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Monthly Archives: November 2012

In the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives

“In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes of pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”

__________

The opening short story in David Eagleman’s enthralling collection Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

Sum is a series of imaginative and often revealing explorations of what an afterlife could be. In this, Eagleman’s book represents a brilliant window not onto the next world, but onto this one — the cluster of oft-ignored paradoxes and properties that make up the setting in which we experience our lives. This book is as playful as it is poignant; a very rare achievement and a highly recommended read.

Check out three more stories from the collection, reprinted by the New York Times here.

The photograph is of the ramp of a ferry as it was being drawn up to cross the channel at County Kerry, Ireland.

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“Limb from Limb” by Charles Brasch

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Charles Brasch, Limb from Limb, Poem, poetry

Young John

He is afraid of me
and I of him
Who might tear each other
limb from limb

Or compel each other
heart to heart
never to tear again
locked limbs apart

__________

“Limb from Limb” by Charles Brasch.

It’s difficult to create something so sublime in thirty-one words. This poem is notable first for its simplicity (you already have it memorized) and its symmetry (the two strophes play perfect foils to each other). But Brasch’s work is also striking because of the identities — or lack thereof — given to both speaker and subject. This is surely a deliberate move on the part of the writer, as it makes the poem universal: we all have a “he” to whom we are simultaneously drawn and repelled. Brasch condenses this conflicting relationship in his brilliantly agile opposition of ‘limb from limb’ and ‘heart to heart’. It’s difficult to think of images which are, at the same time, so soft and yet so sinewy, so sublime and still so crudely human.

The lone edit I would perhaps make to the poem would be to remove ‘again’ from the second stanza. The work moves with more momentum into the final line if you read it without those two syllables, which create more melodic friction than poetic force.

To read another equally brilliant (and coincidentally thirty-one word) poem, check out “High Country Weather” by James K. Baxter.

The photograph is of a portrait which hangs in my house.

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The Greatest Gift

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1 Corinthians, Christianity, religion, the Bible

Wailing Wall1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

__________

The 13th chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians.

The picture was taken at a place where I’ve seen — on several occasions — both real love as well as some very, very clamorous cymbals: the Western “Wailing” Wall of Solomon’s Temple.

Just as I took this particular shot, a black cowled Hasidim whispered for me to put my camera away, as the sun was just fading over the wall, and Shabat — a time which forbids ‘work’ like clicking a camera shutter — was beginning.

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A Lover’s Quarrel with the World

25 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Art, Freedom of Speech, John F. Kennedy, Robert Frost, the artist

John F. Kennedy

“When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist’s fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.’

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future…

I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.”

John F. Kennedy Reading

__________

From John F. Kennedy’s speech honoring the life and work of Robert Frost, given on October 26, 1963 at Amherst College.

For the best compilation of JFK’s speeches and writings, pick up Ted Sorenson’s Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John F. Kennedy 1947 to 1963.

In this speech, Kennedy emphasized the essential place of art — and specifically poetry — in democratic society, paving the way for the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, which was signed into law two years later by President Johnson, creating The National Endowment for the Arts.

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Empty Sunlit Rooms

23 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Childhood, houses, Surprise by Joy

Guess“My father, growing, I suppose, in prosperity, decided to leave the semidetached villa in which I had been born and build himself a much larger house, further out into what was then the country. The ‘New House,’ as we continued for years to call it, was a large one even by my present standards; to a child it seemed less like a house than a city… the New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase in the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks in a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

__________

From Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Lifeby C.S. Lewis.

As I return home for Thanksgiving, I’m reminded of these words, and the ease with which Lewis remembers and recaptures that feeling of being a child, enthralled at opening an attic door or flicking on a basement light.

The picture is of my old dog, Guess, lounging in his favorite spot.

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Anti-Semitism Is Not a Mere Prejudice

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, Speeches

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anti-Semitism, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Pearl Lecture, Hamas, Holocaust, Israel, Jews, Nazism, Palestine, racism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Christopher Hitchens

“But the Jews of the Arab lands were expelled again in revenge for the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1947–48, and now the most evil and discredited fabrication of Jew-baiting Christian Europe—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—is eagerly promulgated in the Hamas charter and on the group’s Web site and recycled through a whole nexus of outlets that includes schools as well as state-run television stations.

