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.

Whores for Gloria

William T Vollmann

He remembered how Melissa had said to him well one of the things I used to do to combat that boredom was building forts, building like a little cave with the sheets, crawling under it, like a little tent I was inside by myself, setting up housekeeping, just pretending I was somewhere else. It was kind of easy in the dark environment. That's what being a kid is about, pretending. You've got to pretend you're this, pretend you're that, pretend you're a grownup, pretend you're not, pretend you're somebody else. --That's right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed and when you're a grownup you've got to pretend you're with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is.

Prostitution is a topic that is very interesting to me. Putting a price on something so intimate as love--love being a thing that should be out of the realm of economies as much as eternal is out of the realm of time. Love surely does not operate by any economic law. So prostitution is one of the few places love subjects itself to economics.

As much as prostitution is paying for a physical feeling, it must also be paying for an emotional feeling; nothing can be so close, so physically personally close and not be emotional. If there's any sense you get from Whores for Gloria, it's that prostitution is about much more than paying for sex.

On Violence

Hannah Arendt

The amount of violence at the disposal of any given country may soon not be a reliable indication of the country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power.

Not only has the progress of science ceased to coincide with the progress of mankind (whatever that may mean), but it could even spell mankind's end, just as the further progress of scholarship may well end with the destruction of everything that made scholarship worth our while. Progress, in other words, can no longer serve as the standard by which to evaluate the disastrously rapid change-processes we have let loose.

 Not every graph has an asymptote, but we seem to be nearing an asymptote in technological growth. If Arendt is speaking of nuclear war in the first part of her sentence (progress of science vs progress of mankind), could the Internet be the meaning of the second part of her sentence (progress of scholarship ending the value of scholarship)? Probably not since the book was published in 1970. Still, I wonder if it isn't true. 

Epitaph of a Small Winner

Machado de Assis
Tr. William L Grossman

These are my thoughts as I disembarked at Lisbon and set out for Coimbra. The University was waiting for me with its long list of difficult subjects. I studied them with profound mediocrity, which did not prevent my acquiring a bachelor's degree; they gave it to me with all the customary solemnity, at the end of the number of years required by law. The beautiful ceremonies and the festivities filled me with pride and, even more, with sadness at having to leave. I had won at Coimbra a great reputation as a playboy; I was a harebrained scholar, superficial, tumultuous, and capricious, fond of adventures of all kinds, engaging in practical romanticism and theoretical liberalism, with complete faith in dark eyes and written constitutions. On the day when the University certified, in sheepskin, that I had acquired a knowledge which, in truth, I had not, I confess that I felt somehow cheated, although nonetheless proud. Let me explain: the diploma was a letter of enfranchisement; if it gave me liberty, it also gave me responsibility. I put it with my other possessions, said goodbye to the banks of the Mondego, and came away rather disconsolate, but with an impulse, a curiosity, a desire to elbow other people out of the way, to exert influence, to enjoy, to live--to prolong my college days throughout my life.

I left him with these suspension marks and went to take off my boots, which were tight. One relieved of them, I breathed deeply and stretched myself at full length, while my feet, and my whole self with them, entered a state of relative happiness. Then it occurred to me that tight boots are one of the greatest goods in the world, for, by making feet hurt, they create an opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of taking off your boots. Torture your feet, wretch, then untorture them, and there you have inexpensive happiness exactly to the taste of Epicurus and of the shoemakers. While this idea was working out on my famous trapeze, my mind's eye turned toward Tijuca and saw the young cripple disappearing on the horizon of the past, and I felt that my heart would soon take off its boots. And that is exactly what this lascivious fellow did. Four or five days later I was to enjoy that swift, ineffable, spontaneous moment of pleasure that succeeds a bitter pain, a worry, an illness...From this I inferred that life is the most ingenious of phenomena, for it sharpens hunger only so that it may offer an opportunity to eat, and it creates corns only because without them one cannot achieve the relief that is perfect earthly happiness. In truth, I tell you that all human wisdom is not worth a pair of tight boots.

