The Last Place on Earth

Roland Huntford

When Nansen said that 'to do everything with human beings causes much work and much suffering' he was denouncing culpable stupidity; but to Sir Clements the squandering of human effort was the expression of an ideal. One aspect of the English romantic movement was to equate suffering with achievement. There was a virtue in doing things the hard way. Contemporary drawings show British bluejackets straining in serried ranks before grotesquely overladen sledges, like soldiers marching into battle; humbly heroic figures overcoming the power of Nature by brute force and sheer grit. Dogs interfered with this vision; they made things seem too easy. That really was their crime.

'Adventure' as the American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson liked to say, 'is a sign of incompetence'

The Panda's Thumb

Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is irreversible; signs of ancestry are always preserved; convergence, however impressive, is always superficial.

In reading Schweber's detailed account of the moments preceding Darwin's formulation of natural selection, I was particularly struck by the absence of deciding influence from his own field of biology. The immediate precipitators were a social scientist, an economist, and a statistician. If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understand of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense--the debate about angels on pinheads--makes sense once you realize the theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. In certain theological systems, the corporeality or noncorporeality of angels is an important matter indeed.

But I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation--and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. Few honest passions are not based upon some valid perception of unity or some anomaly worthy of note. The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.

Gould's work, in addition to being very accessible biology and natural history, also carries a valuable tone: Gould sounds impressively fair. Often when I read science or history, or almost anything that claims to be non-fiction, I am most struck by the human capacity to be wrong. It seems that given a choice, we always choose the wrong answer. Gould's value lies in his ability to see, without ridicule or pride, the folly of past generations. Gould chronicles the physiometrists of the nineteenth century, complete with their repulsive racism, and yet manages to find room for the context and thus to find the value in their bullshit. It is not so much a magnanimous stance that reviews the many points at which humans have chosen to stick their heads in the sand, but a humility that recognizes we are probably wrong on a good many counts ourselves. Gould recognizes that dismissing another person's thought is the easiest mode of life, but certainly not the pathway to wisdom. 

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse
Tr. Hilda Rosner

And Siddhartha said softly, as if speaking to himself: What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. The driver of oxen makes this same flight, takes this temporary drug when he drinks a few bowls of rice wine or cocoanut milk in the inn. He then no longer feels his Self, no longer feels the pain of life; he then experiences temporary escape. Falling asleep over his bowl of rice wine, he finds what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape from their bodies by long exercises and dwell in the non-Self.

He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river, and if the One and Divine in Siddhartha secretly lived in blue and river, it was just the divine art and intention that there should be yellow and blue, there sky and wood--and here Siddhartha. Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them. How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion, I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened. I have indeed awakened and have only been born today.

And yet he envied them; the more he became like them, the more he envied them. He envied them the one thing that he lacked and that they had: the sense of importance with which they lived their lives, the depth of their pleasures and sorrows, the anxious but sweet happiness of their continual power to love. These people were always in love with themselves, with their children, with honor or money, with plans or hope. But these he did not learn from them, these child-like pleasures and follies; he only learned the unpleasant things from them which he despised.

The ferryman smiled again. He touched Siddhartha's arm gently and said: Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, which you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.

When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

The story of the Buddha who the people flock to in order to learn wisdom and how to live the good life is almost a cliche. The story of the ancient philosopher who gathers those who are seeking around him and who teaches the good way permeates our culture. The guru on the top of the mountain has had ten million people climb up to him, all seeking enlightenment. We want to know so we can live the good life.

Although it is going out on a bit of a limb, I wonder if the reason most people seek after knowledge is to get at the good life. Many philosophers pursue understanding in order to discover this good life. I wonder if when it is sought at it's root, if the reason for all learning isn't to live the good life. People want to know so that they can live better.

How is it then, that our institutions of learning, Universities and colleges and schools, feel so different? Professors in schools are not interested in the good life. Or, if they are, the good life is apparently the academic life--which is to say, is not a life that everyone can live. When you look at our learned men and women you can't help feeling that there is quite a bit of difference between them and the guru's on the mountain's, the peaceful sage ferryman, and the great philosopher kings. Who among the professor's in our society is living the good life? An unfair question that asks you to judge and qualify things you couldn't really know, but all the same a question that gets at this root.

Most professors, the people who are learned, still submit to the institution of the academy which often times seems to be designed more by the flow of money than anything else. They teach classes and purvey their wisdom in the form of credits and class hours and assignments and letter grades and degrees. Is this learning? Is this wisdom? Credits and degrees may be good and wonderful, but it makes me feel like the learning we have is cropped and shallow. 

What are we pursuing learning for in the United States? Is it to get rich? Is it to be healthy? To be happy? To be famous or powerful? To make a difference? Aren't all these things encompassed in the good life? Why else would you seek riches unless you thought they could make life good; why else try to be healthy or happy? Why would you want to be famous or powerful or make a difference? We pursue learning in order to find the path to the good life, but we won't admit it.

Where is the learned sage who gathers round those who are seeking and lives this good life, rather than isolating it in their writings and having nothing to do with it in their lifestyles? I realize that I am resorting to questions to argue a point, but I feel that our understanding of learning is far too narrow. I am restrained to questions because the varieties of academic experience I see available are so pinched. I do believe that wisdom and learning can be helpful to living a good life and I would like to see learning recognized in a broader sense.

Essays Vol I

Michel de Montaigne

I felt compassion for the poor people who were taken in by these follies. And now I think that I was at least as much to be pitied myself. Not that experience has since shown me anything surpassing my first beliefs, and that through no fault of my curiosity; but reason has taught me that to condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible, is to assume the advantage of knowing the bounds and limits of God's will and the power of our mother Nature; and that there is no more notable folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our capacity and competence. If we call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes! Let us consider through what clouds and how gropingly we are led to the knowledge of most of the things that are right in our hands; assuredly we shall find that it is rather familiarity than knowledge that takes away their strangeness. 

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine understanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits. Now, what seems to me to bring as much disorder into our consciences as anything, in these religious troubles that we are in, is this partial surrender of their beliefs by Catholics. It seems to them that they are being very moderate and understanding when they yield to their opponents some articles in dispute. But, besides the fact that they do not see what an advantage it is to a man charging you for you to begin to give ground and withdraw, and how much that encourages him to pursue his point, those articles which they select as the most trivial are sometimes very important. We must either submit completely to the authority of our ecclesiastical government, or do without it completely. It is not for us to decide what portion of obedience we owe it.
Moreover, I can say this for having tried it. In other days I exercised this freedom of personal choice and selection, regarding with negligence certain points in the observance of our Church which seem more vain or strange than others; until, coming to discuss them with learned men, I found that these things have a massive and very solid foundation, and that is only stupidity and ignorance that makes us receive them with less reverence than the rest. Why do we not remember how much contradiction we sense even in our own judgment? How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday, which are fables to us today? Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul.

