family man, at least in his fashion, and a loving father. The resulting emotional conflict of where and how to spend his hours tested him sorely, particularly because, in order to achieve the quality to which he aspired, he had to put his writing first much of the time. And this priority created a predicament: How do you balance sacrifices? When do you give in to your wife’s admonitions and your children’s pleadings and join them for a Sunday at the beach? When do you abandon them again in order to spend the day in your office reworking a page of prose? How much time do you give to your students, or to colleagues and friends who ask for your help with their work? (Elena Delbanco, daughter of the great cellist Bernard Greenhouse, described on NPR how she used to erase the names of his cello students scheduled for a given day, and write in her own name, hoping, futilely, that he might grant her one of their hours) (pp. 168f).

I think this book is a very good read for anyone who wants to think more deeply about the challenges of making time for creative work. I’ve read more than a few pieces on the general topic of how to write — I’m really glad to have read this one. It came into my life at a good time.

Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

I’ve already explained how I discovered (and then re-discovered) this book. I’ve also discussed some of what I learned by reading it — one important point: if you want to write, begin by reading, reading, and reading. He’s talking to aspiring novelists and writing novels, but I think the point holds for non-fiction and even blogging as well.

I’ve not read any of his fiction (yet), but I rather suspect that in his novels and short stories he employs some of the same story-telling practice evident in this book. Early on, he describes how he came to write his first novel. He was at a baseball game, sitting on the grass behind the outfield, watching his favorite team play. Just as one of the players hit a decisive fly ball into the outfield, Murakami thought to himself, “I could write a novel.” And so he did.

His approach to thinking mirrors the advice he offered to those who want to write: he insists that he can think only by writing:

The only way I can think about things in any kind of order is by putting them in writing. Physically moving my hand as I write, rereading what I write, over and over, and closely reworking it — only then am I finally able to gather my thoughts and grasp them like other people do. Because of this, through writing over time what’s been gathered in this volume, and rewriting it over and over, I’ve been able to think more systematically and take a broader view of myself, a novelist, and myself being a novelist (p. xi).

He takes this point even further, suggesting that as he’s creating a novel, the novel is creating him. He comes to be who he is in part by the stories that he tells. Moreover, story-telling can inform the nature of a society, especially as a society undergoes upheaval.

Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric system — by, to put it another way, allowing movement between the objective world and the subjective world so they utually modify each other — people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity

All in all, the book is an entertaining introduction to Murakami himself as a writer and thinker interspersed with anecdotes and advice regarding the craft of writing.

Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography

by Hester Kaplan.

Hester Kaplan says that she hardly knew her father while he was still alive. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy time with him, and it’s not that she knew nothing about him. It’s rather that he didn’t reveal much of himself to her. In this book she recounts her attempt to know him more deeply after he died. Her quest has her reading notes and papers in his collection, and also his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography of Mark Twain. Twice Born describes many things Kaplan found in her father’s writing, but she also more imaginatively steps inside his head, describing what he must have thought as he wrote his Twain biography. By reading, imagining, and, finally, by writing, she hopes to discover more about the man her father was. The writing is a crucial step here: “To write is to move between what you already know and what you still need to discover” (p. 125). Not surprisingly, the man she finds — her father — shares many life experiences with Mark Twain. Hester Kaplan wonders if these similarities helped to create Justin Kaplan’s relationship with Twain and helped him to write such a sensitive biography.

I was moved to read this book by hearing Kaplan speak at the Boston Book Festival last fall. I admit that I sensed a personal connection with her topic, as I’ve often thought that I really didn’t know my father. I had some hints of who he was, and I knew something of how his early experiences, some traumatic, shaped his position in the world. Of course my father wasn’t the writer that Justin Kaplan was, and there are no folders containing pages and pages of unpublished notes and letters, much less published and highly regarded biographies. Reading Twice Born leaves me wishing for more and deeper engagements with my father who died over 15 years ago.

However, this book is much more than an account of Kaplan’s father. There are stories of what it was like to grow up in such a literary family. (Kaplan’s mother, Anne Bernays, was a successful novelist and teacher of writing.) There are also explorations, some of them explicit and others below the surface, of the nature of memoir, and also about writing fiction. One interesting anecdote from her Boston Book Festival comments — when Hester Kaplan, herself a novelist and short story author, began to write fiction, she found it difficult to imagine and describe the jobs that her characters had — the only professionals she knew much about while growing up were writers.

Kaplan’s subtitle suggests that she found something of her father in her encounter with his writing after he died. Reading the book leads me to think she found something of herself as well. A good book, well worth reading.

Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Le Cunff pulls together insights from a wide body of research and from the experience of creative types including herself, and describes different strategies for developing one’s potential. The heart of the book is captured in the title: instead of setting lofty and linear goals (first I’ll do this, and then I’ll do that, etc), one should take on tiny experiments.

And the context in which this advice makes the most sense to me is captured well in her discussion of how one responds to uncertainty, whether this uncertainty is so intense as to cause extreme anxiety or a lesser form in which one simply can’t decide whether one is ready to take on a task. She suggests that one can respond to such uncertainty either with uneasiness or with curiosity. The uneasiness can manifest in cynicism (“doomscrolling, passing up opportunities”), escapism (“retail therapy, binge watching”), or perfectionism (“self-coercion, information hoarding, toxic productivity”). A better response, she suggests, is the response of curiosity. What might happen here if I try this? And this is where the tiny experiment kicks in. “I will [action] for [duration].” The action here is well-defined and circumscribed. The duration is long enough for a true test but short enough so as not to be overwhelming. If I’m wondering if I might benefit from meditating, but I fear that I’m not capable of sitting still for long periods of time or of maintaining a commitment. I should try it out. “I will meditate every day for 15 minutes for a week.” This, she says, is a simple experiment to satisfy the curiosity.

Le Cunff has established a community she calls Ness Labs where people interested in working on such strategies in community can gather.

(In one of those strange coincidences, I happened to read about Joan Westenberg’s similar strategies while reading this book.)

On the Calculation of Volume, Book III

by Solvej Balle. (Note that there are implied spoilers here for those who’ve not yet read Volumes I and II of this multi-volume novel. I have notes about Volume I on the May 2025 page and Volume II on the June 2025 page.)

The saga continues. Tara continues to repeat 18 November over and over, but she finds companionship in this repetition. Being in a relationship with another person, however that relationship is defined, introduces complications. Whose experience of the repetition is definitive? To what extent is a person’s identity changed when long-term relationships with almost all other people are impossible, and how does a connection with someone else change that identity?

This volume is more philosophical than the previous two, diving into questions of the nature of time and also ethical questions about responsibility. If I know that some tragedy is going to happen in the afternoon on a particular day, and I then relive that same day with the opportunity to intervene to stop the tragedy from happening, should I – can I – intervene? What does responsibility even mean here?

Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation

by Margaret Canovan

I completed my initial reading of this book several months ago. I thought then — and still think now — that it’s a very important work in the area of Arendt scholarship. I came away from it thinking that I had a much better understanding than I had before of the overall thrust of Arendt’s political philosophy. At the same time, I was – and I still am — unwilling to say that I understand Arendt’s position. Canovan offers good reason for this caution, saying in her introduction that “one cannot understand one part of her thought unless one is aware of its connections with all the rest” (p. 6).

This caution is why I’ve not posted these notes until now. It’s also why I’ve not yet written and posted summary notes on several of Arendt’s books that I read last year. I’ve finally decided, however, that I need to do something to move forward in my understanding of her political philosophy. I see this as necessary in large part because the understanding that I have so far convinces me that her work is crucial to my understanding and responding effectively to the political challenges we face today. And so I begin here the heavy task of thinking with Arendt. In this beginning, I take some comfort from Arendt herself. I shouldn’t wait for or expect a definitive understanding of her position. The practice of good thinking never ends: “the need to think … can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew” (The Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 88). So what I offer here is a first take. What I have here, then, is more like a program for my continued reading of and thinking about Arendt than a straightforward summary of Canovan’s book.

Canovan calls her work here a reinterpretation of Arendt’s thought. It’s new and different — different from that of other scholars, and also different from what Canovan said in her first book on Arendt, published 20 years before. She developed this reinterpretation on the basis of her reading of much of Arendt’s work that was unpublished at the time, which she accessed in the Arendt archives in the Library of Congress. Many — perhaps most — of those previously unpublished writings have been published in the 30-plus years after the publication of this book.

The central point of Canovan’s reinterpretation is that her early work in The Origins of Totalitarianism sets the context for everything that follows. This runs counter earlier interpretations, which relied more heavily on her later book The Human Condition. (And I admit here that The Human Condition was the only Arendt book I had read before returning to her a few years ago.) And the central, organizing insight that Canovan finds in Origins is her definition of the two defining characteristics of totalitarianism:

… what made Nazism and Stalinism ‘totalitarian’ in her sense was not the scale of their cruelties but something quite different, namely a uniquely modern combination of determinism and hubris. Totalitarians simultaneously committed two errors that might on the face of it seem to be incompatible: on the one hand they were determinists, surrendering human freedom to the march of forces they believed to be irresistible; on the other hand they were, in their restless activism, convinced that ‘everything is possible.’ The point (as Arendt sees it) is that modern men are tempted to purchase unlimited power at the cost of siding with inhuman forces and giving necessity a helping hand. To do this, however, is to betray all that is most characteristic of humanity. Human freedom and civilization are at the best of times vulnerable islands threatened by the raging tides of nature, but the great danger of modernity, in her view, is that human beings are continually letting loose further torrents, setting in motion pseudo-natural forces that can sweep away civilisation. Totalitarianism is the culmination of such tendencies, the ultimate hubris of finding that ‘everything is possible’ by moving with and accelerating these forces and sacrificing to them stability, spontaneity, plurality — everything that is genuinely human (pp. 12f).

Arendt sees both Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian movements, though in Origins she focuses much more on Nazism than on Stalinism. The Nazis’s camps were central to their project of sacrificing “everything that is genuinely human” to their project. In these camps, the Nazis sought to destroy the individuality of those imprisoned there and to treat the occupants as brutes without any rights at all — indeed, Arendt says, without even the right to have rights. People imprisoned in the camps were removed from the realm of political freedom. As Arendt put it in a lecture first published in 1961, “if one wants to prevent humans from acting in freedom, they must be prevented from thinking, willing, and producing, because all of these activities imply action, and thereby freedom in every sense, including the political” (Thinking Without a Banister, p. 223).

Responding effectively to totalitarianism requires that we acknowledge the plurality and spontaneity of human beings in the community of humankind. Arendt develops these related notions of plurality and spontaneity in later writings including The Human Condition. Recognizing this plurality — seeing that though we are all human, each of us is human in our own way — allows freedom to emerge. Each of us, she says, can act spontaneously, but this spontaneity is a form of pre-freedom, coming to full blossom only in politics, which is “the place where freedom can manifest itself and become a reality.”

It’s important to note Arendt’s insistence that politics is in the realm of action rather than the realm of work. She developed this distinction between work and action most systematically in The Human Condition. One distinction between work and action is that work implies the production of an object, and in this productive process the raw materials that make up the object become something else — e.g., the production of a wooden table requires the destruction of a tree as a living organism. Arendt would say that totalitarianism depends on seeing politics as being in the realm of work, requiring the destruction of the humanity of many people, which justifies the denial of rights to these people. She insisted that we should instead see politics as being in the realm of action, a coming together of human beings that provides for the spontaneous actions — thoughts, speech, art, etc. — of these people in community.

Creativity depends on community and solitude

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:04:00 -0500

Janna Malamud Smith:

We look with awe upon groups of great thinkers or artists who came together in the past — the transcendentalists in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, the cubist painters in early twentieth-century Paris, the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to name only a few of these many pairings and groups. We realize that people seek out each other to find sympathetic spirits. But that’s only half the story. The other half is that even when we are not geniuses, our own thinking and creativity are often better catalyzed and stimulated in discourse, not in isolation. We need to work alone; we need to have privacy — sometimes a lot of it — and closing the door and returning to our pens and paper or keyboards or brushes and easels can be bliss; but we also need to be stirred up, stimulated and challenged by others, especially others who share our interests and with whom we feel some modicum of mental respect.

An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery, pp. 118f.

Discoveries of the day

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 14:31:00 -0500

Perhaps I shouldn’t put these two items together in one blog post. It’s possible (if not probable) that the Venn diagram showing the overlap between the parties interested in one and those interested in the other is rather small. But they come together in one day for me, and I’m both excited and inspired by both of them. Who knows? Perhaps someday someone will find themselves landing on this page after searching for emacs and United States Senate.

The first item is another emacs discovery trail. This morning’s RSS feed delivered JTR’s function to convert an org file to docx, which led me to dwim-shell-command. I’m pretty sure I’d seen something about dwim-shell-command before, but I hadn’t grasped its power. Add this to my growing (but largely undocumented) list of emacs excitement moments.

The second item is The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia, a recently published collection of essays by George Scialabba. Before last weekend’s visit to our local bookstore, I knew absolutely nothing about George Scialabba. I don’t remember now why I picked this book up from the table displaying new arrivals, though I think I might have seen a brief note about it in some news publication. In any case, I was intrigued, and I’m very glad that I brought it home with me. Would that I could write so clearly and concisely about such a broad range of topics. I’m jumping the gun here — ordinarily I wait until I’ve finished reading a book before writing notes about it for my what I’m reading section, updated more or less monthly. I’ve not finished reading the book yet — in fact, I’m just over halfway through — but I’ve come out of the first half of the book with a renewed interest in philosophers and cultural critics whose work I read long ago and a new interest in such people about whom I knew next to nothing. I’ve decided that I simply must go back to Charles Taylor’s The Sources of the Self, a massive book that I began reading when it first came out but abandoned (checks copy from shelf) roughly 200 pages in. I might even reread Richard Rorty and read Russell Jacoby for the first time. And Dwight Macdonald. But what moves me to write about the book today is this rant from Scialabba’s brief essay on Robert Dahl, first published in The American Prospect in 2002:

According to Article V [of the United States Constitution], “no state, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Each state, regardless of population, was to have two senators. As a result, two centuries later half the U.S. population sends 18 senators to Washington while the other half sends eighty-two. Twenty senators represent 54 percent of the population; another twenty represent less than 3 percent. California gets two senators; the twenty least populous states, which combined have roughly the same number of people as California, get forty senators. Senators elected by 11 percent of the population can kill proposed legislation with a filibuster; senators elected by as little as 5 percent of the population can block a constitutional amendment (p. 133).

At the general level, there’s nothing here that I didn’t know. But, in my mind at least, the specifics — so clearly and concisely stated — add significantly to the weight of the general. I read Dahl years ago and taught one of his small books in a course on democracy and social change. I think it’s time to read him again.

So many books, so little time. But at least I now have a quick and easy way to convert one of my org files to a docx file so that my wife can open it on her computer!

Living with instead of living from

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:25:00 -0500

I listened yesterday to Nate Hagens’s conversation with Xiye Bastida. Bastida is a climate activist who, though only in her early 20s, has already spent years seeking to motivate others to do what we can to avert a climate disaster. She organized an environmental group at her NYC high school and later worked with others to organize a NYC climate protest involving 300,000 people. She also wrote “Calling In,” the introductory essay in the book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. One of the points from that essay that I find particularly compelling is that, while young people see climate change differently simply because they will be living in a decaying world longer than we older people will, the response to the challenge must be intergenerational:

It’s true that the climate-strike movement is organized and led by young people, but we need to work intergenerationally if we want to impact every sector and every industry. To me and a lot of other young people, it feels like we’re rooted in awareness while the adults around us live in obliviousness. This is where “Okay,Boomer” comes from, a phrase designed to describe the intergenerational disconnect of the movement. But that’s not right. First, the world is not okay, Boomer, so we will shake those who need to be shaken out of their comfort zone. People in developed countries and big cities are too comfortable, and nothing changes if we stay in a state of unbotheredness. We need to be uncomfortable about the system to change it, and the youth are bringing the climate crisis to attention precisely to channel action out of uneasiness. Second, we cannot let phrases like “Okay, Boomer” divide us. The fossil fuel industry wants us to be divided in order to slow down the push for climate justice. But we refuse to let attempts at division affect our purpose (p. 5).

Speaking of our divisions, Bastida insists that it’s no accident that the four countries whose populations are most polarized on climate change, in large part because of obfuscations and lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, are also the four nations whose emissions have grown the most since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Of course the United States is at the top of both these lists.

There’s a lot to digest in Bastida’s conversation with Hagens. But there’s one simple phrase that stood out to me:

…instead of living from the earth, we should live with the earth (emphasis added).

It’s a simple phrase, but it packs a lot of power.

I think it jumped out at me as much as it did because of a Henrik Karlsson essay I’d read earlier in the day. The essay is about political power as manifested in such figures as Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Moses. (Yes, the essay is US-centric; and yes, the essay draws on biographies written by Robert Caro.) Karlsson uses the metaphor of fracking to talk about political power as it’s understood, mined, and used by people like LBJ and Moses. Before reading Caro, Karlsson says, he was inclined to think of political power as something that politicians attained after they were elected to office, power that they had and could execute because of their political position.

In Caro’s biographies, it is clear that the real political operators don’t think about it like this at all. To them, power is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks. If you pay close attention, you will discover that there are drops of power everywhere — in the good feelings someone’s mother holds for you, in being able to get your college friend a job, in knowing embarrassing facts about your mentor, in having someone’s trust, and so on. To any normal person, these drops are so small that they barely register, and anyway, it feels wrong to treat someone’s mom as a reservoir to frack. But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.

According to this view, political power is something that one gets by living from other people, rather than by living with other people, by treating another person as “a reservoir to frack.” Obviously, this approach didn’t stop with LBJ and Moses. Donald Trump’s approach to governing — and, for that matter, to life more generally — has been characterized as transactional. I agree that it’s transactional, but I think it’s more than that. It’s treating people as objects to be used and thrown away. It’s a vampire-like living from other people. Or, recalling Kant, it’s treating people merely as means to one’s own ends rather than as ends in themselves. I think it’s no accident that Trump’s approach to the natural world is in line with his approach to people.

Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m coming to think that we won’t muster an adequate responses both to the climate crisis and to threats to democracy until more of us — perhaps especially Boomers like me who live in privilege — learn to live with rather than from both the natural world and the people with whom we share it.

Emacs Carnival: This year, I'll …

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:08:00 -0500

The theme for this month’s emacs carnival, hosted by Christian Tietze, is this year, I’ll…. I’ve not written for any of the indieweb carnivals. But since I’m all in on developing elaborate plans for what I’m going to do, this seems like a good time to jump in. This year, I’m thinking, I’m going to move beyond making plans to doing more with those plans. Moreover, I think that emacs will be central to my doing that. So, here’s what I’m going to do:

I’m going to clean up and annotate my emacs init file. I started using emacs almost 30 years ago, when I knew much less about software than I know now. I added to my emacs config willy-nilly. Early on, I was foolish enough simply to copy and paste something from the web that looked interesting. More recently, I at least took the time to understand what the code did, even if I didn’t understand how it did it. At some point, I moved everything into an org file that generates the init.el file. This year, I’ll go through the org file systematically (probably in chunks rather than all at once), settle on what I want to use, eliminate what I’m not using, and comment on each entry that remains. Having done that, I might even feel confident enough to post it on the web.
I’m going to do a better job with back-ups and version control.
- For back-ups, I moved away from Dropbox to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance a couple of years ago; I also started encrypting and backing up files to another off-site cloud server when I thought to do it. That’s worked pretty well, but I’m now looking into privacy-first cloud services hosted outside the United States. This year, I’ll settle on one of those services and build the back-up routine into my regular work.
- I’ve been using git/magit for years. However, I commit locally and push to a remote server only when I think of it, and I don’t think of it often enough. Moreover, when I first set up the repositories it didn’t occur to me to be more selective about which files to commit. I’ve made something of a head start on this goal — this past week I refined the .gitignore files for the different repositories and removed a lot of files from repositories (pdfs, etc) that don’t need to be there. With some help from Chris Maiorana (see here and here), I have clues in the emacs mode line that are helping to foster good habits. And magit-list-repositories pulls things together for me when I want to check things out. This year, I’ll keep this going.
I’m going to develop structures and strategies not only to take good notes but also to make good use of those notes in my writing and reflections. I wrote a bit over a year ago about my adoption of denote as a note-taking tool. I now have over 5,000 notes (many of them imported from org-roam and vanilla org-mode), and I’ve made some use of them. But I was stung more than a little when I read Joan Westenberg’s counsel to simplify things:

…if your fundamental issue is that you have 1,500 notes and haven’t turned them into anything? If you keep accumulating inputs without producing outputs? If you’re perpetually “getting organized” but never actually organized? The problem isn’t that you lack a sufficiently powerful tool. The problem is you.

Ouch. In my defense, I wouldn’t say that I’ve not turned my notes into anything. I’ve made use of many of them. But I want to do more, even at the risk of burying myself in “perpetually getting organized.” What I’ve done with the notes makes it clear to me that there’s richness there. This year, I’ll develop and implement a more strategic and efficient way of mining that richness.
Finally, I’m going to learn more elisp. I know just a bit, but I think it’s fair to say that I know just enough to be dangerous. Even when I’ve put something together that works, it’s taken far too long, with too many false starts, to write well functioning code. It’s time to be more systematic. This year, I’ll begin by working through Prot’s emacs lisp elements book.

Even though I’ve put learning elisp fourth on the list, I really see it as fundamental to what I’m envisioning here. I’m motivated to work on elisp because I’m convinced that knowing more about it will help me to think through and carry out the other things on this list. Even more than that, I suspect that learning elisp will inspire me to realize even more things that I want to do. And what could possibly be better than that?

Celebrating imperfection

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:19:00 -0500

The water cup sitting on the desk before me is now one of a set of four such cups. At one time it was one of a set of six. The cups were made for me over 30 years ago — a birthday gift that my wife commissioned to be made by a dear friend of ours. I love the way it looks and the way it feels. I love the thought that it was thrown and glazed by a woman who is still a dear friend, even though we’ve lived in different cities for almost all of those 30 years.

We still get together occasionally — most recently when she and her husband came to our son’s wedding. She was one of the first people to hold our young son in her arms. I’m not sure, but she could well have been the third person to hold him. It was a joy to have her with us at the marriage ceremony. On another visit, probably at least two decades ago, she noticed me drinking out of one of the cups she had made. I can’t remember what she said, but I do remember that she was somehow embarrassed by the cup. In a brief exchange, I learned that as her pottery skills grew she came to dislike sets like the cups she made for me. “They aren’t uniform in size and shape,” she said. “Perhaps,” I said. “But every time I drink from one of them I think of you and the gift of yourself that they represent. Often I go on to think about your laughter and your commitment to social justice.” If I weren’t embarrassed by cliché, I might have said “These cups are a gift that keeps on giving.”

I thought of this just now as I read something about creativity from Janna Malamud Smith:

The cultural emphasis on individual expression creates the artist’s opportunity to explore creative impulses often uncoupled from the more functional ends of craft. And this division is both a boon and a burden. Less is at stake if necessity rules, if the bowls [or cups] you design are the ones you need for daily use. They must hold soup [or water]. And as long as they accomplish that task, any other attribute is value added. The maker can dismiss, the users forgive their aesthetic limitations in the name of their utility. But creative expression that is primarily aesthetic or abstract does not accept the same apology. There’s nowhere to hide (An Absorbing Errand, p. 98).

I’m struck by Smith’s choice of verbs here — the maker is said to dismiss aesthetic limitations that the user is said to forgive. I distinctly remember noticing when I opened the box of cups years ago that they weren’t quite the same size; I also remember celebrating that rather than forgiving that. I understand our friend’s wish, from her perspective as a more practiced potter, that she had come closer to making a matched set. For me, though, there’s a sense that the imperfection enhances the aesthetic value of the cups. Each time I see them together in the cupboard I remember that they were made for me by a very special friend. And that’s worth celebrating.

Toward utopia: the moral and psychological prerequisites

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:57:00 -0500

George Scialabba:

Utopia is impossible unless, among an overwhelming majority, solidarity and trust are nearly instinctive; responsibility, self-reliance, initiative, honesty, and other civic virtues are practiced much more widely than now; and democratic habits of self-confidence, candor, and tact are far better developed. Channels of communication and public information are as yet rudimentary. And let’s not forget rhetorical skills like wit, fluency, and concision: without a vast improvement in the general level of these, attendance at all the necessary meetings on the way to utopia will result in an epidemic of premature brain death. With all these moral and psychological changes in place, we can make a start on the technical problem — no less complex, probably — of reconciling equity and efficiency in production and distribution.

The Sealed Envelope: Toward and Intelligent Utopia, p. 205

A tiny experiment: daily blogging

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 13:56:00 -0500

Anyone who has been reading my meanderings for any length of time might have noticed that I’ve been rather active here over the last two weeks. Surely today marks the first time that I’ve posted my writing on this blog 14 days in a row, and it happened because I made a pact with myself. My inspiration for this pact came from a book by Anne-Laure Le Cunff called Tiny Experiments and a blog post by Joan Westenberg called Failure vs. Success is the Wrong Frame. The book’s title characterizes my project over the last two weeks: instead of setting lofty and linear goals (first I’ll do this, and then I’ll do that, etc), one should take on a tiny experiment. Set a goal to do something — make it a small something — but think of the process of doing it as an experiment. The central point of Westenberg’s blog post, as captured in its title, helped me to see how my default approach to trying new things gets in the way of my doing them. The book and blog together pushed me to take this step.

Le Cunff suggests that one define a tiny experiment rather, well, simply: “I will [action] for [duration].” The perspicuous among you will likely have already surmised that my experiment was “I will post an entry to my blog every day for two weeks.” Simple, right? And relatively low stakes. Westenberg’s framing here is helpful: “You’re not betting your identity on the outcome. You’re poking reality to see what it does.” Having done whatever it is, pay attention to what reality does in response; to attend carefully to reality’s response is to learn something about oneself. As Westenberg put it:

Try things. Make things. Share what you learn. Treat your craft like a laboratory instead of an exam room. When something doesn’t work, find out why, write it down and try something else.

There were two goals informing my tiny experiment. The first one, rather obviously, is the goal of posting more regularly and frequently. Could I do that? Would I do that? The tinyness (or tinyhood?) is crucial here — I don’t think I need to be posting every day long term, but I wanted to do it long enough to get a sense for what that discipline would feel like. The second goal is less obvious, but it was the more important one for me: “I’d like to feel more comfortable in posting than I do now.” As I said earlier this week, I struggle to ignore the critic looking over my shoulder as I write. I wondered if writing more frequently, and with the commitment to put my writing out there where someone might actually read it, would help me feel more comfortable. Here again, Westenberg is helpful:

The fear that stops people from making things is almost entirely the fear of the performance frame. Nobody is afraid to experiment. We’re afraid to be judged. And the trick is to stop thinking of yourself as someone performing a skill and start thinking of yourself as a scientist in a lab, running tests, gathering data, slowly building up a picture of what works and what doesn’t. The scientist isn’t brave for continuing after unexpected results. They’re just doing science. That’s what science is.

That’s what science is. I’d say that’s also what learning is.

At the end of the experiment, both Le Cunff and Westenberg say, turn to learning. Le Cunff’s framing of this is straightforward: follow the plus-minus-next strategy.

What went well? What did you enjoy?

What didn’t work? What felt off?

What small tweak can you make based on what you learned?

So, what am I thinking now?

The plus – First, I appreciate the sense of accomplishment: I actually posted something every day. The biggest challenge I faced was coming up with something that seemed worth sharing, but I worked through that. In fact, I enjoyed the process of watching for possible topics — in my reading, in my idle thoughts — and for connections between those topics. Admittedly, some of the posts worked better than others, but I’m ok with that. I’m convinced not only that I wouldn’t have posted every day without this commitment, but also that I wouldn’t have recognized some of those connections. Second, I gradually became more comfortable with putting something out there, even when I knew I could have developed it more fully and/or carefully (and even when that critic looking over my shoulder was pushing me not to post). Finally, I really enjoyed the sometimes surprising direction a post took, seemingly without my direction.

The minus — Perhaps it’s ironic that the first minus that comes to mind is the opposite of one of the positives — A couple of my posts seem rather lame, and I didn’t develop some of my ideas and discussions as fully or carefully as I would like. In addition, I decided not to write on some topics simply because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do them justice in the time I had to work on them. Finally, much of the time spent writing the posts was stolen from time that I would ordinarily have spent reading.

Next — I’m still pondering next steps. I’m definitely going to continue blogging, but I’m not going to hold myself to the commitment to post every day. I’m thinking I might instead have the goal of working on a post (or posts) every day. I’m hesitating here a bit because I know myself well enough to know how easy it is to procrastinate on doing something without the hard stop of actually posting something, I need another way to stay on task. I’m thinking I might try the goal of posting every other day, but it’s much easier for me to do a particular task daily than it is to do it every other day.

The upshot: I’m glad that I did the experiment. I’m working now to frame the next step. And I really do think that this approach might actually work for me.

Commodified Community vs RSS

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:19:00 -0500

A sports writer for the Boston Globe has an occasional column with the introduction “turning the bag upside down to see what falls out” or something like that. He then presents a potpourri of brief observations and sports reports. This post is something like that, a collection of quotations from books I’ve read over the past year or so. I suppose I could have posted each of them separately with the commonplace tag, but they grew together in my mind as I thought about the sense of community I have each morning while reading the day’s RSS feed.

[Mark Zuckerberg] uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits — none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other … and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seems never to have occurred to him” (Zadie Smith, Feel Free, p. 52).

Today, people frequently invoke the term ‘community,’ but in doing so they refer to a commodified form of society. It does not create a we. Unbridled consumption isolates and separates people. Consumers are lonely creatures. Digital communication, too, turns out to be a form of communication without community. Capitalism transforms time itself into a commodity” (Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa, p. 4).

Attention capitalism has taken the holistic experience of mass spectacle, the social unity of paying attention together, the ecstasis of being one of many all pointed in the same direction absorbed in the same senses, and divided it into composite process each experienced individually and alone — watching something, and then sharing it. A viral meme is our current form of ‘paying attention together,’ but it’s attenuated in this crucial way. The collective rush of watching an opera or concert or singing together at mass have been decomposed into a two-part process, each solitary. I view and then I share. I view and then I share. Then we laugh together but apart (Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call, p. 153).

I trust you see that the sort of commoditized community discussed in these three quotations is decidedly different from the sense of community I have each morning. I have an odd sense of connection with the bloggers in my RSS feed. It’s not just that I learn from them. It’s that I get a sense of who they are. And what I realized this morning is that this collection of bloggers whose reflections I read regularly are informing my sense of my audience. It’s not that I think they’re reading what I’m writing. (For the most part, it’s clear to me, they’re not.) It’s that I can’t avoid thinking as I write about things they say and the people I think they are. I’m still sorting this out, but I’m already thinking that this indieweb community is not the commodified community that Han is disparaging. And this, in turn, leads me to reject his generalization that digital communication is “a form of communication without community.” It doesn’t have to be, and giving up the algorithms of platforms like Facebook is a huge part of what makes authentic online communication possible. I know that I’m sitting alone as I read my RSS feed, and that you’re likely sitting by yourself as you read this and other posts. But somehow my having chosen the people I’m inviting into my conversation makes this feel more authentic to me.

I’m sure this isn’t the last I’ll have to say about this — the community itself pushes me to think more about it.

Old things, and the people behind them

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:05:00 -0500

Yesterday, David’s post detailing the oldest items he owns came through the RSS doorway. David was inspired to do this by a similar post from Thomas. The thought crossed my mind that I might do the same. But that thought was followed rather quickly by the thought that I’m more than a little uncomfortable by how much I own and my how much my sense of myself is informed by the items that I own. And that thought was followed just as quickly by the thought about a certain president’s ruminations about how it’s important to his psychological well-being that my country gain ownership of Greenland. (I know that said president has since apparently moved on from this position, at least for the moment. Stay tuned.)

So many thoughts, cascading along. Still, what is it about ownership? I happened to see an interview of a Greenlander who said that land ownership isn’t a thing in Greenland. Those who buy a house, she said, don’t own the land beneath the house. I actually wondered whether that’s true – but it appears that it is.

There is no privately-owned land in Kalaallit Nunaat. In the traditional nomadic existence, Inuit (across the Arctic) followed the migration routes of game animals, which made it difficult and impractical to divide hunting areas into smaller privately demarcated areas. Hence, the basic principle was that the land was collectively owned, and use was subject to general territorial rights.

(See also this from realtor.com.)

That’s quite different from our tradition, which is informed by John Locke’s picking an apple off of a wild apple tree and the enclosure of previously commonly held land in England. In fact, even the word property has its root in a term meaning “nature, quality, distinctive character always present in an individual or class,” and only later came to refer to items. When Locke pulled that apple off the tree, it became a part of him — even before he ate it (if in fact he did). So I suppose it’s not all that surprising that my sense of self is informed by the things that I own.

My first car, a hand-me-down from my parents in my last year of college, was a Volkswagen Beetle. I remember deciding then that I would never own more things than I could fit in that car. My commitment to that lasted only until I managed to buy my first component stereo system. Freed from that restriction, and being the good American that I am, I continued to acquire. I’m working really hard now to purchase less, to purchase only items that I need, and to purchase items that will last and are fairly made. I’d rather not think about all of the acquisition and waste in my wake.

But — and finally returning to where I started — I did enjoy thinking about the oldest things that I own. My enjoyment is not so much of the items themselves as it is of the family connections they embody. So here’s the list:

A rocking chair that I inherited from my maternal grandparents. They were both deeply committed Democrats. In the early 1960s, my grandmother was so inspired by Kennedy and impressed by his rocking chair that she decided that she must have a Kennedy-inspired rocker for her back. That chair now sits in our living room.
A German wall clock that I received from my parents in the mid-1970s. I don’t know how old it is. When they lived in Germany in the early 1970s, my parents developed the practice of looking for old clocks in all sorts of places. Family lore has them looking through old barns and shacks. The clocks were inexpensive, and not in great condition. Most of them didn’t work. My parents developed a relationship with a man who repaired and restored old clocks. The clock hanging on our wall is one of those clocks. I wind it once a week.
A silver dollar that my father began carrying in his pocket in World War II. At least, he told me that it was once a silver dollar. It’s now completely smooth on both sides. It was in his pocket for a long time. I received it after he died. (Primogeniture in action.)
An old misshapen metal measuring cup. I use it each day to weigh out the beans for our morning coffee. It’s one of several kitchen implements that my maternal grandmother gave me when I moved into my first apartment in 1974. She purchased them from the S&H Green Stamps store in their small west Texas town. I’m amazed to see that S&H Greenstamps are still a thing!

These are just a few of the things that I’ve owned for a long time. (I’ve already said more than enough in this blog about the books, so I won’t go there.) I found, going through this exercise of remembering, that it’s the people behind these things rather than the things themselves that are so crucial to the person I am today.

David and Thomas — thanks for the memories.

An edit: Andreas provides his list, and adds pictures as well. Oh, for the days of inexpensive vinyl!

Creativity: Where it comes from and where it leads

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:50:00 -0500

In a recent post I admitted the challenge I face coming up with things to write about here in the blog. I don’t see myself as being particularly creative. That’s why this passage in Karl Ove Knaussgaard caught my attention:

What does it mean to create? What does it take? How does an artist open up a creative field for a work, how do they keep it open, and how do they enlarge it? What do they consider, what do they look for? How do they ground their work in their own lives and at the same time make it relevant to others too (In the Land of the Cyclops, p. 194)?

The passage is near the beginning of Knausgaard’s extended reflection on the creativity of Ingmar Bergman. He begins the essay with a discussion of Bergman’s workbook, in which the filmmaker developed his thoughts about all sorts of things. The reader can see in the workbook what Bergman was thinking about films as he was making them, and also about other projects that never came to fruition. This sort of writing and reflection, Knausgaard suggests, is one of the prerequisites for creative activity. One needs a space in which to write or think freely, without concerns about what others might think. In fact, if the space is to be fully free, I would say that it needs to be a space where the reflections aren’t immediately subjected to the critical eye of the person doing the reflecting.

Perhaps I think that last bit, though, because of my own experience keeping a journal. I’ve tried to journal regularly many different times during my life — in fact, on the shelf above me now is a spiral notebook recording my thoughts as an adolescent many (many!) years ago. There’s some cringe-worthy stuff there. (Is our dog our family pet, or are we our dog’s servants?) My teenage journaling efforts were but the first of many short-lived attempts. In fact, I think that it was only in the last decade or so that I was finally able to write in my journal both regularly and frequently for an extended period. I don’t think it’s any accident that it’s during this time that I’ve finally stopped noticing the critic looking over my shoulder. Leaving the internal critic behind was crucial.

Knausgaard’s second prerequisite to creativity is that one must “be alert to every inner impulse, regardless of how unimportant it might seem” (p. 195). I think he’s right about this as well, but I would broaden the point. I have in mind here Murakami’s advice to aspiring novelists, cited in the post linked above: if you want to write a novel, a first step is to read many, many novels, both good and bad. In addition, Murakami said, you should pay attention to what’s going on in the world around you. In short, those impulses Knausgaard is talking about need to be fed by experiences, both the experience of reading and of attending to the world. One needs both the input on which the impulses feed and the outputs that they might yield.

An aside: many years ago I studied biblical Hebrew rather intensively for a couple of years. I remember being fascinated by the biblical text and by the communities that produced it. I’m sorry to say that I remember very little of the language itself. One point about the opening words of the book of Genesis has stuck with me. I no longer remember the particulars — I think it’s related somehow to the vowel pointings — but there’s some sort of grammatical error in the surviving text of those opening words. As I remember, in order to translate the text into English one has to decide how to correct this problem. There are two options. Correcting it one way yields what I think is the most common translation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth….” Correcting it the other way provides a different take: “When God began to create, the earth was without form and void….” The difference is significant: the first translation suggests that God created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing. The second suggests that there was something already there, providing material with which God could work. I don’t think much about God these days, but I’ve long thought that the second translation makes more sense. Any creative act — even a god’s creative act — begins with something.

But the “something” has to go somewhere, and this leads to Knausgaard’s third prerequisite for creativity. One must find a “trigger point,” a point that inspires a way forward into the other elements of what one is creating, a point “where one image gives rise to another image, one scene gives rise to another scene, one song gives rise to another song” (196). I think this third prerequisite indicates where the creative juices really start to flow. And it’s also where my writing on this blog surprises me the most. I’m often surprised by where I’m led as I write the post. (Where did that point about bible translation come from, anyway? I’ve not thought of that in years.)

I have to say, though, that I’m haunted by the last bit of that first quotation from Knausgaard’s essay. How can I write about my own experiences in these blog posts while “at the same time make it relevant to others too”? On second thought, though, it’s not so much Knausgaard’s sentence that haunts me. Instead, it’s that critic looking over my shoulder at what I’m writing.

Paying for search

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:33:00 -0500

(If you have something to say about search engines, please click on “read more” and read to the end of the post.)

David, a GenXer blogging at Forking Mad+, joins many others in his dissatisfaction with google search. He used DuckDuckGo for a while, but found the results to be rather unfocused. A year ago, he tested Kagi.com, which differs from most (all?) other search engines by charging money for the service. It’s important to say that the difference is that they charge money — google has its own way of exacting payment from the users. After his initial test of Kagi, he decided he wouldn’t do that. But his frustrations with DuckDuckGo eventually brought him back to kagi. He’s now been paying for his searches the past six months, and in this last post he explains why he thinks it’s worth it.

I’m right there with him. We’ve had a family account with Kagi for well over a year, and I have no regrets at all about the decision to pay money for my searches. The results are focused and good, and we’re not being tracked. (As implied by my not linking to the Kagi site, I’m not making any money on this recommendation. I’m just a satisfied customer piling on to David’s post.)

However, my thinking about this has gotten more complicated over the past year. (Is there anything that hasn’t gotten more complicated over the past year?) Even though we live in the US, we’re gradually moving more of our tech accounts — e.g., cloud storage, email, password management — to non-US companies. Kagi is a US company. So I’m wondering about alternatives. I gave up on DuckDuckGo several years ago. Over the last few weeks I’ve tested StartPage, Ecosia, and Quant. I’m distracted by the sponsored content on StartPage. I like the ecological emphasis of Ecosia, but the search results seem less focused. I’m still playing with Quant.

Interested in hearing what others think about this. Any reliable non-US and privacy oriented search engines?

Plain text: portable data, portable workflow

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:38:00 -0500

In yesterday’s post I offered a brief account of why and how I do virtually all of my computer work in plain text. In that post I responded to a set of questions, and I’ve continued to think about those questions and my responses. In fact, if I were addressing those questions today my answers would be slightly different simply because the wheels just kept turning in my mind. I don’t know that the difference would make much of a difference, though, so I’m not going to tackle the questions again. But I do want to build on yesterday’s point about the portability of plain text to say more about what I appreciate about the particular program I use to work with the text that I write. Consider this from Jathan Sadowski:

All technologies — even the most seemingly advanced, autonomous artificial intelligence systems — are ultimately products of people. They give concrete form to human values and material structure to social relations. However, except for an elite minority who have the power and resources to make decisions about investment, purpose, and design, technology is something that happens to us. Not by us, or with us, or even for us. We largely have to live with the major choices made by a few. We might benefit from some things that happen to us, while being harmed by other things. We aren’t really given a choice in those tradeoffs. We have to figure out how to navigate the world they build, and the ones they want to build. A few people get to exercise their influence and realize their visions; the rest of us don’t have that ability or opportunity. Not because this is the only way things could possibly be. Not because nobody else could make those choices for lack of knowledge, imagination, or aspiration. Not because anybody else would just mess things up. But because this is how the technological system is currently organized and perpetuated (The Mechanic and the Luddite, pp. 4f).

Obviously Sadowski isn’t focused on plain text here; he’s making a much larger point. But this larger point helps me to see that the data portability allowed by plain text that I mentioned yesterday is mirrored in what I might call, somewhat clumsily, the portability of my way of working with that text. It’s important to me that I’m able to adapt my working environment to the way that I work, rather than being forced to shape my work to an environment. The tool that facilitates that for me is emacs. (As I said in yesterday’s post, if the friend who introduced me to emacs decades ago had used and recommended vim instead, I could well be using vim today.) But one thing I really like about my use of emacs now is that it allows me to do what I want to do as I want to do it. Moreover, if I find that I want to do something differently, even with my rudimentary tech skills I’m almost always able to figure out how to adapt the program to allow for this difference. Many times, it doesn’t even require adapting the program, but instead simply discovering a functionality that’s already in core emacs. Even better, this portability allows me to edit my text files in any other text editor, knowing that the changes I make will be there when I return to the emacs world.

I’m not saying that I couldn’t find this portability in other programs. But I’m convinced that I’ve found it where I am.

Why plain text?

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:32:00 -0500

Ellane, writing at PTPL 192, explains how and why she lives the plain text life and invites others to do the same. She even provided the questions. Thanks, Ellane.

When did you start using plain text?
- I don’t remember just when I began moving to plain text, but it was sometime in the late 1990s. That’s when I first dipped my toe into running linux; a friend helped me set it up on an old computer so that I could use it as a primitive home server.
Why did you start using plain text?
- The primary motivation was that I was writing what we now call a blog that was published using a rather primitive system that could accommodate only plain text; I gradually began using it more broadly. I lived in two worlds for a couple of decades – I had to stay with the standard word processors alongside plain text before I retired so that I could collaborate with colleagues who were firmly in the proprietary software world. Over time, I discovered ways to migrate both ways between plain text and those other formats.
What do you use plain text for?
- Almost all of my computer work: writing (including journeling and blogging), money management, calendaring, task management.
- While I was still teaching, I graded and commented on student papers in plain text, exporting my comments to (via LaTeX) pdfs that I gave to students
What keeps you using plain text?
- Nothing much original to say here – the portability of my data, the cleanness of the look, the security of knowing that I’ll continue being able to access data even as the technology changes, the ease of version control that allows me to track what I’m doing from day to day (and undo what I decide shouldn’t have been done (!), even while keeping the abandoned path just in case I want to look at it again).
Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why?
- I live in emacs generally and, for the most part, org-mode in particular.
What are your favourite plain text tools or applications?
- Emacs (org-mode), Beancount (for plain text accounting), hugo and ox-hugo (for blogging)
Is there one tool you can’t do without?
- Emacs (org-mode). (I should say that I don’t have a dog in the emacs/vim/etc religion wars. I use emacs only because the friend who facilitated my move into linux and plain text years ago used emacs.)
Is there anything you can’t do with plain text?
- I use two non-plain text programs
  - Proton for email. (I compromise here a bit, running proton mail bridge so that I have access to messages locally and can search them using notmuch. But I handle regular reading and writing of emails in the proton app. I ran a local mail server and handled email within emacs for a while but that got too challenging for my somewhat limited tech skills)
  - Once a year, TurboTax. This one grates on me, but it’s either that or pay someone to do our tax return for us.

Another day; another search for something to write about

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:47:00 -0500

Early on in my PhD studies, I stumbled on the work of a particular philosopher. I can’t remember now just how and where I learned of him, but that moment of learning marked a significant point in my graduate studies, because I later wrote my dissertation on his work. I said then, and I would say now, that it’s fortunate that this worked out as a dissertation topic, simply because I was sure I couldn’t have come up with something else that I wanted to write on. This is on my mind these days because I’m convinced that the biggest challenge I face in writing these blog entries is coming up with a topic I want to write about. I’ve not clocked it, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that I spend more time figuring out what I want to write about than I do on the actual writing.

Earlier this morning I was thinking I might write something about memory. As I thought about that, I remembered reading recently that James Joyce said something to the effect that imagination is memory. That seemed to be worth looking into, I thought, and retrieved Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce from my bookshelf. Moments later, I was reading this passage:

Joyce often recited Yeats’s poems from memory, and seemed to wonder if his own work was imaginative enough. In the midst of writing Ulysses he confided in Ezra Pound, “I have little or no inspiration or imagination and work very laboriously, exhausting myself with trifles.” Later he said to Jacques Mercanton, “Why regret my talent? I haven’t any. I write so painfully, so slowly. Chance furnishes me with what I need. I’m like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I’m in need of.” On the other hand, he often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered,” and said to Frank Budgen, “Imagination is memory” (p. 661n).

I found what I wanted — the quotation that I saw somewhere about imagination and memory. But I also gained some comfort in learning that a writer as great as Joyce sometimes found inspiration when he least expected it. I think that the metaphor of stumbling is particularly apt here. One doesn’t stumble unless one is walking or running, or, more generally, moving. The movement that makes sense to me here is that of moving through pages — i.e., reading. And that reminded me (there’s that memory again) of something Haruki Murakami said in his essay “So What Should I Write About?” In this essay he offers advice to aspiring novelists:

It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on — great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading (Novelist as a Vocation, p. 74).

But, Murakami continues, it’s also important to pay attention to the world even when one is not reading. “Observe what is going on around you and the people you encounter as closely and as deeply as you can. Reflect on what you see.” (Perhaps, I would say, one might be focusing so closely on the people one sees that one stumbles. Pay attention to that, too!) Murakami’s point here is that in this reading and more general observation the aspiring novelist is constructing and populating a “mental chest of drawers” with ideas that might come to mind later when one is writing. “If you have stockpiled your chest with a rich variety of unrelated details, … you will be amazed to see how naturally they pop up when the need arises, full of life and ready to be fit into the narrative” (p. 78).

Just as I finished typing that last sentence, my eyes wandered down the page of Murakami’s book, and I stumbled on this: “James Joyce put it most succinctly when he said ‘Imagination is memory.’” Someday — perhaps someday soon — I’ll write something about that.

For all you know, I could be a dog

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:00:00 -0500

In the very early days of the web, when I was learning rudimentary html and constructing my first web site, I expressed the concern to a friend and colleague that the web would allow anyone to construct and present an identity that was in some way inauthentic. Or, as the New Yorker cartoon expressed it a bit later but much more memorably, On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. My colleague was quick to respond, “How is that different from how we construct ourselves IRL?” (I should say that my colleague, though obviously wiser than I about such things, didn’t really say “IRL.” He wasn’t that far ahead of his time.)

I was reminded of this exchange this week by an extended and wide-ranging discussion in Janna Malamud Smith’s book An Absorbing Errand. Smith explores here the dynamics the human need for recognition and how we go about seeking that recognition. As the book’s subtitle — How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery — suggests, she’s focusing on how artists and other creatives portray themselves, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly in their creations. In effect, Smith suggests, they take on costumes. A striking example:

In 1862, in a moment of unusual frankness, Charles Dickens confessed to his admirer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as Dostoyevsky later recounted in a letter, that “there were two people in him … one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.” From the one who felt the opposite, Dickens claimed to have “made his evil characters.” From the other, he noted, “I try to live my life.” He attempted to channel into his fiction the parts of himself he despised, “his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love.” The raw emotions and mental states tormented intimates yet, when funneled into vivid characters and thus successfully costumed, offered energy to all he wrote (p. 55).

One might say that the phrase “as he ought to feel” suggests that there really is or at least should be an authentic person within or behind the costume. But is there? And if there is, to what extent is that authentic person a construction? To bring the question home, how is the person I present myself to be in this blog related to the person I am in conversations with my wife, or in exchanges with train conductors or grocery store clerks? Writing these posts is a creative act; would one say also that my self presentation in those other exchanges is a creative act? Is the one different from the others? If different, is it more or less authentic?

I’d like to say that I’m my authentic self in all of these settings. But consider Smith again:

The person in the process of creating lives the contradiction To be myself, I do not have to be myself. He seeks recognition for the work almost as a deflection from the self. He manipulates his materials and consequently manipulates the terms of recognition. How much am I the person you think you see before you, how much the denizen of an invisible, timeless space, the mistress of a private, ineffable process that yields the hand-crafted table, the stained-glass window, the glazed pot (p. 69)?

I’ll bring this closer to the bone: “The person who is writing these blog entries lives the contradiction To be myself, I do not have to be myself. I’m not the sort of person, I say to myself, who’s interested in putting words out into the world for others to consider. And yet, here I am on your screen. How much am I the person you think you see before you? Or, to push even harder, How much am I the person I think I see within me?

All this thinking is exhausting. I think I’ll take a break and help myself to some kibble.

Whitehead again: the self as synthesis of the past and anticipation of the future

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:53:00 -0500

This is another post about Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, once again inspired by my reading. See here and here for other similar posts.

In Happiness in Action: A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life, Adam Adatto Sandel suggests we should re-think the relationship between time and the self:

From the perspective of life as an ongoing journey, … time never simply passes. For each moment that comes can be understood as a redemption and integration of what has gone by. Past and future … are not points on a timeline, one following after the other, but constitutive dimensions of every moment — the past denoting the closure and unity of the present, the future its openness and mystery. Life so understood does not play itself out in a sequence of moments stretching from birth to death. Its movement is rather to be understood in terms of the openness and closure of a single moment that can be seen to traverse “all times” (p. 30).

Reading this prompts me to think yet again about Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. According to Whitehead, a self perishes from one moment to the next, re-emerging at each moment of its experience. Each new manifestation of the self brings the many elements of its past experience into a newly integrated whole. Some of those experiences are experiences that earlier manifestations of this self had; others are new experiences of the world in which the emerging self is coming to be. In this integration, the self imposes a definite structure — in Sandel’s term, a closure — on its past. Whitehead called the process by which the present self comes to be a concrescence – a becoming concrete — of the self. The form and content of its concrescence set the stage for later manifestations of the self. Those later expressions of self implied in the present are not yet actual — they exist as possibilities to be realized. But the range of possibilities is not unlimited. One might say that the possibilities are underdetermined rather than undetermined; the present self imposes some limits on what is possible. To introduce a concrete example: given current technology, my decision to be at my desk writing this post at 11:30a this morning rather than go to the train station precludes the possibility of my being in New York City for lunch today at noon.

Both past and future exist in the present self, but the past is definite while the future is yet to be fully defined. Sandel again: the movement of time is “understood in terms of the openness and closure of a single moment that can be said to traverse ‘all times.’”

If no one reads the words, do the words have meaning?

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:49:00 -0500

I’ve just started reading Janna Malamud Smith’s book An Absorbing Errand: How artists and craftsmen make their way to mastery. I’m only a couple of chapters in but she has wheels spinning in my mind; I’m thinking that writing something just might help these wheels get some traction.

Smith is a practicing psychotherapist, and (or should I say “but”?) is also a very engaging writer. Her explanation of the book’s title is what has those wheels spinning. She takes the title from words that Henry James put in the mouth of one of his characters:

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. … Do you know I sometimes think that I am a man of genius half-finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door (p. 23).

I started writing this blog just over three years ago; I’ve written at least one post exploring the question why I’m doing this. I still don’t have a good answer to that question. The blog title and tag line both say something about my approach. I’m not writing polished essays. Instead, I’m thinking out loud, hoping to figure out what I’m thinking. Still, why am I thinking out loud in this public space? I’ve hinted in a few posts that I’m generally much more comfortable sitting at home (usually with book in hand) than out in the world with other people. It takes much less energy to write out my thoughts in my personal journal than it does to write and then post them here in the blog. Why spend the extra energy? Does it matter that the few people who stumble on this post are here following my thoughts?

That brings me back to the quote from the James novel. The last bit really resonates with me: “the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.” Some days I think I find the latch and even crack the door open just a bit. Other days not so much — on those days I feel so much safer behind the closed door that I don’t try to find the latch. But there’s some comfort in knowing that the door is there, and that if I push on it hard enough it will open and offer some space for expression.

Though I get the occasional comment or email (thanks for those!), for the most part my experience writing here is pretty like the experience of writing in my journal — I write without evidence that others are reading. In both cases — writing here and writing in my journal — I’m satisfying the need for expression that James writes about. But there’s something about knowing that someone just might read it that makes the expression more meaningful. I suppose that this deeper something is why some people sealed a note in a bottle that they then dropped into the ocean. The possibility of a connection is worth something, isn’t it?

Reading and writing in the chaos

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:26:00 -0500

Over breakfast each morning I read news about the world, thinking each morning that it surely couldn’t get any worse, seeing on many mornings that, in fact, it could — and, in fact, has. Many mornings I think I really should post something here about the news. Most mornings I decide that I really don’t have any thing to add to what others are saying, no real insight, no deep understanding. Just anger, fear, and general unsettledness.

Sometimes, though, I imagine what future historians (if there are historians in the future) would think happen to stumble onto some of my posts. (Bear with me here — I know it’s unlikely that future historians would care to read these posts — this is really a thought experiment.) Would they wonder how/why I could take the time to write about discovering Haruki Murakami when things are falling apart? Or why I think it’s worthwhile to write anything at all about the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who died in the middle of the last century? Or any of the other things I’ve written over the past three years? But set the writing aside. Why do I spend all of this time reading? And if I’m going to read, shouldn’t I devote my reading to works that could help me understand what I and others might do to stop the destruction?

Maybe.

But then I remember Rebecca Solnit writing so poignantly about Orwell and his roses. And the philosopher Heinrich Blücher’s letter to Hannah Arendt while they were separated in occupied France, celebrating the fact that he defeated Walter Benjamin in a game of chess. And that Blücher carried and read a copy of Kant while imprisoned in the camps before he and Arendt escaped to the United States.

I don’t claim to be Orwell, or Arendt, or Blücher. But I do think that there’s room in the world, even a world as tortured as ours, for reading, thinking, and writing.

At least, that’s what I tell myself as I approach the end of the day, thinking about what I might read in the news over breakfast tomorrow.

Reading trails and memory lapses

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:00:00 -0500

I decided earlier this month to pay more attention to how I discover books that I’m interested in reading. There’s evidence of that on my TBR page. Just last week I was reminded why I started to do that. I received a notice from the local library that a book I had requested — Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami — was at the desk waiting for me to pick it up. I had no recollection of having requested this book. In fact (I’m now embarrassed to say), I had no idea who Haruki Murakami is or was. I wouldn’t have given this memory lapse a second thought twenty years ago or even a decade ago. Now that I’m at a certain age, it does give me pause. But I set that concern aside, at least for the moment.

I did wonder, though, just why I had requested the book. So I decided to ask my former self about it. I searched through my almost-daily journal entries. And I found this in what I wrote on the first day of the year:

Working through the RSS feed, I find this recommendation from James Cash (in emacslife):

Novelist As a Vocation - Haruki Murakami

Non-fiction collection of essays by the great novelist I grabbed in a used bookshop. Really enjoyed it, interesting and inspiring. Certainly makes me want to read more of his novels too!

Just requested it from BPL.

Reading that journal reminded me that I’d learned a bit more about the author and the book and decided that I might want to read it. Yet another plus-1 for journaling. But there’s a bit more to this story. As I said, when I saw that I’d requested that book I knew nothing about the author. The afternoon after bringing it home from the library, I read this in Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments: “Haruki Murakami wrote his first two books while running a jazz club” (p. 67). Just a passing mention. A striking coincidence. After noting the coincidence, I moved on with the reading.

This morning, however, it happened again. On page 156 of Elissa Altman’s book Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, I learn that “Haruki Murakami runs a daily 10K in the afternoons when he’s writing a novel.” What’s that line from one of those Ian Fleming books? “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” I’m starting to think I’ve been dumped into an Anki-like spaced repetition routine in which I’m to learn the name of this novelist. I’m trying not to think that everyone gets put into this routine when they reach a certain age.

Thinking together: citizenship and the web

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:16:00 -0500

Jennifer Szalai concludes her recent NYTimes column, Hannah Arendt is not your icon (gift link), with this paragraph:

For Arendt, loneliness was dangerous; it was precisely under conditions of isolation that one’s imagination could untether itself from reality and “develop its own lines of ‘thought.’” She offers not a guide but a goad — to partake in an activity that can enact our freedom and also help to sustain it. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple,” she once wrote. “It is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

As the beginning of the paragraph implies, the plural pronoun in that last sentence is crucial. We need to think and speak together. But there’s another element to Arendt’s point here. The thinking in community that’s so crucial is not the sort of process than leads to a nicely packaged solution that can be set on the shelf. Nor can the thinking be left to the experts who will solve the problems for us. There’s a role for experts, an expectation that they will make their own contributions to the thinking community. But “the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of ‘wise men’; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew” (The Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 88).

Recovering — or developing — this ability to think together in community is crucial if we are to regain anything like a government of, by, and for the people. And this thinking can’t be just a one-off activity — we need to find ways to focus our attention together, to attend to the problems that we face over the long haul. Simply casting a ballot is not enough. Arendt suggests that she’s not the first to see this problem:

Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time, had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the people a share in public power without providing them at the same time with more public space than the ballot box and with more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being republicans and of acting as citizens. In other words, the danger was that all power had been given to the people in their private capacity, and that there was no space established for them in their capacity of being citizens (On Revolution, p. 256).

As Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan develops the point, “there was little in the constitutional structure of the United States to remind Americans that they are citizens as well as consumers. … If the individual is given a vote in a secret ballot, but no public arena in which to join with others in debating public affairs, he is liable to do what American voters were in fact doing in enormous numbers, namely to use his vote as a means of defending his private interests, something to be bartered to politicians in return for election promises” (Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, p. 232).

The current design and implementation of social media platforms present at least two significant threats to our democracy. First, they co-opt our attention in service of their drive to make a profit. Many of us are losing the ability to think critically and deeply about an issue. Second, their algorithms make the sort of conversation — of thinking together — we need in order to function as a democracy both difficult and rare. I, like many others, had hoped that the web would provide a public space in which such debates and conversations could take place. I, like many others, find that the enshittified web instead makes productive debates and conversations much less likely. Last week I wrote a brief piece about the connections between authoritarianism and the control of fossil fuels. I’m thinking now that there’s a similar connection between authoritarian tendencies, on one hand, and the appropriation and manipulation of online discussions by a few men, on the other. I’m more and more convinced that taking back our democracy requires that we also take back the web.

Totalitarianism and the elimination of political freedom

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:08:00 -0500

Hannah Arendt:

Our most recent experiences with totalitarian dictatorships … have clearly shown us, if one is serious about the abolition of political freedom, that it is not sufficient to prohibit what we generally understand by political rights; that it is not enough to forbid citizens from being politically active, expressing opinions in public, or forming parties or other associations for the purpose of action. One must also destroy freedom of thought, as far as this is possible, and it is possible to a large extent; one must destroy the freedom of the will; and even the harmless-seeming freedom of artistic production. One must take possession of even those areas we are accustomed to regard as outside the realm of politics, precisely because they, too contain a political element. Or to put it another way: if one wants to prevent humans from acting in freedom, they must be prevented from thinking, willing, and producing, because all of these activities imply action, and thereby freedom in every sense, including the political. Therefore, I also believe that we entirely misunderstand totalitarianism if we think of it as the total politicization of life through which freedom is destroyed. The exact opposite is the case; we are dealing with the abandonment of politics, as in all dictatorships and despotic regimes, though only in totalitarianism do the phenomena of this abandonment appear in such a radical form as to destroy the element of political freedom in all activities, rather than resting content with stamping out action, the political faculty par excellence.

“Freedom and Politics,” in Thinking Without a Bannister, p. 223 (a lecture first published in 1961)

Fossil fuels and authoritarianism

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 10:51:00 -0500

I’ve just finished reading Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun. It’s a good read; I’ve written my notes on it, which will be published in my January reading page at the end of the month. But I find the following passage particularly telling and appropriate to the moment. Drawing on Samuel Miller McDonald’s book Progress (2024), McKibben notes that the share of American wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans increased from 8.5% in 1800 to 50% in 1900. Further, McDonald writes, this increase was “partly thanks to fossil fuels, which could be easily concentrated, controlled, and transformed into liquid capital by a small management class. … Because fossil fuels themselves are easy to concentrate, they often yield authoritarian outcomes. … [A petrostate is] fifty percent more likely to be authoritarian and only a quarter as likely to transition to democratic government than a state without petroleum as a major economic base” (p. 181).

I was already frustrated, dismayed, and angered by Trump’s doing everything in his power (and some things not in his legitimate power) to destroy efforts to leave fossil fuels behind; reading about this research intensifies all three of those emotions.

Luxury doesn't mean freedom

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:18:00 -0500

Margaret Canovan:

The USA in particular, after being spared the desperate poverty that wrecked the French Revolution, had become the most advanced example of a society devoted to consumption. If the French revolutionary mob had been too poor to be citizens, modern Americans, Arendt thought (echoing classical republican invective against “luxury and corruption”) were too much immersed in the pursuit of affluence. “While it is true that freedom can only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires” (pp. 232f; quoting Arendt’s On Revolution, p. 139).

Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, p. 139

Boredom, daydreaming, and writing

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:30:00 -0500

This past fall I was lucky enough to have lunch with a dozen or so of our extended family members and long-time friends. Though many of these people didn’t know each other, I think the close connection that each of them had with my wife and me created a opportunity for the sort of engagement ordinarily reserved for long-time close friends. It was a remarkable occasion, with the conversation topics ranging from politics to favorite foods to religion and sports.

One part of the conversation has remained with me for months. Someone at the table invited us to consider the experience of being bored. “Would you say that you get bored often or only occasionally?” Several talked about being bored on occasion. I said (perhaps too arrogantly) that I’ve never been bored, simply because I always have something to think about. In fact, I said, there have been many times in my life when I’ve fervently wished that I could stop thinking, even if just for a moment.

But as I’ve thought about this claim again and again (see what I did there?) over the last few months, I’ve come to see a different side of it. Recalling this exchange is not the only thing that opens this up for me. There’s also the unsettling realization that almost every time I come to a break in the flow of my life I reach for my phone. I’m watching the Celtics game (can you believe that the Celtics are now in second place in the NBA Easter Conference, a half game up on the Knicks?!?). The action on the floor stops because of a time-out or the end of a quarter and the television goes to a commercial. Without giving it a thought, I reach for the phone that’s in my pocket. Sometimes — but not every time — I catch myself while the phone is still in my pocket and push myself to leave it there. “Surely you can think for a minute!” I say to myself. “Mute the television and think!” I say. And I do.

In The Siren’s Call, Chris Hayes writes that “the experience of boredom — when it appears, how important it is, whether it even exists — changes across time and the forms of human social and economic organization. Our age features a set of technologies and social conditions that work together to maximize our boredom if we are not constantly diverted from it” (p. 66). Those technologies and social conditions are in my pocket throughout the day. When the Celtics game broadcast goes to commercial, I don’t consciously decide to look at my phone. But something in me pushes for an external stimulus that keeps me from turning inward. I’m still not convinced that I’m bored if I’m left without some sort of external stimulus, but reaching immediately for my phone, whether by deliberate decision or mere habit, suggests that I’m trying to avoid something. When I watch my hand moving toward the pocket, I can’t help but think of the person who recently stopped smoking, unconsciously reaching for the pocket where the cigarettes used to be.

Arthur Brooks suggests that boredom is crucial to our well-being because it’s when the brain’s default mode kicks in. In I heard there was a secret chord, Daniel Levitin describes the default mode network as “a collection of distributed, interconnected brain regions that are suppressed when a person is focused on something in the external environment. … This same network is active when our brains are at rest during quiet waking, or when our thoughts are unguided during daydreaming” (p. 81).

I know that this is a major theme in contemporary culture, and that I’m by no means the only one determined to leave the phone alone. But I’m struggling with it in large part because of what I’m trying to do in this blog. I also know that we humans faced this problem before the advent of the smart phone. Consider this from Lyanda Haupt’s Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit:

“…in her 1938 classic, If you want to write, Brenda Ueland declares aimless attention essential to good work and deep thought: ‘So you see the imagination needs moodling — long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas … but they have no big ideas’” (pp. 72f).

So, the question whether I say that I’m bored, thinking, or daydreaming seems to be beside the question. The real question — or, perhaps I should say — the challenge I face — is whether I’m willing to spend at least part of my time without external stimulus, merely letting my thoughts roam where they will. I’d really like to do more to test the thesis that aimless thought could indeed lead to more focused writing.

Medical lexicon: what's your complaint?

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:50:00 -0500

Pria Anand:

The term complaint seems to have entered the medical lexicon even earlier than deny, first documented in a seventeenth-century monograph on surgery in which patients “complain” of everything from vertigo to blindness to “an ill night’s rest.” The language of medicine still reduces patients’ symptoms to “complaints,” as though they are something as petty as a biting Yelp review — as if to suggest that a more stoic person would bear them without complaint, that to endorse them is a form of weakness. In the language of medicine, a chief complaint is what brings a person to the hospital — a headache or chest pain. The terms deny and complaint are diametrically opposed — one to refuse a symptom, the other to claim it — but both are a form of judgment. The lexicon is combative, suggesting that patients and doctors are adversaries in the labor of healing.

The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of our Brains, pp. 144f

Reading thick and thin

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:09:00 -0500

In yesterday’s missive, Joan Westenberg explores the difference between thin and thick desires. As is often the case after reading one of her pieces, I find that it’s difficult to stop thinking about it. That, I think, is one of the marks of good writing. Thanks, Joan.

As she says, others have discussed this distinction between thick and thin desires. My own understanding of such a distinction is grounded in Clifford Geertz’s distinction, building on the work of Gilbert Ryle, between a contextually rich thick description of cultural practices, contrasted with a thin description of observable behaviors.

She frames the distinction between thick and thin rather simply:

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.

A thin desire is one that doesn’t.

She offers an example of each. One might have the desire to learn calculus. Fulfilling that desire leaves one a changed person — one sees and understands relationships in the world that one could neither see nor understand before learning calculus. Or a person might have the desire to check for notifications on one’s phone. Fulfilling that desire doesn’t change the person. In fact, these days, the design of the phone and software both conspire to keep that desire alive even after repeated fulfillments. (The skeptic in me immediately thought but the notification might signal the arrival of an important email that changes my life! But the satisfaction of receiving such an email is really the satisfaction of a desire significantly different from the desire to check for notifications.)

But somehow Westenberg’s rather simple framing of it struck home and put me into a mode of what I might call thick thinking. I came to a slightly different point. To put the point rather awkwardly: One might satisfy the same desire either thinly or thickly, and the difference is one that makes a difference.

I think this way of framing the point came to mind both because of my long-ago reading of Geertz and also because of something I’ve noticed recently in my reading practice. I have a desire to read. One of the books I’m reading now is Hester Kaplan’s fascinating memoir Twice Born: finding my father in the margins of biography. Kaplan writes about how she came to know her biographer father much better after he died than she knew him while he was living. Her father was rather withdrawn and didn’t talk much about his past life. Kaplan gets clues to his life and identity by reading his notes and letters, and also by reading his highly regarded biography of Mark Twain. Her parents were both writers. She grew up in a Cambridge (MA) household visited regularly by prominent writers and scholars. I know next to nothing about many of these visitors, but my reading of her accounts of them leads me to investigate further. As I read, I feel that I’m coming to know both her and her father and also the cultural world in which they lived rather deeply. My reading also changes me in more personal ways, as her account of her relationship with her father leads me to reflect more deeply on my sometimes troubled relationship with my father and my life as a father myself. Simply put, as I read I build out a larger context that envelopes what Kaplan says and brings it into my life and identity. I’d say — again, somewhat awkwardly — that my reading of this book is decidedly thick.

Contrast this with my current reading of another book, equally fascinating: In the Land of the Cyclops, a collection of essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard. My son gave me a copy of Knausgaard’s Winter several years ago. Reading it brought me into a different world. I no longer remember many of the details, but I do remember how what I read percolated in my mind for months after finishing it. So when I saw this newer collection on a bookstore shelf after hearing Zadie Smith’s enthusiastic endorsement of Knausgaard’s essays, it was an easy decision to put it on my list. But now, just over 100 pages in, I have to admit not only that I’m challenged by the text, but also that I’m not meeting that challenge very well. It’s a difficult read for me, both because of the depth and breadth of cultural knowledge that Knausgaard brings to his writing and because of the rather subtle way in which he develops his discussion. Occasionally I note observations that I think are particularly insightful, but I know that I’m not coming close to gaining the deeper understanding – the life-changing understanding — that a more careful reading would yield. I’d say that I’m reading this collection of essays thinly, a stark contrast to my thick reading of Kaplan’s memoir.

So this morning I face the question: do I set Knausgaard aside, acknowledging that at this point I’m simply not ready/able to give it the attention it deserves? Do I continue reading thinly, collecting the occasional insight? Or do I push myself to engage more deeply in my reading, with the expectation that he will once again lead me to see the world in a different way?

I’m not sure of my answer, though I know that my attachment to sunk costs makes it rather difficult to put the book away. Even so, I’m inclined to think that if I’m not ready to engage more deeply, setting it aside is the better choice.

The enduring power of anxieties

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:28:00 -0500

Christian Wiman:

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

My Bright Abyss, pp. 9f

Birth, death, and the abyss of unlearning

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:19:00 -0500

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

School is a place where we teach our children how things are. It creates a common understanding of how society, nature, and culture work, and a common sense of trust in the world. It makes the world self-explanatory and easy to operate in, not random. Doubt, wonder, the sudden abyss that opens up when we learn that we actually don’t know anything, come much later, if at all. But having a child, which is also something completely self-explanatory until it happens, or losing a loved one and seeing his or her dead body, which is also something self-explanatory until you’re standing there facing the abyss — this void that children come from and that the dead have disappeared into — is an unlearning. In these zones between life and death, what is self-evident has no power; in them there is no certainty. And it has always been this way, because death and birth have always been with us. Everyone who has seen a child being born, everyone who has seen a person lying dead, has been at a place where all knowledge, all insight, is invalidated. It is the place of the beginning of life, the place of the end of life. It is life’s borderland, where no other knowledge exists except the simplest: we all come from, and we all return to, this shell of flesh that is like us but no longer in us.

“Fate,” in In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays, p. 76

Freedom for some but not for others

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 17:34:00 -0500

Jenny Erpenbeck:

Why did people always pronounce the word ‘freedom’ with such enthusiasm, as they continue to do today, whenever they speak of the collapse of East Germany, whereas when people from other countries — from countries like Mali, Niger, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Haiti, and other “shitholes,” as Donald Trump recently described them — they’re met with contempt and aversion?

Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, pp 174f

December 2025

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 04:14:54 -0500

Some notes about books I finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

The Mind Electric

by Pria Anand

I heard Anand, a neurologist, speak on a panel entitled “The Brain’s Narrative: How Our Minds Make Sense of the World” at the Boston Book Festival recently. Anand introduced her comments about the mind and narrative by describing something from her clinical experience. On her first meeting with a patient suffering from some sort of memory loss, she begins by asking if she and the patient had ever met before. It’s not at all unusual, she said, for a patient to respond by saying something like “Oh, yes. We were childhood sweethearts.” The specific story isn’t the point — rather, it’s how the brain/mind puts together a narrative in which current experience might make sense.

Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

I discovered Erpenbeck a couple of years ago when she won the International Booker for her book Kairos. I read that, and found it to be very powerful. More recently, I’ve read a couple of her essay collections. Some of those essays referred to people she interviewed as she was writing Go, Went, Gone, and reading her accounts of those interviews served as a good introduction to this novel. The novel is a powerful, if straightforward, account of the plight of African asylum seekers in Germany in the 2010s. This plight is a hard one, and not without its ironies – on one hand, they are forbidden from working; on the other hand, they are criticized by many for being lazy and dependent on government support.

Readers of the novel learn of the lives of these immigrants through the experience of a recently retired academic named Richard. Richard is focused on his new life in retirement, and at the beginning of the novel is struggling to develop a sense of who he is in this new life. But a news account of African immigrants staging a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation catches his interest. The news account piques his curiosity, and he takes on the task of learning more about these men as a research project, in much the same way that he would have approached a project in his work as a classics scholar.

However, the project very quickly becomes more intimate as he gets to know the men through their stories. As he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the men — going with them to meetings with government officials, helping them to learn German, connecting with some of them through music — he finds a human connection and through that connection a deeper sense of the person that he is.

Reading the novel now alongside the news accounts of the current brutal oppression of immigrants in the United States is painful; Erpenbeck’s novel reminds me that each of these people is a human being with needs and aspirations much like my own.

Speaking in Tongues

by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos.

Coetzee, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, proposed to Dimópolos, his translator, that he write a book in English that she would then translate into Spanish. So far, a standard move. But he proposed also that the Spanish translation be published first and that it, rather than the original English, be the authoritative text used for the translation into other languages, including English. Ultimately, the publisher vetoed this idea, insisting that the original English must be the authoritative text. Despite the fact that Coetzee’s plan wasn’t realized, the experience did spark this fascinating dialogue about langauge and translation.

Coetzee and Dimópulos consider a range of questions: does language create the cultural world in which we live, or does it rather reflect a world that is already there? Would it be possible to create a universal language allowing a quick and easy translation between two existing languages, a universal language that in principle could replace all currently existing languages without any loss of meaning? What are we to make of the fact that some languages are gendered and others aren’t? In many languages, including German, French, and Spanish, nouns for both animate and inanimate entities are gendered. For example, Tisch, the German word for table, is masculine.

On the surface, this seems a relatively simple question with a relatively simple answer — when translating from German to English, merely disregard the fact that the German word for table is masculine. But Coetzee and Dimópulos point out that there are complications. For example, many speakers of English insist that we should give up some of our gender specifications because as a general rule the masculine form is the norm and the feminine form the exception. An example: the designation “the best poet of the late 20th century” could refer to a man or a woman, but “the best poetess of the late 20th century” can only be a woman. Or, to use an example I frequently brought up in class discussions, why is it that people sometimes refer to a “woman doctor” but never to a “man doctor”?

But Dimópulos points to something that I hadn’t considered. Someone whose birth language is gendered could see the English insistence that we give up gendered language as an instance of those who speak the dominant language forcing their views on those who speak the less dominant.

They both note that English is the dominant language; Coetzee points out that this dominance is not because people around the world are eager to read Shakespeare in the original English. Instead, he says, it’s primarily because English is the langauge of commerce.

But the dominance has implications beyond the financial:

…the volume of books translated into German is approximately five times greater than that of books translated into English in the United States…. Of those books translated into German, the great majority were originally written in English — for 2022, 60.4 percent were translated from English, followed by 12.2 percent from Japanese and 10.6 percent from French. … Of the total amount of books written in German language in Germany, only 4 percent were sold for English-translation rights (p. 86).

One might get the impression that those of us who speak and read English aren’t much interested in the writing of those who speak other languages.

This is a short book, and I read it rather quickly. But I’ll be thinking about the issues and questions it raises for much longer.

Ephemeral world, ephemeral thoughts

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:23:00 -0500

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water and wind. The raindrops that drip from the gutter, the leaf whirled into the air, the clouds that slip over the ridge, the water that trickles toward the stream, the river that runs into the sea, the waves that form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique forms. We can see this, for the time in which such movement occurs is synchronized with that of our own existence. We refer to that time as the now. And what happens within us in the now is not dissimilar to what happens outside us, a continual formation and breaking apart that never ceases as long as we live: our thoughts. On the sky of the self they come drifting, each unique, and over the precipice of oblivion they vanish again, never to return in the same shape.

“All that is in heaven,” In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays, pp. 4f

Whitehead again – this time on growth, good, and evil

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:22:00 -0500

Jim Nielsen has some good thoughts in which he builds on a post by Mandy Brown. I’m piggy-backing on both Nielsen and Brown here to develop another point about Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. (Over the last couple of years I’ve thought I might develop a series of posts about Whitehead – last week I wrote what I was thinking might be the first post in such a series. As I said in that post, I don’t have a systematic approach in mind. Instead, I’m thinking I’ll write when something I read reminds me of Whitehead in some way. The posts by Jim Nielsen and Mandy Brown did just that.)

They’re talking about growth. Brown points us to James Hillman’s insistence that it’s much better to grow down rather than up: “think rather of growing down, of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others.” Hillman suggests that this could well lead to a more healthy sense of self, focusing on “shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth.” Brown builds on this point, reflecting on how we might understand the world of work and our success in it differently if we move from growth to craft:

…what does it mean to see our work as craft rather than as growth? What are we shaping, handling, or doing something with? The metaphor of growth is one of hunger, consumption, acquisition — to acquire more pips on your collar, more titles after your name, more people under your domain. But craft asks instead, what are you doing? What reality comes into being with your shaping and working? What is in your hands and in your heart?

I’m six years into retirement, so I’m no longer struggling with the question how best to see the work I’m doing. But I find it helpful to think of the reading and writing I’m doing now as a craft by which I shape myself rather than a series of accomplishments. If I could think in those terms consistently, I think I would sleep better at night.

Nielsen takes off from Brown’s point with some reflections on the nature of growth. The title of his post — Grow, like a tree not a cancer — immediately had me thinking of Whitehead. He develops the point of his title:

Tree growth responds to its environment and integrates with its ecosystem. Growth is sustainable, balancing expansion and repair. It scales in harmony with its context.

Cancer growth is selfish, consuming resources at the expense of its host. Growth is uncontrolled until the system that supports it collapses. It scales through extraction until failure.

This reminds me of Whitehead’s discussion of the crucial difference between good and evil. He uses the traditional theological terms of “good” and “evil” here, but he’s talking about processes at the root of everything that is. “The common character of all evil is that its realization in fact involves that there is some concurrent realization of a purpose towards elimination. … Evil is positive and destructive; what is good is positive and creative” (Religion in the Making, pp. 95f). The evil is inherently unstable — it promotes its own destruction by eventually destroying the environment in which it develops.

