Monthly Archives: July 2013

“How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

__________

“How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)” by writer and farmer Wendell Berry. You can find it in his outstanding book This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems.

Turning Coffee into Theorems

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Science

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Paul Erdős

“Paul Erdős was one of the most brilliant and prolific mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was also, as Paul Hoffman documents in his book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a true eccentric—a ‘mathematical monk’ who lived out of a pair of suitcases, dressed in tattered suits, and gave away almost all the money he earned, keeping just enough to sustain his meager lifestyle; a hopeless bachelor who was extremely (perhaps abnormally) devoted to his mother and never learned to cook or even boil his own water for tea; and a fanatic workaholic who routinely put in nineteen-hour days, sleeping only a few hours a night.

Erdős liked to work in short, intense collaborations with other mathematicians, and he crisscrossed the globe seeking fresh talent, often camping out in colleagues’ homes while they worked on a problem together. One such colleague remembered an Erdos visit from the 1970s:

… he only needed three hours of sleep. He’d get up early and write letters, mathematical letters. He’d sleep downstairs. The first time he stayed, the clock was set wrong. It said 7:00, but it was really 4:30 A.M. He thought we should be up working, so he turned on the TV full blast. Later, when he knew me better, he’d come up at some early hour and tap on the bedroom door. ‘Ralph, do you exist?’ The pace was grueling. He’d want to work from 8:00 A.M. until 1:30 A.M. Sure we’d break for short meals but we’d write on napkins and talk math the whole time. He’d stay a week or two and you’d collapse at the end.

Erdős owed his phenomenal stamina to amphetamines—he took ten to twenty milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin daily. Worried about his drug use, a friend once bet Erdős that he wouldn’t be able to give up amphetamines for a month. Erdős took the bet and succeeded in going cold turkey for thirty days. When he came to collect his money, he told his friend, ‘You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.’ After the bet, Erdős promptly resumed his amphetamine habit, which he supplemented with shots of strong espresso and caffeine tablets. ‘A mathematician,’ he liked to say, ‘is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.'”

__________

From the section on Paul Erdős in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

Erdős also had a distinctive lexicon which he used regardless if his audience understood its terms or not. For instance, although he was an atheist, Erdős spoke of “The Book” — a hypothetical volume into which God had poured his most nebulous mathematical proofs. He would frequently declare, “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.”

Moreover, while he doubted the existence of God, he referred to the divine as the “Supreme Fascist,” or SF, which he accused of hiding his socks and Hungarian passports, and of concealing the most exquisite mathematical concepts and proofs from man. Often Erdős would declare, after discovering an especially beautiful mathematical proof, “This one’s from The Book!”.

Some other terms from Erdős’s dictionary:

– Children were referred to as “epsilons” (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε))
– Women were “bosses”
– Men were “slaves”
– People who stopped doing mathematics had “died”
– People who physically died had “left”
– Music was “noise”
– To give a mathematical lecture was “to preach”
– To give an oral exam to a student was “to torture” him/her.

Erdős’s affirmative mantra was, “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.”

He also declared, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

For his epitaph, he suggested, “Végre nem butulok tovább,” which is Hungarian for “I’ve finally stopped getting dumber.”

Erdős is also the only person to have an Erdős number of 0.

A Universe from Nothing

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Philosophy

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Gottfried Leibniz

“Nothing is, for example, popularly held to be better than a dry martini but worse than sand in the bedsheets. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. Nothing is impossible for God yet a breeze for the rankest incompetent. In fact, no matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would simply mean that everything is obvious–including, presumably, nothing. That, perhaps, is why the world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing. But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also many bumptious types about–call them nullophiles–who are fond of declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.

The philosophers of antiquity were inclined to agree. Ex nihilo nihil, they unanimously declared: ‘Nothing comes from nothing.’ Not only does this maxim attribute to nothing the divine quality of being self-generating; it also impiously denies God the power to prevail against nothingness, to bring about a world ex nihilo…

To say God created the world ‘out of nothing’ is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of anything. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than nothing at all.