Montaigne sees two sides to every story; or, he will always show you how your viewpoint fails to fully understand the opposing viewpoint. A continual thread that runs through most of Montaigne's essays is his desire to disarm our tool of dismissal. Montaigne recognizes the basic human desire to not meet what we do not understand or disagree with, but to circumvent it by ipso facto arguments. Society would rather deal with personality or culture or the color of a person's eyes than meet the logic of an argument. Therefore, as Montaigne's continual picking at our scabby opinions reveals, we tend to hide from reality by facing superficiality.

The color of a person's eyes, like their skin, may matter, but not for the reasons generally given. Democrats say that you shouldn't vote for Republicans because they are war-mongerers and support the rich and are racists, not because Democrats believe that wars won't achieve what they think they will nor because wars are evil, and not because they believe that tax cuts will not benefit low-income families as much as they will benefit those with higher incomes. The Republicans say you shouldn't vote for Democrats because they want to give control of the country to other nations, because they play to the victim mentality and don't believe in good honest hard work, not because presenting a strong presence on the international level will benefit US interests nor because continuing unemployment benefits enables people. We--and you can define this term however you feel necessary--have become adept at telling strong stories that preempt logical arguments. Immigrants are illegal drug-running aliens who all probably belong to a gang; laws against abortion curtail women's rights and extend male hegemony; and the people who blew up the World Trade Towers are terrorists who cackle evilly and enjoy destruction. If you can find the right name, the right story, for your opposition, you don't have to worry about what they say at all. If you need any more proof of this, have you ever heard a cogent explanation of 9-11 from the people who did the bombing? Contrast the paucity of such explanations with the vast effort we expend explaining why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

However, I think it's equally dangerous to fall into the trap of meeting only the argument and ignoring the color of eye and skin and faith. It seems to me that we are eager to dismiss these colors because when it comes down to it, we don't understand them. They point out to us that there really are differences among humans. In a perfect world of logic, if we knew all the information, and had all the clarity of reasoning power at our disposal, no one in their right mind could disagree with anyone else. But you only have to look at a person's eyes and note the color there, to be assured that no amount of reasoning is ever going to bring about such broad agreement. At least for now, these things remain to remind us that there is still so much that we do not comprehend.

The Creators

Daniel J Boorstin

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story--a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. Here I have chosen creators who appeal to e, who have brought something new into the arts. But each of us alone must experience how the new adds to the old and how the old enriches the new, how Picasso enhances Leonardo and how Homer illuminates Joyce. 

I used to believe that there was no such thing as originality. I was convinced that there was nothing new beneath the sun and I read Ecclesiastes as the greatest expression of the futility of searching for something new. But I couldn't help enjoying all the many stories I read, and I did keep reading stories, old ones and new ones (speaking chronologically). Somehow, in the reading of all the many stories, I have become convinced that there really is such a thing as originality. That there can be a new story.

Boorstin's primer of the history of European (see end note) art has convinced me all the more of this truth. Although Boorstin's review of art quickly becomes a review of great artists, it none-the-less leaves you with the feeling that there is a chance that someone might make something new, that the forms of beauty and imagination, though they are all based off of the same subject matter, somehow hold the potential for genuine creation.

I was convinced that nothing new could exist because the only source we have is that which has already existed. If this was the case, I thought, it would be unreasonable to believe that something new could be managed since new would seem to entail not having existed before. It isn't new if it's old. I believed that all art was trying to reach back to truth or to reach back to depicting nature (by which I probably mean truth) in its fullest revelation. To me, that necessarily meant nothing was new.

I do still believe that art is attempting to depict truth (as opposed to reality or facts). But newness becomes real when we understand truths which we had not understood before. Truth being eternal, I don't think it can be new or old, but our understanding of truth is hardly eternal. The history of human understanding of truth is a history full of newness and originality (and also a good deal of missteps). So I do believe in originality. You have only to look at art to come to this belief. 

End Note. Boorstin subtitled this work A History of Heroes of the Imagination. A suitably grand subtitle for such a topic, it leaves me with a unpleasant taste in my mouth as I finish the work and find that it was much more accurately a history of heroes of the European imagination. Boorstin makes nods at other cultures, adds odd chapters in which he condenses the art of entire cultures (cultures which have lasted longer than the Europeans) into quick blurbs. This is frustrating. His subject is admittedly of gigantic scope and it would be impossible to discuss the entire history of art without leaving out many important figures, but in light of his consistent decision to focus on the art of Europeans, really Western Europeans, I feel that Boorstin should re-market the work as a European history of imagination.

You Bright and Risen Angels

William T Vollmann

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles. 

An owner of an apple orchard has a bad year because his apples aren't selling. He believes that the reason they aren't selling is that people have suddenly started eating more oranges. At a town-hall meeting, he tells a group of community members who don't know much about orchards, What we're talking about is oranges, not apples. The implication of this statement is that most people think the important issues is apples, and while they matter, the true professional knows that there is something else going on.

In a recent interview with Barbara Walters, General David Petraeus, US head of command in Afghanistan said, What we're after is increasing security for the population, not trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in the country.

The implication here is that most people believe the US is trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in Afghanistan. The last time you heard about people trying to kill or capture everyone in a specific group, didn't it sound like genocide? Though we do not always think about what we say, Petraeus' comment reveals something very disturbing to me in how America thinks about its War on Terrorism. Petraeus' comment was not a harsh correction or a firm reminder; he spoke calmly and it did not seem that capturing or killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan was a thing that should be avoided, only that it wasn't as good a goal as providing security to the population. One got the sense that capturing and killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan would be a nice by-product, but regrettably it was not as important as security.

It's dangerous when any nation or group of people decide that another group needs to be captured or killed. This is a very troubling idea to me. Few Americans would have difficulty digesting the statement: Our mission is to kill every terrorist. Yet, terrorist is a term that we reserve the sole power of applying. I'm willing to bet that Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic extremists do not think of themselves as terrorists. When they get together at Ramadan for family reunions, and mom asks what Osama is up to now days, the answer is not, Oh, he's still a terrorist, probably will stick with it for a few more years, there's a lot happening in the field right now. Since we have the right to apply the label and the label removes its bearer's right to life, shouldn't someone be asking some questions about this?

Beatrice and Virgil

Yann Martel

He has another one that morning, while Beatrice is still sleeping. Virgil remembers how their miseries started. Started in his mind, that is, the moment when he realized what was happening to them. He acts it out. He's reading his morning paper at his favorite cafe and his eyes are drawn to one of the headlines. The headline announces a government edict concerning new categories of citizens--or rather, as the article makes clear, a category of citizens and a new category of non-citizens. Virgil reads with increasing astonishment as he realizes that he--he himself personally, in all his specific details, this monkey sitting in a cafe reading a paper, such an ordinary thing--is the exact and intended target.

Yann Martel writes with burning realizations. I've read three works by him now, and in all of them, the reader is exposed to a slow welling into sudden realization of some awfulness. It's not as simple as saying he uses twists or a gimmick in every novel, although one wonders if he hasn't trapped himself with the fame of his famous twist. Martel's burning realizations are like strings holding back sharp blades while candles are placed to burn through them. You get a sense of what is going to happen, sometimes a very detailed and clear sense, but it's nothing compared to the sudden whoosh of the blade swinging down.