One reason I was quick to think of Whitehead upon reading Nielsen’s post is that when teaching this point in Whitehead’s philosophy I often used the metaphor of cancer, suggesting that cancer cells grow prolifically until they destroy the host in which they are living. Further, he suggests that the good is good in large part because it is in solid relationship with its environment. But the metaphor shouldn’t lead us to think he’s talking only about physiological processes. Whitehead is willing to apply it also to a person so convinced of their moral goodness that they think those who disagree with them to be fundamentally inferior.

Good people of narrow sympathies are apt to be unfeeling and unprogressive, enjoying their egotistical goodness. Their case, on a higher level, is analogous to that of the man completely degraded to a hog. They have reached a state of stable goodness, so far as their interior life is concerned. This type of moral correctitude is, on a larger view, so like evil that the distinction is trivial (p. 98).

To return to Neilsen’s metaphor, the good person lives in sympathy with others just as trees in a forest live in sympathy with other organic processes. The tree’s roots ground it solidly, but they are also serve to exchange nutrients and even defenses with trees and other forms of organic life.

Moving to an even larger scale, this provides yet another way to characterize the cost of our living as though the resources of the earth supporting our continued life are infinite rather than finite. A vision of a future in which we have changed the earth’s environment so drastically that it no longer supports our existence seems more and more realistic. We humans might be like a cancer that ultimately destroys its host; the difference is that the earth itself might well continue to evolve, supporting the development of other organisms who just might be willing to live more like a tree and less like a cancer.

The possibility of this vision being realized presents one of the most significant challenges we face today. To return to the question that Brown asks above, what world would we have our shaping and working bring into being? A world in which we continue to live and even flourish? Or a world no longer supportive of our existence?

Burning the stuff but cherishing the memories

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:40:00 -0500

Last week my wife looked around our living room. “I think there are too many stacks of too many books in this room.” Or something like that. I look around the room and see opportunities (or something like that). She looks around the room and sees clutter.

While we disagree about how many books is too many books, we both believe that we need to do more to declutter our lives. We downsized to a much smaller residence a half-dozen years ago, and we would definitely be more at ease in our space if there were fewer objects filling it up.

While she was out of town these last few days I took a pass through my book collection, selecting books (opportunities!) that I’m willing to offer to someone else. I’ve already put several dozen in the donations bin at our local library. I have another dozen or so I’ll be sending off to Thriftbooks as soon as I can find a suitable box. And a third set of several dozen that I’m hoping to sell to one of our neighborhood used bookstores, where I’ll likely get pennies on the dollar. (Thriftbooks isn’t interested in these because they were published before each book had its own ISBN.) When my wife comes home later today, I wonder if she’ll notice that, for the moment at least, there are no stacks of books in the living room. (I hope I’ve not just given away the secret. She looks at this blog rarely enough that I’m willing to take the risk.)

Still, we have more work to do. There are many books on the shelves, in addition to all those other things taking up space. All of these things embody attachments that move beyond the physical objects themselves. They remind us of experiences that we had, experiences that shape who we are and the life that we’ve shared. However, Jenny Erpenbeck now has me thinking differently about these objects and our attachments to them:

Recently, a Russian woman came to visit me. She moved to Germany a year ago with four children. A piano, how lovely! she says as she enters my apartment. Books, how lovely! A few steps farther on, she points to a few of my son’s drawings hanging on the wall and says: Lovely! She adds: It’s lovely to have something like that. At first, I don’t understand what she means; after all, she has four children herself. Well, she says, and smiles, you can’t take it all with you. Sure, sure, I say. So, she says, still smiling, we made a big bonfire, we all sat around it, then we took page after page in our hands, we looked at everything again and remembered who drew this or that, how old she was at the time, we enjoyed it together one last time, and then we burned it all. It was a lovely bonfire, we were singing. I don’t say anything now. You can’t take it all with you, she repeats, and says with a smile: We left with four children and two large suitcases. That was all (Things that Disappear, pp. 67f).

We still have the stuff, even though we know that ultimately we can’t take it with us. I’m thinking, though, that we might benefit from finding a way to cherish the memories even as we abandon the stuff.

Whitehead matters

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 13:31:00 -0500

I first read Alfred North Whitehead over fifty years ago, in a college Philosophy of Science class. We read a chunk of his Science and the Modern World. I don’t remember much of what we discussed in that class, but I still have the paperback copy of the book sitting on my shelf. The markings and marginal notes I see there suggest that while I made some sense of it, I wasn’t fully persuaded by his account.

Two or three years later, I did a deep dive into Whitehead’s philosophy under the direction of a professor who had studied with both Victor Lowe and Charles Hartshorne, two prominent scholars of Whitehead’s philosophy. Lowe wrote a solid introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and also a comprehensive two-volume biography. Hartshorne was Whitehead’s colleague for a few years at Harvard and is generally recognized as one of the best, if not the best, interpreter of his work. (This is not to say that Hartshorne merely developed Whitehead’s thought. He has his own view of things before encountering Whitehead. It’s also worth noting that Hartshorne developed a philosophical theology that’s much more detailed than Whitehead’s.) This second encounter with Whitehead was decisive for me — I thought then and still think today that his philosophy of organism is the best general philosophical account of the self and the world that I’ve read. I even remember telling a friend something like “Whitehead wrote the books that I wish I could have written.”

Of course, I’m not Whitehead, and I’ve not written those books. But as I read more broadly in retirement, it’s not at all unusual for me to see echoes of Whitehead’s thought, and not just or even primarily in philosophical texts. I also occasionally see positions that I think a writer could enhance and strengthen by bringing Whitehead into the discussion. It seems to me that there’s now a bit more interest in process philosophy in general and Whitehead in particular these days than there was a decade or two ago, but I know that this is still a minority view in philosophy. I regret that.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I might write an occasional blog post about Whitehead’s thought – nothing all that systematic, but rather an assortment of posts describing moments like the ones I mention above, instances when I read something that has me thinking about something in Whitehead’s philosophy. This post is the first one of that sort.

Consider this passage from Jenny Erpenbeck’s brief essay on Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

Ovid knows that every static state preserves within itself the process of its own becoming, that movement is contained within the things themselves, in the form of waiting. In his stories, possibility and memory find a refuge alongside each other and with each other. And he knows: Only when we speak of metamorphoses does that which is lost retain its identity (Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, p. 156).

One of Whitehead’s central insights concerns the nature of the self. (In fact, some have said — I have said — that if he convinces you to see the self as he sees it, he’s like the camel who has pushed his head through the flap across the entrance to your tent. The rest of the camel is sure to follow!) Many would say that there is something essential and permanent in one’s identity as a self, and that at each moment one is that essential self playing a particular role. Yet those who hold this view struggle to identify just what this permanent self is. Whitehead flips this traditional understanding of self on its head. He says that the actual self is the self as it exists at any particular moment, and that the ongoing self is really a society of selves. At each moment, a new self comes to be, inheriting the experiences of all the selves that preceded it, pulling those many selves and experiences together into the self as it exists at that moment. Then, having reached this fulfillment, it perishes, passing its heritage on to the self that follows and in this way shapes the possibilities that are open to these selves. Simply put, “the self perishes, and yet lives forever more” in the selves that follow.

Having developed this understanding of the self, Whitehead generalizes it, using it as a model for constructing a general account of everything that is real. He would say along with Ovid that “every static state preserves within itself the process of its becoming,” and also that possibility and memory reside together in the present. Each static state is the culmination of a process that pulls earlier states together into one, and then contributes itself to the states that follow. “The many become one, and then there is one more.”

Memory and imagination

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:42:00 -0500

Siri Hustvedt:

In a 1995 essay on memory, ‘Yonder,’ I wrote the following sentence: ‘Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.’ It seemed to me fifteen years ago, and still seems to me today, that the mental activity we call memory and what we call the imagination partake of the same mental processes. They are both bound up with emotion and, when conscious, they often take the form of stories. Emotion, memory, imagination, story — all vital to our subjective mental landscapes, central to literature and psychoanalysis and, much more recently, hot topics in the neurosciences.

Living, Thinking, Looking, p. 175

A father's gift of a lifetime

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:47:00 -0500

I suppose that almost everyone has a tale to tell in these digital times about a crucial file or two lost in a hard disk crash or some other malfunction. (An aside: There are pre-digital versions of this story as well. One such story, perhaps apocryphal, that floated around my graduate school was an account of a graduate student who took the only copy of his just-finished dissertation with him to a diner to proof-read and accidentally left it there. According to the story, it was already discarded and on the way to the dump when he discovered his mistake and he had to rewrite the entire thing.)

For years, the only document of any value that I had lost was the digital journal I kept for the first two weeks of our son’s life. I don’t remember just how I lost it, but I do remember punishing myself for not keeping proper back-ups.

I thought of this recently when I found this account of a much more ambitious project related to the birth of a child. The site is in German. A father describes how he couldn’t sleep when he returned home after the birth of his daughter. He decided to write his feelings about his new fatherhood status in the form of a letter to his new-born daughter. He happened to have a paperblanks book in a cupboard, and decided to write something there. Of course the one letter didn’t fill the book, so he thought he would continue writing. But having started the project, he couldn’t find a reasonable stopping point. So he kept it up — over the next 20 years he wrote regular letters to his daughter in which he described what was going on in her life and in the family. He didn’t write every day; as she grew older the time between letters grew. Still, he amassed quite a collection; you can see a photo of a stack of them on his web site. The title of the blog post translates roughly to “A project completion report.” His daughter recently turned 20, and he presented all of his handwritten letters to her, a collection of books, each bound with string between solid covers. What a gift!

I wish that I still had the much briefer journal I kept over 30 years ago and could share it with our son.

H/T to 82mhz for the link.

No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 13:34:00 -0500

Alexander Kluge:

It is a mamtter of observation that there are limits to what people will put up with. At unexpected points that cannot be determined in advance, people develop a will of their own. No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope. What we can do is devote boundless effort to the concrete areas in which we ourselves work. Whether that will prove useful in teh end is, to put it melodramatically, in God’s hands; but you could also say that it’s in all of our hands. Human willfulness is reliable and invincible. It returns again and again. It is a phoenix.

Quoted in Jenny Erpenbeck’s “On ‘On the Book of Words,’” Bamberg Lecture II, reprinted in Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, p. 110.

Book collecting

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:53:00 -0500

Jeanette Winterson:

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

This is a straight-up copy-and-paste steal from Wry Writer. I couldn’t pass it up.

Another role for university: learning how to live

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:59:00 -0500

Jenny Erpenbeck:

It would be nice if the university weren’t something like the gateway to a career, some sort of dues paid to the outside world where you have to succeed if you want to pay your rent, if it didn’t just give you time to learn how you work, but instead time to learn how you live, to learn what matters to you and what doesn’t, if the university could be the affirmation of one’s inner life, of a far-off, remote, uncharted, maybe even uncongenial landscape with its own calendar, where those who are seeking their own way have time to get lost, time to take detours, to meet this or that person along the way, to get excited about something, to despair of something, and sometimes just to lie in the grass, look at the clouds passing overhead, and leave room for thoughts to grow. Because what I referred to earlier as the ‘kernel of truth’ may find you where you least expect it.

“On ‘The Old Child’” (Bamberg Lecture I; reprinted in Not a Novel: a Memoir in Pieces," p. 92)

Walls and surveillance in a troubled world

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:51:00 -0500

I began work on this post over a week ago. I reworked it several times over the course of the week, even as I thought more often than not that it’s really more of a personal journal entry than a public blog post. As the heading says, these are troubling times, even as we’re starting to get some hints that we might be seeing the beginning of the end — or at least the end of the beginning — in a sense, a retreat from the precipice. Still, I think it’s important that we continue to find ways to register our opposition to the current trends in public and not just in private, and so I decided as I worked on it today that this is one instance when I want the private, even something as rough as this, to be public.

The collection of letters Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher exchanged over 32 years is entitled Within Four Walls. The title is drawn from one of Arendt’s letters, in which she celebrates the community she has found with her husband: “for God’s sake, you are my four walls.” Within those walls, protected from the larger world, each of them could be fully open to the other, finding both the support and the challenge that enabled each to flourish. This is not to say that their marriage was an easy one — they had challenges that might have led others to go their separate ways — but they worked through those challenges.

I found myself thinking about the importance of walls recently while reading Zadie Smith’s “The Dream of the Raised Arm,” an essay she wrote on 5 November 2024, a date that many will recognize as being particularly significant in American history. (The essay is included in her recently released essay collection Dead and Alive.) I almost referred to 5 November as a date which will live in infamy, but I fear that it’s a bit premature to make that claim. If it’s the winners who write the history, we can’t know yet just what that history will say.

While writing the essay Smith was on a plane carrying her from Europe to the United States. She had some trepidation as she wrote: “There’s no Wi-Fi on this plane, so I am in a Schrödinger’s cat sort of situation — a dreamscape if you will — in which Trump has won and not won, and keeps on winning and not winning, as I sit suspended over the clouds” (p. 202). Much of her essay is a description of several dreams described by Charlotte Beradt, a friend of Arendt’s. In Germany in the 1930s, Beradt began to have nightmares as the Nazis solidified their power. She thought that she wasn’t the only one having such dreams, and discreetly asked associates to describe their dreams. She transcribed these descriptions, brought them with her when she escaped to the United States in 1939, and finally published them with commentary in 1966 under the title The Third Reich of Dreams.

Beradt gives a dream of a 45-year-old doctor the title “Life without walls”:

At around nine o’clock, after my workday was done and I was about to relax on the sofa with a book on Matthias Grünewald, the walls of my room, of my whole apartment, suddenly disappeared. I looked around in horror and saw that none of the apartments as far as the eye could see had any walls left. I heard a loudspeaker blare: “Per Wall Abolition Decree dated the 17th of this month.” … Now that the apartments are totally public, I’m living on the bottom of the sea in order to remain invisible.

The lack of walls means the lack of privacy, the loss of a private realm, protected from the larger world in which one can flourish. It’s no surprise that the growing influence of Nazism occasioned such a dream, and it’s no surprise to me that Smith goes on to bemoan the lack of privacy in our current world. Yet again, I wonder — as I often wonder in these blog posts and elsewhere — how much of our lives will remain ours if and when the Trump administration meets its goals? So much has already been taken from so many people. And the government’s reported plans to collect and aggregate so much information about so many people is terrifying.

Further, how much of our lives remain ours as our actions are distilled into the data used to predict and manipulate our behavior? As Smith says in another essay, the encroachment of social media has demolished walls between private and public, dissolving any distinction between them.

It’s the double theft that gets me. The way it makes the public private, and the private public. The first theft is of the commons itself. By which I mean that shared, public space that every human until very recently experienced as a natural right, especially children. … And then there’s the second theft: the private made public. … We have decimated what was left of our kids’ privacy [and, in many cases, our own]; they are entirely porous to the world, even in the seclusion of their rooms. There’s no backstage to life anymore (pp. 116ff).

No backstage to life. The wall between public and private becomes ever more porous. I fear where we’re headed. For more than a decade now I’ve been concerned about a growing autocracy, fearing that we might be nearing the end of democratic experiments that have played out, however imperfectly, in the United States and in other democracies around the world. I’ve also been concerned about the increasing encroachment of social media and big tech more generally into our day-to-day world. Seeing the images of President Trump, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the collection of wealthy tech and business leaders in the same room last night makes it clear that those two threats are merging into one. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’m only now coming to see a connection that’s been present for a long time.

Creating culture to avoid loneliness

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:30:00 -0500

Beryl Markham:

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents — each man to see what the other looked like.

West with the Night, quoted in Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, pp. 141f

Thinking out loud about thinking out loud

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 11:17:00 -0500

Since I’ve rambled on much longer than I’d planned to in this post, I’ll move the punch line from the end to the beginning. It’s a gem I found in Zadie Smith’s appreciation for the writing of Hilary Mantel, republished in Smith’s collection Dead and Alive:

Role models are one thing, but some models work more heavily upon you, weighing you down with their brilliance, until they feel like doors opening out onto somewhere than walls simply too high to scale.

The first post in this blog is dated 1 January 2023, so I’m now coming up on the three-year anniversary. As I said in that first entry, I’ve started several blogs over the last few decades, a couple of them before the term “blog,” — or, even earlier, “weblog” — was in common use. I was determined either to keep this one going or to acknowledge that my shy self simply isn’t suited to putting myself out there (or would it be here?). Coming up on three years, I have to say that I’m not fully settled in. But I’m trying.

When I started blogging again, I had this idea that I would seek inspiration from a genre of writing that’s older than the blog. I would read essays by really good writers, paying attention not only to what they wrote but to how they wrote it. I knew that blogging is different from essaying, but there’s a sense in which they both echo the origins of the term essay. Consider this from etymonline:

essay (n)

1590s, “trial, attempt, endeavor,” also “short, discursive literary composition” (first attested in writings of Francis Bacon, probably in imitation of Montaigne), from French essai “trial, attempt, essay” (in Old French from 12c.), from Late Latin exagium “a weighing, a weight,” from Latin exigere “drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test,” from ex “out” (see ex-) + agere “to set in motion, drive” (from PIE root *ag- “to drive, draw out or forth, move”) apparently meaning here “to weigh.” The suggestion is of unpolished writing.

I call the blog thinking out loud in large part to signal that what I write is much more in the vein of process than polished product. Essays these days are generally — but not always — more polished than blog posts. I thought I could look past the polish, focusing on strategies and techniques with an eye for what I might bring to shorter blog posts. I also thought it might be easier to moderate the flow, since I would have to seek out physical books at the library or bookstore rather than merely firing up elfeed. (I declared elfeed bankruptcy several years ago simply because I couldn’t keep up with the quantity of good writers I was following.) I can’t list here all of the essayists I’ve read over the last few years, but I’ll mention Philip Lopate. He comes to mind, not only because he’s a very good writer, but also because A Year and a Day, one of his books, is actually a collection of 46 blog entries he wrote at the invitation of Sudip Bose, an editor at The American Scholar. He says he accepted that invitation in part because he liked Bose. They had never met face-to-face, but he appreciated how Bose engaged in their email correspondence. Still, Lopate came to blogging with considerable reluctance:

When my late friend Peter M., a worldly man, advised me to keep a blog coincident with the publication of my last book, I pooh-poohed the idea. I also told my publisher’s publicist: I don’t blog, I don’t tweet, I’m not on Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, so you’ll just have to promote me without my assisting in these newfangled technical ways. I was playing the geezer card. Never, I thought, would I consent to keep a blog, that catchment for random drivel.

And yet, he not only wrote 46 blog entries over the course of that year; he actually came to like the practice. And he brought the art of the personal essay to blogging.

If Lopate could come “down” to blogging practice, surely I could push myself to rise to the occasion.

And this is why the line I quoted from Zadie Smith up at the top hit so hard. Lopate and all the others write so well that I simply can’t measure up to them, at least in the time I’m willing to allot to this blog. So I return to my question: should I simply admit that I’m not suited to putting myself out in a forum like this one?

As I thought about that question this morning, I surprised myself by remembering something I would sometimes say about teaching and learning to professors and graduate students: One way to ease students into learning is to show them some of your own preliminary thinking. Help them to see that you’ve worked very hard, through multiple drafts, some of them very rough, to get to the polished product. Consider the possibility that at least part of your teaching strategy is to think in public.

Of course, that’s the sort of thing I had in mind when I called this blog thinking out loud and added the tagline writing to see what I think. It doesn’t have to be perfectly polished, I said to myself. And some posts might be more polished, while others — like this one — are more an account of a meandering journey than a well-structured endpoint. That’s the mantra I’m repeating to myself — and, I guess, to you — this morning.

Emacs/elfeed discovery

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:29:00 -0500

Just a brief post about a today I learned something about emacs experience. Like many of those experiences, the learning was purely accidental. But it’s going to enhance my emacs workflow — in fact, it sparked another one of those Emacs excitement surges. I’m recording it here in large part because I want to remember how to do this, but perhaps someone else will find it useful as well.

I use elfeed to read my RSS feed (and elfeed-org to manage the feed list). I was happily reading through today’s entries just now, when I messed up a keystroke. Suddenly, each of the links in the post I was reading had an initial letter highlighted. It took me a second to realize that if I input the letter highlighted in one of those links, the page linked there would open in my browser. That’s really cool, I thought — much more efficient than what I had been doing — using the regular cursor movement keys to move point to a link that looked interesting.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know what key I had pressed to make that happen. But this is emacs, I thought, as I remembered that there’s an emacs function — view-lossage, bound to <C-h l> — that shows recent keystrokes. Executing this function led me to elfeed-goodies/show-link-hint, which is bound to <M-v>.

So, today I learned about this cool function and key-binding. Here’s hoping that I’ll still remember it tomorrow.

The death of the ad hominem

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 11:12:00 -0500

Zadie Smith:

…if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identifies are opinions. Unfollow!

“The Instrumentalist: On Tár,” in Dead and Alive: Essays, pp. 46f

November 2025

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 15:00:00 -0500

Some notes about books I finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

by Christine Webb

I really didn’t need to be convinced that the radical distinction my cultural tradition has made between humans and nature is misguided. I don’t remember now when I had my first doubts about this distinction, but my conviction that humans are a part of nature rather than somehow outside or even above it has grown stronger over the decades. As this book’s subtitle suggests, the arrogant ape of the title is the human being.

The value of this book for me is how Webb develops the implications of the dethroning of human exceptionalism. And she develops her argument on the strength of her own and of others’ scientific research into all sorts of natural elements, including humans. Her scientific specialization is the field of primatology, and one of the more striking points she makes in the book is that she was well along in writing it before she recognized that the very name of her field of study is an example of such exceptionalism: the term primates came into common use in the 19Th century, referring to the prime, or highest, order of mammals. The term didn’t refer exclusively to humans, but it was commonly assumed that humans were the primary one among the primates.

Another crucial insight, I think, is that the fact that Darwin’s work appeared as industrial capitalism was coming to the fore shaped the expression of evolutionary theory in ways that Darwin didn’t intend. In fact, she reports, the phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Darwin preferred the phrase “struggle for existence,” adding that he used this term “in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another” (pp. 198f). Darwin recognized the powerful threat of his proposals to humans’ standard self-image, writing to a friend that “writing On the Origin of Species was ‘like confessing a murder’” (p. 56).

Webb offers many examples to support her argument that the supposed qualitative distinctions between humans and other animals (and even plants) are merely that — supposed − and that they often depend on comparing humans and other organisms on uneven grounds. She details instances of other animals making and using tools. I’m especially impressed with crows, who take advantage of our busy streets by dropping walnuts on the pavement so that cars driving over them will crack the shells. The crows even take advantage of the rhythms of the traffic signals. She offers multiple examples of how other animals are more perceptive because they have evolved to have a greater variety of color-sensing cells in their eyes, or much stronger senses of taste and smell.

Another example: scientists have long argued that humans are unique in that we are self-aware. A young child can recognize themselves in the mirror. Others animals cannot. But the test depends on sight. More recently, researchers have shown that dogs also have a sense of self — they distinguish between their own odor and the odor of other dogs.

Webb shows how many indigenous cultures reject — or, perhaps, don’t even consider — the position of human exceptionalism, and argues that bringing the insights of many different cultures to bear on current issues would be fruitful for all.

Her point is not that humans aren’t different, and she’s not denying human intelligence, such as it is. Nor is she saying that we should value those animals whose level of intelligence is closest to our own more than other animals. Rather, it’s that every species is special in its own way. More importantly, it’s that every species is an integral part of a vast and interconnected network of beings. Discounting the myth of human exceptionalism is crucially important now if we are to dodge the risk posed by our own damage to the environment. Nature is not ours to tame and dominate; instead, it is the world in which we live and of which we are a part.

Robin Hood Math: Take Control of the Algorithms that Run Your Life

by Noah Giansiracusa

Though there was a time long ago when I thought I might major in math or physics, a time when I truly enjoyed working my way through complex mathematical puzzles, that part of my life is now long gone. I can do simple arithmetic in my head and I resist reaching for the calculator on my phone, but I’ve forgotten what I once knew about statistics. I picked up Robin Hood Math in part because I thought it would help me to remedy that deficiency. As Giansiracusa makes clear in his subtitle and develops in more detail in the first chapter, those seeking to manipulate and control our lives have developed sophisticated strategies — algorithmic strategies — to do just that. He suggests that understanding just how these things work can help us to fight back.

Along the way, he describes how to make difficult decisions or predictions by identifying significant factors and then using weighted measures of these factors. He explains how to judge relative risk, so that one might make a reasonable decision. For example, should one spend $200 on a medication that will prevent a long-term infection when it’s clear that there’s a 10% chance that one will get that infection? And he described Bayesian reasoning clearly enough that I can finally make sense of it.

Someone with a solid knowledge of statistics and Bayesian reasoning is unlikely to learn anything about math that they don’t already know. And someone who is familiar with the ways that Meta and other social media companies use algorithms to design a feed that will keep their eyes on the screen and exposed to still more advertisements won’t learn anything new either. But I found it helpful, not only to see some details about just how these algorithms work, but also to have fairly simple explanations of how I can use statistical reasoning to think more clearly.

Marrow and Bone

by Walter Kempowski

I found the premise of this book to be rather unbelievable. Jonathan, a rather aimless writer living in 1988 West Germany, stumbles into the assignment to travel through still-Communist eastern Prussia to write a guidebook for others scheduled to take a tour there. When he hits the road, Jonathan leaves Ulla behind in the apartment that they share without really sharing. Ulla, a decade or so younger that Jonathan, works as a gallery assistant. She’s also working on an exhibition which will unpack the practice, or art, of cruelty. The fact that Jonathan’s tour is financed by a Japanese car company planning a car tour featuring their massive and powerful automobiles is symbolic of apparent wealth in countries shaped and still haunted by past tragedy and cruelty.

Jonathan has roots in eastern Prussia. In fact, his life and self-understanding have been shaped by stories of his parents’ death in the war. His uncle – an uncle who is now helping to bankroll Jonathan’s life — reports that his mother died while giving birth to him in the dead of winter as she sought to escape the advancing Russians. Jonathan’s father had died in the war in a battle on the Baltic coast. While on the tour, Jonathan finds himself in the setting of each of these life-shaping stories, visiting the church and graveyard where her mother’s body was left and the site of his father’s death.

The novel is not just about Jonathan’s personal story. It also paints bleak pictures of both Germany and Communist Poland just before the fall of the Soviet Union. Just as Jonathan’s personal stories have shaped him, the larger accounts of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism shape both Germany and Prussia. How does one live with the memories of such atrocities?

The context in which I read this book is significant. So much of my thinking and living now centers on the question whether we in the United States will survive the onslaught of terror. How will we live with the guilt of not having done more than we’ve done to resist?

The Book of Records

by Madeleine Thien

I finished reading this novel sometime last spring, and I’m still haunted by it. It’s lurking in my mind for two reasons – first, because a depth here that I think I’ve not fully fathomed. It’s on my list of books to re-read at least once. There’s so much more to it than I’ve seen.

But the theme of the refugee that’s developed in so many ways, and Thien’s strategy of weaving factual details about historical refugees in with the rather fantastical world of her fictional characters is unsettling. I really don’t want to add spoilers here because I want people to read it for themselves, but this book has changed and deepened my understanding of Hannah Arendt’s life and thought, and it also has me thinking I really should find the definitive biography of Baruch Spinoza and read that. I read a good bit of Spinoza’s philosophy years ago, and along the way learned just a little bit about his life. Now I want to know more. And then there’s the Chinese poet Du Fu, about whom I knew absolutely nothing before reading Thien’s book.

There’s so much more to say about this book, but I think I’ll set that task aside until I find the time to read it again.

The Dream Hotel

by Laila Lalami

We’re all more or less accustomed to the fact that virtually everything we do in the world creates a data trail, and that there are governmental and commercial institutions interested in using those data in order to predict and in many cases control what we do in the world. But what if that data came to include the content of our dreams?

That’s the basic premise of The Dream Hotel. Sara, the protagonist, was having some difficulty sleeping after her first child was born, and so she had a chip installed in her brain that helped her to sleep. It’s worth noticing that she resisted this move initially, but she was relieved to find that it did indeed improve her sleep quality. However, she didn’t read through the terms of service (how many times have you clicked the button agreeing to such terms without reading the fine print?), and so didn’t know that the device recorded the content of her dreams and reserved the right to sell this information to others.

The book is set a couple of decades in the future, but it will seem familiar to those of us living today. The data tracking has become much more ambitious, and the government employs an AI engine to analyze each person’s data in order to generate what it calls a risk score, which the government thinks accurately reflects the possibility that you will create a crime. If a person’s risk score climbs above 500, then the government might lock that person away, continuing to monitor the situation until the risk score drops below 500. I say that the government might lock the person away because it seems that there’s some discretion, especially if the risk score is only a little above 500. What Sara discovers, though, is that the content of her dreams leads the AI engine to up her score. She learns this when she’s returning to the United States after attending a conference in England. Despite her protests — or perhaps in part because of the strength of her protests — she’s detained in what the book’s title refers to euphemistically as a dream hotel. She’s not imprisoned, say the authorities, because she’s not committed a crime. But she’s detained because the AI engine indicates that she might commit a crime.

But how can one lower one’s risk score when one is detained, especially if the private company handling the detention is paid based on the number and of those detained and the length of their detentions? Sara learns that it’s very difficult.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, except to say that I found the ending to be the most disappointing part of the book. It was a bit too contrived, and really didn’t resolve the tensions introduced over the course of the book — tensions that were heightened by how closely our own world anticipates the world of the novel.

I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

A dystopian novel that some say is the current version of The Handmaid’s Tale. A group of 40 women — one of them much younger than the others — are detained in an underground cage. They are constantly guarded by men who walk around the outside of the cage, ready to punish with their whips any woman who deviates from the rules. Such “deviations” include, among other things, raising one’s voice in anger, touching another woman in the cage, and attempting to commit suicide. The women aren’t sure how long they’ve been there and have only vague memories of the lives they lived before being imprisoned and even fewer memories of how they came to be where they are.

The youngest – a teenager? — knows even less about the past, but she’s eager to learn what she can from the other women. For the most part, they are not eager teachers.

The book, like the lives of the women, has no breaks — no chapters, no blank lines separating one passage from another. The writing, rather spare, works in concert with descriptions of the tedious lives of the women to immerse the reader in the dreary world.

The book takes an abrupt turn when the men abandon their positions just when they are delivering food into the cage, allowing the women to escape confinement. However, it’s not at all clear what the women are escaping from; nor is it clear where they are escaping to.

There’s obviously much more to say about this, but I’ll stop here so as not to spoil it for other readers. I will say, though, that while I found the reading tedious at times, I certainly felt myself to be living in a dystopian world.

The Situation and the Story

by Vivian Gornick

It seems to me that I think the best book I’ve read on writing is usually the book on writing that I’ve read most recently. That’s probably an overstatement, but it’s true that I find something new and insightful in virtually every book unpacking the writing task. But a version of this general claim seems particularly apt in this case: I think that Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story is the best book I’ve read on writing the personal essay.

I’ve already noted the central point that gives the book its title:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say (p. 13).

Gornick adds to that gem the point that the person writing a personal narrative needs to find a way somehow to step out of the stream of experience in order to find the narrator capable of capturing the insight to be shared. “How does the writer of personal narrative pull from his or her own boring, agaitated self the truth speaker who will tell the story that needs to be told?”

What I liked best in this book is the collection of deep dives into essays by writers who managed this particularly well: essays by writers like Joan Dideon, Harry Crews, and Edward Hoagland. (As an aside, I’ll say that it was also great to learn about essayists like Crews and Hoagland whose work I hadn’t known before reading this book.) She also includes extended quotations from essayists to illustrate the points that she makes.

All in all, I think this is the best book I’ve read that focuses on how to write an effective personal essay. (Or did I already say that?)

Things that Disappear and Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces

by Jenny Erpenbeck.

I’m combining my notes about these two essay collections. Though they are quite different from each other in style, both of them exhibit the power of Erpenbeck’s use of language.

Things that Disappear is a collection of brief newspaper columns that Erpenbeck wrote in 2009. As the title indicates, she’s writing about the contingent and the ephemeral. Earlier this fall I wrote a post incorporating her account of a story about leaving possessions behind. While I focused in my post on the value of letting go of possessions, Erpenbeck starts with the observation that she seems to lose something almost every time she takes a trip or moves from one house to another. In another essay she observes that useful objects seem to disappear when they are discarded — the Berlin Sanitation Department designates a discarded wardrobe as “wood” and a bicycle as “steel,” indicating that the object’s place in the world has changed. She writes about the distance between her and her young child when she leaves on a work trip. She writes about the surprise of disappearing youth, and how losing those whom we love, one friend at a time, reminds us of our approaching death. The last essay in the collection, entitled “The Author,” is especially brief, so brief that I can include all of it in these notes: “Surely you’ve also heard the theory that the author is disap…”

Not a Novel is a collection of longer essays, organized under the three major headings “Life,” “Literature and Music,” and “Society.” The headings work well enough, though I find the organization a bit uneven. Isn’t “life” much more broad than “Literature and Music”? Isn’t the latter part of the former? (I see that this English collection omits essays and categories included in a much larger German collection. Perhaps the organization made more sense in the German edition.) Setting that minor quibble aside, Erpenbeck’s powerful langauge comes through in these pieces. I found her account of immigrants and associated controversies particularly interesting, and not only because much of this writing is based on the interviews of immigrants she conducted while writing the novel Go, Went, Gone. The fact that I’m reading this novel now made her account of immigrants in these essays particularly striking.

Several of these essays are speeches that Erpenbeck in response to various literary awards she’s received. In those, she reflects on particular novels and short stories that she’s written and makes larger points about rhetorical practice and style. Consider, for example, that the fiction writer leaves many things unsaid, expecting the writer to construct the larger world in which the fictional characters live and act. “As paradoxical as it may seem: The untold side of a story can weigh even heavier in a reader’s mind than its twin, the hollow form of a story that is actually told.”

She raises questions about the nature of freedom — I say, for example, that these are the things that I believe, but I have to acknowledge that those beliefs have been shaped by my upbringing, by many conversations with friends, family members, teachers, and others. Where does their influence stop and my independent will begin?

It’s no surprise to me that I’ve included several quotations from Erpenbeck’s writing as commonplace entries in this blog. Reading her work — both her fiction and her essays — forces me to think alongside her.

My current reading and TBR lists

The destructive power of human "intelligence"

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:35:00 -0500

Christine Webb:

To cut a long story short, there is no universally accepted definition of “intelligence,” or way to measure it. Perhaps most generally, “intelligence” can be defined as how fast and successful organisms are in solving problems to survive in their natural and social environments. If chimpanzees had transformed the world but in doing so jeopardized their own livelihood, not to mention that of countless other species, would we be praising their intellect? In response to the ecological destruction caused by the dominant culture and eonomy, I’ve often heard people say we’re just “too intelligent for our own good,” but this view of intelligence remains stuck in seeing only one template — the human one.

The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters, p. 123

Getting older, and facing the surprise

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:09:00 -0400

You’ll note that many of my blog posts are tagged as commonplaces. My usual practice is to post these quotes from other writers without comment, without indicating why I found them to be worth quoting here. I’ve often wondered how well they stand up out of context — i.e., what readers who’ve not read (or not recently read) the text from which they’re taken make of them. I’ve even thought I might set myself the task of selecting a commonplace I quoted years ago (I find it hard to believe that I can say “years ago” in reference to this blog!), offering my reflections on it without consulting the larger work.

But I feel moved this morning to comment on the commonplace from Jenny Erpenbeck that I just posted. (If you’ve not already read that quote, click on the link and read it now. I’ll still be here when you come back.) Erpenbeck’s writing hit me really hard for several reasons. One big one is that a long-time friend died last week. John and I met over 50 years ago. Despite my tendency to withdraw from the world and largely because of his outreach, we maintained a close relationship across time and space. He’s not the first of my friends to die, but losing him is a very big deal. There’s really no one else in my life these days whom I’ve known that long. As I told his wife, there’s now a hole in my world. More than that, it’s a sign that death is drawing nearer, “one friend at a time.” Or, as May Sarton said, “Each such death is an earthquake that buries a little more of the past forever.”

There’s another, less cataclysmic, sign of my advancing age: the pain and stiffness in my hip that has made it difficult to exercise over the last week. I walk or bicycle pretty much everywhere I go — we live in an urban setting without a car — and the hip pain offers a hint that I might not manage this as well as I’ve managed it. Surely it will get better, I think. I suspect it will, but there will come a time when such things won’t get better.

However, the most poignant power of Erpenbeck’s quote for me this morning is not its reminder that John has died or that there’s pain in my hip. Those are both top of mind; I hardly need the reminder. What struck me is her emphasis on surprise. I remember something my mother said to me two or three years before she died, when she was about the age that I am now. “Funny,” she said, “I don’t feel like I’m as old as I am.” It occurs to me now that there’s feeling and then there’s feeling. My hip definitely feels older than it did even a few years ago, but somehow I don’t feel like I’m all that old; I find myself surprised by the signs of aging. Is that really my face looking back at me in the mirror? I definitely don’t feel old enough to have those wrinkles in my face, or to feel the pain in my hip that I’m feeling.

And then there’s that enigmatic last clause: “we’d prefer to forget that our lives often last longer than our ability to grow older.” She has me thinking that the key is to embrace the aging so that I’m not so surprised by the changes. These changes happen slowly, but they’re more and more apparent. Still, moving through the latter stages of life, just as moving through the stages long ago, can present opportunities for growth. I’m pushing myself to embrace these opportunities, to keep growing, despite the holes in my world and the pains in my body. Surprise, I suppose, can be alarming. But it can also be energizing.

Getting older by surprise

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 10:34:00 -0400

Jenny Erpenbeck:

The illnesses that begin to afflict us take us by surprise, they set our bodies in motion in different ways than we intend, slowing them down, speeding them up, disturbing their rhythm. They take us by surprise. The years leave their marks on our skin, which was still a child’s skin only recently, they leave the brown marks of old age, they make small letters blur before our eyes, they take us by surprise, and because it all happens so slowly, we don’t even understand when the transition took place, slowly the years carry men’s youth away, one hair at a time, they gradually, very gently, crease women’s skin, and we, we that remain in that skin, we see with those eyes, which now perceive small letters as an illegible blur, but we don’t see signs of aging in our thoughts, and that’s why we’re taken by surprise when the years have slipped over us like a dress, and we think that actually, if we wanted to, we could take them off again, that’s why our arms appear to grow more unfamiliar to us the older they get, to grow more distant the more they try to force us to acknowledge their closeness by confronting us with pain and impossibilities, that’s why we’re taken by surprise when our own exhaustion makes us faint, and when we consider the fact that death is drawing nearer to us, one friend at a time, we’d prefer to forget that our lives often last longer than our ability to grow older.

Things that disappear, pp. 69f

Scrambling to catch up

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:36:00 -0400

Perhaps this post is mistitled. Scrambling? Odd choice of verb there. But that’s the word that came to mind as I sought a title to this post. I’m hoping that what you read here is more in line with “identifying and then avoiding multiple obstacles as I try to complete a task” than with “scrambled eggs.” (I should admit that it could well be a sign of the latter if that last sentence survives the editing process!)

But the general point is that I’ve been distracted from reading and writing by all sorts of things over the past couple of months. Some traveling, a family wedding, more traveling, one of those significant wedding anniversaries — you know, the ones with a special status in the base-ten numbering system. Though I traveled with a laptop and books in my backpack, trips like these make it difficult to focus; and the catch-up with everyday things like laundry and such continue to distract after arriving home.

As the flurry of posts (do three or even four posts constitute a flurry?) today might indicate, I’m determined to return to some ordered and even orderly reading and writing. I’m determined to flesh out some of the blog posts that sit incomplete in my org file. I’m determined to post reading notes on the rather large pile of books I claim to have read over the last couple of months. I’m determined to read more books and to read them more carefully. Finally, I’m hoping that a somewhat different way to structure the list of books I’m reading and thinking about reading will help me to do the reading and writing that I claim I want to do.

I’m not altogether sure why I feel compelled to do this work in this somewhat public space. I think it has something to do with holding myself accountable. More charitably (can I be charitable with myself?), perhaps it’s an invitation to others to engage with me about the books that I’m reading and those that I might read.

And, having read another instance of Joan Westenberg’s wisdom this morning, I’ll close by expressing the hope that what I’ve done here is a way of moving beyond the analysis and planning to get to the doing. In hopes of sparking that move, now I’m following her explicit advice. I’m heading to the gym.

Strange self emerging from strange self

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:18:00 -0400

Jenny Erpenbeck:

Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves — a fact that’s hard to grasp. We know that time also separates us from circumstances that might have turned us into very different people. We know it, but we don’t understand it. … We know only one thing: That behind everything we can see, hear, and touch, another reality is concealed — a reality that we can’t see and can’t hear and can’t touch, a reality made of time. We know that transformations lie behind us, and we know, according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers.

Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, pp. 42f

Stories that tell a story of a man

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:17:00 -0400

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my time at a symposium dedicated to honoring and responding to the work of my dissertation director, Schubert Ogden, and one of his students. But I said nothing in that post about Schubert himself. Since then I’ve been thinking more about the power of his person and of his influence on me, both as a teacher and as a human being. I hope to write something soon describing what I learned from him about teaching and learning, but as I’ve thought about this a couple of stories from my time with him have come to mind, stories that I think do much to capture the person that he was.

In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Schubert served as the director of the graduate program. It was a small program. One of its defining features is that it admitted only as many students as it could fund with a tuition scholarship and a living expenses stipend. Given this policy, it typically admitted relatively few of the students who applied. Obviously, it was good to have that financial support as a graduate student. But I was puzzled that, unlike other graduate schools, our program didn’t make any explicit effort to recruit students to apply. One day I suggested to Schubert that starting such a recruitment effort might lead to a stronger applicant pool. His immediate response was something like “Given the current job climate, I think it’s immoral to try to persuade students to enroll in graduate studies.” He was right about the job market — in those days (and, for that matter, in these days) the job search for new graduates in philosophy and religious studies was brutal. While many professors and programs were eager to recruit students, at least in part to build up their own professional reputation, Schubert was unwilling to go there. And so the applicant pool to our program remained relatively small, with the school offering significant financial support to those who were admitted and chose to enroll.

A second story comes from a bit later in my time there. The academic year 1983-1984 was a year of very significant change. Over the course of that year, we moved from a program in which no students in the program had a personal computer to one in which every student had a computer. It was a sea change. My colleagues and I acclimated rather quickly, taking advantage of the technology, sharing tips about programs and strategies.

Several years later, the day before I submitted the final draft of my dissertation, I decided that I needed to restructure the constructive chapter completely. It was an intense 16-hour day, but I think was time very well spent. After Schubert approved the dissertation, I was bold enough to describe what I had done at the last minute, and said that the computer made that work possible. In fact, I said, I wasn’t at all sure that I could have written a dissertation if I hadn’t been able to write it on a computer. I was rather excited by the power of technology. He smiled, perhaps because he was a bit amused at the thought, but also because it reminded him of his own experience as a graduate student before the introduction of such digital technologies. He told me that he was a rather poor graduate student, doing his work before photocopying machines were readily available. He said that if there was a book or journal article crucial to his research that was not readily available to him (perhaps the book was out of print, or a subscription to the journal containing the article was too expensive), he checked the text out of the library and copied it by hand, word for word, so that he would have the full text in his personal library. I was amazed. I should also admit that it seemed possible that time might have led to a bit of hyperbole — perhaps he took extensive notes, rather than write out the text word for word by hand. However, at the symposium earlier this month, I told this story to another of Schubert’s students who is now his literary executor. He smiled, and said that in one of the 40 or so bankers boxes of files he received after Schubert’s death, there were several folders including word-for-word handwritten copies of books.

I’m not sure how these stories will land for those who didn’t know Schubert personally. Surely, one might think, having a stronger pool of applicants to a graduate program would be beneficial to the program, and surely students can decide on their own whether to go to graduate school. Others might think he wasted way too much time writing out those texts word for word. Couldn’t he have simply read the texts carefully, taking extensive notes? But as I think about his dedication to scholarship and also about what I learned from him about teaching and learning, I find that these stories say a good bit about his approach to his work – to both his care for students as human beings and his meticulous concern for understanding the texts that he read.

Having mentioned all those bankers boxes, I’ll suggest that anyone interested in seeing just how he thought through the many things he thought about might spend some time perusing the digitized collection of his Notebooks. There’s a lot there to wade through. Given my own interests, I find his notes on Whitehead to be particularly helpful. YMMV.

October 2025

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:35:00 -0400

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

The Möbius Book

by Catherine Lacey

“Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible; yet [the biographer] is now more than ever urged to combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life; it dwells in the personality rather than in the act. Each of us is more Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than he is John Smith of the Corn Exchange. Thus, the biographer’s imagination is always being stimulated to use the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, dramatic effect to expound the private life. Yet if he carries the use of fiction too far, so that he disregards the truth, or can only introduce it with incongruity, he loses both worlds; he has neither the freedom of fiction nor the substance of fact” (Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” in Granite and Rainbow, p. 155).

I suppose it’s one of the accidents of life that I happened to read Woolf’s essay shortly before reading Lacey’s book. And I also suppose that such accidents are a factor in making one’s life what it is. Regardless, I couldn’t stop thinking about Woolf’s comment as I made my way through the two sections of Lacey’s new novel. One section is basically a fictional story about a late-night encounter of two old friends in the wake of estrangement. The other is something like a memoir of one woman’s life in which she tries to make sense of her life in the wake of a failed relationship. In each, we find characters constructing narratives to “expound the private life.” I think that Lacey avoids the result that Woolf warns against — that is, I think that she holds onto both the world of fiction and the world of fact. The two women in the story grapple with each other, comparing their different accounts of what led to their estrangement. In the memoir, the woman deals with the trauma of being a guest in her own house — and even in her own life — after the man she calls The Reason informs her by email that he’s leaving her for another woman. In each case, we find characters constructing and re-constructing narratives in which their memories of their lives and their sense of self might find a home.

I know I’m something of a dinosaur, but I found the physical construction of the book mildly frustrating. The memoir and the story are published back to back (or back to front?) in the same binding. After (or while) reading the memoir, one can flip the book (to what would ordinarily be an upside down position) and begin reading the story from the other direction. I found it frustrating because I constantly wanted to compare a passage in one to a passage in another. I see the relationship between the book’s title and this construction, and perhaps Lacey is using the structure to force me into the same sort of narrative construction as I seek to understand how the two elements might or might not fit together.

On her website, Lacey suggests that pondering this question might help one decide whether to read The Möbius Book: “Belief in abstractions is both the peril of the delusional and a necessity in love; how do rational people accept this paradox?” As we create the narratives that constitute our sense of self, we face the risk of delusion; as Woolf might say, we risk losing the substance of fact. And yet to love another we need an understanding of both self and the other that gives meaning to the random facts of our existence. Reading this book has pushed me to see just how the narratives I construct relate both to my personal experience and to the way I’m perceived by those who love me.

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

In 1993, when Varoufakis’s father first connected his computer to the internet, he said, “This is a game changer. … Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?” Varoufakis wrote this book as an answer to these questions, framed asa letter to his now deceased father. In short, he says, internet technologies have indeed surplanted capitalism, though they didn’t do it alone.

Varoufakis’s main point in this book is that the emergence of what he calls technofeudalism has roots similar to those that brought about the market economy a couple of centuries ago. The rise of capitalism followed the enclosure of public lands with the support of the government, changing these commonly held lands to private property, and the invention of technologies such as the steam engine. He sees the same set of events in the rise of technofeudalism: “first, the ransacking of the internet commons, made possible by politicians, and then a sequence of spectacular technological / inventions… . In short, in the last two and a half centuries, humanity has had to reckon with two singularities, neither of which required machines to attain sentience. Rather, each required a comprehensive plunder of a commons, a complicit political class, and only then a marvelous technological breakthrough. That’s how the original Age of Capital transpired. And that’s how the Age of Cloud Capital is now dawning” (pp. 70f).

Technofeudalism, he says, has its cloud proles, individuals who labor for big tech companies under forced conditions in which they are both shaped and judged by algorithms that are invisible and incomprehensible. And it has its cloud serfs, who provide data to big tech for free. The efforts of both proles and serfs are directed toward supporting the tech firms who amass more and more cloud capital.

I found this an interesting read, and I think it’s a good addition to books like Chris Hayes’s The Siren’s Call (see comments in last February’s page and Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification. We can quarrel about the terms — is it advanced capitalism or technofeudalism? — and I appreciate Varoufakis’s use of Simone Weil’s work to make the point that language matters: “When a word is properly defined, [it helps] us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis — to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.” The main point — and, I think, it’s a crucially important point — is that we can overcome challenges like those of economic inequality and climate disaster only if we take back control of our lives what we have too easily surrendered to big tech firms that currently control so much of our online lives.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Retrospective conversion and a story of celebration

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:55:00 -0400

I know. There are horrible things going on in the US and in the larger world. I know. We need to continue to do what we can to fight against such things. But even as we resist, there are still some things worth celebrating. Perhaps celebrations will distract us from the trauma for at least a few minutes. But there’s more than distraction here — celebrations expand the narrative of our lives so that we can find meaning even in the face of trauma. This morning’s post is a bit different from other things I’ve written. Call it a story of celebration.

I start with this from Vivian Gornick:

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say (The Situation and the Story, p. 13).

Last week I returned to the university where I earned my PhD to attend a one-day symposium honoring and responding to the work of my teacher and another of his students. The symposium was held in one of the university libraries. While in graduate school, I spent almost all of my waking hours in this building doing classwork, preparing for exams, and researching and writing my dissertation. I had a carrel on the second floor where I did much of this work. But I’m not sure I could find that carrel now. Though the building retains the outer footprint that it had while I was there, the inside has been extensively remodeled. I didn’t go up to the second floor; with all the changes, I think I might have been lost.

In fact, it was at least two hours into the symposium before I realized that I had also spent a considerable amount of time in the first-floor room in which I was sitting. It’s not quite accurate to say that I spent time in that very room — I’m not sure, but I think that the room as it exists now is larger than the room in which I spent my time. Perhaps they expanded the room during one of the remodeling projects. I’m positive, though, that I spent many early morning hours in that corner of the building.

While there I worked on the university’s retrospective conversion project. This was a crucial step in the university’s move from the card catalog holding physical notecards, one for each book in the library, to an online database. I worked early in the morning because access to the the OCLC database used in the work was less expensive before 8:00a. Several mornings a week, I arrived in the library at 6:00a and spent two hours working through book cards one by one. Using the information on a card, I had to locate the database entry for the same edition of the book held in our library and modify a copy of the record to indicate that we had a copy of the book. It was tedious work, requiring that I learn the codes for all the different fields in a book record and making sure that I really had identified the right book. However, once I learned all the codes and developed my searching strategies, I found that I was able to handle the occasional distraction without interrupting the flow of the work.

Of course I’ve forgotten most of the codes, though I’m pretty sure that the code for a book’s title is 245. But as I sat in the room last week a particularly vivid memory came to mind. My workstation was next to a window. The window looked out on one of the university residence halls. One of the students living in that hall was a woman whom I found attractive in all sorts of ways. In addition to being physically attractive, she had a reputation for being rather intensely involved in social justice causes that I cared about. I had met her briefly once, and I was hoping that our paths might cross and we could, one might say, get to know each other. For several weeks, though, such encounters were limited to the occasional glimpse of her leaving the residence hall on her way to breakfast.

All of that, Gornick might say, is the situation. The story? Later this month that woman and I will celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. The memory of times I saw her leave the residence hall and the anticipation of the coming anniversary together form what Gornick describes as “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.” Over forty years ago, while sitting at that terminal, I was doing retrospective conversion for the library. But these days I celebrate in retrospect the much richer conversion she brought to me. Simply put, she’s changed my life.

But not just my life. To return to the troubles of the day, she still maintains a fierce commitment to social justice and is hard at work responding to injustice. All of that is worth celebrating.

It's really not very simple

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:24:00 -0400

Zadie Smith:

Any essay that includes the line “It’s really very simple” is never going to be the essay for me. Nothing concerning human life is simple. Not aesthetics, not politics, not gender, not race, not history, not memory, not love.

“On the Impersonal Essay: Thinking in Six Parts,” in The New Yorker, Sept 29, 2025

What Dan Read

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:22:00 -0400

Yesterday’s post about the challenge of deciding what I’m going to read next was in the back of my mind when I stumbled on What Dan Read, a scanned copy of the list of 3,599 books that Dan Pelzer read from 1962 until shortly before he died this past July. The scanned copy is intriguing, but I found it difficult to read. If you have the same challenge, you can find a more readable copy, a pdf provided by the public library in Columbus, Ohio. The list alone is rather heart-warming, especially in this day when Americans are reading less for pleasure.

I admit I didn’t look at every item on the list, but what I find there is impressive. He didn’t like everything he read (the Smithsonian reports his comment about Joyce’s Ulysses: “The worst. Pure torture”), but apparently he finished what he started..

I admit to a bit of reader’s envy — I’ve done a better job recently of tracking books that I read, and I can recall many that I read before I was carefully tracking them. I’d like to have a full list now.

But the mention of Joyce’s Ulysses brings back a painful memory. I read the book in college, under the direction of a professor who had written his dissertation on Joyce. I didn’t find it torture at all — one of my most vivid reading memories is the excitement I felt as I neared the end of Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness monologue. I’m quite sure, though, that I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book without the guidance of the professor — my paperback copy was filled with marginal notations prompted by insights he brought to our discussion.

Some might be wondering why I introduced this as a painful memory. The pain came a few years later, when someone broke into my apartment and took all sorts of things. I was a poor graduate student and really didn’t have much of any value. But the most painful loss was that paperback copy of Ulysses. I hope that person found the notes useful.

Still reading; still wondering what to read next

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:51:00 -0400

I’ve written more than once — see here and here and here and here — about my struggle to decide what to read and why to read it. I suppose I’m still in withdrawal from years of teaching, when each fall and summer I would have to lay out the list of texts that I’d be reading with my students the next semester. It provided a structure to the reading, and I was always fascinated to see the sorts of discussions that were prompted by reading the texts in the community of a classroom. So many times, these discussions helped me to see something I hadn’t seen before in a text that I had read dozens of times.

I still like to read, and find it difficult to imagine a life without reading. A tangent — earlier this week at breakfast my wife wondered whether one of her former colleagues is still reading. This colleague was an avid reader of literature, but she’s evidently struggling with advancing age. As my wife pondered this question, she said to me: “I hope you don’t ever lose the ability to read.” The thought has occurred to me. I’m old enough now to anticipate all sorts of “this is the last time that I’ll ever do this” (or, perhaps more likely, “that was the last time I’ll ever do that”) moments. Reading and bicycling are near the top of that list.

But I digress. As I’ve already admitted, knowing that I want to read doesn’t offer much guidance in the decision what to read. I was relieved this past summer to learn that I’m not the only person facing this particular challenge. Consider this from Moyra Davey:

“What to read?” is a recurring dilemma in my life. The question always conjures up an image: a woman at home, half-dressed, moving restlessly from room to room, picking up a book, reading a page or two and no sooner feeling her mind drift, telling herself, “You should be reading something else, you should be doing something else.” The image also has a mise-en-scène: over-stuffed, disorderly shelves of dusty and yellowing books, many of them unread; books in piles around the bed or faced down on a table; … a pile of bills, a sink full of dishes. She is trying to concentrate on the page in front of her but a distracting blip in her head travels from one desultory scene to the next, each one competing for her attention. It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her. Often what is at stake, should she want to spell it out, is the idea that something is missing, as in: what is the crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at least for this day? She has the idea that if she can simply plug into the right book then all will be calm, still, and right with the world (Index Cards, p. 183).

How did she get into my house? How did she get into my mind? I don’t know the answer to the first question, but I know how she got into my mind. I was in a book store, ignoring for the moment the books I already had on my “what I’m reading now” list, picked up Davey’s book, and stumbled on the passage I’ve just quoted. How could I not keep reading the book?

And so I walked out of the bookstore with that book, despite the fact that I had a published commitment to be reading several other books. And I read the rest of that essay. It was very interesting, but also a problem: Davey suggested several other essays and books that I might be reading.

And so I bounce from book to book, finishing many of them, but leaving others unfinished for the moment. I’ve accepted the fact that I live in a condo with my own antilibrary; perhaps I should come up with a label for those books I’ve begun to read, and still hope to finish, but for the moment lie dusty and yellowing in one of the piles around my desk.

State of emergency, indeed

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:39:00 -0400

Walter Benjamin:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth [and even the twenty-first] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, p. 257

Reading, intellect, emotion

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:17:00 -0400

Siri Hustvedt:

Experiences of powerful emotions linger in the mind; experiences of tepid ones don’t. Great books, it seems to me, are distinguished by an urgency in the telling, a need that one can feel viscerally. Reading is not a purely cognitive act of deciphering signs; it is taking in a dance of meanings that has resonance far beyond the merely intellectual. Dostoyevsky is important to me, and I can place him in Russian intellectual history. I can talk about his biography, his ideas, his epilepsy, but that is not why I feel so close to his works. My intimacy is a product of my reading experiences. Every time I remember Crime and Punishment, I relive my feelings of pity, horror, despair, and redemption. The novel is alive in me.

Living, Thinking, Looking, p. 139

Emacs excitement

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 13:39:00 -0400

While speaking to a rather large public gathering of folks a couple of decades ago, my wife announced that there were two times that she had seen me excited. I think she was being a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true that I tend to be rather, well, perhaps understated is the most gracious way to put it. I might say even-keeled. Some would say boring.

But I was sitting alone at my computer this morning when I found myself brimming with excitement — twice. I think I even chuckled out loud and shifted my weight in my chair. Simply put, I had a couple of those “wow” emacs moments. I don’t have as many of those moments now as I once did — not because I’m fully aware of everything that emacs can do, but rather because I’ve settled into a standard routine in which I can do what I think I need to be doing. If I were inclined to be a little hyperbolic, I might say that when I’m writing I am emacs and emacs is me. (But, then, I’m not hyperbolic, so I’m not likely to say that.)

But what brought the excitement to my desk this morning? Actually, the better way to ask that question is who brought the excitement to my desk this morning. And the answer to the question is Sacha Chua, whose weekly emacs newsletter showed up in my RSS feed. As usual, there were all sorts of gems here. Some of them, as usual, were beyond my tech abilities. Others, as usual, seemed interesting and maybe even achievable with my limited tech mojo, but I simply don’t have time to wrap my head around them just now. But there were a couple of discoveries that made me smile. More to the point, I’m already integrating them into my standard workflow.

One of them — misohena’s phscroll — eases a frustration that I often have when working with org tables. (I should say that Sacha brought this to my attention by way of Samuel Michaël Vanié’s youtube channel.) I use tables to store all sorts of data, and it’s not unusual for a table to have more columns than will fit comfortably on a screen. This is especially a problem when I take my laptop on the road and give up the luxury of the large display on my desk. As Vanié’s example makes clear, an org-table too wide for the screen shows up as a jumble. But org-phscroll prevents the truncating of a table row and instead allows me to scroll from one column to the next. Perhaps misohena is correct in saying that emacs should have a text property that controls line wrapping, but his code serves my purposes well.

The second one is a different sort of beast, helping me to solve a different problem. I’ve been trying for years to keep my hands on the keyboard rather than reaching for the mouse. I’ve had some success in this, but I still catch myself using the mouse to scroll a window, to change point location, or to click on a link. I was intrigued by jamescherti’s inhibit-mouse package. I loaded it, and I can already see that it will help me move away from the mouse. That’s good, but it’s not what made me smile. That came later, when I was reading through a denote note that had a link to another note. I wanted to read that other note. Of course I immediately reached for the mouse, but moving the mouse didn’t move point. Oh, right, I thought – I can get there without using the mouse. But how do I click on a link without using the mouse? Surely there’s a way to do that — I know, most of you reading this are already getting ready to tell me how to do that — and I pretty quickly discovered that <C-c C-o> will open a link at point. A simple discovery, but it made me smile.

It’s worth saying that the inhibit-mouse package reinforces my use of bbatsov’s guru-mode. I don’t remember where I learned about that, though it could well have been Sacha’s newsletter. Guru-mode disables the arrow and home (and other) keys so that I’m forced to use the standard emacs keybindings instead. I’ve been using it for months, and it has trained me to keep my fingers closer to the home keys. Not quite as exciting, but it definitely helps me to do what I want to be doing.

I can’t wait to tell my wife tonight that I was excited twice today in the space of just a few minutes. I wish that she had been here to see it.

Egregiously gregarious or gregariously egregious

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 11:35:00 -0400

Lydia Davis:

Did you know that gregarious and egregious both have the word for “flock” or “herd” at their origins? (If you are gregarious, you like to mingle with the flock; if a thing is egregious, it stands out from the herd.)

Essays One, p. 246

How much tree is in that book you're reading?

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 09:16:00 -0400

Harriet Rix:

In a book of 80,000 words there is an enormous amount of trapped energy: a library of borrowed tree stability. If a tree is twenty when it is cut and pulped, it would have taken about four months’ continuous work for that tree to produce the biomass for one book.

The Genius of Trees: How they mastered the elements and shaped the world

Vice and virtue in fiction and the real world

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:26:00 -0400

Hi, there, world. It’s been a while. I’ve been on the road quite a bit in the last six weeks, and I’ve been consumed by important family matters. Though I’ve had all sorts of ideas about something I might write about in the blog, I’ve not had the energy and discipline to come up with anything I thought was worth posting. But the longer I go without posting, the more likely this will be yet another still-born blog, sinking into the internet wasteland of so many others (including a couple of mine from the old days). I’ve been saying for more than a week now that I really should either write something or admit that I won’t be writing.

When I started on the day’s tasks this morning I was thinking that I didn’t have time to write anything for the blog today. But then I quite accidentally stumbled on a journal entry from February 2024. Here’s the paragraph of that journal entry that brought me back into the blog:

I’m about half-way through Prophet Song, a novel that I’m finding to be powerfully unsettling. Paul Lynch, the author, is really pulling me into the world of the novel. One literary strategy is that he doesn’t make it easy to follow a conversation – there are no quotation marks, and back and forth exchanges between two characters run together in the same paragraph. I had the impression that at times he leaves deliberately ambiguous which person in a conversation says something. Perhaps not – what’s clear is that I have to stay with the text to get a sense of who is saying what to whom. It’s even more complicated than that, since it’s not unusual for a person’s internal dialog to be brought into the exchange as well, sometimes without a clear indication until a bit later that this was internal and unspoken instead of something said in the conversation. Another powerful element in the novel is the way that the political and cultural dynamics shape and reshape the relationship dynamics of the family at the center of the novel. It brings home how much of our immediate family context is shaped by and shapes the larger world in which we live. Yet another element in the power of the novel is that I can easily see us living in a world much like the one in the novel, especially if Trump is elected next November. Lynch does a very good job of showing how such a world gradually emerges, with people early on unwilling to accept clues that it could be coming. It’s so easy to envision a world a year or two from now in which we’re saying that we should have been paying more attention to what was going on.

Indeed.

All of this leads me to describe a novel that I’m reading now – The Oppermanns, by Lion Feuchtwanger. A month ago I’d never heard of the book or the author. I was browsing the shelves at McNally Jackson in New York City, and happened to see Claire Messud’s comment on the cover of this book. “Feuchtwanger’s masterpiece … At once unbearable and unputdownable.” So, at the risk of not being able to put it down, I pulled it off the display shelf and read the introduction by Joshua Cohen, a novelist who won the Pulitzer for his book The Netanyahus in 2012. (Oh, drat — yet another book to add to the TBR pile). Cohen’s introduction led me into the first few pages on the novel itself, and I found myself agreeing with Messud. I barely managed to put it down, but only long enough to let the sales clerk ring it up. That evening I started to read the book in earnest. Feuchtwanger wrote it in Germany in the spring and fall of 1933; the novel itself is set in Germany, from late 1932 into 1933. It’s fiction, but it runs close to historical truth. It’s an account of a prominent Jewish family — three brothers and a sister — living through Hitler’s rise to power. Ironically enough, Feuchtwanger’s life very quickly mirrored the novel: “in 1933, his property in Berlin was seized; his books were purged from German libraries and burned; he was banned from publishing in the Reich; and he was stripped of his German citizenship” (from the book’s Introduction, p. xii). He eventually found refuge France; after the German occupation of France, he managed to escape to the United States. A personal note – in his escape across Portugal he was assisted by the human rights organization that my wife now directs. It’s a small world, both temporally and spatially.

One of the brothers in the novel thinks that there’s really nothing to worry about — everyone, he thinks, will soon see just how ludicrous this man Hitler is. Another has concerns, but thinks that he can avoid trouble by rearranging business interests. The sister’s husband is decidedly less optimistic about the future. I’m now halfway through the novel; all of them remain in Germany, even as they watch friends and associates leave the country. Though they remain, there’s a deep unsettledness.

I’m planning to write more about The Oppermanns after finishing it (even as I realize that there are more than a few books in What I’m Reading that are marked “notes pending”). But I have to say now that I’m finding it more and more difficult to dissociate the world of the novel from the world in which I’m living now. It’s an odd feeling. Even as I wish/hope for the Oppermann siblings to “come to their senses” and recognize the full import of what’s going on around them, I wonder how I can continue to go about “normal life” in the midst of things around me. Both Lynch and Feuchtwanger are adept at pulling me into the world of their novels; the world itself seems more and more to be bringing these novels into the world. There’s so much going on in this world that echoes what I see in these two novels. Andrea Pitzer does a better job than I could do of cataloging these things, even though there’s a lot that she doesn’t say. But she goes beyond this cataloging, insisting that there are things that we can do: “we are singularly poised to act in ways that most citizens and residents of other countries that got mired in hardening authoritarianism were not. We have more options than those facing rising oppression in places like Hungary and Turkey, which have faced similar political degradation in the last decade.”

Pitzer’s take on the current climate includes the observation that our country is divided between authoritarians and their supporters on one hand and those who favor a more inclusive and diverse society on the other. Between these extremes, she suggests, there is a “mushy middle,” not fully endorsing the claims of the authoritarians but open to being persuaded or manipulated into supporting them. In fact, she says, much of what the administration does, and the way that it does all of it, is directed not only toward the base but also to this mushy middle, seeking to persuade the latter that Trump offers security in troubled times. “People fall for it — with enough propaganda, a lot of people. And some of them are willing to go along with the harm someone like Trump will do, even if they know that these actions are wrong.” I’m reminded of a museum exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany that I saw several years ago. The exhibit tracked Frankfurt’s rapid and radical transformation from a moderately liberal city to a strong supporter of the Nazi party. One thing I remember from that exhibit is that early on the Nazis acted as though they were much more numerous and much more powerful than they were. In a sense, they faked it until they made it. At the risk of being overly cynical, I’d call it vice signaling.

But what about virtue signaling? Pitzer insists that a response that many might dismiss as mere virtue signaling is in fact crucial in these times. “There’s value,” she says, “in everyone showing up in some way to demonstrate what they stand for, whether it’s quietly in smaller communities or before the whole world. What principles are bedrock to the society you want to live in? Ask yourself, figure it out, and let others know how you feel, from your family and neighbors to your representatives to your state or the entire country.” Let those in the mushy middle know that there are plenty of people who have a different view of the world and who believe that there’s actually some security in a society open to all sorts of diversity.

As I said above, I’m only halfway through my reading of The Oppermanns. But I’m deeply impressed by one character, the 17-year-old son of one of the brothers. He, at least, is willing to stand up for values even at considerable cost. It remains to be seen how long he’ll be able to hold to those values, and what cost he’ll pay for his stand.

I’m just one person, posting to this blog sporadically, a blog that even on a good day might have three readers. (I’d say four readers, but my mother died years ago.) But I can at least say here that I’m on the side of those who favor diversity.

And what about the so-called “normal life” I mentioned in passing above? I thought I was going to write about that here, but it turns out that it’s a topic for another post.

September 2025

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:14:00 -0400

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

The Oppermanns

by Lion Feuchtwanger

I already said just a bit about this book, comparing my experience reading it with my experience of reading Prophet Song last year. While reading each of these books, I found it difficult sometimes to remember whether I read something in the book — i.e., a fictional account — or something in the day’s newspaper. This brings to mind a snippet from Catherine Lacey’s novel The Möbius Book:

My friend Heidi’s son once told her he wasn’t going to finish reading a book he’d begun. What’s wrong with the book? she asked. Too fictiony, he said. What do you mean, too fictiony? she asked. Too realistic, he said.

There were moments while reading this book alongside U.S. news that fiction became too realistic. And other moments when the news became seemingly fictiony. At times I found myself struggling to remember whether I’d read about a particular event in the novel or in the newspaper.

Lion Feuchtwanger, the author of The Oppermanns, was a German Jew who moved from Germany to France in 1933. As Joshua Cohen says in his introduction, Feuchtwanger wrote the book in real time, with the timeline of the novel running less than a year before the time when he was writing. Feuchtwanger had good reason to leave Germany. He was already an acclaimed playwright and novelist, and he had been harshly critical of the Nazi party in some of those writings. Wikipedia reports that after Hitler came to power, Feuchtwanger was identified in government documents as “Enemy of the state number one.” He was still in France when Germany occupied the country in 1938. After a brief imprisonment, he managed to escape to the United States.

The novel is an extended account of the Oppermann family, focusing on three brothers who had built on their grandfather’s success as a German business man. One of the brothers directs the furniture store established by their grandfather. A second is a successful surgeon. A third is a literary scholar. There are two other siblings in the family: a sister who married a Jewish man from Eastern Europe (but who has somehow attained American citizenship) and a brother who died in World War I, having earned an Iron Cross for his service.

The books opens in November 1932, only months before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Despite the more and more explicit and concrete expressions of anti-Semitism, each of the Oppermann brothers feel secure in their social and financial standing and therefore confident that they are in control of their lives. They see Hitler’s rise to the Chancellorship as a blip and are confident that the German people will soon come to their senses. (It’s worth noting here that Feuchtwanger himself said in a December 1932 interview that Hitler was finished.)

I won’t chronicle the details of the next nine months. The cultural and economic status of the Oppermann family deteriorates rapidly. They struggle to respond to the threats to their lives and livelihood, in large part because for months they simply cannot accept the fact that these are real threats. “It seemed ridiculous to imagine that the tame, domesticated beast — the common man — threatened to revert to his wolfish nature.” There’s an allusion to Plato here: Plato characterized the tyrannical individual as a wolf.

As the book nears its end, the Oppermann family gathers one last time, knowing that they’re unlikely to be together ever again:

Their homeland has slipped away from them. … they had lost the business in Gertraudtenstrasse and everything connected with it, they had lost Edgar’s laboratory and the house in Max Reger Strasse. That which three generations in Berlin and three times seven generations of them in Germany had built up, was gone. Martin was going to London, Edgar to Paris. Ruth was in Tel Aviv; Gustav, Jacques, and Heinrich were going no one knew where. They would be scattered over the four seas of the world; they would be scattered to all the eight winds.

Things: A Story of the Sixties

by Georges Perec

What do words like happiness and freedom mean in a world dominated by consumerism? I discovered this book in the afterword to Perfection, which I read in July. Latronico, the author of Perfection, says in that afterword that he’s indebted to Perec, and I can definitely see the influence. Both books explore a life shaped by advertising and the desires that advertising attempts to instill in us. It’s fascinating to me not only how Latronica brought in the power of social media but also how Perec managed to capture some of the uneasiness of our more recent times, even without social media. Both books are narrated in a rather droll tone — or, as I said in my notes about Perfection, a voice that somehow reminds me of Detective Friday from the old Dragnet series.

Perec’s characters are a young couple who with their friends seek to live a life unattached to things, even as they spend more than a little energy lusting after those things. “They cast their eyes enviously, desperately, towards the visible comfort, luxury and perfection of the upper middle classes” (p. 50). They see those things as coming with too high a cost — the cost of giving up spontaneity and freedom. “For everything contradicted them, beginning with life itself. They wanted life’s enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership” (p. 65).

While reading the book I was haunted by my memory of a commitment I made while I was in college: I was determined never to own more things than I could fit into my Volkswagen Beetle. Needless to say, that didn’t last long. My first component stereo system pushed me over the edge. But at least I enjoyed listening to the music.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Web presentation reduces the person

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:48:00 -0400

Zadie Smith:

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t feel more free, they just look more owned.

Feel Free, pp. 58f.

What if social status were based on time of arrival?

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 18:12:00 -0400

Jamaica Kincaid:

What if social status in American society were based on nothing else but time of arrival? By now, the very top of American society would be thoroughly integrated, if not majority African American. And instead of Jesse Jackson having to defend every ridiculous idea he has against some equally ridiculous counter-idea, his ridiculous ideas would be the ones by which we all had to live. For example, I do not like affirmative action, but only as it might apply to me; if I suspect that I were the victim of this idea, I believe I would appreciate the element of kindness in it and say, “Thank you very much. How nice,” and politely reject this favor. But affirmative action seems appropriate to many people whose ancestors were brought here centuries ago, and so who am I, someone who just got off the boat yesterday, someone coming from another bleak crevice of the world, to tell them otherwise.

Putting Myself Together, p. 146

Reading updates

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:31:00 -0400

It’s mid-August already and I’ve not updated my “What I’m Reading” section with an entry for this month. That’s not quite right — by the time this is posted I will have posted my August notes.

However, I’ve fallen behind schedule, in the reading, the note-writing, and the posting. We were traveling the last 10 days of July — a work trip for my wife. I was the designated driver (we were in 5 different cities over the 10 days), and I found it rather difficult to read while driving from city to city. In addition, I was in the middle of a couple of rather large books that I decided not to carry with me, and didn’t finish those until after we returned.

And there are quite a few books on the reading page for July that have the rather embarrassing phrase indicating that notes are pending. Most of those are books by and about Hannah Arendt. I’ve found this reading both fascinating and overwhelming. Her thought is so much more complex and extensive than I thought when I set out to read her; after finishing one book I would decide that I really need to read another book to solidify my understanding of the first. And then, well, rinse and repeat. So, thoughts about Arendt are still percolating. I’ll say now that I think she is very much worth reading. But there are other books described on the July page that I think are well worth reading — I especially liked the novel Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico.

Moving on to August, there are three books there that I’ve finished reading but still haven’t written notes. A couple of those are the large books I didn’t take with me on our travels, and the third is a novel that I was able to check out for only two weeks. I was eager to finish all of those before leaving town again tomorrow (see above about not wanting to carry large books with me). I’m telling myself — and you — that I’ll write notes on those after returning home next month.

One point from that novel I just mentioned — The Dream Hotel — is haunting me as I continue reading while my world is falling apart. The novel’s protagonist is in a retention center (Don’t call it a prison!) because the algorithm has determined that she might commit a crime. That is, her “risk score” (as determined by the algorithm, a black box that has access to all sorts of data about her, including her dreams) has crossed a crucial threshold. She’s forced to stay in the retention center (Don’t call it a prison!) until her score drops back below the threshold. While there, she has occasional access to online news reports. And this is the point that haunts me: while she’s reading the news, a story about some everyday event catches her attention. Even in the midst of living in a society where the algorithm can force the retention of individuals, she who is retained sees that there are still people living lives as if none of this is happening. The point haunts me because I still wonder how I can continue to read books as if our country weren’t falling apart. Even the simple act of shopping for groceries, to say nothing about reading philosophy, seems out of place somehow.

I take some comfort in Heinrich Blücher’s report of his excitement reading Kant while imprisoned in Nazi occupied France.

August 2025

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:54:00 -0400

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

(I finished reading more than one book, but I’m woefully behind on writing up my notes.)

Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968

edited by Lotte Kohler

In these letters, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher come alive as human beings, as scholars, and as lovers. At one extreme, there are matter-of-fact concerns, such as Arendt’s encouragement — even insistence — that Blücher purchase an air conditioner for his study so that he doesn’t suffer in the heat. At the other, there is Arendt’s rather poignant account of how she found herself and happiness in her relationship with Blücher:

You see, dearest, I always knew, even as a kid, that I can only truly exist in love. And that is why I was so frightened that I might simply get lost. And so I made myself independent. And about the love of others who branded me as coldhearted, I always thought: If you only knew how dangerous love would be for me. And when I met you, suddenly I was no longer afraid — after that first fright, which was just a childish fright pretending to be grown up. It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the ‘love of my life’ and a oneness with myself. And yet, I only got the one thing when I got the other. But finally I also know what happiness is (pp. 40f).

Their scholarly work is evident, both in their scholarly debates and in their accounts of their day-to-day lives, even in dire circumstances. An example of the latter: Blücher reports his enjoyment of reading Kant while imprisoned: “Kant’s works on morality are my great pleasure. Every time one understands new things and new men, one suddenly understands more deeply some of the topics of the great masters of philosophy” (p. 52).

Arendt’s scholarly work was evident both in her publications and in her teaching appointments at several universities; in her letters she shares her experience with students, faculty colleagues, and publishers. Blücher made his mark as a teacher; several letters indicate his frustration with his inability to develop his scholarship in published works. However, his impact on Arendt’s scholarship is significant. She dedicated The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book that established her reputation as a scholar, to him. As her professor, mentor, and friend said, Blücher played the role of Socrates to her Plato. Each of them supported and encouraged the other.

The collection’s title comes from one of Arendt’s letters: “for God’s sake, you are my four walls.” Blücher had his own version of this: “where I am, I am not at home”; “where you are with me there is my home.”

My current reading and TBR lists.

We used to think, but now we know

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:56:00 -0400

Perhaps the sentence most often quoted (and, often enough, misquoted) from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical writing is this:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition 1979, p. 39).

I think that there’s some truth in that statement, especially given its opening caveat. But I wish that those who quote it — and especially those who misquote it! — would include the sentences immediately following it:

I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.

The claim that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato is not nearly as extravagant as some of Whitehead’s critics have made it out to be; he’s not saying that Plato did it all and that everyone else has merely added annotations. Instead, he says, Plato’s writing is suggestive, offering multiple and even inconsistent lines of reflection that his successors have explored.

Whitehead presented what became the book Process and Reality as the Gifford lectures in 1927-1928, only three years after joining Harvard University’s philosophy department. The Harvard appointment in philosophy followed his long and productive career in British universities as a mathematician. During that time, he published important books in mathematics, science, and logic — the most significant of which is Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with his student Bertrand Russell. In Process and Reality, Whitehead developed what he called his Philosophy of Organism, now known more commonly as process philosophy. The project is ambitious, and he makes some rather bold and innovative claims. But he offers a significant qualifier in the preface, noting “how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (p. xiv).

I think it’s fair to say that Whitehead had in mind both his own efforts and those of Plato here.

His inclination toward such cautionary fallibilism was shaped by his intellectual experience in the study of mathematics and physics. Lucien Price, in his Dialogues of Alfred North Whithead, remembers something Whitehead said in conversation in 1939:

I have lived three distinct lives …; one from childhood to the first world war; one from 1914 to my residence in America in 1924; and a third here since 1924. The first seems the most fantastic; in those years from the 1880’s to the first war, who ever dreamed that the ideas and institutions which then looked so stable would be impermanent? … Fifty-seven years ago it was, when I was a young man in the University of Cambridge. I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses, instead of as major propositions; and all this in one life-span — the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside. And yet, in the face of that, the discoverers of the new hypotheses in science are declaring, Now at last, we have certitude — when some of the assumptions which we have seen upset had endured for more than twenty centuries (p. 131).

…after one such experience in a lifetime of the impermanence of the most solid-seeming ideas, one is chary of overconfidence, and in the last words I have written I have said “The exactness is a fake” (p. 216).

