Monthly Archives: October 2012

Go Right Ahead and Scold Him

30 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Literature

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Ice Nine

“I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. The sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel…

There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight. It was winter, now and forever. I helped Mona out of our hole.
She shook her head and sighed. ‘A very bad mother.’
‘What?’
‘Mother Earth–she isn’t a very good mother any more.’

‘Hello? Hello?’ I called through the palace ruins. The awesome winds had torn canyons through that great stone pile. Mona and I made a half-hearted search for survivors — half-hearted because we could sense no life. Not even a nibbling, twinkle-nosed rat had survived. The arch of the palace gate was the only man-made form untouched. Mona and I went to it. Written at its base in white paint was a Calypso. The lettering was neat. It was new. It was proof that someone else had survived the winds. The Calypso was this:

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”

__________

From the ending of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle: A Novel.

The substance “ice-nine” remains a mystery for most of the novel. Midway through the story, however, you find out that it’s a revolutionary scientific discovery — a form of frozen water which is stable at room temperature and which causes all liquid water it touches to take the same properties. Ice-nine eventually winds up in the hands of a dictator, and, not to leave you on the edge of your seat, the world ends.

So the scene above is of the earth’s ending. And the quiet, frozen apocalypse over a tundra-of-an-ocean, brings to mind Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Moreover, the cold truth that the world is something which is not ours to own, but rather borrowed — “that He to us did lend” — is echoed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which describes a similarly haunting post-apocalyptic scene. “[The father] walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Darkness implacable…Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

__________

My thoughts are with my friends along the East Coast who are now braving nature’s bad side. Stay safe.

The picture is of rain on the hood of a car. Houston, Texas.

If We’re Going to Waste Our Time Like That

26 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Speeches

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Sam Harris

“Now most of us do our best to not think about death. But there’s always part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, or a phone call away, from being starkly reminded of the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us. Now, I’m sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form; you must know how uncanny it is to be suddenly thrown out of the normal course of your life and be given the full time job of not dying, or of caring for someone who is…

But the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. And it’s not just what they did with their time — it’s not just that they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns — year after year — when life was normal. This is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s going to be a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you’ll think ‘What was I doing?’. You know this, and yet if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. Like, watching a bad movie for the for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse.

These things only make sense in light of eternity. There had better be a heaven if we’re going to waste our time like that.”

__________

From Sam Harris’s talk on Death and the Present Moment.

Now go do something good, and learn something worthwhile, and tell someone you care about them. And stop watching Cast Away — you’ve seen it, like, four times.

“The Garden” by Mark Strand

25 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by in Poetry

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Mark Strand

It shines in the garden,
in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,
in the brim of my father’s hat
as he walks on the gravel.
In the garden suspended in time
my mother sits in a redwood chair:
light fills the sky,
the folds of her dress,
the roses tangled beside her.
And when my father bends
to whisper in her ear,
when they rise to leave
and the swallows dart
and the moon and stars
have drifted off together, it shines.
Even as you lean over this page,
late and alone, it shines: even now
in the moment before it disappears.

__________

“The Garden” by Mark Strand.

In L.A.

24 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Literature

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New York

“In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF – BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.”

New York

__________

Words spoken by the riotous John Self — protagonist of the hilarious novel Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis.

The photographs were taken several years ago in N.Y., not L.A.

New Bibles for a New Babel

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in History, Photography, Religion

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Charles Bridge, Prague

“Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as ‘England’ itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the ‘Authorized’ or ‘King James’ version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. ‘The powers that be,’ it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, ‘are ordained of God.’ This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’; ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’; ‘From strength to strength’; ‘Grind the faces of the poor’; ‘salt of the earth’; ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose…

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it [The Bible] or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: ‘Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.’

Charles Bridge, PragueAt my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative ‘ifs’ and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s ‘Contemporary English Version,’ which I picked up at an evangelical ‘Promise Keepers’ rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: ‘Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.’

Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of ‘my friends’ for ‘brethren,’ but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the ‘New English Bible,’ T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing ‘in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.’ (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose…”

Charles Bridge, Prague

__________

From Christopher Hitchens’s essay about the beauty of the King James Bible and the triviality of so many modern Biblical translations. When the King Saved God: a recommended read for anyone with an interest in Christianity, literature, history, words, language, or the church.

The photographs were taken on the Charles Bridge in Prague.

You Can Never Tell the Good Thing from the Bad

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Film, Interview, Journalism

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Mike Nichols

From the conclusion of Abigail Pogrebin’s interview with acclaimed filmmaker Mike Nichols:

“I find myself looking at this famous director, who dines regularly with Spielberg and ‘Harrison’ [Ford], who has a staff at home, and a pool outside, and an equally accomplished wife upstairs on a conference call, and I find myself asking the old chestnut: Does he ever think about how far he’s come from that seven-year-old on a boat from Berlin? Nichols pauses. “I do think about that. What I think mainly is that I’m ridiculously lucky. I mean, indescribably lucky. Frighteningly lucky. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh please, don’t let some spiritual bill be piling up somewhere.’ And I’m relieved to remember that the first part of my life (as a German Jew escaping the Nazi regime) was not wonderful by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe, maybe, maybe I’ve paid my dues in that tough, painful first part, which was, after all, very long. We’ll see. If not, then I’ll be sorry. Of course the gag is that the luck was there to begin with. As I’m always telling my children and they’re now always telling it back to me: ‘You can never tell the good thing from the bad thing. Sometimes not for years, and sometimes never, because they become each other.’

__________

From Abigail Pogrebin’s Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.

This quote comes at the end of Pogrebin’s profile of Nichols, the comedian and director of The Graduate, Angels in America, and several other cinematic masterpieces. I read this for the first time in eighth grade, and it was my introduction to an idea that I still consider perhaps the deepest bit of philosophy I’ve yet read; namely, the notion that life is inherently tragic because we have to go about experiencing it in one direction while understanding it in the other.

Two great thinkers recognized and wrote about this idea before Nichols could have known. They are, first, Clive Staples Lewis, who, in reflecting on the tragic and abrupt passage of his wife, said, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” In other words, if it weren’t for the sublime moments in the presence of his former wife, the time in her absence wouldn’t be so painful.

We all understand this intuitively. The horrendous moment sometimes becomes the happy joke with the help of time, and the golden, shining instance often turns into a point of particular melancholy, and longing, and loneliness once it becomes a mere memory. You cannot tell the good from the bad: they become each other. Lewis spent several books — Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, The Problem of Pain — trying manfully to work this out.

Yet the original and best distillation of this idea was made by Søren Kierkegaard in his journals. He recognized the tragic and unavoidable truth that life can only be understood retrospectively. So you don’t know the mistake until you’ve made it, and you cannot truly know the beautiful moment until it has already passed you by. Kierkegaard wrote:

“It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backwards.”

Now reflect back on Nichols’s words.

Featured Like Him

19 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Literature

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ShakespeareWhen in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

__________

William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.

The Bard was envious. The greatest writer who ever breathed, the one that stands now in immortal isolation above the literary world, coveted another’s talent — he found himself “desiring this man’s art”.

Sonnet 29 is a poem that we would all be the richer having memorized. Not only is it musically flawless, it tells of something both unsettling and reassuring: the apparent envy and inner-struggle of the great Shakespeare. Here is a man who troubles “deaf heaven” with hopeless prayers, bemoaning his “outcast state” as one always in want of the appearance (“featured like him”), the freedoms (“scope”), and the friendships of other men. He even envied the craft, the artistic gifts, of another. Only one question could arise here: who in the world did Shakespeare see as more gifted than himself?

I have to know the answer.

As an aside: it’s interesting that the sonnet ends on a note of hope. In thinking about the love of the poem’s addressee, Shakespeare emerges like a lark from his sunken state, filled with hope enough to scorn to change places with a prince. So Shakespeare, who was a Protestant (though some interesting textual evidence suggests he was a closet-Catholic), transcends the torment of melancholy through the plain solution of earthly love, rather than the salvation offered by a deaf sky.