When I started Beatrice and Virgil, I worried that it was going to be Life of Pi all over again. A story of animals signifying things too horrible to tell factually, things that required the truth more than they required the facts, and of course, I also worried that there would be a twist at the end--that sudden jerking away of the screen that shows everything in a new light. But, and this is the but you will be happy to hear, it is not the case.

Beatrice and Virgil is an adequate continuation of Martel's work. He doesn't try to do Life of Pi over again, he writes a novel knowing that he has written that famous novel, and he resists making the spectacle of this the awesome spectacle of that.

Interestingly, there still may be a giant shocking twist in this novel. But it is only revealed by the cover. If you remember that most of what Martel writes confuses fact and fiction, confuses stories and history--in fact most of what he writes suggests that everything is story--and if you remember this, his calling Beatrice and Virgil a novel is very interesting. It's a story about an author who wrote a very famous book and then didn't really write any others. The author is from Canada. The author wrote a book that had animals in it. The author has a son named Theo. The author moved to a new city after he couldn't write any more. A good question to ask is can a biography be turned into fiction by calling it a novel?



Note
Criticism is not figuring out what the author intended or the meaning a reader can take from a work; criticism is writing a new book. Each reader reads a thing the author never could have written. In fact, each reader can actually be said to write a new book. When we make connections or see images, feel emotions and imagine characters, we are not playing a game where we try to align ourselves as closely as possible with what was happening in the author's head as he traced his words on the page. No, we are performing an equally creative act. Unless criticism is seen as a creative act, it will be empty. Criticism is not reactive, it is creative. More than this, criticism is creation.

Waiting

Ha Jin

Once alone in a toilet stall, he tried to sort out his thoughts. Manna must have hoped he would spend two thousand yuan to buy off Bensheng at that time, though she had never made her wish explicit to him. He remembered clearly that she refused to share such a cost. Then why did she call him 'miser'? He felt something clutching his lungs, and a pain gnawed him in the chest. Had he had that much money, he would certainly have brought about the divorce sooner. He had told her that he only had six hundred yuan in the bank, and she wouldn't even reveal to him how much she had saved. She must have thought he was a rich man and could easily afford two thousand yuan. After so many years, how come she still didn't believe him? Why on earth had she always kept her secrets from him, never allowing him to see her bankbook?
In his mind a voice replied, Because money's more precious and more effective than love. If you had spent the money, everything would have worked out all right and you could have enjoyed a happy marriage.
No, it wasn't that simple, Lin retorted.
It was simple and clear like a bug on a bald head, the voice went on. Say you had owned ten thousand yuan and spent one-fifth of it on your brother-in-law, counting that as a loss. Then you could have married Manna a decade ago. If so, she wouldn't have harbored a grievance against you. You see, isn't money more powerful than love?
That's not true, Lin countered. We needed no money to help us fall in love, just as we need no money to consummate our marriage.
Really? Then why did you spend eleven hundred yuan for the wedding? Why have you kept separate bank accounts?
Lin was at a loss for an answer, but he suppressed that cold voice. For a long while he remained in the bathroom, which was the only quiet place where he could be unobserved. Now he was sitting on the windowsill with his back against the wall, absentmindedly watching the backyard. It was already dark; beyond the screen mosquitoes were humming and fireflies were drawing little arcs. From a dormitory house a harmonica was shrieking out "The Internationale" disjointedly. A truck driver was burning oily rags at the corner of the garage, a bucket of water standing by him. Far away on the hill a cluster of gas lamps were flickering in a temporary apiary. Some beekeepers were still busy collecting honey over there despite nightfall.

Ha Jin's story of a man waiting to get married stumps you. What are you to do with this? A man waits to be with the woman he loves because he's already married by an arranged marriage to a woman who, let's face it, isn't all that bad, although she does have bound feet and is a bit of a peasant, but all the same she takes care of his aging parents and serves him and is faithful and raises their daughter and works really hard and at the end of the story she seems like a pretty wonderful woman all-round, yet still this man is determined to marry this other woman, the one he loves, only he doesn't feel forceful enough about it to be harsh and compel his wife to divorce him, nor does he feel passionate enough to break the rules and have an affair with this woman he loves, so instead he waits twenty years or so and then divorces his first wife and marries this woman who becomes his second wife. What do you do with this guy?

Lin (this wishy-washy guy) comes across as a repugnant wimp, yet you can't really be angry with him because he has good motives. He doesn't want to hurt his first wife, because while he doesn't necessarily love her, he does care about her. He doesn't want to hurt his second wife by having an affair with her because he's conscious of the laws of culture enforced in China during the Cultural Revolution and doesn't want either of them to lose their jobs. Really, he just can't make a decision. The story is one that vividly characterizes indecision.

But Ha Jin, like every good writer, knows the importance of a bathroom. I am convinced that there is no more thoughtful place than a bathroom. Lin's strongest moments occur in the bathroom. I would like to point to the cliche: shit or get off the pot, which is what one wishes someone had yelled at Lin earlier on in the story, but he manages to figure something out in the bathroom.

Nero

Edward Champlin

Nero has remained notorious for two millennia because of a series of extravagant public gestures, usually outrageous, often repellent, always riveting: murdering the mother with whom he may have slept, killing his pregnant wife in a rage, castrating and marrying a young freedman, mounting a public stage to act a hero driven mad or a woman giving birth, racing a ten-horse chariot at the Olympic Games, fiddling while Rome burned, burning Christians to light up the night, building the vast Golden House, and so forth. My purpose in this book has been restricted: to explain what Nero might have meant by the deeds and misdeeds that that have made him so notorious for so long. I have not tried to justify his actions or to rehabilitate his character, and I have not attempted to discern any large program, political or artistic. I have assumed that his actions were rational--that is, he was not crazy--and that much of what he did resonated far more with contemporary social attitudes than our hostile sources would have us believe. The Nero who has emerged in the preceding pages, whatever his many faults as an emperor and a human being may have been, was a man of considerable talent, great ingenuity, and boundless energy. He was an artist who believed in his own abilities and vision, and an aesthete committed to life as a work of art. He was a historian with a keen sense of the sharp reality of the past (real, legendary, mythical) in daily life at Rome, and a public relations man ahead of his time with a shrewd understanding of what the people wanted, often before they knew it themselves.

The center of the triumphal spectacle was of course the triumphator. He entered the city riding in a high, two-wheeled chariot, the currus triumphalis, drawn by four horses and decorated with laurel branches. All of Augustus' successors in fact used the first emperor's own, elaborately decorated chariot. Beneath it, for the purpose of warding off evil, was slung a large phallus, which might be adorned with bells and whips. The general himself was a blaze of color in his triumphal garb, the vestis triumphalis. Normally he wore a purple tunic embroidered with gold palm branches, the tunica palmata, and over this a purple toga embroidered with gold stars, the toga picta. On his head he might wear a laurel wreath, the corona laurea, as did some of his suite, or a public slave might hold a heavy gold wreath, the corona triumphalis, over him. In his right hand, he would carry a laurel branch; in his left, an ivory scepter topped by an eagle. Around his neck he wore a bulla, a protective amulet, and, in the old days at least, he would have his face painted red. 
There is no question that the triumphator, the successor of the kings of old, was meant to represent Jupiter. Riding with him in the chariot, the slave would periodically remind him who he was: Respice post te, hominem te esse memento, Look behind you, and remember that you are a man. 