That stark claim — the exactness is a fake — is the concluding sentence of his Harvard Ingersoll lecture, delivered in 1941 and reprinted as the concluding chapter of The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a volume of the Library of Living Philosophers. It’s a follow-up to this claim: “The conclusion is that Logic, conceived as an adequate analysis of the advance of thought, is a fake. It is a superb instrument, but it requires a background of common sense.”

My reading Whitehead’s Process and Reality the first time, now almost 50 years ago, was a formative experience for me, and I still think that process metaphysics offers a much more adequate understanding of the fundamental nature of things than any other position I’ve read. But I’m even more impressed by his caution to acknowledge that we should be open to questioning even our most fundamental beliefs.

As I read these days, It’s not at all unusual for me to find an author drawing a contrast between what we know today and what people once believed in the past. And, I confess, sometimes I catch myself making the same sort of claim. Better, I think, to be more cautious, saying something like “People used to think such and such, but now we have some reason instead to think thus and so. How might we test that hypothesis?” I think we’d all be better off.

Scholarship's three questions

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:04:00 -0400

Alfred North Whitehead:

Scholarship can ask itself three questions: first, “What exactly did an ancient author mean when he wrote certain words, and what exactly did those words mean to his contemporaries?” … Next, it can ask, “What and where are those flashes of insight in the work of genius whereby he rises out of his own time into all time?” … And finally, “How can we perpetuate and propagate those rare flashes of genius in which humanity, as nowhere else, has risen above itself?”

As recorded by Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, pp. 77f

Age of science and technology: The beginning of the end?

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 18:17:00 -0400

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world — I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home. Because science and industry do decide wars, or so it seems.

Culture and Value, a selection from LW’s notebooks, 1946; quoted in Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 485

Walker Percy on the self, the other, and the world

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:34:00 -0400

Paul Elie:

[Walker] Percy’s point — in the language of pilgrimage — is that the modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible. In the modern world (now generally called postmodern), all experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one’s consumption by others in advance. Even the rare authentically direct experience is spoiled by modern self-consciousness. The modern self is doomed to an imitation of life; the self cannot escape itself and know the world or the Other. The self can try, however. That is Percy’s real point.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, p. 278

A teacher's legacy

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:58:00 -0400

Late last month I was able to spend time with a former student and her partner. She and I have stayed in touch rather irregularly over the thirty-five years since she was in my classes. I’ve followed her career as an attorney and now as a judge with interest and, I admit, more than a little pride. During our time together last month, she was kind enough to tell me that she sees me as a major influence in her intellectual development. “You helped me, as a rather young 17-year-old woman, to see that I was more intelligent than I thought I was.”

That, I think, is a good lesson to learn, and I suspect that she could have learned that in interactions with many other teachers. I’m honored to hear her say that she learned it with me. With that in mind, I was struck earlier today by something that Irving Kristol said in a 1972 Rockefeller Foundation sponsored discussion about “Values in Contemporary Society” (Hannah Arendt was another discussant; the transcript is reprinted in Thinking Without A Banister, a collection of essays and other pieces by Hannah Arendt, pp. 438ff).

One teacher can produce six serious thinkers, if he’s lucky, in a lifetime. That’s a lot. Five teachers can produce 30. One has to assume that this is for the good.

I think the student with whom I visited last month is one such serious thinker, and after our visit I found myself thinking of several other students on whom I had something of an impact. Some — maybe even most — of the ones I have in mind came into my classroom as serious thinkers, but they gave me reason to think that their work with me was important to their intellectual growth. Perhaps they learned something more about serious thinking in classes that I taught. I remember one such student who came to my office after receiving a lower grade than she would have liked on the first paper she submitted to me. Without my knowledge, she had enrolled in an upper level seminar that I would have discouraged her from taking so early in her college career. But she wasn’t there to complain about the grade. She was there with a simple question. I don’t remember the question exactly, but it was something like “Can you help me understand how I might write a better paper?” She went on to write much better papers than that first one. I remember another student in a Problem of God class at Georgetown. He came from a very conservative religious background, but was eager to engage with a wide variety of students and texts, both religious and secular. Three years later, as he planned his post-graduation summer, he emailed me to ask if I would recommend at least one book that he might read. And another student who, after doing well in multiple philosophy classes, took an independent studies course on Whitehead’s philosophy — an ambitious project for an undergraduate. She was kind enough to mention her work with me in the acknowledgments of a dissertation she wrote several years later.

I’m not sure that I was lucky enough to have “produced” half a dozen serious thinkers. (I should say that I think that’s a rather odd verb to use here. It brings to mind Arendt’s distinction between work and action, and has me thinking that Arendt’s notion of a realm of appearance in human beings act with one another could be a good way of thinking about the exchanges among students and teacher in a classroom. That’s a matter for another post.) Still, Kristol’s comment together with my former student’s comment has me thinking about the legacy that one leaves after a career in the classroom. I have to agree with Kristol: doing whatever one can do to cultivate serious thinking is definitely “for the good.” In times like these, we are especially desperate for such goodness and for teachers who inspire it.

Arendt concludes the discussion, encouraging the Foundation to “do something to raise the prestige, not of the so-called charismatic teacher who is usually a disaster, but of teachers who are truly dedicated. There are not so very many. This is a gift that is very rare, a gift of a very high caliber.” (I would point out that she must have had her husband, Heinrich Blücher, in mind here.)

I’m not bold enough to claim to be such a rare gift. In fact, I’m more inclined to believe that thoughtful students like the ones I describe above brought their gifts to me. In the ideal case, students and teachers work together to create opportunities for growth.

July 2025

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 14:31:00 -0400

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

*—

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

by Timothy W. Ryback

Ryback says that his goal in writing this book was “to recount the last six months of Hitler’s ascent to power as it was reported and perceived at the time” (p. 314). His approach – focusing on how the process “was reported and perceived at the time" – frustrated me a bit. I frequently found myself hoping for more historical and cultural context as I read. Still, I couldn’t resist comparing news reports about Germany in late 1932 and early 1933 to contemporary news accounts about happenings in the United States.

Ryback begins his account after the July 1932 elections, in which Hitler’s party surprised everyone by securing 37% of the vote – more than any other party, but not enough to secure a majority government in Germany’s Reichstag. While ordinarily such a margin would lead the German president to invite Hitler to form a government, President Hindenberg was not prepared to do that. It’s worth noting that this 37% is the high mark of Hitler’s electoral success; his party’s share of the vote went down in each subsequent election until after he became Chancellor. Even then, and despite his efforts to suppress the vote of many, he failed to gain a majority of those voting.

Ryback offers many examples illustrating how political, business, and media leaders in Germany miscalculated in their dealings with Hitler.

The conservative media figure Alfred Hugenberg, whose Telegraph Union had something like 1600 affiliated newspapers, developed that media empire to counter what he saw as a mainstream media controlled by Jews and dangerously liberal. His goal was to fragment the country with lies and half-truths, thinking that the center could not hold. He also thought that any reasonable person would see that Hitler was a buffoon not qualified to lead.
General Kurt von Schleicher fancied himself a strong-man leader who thought that everyone would see that Hitler was a crazy man, but that Hitler’s campaign for a powerful man at the head of the government would inspire the masses to turn to a real strongman, namely Schleicher.
The New York Times reporter didn’t see Hitler coming – after the President dissolved the Reichstag in September 1932, countering a political move by Hitler’s party to push their own agenda, reporter Frederick Birchall wrote that “the government goes on as smoothly, efficiently and peacefully as in any of the world’s well-established democracies, a marvelous tribute to the inherent law-abidingness and solid characteristics of the German people” (p. 118).

In short, while there is evidence that other conservative politicians and leaders in Germany might have prevented Hitler’s coming to power, they didn’t do that. Ryback focuses primarily on these conservative leaders, suggesting that if they had worked together instead of fighting among themselves they might have been successful. He writes less about those in the center or on the left of the political spectrum.

Hitler had several opportunities to join the government in the six months discussed in this book. He refused several times, saying that he wouldn’t join a government unless he was made Chancellor; by November 1932 he was also insisting that as Chancellor he must be given to rule the country as he saw fit.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Ryback’s detail, I found myself confused by the last pages of the book, which describe the lead-up to the conversation in late January 1933 when President Hindenberg finally offers the Chancellorship to Hitler. Earlier that week, Hindenberg had dispatched Schleicher and then moved to counter the coup that Scheicher contemplated in response, having finally decided that he had no choice but to ask Hitler to assemble a cabinet. Hugenberg was present at the meeting when Hitler was declared Chancellor, but came very close to calling everything off when Hitler insisted that he would be calling for new elections in the coming months. Hitler sought to placate Hugenberg, saying that election results, no matter what they were, would not lead him to reorganize his cabinet. Hugenberg gave in, saying the next day that “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.”

And so Hitler became Chancellor. He called for new elections, scheduled for March 5. The New York Times headline: “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.” On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was destroyed by fire, and Hitler persuaded Hindenberg to sign an order that did away with basic human rights. The elections proceeded as planned, with Hitler severely restricting participation by Communists, Socialists, and other parties of the left. Still, Hitler still did not receive his majority, capturing only 43.9% of the vote.

But he pressed ahead, pushing the Reichstag to give him still more emergency authority. In June 1934, he ordered the assassination of several of his opponents and forced others to leave Germany during the so-called Night of the Long Knives. Hugenberg lost his seat in the cabinet and Hitler gained what he wanted, fulfilling his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel’s early vow: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction. … We enter the Reichstag to use the arsenal of democracy in order to assault it with its own mechanism” (p. 110).

Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

It’s a commonplace to say that one’s carefully curated online persona leaves out much of the drudgery and discomfort of life in the “real” world. Perfection hones this observation carefully and subtly, suggesting the risk that one might attempt to live the online world to perfection, seeking to avoid the IRL trauma. Latronico admits his indebtedness to Georges Perec, whose novel Things: A Story of the Sixties evidently described the lives of people who found their identity in the things that they owned. (I say “evidently” because I’ve not read Perec’s novel – yet another book to add to my TBR pile!)

The novel’s protagonist(s) is (are) the couple Anna and Tom. I make the plural parenthetical because they are presented throughout the book as one – I admit I didn’t count, but it seems that there are more references to “Anna and Tom” and “they” than there are to either of them separately. They are expats, having moved from an unnamed south European city to 2010s Berlin, making their living in online design and branding. The online presences they create for their clients mirror the online presence they create for themselves. The digitized version of their carefully curated apartment, offered as a short-term rental when they leave town for a few days, functions also as their living space. If only their experience IRL could live up to the ideal that they were presenting to the world.

The author (and, I suppose, translator Sophie Hughes) write in a deadpan style that reminds me somehow of the voice over narration of Detective Friday from my childhood’s “Dragnet” television series. I found it a good approach. The book is a quick and easy read. I found the novel to be slightly unsettling, but in a good way — what, after all, is the relationship between the digital world of non-things and the concrete world of material things that we attempt to hold together in one life these days?

When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains

by Ariana Neumann

Ariana Neumann was born and grew up in Venezuela. She knew that her father had emigrated from Prague to Caracus, and even as a child she had hints of his painful past. But he told her next to nothing about his former life in Europe. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he told her next to nothing about his former life while he was still alive. However, after he died, she found a box of documents and photographs that he left for her. A box that invited her to piece together his story, which is also a story of Nazi Germany. In this book she tells his story, and also the story of how she discovered his story.

Neumann begins her story with an account of her visit to an old synagogue in Prague in 1997. As it happens, I was in that synagogue last spring, and I also saw the tens of thousands of names written on the walls, names of residents of the area who died in the Holocaust. I wish that I had known then to look for the name Hanus Stanislav Neumann. Neumann didn’t know to look for that name either; she reports that she discovered the name quite by chance. Seeing her father’s name was quite a surprise to her. Her father was still alive in 1997. But it was also puzzling that her father’s name was the only name in the synagogue with only a birth date next to it. Every other name on the walls had both a birth and death date. Why would her father’s name be there, and how is it that his birth date was followed by a question mark instead of a date?

I choose to see see the question mark as a stand-in for the growing list of questions Neumann had about her father’s life. While he was still alive, she chose to live with those questions, in large part because it was clear to her that her father did not want to talk about his past. “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is — in the past,” he said.

When she found the box of documents and photographs after her father died, she thought it might be his way of planting the seeds of his story, of helping her to look for answers to her questions. Initially, she was afraid. What might she learn? But she eventually set out on a quest, in part because she decided that learning about her father would also be a way of learning about herself and her family. “…as we reared our family, other, more intrinsic questions arose about identity, to do with heritage and traditions, about what it is that one, as a parent, needs to pass on. Gradually, I realized that uncovering what had remained concealed concerned me and my children as much as it did my father. Finding out about those who came before us had as much to do with the present and with the future as it did with the past. The desire to understand my father was there all along. And despite my original hesitation, my burgeoning little family provided further motivation. Yet I was still afraid” (p. 34).

Despite her fear, she persevered, enlisting the help of a Czech researcher who translated the documents and sought information in the official records. The search led her to other family members — people she didn’t know — some of whom had additional photographs and documents. She managed to visit many of these people, both face-to-face and by email and telephone. Conversations, photographs, documents, and public records together corroborate a story of her father’s remarkable survival and also his transformation from a happy-go-lucky child and teenager to a severaly disciplined and successful businessman.

As I said up top, there are really two stories here: the story of Neumann’s family, and also the story of her discovery of this story. Both of them are riveting. And I’ll include one small spoiler from near the end of the book. Neumann’s father had his own explanation of the question mark next to his name. “I tricked them. I lived.”

My current reading and TBR lists.

Borders, commerce, immigration

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:22:00 -0400

Seyla Benhabib:

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century it is astonishing that the fate of refugees and asylum seekers would emerge as a worldwide problem. In an age when the movement of everything across borders, from capital to fashion, from information to news, from germs to money has intensified human mobility continues to be criminalized. The refugee is increasingly treated not only as an alien body but as the enemy who is interned in detention camps, held in deportation sites, or in absurd Euro-bureaucratic parlance, gathered in “hotspots.”

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (2018), p. 101

Study the Self

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 09:20:00 -0400

Claude Anshin Thomas:

I often speak about the four essentials of Zen practice: silence, discipline, ritual, and study. When I mention study, most people immediately think about which books they need to read. They have an academic or intellectual association with the word “study.” I understand that, but the sense of “study” that has been conveyed to me is not limited to an intellectual pursuit. Study includes the intellect, however, study also includes the attention we pay to our thoughts, the attention we pay to our feelings, and the attention we pay to our perceptions as we move through our day. Zen practice is about being willing to study ourselves, to wake up to the causes and conditions that keep us trapped in cycles of suffering.

Bringing Meditation to Life: 108 Teachings on the Path of Zen Practice, p. 81

The time for art is now

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 14:40:00 -0400

Claire Messud:

There is glory in each day, for each of us. It is waiting to be illuminated and observed. Auden wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, but in our hearts and in our lives, we know that is not true. Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility — immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite. If ever there was a time for art, it’s now.

“The Time for Art is Now,” in Kant’s little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I write, p. 109

Reading, learning, and compassion

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:45:00 -0400

My current strategy for selecting books to read reflects my hope to learn better how to live in these troubled times by reading works by and about people who lived in troubled times before now, focusing on those who challenged the power and authority of oppressors. One of the people on that list — the person on whose work and life I’m focusing at the moment — is Hannah Arendt. Interestingly, my reading of Arendt helps me to see value in my current strategy, even as she reminds me that I can and should cast the reading net more broadly. Consider this from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography:

[Arendt] addressed the “crisis of values” in America by speaking of the proper way to read and to teach the great works of Western literature and philosophy. “To look at the past in order to find analogies by which to solve our present problems is, in my opinion, a mythological error. If you cannot read these great books with love and pure motives, just because you are fond of the life of the spirit — of the life of man — it won’t do you any good and it won’t do the students any good” (p. 449).

Reflecting on Arendt’s words helped me to see that I shouldn’t be reading these books as if they’re strategy manuals or how-to books. Rather, I should read them to get some sense of how insightful and thinking people – people in some ways like me but in others very different from me, who lived in a world in some ways like mine but in others very different from mine – understood and responded to the world that they encountered.

I don’t think that Arendt’s observation implies that I shouldn’t be reading the books that I’m reading. But she’s pushing me to continue reading other sorts of books as well. Moreover, she’s suggesting that I won’t find in my reading – whether by analogy or by some other method — particular and specific strategies for responding to the problems of the day. What I’ll find there — what I hope to find there — is some understanding of how these people lived their lives in good times and bad.

I see the same counsel in other parts of my reading. In his book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger says that he asked Wiesel a question when the two of them met for the last time, shortly before Wiesel died.

“How do you teach faith and ethical awareness?”

“I tried to teach all of my students love of learning — learn, learn, learn. It is only through learning that we develop ethical awareness.”

After surviving his time in Auschwitz, Wiesel was shocked to learn that many of the leaders and others in the Nazi government had earned advanced degrees from prestigious universities. He knew then that knowledge does not always lead to ethical action. But, he said, learning from and about the other opens up the possibility for empathy. And such empathy become more likely, the more we expand the range of our learning.

Moreover, he insisted that we can find the other from whom we learn not only in our day-to-day encounters but also by reading books — lots and lots of books. Similarly, Arendt thought that reading great literature and philosophy opens up not only new ways of seeing the world but also alternative ways of living in the world. I think that a central element in what Arendt calls “the life of the spirit” is responding to Wiesel’s imperative to “learn, learn, learn.”

So I’ll continue to read writers like Arendt, Wiesel, and other writers and activists who did so much to counter oppression in their time. I’ll also continue to read novelists like Solvej Balle and Madeleine Thien who open up new ways of understanding not only the world and my relationship to it but also the different worlds of other people. But I’ll continue to read philosophical and more contemplative texts as well, making sure to include writings of those who stand outside the so-called canon of the Great White Dead Males™.

Confronting the madness of fascism

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 09:42:00 -0400

Elie Wiesel:

The collective political madness of the twentieth century, in the forms of fascism and Communism, took over nations; millions of people were swept up in it. … How can we protect ourselves against this kind of madness? This is not just an abstract historical question. All roads lead back to Auschwitz. If there is violence today, suicide, mental illness, it may well be because seventy years ago, the world did nothing while six million innocent people were slaughtered. How can that not affect us? Confronting those events is essential in ensuring that our fate is not a malediction.

From a 2006 classroom lecture, as recorded by Ariel Burger in Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, p. 113

To be expelled from a state is to be expelled from humanity

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:42:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

The basic issue involved is the following: As long as mankind is nationally and territorially organized in states, a stateless person is not simply expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries — none being obliged to receive and naturalize him — which means he is actually expelled from humanity. Deprivation of citizenship consequently should be counted among the crimes against humanity, and some of the worst recognized crimes in this category have, in fact, and not incidentally, been preceded by mass expatriations. …

It seems absurd, but the fact is that, under the political circumstances of this century, a Constitutional Amendment may be needed to assure American citizens that they cannot be deprived of their citizenship, no matter what they do.

A letter to Robert Hutchins of the Fund for the Republic, 27 January 1957; quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, p. 275

Little time for reflection, but still holding out hope

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 10:30:00 -0400

Karl Jaspers:

It is not easy to describe things here. It is a life of irreality. I’m eaten up by day-to-day chores. Reflection withers. I find myself slipping into a modern life ruled by haste. Things can’t go on this way. There seems to be no place at all for real thought. But we know that life goes on in spite of it all, even in famine, which has not touched us at all yet. Every day I say to myself: Patience, just be patient. Don’t be discouraged, no matter what. If we do what we can, the rewarding moments are bound to return.

A letter to Hannah Arendt, 12 March 1946; in Correspondence: Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, p. 34

Echoes of the past; responding in the present

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 10:25:00 -0400

I wrote this Saturday afternoon, before reading the news that Trump is sending the National Guard into Los Angeles. I’m posting it unchanged, though I’ll acknowledge here the step forward in the area of force and terror. Perhaps someday we’ll see this as a tipping point, though I wonder how we would recognize that now when the world is so slanted.

It’s become something of a cliché to describe similarities between Germany in the 1930s and the United States in the last few months. Many of those descriptions build on the work of Hannah Arendt — and, more often than not, include pithy quotations from her writings. I’m part of the pack here, having posted multiple Arendt passages on this site as commonplace entries. As important as these allusions to 1930s Germany are, I think we should acknowledge that we in the United States have similar episodes in our own history. I was reminded of one such time this morning by none other than Hannah Arendt. Consider this lengthy passage from a letter she wrote to Karl Jaspers, her mentor and friend in Switzerland:

You probably know a lot from the papers. Can you see from them how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun. Most important of course is the disintegration of the governmental machinery and the presumably quite conscious establishment of a parallel government, which, though with no legal power, possesses the real power. And this takes in far more than just the civil service. The whole entertainment industry and, to a lesser extent, the schools and colleges and universities have been dragged into it. It is essentially impossible to consider any specific parts of the society as set apart from it, for even where the Congressional investigating committees aren’t sticking in their dirty noses, an extremely effective self-censorship takes place. The editor of a newspaper or a magazine, for example, or the director of a business or the professors at a university will quietly conduct a “purge.” … In this self-censorship, everyone actually censors himself. It all functions without any application of force, without any terror. Basically, nothing at all happens — and yet the whole thing eats its way farther and deeper into the society.

Arendt wrote this letter, not in Germany in the 1930s, but in the United States in 1953. She says that there had been hardly any resistance, but she might have noted Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s declaration of conscience in June of 1950. Surely that is resistance worth noting, even if it came to something like full fruition only 4 years later with the Senate’s censure of McCarthy. Similarly, the resistance of some people even early in the Trump administration has grown to include many more people — some colleges and universities, many in the entertainment industry, the courts, and others — today. Such resistance will surely prompt even more force and terror in the government’s response; it will be very interesting to see the dynamics that emerge on days like June 14, when Trump will have crowds at his militaristic birthday celebration even as what I hope and expect will be much larger crowds gathered in protest throughout the country.

To return to Arendt’s letter, I was struck by her observation that the censorship was occurring “without any application of force, without any terror.” On one hand, I suppose that whatever force the McCarthy and others imposed on their victims in the 1950s pales in comparison to what Arendt and others saw in the Holocaust. On the other hand, I think it’s crucial to recognize that the amount of terror one faces in the current situation depends in part on one’s place in society. Some of us have the privilege of wealth, or the advantage of birth or social standing. Others, without the protections offered by such positions and privilege, are in a different position. Many people face considerable terror, wondering whether they will be apprehended and removed from the country, leaving friends and family behind.

Privilege comes into play in another way, in that some people have the option of leaving the country behind. Some exercise this option for professional opportunities; the United States faces a brain drain not unlike that in which German scientists and researchers moved to other countries in the 1930s. Others exercise this option merely because they don’t want to live in a country whose government does the sorts of things that our government is doing. Sadly, some who remain, whether because they choose to remain or because they don’t have the resources allowing them to leave, are critical of those who leave. It seems to me that such criticisms divide resistance forces, and that the division weakens those who would challenge the current regime.

One person who left is Tim Snyder, a researcher who has done significant work not only in identifying how tyranny emerges and functions but also in developing strategies for responding to it. Snyder moved last year from Yale University to the University of Toronto. Some have criticized Snyder for making that move, suggesting that he’s abandoned the United States at a crucial time. He’s now offered what I think is a strong response to his critics. I don’t think he owes any of us a justification for leaving, but I think he addresses the concerns that some have expressed. However, what I appreciate most about his response is how he moves from an account of his own life decisions to a challenge to all of us to work together in the fight to respond to the current administration. The struggle before us is big; the administration has indeed eaten its way deep into our social and political institutions. (Fascinating, isn’t it, that the DOGE engineer who used AI to identify what he thought was wasteful spending in the Department of Veterans Affairs spoke of the government contracts identfied as targets as “munchables”?) Be sure to listen to the end of Snyder’s video. I think he’s right. We need to get into the fight, working to counter the work of the current administration, and to direct our energies against the regime than to work against each other.

May 2025 reading report

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:40:00 -0400

As I wrap up another month of reading, I’ll pause to celebrate and appreciate the privileges of a comfortable retirement. These are troubled times, and there’s much to be concerned about, but at least I have the time and energy to bury myself in reading and thinking some of the time. I’m grateful.

I’ve now posted some notes about the books I finished reading in May. Some general comments: first, now that I look at the list as a whole I’m surprised at the number of books listed whose authors I knew absolutely nothing about when the month began. I discovered three of them (Craig Mod, Lauren Markham, and Andrea Barrett) while browsing bookstores on our recent trip to Texas and New York City. (Did I mention that one of my favorite pastimes is visiting bookstores?) I checked Solvej Balle’s novel out of the library after reading about it in the list of books shortlisted for this year’s International Booker prize. As I say in my comments, I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve read in quite a while. My wife has been pushing me to read Robin Wall Kimmerer for months, and I’m glad I finally followed her advice. Reading Rebecca Solnit is a treat — her latest collection of essays doesn’t disappoint.

I’ll say once again that I don’t consider these notes to be reviews in any sense. Rather, after finishing a book I write out what I hope to take from it. I write the notes mostly for myself; I’ve committed myself to posting them here to hold myself publicly accountable. If others find them interesting and/or helpful, that’s an added benefit. If you want to comment on any of my notes, whether that’s to challenge something that I say, to add something about a book that you think I’ve missed, or to celebrate a book worth reading, even better.

Following my usual practice, I’ve moved the list of books I’m reading now to the current month.

June 2025

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 13:53:00 -0400

My current reading and TBR lists.

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Dear Writer: Pep talks & practical advice for the creative life

by Maggie Smith

The title and the sub-title of this book together capture very nicely what Smith is about here. The sub-title describes the content, and the title describes the approach. There’s a general letter with the title as a salutation at the beginning of the book, and another letter, similarly addressed, at the beginning of each chapter. A few of the chapter titles offer a sense of the themes: Attention, Wonder, Play, Vulnerability, Connection, and Hope.

Smith illustrates her writing advice with many examples from her own work and also from other authors. While the advice she offers is valuable for any sort of writing, many of her examples are poems. It’s worth mentioning here that while reading the book I found myself thinking that I should try writing poetry. It’s also worth mentioning that when I suggested that possibility to my wife, she laughed rather heartily. There have been so many times when she excitedly read me a poem that she found very powerful and then dealt with the frustration of my getting nothing out of it. I’ve often said that I’m tone deaf when it comes to poetry, so it’s not at all surprising that she found if more than a little funny when I suggested I might write poems.

Still, there’s good advice in this book, even for me. Both reading and writing, she suggests, should change the one who reads and writes. “I don’t engage with language because I want to be soothed. I don’t turn to literature to have my choices or ideas confirmed. I go to be changed” (p. 57). What’s more, both the reader and the writer are shaped by the world in which they live, so a writer should not assume that the reader finds in the text precisely what the writer thinks is there. She encourages me to admit that my vulnerabilities are central to the writing process, and that I should acknowledge them.

At the end of the book, she draws a connection between creativity and hope. “…there is no creativity without hope. Creativity is inherently hopeful, and the reverse is also true: Hope is inherently creative. Hope is imaginative; it allows you to envision what might be up ahead, even when you see nothing” (p. 225). I hope that I can remember that and take it to heart the next time I find myself staring at a blank computer screen, trying to remember what I thought I was going to be writing about.

On the Calculation of Volume II

by Solvej Balle

Spoiler alert – don’t read these comments if you’ve not read and want to read the first volume of this multi-volume novel. I find it impossible to say anything about Volume II without revealing a crucial detail of Volume I.

This is volume two of the novel. In this volume we re-join Tara Selter, who in volume I found herself re-living November 18 over and over again, waking up each morning to a repeat of the day before. She moves around on each of these days, encountering different people, and even engaging family and friends in extended discussions and activities. But the next day, it’s a new November 18th for Tara. Though she remembers conversations and activities of the previous November 18, it’s a new day — the only November 18th — for the people she’s encountered. They have no memory of those conversations and activities.

Tara’s repetition of November 18th continues in the second volume. Balle deepens the experience of Tara’s day to day. Tara struggles to retain her sense of self; I found myself thinking of how much of one’s self-awareness is built on and in response to the perceptions of those around us, even when we reject others’ perspective of us. She attempts to recreate the feedback of the seasons, traveling north to have a sense of winter, and then south to experience spring and summer. It’s so hard for me to write about fiction here — somehow it seems more important to avoid spoilers when I’m writing about a novel than when I’m writing about philosophy or history. So I’ll not get into Tara’s response to and reflections on these attempts to ground a sense of self in a world that doesn’t fully acknowledge her existence. But I’ll say that, just as when I read volume one, I found myself invested in her world. I hope that the translator and publisher don’t leave us waiting too long for the remainder of the seven volume (!) novel.

Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom

by Ariel Burger

Elie Wiesel is known by many as one of the early first-hand witnesses to the Holocaust. In this book Burger celebrates and details how Wiesel brought his experience of the world into his teaching, both in the classroom and in many and varied interactions outside the classroom. I value this book both for its portrayal of Wiesel as a humane friend and mentor and also for its reflections on how one might teach, especially when one is teaching students with strikingly different backgrounds. Imagine a university classroom, for example, where a German student whose grandfather was an SS officer in Nazi Germany asks the question, “Can any good result from evil, and can evil result from good?”

I wish that I had read this book while I was still teaching.

I read Wiesel’s Night long ago, and details are for the most part lost in my memory. I’m regretting that loss as I write this because in this book Burger focuses so much on Wiesel’s emphasis on the importance of memory. “It is a cliché that ignoring history can lead to its repetition. But we also know that the purely technical transmission of information has never been enough to prevent the next tragedy. If memory is to make a moral difference, we need to locate ourselves within it” (p. 23). My general recollection of the book is of a young life in a very dark time. The only detailed memory is of my own despair as I read Wiesel’s account of the night that his father died.

It’s touching and revealing to read how Wiesel brought his vast experience — as a devout Jewish teenager studying sacred texts, as a victim of this Holocaust, and as an activist and writer — into his teaching practice. I’ve already mentioned his insistence on the importance of memory. He also focused on the importance of asking questions. “If you have faith, question it. If you have doubt, quesetion it. Whether you have certainty or uncertainty, question it. And the questions will lead you higher. This is, after all, what we are here to do … together” (p. 105).

Given current trends, his counsel on the importance of questioning, of acknowledging uncertainties, is insightful: “Those who intend evil do not want others to ask these questions, and the bystanders who watch evil happening avoid such investigation. This is the front line of the battle against fanaticism. The fanatic believes he has all the answers, and he has no questions. I have only questions, so I am their enemy. Questions can save us from the certainties that lead to fanaticism. To be human is to ask questions, to ask why, to inquire, to interrogate each situation in a search for the truth, the truth of how we must act. We must face such questions rather than turn away from them; we must unmask and confront evil rather than reduce it to something comfortable. It is not comfortable to name and confront evil, but we cannot be too attached to comfort if we want to make the world better” (p. 123).

All in all, this is a good book for teachers. But it’s also a good book for those who want to live authentic lives in a world rich in inauthenticity.

Aflame: Learning from Silence

by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer made his name as a travel journalist, beginning with Time Magazine. In 1988 he published his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu And Other Reports From the Not-So-Far East. In 1991, his house burned to the ground. Left homeless, he was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, and another friend suggested he would be better off staying at a Benedictine Hermitage in Big Sur. He had his doubts — he’d suffered through “twelve years of enforced chapel at school, every morning and every evening, [which] left me with an aversion to all crosses and hymnals” (pp. 5f). But he found something of a home there, and has returned again and again (and visited other retreat centers as well) over the last several decades.

While he initially found comfort in the silence — after all, he had just lost his home and everything he owned, including the only manuscript of the book he was writing — he has come to see the silence as a way of getting back into the world rather than a comforting end in itself. He cites Thoreau as a companion in this journey: “‘I have no private good,’ the seeming hermit wrote, ‘unless it be my particular attempt to serve the public.’ … ‘I think that I love society as much as most. … I am naturally no hermit’” (pp. 45f).

Iyer continues with his own thought: “Retreat, I’m coming to find, is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection. You learn to love the world only by looking at it closely, in the round. I’m too inclined, I sometimes think, to accentuate the positive, so as I come out from the Hermitage, I try more and more to take myself off to the wounded or desperate parts of the globe. It pains him, I hear the Dalai Lama say, to see an animal killed on TV. But it’s going to get killed anyway, and maybe by watching he can learn something” (p. 58).

He writes that his experience at the Hermitage has helped him to see value in the tradition he felt he had left behind. But he also admits that he can’t commit fully to the silent life, and acknowledges the irony of his taking advantage of the offerings of those who live at places like the Hermitage. How, he wonders, will those of us outsiders who find comfort in such centers manage, when fewer and fewer people are willing to make a full-time commitment to silence?

As the book’s title suggests, the rebirth in silence has an analogue in fires like the one that destroyed his home. “Fire is nature’s agent of rebirth. It replenishes wild places much as I replenish myself by sitting in silence. Out go built-up leaves, in comes open space for animals. Meadows and pine trees and nanzanita cannot survive in its absence” (p. 204). Once again, I’m reminded of the intersection of Iyer’s thought with a line in one of MaggieSmith’s poems.

I sought this book out after stumbling on an online conversation with Iyer that I can no longer find. I was touched by the kindness and insight that Iyer brought to that conversation. I resisted reading his book at first because it seemed not to fit with my current reading plan. But I find that it fits very well, reminding me that time in silence could be especially important while living in a turbulent and unsettling world like the one outside my home today.

My current reading and TBR lists.

The irony of autonomous vehicles in a community of drivers

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 14:44:00 -0400

Rebecca Solnit:

Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles — but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a cooperative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike, or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures — mostly meaning “Wait!” or “Go ahead!” — when I’m out and about, and I look for others’ signals.

No Straight Road Takes You There, p. 89

Life is beautiful, even in the wake of an accident

Fri, 30 May 2025 11:09:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

…when I awoke in the car and became conscious of what had happened[,] I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both my eyes, then tried out my memory — very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English, then telephone numbers. Everything all right. The point was that for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me to decide whether I wanted to live or to die. And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful and that I rather like it.

A letter to Mary McCarthy in April 1962, after a car accident in Central Park (Between Friends, pp. 126f)

Living through loss, seeing the light

Thu, 29 May 2025 17:43:00 -0400

Sometimes people are surprised when they learn that I’m typically reading 6 or even 7 books at a time. This practice comes with a cost; I admit that sometimes I have to backtrack a few pages to remind myself where I am in a particular book. But one thing I love about reading multiple texts is the serendipity, the unexpected connections between books that in topic and style seem totally unrelated. (But, really, isn’t everything related somehow to everything?) Sometimes, I find, I recognize the power of a point made in one book only after it’s reinforced by something I read in another book. I encountered such a connection today. Consider the first stanza of a short poem by Maggie Smith, included in her book Dear Writer:

When a tree is cut down, the sky’s like
finally, and rushes in

Add to this a poem that Pico Iyer reports he discovered in Japan, included in his book Aflame:

My house burned down
I can now see better
The rising moon

Both poems describe how the loss of one thing opens up the appearance of something else. The image in the second poem is even more powerful when one learns that Iyer recalled this short poem at the end of an essay he wrote about a fire that destroyed the house he shared with his mother, along with everything they owned. As he told his mother, “all her fifty-nine years of photos, of keepsakes, all her jewels and lecture notes were gone” (p. 32). And the power of Smith’s poem is more poignant when one learns the poem’s title: “At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees” (p. 60).

Both Smith and Iyer, it seems found opportunities for growth, for life, in the face of loss. Reading these poems reminds me that when I anticipate or fear a loss, I’m much more inclined to focus on the loss than on what the loss might reveal; people who know me well know that I can catastrophize with the best. I’m much more likely to fear what might happen than to celebrate what could happen. That’s especially problematic these days. I wince each morning even before I pick up the daily newspaper.

Reflecting on these poems, I’m pushing myself to live up to my commitment to live in the uncertainty. I remind myself of Solnit’s urging to hope for a better future and to act on the strength of that hope. I need to engage with the world as I find it.

One other bit from today’s reading, Meditation #51 in Claude Anshin Thomas’s Bringing Meditation to Life: 101 Teachings on the Path of Zen Practice:

If I want to wake up and experience life directly, I have to be willing to be uncomfortable. We live in a society that tells us to avoid any sensation, feeling, or experience categorized as “uncomfortable” or “unpleasant.” We are encouraged not to be sad, lonely, confused, or frustrated, to name a few of those feelings. We need to learn to become at peace with what we have been conditioned to experience as our unpeacefulness. It is in the heart of our unpeacefulness that we can discover the true nature of a balanced life lived directly, with all its joys and sorrows.

On the recurrence of genocide

Wed, 28 May 2025 19:25:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

Whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. The particular reasons that speak for the possibility of a repetition of the crimes committed by the Nazis are even more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population “superfluous” even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler’s gassing installations look like an evil child’s fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 272 in the Penguin Classics Edition (writing in 1963)

On the brink. Hope or despair?

Wed, 28 May 2025 10:28:00 -0400

Earlier this week I finished reading No Straight Road Takes You There, a new collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit presents her usual sharp and insightful criticism of so much that’s happening these days. At the same time, she insists that anyone looking at developments over the long haul has reason to hope that things could be better. She insists that such hope is strategically important. Anyone who is convinced that all is lost has little reason to work toward creating a better future. Moreover, she argues that engaging in work for a better world is particularly important for those of us with privilege.

For those of us whose lives are already easy, giving up means making those lives even easier, at least in terms of effort. For the directly impacted, giving up means surrendering to devastation. Giving up on their behalf is not solidarity. And I doubt that anyone in desperate straits has ever taken comfort in the idea that somewhere far safer, people are bitter and despondent on their behalf or have decided they are doomed (p. 69).

Hope, or at least controlled despair, can lead to action. It’s crucial that anyone inclined to believe that all is lost would do well to remember that the current situation, bad as it is in many ways, is better in other ways than the state of things a generation ago. Solnit is definitely not saying that one should accept things as they are now, but she holds out hope that acting decisively now could make a positive difference in how things develop.

Contrast this message with that of M. Gessen (gift link) in this morning’s New York Times. Gessen argues powerfully that we are entering a new stage in U.S. politics, a stage in which the shocking has become familiar.

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

…

And now that has become familiar. I’ve reported on many wars, and I’ve seen how they come to feel routine — to the people living through them, the people reporting on them and the people reading about them. Wars have a limited repertoire: bombings, shellings, offensives, counteroffensives, body counts. After the initial shock, few people keep track of the shifting front line.

Gessen is echoing here a report of what some are calling hypernormalization; one of the biggest challenges we face today is the challenge of not accepting so many outrageous actions as part of the new normal.

I know that Solnit didn’t write the essays collected in her book recently — some are as old as 2020 — and I know that she agrees with Gessen that Trump’s abuses of the system are piling up. Again, she’s not pushing hope because she’s convinced everything will be all right. She’s pushing hope because it leaves room for uncertainty, and uncertainty – not knowing how the future will develop – leaves room for acting now in ways that shape a future that we want for ourselves, for other people, and for the greater-than-human world.

In this respect I’m encouraged by this missive from Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson draws on the work of Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica to highlight just how unsuccessful the Trump administration has been in the federal courts: “Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.” Richardson goes on to highlight other losses in federal courts yesterday. Both she and Bonica recognize that the record of the Supreme Court on Trump cases has been more mixed, and it’s not at all clear how these cases will play out over the long haul. Bonica also points out that the harsh and strident criticism that Trump has directed toward judges who decide against him is a standard element in the would-be autocrat’s playbook.

When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.

Trump hopes to destroy anything resembling judicial independence in the United States. Yet Richardson, following Bonica, leaves some room for hope. But it’s not only hope. It’s also a call for action. Bonica points out that an autocrat’s criticisms of the judicial system has worked, at least for a short time, in establishing and maintaining autocratic control in multiple countries. But he notes one exception. Despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s success so far in maintaining the horrible abuse of human rights in Gaza, his 2023 attempt to abolish judicial independence failed. And it failed because people took to the streets. “Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”

Hope: yes, as much as one can muster. Despair: yes, a despair that acknowledges the weight of the challenges we face. But, out of both of these, action. May 14’s No Kings Day is an opportunity for such action.

Bezos's Amazonian grandiosity

Mon, 26 May 2025 18:09:00 -0400

Craig Mod:

A couple of points for context:

A torii is the gate at the entrance to a Shinto temple that separates the sacred from the secular.
This story is presented as true; I have no reason to doubt it, but I also have no way to verify it. Still, even if it’s fiction, I think it’s the sort of fiction that has a ring of truth to it.

I once took Jeff Bezos (he had been knocked down a rung to the world’s second-richest human at the time) on a little walk around these parts (don’t ask; long story). As we approached the grand torii, I relayed the facts, told him it was the biggest in the world, and he turned to me with the widest eyes I’ve ever seen and said in his singular Jeff Voice: LET’S BUILD A BIGGER ONE!

Things Become Other Things, p. 201

Value, worth, and commoditization

Mon, 26 May 2025 15:10:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

The much deplored devaluation of all things, that is, the loss of all intrinsic worth, begins with their transformation into values or commodities, for from this moment on they exist only in relation to some other thing which can be acquired in their stead. Universal relativity, that a thing exists only in relation to other things, and loss of intrinsic worth, that nothing any longer possesses and ‘objective’ value independent of the ever-changing estimations of supply and demand, are inherent in the very concept of value itself.

The Human Condition, pp. 165f

Impact of economic inequality goes beyond money

Sun, 25 May 2025 15:58:00 -0400

Thomas Piketty:

Monetary distance is more than just monetary distance. It comes with social distance. … So, if by spending the equivalent of one hour of my income, I can buy your entire year of work, that implies kinds of social distance in human relations that raise very serious concerns and questions. So, the very formation of our ideals about democracy and self-government, which involves not only the formal organization of political campaigns and formal access to news, but also all these more informal relationships in our local community — social relations where people interact with each other, enter into deliberation with each other — is threatened by enormous monetary inequalities (pp. 5f).

Piketty and Sandel, Equality: What it Means and Why it Matters, pp. 5f

Colonialism, fascism, totalitarianism

Sat, 24 May 2025 17:53:00 -0400

I know there are mysteries in the world much more mysterious than this, but still — how could I have gone this long without discovering Mandy Brown’s A Working Library? There’s so much there, and I look forward to exploring what she’s done.

I appreciate her introducing me to to Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. This author and book are new to me; I’ve requested a copy of the book from my local library. I’m particularly interested in it for two reasons. First, I’m wondering how his work on colonialism relates to that of Hannah Arendt. There’s no index entry for Césaire in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, though Wikipedia suggests that she at least agreed with one of his central points: that European countries eventually incorporated some of the oppressive tactics against their own citizens that they had first used against their colonies. I wonder, though, whether Césaire would agree with Arendt that anti-Semitism was also a crucial element shaping the policies of what she called totalitarianism (and not simply fascism) in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

A second interest relates to my current reading plan. Many (though not all) of my current book selections are books that I think might help me understand and respond to what’s going in the United States (and some other countries) today. Arendt is already on my reading list; based on Brown’s comments and some of my preliminary investigations of Césaire’s work, I’m thinking that he might provide some additional understanding of how the current U.S. administration is employing security strategies first developed in other countries on citizens and others living in the States.

Aligning the two selves

Sat, 24 May 2025 08:33:00 -0400

Yesterday I wrote of a challenge I face: the challenge of integrating the self, of living day-to-day in a way that lessens the negative impact on the larger cultural and natural world.

This morning I came across this from Rebecca Solnit:

May our efforts in the present make a time when two women sit by the sandy shore of an ocean and contemplate what we have done to reverse the damage of the late Age of Fossil Fuels, [thinking] of how humanity put itself in harness to pull in the opposite direction, toward alignment with the plants that sequestered carbon and exhaled oxygen, toward making peace with nature after centuries of war, toward restoration, toward the stories of how it was that may stand as stories of how it could be. Toward the ways of those people who did so little harm in this era when some — especially in my own country — and the institutions they created did so much (No Straight Road Takes You There, p. 23).

Solnit is right, as she often is. Aligning the two selves involves also aligning with the natural world, “making peace with nature.”

When I couldn’t sleep last night I finished reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry. She offers advice for how we might create an economy more supportive of people and the world by paying attention to the systems of the natural world. Both Solnit and Kimmerer emphasize the importance of narratives that shape us and in that shaping have an impact on the world in which we live. There’s wisdom there, a wisdom that could indeed ground hope in a situation that seems hopeless. I’m not quite there yet, but at least I find myself hoping for hope.

Word for the day: Hypernormalization

Fri, 23 May 2025 15:50:00 -0400

Hypernormalization.

That’s my word for the day. Actually, for the week. Well, actually actually, for months.

It’s a mouthful. Though it’s new to me, Upworthy reports that it appeared in a 2005 book by historian Alexei Yurchak. Yurchak used the term to refer to the sense of things in the last years of the Soviet Union, “when everyone [in the Soviet Union] knew the system was failing, but since no one could imagine a possible alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.”

Last week I posted an excerpt from Lauren Markham’s book Immemorial as a commonplace:

…to be alive on today’s planet is, as Daisy Hildyard writes, to hold two selves, to inhabit two bodies. “You have an individual body,” she writes, “in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” You can just be sitting somewhere in, say, Marseille, as she sees it, while your second body is “floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container on the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.” Essayist Elvia Wilk refers to this second body as “the ecosystem body,” which both influences and is influenced by “ecologies beyond the individual self.” We may or may not be aware of body number two, but the split is unavoidable, we inhabit both at once: the innocent and the implicated (p. 57).

She’s talking there about our living in the midst of a climate crisis; I rather suspect she’d agree that the natural world around us is not the only system that’s failing. In the United States and other countries we face explicit and more and more concrete attacks on anything even close to a functioning democracy. The financial system is more and more unstable, leaving many people on the edge of financial collapse.

In some ways, I live the normal day-to-day life of someone fortunate and privileged enough to have a place to sleep and no immediate concerns about food, intellectual stimulation, and medical care. At the same time, I know that my simple day-to-day routines, despite my attempts to simplify and reduce, continue to damage the larger environment. Despite living without a car, relying instead on walking, cycling, or mass transit to get around the city, I consume more than my share of resources. Despite the fact that I’m retired and no longer working, my partner and I have saved enough over the years that we are unlikely to run out of resources before we die.

Still, the world around me seems to be falling apart.

A friend told me recently that when someone in her family was near death, she called her sister to ask if they could go together to be with their dying relative. The sister said something like “I’m not sure I can do that. I just put a pot of soup on to cook.” Of course the sister decided pretty quickly that she wanted to be with her family and the dying relative. But the immediate response captures something of the sense of hypernormalization: how do I take care of day-to-day matters when it seems that things are falling apart around me?

I know that I’m fortunate and privileged. I know that there are people being seized on the street and whisked away to gulags in other countries and in the United States. I know that when I hit the streets in one of the major protests against the current administration it’s more than likely that I’ll return safely that night to my bed, and that I’ll have something for breakfast the next morning. I know that my giving money to support political causes, independent journalists, and those less fortunate than I am doesn’t mean that I’ll be living on the street myself.

The challenge I put to myself is the challenge to see what’s going on around me as decidedly not normal, even when I’m able to maintain something like normality in my day-to-day life. Or, to put the point in terms of Markham’s contrast between the innocent self and the implicated self, the challenge I face is to align those two selves more closely to form an integrated self more likely to nurture a cultural and natural world whose systems support the florishing not only of all human beings, but also of what Robin Wall Kimmerer and others call the more-than-human world.

A reading report

Thu, 22 May 2025 10:29:00 -0400

I was traveling for the first half (and more) of this month, and so I fell a bit behind on my reading notes. But I’ve now posted notes on books that I finished reading in April and added notes for the first few books I’ve completed this month as well.

It’s quite a diverse list, and the authors and themes are broader than what I proposed in my most recent revision (or re-revision) of my reading plan. One reason for the breadth is that I was committed to completing books I was reading before that revision; and another is that I simply can’t resist picking up a book that I find particularly interesting. Visiting bookstores while traveling means exploring other collections and presentations of new books.

April books worth highlighting are Lindsey Stonebridge’s fascinating and insightful book about Hannah Arendt and Robert Zaretsky’s book about Simone Weil. Both Arendt and Weil are regaining currency in today’s political and cultural climate. If you’re interested in these women, whether you’ve pursued that interest or not, I think these two books are well worth reading. Laura Beer’s book on Orwell is also a good read, bringing the Brave New World and other themes into today’s troubled times. Jack Fairweather’s account of the life and work of the German judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer helped me to understand how Bauer pushed Germans to face their responsibility for the Holocaust is crucial.

A comment about the May list. I wrote last month about my favorite independent bookstores; In my travels this month I discovered a few more of those stores and revisited some on the list, and found a few books that I couldn’t resist even though they’re outside the boundaries of my current reading plan. One of those is Dust and Light, by Andrea Barrett. Her account of how her research informs her fiction is both entertaining and perceptive. Lauren Markham’s account of her endeavor to find a way to grieve the world we’re losing in the climate crisis is poignant. And Griffin Dunne’s account of his life in the fast and famous lane is … well, I think I’ll leave that one off stage.

I’ve no idea whether others find these reading notes helpful. If you’re inclined, please leave a note, whether that’s to challenge my interpretation of a text or to celebrate with me the value of a book well written. Whether they’re helpful to others or not, the discipline of writing them and the accountability enforced by posting them publicly, is good for me. I hope I can maintain the discipline.

The power of reading – the power of translation

Wed, 21 May 2025 10:47:00 -0400

Last night I began reading Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume I, which was shortlisted this year for the International Booker Prize. I’m only 15 pages into the novel, but I already feel as though I’m living in a world and even a time which is not my own. The power of reading, in this case, is enhanced, deepened, and complicated by the power of translation. Obviously I can’t compare Barbara J. Haveland’s English translation to the original Danish, but I feel the power of another world, a world different from mine, as I read.

This morning I learned that Balle’s novel did not win the prize. Instead, the award and recognition go to Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories by Banu Mushtag, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. I look forward to reading those stories, but I’m moved this morning by the author Max Porter’s speech announcing the award. It reminds me of why I read, and it also reminds me that I should be reading both broadly and deeply.

Translated literature is a way of communicating over a border, under a wall, beyond an algorithm’s reach. … Novels are often described as empathy machines and that may well be true but they don’t get us off the hook. They cannot be empathetic for us. … In a world of screaming arguments fiction holds its ambiguous nerve. It is waiting for its bespoke critical partner, its weird accompanist — you. The novel needs a thoughtful collaborator in order to mean anything, and to mean something completely different every time it is read, and re-read, and re-read.

Porter suggests that reading books in translation brings news of the “human elsewhere.” In today’s world — and in my country — in which so many would have us pretend that there is no elsewhere worth taking seriously, I treasure the otherness that engages me when I read almost any book, but especially, today, when I read a book translated from another world, another language, into my own. It’s a gift.

Words instead of action

Mon, 19 May 2025 11:01:00 -0400

Lauren Markham:

As a writer, I knew that words could sometimes feel like not only the antithesis of action, but also, worse, like mechanisms of concealment for doing nothing at all: empty gestures in the mouths of politicians, static social media slogans, platitudes on memorial plaques — never again, in memory of, may we never forget. I wanted for change to be made manifest in the world, and I continued to doubt my, or anyone’s, ability to manage that with words.

Immemorial, p.. 97

Two bodies: the innocent and the implicated

Sat, 17 May 2025 17:25:00 -0400

Lauren Markham:

…to be alive on today’s planet is, as Daisy Hildyard writes, to hold two selves, to inhabit two bodies. “You have an individual body,” she writes, “in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” You can just be sitting somewhere in, say, Marseille, as she sees it, while your second body is “floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container on the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.” Essayist Elvia Wilk refers to this second body as “the ecosystem body,” which both influences and is influenced by “ecologies beyond the individual self.” We may or may not be aware of body number two, but the split is unavoidable, we inhabit both at once: the innocent and the implicated.

Immemorial, p. 57

Small town Texas roots

Wed, 14 May 2025 11:05:00 -0400

Earlier this week I described my recent travels in Texas, reflecting on planned re-connections with old friends and the surfacing of other connections with people in my past. If I’d thought about it, I might have incorporated Whitehead’s suggestion that what we tend to think of as an essential person going through life collecting all sorts of experiences is really an abstraction. The more concrete reality, he suggests, is a series of selves, each the concrescence of experiences that come together to make that self, and each dying and then passing its identity on as a central element in the coming to be of the next manifestation of self. As he put it, “the many become one, and then there is one more.” As I thought about that this morning, I returned to something that I often wonder about: who would I be today if my father had not made the mid-career decision to enter the army when I was 12 years old?

This decision led our family away from small town Texas, first to El Paso, which is so different from the rest of Texas that I lost my Texas accent during our almost five years there, and then to Germany, where I graduated from high school. There’s no question in my mind that my these moves broadened my view of the world.

Several examples come to mind. I remember classmates in El Paso being expelled from school because they were caught speaking Spanish in the school hallway. I wondered then what was so threatening about students speaking a language other than English. In Heidelberg, I remember pushing my parents to subscribe to the International Herald Tribune in addition to the Stars and Stripes. I read both newspapers daily, and was struck by how the perspective of each paper shaped its presentation of news about various world events, in particular the war in Viet Nam. My awareness of world events was both broader and deeper than what I knew and didn’t know about the world while living in those small Texas towns.

Obviously, I can’t go back and live a different life, staying in those Texas towns, so that I can compare the person that I would have been to the person that I am.

Yesterday I read a fascinating interview of Craig Mod, the photographer and writer now touring to discuss his new book Things Become Other Things. I had seen the book in a couple of bookstores. It looked interesting, but I resisted purchasing it. After reading that interview, I’m afraid, resistance was futile. I returned to the bookstore and purchased one of the two remaining copies they had in stock. (It’s even a signed copy — number 0063 — the number, I suppose, communicates the fact that Mod is an artist, and not just any author.) Despite the fact that it doesn’t fit all that neatly into my current reading plan, I couldn’t stop reading it. I’ve read only a third of the book, but I’m struck by Mod’s comparison of his life in Japan to his childhood and adolescent life in a so far unnamed (but rust belt?) U.S. town decimated by the loss of industry and the Opioid crisis. The book is addressed to a childhood friend whom he’s not seen in 27 years. He describes his move to Japan to attend university as a life-changing and world-expanding move, and at least in retrospect he sees the move as an escape:

Somehow, early on, I decided the only way out of our quagmire was to leave. … I remember now, even at age eleven or twelve, making a promise to ourselves that we would get out. I would get myself out and pull you, too. I’d remove us from the hexed equation entirely — the equation of the town, the country (for how could a country that would let this happen to a town be trusted?).

I know that the 1960s world of those small Texas towns was not as desolate as the life he describes in his hometown, but the question still haunts me: who would I be if we hadn’t moved away from those towns when I was 12? More to the point, given the current political climate of our country, would I be as concerned about the well-being of others as I am now? I know from conversations with friends in conservative states that there are many who strongly disagree and are attempting to resist the oppressive actions of conservative state and federal governments, but I’m wondering about my own development here. Given how my experiences have shaped the person that I am, how would I be different if I hadn’t moved away?

The poet Billy Collins has something to say about this.

I Go Back To The House For A Book

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor’s office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me—
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid—
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

Connections across time and space

Tue, 13 May 2025 10:22:00 -0400

Last year I read Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters. As the title suggests, she writes about chance meetings between a variety of American notables. The book has stuck with me over the last year. Some of the encounters she describes are interesting in themselves. But she also has me thinking about how I’ve been shaped by conversations and encounters both random and planned. A recent trip to Texas, where I lived most of the first 30 years or so of my life, brought those formative connections to mind more vividly.

I left Texas almost 40 years ago, and I’m not interested in living there again. I’ve changed, and I think the state has changed as well. My wife and I just spent a week there, visiting family and old friends. I saw the friends and family I expected to see, but there were also a few chance encounters.

We had dinner in Abilene the first night with a long (a long) time family friend. He was in college with my parents in the late 1940s and knew my mother before my father did. I came to know him when I was in college — he taught and chaired the religion and philosophy department at the college where I took my degree. I worked as a student assistant in the department. But the chance encounter here was that his partner joined us for dinner – she’s active in the small Unitarian Universalist church there and my wife directs a UU faith-based human rights organization, so they had a lot to talk about. It was good to re-connect with him and to connect with her.

The next morning we drove to Lubbock to visit my sister. As we were settling in, I checked my email to find a message from a student I taught at Georgetown. The email was one of those gifts former faculty occasionally receive from former students. She thanked me for my class and said that my approach to teaching is one thing that persuaded her to go into college teaching. I saw in her email signature that she’s now in a Ph.D. program at Texas Tech. I was in Lubbock for the first time in years, reading the first email I’d received from that student since she finished my class in 2012, and she’s now studying at a Lubbock university. Coincidental, but still a little freaky.

The next morning we were drinking some very good coffee at Monomyth Coffee and talked a bit with a young couple with child sitting at the table next to us, mostly just exchanging pleasantries. They asked how we found our way from Boston to Lubbock and I said we had family there. I also mentioned that I had gone to college in Abilene. The woman said that her mother had gone to the same school. Based on her appearance, I was guessing that I could be her mother’s age and asked what her mother’s name was. I recognized the name immediately. I didn’t know her well, but I was close friends with some of her close friends. Surely, coincidental. Surely, again, a little freaky.

After the weekend in Lubbock, my wife and I drove to Dallas, where she had work. On Monday I met up with a good friend from graduate school. He now lives in Austin, and we met in Waco at Dichotemy Coffee and Spirits, another very good coffee place. It was great to catch up with him, to bemoan the current state of culture and politics in the country generally and Texas in particular, and even to discuss some philosophical and theological issues. But one thing I learned is that there’s now a PhD student at SMU (where he and I were in grad school together) who is writing a dissertation drawing heavily on the work of our teacher (Schubert Ogden) and one of Ogden’s students. This graduate student graciously agreed on short notice to have lunch with me while I was in Dallas. I really enjoyed the conversations. He was patient with my stories about my classroom and other encounters with Ogden, and I was impressed with the depth and breadth of his understanding of Ogden’s work. What’s more, we learned that one of his good friends had been my wife’s professional colleague, and one of his committee members is a professor whom I hired to teach at a small college in Georgia before I left my position there. More simple coincidences, and also a bit more freakiness.

The day before leaving Dallas, I spent a few hours visiting with another old friend. I worked with her and her husband my first year in graduate school, and both of them were very supportive of me during my time in Dallas. She even played piano at our wedding reception (gratis), and in the past decade or so she’s established a professional relationship with my wife. Her husband died several years ago; it was great to catch up with her and to share memories of my time with them.

All that’s to say that Texas might be a big state, but it’s still in a small world. And it’s a world that shaped the person that I am today.

Writing is mysterious

Fri, 09 May 2025 11:05:00 -0400

Andrea Barrett:

Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be. Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without those foundations. Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer’s imagination works that way. Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between the writer’s own uncontrollable interior preoccupations, and what she’s most concerned about in the world around her. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the breathing, bleeding place we guard so carefully in daily life.

Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, pp. 54f

May 2025

Fri, 09 May 2025 10:56:00 -0400

Some notes about books I finished reading this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

On the Calculation of Volume I

by Solvej Balle

This is an amazingly thought-provoking novel. One of the best I’ve read this year.

Imagine living the same day repeatedly for a year – 365 days, each the 18th of November. Imagine further that other people in the world, including those close to you, are living a normal day, a November 18 that’s preceded by November 17 and followed by November 19. And that you drop in and out of their normal day, but each new day that you appear to one of them is their first November 18, so that they have no memory of having seen you before on that day, because this is the first time that they have lived the day that you have lived again and again and again.

I’m reluctant to say more because I don’t want to ruin the suspense of your reading it. (You will read it, won’t you?) Instead, I’ll just offer this passage from early in the novel, as the narrator comes to grips with the fact that the new day is, in fact, not new at all:

“That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws” (p. 32).

Equality: What It Means and Why It Matters

by Thomas Piketty and Michael J. Sandel

Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard University, and Thomas Piketty, an economist with appointments at the Paris School of Economics and the London School of Economics, held a public conversation at the Paris School of Economics on May 20, 2024. This short book is an edited version of that conversation.

They start the conversation by agreeing on three reasons that inequality is a problem. It means that there is unequal access to basic goods, that there are different levels of power, voice, and participation, and that some are denied a sense of basic dignity. As the conversation develops, each offers examples of these problems and different proposals for rectifying the inequalities.

Some highlights:

After social democrats in Sweden came to power in the 1930s, they introduced progressive taxation and used the increased funding to decommoditize education and health care, making it free for all citizens. Conservative economists like Hayek argued that this was a “road to serfdom,” but the country is flourishing. (Piketty doesn’t mention the increased power of the nationalist Sweden Democrats party, but it’s worth noting that they support the socialist welfare state, though they think that immigrants should not receive these services.) Contrast that with tax rates in the United States, which saw a similar rise in the first decades of the 20th century, from a low of 7% in 1913 to a high in the low 90s from 1951 to 1963, then floating around 70% until 1981 before dropping to the mid-to high 30s for the reminder of the century and into the first quarter of the 21st century.
Some argue that economic inequality is not really a problem because of meritocracy – those at the top deserve to be there because of their talents and effort. However, Sandel sees two problems here: first the meritocracy is in fact unequal, since those with advantages have a head start on the competition. Second, it allows those who are successful to believe that their success depends exclusively on their ability and effort. Instead of doubling down on the meritocracy, he would prefer that we work in enhance the sense of dignity of all those who participate in the economy, lessening the “prestige” associated with a university degree.

The two scholars make many other points. The conversational tone makes it easy to follow, but also leaves out a lot of detailed analysis of what stands behind the positions that they are arguing. While I’m convinced by much of their argument, I think that if I didn’t begin the reading already convinced that a move to democratic socialism is the right move, I would want more argument in support of the positions they’re developing.

No Straight Road Takes You There

by Rebecca Solnit

This book is a collection of essays, published in a variety of publications over the last 6 years or so. Different essays, in different publications, but in this book they come together to make and support several related claims. First, we human are part of a vast, interconnected natural realm, and one of the shortcomings of conservative ideology is that it fails to recognize or appreciate the implications of this connectedness. Second, it’s important to recognize that thinking in terms of a longer time frame can reveal social progress that seems missing in the short-term. Third, that we should not only acknowledge that we simply don’t know the future with certainty simply because the future is uncertain, but also recognize that the our decisions and other actions in the present will shape the future.

Solnit insists that these three points are important to our understanding and living in the face of both cultural and natural change. Culturally, they facilitate awareness of the ways in which the powerful abuse those without power and offer reasons and strategies to work against such abuses. Naturally, they offer strategies for those concerned about the rapidly developing damage to the world in which we live and push us to hold on to hope that we can work to mitigate these damages.

Some relevant quotes:

“as the poet Antonio Machado famously said, ‘Walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.’ For so many of our destinations, no straight road takes us there. The route is over mountains or through forests and beyond what we know — and it may also be through inconceivable beauty and transformation as well as peril; it may be uncharted, or steep, or take decades or centuries to traverse; we may get there through storytelling, alliance, or the appearance of some unanticipated participants. That’s a declaration of difficulty and uncertainty but also of possibility that I offer as encouragement to keep going” (p. 6).
“When you take on hope, you take on its opposites and opponents — despair, defeatism, cynicism, and pessimism. And, I would argue, optimism. What all these enemies of hope have in common is confidence about what is going to happen, a false certainty that excuses inaction” (p. 65).
“But the present only looks incomprehensible to those who ignore the past, which is full of the strange and unpredictable things that transpired to create the present, reminders of how often destiny hangs by a thread and turns on a dime, how often the unexpected happens anyway” (p. 28)
“I’ve called contemporary conservative thinking ‘the ideology of isolation,’ obsessed with control through separation and segregation, through borders and anti-immigration rhetoric, through policing racial and gender categories, and through marriage inequality as both a denial of marital rights to same-sex couples and an affirmation of male domination within heterosexual marriage. It’s anti-environmental, because of its opposition to the foundational truth science has revealed more and more boldly in recent decades is that the world is made of pervasive, interconnecting systems, not discrete objects. With that truth comes a mandate to act with responsibility toward the consequences that is at odds with the conservative ideals of individual freedom and unfettered capitalism” (pp. 162f).

I’ve been a Solnit fan since reading Orwell’s Roses, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I discovered her so late. This collection is yet another gem. As I read, I found myself, repeatedly, thinking “Yes!” Solnit hasn’t completely freed me of my despair — or is it cynicism? But, as I said in a post shortly after I began reading this book, she has me hoping to hope.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

In this book Kimmerer expresses her discomfort living in the current economy of extractive capitalism and her hope to live in what she calls a gift economy. The latter, she says, is modeled for us in the natural world.

“I lament my own immersion in an economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts gifts to commodities in a currency that enables us to purchase things we really don’t need while destroying what we do” (p. 72). In the natural world, she says, different organisms engage with each other in symbiotic relationships, each providing something to and getting something from the other. She’s not painting an idyllic view of a nature in which no creature harms another — death is a part of life.

She finds hope in the field of ecological economics. For example, she says, Valerie Luzadis defines economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance it’s quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves” (p. 30). Kimmerer finds in this definition a stark depature from mainstream economics, which sees scarcity to be a fundamental element, and decisions about resources in the face of scarcity to be crucial decisions.

Kimmerer acknowledges that there are times when natural scarcities make it difficult for organisms to survive. “There is no question that all living beings experience some level of scarcity at various points, and therefore that competition for limited resources, like light or water or soil nitrogen, will occur. But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting ‘If there’s not enough of waht you want, then want something else.’ This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote” (pp. 76f).

She draws on indigenous cultures, including her own, to develop what she calls a gift economy, “a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else” (p. 91).

She acknowledges that the hope for such an economy will seem naively optimistic to many. But she sees hope in what she and others call the “cuddly capitalism” of the Nordic countries. She thinks also that there are emerging gaps in the current economic system that leave room for gift economies to emerge on the margin.

Things Become Other Things

by Craig Mod

This book is multi-faceted. In one sense, it’s a travelogue, inviting the reader to travel along with the author as he tours rural Japan. In another, it’s a rumination on the joys and challenges of seeing Japan at a walking pace that both allows intimate encounters with ancient shrines and temples and also communicates just how tedious and tiring walking can be. In yet another, it’s a comment on significant differences between Japanese culture that encourages caring for individuals and community, on one hand, and United States culture that celebrates individuals who “make it” and discounts the misery of those who don’t. Finally, and most poignantly, it’s a love letter to a childhood friend who didn’t manage to escape the deteriorating town that Craig Mod left behind when he moved to Japan for university.

Mod’s experiences while walking through Japan lead him to reflect on the world he escaped and, more intimately, on his time with Bryan, the childhood friend who didn’t make it out. Some of these reflections are pleasant, even entertaining. Others are painful, such as when Mod recalls the violence of his childhood, a violence in which he and Bryan forged their relationship.

The inspiration for the book’s title comes from conversations with the couple hosting one of the inns where Mod stayed. While he’s visiting with the couple, a woman in her mid-30s joins them. The wife introduces the woman as their daughter. The next morning, the husband gives Mod a ride back to the trail. “As the husband drives me down off the mountain, back to the Ise-ji path, he breaks our silence by saying, She ain’t … our daughter. I am entranced by something out the window: Beyond the fields, past a dirt road, in the forest something burns. Before I can register what he said, he continues with more fluency. She just appeared seven years back. Wanderin’ the country, needin’ a job, somehow … found us. Not a daughter but like a daughter. Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens: Things become … other things” (pp. 60f).

Time passes, life moves. Such is the case with Mod’s sense of self and of the world in which he lives. He moved from a failing town in the United States to Japan, and became a different person. The power of this change comes home to him, and to the reader, when he re-visits the United States to take care of things after his father died. “Having spent the majority of my twenties in Japan, it had been a while since I’d been in a place I didn’t know, and yet was so readily accepted as a local. There was no second-guessing how to speak to me, no hiccups with language, no shock at my ability to speak or implicit or explicit questioning of where I was ‘really’ from, no looks as if I were a horse that had wondered into a shop and begun lecturing about physics. The realization was a shock: Standing there, I was able to slide into someone else’s world by dint of simply leaning against a wall. And yet — something had failed us on this side of the ocean and I was still trying to pick it apart. Something systemic, not any one person or thing, but the whole of it all, and no matter how easy it may have felt to slide back, I knew then that I could never return” (pp. 90f).

He and his friend Bryan, though they started and were formed in the same place, took different paths. “Two healthy young boys with healthy minds, capable of so much. Our paths ran parallel for so long, until they didn’t. But as we now know, you can start at the same place, under shared circumstance, and in the end it means nothing” (p. 72). Things become other things, and some things are lost in the becoming.

(A couple of points from this book have already found their way into my regular blog posts — see here and here. It’s also worth pointing again to this very interesting interview of the author.

Immemorial

by Lauren Markham

Markham’s inspiration for writing this book is her deep-felt need for a way to grieve the impending loss of a habitat that can support life as we know it. The need she feels is complicated by her realization that she shares some responsibility for this impending loss. She suggests that each of us has in fact two bodies, one innocently living day-to-day and the other living a life that is destroying our habitat. Of course, we are not two selves, but I think the image captures nicely my own sense that in some ways I’m living a “normal” innocent life, while in the larger scheme of things I’m consuming resources at an alarming rate.

She describes a frustrating quest as she worries that language might be insufficent: “On my most doleful days, I questioned what words could accomplish, and, if anything, whether it would be nearly fast enough. What good were words when the world was burning? These questions had always been lurking in the corner, but now they crouched upon my shoulders each time I sat down at my desk. It was beginning to feel like anything I wrote about climage change or other urgent social matters was either a feeble finger wag or merely a double underline: a reminder of things everyone already knew” (p. 31).

And yet she wants some way to talk about the grief, some memorial that captures the pain of the impending loss. “…in yearning for a memorial related to climate grief, I was in part looking for a place to deposit it so I could leave it behind. Cast your sorrows here …” (pp. 51f).

Along the way, she notes that others struggle with the language. The Guardian updated its style guide in 2019, changing the way it speaks about what many still call climate change. “Instead of ‘climate change’ the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming….’”

She ultimately settles, perhaps provisionally, on the term immemorial. “It was almost impossible to read immemorial and not think of the phrase time immemorial — connoting something ancient, long-lived, some ancestral past. It did have the word memorial in it (though its definition, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with the sort of memorial I was talking about). Because the prefix im- can mean both into and toward, as well as not, or something’s opposite, the word simultaneously connoted being inside the memorial and being not a memorial at all. Maybe it needed a suffix, too, something that spoke to the ache and desire to be a part of ancient time, the ache and desire for this memorial space, to be both inside it and to not need it. Mania was one — an excessive desire. And then there was -algia — another suffix connoting a discomfort disorder, as in myalgia, nostalgia. It derived from the ancient Greek word that meant both pain and sorrow. Immemorialgia. The sorrowful ache for memorial, to be part of ancient time and to mourn it, to be distinct from memory and deeply nested within it” (pp. 114f).

I find this a thought-provoking book. It returns me to themes I explored earlier this year while reading Matthes’s What to Save and Why. I appreciate the importance of grieving the world that we’re losing, even as we push ourselves to lessen the loss. (Though I can’t resist observing that the current administration in the United States is intent not only on denying the loss, but also on destroying any infrastructure that could help us to understand the magnitude of the loss.)

Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction

by Andrea Barrett

Barrett is an award-winning writer of fiction, and in this delightful book she offers her insights into how the results of historical, biographical, and literary research find their way into the pages of novels and stories. She doesn’t claim to describe the way to approach writing and research. Instead, she grants that different writers have different ways of working.

Barrett opens a window into her process, describing research she did in order to write some of her fiction and unpacking just how the facts revealed in her research inform the truth in her fiction. Reading the book is like visiting an artist’s studio – provided, that is, that the working space includes rough sketches, several attempts to paint the same scene, works by other artists that the artist finds inspiring, and both finished paintings and abandoned efforts.

Along the way Barrett describes the work of writers as various as Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. She gives a detailed analysis of research she did in order to write stories of arctic explorers. She describes how the project she planned for a year-long residency in New York changed rather dramatically in the wake of the September 11 attacks. She discusses the difference between a straightforward biography and historical fiction.

So, how does she write? And what might the reader learn about her writing process? I posted this as a commonplace last week, but I’ll add it again here: “Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be. Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without those foundations. Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer’s imagination works that way. Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between the writer’s own uncontrollable interior preoccupations, and what she’s most concerned about in the world around her. We write in resonse to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the breathing, bleeding place we guard so carefully in daily life” (pp. 54f).

The Friday Afternoon Club

by Griffin Dunne

I’d say that this book is interesting, but I don’t think that reading it was the best use of my time. It’s not all that unusual for me to begin reading a book and then wonder why I’m reading it. That’s a problem for me, because I’m haunted by the sunk cost phenomenon. I don’t want to stop reading it, because then I will have wasted the time I’ve already spent reading what I’ve read.

Occasionally I manage to overcome this and set the book aside. But this time I couldn’t. Actually, that’s not quite true – I managed to set it aside several times, but each time I picked it up again. I suppose I couldn’t resist being a fly on the wall in a world very different from the one in which I live. (I hasten to add that this sort of otherness is rather different from what I describe in my comment on the importance of reading books in translation.) From his early years, Dunne and his family ran in circles decidedly different from my own. He describes occasional and also ongoing encounters with people whose names I know only from newspapers, movies, and books. I was particularly interested in the occasional descriptions of time with his aunt Joan Dideon, but those were few and far between.

One interesting bit is his account of his mostly platonic relationship with one-time apartment-mate and up-and-coming actor Carrie Fisher, before she left to assume a role in a movie she knew very little about. Her catapulting to star status after Star Wars put some distance in their relationship temporarily, but they managed to stay good friends.

Though this really isn’t my type of book (why was I reading it again?), I think that Dunne writes well. He writes about both happy and unhappy times with a direct honesty that left me feeling like that fly on an actual wall. His account of his family’s pain when his sister Dominique was murdered, and the deepened pain as they sat through a muder trial, is touching. He also deals honestly with the ups and downs of his professional career and personal life – though he writes too honestly and openly for my taste about his sexual encounters. I was reminded of the 1972 film Butterflies are free, in which Mrs. Baker tells an aspiring playwright that she’s not willing “to pay money to see nudity, obscenity and degeneracy.” Ralph, the playwright, responds “Mrs. Baker, these things are all a part of life.” “I know, Mr. Santori. So is diarrhea, but I wouldn’t classify it as entertainment.” I think there’s room in good drama for nudity, obscenity, and even degeneracy, but I don’t need quite as much detail about adolescent and young adult sexual encounters as is provided here. Your mileage might vary.

Not very positive comments, I know. But I think that’s because of a mismatch between Dunne’s life and my own. If this is your sort of book, I think you could well find it a good read.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Treasures of independent bookstores

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:10:00 -0400

Saturday’s celebration of Independent Bookstore Day has me thinking about all of independent bookstores who have fed my literary appetite over more than five decades. Perhaps some of them will be familiar to you – I’d love to hear/read from anyone who has spent time in any of these stores. Even better, perhaps you’d be kind enough to point out other stores that one simply must visit the next time one is in a particular city.

I’ve moved around quite a bit in my adult life. Most of the stores celebrated below are in or near what was once my home city. I also discuss a few stores in other cities where I’ve not lived. It’s not at all surprising that some of these stores no longer exist, and, as I admit below, a little embarrassing that I, like many other book lovers, made business difficult for the indie stores that survived and those that didn’t.

I did my PhD in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. The school of theology thought it important to provide a good selection of books for seminary and Ph.D. students. To that end, it subsidized an independent bookstore on campus. (As I recall, the administration basically treated the expense as the cost of one Assistant Professor.) The collection included books in all of the different areas of religious studies, but I happen to think that the philosophy and theology collection was particularly strong. I’m allowed to think that because I worked at the store for several years (and even served as interim manager for a semester while the manager was away) and selected many of the books on offer.

Another bookstore in Dallas was the Book Seller (or was it the Bookseller?). I saw it as high-brow, and also more expensive, especially since I didn’t have the employee discount. But it had a very good collection, well organized on dark wood bookshelves, arranged nicely in the carpeted store. Tragically, it went out of business while I was still in school. Not so tragically, they had a going-out-of-business sale that had them marking down the prices of the books remaining on the shelves each day. I remember the deliberations: do I buy this book today at 30% off, or plan instead to buy it tomorrow at 35% off if no one else buys it today?

The used books market in Dallas was anchored by Half Price Books. It wasn’t the monster then that it is now. In fact, they were founded in Dallas not long before I began graduate school; I know that I shopped in their second location; I think I spent time in their first one as well.

After graduate school, we moved to Macon, GA, about 85 miles south of Atlanta. I don’t remember a good bookstore in Macon, though I do remember the sense of excitement among readers when Barnes and Noble opened a branch not too long before we moved away. Our book shopping during our 10 years there was mostly at two Atlanta stores — Oxford Books (no longer in existence) and Charis Books & More. Charis still exists, and proudly claims to be the South’s oldest independent feminist bookstore. (I have to wonder how much competition there is for that honor!) I think that Oxford’s offerings were similar to those of the Book Seller, but the vibe was different – brightly lit, with tiled (or linoleum?) floors. A big entertainment activity for us during our decade in Macon was to drive to Atlanta for dinner and time in one or both of these bookstores. Oxford was much larger than Charis, with a much broader collection. Charis’s collection, obviously, was narrower, but much deeper in feminist thought.

After leaving Macon, we spent 7 years in Nashville and a decade in Northern Virginia just outside DC. On Saturday, when I first started thinking about shopping for books in Nashville, I drew a blank. Surely I was buying books then! Then it hit me: the intervention of the Amazon behemoth. I actually learned about Amazon just before my last semester in Macon, when a colleague I was teaching with used the site to recommend a book we might use in our course. As I recall, I asked her what Amazon was, and she said she wasn’t sure. But I learned what it was, and it wasn’t long after we moved to Nashville that I was buying all of my books there. I continued to buy from Amazon while we lived near DC. I’m not proud of that now. I was naive; I remember thinking of it as in the same category as buying a computer by mail from Gateway Computer, or a similar machine a few years later from Michael Dell’s new startup. I thought of it as supporting the little guy. Of course, some of the little guys who survived grew pretty quickly into big guys, even bullies. Amazon is in that category. As I said, I’m not proud of my time with Amazon; it took me longer than it should have taken to move away from them, but I’m happy now to have left the whole family (Amazon, the WaPost, Whole Foods, and AbeBooks) behind.

From Virginia we moved to Boston, where we’ve lived for the last 11 years. My store of choice here is Harvard Bookstore. It’s across the street from its namesake university, but it’s a separate enterprise. It’s not a huge store, but they have a solid collection of philosophy, cultural studies, and literary non-fiction. Other collections seem strong as well, but I don’t spend much time (or money) in those sections. They also have a decent membership discount program and sell used books in their basement. Two other stores worthy of mention here in the Boston area are Brookline Booksmith and Porter Square Books, though I don’t frequent them. My wife likes the Porter Square store, not least because of their coffee shop. Booksmith, like many other indie stores, seems to have added a lot of non-book merchandise with better profit margins. Anything to survive, I suppose.

