Posts

• Mon, Jan 1, 0001
• 229-minute read

Getting started {#Getting started}

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.

Supply chain weirdness economics {#Supply chain weirdness}

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.

Writing when empty {#Writing when empty}

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.

Isn’t it nice to be home again? {#home again}

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.

Rigging the algorithm on TikTok

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.”

Social media from the quiet corner of the room {#From the quiet corner}

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.

Sharing a microbiome

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.

Why write and why blog?

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.

All the beauty and the bloodshed

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.

What to read in retirement reading

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.

Software software

FOSS and plain text

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.

Dictators, propaganda, and the truth

It’s not at all unusual these days for people on any side of any political debate to compare their opponents to Nazis or fascists or socialists in the past. The usual point of such comparisons is to denigrate one’s political opponents. I would say that, while people are often too quick to jump to the conclusion that some political movement is Nazism or socialism or Stalinism reborn, it’s very hard not to see some similarities across the years.

I was struck by this last summer while touring an exhibit at the Historisches Museum Frankfurt, showing how in just a few years in the 1920s and 1930s Frankfurt changed from a thriving liberal community with one of the largest Jewish populations in Germany to a city largely supportive of Nazism. Apparently one way in which Nazis gained power and acceptance even when they were a relatively small group in Frankfurt was by making strong efforts to appear larger than they were: bringing all of their members together in groups, clearly identifying themselves with clothing. The point was that even a relatively small group of people could appear to be a significant element if they had a visible and explicit presence in a community event. And if they could flood public media with their perspective, whether by taking over radio stations or by blanketing a city street with posters and banners, all the better.

And I was struck by this again recently while reading George Orwell’s review of a book by Bertrand Russell. I’ve posted a brief snippet from this review as a commonplace. Consider a comparison between the MAGA use of social media and other methods to pitch the disproven claims of vast election fraud, on the one hand, and Orwell’s “sinister radio,” on the other. Or between Ron DeSantis’s move to reform Florida education in general and New College of Florida in particular, on the one hand, and Orwell’s “State-controlled education,” on the other.

I know that some would say that MAGA and DeSantis are in fact bringing truth and legitimacy to our culture, replacing “the deep state” with appropriate structures responsive to real and valid concerns of The American People™. But I would like to see an open exchange between representatives of MAGA/DeSantis and those who see real danger in what MAGA/DeSantis are doing in which each side would say clearly and explicitly what it would take for them to be convinced that their position is wrong. Could they possibly reach a point of agreement on the standards by which they would judge the appropriateness of a political or cultural position? My own sense – from my own bubble – is that the standard most often adopted by many who support such efforts by MAGA or DeSantis is simply the MAGA/DeSantis standard itself: It’s appropriate because it supports my position.

The Luddite Movement

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smartphones.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

Thoughts –

• habitual reaching for phone in my pocket
• Center for Humane Technology – we shouldn’t expect to get things like this right the first time
• Logan Lane “i feel smarter”
• Logan’s appreciation for those who make the effort to “show up”

Teaching as thinking in public

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.

An introvert on Mastodon

• On Facebook for a while; I posted some, but primarily photographs
• pushed myself to post photos on Instagram and smugmug, and was fairly regular
• trying to blog
• but, still, when to comment? when to post? How to decide what’s worth posting

Brokenist or Status-quoist?

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.

ChatGPT: Point and Counter-point, etc

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.

Purpose vs goals

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.

So many words, so little time reading

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.

Cycling: Inside or outside?

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.

Revisiting the pasts in the present

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.

Writing (or not) without a deadline

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.

Longevity challenges – self and climate

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.

Lewis Thomas on Altruism

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.

Random thoughts while reading Elisa Gabbert

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.

Looking for hope wherever I might find it

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.

Why is it so hard for us to change course?

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.

Living in the current crisis

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.

Smells of the past

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.

On turning 70

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.

Respecting tradition at the Holocaust Museum

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.

Making a reading plan reading

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.

Confronting again the question why do I blog

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 teh 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.

Paint another Starry Night, man….