In publishing Nero, Champlin was still publishing for academics. Nero is more concerned with sources than the actual subject. More than two-thirds of the book is devoted to discussing the merits of various sources, leaving you with precious little that addresses the content of the these sources. Perhaps I came to Nero hoping for a biography of Nero and so was disappointed when I read a very good primer on the epistemology of history.

Champlin demonstrates the unreliability of most historical sources and the bias the riddles the body of work known as 'history'. He makes you doubt whether any history can be trusted. The service Champlin provides of reminding you that every source has a reason for saying what it says, and that every history is also an objective, a goal, a tool, would be pleasing in moderation, but this biography leaves you wondering if anything can be known about Nero at all. Maybe he wasn't even Roman.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Rebecca Solnit

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in his Confessions, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. The history of walking goes back further than the history of human beings, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning. That history began with the walks of various characters in the eighteenth century, but the more literary among them strove to consecrate walking by tracing it to Greece, whose practices were so happily revered and misrepresented then. The eccentric English revolutionary and writer John Thelwall wrote a massive, turgid book, The Peripatetic, uniting Rousseauian romanticism with this spurious classical tradition. IN one respect, at least, I may boast of a resemblance to the simplicity of the ancient sages: I pursue my meditations on foot, he remarked. And after Thelwall's book appeared in 1793, many more would make the claim until it became an established idea that the ancients walked to think, so much so that the very picture seems part of cultural history: austerely draped men speaking gravely as they pace through a dry Mediterranean landscape punctuated with the occasional marble column. 

Solnit spends a few of her words on this subject, but misses so many opportunities to dwell in walking like a true history of walking could. She commits the boring sin of so many subject historians, turning her history into a chronicle of famous people who have talked about walking. The subject of walking presents such a large untilled field, yet Solnit only manages to raise a crop of sickly alfalfa. But her thoughts on walking did inspire a few interesting moments for me.  


Have you ever marveled at the balance of a human being walking? They flow smoothly forward like liquid poured and yet beneath the flow is disguised a drip drop foot placement, defying gravity. The walker does not carry his weight on feet so much as in movement. In momentum, which is the magic word, abracadabra of the walker. Like sliding, like sleighing, like drifting and flowing, walking is the only movement I have seen that looks like a wheel without a wheel. Walkers should be rollers, but the mechanics are nothing like rolling, the mechanics are tottering. It's a marvel to me that two jointed limbs can produce such a gliding movement.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Richard Farina

But in such a place you choose to live? From five years old, except for summers, you've been in institutions. This is life? Here, in the microcosm, with what you know, you are a waste. Lost, but truly lost.

There is a lot of shit that gets written. It is this realization that has kept me from writing anything about the quotes I've been putting up. I don't want to contribute. Much of the shit that gets written originates in laziness; I hope this where mine comes from. But I have also read shit that seemed to be the product of hard work. It was still shit in case this is unclear. Not to join the bandwagon of haters on the present era, but it also seems that more shit gets written now than ever before. Easy answer is that there are fewer hurdles between you and publishing. Whatever the case, there is a lot of shit written.

This is not to say that Farina wrote shit. Well, he probably did, but this is not to say that this particular piece of writing by Farina is shit.

But despite all the shit being written, mine included, it's better that it get written than nothing be said at all. There are dead bodies floating in the water with which people brush their teeth. There are people who live in their cars and get tickets for having nowhere to go. There are people who are out of their minds and no one will help them in order to preserve their rights. There are people saying the same evil about their evil enemies that their evil enemies are saying about them. Going back to Vollmann and his question (How can we not know what goes on in this world?) I would rather write shit about the shit that goes on, than be too afraid to write anything at all.

On Beauty and Being Just

Elaine Scarry

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato's dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation.

Before leaving the site of persons, we must recall that we were here looking at only one complaint, the complaint that we might, by looking at such persons, bring them harm. But there are, of course, other arguments less political but equally antagonistic to the site of persons, such as the notion that beautiful persons do not deserve to be attended to for their beauty. Sometimes this idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that their beauty is natural: such persons were born with it, lazily inheriting it through no labor or merit of their own. (This argument is not very strong since so many things we unembarrassedly admire--great math skill, a capacity for musical composition, the physical agility of a dancer or speed of an athlete--entail luck at birth.) With equal energy the idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that such beauty is artifactual: such persons spend hours running along the beach, plaiting their hair into tiny braids, adorning themselves with beads, bracelets, oil, arrays of color. (This argument is also not very strong since we normally admire feats of artifactual labor, the formation of good government, a well-run newspaper, a twelve-year labor of self-education.) The two complaints contradict one another--one proposing that it is not the natural but the artifactual that should be honored, and the other proposing that it is not the artifactual but the natural that should be honored. More important, they together contradict the complaint we were considering: they say beautiful persons do not deserve to be looked at, whereas the complaint we were wrestling with says beautiful persons deserve not to be looked at (for their own safety). Although, therefore, we have limited ourselves to political arguments, we find--when we step off the straight and narrow path of our present inquiry--an incoherence equal to the one that lies straight ahead. 

Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care: if we do not search it out, it comes and finds us.

It is as though one has ceased to be the hero or the heroine in one's own story and has become what in a folktale is called the 'lateral figure' or 'donor figure'. It may sound not as though one's participation in a state of overall equality has been brought about, but as though one has just suffered a demotion. But at moments when we believe we are conducting ourselves with equality, we are usually instead conducting ourselves as the central figure in our own private story; and when we feel ourselves to be merely adjacent, or lateral (or even subordinate), we are probably more closely approaching a state of equality.

Radical decentering might also be called an opiated adjacency. A beautiful thing is not the only thing in the world that can make us feel adjacent; nor is it the only thing in the world that brings a state of acute pleasure. But it appears to be one of the few phenomena in the world that brings about both simultaneously: it permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure, thereby creating the sense that it is our own adjacency that is pleasure-bearing. This seems a gift in its own right, and a gift as a prelude to or precondition of enjoying fair relations with others. It is clear that an ehtical fairness which requires 'a symmetry of everyone's relation' will be greatly assisted by an aesthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness.

True Grit

Charles Portis

That is bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.

If the River Was Whiskey

T C Boyle

Let's face it, Ellis said, it's a society of haves and have-nots, and like it or not, we're the haves.

The Trojan Women

Euripides
Tr. Richard Lattimore

Achaeans! All your strength is in your spears, not in
the mind. What were you afraid of, that it made you kill
this child so savagely? That Troy, which fell, might be
raised from the ground once more? Your strength meant nothing, then.
When Hector's spear was fortunate, and numberless
strong hands were there to help him, we were still destroyed.
Now when the city is fallen and the Phrygians slain,
this baby terrified you? I despise the fear
which is pure terror in a mind unreasoning.