And a few centuries later, someone finally did—a foppish and conniving German courtier who also ranks among the greatest intellects of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The year was 1714. Leibniz, then sixty-eight, was nearing the end of a long and absurdly productive career. He had, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, invented the calculus. He had single-handedly revolutionized the science of logic. He had created a fantastic metaphysics based on an infinity of soul-like units called “monads,” and on the axiom—later cruelly mocked by Voltaire in Candide—that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ Despite his fame as a philosopher-scientist, Leibniz was left behind in Hanover when his royal employer, the elector Georg Ludwig, went to Britain to become the newly crowned King George I…

It was in these gloomy circumstances that Leibniz produced his final philosophical writings, among them an essay titled ‘Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason.’ In this essay, he put forth what he called the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason,’ which says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. ‘This principle having been stated,’ Leibniz wrote, ‘the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

For Leibniz, the ostensible answer was easy. For reasons of career advancement, he had always pretended to hew to religious orthodoxy. The reason for the world’s existence, he accordingly claimed, was God, who created it through his own free choice, motivated by his infinite goodness.

But what was the explanation for God’s own existence? Leibniz had an answer to this question too. Unlike the universe, which exists contingently, God is a necessary being. He contains within Himself the reason for His own existence. His nonexistence is logically impossible.

Thus, no sooner was the question Why is there something rather than nothing? raised than it was dispatched. The universe exists because of God. And God exists because of God. The Godhead alone, Leibniz declared, can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery of existence.

But the Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence did not prevail for long. In the eighteenth century, both David Hume and Immanuel Kant—philosophers who were at loggerheads on most issues—attacked the notion of ‘necessary being’ as an ontological cheat. There are, to be sure, entities whose existence is logically impossible—a square circle, for instance. But no entity’s existence, Hume and Kant agreed, is guaranteed as a matter of pure logic. ‘Whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent,’ Hume wrote. ‘There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction’—including God.”

__________

From Jim Holt’s compendious, mind-bending book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The man pictured above is Mister Leibniz.

Read related excerpts from Holt’s book below:

Baruch Spinoza

Could the World Cause Itself?

Constellation PerseusThe Cosmos as a Concept

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

The Palace of Memory

29 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by in Literature

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Martin Amis

“A very strange thing happens to you – a very good thing happens to you – in your early fifties. And I’m assuming that my case is typical, which is what novelists do; a poet can’t be typical about anything, but a novelist is an everyman (and an innocent and a literary being), and you assume that how you feel is how everyone feels.

And I’ll predict that in your fifties, something enormous will happen in your mind, and it’s like discovering another continent on the globe: and what happens is, you’re suddenly visited by the past.

And it’s there like a huge palace in your mind, and you can go visit all these different rooms and staircases and chambers. And it’s particularly the erotic, the amatory past – and if you have children, they’re somehow very strongly present in this palace of the past.

I say it to my sons – I don’t say it to my daughters – look, when you’re having an affair, make notes. Try to remember everything about it. Because this is what you’re going to need when you’re older. You’re going to need these rooms.

And they’re a huge resource as you continue to grow and age.”

__________

From Martin Amis’s interview with Edmundo Paz Soldan at the British Council’s Hay Festival in Xalapa in Veracruz, Mexico.

Although I’m not to the same stage of life as Amis, I think that this is the image, the framework for understanding memory that most accords with my own experience. I like the conception of memory as a physical system with its own reified, mapable dimensions that you can mentally inhabit and explore.

From another recent Amis interview for the LA Review of Books:

Did having children have a big effect on your writing?

MA: Oh yes. For one thing, I had this new cast of characters… Children are very comic.

