• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Company of Saints

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Arthur Koestler, Dom Perignon, Edmund Wilson, heaven, Ian McEwan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, saints

Saint Patrick“Arthur Koestler expressed ‘some timid hopes for a depersonalized afterlife.’ Such a wish is unsurprising — Koestler had devoted many of his last years to parapsychology — but to me distinctly unalluring. Just as there seems little point in a religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as opposed to one which tells you how to live, which colors and stains everything, which is serious, so I would want my afterlife, if one’s on offer, to be an improvement — preferably a substantial one — on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can’t see that this has any advantage over complete extinction. Why have hopes, even timid ones, for such a state? Ah, my boy, but it’s not about what you’d prefer, it’s about what turns out to be true. The key exchange on this subject happened between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Edmund Wilson. Singer told Wilson that he believed in survival after death. Wilson said that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to survive, thank you very much. Singer replied, ‘If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.’

The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing. And while we’re on the subject, I think the company of saints might be distinctly interesting. Many of them led exciting lives — dodging assassins, confronting tyrants, preaching at medieval street corners, being tortured — and even the quieter ones could tell you about beekeeping, lavender-growing, Umbrian ornithology, and so on. Dom Perignon was a monk, after all. You might have been hoping for a broader social mix, but if it ‘has been arranged,’ then the saints would keep you going for longer than you might expect.”

__________

From Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes.

I stayed up most of last night reading Barnes’s highly anticipated new work Levels of Life. It’s one of the most refined, and probably the most heartbreaking book I’ve ever read. The last third is an extended essay on loss and bereavement — a meditation so heavy that the only thing keeping you from collapsing under its emotional weight is the lucidity and beauty with which it’s crafted. Barnes is an absolutely masterful writer. For my money, Ian McEwan is the only living author who can write such intricate prose.

Pick up a copy of Levels of Life.

Read other parts of Nothing:

Julian Barnes

Identity is Memory

Julian Barnes

Because the Universe is Happening to You

Julian Barnes

Mere Human Love

Julian Barnes

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Saint JeromeBarnes on Belief and Doubt in Religious Art

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

You, Romans

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aeneid, foreign policy, Poem, poetry, Virgil

Roman Statue

The Greeks shape bronze statues so real they seem to breathe,
And carve cold marble until it almost comes to life.
The Greeks compose great orations, and measure
The heavens so well they can predict the rising of the stars.
But you, Romans, remember your great arts;
To govern the peoples with authority,
To establish peace under the rule of law,
To conquer the mighty, and show them mercy once they are conquered.

__________

From Book VI of Virgil’s The Aeneid.

Throughout the day, as a break from studying for exams, I’ve been flipping through the middle third of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Aeneid. Other versions of the full text are available online, but from what I can tell, Fitzgerald’s is the best modern English translation.

As students of American politics, we can perhaps map this two-thousand-year-old passage on to some of the United States’ more altruistic (but shrewd) modern, interventionist foreign policy — Marshall Aid, the Berlin airlift, applying soft power in containing the Soviet Union, even our restraint during the Boxer Rebellion in China.

It’s a standard we should continually keep in mind.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Cosmos as a Concept

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

atoms, existence, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Jim Holt, particle physics, Pauli Exclusion Principle, physics, quantum theory, Radiolab, string theory, universe, Wolfgang Pauli

Constellation Crux

Talk about the recent changes in our understanding of physics.

Well we’ve discovered that the atom is almost entirely empty space. If you took a baseball and put it in the middle of Madison Square Garden, that would be like the nucleus, and the first level of electrons are as far away as the exterior of the Garden. So you can think of this baseball, this nucleus, as a tiny dot all alone.

So the atom is almost entirely empty space. But why don’t I fall through the floor here, because the floor is mostly empty space and I’m mostly empty space? If you look at it on the micro level, this apparent solidity is the product of a pair of purely mathematical relations: the Pauli Exclusion Principle and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

And if you study quantum field theory, which is what all physics graduate students now begin with in graduate school, you discover that even particles are unreal. They are just temporary properties of what are called fields, and fields are just distributions of mathematical quantities through spacetime. So particles don’t seem to be grounded in anything tangible. And the pervading theory in quantum mechanics says that a field is like a stream of numbers — pure information — numbers that tell you where an electron might be. But you can’t observe it, only its effect on other things.

And if something is in principle unobservable, you may as well say it doesn’t exist.

So what is a rock? A rock looks like a good, solid, persisting object. But it really, in our perception of it, is energy transitions — changes in the distribution of energy from one state to another. And when that happens, energy is radiated. It goes through my pupil, and strikes my retina, and I perceive the rock.