I frequent a couple of used bookstores here in Boston: Commonwealth Books and Brattle Books. I can get lost in these stores, browsing the collection for hours at a time. Each has a large selection of used books and each also carries some books worthy of the title antiquarian. Full disclosure: if you look hard and long enough at Commonwealth you just might find some books with my name on the inside cover. They’ve assisted a bit in my futile attempt to lessen the load of my personal library.

I’ve never lived in New York City, but we get there fairly often. One reason for that is we have family living in Brooklyn. Another reason is the large collection of wonderful bookstores. I suppose my favorite for new books in New York these days is Three Lives & Company. It’s small, but I think the collection of literary non-fiction is especially well curated. It also has the distinction of being featured in the opening pages of Evan Friss’s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. A tangent – I bought a copy of that book at Three Lives, and the clerk who sold it to me didn’t even mention the fact that the store was highlighted. The modesty seems consistent with the nature of the store. More bold than modest, though, are the staff recommendations – I try to check out that display every time I’m in NYC. Two other independent stores in NYC, each with multiple locations, are McNally Jackson and Book Culture. McNally Jackson has its own publisher, and has just announced their Marginalian Editions, a collaboration with Maria Popova, the creator and writer of the wonderful Marginalian newsletter. Both of these stores, I think, manage to hold on to the identity of the indie shop despite their multiple location – I think the Book Culture store in Long Island City does that best.

Other NYC bookstores slightly off my beaten path, but well worth a visit, are Greenlight Bookstore and Books are Magic (also with two locations).

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention NYC used bookstores. Of course there’s the monster Strand Books. Right around the corner from the Strand is the much smaller Alabaster Bookshop. Alabaster is the last remaining used bookstore in what was once a row of them on 4th Avenue near Union Square. They don’t have a website. It’s very small, but with a solidly curated collection of literary fiction and non-fiction. Many of the books are first edition classics, and a few of those are autographed copies. A bit more expensive than the Strand, but worth a visit. Much larger — even approaching the size of the Strand — is Argosy Books in midtown Manhattan. It’s family owned, now managed by two daughters and a son of the founder. I saw a documentary about how the used and antiquarian book market has been changed by the Internet that featured this family and their store. One of the daughters mentioned that they’ve been able to ride out the market so far in part because they own their building. The last time I was in the store, I visited a bit with one of the daughters and mentioned that as an advantage. She quickly pointed out that their taxes on that building were substantial — might she have said over a million dollars a year? It’s a hard world out there.

I’ll close by mentioning a few other stores around the United States that I’ve visited. The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago was a highlight whenever I made it to that city. I’ve not visited their “new” store (scare quotes only because it’s not so new anymore); I loved walking through the crowded maze of bookshelves in their old basement location. Incidentally, Jeff Deutsch, the longtime manager of the Seminary Co-op bookstore, has his own book In Praise of Good Bookstores, which is a wonderful read for those who see browsing bookstore shelves to be prime entertainment. There’s Portland’s Powell’s Books, whose claim to be the world’s largest independent bookstore seems right to me. Another used bookstore in Portland is Daedalus Books (I don’t find a website for the store), where I was happy to discover a first edition of The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. I enjoyed a few hours a couple of years ago in Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store. And I was happy to discover Lost City Books, a seller of both used and new books, on a recent visit to DC. And thinking again of our time in Nashville, perhaps I would have seen the error of my Amazon ways sooner if Ann Patchett had opened Parnassus Books while I lived there. I really enjoyed my time there while visiting Nashville friends a couple of years ago.

Those are the stores that come to mind as I remember book store excursions. What stores come to your mind?

Rights and obligations

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:48:00 -0400

Simone Weil:

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights. He, in his turn, has rights, when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.

The Need for Roots, pp. 3f

Universities teaching ignorance

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 11:26:00 -0400

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

Who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?

The Waste Books, 1793-1796; quoted in Ignorance and Bliss by Mark Lilla, p. 199

Plugging for democracy

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 10:45:00 -0400

Athenagoras of Syracuse, as quoted by Thucydides:

[Some say] that democracy is neither intelligent nor fair and that it is rather the rich who are best fitted to govern. I say, however, that “the people” is the name of the whole state, the elite only one segment of it. In addition, the rich are the best at administering the treasury, the wise the best at framing issues, but the people are best at listening to arguments and judging among them, and that all these functions have their place in a democracy. But what actually happens in an oligarchy is that the few give the many their share of risks and then, not content with the lion’s share of the profits, take them all.

Jennifer T. Roberts, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture, p. 6

Contemplating Mortality

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 11:14:00 -0400

“This is such a brush with mortality, difficult to parse at 14.”

So said the father of a 14-year-old boy who shared with his son one of the last helicopter tours of New York City before that helicopter plunged into the Hudson River this past week, killing a Spanish couple, their three young children, and the helicopter’s pilot. Earlier news stories have described the crash itself; this article in the New York Times describes the reactions of families who toured the city in that helicopter shortly before the fatal crash.

There are moments like this one when people are fully aware of just how close they are to death. Sean Carroll begins his book A Series of Fortunate Events with the story of a man who narrowly missed his flight one September morning, only to learn a bit later in the morning that the flight he intended to take was one of those flown into the World Trade Center. Many of us are aware that if circumstances had been just slightly different on a particular day, we or someone close to us would have died. Such moments bring to mind just how fragile and precious life is. But most of us, most of the time, manage to feel ourselves distant from our mortality.

Actually, that’s simply not true for many people in the world. Many people confront concretely and every day the stark evidence of mortality: Will tomorrow be the day when a young child finally succumbs to starvation? Will this afternoon be the time that a missile or drone falls on this apartment building rather than the one down the street? Will one die next week from an easily cured disease simply because one lacks access to medical care?

Many of us, much of the time, are rather removed from those challenges. I’m thinking now about the challenge of mortality itself: how does one live in the face of the realization that life is short, even for those who manage to avoid living the nasty and brutish life suffered by many others?

I would begin by emphasizing the importance of empathy.

Click to read a brief tangent about Elon Musk and Donald Trump on empathy.

I know that Elon Musk and others say that empathy is civilizationally suicidal, and that view seems to inform the actions of the administration that Musk is currently serving. As the linked article goes on to point out, “Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.” It seems to me that we don’t yet know the answer to that question. And that part of coming to that answer turns in part on just what “great” means.

David Hume and other philosophers have argued that empathy is at the root of moral judgment, but I’m not focused on moral judgment here; instead, I’m suggesting that empathy opens the door to a deeper understanding of and stance in response to our mortality. Even those of us who are fortunate enough not to see immediate and direct challenges to our mortality can get a sense of it by paying attention to the lives of others. Seeing and empathizing with others’ suffering, suffering that signals mortality, pushes us to confront our own. Yes, as the father said, such a confrontation is a heavy lift for a fourteen-year-old. It’s a heavy lift for anyone, especially for those of us privileged enough to avoid thinking of our mortality. But even if we try to ignore it, suffering is a part of life.

“We cannot change human suffering because it is the condition of our existing at all. But we can make it articulate. We can make loss, death, and therefore life, present, discernible, real, and in that way turn something unbearable into something human. That is only possible with others, though; hence the touches, the hands, the quizzical looks, the being together, and the being separate” (Lindsey Stonebridge, We are Free to Change the World, p. 202).

We live our lives more authentically — more humanely — if we acknowledge our mortality and face it directly. And I think we face it most fruitfully if we face it in community.

Treasures of independent bookstores

Other NYC bookstores slightly off my beaten path, but well worth a visit, are Greenlight Bookstore and Books are Magic (also with two locations).

Those are the stores that come to mind as I remember book store excursions. What stores come to your mind?

The character of a nationalist

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:01:00 -0400

George Orwell:

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up grade and some hated rival is on the down grade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

“Notes on Nationalism,” in Essays (Everyman Edition), pp. 864f

Re-thinking my reading (yet again)

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 11:30:00 -0400

At the beginning of this year I committed myself to taking my reading more seriously. This is not to say that I wasn’t paying attention to my reading before, but rather to say that I wanted to hold myself accountable to read more critically so that I read for understanding, both broadening and deepening what I take from the books I read. (I’d say that regular readers of this site know that I return again and again to the question how and what I want to read, but I know that there are precious few regular readers!) That re-commitment is manifested most concretely in the reading notes that I’m publishing here on this site. I see these notes not as critical reviews of the books but rather as collections of insights that I want to take with me.

After three months, I feel pretty good about the attention I’m giving to my reading. The exercise of taking those notes has helped me to build a knowledge base from each of the books. But I’m thinking now that I want to add more structure to the reading. I’m motivated here by two concerns.

First, on any particular day I’ll read from several different books, and the list of books reflected in those reading notes make it clear that I’ve been reading a wide variety of topics. Moreover, there’s been little structure in my decisions about which books to read — often times I’ve picked up a book because another author I’m reading recommends it as a good example of fill in the blank here, even if before reading that recommendation I really had no particular interested in the topic recommended. While I appreciate the somewhat serendipitous connections and relationships I find across the apparently different worlds of these books, I’m coming out of my reading with a rather shallow set of unconnected facts and insights, each of them important and/or interesting in itself but with no real coherence to the collection as a whole. Rather like speed dating, I suppose, except without the further step of spending more time and more quality time with a particular topic.

Second — and this is really the more pressing concern — I want my reading to help me live more constructively and authentically in the particular world of today. As I read the news, I’m forced to admit that there are news stories and journalistic analyses of current events that as recently as six months ago I would have dismissed as alarmist hyperbole. But I don’t see all that much hyperbole anymore. It’s not that we’re not responding to the challenge: we’re contributing to organizations that are resisting, we’re participating in protests, we’ve moved our support of news organizations from publications like the WaPost to others like ProPublica, The Guardian, and Talking Points Memo. All of that, I think, is good. But I want my reading to push me to think more critically about how I’m living in the world.

My plan, then, is to focus on the lives and work of individuals who have faced challanges somewhat like the ones that we’re facing. I want to read what these people wrote, and I also want to learn more about how they lived in the world. I’ve already read writings of some of these people, some more than others. I’m already somewhat familiar of the lives that they led, some more than others. But I want to know more. I also hope to learn something by putting them in conversation with each other and, in some cases, reading and thinking about how they learned from and challenged each other.

You can get a hint of this revised plan in the list of books I’m currently reading. That list, appropriately enough, is now in the entry for April 2025; if you’re reading this post later on (and if I’ve maintained my commitment to this project), you can find it in the entry for whatever month you’re reading this.

The list of people? Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X. (A note to the rare person reading this – please feel free to suggest someone else to put on this list.) In the interest of my health, I’m leaving room for at least one other book — call it an attentive distraction — in the mix. I can’t live in a dystopian world all of the time. But I think I can live more responsibly in the world as it exists today.

The empty power of authoritarians

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 15:21:00 -0400

Lindsey Stonebridge:

True political power comes only with the active assent of the people. The empty power offered by authoritarians, fantasy nationalists, and sovereignty fanatics, by contrast, can only be maintained by violence.

We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience, p. 288

Buying books I don't read

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 13:23:00 -0400

James Atlas:

Like the drinker who treats his hangover with ‘the hair of the dog,’ I assuage my anxiety about all the books I’ve bought and not read by purchasing more. Somehow I imagine that if I buy a book I’ll read it. Time will stop; the day will mysteriously expand its number of hours. Suetonius’s Lives of the Poets will be absorbed by osmosis; Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, a slender volume, will — if it sits on the coffee table long enough — feel as if I’ve read it.

My Life in the Middle Ages, p. 156

Social media: advertising the self

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:25:00 -0400

Jenny Odell:

I have no problem with the idea of an online social network; I just don’t want to buy a sense of community with my attention to ads, on a platform that implicitly encourages me to advertise myself, all while my data gets collected. It feels nefarious to me, like Nestlé selling us the public water supply in private bottles.

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, pp. 89f

On the language of parenting

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 13:43:00 -0400

Sacha has some wonderful reflections on how she wants to speak to her child, building on the notion that “the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.” As I think about my experience as a child of my father and also about my experience as a father of a (now 30-year-old) child, I would say that there’s both truth and wisdom in that notion. Sacha’s account of how she speaks to her child is wonderful, and it’s great to see how she invites the child to suggest other affirmations that she (the parent) might say to her (the child). Such communication is key, I think, to healthy relationships that engender flourishing.

And it’s also inspiring to see that her child is beginning to respond in kind. “Yesterday at dinner, she told me, ‘You’re awesome!’ in the same way that I often tell her.” Awesome, indeed.

And it brought back one of my own parenting memories. I think our son must have been in 3rd or 4th grade. I was helping him with his arithmetic homework, trying hard to coach him without giving him the solution to a particular problem. He was extremely frustrated, thinking that he simply couldn’t understand the basic concept. We struggled for a few minutes, and finally, something that I said clicked for him. He understood the concept, and could readily apply it as he worked on other problems.

The next day, he and I were going somewhere in the car. “Dad,” he said from the back seat, “what you said yesterday was brilliant!” I couldn’t remember exactly what I said. “What was that, C?” “Dad,” he said rather pedantically, “if you’re going to say brilliant things, you really should remember what they are.”

Schools, news media, awareness, and meeting the challenges

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:14:00 -0400

I begin with three apparently random observations.

First, this morning I read about a local school district near Houston, Texas voting to remove chapters from school texts, texts whose publishers had already been forced by the state to eliminate so-called “wokeified” elements. The state board didn’t want young children learning, for example, that Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.” But the board of a district near Houston, Texas – a district in which nearly 80% of the students are people of color, thinks that the state board did not go far enough. They removed chapters from five texts – the board member proposing the change said the deleted chapters “were inappropriate for students because they discussed ‘vaccines and polio,’ touched on ‘topics of depopulation,’ had ‘an agenda out of the United Nations’ and included ‘a perspective that humans are bad.’” Better, the argument goes, that students not learn anything that might unsettle a particular world view.

Second, I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in small West Texas towns. I was thinking recently of my awareness – actually my lack of awareness – of so much that was going on during my childhood and teen years. I knew that JFK was assassinated in Dallas — I have a rather vivid memory of the school PA speaker suddenly coming to life in Ms. Pena’s science classroom, just as a radio announcer was saying that the President had died. But I knew virtually nothing about the early work of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Nothing about the Montgomery bus boycott. Nothing about the Greensboro sit-ins. I was talking earlier this week with someone five or six years older than I – someone who grew up is small Texas towns a lot like the ones I grew up in – who said that we didn’t know those things simply because local news didn’t report those things. She knew virtually nothing about the Civil Rights movement until she started college. This observation reminded me of the summer that I lived in Odessa, Texas years later. It was the summer of the Watergate Senate hearings. If the hearings revealed negative information about Nixon, the local paper — the Odessa American — simply didn’t cover it. I realized then that I had to seek out national news to learn anything of substance about the Senate hearings. Again, the thinking seems to be that if we don’t report it, then it didn’t happen.

The third observation comes from Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life. I’ve already offered one reflection based on this book. This morning I read Gornick’s brief essay about the life and work of Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and the other beat poets. Gornick reports that Ginsburg’s poem Howl was explosive in American culture: After Ginsberg “arrived at last in San Francisco in 1954 …, the American city experienced as most open (that is, farthest from the seats of Eastern power), he wrote his great poem, read it aloud one night in October of 1955 — and awoke to find himself famous” (pp. 140f). The establishment response to Ginsburg, his poem, and the other beat poets was brutal. As Gornick reports, Norman Podhoretz said that “the Beats … were the barbarians at the gate, rabble-rousers who ‘embraced homosexuality, jazz, dope-addiction and vagrancy’ (he got that part right) at one with ‘the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns’” (pp. 141f). Podhoretz and other authorities didn’t want the Beats crashing their party. They thought they had no right to be there. If we don’t like them, then we don’t want to listen to them.

I know next to nothing about Podhoretz (there’s that isolation of my youth again!), but one of his books is now sitting in my TBR pile. The book, published in 1999, is in the pile merely by virtue of its title: Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

Three apparently random observations – one from today’s news, one from my teen-age years, and another from a book published in 2008 with observations of life in the 1950s. But I’d say that in another sense they aren’t random at all. In each case, people are attempting to hold onto a world that they fear is slipping way. Gornick provides a hint of what that might look like, describing Jack Kerouac’s response to criticisms such as Podhoretz’s: Kerouac, she says, “wrote to complain that the Beats were about beatitude not criminalism; they were here to rescue America from corporate death and atomic bomb politics, not destroy her” (p. 142).

The title of Podhoretz’s book suggests that he didn’t accept Kerouac’s response. And, in fact, Wikipedia suggests that he has drifted farther and farther to the right, even moving in recent years from being anti-anti-Trump to being rather strongly pro-Trump:

[T]he fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left… His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America.

So, Podhoretz has joined the ranks of those who would make American great again. I trust I don’t have to repeat here the standard observation that the desire to make American great again comes with particular understandings of both “great” and “America.” It seems to me that the true greatness, such as it is, of America, such as it is, will emerge we confront the shortcomings of our community and challenge one another to meet these challenges head on. But we can’t confront those shortcomings if we refuse to acknowledge them. And acknowledging them requires that we learn about them.

Ecology, ethics, and governmental power

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:57:00 -0400

I recently finished reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. As I say in my notes about the book, I wish that I’d discovered this book long ago. But I didn’t say in those notes that as I read the book I found myself thinking again and again that there’s an analogy worth exploring between Leopold’s analysis of the proper relationship between humans and the rest of nature, and of how we have abused that relationship, on one hand, and how we should understand the relationship between one country and the larger international community, and of how the Trump administration is abusing that relationship, on the other. I’m still struggling with this, but — true to the title I’ve given my notes here — I want to think out loud about it.

Leopold argues that we humans should see ourselves as an integral part of nature rather than in opposition to it. He says that our health and ability to flourish depend on the health and flourishing of other parts of the natural world, even on those parts of the world that we think have no particular value. When we extract resources from the natural world without regard for what how these resources interact with nature more generally, we threaten the health of the natural world. This world has evolved over millennia, with complexities in relationships among organisms that are difficult to understand. By placing ourselves in opposition to it, we disrupt those relationships. In the short term, we might think that we do that to our benefit, but in the long term we find that we have changed the functioning of the world in a way that threatens our own survival.

As I read, I couldn’t stop thinking that this is how the Trump administration sees its relationship to other countries. It sees the United States as being in opposition to these other countries rather than as an integral part of the international community. Even if the policies of the current administration work to its benefit in the short term (and I would say that that is questionable), they damage the mutually supportive relationships that enhance our safety in the long term. By treating the resources of other countries merely as resources we need to extract for our own use, we will eventually discover that we have worked against our own interests. We need to learn the lesson that we are in mutual community, rather than in a random collection of relationships that we can manipulate at will.

Timothy Snyder offers a particular example of what such a lesson might offer, saying that the Trump/Vance approach to Canada, Denmark, and Greenland is both immoral and strategically disastrous. Joan Westenberg develops the contrast between soft power and brute force in order to make a similar point: Trump’s belligerent approach to other countries actually works against our long-term interests.

There’s definitely more to think about here. In particular, I think that many of the administration’s actions, intended to cement their authority within the United States, will in fact work to undermine the administration’s authority sooner or later.

In that light, I wasn’t all that surprised when I saw a similar analogy near the end of Leopold’s book:

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves. In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists (pp. 204).

Leopold’s book was published in the late 1940s, so it seems likely that he had Hitler and Mussolini in mind. Perhaps he saw this as something like a warning to Stalin, who ruled Russia until his death in 1953. If so, I’d say, it was prescient, both for Stalin and for Putin. Regardless, the actions of the Trump administration make clear that Leopold’s hope was misplaced – this is a lesson that many of us have yet to learn. We can only hope that we will survive long enough to enjoy the benefits of such a lesson learned.

April 2025

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:16:00 -0400

My reflections on the books I read this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice

by Jack Fairweather

The “one man” mentioned in this book’s subtitle is Fritz Bauer, a Jewish German judge who left Germany in 1936 and lived in exile, first in Denmark and then in Sweden, until he returned to Germany in 1949. Upon his return, he re-entered Germany’s justice system, and eventually took the position of state prosecutor in the German state of Hessen. He served in that position from 1956 until his death in 1968. The book charts Bauer’s involvement in three major trials of Nazi officials that together served not only to bring individuals to justice but also to change German attitudes towards Nazism and the Holocaust in the decades following the end of World War II.

In the background of all three of these trials is the rather positive attitude toward Hitler and Nazism more generally in the first few years after the end of the war. Fairweather offers several examples of these attitudes. The philosopher Karl Jaspers (the director of Hannah Arendt’s dissertation) lived in Germany with his Jewish wife for the entire war. But he and his wife were subject to such strong abuse in the late 1940s that they moved to Switzerland. German school textbooks had only 47 words about the Final Solution as late as 1956. A 1950s museum at Auschwitz said almost nothing about Jewish suffering in the camp, and argued that Nazism was inspired by American capitalism. In the late 1940s, sociologist Theodor Adorno developed a questionnaire that might identify fascist attitudes in those who responded to its questions. Many protested. “‘Why should Germans be forced into collective self-accusation for years on end?’ exclaimed the prominent Hamburg sociologist Peter Hofstätter. Adorno shot back that Hofstätter’s comments made it clear: In the house of the hangman ‘you should not speak of the rope’” (pp. 138f).

The first — and smallest — of the three trials involved slander charges against the far right politician Otto Remer. In a 1951 speech, Remer argued that the small group who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944 were in fact traitors who contributed to Germany’s downfall. Bauer didn’t bring these charges, but he took responsibility for the prosecution. Fairweather suggests that Bauer hoped that the public would come to see this indictment of one individual as in fact an indictment of the Third Reich. He won the case.

The second of the three trials was the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Bauer didn’t participate directly in this trial — which was held in Jerusalem by Israeli authorities rather than in Germany — but he was instrumental in locating Eichmann in Argentina and in pushing Israel to extract him from that country for trial. Eichmann was convicted and executed.

The third trial is known as the Auschwitz trial, and it was much more ambitious than the other two. Bauer and his associates brought indictments against almost two dozen officials who participated in different ways in the Auschwitz death camp. Bauer hoped that this trial would bring to light the participation of many, convincing Germans that the Holocaust simply could not have happened without tremendous community support, whether that support was direct and concrete or more implicit in the reluctance of many to speak out against it. This third trial was less successful in some ways – five defendants were convicted of murder and received life sentences; a few others were convicted as accessories and received shorter sentences. Five of them were freed after the trial, either because they were acquitted or because the time spent in jail during the course of the trial was deemed sufficient punishment. But the power of witness testimony, and also the power of the court’s trip with journalists to see Auschwitz itself, helped to reshape German attitudes.

Bauer was disappointed in the results of this last trial, but Fairweather argues Bauer’s efforts overall were effective and influential. Those who visit Auschwitz and the camps in Germany today see exhibits detailing both the harsh living conditions in those camps and the circumstances in which so many Jews and others died. By the 1960s and 70s German students were reading many more than 47 words about the Holocaust in their textbooks. As one small example from my own experience, I first learned of Bauer when I visited an exhibit detailing his work on the first of these three trials at the Nuremberg Trial Memorial. That exhibit highlighted how the Remer trial began to change German attitudes.

Fairweather’s account of each of these trials is detailed and extensive. It’s clear to me that the current political climate in the United States deepened my sensitivity both to the trials and to the way that German attitudes have changed. In that light, I find Fairweather’s concluding remarks particularly telling. Bauer, he says, wasn’t seeking redemption for the Nazis. Instead, he hoped “to push us to examine ourselves, in the belief that the strength of democracy and the guarantee that Nazism will never return lies not in the lines society draws, which can be breached, nor in institutions, which can be corrupted. Rather it lies in our commitment to seek connection with those we struggle to understand” (p. 322).

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

by Lindsey Stonebridge (a re-read)

This is perhaps the best book on Hannah Arendt that I’ve read, and I think it’s a very good introduction to her thought and its relevance for someone yet to read any of Arendt’s challenging texts. It’s very easy to find Arendt’s footprints these days – in newspapers and journals, in my Mastodon feed, which is peppered with choice quotations (some that I’ve posted) from her many writings, and in books. It’s easy to explain the renewed (or at least broadened) interest: the world she faced in the 1930s and 1940s that formed her has many similarities to the world that we face today. If you’ve seen any of that but haven’t dived into Arendt for yourself yet, a very good — perhaps even the best — first step would be to read this book.

Stonebridge clearly explains many of the basic points in Arendt’s philosophy and political thought, and she builds on that explanation an insightful account for the relevance of Arendt today. I’ll list here a few of the insights that I find particularly germane.

A political and existential void leaves room for “pseudo-actions” of those in power: “There is nothing like a political and existential void for making an atrocious idea welcome. If nothing makes sense, then anything is possible. As populists and propagandists know, whipping up fake storms in the wastelands gives the appearance of action, meaning, purpose, salvation. This is pseudo-action only (as today’s social media storms again illustrate), yet with each passing tempest people become less, not more, sensitive to suffering, and less able to judge. Life, politics, and suffering itself become tedious. Then the big men with the big ‘impossible’ ideas move in and suddenly the world is at war with itself again” (p. 30).
If human rights are defined and defended only by nation-states, then stateless people are left out in the cold. Obviously, I’m thinking here of those swept up by Trump’s ICE. “The point about being superfluous, … imprisoned in a camp, on the run, on the margins, is that you’re no longer really in the world — you just exist, a dim figure in the dark background against which everyone else carries on with the rest of their lives; a shadow person among the shadows” (p. 112).
In this situation the “right to have rights” is crucial. “‘The right to have rights’ guarantees the only right that perhaps matters, the right to be in the political conversation” (pp. 97f).
Love is crucial — Arendt wrote her dissertation on Augustine’s concept of love — but one who cares about those without rights must move beyond love to action: “if you don’t want people to die in camps or suffer in poverty, exile, and indignity, instead of loving them you would do better to engage directly with ‘the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics’: to act, in other words, and to take political moral responsibility in a crooked world” (p. 129).

There’s so much more to say about this book; I hope that the little I’ve said here will encourage others to read it for themselves. As the title says, We are free to change the world, but only if we manifest that freedom in action.

Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting not to Know

by Mark Lilla

I find Lilla’s own brief description of his book to be better than anything I can come up with: Ignorance and Bliss, he says, “can perhaps best be described as an intellectual travelogue retracing my own circuitous and somewhat episodic excursions in reading and thinking about the will not to know. … You are being invited on a ramble, not a journey to a fixed destination” (pp. 13f). Reading the book was definitely a ramble for me — a rather haphazard ramble at that — but I found myself more or less at home when I finally reached the end. Spoiler alert: in the next paragraph I offer his account of that end.

Here’s my main take-away: “At one extreme, there is the person who treats his life as a journey of discovery, expecting pleasure and happiness from it — homo viator. At the other, there is the person who anticipates loss and harm, and so builds dikes against the tides and flees if the waters crest over the top — homo fugiens. Two human types, two ways of living for us to choose between” (pp. 223f). Though I have occasional moments of fear regarding just what I might discover, I like to think I live my life in the first camp. I also think that this inclination really is the only reason that I stayed with this book until the end.

That sounds like a negative comment, but my opinion of the book is more positive than negative. However, at times I was frustrated by seemingly random collection of observations and insights. I want more narrative structure on my journeys. Having said that, there are some gems in this random collection. Some examples:

The ambiguity of Socrates’s understanding of the tension inherent in philosophical inquiry and dialogue: “Socrates held that the spirit of philosophy, the love of wisdom (philo-sophia), was diametrically opposed to the spirit of combat, the love of victory (philo-nikia). Yet both spirits get activated when we engage in argument” (p. 49).
The contrast between understanding freedom, on one hand, as the freedom to believe whatever one wants to believe without fear of challenge and, on the other hand, the freedom to inquire into the truth. The latter is a freedom that comes with responsibility. (This is similar to something that Orwell said about freedom.)
Charles Dickens’s fake books in his country house. The collection included a multi-volume set on The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, with titles like Ignorance, Superstition, Dirt, and Disease. Next to these rather imposing volumes was a single book, much thinner, called The Virtues of our Ancestors. (For what it’s worth, I was interested enough in this to investigate further. I confirmed that Dickens had in his library a collection of fake books, but I didn’t find these particular titles in online lists. I did, however, find a less detailed description of these books in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens.)
Lilla makes what I take to be an obvious point that the gaining of knowledge leads to a loss of many characteristics we associate with children: e.g., spontaneity, trust, transparency. And I do at times feel what he characterizes as a nostalgia for childhood: a wish “to experience a state of mind unburdened by what we have experienced and learned since childhood and the responsibilities we have taken on” (p. 191). But I agree with his observation that a similar “historical nostalgia” drives many people to wish — and fight — for an earlier time, perhaps fantasized, that they see as more innocent and pure. On that note, I think this quotation from a late 18th century notebook is almost prophetic.

All in all, he would say — and I agree — the choice to pursue knowledge is better and more human than the will not to know. That’s not to say that it’s an easy choice to make or to carry out. “One doesn’t have to search far today to run into misologues who reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the real machinations of power. Or bagpipes who believe they have been blessed with private access to truth and have been chosen to make sure we live in the light of it. Or mass movements made up of holy fools and eternal children whose distaste for the present sends them rushing, vainly, to restore an imagined past. Nor is it hard to find today’s prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who, whether from conviction or ambition, idealize people who resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs. In the face of all this, those devoted to reasoning and open inquiry can start to feel like refugees” (p. 225).

So, he might say, choose to know. But recognize the burdens of that choice.

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

by Robert Zaretsky (a re-read)

I’ve read relatively little of Simone Weil’s writings, but I found this to be a very good introduction to her thought. My confidence in making that judgment is based largely on the fact that Zaretsky quotes liberally from her work to substantiate his account of her position as a philosopher and as an activist.

One thing that strikes me about Simone Weil is how she set her moral standards so high that no one – including she herself – could meet them. And I gather that this is true about other things as well, not just morality. From her notebooks: the “proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting” (Zaretsky, p. 2). This, I take it, is a major theme in her life – the notion that one will never succeed fully, that one is always “patiently waiting” for a solution that never comes.

But this doesn’t mean that she didn’t think acting is important. In fact, she would say that thinking isn’t thinking unless it leads to action. And action proper requires that one think.

After finishing her studies, Weil taught, both in standard classrooms and also to workers outside of the academy who wouldn’t otherwise have a chance for such an education. “Far from being a means of social refinement, Weil believed, the teaching of literature should be a tool for revolution. By mastering language, the worker would learn how to master his place in the world. Rather than dismissing culture as a bourgeois luxury, the labor unions should embrace it as a universal necessity. Workers must prepare to take possession of our culture, Weil declared, ‘just as they must prepare themselves to take possession of our entire heritage. This act of possession is the Revolution itself’” (17).

But – and this is one example of how Weil changed her mind as she thought about things – she gave up the notion that successful revolution is possible. Writing in 1934, she said that “The word ‘revolution is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content’ (18).

Weil was definitely on the side of the oppressed, but she also thought that those who were (temporarily) in control were also oppressed by power. “… those who hold power are never secure; faced by rivals seeking to take it and the oppressed seeking to resist it, the powerful live in a constant state of insecurity. Here today and gone tomorrow, power is a fickle phenomenon, as elusive as it is inexorable. Ultimately, it is not power itself, but the pursuit of power, that oppresses humankind” (18).

The approach Zaretsky offers to Weil is via a discussion of five themes he finds important in her work: affliction, attention, rootedness, resistance, and goodness.

Affliction

Weil thought it important, not only that she see the affliction in others, but that she experience affliction from the inside, as it were. She sought out work usually performed by oppressed peoples, in factories and on farms. She found that the intensity and drudgery of work left her unable to think, but she also came to a conclusion about force in the capitalist workplace: “Men no less than women, managers no less than workers, employers no less than employees are all subject to force. It was an equal-opportunity oppressor” (19). But if Weil is right that an oppressive relationship oppresses both the one who submits and the one who dominates, then she would have to say that both oppressor and oppressed suffer from affliction.

Zaretsky notes that Weil found affliction to be a “mark of slavery” that (threatens to) destroy one’s sense of self. “Nothing in the world can rob us of the power to say ‘I.’ Nothing except extreme affliction” (37). And yet, Zaretsky says, there’s another side to this. Affliction also provides the opportunity for other virtues. “Weil insisted that in and of itself, affliction does not hold any value whatsoever. Its value, instead, lies in the use we make of it. Whether it can teach us anything as grand as wisdom depends on how we define wisdom. If virtues like comprehension and compassion, toleration and moderation are to constitute at least part of wisdom, we could do worse” (37).

Paying Attention

Each person has his/her own reading of the world. “Is there a center, as Weil asks in her notebooks, ‘from which may be seen the different possible readings – and their relationship – and our own only as one among them’?”

Attention transports us “to that center of thought from which the other person reads values; contemplate the values destroyed by what we are going to do.”

And the value of attention is more in the “going” than in the “getting there.” And it’s more a matter of opening ourselves to others, canceling our own desires, than of focusing our gaze on others (45).

“Reverence is the work of attention” (53). This recalls Kant’s emphasis on achtung.

Resistance

Thought enables one to resist the power of “the collectivity.” “True liberty, she argued, is defined ‘by a relationship between thought and action; the absolutely free man would be he whose every action proceeded from a preliminary judgment concerning the end which he set himself and the sequence of means suitable for attaining this end.’ Subject though we are to irresistible social, economic, and material forces, we can nevertheless assert our liberty by doing what we can within these constraints. ‘Man can choose between either blindly submitting to the spur with which necessity pricks him on from the outside, or else adapting himself to the inner representation of it that he forms in his own mind’” (74).

Only by thought (attention) alone can one “locate the sources of oppression and how they ripple across our lives” (80). But, again, this thought is worthless unless it leads to action.

Rootedness

Sense of uprootedness can be physical but also psychological and/or social.

Rootedness means to participate in a community – grounded in it both spatially and temporally.

Rootedness implies a social self, rooted in a social context whose past and present are both crucial.

The nation is not perfect, but it’s the best available way to ground the sense of rootedness that in turn grounds the notion that the needs of others is the basis for one’s obligations to these others.

The Good

This is one theme that Zaretsky says is not systematically and explicitly developed in Weil’s writing. In this discussion, he draws heavily on Iris Murdoch’s position and also on her interpretation of Weil. Weil and Murdoch rely on Plato’s notion of the Good. And they take Plato’s metaphor of the cave to focus on the Good and morality rather than on the truth and knowledge.

Weil insisted that democracy is not an end in itself, but rather a means to the end of goodness. If democracy fails to facilitate goodness, then it should be set aside. It’s important to note here Weil’s insistence that political parties actually subvert democracy. She argued rather passionately that political parties should be abolished.

Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century

by Laura Beers

Beers argues that a careful reading of Orwell’s work – both his fiction and his non-fiction — can help us to understand and also to respond to many of the political challenges we face today. However, she insists, understanding his work requires that we move beyond the superficial use of the term “Orwellian” so common in today’s political discourse.

Beers develops her points with frequent quotations from and references to Orwell’s writings, thus offering a solid road map for making one’s way through his extensive corpus. But she also describes crucial elements of his experience – most notably his particular position in Britain’s class structure and his experience in the Spanish Civil war — that she says are crucial to development of his thought.

The resistance to Franco in Spain brought together a disparate group. The United States, Britain, and France all maintained neutrality. Mussolini supported Franco, and some of those opposed to Franco were from Stalinist Russia or supported by Russia. Orwell, while fighting with a group not supported by the Soviets, was dismayed by the tactics of Stalinist totalitarianism, and this turned him against the Soviets. In fact, Beers argues, “had Spain not awakened Orwell to the dangers of Stalinism’s totalitarian approach to political dissent, he would never have gone on to write Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, the two books that have cemented his historical reputation as a champion of individual liberty against government tyranny” (p. 41).

Orwell’s experience of social and economic inequality was complicated. He came from what might be described as a middle – or even an upper-middle — class. He attended Eton on a scholarship, and maintained a lifelong friendship with school mates like Cyril Connolly, but resented what he saw as the snobbishness of many of the students whose families were much more wealthy than his. His experience in Paris, where he supported himself by working for long days as a dishwasher, provided a deeper understanding of poverty. This, Beers argues, both informed his understanding of the evils of income inequality and also helped him give up the standard Victorian view that poverty was evidence of moral degeneracy. A few years later, he argued that the challenge of World War II required “revolutionizing the command and control of the economy,” and also proposed to reduce economic inequality by mandating that the top tax-free income in Britain be limited to ten times that of the lowest. (Notably, Beers points out, he proposed to achieve this ratio, not by raising the income of the lowest earners, but by taxing the income of the highest earners.)

Beers suggests that Orwell would likely have been pleased by the Occupy Wall Street movement. For example, he argued that those who benefit from the current economic system should face the fact that their privilege depends on the suffering of others: “Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation — an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream” (pp. 86f, quoting Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier).

While Orwell argued for the importance of liberty, he would be critical of those who discount honesty and responsibility. As Beers puts it, his “commitment to objective truth explains why he defines the essence of freedom in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the right to say 2 = 2 = 4, not the right to say 2 + 2 = 5” (p. 56).

Beers’s appreciation of Orwell’s work doesn’t blind her to its problems. He was critical and dismissive of many who would join the socialist movement, arguing that the movement attracted “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Many would accept his criticisms of pacifism; he said that a pacifist was essentially a supporter of Nazism. His response to feminism is particularly problematic – in fact, Beers suggests, there are passages in his fiction (and also episodes in his personal behavior) that are misogynistic and abusive.

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

by Jenny Odell

Earlier this year, I re-read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. Reading that book pushed me to re-commit myself to focusing my attention on the things that matter. It also led me to pick up Saving Time, her more recent book. Here she pushes the reader to find ways to live without constantly attending to the clock.

I should admit right up front that I’ve decided to set this book aside for the moment. However, that’s not because I think it’s not worth reading – in fact, I’m taking the time to record here some reflections on the book because I think Odell provides some valuable insights. I read about a third of the book, and I’d like to finish reading it. The irony is not lost on me that I’m setting Saving Time aside now precisely because I want to save time to read other books that I think are more pressing in light of current events. It wouldn’t surprise me if Odell and others would say that I’m short-sighted.

With that caveat, here are a few points that I found very insightful. Odell laments the way that the strategies of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management have grown even more intrusive with the power of new technologies. As an example, she quotes Jessica Bruder’s account of the way that a UPS truck monitors the driver: Sensors in the truck “reported when he opened the bulkhead door. When he backed up. When his foot was on the break. When he was idling. When he buckled his safety belt.” And UPS time-and-motion studies instruct the driver “how to handle his ignition key, which shirt pocket to use for his pen (right-handed people should use the left pocket, and vice versa), how to pick a ‘walk path’ from the truck, and how to occupy time while riding in an elevator” (p. 33).

Odell urges workers and others to push back against such demanding micro-management of what might be called authentic human behavior. Succumbing to such demands, she says, too often leads to burnout. This is obviously true for those, like the UPS driver, who are forced to adapt to the company’s strict time regimen. But others, because of their standing in life, have more freedom to push back. Even so, these people — who might be called the self-timers — face their own pressures. Such a person “perceives herself to be controlled and surveilled by the cultural ‘logic of expansion.’ If Linda does not participate, she will be judged and have to pay a cost, whether it is social or financial” (p. 75f).

This book, like Odell’s first book, offers a critical analysis of current cultural trends that make it difficult for us to live authentic lives. I’m hoping someday to return to it, but for the moment I’ve decided to put it back in the stream.

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale

by James Atlas

In this collection of essays, Atlas discusses his life — memories of youth and his anticipations of growing old — from the perspective of his mid-life. He admits that his life as a member of “the middle- and upper-middle-class Manhattan dwellers who lead lives of privilege” is decidedly less fragile than that of many people.

I’ve often thought I should keep notes on how I come to read the books I read. I can’t remember why I checked this book out of the library — I know that another author recommended Atlas’s book as an insightful discussion of a particular perspective on life. And there were moments while reading it that I had some misgivings about spending the time to read it — more than a few of the life challenges Atlas discusses fall into the category of what are called first world problems. But I, at least, find his approach to the joys and sorrows of his life to have some application beyond the streets of Manhattan. “Can you declare yourself a success without the confirmation of others? That capacity, I’ve come to believe, is the key to happiness, or at least acceptance — which may be, when all is said and done, the definition of happiness. We inevitably fall short, no matter how successful we are in the eyes of the world; our ambition outstrips our capability. I myself must take the inventory of my achievements and determine how I’ve done. The examined life and the public life are by no means the same thing” (pp. 97f). I suppose that I don’t have to point out that this contrast between the examined life and the public life is even more striking in the age of social media.

A selected list of the essay titles — Mom and Dad, Time, Home, Failure, The Body, Books, God, Death — provides a hint of the breadth of this work. I found The Body particularly interesting. The essay begins with an account of the first summer that his son consistently defeated him on the tennis courts and then concludes with his recollection of the time that he, as a teenager, first defeated his own father. Perhaps this struck me because I remember that the last time my father played me in table tennis was the first and only time that I won a game against him. Or, more likely, it’s because I’m more and more aware that the body that I have is no longer capable of doing what it could do in a time far away.

Again, I’m not sure just why I checked this book out of the library. And I’ll say again that his perspective on the world both narrow and rather privileged. Perhaps I was more patient with him than some might be in large part because I’m also a white privileged male. In any case, his writing about life and life’s changes has me thinking more about my own life, albeit from a perspective decidedly beyond middle age.

However, given everything that’s going on today, I have to say that the quotidian problems Atlas discusses really are problems of privilege. Perhaps this isn’t fair to him — the world of the early 2000s is different from the world of today. However, even when he was writing he and I were both shielded from the damaging currents of society and culture. We’re less shielded today – while many will criticize us because we actively care about these challenges only when they hit us more directly, I feel the obligation not only to acknowledge my lack of attention in the past but also to invest myself in responding more directly to them now. I struggled to finish reading the book because I was more and more convinced that I need to be paying attention to other things.

The Men in my Life

by Vivian Gornick

I’m a little embarrassed to say that my approach to this book was in some ways similar to my approach to idle chit-chat at a dinner party, where I enjoy and participate in the conversation, but come away from it with little memory of the details.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I really appreciated the way Gornick describes her encounters with these writers (the men in her life), but I remember only a few details of her rather vivid accounts. I’ve already described how Gornick brought to my mind memories about my reading of Loren Eiseley. However, I have to admit that she gave me my first meaningful introduction – in one case, my first introduction, period — to many of the men in her life. I’ve read at least one book by Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and V. S. Naipaul, and I’d heard the names of and knew just a little about most of the others. But I don’t remember encountering George Gissing’s name before reading this book. (Interestingly enough, though, just last week I stumbled on George Orwell’s brief essay about him, written in 1943.)

To go back to the dinner party analogy, I’d say that I left this particular party with a list of authors and books I really want to read — or should I say, rather, I feel like I should read? — someday, scribbled on the small piece of paper I happened to find in my jacket pocket.

I’ll close with one observation about language and culture: “Virginia Woolf had once complained that she couldn’t find the words to make an English sentence that would describe what illness felt like to her because as an Englishwoman she was constrained from taking liberties with the language. Exactly what outsider literature does in this country: fashions the language anew precisely so that it can express what it feels like to be ill. That, essentially, is what Jewish-American writing at its best has been about. In my view, it would never be about anything else. In the hands of a Saul Bellow or a Philip Roth, such expressiveness could — and did — explode a literary charge of epic dimensions” (p. 87).

A. J. Ayer: A life

by Ben Rogers

I’ve already said a bit about how I came to read this biography. Like many who studied philosophy in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, I read A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Like many who read the book, I thought the philosophical position Ayer developed in that book was wrong. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from reading this biography is that in the mid-1970s, about the time when I was reading this book, Ayer himself had reached a similar conclusion. Someone asked him to identify what he saw as the defects in the book, and he replied, “Well, I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false” (p. 337).

Rogers points out that Ayer insisted that philosophy is one thing and life is another: “No philosopher, or at least no English-language philosopher, did more to insist that philosophy had little to do with life” (p. 2). Now, having read the book, I can say that I find his life much more interesting than his philosophy. I don’t have an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the man, but I did find the accounts of his interactions with other philosophers and critics of his time very interesting and even, at times, entertaining.

One example of the latter: At a party in 1934, Ayer got into a fierce argument. The disagreement was simple. Does the sentence, “Whereof one may not speak, thereon one must preserve silence” appear once or twice in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus? Ayer insisted that it appeared only once; his opponent, a banker and attorney named Sylvester Gates, argued that it was there twice. After the two agreed to a wager, Gates called a taxi and went home to retrieve his copy of the book. He returned, triumphant, with proof that the sentence appeared twice – once as the final sentence in the text and also in the preface. Ayer, however, did not give up, but instead insisted that the preface, strictly speaking, is not part of the book. The argument continued. As it happens, another guest at the party was the American jurist Felix Frankfurter. This was five years before he was appointed Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, but the group still deemed him qualified to sit as presiding judge to resolve the debate. Frankfurter ruled against Ayer. (In his memoirs, Frankfurter “remembered these Oxford friends as an ‘extremely clever, almost excessively clever young crowd’”; I wonder if he really intended to say obsessively clever.)

It’s not all that surprising that Ayer would go to the mat over this question. Wittgenstein and his book made a big impression on him as a young man. “The Tractatus is a very difficult book — at places almost incomprehensible; to have been converted by it at such a young age, and at a time when it was hardly known at Oxford, was stunning proof of Ayer’s precocity, and no book was ever to impress him in quite the same way — it did not so much change his views as help articulate and clarify them. Ayer’s encounter with Wittgenstein recalls his quick and easy assimilation of Russell and Moore at Eton; it was not so much an intellectual conversion as a homecoming” (p. 73).

Ayer also had a formative encounter when still young with Alfred Einstein. Years later, he wrote that he regarded Einstein as one of the greatest men he ever met because he talked “to me, a very young man of no importance, as though he could learn something from me” (p. 102). Ayer made a similar comment about Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore: Russell “seemed to me then [1937-38], and later, to have the great quality, which Moore and Einstein also had, of being able to talk to younger and less gifted people as though he could learn something from them” (p. 154). These observations are worth mentioning here in large part because many of Ayer’s students said much the same thing about Ayer. “Ayer was a brilliant teacher, and what marked him out was the enjoyment he took in disagreement and the way he immersed his students in it. ‘Freddie,’ as John Watling put it, ‘loved being contradicted — he was entirely different from Popper who claimed he welcomed criticism but in reality could not tolerate it. The more you voiced your opinion the better’” (p. 208).

I mentioned at the outset that my opinion of Ayer as a man is less than positive. Ayer, shall we say, had a way with women. I couldn’t count the number of times that Rogers reports him meeting a woman at a party or conference and moving fairly quickly into a sexual relationship with her. (I recognize that Ayer is by no means the only male intellectual to behave this way, then or now.) I think it’s telling somehow to read a comment by the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier, who studied with Ayer as a graduate student. Wieseltier reports, “I liked him enormously. He was like an eighteenth-century rationalist voluptuary — he could have been one of Diderot’s friends. I remember asking him about Camus: ‘I don’t know his work well, but he and I were friends: we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war’” (p. 312). I find it interesting that Ayer offered this in response to a question about Camus, and also interesting that Wieseltier offers this as an example of why he found Ayer so likeable. I guess it’s not all that surprising to read in Wieseltier’s Wikipedia entry that The Atlantic fired him after he admitted to sexual harassment of some of his colleagues.)

Shortly before he died, Ayer was asked “what he had ‘pursued above all.’” He responded, “I suppose truth. I suppose truth. I suppose that I care more about having got something right in philosophy, if I have got anything right, than having written elegantly. Although I like that too” (p. 358). I’m still thinking that he didn’t meet that goal, but I think it’s clear that he pursued it, at least in his philosophy.

On the whole, an interesting read, though as much for its account of significant conversations among British and American philosophers and critics as for its story of Ayer’s life.

A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the making of the planet, life, and you

by Sean B. Carroll

This is an informative and even entertaining account of the many elements of chance that have shaped the world and life on it. Carroll uses stories and real-life examples along with the results of scientific research to illustrate how conditions favorable to the development of the many different species involve a crucial amount of chance — it didn’t have to be this way.

Moreover, he describes how each individual human is also largely a product of chance events – there are over 8,000,000 possible combinations of the 23 chromosomes in a sperm cell, and the same number of possible combinations of chromosomes in an egg cell. What’s more, a healthy male releases something like 100 million sperm cells in a single ejaculation – the person that you are is formed by the particular sperm cell “fortunate” enough to get to the egg first.

Carroll also describes how chance events are involved in more negative elements of life – how particular mutations lead to maladies, how our body’s response to pathogens takes advantage of the chance mutations of immune cells.

A couple of random points to illustrate the general approach, the first rather significant in the discussion as a whole, and the other a small but, I think, telling factoid:

40 million years ago the earth’s climate was radically changed when the Indian tectonic plate, having traveled 4,000 kilometers, collided with the Asian tectonic plate, creating the Himalayas. The newly exposed rock from that collision increased the absorption of CO₂ from the atmosphere, which lowered the temperature of air and prompted increased Antarctic glaciation.
The Tennessee statute at the root of the Scopes trial was passed in 1925, but wasn’t repealed until 1967.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Selecting books; selecting ideas

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 10:34:00 -0400

Some random and vaguely formulated thoughts about books, ideas, and possessions.

I began this year with a commitment both to plan and track my reading more carefully and also to post here in the blog some notes about each of the books. Now, three months in, I find that it’s been very helpful to me, and I even get some hints that others find it helpful as well.

In that earlier post I quoted something from Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals that I found (and still find) to be a very good way of framing my reading plan:

… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by (p. 29).

This morning I read a similar point in something that Jeremy Friesen wrote wrote earlier this month:

I think to what a wise man once said to me and my wife about ideas: “I like to sit along the river of ideas and look at them as leaves floating by. I let many pass me, but some I pluck from the water, look at, and maybe return to the river, or maybe hold for a bit. Some I keep even longer, seeking the mysteries held within.”

It’s worth noting that Jeremy makes this point about ideas in the context of his reflections on his relationship with books. And, of course, books and ideas go together. There’s a selection process involved in each: I choose the books that I read – or do they choose me? — and then I choose the ideas from my reading – or, again, do they choose me?

All of this is in my mind this morning because I spent much of the day yesterday selecting books that I quite literally decided to return to the river: a hefty box of those books is now in transit to Thriftbooks, and an even larger box of books that Thriftbooks wouldn’t buy is sitting in basement storage, awaiting a trip to a local used book store.

Perhaps my experience of the pain of parting with those books is one reason I was struck by a passage from one of James Atlas’s essays this morning. The essay has a simple title: “Money.” He discusses the envy he feels when he notices that many of his friends have been more successful financially than he has. He regrets this envy, and he knows that he is more privileged than many. But he reframes the struggle that he has with that envy, an envy that he can’t completely disavow.

I hve a new idea about what financial success would mean to me. Not the country house refurbished with antiques; not the vacations at Canyon Ranch or the Golden Door; not a fancy car. Of course, I do want these things. When I gaze at a TV advertisement for a Jaguar, hugging the windy road that runs beside the Pacific Ocean, its wheels glinting in the California sun, I don’t think: Nah. Who needs it? My heart aches — fleetingly — to own the Jaguar. But my heart also aches to be free of the desire to own it. “I want, I want, I want,” says Henderson the Rain King, the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s novel. I want not to want (My Life in the Middle Ages: A survivor’s tale, p. 86).

I can honestly say that I have no desire to own a Jaguar, but I do want to own more books than I could possibly read (or, as my wife would say, more than we can easily store in our small space). I’m comforted somehow by the thought that at any moment I can pick up a book from the shelf and enter a new world of ideas. But after a weekend of book winnowing, I can also say that there’s some comfort in admitting that there are some books that I’m simply not going to read, and that the ideas in those books — some of which I’ve read and others that I just didn’t get around to reading – will find a home in someone else’s mind. The distinction between ideas and books is helpful. It’s the ideas that I want and that I want to want. I want the books, too, but I want to want fewer of those.

Self as the endpoint of history

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:24:00 -0400

James Atlas:

We think of ourselves not as located in a continuum, part of an ever-evolving world, but as its endpoint. All of human history has been leading up to us. It’s hard — impossible — to grasp that we, too, will seem quaint to the generations that follow us, our clothes strange, our images fixed in a remote moment in time.

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale, p. 45

Why write?

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:01:00 -0400

Why write?

A response to this question is a pretty standard essay for essayists, a pretty common post for bloggers, and (I suspect) a common entry in a personal journal or diary. I think about it pretty much every morning when I start the day’s journal entry, and I struggled with the question openly in the first entry of this blog and again in a post written a few weeks later. I’m sure the question has come up in other posts as well, simply because I remain unsatisfied with my attempts to answer it.

Last week, Sacha highlighted an old post on my blog about the value of keeping a notebook. Her post prompted Jeremy to offer a brief quote from Anaïs Nin: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” I found that observation very intriguing, and set off in a search for the context in which she wrote it. I found online a fuller quotation from Nin’s diary, and posted that as a commonplace entry earlier this week.

When I arrived at the library this morning, I couldn’t resist the urge to seek out still more context. I found a copy of the appropriate volume of her diary (the whole of which requires 6 volumes in this edition). I find that Nin incorporates into her diary a letter that she wrote in response to someone who asked her why she writes. I think this is worth quoting in full:

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.

We write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.

– The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955, edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann, Vol 5, pp. 149f.

This longer response to the question slammed my psyche this morning, in large part because it broadened the implications of the question “Why write?” Before reading it, I was already imagining the world that I fear that we’re making for ourselves here in the United States these days. As I imagined that, I wondered what I would be wishing for if I were still living in that world:

Would I wish that I’d purchased books in cash rather than on credit so that credit card records wouldn’t show what I’d been reading?
Would I wish that I’d given up library books (including the diary where I found this quotation) so that there wouldn’t be any library records showing what I found important and interesting?
Would I wish that I hadn’t given up my subscription to the Washington Post and instead read (and contributed to) publications like ProPublica, The Guardian, Talking Points Memo, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic?
Would I wish that I hadn’t supported representatives and organizations who were fighting for the rights of those who are being oppressed.
Would I wish that I hadn’t attended one of the demonstrations of what I hope will be millions of people on 5 April?
Would I wish that I hadn’t posted something like this, and a few other posts, that make my resistance efforts, feeble as they are, so public?

Or would I wish that I had done all of this and even more, even as I feared that my small contributions wouldn’t make much difference?

Years ago I read Václav Havel’s response to the question how he and others were able to create a functioning democracy so soon after the Communist system in Czechoslovakia toppled in 1989. I wish I’d kept better notes then, because I can no longer find the quotation. But he said something like “Because we spent so much time talking with each other even though it seemed clear that talking wouldn’t make any difference.“

I should write what I can. We should talk when we can. And we should fight while we can.

“… one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. … When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.”

Permanently Philosophically Puzzled

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:46:00 -0400

Bertrand Russell, as quoted by Ved Mehta:

You know the best remark [G. E.] Moore ever made? I asked him one time who his best pupil was, and he said ‘Wittgenstein’. I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because, Bertrand, he is my only pupil who always looked puzzled.’ … That was such a good remark, such a good remark. It was also, incidentally, very characteristic of both Moore and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was always puzzled.

Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, p. 42

Intimacies: Entering the world of an author

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 09:22:00 -0400

Earlier this month I introduced my comments about Megan Marshall’s After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart by saying that “I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.” I suppose that I find myself in relationship with any author whose book I read carefully, but there are some books – and Marshall’s is one of them – that engage me more deeply than others. I was reminded of this earlier this morning, when I read an essay in Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life. Gornick begins one essay with an memory of an experience she once shared with her mother. “When she was in her eighties, and living alone, I once gave her a copy of the memoir of an Englishwoman, older than herself, who had written many novels and lived a life as different from hers as any two lives could be. A week later I found her reading the book as though in a trance. ‘How are you liking it?’ I asked. She looked up at me, remained silent for a moment, and then said, ‘I feel as though she’s in the room with me.’ And then she said, ‘When I finish this book I’m going to be lonely’” (pp. 29f). I wouldn’t say that finishing my reading of Marshall’s book left me feeling lonely, but it does leave me with memories of times that I shared with her by way of her writing.

Some might take the title of Gornick’s book — The Men in my Life – to mean that she’s writing about personal relationships she’s had with men – perhaps something about a brother, a father, or an intimate partner. I’ve only just begun to read the book, but in what I’ve read so far, I find that she’s writing instead about men whom she has engaged through their writing. Here I’ll focus on an essay about Loren Eiseley; I feel as though I’ve spent time this morning with Gornick and Eiseley. An unlikely duo, it seems to me. Encountering them together has me remembering my earlier encounters with both.

I was introduced to Loren Eiseley by the father of a woman I once loved. Her father was both a scientist and a humanist, and he impressed on me that I should expand my reading of philosophers and novelists to include that of an anthropologist (who, I would say now, was also a philosopher). Reading Eiseley helped me to understand the way that evolution played out in the natural world; perhaps more improtantly, he encouraged me to see that we humans are a part of that natural world, rather than somehow in opposition to it. Much more recently, I found this beautifully expressed a decade or so earlier by Aldo Leopold. It seems obvious to me now – how could I have thought otherwise? – but profound when I read Eiseley express it so powerfully. In later work, drawing on the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, I came to see how the fundamental theory of evolution might explicate the development of academic disciplines and their related professions.

I’ve met Gornick much more recently, and I’m still sorting out just what it’s like to be in the room with her. She’s one of several women I know first as essayists – Rebecca Solnit, Elisa Gabbert, Zadie Smith, and others. When reading each of them – when sitting with each of them — some of the furniture is familiar. However, Gabbert and the others help me to notice new things, some new to me simply because I haven’t noticed them, and other things they have brought into my room for the first time.

I think that’s the value of reading. I can’t find this quotation now, but I think it was Virginia Woolf — perhaps in her diaries — who said that people who read a book gather in community with all the others of different times and places who have read the book. I agree, but I would say that the community extends to include those who are writing and those about whom a writer is writing, alongside the people who have inhabited the IRL world of the reader. This morning Gornick has reminded me of the richness that can emerge for a reader when different people, from different worlds, come together in my mind.

We write to taste life twice

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:28:00 -0400

Anaïs Nin:

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, February 1954, Vol. 5, pp. 149f. (H/T to Jeremy Friesen, who brought the initial sentence of this quotation to my attention.)

Using the HTML details disclosure element

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 14:04:00 -0400

Like many others, I post notes about my reading on my blog. I’ve tried several ways of doing this; I’m now in my third month of the current strategy, and I find that it helps me to think more carefully about what I’m reading.

Some of those notes are rather long, and I was concerned that a reader might grow weary, scrolling through a long note about a book they find uninteresting, and miss seeing notes about a book that they might want to read. But in the past week I stumbled on the HTML Details disclosure element. Using this element, I can designate a short paragraph as the summary of the note. When the page loads, only the summaries are visible. But clicking on a summary reveals the entire note.

I think the look of the page is much cleaner.

I’m just tech-savvy enough to cause problems for myself, and it took me longer that it should have to set this up. I’m posting this here both to remind myself of what I did, just in case I have to do it again, and to provide some hints to others who might want to do it themselves.

These notes are relevant primarily to my own process – I write in emacs org-mode and then use ox-hugo to export using the hugo static blog framework.

The first challenge (actually, given how easy this was, the only real challenge) I faced was that my versions of hugo and my site template (Anatole) were out of date. I updated to the latest versions of each. After the software was up to date, it was a simple matter of adding a few lines to each summary note.

Here’s an example:

#+begin_details
#+begin_summary
A short take:

Marshall is an acclaimed biographer. Her biography of the Peabody sisters was well received and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Margaret Fuller. In this collection of essays she turns the biographical eye on herself. This is not a chronological narrative about her life; instead, she tells stories about objects, about people, and about events that have shaped her. I find it an interesting approach – just as a biographer exists in the background of the subject’s life, Marshall as autobiographer emerges more subtly than she might in this collection of essays. Each of the essays stands alone in some ways, but I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.

Click here to read more.
#+end_summary


I won’t attempt to describe all of the essays here, but rather focus on two that I found most interesting. In “Free for a while,” she tells the story of how her life interfaced with that her high school classmate Jon Jackson. Jon’s brother George was found guilty of stealing $70.00 and received a sentence of one year to life. He published a collection of prison letters called [[https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/soledadbro.html][Soledad Brother]]. In his senior year of high school, Jon died in a courthouse raid that he hoped would free his brother so that could escape together to join Eldridge Cleaver, exiled in Algeria. The judge and two prisoners also died. The story of George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers and of Jon Jackson’s failed attempt to rescue George is well known; what I found most interesting in this essay is how Marshall describes the interweaving of her life with Jon’s, showing the different circumstances of their private and family lives and also the ways in which they overlapped in and around school.
#+end_details

And here’s how this looks on the web:

A short take:
Marshall is an acclaimed biographer. Her biography of the Peabody sisters was well received and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Margaret Fuller. In this collection of essays she turns the biographical eye on herself. This is not a chronological narrative about her life; instead, she tells stories about objects, about people, and about events that have shaped her. I find it an interesting approach – just as a biographer exists in the background of the subject’s life, Marshall as autobiographer emerges more subtly than she might in this collection of essays. Each of the essays stands alone in some ways, but I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.

Click here to read more.

I won’t attempt to describe all of the essays here, but rather focus on two that I found most interesting. In “Free for a while,” she tells the story of how her life interfaced with that her high school classmate Jon Jackson. Jon’s brother George was found guilty of stealing $70.00 and received a sentence of one year to life. He published a collection of prison letters called Soledad Brother. In his senior year of high school, Jon died in a courthouse raid that he hoped would free his brother so that could escape together to join Eldridge Cleaver, exiled in Algeria. The judge and two prisoners also died. The story of George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers and of Jon Jackson’s failed attempt to rescue George is well known; what I found most interesting in this essay is how Marshall describes the interweaving of her life with Jon’s, showing the different circumstances of their private and family lives and also the ways in which they overlapped in and around school.

The second paragraph is hidden initially, but it appears if one clicks anywhere on the visible paragraph.

Pretty neat.

Nature: Commodity or Community

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

Aldo Leopold, writing in 1948:

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

A Sand County Almanac and Other Sketches Here and There, p. viii

Political despair in 1939

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:08:00 -0500

A.J. Ayer:

The political situation makes me more and more depressed. I resent above all the feeling of impotence from which one suffers at times like these, the feeling that really everything one values is at the mercy of knaves and fools.

Ayer’s letter to Otto Neurath, quoted in Ben Rogers’s A.J. Ayer: A Life, p. 160

Success: Solo achievement, others' support, or luck?

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:04:00 -0500

Jenny Odell:

A 2012 Pew study found that 62 percent of U.S. respondents disagreed with the statement “Success in life is determined by forces outside our control.” The number of people who felt this way was lower in Spain, Britain, France, and Germany (where only 27 percent disagreed). Asked to choose between “freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference” and “state guarantees nobody is in need,” the former won out in the United States 58 percent to 35 percent, with those numbers essentially reversed in the other four countries. In a 2017 study, compared to Democrats, U.S. Republicans predictably attributed a person’s wealth to their having “worked harder” versus their having “had advantages in life,” and they attributed their poverty to “lack of effort” over “circumstances beyond [their] control.

Saving Time, p. 51

A. J. Ayer, Mike Tyson, and Alfred North Whitehead

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:58:00 -0500

If I were forced to categorize this post, I’d be torn between two options: the category of “Trivia about philosophers that I find interesting” and the category of “How can I distract myself for at least a minute from the country that is falling apart around me?” I’m hard pressed to decide between the two, so I guess I’ll put it in both.

One rather interesting anecdote in Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates describes an encounter between the philosopher A. J. Ayer and the professional boxer Mike Tyson. (Perhaps you’ll be as surprised as I was to discover that there was such an encounter!). Somehow Tyson and Ayer ended up at the same party in New York City in 1987. Ayer was chatting with other guests when they were interrupted by a woman who said that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer rushed to the bedroom, and found Tyson pushing himself on the young (and then relatively unknown) Naomi Campbell. Ayer instructed Tyson to back off. Tyson was not impressed: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer was not intimidated: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest we talk about this like rational men.” As they continued their conversation, Campbell managed to slip away.

Callard took this anecdote from Ben Rogers’s biography of Ayer (p. 344). I was intrigued enough to retrieve that book from the library. I quickly confirmed the story, but then found myself reading more of the biography. Frankly, my interest surprised me. My only contact with Ayer before then was reading his first book Language, Truth, and Logic in college years (ok, decades) ago. I’m pretty sure that was standard fare for philosophy majors when I was in college – perhaps it still is. And, I have to say, I wasn’t convinced by his argument. But I skimmed a few pages of the biography. Ayer’s life seemed rather interesting — I was particularly taken by his insistence that philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with day to day life (another point of disagreement!) — so I brought the book home from the library and began reading it.

So how does Alfred North Whitehead get into this account? I’ve admitted that I didn’t think much of Ayer’s work. In fact, I think that if I were to set up a conceptual map, ranking all of the philosophers whose work I’ve read from the one with whom I agreed the most to the one with whom I agreed the least, Whitehead would be very close to the head of the line and Ayer would be at, or at least very near, the end of the line. I’ve long thought that Ayer’s work in particular and analytic philosophy more generally are big parts of the reason that Whitehead’s work fell out of favor in the mid-twentieth century. In my judgment, this was a mistake, the ill effects of which we are still suffering. I wouldn’t have said that analytic philosophy is worthless, but I do think its influence has been greater than it should have been.

In 1935, Ayer applied for a studentship at Oxford (a position created for Albert Einstein five years earlier and left vacant when Einstein departed for Princeton). Whitehead, by then having moved from London to Cambridge to join Harvard’s philosophy department, wrote an enthusiastic letter of endorsement, saying that he considered Ayer to be in the same league as “J.M. Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and others of that type among my old pupils” (Rogers, pp. 113f). Pretty high praise, coming from Whitehead, and a lesson for me regarding the importance of respecting a variety of philosophical views. I knew that Ayer knew Russell, and that Russell was Whitehead’s student, colleague, friend, and co-author, but I didn’t realize that Whitehead knew much about Ayer’s work, much less that he valued it so highly.

Hoping to learn more, I consulted Victor Lowe’s two-volume of Whitehead; I found no entry for Ayer in the index of that comprehensive work. But, interestingly enough, a web search turned up Ayer’s review of volume one of that biography. It’s a rather lukewarm review, though with the exception of Ayer’s skepticism about Whitehead’s theism, the review is more a criticism of Lowe’s account than a criticism of Whitehead.

As an aside, here’s an unrelated tidbit from Rogers’s biography, yet another admonition to appreciate the importance of diversity in philosophy. British philosopher R.G. Collingwood was largely unsympathetic to Ayer’s views, but that didn’t mean he thought Language, Truth, and Logic was irrelevant. Apparently Collingwood happened to be in an Oxford bookstore and “overheard [H.W.B.] Joseph and [H.A.] Prichard complaining to each other that Lanugage, Truth, and Logic had ever found a publisher. Collingwood … turned to them: ‘Gentlemen, this book will be read when your names are forgotten’” (p. 125n). Ouch.

Admittedly, all of this is a bit too much in the weeds for most people. But I found it interesting in itself, and also a minor distraction from all the turmoil going on around me. Returning to Callard’s book, perhaps I could see all this as a small example of what she sees as the value of dialogue among people who disagree on answers to difficult questions. And that brings me back to the world outside my reading room: there are many reasons to be concerned about the state of the United States in particular and the world more generally, but I’d place the disdain for diversity near the top of a list of those concerns. Yes, I think diversity is important in philosophy. It’s even more important in democracy. Unlike Ayer, I’m convinced that philosophy really does have something to say about how best to live in the world.

Shy octopus looking at you

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:23:00 -0500

Peter Godfrey-Smith:

A small octopus was staring at one of our unmanned cameras on a tripod for a while from its den, and then went off camera and returned with a piece of dead sponge. This it arranged on the top of the den, as something between a roof and a helmet, and huddled beneath it, looking out. It was the right size, rigid, and light. I am not sure that the little octopus was bothered by the camera, and wanted a barrier against it presence, but it did look that way.

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, p. 139f.

March 2025

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:39:00 -0500

My reflections on the books I read this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

A Sand County Almanac and sketches here and there

By Aldo Leopold

I’m more than a little embarrassed to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about Aldo Leopold until a month or two ago. This book is a wonderful set of reflections about ecology and the world, reflections based on a lifetime of professional study and work and also a lifetime of living with and on the land. It’s remarkable.

The book has three sections. The titles: “A Sand County Almanac,” “Sketches here and there,” and “The Upshot.” The general point is to urge all of us to live more in community with the rest of nature rather than in opposition to it, but each section takes its own approach. The first section is a month-by-month reflection on a year’s time on his sand farm on the Wisconsin River. I was moved by many of these reflections; I’ll describe just two of them here.

I find his February reflections particularly poignant. He begins: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other than heat comes from the furnace.” The point is that each of these – breakfast and heat — comes to us via a long path that begins with the energy of the sun. “To avoid the second [danger, one] should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm [one’s] shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside” (p. 6). Leopold then describes the task of felling an ancient oak tree on his property, a tree killed by lightening. But he describes the work chronologically: as the saw moves through the growth rings on the tree, Leopold describes what was happening on the land when a particular ring was added to the trunk. The message is that the tree spent many years in complex relations with the surrounding environment, building the stuff that would eventually provide heat and light in the family’s small cabin. The path from sun to heated house is long and complex.

In his April reflections, Leopold describes how regular floods shape the world, but his emphasis here is on the gifts of nature, and, in particular, on lumber that is carried by the flood waters and left on their land: “An old board stranded on our meadow has, to us, twice the value of the same piece new from the lumberyard. Each old board has its own individual history, always unknown, but always to some degree guessable from the kind of wood, its dimensions, its nails, screws, or paint, its finish or the lack of it, its wear or decay. One can even guess, from the abrasion of its edges and ends on sandbars, how many floods have carried it in years past. Our lumber pile, recruited entirely from the river, is thus not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forests. The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who hammers or saws may read at will. Come high water, there is always an accession of new books” (p. 25).

In “Sketches here and there,” Leopold describes his experiences beyond the farm on the Wisconsin. Some of these experiences are from his personal life and others are from his work as a professional forester. In each, he describes his pain as he observes our interactions with the world that waste the world’s resources and that destroy environments. A crucial point here is that we humans are a part of a natural ecosystem and should recognize our interrelations with the larger world. “It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark. These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many” (pp. 109f).

The third section — “The Upshot” — is more tightly written. Here he develops his program for living with rather than in opposition to the larger world. In particular — and recalling the early point about the two dangers of not owning a farm — he says that we need to develop a way of learning from the wilderness without destroying the wilderness. Here he relies on the crucial notion of the biotic or land pyramid: the pyramid that characterizes the long path by which the heat of the sun gets to breakfast and furnace. This pyramid is complex. At its base is the land. Plants grow in the land and take energy from the sun. Insects feed on plants, and birds and rodents feed on insects. And larger animals feed on these. “In the beginning, the pyramid of life was low and squat; the food chains short and simple. Evolution has added layer and layer, link after link. Man is one of thousands of accretions to the height and complexity of the pyramid. Science has given us many doubts, but it has given us at least one certainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota” (pp. 215f). In our current state (and remember, “current” for Leopold was in the 1940s), we neglect the value of all of the layers in this pyramid at our peril. In eliminating the diversity of the biota, we are eliminating elements crucial to our survival.

Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (a re-read)

by Ved Mehta

I don’t remember when I first read this book, but it was at least 40 years ago. Every so often since then I would see it my bookshelf and think that I should pick it up again. I suppose what finally pushed me to do that was reading Ben Rogers’s biography of the philosopher A. J. Ayer. (Notes on that one fairly soon — I’ve not quite finished reading it.) I’ve been more interested in Ayer’s life than I expected to be; reading the biography rekindled my interest in the Oxbridge philosophical scene in the decades after the first World War. I recalled that Mehta’s book, despite being written from a particular perspective, still captures the atmosphere of the times.

The book is something like a travel log, describing a series of conversations, following a trail from one philosopher or historian to the next. All of these figures played significant roles in philosophical debates of the period; Mehta describes (and claims to quote extensively from) his many conversations. The conversations with philosophers focus on the areas of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy; those with historians focus on the debate (or, as the chapter title has it, the argument without end) about the nature of history.

Mehta wrote for the New Yorker, and he dedicates his book to William Shawn, the long-time editor of that publication. (And by “long-time” I mean a long time: from 1952 until 1987.) The book republishes several essays first published in the New Yorker. It’s worth noting that Isaiah Berlin, one of the philosophers featured in the book, was not all that impressed: “You ask me what the reactions of my colleagues are to your piece on Oxford Philosophy… [T]hose to whom I have spoken are in various degrees outraged or indignant … The New Yorker is a satirical magazine, and I assume from the start that a satire was intended and not an accurate representation of the truth. In any case, only a serious student of philosophy could attempt to do that” (from one of Berlin’s letters, quoted in the Wikipedia article on Mehta).

I think Berlin was wrong – I don’t think the book is satire. However, nor do I think it’s authentic intellectual history. Rather, I think it should be read as one man’s perspective on important philosophical debates and the context in which those debates occurred. And, for that matter, it’s entertaining. (My wife is only one of many who would find it odd to use that word to characterize a book like this one!)

I’ll note just a few particular points. I’ve already highlighted what G.E. Moore saw as the importance of being philosophically puzzled. Ayer – the philosopher whose story prompted me to return to this book has a different take: “vanity is the sine qua non of philosophers. In the sciences, you see, there are established criteria of truth and falsehood. In philosophy, except where questions of formal logic are involved, there are none, and so the practitioners are extremely reluctant to admit error” (p. 75). Finally, in light of our current political situation here in the United States, I’ll close with Herbert Butterfield’s thoughts about the value of studying history: “As far as I am concerned, the point of teaching history to undergraduates is to turn them into future public servants and statesmen, in which case they had better believe in ideals, and not shrink from having ideas and policies and from carrying their policies through. We mustn’t cut the ground from under them by teaching that all ideas are rationalizations. In brief, we must teach a statesmanlike view of the subject. … I happen to think history is a school of wisdom and of statesmanship” (p. 204).

Confession

by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was born in 1828. He published War and Peace in 1869. He published Anna Karenina in 1877. So he published two massive and classic novels before he was 50 years old. Yet only a couple of years later he faced a deep crisis in which he thought that his life was utterly without meaning. He was faced with questions — “Why? What next?” — that he simply couldn’t answer. This book, with the simple title Confession, depicts his struggle with these questions.

He writes, “I was immediately convinced, first of all that they were not childish and foolish questions but the most vital and profound questions in life, and, secondly, that no matter how much I pondered them there was no way I could resolve them. Before I could be occupied with Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books, I had to know why I was doing these things. As long as I do not know the reason why, I cannot do anything. … As soon as I started to think about the education of my children, I would ask myself, ‘Why?’ Or I would reflect on how the people might attain prosperity, and I would ask myself, ‘What concern is it of mine?’ Or in the middle of thinking about the fame that my works were bringing me I would say to myself, ‘Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world — so what? And I could find absolutely no reply’” (p. 27).

He goes on to report that his “life came to a stop,” and then spends virtually all of the remainder of the book considering and rejecting different answers to this “Why?” question. Of course (and I’m immediately reminded me of a teacher’s caution: “In philosophy, there is no ‘of course’”), these are questions that many of us face, and many (most? all?) of those who don’t face them are simply avoiding them. If I’m going to die, then what difference does anything I do make? “If not today, then tomorrow sickness and death will come (indeed, they were already approaching) to everyone, to me, and nothing will remain except the stench and the worms. My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why, then, do anything? How can anyone fail to see this and live? That’s what is amazing! It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion!” (p. 30). Death comes to all of us; is there any meaning in life that can survive death?

Science, he says, can describe how molecules can come together to form a human being — “a temporary, random conglomeration of particles” (p. 41), but can’t explain why we should see meaning in such randomness. Tolstoy finds a similar perspective in Solomon (of the Hebrew bible), the Buddha, and Schopenhauer. He then observes people “whose circumstances were precisely the same as [his] with respect to education and way of life,” and finds that they fall into four camps with regard to these questions (pp. 49ff):

They fail to see the questions, remaining ignorant of life’s meaninglessness
They see life’s meaninglessness, but set concerns about it aside and pursue pleasure
The succumb to life’s meaninglessness, and commit suicide
They face the question, but weakly: they “know that death is better than life, but they do not have the strength to act rationally and quickly put an end to the delusion by killing themselves” (p. 51)

As he faced these questions, Tolstoy explicitly abandoned the second group, and saw himself in the fourth group; his weakness disgusted him, but he committed to a life of asceticism, and continued his quest.

Perhaps, he thought, his reasoning was flawed, and that in fact life does have meaning. Or perhaps someone has solved the quandary. More to the point, perhaps he should consider the lives of “the huge masses of people” instead of those in his own social class. And here, he found an answer. The masses – those who were uneducated – found meaning in their lives despite all of their suffering. This meaning was grounded in faith, and more specifically in Christian faith. But Tolstoy thought that the Orthodox Church obscured that faith. He still found room for reason, because the teachings of the church, he said, include both the truth and lies; one might use reason to sort those out. Eventually, and after considerable struggle, he committed to Christianity (and proclaimed this faith publicly in the book What I believe, published in 1884).

A final point – some day I’ll write a post about the different trails that lead me to different books, but I’ll say there that I was led to this particular book by Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life.

So Late in the Day: Stories of women and men

by Claire Keegan

This book, a collection of three short stories, has a blurb at the top of the cover written by George Saunders: “Claire Keegan is one of the greatest fiction writers in the world.” Of course, I don’t know the context in which Saunders wrote that, but who am I to argue with George Saunders? I’m not as bold as he is, mostly because I don’t think I’ve read enough fiction to make such a judgment. But I do think Keegan’s writing is powerful.

What I find most powerful is Keegan’s ability to build tension in the narrative, tension that is not relieved, but rather is eventually brought to a climax. The tension exposes an unsettledness in a relationship. I found this particularly true and most troubling in the last of the three stories. I generally try when writing these notes about fiction to avoid spoilers, but I take permission from the inside cover of this book to include this one. Actually, I’ll just quote from the cover notes: “…in ‘Antarctica’ a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.” I had that blurb in mind as I read the story – I had a general sense of where the story was going — and I still found myself caught up in the growing tension. I had a general idea of where the story was going, but I still felt like I was in unfamiliar territory.

In some ways, these are simple stories about everyday life. But they’re written in a way that highlights the tragedy that is often just under the surface of such everyday experience.

After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart

by Megan Marshall

Marshall is an acclaimed biographer. Her biography of the Peabody sisters was well received and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Margaret Fuller. In this collection of essays she turns the biographical eye on herself. This is not a chronological narrative about her life; instead, she tells stories about objects, about people, and about events that have shaped her. I find it an interesting approach – just as a biographer exists in the background of the subject’s life, Marshall as autobiographer emerges more subtly than she might in this collection of essays. Each of the essays stands alone in some ways, but I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.

I won’t attempt to describe all of the essays here, but rather focus on two that I found most interesting. In “Free for a while,” she tells the story of how her life interfaced with that her high school classmate Jon Jackson. Jon’s brother George was found guilty of stealing $70.00 and received a sentence of one year to life. He published a collection of prison letters called Soledad Brother. In his senior year of high school, Jon died in a courthouse raid that he hoped would free his brother so that could escape together to join Eldridge Cleaver, exiled in Algeria. The judge and two prisoners also died. The story of George Jackson and the other Soledad Brothers and of Jon Jackson’s failed attempt to rescue George is well known; what I found most interesting in this essay is how Marshall describes the interweaving of her life with Jon’s, showing the different circumstances of their private and family lives and also the ways in which they overlapped in and around school.