I was quite broody for a while before they came. I’d got completely fed up with the single life. I wanted a new relationship between me and the world, and having children does change that. They’re the best thing, children. I felt from a very young age that these were the things on offer in life, and I wanted to have the life that involves bearing children. A negative example was Philip Larkin — no children, no marriage, no divorce, no war. My father was the opposite; he did it all…

It’s very nice to still have a 13 year old. It’s rejuvenating just looking at her. I find them fascinating. They’ll be gone soon. The empty nest — people have nervous breakdowns. I’ll be sad when they leave home…

As you get older, you don’t take any comfort in your achievements. What matters is how it went with women and how it went with children. That’s what becomes important.

“In Dreams” by Ian Hamilton

27 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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NPG x35720; Ian Hamilton by Mark GersonTo live like this:
One hand in yours, the other
Murderously cold; one eye
Pretending to watch over you,
The other blind.
We live in dreams:
These sentimental afternoons,
These silent vows,
How we would starve without them.

__________

“In Dreams” by Ian Hamilton, which you’ll find among his consistently excellent Collected Poems.

The link above takes you to John Etheridge’s The Book of Pain, a site which catalogs his writing and some of the work which influences it. John’s writing is very intricate and careful and readable: it’s one of the few such sites I check consistently.

Mark Twain’s Daily Routine

26 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Literature

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Mark Twain

“In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study—they would blow a horn if they needed him—he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. ‘On hot days,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.’

After dinner, Twain would read his day’s work to the assembled family. He liked to have an audience, and his evening performances almost always won their approval. On Sundays, Twain skipped work to relax with his wife and children, read, and daydream in some shady spot on the farm. Whether or not he was working, he smoked cigars constantly. One of his closest friends, the writer William Dean Howells, recalled that after a visit from Twain, ‘the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.’ Howells also records Twain’s difficulties getting to sleep at night:

In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and he had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.”

__________

From the section devoted to Mark Twain, one of the finest Americans to ever breathe, from Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

It Has to Be Earned: Arthur Brooks on Creating Value

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in Freedom, Interview, Politics

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Arthur Brooks“Financial status is the way we demonstrate to others (and ourselves) that we are successful—hence the fancy watches, the expensive cars, and the bespoke suits. We use these things to show other people not just that we are prosperous, but that we are prosperous because we create value.

There is nothing strange about measuring our success with money; we measure things indirectly all the time. I require my students to take exams not because I believe their scores have any inherent value, but because I know these scores correlate extremely well with how much they have studied and how well they understand the material. Your doctor draws your blood to check your cholesterol not because blood cholesterol is interesting in and of itself, but because it measures your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. In the same way, we measure our professional success with green pieces of paper called ‘dollars.’

What scholars often portray as an ignoble tendency—wanting to have more than others—is often evidence that we are driven to create value. Wanting to create value is a virtue, not a vice. The fact that it also brings us happiness is a tremendous blessing.

Have you ever wondered why rich entrepreneurs continue to work so hard? Perhaps you’ve said, ‘If I had a billion dollars, I’d retire.’ This is what Mack Metcalf [a forklift driver who won a $65 million Powerball Jackpot, and died 4 years later from cirrhosis of the liver] actually did when he won the lottery. But if he had earned that money doing something creative and productive, things would almost certainly have gone differently for him. People who succeed at what they do tend to keep doing it. The drive to succeed, as opposed to just having more money than others, explains why the super-rich—who already have so much more than virtually everybody—continue to work.

Take the case of billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. The world’s 14th-richest man, he would need to spend more than $30 million per week, or $183,000 per hour, just to avoid increasing his wealth. Further, he would have to spend it on items with no investment qualities, meaning that, unless he sets his money on fire, or (better yet) gives it away, he simple cannot not be filthy rich. Yet he continues to slave away, earning billion after billion. Being rich, and having more than the average Joe, simply cannot be driving Larry Ellison. It is the will to succeed and create value at greater and greater heights.