The Boilerplate Rhino

David Quammen

The yellowfin tuna is not celebrated for its intelligence. It's celebrated for its flavor. The spotted dolphin, on the other hand, is famously brainy and no one will tell us how it tastes. The killing of dolphins is a national outrage; the killing of tuna is a given. I keep asking myself why. There are some good reasons and some bad reasons, I think, which haven't been closely examined, or even sorted apart.

The Ethics of Memory

Avishai Margalit

Caring is a demanding attitude toward others. Some of us are by inclination good-hearted people, who may have a diffused benign attitude toward our fellow human beings in general. But this diffused good will does not amount to that unselfish heed to the particular needs and interests of others that caring requires. The snag is not that it is hard to like people we don't know: caring does not necessarily require liking. What we find hard is the attention that is implied by caring. Women may be better at dividing their attention than men, and thus more able to c are for others than men, as Carol Gilligan used to argue. But even Mother Theresa lacked the resources to pay attention to everyone. Along with Dostoyevsky, we are suspicious of those who care for humanity in general but who do not care for any human being in particular. We should be even more suspicious of those who pay attention only to what they feel toward others but are incapable of paying attention to others; in short, we should be suspicious of sentimentalists.

Are we wrong to judge our life by the way we remember it rather than by the way we experience it? The so-called scientific picture says yes; the literary picture says no. And I say (timidly perhaps) that the truth is in a combination of the two--a picture, that is, that can combine our experienced life, which is colored by moods, with our remembered life, which contains emotions. There is, however, one other picture that I would like to mention, which challenges the assumption taken for granted both by the scientific and the literary images. The common assumption is that life should be measured by addition, not by subtraction, and that the difference between the two pictures is in what it is that should be added. The scientific picture contends that the addition should encompass all the experiences in one's life, remembered as well as unremembered. The literary picture, in contrast, contends that the addition should comprise all the highlights that are remembered and that go into a coherent story of one's life.

The hope with which I credit moral witnesses is a rather sober hope: that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony. What is so heroic in this hope is the fact that people who are subjected to evil regimes intent on destroying the fabric of their moral community easily come to see the regime as invincible and indestructible and stop believing in the very possibility of a moral community. Being a helpless inmate in a Nazi concentration camp or a Bolshevik gulag can make you believe that the thousand years Reich or the unstoppable juggernaut of the communist triumph is just the way of the world. The disparity of power between victim and perpetrator confirms every minute what seems to be the invincibility of the regime. Under such adverse conditions, to believe in what would under normal circumstances be a rather reasonable belief--namely, that the evil power is limited and temporary--is hard indeed. The belief, under such conditions, in the possibility of a moral community calls for a veritable leap of faith. But then the moral witness does not have to have the assured confidence of a sleepwalker that is manifested by a religious witness.

In the 'enlightened' picture, truth is given in principle to all; truth is on the surface. Even expert scientific knowledge is not esoteric knowledge but is in principle knowledge open to all. In the final analysis, the authority of the 'new knowledge' hinges only on observations. In this new picture, the reliability of hearsay testimony is tested by sampling the witness's statements against our observations.

The comparison between the God who remembers man and the mother who remembers the child of her womb is interesting. In Hebrew the words rehem (womb) and rahamim (mercy) stem from the same root. Mercy is returning those who are far away to their source, the womb. Hence, the act of remembering is an act of mercy and grace.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

David Markson

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.
Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.
Nobody, came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.
To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages altogether.
I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.
Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.
And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.

The Comforters

Muriel Spark

Caroline thought, 'Well, he will ring in the morning.' She lay on her divan staring out at the night sky beyond her balcony, too tired to draw the curtains. she was warmed by the knowledge that Laurence was near to hand, wanting to speak to her. She could rely on him to take her side, should there be any difficulty with Helena over her rapid departure from St Philumena's. On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.

Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena. 

Finding a Form

William H Gass

Narratives like the story of Gyges and his ring imperceptibly seduce their listeners, because they always solicit our participation: not for a naive or complacent identification with the protagonists necessarily (where each of us is Gyges, Eve or Adam, maybe God), or even with the rich raciness of their roles (where each of us takes the queen's place in bed, or the serpent's in the tree), but by an implication that extends to the idea of man in general; so even if I say to myself: "I wouldn't go down in that gorge--no way--or sneak that ring from that dead man's finger--not me--and I'm too good a guy, basically, to be bought by a little loose change, free flesh or a position of power," nevertheless (and this is Glaucon's expectation), I can believe everybody else would; so when Glaucon suggests we place one such ring on the finger of a plainly unjust man, who has already flouted society's conventions without its aid, and then another on the finger of a man who has always behaved like a good worker bee, a diligent drone, my mind moves easily along the track which has been greased for it to the right rhetorical conclusion: beneath clothes, cosmetics, and conventions, where we confront the naked soul, there is no difference to be discerned between the sinner and the saint, both souls are so stained and opaque, except that the saint, in addition to his other vices, is a successful hypocrite.

The Last Unicorn

Peter Beagle

My lady, he said, I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story. 

Libra

Don DeLillo

Kennedy should have blown it up when he had the chance, Ferrie said.
You blow up Cuba, you get the Russians.
I've got my rubber bedsheets all ready. An eternity of canned food. I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It's a government  funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines int eh woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit.

Memory

Elizabeth Loftus

Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory. Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed. These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable. 

A healthy distrust of one's memory, and of memory in general, is not a bad idea. When all is said an done, memory is selective; the memory machine is selective about what gets in and selective about how it changes over time. This may be adaptive in many ways. Why should we cling tightly to those memories that disturb us and spoil our lives?? Life might become so much more pleasant if it is not marred by our memory of past ills, sufferings, and grievances. What good does it do for my friend Diana to remember clearly all the ways an old beau has mistreated her? We seem to have been purposely constructed with a mechanism for erasing the tape of our memory, or at least bending the memory tape, so that we can live and function without being haunted by the past. Accurate memory, in some instances, would simply get in the way. Now, knowing this, others can--if they so wish--take advantage of us. Advertisers and politicians, for example, can bend memory to their advantage. In doing so, they are simply tampering with a system that serves us well in some ways but occasionally does us in.

According to the cliche, memory fades. In fact, however, it grows. What may fade is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events. But every time we recall an event we must reconstruct the memory, and so each time it is changed--colored by succeeding events, increased understanding, a new context, suggestions by others, other people's recollections.

The Strange Tale of Mr. M and the Nature of Memory

Philip Hilts

In reflection upon these things, after a time, I began to feel that the heart of memory's mystery is not actually the memory. It is the act of experience itself that is most mysterious.
We do not actually see the color of objects; we merely pick up with limited antennae--the rods and cones--a few of the different wave forms, in a narrow range of vibration, among the many deflected-off objects. Because we sense them as different, we have named them 'colors.' But the colors are not properties of objects; they occur between the object and the eye. We do not hear the sounds of the world either; we merely pick up a few of the scattering waves of pressure in the air, in a narrow range of frequency, as they tap against the stretched skin drums within our ears, and we have named them sounds. We do not smell the fragrances of the world but merely pick up a few of the escaping chemicals from the surface of nearby objects, in a narrow range of shapes that well fit the detectors within our noses, and we have called them smells.