On a live album, Joni Mitchell, as she listened to fans in the audience shout out song requests, offered some reflections on the difference between the art of painting and the art of music. She said, for example, van Gogh painted Starry Night and set it aside. No one watching work or encountering him on the street said (paraphrasing from memory here) “paint another Starry Night, man!” (Not that it matters, but there actually is another painting, also by Van Gogh, commonly known as Starry Night Over the Rhône. Perhaps it’s relevant that van Gogh did this one before doing the more famous one.)

I remembered this when I read this comment by Mary McCarthy:

… reproductions of works of art (Van Gogh) mass-produced and mass-hung do destroy them. By sheer multiplication – if you see what I mean. Multiplication destroys them as one-and-indivisible. Yet this does not seem to happen with music (records) and obviously not with books. Jim [West, McCarthy’s husband] points out … that a musical composition does not have durability (in the sense of a statue or painting) except through repetition; this is also true of a novel, though somewhat differently, since a text does not require performance. But if it needs repetition to achieve durability, the repetition cannot damage it (Between Friends, p. 86).

Say more about this:

• current suit (internet archive) and general publishing tendency to control circulation of digital texts
• somethign about the “performance” of a novel as one reads it

It takes as long as it takes

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.

The fuzzy line between fiction and non-fiction

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?

Reading Plan: September through November 2023 reading

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

There’s reading, and then there’s reading reading

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.

Marking life’s passages

Shortly before our (only) son was born, my wife and I discovered a book called What to Expect when your’re Expecting. We weren’t the only ones to discover that book – it was quite the rage among parents at that time. And evidently it continues to have an audience. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s now a What to expect website. In any case, we found the book very helpful for all sorts of reasons, perhaps most importantly because it helped us to have the sense that “we could do this.” (I, at least, still struggle to find such reassurance and I’m happy to take it wherever and however I can get it.)

The first book was followed by a series of others – What to Expect in the First Year and so on. I decided that we were very fortunate that our son was born when he was, because it seems that the authors were ready with their next book of advice just as were entering the relevant period of our son’s life. (I won’t take the time to verify this now, but somehow I got the idea that the books’ authors must have had children only a couple of years before our son was born, so their interest in particular questions ran slightly ahead of ours.)

So much of what we learned from those books related somehow to the “firsts” – the first sonogram images that were rather indistinct, at least to our untrained eyes. The first kick in my wife’s belly. Later, the first poop. The first solid food. The first steps. And on and on. Each of these firsts promised exciting and sometimes unsettling times. We enjoyed all of them, though in some cases that “enjoyment” was in the catechestric sense . of the term. (I’m thinking here of a usage example I remember reading in the OED: “my aunt is currently enjoying poor health.”) So, some pleasurable enjoyment and some not so pleasurable. But on the whole a wonderful experience that continues to be wonderful.

The What to Expect books carved the chronology of development into discrete chunks.In some cases , the move from one developmental chunk to the next was marked by one of those firsts. (For example, I still remember the difference in diaper contents after the introduction of solid food!) But the lines dividing one chunk from the next in many instances were increasingly fuzzy as we moved on, and we (my wife, our son, and I) weren’t always ready to move from one stage to the next at the same time. Wise advice from one of our friends, herself a parent with more years in the game: “You’ll finally figure out just how to deal with a three-year-old just when your child is turning four.” Indeed.

As I think about it, I see that life can be seen as a series of firsts. Early on, the firsts are clumped close together, and get spread out more as we grow older. I think there are precious few firsts in my life these days.

I’m thinking of these firsts and of passages of time more these days. I’ve been reading May Sarton recently, and I’m struck by how in her published journals she tried to capture particular moments in her life. Such an approach is explicit in several of her book titles (At Seventy: A Journal; Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year, and At Eighty-Two). But other journals with different sorts of titles are tied to specific times in her life, in two cases associated with her living in a particular house and town.

But my thinking about firsts and about life’s changes is inspired by other things as well. A dear friend of many years, now living in a city distant from mine, is struggling with profound heart problems. We’re arranging a visit, and the friend observed that this is likely the last time we will see each other. Of course, any such visit could turn out to be the last visit, but it’s still strikingly different to know going in that it’s very likely to be the last one. What will we talk about? Will we find ways to express the appreciation for each other that we typically leave unexpressed, or at least under-expressed?