Who enjoys the benefits created from the slaving of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and all of America’s other success-addicted, ultra-rich entrepreneurs? We all do: As long as fortunes are earned—as opposed to stolen, squeezed from governments, or otherwise extorted from citizens—this is good for all of us.

Oracle has not made Larry Ellison a rich man without any benefit to society. The firm currently has tens of thousands of employees, people with well-paying jobs to support their families. The company has introduced technology that has benefited all parts of the economy, and it has paid billions to its shareholders. And we can’t forget that Oracle has rendered generously unto Caesar, year after year: In 2007 alone, it paid $1.2 billion in corporate taxes, totally apart from the personal taxes paid by Ellison and his employees.

Money is a measure of success, and a handy one at that. But there is a dark side to this fact: People tend to forget that money is only a measure. Some people focus on money for its own sake, forgetting what really brings the happiness…

In 1978, for example, researchers presented a sample of adults with a list of 24 big-ticket consumer items (a car, a house, international travel, a swimming pool, and so on). They were asked how many of these items they currently possessed; they were also asked, ‘When you think of the good life—the life you’d like to have—which of the things on this list, if any, are part of the good life as far as you are personally concerned?’

Inevitably, people felt that the ‘good life’ required more things than they currently possessed. Among the people between 30 and 44 years old, the average number of items owned was 2.5, while the ideal number was 4.3. The same people were interviewed 16 years later, in 1994, and presented with the same list. Naturally, most people had more items; the ones formerly in their 30s and early 40s (now in the next age category, 45 to 59 years old) had 3.2 items, on average. They were closer to the good life, right? Wrong. Their requirements for the good life had now shifted, to 5.4 items. In other words, after 16 years and lots of work, the ‘good life’ deficit had stayed almost exactly the same. The more stuff you have, the more you want.”

__________

From Arthur Brooks’s article Can Money Buy Happiness?.

Tomorrow is my last day working at the American Enterprise Institute, of which Arthur Brooks is the current president.

Following his graduation from high school and a brief stint at the Annapolis Brass Quintet in Baltimore, Brooks moved by himself to Spain to become the principal French hornist of the City Orchestra of Barcelona. While eating lunch in the AEI dining room the other day, I overheard Brooks recount this personal story too improbable for any novel, which he capped off by saying he was leaving the table to head to catch a flight — to western India to meet with the Dalai Lama. Needless to say, he’s a pretty compelling case.

Below is an excerpt from Marvin Olasky’s recent interview with Arthur Brooks:

How many French hornists have become presidents of the American Enterprise Institute? One.

What are the similarities between playing the French horn and being president of AEI? Creativity… the working out of ideas that are of interest to other people… and the privilege of having audiences enjoy your work. The only barriers in front of you are those put in place by your own imagination.

Why did you decide to move from a prestigious orchestra position to academic work? Things were going well … and I wasn’t happy. What I wanted to be was an economist. I wanted to do that analysis of how the gears turn in society. I hadn’t even gone to college, so at 28 I had to go to college and get a graduate degree.

When you told your dad about your new plan, what did he say? I said, “Dad, I want to become an economist.” After a silence he said, “Why would you want to do that? You’re at the top of your career.” I said, “Because I’m not happy.” He said, “What makes you so special?”

A Harvard economist once told me he did not plan to have any children because he figured that every child would cost him a book, and he wanted to publish books rather than have children. You have three children, and you’ve published lots of books. Does having children inspire you to publish more? I do believe the world will benefit more from my children than it will from my books, but there is a connection. My wife and I had had our two sons biologically. I was writing this book about charity and finding that when people give to charities their lives improve dramatically. I wrote a chapter on it, and everything I write my wife Esther reads.

That’s wise. For sure. She’s spiked a lot of my stuff. Susan probably spikes your stuff too sometimes, right?