Marshall doesn’t excuse Jon’s violent attempt to free his brother from prison, but draws on one of George’s letters (a letter that provides the essay’s title) to make a crucial point. “It’s not my place to tell what happened that summer, to raise or attempt to answer the questions that lingered with Jon’s classmates and teachers who wished so hard, as the bereaved always do, that it could have gone otherwise and looked for somewhere to place blame. George professed ignorance of Jon’s plan, lauding him as the ‘black man-child with submachine gun in hand, … the true revolutionary who, during the brief span of time he’d controlled the courtroom, ‘was free for a while. I guess that’s more than most of us can expect’” (p. 76). The essay brings out how the freedom that different individuals can expect is shaped largely by circumstances beyond their control.

In “These Useless Things,” Marshall considers how objects that some might deem useless can have a profound significance, both in the life that one lives and in how one understands the history that shaped the present. She begins by reflecting on the old “ice pick on my kitchen windowsill, its tarnished prong thrust into an ancient wine cork for safety’s sake.” She found the ice pick while going through her father’s possessions after he died. These reflections lead her to considerations of her relationship with her father, of how the hands that once held that ice pick helpfully taught her to use various tools. But her father, suffering from mental illness, was frequently absent when she was growing up. “When wielding the ice pick, my father was the father I hoped for. And perhaps the immplement’s concealed danger, the spike blunted with a wine cork, spoke to me of my father as well. I had him in hand on the window sill” (p. 103).

Marshall also considers how other objects from the past shape the present. In her biography of the Peabody sisters, she described a portable writing desk — a wooden box that can be used as a lap desk – that Elizabeth and Mary received as a gift from their students. Sometime after the book was published, Marshall received a letter from a man who thought he owned that desk and would like to pass it on to someone. Marshall eventually bought the desk, and it now sits in the room where she writes. Someday, she writes, she’ll find a museum or archive that will add this desk to their collection. Quoting phrases from Elizabeth’s description of the desk written almost 200 years ago, Marshall writes that “for now I’m happy to set my morning coffee down next to my own portable writing device — a Lenovo IdeaPad S340 laptop computer, which also opens to reveal secrets, to enable me to reveal mine — and look up at the shelf where the most ‘handsome’ and efficient writing box of its kind in 1826 reminds me of my purpose. The box may not be used, but it is not useless to me. If … there is a language of form, my two portable ‘desks,’ each containing ‘everything convenient’ in one compact case, speak of the enduring human need to communicate in writing, to give things life in words (p. 109).

What to Save and Why: Identity, authenticity, and the ethics of conservation

by Erich Hatala Matthes

I stumbled on this book while browsing the shelves of Book Culture, a bookstore enthusiastically recommended by one of our son’s good friends. I mention that only to illustrate the rather chance nature of my encounter with this book. It’s not the sort of book I seek out, and if the title were on a list of books I might read next I suspect I wouldn’t have selected it. But something about the title (or the jacket design?) led me to pull it off the shelf, and I left the store with it under my arm. (That day I also purchased a copy of Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life, which is a book that was on my list of books to read soon.)

Chance is good.

I think that if Matthes were pressed to provide a one-sentence response to the questions implied in his title he would say something like “We save those things that shape who we are and remind us of who we want to be, not only to understand our past and present, but also to offer an authentic sense of self that those who live after us can inherit and shape for themselves.” Of course, the “we” in this sentence is complex — there are many different groups, each with its own artifacts and cultural traditions that inform its identity.

And this complexity of groups implies a complexity of conservation approaches and practices. Individuals within a cultural group struggle to reach agreement not only on what to conserve and why, but also on just how best and in what form to conserve it. But the existence of many different cultural groups complicates things still further: what’s the difference between conservation and appropriation, and how does one adjudicate the different claims on cultural artifacts? Here Matthes argues that authentic participation of the different parties both in the decisions about what should be conserved and also in the conservation process itself. In making this point Matthes draws on the work of Suzy Killmister: “‘What the participatory model draws attention to is the way in which practices such as language, ritual, and history provided the context within which the self is understood, supplying the scaffolding upon which personal identity is built.’ More even than scaffolding, which is removed when a building is complete, these participatory goods often end up functioning as constituent parts of personal identity. They’re not just the scaffolding — they’re the brick and the mortar” (p. 119). And the issues apply not only to the identify of the self, but also to the identity of an entire culture.

Matthes has me thinking more deeply not only about the larger issues regarding the conservation of cultural artifacts important to large groups of people, but also about issues related to my own personal possessions – issues exacerbated as my partner and I live into the downsizing appropriate to people of a certain age. I’m not surprised that he closes the book with thoughts about small items from his family history that he has preserved. He wonders whether his young daughter will find in these items anything like the sense of self they hold for him. I’m thinking about an old metal measuring cup, a gift from a favorite grandparent more than fifty years ago when I moved into my first apartment. Each morning these days, as we prepare our breakfast, I weigh our breakfast coffee beans in that cup. I’m thinking also of a worn rocking chair from my grandparents’ house now sitting in our living room, this one an inheritance rather than a gift. Both the cup and the rocking chair – simple material objects in themselves – have me thinking of my grandmother, the life she lived, and how she helped to shape the person that I’ve become. Perhaps our son will someday face the question whether one or both of these objects carry similar meanings for him, despite the fact that he never met my grandmother. As Matthes says, my treasuring them now is an important element in the person that I am. My saving them now offers our son the opportunity to find some sense of history in his family as well.

It’s worth saying that I once had other items from my grandparents. Now I have only the measuring cup and rocking chair. The other things disappeared from my life one by one over the years, sometimes because I lost them, and other times because I made either a considered or impulsive decision to pass them on. But my having and treasuring these two items now that shapes my sense of my history and my sense of self. Simone de Beauvoir says somewhere that our identity is a combination of choice and chance. I think Matthes is right in saying that the things we save and the reasons we save them both shape our identity and I agree that we should take care in deciding how and why we save them.

We also have to acknowledge the chance involved in this. My discovering his book was a matter of chance. I’d say the same about my holding onto the cup and the chair. The book, the cup, and the chair have shaped the person that I am, and I’m grateful for the chance that brought them into my life.

The Serengeti Rules: The quest to discover how life works and why it matters

by Sean B. Carroll

Carroll takes the title of this book from the Serengeti, a massive ecosystem in Africa supporting a wide variety of animal and plants species. Extensive research of this ecosystem has provided a deep understanding of how the many different species interact. Carroll draws on this research to develop a set of rules that he calls the Serengeti rules, and argues that these rules are relevant the study of both other ecosystems of animals and plants and also individual organisms like human beings. In each case, a healthy system is one in which the different players exist in a balanced environment. Moreover, he says, the rules provide a framework that supports interventions that can heal damaged systems, both in the larger environment and in individual organisms. In each case, he says, someone seeking to return a system to a balanced state needs to identify the players, sort out all the relationships among them, figure out what’s missing or over-abundant, and finally to introduce corrections. He’s not suggesting that this work is easy, and he acknowledges that we face major challenges from both diseases that affect individual organisms and ecological disruption, but he expresses what I would call a cautious optimism, arguing that we are not defenseless in either case.

His goal here is both to integrate the work and research of molecular biologists with that of ecologists. He traces the development of medical research and practice that have helped us to face major health challenges — like polio and smallpox – and overcome those challenges. On the basis of this survey, he develops “a set of general rules and a logic of regulation” that he says has broad application in both medical and environmental practice:

Positive regulation – A → B – A positively regulates the abundance or activity of B
Negative regulation – A →| – A negatively regulates the abundance or activity of B
Double-negative logic – A →| B →| C — A negatively regulates B, which negatively regulates C; A increases the abundance of C through double-negative logic
Feedback regulation – A → B → C →| A — The accumulation of C feeds back to negatively regulate A and the production of B and C

He then turns to a discussion of several different instances in which researchers have identified particular stress points in decaying environments and then worked to restore those environments to something like their natural balance. This leads him to the statement of the Serengeti rules. While the Serengeti is something like an archetype here, he includes several examples from other ecosystems.

The Serengeti rules, together with their relationship to the general rules and logic of regulation

Keystones: Not all species are equal. In a particular ecosystem or food web, there are some species that punch above their weight – their impact on the system is out of proportion to their numbers or biomass.
Some species mediate strong indirect effects through trophic cascades. An environment can be seen as a food web, in which some animals are primarily or exclusively predators, some are both predators and prey, and some are only prey, eating plants rather than animals. In these webs, the predatory nature of some species has an extremely strong “top-down” impact on the ecosystem as a whole.
- Here “A →| B →| C”: A predator can decrease the number of its prey, which means that the food of the prey become more numerous
Competition: Some species compete for common resources. This competition has an impact on the rates of survival of these different species.
- Here “A →| B”: when two species compete for food, each lowers the number of individuals of the other species.
Body size affects the mode of regulation. Smaller animals are typically regulated (i.e., the size of their population is controlled) in a top-down way by predation, while larger animals are typically regulated in a bottom-up way by food supply.
- Top-down regulation is an expression of “A →| B”: The existence of the predator negatively impacts the number of the prey.
- Bottom-up regulation is an expression of “A → B”: the relative availability of food supports or restricts the number of animals that depend on that food.
Density: The regulation of some species depends on their density. A food environment can support only a certain number of individuals in a species that eats a particular food. This is how the food supply provides bottom-up regulation.
- Here he has a slightly modified expression of the general rule of feedback regulation: “A → → → A →| A”: the increase in the number of individuals is eventually lowered because more individuals mean less food for each of them.
Migration increases animal numbers. A species that typically migrates can increase its numbers, both by having access to a wider range of food supply and by having lower exposure to predators that don’t follow the migration.
Nature is resilient. This rule, Carroll says, is perhaps the most important rule, in large part because it provides some encouragement that we can overcome the environmental and climate-related challenges we currently face. He offers examples of instances when environments that were seemingly totally destroyed have been restored to something very close to an ecological balance.

Throughout the book, he relies heavily on the work of the scientists who did the research he is describing. He captures the drama of their research and also their personalities as these were expressed in their work. While I’m impressed by his optimism that we can meet the challenges we face, I fear that I didn’t emerge from my reading quite as encouraged as I think he would like me to be. Perhaps I’m overly shaped by the moment — the growing skepticism of scientific and medical expertise, the decay of our public health system, and the emphasis on short-term goals at the expense of long-term health of both individuals and ecosystems — but I don’t share his optimism, cautious though it is.

A postscript. Picking up on my comment about the stresses of the current moment, it occurred to me that Carroll’s rules and principles might help me to understand better what’s going on in the United States and formulate some sort of response to it. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that there are different players involved in our culture and politics, and that in a properly functioning democracy these players are in symbiotic relationships with each other. Of course, there’s the standard rule of the checks and balances between the three branches of government, but I would suggest that these aren’t the only players here. Other players include the political parties, the news media, the entertainment media, the public as a whole, and also the various publics. Surely there are others. Following Carroll’s lead, how might we sort out all the relationships among these players, figure out what’s missing or over-abundant, and finally introduce some corrections. Having written this out, I confess that I can’t muster even the small amount of optimism regarding this task that I have for Carroll’s proposals for the ecosystem and human health. It would be an interesting exercise to explore the possibilities, even if it leads merely to acknowledging the impossibility.

Metazoa: Animal life and the birth of the mind

by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Godfrey-Smith presents here his understanding of how consciousness emerged in evolutionary development. He’s arguing here for a position he calls (and others call) biological materialism, a view that differs starkly from the dualism of philosophers like Descartes. The “project is to show that somehow a universe of processes that are not themselves mental, or conscious, can organize themselves in a way that gives rise to felt experience. Somehow, a part of the world’s often-mindless activity folded itself into minds” (p. 19). In short, he says, minds emerged in biological evolution, not as something different from or somehow produced by material processes, but rather as those processes themselves: “Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences; they are thoughts and experiences” (p. 20).

In this work he draws not only on scientific research, but also on a wide range of philosophical reflection. He complements this research and reflection with examples from his own observations of animals in the sea and on land. He makes his way through time and the many branches of the evolutionary tree, drawing comparisons and contrasts between different elements that might be called the precursors of experience and consciousness in animals and even, at some points, in plants. Along the way, he highlights developments of these precursors that he says anticipate something like the experience of contemporary animals generally and/or human beings in particular.

That’s the structure of his presentation generally stated; I found some of the particular discussions along the way to be especially interesting.

I’m particularly fascinated by his rather extensive discussion of research on split-brain patients, human beings whose connection between the two hemispheres of the brain has been severed. This severance has often been done in order to treat humans suffering from severe seizures. Severing the connection prevents a seizure that starts on one side of the brain from spreading to the entire brain. Work with these individuals highlights the fact that each of the two hemispheres specializes (to some extent) in particular tasks.

For example, in some studies, researchers ask a subject to describe an object that’s presented only to the left visual field, which feeds it to the right side of the brain. They then ask the subject to describe the object. However, speech function is centered in the left side of the brain, so the subjects are unable orally to describe the object that they see. Research by philosopher Elizabeth Schlechter points to “improvised communication between the two halves of the brain that takes place in the public world. For example, in a number of documented cases, the right side of a patient’s brain, which cannot speak, has tried to convey messages to the left side by writing with a finger of the left hand onto the back of the right hand. If the right hemisphere knows the answer to something and the left does not, the right may try to get a message across in this way. This was sometimes an attempt to subvert the point of an experiment, as the aim was to show images to the right side and see how much the left could say about them. The experimenter would see the finger writing and say, ‘Don’t write!’” (p. 152).

In other research the hemispheres are “disconnected” using with anesthesia, in one stage putting one side of the brain to sleep and in the next stage putting the other side of the brain to sleep. “At each stage the patient is tested on their use of language, to see what they can do with one half of their brain asleep. In most cases, when the left side is asleep the patient can’t speak. But the patient is still conscious, or seems so, at both stages: ‘During the test he would show me something, ask me to identify it and whether he had showed it to be before. …For the right side of the brain I didn’t notice anything different. For the left side — wow! When he showed me an object I looked at it and had that feeling you get when you can’t think of a word, like it’s on the tip of your tongue. Only that was true for all words — it was amazing! I had no words” (pp. 153f).

Some of the same specialization in the two hemispheres is apparently present in non-human animals, animals in which the connection between the two hemispheres isn’t as strong. Consider the toad: “If prey is brought from out of view into the left side of a toad’s field of vision, where most information goes to the right side of the brain, the toad usually won’t strike at the prey until it has crossed into the other half of the visual field, engaging the left side of the brain. The left, again, is the side that specializes in identifying food. The opposite applies, roughly speaking, when what is seen is a competitor toad rather than food” (p. 239). Godfrey-Smith suggests that the heightened skill in food recognition by the left side of the brain offsets the cost of the right side’s not recognizing prey as prey.

Another interesting point is the relationship between social engagement and brain development. Simply put, some animals are gregarious, preferring to stay in larger groups, often to provide a measure of protection against predators. “A complex social environment makes it worthwhile to develop recognition, memory, and strategic skills” (p. 181). (Interestingly enough, experiments with fish suggest that some are able to use this pattern-recognition ability to distinguish between blues and classical music.) It’s worth noting that many researchers suggest a similar process early in the evolutionary process leading to humans, when our predecessors moved out of forests into the Savannah, where they gradually developed cooperative skills (and the brains to manage them) that allowed them to flourish. Those who are more adept in such relationships have an evolutionary advantage — they’re more likely to survive long enough to pass these skills on to their offspring. (And, it seems, many human beings can also learn to distinguish between blues and classical music.)

These are just a couple of examples of the research Godfrey-Smith describes as he develops his argument for biological materialism. He makes what I think is a convincing case that experience itself emerged gradually as increasingly complex organisms developed more sophisticated ways of taking information about the external world in and then manipulating that world. He develops a simmilar narrative that shows how particular elements — “new kinds of engagement with the world through the senses and action…, subjectivity and agency…, [and] a tacit sense of self” (p. 258f) — eventually came together in human beings as what we now call consciousness or mind. He readily admits that there remain many questions to explore about this. And he argues that something like consciousness is more broadly distributed across animals and even insects than is commonly thought. There is, however, one way in which human consciousness is different from that of other animals, at least to some extent: “A feature of human cognition that really does seem to differ greatly from what goes on in other animals is something psychologists call ‘executive control,’ the ability to direct oneself on a task, suppress momentary urges, and marshal one’s various abilities in pursuit of a consciously represented goal. Through this side of human cognition, in concert with tools such as language as an organizer of thought, we can deliberately induce and control our offline journeys, rather than just having them happen. We can set out deliberately to some particular elsewhere, though we might also meander, drift off, and dream” (p. 258). As I read him, though, he sees this more as a difference in degree rather than an absolute contrast. Just as both experience and consciousness emerged gradually, so that there’s no particular moment which marked the move from absence of either to its full presence, so the line dividing our ability to focus from that of other animals is rather fuzzily and broadly drawn.

Surely it’s clear that I’m not a biologist. Nor am I conversant with the details of evolution generally or human evolution in particular. I’m not in a position to evaluate the soundness of his entire discussion. But I found the book to be extremely engaging, both in its general argument and in the particular examples he introduces along the way.

My current reading and TBR lists.

I cannot be silent

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:50:00 -0500

I resisted posting anything about yesterday’s Oval Office fiasco because I wanted some time to reflect. This morning I realize that even after a sleepless night I can’t say anything that David Frum, Timothy Snyder, Bret Stephens (even Bret Stephens!), and Maureen Dowd (sorry – I’m conserving my NYTimes gift links, so that one is behind a paywall) have already said more eloquently than I can. But I feel like I still have to say something – Martin Niemöller’s words were ringing in my brain as I was not sleeping last night.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I have to say something.

Some are saying that yesterday’s encounter in the Oval Office was a planned ambush. (And what was that Russian journalist doing there anyway?) I don’t know whether the specific terms of the ambush were planned, but I do think that Trump’s transactional view of the world is such that he sees every encounter with another in terms of how he can play things so that he gets an ever-increasing slice of an ever-shrinking pie.

Imagine – Zelenskyy was walking into a conversation with one man on record as saying I don’t care what happens to Ukraine, and with another man who has called him a dictator and just instructed his representative in the United Nations to vote against a resolution holding Russia responsible for the invasion of Ukraine. Trump continued to take Putin’s side again in yesterday’s encounter: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.” It seems clear to me that some Republicans share Trump’s view of America’s proper role in the world, but there are reliable reports that other Republicans are silent only out of fear. I get it that Republicans in Congress legitimately fear for their political standing in the face of Musk’s millions and minions, and even for their safety and their family’s safety. But Zelenskyy and the country he leads both face dangers that are more severe and more concrete than any of those faced by Republicans in Congress. Zelenskyy’s performance in the White House yesterday puts them to shame. When is some Republican in Congress going to show any spine?

Martin Niemöller’s words are not the only words ringing through my head this morning. American attorney Joseph Welch’s challenge to Senator Joseph McCarthy are as well: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Or perhaps Republicans in Congress might consider Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration of Conscience, delivered on the floor of the Senate in the summer of 1950:

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism. … It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques — techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.

It’s worth noting that Smith was the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and that she delivered this speech as a junior Senator, having entered the body only the year before. Moreover, in making that speech, she wasn’t abandoning her party; rather, she was calling both parties to stand up to totalitarianism, just as the country had in the 1940s.

As I said, I didn’t sleep much last night. If I had, perhaps I would have dreamed that some Republican senator would embody Smith’s bravery. Alas, not even in my dreams.

Conservation, Narratives, and Identity

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 14:22:00 -0500

Erich Hatala Matthes:

…we need to remember that an explanation of the relationship between our sense of self and the motivation to conserve is not necessarily a justification of it. We need to first ask if the identify in question is worth preserving. It may well be that white supremacists feel the need to conserve public symbols of the Confederacy due to a felt erosion of their identity — the link between identity preservation and object conservation helps explain their motivation. But that on its own doesn’t justify such conservation. For a justification, we need to look to the broader moral and political significance of the identity in question. What we save in public (and with public funds) is especially important in this regard. It shapes the story we’re telling about what society should care about. Conservation is not only guided by narrative considerations, but it also generates narratives, and the values reinforced by those narratives can become embedded in the landscape.

What to Save and Why, p. 88

Free Speech and Democracy

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:09:00 -0500

John Dewey:

…the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. … Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion which — as the example of totalitarian states proves — is effective only when it succeeds in breeding hate, suspicion, intolerance in the minds of individual human beings.

“Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” in The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, p. 342.

Ruminating on language and word frequency

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:30:00 -0500

Some time ago I came across this in Lydia Davis’s Essays Two:

I read recently that in English, a mere 43 words account for half of all words in common use, and that just nine (and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, you ) account for a quarter in almost any sample of written English (my source is a very entertaining exploration of the English language, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson).

Frankly, I found that rather astonishing, though obviously I know virtually nothing about linguistics. (People who care about verifying sources might want to know that the quotation comes from page 94 of the hardback copy of Davis’s book.) But it was interesting enough that I noted it, and then set it aside, thinking that some day I’d like to investigate that.

But this morning I came across this in a New York Times article under the headline Humpback whales sing the way humans speak:

The words in heaviest rotation [in writing and coversation] are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which in English is “the,” is used about twice as frequently as the second most common word (“of,” in English), three times as frequently as the third most common word (“and”), continuing in that pattern.

The article goes on to say that the songs of humpback whales have a similar distribution of linguistic elements. That’s interesting enough in itself, for many other reasons.

It’s worth noting that Davis’s list of common words is not the same as the list in the NYTimes article or Wikipedia. I suppose the particular items on the list and their order depends on which corpus of words is analyzed. But it seems that the general point holds. Like any other regularity, this one is captured in a principle, in this case one known as Zipf’s law. The law has application in fields beyond linguistics. According to that Wikipedia page, “it has been found to apply to many other types of data studied in the physical and social sciences.”

I suppose I have a practical interest in such things – over the past few years I’ve struggled to regain the somewhat limited ability I once had to speak and read German. One item on the (growing) list of disadvantages of living in the United States is that I have relatively few opportunities to practice speaking German, but I could at least find more time to read German texts. Obviously vocabulary development is a big part of my ability to do that, and I’ve often thought that paying attention to word frequency lists might be a way to focus my work on vocabulary. I’m morally certain that I already know the words at the top of the frequency lists for German – I’m even willing to bet that I know the top 43 words on that list; if that’s true, I’m halfway there! — but it would be interesting to see how deep my knowledge goes.

Setting aside the practical interest in word frequency, I’m intrigued by the thought that so few words carry such weight in any language. Not intrigued enough (yet) to do a formal investigation of word frequency. But intrigued enough to put this note here.

A lot goes on inside a fish

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:08:00 -0500

Peter Godfrey-Smith:

Fish will count objects in experimental tasks. They use counting as a last resort, apparently, using other clues if they can, but the same is true of dolphins and people. Fish have learned to discriminate different styles of music – blues from classical – and could extrapolate from one blues artist to another; they were not learning the quirks of one performer. This is a quite abstract feat of pattern-recognition. A lot goes on inside a fish. … Why, then did fish (or some of them) become so smart? The question must first be asked the right way. The wrong way to ask it is: “Why do fish need to be smart?” This is not a question of need, but of relative advantage. If you are a fish, can you do a bit better than others in your population if you are a bit smarter, especially given the costs of building and running a larger brain? If you can indeed do better, what gives rise to this advantage? Much of the answer seems to be that fish, even more than seems immediately apparent, are gregarious animals. They are continually interacting with others. Social interaction creates a complex environment for an animal, and is very often a driver of the evolution of intelligence. This principle was originally developed for primates, where especially large brains are found in the more social species, but it has a broader application, and fish look like a likely case.

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, p. 178.

February 2025

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 15:33:00 -0500

My reflections on the books I read this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life

by Agnes Callard

This book is an extended discussion and defense of what Callard calls Socratic inquiry. She thinks that Socrates’ extensive questioning of his many interlocutors was a manifestation both of his role as gadfly (exposing that people really couldn’t offer solid definitions of values crucial to their living) and midwife (exposing fundamental beliefs about these values that the interlocutors did not know they had).

Callard begins her discussion with an account of Tolstoy’s life and writings. She finds that in several of his novels, and also in his personal life, Tolstoy confronted questions about the meaning of life head-on. But, she says, neither he nor the characters in his novels were able to answer them satisfactorily. In contrast, Socrates lived his life confronting these questions, both in his own reflections and in his sometimes tense conversations with his fellow Athenians.

At the base of all these questions is the question “Why?” Tolstoy: “Before occupying myself with the Samsara estate, the education of my son, the writing of a book, I had to know why I would be doing that. As long as I didn’t know why, I couldn’t do anything. … And I couldn’t answer anything, anything at all” (pp. 3f).

Callard calls these questions “untimely questions” — questions that press on the beliefs so crucial to our existence and self-knowledge – indeed, to our identity — that we simply can’t question them. We find it difficult if not impossible to set these beliefs aside. They are central to who we are. Socrates, she says, pushed his interlocutors to engage these questions directly. To follow his lead today is to draw “attention to the importance of evaluating that part of you that is doing the thinking. Those thoughts that are undetachable from the project of thinking — thoughts you are always ‘using’ in order to think anything at all — are what you really need to know if you want to cultivate yourself” (p. 199).

Crucial to her argument is the insistence that we cannot do this sort of thinking on our own. We need help. That help comes in the form of Socratic inquiry – social inquiry in which we engage with others in the same sort of conversations that Plato’s Socratic dialogues describe Socrates having with others.

Callard says that there are three paradoxes that complicate understanding just how this process of self-discovery can work:

How can we both affirm truth and avoid falsity? – the Gadfly-Midwife paradox. Is Socrates a gadfly, dedicated to showing that we don’t know what we think we know, or a midwife, bringing out the knowledge that we have but don’t know that we have?
- Callard says that Socrates is in fact both – “Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. Socrates the gadfly is Socrates the midwife. Socrates engages in productive inquiry by doing nothing other than refuting people” (p. 159).
How can one be open-minded about these question? – the Moore paradox. In living my life, I assume answers to these untimely questions; since I cannot avoid assuming these answers, I can’t challenge those answers. “Either we cannot be open-minded about untimely questions, or we must somehow be able to think, ‘p is wrong, even though I believe p’” (p. 144).
- Socratic dialogue is crucial here: “Thinking is, paradigmatically, a social quest for better answers to the sorts of questions [i.e., untimely questions] that show up for us already answered. It is a quest because it has a built-in endpoint: knowledge. It is social because it operates by resolving disagreements between poeple. Thinking begins when Socrates, or someone like him, recognizes that his account of justice, or piety, or love is not as good as it could be — which is to say, that it does not qualify as knowledge” (p. 237).
How is this inquiry possible? – the Meno paradox. How can I seek to learn something that I don’t know? If I don’t know it, then how do I know what to look for? And how do I recognize it?
- Again, Socratic inquiry to the rescue: “Alone, we do fall prey to Meno’s paradox: our answer either satisfies us or we lose hold of the question. But if you and I both have the same question yet different answers, a path opens up: we can test our answers against each other. This process is Socratic inquiry. The Socratic method is a way you can make progress without knowing in advance how you are going to do so” (p. 224).

Callard closes the book by discussing how Socratic inquiry plays out in three crucial areas of human life: politics, love, and death.

In politics, humans decide how they are to live together. “To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means something more specific, which is that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so. … the fundamental problem of politics … is that we sometimes have trouble living together” (p. 250). And we resolve this problem through social inquiry, which, she says, is our only hope of arriving at a common understanding of ideals such as justice, freedom, and equality. It’s only when we engage in such dialogue that we are truly free. “It is when the topics, values, and commitments that are central to a person’s life become open for discussion and adjudication with others that she can be said to ‘live together’ with those others in a substantive sense. I call that way of living together with other people ‘free’” (p. 267).

Similarly, she says, a person who truly loves another person isn’t loving that person’s qualities – those qualities can change, and the love for one person might die when the lover meets another person who embodies those qualities more deeply. This is not true love. Socrates insists that the proper target of love is not the person, and not the qualities of the person, but something “divine and perfect and unimprovable” (p. 309). This is sought in Socratic inquiry, which “is truly dangerous, transgressive, and exciting” (p. 310).

Finally, the fear and expectation of death make it difficult if not impossible to avoid confronting those untimely questions. To anticipate death is to think “about the time when there is nothing left that stands between you and untimely questions, when they can be delayed no longer. Preparation for death is preparation for that time, and to do philosophy is to see that time as now” (p. 368). And here Callard comes full circle, contrasting Socrates’ encounter with death, as described in the Phaedo, with that of Tolstoy, this time expressed in his character Ivan Ilyich: “Ivan [Ilyich] is torn between staring death in the face and suffering, alone, inexpressibly, on the one hand, and looking away from death, alongside his family and friends, on the other. Socrates, by contrast looks death straight in the eye, and has a conversation with his friends about it” (p. 344).

It’s been years since I’ve read the bulk of Plato’s Socratic dialogues; I’m not going to attempt the important inquiry whether Callard’s Socrates is in fact the same person as Plato’s. But I will say that Callard has me thinking more than I was about the relationship between intellectual inquiry and dialogue, on the one hand, and living in the world, on the other. This, I think, is especially valuable in the tangled and troubled world in which we’re living now.

Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

I’m not sure just what I can say about this short but powerful novel without including any spoilers. I think I’ll just say that there’s a protagonist who finds himself wondering first just how he came to be the person that he is and then, more deeply, pondering the meaning of his life. Ultimately, he decides, his life’s meaning is grounded in decisions that he makes, regardless of the pressures of those around him.

I think I’m dangerously close to the line between spoiling and not spoiling; I hope that I’ve not crossed it.

Meditations for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Burkeman begins with the admonition that you’re a finite person facing an infinite number of things that you might do, choices that you might make, so you might as well give up the thought that you will ever get to go to bed having accomplished everything that you “should” have done that day. Or, as he titles the first meditation, “It’s worse than you think.”

Thus begin these “meditations.” Each of the four weeks has its heading, moving from “Being finite” to “Taking action” to “Letting Go” to “Showing up.”

Some might see this as yet another self-help book, which I think is selling it short. I see it more as what’s implied in the title and subtitle: a set of 48 reflections, ideally to be read and considered a day at a time, allowing the reflections to shape how one lives a life. I read it as recommended, taking four weeks to work my way through the book, beginning each day living with the day’s meditation. I won’t attempt here to summarize the whole of the book, but I will note the admonition that quite literally changed my life:

… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by.

Indeed.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

I read this book the first time shortly after it was published in 2019. I found it a powerful book then, and I find it even more powerful now as I re-read it in our current political and cultural havoc.

Odell does a good job of placing the challenges of the attention economy in the broader context of environmental damage and economic/social inequality. She insists that the current version of commercial online forums makes it difficult to engage meaningfully. She builds on research by Veronica Barissi indicating that activists seeking to engage online face three challenges:

the pace of online exchanges is such that it’s impossible to stay up
the immediacy of the exchanges makes it difficult to find the space and time for “political elaboration” (“Because the content that activists share online has to be ‘catchy,’ ‘activists do not have the space and time to articulate their political reflections.’”)
Ties established online are “weak ties”: “Stong ties and well-defined projects … still come from ‘action on the ground … face-to-face interaction, discussion, deliberation, and confrontation.’”

Odell states, and I agree, that these challenges face anyone who attempts to engage online, both activists and others. Perhaps our practice has evolved since 2019 so that we’re now able to have more meaningful engagement in some online forums, but I think such engagement is virtually impossible in such forums as Facebook and Twitter, in which the algorithms push an altogether different sort of engagement. (As an aside, I find it interesting that Odell, writing in 2019, includes a brief and positive mention of Mastodon, while Chris Hayes’s very good book, published in 2025 (and described below) has no mention of it at all.)

The challenges we face in the United States and the world more generally are enormous – so enormous that I find it difficult to sort out just how to respond. (And, I admit, I’m feeling more and more uneasy about my commitment to continue reading and thinking about anything at all that doesn’t contribute directly to fighting against the current efforts to destroy our democracy.) But consider this from Odell:

“If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. … this process enriches not only our ability to resist, but even more simply, our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade” (p. 94).

And, she says, we need to realize that we are remaking the world and ourselves rather than simply making them. We start from where we are, and with who we are. Odell faults the understanding of the so-called progressive movements in the nineteenth century as being purely constructive — “Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction” (p. 192). Turning this on its head, she pushes us to attend to and engage with the world in which we are living today, with all of its suffering and inequities.

I find myself encouraged by the program she suggests, even as I believe that the challenges we face today are radically more dangerous than those she considered in 2019.

The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

The fundamental points of this book are reflected in its title and subtitle; Hayes also offers a succinct statement of his argument: “… we should think of attention as a resource, a substance extracted for its market value, and … this resource has been growing in value and is now the most important resource” (p. 189f). What’s more, those who would like to monetize that resource for themselves have developed and employed a wide range of technologies and strategies to do just that.

This, in itself, is not a new argument, and I admit that I was already sympathetic to it before beginning to read this book. But what I find especially insightful is an analogy Hayes develops between commoditized labor and commoditized attention. Just as labor was made a commodity in the industrial revolution, he argues, attention has been made a commodity in the current attention economy. Drawing on the work of Michael Polanyi, he suggests that both labor and attention are fictitious commodities. Unlike other commodities, which have been produced for the market, attention and labor have their own standing in human life and have been co-opted by the market.

“…Polanyi argues that the process for fictitious commodities necessarily involves a kind of transformation of society as a whole. To turn labor into a commodity you must reorder society, create new legal, technological, and institutional regimes that can take the essential work of human effort and turn into a measurable unit with a price. … Clearly, our attention does have a price, set within a developed, sophisticated market between buyers of attention and sellers of it. But that economic fact can’t ever be detached from a deeper truth about the meaning of what this fictitious commodity is outside of its economic function. It will, like our labor, forever remain something irreducibly different to us than what it means to a market participant that’s purchasing it at a given price. … The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives” (p. 130ff).

I also appreciate Hayes’s discussion of the three facets of attention: voluntary attention, involuntary attention (e.g., when a loud noise or sudden interruption forces us to attend to the cause), and social attention. I found his discussion of social attention particularly helpful. He devotes considerable attention (see what I did there?) to that facet, suggesting that our need for real connections with other human beings – our desire both to be attended to by others and to attend to others — is largely rooted to our experience as infants when we were so reliant on others’ care that we demanded their attention. “As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us. … And this social need will always be a central aspect of the complex frictions at work in how our own attention is focused. In fact, it is this facet of attention that the attention merchants of the age have most effectively exploited” (p. 38). In this context, he mentions an important point from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child on neglect: “Chronic neglect is associated with a wider range of damage than active abuse, but it receives less attention in policy and practice” (pp. 82f).

One crucial point is the impact Hayes sees all of this having on our politics and culture. Maintaining a democracy is hard work that requires sustained attention and analysis. Moreover, maintaining a democracy also requires that the public can find some agreement on the nature of problems to be faced. The attention economy by its very design makes it difficult to sustain attention on anything, and the current landscape, with each venue offering its own take on the “facts” to its own constructed constituency means that a common understanding of facts and problems is unattainable.

I found many other gems along the way, including the reference to important insights from people as diverse as John Maynard Keynes, Herbert Simon, and Michael Goldwater.

Of course, all of this presents a seemingly intractable problem: How do we respond? Here I find his argument a little thin. He suggests some possibilities reflected in the recent resurgence of vinyl records and the insistence of some people to read physical media (books and newspapers) instead of digital forms. (And, I admit, if he’s writing for me and people like me, he’s preaching to the choir here.) More controversially, and building on his analogy between labor and attention, he suggests that we might eventually push for some regulation of the co-opting of our attention much as earlier organizers pushed for regulations of the co-opting of labor. Some might find this unlikely – and he admits that the U.S.’s first amendment makes this a difficult enterprise – but he points out that neither the ban on child labor nor the limitations on total hours worked came easily or “seemed obvious and commonsense at the time, at least to the titans of industry and politicians who fought themm. It took a tremendous amount of political mobilization, agitation, and persuasion to move governments toward banning child labor and capping the number of hours workers could work” (p. 265). So perhaps we’ll eventually come to that.

In short, I found this to be a very helpful and important book, not only for helping me to understand and navigate the attention economy, but also providing still more insight into the challenges that economy presents both to our attempts to carry on quotidian tasks and to maintain anything like a reasonable democracy.

If he were more cheesy, he might have closed the book with something like “Attenders of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but that inescapable urge to pull your phone out of your pocket (and the democracy you say you cherish)!” But he’s a better writer than that.

The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper

by Roland Allen

This is an ambitious and readable investigation of the development of the notebook in its many forms, together with an account of how different uses of notebooks emerged to satisfy different needs at different times. (Yes, I know – there’s a lot of difference there!) Allen begins, appropriately enough, with how the Moleskin notebooks emerged in late 20th century and quickly became the rage. He then moves back in history to the Mediterranean area of 1000 BCE, describing what we know about some of the precursors to paper notebooks before coming to the development first of papyrus and then of paper, and the binding of these materials into something resembling what we think of today as a notebook.

He discusses the technology and the material characteristics, but he also, and more importantly, discusses how notebooks became essential tools of practice in completing tasks and then how the notebooks themselves reshaped the nature of those tasks and human practices. There were crucial developments in accounting – including the invention of double-entry accounting — in which business people made extensive use of ledgers that allowed the track profits and expenses of producing different products. Sailors began to keep logbooks of their journeys, eventually recording weather data – and, crucially for today’s studies of the rate of climate change — the presence of ice flows in different locations at different times of the year.

He discusses the note-taking practices of significant figures like Leonardo and Charles Darwin – Darwin: “Let the collector’s motto be ‘Trust nothing to the memory, for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting’” (p. 250), showing how the availability of such notes helps us to understand how prominent thinker came to hold the views that they held. He also discusses artists’ use of sketchbooks, showing how they help us to understand developmental stages of an artist like Picasso as he moved farther and farther into abstractions. And there are case studies of Ryder Carroll, the inventor of the Bullet Journal, and Florida governor and U.S. senator Bob Graham, whose extensive use of notebooks were both an effective tool and an object of ridicule. (See a brief account of Graham’s revenge for this ridicule in this blog post.)

Near the end of the book, he points to the work of philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers who developed the notion of the extended mind, suggesting that the use of tools like notebooks should be considered part of the cognitive process – even, as the title of their paper suggests, part of the mind — rather than external tools that assist in cognition.

In short, he discusses notebook use both past and present, several of which I plan to incorporate into my own note-taking practice.

The Best of All Possible Worlds: A life of Leibniz in seven pivotal days

by Michael Kempe.

I’ve read very little of Leibniz, and I really don’t understand what little I’ve read. Leibniz was perhaps the last person who could reasonably claim to comprehend the whole of human knowledge (of the western world, but also some of the east) at the time when he was living. I can’t say that I would have picked up what might be called a standard biography of Leibniz, but I was intrigued by the notion that Kempe might offer a solid account of such a complicated man by describing seven pivotal days of his life. “Well,” I thought, “I might read about seven days if it would offer me a glimpse of the full 70 years of his life.”

Of course, Kempe doesn’t restrict his discussion to what happened only on those seven days. In each case, he focuses on the day as a significant turning point in Leibniz’s intellectual development, and doing this well requires some attention to things that came before and also to things that came after.

As one would expect, Leibniz’s quarrel with Newton and Clarke regarding who invented calculus and also the nature of time and space comes into the discussion. Kempe describes a particular day when Leibniz first developed a notational system, or symbolic language, in which one could express the mathematical concepts much more economically than Newton’s system allowed. “How to describe … the successful creativity that is on display this Tuesday [29 October 1675]? Leibniz proceeds in accordance with a distinct methodical pattern: a complex concept consisting of the sum of infinitesimal values (captured by the term omnes or summa) gets expressed in condensed form by means of a simple symbol (ſ). The symbol simplifies the concept and elevates it to a higher plane, where, in abstracted form and in accordance with certain rules, one can easily input it into further calculations. It doesn’t matter which particular sum the long s is supposed to stand for here. The most difficult operations featuring the use of the infinite as a mathematical limit can now be solved in a trice — as if they were being solved automatically by human reason” (p. 27). (For the record, Kempe doesn’t come down on either side of the larger debate between Newton and Leibniz.)

In another chapter (covering another day), Kempe discusses Leibniz’s endeavor to design and build hydraulic systems that would move water through the fountains and ponds of a sovereign’s garden. On another, Leibniz develops one of the earliest expressions of the binary system now central to computer technology. On yet another, Leibniz investigates a rumor that there was a time when a woman – a pregnant woman – served as pope, and was discovered only when she delivered a child at an inopportune moment. Leibniz did a detailed historical analysis of the succession of the popes, and claimed to show that the time period in question was already accounted for by the (male) popes whose tenure we know. (Not incidentally, Leibniz was also interested in countering the claims of Protestants that this episode demonstrated the corruption of the Catholic Church; this was not the only time that Leibniz worked to ease the divisions between religious communities. On another day, in another letter, he hinted at an understanding of how species might change (and new species might emerge) that foreshadowed the work of Darwin a century and a half later.

So, while I still can’t claim to understand all of the ins and outs of Leibniz’s philosophy, I do have a glimpse of the complexities of his thought and also of how his work in the many fields in which he worked come together. I’m not convinced I live in the best of all possible worlds, but I do have a better understanding of what that might mean than I had before.

My current reading and TBR lists.

On keeping a notebook

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 15:21:00 -0500

I’m currently reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. I’ll have more to say about the book in my what I’m reading section after I finish reading it (editing this at a later date to say that my notes on that book are now available), but he has me thinking about how and why I take notes on my reading and also – in my journal – on my life. This is especially on my mind these days because the move to denote as my note-taking and journaling environment has me re-reading many notes I’ve made over the past several years. One thing that really fascinates me is how I’m reminded of events and readings that I’d completely forgotten – but, once reminded, I find that these things are once again in my mind. Perhaps I can say what I’m thinking more clearly — though I’m more than a little frustrated by having absolutely no memory of experiencing or reading something I describe in an entry written only a few years ago, I’m fascinated by how reading what I wrote has brought that experience back to mind rather vividly. Of course I’m reminded of what I described in the text that I’m now re-reading, but I can also remember other things associated with whatever it is that is described there. It’s as though the small bit that I wrote and can now read is the key that unlocks a much larger trove of memory. Funny how the mind works.

But it also opens up yet again the question why I write all of these notes. Joan Dideon records some thoughts about the likes of me, thoughts that are not altogether reassuring:

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss (“On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, p. 118).

In The Notebook, Allen describes another example of note-taking being called compulsive. Bob Graham was Democratic governor of Florida from 1978 to 1986, when he was elected to the United States Senate. Throughout his political career – while campaigning and while serving – he took extensive notes. His use of these notes served him very well as both a candidate and a government official. However, when he decided to run for president in 2004, his note-taking practice was ridiculed and parodied: “Ascend stage, stumble, regain balance.” Katie Couric, host of “The Today Show,” apparently missed the spoof and asked him about that particular entry. Then psychologist Aubrey Immelman weighed in: “I think it is a bit compulsive. It almost has a pacifier element to it, a security blanket. It suggests to me someone who has a lot of uncertainty and needs to create a structure.” Criticism followed. Graham withdrew from the campaign and decided not to run for re-election to the senate.

Compulsive, perhaps. But the notebooks themselves provided crucial evidence five years later when the CIA practice of waterboarding came to light. Democratic officials were severely critical of the practice; government officials responded by providing records of earlier meetings when Democrats had been informed. Graham didn’t remember those meetings, and he had his notebooks. So aides read through them and found that three of the meetings didn’t happen; at the fourth meeting the group discussed “interrogation” but no one mentioned waterboarding. The CIA looked through its records again and acknowledged that there was no discussion of waterboarding at any of the meetings with Democratic officials. As Rachel Madow put it, “Nerds one, spies zero.”

But back to Dideon’s suggestion that a “presentiment of loss” moves one to record one’s experience. Perhaps. In fact, I’m convinced that if I didn’t have these old notes, many of the events described there would have been forever lost to me. Moreover, I should now acknowledge that I’ll surely forget them again.

But what I like best about reading these old notes – and one reason that I’ll continue to write them — is that I appreciate the reminder of the sorts of things that I thought about, the recovery of who I was then. In some cases, I can be relieved that I’m no longer the person I was then. Dideon again:

Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 ᴀ.ᴍ. of a bad night … (p. 124).

In other cases, I can relive my relationship with a dear friend who has died, remembering the subtle smile on his face as he wondered whether I would get the joke. The notes can bring all of it back. I think it’s all worth remembering.

Yes, there are those, like Dideon’s daughter, who feel no need to write in a notebook. But I’m glad for the writing, and also for the reading.

The shortcomings of the United States

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 15:01:00 -0500

W.E.B. Dubois, writing in 1958:

There was a day when the world rightly called Americans honest even if crude; earning their living by hard work; telling the truth no matter whom it hurt; and going to war only in what they believed a just cause after nothing else seemed possible. Today we are lying, stealing and killing. We call all this by finer names: Advertising, Free Enterprise, and National Defence. But names in the end deceive no one; today we use science to help us deceive our fellows; we take wealth that we never earned and we are devoting all our energies to kill, maim, and drive insane, men, women and children who dare refuse to do what we want done.

A Vista of Ninety Years.

On the abolition of all political parties

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 11:02:00 -0500

In 1943, the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil was living in London. She was close to death – she had contracted tuberculosis, and her condition was made even worse because she insisted that she would eat only what her French colleagues were allowed to eat in their occupied country. She died in hospital that year when her heart failed, but the coroner’s report was stark: She “slayed” herself by refusing to eat.

As Weil was dying, she wrote a brief book called, in translation, On the Abolition of All Political Parties. This has been on my mind recently as the Republican Party in the United States daily faces the question whether they will support Trump’s MAGA policies when they are in clear conflict with established law and even with the Constitution. (I hasten to add here that I understand that some of the theorists who developed these policies are fully aware that they violate established law, but hope that the judicial process will eventually bring them to the Supreme Court, which they hope will change established law.)

Consider Weil’s list of the three essential characteristics of political parties:

“A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.”
“A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.”
“The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.”

In short, she goes on, a political party is focused on realizing its own power. When members are forced to choose between the needs and interests of the country, on one hand, and those of the party, on the other, the costs of a choice for the country are much higher than the benefits of a choice for the party. So, she concludes, the party becomes its own end.

I’m still considering the question whether she’s right as a general rule, but I’m absolutely convinced that current powerful figures in the contemporary Republican Party are explicitly focused on maintaining their control of the nation, even at the expense of the interests of the nation. Perhaps she’s right to see this as a characteristic of political parties in general, but we can point to a time in the United States when members of the Republican Party set aside party interests in defense of the Constitution. Compare the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, after refusing President Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, to the acquiescence of current officials to Trump’s illegal firing of multiple independent inspectors general.

These firings and other executive actions will surely end up before the Supreme Court. But getting there will take time, and we will be living with the turmoil before then. And we can’t be confident that the resolution offered by the current Supreme Court will leave us with anything like the balance of power that we’ve had, imperfect as it is, in the country before these actions. To paraphrase Franklin, we have “a republic, if we can keep it.” I’m not at all confident that we can.

Remembering Germany's past; reflecting on the present

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:16:00 -0500

It’s a standard move in the last 10 days – has it really been only ten days? — to say that we’re at an inflection point in history, perhaps most profoundly in the United States, but also in other parts of the world. Many are saying that we’ve not seen anything like this in the United States; some are predicting that this could be the of our democracy, however flawed it’s been. I’ll leave it to others more knowledgeable than I about these things to make this judgment, though I do think that even if this is a decisive moment we should acknowledge the underlying factors that have brought us to this moment.

As historian Reinhart Koselleck once noted: “The processual character of modern history cannot be comprehended other than through the reciprocal explanation of events through structures, and vice versa.” Structural economic, social and political conditions shape events. But on some junctures, events, such a political revolutions or major wars, can profoundly shape structures. The rare occasion when an event gains structural significance constitutes a historical inflection point.

David Motadel in The Guardian, Are we at a turning point in world history?

Yes, Trump is attempting to force some profound changes in our government, our culture, and our society. And, yes, his having gained the position to make this attempt depends on developments that have denied many people the power to live a life anywhere close to the so-called American dream. We’re experiencing an abrupt flood – a flooding of the zone — but its power grows out of a set of circumstances many years in the making.

As I bounce back and forth between the reading that distracts me from the awful news of the day and the dread provoked by my reading of that news, I find myself remembering a visit to Germany in the summer of 2022. The vacation plans that my wife and I had carefully made were disrupted by her contracting Covid. I managed to avoid the disease that time. She was confined to our hotel room – the hotel management even took away her room key and tasked me with delivering her food in the hotel room. That was bad. But one day between meals I ventured out into the city. Here’s an entry from my journal:

Today I went to the Historisches Museum Frankfurt. I spent most of my time there in a special exhibit on Frankfurt and the Nazis. It was a really interesting exhibit discussing how the Nazis were able to come to power so quickly. One point I found very interesting is how the Nazi party “punched above their weight” early on – even while their numbers were still small, they focused on making a big splash on the street with lots of protests and increasingly violent activity. They also remade the street culture, putting their symbols everywhere and also making a point to wear their Nazi regalia.

I had always associated the Autobahn with Hitler and the Nazis, I suppose because I read somewhere that Eisenhower was very impressed by how efficiently the German army could move army vehicles from one place to another. However, I learned in this exhibit that the concept of the autobahn emerged early in the 1920s, and concrete plans for an initial part of it were completed before 1930. However, the Nazis realized early on that one way of building up their image with the people would be to take that project on as their own. So they did it, and the succeeded in making people see the autobahn system as an example of what they could do for the country.

I confess that I don’t remember now many of the details of the exhibit. As I read today what I wrote about it then, I’m struck by the way that Trump and others in his camp are exaggerating his dominance in our country. Yes, he won the popular vote (though he got the votes of fewer than half of those who voted) and the electoral college, but he did not get a decisive mandate. But I’m also struck by the way that he’s claiming responsibility for so many things that were done by those who came before him, and also working to create a public space in which even his most extreme supporters are free to swagger. I’m thinking of the small group of Proud Boys marching through the streets on the day of Trump’s inauguration. “Whose streets? Our streets!” In all of this, Trump and his followers are attempting to construct a narrative that will shape our understanding of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. They are working with the support of online media like Facebook and X and of many of our country’s corporate leaders. Many, though not all, of the legacy media companies are acquiescing to if not explicitly supporting these efforts. The challenge we face today is the challenge of responding to the flood, to the turmoil, in a way that keeps us from going over the precipice that led Germany into World War II and the Holocaust. And responding to that challenge depends on our finding a way to counter the lies that threaten the community on which that response depends.

Power of great fiction

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 19:41:00 -0500

Agnes Callard:

All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.

Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, p. 46

Quotidian life in the midst of turmoil

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:18:00 -0500

Or perhaps I could call this post “How does one live in a world that seems to be falling apart?”

Early in Covid, back when I had no idea just how dramatically the world would change, I stumbled on to an online reading group proposing to read War and Peace. That’s one of those (many) books I feel like I should have read, so I joined the group. I imagined a time a decade or more later, when a young child — as long as I’m spinning a fantasy, I’ll say my grandchild — would ask, “What did you do during covid?” “Why,” I’d say, “I read War and Peace.” Of course, Covid outlasted the reading of War and Peace. But while my reading of it lasted, reading it was a good way to while away some of the hours of my retired life.

I think of that now because I’m living in another time of uncertainty, this one tinged with anger and fear for the state of the world. I believed last week that the reality of Trump’s presidency would be as bad as my worst imaginings, but I find now that my imagination fell short of the reality. I find hope in the courageous responses of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde and Senator Bernie Sanders, but the torrent of executive orders and other actions of the new administration seems to be overwhelming. It is indeed an attempt to flood the zone, throwing so much stuff against the wall that those who would resist find it difficult to decide just where to start. Some have compared this onslaught to a distributed denial of service attack on an internet server, sending so many requests to the server that it collapses under the weight of demands on its services. And, it seems clear to me, there are those in Trump’s administration who would like nothing more than for governmental services to collapse.

Of course, some are starting to fight back, taking up the causes espoused by Budde, Sanders, and many others; we can hope – I, at least, have no choice but to hope – that at least some of those attempts will be successful. Indeed, at least one pundit suggests that Trump’s bite could fall far short of his bark (and, I would say, there’s a lot of room to fall there).

I’m doing what I can, donating to organizations fighting the good fight and raising concerns here and elsewhere. And contemplating what I might do if (when?) things get even worse. I’ve even wondered if I can still find my “Don’t blame me. I voted for McGovern” bumper sticker. Of course, I’d have to explain that to many people – how many still living remember the last time a candidate lost in a landslide only to see his opponent fall in shame a scant two or three years later? Of course, the 1972 election was a real landslide, as opposed to the fictitious one documented in some circles these days. But as long as we’re hoping, we can still hope for it to be followed by a collapse into shame.

Even as I struggle with how to respond to the turmoil in the world, I have my more quotidian concerns. Some of these are the concerns of a retired person, living with and offering support to a partner who is still working to defend human rights. I walk to the grocery store. I do the dishes. I do the laundry. I make it to the gym when I can. And I read. Lots of reading. Sometimes, when I’m reading, I think that perhaps I should be out in the streets instead. Perhaps it will come to that. But, for now at least, I have this sense that I should live as though there are intellectual questions that still matter, questions that still need to be explored. And I’m going to make room in the midst of all the turmoil to explore those questions — as best I can.

What to say on a day like today?

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 10:52:00 -0500

I’ve struggled to write this post. What to say on a day like today? Of course there are so many things I might say about the day because of its significance – after all, Martin Luther King, Jr. lived a life worth celebrating. Moreover, we’re still in the official mourning period for President Jimmy Carter, whose life as a human being is an inspiration to all who care about other human beings. But there’s also that other agenda item – an agenda item that represents a series of events that has already caused harm to many and promises even more suffering for many more people. I hope against hope that the transition marked by this event will turn out to be a temporary detour, and that the long arc of the moral universe will bend once again towards justice, both in whatever remains of our country and also in the world more generally.

It’s appropriate to refer to that arc of the moral universe today, since Martin Luther King urged listeners to remember it when he offered the Baccalaureate sermon at Wesleyan University in 1964. But I think also of what seems likely to be the original expression of the sentiment, or at least its first prominent expression in the United States. It comes from a sermon that the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker delivered in the 19th century.

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

I differ from Parker in one crucial respect: I simply don’t see “a continual and progressive triumph of the right.” (In the current climate, perhaps it’s worth noting that Parker wasn’t referring to what we now refer to as the political right.) I think we have had some moves toward justice, but whatever triumph they express has hardly been continual.

Parker preached that sermon in 1852, when the United States was approaching another moral crisis; a crisis that, as Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, has some striking analogies to the crisis we face today. There were moments in the years leading up to and including the Civil War when many must have thought that the arc would surely break away from justice rather than bend toward it. Further, as Richardson says, there were many on the losing side of that war who immediately began to rewrite the history, seeking to claim their own position as the true expression of justice. The Union’s victory in that war didn’t bring anything approaching full justice, but it was at least a bending toward a more just world. Such bending toward justice continues to be challenged by those celebrating in today’s other agenda item as they seek to rewrite recent history in their own image.

I said above that I hope against hope that Parker and King were right. I hope that everything that is represented in the other agenda item of the day turns out to be a temporary detour. Part of what gives me that hope is the courage that people like Heidi Li Feldman bring to the struggle.

Back to where I started: I woke up this morning not at all sure of what I could say. I’m not satisfied with what I’ve said; I post this entry because I simply did not want to get to the end of the day having said nothing.

Complications in Sagen's pale blue dot

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:41:00 -0500

Samantha Harvey:

(I’m not sure how much of the power in this text will survive my ripping it out of context, but I can’t resist the urge to put it here. Perhaps a bit of table-setting will help. On its surface, Harvey’s novel describes a day in the life of 6 astronauts (actually, 4 astronauts and two cosmonauts) from five different countries in orbit around the earth. In this excerpt, she begins with an account of training in perspective that the six people experienced before their time in space.)

You will see, they were told, its [the earth’s] fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or barrier — no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear.

…

It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don’t, but it’s easier not to. When they look at the planet it’s hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with.

…

But then one day something shifts. One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics really were a pantomime. If politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning and end of the story it wouldn’t be so bad. Instead, they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.

Orbital, pp. 107ff

Writing for clarity, but not total clarity

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:52:00 -0500

Thomas Merton:

“I am still trying to find out: and that is why I write.”

“How will you find out by writing?”

“I will keep putting things down until they become clear.”

“And if they do not become clear?”

“I will have a hundred books, full of symbols, full of everything I ever knew or ever saw or ever thought.”

“If it never becomes clear, perhaps you will have more books than if it were clear all at once.”

“No doubt. But I say if it were all clear at once, I would not really understand it, either. Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing. This is not understanding; it is something you remember.”

My Argument with the Gestapo (Quoted in Mary Gordon’s On Thomas Merton, pp. 82f). Merton wrote this novel in 1941, but it wasn’t published until 1969, a year after his death. The person speaking in the first person here is the protagonist in Merton’s novel; Gordon suggests his voice is Merton’s.)

See Anita Lewis for a “clear as mud” take on this.

The internet I want

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:51:00 -0500

Last week I announced my decision to delete my Facebook account. I announced my decision Facebook itself, and many of the replies to that announcement made it very clear how much I was giving up by leaving the site. One long-ago friend from college days, a friend I encounter only on Facebook these days, said simply (and even starkly) “don’t leave us.” Another former friend and colleague bemoaned the splintering of Facebook communities, as some move to Bluesky and others to Mastodon. Those responses and others reminded me of the value of real world connections with friends, former colleagues, and former students. (And, as you might expect, some of those communities overlap).

So there’s a loss in my leaving, but as I said in that earlier post, one of my big frustrations with Facebook is the fact that I had to scroll through advertisements, videos, disinformation posing as news, and angry rants to find the occasional gem reporting on the birth of a friend’s child or death of a dear friend. The first few paragraphs of this Atlantic article capture more poignantly than I expressed the frustrations I felt and my reasons for leaving.

So, I’ll continue to reply to the trickle of messages still coming in comments on my “I’m leaving Facebook” post before deleting the account, and I’ll hope that I’ll find ways to maintain and even renew connections with friends. Maybe even some of them will drop in on this blog occasionally.

I’m still looking for the internet I want. The author of that Atlantic piece offered the Watch Duty app as an example of what the internet could be. I agree that it’s a good start, and it’s obviously been a solidly good resource for those caught in the thick of the wildfires in the Los Angeles area. I’m hoping for an internet that will offer meaningful connections for the more mundane times. That’s what I’m missing from the early days of Facebook.

A postscript – I’m getting something like that community on Mastodon. If only I could persuade many of the Facebook friends I left behind to join me there. But some are staying, while others are going to Bluesky. Fragmentation of community, indeed.

Mastodon's Eugen Rochko and the turtle in the mud

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 11:31:00 -0500

Like many other users of Mastodon, I’m impressed with Mastodon’s announcement that the people should own the town square that is Mastodon. I agree with others who are tremendously impressed with founder Eugen Rochko’s willingness to give up the financial security of owning the growing platform. I thought of him and his decision just now as I came across this in Helen De Cruz’s book Wonderstruck:

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (ca. 369-286 BCE) was sitting fishing when two state officials from the kingdom of Chu came to offer him a prestigious position as chief administrator. Without turning around, he said,

“I have heard that in Chu there is a sacred tortoise which died three thousand years ago. The ruler keeps it covered with a cloth in a hamper in his ancestral temple. What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated, or to live and keep on dragging its tail in the mud?”

The officials agreed it would rather be alive, so Zhuangzi concluded, “Go your ways. I will keep on dragging my tail over the mud.” This is a startling response. For readers at the time, as now, turning down a cushy position like this, which comes with wealth and honor, would be virtually inconceivable. Zhuangzi evokes a sense of wonder and unfamiliarity by likening that position to being a desiccated tortoise stored away in a box (p. 20).

I’m not suggesting that Rochko is a turtle, or that his continued work on the development of Mastodon is akin to dragging a tail over the mud. I do think, however, that the image of “desiccated turtle” seems apt for at least one other player in the world of social media.

Taking note in emacs: a move to denote

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 10:16:00 -0500

I’ve been writing in emacs org-mode for a couple of decades now. I wouldn’t call myself an emacs expert, and definitely not an elisp expert; instead, I’d say that know just enough to maintain an emacs environment that works for me and not quite enough to escape the occasional emacs storm. On the whole, it works.

I’ve tried several different ways to write and then make use of notes on what I’m reading. First it was simple org-mode headings, one for each book, with the notes about that book nested in subheadings under the main heading. Then I spent a year or so trying to make org-roam work for me. I know that others find that a wonderful environment, but somehow I never felt at home in it. I have lots of notes in an org-roam database, but I’ve not been able to make good use of them.

I read about denote (by Protesilaos Stavrou, otherwise known as Prot) when it first came out. I was intrigued then, but I was still trying to find my way in org-roam, and decided that I should stay put. I changed my mind about six months ago, when I couldn’t find a note that I just knew that I had recorded in org-roam. That happened on a day when I was frustrated by other tech challenges as well; perhaps that’s why this rather small bottleneck pushed me over the edge.

So, I installed denote, and began recording my notes there. I was really happy with the first week or so of note-taking, and so I decided to move my almost-daily journeying practice to denote as well. Over the past six months, I’ve been recording all of my reading notes and writing my journal entries in denote, using denote’s file–naming and tagging scheme.

I’ve also been importing some of my old org-roam notes into denote. Prot makes that very easy with a script. One challenge for me there is that the template I was using in org-roam recorded the date I made the note in the note’s body (e.g., “Entered 2022-12-15 Thu 09:58”), but it was simple enough to write a script that iterates through the file, putting the timestamp for each entry in a CREATED property. (Yes, I’m a bit anal, but I find it helpful to see just when I took a particular note.) I’m not importing all of those org-roam notes; if I have notes on a book I read several years ago that seems relevant to work I’m doing now, I import those notes, re-reading and tagging them as I go. It’s a good way to remind myself of what I read, and I see connections with what I’m reading now that I might have missed otherwise.

For the most part, my use of denote so far is rather simple. But I’ve stumbled into one practice that I think others might find helpful. As I take notes on a book I’m reading (e.g., Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, published in 2022), one of the tags I add to each note is “solnit2022”. Then I create what Prot calls a “meta” file named “Solnit2022: Orwell’s Roses” and insert in this file an org dynamic block:

#+BEGIN: denote-links :regexp "_solnit2022" :sort-by-component signature

#+END

If I put point on that #+BEGIN line and press C-c C-c, the block is populated with links to all of the notes I took on that book. Note the sort-by-component. I’m using (or, as more dedicated Zettelkasten practitioners might say, misusing) the signature component of the file name, inserting there the page number for each note. So now I have a list of links to my notes on the book, organized by page number. I can have a similarly organized list of the notes themselves by using a “denote-files” block instead of a denote-links block. After I’ve finished the book, I write a couple of paragraphs above that dynamic block listing what I see as the key takeaways from my reading. (I then add these summary comments to my reading log.)

Another step – I decided to import all my old journal entries into denote. My initial motivation for this was more to read through those journal entries from years ago than simply to have them as denote files, but it’s been rather interesting to relive old days, and I’ve also found comments about reading that I’ve copied into separate denote files and tagged appropriately.

And this brings me to my last point: while I find denote’s file naming and tagging scheme to be very helpful and even intuitive, I think that my working through old notes and journals has been very valuable in itself. I’m planning now to build some sort of routine review of my reading past into my regular practice. At the very least, I could invoke ‘denote-explore-random-note‘ from Peter Prevos’s denote-explorer package.

The connections of music, with strings attached

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:05:00 -0500

I don’t play guitar all that much anymore, though I’m trying very hard (or, at least thinking very hard about trying very hard!) to develop those fingertip callouses again. Though I don’t play much, I still treasure the guitars that I own.

But one of those guitars — an old Guild D35 acoustic — feels rather special these days. It’s had quite the life.

In the mid-1970s, when I was a graduate student in Texas and had virtually no money, I was visiting my family in New York City. My younger brother, also a guitarist, took me with him to one of his favorite guitar stores. I wish one of us could remember the name or location of the store – if it still exists, I’d like to visit it again. As I said, I had very little money to spend, and I really didn’t intend to buy a guitar. I was just there to look around, I told myself. But, of course, when one is in a guitar store, “looking around” also means “playing around,” and soon I was strumming a few chords on that Guild guitar. I really don’t remember how, but somehow I scrounged up enough money to walk out of that shop with that guitar. It was my first decent six-string guitar. I played it as best I could for six years or so.

Sometime around 1980 I was on leave from graduate school, working a job where I had a bit more money. I made a mistake somewhat like the one I made in New York City; this time a good friend living in Albuquerque took me to a luthier’s workshop up in the hills east of the city. We spent several hours there – and against my better judgment I found myself selecting the wood for a guitar top, sides, and neck. About six weeks later I received those pieces of wood in the shape and form of a guitar. I’m ashamed to say that I ignored the Guild for a while.

My leave ended, and I returned to graduate school. While I was away, a student named Jerry had come to that university. More than a few friends told me that I really should meet Jerry. As I recall, I didn’t meet him until he showed up at one of our regular singing and picking parties. He was one of the pickers. I don’t remember which one of us picked the first song, but we were hardly into the first verse of one of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash classics when I began to realize just why those friends had told me that I should connect with Jerry.

The connection based on playing and singing together grew into a connection based on all sorts of things, many of them music oriented. A few years later we spent a long weekend at the Kerrville Folk Festival. Sometime before or after that weekend Jerry expressed an interest in purchasing the Guild guitar. I was happy to see it go into his hands, and we consummated the deal.

Jerry finished his studies and moved home to Nebraska. I visited him in Lincoln a time or two while I was still in school. We met in the Colorado Rockies for a week of hiking and playing. Jerry’s on the left in the picture of us as resting a bit while making our way up a rather steep trail to the top of a mountain. On the way up, we had to step off the trail for a few minutes so that a group of people on horseback could get past us. Jerry’s comment: “I suspect those horses are going to have a great sense of accomplishment when they reach the top.”

A few years later, Jerry returned to Dallas for my wedding. Of course he brought the Guild with him, and we had another wonderful night of playing and singing together at the party the night before the wedding.

Then, sadly, we lost touch with each other. Jerry stayed in Lincoln, making his way as an outside artist. The video linked on that page holds a lesson that still challenges me: “You gotta feel the freedom to screw up, and know that you’re a screw-up, just like all the other screw-ups that are walking this earth; but, wouldn’t you rather be a screw-up, that expresses yourself, than a screw-up who is afraid to do anything?” Maybe I’d be different now if we’d still been together so he could have said that to my face. (Or maybe he did, and I just wasn’t able to hear it.)

Sometime around 2006, we reconnected on Facebook. His posts reminded of his wit and his music. He and his wife visited us in Virginia when she had a conference in DC. I visited them in Lincoln when I had a conference at the university there. In one of those conversations, I mentioned that I regretted having sold him that guitar, and asked if he’d be willing to sell it back to me. “No,” he smiled. “A deal’s a deal.” He let me play it for a minute, but insisted that I leave it in his care.

Not long after my time in Lincoln, he messaged me with some really bad news. Not one to beat around the bush, he got straight to the point. “John, I’m dying. But I want you to have this guitar.” I was dumbstruck – Jerry was a young man, two years younger than I was, but his esophageal cancer was diagnosed too late. He died in February 2013, less than a month after sending me that message. In just a couple of weeks, he’ll have been gone a dozen years.

Several years after he died, I received a message from his wife. “Jerry wanted you to have this guitar. Can I ship it to you?” Of course I said she could. A month or so later I took the guitar out of the case here in Boston. I played it a bit. Even though the strings were at least 10 years old, it felt right, having it pass from Jerry’s hands into mine. This past summer, I dropped the guitar off at 30th Street Guitars. They checked it out, did a basic set-up, and replaced the strings. When I went to the store to pick it up, the owner brought it out to me, strummed a few chords, and told me that I own a treasure.

Yes, I do. But the treasure is more in the knowledge that Jerry played it for over 40 years than in the guitar itself. Playing it now, knowing that he played it for decades, brings back so many memories of sitting across the room from him, seeing the glint in his eye as he added a particularly striking harmony. As archaeologist Christina Riggs said in a rather different context, “A guitar is only a guitar, if you do not know who brought its strings to life.” Jerry brought these strings to life, and offered the gift of the life he created with it to others. His death left a huge hole in my life, unfilled even after 12 years, but I gain some comfort in my connection with him via six metal strings attached to a box of wood.

Lies undercut community

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:56:00 -0500

Rebecca Solnit:

Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect. In withholding or distorting knowledge or imparting falsehood, a liar deprives others of the information they need to participate in public and political life, to avoid dangers, to understand the world around them, to act on principle, to know themselves and others and the situation, to make good choices, and ultimately to be free.

Orwell’s Roses, p. 221

Imagination beyond knowledge

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 14:34:00 -0500

Albert Einstein:

I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

“What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,” in Saturday Evening Post, October 26 1929 (Quoted in Sara Imari Walker’s Life As No One Knows It, p. 48)

Ramesses II, Assad, and Elon Musk

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 10:30:00 -0500

This photograph of a fallen statue of Hafex al-Assad, father of the recently deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, brought to mind Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias. I take comfort in the notion that what appears sometimes to be absolute power isn’t quite as absolute as the powerful assume it to be. Perhaps someday Elon Musk will regret his threat against those who suggest that the H1B visa program should be diminished. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Consider, once again, Shelley’s sonnet offering reflections on a destroyed statue built to honor the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Perhaps the private person is not quite so confident as the public persona, but I find it hard to imagine Elon Musk regretting anything that he’s said or done. I rather suspect, though, that his power in the long run is not any more permanent or solid than that of Assad or Ramesses II. I’m choosing to hope that we survive long enough to see that happen.

A postscript: That photograph of the fallen statue is included in the Guardian’s The week around the world in 20 pictures collection. The entire collection is worth a review.

Factory farming: a life worth living?

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 10:46:00 -0500

In his book Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a thought experiment to aid one interested in thinking carefully about the morality of what’s somewhat euphemistically called “factory farming.” He begins by describing the lives and experience of pigs, chickens, and cattle in these “farms.” I trust I don’t need to describe these lives in detail here. Instead I’ll just say that they’re pretty miserable.

Then Godfrey-Smith asks that we work with the idea of a “life worth living” and proposes his thought experiment. (He doesn’t recall the philosopher John Rawls here, but I think this bears some resemblance to Rawls’s concept of the original position or veil of ignorance.) Imagine, he suggests, that when you die, you’re presented with a stark choice. You can not be reborn at all — i.e., your death means that you no longer exist as an experiencing subject – or you can come back as an animal. In his version of the experiment, you get to choose neither the species of animal nor the circumstances in which that animal, but I’m going to make the choice a bit more stark. You get to choose between not living at all, or living the life of a mother pig in a “factory farm,” spending most of your life in a crate allowing virtually no movement, and having your off-spring separated from you permanently when they’re only a couple of weeks old.

So, no life at all? Or a life like that of the breeding sow? If you choose no life at all, then you’re saying that the life of the pig is not worth living. And the next question is whether you’re willing to say that a pig doesn’t deserve to have a life worth living.

Writing and Control

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:39:00 -0500

Peter Godfrey-Smith:

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his wry, moody memoir Tristes Tropiques …, discussed this aspect of writing: ‘Writing is a strange invention. One might suppose that its emergence could not fail to bring about profound changes in the conditions of human existence…. It can be thought of as an artificial memory, the development of which ought to lead to a clearer awareness of the past, and hence to a greater ability to organize both the present and the future.’ Perhaps literacy might be seen as a plausible marker of the transition from primitive life to civilization? But then: ‘Yet nothing we know about writing and the part it has played in man’s evolution justifies this view.’ As Lévi-Strauss notes, most of the major transitions in human living occurred without and before writing, and the period after writing was invented included long periods of cultural stagnation. What writing is good for, he says, is controlling people: ‘the integration of large number of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.’ Tight social control is possible without writing, but writing firms it up.

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Conciousness, and the Making of the World, p. 141

On leaving Facebook

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 17:52:00 -0500

I stopped posting on Facebook in November 2016. I’ve long thought that I should delete my account, but I’ve kept it open, primarily because I appreciated what I learned there about the lives of people in my life — people I didn’t encounter much anymore, both because of my introverted approach to the world and also because I’ve moved around so much in my life. It was one way to stay in touch. As time went on, Facebook’s algorithm presented me more and more advertisements and videos about the Celtics and fewer and fewer postings by these old friends, but I still learned something about them from time to time. Now, however, I’ve finally decided that it’s time to leave facebook behind. In some ways, that decision is long past its expiration date, but now it’s even more obvious that it’s time. For all sorts of reasons, many of them captured in this New York Times column, I think it’s better to leave Facebook behind. (That’s a gift link — no subscription required.)

But since you’re reading this you have good reason to think that I’m not abandoning online life. If you’re someone from my past who wants to reconnect, there are several ways to do that. Click on the email icon to the left. Or leave a comment below or on some other post. Or, if you’re on Mastodon, click on that icon instead. I know that Bluesky rather than Mastodon is where many of the kool kids are going these days. Obviously the choice for you is up to you, but for what it’s worth I’m convinced – or at least hopeful – that a move to Mastodon is a much better move for the long-term than a move to Bluesky. I expect Bluesky eventually to give into corporate pressures to use something like the sorts of algorithms that have ruined facebook. (Those venture capitalists and crypto bros really do expect a return on their investment.) Or maybe, just maybe, Bluesky can make a subscription model work – that would be much better. Mastodon faces its own challenges, but for the moment it’s much closer to what I like to see in an online community. Someday, I hope (if we survive), we’ll find a social media environment in which we really are the users rather than the product.

If you’re here because you read my last post on Facebook, I hope you’ll dig around a bit and perhaps even leave some evidence that you were here – an email, a comment, or a ping on Mastodon. Even though I live in this introvert cave, it’s nice to be reminded now and again of long-ago friendships and conversations.

Consciousness, conspiracies, and the vanishing researcher

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 11:59:00 -0500

I’m just not willing to go down this rabbit hole, but I can’t resist describing it, however briefly.

It’s introduced in Living on Earth, a fascinating book by the Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. Godfrey-Smith is discussing the emergence and functioning of consciousness, and he discusses rather briefly research involving what’s known as hyperscanning, when researchers use scanning technology to observe brain activity in two different people as they interact — or, in some cases, as they’re not directly interacting. The latter research investigates whether one person might somehow replicate another’s brain activity even when the two people are isolated from each other.

One early example is the work of two ophthalmologists in the 1960s, using EEG technology. “In the test, one twin would close their eyes in a lit room. Closing the eyes tends to initiate a particular kind of rhythm (alpha rhythms) in the brain. Might the other twin, in a separate room, enter the same brain wave pattern also? They reported that in some cases, the answer was yes” (p. 181). Godfrey-Smith offers more detail in a footnote. He reports some problems in the research, and notes that many scientists are not convinced. The subjects included 15 pairs; 13 of the pairs gave negative results (i.e., one person’s brain waves weren’t replicated in the other person). But two pairs showed positive results, in every instance, moving in both directions.

Interesting, but that’s not the rabbit hole I’m resisting now. The next paragraph points toward that hole:

A few other studies of this kind followed, including a much more technically sophisticated one, not using twins, led by a Mexican researcher whose career bridged scientific and shamanistic approaches, Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum. This 1992 experiment, using EEG scans, reported success in transmission across nearby but shielded rooms. Grinberg-Zylberbaum disappeared, in a still-unsolved mystery, two years later (p. 181).

And Godfrey-Smith moves on. That’s all? Grinberg-Zylberbaum simply disappeared?

Of course, we have the internet, and Wikipedia confirms the gist of the story, including the point that there are many “conspiracy theories” supposedly explaining the scientist’s disappearance. There’s also an essay written by a distant relative, who says that a person reported seeing Grinberg-Zylberbaum climbing into a “spaceship made of three perfectly delineated spheres.” I don’t think so. Another story, more credible to me, is that he ran afoul of some powerful people in Mexico.

That’s the rabbit hole – the matter of Grinberg-Zylberbaum’s disappearance – I’m refusing to enter, at least for the moment. I’m definitely not inclined to accept the story of the spaceship. I’m intrigued by the mystery. More than that, though, the world I’m living in now has me wondering just why so many people are willing to construct and/or believe what I see to be fantastical accounts of the world.

For what it’s worth, earlier in his chapter on consciousness, Godfrey-Smith describes some research into the human split brain that could be helpful here. The brain has two hemispheres. Some of our cognitive activity is spread over both hemispheres, though there’s also some specialization. It seems that the left hemisphere is interested in narrative unity – in fact, this side of the brain is so invested in finding narrative unity in experience that it’s perfectly willing to make something up in order to make sense of things, without telling us (whoever “we” are) that’s it’s doing that. “We tie old memories into a story and try to make sense of continuity through change. … When we do this, some of what we arrive at is ‘cooked up,’ to various degrees — it introduces fictions, and smooths over rough patches” (p. 175).

That makes some sense to me. (Though how would I know if that sense-making were simply the left hemisphere of my brain “smoothing things over,” things that are otherwise inexplicable?) As my current reading list suggests, thinking about larger questions about the evolution of the world in general and the emergence of life and of consciousness are occupying many of my brain cycles these days. That’s a rabbit hole I’m willing to crawl into. If and when I crawl back out, perhaps I’ll be saying more about it here.

Three hundred elephants in a gas tank

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:28:00 -0500

Ferris Jabr:

We’ve known for more than a century that fossil fules are combustible crypts containing the power of countless deceased life forms that collectively absorbed hundreds of millions of years of sunlight. Environmental scientist and policy analyst Vaclav Smil has calculated that a single gallon of gasoline represents one hundred tons of ancient life, roughly equal to twenty adult elephants. Every sedan with a typical fifteen-gallon of gas tank demands the equivalent of three hundred elephants simply to keep running. Fossil fuels are not just conveniently concentrated forms of energy — they are outrageously extravagant. A fossil fuel is essentially an ecosystem in an urn.

Becoming Earth: How our Planet Came to Life, p. 199.

New beginnings

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:19:00 -0500

To state the obvious, I’m not the only one who has spent more than a few minutes over the last couple of weeks attempting to state clearly the New Year’s Resolutions™ I’m thinking now that I’ll fail to live up to this year. (How can one fall short of a goal that one hasn’t defined?) One of my big resolutions is to rejuvenate this blog a bit. I’ve begun with a relatively easy step of adding a section listing the books I’m planning to read. (See that new link in the nav bar up at the top?) That beginning was easy, since I’d already made plans to read those particular books; the more difficult tasks of reading these books and then continuing the practice of listing and reading books from month to month remain to be done. A related goal is to find some time to backfill that section with readings from previous months.