Sobs, tears, an improvised altar with saints and crucifix, black curtains on the walls, strips of black velvet framing the entrance, a man who came to dress the corpse, another man who took the measurements of the coffin; candelabra, the coffin on a table covered with gold-and-black silk with candles at the corners, invitations, guests who entered slowly with muffled step and pressed the hand of each member of the family, some of them sad, all of them serious and silent, priest, sacristan, prayers, sprinkling of holy water, the closing of the coffin with hammer and nails; six persons who remove the coffin from the table, lift it, carry it, with difficulty, down the stairs despite the cries, sobs, and new tears of the family, walk with it to the hearse, place it on the slab, strap it securely with leather thongs; the rolling of the hearse, the rolling of the carriages one by one...These are notes that I took for a sad and commonplace chapter which I shall not write.

I guess there are two ways of looking at things: either we think that no matter what happens in this world, where you are is a reflection of your mettle, how hard you scraped and scrounged and pushed and persevered and that if you are doing well in life, it's because you earned it, or we think that mostly it's just how things worked out.

The generation before this current rising one, and the baby boomer generation, these (at least in the US) experienced quite a bit of prosperity and good life. They worked hard and they profited and they were able to raise the next two generations in a atmosphere of plenty.

So what would it mean if the national debt got too big, if the US economy followed the Greek and Portuguese economies into untenable standings? And what would happen if in this difficult economic situation, even the scrapers and scoungers, the pushers and perseverers found that it was not enough?

Those who prospered in the last generations no doubt prospered because of their own merits, but what if people are like seeds? Tossed into lousy soil in a time of drought, how will seeds grow? I do not mean to demean the achievements of the generations before us that provided such plenty and comfort as we were raised, but I want to ask, how much of these accomplishments were bought on borrowed time? The US national debt is $13,043,347,548,011.01 (as of June 30, 2010 at 12:29:01 AM GMT). I don't get the feeling that anyone is going to stop spending money they don't have soon.

So where is this going? Well, you know the maxims, You work hard and you'll be alright. Hard work and honesty have their rewards. But what if it has a lot more to do with the crap shoot of when you are born? We already know that location has a lot to do with plenty. If you're born to a powerful king it's more likely that you'll have food to eat everyday than if you are born to a crack addict in Imperial County. I'm contending, I think, that it's the same time-wise, and that the generations before us managed to be born into prosperity, as were we, but that this prosperity was purchased at the expense of both past and future.

But still, that isn't much more than whining. And it might even be an argument for sitting around on your sorry ass watching television shows like Glee and Heroes. I do believe that hard work matters, scraping and scrounging are mostly good, as are pushing and persevering, but also the more than healthy realization that if you have anything, you got a good deal lucky. So open your hand and act like what you have is what you were given, not what you earned.

The Metaphysical Club

Louis Menand

Veblen's view of the hedonistic calculus was that it was founded on "a faulty conception of human nature," picturing a person as "a homegeneous globule of desire of happiness" played upon the external forces. Like most academic opponents of Social Darwinism, Veblen did not reject Darwinism; he only thought that by reading Darwin in the light of classical economic theory, Spencer and his American epigones had missed the point. Real ecolutionary economics, Veblen thought, required a picture of human beings not as passive reactors to stimuli, but as actors for ends. And not all our ends can be expressed in the language of profit and loss. "In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the substance of an individual's conscious life," as he put it in The Theory of the Leisure Class, "the economic interest does not lie isolated and distinct."

Menand provides an interesting, accessible map of the development of thought in the United States from just before the Civil War through the turn of the century up to right before WWI. Any time I read a history of philosophy, I am always somewhat startled how strongly the evolution of thinking influences what I imagine are my own, private and individually determined beliefs. Usually the most uncomfortable aspect of this realization is not so much finding what I believe determined by and predicated on thoughts thought a hundred years ago, but that the very way I think is greatly influenced by people I have never heard of, and sometimes do not agree with. Though our thoughts may occasionally be our own, the walls within which our minds are allowed to run, are built ages ago and are very difficult to raze. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S Thompson

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an our with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

 The word is that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is non-fiction.