Yeah. A couple times that she hasn’t I wish she had. Exactly. So I brought home this chapter that shows charitable actions make you happy and healthy. Esther ruminated on it for a while, then said, ‘We ought to use the information in this book to change our lives a little bit. I think we should give more.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll write a check.’ And she said, ‘I think we should adopt a baby.’ I said, ‘It’s only a book!’ Then of course I had no argument, so we did. We adopted our daughter from China. She’s now 8 years old.

Two questions: First, how should we define fairness? Seventy percent of Americans believe that true fairness means rewarding merit and creating an opportunity society, which is exactly what the free enterprise system is designed to do. The fairest system is one in which people have an opportunity to rise. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a safety net, but a safety net is not middle-class welfare. It’s not spreading the wealth and getting rid of risk: It’s simply making sure that people don’t have the most abysmal poverty and starve.

Second question: “Earned success” is a key concept in your book. What does that mean? Earned success is the idea that you’re creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people. It’s not money per se: It’s the value you create with your life. You can denominate it with souls saved, or neighborhoods that are habitable, or clean drinking water in Africa, or lots of money, or beautiful works of art, or having children who are honest and have good values, or whatever. People who say they’ve earned their success are the happiest people. It has to be earned. 

The Moral Landscape

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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Sam Harris“One of the most interesting things to come out of the research on human happiness is the discovery that we are very bad judges of how we will feel in the future—an ability that the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has called ‘affective forecasting.’ Gilbert and others have shown that we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and bad experiences will affect us. Changes in wealth, health, age, marital status, etc., tend not to matter as much as we think they will—and yet we make our most important decisions in life based on these inaccurate assumptions. It is useful to know that what we think will matter often matters much less than we think. Conversely, things we consider trivial can actually impact our lives greatly. If you have ever been impressed by how people often rise to the occasion while experiencing great hardship but can fall to pieces over minor inconveniences, you have seen this principle at work. The general finding of this research is now uncontroversial: we are poorly placed to accurately recall the past, to perceive the present, or to anticipate the future with respect to our own happiness. It seems little wonder, therefore, that we are so often unfulfilled.

If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment — by giving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their mental state — you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information ‘the experiencing self’ and the second ‘the remembering self.’ And his justification for partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two ‘selves’ often disagree. Indeed, they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time. We saw this earlier with respect to Kahneman’s data on colonoscopies: because ‘the remembering self’ evaluates any experience by reference to its peak intensity and its final moments (the ‘peak/end rule’), it is possible to improve its lot, at the expense of ‘the experiencing self,’ by simply prolonging an unpleasant procedure at its lowest level of intensity (and thereby reducing the negativity of future memories).

What applies to colonoscopies seems to apply elsewhere in life. Imagine, for instance, that you want to go on vacation: You are deciding between a trip to Hawaii and a trip to Rome. On Hawaii, you envision yourself swimming in the ocean, relaxing on the beach, playing tennis, and drinking mai tais. Rome will find you sitting in cafés, visiting museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine. Which vacation should you choose? It is quite possible that your ‘experiencing self’ would be much happier on Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of Rome one year hence. Which self would be right? Does the question even make sense? Kahneman observes that while most of us think our ‘experiencing self’ must be more important, it has no voice in our decisions about what to do in life. After all, we can’t choose from among experiences; we must choose from among remembered (or imagined) experiences. And, according to Kahneman, we don’t tend to think about the future as a set of experiences; we think of it as a set of ‘anticipated memories.’ The problem, with regard to both doing science and living one’s life, is that the ‘remembering self’ is the only one who can think and speak about the past. It is, therefore, the only one who can consciously make decisions in light of past experience…

It seems clear, however, that the ‘remembering self’ is simply the ‘experiencing self’ in one of its modes…

If we could take the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human life and assess a person’s well-being at each point in time, the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ would disappear. Yes, the experience of recalling the past often determines what we decide to do in the future—and this greatly affects the character of one’s future experience. But it would still be true to say that in each of the 2.5 billion seconds of an average life, certain moments were pleasant, and others were painful; some were later recalled with greater or lesser fidelity, and these memories had whatever effects they had later on. Consciousness and its ever-changing contents remain the only subjective reality.

