Tag Archives: Douglas Hofstadter

I Am a Strange Loop

19 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by in Biography, Philosophy

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Carol and Douglas Hofstader

“In the month of December, 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

What hit me by far the hardest was not my own personal loss (‘Oh, what shall I do now? Who will I turn to in moments of need? Who will I cuddle up beside at night?’) — it was Carol’s personal loss. Of course I missed her, I missed her enormously — but what troubled me much more was that I could not get over what she had lost: the chance to watch her children grow up, see their personalities develop, savor their talents, comfort them in their sad times, read them bedtime stories, sing them songs, smile at their childish jokes, paint their rooms, pencil in their heights on their closet walls, teach them to ride a bike, travel with them to other lands, expose them to other languages, get them a pet dog, meet their friends, take them skiing and skating, watch old videos together in our playroom, and on and on. All this future, once so easily taken for granted, Carol had lost in a flash, and I couldn’t deal with it.

There was a time, many months later, back in the United States, when I tried out therapy sessions for recently bereaved spouses — ‘Healing Hearts’, I think they were called — and I saw that most of the people whose mates had died were focused on their own pain, on their own loss, on what they themselves were going to do now. That, of course, was the meaning of the sessions’ name — you were supposed to heal, to get better. But how was Carol going to heal?

I truly felt as if the other people in these sessions and I were talking past each other. We didn’t have similar concerns at all! I was the only one whose mate had died when the children were tiny, and this fact seemed to make all the difference. Everything had been ripped away from Carol, and I could not stand thinking about — but I could not stop thinking about — what she’d been cheated out of. This bitter injustice to Carol was the overwhelming feeling I felt, and my friends kept on saying to me (oddly enough, in a well-meaning attempt to comfort me), ‘You can’t feel sorry for her! She’s dead! There’s no one to feel sorry for any more!’ How utterly, totally wrong this felt to me.

One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes, and all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, ‘That’s me! That’s me!’ And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us together into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized then that although Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it lived on very determinedly in my brain.”

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The most moving section of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s endlessly layered and enigmatic book about the nature of self, I Am a Strange Loop.

I should mention that I first heard of Hofstadter’s work from David Brooks, who has cited this passage in several of his columns since first quoting it in “A Partnership of Minds” in July 2007. These remarks command a full page in his newest book The Road to Character.

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What Old Photographs Mean

11 Monday May 2015

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Robert Hofstadter

“One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father, taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, ‘What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.’ The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

After a few minutes of emotional pondering — soul-searching, quite literally — I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.

In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad — and yet, think of the powerful effect that they had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority — to the experience of living in the heart, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards — scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being — his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions — and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.

Although the above is a bit more flowery that what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange.”

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From the beginning of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s remarkable book I Am a Strange Loop.

Pictured above: Robert Hofstadter, 1961 Nobel prize winner in psychics, discoverer of the structure of protons and neutrons, and father of Douglas.

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