I anticipate other “lasts” as well – something as mundane as the last bicycle ride, or the last text I read. Long ago, I learned from Whitehead that it makes sense to think of myself as actually a series of selves (he used the term “personal society”), each creatively bringing together the preceding self with experiences of the world around it. “The many become one, and then there is one more.” In that understanding, I acknowledge that I am in fact dying in each moment, contributing myself to the selves that follow.

• the last bike ride
• the last book read
• the last thought recorded in written text
• Early passages (a la What to Expect) marked passages in which we anticipate and prepare for the future. These later passages prompt the treasuring of the past, a past that shaped who we are today.
• The anticipation of the future shapes we are today, and the past shapes who we are today.

Remembering Joe Stamey

(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.

Finding a writing topic

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.

From the TBR pile to the NTBR pile reading

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.

More thoughts about the NTBR pile

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 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.

Culture, the world, and fictive constructions

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.

A perspective on the moment

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.

Where do we go when we retire?

I retired over four years ago; my wife plans to retire a bit over two years from now. 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.

Will you join me at the ActivityPub?

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.

Reading inspiration and inspiring reading

Last spring I stumbled on the 2023 Books of Summer challenge. I took on that challenge, not only because I had the sense that I wanted to add a bit more structure to my reading life, but also because, like the woman who first issued the challenge, I was embarrassed by the number of unread books sitting on my shelves – many of them books that I really did want to read. So I spent some time putting the list of books together and then read most of those books over the next three months. I say “most of” because I gave myself the freedom to make a couple changes in the list, and there’s a story there about how my reading decisions change.

One of the books on the list was by May Sarton, an author whose work I’d not read. In fact, I knew very little about her other than the fact that she was a poet. But Maria Popova suggested that Sarton offered some insights into solitude that intrigued me. So I added The House by the Sea to the list. I was looking for a copy in a used bookstore. The store didn’t have that book, but it had another of Sarton’s books, a signed first edition. The book had a letter printed on stationery with a London address printed at the top, and was signed by a woman named Julia.

A bit of investigation revealed that the letter was from Juliette Huxley to Evelyn (Evie) Ames

Cars and the trolley problem

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.

Chance meetings and the forming of an identity

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.

Too many details, not enough story

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.

Living without a home

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.

Remembering my mother

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.

The power of conversation (and hope)

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.

Reading Arendt and Solnit

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.

Note to self: Topics and themes to think about

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.

Political parties and polarization

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:

1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
2. A political party is an organization designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
3. 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.

Proton, Privacy, and non-profits

A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked how he might get a throw-away email address that he could use to sign up for a web service without opening himself up to receiving all sorts of emails he didn’t want to receive. I was happy to tell him about Proton. Last year, I finally gave up on attempting to self-host my email accounts. (I know that some people do that successfully, but those people are far more tech-savvy and/or have more time to devote to trouble-shooting than I do.) I did not want to use gmail because I didn’t want to pay for “free” email with data drawn from my email messages that then is used to market me to other companies. In fact, I’d already made the decision to pay Kagi to small amounts of cash (instead of larger amounts of personal data) for things to search the web. As I investigated the possibilities for email service, Proton seemed like an obvious choice. I dipped my toe in their waters first with a free account, but after a couple of weeks I went all in, signing up for Proton Unlimited, which comes with multiple high-speed VPN connections and ample encrypted cloud storage, in addition to up to 15 dedicated email addresses on up to three different custom domains. I also get up to 25 different calendars, but that seems like overkill in my retired status. (I hardly need one calendar. As I often tell people, week-ends no longer exist for me.)

Of course, he wasn’t asking for all that. I recommended Proton to him because they offer what they call email aliases. When signing up for a web service, Proton will hide your real email address by creating another email address that stands between your real email address and the service. For example, if I’m signing up for something at randomwebsite.com, Proton might suggest <randomwebsite.penguin53@passmail.net>. Put that email address in the sign-up form, and Proton will forward any email sent to that address to your real email address. If (or when) you grow weary of receiving email sent to that email address, simply delete the email alias and you’re done with it.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is not a standard email address. For example, you can’t initiate an email exchange using this email alias as your return address. You can, however, reply to emails sent to that address and the recipient will see the alias rather than your real email address in the From field.