This might license the view that the sickness [of anti-semitism] is somehow ineradicable and not even subject to rational analysis, let alone to rationalization. Anti-Semitism has flourished without banking or capitalism (for which Jews were at one time blamed) and without Communism (for which they were also blamed). It has existed without Zionism (of which leading Jews were at one time the only critics) and without the state of Israel. There has even been anti-Semitism without Jews, in states like Malaysia whose political leaders are paranoid demagogues looking for a scapegoat. This is enough to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is not a mere prejudice like any other: Sinhalese who don’t like Tamils, or Hutu who regard Tutsi as ‘cockroaches,’ do not accuse their despised neighbors of harboring a plan—or of possessing the ability—to bring off a secret world government based on the occult control of finance.

Paradoxically, then, there is something almost flattering about anti-Jewish racism. To have been confined in the ghetto for so long, and then to be held responsible for Marx, Freud, and Einstein, to say nothing of Rothschild… Yet the outcome is always the same: to be treated as human refuse and to be either deported or massacred. Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay profiling the anti-Semite has many shortcomings, but it’s hard to argue with his conclusion that such a person must necessarily carry a thirst for murder in his heart. Yet this is perhaps true of other racists as well. What strikes the eye about anti-Semitism is the godfather role it plays as the organizing principle of other bigotries. The Nazis may well have thought of Slavs and Poles as less than human, but it was the hatred of Jewry that cemented their worldview (and, horribly enough, gave them something in common with many of their Slavic and Polish victims).”

__________

From Christopher Hitchens’s short article Chosen.

Watch Hitchens give the annual Daniel Pearl lecture on anti-semitism below. This is one of the best speeches you’ll ever watch.

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Israel Is a Special Fascination for Fanatics

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Amos Oz, fanaticism, Israel, Palestine

Amos Oz

“…Israel is a special fascination for fanatics all over the world, possibly because it was born out of a dream. And the magnitude of a dream created unrealistic expectations from Israel. Israel is expected to achieve world record in high jump morality. It is expected by some people to be the most Christian nation in the world, if not the only Christian nation in the world in terms of turning its other cheek to an enemy. It is expected to perform as a universal role model in morality. It cannot live up to those expectations, not in a state of everlasting conflict. Unfortunately Israel’s moral standard in its conflict with the Arabs, with the Palestinians, is sinking lower and lower. But certainly these are not the world record in morality.

Fanatics are quick to jump on Israel. If Israel is not a sample state. If Israel is not a light unto the nations, let there be no Israel…”

__________

From Amos Oz’s recent speech on Fanaticism, Israel, and Palestine.

Read Saul Bellow’s take here: What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot.

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Why We Are Proud That We Are Americans

17 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Why We Are Proud That We Are Americans

Tags

Make Gentle the Life of This World, Robert Kennedy

Robert and Ethel Kennedy and Their Children

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product… if we should judge America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.  From the beginning our proudest boast has been the promise of Jefferson, that we, here in this country would be the best hope of mankind. ”

__________

Robert F. Kennedy, in his March 1968 address to the students of the University of Kansas.

This excerpt appears in the book I’m currently reading, Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, Maxwell Kennedy’s collection of his father’s speeches and the quotations — from the Greeks, Romantics, Bible, and elsewhere — that Robert recorded in his journal throughout the 1960s.

Listen to this portion of the speech here:

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Because the Universe Is Happening to You

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

conscious, Freud, How We Die, John Bowker, Julian Barnes, Montaigne, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Sherwin Nuland, Time

Julian Barnes

“I know many people who don’t think about death as much. And not thinking about it is the surest way of not fearing it – until it comes along. ‘The evil is knowing it’s going to happen.’ My friend H., who occasionally rebukes me for morbidity, admits: ‘I know that everybody else is going to die, but I never think I am going to die.’ Which generalizes into the commonplace: ‘We know we must die but we think we’re immortal.’ Do people really hold such heaving contradictions in their heads? They must, and Freud thought it normal: ‘Our unconscious, then, does not believe in our own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.’ So my friend H. has merely promoted her unconscious to take charge of her conscious.