And so it is, after some years of exploration and thought, that we must conclude that the central feature of memory is its malleability. It is changeable upon the instant. New information adds to, overlays, or confuses old feelings, thoughts, and knowledge. Memory is, at the end, a site of endless construction where facades come down, beams are shifted, walls are sucked together or blown apart, all in response to the current, most urgent needs.

Mental life may be imagined as a continuous storytelling--taking bits and fitting them into a running narrative that makes sense of where we have been, what's going on now, and what to do next. It is stories that make some kind of sense of the welter of data from outside, where there is no sense. It is we who must make sense of things. 'Stories' are merely the structure we make with selected bits of input. We meet two Italians and so, on meeting the third, expect something and are pleased to find it. Now we have some kind of internal rule about Italians. True, it could be overturned on further experience, but we use our expectations like pitons to scale the side of life.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain's context, its--as it were--shape and texture. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. The depressed person had, as a child, required orthodonture, and each parent had claimed -- not without some cause, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement, the depressed person always inserted when she described the painful struggle between her parents over the expense of her orthodonture -- that the other should be required to pay for it. And the venomous rage of each parent over the other's petty, selfish refusal to pay was vented on their daughter, who had to hear over and over gain from each parent how the other was unloving and selfish. both parents were well off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person that s/he was, of course, if push came to shove, willing to pay for all the orthodonture the depressed person needed and then some, that it was, at its heart, a matter not of money or dentition but of 'principle'. And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a trusted friend the circumstances of the struggle over the cost of her, to concede that it may very well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, just that (i.e., a matter of 'principle'), though unfortunately not a 'principle' that took into account their daughter's needs or her feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of parental neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected -- here the depressed person nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment -- to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in. This was just one example. The depressed person averaged four interpolated apologies each time she recounted for supportive friends this type of painful and damaging past circumstance on the telephone, as well as a sort of preamble in which she attempted to describe how painful and frightening it was not to feel able to articulate the chronic depression's excruciating pain itself but to have to resort to recounting examples that probably sounded, she always took care to acknowledge, dreary or self-pitying or like one of those people who are narcissistically obsessed with their 'painful childhoods' and 'painful lives' and wallow in their burdens and insist on recounting them at tiresome length to friends who are trying to be supportive and nurturing, and bore them and repel them.

Vineland

Thomas Pynchon

What it was, 's your mother lost her respect for me. She'd be too honorable to say it, but that was it. She'd think these things all the way through, politically, but I'd only be trying to get out of the day in one piece. I was never the brave Wobbly her father was. Jess stood up, and he was struck down for it, and there was all of American History 101 for her, right there. How the hell was I gonna measure up? I thought I was doing what was necessary for my wife and my baby, freedom didn't come into it the way it did for Sasha, your grandpa, understood that taking 'free' as far as you can usually leads to 'dead,' but he was never afraid of that, and I was, 'cause they can drop a Brute 450 on you just as easy as a tree...

If her luck held, she'd never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, and all she'd ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha, deal with Zoyd and his footloose band and all the drawbacks there, forget Brock, the siege, Weed Atman's blood, 24fps and the old sweet community, forget whoever she'd been, shoot inoffensive little home movies now and then, speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light. Prairie could be her guaranteed salvation, pretending to be Prairie's mom the worst lie, the basest betrayal.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this. 

The History of Love

Nicole Krauss

It's also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it--just to name it--must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)  

I was beginning to seriously worry. What if Bird's religiousness wasn't just a passing phase but a permanent state of fanaticism? My mother thought it was his way of dealing with losing Dad, and that one day he would grow out of it. But what if age only strengthened his beliefs, despite the proof against them? What if he never made any friends? What if he became someone who wandered around the city in a dirty coat handing out life jackets, forced to deny the world because it was inconsistent with his dream. 

Dune

Frank Herbert

In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

The Atlas

William T Vollmann

Scissoring legs and shadows scudding like clouds across the marble proved destiny in action, for the people who rushed through this concourse came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing themselves without reference to each other. A few, like the small girl who sat on the stairs holding her bald baby doll, or the lady who stopped, shifted the strap of her handbag, and gazed at the departure times for the New Haven Line, delayed judgment (and an executive paused in his descent of the steps, snorted at the girl’s doll, and said: I thought that baby was real!). But no one stayed here, except the souls without homes. Above the information kiosk, the hands of the illuminated clock circled all the directions, and condensed into meaningless animal sounds. There was a circle and its spokes were their trajectories. But the circle turned! They did not understand the strangeness of that. Creased black trousers, naked brown legs, merciless knees, skirts and jeans, overalls swollen tight with floating testicles, paisley handbags passing as smoothly as magic carpets, these made noise, had substance, but the place become more and more empty as I sat there, because none of it was for anything but itself. The belt of brass flowers that crossed the ceiling’s belly meant something, made the place more like a church; the tunnels where the trains stretched themselves out, gleaming their lights, were the catacombs. One of those passageways went to the Montrealer, my favorite train. Canada’s railroads continued north from Montreal, which was why when I peered into that tunnel (I’d ridden the Montrealer so many times, and wouldn’t anymore), it was almost as if I could see all the way to Hudson Bay; one Canadian National sleeper did still went to Churchill--

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Steven Galloway

A dead body won't bother anyone. It will be a curiosity, but unless some viewer knew the hatless man it will mean nothing. There's nothing in a dead body that suggests what it was like to be alive. No one will know if the man had unusually large feet, which his friends used to tease him about when he was a child. No one will know about the scar on his back he got from falling out of a tree, or that his favorite food was chocolate cake. They will not know that when he was eighteen he went on a trip with his friends from school, hitchhiked all the way to Spain, where he slept with a blond girl whose last name he never even knew, and that he would think about this often over the next thirty years, always at the strangest times, while peeling an orange or sharpening the blade of a knife or walking up a hill in the rain. 

Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis

Dixon didn't trust himself to speak. Quite apart from his own convictions in the matter, his experience of Margaret had been more than enough to render repugnant to him any notion of anyone having any special needs for anything at any time, except for such needs as could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom. Then he realized that Christine must perhaps unconsciously, be quoting her boy-friend, or some horrible book lent by her boy-friend, whose desire to range himself with children, neurotics, and invalids by thus specializing his needs was not, at the moment, worth attacking. Dixon frowned. Until a minute ago she'd been behaving and talking so reasonably that it was hard to believe she was the same girl as had helped Bertrand to bait him at Welch's arty week-end. It was queer how much colour women seemed to absorb from their men-friends, or even from the man they were with for the time being. That was only bad when the man in question was bad; it was good when the man was good. It should be possible for the right man to stop, or at least hinder, her from being a refined gracious-liver and arty-rubbish-talker. Did he think he was the right man for that task? Ha, ha, ha, if he did. 