Something to consider.

The Highlight of the Election

19 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Current Events, Humor, Politics, Speeches

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Barack Obama And Mitt Romney Address Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation DinnerI’ve enjoyed this election. Unlike a lot of people, and unlike in 2008, I’ve generally found this race to be both serious and stimulating in its own right and a good starter to some (sometimes fruitful) political conversations.

Last night, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama spoke at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City. Their speeches represent — at least to me — some of the highlights of this campaign, as they’re full of alternating self-deprecation and zingers on the other guy, and each ends on notes of graciousness and rapport. The Al Smith dinner speeches are a tradition started by Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960, and they represent some of the values — of disagreement without disagreeableness — that should make us all feel that cliché phrase, proud to be American. 

Amidst the bitterness and venom of the election season, it’s refreshing to watch the following clips. (You don’t have to take sides as to who won.)

__________

Mitt Romney

“President Obama and I are each very lucky to have one person who is always in our corner, someone who we can lean on, and someone who is a comforting presence. Without whom, we wouldn’t be able to go another day. I have my beautiful wife, Ann, he has Bill Clinton.”

Barack Obama

“This is the third time that Governor Romney and I have met recently. As some of you may have noticed, I had a lot more energy in our second debate. I felt really well rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate.”

“Wasted” by Kingsley Amis

14 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Poetry

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Amis FamilyThat cold winter evening
The fire would not draw,
And the whole family hung
Over the dismal grate
Where rain-soaked logs
Bubbled, hissed and steamed.
Then, when the others had gone
Up to their chilly beds,
And I was ready to go,
The wood began to flame
In clear rose and violet,
Heating the small hearth.

Why should that memory cling
Now the children are all grown up,
And the house – a different house –
Is warm at any season?

__________

“Wasted” by Kingsley Amis, which can be found in his Collected Poems 1944-1979.

Amis Family

The Better Angels of Our Nature

13 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by in History, Psychology

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Steven Pinker“Charles Napier, the British army’s commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee (the Hindu practice of a widow sacrificing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre), replied ‘You say that is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.’”

__________

From The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.

The Mystery of Consciousness

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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Heidelberg“The universe is filled with physical phenomena that appear devoid of consciousness. From the birth of stars and planets, to the early stages of cell division in a human embryo, the structures and processes we find in Nature seem to lack an inner life. At some point in the development of certain complex organisms, however, consciousness emerges. This miracle does not depend on a change of materials—for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Rather, it must be a matter of organization. Arranging atoms in a certain way appears to bring consciousness into being. And this fact is among the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

Many readers of my previous essay did not understand why the emergence of consciousness should pose a special problem to science. Every feature of the human mind and body emerges over the course development: Why is consciousness more perplexing than language or digestion? The problem, however, is that the distance between unconsciousness and consciousness must be traversed in a single stride, if traversed at all. Just as the appearance of something out of nothing cannot be explained by our saying that the first something was “very small,” the birth of consciousness is rendered no less mysterious by saying that the simplest minds have only a glimmer of it.

This situation has been characterized as an “explanatory gap” and the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is surely both. I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have judged the impasse to be total: Perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Consciousness might represent a terminus of this sort. Defying analysis, the mystery of inner life may one day cease to trouble us…

But couldn’t a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy.

Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood at the level of the brain. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object—its color, contours, apparent motion, location in space, etc. arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of a ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is perfectly intelligible—and it suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the character of our experience can often be explained in terms of its underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why it should be “like something” to see in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.

For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There seems to be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we fully conscious during sleep and merely failing to form memories? Can human minds be duplicated or merged? Is it possible to love your neighbor as yourself? A precise, functional neuroanatomy of our mental states would help to answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. And yet, whatever insights arise from correlating mental and physical events, it seems unlikely that one side of the world will be fully reduced to the other.

While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something” to be what we are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this universe. How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided…”

__________

From the essays The Mystery of Consciousness and The Mystery of Consciousness II by Sam Harris.

The picture was taken by the Neckar River in Heidelberg, Germany.