Thus, if your ‘remembering self’ claims to have had a wonderful time in Rome, while your ‘experiencing self’ felt only boredom, fatigue, and despair, then your ‘remembering self’ (i.e., your recollection of the trip) is simply wrong about what it was like to be you in Rome. This becomes increasingly obvious the more we narrow our focus: Imagine a ‘remembering self’ who thinks that you were especially happy while sitting for fifteen minutes on the Spanish Steps; while your ‘experiencing self’ was, in fact, plunged deeper into misery for every one of those minutes than at any other point on the trip. Do we need two selves to account for this disparity? No. The vagaries of memory suffice.

As Kahneman admits, the vast majority of our experiences in life never get recalled, and the time we spend actually remembering the past is comparatively brief. Thus, the quality of most of our lives can be assessed only in terms of whatever fleeting character it has as it occurs. But this includes the time we spend recalling the past. Amid this flux, the moments in which we construct a larger story about our lives appear like glints of sunlight on a dark river: they may seem special, but they are part of the current all the same.”

__________

An absolutely reorienting insight from chapter five of Sam Harris’s ambitious new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

I found and have read the whole book here. But buy it to support one of our best thinkers and writers about cognition and philosophy.

“The Tunnel” by Mark Strand

21 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Cat at the Door

A man has been standing
in front of my house
for days. I peek at him
from the living room
window and at night,
unable to sleep,
I shine my flashlight
down on the lawn.
He is always there.

After a while
I open the front door
just a crack and order
him out of my yard.
He narrows his eyes
and moans. I slam
the door and dash back
to the kitchen, then up
to the bedroom, then down.

I weep like a child
and make obscene gestures
through the window. I
write large suicide notes
and place them so he
can read them easily.
I destroy the living
room furniture to prove
I own nothing of value.
When he seems unmoved
I decide to dig a tunnel
to a neighboring yard.
I seal the basement off
from the upstairs with
a brick wall. I dig hard
and in no time the tunnel
is done. Leaving my pick
and shovel below,

I come out in front of a house
and stand there too tired to
move or even speak, hoping
someone will help me.
I feel I’m being watched
and sometimes I hear
a man’s voice,
but nothing is done
and I have been waiting for days.

__________

Mark Strand’s “The Tunnel”. You’ll find it in his collection Man and Camel: Poems.

Question: from whose perspective is the final section of the poem written — the protagonist’s or the stranger’s?

The parallel phrasing of the poem suggests that the man watching, the stranger, is in fact no stranger at all; he is an element of the protagonist (the tunnel-digger) that the protagonist externalizes and is unwilling to accept. The two entities are linked by a psychological loop, as the “tunnel vision” of the tunnel-digger leaves him exactly in the place of the stranger by the end of the poem. The only dilemma is he doesn’t know it, and the man’s voice he sometimes hears is merely an echo of the orders he gave while in his self-imposed lockdown at the opening of the poem. By the conclusion, he has been waiting for days, just as the man, at the beginning, had been standing in front his house for days too.

I took the photograph in my backyard in Houston, Texas.

Brothers and Countrymen

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in History, Politics, Speeches

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Robert Kennedy Speech

“The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed…

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

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From one of the most tender American politicians of the twentieth-century, Robert F. Kennedy, speaking on “The Mindless Menace of Violence” the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Put it on your shelf: RFK’s Collected Speeches.

These words should be penetrating and immediate to all of us, regardless of what we feel about the Trayvon Martin killing and the subsequent trial and verdict.