'Well, it's this. From what you've seen of us both, do you think it would be a good thing if I got married to Bertrand?'
Dixon felt a slight twinge of distaste he couldn't quite account for. 'Isn't that rather up to you?'
'Of course it's up to me; I'm the one who's going to marry him or not marry him. I want to know what you think. I'm not asking to be told what to do. Now, what do you think?'
This was clearly the moment for a burst of accurate shelling from Dixon in his Bertrand-war, but he found himself reluctant to fire. A reasoned denunciation of the foe, followed up by a short account of his recent conversation with Carol, would stand a good chance of bringing total victory in this phase, or at least inflicting heavy losses. He felt, however, that he didn't want to do it like that, and only said slowly: 'I don't think i know either of you well enough.'
'Ah, to hell, man' - had she picked that up from Uncle Julius? Dixon wondered - 'you're not being asked to do a thesis on it for your doctorate.' As Carol might have done, she pinched his arm too hard, making him cry out, saying to him in vocal italics: 'What do you think?'
'Well, it's...I must say what I think, you know.'
'Yes, yes, of course, that's what I asked for, isn't it? Do get on with it.'
'Well, then, I should say No.'
'I see. Why not?'
'Because I like you and I don't like him.'
'Is that all?'
'It's quite enough. It means each of you belongs to the two great classes of mankind, people I like and people I don't.'
'It sounds a bit thin to me.'
'All right, if you want reasons, remember they're my reasons, though that doesn't mean to say they oughtn't to be yours as well. Bertrand's a bore, he's like his dad, the only thing that interests him is him. On any issue you care to mention he can't do otherwise than ignore your side of things, just can't do otherwise, see? It's not just him first and you second, he's the only bloody runner. My God, what you said about him putting you int eh wrong by starting rows shows you've got his number. I don't see why you have to have someone else to say it for you.'
She said nothing for a moment, then spoke rather in her censorious manner: 'Even if that were true, it needn't prevent me from marrying him.'
'Yes, I know women are all dead keen on marrying men they don't much like. But I'm saying why you oughtn't to marry him, not whether you want to or are going to or not. I think that once the things that are supposed to wear off wear off, you'll have a hell of a time. You couldn't trust the fellow with your best...I mean, he'd always be having rows, and you say you don't like rows. Are you in love with him?'
'I don't much care for that word,' she said, as if rebuking a foul-mouthed tradesman.
'Why not?'
'Because I don't know what it means.'
He gave a quiet yell. 'Oh, don't say that; no, don't say that. It's a word you must often have come across in conversation and literature. Are you going to tell me it sends you flying to the dictionary each time? Of course you're not. I suppose you mean it's purely personal - sorry, got to get the jargon right - purely subjective.'
'Well, it is, isn't it?'
'Yes, that's right. You talk as if it's the only thing that is. If you can tell me whether you like greengages or not, you can tell me whether you're in love with Bertrand or not, if you want to tell me, that is.'
'You're still making it much too simple. All I can really say is that I'm pretty sure I was in love with Bertrand a little while ago, and now I'm rather less sure. That up-and-down business doesn't happen with greengages; that's the difference.'
'Not with greengages, agreed. But what about rhubarb, eh? What about rhubarb? Ever since my mother stopped forcing me to eat it, rhubarb and I have been conducting a relationship that can swing between love and hatred every time we meet.'
'That's all very well, Jim. The trouble with love is it gets you in such a state you can't look at your own feelings dispassionately.'
'That would be a good thing if you could do it, would it?'
'Why, of course.'
He gave another quiet yell, this time some distance above middle C. 'You've got a long way to go, if you don't mind me saying so, even though you are nice. By all means view your own feelings dispassionately, if you feel you ought to, but that's nothing to do with deciding whether (Christ) you're in love. Deciding that's no more difficult than the greengages business. What is difficult, and the time you really need this dispassionate rubbish, is deciding what to do about being in love if you are, whether you can stick the person you love enough to marry them, and so on.
'Why, that's exactly what I've been saying, in different words.'
'Words change the thing, and anyway the whole procedure's different. People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. You don't ask yourself what greengages are, or how you know whether you like them or not, do you? Right?'

Runaway Horses

Yukio Mishima
Tr. Michael Gallagher

I'm not a beginner at this any more, Honda mused. I've done my work without being swayed by the opinions of others, and I can say that I've met the prescribed standards. I've become thoroughly adept at my profession--like a potter whose clay seems to shape itself, taking the form that he wants it to.
Suddenly he realized that he was on the verge of forgetting the face of the defendant who had just stood trial before him. He shook his head. Try as he might, he could no longer clearly visualize the man's features.

Two men may talk together enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across has been destroyed.

I don't understand. I don't understand it at all. And then, after we did the killing, not one of us would have disregarded his vow to kill himself at once. So if we could have done as we had meant to, not a single branch, not a single leaf of the tangled thicket of the law would have brushed so much as the tip of our sleeve or the hem of our kimono. We would have slipped marvelously through the thicket and gone rushing headlong up into the bright sky of heaven. So it was the with the League of the Divine Wind. Though, I know, the tangled underbrush of the law didn't grow as thick in the sixth year of the Meiji. The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man's desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not  be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind. The extraordinary purity of a handful of men, the passionate devotion that knows nothing of the world's standards...the law is a system that tries to degrade them to 'evil', on the same level as robbery and crimes of passion. This is the clever trap that I fell into. And because of nothing else but somebody's betrayal!

The Lazarus Project

Alexandar Hemon

I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. But I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it--Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity--you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story, and maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth--reality is the fastest American commodity.

I was still too weak to pursue my pleasures at the expense of others, certainly not at the expense of Mary or this wretched harlot who was probably going to be slapped by her pimp for failing to fuck a God-given American. And I was not unselfish enough not to be tempted by pursuing pleasure with abandon. Forever stuck in moral mediocrity, I could afford myself neither self-righteousness nor orgasmic existence. That was one of the reasons (unspoken, to Mary, or anybody) why I absolutely needed to write the Lazarus book. The book would make me become someone else, go either way: I could earn the right to orgasmic selfishness (and the money required for it) or I could purchase my moral insurance by going through the righteous process of self-doubt and self-realization.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks

He was understandably discouraged by this experience--and this thought--and also by another thought which he now expressed. 'Suppose you could take away the tics,' he said. 'What would be left? I consist of tics--there is nothing else.' He seemed, at least jokingly, to have little sense of his identity except as a ticqueur: he called himself 'the ticcer of President's Broadway' and spoke of himself, in the third person, as 'witty ticcy Ray', adding that he was so prone to 'ticcy witticisms and witty ticcicisms' that he scarcely knew whether it was a gift or a curse. He said  he could not imagine life without Tourette's, nor was he sure he would care for it.

Superficially she was a mass of handicaps and incapacities, with the intense frustrations and anxieties attendant on these; at this level she was, and felt herself to be, a mental cripple--beneath the effortless skills, the happy capacities, of others; but at some deeper level there was no sense of handicap or incapacity, but a feeling of calm and completeness, of being fully alive, of being a soul, deep and high, and equal to all others. Intellectually, then, Rebecca felt a cripple; spiritually she felt herself a full and complete being.