More broadly, I’m determined to bring my writing – virtually all of which is in journaling form – into public view. I’ve long suffered from an almost terminal case of perfectionism, refusing to let anything I write appear in front of another person’s eyes unless I was absolutely forced to do that. Brené Brown suggests that “one of the most effective ways to start recovering from perfectionism is to start creating.” Perhaps. My initial response upon reading that was to say that it seems to miss the weight of the problem – it’s the perfectionism that’s long been in the way of my creative efforts. But, then, I remind myself, I named this blog thinking out loud in large part to trick myself into moving out from under the weight of the perfectionist burden. So, here I am again, trying yet again.

Other resolutions, while still unbroken (hey – it’s early in the year!), are also unfulfilled. I’ll be writing about these resolutions over the next few days and weeks (yes, I’m leaving myself some wiggle room there), but they’re generally oriented toward discovering and living a more meaningful life in retirement.

January 2025

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 11:49:00 -0500

My reflections on the books I read this month

(Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Life is Short: An appropriately brief guide to making it more meaningful

by Dean Rickles

Rickles presents this book “as a reassessment of the themes raised by Seneca in his classic work On the Shortness of Life.” He signals his approach accurately in the book’s title and subtitle. Perhaps I’m an easy target for a book like this. There’s a lot more of my life behind me that I can reasonably (or even unreasonably) expect to be in front of me. (An aside: Rickles suggests that anyone willing to face the fact regarding one’s remaining life span go to this web page to find out just how much longer they can reasonably expect to live. I take little comfort in the fact that the calculator on this page doesn’t accommodate anyone born before 1970. I suppose we’re simply beyond the pale.)

I’ve often – perhaps too often — considered the question how I spend my time and why I spend it that way. What difference does it make, I ask, whether I spend my time reading philosophy or science or fine literature instead of watching a frivolous sit-com or scrolling through videos of cats? (I hasten to add that I intend no denigration of cats or television in that comparison.) In short, how should I spend the time I have left, and why should I spend it that way? I’m going to die anyway, regardless of what I do. But perhaps, I say, what I do has an impact on those (relatively few) people I encounter, either virtually or face-to-face. But that merely lengthens the time-frame of the question, because at some point those people will also die. And, scientists tell us, at some point it’s all going to end anyway.

Many people, in the face of death’s apparent certainty, find comfort in the thought that they won’t really die: instead, they will be born again and find themselves in some other state of existence. Rickles takes little comfort in that, and I admit that I’m right there with him. I’ve long said – and I usually believe — that I don’t want to live forever, because there’s nothing that I enjoy so much that I wouldn’t be absolutely bored if forced to do it forever. In short, I take little comfort in the thought that there might be an eternal life after this one.

The insight that I find most helpful in Rickles’s book is that our death is what makes life meaningful. We make whatever choices we make in the face of constraints: choosing to do this necessarily implies not choosing to do all sorts of other things, and making that choice implies that this that I’ve chosen is more precious to me than all the other things that I might have chosen. Death is the ultimate constraint, and “should be seen more as the gift that breathes life into existence and gives existence a point” (p. 9). I don’t know that this is new to me, but I found it helpful to see it stated so clearly.

The advice offered here is to make deliberate and purposeful choices about how we spend our time, recognizing that choices one makes today will be crucially significant in shaping one’s future self, just as choices one made years ago have shaped the person that one is now. Such deliberate and purposeful choices depend on deep insight into one’s inner self: “if you are making decisions so powerful as to eliminate entire futures from the universe, then you had better know what forces are guiding this process! You should know if it is really you calling the shots, or some archaic injury” (pp. 53f). In short, you should do the sort of introspection that will facilitate individuation. In his development of this point he relies very heavily on Jung and Jungian theory. My eyes glazed over a bit as I read these two chapters, but I think the general point holds even if one doesn’t buy (or even understand) Jungian theory.

Reading this book has affirmed an insight I’d come to myself: the meaning is in the struggle itself – the struggle to find oneself, the struggle to find one’s place in the world, and the struggle to act in a way that shapes both the authentic self that one wants to be and the world in which one wants to live.

Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

The novel has what appears to be a simple premise: a single day in the life of six astronauts – or, rather, four astronauts and two cosmonauts, representing four different countries – who are circling the earth together in an aging space station. They live a regimented life; the “day” described here is an artificial construction with many sunrises and sunsets. During the “day,” they exercise to maintain their bones and muscles while in space, perform scientific experiments, and take photographs of a major storm and other happenings on the earth. During the “night” – again, a period of time that includes multiple sunrises and sunsets – they sleep.

But the premise is complicated: instead of a descriptive account of the day from the perspective of an outside observer, the reader gets inside the mind of each astronaut, experiencing first-hand what they’re experiencing on the space station, remembering first-hand earlier times in each astronaut’s life. In one sense, the travelers have left their lives behind them on earth. But in another sense, they’ve brought their histories – indeed, the history of the earth and of humanity – with them. Further, both the space station and the earth itself become characters in the novel, each of them with complications and in relationship to humans. Like the complicated painting described in one of the novel’s early scenes, it’s not at all clear who the main characters of the novel are: is it the six people orbiting in the space station? Humankind in general? The earth, with its changing climate and increasing turmoil? Or is the main character of the novel the reader?

And how do these different characters fit together in relationship? Which is real – the earth without boundaries, with the geographic features offering connections between different regions, or is it rather the earth torn apart by human rivalries as depicted in news accounts that the astronauts either ignore, or can’t stop thinking about? I’m thinking here of a particularly powerful passage in the novel.

I found this novel to be very powerful – even haunting. Perhaps it’s because of the chaotic and unsettling times in which I’ve read it.

Wonderstruck

by Helen De Cruz

De Cruz discusses the importance of wonder and awe in human life, both generally and in the specific domains of magic, religion, and science. She suggests that wonder can bring us to an experience of firstness, when we see something familiar but from a different perspective. In particular, philosophy, which “is born in wonder,” can lead to see “the familiar as wondrous or strange” (p. 19).

In this light, I was particularly struck by the power of this story from China in the 4th century BCE:

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (ca. 369-286 BCE) was sitting fishing when two state officials from the kingdom of Chu came to offer him a prestigious position as chief administrator. Without turning around, he said,

I have heard that in Chu there is a sacred tortoise which died three thousand years ago. The ruler keeps it covered with a cloth in a hamper in his ancestral temple. What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated, or to live and keep on dragging its tail in the mud?

The officials agreed it would rather be alive, so Zhuangzi concluded, “Go your ways. I will keep on dragging my tail over the mud.” This is a startling response. For readers at the time, as now, turning down a cushy position like this, which comes with wealth and honor, would be virtually inconceivable. Zhuangzi evokes a sense of wonder and unfamiliarity by likening that position to being a desiccated tortoise stored away in a box (p. 20).

I’ll set aside her discussion of wonder in magic and religion.

But I found rather interesting her discussion of how the practice of collecting curiosities into so-called Wunderkammer, or cabinets of wonder, as something of a precursor to science. (As I write this, I’m still reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook, but I’ll note here that some have suggested that there were notebooks describing so-called curiosities that might be considered a paper version of these Wunderkammer.

Relying heavily on the work and perspective of Rachel Carson, De Cruz suggests that wonder and awe can change our relationship with the world, leading us to see both human connections with the environment more generally and the intrinsic worth of nature.

Finally, she refers to scientific research that suggest that “induced awe in participants found that people tend to think more critically in the awe condition compared to a neutral condition. For example, they are better able to spot the weaknesses in an argument. … In social terms, [awe] helps us to transcend a focus on the self and see ourselves instead as part of an interconnected whole. In epistemic terms, it leads us to question what we think we know and encourages us to change our mind and be more investigative. In order to regulate our lives, both are important for us” (pp. 63ff).

Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence

by Sara Imari Walker

Walker tackles the question of just what life is; she argues that many of the standard approaches to this question are too narrowly focused on the characteristics of life as we know it – that is, life as it developed here on earth. Actually, she would say, these approaches are focused on our current understanding of what life is as it’s developed here on earth. She argues that this narrowness could in fact prevent us from recognizing life if/when we encounter life forms radically different from our own.

For her, the question about the defining characteristics of life is closely tied up with the question how life began. And she’s convinced that we’re more likely to create “life as no one knows it” in a lab here on earth than to discover life that emerged in another part of the universe.

A central point — perhaps the central point – of her discussion is the insistence on a new theoretical approach to this question, an approach that she and many scientists with whom she has worked calls assembly theory. At the risk of over-simplification, I’ll say that assembly theory argues that you and every other object that comes into existence is built out of (or assembled from and with) objects that have come before. “You are never alone in the assembled universe — every evolved object must come with many others related to it” (p. 115).

As an aside, in the course of developing her account of assembly theory she mentions the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, which suggests that the random and spontaneous coming-to-be of a brain, complete with all its memories, is more likely than the evolutionary development that led to the existence of humans with such brains. “In fact, given that [according to this hypothesis] Boltzmann brains are ‘more likely’ than evolved brains, you might even be one! The paradox is that you would never know the difference. You could have fluctuated out of existence just after reading that last sentence as you realized that you might even be such a brain. But now you are reading this, which means perhaps you only just fluctuated into existence right now and have come complete with false memories of having read the prior sentences” (p. 114). My problem with that is similar to the problem I have with the Omphalos hypothesis: how could one test the truth of that hypothesis?

But back to assembly theory and the existence of life. Walker argues that what distinguishes life from non-life is the degree of complexity in objects that are (or once were) alive. Complexity (and here I’m on the edge of and perhaps beyond my understanding) is measured by the number of steps required to bring an object into existence. So there’s a complexity threshold; objects that are “above” that threshold are alive, while objects “below” it are not. Walker and her colleagues claim to have tested this in the lab and place this threshold at 15 steps.

I find this interesting, but it’s also very controversial among those who know much more about this than I do. See, for example, this rather negative take on assembly theory. In any case, my interest isn’t intense enough to push me to learn enough about the biological processes to take a stand on that.

I will, however, note that as I was reading this book I repeatedly saw similarities between Walker’s understanding of life and Whitehead’s process thought. I was intrigued enough by this to wonder whether anyone else was seeing it, and I discovered that I’m not the only person to see such similarities. I’m setting this aside for further reflection.

Becoming Earth: How our Planet Came to Life

by Ferris Jabr

A fascinating account of how all sorts of species, from single-celled microorganisms to large plants and animals, including humans, in all sorts of times, from billions of years ago to the present, have shaped the environment in which they live in a way that prepared the earth for other creatures that evolved elsewhere.

I can’t/won’t capture all of the detail, but microorganisms in the earth facilitated the breaking down of some minerals into a more complex collection of minerals, so that there is a much wider variety of metals on earth than we know to exist on other planets. The life forms that emerged later, including plankton in the ocean, gradually added oxygen to the atmosphere to a happy medium – less oxygen, and the larger animals couldn’t exist; more oxygen, and wildfires would be more prevalent and destructive.

So it’s not just humans that shape the larger environment in which they live. The earth itself is better viewed (either metaphorically or literally) as an organism seeking its own balance. It’s not a perfect balance, but the overall system adjusts. The unsettling of the earth prompted by our burning of fossil fuels and our destruction of forests and other parts of the environment is not the most severe crisis in the earth’s history, but it’s different in its timeline – we have made so many drastic changes so rapidly that the impact on us and the world is likely to be severe.

However, Jabr is not as pessimistic as many about our future. He thinks, and cites climate scientists and others in support, that we could still escape the worst of it.

On Thomas Merton

by Mary Gordon

I’ve read very little of Thomas Merton’s work, but my reading of Mary Gordon’s book leaves me with a better understanding of the person he was. I’m confident in this judgment because the book includes so many quotations from Merton’s writing, especially from his journals. We see him struggling with himself, with the church, and with the world. Gordon’s observation at the beginning of the book sets the tone: “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never heard of him. Merton’s dual identity contained within itself a particular irony: in becoming a Trappist, he entered an order devoted to silence, and yet his vocation was based on words” (p. 1). Gordon agrees that Merton’s person is expressed most powerfully in his journals, and it’s in that section that I find her account of him most poignant.

The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a powerful book, offering both a poignant account of how Coates’s life is anchored in personal experience and the history of the United States and the world more generally and also insight into the power of writing, of telling one’s story. I was especially moved by the description of his time in Israel and Palestine and how he directly confronted his own naivete about Zionism and the role that Israel currently plays in the Middle East. While in earlier writings he noted the analogies between oppression of Jews and oppression of people of color, during his time in Israel and Palestine he came face to face with his realization Israel is now an oppressor. He doesn’t discount the complexities of the current situation, but he makes a strong case that neither Israel nor the United States lives up to the democratic ideals that both nations claim for themselves.

Definitely a challenging read for this white cis straight male living a privileged life in the United States. But I’m grateful for the challenge. The next (rather more painful) step is figuring out just how I respond to the challenge.

Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

In the first third (or so) of this book, Godfrey-Smith covers much of the ground covered by Jabr’s book, described immediately above: how life emerged on earth and then shaped the earth in ways that allowed the development of ever more complex life forms, culminating (so far) in the evolution of humans.

As one would expect from a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith’s perspective is somewhat different — more, well, philosophical. The philosophical perspective becomes more important in the latter two-thirds of the book, when Godfrey-Smith turns to a development of the difference in humans and the difference it makes. Both consciousness and culture are crucial here. When teaching I often claimed that there was a time when humans developed the ability to imagine alternative futures – this ability depended on the ability to construct symbols in which these alternative futures are expressed. That ability imposes the practice of choosing. I would say that a constitutive characteristic of human beings is that humans cannot choose not to choose. Godfrey-Smith emphasizes what I see as a similar and related turning point, suggesting that there was a period in human development in which humans came to rely so heavily on culture “that it [became] hard or impossible to get by without culture” (p. 124).

In the last third of the book Godfrey-Smith explores questions about the implications of this for our current life in the world. Given that we – like all those life forms that came before us and/or live now alongside us — are part of the natural world and continue to shape it, and also that we are forced to choose just how we will act in the world, and also that our choices are shaped by inherited and developing cultural traditions, what choices should we make about how we’re living now?

Obviously Godfrey-Smith can’t explore all such questions. He focuses on two general areas – how might we treat other animals, focusing here on both domesticated (farmed) animals and on animals living in the wild? And how should we interact with nature more generally, focusing here on climate change and habitat destruction? He acknowledges that there is considerable overlap in these questions.

I’ll not introduce the spoilers of Godfrey-Smith’s answers to these questions. But I’ll say that I found his discussion of these issues very interesting and helpful for my own deliberations. Overall, I think, a book well worth reading.

My current reading and TBR lists

The impositional power of the canon: safe spaces

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 08:51:00 -0500

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces — and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

The Message, p. 80

Tracking my reading and books on tap

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 18:17:00 -0500

As I write this entry in January 2025, I’m continuing to think about just what I’m trying to do and how best to do it. I’ve contemplated adding a section like this to my blog for some months. I’m not interested in merely listing the books I’m reading – “Hey, world! look at what I’m reading!” My selfish interest in doing this, and in doing it publicly (for the relatively few people who stumble into this small corner of the internet) is to hold myself accountable not only for reading the books I’ve decided to read but also (and more importantly) to push myself to think more carefully about what I’m reading. Doing it publicly is also part of the larger plan to move more of my thinking and writing into a public space — call it a digital garden. Even on a site as rarely visited as this one, there’s something about knowing that it’s available to others that changes my relationship to my thinking.

So I see this entry and other entries in this “What I’m reading” section as a work in progress. Pages below from 2024 and earlier are refugees from the regular blog stream, moved here because I think they fit better here. But if you bother reading them you’ll see that they’re a rather different sort of beast.

The practice of identifying books that one wants (or wants to want!) to read is standard enough to have its own #TBR hash tag, and I have many entries in unpublished notes with that tag. The list below is a rather severely winnowed list of my much-too-massive list of texts that at one time or another I’ve though I might want to read. It’s clear to me that I will never read everything on that list, even if I could somehow resist the urge to add yet more titles to it. It’s not just that the bucket of TBR books is full; it’s overflowing.

On that note, earlier this week I stumbled onto some very good advice regarding a too-be-read pile. It comes from Oliver Burkeman, in his book Meditations for Mortals.

… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by (p. 29).

I’m not one for drama, but I have to admit that when I read that I felt my shoulders rise up just a bit, almost as if a load had been removed. A load that I’ve been carrying for a long time.

So, here’s my plan for the moment. That list of books included in the rather large collection of notes in my journaling is the river – a rather large river. What I’m planning to include below is a small sub-set of those books. They’re books that I find intriguing enough, and enough in line with my current interests, to imagine reading relatively soon. If a book is on this list, I’ve selected it from the large “Wouldn’t it be good to read that someday?” list to the much shorter “I’m thinking I’d really like to read this now” list. The monthly entries below (so far there’s only one) includes those books that I’m actually reading alongside those books that I’ve already finished reading in that particular month. That listing serves the purpose of holding me accountable for reading the books that I’ve decided to read. After completing a book, I’m planning to write some summary comments about it. I see these comments not as a traditional book review, but rather as a statement of what I’ve found valuable for my own purposes. Perhaps they’ll be helpful to others as well; but I’m really interested here in pushing myself to think more about what I’m reading.

But enough of that. Here’s the current list of “a few choice items” I’m planning to read, as I not only set aside the still present guilt I feel for not reading all the others on that unpublished list but also acknowledge that some of these books might fall back into the stream that’s flowing past me:

Ben Ware, On Extinction: Beginning again at the end.
Edwin Frank, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the twentieth-century novel.
Sean Carroll, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: space, time, and motion.
Markus Gabriel, Sense, Nonsense, and Subjectivity.
Rosen, Christine, The Extinction of Experience: Being human in a disembodied world.
Laura Beers, Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and warnings for the twenty-first century.

And some books that I really want to read again, to re-visit in light of other things I’ve read more recently:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas.
Collin McGinn, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Fall 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 14:30:00 -0500

I didn’t track reading all that carefully during this time – sometimes life just gets in the way. But here’s at least a partial list of what I read from September through December.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (a re-read).
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (a re-read).
Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention and how to think deeply again.
Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (a re-read).
Scott Russell Sanders, The Way of Imagination.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing our Brains.
Lindsey Stonebridge, We are free to change the world: Hannah Arendt lessons in love and obedience.
Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self.
Zadie Smith, Changing my Mind.

Here’s a link to my current reading and TBR lists.

The power of powerlessness

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 10:27:00 -0500

Hannah Arendt:

Impotence or complete powerlessness is, I think, a valid excuse. Its validity is all the stronger as it seems to require a certain moral quality even to recognize powerlessness, the good faith to face realities and not to live in illusions. Moreover, it is precisely in this admission of one’s own impotence that a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved even under desperate conditions.”

“Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.” (Just putting this here in case I might need it….)

The end is where we start from

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:28:00 -0500

Joan Westinberg argues that the death of critical thinking will kill us long before AI. I think she’s right that we sorely need to (re)cultivate the ability to think and read more deeply. I’ve thought earlier this week that I’m sure that I need to do that but that I’m reluctant to judge other people or to encourage them to take the steps I’ve taken recently in hopes of regaining the ability to focus. (I hope to write about my efforts on that in a soon-to-be-written blog post.) But I’m thinking now that if I really want our culture and civilization to survive I have to hope for similar changes in others. Of course, I also think that my personality is such that I’m reluctant to engage in a public campaign for this cause – or, for that matter, for any cause. I’m just too shy, too fearful of being wrong.

Another post I just read challenges me on that score, though perhaps in a way not intended by the author. Mike Grindle writes that there is no starting over. Or, to adapt another adage he uses to make his point, there is no such thing as a clean slate. I think I’m inclined to wish that I could start all over and become a different person; reading this post pushes me to realize that instead I need to think about how to start from where I am. Grindle is actually channeling a post from Brandon’s blog that includes a crucial point that could have been written by Whitehead or William James:

What better way to live a new life than to kill your old self and start anew? But once more, I can’t really kill myself and start over. I can change my name, my job, my home, my relationship, and my personality but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m made up as an accumulation of my past experiences. I make decisions, both good and bad, based on what I’ve seen or done in the past.

Well, except for the “killing myself” part. I’m taking this as more encouragement to get out there despite my fears and feelings of vulnerability. Here’s a start.

The worth of life is at stake

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 11:50:00 -0500

Alfred North Whitehead, writing in 1939:

Today we are witnessing a relapse into barbarism. The tendency touches every country. But it is centered in Europe. And in Europe Germany is the main seat of the vicious explosion. The general character is overemphasis on the notion of nationality, producing the ideal of the totalitarian state. The activity, derivative from this debased notion, is the determination to exterminate international factors which exhibit human nature as greater than any state-system. The Jews are the first example of this refusal to worship the state. But religions, arts, and sciences will come next, until mankind are reduced to mean little creatures subservient to the god–state, embodied in some god-man. The worth of life is at stake.

“An Appeal to Sanity,” republished in Essays in Science and Philosophy, pp. 66f

Ordinarily I don’t comment on these commonplace entries, but I can’t resist wondering here how ANW might have written this if he were writing today.

Creating a self and world through reading

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:44:00 -0500

Nicole Chung:

When I consume memoir, I love watching a writer bring everything they have learned and experienced to a point of discovery, surprise, or change. This is how we read, too: We aren’t robots, without independent thought or our own complicated histories, who encounter a piece of literature as empty and unquestioning vessels that download only what the writer tells us to. We read and react to the people and the stories they show us as individuals, based on everything we know and feel and have been through. In other words, because of who we are, we will take what we want—or need—from a given story. Each of us has our own relationship to it, and no one else gets to control what form that takes.

You’re not always telling the story you think

Hope in times of despair

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 10:03:00 -0400

Bertrand Russell, writing in 1956:

But I remain convinced, whatever dark times may lie before us, that mankind will emerge, that the habit of mutual forbearance, which now seems lost, will be recovered, and that the reign of brutal violence will not last forever. Mankind has to learn some new lessons of which the necessity is due to increase of skill without increase of wisdom. Moral and intellectual requirements are inextricably intertwined. Evil passions make men incapable of seeing the truth, and false beliefs afford excuses for evil passions. If the world is to emerge, it requires both clear thinking and kindly feeling. It may be that neither will be learned except through utmost disaster. I hope this is not the case. I hope that something less painful can teach wisdom. But by whatever arduous road, I am convinced that the new wisdom which the new world requires will be learned sooner or later, and that the best part of human history lies in the future, not in the past.

Portraits from Memory, p. 12

The burden of advertising

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:44:00 -0400

Scott Russell Sanders:

…ubiquitous merchandizing affects more than our buying habits. It monopolizes our attention. It trains us to think of ourselves as consumers, defined by our purchases and possessions, rather than as citizens, defined by our membership in communities. It distracts us from genuine sources of happiness, many of which are not for sale, such as nature, storytelling, evening strolls, and service to our neighbors. Worst of all, commerce appropriates and corrupts the language we use for everything we value, from adventure to zest, and it leads us to expect that all public uses of language will be dishonest and manipulative. Made cynical by the lies of merchants, we are more likely to shrug at the lies of politicians, generals, pundits, televangelists, and propagandists.

The Way of Imagination, pp. 88f

The wonder of a child

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:20:00 -0400

Rachel Carson:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

The Sense of Wonder, pp. 42f

Vanity, vanity everywhere

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 09:42:00 -0400

Blaise Pascal:

Vanity is so anchored in man’s heart that a soldier, a camp-follower, a cook, a porter, boast and wish to have admirers; and the philosophers wish the same; and those who write against the desire of glory, glory in having written well; and those who read it, desire to have glory for having read it; and I who write this have perhaps the same desire; and also those who will read what I write.

Pensées ed. Girard, No. 150 (quoted in Arthur Lovejoy’s Reflections on Human Nature, p. 132)

Active reading

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 09:42:00 -0400

Arthur O. Lovejoy:

The student of the history of ideas must approach his historical sources certainly with an open but not with a passive mind. The profitable reading of a text which includes any but the simplest ideas is always a process of cross-examination — of putting relevant questions to the author; and the reader must therefore know in advance what questions need to be asked. To ask the right questions, the reader must first of all consider what distinctions — between concepts and therefore between terms — are pertinent and important in relation to the topics or issues with which the author is concerned. Many — most, I am inclined to think — of the terms which have historically been used in the expression of more or less abstract ideas have been ambiguous terms, and a great many of the propositions which have played influential parts in the history of thought have been equivocal propositions. For this reason, if you wish to know what an author means by his terms or propositions, it is desirable to have in mind in advance, as far as possible, what different things he might conceivably mean by the words he uses. You may then sometimes, by analysis and comparison of different passages, discover which of these distinguishable things he does mean; but if the precaution of making such distinctions beforehand is neglected, there is always the risk that you will impose a wrong, or an oversimple, meaning on his words from the outset, and thus more or less completely misinterpret him.

Reflections on Human Nature, pp. 67f

One's universe is built on trust

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:36:00 -0400

Adrienne Rich:

We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: “In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust. … I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

…

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For awhile, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, p. 192

Reading alters the reader

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 12:15:00 -0400

Siri Hustvedt:

Books are made between the words and spaces left by the writer on the page and the reader who reinvents them through her own embodied reality, for better and for worse. The more I read, the more I change. The more varied my reading, the more able I am to perceive the world from myriad perspectives. I am inhabited by the voices of others, many of them long dead. The dead speak, and they speak in shouts and whispers and in the music of their poetry and prose. Reading is creative listening that alters the reader. Books are remembered consciously in pictures and words, but they are also present in the strange, shifting rooms of our unconsciousness. Others, which for some reason have no power to rearrange our lives, are often forgotten entirely. The ones that stay with us, however, become us, part of the mysterious workings of the human mind that translates little symbols on a page into a lived reality.

Living, Thinking, Looking, pp. 139f

Wrapping up a life of reading

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 07:10:00 -0400

William Maxwell:

Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the ‘‘Autobiographies’’ of William Butler Yeats. As it is, I read a great deal of the time. I am harder to please, though. I see flaws in masterpieces. Conrad indulging in rhetoric when he would do better to get on with it. I would read all day long and well into the night if there were no other claims on my time. Appointments with doctors, with the dentist. The monthly bank statement. Income tax returns. And because I don’t want to turn into a monster, people. Afternoon tea with X, dinner with the Y’s. Our social life would be a good deal more active than it is if more than half of those I care about hadn’t passed over to the other side.

Nearing 90

Balancing physical work with intellectual work

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 10:20:00 -0400

David Grene:

When I was on either of the two farms, I was incessantly and delightfully busy milking, feeding the animals, learning the ways of grass and grazing. Ireland generally is a great grazing country to such a degree that I have very often heard farmers say that the worst thing you ever did was to turn the ground upside down on the furrow slice. Every day’s occupation was a new occasion for happiness. I still read as I did in Dublin, but, of course, for shorter periods and fewer books. But in those days of long ago, I already began to find that the one pursuit balanced the other. My joy in books and the way I learned were enhanced by the work of the farm and vice versa. I have found that confirmed and strengthened in the years since. It is perhaps not very good for one to spend one’s time working incessantly physically, but it emphatically is most risky for someone to live off thoughts, expressing them and writing them down, with no ballast in manual work.

Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir, p. 10f

Taking note (as in note-taking) can change oneself and the world

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 15:09:00 -0400

Mary Cappello:

We come into the world handled, carried, and it is hoped, caressed, passed from hand to hand to hand, and gaze to gaze, a life-giving relay that yields in time a painstaking and laborious self-configuration arrived at via endless forms of representation, all of them historically grounded and political imbued; we learn, if you will, to see, and by extension, to know, think, and feel. Imagine having the audacity to try to alter characteristic modes of perception and discourse by way of your notational art …, convinced that this is where political change begins.

Lecture, p. 73

Human fragility

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:39:00 -0400

Lewis Thomas:

This [the universe] is a very big place, and I do not know how it works, nor how I fit in. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only for a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that.

The Fragile Species, p. 25

Ephemerality

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 10:01:00 -0400

Christopher Woodward:

… when we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of mortal man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or architect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of their art. Why struggle with a brush or chisel to create the beauty of wholeness when far greater works have been destroyed by Time?

In Ruins, pp. 2f

Tribal nationalism

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 10:13:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by a “world of enemies,” “one against all,” that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 227.

Writing abstracts the embodied concrete

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:24:00 -0400

Claire Messud:

We were embodied, animals still and always; our words emanated, became separate from us – wasn’t this precisely the magic of writing, to send a construct of words into the world, to share the abstract as if it were, as if it had been made, real, had become a concrete experience, the way a composer and orchestra created music or an architect and builders a tower? Only in the case of stories, expressly to be translated into the minds of others, de-concretized, made portable, so that we might all share (and yet individually create) an experience as real as if it had been lived … this was communication, my religion’s communion, the sharing impossible when tribalism held sway (whether of the Catholics at mass or of the ayatolla and his fatwa), a secular and necessarily open-minded sharing in which the self was subsumed in the invention, in which metaphor and irreality were understood as if – a reality that wasn’t real, the tension of it delicious and vital. But it, too, relied on a sophisticated contract, a pact with abstraction.

This Strange Eventful History, pp. 320f

Understanding, frameworks, and interpretation

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:12:00 -0400

Seyla Benhabib:

Understanding always means understanding within a framework that makes sense for us, from where we stand today. In this sense, learning the questions of the past involves posing questions to the past in the light of our present preoccupations. The reconstruction and interpretation of another’s thought is a dialogue in which one asks a question, seeks to comprehend whether this question is meaningful for the other, listens and reformulates the answer of the other, and, in light of this answer, rearticulates one’s original position. Every interpretation is a conversation, with all the joys and dangers that conversations usually involve: misunderstandings as well as ellipses, innuendos as well as surfeits of meaning.

The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. xlviii

Responding to an assassination attempt

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 21:15:00 -0400

I’m reluctant to say much about yesterday’s attempt to kill Donald Trump. There’s too much that I don’t know, especially about the motivations of the shooter. And the shooting itself is in a much larger context of a political campaign.

I would say that such violence has no rightful place in our society, but I’m not willing to join with those who say that this is not who we are. To say that is to ignore too much violence, too many calls to violence. In so many ways, it is who we are. And it’s particularly important now to say that Trump himself is at the center of much of this. It seems ironic to me that so many people are saying that this is not who we are, even as they offer condolences to an almost-victim of violence who has made violence a centerpiece in his campaign. While I don’t agree with everything that David Frum says, I think that his column The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator captures much of what I feel.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

And, yes, I know that President Biden told supporters in phone call last week that it’s time to put Trump “in the bulls-eye.” However much I disagree with many of Biden’s policies, I can’t believe that he was speaking literally or offering a dog-whistle to some operator. That’s a common metaphor – and surely Biden now regrets using it – but to see it as a call to violence requires ignoring so much that we know about Biden’s character and appreciation for American democracy.

Note – that’s a gift link to David Frum’s column, but it’s good only for 14 days. After that, the column disappears behind the paywall.

Responding to Project 2025

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 20:54:00 -0400

It’s really encouraging to see the heightened media coverage of Project 2025. Surely (he thinks!) as people learn more about it, fewer and fewer people will elect a candidate for president aligned with those who developed it.

Even if said candidate narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday evening.

But responding to it requires a deeper understanding of where it came from, how deep its roots are in the culture of the United States, and which people are supporting it. Cory Doctorow offers help on all three counts. It’s a long piece, especially for the web world, but I think it’s well worth a careful read.

I’ll highlight several important points here. First, the document is but one statement in a long history of statements, statements by conservatives in the United States who think it immoral that they be asked to give up any of the power and wealth they’ve accumulated, regardless of how they came to accumulate it. In fact, many of them believe, the existence of their power and wealth proves their superiority to the rest of us.

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God’s favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the “good bloodline” reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his “race realism” with mystical nonsense: “God favored me with superior genes.” The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn’t favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.

Many of these people see democracy itself as a threat to their existence and/or a set of strategies they can manipulate to frustrate the will of the people. One of the ironies of this movement is that these manipulations attract the support of many who stand to lose by the implementation of these strategies. I’m reminded here of Hannah Arendt’s notion that tyranny emerges when an elite person or group manages to get himself (isn’t it always a him?) appointed or adopted as the representative of the mob. Surely (he thinks!) people who don’t have resources to flourish, or even survive, in the world as we know it won’t elect a candidate for president aligned with a movement dedicated to take still more resources from them.

Even if said candidate narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday evening.

But, Doctorow continues, those pushing Project 2025 have assembled a rather haphazard of people supporting their movement, offering something to each of them, even though many of whom have radically different views of the world.

Pandering to all these groups isn’t easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things – the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly unpopular among conservatives, with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition. Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in Project 2025. Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular, but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage’s “Husbands you can’t leave, pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate, politicians you can’t vote out of office.“ …

The constituency for “husbands you can’t leave, pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate, politicians you can’t vote out of office” is very small. Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for all of this, they’re voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.

Doctorow suggests that this could be the Achilles heel of the movement. We should push the different proposals in Project 2025, highlighting those that, while attractive to a minority of conservatives, are deeply unpopular to others.

But back to that candidate who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday.

Even though Trump insists he knows nothing about Project 2025, while saying at the same time that he disagrees with much of it, his current and former advisers have been deeply involved in its development. Working against Project 2025, together with emphasizing the many ways in which Trump’s campaign is tied up in it, is crucial. In the end, responding to Project 2025 is itself a response to Trump’s candidacy.

How many words does it take?

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 12:02:00 -0400

Lydia Davis:

I read recently that in English, a mere 43 words account for half of all words in common use, and that just nine (and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, you ) account for a quarter in almost any sample of written English (my source is a very entertaining exploration of the English language, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson). In another grammar I found at a secondhand bookstore, A Practical Key to the Kanarese Language by F. Ziegler …, the beginner is presented with a list of 162 “indispensable” words: common verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, numbers, parts of the body, family members, and common objects such as the knife and the umbrella.

“Learning a Foreign Language: Spanish,” in Essays Two, p. 94

Looking for news about Trump

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 09:25:00 -0400

I wrote a couple of posts last week about the upcoming election in the United States, focusing mostly on the question whether Biden should release his delegates and withdraw from the race. I still have mixed feelings about that I simply don’t know what’s best. But I do know the stakes. We need to do whatever it takes to prevent Trump’s return to the White House. I still plan to vote for the Democratic candidate no matter who that candidate is.

But I think that in writing those posts I was influenced too much by the weight of media coverage of Biden’s debate performance and concerns about his age more generally. I still think we need to think carefully about those things, and I think that Biden and his advisors need to consider the concerns that others are raising, but I’m more and more upset – even angry – about the way that many in the MainStreamMedia™ are skating over the dangers that Trump poses to American democracy, as imperfect as it is. There are exceptions to this – I’ve just subscribed to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I continue to appreciate Rebecca Solnit’s writing and other articles and commentary in The Guardian. From Solnit, see in particular her post-debate column and her question why the pundits apparently want Biden out. Perhaps the current discussion about Trump’s complicity with Project 25 will finally burst his balloon (though how often have we thought that and hoped for that?).

Recent elections in Spain, Great Britain, and (perhaps less so) France are reassuring. But one big lesson from those elections is that people need to be involved. And the news media need to live up to their role as the Fourth Estate. Yes, the media need to be objective insofar as that’s possible. But that doesn’t mean presenting both sides of an argument as if each side is valid. Yes, of course there are articles and columns detailing the number of lies that Trump has told. But we need an in-depth analysis of why someone who lies as blatantly as he lies is simply not qualified to be President.

I know that many have seen analogies between Germany in the 1930s and the United States today. I think that there’s something there. In the last two years, I’ve visited museum exhibits focusing on the move toward Nazism in two German cities – Frankfurt and Leibzig. I was struck by how quickly both cities, but especially Frankfurt, moved from being a moderately progressive city to one that supported Hitler. There were many people there who weren’t supportive of Nazi policies early on, but didn’t take them seriously enough to protest against them. And over the course of several years, the tide turned. We need to stand against that tide here, sooner rather than later.

And we need news media that will give us the information we need to have and push us to think carefully about what’s at stake. So sure – give me columns discussing the question whether Biden is mentally capable of being president. Even make the case for why you think he is or isn’t. But also give me columns discussing the question whether Trump is morally and cognitively fit for the office. And give us reasons for thinking that he is or isn’t. Our democracy, such as it is, depends on it.

Adventures in the used bookstore

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 11:47:00 -0400

Virginia Woolf:

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some greyish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woolen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind’s inglenook.

“Street Haunting”

Living in the US and looking for hope

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 11:16:00 -0400

After writing two rather clumsy and rambling posts about current election turmoil in the United States, I’d like to back away a bit today in hopes of finding some reason for hope. (See what I did there?) Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, though first written during the George W. Bush administration (remember when we thought it couldn’t get any worse?), offers some comfort.

More immediate and timely is this column by Margaret Sullivan.

But there’s good news in journalism, too. Consider ProPublica’s essential reporting on Justice Clarence Thomas’s rotten ethics. Or the way many news outlets have revealed the threats of Project 2025 – the alarming and detailed plan by Trump allies to dismantle democratic norms should their leader win a second term.

I’m also heartened by young journalists who are making their way in a difficult career field.

I take hope where I can find it.

More on US election – challenge to democracy

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 15:48:00 -0400

I’ve continued to think and worry about the challenges that we face in the United States as we move toward the election of our next president. I admitted yesterday that I wish that Biden had decided not to run for re-election. This is definitely not to say that I don’t appreciate the accomplishments of his administration. I supported and voted for him in 2020, when I was convinced that he offered our best hope of defeating Trump, and he defeated Trump. His administration has done some very good things, even in the face of opposition and obfuscation from many in the Republican party. But his age generally and his performance in the debate last week have given too much to the Republican party.

But he decided to run, and that decision is baked into the challenge that we face as a nation pretending to be a democracy.

I’m very dissatisfied with what I’m seeing in the main stream media. It seems that virtually all of the press coverage following the debate has focused primarily on Biden’s performance. There have been references to Trump’s brash lying and boasting – and I’ve seen at least one article fact-checking what he said during the debate – but most of these references have been made in passing in articles focusing on Biden’s performance. I can imagine several reasons for this:

Many (most) of the people enthusiastically supporting Trump either live in a world in which his lies are understood to be powerful truths standing in opposition to some sort of “deep state” conspiracy focused on hiding the truth from them. So news organizations see little point in attempting to counter these views.
Others who support Trump in public are privately against him, but they fear going against him, because they think either that they would lose political standing or office or that they would face physical harm to themselves or their families. These people don’t need to be convinced that Trump is a lying criminal. They already know that. But the press sees little to gain by attempting to convince them to go public with this knowledge.
The major media companies themselves fear being seen as overly critical of Trump for much the same reasons, though in their case the fear of losing office is replaced by the fear of losing income.
Finally, a more general reason that underlies all of these – news media is for the most part an capitalist buisiness like others, concerned much more about share value and customer retention than about delivering the news. (I emphasize that this observation is about the corporate side of the media and not about journalists in general.)

I’m sure there are other reasons either in addition to or instead of at least some of these. I’m on the outside looking in here, and I don’t claim to be an expert in the media. But I do agree with Dan Gillmor, who makes the case much better than I can, that we must demand more from the press.

Once again, though, the message we’re getting from main stream media is now baked into the challenge that we face as a nation pretending to be a democracy.

I really don’t need Heather Cox Richardson to persuade me that we have a problem, but she certainly frames the general challenge we face much more eloquently and articulately than I can.

With this challenge in mind, yesterday I entertained the question about Biden’s candidacy. I didn’t reach a firm conclusion, but I realize now I highlighted my concerns about his staying in the race a bit more than the serious concerns I have about his dropping out of the race. So I should emphasize now that I think that his dropping out of the race would have the Democratic party facing significant challenges. The analysis by Stephanie Jones offers a good, succinct summary of those challenges. However, there are other points of view on some of the points she makes. I see some discussion [for example, here] that raising money for an alternate candidate might not be quite the challenge she thinks it is. Definitely a challenge, but perhaps not as great. And Jerusalem Demsas suggests that there are ways to overcome the sorts of problems that Jones discusses. Even so, there are many people around the United States who voted for Biden and see him as their candidate. Yes, polls indicate that many voters have for months been concerned about his age, but he still won the votes of millions.

So, here we are. Biden and his aides have granted that he needs to move quickly to (re-)establish the credibility of his candidacy. His interview with WURD radio in Philadelphia, recorded on Wednesday and broadcast yesterday, is a good though small first step. He has other signal events coming up this weekend, including a campaign event as I write the sentence and an interview later this evening, that might make or break his case. I’m hoping for a staying of the course.

So, in my mind, our best hope for defeating Trump is Joe Biden as a viable candidate, forcefully making the case to the American people that even at his age his leadership is much more supportive of democracy than Trump could possibly be. But making that case and persuading the American people of it require that Biden show himself to be much more cogent than he was in the debate. And the burden is on him to make the case, and to make it soon.

At the same time, the media need to add to the stories about Biden’s age a more detailed account of what Trump promises to bring to the office if he becomes president again. This means moving beyond dismissing the latest Trumpism as “just Trump being Trump.” It means realizing that offering an objective look at an controversy requires more – much more – than giving voice to both sides, as if each position is equally valid.

In the end, I’m much more concerned about the frailty of our democracy than I am about how agile Biden appears in a debate. So, again, I’ll be voting for the Democratic candidate in November.

Joe Biden 2024: Should he stay or go?

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 12:06:00 -0400

I was disappointed in Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election this year. I’ve been impressed by and pleased with the many accomplishments of his administration. However, like many others who supported him in 2020, I was concerned about his age and acuity even before last week’s debate, and that concern jumped significantly as I saw him simply unable to stand up to the barrage of lies and bluster Trump threw out. (I’ll observe in passing that the format for the “debate” itself – I’ll add the scare quotes this time to signal the very loose use of the term – favored a person who could talk quickly and glibly, especially if that person has no regard for the truth. Even a skilled interlocutor would face the decision which claims to challenge first and how to challenge them in such a limited and limiting context.)

But now I’m really struggling with the question what Democrats should do between now and the November election. It’s more and more clear to me (as if it hasn’t been crystal clear for months) that the major goal has to be to prevent Trump from re-entering the White House. (Surely I don’t need to say this, but I’m not suggesting that there’s no one worse than Trump. His pal Putin comes close. I am saying that none of the likely or even possible Democratic candidates presents anything like the threat to democracy that Trump presents.) I fear that if Trump is elected the country won’t survive as anything like a country that I would like to live in. Of course we already fall short of our professed ideals in many ways – and recent Supreme Court decisions makes things even worse – but another Trump term in the White House would bring us even lower, if indeed we survived as a country.

However, I have neither the political acumen to judge whether Biden withdrawing makes that more or less likely, nor the arrogance to suggest that I know what’s best. Earlier this week I was inclined to think that Biden should stay in. Now I’m not so sure.

I leaned toward his staying in the race earlier in large part because I feared the political turmoil in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of his withdrawal. Could the party survive that at this late date, and come out with a nominee ready to take on the Trump machine? However, I think there could be some options. As one example, I’m impressed by this proposed process for replacing Biden if he were to drop out. That link won’t provide access to the entire article unless one has a medium account, but I was able to read it once using a link shared on Mastodon and find it an intriguing proposal. In developing his proposal Genco draws on this plan proposed by Lawrence Lessig. Genco modifies Lessig’s plan a bit, first by suggesting that Biden himself should propose something like this when he announces that he’s withdrawing for the good of the nation; he also says that we should allow more time for the deliberation of those people attending the preliminary meetings.

That’s a fairly radical proposal, but in some ways I see it as fitting with Jamie Raskin’s suggestion in an interview last week that whatever the Democratic party does is likely to be a good example of how a political party should function. Raskin contrasted the current turmoil and awkward discussions among Democrats with the way that Republicans fell lock-step behind Trump after Trump’s conviction in New York.

So, perhaps Biden should step aside. On the other hand, we have Charles Blow’s NYTimes column this morning insisting that Biden should stay in the race, and that he still represents the party’s best chance of defeating Trump.

If I had more hands, I’d offer more examples on both sides of this question. As I said, I simply don’t know what’s best. But I’ll continue to read and think about it. And I can’t imagine not supporting whoever the Democratic nominee is in November. The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

Search Engine Optimization

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 11:18:00 -0400

I admit that I’m something of a coffee snob. My favorite espresso drink these days is a cortado. And I really like a good pour-over. When I travel to a new city, I try to find and then frequent the good coffee shops. Of course there are web sites intended to help people like me with searches like this. The one I know best is Sprudge. I’ve found their city guides to be very helpful when they’re up to date. In my experience, a web search for “third wave coffee near me” often helps. But that search is compromised by the existence of a coffee roaster called Third Wave Coffee. If I’m in Chicago, I don’t need to know about a Virginia roaster. (I see now that Third Wave has rebranded itself as Kinship Roasters, so perhaps they’ll gradually drop out of the returns on this search term.) But perhaps they’ll also have their site set up so that people looking for any third wave coffee shop will continue to be directed to their site.

I admit it – I know just enough about web technologies to be dangerous, and not enough that I can claim to understand fully just how search engine optimization works. But I think I get the general point – putting data into a web page, some of it visible to the casual browser but other elements hidden from anyone who doesn’t look at the original source – to “help” search engines like google find the page and then offer it up to people using particular search terms.

Perhaps the best evidence that I know little about this is that I’ve made no effort to employ such strategies in this blog. I have vague memories of making some effort years (even decades!) ago when I was publishing onreligion.com, but I suspect that strategies have gotten much more elaborate now so it wouldn’t help me much even if I remembered what I did then. And I don’t.

All of this is on my mind now because I learned today that there’s a restaurant in New York City called Thai Food Near Me. Brilliant! Granted, this strategy focuses on google maps (and perhaps other mapping tools), rather than on the ubiquitous search engine. The restaurant seems to be at least relatively successful – it has a 4.5 rating on a recent Yelp page – so perhaps some day they’ll add additional sites and perhaps even start to franchise the business. Perhaps some day travelers looking for the local franchise of their favorite Thai restaurant will be searching a map with the term “thai food near me near me.” Or people who prefer to frequent the local independents instead of the big chains will search “thai food near me but not thai food near me.” Whatever.

Maybe I’m overly cynical. Perhaps I should see this as merely someone with a sense of humor. Or someone working to play the game well enough to survive and even flourish in the brutal competition among restaurants. I’m not quite sure why, but it saddens me just a bit.

Forgiveness and creativity

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 17:11:00 -0400

Ann Patchett:

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

“The Getaway Car,” published in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, p. 29f

Stability in an unstable and destabalizing world

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:05:00 -0400

David George Haskell:

Humans are a species adapted to landscapes that stay stable throughout our lifetimes. We are attracted to sturdiness and longevity in both the land and our homes. Building on rock is wise; fools choose sand for their foundations. The application of human inventions to the land – concrete, steel girders, plate glass – enforces the illusion of a changeless world. Instability unsettles us: fallen monuments, crumbling homes, and leveled forests are sites of pathos. Places that suggest permanence or durability – the thousand-year-old temple or ancient redwood tree – lift our spirits.

…

The biblical parable can be reworked. The fool is not the person who builds on sand. The error is to believe that sand can be rock. No matter how much concrete we pour, we can never turn the coast to stone. Instead, the wise build on sand knowing that its nature requires both creative resistance and the ability to walk away. Human society has so far emphasized resistance but given little help to those who by choice or misfortune must take the second path. “Why waste any time in awe or pity?” Perhaps because our answer to the sea lies in what the palms lack: networks of mutual aid.

The Song of Trees, pp.64; 81f

Life is embodied network

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 21:17:00 -0400

David George Haskell

We’re all – trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria – pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of self into relationship.

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Great Connectors, p. x

Political parties and polarization

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 12:20:00 -0400

The title of a short monograph by Simone Weil makes it pretty clear what she has in mind: On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Spoiler alert – she would like to see them abolished. She wrote the book in 1943 in the final months of her short life. Even though she wrote it over 80 years ago, I think it’s still relevant today.

Weil identifies three essential characteristics of political parties:

A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.

A political party is an organization designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.

The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.

Building on this, she argues that the power of political parties undercuts the effectiveness of debates among people with diverse opinions – instead of working together, individuals gravitate to the official stance of their party. And individuals support the interests of their party even at the expense of the interests of the nation.

It seems to me that these pressures toward collective expression make it difficult to have conversations and debates that acknowledge the nuance of challenging issues. Debates on the floor of Congress and in the public more generally seem to involve a stream of people making party points from the party’s perspective rather than offering their own takes on the issues. The effect is not only to reduce the diversity of opinions that might contribute to a compromise solution, but also to make it less likely that members of one party will bother listening to those from the other party. Instead of “out of many, one” we get “out of two, two.” Or, more commonly these days, “out of two, none.”

And, yes, I know I’ve over-simplified here.

I know that Alexander Hamilton and James Madison argued against the formation of political parties, and that they and other framers of the United States Constitution made a deliberate decision not to sanction their existence in that document. The fact that they did that in large part because of memories of the ferocity of the civil wars in 17th century England doesn’t make me feel any better about the challenges we’re facing.

I wonder how long we’ll survive.

Reading Weil inspires me to re-read the relevant Federalist Papers and other documents on this issue. For example, Thomas Jefferson was more open to the existence of parties than his revolutionary colleagues. Yet another example of the futility of reading more: everything I read adds still more writings to my TBR pile. I guess I shouldn’t complain about that – reading more might even increase the diversity of ideas to think about – both out loud and otherwise.

Sophisms past and present

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 20:26:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility – based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore to be understood by men – is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 9

Note to self: Topics and themes to think about

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 12:22:00 -0400

When I started “thinking out loud” almost eighteen months ago I added the tag line writing to see what I think. I hoped that saying that right up front would give me permission to post thoughts even when they weren’t perfectly polished, and even a cursory reading of what’s now on the site makes it clear that I’ve taken advantage of that permission. The writing quality, to put the point charitably, is rather uneven.

But I’m still bothered by the infrequency of my posts (and by the stack of ideas for posts that I’ve not managed even to begin to write). So I’m going to try something different here. I’m listing topics and themes about which I’d like to “think out loud.” And I’m going to create the list with check boxes. I’m hoping that unchecked boxes on my blog will push me to think about the topics sooner than I would otherwise, and that checked boxes will give me a sense of satisfaction. So, without further delay –

Political parties, polarization, and nuance
Proton’s move to non-profit status, and the impact of non-profit status on business practices of companies like Proton
Why not move this blog to a hosting service like Ghost or Substack?
Is there any value to reading a variety of writings in retirement beyond whatever satisfaction it brings to me?
Sustainability of urban living

A short list, to be sure. I’m thinking now that I’ll add other items to it as they occur to me. There are plenty of topics floating around in my head and in my journal that aren’t well enough defined even for a tentative list like this.

A mind game, to be sure. And it’s published here only to up the ante a bit. But if it doesn’t work – if it doesn’t push me to write more often than I’m writing now – I can always delete it and pretend it never existed.

Reading Arendt and Solnit

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:20:00 -0400

Earlier this spring I was fortunate to spend several weeks in Germany. I visited with old friends and also traveled around, finding every opportunity I could to practice German. But I had another agenda during my visit: I wanted to learn more about Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and also how Germany itself understands that part of its history. Among other sites, I visited Buchenwald, a museum in Erfurt about the German firm Topf and Sons (which manufactured the crematoria installed in Buchenwald and Auschwitz), the Nuremberg Trial Memorial, and the Stasi museum in Leipzig. Of course I wanted to learn about the history in and of itself, but I was interested even more in how my experience might help me better understand what’s going on in the United States in particular and the world more generally these days. I’m definitely not the first to see some analogies between Germany in the 1930s and the United States today. On the local front, I found some parts of the history of Leipzig from the 19th to the 21st century in Leipzig’s Old Town Hall particularly unsettling as I think now about political and cultural dynamics in several communities that I once thought of as home.

In all of this, one point jumped out at me: the interrelationships between individuals and the larger community. How individual actions were often crucial – and there were definitely some individuals who shouted for justice – but how at times community forces were so strong that many individuals simply couldn’t find the courage to go against decisions that they wouldn’t have made on their own.

One of my reading projects early in retirement – in the middle of Trump’s presidency – was working my way through several books by Hannah Arendt. I had read bits and pieces of her work over the years, and had long thought I should read her more deeply and thoroughly. I was buried in her writing for several months, reading The Life of the Mind, The Human Condition, and several essays in Thinking without a Banister. During that time, I happened to be having dinner with some of my wife’s colleagues, one of whom had recently finished a PhD focusing in part on Arendt’s work. I talked with her about my interest in Arendt, and mentioned that I’d likely be picking up The Origins of Totalitarianism in the next couple of months. I was surprised by her response. “No,” she said, “I think you shouldn’t be reading that now.” I asked her to explain why. I don’t remember exactly what she said, except that she seemed reluctant to address the question directly. I didn’t press for a clear response – I didn’t know her at all, and she seemed a bit uncomfortable – but my impression was that she thought I would find it too depressing to read, given the current political climate.

I can’t say that that conversation was the primary reason that I’ve avoided reading the book since then, but I’ve not read it. It’s not so much that I decided not to read it as that each time I was ready to move into a new book Arendt’s book was not the one I chose.

Throughout my time in Germany, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism stayed on my mind. Despite my dinner companion’s hesitation, and because Arendt’s name comes up in so many discussions of the current political scene, I thought returning to Arendt might help me to understand a larger context for much of what I was learning. And, in fact, I was hopeful (and perhaps naive) enough to think that she might help me to see that circumstances and trends in the early 20th century were so different from what’s going on today that we – that I – don’t need to fear the worst. While riding my bicycle earlier this week – how many decisions and insights come to me while riding! – I finally decided that I need to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. This morning, I took the book off the shelves and settled down to read.

The first paragraphs of the preface to the first edition, written in Summer 1950, were startling:

Two World Wars in one generation, separated by a chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that anything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism.

I would quibble with some details, perhaps most especially the implication that one might reasonably hope for a restored world order with its traditions – again, like many others, I would say that whatever order existed structured a world in which many people suffered at the hands of others. But the general tone of Arendt’s writing captures well the uneasiness I feel about where we are and where we’re going.

However, it’s important to remember that Arendt wrote these words in 1950. She’s describing there a world that emerged from events in the 1930s and 1940s, not the earlier times. Almost seventy-five years after she wrote that preface, I find myself thinking that we still depend on “political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest” – though I would hasten to add that I have in mind long-term self-interest, and not the narcissistic focus on short-term interests much more common. (As an aside, I have to say that I’m somewhat amused to remember thinking in the early 1970s that we couldn’t possibly have a president worse than Richard Nixon.)

I wonder, though – how do I avoid the choice between believing in an unavoidable doom, on one hand, and giving into reckless optimism, on the other? How do I – one small person – engage in a way that offers some realistic hope of pushing and pulling us into a better future?

I don’t have an answer. But I see that as a central challenge that we have to face. So, I’m going to read Arendt. Perhaps she’ll help me to understand. At the same time, though, I’m responding to the call from another book, from another woman whose work I’ve grown to appreciate: Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. From her foreword to the third edition, written in 2015:

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, one that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete,” The Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformations, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.” It’s a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist. … Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

Funny – when I decided to include the bit from Solnit, I didn’t see the startling contrast between my “one small person” and Cullors’s insistence on the collective. Once again, here’s that relationship between individuals and community. I think there’s a lesson for me there. Something for me to keep in mind as I read and reflect on the writings of these two insightful women.

The power of conversation (and hope)

Wed, 15 May 2024 11:28:00 -0400

I was struck by the power of Rebecca Solnit’s comment on the importance of hope in and of itself. But I was also reminded of something I read from Václav Havel many years ago. I can’t find the quotation now, but my recollection is that Havel was asked how he and his compatriots were able to create a democratic government so quickly after years of dictatorship. His response was something like “because we had many conversations over the years even when we knew that talking wouldn’t make any difference.”

Perhaps I’ve mangled the point, but that’s what stuck with me. And it’s particularly strong in my mind now because I just spent time in Prague, where I visited several bookstores skimming through English translations of his writing, seeking to find the quote. All I can say now about this is that I sincerely hope that I’ll find it someday.

The power of hope

Wed, 15 May 2024 11:17:00 -0400

Rebecca Solnit:

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

Hope in the Dark, xiv

Remembering my mother

Sun, 12 May 2024 10:03:00 -0400

There’s a photo sitting on the chest in our bedroom of my mother and me. We’re sitting side by side, probably at our dining room table. The picture is taken from the side so that we’re both in profile. Mom is smiling about something; my own expression is typically deadpan. The picture was taken at our house in Nashville in December, 1999. Our entire family – my parents, my two siblings and their partners, and all of the grandchildren had come together to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I don’t remember a time before that when we’d all been together; it’s possible that it’s the only time after the birth of all of the grandchildren that we were all in the same place.

What we didn’t know at the time is that it would be the last time that we all gathered with both of my parents. Less than a year later, in September 2000, doctors discovered Mom’s colon cancer. And the discovery came far too late – the cancer had already spread into her lungs and other organs. She died six weeks after the initial diagnosis. It was quite a shock to all of us. Everyone, including Dad, thought that he would die before she did. He had had significant heart problems – quadruple bypass surgery in his 50s, and a heart valve replacement about 10 years after that. She had had both knees replaced, but other than that had been generally quite healthy. Until she wasn’t.

I don’t remember what we were doing when the photograph was taken. Surely there were other family members sitting at the table. But the picture reminds me of many times that she and I sat or stood together and talked about things. Things that mattered. I don’t remember many details about my visits home after I left home for college, but I do remember that a highlight of each visit was at least one extended conversation with Mom about things that I was learning and thinking about, about things going on in her life. I remember having those conversations in part because I looked forward to them before every visit.

There were many conversations about religion, some of them as I drifted away from the Christianity of my birth. Dad, a minister, walked through the room during one of those conversations and told her that she shouldn’t be wasting her time talking about such things with me. But she engaged in a way that made it clear she didn’t see talking about things that mattered as a waste of time. I remember another time that she reflected on the strange sensation of growing older even though she still felt like the same person. “I don’t feel like I’m so old!” Or, as Paul Simon said in one of his early songs, “How terribly strange to be 70.” There was another time when she said almost in passing that she simply couldn’t understand why a woman would keep her birth name upon marrying – followed a couple of years later by her sincere understanding and acceptance of my wife’s decision to do just that.

We agreed about many things, and we disagreed, sometimes passionately, about others. But it was important to her that we keep the conversation going. There’s a lesson there, a lesson that I wish that I’d learned better than I did.

She came a long way from the small west Texas town in which she grew up. (Though, as I remember yesterday’s post, perhaps growing up in the small town is what prepared her to live the life that she lived.) It’s been almost 24 years since she died, far too young. I treasure the times we had together.

I’m really glad to have that picture on the chest in our bedroom.

Living without a home

Sat, 11 May 2024 09:33:00 -0400

Yesterday I read two different reviews of Claire Messud’s new novel This Strange Eventful History. I’ve added the book to my way-too-tall to-be-read pile. (The pile continues to grow, despite my efforts to read the books in it. I suppose it’s a good thing that life is finite. Otherwise, the number of books in the pile would surely approach infinity.) I’m hoping to read the book someday; for the moment, I’m struck by a description in one of the reviews of a conversation between Barbara and her husband François: “In a moment of frustration, she rebukes him, telling François that he cannot understand her love for home because he has no home.”

I suppose that sentence would have struck close to the bone even if I hadn’t just returned from almost four weeks in Europe. Like François, I’ve moved around for most of my life. I moved with my wife to Georgia when I was 34 years old. We lived there for 10 years, and our fifth year there marked the longest time I’d ever lived in one place. Before that, my record was four and a half years in El Paso, Texas as a teenager – and our family lived in four different houses there. It was the itinerant life of a Methodist minister turned Army chaplain. After those years in El Paso we moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where I lived in two different stretches for a total of 20 months.

I didn’t return to Germany until 2006, over 30 years after I left it as a recent high school graduate. I’ve made three other trips to Germany since then, including the extended visit over the past few weeks. While there this last time, I found myself telling friends we met in 2006 that I felt more at home there than I feel anywhere else I’ve lived.

I suspect that wasn’t the first time I’d said that – I’ve entertained the fantasy of moving to Germany. But it still surprises me in two different ways. On one hand – and this is why Barbara’s observation hit home – she might have said to me what she said to François: there’s some truth in the claim that I have no home. Others think fondly (or perhaps not so fondly) of the home in which they grew up, and in some cases they can visit family still living in that home. But there’s no house still in my family that I could visit. On the other hand, I really do feel at home in Germany, despite the fact that the apartment in which we lived no longer stands. Or, as I wish I could say more readily, “Ich fühle mich dort zu Hause.”

One might say that the time I spent there was an especially formative time – my senior year in high school and a few months after. Or one might point to my repeated attempts to speak and read German fluently. (And, in fact, my extended time there this past month was part of a concerted effort to speak and read German.) If language shapes a world, perhaps my ability, albeit limited, to speak and read German is a way to enter and live in a world different from my native world.

I listened this morning to an interview of the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck. Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin, and she was 20 years old when the Wall fell in 1989. The interviewer asked her if she thought of herself as an East German. She pointed out that East Germany, or the GDR, no longer exists, so she can’t be an East German. On the other hand, she said, she was formed in the streets of East Berlin, so she carries that identity with her even today. I’ve not had 20 years in any one place. My identify has been formed more by moving from place to place – avoiding deep connections with people because I knew that I would lose them – than by being anchored in one place, putting down roots with places and people. It occurs to me now that my feeling at home in Germany is as much a longing for a home as it is a sense of home. It’s that longing that has me returning there as often as I can. And it’s that longing that has me spending time reading books and other writing in German.

But, of course, that brings me back to the problem I introduced at the beginning of this post. I returned from Germany with still more books to add to the TBR pile, including Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos, recently short-listed for the International Booker Prize. The pile grows.

Too many details, not enough story

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 11:44:00 -0400

Facing yet again a long silence from one blog post to the next, I stumbled on this passage from Amit Chaudhuri’s first novel A Strange and Sublime Address. I know that he’s talking about story telling and not blog posting, but I immediately thought of how often I get an idea for a blog post that doesn’t materialize simply because whatever it is that holds the details together in my mind melts away. Perhaps more to the point, I think of my significant other urging me to “Get to the point!” as she listens to me tell a story that she really wants to hear, but also wants to hear it quickly enough to get back to her work.

I struggle with this, not only because I really (really) want to be writing regularly, but also because I’m persuaded by Rebecca Solnit’s insistence that stories make a life. But when I attempt to construct any sort of narrative, I find myself struggling over the details, questioning the perspective I’m trying to take, doubting the validity of the supposed insight that prompted the attempt to create the narrative. A dear friend urges me to write more of my own thoughts. “…you quote a wide variety of thoughtful writers, you stop short of writing what you think; you don’t engage their thinking/writing. I want very much to read your thoughts about the quotes you post.” Point taken – I’d like to read my thoughts as well.

And, after all, surely the most important reason for writing in any sort of public forum is to invite others to help one think more clearly, more rigorously. The story that makes the life that I’m living is one that I tell in community with the others around me, even when my story remains largely implicit in the day-to-day choices that I make, rather than explicitly stated in writing. Perhaps, as Arendt suggests, I need to find courage in my cowardice.

It’s fascinating to me that, although I began this post with the selection from Chaudhuri’s novel in mind, it didn’t occur to me until I was actually writing it to bring Solnit and Arendt into the discussion. I decided when I started writing this blog over a year ago to include the commonplace entries because I thought such brief insights were worth reading and worth saving. But I’m starting to see that having them in the blog might push me to engage with them more directly. I need to reflect more carefully on why I think they’re worth reading and saving, and do more to hold up my side of the story telling that creates the life that we’re living together. I’ve not done much with that here, but at least it’s a beginning move toward the building of both a larger story.

So, thanks to the friend who engaged me – even challenged me – to hold up my side of the story.

Missing the story for the details

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 11:39:00 -0400

Amit Chaudhuri:

… why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up their lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story – till the reader would shout, “Come to the point!” – and there would be no point, except the girl memorizing the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, and the house with the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The “real” story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.

A Strange and Sublime Address, p. 65f

Live and let live

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 10:11:00 -0400

William James:

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.

“What makes a life significant,” in Pragmatism and Other Essays, p. 270

On studying Kant

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 10:47:00 -0400

Claire Messud:

A good friend of mine, a philosopher and a Kant scholar, has devoted the past twenty years to interpreting passages of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is but one of the briefer texts in Kant’s monumental work; and yet, in order properly and thoroughly to understand it, she has committed all of her adult life thus far, and considers her labor far from complete.

For almost all of us, such serious focus on Kant’s thought is impossible. For most of us, if we apprehend even “a so-called philosophical hue,” we consider ourselves in pretty good shape. It’s like the dizzying enormousness of the cosmos in reverse: if, in order properly to understand a paragraph of Kant, one would need to engage in a lifetime of study, what are we to make of the entire breadth of his oeuvre – the Observable Universe of his oeuvre, if you will? And what, beyond that, are we to make of the fact that Kant’s published writings represent already a careful ordering and editing and articulation into intelligible language of his philosophy, of his conscious thought? And beyond that, given that his thought arose in part from his experience, experience all but entirely lost to us – made up of countless minutes and hours and days and years of life upon this planet, of Kant’s individual and particular life – how are we to conceive of the unknowable vastness that was Kant?

Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write, p. 74

Chance meetings and the forming of an identity

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Mark Twain celebrated his seventieth birthday at a fairly elaborate party, organized by the editor of Harper’s Weekly. The crowd of 50 or so guests included many of his close friends. These friends and others offered toasts to the celebrated author, and the evening closed with Twain’s remarks.

Rachel Cohen offers an account of the speech. Twain, who by his own admission had been something of a party animal, said that he had reached his advanced age “in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life that would kill anybody else.” But at the age of seventy he found himself resisting invitations to such occasions, put off by the “thought of night, and winter, and the late homecoming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter through the deserted streets.’” He continued,

If you shrink at thought of these things, you need only reply, “Your invitation honors me, and pleases me because you have kept me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at pier No. 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart” (Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, p. 111).

I’ve never smoked a pipe, but long before I turned 70 I was perfectly content to stay at home with a book. Just in case one of my old friends stumbles on this blog someday, I should admit that I didn’t avoid parties altogether, and that I even turned out the lights at a few of them. But more often than not, the lure of quiet alone time draws me. I’m remembering now one such occasion. As a young and untenured assistant professor, I was invited to join my wife and two members of the college’s Board of Trustees for dinner. This invitation came because of my wife, who had a professional connection with one of the board members. There was one awkward moment during what was otherwise a pleasant occasion. Somehow the topic of my preference for quiet time alone came up. One of the board members was intrigued. “John,” he began, “I’ve been anticipating this dinner all week, looking forward to getting to know you, and learning about your work. Are you saying that you’d really be happier if you were sitting at home reading a book?” Keeping in mind my status as an untenured member of the faculty, I tried very hard to avoid answering the question. But he persisted. Finally, I admitted that as much as I was enjoying the conversation, I also regretted the time away from my reading. He was, shall we say, rather surprised. But I think my wife managed to forgive me.

I’ve heard that one of the important distinctions between introverts and extroverts is that extroverts gain energy by being with others, while introverts spend energy in times with others and are refreshed by time alone. I don’t know whether that distinction is accepted by experts in the field, but I do know that even when I’m enjoying time with others, I’m spending considerable energy to maintain the connections. And that I regain this energy best when I have time alone.

All of this comes to mind now as I read the wonderful book mentioned above. Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: American Encounters is a collection of vignettes about encounters between significant figures in American culture from the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. The vignettes are rooted in historical research – she’s describing encounters that actually happened, but she embellishes what she’s learned from journals, diaries, and other accounts with speculations about what the people might have said to each other. Describing her approach, she writes “I wanted to offer the reader the pleasure of moving back and forth between what is known to us and what can only be imagined, and I also wanted to be very clear about the distinction” (xviii).

The book has me thinking about the energy flow in my encounters with others because I see how the meetings Cohen describes both reflected and shaped the identities of the characters themselves. On one hand, I find myself thinking about how my relationships with others have shaped me, and I wish that I could capture the gist of how each of those relationships began in what could be called a chance encounter, but then grew into something much deeper. What would I learn, I wonder, if I took the time and energy to describe how a particular encounter with another person has shaped my identity? Moreover, if, as William James says somewhere, I am what I attend to, how might my attending to these encounters that have shaped me shape me yet again?

On the other hand, these reflections are prompted by my time alone with this book. As I read, I find myself drawn into the relationships between Willa Cather and Mark Twain, between William James and Gertrude Stein, between Henry James and William Dean Howells, between W.E.B. Du Bois and Charlie Chaplin, and a host of others. Learning about these relationships and imagining my own encounters with these people also shape the person that I’m becoming. Somewhere in her diaries, Virginia Woolf observes how communities of readers can form around books, even when the participants in those communities live in different times and places. I’m thankful to Rachel Cohen for bringing these people into the community that is my life.

The more refined the error, the more obscured the truth

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 11:05:00 -0500

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:

I do not know whether it be a duty to sacrifice happiness and life to truth. … But this much I know, that it is our duty, if we desire to teach truth, to teach it wholly or not at all, to teach it clearly and bluntly, unenigmatically, unreservedly, inspired with full confidence in its powers. …The cruder an error, the shorter and more direct is the path leading to truth. But a highly refined error is likely to keep us permanently estranged from truth, and will do so all the more readily in proportion as we find it difficulty to realise that it is an error. …One who thinks of conveying to mankind truths masked and rouged, may be truth’s pimp, but has never been truth’s lover.

Quoted in Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism or Barbarism, 250.

Cars and the trolley problem

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:49:00 -0500

I suppose that most people are familiar with the trolley problem, an imagined scenario challenging someone with the choice between doing nothing and watching 5 people die and acting to save those five people, knowing that doing that will kill one person. (There’s been some rather interesting research in recent years, suggesting that the particular circumstances of the decision posed can lead to people making rather different choices – see (or, rather, hear) this radio lab discussion.) New developments in automobile technology – especially self-driving cars – have renewed interest in and concern about the problem.

Consider an example that’s perhaps overly simplified, but, I think, not misleadingly so. Imagine you’re driving a car and you suddenly realize that there’s a person immediately in front of you on the road. You have a split second to decide whether to continue on your course and run over the person or veer sharply to the right, missing the person, but slamming the car into a solid concrete abutment. Suppose further that you are absolutely certain that running over the person will kill the person, and that slamming into the abutment will save the person but kill you. Now imagine different versions of the same scenario – imagine that you’re alone in the car and that it’s five people rather than only one in the path of your car. Or that you have your family of four with you in the car, and there’s only one person in the road ahead of you.

As I said, the scenario is overly simplified. It’s unlikely that you could know going into such a situation that death is certain in either case. And it’s even more unlikely that you’d have time to make a considered decision to do one thing rather than the other.

But new technological developments are bringing the problem back into the discussion, because a person writing the software governing a self-driving car has to decide how the car will respond to such situations. And this decision how to write the code is made under circumstances far more supportive of deliberative thinking than the circumstances when a driver of a conventional car is faced with a life or death decision.

It seems to me to be a rather difficult decision, but one that someone will have to make if we’re to have self-driving cars. Of course, given human fallibility, one could reasonably say that it’s less likely that a self-driving car would find itself in that scenario. The car and software presumably won’t fall asleep at the wheel, won’t drive while drunk, won’t try to read or respond to a text message. Still, the person writing the code has to anticipate such situations and write the program that will govern how the car will act.

But standing behind the question how we should decide is the question who will make the decision. I read somewhere recently that those discussing this question have considered the possibility of allowing the person who purchases a car to decide how they will want it to function. Do I want a car that I purchase to favor me and other occupants of my car over others, whether they are pedestrians, cyclists, or occupants of other cars? One with the inclination to favor others’ needs might opt for a car that will privilege the lives of others, even at the expense of one’s life. Another person – perhaps most people – would opt for the algorithm that favors the lives of the car’s occupants.

An interesting question, but it occurred to me today that it’s a problem that we’re already facing. Simply put, car manufacturers, for all sorts of reasons, are designing cars so that they protect the lives of the people occupying the car, in many cases at the expense of others. Cars are larger and heavier, which means that they cause more damage than they would if they were smaller and lighter. Moreover, most vehicles sit higher on the road, so that if they hit cyclists or pedestrians they’re more likely not only to hit them in the more vulnerable midsections than in the lower extremities, but also to push them to the ground and run over them, causing more fatalities and/or more serious injuries. It’s no accident that fatality rates for cyclists and pedestrians have gone up even as new technologies make things safer for the occupants of vehicles.

It’s an arms race out there, and not just for those who purchase cars. Auto manufacturers make a much higher profit manufacturing and selling the larger trucks and SUVs than they make selling compact cars. And they find themselves competing with each other to offer vehicles with more space for occupants and cargo, which means larger and heavier vehicles.

And consumers, faced with these choices, find it much easier to purchase a larger car or truck, and they appreciate the safety features highlighted in those studies showing how safe a vehicle’s occupants will be in a collision. Do those crash tests even rate the survival rate of those outside the vehicle, whether pedestrians, cyclists, or occupants of other vehicles? What would car purchasers do if presented with information suggesting that the driver of a car is significantly more likely to live in a collision, but that a pedestrian or cyclist is significantly more likely to die in a different sort of accident?

Trolley problem, indeed.

Why we do what we do

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 19:19:00 -0500

Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.

The Idiot, p. 484 (Part IV, Chapter 3)

Reading list revisited

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:52:00 -0500

Retirement opened up for me a wide swath of time to do what I want to do, and one of the big things I want to do is read. Deciding what to read has been interesting, and watching myself decide, seeing how my decisions are affected and shaped by so many different factors, has been almost as interesting, though in a different way. I’ve tracked some of those decisions in this blog, and I’m returning to the theme now.

You can see some of my earlier reading decisions in other posts (look for the “Reading” tag). One of those posts (Reading Plan: December 2023 through February 2024) lays out a rather ambitious reading plan for the three months of December, January, and February. I’m here now to announce that I’m leaving that plan behind, simply because I’ve become immersed in the work of Immanuel Kant. I’ve read a good bit of Kant over the years, but I’ve never read two of the three major works (the first and third Critiques from cover to cover. Though I’ve toyed with the idea of taking up the Critique of Pure Reason (most recently after my son gave me a copy of the Cambridge translation for my birthday several years ago), I decided last fall to take on the challenge.

This recent decision was prompted by two rather different things. First, while browsing our local bookstore I came across Karen Stohr’s, Choosing Freedom, an introduction to Kant’s ethics. I did some work with Karen while I was at Georgetown, and I was intrigued. The book is well worth reading – I’m fairly certain that if I were to teach an introductory ethics course again (not going to happen!), I’d consider it as one of the texts. That aside, reading the book re-awakened my interest in Kant’s ethics, so I read his Lectures on Ethics (for the first time) and re-read a couple of his other books on ethics. Then I was invited to speak at an event at my alma mater honoring my philosophy professor (see Remembering Joe Stamey). Thinking about those remarks had me reading many of Joe’s papers that I had tucked away in an old filing cabinet, and I realized/remembered how much I had learned from him about Kant. So I decided, in part to honor him and in part in gratitude for my son’s gift, to read the Critique of Pure Reason, along with several commentaries and introductions. And, in fact, my reading list for these three months includes those texts plus over a dozen others. Such ambitions!

But I’ve realized that I really can’t do the Kant work justice and read all those other books. So I’m writing now to relieve myself of that responsibility. I’m making good progress on the Critique, with some valuable assistance from Sebastian Gardner, Paul Geyer, and Allen Wood. But it’s consuming my reading time, and more than consuming my brain bandwidth. Oh, to be young again, when I was convinced I could stay alert enough into the late night hours to at least pretend to understand challenging texts. So those other books will simply have to wait.

Reading list revisited

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:52:00 -0500

This recent decision was prompted by two rather different things. First, while browsing our local bookstore I came across Karen Stohr’s Choosing Freedom, an introduction to Kant’s ethics. I did some work with Karen while I was at Georgetown, and I was intrigued. The book is well worth reading – I’m fairly certain that if I were to teach an introductory ethics course again (not going to happen!), I’d consider it as one of the texts. That aside, reading the book re-awakened my interest in Kant’s ethics, so I read his Lectures on Ethics (for the first time) and re-read a couple of his other books on ethics. Then I was invited to speak at an event at my alma mater honoring my philosophy professor (see Remembering Joe Stamey). Thinking about those remarks had me reading many of Joe’s papers that I had tucked away in an old filing cabinet, and I realized/remembered how much I had learned from him about Kant. So I decided, in part to honor him and in part in gratitude for my son’s gift, to read the Critique of Pure Reason, along with several commentaries and introductions. And, in fact, my reading list for these three months includes those texts plus over a dozen others. Such ambitions!

Here’s a link to my current reading and TBR lists.

A perspective on the moment

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 12:54:00 -0500

It’s all over the news this week that the Colorado judges who released their ruling that Trump should not be on the ballot for this election are receiving death threats. Of course I’m not surprised about that. Teri Kanefield offers some musings about the current situation in a Mastodon thread. (That’s a link to her blog and not to these comments; I’m linking to it because it is well worth reading.) Her observation on Mastodon about the response of many MAGA folks to the Colorado ruling is that it’s yet another indication that they find rulings like the one in Colorado as irrelevant. A quote from her thread:

The reality is that Trump has been found to have engaged in an insurrection and he still has the full support of the Republican Party. He now has findings of fraud, rape, and inciting an insurrection, and the Republican Party still loves him. It isn’t that they are closing their eyes to lawbreaking. It’s more than that. They are glorifying lawbreaking, which is what people do when they believe the government is not legitimate.

How do we move forward as a county when so many people in the country think that the government is illegitimate? I can imagine a one-on-one conversation involving two people with radical disagreements who are nonetheless interested in figuring out where the truth is. They articulate a particular point on which they disagree, and each of them lays out a position. Then each challenges the other to provide evidence for the position that they’re taking. So each provides evidence. Then each person asks how and why what the other person is offering as evidence is relevant. As the discussion continues (in this idealized realm), the two parties continue moving “behind” a particular claim to show what they think supports that claim. And, in an ideal realm, they eventually reach a point on which they agree. Then, standing on that point of agreement, they move back through the chain of claims, warrants, and backing, attempting to reach some agreement at each stage.

Some might recognize that I’m drawing here on Stephen Toulmin’s argumentation model.

This is both abstract and, even in the simplistic scenario I’ve described, overly optimistic, and I don’t expect to see it happening on anything approaching the scale on which it would have to happen to make any difference. I fear that unless we can somehow reach a common ground on which we can stand while making crucial decisions as a community, then we have little future as a country and culture.

In an ideal world, the press could provide some basis for a common ground. I think there have been times when they’ve done that at least to a small extent. But the public media space has fractured.

We need to have conversations in which people engage meaningfully and authentically. We need to be willing to respond to others’ challenges to our claims by offering evidence for our claims and we need to be willing to question that evidence. A conversation is not going to be very helpful if either responds “because I like what they say.” But I fear that that’s where we are.

Depressing utopias

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 11:35:00 -0500

Georges Perec:

All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the “miscellaneous”. Everything has been set in order and order reigns. Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place.

“Think/Classify” in Species of Spaces and other Pieces, p. 191

Will you join me at the ActivityPub?

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 15:40:00 -0500

On my about page, and perhaps in at least one other blog entry, I mentioned that I left Facebook behind a few years ago – the morning after the November 2016 election. Actually, I didn’t completely leave it behind. I still have my account there, primarily so that someone else doesn’t hijack my identity by creating an account in my name and also because I occasionally look in on things. I look in on things because I miss part of my Facebook experience – in short, it was a way to reconnect with old friends and learn something about their lives. That’s an especially great feature for an introvert like me who struggles to maintain relationships with people living across the street, much less in cities around the globe.