“It is my conviction that nothing enduring can be built on violence. The only safe way to overcome an enemy is to make of that enemy a friend.”—Mahatma Gandhi

Martin Luther King, who in 1959 traveled to India to learn about nonviolent resistance from the disciples of Gandhi, made an observation that’s been with me since I read it several weeks ago:

The great irony of our age is that we have guided missiles, and misguided men.

Another terrible irony: two months after giving this elevated speech, Robert Kennedy was killed in the same way as King — shot, struck down by the mindless menace of violence. But he did leave us this affirming incitement to press on, a principle with which he had to wrestle his fair share:

“Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”

Below are some of my favorite pictures of Robert Kennedy and his family.

Robert Kennedy and Family

Robert Kennedy and Child Robert Kennedy and Kid on Shoulders Robert Kennedy and Son Playing Robert Kennedy and Son

Robert Kennedy and Boys

Robert Kennedy and Daughter Robert Kennedy Reading the Paper

Robert Kennedy and Kids on a Swing

Read Robert’s impromptu eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., which was given the night King was killed and a day before this speech.

Martin Luther King Jr. Preaching

Read Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for Robert — one of the most hauntingly beautiful speeches I’ve ever heard.

Robert and John F. Kennedy

F*ck

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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Steven Pinker

Where does the word “fuck” come from?

The problem with tracing the origin of taboo words is that people don’t write them down, precisely because they’re taboo. So you have to do a lot of detective work.

In the case of “fuck,” for example, the earliest known usage in the English language was a bit of rude graffiti carved outside a monastery in a kind of pseudo-Latin. It’s the first written inscription of the word, and it’s from the fifteenth century. So it’s an old word.

But you can trace it back even further if you look for cognates in other languages. And there are similar words in Scandinavian tongues, and in German, Dutch, and so on.

By that means you can show that “fuck” comes from Scandinavian, and it originally means “to strike” or “to beat.” And that’s a little bit like some of our rude terms for sex, like “to bang.”

These call to mind a not very pleasing image of the sexual act — that of a man doing something violent to a woman, which we also see in some of the taboo phrases around sex: “they fucked him over,” “he got screwed.” These each allude to the underlying metaphor that to have sex is to exploit a woman.

That’s a conception that we all unconsciously recognize and acknowledge whenever we use an idiom like, “we got screwed,” but it’s something that we consider not fit for polite company.

And all of the acceptable terms for sex — like have sex, make love, go to bed with — hide that conceptualization…

And there’s something that feels misogynistic about swearing in general, curiously enough. Although women are swearing a lot more than they used to, swearing is still more of a guy thing. We have old notions like language that’s “appropriate for mixed company” – mixed meaning “men and women”; and expressions like “to swear like a sailor” or “locker room language,” all alluding to the fact that swearing is considered masculine, and that there’s something offensive to women about swearing.

And indeed many guidelines to sexual harassment include the telling of sexual jokes as a kind of harassment. Even though you’d think the topic of sex should be gender neutral… since it takes two.

And I believe this fact is rooted in a basic feature of human sexuality: that indiscriminate sex biologically works to the advantage of the male. And it’s because there’s a lot more at stake for women; she can get pregnant, and then she’s stuck with the child. Whereas the male can get away with just a few minutes of copulation, and in principle that can be the end of it.

So women in their behavior, in their emotions are more discriminating when it comes to sex. The casual use of sexual language, by connoting an atmosphere of licentiousness, is felt to work to the advantage of men more than women.

And in addition, as we’ve mentioned before, many sexual idioms have a rather unflattering image of sex as an act which damages or exploits a woman. Not only “we got screwed,” but “oh my printer is fucked up” – meaning broken, damaged.

So certainly over-use of sexual swearing can feel offensive to women. And as with any other aspect of language use, it’d be common sense and common courtesy to anticipate how the language will affect your audience, depending on whether it’s male or female, younger or older, and in a formal setting or more casual setting.

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From the writer that I consider to be the best living communicator of science, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, as interviewed by The Guardian about his groundbreaking book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.