'She is an idiot Ecclesiastes, I said to myself. And in this phrase, my two visions of her--as idiot adn as symbolist--met, collided and fused. She had done appallingly in the testing--which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits. She had come apart, horribly, in formal testing, but now she was mysteriously 'together' and composed.
Why was she so decomposed before, how could she be so recomposed now? I had the strongest feeling of two wholly different modes of thought, or of organisation, or of being. The first schematic--pattern-seeing, problem-solving--this is what had been tested, and where she had been found so defective, so disastrously wanting. But the tests had given no inkling of anything but the deficits, of anything so to speak, beyond her deficits.

This was my human, as opposed to my neurological vision.

Is it possible, I wondered, that this being before me--at once a charming girl, and a moron, a cognitive mishap--can use a narrative (or dramatic) mode to compose and integrate a coherent world, in place of the schematic mode, which, in her, is so defective that it simply doesn't work?

It didn't work with Rebecca, it didn't work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done, futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives.

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment.

This is the positive side--but there is a negative side too (not mentioned in their charts, because it was never recognised in the first place). Deprived of their numerical 'communion' with each other, and of time and opportunity for any 'contemplation' or 'communion' at all--they are always being hurried and jostled from one job to another--they seem to have lost their strange numerical power, and with this the chief joy and sense of their lives. But this is considered a small price to pay, no doubt, for their having become quasi-independent and 'socially acceptable'.

Written before 1985, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat continually uses a terminology of idiot, moron, retard to refer to mental conditions. Reading the book now you get a strangely shocked sense as though Sacks were insulting his patients, yet loves the people he serves. So you find yourself cornered: he clearly does not mean to demean but it cannot be denied that he is speaking for society when he speaks here.

This barbaric way of speaking of those with mental health conditions and the revolution in sensistivity that occured and is occuring within it, is something that should and will begin in the homelessness world. Now we speak of and see homelessness and poverty with the insensitive and uncaring and unrecognizing eye that was so characteristic of how the people with mental conditions were seen in the '80s. Of course, you can err on the side of too much sensitivity, but what is called for is an eye that sees as God sees and recognizes the humanity, which is to say usefulness of each person.

But this leads me to ask, where is Mark useful? Or, where is Alvin useful? I really don't know, at all really. See, Mark is a difficult case: he's violent and has been drunk for so many years you think his brain is fried. So is Alvin: he's a hoarder and a health hazard to himself and doesn't seem to understand the realities of society. So is Michael, so is Mike so is and now I'm just filling in these names without thinking. There were so many instances in Sacks where what we took to be a problem, what was seen as a flaw actually became something entirely else as he began to see it with different eyes. In a way his book is almost a step by step walking you out of the one and into the other.

What I see in Sacks is the beginning of a desire to move from problem-centered therapy to gift-centered therapy. What happens in the case of many people with severe mental conditions is that in our attempt to discover what is 'wrong' so that we can fix it, we end up 'driving them full-tilt upon their limitations' like sailing a boat onto a reef in order to see where it is leaking. And so you get this sense that medicine is more concerned with what's wrong than what's right. But what if the best way to bring about a good (the best?) equilibrium is to focus on what's right in Sacks' case histories? Seeing the artist in the autism and the music in the 'mental retard'. So then what would this look like for homelessness?

Right now we ask, 'What do you need?' but waht if the more important question is 'What don't you need?' Because if we can figure that out, then we know what they are good at and we know what we can start with, what can be the basis of 're-entry into society'.What if the most important thing for us to be asking is what is good here? What is good about who this person is, what is good about their situation?

Now, all this is a load, a bunch of crap because, frankly, I haven't done anything yet to see if good things happen. I ahven't helped anyone yet. But time isn't up yet and we will see.

Problems: medical, mental, societal, emotional, attitudinal, economical, whatever, are only ever part of the whole, and if you give them a veto over the things that are going better than perfect, the gifts, the goods, then you'll never really get anywhere. It's like a black and white drawing: to see only one color is really to see a distortion or a half, no matter how much color there is. The shape of the other color is just as much a shape as the first. So the good is just as much a reality as the bad.

The Giver

Lois Lowry

It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane. 

The Tao of Pooh

Benjamin Hoff

Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems--appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots--but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins. Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, and the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought. When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door. The Television Set is turned on to make it go away. But it doesn't go away. So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing.

There is something to be said for not doing anything.

The Harvest Gypsies

John Steinbeck

In this series the word 'dignity' has been used several times. It has been used not as some attitude of self-importance, but simply as a register of a man's responsibility to the community. A man herded about, surrounded by armed guards, starved and forced to live in filth loses his dignity; that is, he loses his valid position in regard to society, and consequently his whole ethics toward society. Nothing is a better example of this than the prison, where the men are reduced to no dignity and where crimes and infractions of the rule are constant.
We regard this destruction of dignity, then, as one of the most regrettable results of the migrant's life, since it does reduce his responsibility and does make him a sullen outcast who will strike at our Government in any way that occurs to him.

Dignity is a register of man's responsibility to the community. What Steinbeck says here of the migrants from Oklahoma applies equally to the various other 'problem groups' in our societies today--the homeless, the poor, illegal immigrants, felons, sex offenders, etc...

Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that the actions or attitudes of these various groups have precluded their valid position towards society. We act as if it would be nice if such groups could have a valid position towards society, and ethics towards society sound good too, but, well....we shrug our shoulders. After all, there is a reason they are the groups they are. I guess what we really say is that it wasn't us who took their dignity away, it's them, they gave it up. Coming here illegally, committing a felony (or getting caught), their choices, their foolishness, their addictions, their faults are what have brought them to this undignified situation. They stepped away from society; we didn't step away from them.

Though expectations are not what will determine their actions, though by expecting upstanding citizenry of them we won't erase their faults, it is still possible that the return of a clear position in regard to society might be the first, necessary foundation from which to fix their problems. They them their. Theirs those, these, them. The arrogance behind fixing their problems, behind the language of they is more evidence of the loss of relation to society.

Expecting a man to be a man won't make him one, but expecting him to be a pig will achieve even less. At least if we expect a man of him, we have a chance of recognizing the man in him...I don't know what we'll ever see expecting a pig of him. If a man is expected to be an animal, how will we recognize when he has become a man? I guess being poor takes away your dignity, but it seems that dignity, as in 1936, is something we still haven't connected with success in society.

The old story of giving a man a fish and that guy eating for a day has been told in many versions, but I'm going to add another. It's been said that it's better to teach him to fish, so that he'll eat for more than a day; it's been said that it's hard to learn when your starving, so giving a fish and teaching at the same time are probably pretty good in relationship; and it's even been said that you have to look at the pond the man is fishing in, to see if there are any fish for him to catch; but what about the reason the man would want to fish in the first place? If while he is learning he doesn't feel that his fishing has any meaningful relation to society, if he doesn't feel like society needs him to fish, how long will even the best fisherman keep at it?

I agree with Steinbeck: the destruction of dignity is one of the most regrettable results of our current attitude towards poverty, crime, and addiction.