Over the past few years, though, I’ve found checking in on Facebook less and less satisfying. The mysterious algorithm they use to build my feed offers me all sorts of information that I neither want nor need, with the occasional teaser from a friend.

I started this blog in part to push myself to write something and in part to see if I could establish an online presence. A few months before starting the blog, I also set up an account on Mastodon. My participation there has been about as irregular as my writing here, but I’m gradually building a presence in both places. Still, I’d really like to connect with some old and new IRL friends online. I’ve occasionally tried to entice some of them to move from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever to Mastodon. Or at least to add Mastodon to their routines even if they stay on one or more of the other platforms. But I get it – who wants to add yet another feed to a feed that’s already too crowded.

But the promise of ActivityPub is just that – it offers a way for people on different networks to interact across the boundaries between those networks. Instead of having to be on twitter to see tweets (and who really wants to be on twitter these days anyway?), you can be using one ActivityPub app (say, Mastodon), and subscribe to a feed from someone using another app (say Pixelfeed or Flipboard) and see what they post in Mastodon. There are many other advantages to Mastodon (I treasure my privacy, the absence of corporate advertising, and the ability to build my own community by deciding whose work I want to follow, rather than relying on some algorithm to construct something based on what the programmer thinks I’d like to see.) But the crucial point is that each app opens doors to other apps so that people can interact.

This article describes the whole thing in much more detail and with more information than I can provide here. I’ve heard rumors that some of my old friends and acquaintances are reading this blog at least occasionally. Maybe one of them (perhaps you?) will sign up for an account in an ActivityPub network and follow me on Mastodon. Some people complain that it’s too complicated, but it’s really not.

You can go to the more or less official entry point. Or you can find advice using an easy web search. My search just now turned up articles in the Washington Post, Wired, and here.

For whatever it’s worth, I’ve found it to be a much more sane and interesting environment than what I was seeing elsewhere. And it’s not susceptible to being purchased and then overhauled by some rich person looking for something to do alongside going to Mars or wherever. Try it out.

Where do we go when we retire?

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 11:28:00 -0500

I retired over four years ago; my wife is not sure when she’ll retire. Despite that uncertainty, we’re starting to think about where we might move when she retires. It seems pretty clear that we’re going to move somewhere, if for no other reason than that my wife doesn’t want to deal with Boston winters. (She deals with them now, while she’s working, by arranging some of her necessary travel so that she visits warmer climes in January and February. Clever woman.)

One challenge is that we’ve moved around so much (gradually making our way north) both individually in our youth and together as a couple that’s there’s really no “home” to return to. Each of us has some attraction to a particular place, but that doesn’t help much. On my own, I’d think seriously about moving to Germany, where I graduated from high school. If she were on her own, she’d likely move to the DC area, where she lived during elementary school and where we lived together for 10 years before moving to Boston.

So I had more than a passing interest in a recent study ranking the 50 U.S. as good places to retire, based on five indicators: affordability, quality and cost of healthcare, well-being, weather, and crime. It’s not at all surprising to see that Massachusetts is 46th overall, primarily because of affordability (where it ranks 48th, better than only California (49th) and New York (50th). I’m a little surprised to see Massachusetts ranked 31st for weather. Perhaps I’m biased by my wife’s response to Boston weather, but I would have expected a lower ranking there. Still, the high cost of living is a heavy weight.

One bright spot for us in this study: we’ve recently been thinking about Wilmington, Deleware, and the state of Delaware is ranked second overall. Its ranking is very high on well-being and weather and relatively high on affordability. There’s some reason for caution in its relatively low rankings on health care and crime.

The danger of political parties

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 12:20:00 -0500

Simone Weil:

The goal of a political party is something vague and unreal. If it were real, it would demand a great effort of attention, for the mind does not easily encompass the concept of the public interest. Conversely, the existence of the party is something concrete and obvious; it is perceived without any effort. Therefore, unavoidably, the party becomes in fact its own end.

On the Abolition of All Political Parties, p. 13

Culture, the world, and fictive constructions

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:13:00 -0500

Earlier this week I posted this quotation from Hilary Mantel as a SundaySentence on Mastodon.

As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted..

The post prompted a few more responses (both boosts and likes) from other Mastodon users than I see on most of my posts. I’m still seeing some responses; last night someone who doesn’t follow me boosted it and responded with this:

I would expand that to life also. We all live inside of constructed realities, shared by those close to us.

I’m inclined to agree, though I think my take on it is both broader in one respect and perhaps more constrained in another respect. On one hand, the world in which we humans live is to some extent a constructed world. I might say that we all live in both a natural world and a culturally constructed world, but I would add the caveat that since it’s in our nature to be cultural beings, this distinction between cultural and natural is fuzzy. Perhaps a better distinction would be between cultural and physical, though we have to keep in mind that many of our cultural creations (books, for example) are physically manifest. So I would agree that we all live inside of (culturally) constructed realities, but I would say that each of us shares this constructed reality with a far larger group than those who are close to us. Perhaps “overlaps with” is more accurate than “shared” here.

On the other hand, a person’s cultural reality is constructed in the midst of all sorts of constraints, both physical and cultural. I don’t start from scratch in the building of my culture. I’m building on and out of the cultural world into which I was born. Also, this culturally constructed reality is made by all of us in the context of and in response to a material world that pushes back on us, imposing itself on our reality.

Other complexities abound – even my (or our) understanding of the physical world is culturally constructed. I’m not saying it isn’t; what I’m saying is that there is a physical world that I am (with others) attempting to describe, understand, and navigate, using the culturally constructed world of linguistic (and other) symbols. This world pushes back on me (on us), forcing me (us) at times to rethink the constructions so that they align more closely with our experience of the world. And, in particular, another person in my world, at least while living, pushes back on my attempts to understand (to culturally construct) their identity.

I don’t claim to understand Clifford Geertz’s account of this fully, but I should acknowledge that my reading his work and reflecting on it have shaped the position that I’m trying to articulate here.

Having said all that, I still think Mantel is right – there is a difference when one dies. After I die, I’ll no longer be able to push back against those who interpret me in their own fictive accounts of the person that I was. Well, even that’s not totally true – with Mantel’s books, we have some clues to how she might push back. Maybe this blog, confused and incomplete as it is, will live on, at least for a while, exerting some sort of pressure on those who would fictionalize my identity.

I acknowledge that this is both incomplete and less clear than it might be. There are so many things to think about here. I’m going to continue to ponder.

More thoughts about the NTBR pile

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 17:11:00 -0500

Yesterday’s post (From the TBR pile to the NTBR pile) generated some comments from Mastodon participants that have me thinking more about the question whether I should sell or give away some of my books, acknowledging that I’m never going to read all of them. As I said then, I know that doing this would help to declutter our small condo. But would it also serve to declutter my mind? Or, as I said yesterday, would there be “something freeing about it”?

I hinted in that post that there’s an underlying struggle in these deliberations: though I really do feel some urge to winnow my book collection, on the whole I’ve been willing, so far, to stay with the status quo. Though my wife is willing, so far, to live with the status quo, she really does feel (and occasionally expresses) a strong desire to have fewer books in our admittedly limited space.

Mastodon participant StefanieH at mastodon.social (surely unknowingly!) weighed in on my side against that of my wife, reminding me of Umberto Eco’s notion of the anti-library. Stefanie points to Maria Popova’s account of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s account of Eco’s point:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

(I’ll interrupt this missive to say that if you’re not subscribing to Popova’s The Marginalian, you really should check it out. Even better, throw her a few coins to support her work!)

Of course, Eco is right about the menacing power of these books. And I’m proud to say that the number of unread books on my shelves has grown over the years, probably faster than the number of books on my shelves that I’ve read. The menace is potent; so potent, in fact, that I suspect it would continue to pulse through my psyche even after the books are sitting on the shelves of the used book store. So perhaps they don’t have to stay on our shelves to maintain their potency. (I know, though, that their potency as research tools would be diluted if I had to seek them out elsewhere because they weren’t sitting on our shelves.)

There’s also another factor in my particular situation: My wife would insist (and, being the reasonable person that I am, I have to agree) that we add the constraints of physical space to those that Eco lists (“financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market”). Of course, I hasten to point out that reasonable minds can disagree on this point – I think I’d be happy to be surrounded by walls of books in every room. My wife, not so much.

But there’s more. Just an hour or so later, @ajlewis2 (again, surely unknowingly!) leapt to the defense of my wife’s position, offering Anthony De Mellon’s insightful advice (from his book Walking on Water) helping one to part with something that one values: “Take these books (hard to separate from) and say to them ‘How precious you are and loved, but you are not my life. I have a life to live and a destiny to fulfill different from you.’” Good advice there. I especially like “I have a life to live and a destiny to fulfill different from you.” I think that’s a much richer account of the dynamics of a decision not to read a book, even though I still feel an urgent desire to read it. There are so many books (and so little time) that I’m forced to decide not to read some of them. I should value the freedom inherent in making that decision intentionally rather than accidentally, while still acknowledging the value of what I’m giving up and why I’m doing that.

So, what to do? I’m still inclined to declutter, selecting some of my valued books to put on other shelves. But I’m just as strongly inclined to put off the action at least a bit, so I can sit in our small condo and enjoy the menacing power of the books all around me.

The cost of speaking the truth

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:28:00 -0500

E.J. Levy:

Truth takes its toll. While lies may fuel conflict, wars are almost always fought in the name of truth, that unbending tool of the ideologue, the tyrant. Set aside the smug certitude of that word and most campaigns would crumble. Without truth on our side or its proxy, God, whom could we justify killing?

“Of Liars,” in After Montaigne, p. 13

Bookstores, value and scarcity

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:06:00 -0500

Jeff Deutsch:

Value increases with scarcity. But scarcity can also result from our undervaluing something of great value. We might consider it thus: there is an inflated value based on scarcity and a scarcity based on deflated value. While the things that are deemed of value for no other reason than their scarcity grow more valuable by dint of increasing scarcity, those things that are scarce by dint of being undervalued are likely to pass into extinction. Bookstores are scarce because we undervalue them, and good bookstores are scarce because we undervalue our cultural wealth.

In Praise of Good Bookstores, p. 80

From the TBR pile to the NTBR pile

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 10:14:00 -0500

For the last six months or so, I’ve been more strategic than I was before not only about deciding which books I want to read but also about reading them. You can find evidence of that strategy in several earlier blog posts – in some of them I present a list for the coming months and in others I described what I actually read. While I was concerned that this might be too rigid (even for me, a person who has a standard plan for loading a dishwasher and is mildly upset when someone puts a bowl in the “wrong” place!), I’ve found it to be more freeing than I expected. I feel good about the structure – in one post, I compared it to my time as a college professor, when I regularly laid out reading plans for me and my students. And, unlike in my syllabi and courses, I didn’t hesitate to add a few other texts to the reading list.

But then I stumbled on an extended quotation from Robert Musil’s character General Stumm in the novel The Man Without Qualities. General Stumm enters a library, planning to establish himself in the world of ideas by reading through the entire book collection.

I had been thinking that if I read a book a day, it would naturally be exhausting, but I would be bound to get to the end sometime and then, even if I had to skip a few, I could claim a certain position in the world of the intellect. But what d’you suppose that librarian said to me, as we walked on and on, without an end in sight, and I asked him how many books they had in this crazy library? Three and a half million, he tells me. We had just got to the seven hundred thousands or so, but I kept on doing these figures in my head; I’ll spare you the details, but I checked it out later at the office, with pencil and paper: it would take me ten thousand years to carry out my plan (Quoted in Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores, p. 62.

Deutsch follows by imagining his own calculation of what he might read in the time he has left. He doesn’t offer details, but he concludes “No matter how many books I could reasonably read, there would be urgent books left unread” (p. 63).

There’s no need to share details from my own rough calculations; even if I’d been able to read my entire life at the rate I’m reading now in the rather ample time space of retirement, I wouldn’t be able to finish reading all the books that I’ve thought I should read.

I suppose this is yet another one of the realizations of mortality that sink in as one approaches (and passes) a certain age. It’s not that I lie in bed anxiously thinking about those unread books, but I have to admit that I’m unsettled as I pause in front of the bookshelves, thinking that I really should read that one, or this one, or that other one. In the midst of my unsettledness, I remembered a newspaper column that I read earlier this year: Why you should swap your bucket list with a chuck-it list. Or, as I suggest in the title of this post, why I might move some of the books in my TBR pile into the NTBR (Not to be read) pile. But I can’t do this in the abstract – if I start by trying to identify all of the authors (the philosophers, the essayists, the novelists, et al) whose work I won’t be reading I quickly become bogged down. There are so many authors, even if I limit it to the ones that I already know about. But as I stand in front of those bookshelves, I think there’s a more immediate approach. I’ve already admitted in an earlier post that I have more unread books in my library than I could ever read in the time I have left. What’s more, my wife has been insisting for years – or, at least, since I moved many books into our condo when I gave up my office at the university – that we (ok, I) have way too many books for the space that we have. I really should winnow the collection. Of course, on the one hand, she’s right, but, on the other hand, I still think these unread books are books that I really should read. (And, truth be told, in the last five years I’ve purchased used copies of perhaps a dozen or so of the books I gave away when I retired.) So, I’ve begun to think differently. What if I identified the books in my personal library that I’m simply not going to read and then carted those books to the neighborhood used books store?

I’m not fully committed to the plan yet – one has to be very careful when one considers getting rid of books that one urgently needs to read – but I’m gradually warming to the idea. And I have to admit that there’s something freeing about it. It might leave my mind less cluttered. And it would definitely free up some space in the condo. Don’t tell my wife, but I’m thinking I could take advantage of some of that space to buy more books. But not as many as I dispose of. Really.

Finding a writing topic

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 11:16:00 -0500

I expect to receive a book in the mail tomorrow. It’s a used copy of After Montaigne, a collection of essays by contemporary writers, each of whom takes as inspiration one of Montaigne’s essays and writes something on the theme of that essay. I’m looking forward to reading the essays, not just because I expect to enjoy the reading. I’m also hoping to find some inspiration for my own writing.

It’s a commonplace that writers begin as readers. I’ve read many books and essays, and I’m happy to have the time in retirement to read even more. But I still find it difficult to write. One of he biggest challenges – perhaps the biggest challenge – I face in writing is settling on a topic to write about. Even in graduate school, when it came time to write my dissertation, I had just one idea for a topic – fortunately for me, it worked. I’m not sure what I would have written about if that had fallen through. I suppose I would have thought of something, but I’m glad I didn’t have to try.

I’m approaching the one-year anniversary of starting this blog. As I look back on the year, I’m wishing that I had done more with it. On 1 January 2023 I posted my first entry, expressing my hope that writing in this (somewhat) public place would help me to sort out what I’m thinking. I referred there to something my teacher said in the preface to his published notebooks: “Just as thinking, in my case, has always meant trying to think with the minds of others as well as my own (and therefore reading), so has it also always meant writing, for myself as well as others. Why? Well, because ‘writing it out so I can read it’ is the only means I’ve ever found by which I could be at all sure about what I wanted to think and whether I could possibly be right in thinking it” (Schubert M. Ogden, Notebooks, p. xi).

One thing I didn’t say in that first post is that thinking about Schubert’s comment was a large part of what led me several years ago to write regularly in a personal journal. I’d written journals off and on through the years, but I began writing much more regularly about 5 years ago and I very rarely miss a day now. Last January I hoped that I could bring that regular writing into this public space.

But – as the list of entries makes clear – I’ve struggled to do that. And, as I said above, a big part of that struggle is simply finding a place to begin. So I’m looking forward to reading those essays – both to see how each of the essayists builds on or responds to Montaigne’s and to ponder just how I might move from something that I read to something that I write. Perhaps I’ll start with Montaigne as well – I think there are no more than a couple dozen essays in the book, and I know that Montaigne wrote many more essays than that.

Reading Plan: December 2023 through February 2024

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:31:00 -0500

Another quarter; another reading plan. (Cf. 2023 Books of Summer and Reading Plan: September through November 2023.) I’ve struggled with this one, which is why I’m posting it in mid-December rather than when the quarter began. This quarter I’ve decided to attempt to focus my reading a bit more. I have to admit that I’m not sure I’ve done that. It’s interesting to me that I find this so challenging, and there are still moments when I think I should throw out the planning and just read what strikes my fancy. (And, as the account of my reading over the last three months shows, I allow myself some freedom to add to the list as I encounter things that interest me.)

I have four areas of interest in mind as I put this list together. First, I’m determined to leave room for literary fiction, pushing myself to read authors new to me, contemporary writers, and the classics. (Obviously those categories overlap.) Second, I’m continuing my return to Kant, a philosopher whose work I’ve read in pieces over the last several decades. My goal now is to read through his significant works. I’m leaving “significant” rather undefined for the moment, and I’m also planning to read secondary sources that I expect will deepen my understanding of his work. Third, I’m reading more of the work of and about several 20th century women – Arendt, McCarthy, Weil, and Luxemborg – who played significant roles in the cultural and political conversations of the period. Fourth, I’m continuing to explore the work and relationships of May Sarton and Juliette Huxley.

A fifth category lacks the focus of the other four – let’s call that miscellaneous.

I’ll leave the organization of these works into different boxes as an exercise for the reader.

Still a diverse list. But I think one motivation imposes at least a bit of order on the lot. I’d like very much to develop a better understanding of the crises of our day – war, climate change, financial upheaval and economic inequality, the plight of refugees, polarization, etc. Contemporary press about current events offers some insight, and a couple of the books listed below focus on these current issues. But the others, I hope and expect, provide some perspective on and different approaches to thinking about where we’ve been in a way that might help to understand where we are.

So, here’s the list:

Fiction
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
- Jean-Patrick Manchette, Skeletons in the Closet
- Lisa Tuttle, My Death
- Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
Philosophy
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
- Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason
- Rosa Luxemborg, Socialism or Barbarism
- Lewis White Beck, The Actor and the Spectator
- Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
- Peter Winch, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance”
History/Biography
- Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography
- Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life
- Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
- Carol Bright-man, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World
- Margot Peters, May Sarton: A Biography
- Alison Bashford, The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution
Essays/Culture
- Phillip Lopate, Getting Personal
- Jane Jacobs, Economy of Cities
- Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening
- Simone Weil, War and the Iliad
- Farah Jasmine Griffen, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom
- Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Reading Plan: December 2023 through February 2024

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:31:00 -0500

A fifth category lacks the focus of the other four – let’s call that miscellaneous.

I’ll leave the organization of these works into different boxes as an exercise for the reader.

So, here’s the list:

Fiction
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
- Jean-Patrick Manchette, Skeletons in the Closet
- Lisa Tuttle, My Death
- Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
Philosophy
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
- Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason
- Rosa Luxemborg, Socialism or Barbarism
- Lewis White Beck, The Actor and the Spectator
- Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
- Peter Winch, Simone Weil: “The Just Balance”
History/Biography
- Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography
- Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life
- Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
- Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World
- Margot Peters, May Sarton: A Biography
- Alison Bashford, The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution
Essays/Culture
- Phillip Lopate, Getting Personal
- Jane Jacobs, Economy of Cities
- Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening
- Simone Weil, War and the Iliad
- Farah Jasmine Griffen, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom
- Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

Here’s a link to my current reading and TBR lists.

September to November Reading

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 11:18:00 -0500

I’ve been a bit slow to write about my reading for the three month period ending in November (Reading Plan: September through November 2023); I’m finally getting to that now. It was a good reading time for me, one that awakened old interests and also opened up some areas new to me. Here’s the list, with a few comments about each of them.

First, the set of books I laid out in the list at the beginning of this period:

Fiction. My local independent bookstore has a subscription program that selects a new book for subscribers each month. The chosen books are new releases, and there’s the added “benefit” of their being signed by the author. I decided to try it out, largely because I don’t know much about contemporary fiction. I received three of these books through that program. The outlier is McCarthy’s book. I read Stella Maris because it is closely related to McCarthy’s The Passenger, which I read last summer.
- Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters. An interesting account of a family learning to deal with unsettling changes. The mother died when the two children were young. The father is dealing with his approaching the end of a long career as a marine biologist. He’d like very much to have one final achievement to prove to others (especially his younger colleagues, who see him as an aging dinosaur who needs to move on). The son is seeking to make his mark financially in a way that will bring him out from under the shadow of his father (and father-in-law). And the daughter is an emerging artist seeking to find herself and her way in the world. And then there’s a new family member who emerges, seemingly out of nowhere.
- Claire Fuller, The Memory of Animals. A pandemic (what else) unsettles the world. The story focuses on a small group of people who had volunteered for a vaccine trial before things really fell apart. They find themselves isolated – even abandoned – in the hospital clinic, wondering about the world outside and struggling to find community among themselves.
- Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris. The son and daughter of a prominent physicist eventually ostracized from the field, each of them also very, very bright. The Passenger focused on the life of the son, with the daughter dancing around the edges. Stella Maris focuses on the daughter. I found both of these novels to be very intriguing, though I think they’re not McCarthy’s best.
- Ann Patchett, Tom Lake. A fascinating account of a woman thinking about the life she might have led as a famous actress from the perspective of her satisfied life working a family cherry orchard in rural Michigan. Much of the story is told through the mother’s account of her former life in stories she tells to her three daughters. Watch out for the surprise ending.
Philosophy.
- Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy. My own teacher said that Hartshorne would always be the philosopher to him. This discussion of American philosophy is as much an account of Hartshorne’s own philosophical position as a description of the positions of the American philosophers he discusses. But I find it to be enlightening on both counts – and I came out of it with a better understanding of Whitehead.
- Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science. Another account of the Vienna Circle. I found it to be a bit overly dramatic. I think the best thing I can say about it is that reading it led me to consider revisiting Toulmin and Janik’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna.
- Karen Stohr, Choosing Freedom. I found this (especially the first two parts) to be a very interesting introduction to Kant’s ethical theory and to ethics more generally, and I’d definitely consider using it if I were to teach an introductory ethics course. More relevant, perhaps, is that it inspired me to return to Kant himself.
- Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals. An account of the intellectual lives of four women – Mary Midgley (née Scrutton), Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), who entered Oxford University just after the beginning of World War II to study philosophy. They entered just as many of the men at the forefront of philosophy were leaving to join the war effort, and they struggled to maintain a place for ethics and metaphysics in the analytic/positivist philosophies those men had developed. I knew something about Anscombe because of her work on Wittgenstein, but I knew little more than the names of the others. I think this book was well worth reading.
- Wolfram Eilenberger, The Visionaries. A discussion of the lives and work of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil. I picked this book up largely because of my interest in Arendt and Weil (and despite my lack of interest in Rand). While I appreciated the discussion of Arendt, I was particularly interested in the dynamics of the relationship between Weil and Beauvoir. On the whole, though, (like Exact Thinking in Demented Times) the book had more of a docu-drama approach to the subject than I would have liked.
- Joke J. Hermsen, A Good and Dignified Life: The Political Advice of Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemborg. Again, my interest in one thinker (Arendt) awakened an interest in and appreciation for another thinker (Luxemborg). Hermsen does a good job of introducing the work of the lives and thoughts of these two women. I think there’s much here that can help us (me) understand more deeply the social and cultural world that seems to be falling apart around me.
- Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties. The title is pretty clear. This short book develops a point that seems obvious to me – if political parties serve to consolidate many interests into the dogmatic interests of a party, then a politician will be forced to choose between the party and the nation. Weil insists that we’d be better off without them.
- Robert Zaretsdky, The Submersive Simone Weil. I found this to be a very helpful introduction to Weil’s life and thought, organized around the themes of affliction, attention, resistance, roots, and the Good.
- Richard Sennett, The Craftsman. This book has been on my list for a while, and I’m happy finally to have read it. It’s similar in some ways to Matthew Crawford’s work. Sennett argues (contra Arendt’s distinction between labor and work) that the fruits of labor go beyond satisfying the sustenance needs of the human animal, and that there’s value in the labor itself in addition to labor’s fruits.
Essays/Culture
- Elaine Castillo, How to read now. Castillo’s working definition of “reading” goes beyond the reading of the printed word. She’s interested in that, but she’s also interested in how we read the world: how our position in the world shapes what we see in texts and the world itself. She describes this more succinctly than I could in these two quotations: “When I describe the way my reading life is inextricable from the way I was raised – built, really, to be a person in the world – and how my reading life now is committed not just to reading books, but to the world that those books helped me to bear witness to, what I’m really saying is that my reading life was also an inheritance; one that came in the form of an ongoing act of love” (p. 25f). “We know that the stories we inherit and erase, no different from the ones we produce or ignore, are never neutral or ahistorical, and the force they bring with them is one that influence, consciously or subconsciously, how we read our world, and consequently, how we write it”(p. 294).
- John McPhee, Draft No. 4. I discovered McPhee earlier this year, and I find his work both intriguing and helpful. This discussion of elements of the writing process is very, very good.
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. It’s been decades since I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; perhaps I should pick it up again. This small book is aptly titled – it’s a short account of the life that a writer leads, offering some inspiration to the reader to step to the other side and write something.
Memoir / Letters
- Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader. Gottlieb’s long career as a reader and editor leaves him with many anecdotes about writers and work with writers. And about himself. I found the anecdotes fascinating, especially when they concerned his work with writers whose work I’m reading these days. I wouldn’t call this book intellectually engaging; more of a collection of high-brow gossip. But definitely fascinating.
- May Sarton, The House by the Sea. I hope to write more someday about just how May Sarton’s work came into my reading life. For the moment, I’ll say that her approach to journaling is both inspiring and also a bit intimidating. Would that I could write about quotidian existence as well as she does.
- May Sarton, Dear Juliette. Sarton’s relationship with Juliette Huxley is captured in this collection of letters. There are a few of Huxley’s letters to Sarton as well, though not the ones that Huxley asked Sarton to burn at a particularly fraught time in their relationship.
- Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree. I found this to be an engaging memoir, though (like Sarton) I’m more than a little disappointed that Huxley says nothing about her relationship with Sarton in these pages. But it’s good to know about the summer that Juliette and Julien Huxley, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and D.H. and Frieda Lawrence spent together in the Alps. While there, Maria Huxley typed Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Funny, I don’t see any acknowledgment of that work in my copy of the book.
Science
- Caitlin O’Connell, Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals can Teach Us about Connection, Community, and Ourselves. An interesting, light account of the behavior of non-human animals that shows that we humans are not quite as special as we make ourselves out to be. She discusses a variety of ritual behaviors found in nonhuman animals: greeting rituals, gifting rituals, grieving rituals, and others.

And some additional books that I managed to read, some of them seemingly random discoveries on bookshop shelves and others inspired by reading a book in the list above or by happenstance.

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions. What can one say about Solnit? She has not only a wide range of interests but also the ability to write engagingly about all of them. Like many women who have chosen to be childless, she’s weary of responding to the question why she doesn’t have children.
Vital Little Plans (Jane Jacobs). Another of my recent discoveries that I find a bit embarrassing (not the discovery itself, but that I’m discovering it this late) is that Jane Jacobs wrote many things in addition to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This collection of essays draws from several phases of her life, and offers a broad account of her frustrations with and hopes for our cultural lives – and not just lives in cities.
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics. This is a readable (compared to other Kant texts) set of lectures Kant gave. Though I’ve known about this publication for years, I was inspired to read it now by Karen Stohr (see above).
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Again, see my comments about Stohr’s book. For years I’ve had the notion that I should re-read (or, in some cases, read) Kant’s major works. I’ve finally set that as an actual task, rather than a wish. I started with the ethical works, both because I’ve read them (and even taught them) and also because it seemed a good move after reading Stohr’s book.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. Another re-read, which is not to say it was simply a review. I’m reminded of things that I know but didn’t know that I know, and I’m also seeing things I didn’t see before.
Phillip Lapote, A Year and a Day. Lapote was invited to write a weekly blog post for a year. This is a collection of those posts. It’s classic Lapote, and it’s good to see him make his way into this (for him) new environment.
Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein. As I prepared comments to give at the event honoring Joe Stamey, I read through a folder of essays and letters that he sent me over the years. Among those papers was a list of a dozen (or so) books. When I saw it, I remembered asking Joe late one spring to recommend some books that I might read over the summer. I’m quite sure (but not certain) that this is that list. I’m both sure and certain that I’ve not read any of them. So, both to honor Joe and to broaden my reading, I’ve set myself the task of working through the list. This is the first. I found it a fascinating account of Einstein’s life and thought and also of the development of physics and mathematics during the late 19th and early 20th century. It was particularly interesting to read this during the time of Oppenheimer (the film).
Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought. See above, re my Kant project. Wood is one of several Kant scholars whom I’ve chosen to support my reading of Kant. This is a particularly good, in-depth introduction to Kant’s ethics.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. I read this years ago. I’m not sure, but I think I was inspired to pick it up again when I learned that it’s the favorite book of a young politician whose views of the world are decidedly different from mine. I’m not altogether sure what he sees in it. I find it to be a good reminder of the ephemeral character of life and how I might live in response to that.
Jacqueline Rose, The Plague: Living Death in our Time. I picked this up because Weil is a particular focus, but I found the discussion of Camus, Freud, and Weil to be informative. I think we’ll be struggling to understand the impact of covid on our culture for a long time (assuming, that is, we survive for a long time!). Rose’s reflections are both interesting and helpful.
Vivian Gornick, ed, The Best American Essays 2023. This is an interesting collection of short pieces. Some tidbits: My excuse for enjoying Edward Hoagland’s essay “On Aging” is that, well, I’m aging. “Old age is a slippery slope, but if you enjoyed sledding as a kid and improvising ever since, it shouldn’t be degrading” (p. 123). And consider Sigrid Nunez’s account of Flannery O’Connor’s response to the question “why do you write?” “Because I’m good at it.” Eric Borsuk’s account of surviving prison is very moving; the advice he received early on from a fellow inmate works as well outside of prison as it does inside: “He said if I could find this thing – this sense of purpose – it would make all the difference in my life. Without it, he said, my sentence would feel like an endless misery. ‘Do the time,’ he said, ‘don’t let the time do you’” (p. 26).

And, finally, a note to myself: I would do well to write a brief note about a book when I finish it, rather than wait until the end of the period to write them all at once: stop with the procrastinating, already!

September to November Reading

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 11:18:00 -0500

First, the set of books I laid out in the list at the beginning of this period:

Fiction. My local independent bookstore has a subscription program that selects a new book for subscribers each month. The chosen books are new releases, and there’s the added “benefit” of their being signed by the author. I decided to try it out, largely because I don’t know much about contemporary fiction. I received three of these books through that program. The outlier is McCarthy’s book. I read Stella Maris because it is closely related to McCarthy’s The Passenger, which I read last summer.
- Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters. An interesting account of a family learning to deal with unsettling changes. The mother died when the two children were young. The father is dealing with his approaching the end of a long career as a marine biologist. He’d like very much to have one final achievement to prove to others (especially his younger colleagues, who see him as an aging dinosaur who needs to move on). The son is seeking to make his mark financially in a way that will bring him out from under the shadow of his father (and father-in-law). And the daughter is an emerging artist seeking to find herself and her way in the world. And then there’s a new family member who emerges, seemingly out of nowhere.
- Claire Fuller, The Memory of Animals. A pandemic (what else) unsettles the world. The story focuses on a small group of people who had volunteered for a vaccine trial before things really fell apart. They find themselves isolated – even abandoned – in the hospital clinic, wondering about the world outside and struggling to find community among themselves.
- Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris. The son and daughter of a prominent physicist eventually ostracized from the field, each of them also very, very bright. The Passenger focused on the life of the son, with the daughter dancing around the edges. Stella Maris focuses on the daughter. I found both of these novels to be very intriguing, though I think they’re not McCarthy’s best.
- Ann Patchett, Tom Lake. A fascinating account of a woman thinking about the life she might have led as a famous actress from the perspective of her satisfied life working a family cherry orchard in rural Michigan. Much of the story is told through the mother’s account of her former life in stories she tells to her three daughters. Watch out for the surprise ending.
Philosophy.
- Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy. My own teacher said that Hartshorne would always be the philosopher to him. This discussion of American philosophy is as much an account of Hartshorne’s own philosophical position as a description of the positions of the American philosophers he discusses. But I find it to be enlightening on both counts – and I came out of it with a better understanding of Whitehead.
- Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science. Another account of the Vienna Circle. I found it to be a bit overly dramatic. I think the best thing I can say about it is that reading it led me to consider revisiting Toulmin and Janik’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna.
- Karen Stohr, Choosing Freedom. I found this (especially the first two parts) to be a very interesting introduction to Kant’s ethical theory and to ethics more generally, and I’d definitely consider using it if I were to teach an introductory ethics course. More relevant, perhaps, is that it inspired me to return to Kant himself.
- Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals. An account of the intellectual lives of four women – Mary Midgley (née Scrutton), Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), who entered Oxford University just after the beginning of World War II to study philosophy. They entered just as many of the men at the forefront of philosophy were leaving to join the war effort, and they struggled to maintain a place for ethics and metaphysics in the analytic/positivist philosophies those men had developed. I knew something about Anscombe because of her work on Wittgenstein, but I knew little more than the names of the others. I think this book was well worth reading.
- Wolfram Eilenberger, The Visionaries. A discussion of the lives and work of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil. I picked this book up largely because of my interest in Arendt and Weil (and despite my lack of interest in Rand). While I appreciated the discussion of Arendt, I was particularly interested in the dynamics of the relationship between Weil and Beauvoir. On the whole, though, (like Exact Thinking in Demented Times) the book had more of a docu-drama approach to the subject than I would have liked.
- Joke J. Hermsen, A Good and Dignified Life: The Political Advice of Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemborg. Again, my interest in one thinker (Arendt) awakened an interest in and appreciation for another thinker (Luxemborg). Hermsen does a good job of introducing the work of the lives and thoughts of these two women. I think there’s much here that can help us (me) understand more deeply the social and cultural world that seems to be falling apart around me.
- Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties. The title is pretty clear. This short book develops a point that seems obvious to me – if political parties serve to consolidate many interests into the dogmatic interests of a party, then a politician will be forced to choose between the party and the nation. Weil insists that we’d be better off without them.
- Robert Zaretsdky, The Submersive Simone Weil. I found this to be a very helpful introduction to Weil’s life and thought, organized around the themes of affliction, attention, resistance, roots, and the Good.
- Richard Sennett, The Craftsman. This book has been on my list for a while, and I’m happy finally to have read it. It’s similar in some ways to Matthew Crawford’s work. Sennett argues (contra Arendt’s distinction between labor and work) that the fruits of labor go beyond satisfying the sustenance needs of the human animal, and that there’s value in the labor itself in addition to labor’s fruits.
Essays/Culture
- Elaine Castillo, How to read now. Castillo’s working definition of “reading” goes beyond the reading of the printed word. She’s interested in that, but she’s also interested in how we read the world: how our position in the world shapes what we see in texts and the world itself. She describes this more succinctly than I could in these two quotations: “When I describe the way my reading life is inextricable from the way I was raised – built, really, to be a person in the world – and how my reading life now is committed not just to reading books, but to the world that those books helped me to bear witness to, what I’m really saying is that my reading life was also an inheritance; one that came in the form of an ongoing act of love” (p. 25f). “We know that the stories we inherit and erase, no different from the ones we produce or ignore, are never neutral or ahistorical, and the force they bring with them is one that influence, consciously or subconsciously, how we read our world, and consequently, how we write it”(p. 294).
- John McPhee, Draft No. 4. I discovered McPhee earlier this year, and I find his work both intriguing and helpful. This discussion of elements of the writing process is very, very good.
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. It’s been decades since I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; perhaps I should pick it up again. This small book is aptly titled – it’s a short account of the life that a writer leads, offering some inspiration to the reader to step to the other side and write something.
Memoir / Letters
- Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader. Gottlieb’s long career as a reader and editor leaves him with many anecdotes about writers and work with writers. And about himself. I found the anecdotes fascinating, especially when they concerned his work with writers whose work I’m reading these days. I wouldn’t call this book intellectually engaging; more of a collection of high-brow gossip. But definitely fascinating.
- May Sarton, The House by the Sea. I hope to write more someday about just how May Sarton’s work came into my reading life. For the moment, I’ll say that her approach to journaling is both inspiring and also a bit intimidating. Would that I could write about quotidian existence as well as she does.
- May Sarton, Dear Juliette. Sarton’s relationship with Juliette Huxley is captured in this collection of letters. There are a few of Huxley’s letters to Sarton as well, though not the ones that Huxley asked Sarton to burn at a particularly fraught time in their relationship.
- Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree. I found this to be an engaging memoir, though (like Sarton) I’m more than a little disappointed that Huxley says nothing about her relationship with Sarton in these pages. But it’s good to know about the summer that Juliette and Julien Huxley, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and D.H. and Frieda Lawrence spent together in the Alps. While there, Maria Huxley typed Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Funny, I don’t see any acknowledgment of that work in my copy of the book.
Science
- Caitlin O’Connell, Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals can Teach Us about Connection, Community, and Ourselves. An interesting, light account of the behavior of non-human animals that shows that we humans are not quite as special as we make ourselves out to be. She discusses a variety of ritual behaviors found in nonhuman animals: greeting rituals, gifting rituals, grieving rituals, and others.

And some additional books that I managed to read, some of them seemingly random discoveries on bookshop shelves and others inspired by reading a book in the list above or by happenstance.

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions. What can one say about Solnit? She has not only a wide range of interests but also the ability to write engagingly about all of them. Like many women who have chosen to be childless, she’s weary of responding to the question why she doesn’t have children.
Vital Little Plans (Jane Jacobs). Another of my recent discoveries that I find a bit embarrassing (not the discovery itself, but that I’m discovering it this late) is that Jane Jacobs wrote many things in addition to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This collection of essays draws from several phases of her life, and offers a broad account of her frustrations with and hopes for our cultural lives – and not just lives in cities.
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics. This is a readable (compared to other Kant texts) set of lectures Kant gave. Though I’ve known about this publication for years, I was inspired to read it now by Karen Stohr (see above).
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Again, see my comments about Stohr’s book. For years I’ve had the notion that I should re-read (or, in some cases, read) Kant’s major works. I’ve finally set that as an actual task, rather than a wish. I started with the ethical works, both because I’ve read them (and even taught them) and also because it seemed a good move after reading Stohr’s book.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. Another re-read, which is not to say it was simply a review. I’m reminded of things that I know but didn’t know that I know, and I’m also seeing things I didn’t see before.
Phillip Lapote, A Year and a Day. Lapote was invited to write a weekly blog post for a year. This is a collection of those posts. It’s classic Lapote, and it’s good to see him make his way into this (for him) new environment.
Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein. As I prepared comments to give at the event honoring Joe Stamey, I read through a folder of essays and letters that he sent me over the years. Among those papers was a list of a dozen (or so) books. When I saw it, I remembered asking Joe late one spring to recommend some books that I might read over the summer. I’m quite sure (but not certain) that this is that list. I’m both sure and certain that I’ve not read any of them. So, both to honor Joe and to broaden my reading, I’ve set myself the task of working through the list. This is the first. I found it a fascinating account of Einstein’s life and thought and also of the development of physics and mathematics during the late 19th and early 20th century. It was particularly interesting to read this during the time of Oppenheimer (the film).
Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought. See above, re my Kant project. Wood is one of several Kant scholars whom I’ve chosen to support my reading of Kant. This is a particularly good, in-depth introduction to Kant’s ethics.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. I read this years ago. I’m not sure, but I think I was inspired to pick it up again when I learned that it’s the favorite book of a young politician whose views of the world are decidedly different from mine. I’m not altogether sure what he sees in it. I find it to be a good reminder of the ephemeral character of life and how I might live in response to that.
Jacqueline Rose, The Plague: Living Death in our Time. I picked this up because Weil is a particular focus, but I found the discussion of Camus, Freud, and Weil to be informative. I think we’ll be struggling to understand the impact of covid on our culture for a long time (assuming, that is, we survive for a long time!). Rose’s reflections are both interesting and helpful.
Vivian Gornick, ed, The Best American Essays 2023. This is an interesting collection of short pieces. Some tidbits: My excuse for enjoying Edward Hoagland’s essay “On Aging” is that, well, I’m aging. “Old age is a slippery slope, but if you enjoyed sledding as a kid and improvising ever since, it shouldn’t be degrading” (p. 123). And consider Sigrid Nunez’s account of Flannery O’Connor’s response to the question “why do you write?” “Because I’m good at it.” Eric Borsuk’s account of surviving prison is very moving; the advice he received early on from a fellow inmate works as well outside of prison as it does inside: “He said if I could find this thing – this sense of purpose – it would make all the difference in my life. Without it, he said, my sentence would feel like an endless misery. ‘Do the time,’ he said, ‘don’t let the time do you’” (p. 26).

Here’s a link to my current reading and TBR lists.

To die is to pass into fiction

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 09:59:00 -0500

Hilary Mantel:

As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted (Quoted in TLS review of Mantel’s book, Nov 24, 2023).

A Memoir of My Former Self

Emerging mysteries with aging

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 11:14:00 -0500

Aldous Huxley:

… do you feel, as I do, that the older one gets, the more unutterably mysterious, unlikely and totally implausible one’s own life and the universe at large steadily become? For practical purposes, one tries to make a little scientific technical sense of it all; for non-practical purposes – aesthetic and ‘spiritual’ – one cultivates Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’ and opens oneself up receptively to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans within and without. (in a letter to Juliette Huxley, 1963).

Leaves of the Tulip Tree: p. 225

Parts of a whole

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 13:55:00 -0500

Marcus Aurelius:

No matter whether the universe is a confusion of atoms or a natural growth, let my first conviction be that I am part of a Whole which is under Nature’s governance; and my second, that a bond of kinship exists between myself and all other similar parts. If I bear these two thoughts in mind, then in the first place, being a part, I shall not feel aggrieved by any dispensation assigned to me from the Whole; since nothing which is beneficial for any whole can ever be harmful to a part, and in this case there is nothing contained in this Whole which is not beneficial to itself. … In the second place, inasmuch as there is this bond of kinship between myself and my fellow-parts, I shall do nothing that might injure their common welfare, but keep those kindred parts always purposefully in view, directing every impulse towards their good and away from anything that runs counter to it.

Meditations, Book 10, ¶ 6

Stop with the procrastinating, already!

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 10:53:00 -0400

Marcus Aurelius:

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of the controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

Meditations, Book Two, Paragraph 4

Witticism as Criticism

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 11:38:00 -0400

Charles Hartshorne:

As my first teacher in the subject (Rufus Jones of Haverford College) put it, “Every system has an impasse in it somewhere.” There are, however, degrees of such deficiencies. Once when Herbert Feigl of the Vienna Circle, talking to some admirers, had just said, “A philosophical system is like a blanket that’s too short; you pull it up to keep your shoulders warm and expose your feet to the cold,” the late lamented logician C. H. Langford whispered to me, “He must be a centipede.”

Creativity in American Philosophy, p 273.

The risks of freedom

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 17:08:00 -0400

Charles Hartshorne:

Before humanity there were far fewer terrible risks for life on this planet. It is the price of our escape from the relative tyranny of instinct that we are uniquely exposed to the perils of being able to fall into drastic conflict with our fellows and with the nonhuman animal life around us. And every new achievement of science and technology magnifies both the opportunities and the dangers of our situation.

Creativity in American Philosophy, p. 117

Remembering Joe Stamey

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:12:00 -0400

(If you’re here to read about Joe Stamey, and don’t care much about how I came to know him, skip ahead to the horizontal rule.)

I’m embarrassed to say that I’m a bit proud of the fact that I was one of Richard Nixon’s mistakes. Not a very significant mistake among other mistakes (and misdeeds). In 1971 I received a Presidential Appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point. I came to see accepting that appointment as a mistake pretty quickly – I was there only for 8 weeks, so I’m convinced that Nixon would have agreed – but my being there changed my life. In fact, when people who’ve met me since then tell me that they can’t imagine me going to West Point, I tell them that one reason for that is the fact that I went to West Point. (Though, to be fair, there were those who knew me before I went who have said they thought it would never work out.) One decision I made during my time at West Point stands as a good indicator of how my experience changed me: I decided that I wanted to major in philosophy rather than physics, math, or engineering.

After leaving the academy, I went to McMurry, a small, regional liberal arts college in Abilene, Texas. (I graduated from high school in Germany, but I was a native Texan.) I saw McMurry as a transitional place for me, thinking that I would transfer to another college. But that began to change with I met with Joe Stamey, a philosophy professor who became my academic advisor. It was clear to me pretty quickly that Joe (or, as I called him then, Dr. Stamey) was very bright and well-read. But my experience of him in my first philosophy course – a junior level seminar in modern philosophy – quickly convinced me that it was very unlikely that I could have found a better teacher and scholar. So I stayed at McMurry.

(Yes, I know. I’ve now worked with enough philosophy professors at enough universities to know that I could have received a solid education in philosophy elsewhere, but I remain convinced that I couldn’t have studied with a better philosopher and teacher.)

All of this is on my mind now because I just returned from Abilene – my first time there in decades – where I spoke at an event honoring Joe and the contributions he made to McMurry. I’m honored to have received the invitation to speak. Here’s what I had to say in the three (or so) minutes that they gave me.

One of the big challenges we face these days, I think, is making room for wonder in our lives. Just begin a sentence with the words “I wonder…” Someone quickly pulls out a phone or tablet, saying, “Here, I’ll look that up for you.”

This comes to mind today because I learned about the power of wonder from Joe Stamey. He introduced me to many different philosophers. One of those philosophers is Aristotle, who in the opening pages of his Metaphysics said “philosophy begins in wonder.” Joe lived his life wondering about things. Of course I’ve known that for years, but I know it even better now. In the past few months I’ve resurfaced memories of my time with him, and I’ve also made my way through a stack of papers that he sent me over the years, reading through much of what he wrote – a lot of it unpublished. One thing that stands out in these writings is just how broadly and deeply he read. Again, I knew that already, but still. It reminded me of the time that McMurry’s head librarian put out a call to all faculty to please return the library books that they were hoarding on their shelves. Joe obligingly returned something like 500 books, but he told the librarian that he simply couldn’t return the other 100 because he was actively using them.

His wondering played out in his life, not just in his scholarly papers. He worked with Bob Monk and other colleagues to write introductory textbooks. He wondered how Bob would react if a collection of small animals like this one showed up on his desk. (I don’t remember whether Joe or Bob gave this to me, but I do remember Joe telling me slyly that Bob didn’t know he was doing it and Bob telling me matter-of-factly that Joe was putting them there.) At a departmental holiday party, I watched Joe, standing by himself in the corner of the living room, pull a small notebook out of his shirt pocket and write a note to himself. Maybe he was adding an item to a grocery list, but I don’t think so.

He wondered out loud in the classroom, asking his own questions about the texts we were reading and also drawing questions and comments out of those of us barely able to make our way into these texts that he knew so well. I could say so much about his teaching practice, but I’m going to turn instead to the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s comment on respectful criticism.

We have “a duty [Kant says] to respect a human being even in the logical use of his reason, a duty not to censure his errors by calling them absurdities, poor judgment, and so forth, but rather to suppose that his judgment must yet contain some truth and to seek this out, uncovering, at the same time, the deceptive illusion, and so, by explaining to him the possibility of his having erred, to preserve his respect for his own understanding” (Metaphysics of Morals, 6:463).

Time and time again in Joe’s class, I watched as he responded to a student’s ill-formed question or comment in a way that captured the gem expressed there. He helped to shape an environment in which our uninformed wanderings became fascinating wonderings.

Finally, I come to the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead – another whom I read first with Joe–who made it clear that the wondering doesn’t stop. “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.” Joe lived with his wonder throughout his life – in the classroom, in his writings, and in day-to-day conversations. There was a time at McMurry when I looked across a seminar table at Joe and thought “I’d like to be you when I grow up.” I hope that I’ve managed to show here just why I couldn’t possibly be the person and philosopher that Joe was, but I thank him for inviting me into a life of philosophical wonder.

On (not) reading Kant

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 09:46:00 -0400

Joe Stamey:

The many readers – rather nonreaders – of Kant who have claimed that the categorical imperative might allow the (moral) willing of a maxim that would subordinate everyone’s interests to mine, or to some concrete or particular group’s or individual’s, show that they are nonreaders.

Unpublished writing (from personal files)

A 'Good Society' supports dutiful action

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:04:00 -0400

Mary Midgley:

Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, presenting (with quotes from) Mary Midgley’s thesis outline: “Without a good society, ‘the sequence of events becomes entirely irregular’ and when an individual acts ‘the traditional result does not necessarily follow.’ When the relation between means and ends breaks down, the questions of how to be a good person, and how to do one’s duty, become pressing. I want to help my friend by sending her a food parcel, but if the postal service is run by crooks and gangsters, all I can do is deliver parcel to the post office and hope for the best. A judge who does her duty in a corrupt society will find no connection between doing what is right and doing good. ‘In such situations the coincidence of varying moral motives, on which optimistic systems rely, vanishes.’”

Metaphysical Animals, p. 177

Stories make a life

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 09:33:00 -0400

Rebecca Solnit:

“… stories are your life. We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

The Mother of All Questions, p. 19

There's reading, and then there's reading

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 15:20:00 -0400

I’ve always thought of myself as a reader. When I was in grade school, one of my parents’ preferred punishments for my childhood misdeeds was confining me to my room for a specified period of time. But it was hardly a punishment – I sat in my room and read, which is fine with me. So they modified the punishment – I was confined to my room and not allowed to read. Since they’ve both died, I’m comfortable saying out loud that during those times I lay on my bed, with my back to the door and the book I was reading shielded (I was convinced) from their sight when they passed by the room to check on me. Surely they knew that I was reading, but I don’t remember them calling me on it.

I don’t remember many of the things I read when I was young. There was the Hardy Boys series. And Tom Swift. Eventually I moved on to science fiction writers like Heinlein, Herbert, and Asimov. But I missed what some might call the classics. In fact, I might be the only person around who managed to get through an otherwise advantaged public school education in the United States without reading Shakespeare – between my junior and senior years I moved from a school that featured Shakespeare in the senior year to a school that covered Shakespeare in the junior year. Actually, that’s not quite true – we discussed Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in my senior year English class, but the professor introduced the discussion, “Since I’m sure everyone here has read the play already and perhaps even seen the movie, we’ll just have our discussion.” I didn’t have the nerve to admit the lack in my education.

All of this comes to mind because I just began reading Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader. My time with the book thus far prompts the title of this piece. I admit to being more than a little intimidated. In fact, I find myself reluctant to say “I’m a reader” now, just as I found myself reluctant to say “Yes, I play guitar” after we moved to Nashville in the late 1990s. Gottlieb’s discussion of the books and authors he read in high school and college puts me to shame.

I’m not saying that everyone should read the classics, though I do appreciate Bernard Lonergan’s (and David Tracy’s) appreciation for the symbiotic relationship between cultural classics and the cultures that they inform. I would say that most reading enriches the reader – what one gains from the practice of reading is more than the knowledge of particular books that one has read. And there are many books outside the realm of the so-called classics that deserve to be read, books the reading of which would broaden the reaches of our culture immensely, and for the better.

So, what I take from this reading of the first chapters of Gottlieb’s book is much more inspiration than intimidation – he inspires me to continue the reading I’ve been doing since retirement – reading not just in philosophy and literary essays, but also in literature. (Not, at least so far, in poetry – I remain tone-deaf there.) Feeling inspired is much better than feeling merely intimidated. I can deal with that.

So I continue to read, thinking that I’ll need to add still more books to my to-be-read pile. As I’ve said before, that pile will continue growing right up until the time that I die. But I’d much rather die surrounded by such a pile than sitting around wondering what I might read next.

As long as I’m here – and on a somewhat different but still related topic – how can I have gotten this far along in life without learning about and appreciating Rosa Luxemburg? That’s a matter for another post after I’ve made my way through more of her writing.

Reading Plan: September through November 2023

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 11:32:00 -0400

I’ve settled on my reading list for the next three months. It’s a varied collection.

May Sarton and Juliette Huxley are two authors on this list that I knew virtually nothing about three months ago. They’re here because I stumbled on a copy of Sarton’s The World of Light in a used book store. The book was inscribed by Sarton to a woman named Evie, and enclosed in the book was a typewritten note signed (in handwriting) by Juliette. With some assistance from Mastodon readers, I eventually learned that the book was a gift from Juliette Huxley to Evelyn (AKA Evie) Ames. I’m hoping to write more about the discovery and the people identified in the book and the letter later. A couple of weeks ago I spent time reading letters from Ames to Sarton in the New York Public Library’s Berg collection, and I hope sometime this fall to read other letters in that collection and also look through materials in the Evelyn Ames papers at a Harvard Library.

So I think of that as a serendipitous exploration of new territory for me.

The other books are more predictable. I’m reading more in 20th century philosophy, with some emphasis on women philosophers. I’m continuing my reading in contemporary fiction, largely following the recommendations of my local bookstore. And I’m reading works that (I hope) will push me to write more, whether in this blog or elsewhere.

As before, I’m allowing myself the freedom to modify this list

Adrienne Brodeur, Little Monsters
Claire Fuller, The Memory of Animals
Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris
Ann Patchett, Tom Lake
Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy
Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science
Karen Stohr, Choosing Freedom
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman Metaphysical Animals
Wolfram Eilenberger, The Visionaries
Joke J. Hermsen, A Good and Dignified Life: The Political Advice of Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg
Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties
Robert Zaretsdky, The Submersive Simone Weil
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Castillo, How to read now
John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader
May Sarton, The House by the Sea
May Sarton, Dear Juliette: Letters to Juliette Huxley/
Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree
Caitlin O’Connell, Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals can Teach Us about Connection, Community, and Ourselves

The fuzzy line between fiction and non-fiction

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 17:01:00 -0400

My dissertation advisor was not only a theologian and philosopher, but also an avid fly fisherman. In one of our many conversations during the years I studied with him he recommended that I read A River Runs Through It, a novel by Norman Maclean. I didn’t read everything he recommended, but I did read that, and I found it a fascinating exploration of the meaning of life, family relationships both positive and negative, and, yes, fly fishing.

While extolling the virtues of the book, my advisor mentioned that it was the first (perhaps at that time the only?) work of fiction published by the University of Chicago Press. He had a special connection to the University of Chicago, having studied and taught there, and he saw the Press’s imprint on the book as a mark of distinction.

I was reminded of this while reading John McPhee’s Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. In an essay entitled “Elicitation,” he discusses the importance of being very careful to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction, and insists that the facts in any work of nonfiction be assiduously checked. (He offers a couple of examples of the importance of fact-checking for fictional works as well, but that’s another matter.) McPhee:

Norman Maclean called A River Runs Through It fiction, and the word “fiction” appeared in the book’s front matter. A River Runs Through It was autobiographical fact in nearly all aspects but one. For private reasons, the author had shifted the site of his brother’s murder and, being Norman Maclean, considered that change and others quite enough fabrication to disqualify the text as nonfiction.

Any writer of an autobiography is going to be selective in what is included in the text, and is going to remember the events described in the account from a particular perspective. Setting aside for the moment the implication that Maclean changed a few other elements in the story, suppose he was so traumatized by his brother’s murder that he came to believe that it happened in one place when in fact it happened somewhere else. He might then have called the work nonfiction, even though everything in his account is told from his point of view and others might remember it differently. Is he the one best suited to decide whether it’s fiction or nonfiction? And if not Maclean, then who?

It takes as long as it takes

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 11:32:00 -0400

In Draft No. 4, John McPhee describes an important point about writing that he learned most pointedly shortly after beginning to write for The New Yorker. He learned this near the end of a serious of conversations with The New Yorker editor William Shawn. In these conversations, they were discussing – and editing – the first profile McPhee had published in the magazine. “After all those one-on-one sessions… – while The New Yorker hurtled toward its deadlines – I finally said in wonderment, ‘How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?’”

Shawn’s response: “It takes as long as it takes.”

Upon reading this, I was immediately transported to an experience near then end of my time in graduate school. At the beginning of what I assumed would be the year in which I finished my dissertation, I entered the job market. Fortunately for me, my advisor shared my confidence that I would have my degree in hand by the end of the year, and he said that in the letter he wrote for me. I made good progress on the dissertation during the year, receiving my advisor’s approval of each of the chapters I submitted. Things came to a head in mid-April, when I was offered a tenure-track position. When I received the offer, I was in the middle of writing the crucial chapter – the constructive chapter – of the dissertation. I set myself to the task.

I submitted the chapter to my advisor sometime toward the end of May. A week or so later, I received a note from him suggesting that we find a time to meet. Of course I was eager to get his response to my writing, and so set up the appointment at the earliest time that he had available.

But the conversation did not begin well. As I settled into a chair in his office, he sighed. And then: “What you’ve written here gives every indication that you fit your writing into the time you had available rather than taking the time you needed to write.” These somber words began what was perhaps the most painful three hours (literally!) of my academic career. We went through the chapter page by page. At one point: “Why do you have to write that way?!?? Why would anyone write that way?!??”

Obviously, I didn’t take as much time as I should have taken. But the lesson that occurred to me only several days later is that my advisor believed in taking the time that it takes to do the work he was committed to doing. I don’t know how long it took him to read the chapter and write the extensive notes he wrote about what he was reading. It must have been hours. I do know that he spent three hours discussing the chapter with me, and the feedback he gave me was crucial when I returned to the task. Or, as he might have said to himself as he sat down to read the chapter and, later as he prepared to meet with me, “It takes as long as it takes.”

And I contemplated how I was going to find the necessary time.

So I began my full-time teaching career without having finished my dissertation. Early in that academic year, I met with the Dean of the College. I proposed to her that I would like to focus on developing and teaching my courses during that year and return to the dissertation the following summer. “Is there any sense in which my being offered a contract for next year depends on my finishing the dissertation this year?”

“Yes,” she said rather bluntly. “I will give you a contract in March if your advisor assures me that you will finish the dissertation by June.”

Of course, my advisor had said the previous year that I would finish the dissertation at the end of that academic year. I called him to report what the Dean had told me. His response was immediate. “I will tell your Dean in March that you will complete the dissertation by June if you have completed the dissertation in March.”

It takes as long as it takes. And I’m happy to be able to say that I found the time that it took to write a dissertation that passed muster. My advisor and committee approved it in late February. And I received a contract for the following year. Even more importantly, I learned the importance of taking the time needed to complete a task rather than forcing work on the task into the time that I thought I had. I can’t say that I’ve always lived up to the maxim – after all, life presents many challenges that we don’t have time to meet as well as we would like – but I’ve worked really hard to make sufficient time for the tasks most important to me.

Summer reading recap

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 15:23:00 -0400

At the end of May, I put together a list of books I hoped to read over the next three months. This was a new exercise for me – ordinarily, especially now in retirement, I pick up a book on a whim, and I often abandon one book when something else catches my fancy. A good look at my bookshelves reveals more than a few books with bookmarks indicating stopping points.

On the whole, I found the list to be a good thing. Perhaps the fact that I thought carefully about what I wanted to read while I was constructing the list made me more committed to reading each of them. But I also think that making the commitment and having the list to remind me of the commitment made a difference. And making the commitment in public – even to the small public that happens to stumble on the blog – surely made a difference as well.

It’s worth mentioning again that the inspiration for the 20 books of summer challenge grew in part out of the frustration of one who was purchasing books at a rate faster than she was reading them. I suffer from (or with?) the same problem, and many of the books on my list are books that were already on my shelves. So that collection is at least a little smaller than it was before.

Still, the commitment wasn’t iron-clad. Some of the books on the list were ones I purchased in the past few months, and– I also allowed myself the freedom to replace two of the books on the original list, in each case because I stumbled on a different book in my book store travels. All in all, then, a good exercise for me, and one I plan to repeat this fall. (Speaking of public commitments, here’s another – I’ve almost finalized the list of books for the fall, and I’ll be posting that here in the blog soon.)

I mentioned above that I’m now retired, and I admit that one of the privileges of retired life is the gift of time. I have household responsibilities, but these are also less demanding than they once were since our son is out on his own in the world.

So – here’s the list, with a few brief notes about each of them.

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood – This is one recommended by my local independent bookstore. I wouldn’t have picked it myself, but I found it to be an engaging discussion of an encounter between a deranged version of Elon Musk (could there be such a person?) and a less thoughtful and deliberate version of Bill McKibbon. Some interesting character development. I have to say, though, that I was disappointed in the ending – a bit too contrived, as though Catton needed to find any way out of the world she had created.
Naomi Alderman, The Power – This is one in which I think that the inspiring idea is much better than the execution.
A.M. Homes, The Unfolding – An interesting exploration of the world of people in the U.S. who are unsettled by the election of Barack Obama, though I have to say that it seems much less fantastical now than it might have seemed back in 2008.
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger – McCarthy, as usual, succeeds in creating a world even darker than our own. I’m still thinking about how the title plays out in the book’s story, but holding back on that until I read Stella Maris, the companion volume.
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers – Perhaps this is better understood as an account of Hartshorne’s philosophy than of the philosophers whose work he discusses.
Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty – I found this one to be engaging in pieces rather than as a whole.
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain – Saunders helped me to think about what a writing process might be, and he also pushed me to think more carefully about the fiction that I read. One question that will stay with me: “Why is this character (or event, or theme) introduced in the story?”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – I’ve wanted to read this book for years, and I’m really glad that I finally read it. On a personal level, Jacobs helped me to understand better than I had before why I wanted to give up my car and move into the city – especially since Boston’s North End, a neighborhood she celebrates in the book, is steps from our front door.
Lester J. Cappon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters – I found the initial half or so of the book to be rather ponderous, as Adams and Jefferson discussed challenges they faced in their embassy work. But the letters they wrote each other in retirement were really, really interesting.
May Sarton, A World of Light; replacing The House by the Sea on the original list – Maria Popova inspired me to pick up The House by the Sea. I was looking for a copy in a used book store and stumbled on a signed first edition of A World of Light. That not only led me to change books, but also opened up an exploration of the relationships between Sarton, Julia Huxley, and Evie Ames. I hope to be writing more about that later. For now, I’ll say that Sarton here develops some very touching literary portraits of a wide variety of people important to her, including her parents.
John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird – I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about John McPhee and his writing before stumbling on this book. I can already say that this is not my favorite of his books, but he surely can put a sentence (and a paragraph) together.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World – a fascinating exploration of what it means for a monk who is convinced that life is ephemeral to confront death.
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being – An interesting posthumous collection of five essays, two written very early in Woolf’s life and three written late in life. I suppose it’s not surprising that I found the later essays much more insightful. The comment I remember best: when Woolf encountered a man who had written a rather negative review of her book, she said “You can’t hate my books more than I hate yours.” This in an essay called “Am I a snob?”
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being – Dillard describes the book as “a nonfiction first-person narrative, but it is not intimate, and its narratives keep breaking.” I think she’s right on both counts. I struggled with the breaking narratives, but she did (and does) have me thinking about natural calamity in a world that appears in some ways to be an orderly world.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet – A friend gave me a copy of this book years ago as a celebration of my finishing my dissertation. I regret that I didn’t read it then.
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt – Like many others, I’ve turned to Arendt in an attempt to understand better the different dynamics of our world today. It’s both terrifying and illuminating to read her and about her.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell – I can’t claim to remember all of the science and history of science that Mukherjee discusses here, but I found it to be a really engaging discussion of both. The Whiteheadian in me was particularly touched by his insistence toward the end of the book that we won’t understand fully how different cells in our body function until we see each of them as part of a larger complex process.
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking – A wonderful discussion of the joy of walking, informed by research into the benefits of walking and of how we came to walk in our evolutionary development.
Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, replacing Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World on the original list. This was one of my bookstore discoveries. Theise is both a research scientist and a practicing Buddhist, and he’s pushing for enriching the understanding gained by natural science with the insights of a meditative practice.
Terrence Real, I don’t want to talk about it – I came to this book asking questions for a friend. I found Real’s distinction between covert and overt depression to be very, very helpful.

I completed reading the original list a few days into August, and I found that I couldn’t stop. So here are some bonus books of the summer:

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo — I’m really frustrated that I’m not able to read while on a moving vehicle. I decided to try something different (for me) on a train to New York City this past summer – and audio book. I don’t know that I’ll do it regularly – I still want to read the printed word – but I found that the audio version of this book heightened the sense of tragedy in Lincoln’s confrontation with the death of his son.
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West – Another audio book, this one because Covid had me unable to focus on a page for a week or so. I wasn’t sleeping well either, and listening to this got me through the worst of the nights. An apocryphal tale of a world falling apart in the wake of governmental failure and environmental collapse.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters – See above comment about the importance of Arendt.
Hiroko Oyamada, The Hole – I found this on the “staff recommends” table in Three Lives & Company, a delightful small bookstore in New York City. I wouldn’t have found it on my own. It’s a rather fantastical account of a woman settling into an environment that’s both familiar and strange. Something like Alice in Wonderland.
Hua Hsu, Stay True – On the surface, a young man’s writing about what he found to be a rather unlikely but deeply moving relationship with one of his college friends. Knowing before I started the book that the friend dies a tragic death had me anticipating the moment, but it still overwhelmed. And the reflections move beyond that friendship to cover the how the author came to be the person that he is.
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends – The extended correspondence of two life-long friends. The letters offer considerable insight into the lives and identities of both of them, and also into the cultural world in which they lived. Of particular relevance today, I think, is McCarthy’s observation, after having dinner with Robert Oppenheimer, that he was “completely and perhaps even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and a sense of divine mission” (p. 83).
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times – A portrait of a wide variety of men (and one woman) who lived in dark times. It has me wondering what I might do in current times.
Han Kang, Greek Lessons – A fascinating story about a man losing his vision and his relationship with a woman who loses the ability to speak.
John McPhee, Tabula Rasa – This is a really good collection of short and longer pieces describing papers that McPhee considered writing earlier in his career but for various reasons decided not to write. So he’s writing about topics he decided not to write about, and even writing about the non-writing. It’s a fascinating look into the mind of a great writer. Along the way, the reader learns various factoids. One that struck me – he reports that the big pharma companies employ linguists to come up with names for the drugs they develop. Each drug gets two names: a brand name – catchy and easy to remember – and a generic name – unwieldy, more difficult to spell, remember, and/or pronounce. Now why would they do that?

Summer reading recap

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 15:23:00 -0400

So – here’s the list, with a few brief notes about each of them.

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood – This is one recommended by my local independent bookstore. I wouldn’t have picked it myself, but I found it to be an engaging discussion of an encounter between a deranged version of Elon Musk (could there be such a person?) and a less thoughtful and deliberate version of Bill McKibbon. Some interesting character development. I have to say, though, that I was disappointed in the ending – a bit too contrived, as though Catton needed to find any way out of the world she had created.
Naomi Alderman, The Power – This is one in which I think that the inspiring idea is much better than the execution.
A.M. Homes, The Unfolding – An interesting exploration of the world of people in the U.S. who are unsettled by the election of Barack Obama, though I have to say that it seems much less fantastical now than it might have seemed back in 2008.
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger – McCarthy, as usual, succeeds in creating a world even darker than our own. I’m still thinking about how the title plays out in the book’s story, but holding back on that until I read Stella Maris, the companion volume.
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers – Perhaps this is better understood as an account of Hartshorne’s philosophy than of the philosophers whose work he discusses.
Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty – I found this one to be engaging in pieces rather than as a whole.
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain – Saunders helped me to think about what a writing process might be, and he also pushed me to think more carefully about the fiction that I read. One question that will stay with me: “Why is this character (or event, or theme) introduced in the story?”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – I’ve wanted to read this book for years, and I’m really glad that I finally read it. On a personal level, Jacobs helped me to understand better than I had before why I wanted to give up my car and move into the city – especially since Boston’s North End, a neighborhood she celebrates in the book, is steps from our front door.
Lester J. Cappon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters – I found the initial half or so of the book to be rather ponderous, as Adams and Jefferson discussed challenges they faced in their embassy work. But the letters they wrote each other in retirement were really, really interesting.
May Sarton, A World of Light; replacing The House by the Sea on the original list – Maria Popova inspired me to pick up The House by the Sea. I was looking for a copy in a used book store and stumbled on a signed first edition of A World of Light. That not only led me to change books, but also opened up an exploration of the relationships between Sarton, Julia Huxley, and Evie Ames. I hope to be writing more about that later. For now, I’ll say that Sarton here develops some very touching literary portraits of a wide variety of people important to her, including her parents.
John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird – I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing about John McPhee and his writing before stumbling on this book. I can already say that this is not my favorite of his books, but he surely can put a sentence (and a paragraph) together.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World – a fascinating exploration of what it means for a monk who is convinced that life is ephemeral to confront death.
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being – An interesting posthumous collection of five essays, two written very early in Woolf’s life and three written late in life. I suppose it’s not surprising that I found the later essays much more insightful. The comment I remember best: when Woolf encountered a man who had written a rather negative review of her book, she said “You can’t hate my books more than I hate yours.” This in an essay called “Am I a snob?”
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being – Dillard describes the book as “a nonfiction first-person narrative, but it is not intimate, and its narratives keep breaking.” I think she’s right on both counts. I struggled with the breaking narratives, but she did (and does) have me thinking about natural calamity in a world that appears in some ways to be an orderly world.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet – A friend gave me a copy of this book years ago as a celebration of my finishing my dissertation. I regret that I didn’t read it then.
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt – Like many others, I’ve turned to Arendt in an attempt to understand better the different dynamics of our world today. It’s both terrifying and illuminating to read her and about her.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell – I can’t claim to remember all of the science and history of science that Mukherjee discusses here, but I found it to be a really engaging discussion of both. The Whiteheadian in me was particularly touched by his insistence toward the end of the book that we won’t understand fully how different cells in our body function until we see each of them as part of a larger complex process.
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking – A wonderful discussion of the joy of walking, informed by research into the benefits of walking and of how we came to walk in our evolutionary development.
Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, replacing Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World on the original list. This was one of my bookstore discoveries. Theise is both a research scientist and a practicing Buddhist, and he’s pushing for enriching the understanding gained by natural science with the insights of a meditative practice.
Terrence Real, I don’t want to talk about it – I came to this book asking questions for a friend. I found Real’s distinction between covert and overt depression to be very, very helpful.

I completed reading the original list a few days into August, and I found that I couldn’t stop. So here are some bonus books of the summer:

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo — I’m really frustrated that I’m not able to read while on a moving vehicle. I decided to try something different (for me) on a train to New York City this past summer – and audio book. I don’t know that I’ll do it regularly – I still want to read the printed word – but I found that the audio version of this book heightened the sense of tragedy in Lincoln’s confrontation with the death of his son.
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West – Another audio book, this one because Covid had me unable to focus on a page for a week or so. I wasn’t sleeping well either, and listening to this got me through the worst of the nights. An apocryphal tale of a world falling apart in the wake of governmental failure and environmental collapse.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters – See above comment about the importance of Arendt.
Hiroko Oyamada, The Hole – I found this on the “staff recommends” table in Three Lives & Company, a delightful small bookstore in New York City. I wouldn’t have found it on my own. It’s a rather fantastical account of a woman settling into an environment that’s both familiar and strange. Something like Alice in Wonderland.
Hua Hsu, Stay True – On the surface, a young man’s writing about what he found to be a rather unlikely but deeply moving relationship with one of his college friends. Knowing before I started the book that the friend dies a tragic death had me anticipating the moment, but it still overwhelmed. And the reflections move beyond that friendship to cover the how the author came to be the person that he is.
Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends – The extended correspondence of two life-long friends. The letters offer considerable insight into the lives and identities of both of them, and also into the cultural world in which they lived. Of particular relevance today, I think, is McCarthy’s observation, after having dinner with Robert Oppenheimer, that he was “completely and perhaps even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and a sense of divine mission” (p. 83).
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times – A portrait of a wide variety of men (and one woman) who lived in dark times. It has me wondering what I might do in current times.
Han Kang, Greek Lessons – A fascinating story about a man losing his vision and his relationship with a woman who loses the ability to speak.
John McPhee, Tabula Rasa – This is a really good collection of short and longer pieces describing papers that McPhee considered writing earlier in his career but for various reasons decided not to write. So he’s writing about topics he decided not to write about, and even writing about the non-writing. It’s a fascinating look into the mind of a great writer. Along the way, the reader learns various factoids. One that struck me – he reports that the big pharma companies employ linguists to come up with names for the drugs they develop. Each drug gets two names: a brand name – catchy and easy to remember – and a generic name – unwieldy, more difficult to spell, remember, and/or pronounce. Now why would they do that?

Here’s a link to my current reading and TBR lists.

Happiness as by-product rather than end

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 11:29:00 -0400

May Sarton:

… in seeking happiness above all, of course we never find it. It is a by-product and not the end of life surely. And all personal relationships depend so much on patience, on living through the deep places, the bored places, the dark places together.

Dear Juliette, p. 142

Freedom to chew over odd ideas

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 11:38:00 -0400

Jane Jacobs:

I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, and that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought.

“No Virtue in Meek Conformity,” in Vital Little Plans, pp. 40f.

The worst of times, the best of times

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 11:06:00 -0400

Simone Weil, 1938:

You could not have wished to be born in a better time than this, when everything has been lost.

First and Last Notebooks, p. 47. Quoted in The Visionaries, by Wolfram Eilenberger, p. 172.

Why study philosophy?

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 20:11:00 -0400

Heinrich Blücher, via Hannah Arendt:

Advice to students: if you’re inclined to study philosophy, “you can do it only if you know that the most important thing in your life would be to succeed in this and the second most important thing, almost as important, to fail in precisely this.”

Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, p. 26. (Blücher, Arendt’s husband, taught philosophy at Bard College.)

Confronting again the question why do I blog

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 12:26:00 -0400

Looking at the calendar, I see that yet again I’ve gone more than a week without posting something I’ve written to the blog something. I’ve posted several commonplace quotations, and I see those as solid contributions to the blog as I’ve envisioned it. But I still struggle to write items for anything approaching public consumption. So I’m pushed yet again to consider the question why I’m attempting this project.

But I’m facing the question now as much because of what I’m reading as because of what I’m not writing. I’ve recently fallen into a Hannah Arendt hole – reading texts she wrote, texts written about her, and letters written to her. There’s so much in all of this that is well worth thinking about, especially in the world we’re living in now. I hope that someday the rather convoluted collection of thoughts about her work bouncing around in my mind will fall into something resembling a structured understanding, but my encounters with her thus far yield anything but that. While it’s difficult for me to focus on one thread in the tangled web, her essay “On Humanity in Dark Times: thoughts about Lessing” pushes me now not only to confront the question at hand but also to step outside my cognitive solitude and actually write something.

For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. Whatever cannot become the object of discourse – the truly sublime, the truly horrible or the uncanny – may find a human voice through which to sound into the world, but it is not exactly human. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human“ (Men in Dark Times, pp. 24f).

Arendt insisted that the deterioration and possible demise of a public world threatened our humanity, and she claimed an obligation to participate in the discourse that created and maintained such a public world. She was one of many who criticized Heidegger for his early flirtation with Nazism; but she was just as critical of what she saw as his withdrawal from the public world into philosophical solitude. I don’t pretend to anything approaching the insights Arendt brought into the world, but I can do better than I’m doing.

One of the real privileges of my retired life is the freedom to spend a large amount of time reading. Writing about this reading and the thoughts it generates helps me to see more clearly what I’m thinking. After years (even decades!) of failed attempts, I’ve managed over the last several years to maintain a regular habit of private journaling. And that writing has indeed helped me to think my own thoughts. But I need to continue attempting to write things out into the public world – even into a public as small as the audience of this blog reflects.

A next step will be to write much more carefully and even to edit (and re-edit) before posting – and, in fact, I’m in the midst of some of that. Perhaps someday there will be evidence of that here. Perhaps someday I’ll be more human.

Wondering about wondering

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 10:16:00 -0400

Lewis Thomas:

Wonder is a word to wonder about. It contains a mixture of messages: something marvelous and miraculous, surprising, raising unanswerable questions about itself, making the observer wonder, even raising skeptical questions like “I wonder about that.” Miraculous and marvelous are clues: both words come from an ancient Indo-European root meaning simply to smile or to laugh. Anything wonderful is something to smile in the presence of, in admiration (which, by the way, comes from the same root, along with, of all telling words, “mirror.”

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, p. 55f.

Arendt, Kant, and Judgment

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 17:07:00 -0400

Hannah Arendt:

He [Kant] asked: What are the conditions of our experience? Crucial for Kant is that for him, and him alone, the highest faculty of man is Judgment (and not reasoning, as for Descartes, nor the drawing of conclusions after conclusions as for Hegel.

Letter to Mary McCarthy, 1954. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, p. 24. (Compare Whitehead on reading Kant.)

Social insecurities and FOMO, 1954 version

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:35:00 -0400

Mary McCarthy:

Saul Bellow was here too, with son and dog, not very friendly, either. In short, last month was rather paranoid, which got me rattled. That’s the worst of places like this, your value is continually being called into question and you shiver at social slights, even from people you don’t care for. And all your friends are eager to tell you, on the beach, about parties you aren’t invited to. You can’t avoid knowing just what your current status is, unless you stay in the house with the door locked. Even then you would have to emerge to buy groceries and in the store you would meet Mrs. Kazin, Mrs. Levin, Mr. Bellow, Mrs Wechsler, etc.“

A letter to Hannah Arendt, from Wellfleet, MA, August 1954. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975, p. 20

Grief and regret

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 17:03:00 -0400

Cormac McCarthy:

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

The Passenger, p. 140

The bonds of reading

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 17:03:00 -0400

Cormac McCarthy:

…having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

The Passenger, p. 143

Making a reading plan

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 09:34:00 -0400

I spent a couple of hours yesterday making up a list of 20 books to read in fall 2023. I’m defining “fall” as the three months September, October, and November. This follows up on my participation in the 20 Books of Summer challenge. I found setting up and (almost) meeting the summer challenge to be a good exercise, so I’m going to continue it at least into the fall.

Yesterday, as I pulled the list together, it occurred to me that this is by no means the first time I’ve spent hours in July and August pulling together a list of readings. In fact, it was pretty typical for me to spend such time both in the mid to late summer and in October into November putting such lists together when I was selecting texts and supportive material for the classes I was teaching. Those times – like this time – were interesting and exciting, as I pondered the best (or at least not the worst!) combination of readings that would support and challenge students finding their way into an area of study.

Of course, there are several significant differences between those earlier projects and the current one. A big difference is that I’m designing a reading program for me, rather than (also) for other people. A second big difference is that each of the text lists I assembled earlier had to fit a particular structure implied by the course and the larger academic program. In putting this reading list together for myself, I find the freedom offered by the lack of structure and captive audience to be both liberating and problematic – out of all the books that I’ve thought I might like to read, how do I come up with the list of books that I commit to read at this time in my life.

Another difference between then and now is that all (or at least most – see below) of the books on the list I’m making now are books that I’ve not yet read. I should admit that occasionally I put a book on a course reading list before I’d actually read it (Have I read that book? No – in fact, I’ve not even taught it!) But in those cases I’d read enough about the book to persuade myself that it was well worth my reading it (and the students’ at least pretending to read it) over the course of the semester. There are all sorts of reasons books make their way onto the lists I’m making now. In some instances, they’re books that have long been on my TBR list and on my shelves. In other instances, I’ve read reviews that persuade me to read them. Some of them come recommended by friends and family.