So I don’t know, Jim, if you would call a rock — like Bishop Barkley did — a thought in the mind of God. But he might say that deep down, what a rock is is an expression of rules, or math, it’s just here like the shadow of an idea.

I’ve heard one physicist say that the cosmos is ultimately a concept. Maybe, a hundred years from now when String theory is worked out, we might have a very different conception of it. But it looks like the universe is mathematics and structure all the way down.

You’re okay with this?

Well I’m a sort of mathematical romantic. I love the idea that the essence of reality is not stuff — stuff is kind of ugly, you want to get rid of stuff, there’s too much stuff in your apartment —

I like stuff.

Well this is a temperamental difference between us. I like the idea that reality consists of a flux of pure information with no further substance.

I don’t know why this makes you so happy. I would love if I’m clapping or hitting someone in the face, that the billiard ball of me is hitting the billiard ball of them. 

But we’re living in an almost spiritual realm, you want to live in this gross material realm…

And if you go back to the 19th century view, that we’re all these hard particle atoms just bumping around, is that any more plausible? Is it any more plausible that you and I are just dumb, hard particles in a certain configuration? And if that’s true, how are certain configurations of these particles tantamount to the horrible feeling of pain?

Whether it’s a mathematical object, or whether its little billiard balls knocking around, it’s still miraculous and improbable that it should produce subjective experience, that it should produce pleasure and pain. I find it to be exhilarating to worry about the metaphysics of physics and the nature of reality even though it doesn’t lead you to any sort of comfortable intellectual closure. It’s a good way of idling away an otherwise boring afternoon.

Constellation Perseus

__________

Selections from Jim Holt in conversation with Robert Krulwich discussing physics and the material universe.

I’ve just discovered Radiolab, the nationally syndicated radio show and podcast hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. I’d bet that you, the voluntary reader of this blog, will enjoy the stuff done at Radiolab. The program devotes entire episodes to a particular scientific or philosophical idea — like “time” or “free will” or “morality” — and approaches it in a highly accesible and absorbing, though still informative, way. The hosts are clever without coming off as obtuse, and the show features incredibly rich sound design. Check out an archive of all of their episodes here.

Read excerpts relating to these same subjects taken from Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?:

Baruch Spinoza

Could the World Cause Itself?

John Updike

This Planet and the Stars were Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period

Henri Bergson

Try to Wish into Nonbeing the Entire Contents of the World

Raindrops on a Car

The Arithmetic of Nothingness

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“Sun and Rain” by W.S. Merwin

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Poem, poetry, Sun and Rain, W. S. Merwin

Chico on a Ledge

Opening the book at a bright window
above a wide pasture after five years
I find I am still standing on a stone bridge
looking down with my mother at dusk into a river
hearing the current as hers in her lifetime

now it comes to me that that was the day
she told me of seeing my father alive for the first time
and he waved her back from the door as she was leaving
took her hand for a while and said
nothing

at some signal
in a band of sunlight all the black cows flow down the pasture together
to turn uphill and stand as the dark rain touches them

__________

“Sun and Rain” by W.S. Merwin, which you’ll find in Collected Poems 1952-1993.

The photo is of Chico laying on a window ledge at my house. There is nothing and no one as comfortable as that cat is when he naps in the sun on a long, lazy afternoon.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The World Is Getting Less Innocent

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Literature

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

consumerism, excess, Experience, Germaine Greer, innocence, Martin Amis, Money, Money: A Suicide Note, the world, wealth

Martin Amis

“I, in common with many writers, feel that there’s a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world. Mostly to do with television. People know a little about a lot, and put very little effort into accumulating knowledge and culture, and when they do, it’s almost like a sort of consumerism of culture…

But with regard to feeling disgust, I think every writer — even the blackest writer — actually loves it all. I suppose it is temperamental, but I don’t sit around feeling disgusted. I feel enthused.

Many of us think the world has reached its nadir, its low point. But in fact this era will be lamented, just like the last. That’s the paradox.

What you can say about the world is that, while it may not be getting any better, it’s getting infinitely less innocent all the time. It’s like, it has been to so many parties, been on so many dates, had so many fights, got its handbag stolen so many times. So the accumulation is what makes the world seem at its worst, always. Because it’s never been through as much as it’s been through today, the earth.”

__________

From an interview with Martin Amis in 1984, discussing his acclaimed novel about consumerism and excess, Money: A Suicide Note.

I’m glad to report that you, the consistent reader of this blog, most likely do not fall into that wide category of people who put minimal energy into absorbing culture and knowledge.