Somewhere, between such useful, tactical turning away and my appalled pit-gazing there lies – there must lie – a rational, mature, scientific, liberal, middle position. So here it is, enunciated by Dr Sherwin Nuland, American thanatologist and author of How We Die: ‘A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one’s allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species… We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died – in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.’

All of which is not just reasonable but wise, of course, and rooted in Montaigne (‘Make room for others, as others have made room for you’); yet to me quite unpersuasive. There is no logical reason why the continuity of our species should depend upon my death, or yours, or anybody else’s. The planet may be getting a bit fullish, but the universe is empty – lots available, as the cemetery placard reminds us. If we didn’t die, the world wouldn’t die – on the contrary, more of it would still be alive. As for the trillions and trillions of living things that ‘in a sense’ – a phrase of giveaway weakness – died for us: I’m sorry, I don’t even buy the notion that my grandfather died ‘in a sense’ that I might live, let alone my great-grandfather and forgotten forebears… Nor do I accept that I die in order that others may live. Nor that ongoing life is a triumph. A triumph? That’s far too self-congratulatory, a bit of sentimentalism designed to soften the blow. If any doctor tells me, as I lie in my hospital bed, that my death will not only help others to live, but be symptomatic of the triumph of humanity, I shall watch him very carefully when next he adjusts my drip…

I understand (I think) that life depends on death. That we cannot have a planet in the first place without the previous deaths of collapsing stars; further, that in order for complex organisms like you and me to inhabit this planet, for there to be self-conscious and self-replicating life, an enormous sequence of evolutionary mutations has had to be tried out and discarded. I can see this, and when I ask ‘Why is death happening to me?’ I can applaud the theologian John Bowker’s crisp reply: ‘Because the universe is happening to you.’ But my understanding of all this has not evolved in its turn: towards say, acceptance, let alone comfort. And I don’t remember putting in to have the universe happen to me.”

__________

From Julian Barnes’s remarkable memoir on mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

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That Head-on-Heart Stuff

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Literature

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

John Self, kindness, Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note

Thailand

“After all we are only human beings down here and we could do with a lot more praise and comfort than we actually get. Earthling reassurance — it’s in permanently short supply, don’t you think? Be honest, brother. Lady, now tell the truth. When was the last time a fellow-Earther let you rest your head on their heart, caressed your cheek, and said things designed to make you feel deeply okay? It doesn’t happen often enough, does it. We’d all like it to happen a lot more often than it does. Can’t we do a deal? Oh boy (I bet you’re thinking), that head-on-heart stuff, whew, could I use a little of that.”

__________

To help you over the mid-week blues… some words spoken by John Self in Martin Amis’s hilarious novel Money: A Suicide Note. Can’t we do that deal?

The picture was taken this summer in Thailand, as our plane banked into the island airport at Ko Tao.

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“To Himself” by Mark Strand

13 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Mark Strand, To Himself

Mark StrandSo you’ve come to me now without knowing why.
Nor why you sit in the ruby plush of an ugly chair, the sly
Revealing angle of light turning your hair a silver gray;
Nor why you have chosen this moment to set the writing of years
Against the writing of nothing; you who narrowed your eyes,
Peering into the polished air of the hallway mirror, and said
You were mine, all mine; who begged me to write, but always
Of course to you, without ever saying what it was for;
Who used to whisper in my ear only the things
You wanted to hear; who comes to me now and says
That it’s late, that the trees are bending under the wind,
That night will fall; as if there were something
You wanted to know, but for years had forgotten to ask,
Something to do with sunlight slanting over a table
And chair, an arm rising, a face turning, and far
In the distance a car disappearing over the hill.

__________

“To Himself” by Mark Strand.

For those who are in Washington, DC: Mark Strand will be giving a seminar and reading tonight at 5:30 PM and 8:00 PM in Copley Formal Lounge at Georgetown University.

For those who are interested, I’ve posted other works of Strand’s here: Mirror and Ever So Many Hundred Years Hence.

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