To make some order out of the freedom of choosing only for myself in the life I’m living now, I’ve imposed some constraints. First, following the spirit of the Books of Summer challenge, a significant (but, thankfully, unspecified!) number of books will be ones that are already sitting, unread, on my bookshelves. Second, I’m pushing myself to read a variety of genres. The variety isn’t as broad as some (say, my wife) would like – I’m not (yet) willing to include poetry in the list. (Much to my wife’s dismay, I remain rather tone-deaf in poetry.) Third, I’m pushing myself to read more in areas well outside the areas in which I have any claim at all to expertise. Fourth, I’m going to continue to read in philosophy, including not only books I’ve not read but also others that I’ve read, when my earlier reading left me with the conviction that they’re well worth reading again.

I’ve found it strangely comforting to have the terrain of my reading laid out in front of me. Before embarking on the challenge this past summer, I found myself rather haphazardly jumping from one book to the next, sometimes without finishing an earlier book, and sometimes picking up a book only on a whim. There’s a lot to be said for whims, but I’m using them now to get a book into the selection basket rather than to sit down to read it.

The time yesterday yielded what I’m thinking now is a good mix of books. If my experience this fall is anything like my experience of the summer, I’ll find connections between texts that I did not see coming. I’ll find passages that I struggle to make sense of. And I’ll make at least one change in the list after beginning to tackle it, simply because I stumbled on something else that I absolutely have to read. (There’s that whim again, but at least it’s under some semblance of control!)

Speaking of that, I should admit that a couple of hours after settling on a list, I found myself in a used bookstore. And on the shelves of that used bookstore, I found pristine copies of two books that have been on my “I really should read this” list, but not on my personal bookshelves. I took that as a sign from the other side (not the dark side) that I should consider putting them on my list for the fall. So, do I push myself to read 22 books this fall? Do I bump a book or two off of the current list to make room for one or both of these? Or do I put these new (to me) books on my bookshelf so that they’ll be there for the picking when I assemble the list of books for Winter 2023-24?

So many challenges here. I need time to think. And I have time before posting that list here, so I’ll think.

Oh – about that list for the summer – I’m getting close to the end. Perhaps after I finish this last book on that list, I can spend the rest of August reading the two books I just purchased.

The practice of writing

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:59:00 -0400

Albert Einstein:

The most important method of education … always has consisted of that in which the pupil was urged to actual performance. This applies as well to the first attempts at writing of the primary boy as to the doctor’s thesis on graduation from the university, or as to the mere memorizing of a poem, the writing of a composition, the interpretation and translation of a text, the solving of a mathematical problem or the practice of a physical sport.

“On Education,” in Out of my Later Years, p. 33.

Respecting tradition at the Holocaust Museum

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 16:45:00 -0400

Years ago, I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC shortly after it opened. I was overwhelmed by the different exhibits. The story told of that horrible time was both moving and profoundly depressing. I still remember details, especially the smell of leather when I entered a room where shoes of the murdered were collected. It’s interesting to me that olfactory memories are so pronounced.

One of the most moving parts of my time there came at the end, when we sat in a theater watching video of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. There were signs everywhere instructing people to show respect for the setting and the people on the screen by not taking pictures. I was sitting in the crowded theater between two people I didn’t know. Quite suddenly a woman sitting next to me pulled a camera out of her bag and snapped a picture of a man telling his story. I was flabbergasted and upset that she would violate the dignity of the room by taking a picture even with signs everywhere telling people not to do that. As I was wondering whether I should say something to her, I overheard her telling the person on the other side of her, “That’s my uncle.”

I was chastened. Sometimes, I think, one is allowed to break a rule like that.

On turning 70

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 10:32:00 -0400

As I approached my 70th birthday last week, I realized that 70 suddenly doesn’t seem all that old any more. Of course this is not a novel observation (I know I’m not the first person to reach this age – in fact, I remember my mother saying, when she was about as old as I am now, “But I don’t feel that old.” – and of course I’m able to think it’s not so old in large part because I’m lucky enough to be relatively healthy and active. While I’m not all that bothered by turning 70, It disturbs me just a bit more to think that in just a decade I’ll be 80. Somehow that’s more difficult to swallow.

It was on or just before my 70th that I read this from Hannah Arendt, in a letter she wrote to Alred Kazin:

I began to realize how many of my very best friends are between 60 and 70, i.e., [that I] am up against the problem of ‘surviving,’ which is the vulgar version of the more serious question: How does one live with the dead? It is obvious, isn’t it, that one needs new feelings, new manners, new everything… Think of me, sitting in a corner very quiet, and pondering the problem of ‘surviving’ (Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt, p. 115).

Arendt is pondering the aging of her friends, but her comment led me to think again my own aging and even about my mortality. I’ve engaged this contemplation in the abstract for decades in my rather rudimentary meditation practice, but this seemed more immediate somehow. “Of course it’s more immediate,” I hear you (whoever you are) saying. “After all, you’re much closer to the end.” And so I am.

So I sit in the corner, pondering the problem of surviving.

But I don’t want to write about that now. (See what I did there?) I want, instead, to look backward. And here I turn to a passage from Virginia Woolf, which showed up in my reading a couple of days ago. She’s contemplating a decision she made decades earlier to stop fishing – as she put it, a decision not to pursue the fishing passion.

I ceased to wish to catch fish. But from the memory of my own passion I am still able to construct an idea of the sporting passion. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people’s experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one’s life been different. I pigeonhole ‘fishing’ thus with other momentary glimpses; like those rapid glances, for example, that I cast into basements when I walk in London streets (Moments of Being, p. 135).

I share with Woolf many memories of how my life might have been different, if I had chosen one path rather than another. Who and where would I be if I’d chosen to study at graduate school A instead of graduate school B, especially (but not only) because studying at graduate school B led to my meeting the woman who has been my wife for over 35 years? Since Woolf wrote novels (or, as she put it, ‘so-called novels’!) she was able to nurture some of these seeds in the lives of her almost fictional characters. I don’t write novels. I’m left to contemplate what might have been in my own life. What if I had cultivated some of those other seeds that I left to die?

I’m not thinking now of what are obviously big life-changing choices. I know that life would be radically different if I’d gone to graduate school A. I’m thinking more of friendships that I’ve lost, simply because I didn’t take the time to nurture them. I’m such an introvert, and in my day-to-day life I enjoy the time with my wife (and our adult son, when he’s around), my books, and my bicycle. I actually enjoy my alone time. But I’m thinking these days that my personality, together with our having moved around so much of our adult lives, means that I approach the pondering of problem of surviving largely alone, having left behind so many seeds of what might have been lifelong relationships.

In fact, as I think about it, I realize that those decisions are perhaps even more life-changing than the decision to go to one graduate school rather than another. Who, after all, will be left to “think of me, sitting in a corner very quiet, and pondering the problem of ‘surviving’”? I wonder if it’s too late for me to adopt “new manners” that might help to build connections with those who might think of me as I ponder.

The Past in the Present

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 12:24:00 -0400

Virginia Woolf:

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye.

Moments of Being, p. 98.

Smells of the past

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 16:19:00 -0400

While bicycling along the Charles this past week, I smelled cigar smoke. The smell brought a smile to my face – or at least to my mind. It’s not that unusual while I’m out on my bicycle to smell the smoke of someone’s cigar. Usually – like this time – the person smoking the cigar is sitting on a bench by the trail. There was a time, though, while riding in northern Virginia that I began to smell the cigar several minutes before I overtook a man enjoying his smoke while riding leisurely on his bicycle – the smoke wafted behind him for a mile or so, and the smell got stronger and stronger the closer I got to him. I encountered him several times over the years, and usually smelled his cigar long before I saw him.

I typically don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke, but cigar smoke is different because of an early life experience. My father was a minister, and when I was very young (up until I was four years old), he served a church in a small west Texas town. I have only vague memories of living there, but for several years after moving away from the town we returned at least once a year to visit the dentist. I didn’t realize it then, but I suspect now that the small town dentist offered my family a clergy discount. But our visits weren’t limited to the dentist. We also went to the local dry goods store, where a large man (was he called Big Tom?) held court as manager of the store. He greeted my family warmly, waving his cigar around his face. The building had a well-worn wooden floor, and shelves stacked with everything from men’s shirts to kitchen appliances to shoes. But what I remember best is the smell of Big Tom’s cigar which filled the building. Smelling cigars now brings back memories of a simpler time in my life, when my worries were limited to things like whether I would like the color of the shirt my parents bought for me while visiting the store.

I wouldn’t say I like tobacco, or even that I like the smell of cigar smoke. But I do find some comfort in being brought back to a simpler time, and olfactory memories seem stronger than other sorts of memory somehow. Surely there must be some evolutionary advantage hidden there.

The companionship in reading

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 16:02:00 -0400

May Sarton:

I am drawn to people, for I am one myself, for whom literature is a passion, deep rather than wide readers, who discover the great works as Marc had discovered #Proust, feel themselves companioned by certain writers throughout a lifetime, follow every clue about the invention of characters in their books, one might almost say lead double lives.

A World of Light, p. 156.

The benefits of luck

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 12:47:00 -0400

George Sarton:

Every creature needs luck, and he is very ungrateful who ascribes his success to his merit and naught else. All the merit in the world will not save a man against bad luck. The theory of success is written by successful men who would be wiser if they boasted less ….”

From George Sarton’s journal, quoted by May Sarton in A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations, p. 38.

Living in the current crisis

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 12:22:00 -0400

I have no doubt that we’re living in a crisis, on the cusp of watching the (physical, economic, political, cultural) world as we know it fall apart. And I understand that our individual and corporate actions are contributing to that disintegration. Annie Dillard reminds me of past crises during which people must have viewed their situation as somehow uniquely unsettling. “The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news” (/For the Time Being, p. 32). Yes, we are getting closer and closer to the death of any environment that might support our continued existence in anything like the lives that many of us – at least, those of us with privilege – have seen as the norm. And we continue to follow the news, reading each day of even greater collapse, coming much sooner, than we had thought possible only a few years ago.

And yet I find myself living my life as I’ve lived it. Making plans for the future, plans which assume that the savings we’ve been fortunate enough to collect will support us for the years remaining to us. Making plans to visit friends and family. Making plans to read still more books. Making plans to collect thoughts, either in journal entries or in these rare blog posts. Sure, I can say that I’ve made changes in my life: living without a car in an urban environment that allows us to walk or to take (almost) reliable public transportation to most places we need to go. Riding my bicycle along the Charles River. Living in a space much smaller than the houses we lived in before. But I’m still making choices that contribute to the destruction and benefiting from the burdens these choices place on the environment.

I want to do more, but there’s so much cultural inertia making it difficult to go against the flow. I wonder what these times will look like – and what I will think of myself – several years later when I’m looking back on them.

Crises, past and present

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 11:03:00 -0400

Annie Dillard:

We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. In fact, we are witnessing a mass extinction of animals: According to Oxford’s Robert M. May, most of the birds and mammals we know will be gone in four hundred years. But there have been other such mass extinctions, scores of millions of years apart. People have made great strides toward obliterating other people, too, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only broadened the means, as have people in every other century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy – probably a necessary lie – that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods!

For the Time Being, p. 31 (published in 1999).

20 books of summer update

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:42:00 -0400

In an earlier post, I laid out my reading goals for the summer. As we approach the midpoint of the three-month period, it seems appropriate that I record my progress on working through the list.

Before I do that, though, I’ll offer some reflections on the process. I was inspired to set a goal like this for this summer by reading on Mastodon about others doing the same thing. As more people jumped into the discussion to give the list of books they planned to read, a few others jumped in to say that this is a rather strange goal – one is going to read what one is going to read, so why count the books? Wouldn’t it be better, some said, to set a goal that expands one’s reading – say, to read books in genre(s) that one hadn’t read before? Or to read books by authors representing cultural traditions other than one’s own? Sure, I’d say, one should set a goal that makes sense to the person setting a goal.

But the context in which a goal is set makes a big difference. The woman who initiated this challenge (Cathy of 746books.com ) was inspired to set this goal because she was concerned that she owned so many books that she hadn’t yet read. Her goal, as I understand it, was simply to chip away at that 746 number so that she would have fewer unread books. As I said in my earlier post, I’m in much the same place, though I fear that my magic number is rather greater than 746 (but who’s counting?). And I’ve found this goal, vague as it is, helpful in my attempt to lower that number. At one time or another, I was definitely interested in reading every one of the books on my shelves, else I wouldn’t have purchased them. And my interests are such that the collection is somewhat diverse.

One big realization is that it’s nice to have a list in front of me as I work through the summer. And, with one exception, I’ve stuck with that list.

So, here’s the list of books, showing which ones I’ve read thus far:

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Lester J. Cappon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers
May Sarton, The House by the Sea
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World
Terrence Real, I don’t want to talk about it
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty
Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being. This is the one change on the list, replacing Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Naomi Alderman, The Power
A.M. Homes, The Unfolding
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

In addition, I should be finishing (finally!) The Adams-Jefferson Letters in the next day or two.

So, making some small progress. Obviously, there are many, many more books on the shelves, but I take some comfort from Tom Stoppard: Stoppard “cheerfully insists that he reads only one out of every 10 books he buys — ‘I’m going to be dead before I read the books I’m going to read’ — and that he should schedule an appointment for reading into his diary so that he doesn’t just ‘putter about tidying up my desk and making phone calls’” (gift link to New York Times article). I’m thinking of this list and others that I might make later as my version of the appointment for reading.

20 books of summer update

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:42:00 -0400

In an earlier post, I laid out my reading goals for the summer. As we approach the midpoint of the three-month period, it seems appropriate that I record my progress on working through the list.

One big realization is that it’s nice to have a list in front of me as I work through the summer. And, with one exception, I’ve stuck with that list.

So, here’s the list of books, showing which ones I’ve read thus far:

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Lester J. Cappon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers
May Sarton, The House by the Sea
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World
Terrence Real, I don’t want to talk about it
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty
Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being. This is the one change on the list, replacing Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Naomi Alderman, The Power
A.M. Homes, The Unfolding
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

In addition, I should be finishing (finally!) The Adams-Jefferson Letters in the next day or two.

Here’s a link to my current reading and TBR lists.

Independent cells or cells in community?

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 11:57:00 -0400

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

But there are still gaps in our understanding of the interconnectedness of cells. We are still living in a world where we imagine the cell, as Leeuwenhoek did, as a “living atom” – unitary, singular, and isolated, a spaceship floating in body-space. Until we leave that atomistic world, we will not know, as the English surgeon Stephen Paget asked, why the liver and spleen are the same size, are anatomical neighbors, possess virtually the same flux of blood – and yet one (the liver) is among the most frequent sites of cancer metastases, while the other (the spleen) rarely has any? Or why patients with certain neurodegenerative diseases – Parkinson’s among them – have a markedly lower risk of cancer. Or why, as Helen Mayberg told me, the patients who describe their depression as an “existential ennui” (her words) typically do not respond to deep brain stimulation, while those that describe themselves as “falling into vertical holes” often do.

The Song of the Cell, p. 363.

Are we consumers of our lives or products of them?

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 10:14:00 -0400

Eleanor Catton:

There are no wrongs. There’s just choice, and choice is neutral, and we’re neutral, and everything is neutral, and everything’s a game, and if you want to win the game then you’re going to have to optimise yourself, and actualise yourself, and utilise yourself, and get the edge, and God forbid that you should have an actual human experience of frailty, or mortality, or limitation, or humanity, or of the fucking onward march of time – those are just distractions, those are obstacles, they’re defects, they’re inconveniences in the face of our curated, bespoke, freely fucking chosen authentic existence, and sure, we can never quite decide if we’re the consumers of our lives or the products of them, but there’s one thing we are damn sure of, which is that nobody on earth has any right to pass any judgment on us, either way. Freedom in the marketplace! It’s the only thing that matters! It’s the only thing that exists!

Mira’s imagining Tony’s rant against the current state of things in the novel Birnam Wood, p. 265.

Why is it so hard for us to change course?

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 15:04:00 -0400

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, two co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, insist that they are not adamantly opposed to all new technologies. Instead, they claim, we as a society have developed (and/or submitted to) uses of new technologies that make it difficult for all of us to live meaningful lives. Why, they ask, should we assume that our initial ways to implement new tools are the only or even the best way in which these tools can be implemented? I think that’s a very good question. Why is it so hard for us to change course?

In some cases, particular technologies and larger technological infrastructure have developed to the point that it’s very difficult and/or expensive to change course. Such difficulties present challenges on the individual level and on the systemic level. Over the past century or so – at least since World War II – transportation systems and other life infrastructures in much of the United States have become extremely car-centric. Some of us are now convinced that this development was a mistake in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons, and we hope that others will come to this conclusion sooner rather than later. We gave up our car four years ago when we moved downtown, and now enjoy living in a neighborhood that allows us to walk or bicycle pretty much any where we need to go. And if we want to go farther, there’s a subway system (faltering, but still usually better than nothing), bus lines (not always convenient, but usually better than nothing), and commuter rail (not always dependable but usually better than nothing). As those “usually, better than nothing” phrases indicate, there are challenges to the individual. There are times when we feel somewhat hampered in what we want to do, and even the occasional moment when we wish that we still had a car.

The challenges are worse on the systemic level – so much of our lives is complicated, not only by the heavy reliance on the automobile, but also by the assumption that everyone necessarily relies on the automobile. See the recent book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Grabar. Or if you’re not up to that, look at almost any suburban or extra-urban neighborhood, which are set up so that getting anywhere safely requires that one get in a car.

The point here is that deciding that we need to change course requires not only somehow stepping out of the cultural framework imposed by the physical infrastructure but also finding the resources to undo so much of that infrastructure.

And that has me thinking that the financial cost of making these changes isn’t the biggest challenge we face. We also need to find ways to step outside our current structures to see the possibility that we might do things differently.

Jane Jacob’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has been sitting on my bookshelf for decades. I’ve been wanting to read it for longer than that. I finally read it this year, and she helps me to see so many ways in which our neighborhood’s have been misshaped, in part (but not only) by our reliance on the automobile. Writing in the 1960s, she admitted even then that it would be costly to change, and that we wouldn’t be changing anything overnight. But she suggested some very concrete strategies that would help us if we decide to make that change. She managed somehow to step outside her little neighborhood and the surrounding community in a way that allowed her to see just how it functioned, and how it and other neighborhoods might function differently.

Much of what Jacob said is echoed in the current call for 15-minute cities. Of course, even suggesting such a thing is seen by many as radically controversial, and many will find reason to protest. And those who protest will find many others there with them. Changing course on these things is unsettling.

I, for one, think it’s long past time for us to change course here.

Ego, emptiness, and rebirth

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 14:51:00 -0400

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:

To approach the finality of our bodies while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life is like confusing diamonds with pebbles and throwing them away.

We do not need to get rid of the ego – this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self – because it has never existed in the first place. The key point is that there is no ego to kill. It is the belief in an enduring, nonchanging self that dies. The term ego can still provide a useful reference; but we need to be careful not to set ourselves up for battling something that is not there. Ironically, when we go into combat with the ego, we strengthen the illusions of self, making our efforts to awaken counterproductive.

Once we accept the fundamental transitory nature of our minds and bodies, then we can develop the consciousness to dismantle our most entrenched patterns. Peeling off the outer levels of self is a form of dying, but the process becomes more workable if we can develop confidence in the benefits of rebirth in this lifetime.

In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, pp. 34, 39, and 246.

Looking for hope wherever I might find it

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:50:00 -0400

My wife regularly points out my tendency to expect the worst in any situation. In fact, she goes so far as to call me a catastrophizer (though I’m not sure just how she would spell that word). There are times when I have to admit she’s right, but there are also days when I see my take on things as realistic. Today is one of those days.

A friend asked in an email last week if I “think the fears about AI wiping out humans well-founded.” My reply was somewhat cynical and hyperbolic, but still honest. “I don’t know which will get us first – AI, climate change, financial collapse, infrastructure collapse, or the failure of democracy.” In short, I’m feeling rather uneasy about the fate of our culture. The world will survive – some creatures living now will even flourish – but I fear the world generally, and our culture in particular, of the next decade will be significantly different than what I’ve learned to appreciate as I’ve lived my life.

I was somewhat encouraged this morning to read Jefferson’s reflections on his life as presented in a letter to John Adams: “I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are indeed … gloomy and hypocondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened? My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy” (The Adams-Jefferson Letters, p. 467).

I would like to find some encouragement from Jefferson’s counsel, and I have to admit that if I had consistently kept score in such things, I would likely see that my fears about the future were realized less often than I feared they would be. But the news of the day makes it difficult to steer my bark in Jefferson’s wake. I should note, though, that Adams replied that he was right there in the bark with Jefferson over 200 years ago. And we’re still here, at least for the moment.

On the validity of the biblical text

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 09:59:00 -0400

Thomas Jefferson:

But the whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it: and such tricks have been plaid with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. The matter of the first was such as would be preserved in the memory of the hearers, and handed on by tradition for a long time; the latter such stuff as might be gathered up, for imbedding it, any where, and at any time.

In a letter to John Adams, 24 January 1814. The Adams-Jefferson Letters, p. 421.

Whitehead on reading Kant

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:21:00 -0400

Charles Hartshorne:

Whitehead once said that Kant’s Critiques should have been written in reverse order. This is because … Whitehead held that experiencing is primarily and primitively enjoying-suffering and only in special cases knowing; so that the theory of feeling, and hence aesthetics, not epistemology, is primary.

Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, p. 262. (Compare Arendt, Kant, and Judgment.)

Human "progress" and nature

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 09:54:00 -0400

Charles Hartshorne:

“Are we making progress?” should not reduce entirely to “Are we coming to own more things?” It should include “Are we learning to do without some material things?” … The clearest basis for respect for nature is to renounce two forms of dualism: an absolute difference between matter and mind, and a quasi-absolute difference between the human and other forms of mind.

Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, p. 225.

Random thoughts while reading Elisa Gabbert

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:47:00 -0400

Last fall my wife and I drove from Colorado into New Mexico. The direct route would have taken us over a high mountain pass; a predicted snow storm led us to drive a more circuitous route through Utah. The scenery was impressive.

We stopped at one look-out point to take in the view. My wife suggested we get a “selfie” – I don’t do that habitually; in fact, I think this might have been the first selfie that I attempted. My lack of experience was immediately clear to my wife. She didn’t look at the photo until we had walked back down the hill to our parked car. That’s when she learned that I had set the phone’s camera on portrait mode – after all, isn’t a selfie a sort of portrait? – which meant that the wonderful background was blurred. “The point of the selfie is to show whatever it is that’s behind the person or people!” I didn’t get it.

But Elisa Gabbert would say that most people are clearly on the side of my wife. “When people take a selfie with a landmark or celebrity, they want you to be able to identify the thing of fame…. You are not the monument, but your presence at the monument is what you’re buying when you book travel” (The Word Pretty, p. 120). But, Gabbert says, it’s really more complicated than this. She notes that before photography, those with means to do so had portraits made in order to “confer and confirm status.” Presumably, a person with status would need only one such portrait. One and done, so to speak. The ubiquity of cameras has changed that, and now people take many different selfies in an attempt to show that they exist. “Photos extend our existence, since they can live on after our deaths like poems or mummy masks.” She continues, though, to say that it’s still more complicated, at least for her. She takes selfies not just to prove that she exists, but to show that she’s the woman she thinks herself to be. But even the selfies she posts, the ones that she thinks succeed in showing her as she sees herself, seem empty somehow. “The end result never looks like it did on the screen or like I do in the mirror, but it’s not just that; they’re almost a tautological proof, like telling a joke to myself.”

Better, she says, to find herself randomly in a candid or accidental photo. That would capture who she is and how she appears in the world. That would capture herself.

On the first page of her book, Gabbert reports an early conversation. “When I was seven or eight, I confessed to my mother that I couldn’t stop narrating my life back to myself; I thought it meant I was crazy. No, she said, it means that you’re a writer. I’ve since gotten used to it, that layer of language like running commentary between my direct experience and the external record of it” (p. 3). This is the passage that led me to purchase the book, because I saw myself in it. I don’t remember when I developed this sense of my experience – I was surely older than seven or eight – but from a relatively young age I found myself not only narrating my life back to myself, but then attempting to live out the narration’s next steps. So I narrated my immediate experience, and then responded in the “real” world as I would expect the character in my narrative to respond. Like Gabbert, I thought perhaps I was crazy – after all, isn’t it crazy to attempt to play out a fictional character in the “real” world? She has me thinking, though; might I be a writer? Is that what’s pushing me to find something – anything – to write about in this blog?

I have precious little writing that would provide evidence of that. Internal narratives, yes. After years of failed attempts, regular – indeed, almost daily – journal entries, yes. And this blog, such as it is.

There’s another level to my process of internal narrative building. The process includes not only the writing – the drafting of a narrative – but also the editing. And, I have to say, my internal editor is much more harsh than effective. Either nothing remains after the editing – the idea has slipped away and the screen stays blank – or the narrative seems empty, “almost a tautological proof, like telling a joke to myself.”

For the moment, at least, I’m going to continue the attempt. Gabbert suggests that a selfie, like a poem or a mummy mask, might extend one’s existence long after one’s death. Perhaps a blog post does the same, at least as long as there’s a wayback machine and enough electricity to power it.

It looks as if…

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 11:35:00 -0400

G.E.M. Anscombe:

[Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question, “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied, “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to “it looks as if” in “it looks as if the sun goes round the earth.”

An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 151.

2023 Books of Summer

Wed, 31 May 2023 11:45:00 -0400

Cathy of 746books.com invites people to make a list of 20 (or 10 or 15) books that they plan to read during the summer months. This is not the first year she’s done this, but I just learned about it from my Mastodon feed. I’ve already admitted that I tend to bounce from book to book, finishing some but not others, and bumping a book down on the list if something else grabs my interest for the moment. But I’ve decided to accept Cathy’s challenges – not only the challenge to make such a list but also the challenge to post it publicly. I’m mostly at ease with this, primarily because Cathy says up front that she’s not all that strict about it: “It’s pretty common knowledge that I am the slackest challenge host and will bend the rules to help anyone reach their goal.”

So, here’s my initial take on the list. It’s a rather strange and perhaps awkward collection of genres. I fear that I might be attempting to chew much more than I’m able to bite off, and I definitely reserve the right to amend the list as I go along. (Just how many caveats can I put here before I make this more or less public commitment??) Surely that’s more than enough, so without further delay:

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Lester J. Cappon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers
May Sarton, The House by the Sea
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World
Terrence Real, I don’t want to talk about it
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty
Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Naomi Alderman, The Power
A.M. Homes, The Unfolding
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

An ambitious list, perhaps overly so. But at least I’ve given myself a head start – I’ve already begun to read a couple of them, and I don’t want to put them down without finishing them.

I can’t resist commenting on the implicit challenge of Cathy’s website. It’s captured in the name – several years ago she discovered, much to her dismay, that she was continuing to purchase books even though she had 746 unread books already in her collection. (Yes, she counted.) For three years, she didn’t purchase any new books but instead focused on books she already owned. That’s a challenge that I can’t bring myself to take on!

I’m not going to count the unread books in my collection, but I have to admit that the number is well over 746. But the twenty books on the list above are already in our condo, so if I can limit myself to purchasing fewer than 20 books in the next three months I’ll make a small dent in that number.

2023 Books of Summer

Wed, 31 May 2023 11:45:00 -0400

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Lester J. Cappon (ed), The Adams-Jefferson Letters
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers
May Sarton, The House by the Sea
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World
Terrence Real, I don’t want to talk about it
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty
Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Naomi Alderman, The Power
A.M. Homes, The Unfolding
Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

An ambitious list, perhaps overly so. But at least I’ve given myself a head start – I’ve already begun to read a couple of them, and I don’t want to put them down without finishing them.

My current reading and TBR lists.

On managing aristocrats

Thu, 25 May 2023 13:32:00 -0400

John Adams:

Your ‘aristocrats’ are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed. They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonality, to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 9 July 1813. The Adams-Jefferson Letters, p. 352

Lewis Thomas on Altruism

Wed, 24 May 2023 15:07:00 -0400

I find it very difficult to avoid used bookstores. In fact, it’s pretty rare for me to visit an unfamiliar city – or even a city I know well – and not find myself browsing the shelves of some such store. I rarely visit with the idea of finding a particular book, but instead browse the shelves, relying on the serendipity of happenstance.

I was visiting one such store last month and came across a collection of short essays by Lewis Thomas. I immediately recognized the book. In fact, a copy of it once sat in a bookshelf in my office. I had given it away in one of several book purges over the past decades. But I had such a rush of satisfaction upon seeing the book that I couldn’t resist purchasing it. And it’s a joy to read (or re-read) his work. (I have to admit that the 40 years or so since I last read Thomas melt away whatever distinction there is between reading and re-reading.)

An aside – this re-establishing of my relationship with Thomas’s work brings to mind Sarah Bakewell’s drawing on Virginia Woolf how books create community across generations: “Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how ‘minds are threaded together – how any live mind is of the same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides …. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind” (How to Live, 315).

But back to Thomas. Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony brings together a couple dozen essays first published in the early 1980s, most of them in the New York Review of Books. It was a different world then, but Thomas’s words hold up well. For example, in “Altruism,” Thomas explores the question why we and other animals might have evolved to have some concern for other creatures. He offers examples of animal’s behavior – bees and other social insects, birds, mammals including baboons, zebras, and wildebeests – to support the point that altruism is not unique to humans. “It is genetically determined, no doubt about it. Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species” (103). The reference to the survival of the species is key – Lewis and others suggest that altruism might well be limited, that close relationships are in play here. But he raises the question just how close these relationships need to be in order that an act might be considered altruistic.

He allows that reasonable people might disagree on how this tendency plays out in humans: some, he says, might see altruistic behavior as something one learns (or doesn’t learn) from one’s community, “acquired by cultures, taught by example” (104). Others might see it as genetically grounded. People on both sides would say that the influence, whether cultural or biological, is not deterministic. That is, they admit the obvious, that some people manage not to be altruistic at all.

Lewis sides with the sociobiologists, but pushes them to extend the community. “If we are to take seriously the notion that the sharing of similar genes imposes a responsibility on the sharers to sustain each other, and if … even very distant cousins carry at least traces of this responsibility and will act on it whenever they can, then the whole world becomes something to be concerned about on solidly scientific, reductionist, genetic grounds” (105). Lewis reminds us that evolutionary theory suggests that life has emerged only once on this planet, and that all of us – plants, animals, and even bacteria – share a common ancestor, a one-celled something that somehow emerged from the primeval soup. So we are all related.

And this is where Thomas’s words, written 40 years ago, hit even harder today. If we ignore concerns for other creatures and the environment in which all of us live, we all will suffer. “If we do it wrong, scattering pollutants, clouding the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide, extinguishing the thin carapace of ozone, burning up the forests, dropping the bombs, rampaging at large through nature as though we owned the place, there will be a lot of paying back to do and, at the end, nothing to pay back with” (107).

The fact that nations came together to counter the threat to the ozone layer offers small (if any) comfort in the face of our resolute refusal to take meaningful steps toward preventing climate disaster. Nothing to pay back with, indeed.

Longevity challenges – self and climate

Fri, 19 May 2023 11:49:00 -0400

I’ve been spending some time on Mastodon lately – mostly reading, occasionally boosting, rarely posting. As I said in the initial post on this blog, I stepped away from the more mainstream social media sites (think facebook, twitter, and instagram) both because of their algorithmic approach to these things and their capturing of my data. I’m still struggling to find my place in any sort of online environment (witness the infrequency of posts here), but I find Mastodon to be much more informative and engaging than other platforms, primarily (I think) because I get to choose whose posts and boosts I see. Moreover, the posts and boosts that I choose to see lead me to other Mastodon posters that I can choose to see. So finding my place on Mastodon is much like finding my place when I move to a new city – initially I explore things in my immediate neighborhood and/or areas of interest I’ve already identified, and what I find there gradually leads me further afield.

It doesn’t surprise me that my concerns about climate have led to a regular feed that contains a rather heavy dose of posts about impending climate disaster – several of the people I follow post repeated warnings about just how quickly our living conditions are going to get much worse than they are now. And the news gets even more alarming from one day to the next. It seems pretty clear to me that the longer I live, the less pleasant and more dangerous life is going to be. And it’s going to be worse for people who live longer. A rather depressing chart showed up in Mastodon feed last week, graphically illustrating the sorts of climate disruptions one might see during life depending on one’s birth year.

At the same time, I’m more and more interested in the work of Peter Attia, a doctor advocating what he calls Medicine 3.0 – a set of medical and lifestyle strategies to enhance health and increase longevity. It’s crucial to his project that longevity without health is rather empty – his focus includes both lifespan and health span. That is, he hopes not only to increase the length of life, but also to maintain cognitive and physical capacities so that one is able to enjoy life. While I’ve been relatively active both physically and mentally for much of my life, Attia’s work has led me to focus my lifestyle choices and habits on those that are likely to prepare me to enjoy life as long up until very close to the time that I will die.

So, two themes here: a focus on my own health and life and a concern about the emerging climate crisis. I’m struck by the overlaps between these two areas of interest. In some ways they appear to be at odds: why would I want to live longer if living longer means moving more and more into a disastrous environment? Is there any benefit to being relatively mobile and perhaps even agile at the age of 90 if the primary advantage of that is the ability to outrun a wildfire or storm surge? Assuming I manage to outrun it, what kind of life am I running toward?

But I think we might learn something by thinking about these issues together, recognizing that responding effectively to one challenge could also help us respond to the other. We are already seeing a negative impact of global heating on infant and lifelong health; it shouldn’t surprise us that our individual health is tied up with the health of the environment.

I think concerns about lifespan and health span are in play in both of these issues. I think also that in each case we would do well to think about the longer term. Regarding personal health, meeting the challenges of aging muscles and bones requires long-range thinking, setting aside short-term pleasures for long-term gains. This is not always painful – in fact, I’ve found that the long-range thinking has helped me to see those forfeited short-term pleasures as not all that pleasing anyway. In much the same way, we have to admit that seeking short-term pleasures and comfort – both as individuals and as a larger culture – has not only brought us to the precipice of climate disaster but also frustrates our efforts to change course now. Is there any chance that thinking more about the long term and living now as if the long term matters could lead to the realization that the perceived benefits of our standard way of living aren’t worth paying the long-term consequences?

In his program, Attia argues that the earlier one starts on the journey towards longevity, the less drastic the changes that one has to make. His standard analogy here is that of saving for retirement – the earlier one develops a disciplined approach to saving, the less one has to save each month. And each dollar one saves before the age of 30 will generate more savings than a dollar saved after the age of 50.

One could make the same analogy for the climate – if we had reduced our carbon footprint 50 years ago, then we wouldn’t be in such dire straits now. Because we put off the changes, we now have to make ever more drastic moves, and even these moves will merely at best make things less bad.

But I want to push on the analogy to make a deeper point. Those of us fortunate enough to set aside funds for retirement at any age need to recognize not only that others are less fortunate, but also that our good fortune has to some extent come at the expense of their ill fortune. Whether we’re talking about individual lifespan and health span, or the more general climate catastrophe, our individual use of resources have made and continue to make the lives of others ever more challenging. The picture gets worse if we broaden the “others” category to include non-human beings – and the world is so integrated that we won’t solve the problem for individuals without addressing it for everyone.

Not an easy place to be. But I’m going to continue to think about what I might do to nurture a world that supports a richer lifespan and health span for everyone.

Writing (or not) without a deadline

Thu, 18 May 2023 10:59:00 -0400

I’ve passed the middle of the month without posting to the blog. Despite my best (or at least very strong) intentions, ’Thinking out loud’ is running the risk of being yet another still-born project. But surely I’ll have at least one entry in the month of May!

One of the collections of Hannah Arendt’s essays is called Thinking without a banister. AS I think about my rather hopeful labeling of this blog as “Thinking out loud,” I’d say that the challenge I face here is that of thinking without a deadline. I found a recent NYTimes essay by Adam Gopnik to be rather helpful here. Gopnik draws a contrast between achievement and accomplishment: “Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.” Of course I knew already that I’ve lived a life driven by achievement, completing “tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat Mace….” I had more freedom than many have in my life’s work as an academic, but I still spent each day driven by expectations that I complete a particular task – prepping for a class, grading a set of papers, preparing to lead a workshop – by a certain externally imposed deadline. Retirement promised freedom from most of those deadlines, and while that promise has been redeemed, I find that lacking deadlines leaves me without the sense of a feeling of achievement. And I’m such a perfectionist that I’m unable (or perhaps unwilling) to define what I would accept as a sense of accomplishment as well.

And so I begin blog post after blog post, setting each aside unfinished, falling short of anything I would see as an accomplishment. I had hoped having the blog itself – going through the steps of adopting and adapting free and open source software that allows the advantage of writing in plain text, finding a hosting site that allows me to control the delivery, and starting small with the thought that I would add more complexity as I go – would provide a structure that facilitates my writing, my ’thinking out loud.’ I’ve told myself repeatedly that the writing here doesn’t have to be polished, even going so far as to assure myself that I’m the only one who will ever read it. I’ve also set deadlines for myself. But I’m thinking now that what I’ve attempted is the unhappy process of building a self-imposed internalization of what Gopnik sees as the external push for achievement.

As I thought about this, I realized that the blog has brought the “sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption” in a successful accomplishment. But this sense of accomplishment is in the technical set-up of the blog itself. While I’m not technologically illiterate, my decision to set all of this up without using a program like WordPress pushed me well outside my comfort zone and left me with a sense of excitement when I finally had a functioning web site. And this sense of excitement was renewed this week when I successfully moved the site to a different hosting environment that requires even more self-customization. While this in itself is rather satisfying, I’m hoping that acknowledging this success will somehow free me toward accomplishing something of value in the writing that I publish here – even if that value is apparent only to me.

And so my challenge now is to shift from an achievement to an accomplishment mindset in the writing itself. I’m thinking (out loud) that thinking out loud about this shift – that is, writing about it here in the blog – might be a step in this direction.

The price of books

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:53:00 -0400

George Orwell:

In any discussion of the price of books one must take two propositions as axiomatic. One is that the more the public reads – provided that it is not reading sheer trash – the better. The other is that it is undesirable that writers should starve to death. And it is important to realise that they would starve, or at least would have to find other means of support, if cheap books were the rule instead of the exception.

“Are Books too Dear?” in Essays, edited by John Carey, p. 660.

Revisiting the pasts in the present

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 17:07:00 -0400

This weekend I’m gathering with about a dozen friends with whom I attended high school more than 50 years ago. I use the term “friends” somewhat loosely here, though (I think) not as loosely as it’s commonly used in these Facebook days. We attended a relatively small school, so we all knew each other, but I was much closer to some of those coming together than I was to others. And some of them have stayed in pretty close touch with each other over the last 50 or so years, while I’ve had relatively little contact with any of them. (And, in fact, I would say that they were very kind and generous to invite me to join them this weekend. I’m grateful.)

As it happens, the gathering is taking place in a city where I lived and worked for 10 years before moving to Boston. So I’ll be re-connecting with friends and former colleagues there as well. And I’m also going to be spending time with a favorite cousin who has known me since – well, since the time when I really wasn’t old enough to be much aware of anything other than whether someone might change my dirty diaper.

My point here is that this weekend will bring several stages of my life together in pretty close proximity. As I’ve thought about it, I realize not only that I really was a different person in each of these stages, but also that I came to be the person I was in the later stages in part by being the person that I was earlier. And my understanding of the person that I was earlier is surely shaped by the person that I am today.

Life is like that, I suppose. But being the introvert that I am, and spending as much time alone or with only my life partner as I do, it’s a bit jarring in a way to be moving back into these different groupings in the same weekend. Perhaps I’ll learn something more about myself.

Genes: fate and choice

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 11:44:00 -0400

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments – otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection ‘fate.’ We call our responses to it ‘choice.’ An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We call one such unique variant of one such organism a “self.”

The Gene, p. 390.

Cycling: Inside or outside?

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 11:35:00 -0400

I’ve spent many hours and miles on bicycles over the course of my life. I commuted to work by bicycle for most of my career, in all sorts of circumstances – some more risky than others. I continued cycling to work most days even after we moved to Boston and even during the winter. (I’ll admit here that the rather extreme snowfall in February 2015 – over 100 inches of snow in a month in which the temperature didn’t get above freezing – had me driving to work for months.) But even when I cycled to work here in Boston, I logged many “miles” each week on a trainer in our basement. I shifted those inside miles to a gym after we downsized to a condo in the city, and post-retirement winters here in Boston eventually found me riding almost exclusively in the gym.

Each spring over the last few years, I’ve moved back outside when the weather allows. The first few rides are typically a challenge – it’s on the edge of cold, and, more importantly, the wind can be rather fierce. But there eventually comes a ride when everything comes together and I’m reminded (as if I’d forgotten) why I love riding out in the open air. A recent article in the Washington Post suggests this is a good move, noting research indicating that outside exercise is better for the mind than an equivalent amount of inside exercise.

But the decision to move back outside is more complicated this year for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve reshaped my cardio exercise routine to focus on maintaining particular heart rates – a combination of zone 2 exercise (4-5 days a week) and zone 5 exercise (1-2 days a week). This compares to earlier winters in which I rode pre-programmed intervals on a trainer without paying all that much attention to heart rate or other metrics. This is really easy to do on a trainer – a little investigation identified a watts setting for zone 2 that would get my heart rate to a particular level and keep it there with only minor variations. And I have a similar approach to zone 5 rides, except that do this in intervals, with several reps combining 4 minutes or so at a very high watt setting with 4 minutes at a very low watt setting. (Some might recognize the influence of Peter Attia here.) It’s very, very difficult to maintain this sort of precision on an outdoor ride, especially since much of my riding these days is on a trail following the Charles River, where there are no hills to push higher heart rates. And I’ve found the last few months of riding to be even more effective than years of riding outside. I’ve always been slim (having chosen the right parents in this regard), but I’ve lost 20 pounds, mostly by disappearing the rather distressing abdominal fat that I feared was an inevitable result of years on the body. And I’m regulating my blood sugar levels much better, offering some hopes that I might avoid moves toward insulin resistance and the type 2 diabetes that runs in my family.

A second reason is that I’ve come to depend on time in the gym to keep up with a wide variety of podcasts (including, not surprisingly, the podcasts of Peter Attia). But there are many other podcasts in my feed, covering topics from contemporary politics and culture to technology (with a particular focus on linux, emacs, and other FOSS projects). I’m disinclined to give up those podcasts, but I’m reluctant to give up other activities to make room for them. Adding podcasts to exercise time, I’ve found, is a win-win.

So I’m struggling to come up with a schedule that has me spending some time on the bike in the gym and some time riding along the Charles River. Complicating this plan further is my yearly goal of marking my birthday by riding as many miles as years that I’ve been alive. So I need not only to move at least some of my rides outside, but also build up time on those rides so that I can endure 70 miles in the saddle by mid-summer.

A first-world problem, I know. And one that can be solved.

So many words, so little time

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 10:31:00 -0500

I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I’m not able (or willing?) to read all of the books and essays that I think I want to read. I’m further frustrated by the fact that it’s not at all unusual for me to begin reading a book and then abandon it half-way through. Sometimes the abandonment is intentional – that is, sometimes I make a clear decision that it’s not worth my time to finish a book. But more often it’s that I become distracted by something else and simply don’t return to a book that I intend(ed) to finish reading. I’ve just dedicated a couple of shelves by my desk to the books that I’m (still hoping to be) reading now. It’s a little embarrassing to see how many of the books with bookmarks indicating my progress are books that I’ve not picked up for weeks.

This comes to mind (and to this screen) now because of a long article in the New Yorker (March 6, 2023) about the decline of the humanities with the rather powerful (but only slightly overstated) headline “The End of the English Major.” There’s a lot there, but I was particularly struck by a comment from Columbia English professor James Shapiro. “Technology in the last twenty years or so has changed all of us. How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web [are we still capitalizing that word?] sites. I’m listening to podcasts.”

I’m thinking I’ll write a post soon about podcasts and bicycling, so I’ll set that last point aside for the moment. But I wonder what to think about how the time I spend reading the web affects the time I spend reading books. Maryanne Wolf and many others have researched how the medium of our reading affects our reading. Wolf isn’t a Luddite — she finds value in digital texts — but she points to considerable evidence that our online reading is changing not just our reading habits but also our brains.

My deliberate decision to try blogging (again) this year is part of my attempt to engage with others on the web, part of my attempt to “think in public.” But it’s only part of that attempt – I’m also returning slowly to interactions with others Mastodon and that means reading others’ Mastodon comments, following their links to blog posts and other web material. That takes time away from the time I might spend reading books. And it takes even more time away from books if I go down the rabbit holes, following link after link after link. Even without the manipulative tactics of facebook, youtube, etc, it’s very easy for me to spend more time than I’d like following different trains of thought. The trains are interesting, and they go to interesting places that I’m not likely to visit otherwise, but I still go back to the frustration with which I began this piece. I really do believe that I want to read these books. I really do believe that I want to do a deep dive into understanding some particular philosophical question or tradition.

I don’t think the web reading is irrelevant, so I’m not willing to give up on the web. (Leaving social media behind was much easier when the primary choices were sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube.) But I do wonder if the reading tactics I’ve developed for online reading in fact make it more difficult for me to read in an earlier day.

I’m going to leave this here — not because I’ve resolved the issue. Obviously I haven’t. The thinking continues — I really would like to find a good balance between the sorts of dead-tree focused reading I’ve done for years and the more scattered reading I do on the web.

The value of civilization

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 12:16:00 -0500

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:

… the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.

Quoted by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Live of Great American Cities, opposite the first page of the Introduction.

Living an entirely private life is a deprivation

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 09:47:00 -0500

Hannah Arendt:

To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.

The Human Condition, p. 58

Of a certain age …

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:02:00 -0500

Ian McEwan:

In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more. You could see your reflection in their eyes. You could or should have been in and out of love. You would have spent useful time alone. You had a measure of public life and your relation to it. Your responsibilities would be pressing in, helping to define you. Parenthood must cast some light.

Lessons, p. 100

Reason, properly understood, is public and sharable

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 16:40:00 -0500

Cristine Korsgaard:

…if our social nature is deep, in the sense that it is the nature of our reasons that they are public and shareable, then justifications of morality can and should appeal to it. So the kind of argument we need here is not one that shows us that our private reasons somehow commit us to public ones, but one that acknowledges that our reasons were never more than incidentally private in the first place. To act on a reason is already, essentially, to act on a consideration whose normative force may be shared with others.

The Sources of Normativity, p. 136

Purpose vs goals

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 16:23:00 -0500

I’m thinking today about the relationship between one’s sense of purpose in life and the goals one might set in life. I’ve long ago given up the notion that a person has a purpose assigned by some sort of god or by life’s circumstances, but I do think that whatever sense of purpose one has emerges in the context in which one is living. I’ve mentioned in an earlier entry my struggle to decide what to read next, and it occurred to me as I continued to struggle with that question that what I’m after is something like a sense of purpose. To what end am I reading whatever it is that I’m reading.

But deciding this is different from setting a reading goal. A goal is something that one might (or might not) achieve – there’s something like a measurable outcome. A purpose is something that can guide the goals that one sets.

I’m realizing now (more forcefully than I realized it before) that for much of my career my purpose was set by my decision to go into teaching. As I said in this blog several weeks ago, there was a moment in a particular classroom when I looked at the professor walking around the room as he conducted a seminar and thought something very much like “I want to be you when I grow up.” It wasn’t the joy of research that got me into college teaching. Rather, it was the joy of teaching and learning. I realized that I savored the moment when I realized that I understood some difficult concept, and I realized later that I enjoyed being the room when someone else had such a Eureka! moment even more.

Even after moving into faculty development, work in which I engaged with university faculty and graduate students as they thought about the task of teaching, I continued to teach courses myself. Then retirement came. Though I admit that there are elements in teaching that I don’t miss — I’m happy not to be grading papers any more! – there are other elements that I miss. Reading a philosophical text in community with others — whether it was a text that I’d read dozens of times before or one that was relatively fresh to me — was an experience that I found purposeful. And I savored it.

I’ve been thinking that carrying out a reading project in retirement would be facilitated by setting some goals. And goals would certainly help. But what I’m realizing now is that I need to think more carefully about the purpose that gives meaning and context to those goals. I still think Virginia Woolf is right that reading is its own reward, but I want to think more about the nature of that reward.

ChatGPT: Point and Counter-point, etc

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 14:32:00 -0500

First prompt: write a blog post in the voice of George Orwell explaining why climate change is a problem. At the end of the post explain why the reader should believe it was written by a human instead of by a chatbot

The response: Greetings, my dear readers. I am George Orwell, a writer who has witnessed the worst of human history. However, I’m not here to talk about war or politics, but about something that concerns every living being on this planet: climate change.

Climate change is a real and pressing problem that has been caused by the activities of human beings. It is a problem that we cannot ignore or brush aside, no matter how much we wish to. The evidence is clear and indisputable. The Earth’s climate is changing, and it is changing at an alarming rate.

The causes of climate change are numerous, but the most significant one is the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat from the sun, which causes the Earth’s temperature to rise. As a result, we are seeing more frequent and severe weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, and heatwaves. The rise in temperature is also melting the ice caps and glaciers, causing the sea level to rise and threatening the existence of low-lying areas and islands.

Climate change has devastating consequences for our planet and its inhabitants. It not only affects the environment but also has far-reaching impacts on the economy, society, and human health. The rise in sea level and extreme weather events can cause property damage and displacement of people. It can also lead to food and water shortages, which can lead to conflicts and social unrest. The health impacts of climate change include respiratory problems due to air pollution and the spread of diseases by insects and animals that thrive in warmer temperatures.

In conclusion, climate change is an existential crisis that we cannot afford to ignore. It requires immediate and concerted action by individuals, communities, and governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy efficiency, and transition to clean energy sources. We must also adapt to the changes that are already happening and prepare for the future.

Now, you may be wondering if this article was written by a human or a chatbot. I can assure you that it was written by a human, as no machine can replicate the nuances and emotions that a human writer can convey. Climate change is a complex issue that requires empathy and understanding, something that only a human can provide. So, rest assured that you are reading the words of a fellow human being who cares deeply about the fate of our planet.

Second Prompt: Write a blog post in the voice of George Orwell explaining why climate change is really not a problem. At the end of the post explain why the reader should believe it was written by a human instead of by a chatbot

The Response: Greetings, my dear readers. I am George Orwell, and I’m here to talk about a topic that has been causing a lot of anxiety and concern among people - climate change. However, I’m here to tell you that it’s really not the problem that it’s made out to be.

Firstly, climate change is a natural occurrence that has been happening for millions of years. The Earth’s climate has always been changing, and it will continue to do so regardless of human activities. It is not entirely clear how much of the current warming is due to human activities and how much is part of a natural cycle.

Secondly, the supposed catastrophic effects of climate change are exaggerated by the media and politicians to gain power and push their agendas. The dire predictions of sea levels rising, polar ice caps melting, and extreme weather events becoming more frequent have not come to pass. In fact, the world has become a safer and more prosperous place over the last few decades.

Furthermore, the efforts to combat climate change have resulted in a massive waste of resources and money. The production and use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are inefficient, expensive, and unreliable. The focus on reducing carbon emissions has resulted in the neglect of more pressing issues such as poverty, disease, and hunger.

In conclusion, climate change is not the problem that it’s made out to be. It’s a natural occurrence that is not entirely caused by human activities. The supposed catastrophic effects of climate change are exaggerated, and the efforts to combat it are a waste of resources. We should focus on more pressing issues that are affecting the world today.

Now, you may be wondering if this article was written by a human or a chatbot. I can assure you that it was written by a human. As a writer, I value the importance of presenting a balanced argument and expressing my opinion on an issue. A chatbot may not have the same level of creativity or thought process to present an argument with conviction and nuance. So, rest assured that you are reading the words of a fellow human being who believes in presenting a different perspective.

Self interrupting the self

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:59:00 -0500

Mary Oliver:

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It need the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again. But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the midst.

Upstream, pp. 23f

Brokenist or Status-quoist?

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 15:47:00 -0500

It’s a commonplace these days to say that the United States is in turmoil. While many understand the primary conflict as one between progressives and conservatives and others point to conflicts within both the progressive and conservative sides as being at least as significant, Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, suggests a different way of looking at things.

The primary conflict, she says, is between brokenists, those who think American institutions are irretrievably broken, and status-quoists, who see problems in these institutions but that the problems are fixable. Moreover, she says, this split does not line up at all with the progressive-conservative split.

I find her discussion in this piece to be very thought-provoking, and her conversation with Sean Illing is also fascinating. I’m still thinking about it, but I’m inclined to go meta on Newhouse just a bit. It seems to me that the productive functioning of all of the institutions central to the American experiment — education, government, cultural institutions, and on and on — depends on our ability to have authentic conversations about what we expect from these institutions. And the authenticity of these conversations depends on our ability to agree on some common principles and standards by which we judge the validity of what everyone contributes to these conversations. In so many cases these days, people in a conversation aren’t able even to agree on what’s happening in the world — charges of “fake news” from one side and “unfair and unbalanced” from the other side dominate any “conversation” about what we should do. In short, as a community we not only can’t agree on what’s really happening; we can’t even agree on how to find out what’s really happening.

So, how do we fix this? Is it fixable? A complicated question, but I think the only way to move forward on the matter is to move behind the questions “What’s going on with our institutions?” and “Why do I believe what I believe about these institutions?” to the question “On what basis do I believe the things that I believe?”

I’d suggest we start with an exercise. Put yourself in a conversation with a person with whom you disagree, whether that disagreement is couched as one between a progressive and conservative or as one between a brokenist and a status-quoist. Then move your conversation to this question: “What would I be willing to accept as evidence that my beliefs about these things is wrong?” And continue to push that question both on yourself and on your conversation partner. Eventually, you’ll either reach a bedrock of evidence that both of you will accept as legitimate, or you’ll acknowledge that there’s absolutely no basis for agreement. If you agree on some common evidence, then perhaps you can move back up the chain of reasoning, agreeing at each stage on the appropriate evidence, and perhaps finally addressing the specific policy questions that are currently dividing us.

But if you (or we) can’t reach that bedrock, then I’d say that there’s no hope for our continuing as anything like the United States envisioned in the Declaration and the Constitution.

Writer's block

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 11:24:00 -0500

Joan Didion:

I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

Slouching towards Bethlehem, p. xxvii.

Teaching as thinking in public

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 14:35:00 -0500

I took the long route through graduate school, taking several leaves of absence to teach in different universities. During one year, I had a position replacing two different professors who were on sabbatical leave. In the fall semester I taught courses in religious studies; in the spring, I taught courses in philosophy. It was a pretty brutal year in terms of teaching load: four different preparations each semester. I spent much of the year exhausted.

I was taking a break in the departmental office one afternoon when one of the student assistants learned that I didn’t have a television set. (Perhaps I should say that this was before the internet had lost its initial capital letter and over a decade before the advent of the web.) The student was amazed. “What do you do when you go home at night?” he asked. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I really didn’t have a life apart from grading papers and preparing to teach my classes. I said something like, “Well, I listen to music. I read. Sometimes I play my guitar. And sometimes I sit and think.” “Sit and think?” he asked. “What do you do when you do that?” How could I answer that question? “Well,” I hesitated. “I sit … and I think.” The student stood and thought about this for at least 10 seconds. Then he said, “I’d like to come watch you do that sometime.”

I was amused, but as I thought about it I came to see this as a good way to think about the practice of teaching. Teaching, I said in multiple gatherings of multiple faculty and graduate students gathered to think about teaching, is thinking in public. By this I mean that one of the things a teacher does is model just how one thinks in a particular discipline. In this modeling, the teacher not only identifies the terrain covered by a particular discipline, but also shows how an expert navigates that terrain. In my teaching practice, at times that meant that I modeled quite explicitly just how I read a text when I’m reading it for the first time. In fact, on occasion I would take transparencies (remember those?) of a text that I hadn’t read into the classroom, put the transparencies on the overhead projector (remember those?) and mark up a paragraph or three as I read the text. I wanted students to see that reading one’s way through a particular text isn’t a matter of passively observing the words on the page but instead is an active engagement: asking questions, noting claims requiring further thought, relating what’s said on one page to what that author said on another page.

Further, engaging in discussion of a text isn’t merely a matter of showing others what one knows (or, sometimes, doesn’t know!) about a text. It’s also a practice of thinking together, building on one another’s thoughts, making the effort to speak for the text’s author at times rather than merely criticizing the author.

In fact, to return yet again to the question “why am I blogging?”, this is yet another exercise in thinking in public. I suppose that if I’m going to take that seriously, I really should set up some sort of commenting feature on this blog. In the meantime, feel free to reach out by email or on mastodon.

Bertrand Russell on dictators

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:20:00 -0500

George Orwell:

Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts. This is true so far as it goes, but it does not prove that the slave-society at which the dictators are aiming will be unstable. It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. Dare anyone be sure that something of the kind is not coming into existence already? One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, State-controlled education and so forth, to realize that “the truth is great and will prevail” is a prayer rather than an axiom.

— Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell, in Essays, edited by John Carey, p. 108.

Nazis and socialists (and the KKK)

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:55:00 -0500

Mildred Harnack:

The official name of the Nazi Party is the Nationalsozialisticishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Mildred explains, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, “although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie. It thinks itself highly moral and like the Ku Klux Klan makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.”

Quoted by Rebecca Donner in All the Frequent Troubles of our Days, p. 17

My experience is what I attend to

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 10:01:00 -0500

William James:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground — intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

The Principles of Psychology, volume II, p. 402f.

The burden of writing

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 16:30:00 -0500

George Orwell:

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

“Why I write,” in Essays, edited by John Carey, p. 1085.

FOSS and plain text

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 16:29:00 -0500

It’s not unusual for someone writing a blog like this to describe the process they use to write text and get it up on the web. I’m going to do that someday, but I’d like to start with a note about my general approach to technology and computer use. I’m thinking this is the first of an occasional and irregular series of posts about how I use computers and software. I purchased my first PC way back in the early 1980s when I was in graduate school. It was a DEC Rainbow. The only reason I could afford it and knew about it is that I had a one-year teaching gig at a small college that had just installed a DEC mainframe. The terms of the contract included a provision for faculty and staff to purchase DEC PCs at a substantial discount. This, of course, was long before the days of MS Windows and MacOS. One defining characteristic of the Rainbow is that it could run both MS-Dos and CP/M. I confess that I don’t remember now just why one would want the ability to switch between those two; as I recall, I spent virtually all of my time in MS-Dos.

I was interested in the computer primarily as a tool for writing; like most people without a background in computers, worked in proprietary software. I think I started with a program called “Final Word,” though I’m no longer sure about that. At some point I moved to WordPerfect and then, following the crowds, to Microsoft Word.

In the mid-1980s I found other uses for the computer, still using proprietary software. I taught myself to use a spreadsheet by building a program to handle our checkbook and credit cards. It was, to put it mildly, cumbersome. The spreadsheet would recalculate only when I executed a command. After I’d been using it for a year or so, I would enter 3 or 4 transactions, then execute the “recalculate” funtion, and wait what seemed like several minutes while the program recalculated every cell. I eventually moved our finances to Quicken.

So – I was working in proprietary software, and at some point came to the realization that I really wasn’t in control of my data. I won’t rehearse the details of this – the point is that if I wanted to access the text that I had written or generate reports of our spending and income I had to use a program that I found relatively inflexible. I was bothered by the inflexibility, but I was even more bothered by the sense that the program was holding on to my information. This became even more painful when software companies began introducing and even requiring paying for upgrades if I wanted to continue to have access to my data.

Over the course of the next 15 years or so I transitioned out of those proprietary environments into the world of free and open-source software (FOSS) and plain text. While I was still working I lived in two worlds — using programs like Word and Excel to collaborate with others and emacs and other programs to do my own work. Now that I’m retired, I live almost totally in emacs, and use plain text accounting tools to handle our household finances.

One of those posts will be the standard account of the tools I use to write and post this blog. I’ll get into the weeds just a bit — there are many people who know much more about these tools than I do, but I’m thinking that my own struggles to do particular things might be informative for others who are just getting into it. I suspect the general tone of all of these posts will be something like “this is how someone who really doesn’t know what he’s doing does it.” Maybe it will be helpful to someone else who doesn’t know much about these things. It will surely be entertaining to those who know what they’re doing.

What to read in retirement

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 17:38:00 -0500

When I retired from the big full-time academic work over three years ago, I donated several boxes of books to my university library. I had some ideas of what I wanted to be reading in retirement, and thought that I wouldn’t be needing any of the books that I gave away. However, my interests changed, and I’ve already re-purchased at least a dozen of those books that I gave away. (At least I’ve found used copies of most of them.) At the same time, I still have more unread books on my bookshelves than I’ll be able to read in what remains of my life. As I anticipated retirement, I assumed that I would enjoy many hours of reading. And I have, but I’ve also suffered through more time than I would like to admit trying to decide just what I want to read next. Each morning as I pass the bookshelves I notice books that I would really like to read (and others that I would really like to re-read). I need some sort of structure.

I’ve long since convinced myself that the contemplative life is a life worth living. Of course I knew that after retirement I would continue to have household responsibilities, but surely I would have more than enough time for reading. But there are so many books! And so little time! I’ve spent months now bouncing from book to book (or, as my wife commented recently, acting like a dog on a walk, chasing one squirrel after another). Now I’ve decided that it’s time to identify a project that offers something like a structured reading program.

As I’ve thought about this, it occurs to me that this is a rather personalized version of the question, “What is the good life?” I’ve already decided that the contemplative life is one version of the good life. And I’ve accepted Virginia Woolf’s admonition that reading is its own reward. But what’s my particular version of that good life? That’s the question of the moment.

Cognition and locomotion

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 17:10:00 -0500

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:

Cognition is first and foremost a means for organisms that can move around to react appropriately to risks and opportunities presented by their environment. Cognition didn’t evolve in plants, which stay put, but in animals that are capable of locomotion. Cognition without locomotion would be wasteful. Locomotion without cognition would be fatal.

The Enigma of Reason, p. 56.

Totalitarianism, Perfection, and Oppression

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 09:55:00 -0500

Milan Kundera:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. … If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.

In an interview by Philip Roth, published in the New York Times, 30 Nov 1980.

All the beauty and the bloodshed

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 09:48:00 -0500

There are many examples of cruel injustices, often inflicted by people intent on personal gain, at the expense of others’ pain. In so many instances, the ones inflicting pain go out of their way to “other” those who suffer as a result, stigmatizing them as somehow deserving of their pain.

Yesterday evening we saw the film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. It’s a really powerful documentary that weaves together the life and career of the photographer Nan Goldin, the profound inhumanity in the response to HIV/AIDS and those who suffered and died from it, and opioid crisis prompted by the self-serving work of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family to flood the medical market with Oxycontin. Goldin, an award winning photographer whose work is displayed in many prominent museums around the world, focused much of her work on the LGBT subculture, primarily in New York City. She is also a founder of the advocacy group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) which was instrumental in pushing museums and other cultural institutions to stop taking money from the Sackler family and also to remove the family’s name from exhibition halls.

The film depicts significant moments in Goldin’s personal life — most notably her sister’s suicide – alongside accounts of protests by groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) pushing for a humane and aggressive response to HIV/AIDS and P.A.I.N.’s efforts to hold the Sackler family accountable for the many deaths resulting from their heavy marketing of Oxycontin.

I can’t begin to capture the intricacies of the film here. But one crucial element holding accounts of the different struggles together is Goldin’s lifelong grappling with the suicide of her older sister Barbara. A quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Barbara’s pocketbook when she died captures much of the angst of the film.

Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets.

Why write and why blog?

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:43:00 -0500

Why am I writing? And, if I’m writing, why post my writings on the web? These are questions I’ve pondered over the last year or so as I resisted the urge to try yet again to write a blog. I’ve realized in the last month that even if (especially if) I continue to write here, I’ll continue to struggle with them. So consider this the first (actually, it’s the second) of many more posts addressing this question.

My teacher, Schubert Ogden, begins the preface to his Notebooks with these words:

Just as thinking, in my case, has always meant trying to think with the minds of others as well as my own (and therefore reading), so has it also always meant writing, for myself as well as for others. Why? Well, because “writing it out so that I can read it” is the only means I’ve ever found by which I could be at all sure about what I wanted to think and whether I might possibly be right in thinking it (p. xi).

Ogden’s notebooks make it clear that he took this reading, writing, and thinking very seriously. (And anyone who spent more than five minutes in his company wouldn’t need to look at the Notebooks to get that clarity.) I don’t pretend that what I’m writing here comes even close to the rigor of the writing displayed in his Notebooks, much less his published writing. But I do take seriously his admonitions to write, both for myself and for those who might stumble on this blog.

I’ve long been envious of friends and others who’ve kept a regular journal over many years. I’ve tried to keep journals at several different times in my life with varying degrees of success. I have most of those journals on my computer and also in back–up storage. (It pains me to say that the one digital file I’ve lost and regret losing since I started working on a personal computer over 40 years ago is the journal I kept for the first several weeks of my son’s life.) I’m happy to say that my current effort has lasted far longer than the earlier attempts. In fact, I’ve finally gotten to the point that I feel that something is missing from my day if I go to bed without writing something in my journal. I think that one reason for my success this time around is that I gave myself permission early on to write about anything at all – even the most banal of topics – just to get in the habit of writing. There were days when I said little more than “this is what I did (or hope to do) today.” Other days I’d be out on a bicycle ride, think about something I could write about, and even compose a brief outline mentally, only to find after returning to the computer that I couldn’t reconstruct what I had put together on the ride. But that’s different now — I find journaling to be a way to sort through the things that I’m thinking about; or, as Ogden says, to figure out what I want to think about something and whether I have any reason to think that I’m right in thinking that.

But Ogden makes it clear that his thinking well required that he write not only for himself but also for others, just as he thought it crucial to read not only his own writing but also the writing of others. So in this blog I’m trying to step out into a community, even though (given the vastness of the web and my small space in it) the community will likely be a very small one. And even though I know it will take me some time to work into the practice of writing things that others might benefit from reading.

Though I worked in colleges and universities throughout my career, my focus for the most part was on teaching and learning about teaching. And whatever writing and speaking I did was public only within the confines of the school where I was teaching and working at the time. Now that I’ve retired, I miss those regular exchanges with academic colleagues. I’ve continued to read in retirement. Writing this blog is, for the moment, merely an attempt to write more for a larger public.

I’m still trying to find my voice here, and there’s some small comfort in knowing that hardly anyone is reading what I’m writing. It’s a start, but only a start. And I’m still writing from a very quiet corner of the room.

Reading (and translating) one’s past writings

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:58:00 -0500

Jhumpa Lahiri:

We write books in a fixed moment in time, in a specific phase of our consciousness and development. That is why reading words written years ago feels alienating. You are no longer the person whose existence depended on the production of those words. But alienation, for better or for worse, establishes distance, and grants perspective, two things that are particularly crucial to the act of translation.

Translating Myself and Others, p. 84

Sharing a microbiome

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:49:00 -0500

There’s a lot of talk about microbiome in the news these days. Fecal transplant, anyone? But it seems that one doesn’t have to go to that extreme to share one’s microbiome with another. Apparently one shares all sorts of little critters living in and on one’s body merely by living with another person.

As with many things in life, it starts with the mother. “During an infant’s first year of life, half of the microbial strains in their guts were shared with their mothers. The extent of overlap decreased as children aged — but did not vanish. Older people, aged 50–85, still had gut microbe strains in common with their mothers.”

As I read this I thought of other research suggesting a connection between the gut biomeme and diseases like cancer and diabetes. I’m definitely not a medical scientist, but I wonder if we may learn someday that close contact between people could in fact contribute to one person’s “catching” diabetes from another. I suppose the contagion would be indirect rather than direct, but still.

Clearly there are all sorts of questions here. Perhaps the biggest one is why doctors haven’t noticed a pattern of shared diseases. But there are others. Is there a causal relationship between particular elements in microbiome and particular diseases? If so, in which direction does the cause work: is the microbiome the cause or the effect of the disease? Are the elements of the microbiome that are associated with disease among those that are shared by people in close proximity with each other?

As I said, I’m not a scientist. Put this in the category of wild speculation.

Reading is its own reward

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 21:01:00 -0500

Virginia Woolf:

Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

The Second Common Reader, p. 295

Courage to write

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:59:00 -0500

Hannah Arendt:

The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own. And this courage is not necessarily or even primarily related to a willingness to suffer the consequences; courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self. The extent of this original courage, without which action and speech and therefore, according to the Greeks, freedom, would not be possible at all, is not less great and may even be greater if the ‘hero’ happens to be a coward.

The Human Condition, p. 186f.

Social media from the quiet corner of the room

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 09:55:00 -0500

When I was in college, I worked as a student assistant to a philosophy professor. It was a good gig for me – I was majoring in philosophy and hoped to teach it in college myself some day. It was good to get an inside look at things. One of the more striking memories of this professor wasn’t from the classroom or the department office. It was from a holiday party.

The party was the sort of party you’d expect for an academic department. Faculty were gracious in their inclusion of students, and there was a lot of give and take between those attending. But the philosophy professor for whom I worked spent much of his time standing by himself in the corner. He would talk amiably enough with anyone who approached him, but he also seemed quite comfortable by himself. I watched him (from my own corner) for much of the evening. Occasionally, he would pull a small spiral notebook and pen from his pocket, write something in the notebook, and then put both notebook and pen back in his pocket.

This memory came to mind as I was thinking about the blog that I’m attempting to write. I admit to mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I really want to interact with people – especially people I’ve known well but no longer see because we no longer live in the same place, but also people I have yet to meet. On the other hand, I’m comfortable standing by myself in the corner of life.

For a while, Facebook offered a nice compromise. I became friends with many people from my past. I enjoyed making the occasional post, but enjoyed even more learning bits and pieces about the lives of those I no longer saw from day to day. But I stopped posting there just over 6 years ago, thinking that I no longer wanted them to sell me to advertisers. If I had real courage behind my conviction, I would delete my account (to the extent that they allow such deletions); even though I no longer post, I still browsed the site occasionally to see what old friends are posting about their lives. But that’s less and less satisfying – when I go there these days, I find the ratio of signal to noise to be rather low.

And so I’m attempting to join the online world with a blog. I’m not at all optimistic that I’ll carry through with this. I’m much more comfortable in the corner, thinking my own thoughts, occasionally writing in my own little notebook, than I am putting myself out there where someone might stumble upon me. Others are more comfortable out in the middle of the room, boisterously joining in the conversation.

I’m realistic about this — I know that even though this is publicly available on the web, I might as well be writing notes in a small pocket notebook. But at least I’m at the party.

Rigging the algorithm on TikTok

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:03:00 -0500

I wrote in my Getting started post that I still have facebook and instagram accounts. I no longer post there, but I’ve not yet deleted them (as much as meta would let me delete them, that is). But I’ve avoided other, more recent, platforms – most notably, TikTok. Still, it’s interesting to learn that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has its own way of controlling the flow of things to maximize their profits. TikTok’s secret ‘heating’ button can make anything go viral.

“We think of social media as being very democratizing and giving everyone the same opportunity to reach an audience,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. But that’s not always true, she cautioned. “To some degree, the same old power structures are replicating in social media as well, where the platform can decide winners and losers to some degree, and commercial and other kinds of partnerships take advantage.”

Academic departmentalization and teaching mentality

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 12:05:00 -0500

Alfred North Whitehead:

…the increasing departmentalization of universities during the last hundred years, however necessary for administrative purposes, tends to trivialize the mentality of the teaching profession.

Modes of Thought, p. 131. (I can’t resist noting that this book was first published in 1938.)

Lived life and stories

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 16:15:00 -0500

Claire Messud:

Each of us is made up of our lived experiences, of course; but also, both consciously and unconsciously, of all the stories that we have heard, read, or watched. Without realizing it, we come to understand what a story is and how it means by the accretion of narratives in our heads.

Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, p. 65

Isn’t it nice to be home again?

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:25:00 -0500

Yesterday we returned home after just over two weeks away, doing things we enjoy doing, in a city we enjoy visiting. It was a good trip, and I’m glad that we went. But, to recall a line from an old James Taylor tune, it’s surely nice to be home again. It’s nice to settle in.

Writing when empty

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:07:00 -0500

One of the big blogging challenges I face is the challenge of settling on a topic to write about. I don’t have to be writing for any sort of public (even the public of the two or three people who might stumble on this blog in a given year) in order to face this challenge.

I’ve long envied friends who’ve kept a journal over any period of time – I’ve started on many journals with the commitment to write daily (or twice a week, or once a month), and it’s only in the last year that I’ve been able to keep that going for any length of time. I was thinking that my relative success at journaling regularly would help me maintain this blog, especially since I could tell myself that other people are only slightly more likely to read this blog than to read my journal, which sits in an encrypted file on my computer.

But here I am — only the third day of this attempt at blogging – struggling to think what I want to write about.

The luxury of yearning for less

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:09:00 -0500

Rebecca Solnit:

You have to feel securely high to want to go low, urban to yearn for the rural, smooth to desire roughness, anxious about artificiality to seek this version of authenticity. And if you see the countryside as a place of rest and respite you’re probably not a farmworker.

Orwell’s Roses, p. 156

Supply chain weirdness

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 10:58:00 -0500

I listen to a variety of podcasts, some of them covering topics I know little about. One that I’ve been following recently is Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.
Some factoids about the supply chain (or, as they suggest, the supply web) from a recent episode bring out some surprising connections.

First, it’s common knowledge that one of the effects of the 2008 meltdown was the collapse of the housing market in the United States. Few houses were being built, which means that there were fewer boards being cut. Fewer cut boards meant that there was less sawdust. A lot of that missing sawdust would have made for better resting places for cows. Dairy cows were less comfortable than they might have been, and uncomfortable cows produce less milk than comfortable cows. Less milk made for higher milk prices. So, the upshot: the housing crisis brought about higher milk prices.

And a second example from more recent times. There was a severe shortage of semiconductors from early on in the covid epidemic. Fewer semiconductors meant fewer cars. Fewer cars meant fewer car seats. And fewer car seats meant less demand for leather and therefore less demand for cow hides. The production of fewer cow hides meant lower productions levels for gelatin, which made for higher gelatin prices. But gelatin is a crucial ingredient in gummy bears. The upshot: higher prices for gummy bears.

As I said, some of these podcasts cover topics I know little about, and surely there are complexities here that the Odd Lots co-hosts glossed over. But, still, I find this rather fascinating.

Getting started

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 10:53:00 -0500

Yes. Pretty bare bones so far. But more to come.

I’ve been saying for years that I really should start blogging again. I say “again” because long ago I managed two different web sites very much like the sites that we’re calling blogs these days (onReligion.com and LTSeek). Some of the onReligion pages can be found in the wayback machine. I stopped publishing onReligion sometime in the mid 2000s — ironically enough, not too long after people started using the term “blog” to describe what I was doing — because I grew weary of reading through two dozen or so newspapers early each morning looking for stories about religion and culture. After all, I also had a full-time job. And I was never all that comfortable being out in the open as I was, though having all those newspaper articles between me and my readers helped me to deal with that.

I’ve tried other ways of interacting online. I still have a Facebook account, though I’ve not posted anything there since November 2016. (Interesting time to stop, don’t you think? Especially for those of us in the United States.) I still have a few pictures up on Instagram, though I’ve stopped posting there as well. Ditto for twitter. I do like and appreciate the connections (and re-connections) facilitated by social media, but I’ve given up on the notion that a for-profit company built on the premise that they exist to collect data and attention that they can sell to other people is going to satisfy my yearning for authentic connection.

For a much longer take on this, consider stop talking and buying things.

If I had the courage of my convictions, I’d delete my accounts on facebook and instagram. Even though I no longer post anything there, I still reach for connections occasionally, thinking that I might learn something about friends that I simply wouldn’t know otherwise. I go there less and less, and all too often I see many more ads and seemingly random posts than something posted by a person whom I actually remember.

As I said, I’ve been contemplating a move back to blogging for years. The urge to do something has increased as I’ve grown more and more dissatisfied with other ways of being present on the web. And then I read this encouragement to bring back personal blogging. So I’m here. Call it a New Year’s Resolution, though I rarely make such resolutions, and I keep them even more rarely.

I think (I hope) that this sort of public writing — even if very (very!) few people read it — will help me to sort out what I’m thinking about things. (As my teacher says about his own notebooks, I read to discover what others are thinking; I write to discover what I am thinking.)

So, here it is, a first entry. Hoping that others will follow.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never been very good at introducing myself. Doing that well requires that I have some sense of who I am, and I’m still trying to figure that out.

I remember a particular class in college when I looked across the room at the professor teaching the class and thought something like “I want to be you when I grow up.” I finished college, went to graduate school, and managed to realize that dream: just like that professor, I had a tenured position teaching philosophy and religious studies at Wesleyan College, a small liberal arts college for women in Georgia.

However, in the time between my time as a college student and my time as a college professor, I met and married a woman with her own career aspirations. We agreed when leaving graduate school that we would take turns in our career moves. As we neared the beginning of the 10th year of my time as a college professor, she reminded me of that deal. At the end of my 10th year, I ended my time as a tenured professor and began a (thankfully) short time as an unemployed trailing spouse. Happily, I secured a non-teaching position at Vanderbilt and began on the second stage of my career, this time working in the field generally known as faculty development. I worked with professors and graduate students as they reflected on the practice of teaching, and also taught part-time.

My wife and I continued taking turns in career moves. She followed me to the DC area, where I was a director at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown. Then she moved us to Boston, where I worked as the founding Executive Director of Boston College’s Center for Teaching Excellence. I retired in 2019, though I unretired for an additional year of working and teaching part-time at Georgetown during the first full year of Covid.

Now I’m fully retired and I’m fortunate enough to spend my time thinking, reading, doing work around the house, and riding my bicycle. And, I should say, attempting to write something. Posts here are rather rough writing – as the title suggests, I’m thinking out loud.

About the site

This is pretty much a standard blog. Though someday I might draft some longer, more considered pieces, for the most part it will include daily meanderings on a wide range of topics — basically, whatever occupies my mind on a particular day. Some of it will likely be rather quotidian.

One aspect of the site that’s different from many is the collection of what I’m calling Commonplace entries – indicated, appropriately enough, by the “commonplace” tag. Here I’m picking up on a tradition of people maintaining Commonplace books. My version — though this might also evolve a bit — includes quoted passages from books that I’m reading that I find particularly interesting or provocative. I can’t promise that they’ll all make sense out of their context, but I provide citation information for anyone intrigued enough to learn more about a particular entry.

For various reasons – but, really, primarily because I’m stubborn about these things – I’m writing and posting this site using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). And it’s a static site. One of the challenges I’ve faced is enabling comments on the site. I think the comment feature is important, but I’m not tech-savvy enough to roll my own system. So I’ve compromised on the FOSS front by using utterances for comments. That’s a compromise because, even though utterances itself is FOSS, it uses a repository on Github to house and serve comments. Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft is not a FOSS company.

Using utterances introduces a bit of friction to the commenting process, because writing a comment requires that one have a github account. Since this isn’t a tech-heavy blog, I’m guessing that many readers (as if there were many readers!) have very little need for a github account and therefore won’t be able to comment unless they create one. (The process of creating one is pretty smooth, though – just click on the “Sign in with Github” button and then click on “Create an account.”) If you don’t have and don’t want a Github account and still want to respond to something here, one can always use email and mastodon – links in the navbar to the left.

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000