Watch the short discussion with Amis below:

Read previously posted excerpts from Money here:

Martin Amis

There’s Only One Way to Get Good at Fighting

New York

In L.A.

Thailand Plane

That Head-on-Heart Stuff

Young Martin Amis

Can You Remember Where You Left Those Keys?

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“For Andrew Wood” by James Fenton

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

For Andrew Wood, friendship, James Fenton, Poem, poetry

Daniel in Ireland

What would the dead want from us
Watching from their cave?
Would they have us forever howling?
Would they have us rave
Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled
Like some ancient emperor’s slave?

None of my dead friends were emperors
With such exorbitant tastes
And none of them were so vengeful
As to have all their friends waste
Waste quiet away in sorrow
Disfigured and defaced.

I think the dead would want us
To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.

And time would find them generous
As they used to be
And what else would they want from us
But an honored place in our memory,
A favorite room, a hallowed chair,
Privilege and celebrity?
And so the dead might cease to grieve
And we might make amends
And there might be a pact between
Dead friends and living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us
Would be such living friends.

__________

For Andrew Wood by James Fenton. Find it in Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984.

The photo is of my old friend Daniel and was taken in Muckross House in Ireland.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Loving Your Enemies

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion, Speeches

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Apostle Paul, Goethe, Love, Loving Your Enemy, Martin Luther King Jr., Ovid, Plato

Martin Luther King Jr. Preaching

“So I want to turn your attention to this subject: ‘Loving Your Enemies.’ It’s so basic to me because it is a part of my basic philosophical and theological orientation—the whole idea of love, the whole philosophy of love. In the fifth chapter of the gospel as recorded by Saint Matthew, we read these very arresting words flowing from the lips of our Lord and Master: ‘Ye have heard that it has been said, “Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.” But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.’

Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command…

Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington

There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, ‘I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.’ There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Goethe, ‘There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.’ There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Apostle Paul, ‘I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.’

So somehow the ‘isness’ of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals…

Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”

Martin Luther King Jr. At Home With His Family

__________

Martin Luther King, in his sermon “Loving Your Enemies”, delivered to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on November 17th, 1957. Find this along with the best of King in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr..

I’m telling you now: carve out 15 minutes in your day to read this entire sermon.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“Awakening” by Robert Bly

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Awakening, Poem, poetry, Robert Bly

Peter's Farm

We are approaching sleep; the chestnut blossoms in the mind
Mingle with thoughts of pain
And the long roots of barley, bitterness
As of the oak roots staining the waters dark
In Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain
And sodden blossoms, out of this
We have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.

The storm is coming.
The small farmhouse in Minnesota
Is hardly strong enough for the storm.
Darkness, darkness in grass, darkness in trees.
Even the water in wells trembles.
Bodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums
Are dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay
To the deep barns where the dark air is moving from the corners.

Lincoln’s statue and the traffic.
From the long past
Into the long present
A bird, forgotten in these pressures, warbling,
As the great wheel turns around, grinding
The living in water.
Washing, continual washing, in water now stained
With blossoms and rotting logs,
Cries, half-muffled, from beneath the earth, the living awakened
at last like the dead.

__________

“Awakening” by Robert Bly, which you’ll find in the collection What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?.

I’ve seen Robert Bly vitiated both in print and in speeches (mostly for his admittedly idiotic book Iron John); but I don’t care what anyone says, this poem hits every note.

Took the picture at my friend Peter’s beautiful family farm in Keswick, Virginia.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Terror and Boredom

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

boredom, Boston Marathon bombing, Islam, Martin Amis, Osama bin Laden, religion, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, The Second Plane

Boston Marathon Bombing

“Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven’t managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion… Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason…

Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As [Sam] Harris puts it:

‘Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden’s favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization… Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right – about anything – seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.’…

In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York – and from winter to summer – with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran’s Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn’t like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack – staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.

There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, ‘Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on airplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East.’…

My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism – thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren’t searching all the passengers. And I couldn’t defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric ‘pollution’ of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient program. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York…

The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to ‘a tolerable level’ (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven’t got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn’t feel.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centers, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else – a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband…

Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. ‘Islam’, as he frequently reminds us, ‘isn’t like that.’ Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means ‘submission’ – the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.”

Martin Amis__________

Selections from Martin Amis’s book The Second Plane.