I explained to my friend how Proton’s email alias feature might serve his purpose. He seemed to think it would work, and he asked more about the company. One of his big questions was whether Proton is a non-profit company. I confessed that I didn’t know the answer to that question.

And what a coincidence – only half an hour or so after that conversation I read Proton CEO’s blog post announcing the company’s transition toward a non-profit structure. I saw my friend again later that day and told him about the move, thinking that it would reassure him. However, this in itself didn’t satisfy whatever concerns he had. He responded that a company’s being non-profit doesn’t guarantee that it’s a good company, a company that he would want to support. As an example, he pointed to many non-profit hospitals whose business practices aren’t always in the best interests of the patients being treated in those hospitals (or, he might have added, of the medical and other staff who work there).

He was right, of course – both in general and in the particular case of some hospitals. In fact, to bring yet another coincidence into this account, that evening I read a doctor’s essay in the New York Times describing his own experience of a not-for-profit hospital’s billing practices that led to his paying significantly more than he expected to pay for a routine x-ray.

I found myself thinking of Kant’s insistence that the only thing that is good in and of itself is a good will. One might have all sorts of characteristics often thought of as positive – one might be intelligent, disciplined, or whatever – but use those traits in order to do bad things. Similarly, I thought, an institution not motivated by profit could still do all sorts of things in its own self-interest at the expense of those it claims to serve. Proton, like any profit-driven company, could manipulate fees charged to customers or cut corners in building or maintaining its infrastructure.

And, in fact, I’ve seen Mastodon postings, now lost somewhere in my thread, from at least one person complaining that the company did just that when doing away with their Family Plan several years ago. It provides web services – email, cloud storage, VPN connections. Doing this sort of work means that it has all sorts of customer data that it could mine for profit. Or, perhaps more likely, it has all sorts of data and potentially ways of collecting more data that would be very attractive to another company seeking to buy Proton. Proton’s move to non-profit status is a deliberate decision not to move in that direction. From the blog post:

Proton’s mission has always been unique. Most companies are created to be sold, and they achieve that by placing profit above all other considerations. For most businesses providing “services” to the masses, the easiest way to profit has been to misuse user data and engage in surveillance capitalism to the detriment of society and democracy. At Proton, we have intentionally taken a different path to achieve a more difficult mission. We want to remake the internet in a way that is private by default and serves the interests of all of society, not just the interests of a few Silicon Valley tech giants. In short, we want to create an internet that is able and willing to defend freedom, no matter the cost.

I’m not claiming that Proton is perfect, or even that it has what Kant would call a good will. But what I’ve seen so far leads me to believe that the company’s transition to a non-profit structure is an indication that they’re at least moving in that direction.

Search Engine Optimization

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.

Joe Biden 2024: Should he stay or go?

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.

More on US election – challenge to democracy

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.

Living in the US and looking for hope

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.

Looking for news about Trump

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.

Responding to Project 2025

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.

Responding to an assassination attempt

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.

The end is where we start from

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.

Joke or no joke?

• Dad’s phone conversation with an old friend shortly before he died
• His “joking” criticisms of me when I was a child
• My students giving me the “joke or no joke” sign
• The reference somewhere (Gabbert? Solnit? Prose?) to a childhood experience similar to mine
• Check the etymology of “joke”

New beginnings

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.

Consciousness, conspiracies, and the vanishing researcher

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.

On leaving Facebook

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.

Factory farming: a life worth living?

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.

Truth and democracy

The responses on Facebook to my last post there brought home the price I’m paying for bowing up. (I posted a somewhat expanded version of that Facebook post here on the blog.) Responses from friends in pretty much all the communities in which I’ve lived reminded me of the importance of all those connections. Reading them brought home even more forcefully the cost of giving up relatively easy access to news and friends, both long-ago and current. But I still think it’s the right decision for me.

• Guardian article on responding to lies
  • “Looking at Meta’s track record outside the US, it is possible to conclude that Zuckerberg has always cared more about his company’s proximity to power than he has proximity to truth. Lack of moderation resources and cultural attention in Myanmar arguably led in part to ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims; dictators like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used Facebook accounts and an army of trolls to undermine and harass legitimate journalism; journalists covering Gaza have found their material mysteriously “shadowbanned” on Meta’s other main conduit, Instagram (Meta claims it was a bug). In Canada, Facebook removed links from its pages to avoid a regulation that would have had the platform pay news organisations a licensing fee. As a result, the platform effectively bans legitimate news outlets at the expense of partisan campaigning. The rightwing Conservative party of Canada looks set for victory in elections this year, and a key part of leader Pierre Poilievre’s communications platform is defending Canada’s English-language public broadcasting through cutting the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations’s budget.”
  • Also this.
• Hannah Arendt on corrosive impact of lying
  • “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” (Most of that interview is behind a paywall, but you can see the quoted paragraph on the excerpt available without a subscription.)
• Fragmentation of news media is not good.
  • Of course every news organization has a perspective, a perspective shaped by all sorts of things
  • Of course my perspective on the world, like everyone else’s perspective, is shaped in part by the information sources I choose to trust
• We need to learn to make our way in the current situation informing ourselves
• The reasons I can’t trust Trump and those prominent political and online personalities who advocate for him
  • Lack of correction

Ramesses II, Assad, and Elon Musk

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.

The connections of music, with strings attached

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.

Taking note in emacs: a move to denote

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.

Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko and the turtle in the mud

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.

The internet I want

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.

What to say on a day like today?

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.

Quotidian life in the midst of turmoil

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.

Emacs Denote as a knowledge base and writing resource

Last month I wrote a brief post about my move to denote as my note-taking environment. That post was a bit short on details, because I wasn’t at all sure that I had much to contribute to others’ practice. However, even that brief note attracted a good bit of traffic. In addition, I’ve continued to refine my practice, so I thought I’d say a bit more about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. As I said before, while I’ve been writing in emacs org-mode for a couple of decades, I’m not an emacs expert – I welcome tips from anyone who can suggest a way I can do what I’m doing more efficiently.

I’ve taken reading notes in standard org-mode for years. Many of those are in files devoted to particular classes that I was teaching. The typical format

Requirements

• tagging

• easy links between notes

• Working with notes while reading

  • One file per note
  • way to organize notes from a particular text so that I can see them in order

• Working with notes for writing

  • way to collect notes on a particular theme
  • way to organize notes from several different texts so that I can write something on a particular theme
  • need to isolate notes so that I can refer to a particular note

• Moving old notes into denote

  • Work with copy of old notes so that I still have them if something goes awry
  • putting page number in signature field
  • putting date note taken into property so that denote ID and date property reflect that date instead of the date imported
    • Example import scripts and macros required for my particular forms of old notes
  • Adding tags and titles
  • Recreating links
  • From howm to denote

Remembering Germany’s past; reflecting on the present

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 it’s 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.

On the abolition of all political parties

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.

On keeping a notebook

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, 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.

Attention, community, and justice

Renewed focus on attention – pun intended. Practice is renewing my ability to focus.

Concern that this work is self-centered, especially in the current political turmoil.

But attention has value apart from its focusing on reading and thinking.

Attention helps us to step outside ourselves and see the world around us – example from David Foster Wallace

Ruminating on language and word frequency

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.J. Ayer and Mike Tyson fight to a draw

One shouldn’t sell philosophers short, even when they disagree with rather formidable opponents. While visiting the United States in 1987, British philosopher A. J. Ayer was at a party in midtown Manhattan. At the party, he was “chatting to a group of young models and designers” (I can’t help noting that the biographer says he was chatting to rather than with his companions), when a young woman interrupted the conversation to say that her friend was in a bedroom with a man who was assaulting her. Ayer rshed into the bedroom and found the boxer Mike Tyson forcing himself on the young (and then relatively unknown) model Naomi Campbell. Ayer demanded that Tyson back off. Tyson responded, “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer stood up to him, “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 began their “rational” conversation, Campbell removed herself from the room.

I resisted posting anything about yesterday’s fiasco in the Oval Office 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 to say. 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.

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 – he 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.” Zelensky and the country he leads both face dangers that are more severe than any of those faced by Republicans in Congress. It seems clear to me that some Republicans share Trump’s view of the world, but there are reliable reports that some 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 the bravery of Zelensky’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. Moreover, she was brave enough to challenge both Democrats and Republicans in that speech, delivered in the year after she entered the Senate.

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.