It has just been released that the younger Boston-Marathon-mass-murderer, Dzhokhar Tsarnev, went to the gym and then a house party with his intramural soccer buddies two days after the marathon bombing. He also tweeted this,

“I don’t argue with fools who say islam is terrorism it’s not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot”

on January 15th of this year (three months to the day before the bombing). Even if that sentiment were true at the time (which is dubious), or was remotely sensible in its construction (which it’s not), it has since been disproved, self-discredited, by the acts of its author.

The liberal West needs to absorb one truth down to the soles of our feet: We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.

To note: I have just spent part of the afternoon hanging out at the office of the captivating scholar of terrorism, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, and threw a slew of questions related to this topic her way. She had some fascinating thoughts on the issue of whether we can apply — or how we should apply — reason to an ideology which is so counter-intuitive, so hideously irrational. I will hopefully write some about this very pleasant and surprisingly funny hang out session later in the week.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“Going” by Philip Larkin

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Coming, Going, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry

Grass with DewThere is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?

What loads my hand down?

__________

“Going” by Philip Larkin, which you can find in The Complete Poems.

“Going” can be read as a complement (or perhaps counterpart) to another of Larkin’s works recently posted here, “Coming”. Both poems begin at an evening. In “Coming” it’s a sundown of warm and tender recognition; in “Going” it’s all gray clouds gathering — portents of some enormous, merciless darkness.

I like both poems a lot, for different reasons, though I think “Coming” is the more polished work. Part of this may be attributable to age. Larkin wrote “Going” when he was twenty-three (optimistic, wasn’t he?). Yet in addition to its craftsmanship, “Coming” is also a better poem, I think, because of the richer set of emotions it projects.

Read “Coming” here:

Ireland Birds

The photograph: taken on the southern coast Ireland several years ago.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

What Is Happening When We See Somebody Die?

20 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Religion, Science

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, David Eagleman, Life, Will Self

David Eagleman

“It may be that people have different flavors, or levels, of anxiety about death. I’m actually quite optimistic about death. I feel like everything about our existence is so mysterious. For example, you don’t remember getting here, you’ve just sort of always been here as far as you recall. You’re told you’re going to die; nobody knows what that means.

We don’t understand the fabric of reality yet. We know that space is somewhere between nine and thirteen dimensional — not just the three dimensions that we see. So I sort of feel optimistic about it. And I feel like, I’m curious about what happens next.

So let me make up a couple of things that could be happening – I’m not saying I believe these, but they’re perfectly possible. So let’s say what happens when you die is that you slip out of these three dimensions and into some other dimensions. Okay, well there’s no evidence to support that, it’s a lovely idea, and when a loved one dies, you can certainly think about that happening.

When it comes to questions of consciousness… most neuroscientists will say something like, ‘Oh well, when you die, you just shut off. That’s the end of it, because the brain stops functioning.’ What’s clear from a century of good neuroscience is that you are totally dependent on the integrity of your biology, and when this starts going downhill, you change. You lose the ability to see colors or name fuzzy animals or understand music. You are your brain. So it seems the logical conclusion to that must be that when your brain stops, you stop.

But there actually are other ways of viewing it that are equally as plausible. And again, please don’t cite me on this, because I’m not saying it is true, but let me give an example of something that could be true.

Imagine you’re a bushman in the Kalahari desert and you find a radio. You don’t understand what it is or how it works, but it’s making voices.

You discover through experimentation that if you pull out the different wires, the voices stop or change. So you would conclude, correctly, that the voices are dependent on the integrity of the physical system. But you’d be missing something very large there, which is that it’s not really about just the integrity of the physical system: there’s electromagnetic radiation, which you don’t have the capacity to detect yet.

So the reason I mention these sort of wacky, far out ideas is that they’re equally as plausible as anything else we have in neuroscience. They’re consistent with all the data. And those different options – there are lots of them – make me feel, when I see somebody die, as though there are many things that could be happening.

Including that they’re slipping off into some different place and the broadcast may still be going on.”

__________

A transcribed portion from neuroscientist David Eagleman in conversation with novelist Will Self. This is a fantastically illuminating interview (the second best for my money, behind the greatest interview ever given, Martin Amis with Charlie Rose).

Eagleman, who I’m proud to say lives and operates a lab in my home city of Houston, Texas, is one of the great living communicators of science. I try to listen to or read everything of his.

Watch a portion of the conversation here:

Listen to the entire Eagleman-Self conversation here.

Read a story from his acclaimed collection of fiction, Sum: “In the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences”

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • Henry Ford Was a Colossal Moron
    Henry Ford Was a Colossal Moron
  • "Not Dying" by Mark Strand
    "Not Dying" by Mark Strand
  • Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children
    Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: