This is All Souls Day. Over time we have given it many other names —Allhallows, All Hallows Eve, All Hallow Even, Halloween, most plainly, Dio de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead. T.H. Luhrmann writes (below) of this day and night with clarity and intelligence. It is a day to wait upon and welcome the dead, not in the zombie sense but into life, as companions we do not outgrow. They are always with us, for better and sometimes for worse, in sickness and health, in joy and grief. In that sense, death is a passage we relive every day, not only on All Hallows Eve. To live fully is at once to experience living and dying. Grandparents, mother and father, husband or wife, treasured pet like Luhrmann's dog Dorethea, even sons and daughters. Our lost loves are forever presences. We do not outlive them, indeed we embody them —they are our ghosts — and we can come to live with them less painfully, more consciously and gracefully, and in doing so renew our lives and theirs. No memorial in time or stone is more authentic or heartfelt.
__________________
New York Times
In the Presence of All Souls
By T. M. LUHRMANN
October 30, 2013
When my dog Dorothea died — she was the first dog I’d chosen for myself, and she had looked at me in a certain way when I visited the shelter, making me feel that I could not leave without her — she left a nearly unbearable ache in my heart. Dogs do this: They hold joy and love and solace in a way humans can’t, and then they die. But after she died, I heard her. I was sitting at my desk and the sounds of her nails tap-tapping down the wood floor of the hall came to my ears, and only when I turned to look for her did I remember that she was gone. Sometimes I felt her presence, like a heaviness on my lap or at my side. Sometimes I still do.
T. M. Luhrmann
It turns out that this is not uncommon. As many as 80 percent of those who lose loved ones report that they sense that person after death. These are real sensory events. People hear a voice; they feel a touch; they recognize a presence. A friend told me that a year after her husband’s death, she would still find him sitting on that bench in the park, waiting for her. She liked that. In fact, one of the central research findings in this area is that post-bereavement experiences are helpful. They’re also more likely to occur after long and happy marriages. (There appears to be no research yet on pet loss.)
One study found that one in 10 people had sensory experiences so rich and frequent that they felt their dead spouse was always with them. “Part of my life is gone,” Dame Thora Hird, a British actress, told The Daily Telegraph in 2000, about the loss of her husband after 58 years of marriage, “but he isn’t a long way away. Don’t think I’m being silly, but I sit in his easy chair in the loft and so often, I have a feeling he’s there.”
Our ancestors thought that the dead could walk and speak with us. That, of course, is the point of Halloween, or Allhallows Eve, the time of year when the veil between the worlds was thought to thin. The day probably descends from one of the great fire festivals celebrated by the Celts, All Hallow Even, the day when the souls of the departed would visit their old homes and warm themselves by the fire. “It was, perhaps, a natural thought,” Sir James George Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist of the Edwardian era, wrote in his magisterial “Golden Bough,” “that the approach of winter should drive the poor shivering hungry ghosts from the bare fields and the leafless woodlands to the shelter of the cottage with its familiar fireside.”
Of course, it was not only the dead who roamed on that night: “Witches then speed on their errands of mischief, some sweeping through the air on besoms” — or brooms — “others galloping along the roads on tabby cats, which for that evening are turned into coal-black steeds.”
We tend to treat this old folklore as so much fluff — the stuff of masks and costumes — but increasingly, scholars are finding evidence for its experiential underpinnings. Another example of a real psychological event that may partially explain our folklore is sleep paralysis. A quarter or more of all Americans report that they have awaked to find they cannot move. Often they feel a weight on their chest, hands clutching their throat and a dark malevolent presence in the room.
“I was a college sophomore,” one man recalled. “One night I went to bed early. I was awakened by the sound of my door being opened, and footsteps approached the bed. I tried to turn on the light beside my bed, but I couldn’t move or speak. The footsteps came to the side of my bed, and I felt the mattress go down as someone climbed onto the bed, knelt on my chest and began to strangle me. I had an overwhelming impression of evil. And then I did move, first my hand and then my whole body. I leaped out of bed, heart racing, and turned on the light to find the room empty.”
David J. Hufford, an emeritus professor at Penn State College of Medicine, experienced that event as a young man. He told one person — who stared at him as if he were crazy — and no one else. Later, when he did folklore research in Newfoundland, he found that the local people had a name — the Old Hag — and an elaborate description for what he had experienced. Mr. Hufford argues that this sleep-related phenomenon — widely documented around the world and in sleep science — forms the core of many events given as evidence for witchcraft practice in the 16th and 17th centuries. Here, for instance, is Richard Coman’s testimony against Bridget Bishop at the Salem witch trials of the 1690s: “The curtains at the foot of the bed opened, where I did see her. And presently she came and lay upon my breast or body and so oppressed me that I could not speak nor stir.”
To be sure, the fact that we can identify in-the-body phenomena (hallucinations, sleep paralysis) associated with ideas about the supernatural does not necessarily mean that those ideas are false. Mr. Hufford, who also studies near-death and other remarkable experiences, is very clear about that: “Learning as much as we can about spiritual experience does not make spirituality go away.”
But what this research makes clear is that when people report that they hear their dead husband or are terrified by an evil presence that groped at their throat in the night, they are not necessarily making it up, nor are they crazy. Events like these are rather what Ann Taves, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “building blocks” of religious experience. The experiences are psychologically real events. How you interpret them is up to you.
Happy Halloween.
T.M. Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University..
When my wife Leigh and I moved from Cape Cod to southern Norway in 2005 I left my sea kayak and paddle behind, under the deck of our small cottage in Onset, Massachusetts. When I returned precipitously to the States to be with Leigh in her final illness, I could not think of kayak or kayaking. Now in northern California, with a lovely marsh and abundant waterbirds almost beside my door, the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay a short distance away, I wish I had my kayak — or rather, I wish I had a lighter, more modest kayak of the kind described below by Matthew Battles.
I was almost born on the water, Mercer Island in Lake Washington, but I graduated to kayaking only a decade ago, loving the boat's beauty, its quiet grace and oneness with ocean or lake, my ability to tote it - portage - on my shoulder, paddle in my other hand, as I hiked from lake to lake or around stretches of rapids in Canada and the US. My best teacher was also an arborist, and I swapped his kayaking lessons for joining him climbing trees.
Off the coast of Maine among the islands, in the sheltered waters of Eggomoggin Reach between Deer Isle and the mainland, on the open ocean, in almost any weather. The usually quieter water of Squam Lake in central New Hampshire, often at dawn in the company of loons and their haunting cry. In Onset Bay off Cape Cod. And most recently, a solo adventure across Canada, paddling in lakes, rivers and finally the sea. A favorite book in my childhood was Paddle to the Sea, about the making of a small kayak and its voyage from British Columbia to the Atlantic. A contrarian at the time, I traveled the other way.
"A recent kayak design," writes Matthew Battles,
"seems like a reprise of the Inuit boat. The Oru Kayak, a folding boat developed by a Bay Area startup, is inspired by origami, made of polyethylene, the rigidity of which allows less material to be used (the Oru weighs twenty-five pounds, ten pounds lighter than a standard consumer-grade kayak). Crucially, the kayak folds down to a parcel the size of an artist’s portfolio. It suggests the possibility of a gentler kind of paddling—a pastime knit into twenty-first century nature, one that could sustain our attention to the fragile worlds in which we paddle."
I have one on order, and expect delivery at the start of the new year. Pictures below:
WISH OUT OF WATER
Orion Magazine
October 23, 2013
by Matthew Battles
In form the kayak is singular, expressive, ideal—a shape that seems to bloom from the matrix of dark water and ice from which it springs. The kayak was in the first instance no mere boat but a weapon, an implement as important to the hunt as harpoon or bow. The shape it takes is closest to the shadow of the seal, perhaps, the very creature it was designed to pursue: hauled out on land or ice, the seal is an extrusion of marine-mammalian ungainliness, a wish out of water; immersed, however, its bauplan sharpens into trim. In profile, the swimming seal prefigures the kayak’s gracile, elongate architecture in its sharpness in bow and stern. And yet there is no mistaking it: the Inuit kayak is a made thing, an object entangled with our imaginative hands, an artifact and an intersection of calculation, material constraints, and human aspiration.
The earliest kayaks preserved in museums date from the early eighteenth century. It was an era of climate change, the thick of the so-called “Little Ice Age” that turned Brueghel’s paintings wintry and drove the Vinlanders out of Greenland. Throughout this time, wood was an exotic material in the Arctic, a bit like Royalex or Kevlar today. The Thule culture, which preceded the Inuit in the Arctic, had enjoyed a comparatively warm era, and they throve in larger, higher-density patterns of settlement and habitation than their successors down to Nanook’s time. Empowering the individual hunter to challenge walrus, seal, and even whale, the kayak helped make it possible for the Inuit to disperse into the smaller, sustainable groups the first modern Europeans encountered when they began to frequent the Arctic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the kayak, the Inuit knit together a world of freezing floes and open water.
Whether paddling across a quiet pond, challenging wind and tide on the open sea, or surfing a standing wave in Class IV rapids, we latter-day paddlers arrive on the scene as escapees, shifted out of our workaday modes and relations into the betwixt-and-between of recreational wildness. Spending time in fragile estuaries or wild rivers can kindle concern for their preservation.
***
I found all the mingled gifts and secrets of the kayak in play during a recent day of paddling on Plum Island Sound. On the rising tide, my wife and I left the Parker River boat launch and turned toward Newburyport and the Merrimack River. Behind the crenellations of the marsh grass, plovers and sandpipers started nervously, guarding our passage. Paddling into the Merrimack’s tidal basin, we caught sight of a row of proud Newburyport homes across the wind-raked channel and the dry, ragged nap of the marsh; astern, the windmills of Ipswich turned over the soft hills. Ahead, a low island rose—a subtle, estuarine insularity with an indistinct marsh-grass shoreline. As we paddled along its perimeter, the stridulation of crickets amidst the grass rendered an acoustic map of the island nearly firm enough to land our boats upon. My paddle brushed the sparse vegetal fringe as we hugged the leeward shore to take advantage of what shelter the rising, rustling grass could spare. Our two kayaks stitched their way across the harbor’s corduroy of wind and current, the thread-holes made by our paddle blades dissolving astern.
The kind of boat we paddled that day extrudes all the paradoxes of modern materials science: lightweight strength, unmakeable mass-producibility, long-lasting irreparability. It’s a consumer product conveniently placed at the end of a supply chain commanding dizzying energies and material displacements. To look at a modern recreational kayak honestly, one needs to see not only the retractable skeg and sealed bulkhead compartments, but also the automobile, the gas station, the refining plant, the gas flares, the surfaces of tundra and tar sands blistered and churned to mud.
"A recent kayak design seems like a reprise of the Inuit boat. The Oru Kayak, a folding boat developed by a Bay Area startup, is inspired by origami, made of polyethylene, the rigidity of which allows less material to be used (the Oru weighs twenty-five pounds, ten pounds lighter than a standard consumer-grade kayak). Crucially, the kayak folds down to a parcel the size of an artist’s portfolio. It’s a boat than can be taken on the subway, snapped together on the dock, and paddled into an urban waterway. In a city like Boston, you could even use the Oru kayak—or something like it—for commuting. It suggests the possibility of a gentler kind of paddling—a pastime knit into twenty-first century nature, one that could sustain our attention to the fragile worlds in which we paddle.
Paul Krugman wrote a short piece yesterday, October 28, that he called "Poetry and Blogging."
Since I love poetry and write and edit a blog (although I dislike the word), Krugman caught my attention. He's been reading a fascinating book about both pursuits, considered in historical perspective: Tom Standage’s Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. A great title. Standage is an editor at The Economist and author of five well-received history books,
including An Edible History of Humanity (2009), A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), and The Victorian Internet (1998). He also is a regular commentator on BBC radio, and has written for other publications including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times and Wired. He has a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford, and says he is the least musical member of a musical family.
He begins Writing on the Wall by quoting Cicero:
"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge."
Paul Krugman's question, "[W]hen and why did we stop reading poetry? Educated people used to read it all the time, or at least pretend to; that’s no longer the case. Frankly, I don’t read poetry except on very rare occasions. What happened?" — is worth a response.
My own thought is too simple, so I can share it briefly. I haven't stopped reading poetry. It's central to my life, as any passing reader of Reckonings knows. I didn't know others had stopped, but Krugman knows far more others than I do, so I imagine by and large he's correct. If so, that worries me, and becomes of a piece with my worry about the decline of literacy in our culture. The costs of that decline are not up there with those of American warmaking, but I suspect not as far from it as might appear, nor unrelated to it. I do recall someone reporting that Mitt Romney had never heard of One Hundred Years of Solitude. A sobering thought. Perhaps now that he has more leisure... but I imagine not. Current and recent American politicians, by and large, with some notable exceptions, and despite the sheer volume of their speech, are not particularly literate. They haven't the time. I gather the same is true of too many journalists and purveyors of other media. More's the pity, for them, their families, and for their country. Given the awful weight of American influence abroad, the whole earth suffers as well.
Here's a contextual note: Humanities in American colleges and universities are suffering seriously declining enrollments compared to a more vocational focus on science and technology. “College is increasingly being defined narrowly as job preparation, not as something designed to educate the whole person,” said Pauline Yu, president of the American Council of Learned Societies.
October 28, 2013
Poetry and Blogging
I just want to give a shoutout to a book I’m reading and really enjoying: Tom Standage’s Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. I’ve been a big fan of Standage’s ever since his book The Victorian Internet, about the rise of the telegraph, which shed a lot of light on network technologies while also being great fun. Now he’s done it again.
Standage’s argument is that the essential aspects of social media — exchange of information that runs horizontally, among people who are affiliated in some way, rather than top-down from centralized sources — have been pervasive through history, with the industrial age’s news media only a temporary episode of disruption. As he shows, Cicero didn’t get his news from Rome Today or Rupertus Murdochus — he got it through constant exchanges of letters with people he knew, letters that were often both passed on to multiple readers and copied, much like tweets being retweeted.
Even more interesting is his discussion of the Tudor court, where a lot of the communication among insiders took place through the exchange of … poetry, which allowed people both to discuss sensitive topics elliptically and to demonstrate their cleverness. You could even build a career through poetry, not by selling it, but by using your poems to build a reputation, which could translate into royal favor and high office — sort of the way some people use their blogs to build influence that eventually leads to paying gigs of one kind or another. The tale of John Harington — of the famous “treason never prospers” line — is fascinating.
[I had to - was pleased to - look up John Harington. Wilipedia says that Harington "(4 August 1561 – 20 November 1612), of Kelston, was an [Elizabethan] courtier, author and master of art, popularly known as the inventor of the flush toilet." His famous line that Krugman mentions was, "Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." Well said. A wise comment worthy of the inventor of the flush toilet, an extraordinarily important gift to us all. Some of our most important reading...]
Incidentally, when and why did we stop reading poetry? Educated people used to read it all the time, or at least pretend to; that’s no longer the case. Frankly, I don’t read poetry except on very rare occasions. What happened?
Anyway, interesting stuff. And since I don’t think Standage is likely to get favors showered on him by our latter-day Queen Elizabeth, buy his book!
Do I speak of the Fountain of Youth, for whose elusiveness we should all be deeply grateful? Of Mircea Eliade's myth of eternal return? (Imagine that, if you will: a merry-go round in Dante's Inferno.) Of our culture's pervasive suggestions that aging well is aging less? (Think "84 years young," or simply "less is more.") Of the fact that science marches on? (We live 40 years longer than we would have in 1880, when the first extensive modern sewage system was built in Memphis, Tennessee, and we would probably have died before we celebrated our 40th birthdays.)
In fact, I'm thinking of none of these. More modestly, I have in mind a colleague's account of an amusing and problematic pair of scholarly articles that appeared this year, one in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the other in the journal of Experimental Gerontology.
Amusing and problematic are my words. My colleague's words are intriguing and fascinating. I shall allow my colleague to remain anonymous so I can run more freely without trodding on or shooting him in the foot.
Turning Back the Clock on Aging
27 October 2013
A fascinating article in this month’s health policy journal Health Affairs concludes that by focusing on diseases one at a time—trying to prevent heart disease or cancer or dementia—we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Instead, we should devote greater effort to delaying the aging process altogether. If we could slow aging, we could in principle delay the onset and progression of all fatal and disabling diseases at once. Instead of surviving your heart attack and then going on to suffer from dementia or cancer, you would remain healthy longer, perhaps dying suddenly, as centenarians have been reported to do.
But will delaying aging improve the quality of life? And how likely are we actually to postpone aging any time soon?
[Excellent questions.]
Using a complicated model known as the Future Elderly Model (FEM), the authors predict what will happen to health care spending, functional status, and life expectancy under various scenarios.
[I must pause for a moment to take note: not the Past Elderly Model or the Present Elderly Model; the Future Elderly Model. Perhaps we may breath more easily, at least with our own and our parents' and our grandparents' experience of aging. Our children's and grandchildren' aging? There is the rub.]
What they find is that decreasing the incidence of heart disease by 25% between 2010 and 2030 wouldn’t do very much for disability rates or overall mortality. Ditto for decreasing the incidence of cancer the same amount [25%] during the same period. In fact, mortality and disability would be much the same as what we can expect if the incidence of cancer and heart disease stayed the same and all that changed is that the number of older people increased, as we can expect when the baby boomers reach old age.
[The baby boomers are nearly upon is. We can almost say, pace Pogo, "We have seen the baby boomers and they are us."]
Delaying aging, by contrast, would have a dramatic effect on both length and quality of life. These benefits would come at a considerable cost—by 2060, costs would be $295 billion greater in the delayed aging scenario than in the status quo scenario because all those people who live longer would typically qualify for Medicare and Social Security. The good financial news, however, is that changing the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 68 and raising the age of eligibility for Social Security from 67 to 68 would offset the increased costs.
[Ah hah. So that's the good financial news. Perhaps good for those of us already receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits, not so good for those who follow us.]
All very compelling. But just what are these potential advances that will allow us to delay aging? The Health Affairs authors cite two scientific papers, one in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and one in a journal called Experimental Gerontology, both published this year. The papers are very intriguing.
The two papers focus on the fact that aging cells secrete a variety of nasty substances that cause chronic inflammation, at least in mice. These chemicals are collectively referred to as SASP (senescence-associated secretory phenotype). SASP or the cells that make them are potential targets for drugs to delay the aging process. So far so good. But as one of the authors points out, it’s not known if SASP causes chronic age-related disease in people. Moreover, it’s entirely possible that disrupting the processes that cause aging and death will turn on the processes that promote cancer. Finally, as another of the authors argued, actually carrying out clinical research in humans, testing whether a drug (if we had one) has a beneficial effect, will take an estimated 17 years. This would bring us to 2030, the exact date in the Health Affairs article by which all the good effects of delaying aging are assumed to have already happened, according to their model. If we aren’t likely to have any aging-delaying drug available for clinical use before 2030, we can’t plausibly expect any beneficial effect until well after that time.
[Well, that certainly clarifies the issue, doesn't it? Let me see if I got it. We all are living and dying, ill or well, before 2030 and after, with or (preferably) without more "anti-aging" drugs, very likely without turning the clock back on aging. I'm glad of that. I'm sorry for the chronically inflamed mice.]
So by all means, let’s go ahead and invest in the basic science of aging. Let’s encourage more clinically trained geriatricians to go into this kind of research (reportedly of 7000 board certified geriatricians, only 12 have research grants from the biological division of the National Institute on Aging). But in the mean time, let’s figure out how best to care for the many frail elders who will be with us for years to come.
[Yes indeed. We are all for well trained geriatricians, the more the merrier. May they live long and happy lives, even if they are not engaged in research that will help our generation and future generations live a little longer. Practicing good medicine with their patients is challenge enough.]
A while ago —time moves right along when one is having fun — I noted in Reckonings a promising new adventure called Brain Pickings, home to the creative spirit of a singular young woman, a gifted artist and collector of diverse wisdom and beauty, Maria Popova. Brain Pickings is now 7 years old, and Maria is celebrating its birthday with a collection of marvelous things she has learned in those 7 years of "reading, writing and living."
In the age-old spirit of gift giving, Brain Pickings is free, but gifts remain gifts only as they are reciprocated and passed on. If you find it of value in your life, your love and work, please consider a donation. As Maria writes, "I love researching and writing Brain Pickings. But it takes hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a month to sustain. Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price. So if you find any joy and stimulation in it, please consider a modest donation — however much you can afford, when it comes from the heart, it’s the kind of gesture that makes me warm with appreciation."
Now to offer Reckonings readers a taste — a week's and a 7 years' feast — of Brain Pickings:
On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work – one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college – with the subject line "brain pickings," announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. "It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read," I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of "materials of historical importance" and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!) Above all, I had no idea that in the seven years to follow, this labor of love would become my greatest joy and most profound source of personal growth, my life and my living, my sense of purpose, my center. (For the curious, more on the origin story here.)
Looking back today on the thousands of hours I've spent researching and writing Brain Pickings and the countless collective hours of readership it has germinated – a smile-inducing failure on the four-minute promise – I choke up with gratitude for the privilege of this journey, for its endless rewards of heart, mind and spirit, and for all the choices along the way that made it possible. I'm often asked to offer advice to young people who are just beginning their own voyages of self-discovery, or those reorienting their calling at any stage of life, and though I feel utterly unqualified to give "advice" in that omniscient, universally wise sense the word implies, here are seven things I've learned in seven years of making those choices, of integrating "work" and life in such inextricable fusion, and in chronicling this journey of heart, mind and spirit – a journey that took, for whatever blessed and humbling reason, so many others along for the ride. I share these here not because they apply to every life and offer some sort of blueprint to existence, but in the hope that they might benefit your own journey in some small way, bring you closer to your own center, or even simply invite you to reflect on your own sense of purpose.
Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for "negative capability."We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our "opinions" based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It's enormously disorienting to simply say, "I don't know." But it's infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right – even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, "prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like." Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don't make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night – and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It's so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don't believe them.You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those who misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living – for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
"Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time." This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it's hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that – a myth – as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I've reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we're not interested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
In 1916, at the peak of World War I and shortly after graduating from Harvard, beloved poet E. E. Cummings penned an epithalamion – a poem celebrating nuptials – for his classmate and close friend Scofield Thayer's marriage to his fiancé Elaine Orr. The newlyweds moved to Chicago and Cummings was drafted to serve in France, where he spent some months in prison for his unapologetic anti-war views. By the time he returned to New York in 1918, the Thayers were living in two separate apartments at Washington Square. Cummings's old friend, who had risen to an influential position in literary circles, became the poet's patron, supporting his poetry and even purchasing his paintings – a context that makes the affair Cummings undertook with Elaine all the more morally suspect, even though the poet knew his friend's insistence on wanting to focus on work was merely a veil for his loss of interest in his wife.
In May of 1919, Elaine became pregnant with Cummings's child – something that threw an even more destabilizing curveball in what was already a triangle of impending disaster. To make matters worse, Cummings shirked his responsibility as a father and abandoned Elaine. Thayer, even though he knew the truth of paternity, stepped in to raise little Nancy once she was born on December 20, 1919. It took Cummings nearly a year to come around – in October of 1920, once it became clear that the Thayers were divorcing, he rekindled his relationship with Elaine and began seeing his daughter, who came to call him Mopsy, daily. The following year, the three moved to Paris, but Elaine, supported by Thayer's alimony, lived comfortably in a large apartment, while Cummings, having lost his patron but bent on keeping the remnants of his dignity, lived the classic poor-writer's life in his own humble quarters. He did, however, set out to build a relationship with his baby daughter, his only child, which he did the best way he knew how – by telling her original stories he made up for her.
The stories, while closer to fables than to fairy tales, are nonetheless charming and doubly so thanks to the gorgeous illustrations by Canadian artist John Eaton. I've tracked down a surviving copy of the original edition for our shared enjoyment:
"At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace,"Annie Dillard famously observed, adding the quintessential caveat, "It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you." And yet, Zadie Smith admonished in her 10 rules of writing, it's perilous to romanticize the "vocation of writing":"There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page."
Still, surely there must be more to it than that – whole worlds rise and fall, entire universes blossom and die daily in that enchanted space between the writer's sensation of writing and the word's destiny of being written on a page. For all that's been mulled about the writing life and its perpetual osmosis of everyday triumphs and tragedies, its existential feats and failures, at its heart remains an immutable mystery – how can a calling be at once so transcendent and so soul-crushing, and what is it that enthralls so many souls into its paradoxical grip, into feeling compelled to write "not because they can but because they have to"? That, and oh so much more, is what Dani Shapiro explores in Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (public library) – her magnificent memoir of the writing life, at once disarmingly personal and brimming with widely resonant wisdom on the most universal challenges and joys of writing.
Shapiro opens with the kind of crisp conviction that underpins the entire book:
Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write.
Book sculpture by an anonymous artist left at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse
Far from a lazy aphorism, however, this proclamation comes from her own hard-earned experience – fragments of which resonate deeply with most of us, on one level or another – that Shapiro synthesizes beautifully:
When I wasn’t writing, I was reading. And when I wasn’t writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere – I was sure of it—and writing was what took me there. In my notebooks, I escaped an unhappy and lonely childhood. I tried to make sense of myself. I had no intention of becoming a writer. I didn’t know that becoming a writer was possible. Still, writing was what saved me. It presented me with a window into the infinite. It allowed me to create order out of chaos.
The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail – not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. “Ever tried, ever failed,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It requires what the great editor Ted Solotoroff once called endurability.
We are all unsure of ourselves. Every one of us walking the planet wonders, secretly, if we are getting it wrong. We stumble along. We love and we lose. At times, we find unexpected strength, and at other times we succumb to our fears. We are impatient. We want to know what’s around the corner, and the writing life won’t offer us this. It forces us into the here and now. There is only this moment, when we put pen to page.
[…]
The page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego—and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude. No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. … Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.
What is it about writing that makes it—for some of us – as necessary as breathing? It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. Time slips away. The body becomes irrelevant. We are as close to consciousness itself as we will ever be. This begins in the darkness. Beneath the frozen ground, buried deep below anything we can see, something may be taking root. Stay there, if you can. Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away. Endure. Be patient. The rewards cannot be measured. Not now. But whatever happens, any writer will tell you: This is the best part.
These rewards manifest not as grand honors and prizes and bestseller rankings – though hardly any writer would deny the warming pleasure of those, however fleeting – but in the cumulative journey of becoming. As Cheryl Strayed put it in her timelessly revisitable meditation on life, "The useless days will add up to something. . . . These things are your becoming." Ultimately, Shapiro seconds this sentiment by returning to the notion of presence and the art of looking as the centripetal force that summons the scattered fragments of our daily experience into our cumulative muse – a testament to the combinatorial nature of creativity, reassuring us that no bit of life is "useless" and reminding us of the vital importance of what Stephen King has termed the art of "creative sleep." Shapiro writes:
If I dismiss the ordinary – waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen – I may just miss my life.
[…]
To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing – is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, “When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.” This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don’t know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring.
The question of what art is has occupied humanity since the dawn of recorded history. For Tolstoy, the purpose of art was to provide a bridge of empathy between us and others, and for Anaïs Nin, a way to exorcise our emotional excess. But the highest achievement of art might be something that reconciles the two: a channel of empathy into our own psychology that lets us both exorcise and better understand our emotions – in other words, a form of therapy.
In Art as Therapy (public library), philosopher Alain de Botton – who has previously examined such diverse and provocative subjects as why work doesn't work, what education and the arts can learn from religion, and how to think more about sex – teams up with art historian John Armstrong to examine art's most intimate purpose: its ability to mediate our psychological shortcomings and assuage our anxieties about imperfection. Their basic proposition is that, far more than mere aesthetic indulgence, art is a tool – a tool that serves a rather complex yet straightforwardly important purpose in our existence:
Like other tools, art has the power to extend our capacities beyond those with which nature originally endowed us. Art compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body, weaknesses that we can refer to as psychological frailties.
De Botton and Armstrong go on to outline the seven core psychological functions of art:
1. REMEMBERING
Given the profound flaws of our memory and the unreliability of its self-revision, it's unsurprising that the fear of forgetting – forgetting specific details about people and places, but also forgetting all the minute, mundane building blocks that fuse together into the general wholeness of who we are – would be an enormous source of distress for us. Since both memory and art are as much about what is being left out as about what is being spotlighted, de Botton and Armstrong argue that art offers an antidote to this unease:
What we're worried about forgetting … tends to be quite particular. It isn't just anything about a person or scene that's at stake; we want to remember what really matters, and the people we call good artists are, in part, the ones who appear to have made the right choices about what to communicate and what to leave out. … We might say that good artwork pins down the core of significance, while its bad counterpart, although undeniably reminding us of something, lets an essence slip away. It is an empty souvenir.
'We don't just observe her, we get to know what is important about her.' Johannes Vermeer, 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter' (1663).
Art, then, is not only what rests in the frame, but is itself a frame for experience:
Art is a way of preserving experiences, of which there are many transient and beautiful examples, and that we need help containing.
2. HOPE
Our conflicted relationship with beauty presents a peculiar paradox: The most universally admired art is of the "pretty" kind – depictions of cheerful and pleasant scenes, faces, objects, and situations – yet "serious" art critics and connoisseurs see it as a failure of taste and of intelligence. (Per Susan Sontag's memorable definition, the two are inextricably intertwined anyway: "Intelligence … is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.") De Bottom and Armstrong consider the implications:
The love of prettiness is often deemed a low, even a "bad" response, but because it is so dominant and widespread it deserves attention, and may hold important clues about a key function of art. … The worries about prettiness are twofold. Firstly, pretty pictures are alleged to feed sentimentality. Sentimentality is a symptom of insufficient engagement with complexity, by which one really means problems. The pretty picture seems to suggest that in order to make life nice, one merely has to brighten up the apartment with a depiction of some flowers. If we were to ask the picture what is wrong with the world, it might be taken as saying 'you don't have enough Japanese water gardens' – a response that appears to ignore all the more urgent problems that confront humanity. . . . . The very innocence and simplicity of the picture seems to militate against any attempt to improve life as a whole. Secondly, there is the related fear that prettiness will numb us and leave us insufficiently critical and alert to the injustices surrounding us.
But these worries, they argue, are misguided. Optimism, rather than a failure of intelligence, is a critical cognitive and psycho-emotional skill in our quest to live well – something even neuroscience has indicated– and hope, its chariot, is something to cherish, not condemn:
Cheerfulness is an achievement, and hope is something to celebrate. If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope.
'What hope might look like.' Henry Matisse, 'Dance' (II), 1909.
They offer an example:
The dancers in Matisse's painting are not in denial of the troubles of this planet, but from the standpoint of our imperfect and conflicted – but ordinary – relationship with reality, we can look to their attitude for encouragement. They put us in touch with a blithe, carefree part of ourselves that can help us cope with inevitable rejections and humiliations. The picture does not suggest that all is well, any more than it suggests that women always delight in each other's existence and bond together in mutually supportive networks.
And so we return to why prettiness sings to us:
The more difficult our lives, the more a graceful depiction of a flower might move us. The tears – if they come – are in response not to how sad the image is, but how pretty.
[…]
We should be able to enjoy an ideal image without regarding it as a false picture of how things usually are. A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because we are so aware of how rarely life satisfies our desires.
3. SORROW
Since we're creatures of infinite inner contradiction, art can help us be more whole, not only by expanding our capacity for positive emotions but also by helping us to fully inhabit and metabolize the negative – and by doing so with dignity, and by reminding us "of the legitimate place of sorrow in a good life":
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is teach us how to suffer more successfully. … We can see a great deal of artistic achievement as "sublimated" sorrow on the part of the artist, and in turn, in its reception, on the part of the audience. The term sublimation derives from chemistry. It names the process by which a solid substance is directly transformed into a gas, without first becoming liquid. In art, sublimation refers to the psychological processes of transformation, in which base and unimpressive experiences are converted into something noble and fine – exactly what may happen when sorrow meets art.
'Sublimation: the transformation of suffering into beauty.' Nan Goldin, 'Siobhan in My Mirror' (1992).
Above all, de Botton and Armstrong argue, art helps us feel less alone in our suffering, to which the social expression of our private sorrows lends a kind of affirmative dignity. They offer an example in the work of photographer Nan Goldin, who explored the lives of the queer community with equal parts curiosity and respect long before champions like Andrew Sullivan first pulled the politics of homosexuality into the limelight of mainstream cultural discourse:
Until far too recently, homosexuality lay largely outside the province of art. In Nan Goldin's work, it is, redemptively, one of its central themes. Goldin's art is filled with a generous attentiveness towards the lives of its subjects. Although we might not be conscious of it at first, her photograph of a young and, as we discern, lesbian woman examining herself in the mirror is composed with utmost care. The device of reflection is key. In the room itself the woman is out of focus; we don't see her directly, just the side of her face an and the blur or a hand. The accent is on the make-up she has just been using. It is in the mirror that we see her as she wants to be seen: striking and stylish, her hand suave and eloquent. The work of art functions like a kindly voice that says, "I see you as you hope to be seen, I see you as worthy of love." The photograph understands the longing to become a more polished and elegant version of oneself. It sounds, of course, an entirely obvious wish; but for centuries, partly because there were no Goldins, it was anything but.
Therein, they argue, lies one of art's greatest gifts:
Art can offer a grand and serious vantage point from which to survey the travails of our condition.
Few of us are entirely well balanced. Our psychological histories, relationships and working routines mean that our emotions can incline grievously in one direction or another. We may, for example, have a tendency to be too complacent, or too insecure; too trusting, or too suspicious; too serious, or too light-hearted. Art can put us in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves.
This function of art also helps explain the vast diversity of our aesthetic preferences – because our individual imbalances differ, so do the artworks we seek out to soothe them:
Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morris's floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
Viewing art from this perspective, de Botton and Armstrong argue, also affords us the necessary self-awareness to understand why we might respond negatively to a piece of art – an insight that might prevent us from reactive disparagement. Being able to recognize what someone lacks in order to find an artwork beautiful allows us to embody that essential practice of prioritizing understanding over self-righteousness. In this respect, art is also a tuning – and atoning – mechanism for our moral virtues. In fact, some of history's most celebrated art is anchored on moralistic missions – what de Botton and Armstrong call "an attempt to encourage our better selves through coded messages of exhortation and admonition" – to which we often respond with resistance and indignation. But such reactions miss the bigger point:
We might think of works of art that exhort as both bossy and unnecessary, but this would assume an encouragement of virtue would always be contrary to our own desires. However, in reality, when we are calm and not under fire, most of us long to be good and wouldn't mind the odd reminder to be so; we simply can't find the motivation day to day. In relation to our aspirations to goodness, we suffer from what Aristotle called akrasia, or weakness of will. We want to behave well in our relationships, but slip up under pressure. We want to make more of ourselves, but lose motivation at a critical juncture. In these circumstances, we can derive enormous benefit from works of art that encourage us to be the best versions of ourselves, something that we would only resent if we had a manic fear of outside intervention, or thought of ourselves as perfect already…
John Feffer has written a valuable and unusual assessment of the U.S.'s challenges and responsibilities, to our own people and those of the world. If the American imperium is in decline — a by no means sure thing — the United States still possesses enormous resources to do good or ill at home and abroad. That balance, given the current crazy tilt of our politics, is also far from clear. Economic inequality continues to increase, the symbolic 1% of two or three years ago has become the 0.1%, an obscene disproportionality of wealth and economic growth. Poverty and its manifold costs continue to grow, along with the plutocracy that hollows our democracy and our pretense to equality.
The United States has supported plenty of dictators in the interests of stability. We have generated considerable instability – in Afghanistan, in Iraq – when it has served our interests. Our stability is often unjust; our instability is devastating....
[T]here are still things we can do, as humans, to develop a more cooperative relationship with nature and prevent apocalypse. Similarly, the United States can take positive steps to avoid [a] global Balkans scenario....
We are in the world, there’s no escaping that. Just as humans must reconfigure their relationship with nature, the United States must reconfigure its relationship with the world. In both worst-case scenarios, the only winners will be the cockroaches....
John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is Crusade 2.0: The West's Resurgent War on Islam (2012).
In his 2007 bestseller The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers,... the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to roam.
It’s an optimistic vision of the future – if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or a cockroach. No more ranchers. No more huge trawling nets or D-Con.
But it’s not such a great future if you’re a human being. In its dispassionate, non-human-centred perspective, Weisman’s book is designed to shake humans out of our naïve assumption that we will always be around, regardless of the existential threats that drape our shoulders like the cloak of Nessus.
Evolution has, for some reason, made us incapable of facing our own demise. It’s almost as if we wouldn’t be able to balance our checkbook or plan our vacations unless we treated nuclear weapons and climate change and pandemics as just another set of vaporous bogeymen that scare the bejesus out of us but always disappear at morning’s light.
Now let’s turn from the existential to the geopolitical. What would the world be like without the United States?
The recent government shutdown has prompted many to contemplate a world in which the United States hasn’t so much disappeared but collapsed in on itself. Focused on domestic issues, Washington would cancel Pax Americana (or Pox Americana, as anti-imperialists like to say) and step down from its role as the world’s policeman and the world’s financier.
Would the world be better off? As in Weisman’s hypothetical universe, how one answers this question depends a great deal on who one is. Americans certainly profit from our country’s economic and military hegemony: our carbon footprint, our per capita GDP, our mighty dollar, our reliance on English as the world’s default language.
We take these entitlements for granted. Non-Americans, however, might feel a bit differently. Like the buffalo and the dolphins and the cockroaches in a human-free world, everyone outside the United States might very well applaud the end of American superpowerdom.
At the height of the recent political crisis in Washington, an English-language opinion piece from the Chinese news agency Xinhua called “for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world.”
It repeated many familiar arguments. The United States “has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.”
The solution, according to the widely read piece, is to strengthen the U.N., create a replacement for the dollar as the global currency, and give more power to emerging economies in international financial institutions. These all seem like sensible suggestions.
But as several U.S. commentators have pointed out, this provocative essay doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese government opinion. Beijing remains dependent on U.S. economic power, whether in the form of American consumers or Wall Street liquidity.
And, to the extent that the United States fights terrorism, polices the world’s sea lanes, and continues to more or less constrain the ambitions of its key allies in the Asia-Pacific, China is also dependent on U.S. military power.
Chinese leadership values domestic, regional, and international stability. It wants, in other words, to preserve an environment in which it can pursue its primary objective: domestic economic growth. If it can hitch a free ride on the gas-guzzling, armour-plated American Hummer, China will gladly get on board.
But if the Hummer starts to mess with its economic growth, political stability, and regional interests, China will bail. For now, after a congressional deal has averted default and ended the government shutdown, Chinese calls for “de-Americanisation” have subsided. But political deadlock in Washington is by no means over. And the structural issues that underlie the relative decline of the United States over the last decade remain in place.
Most observers of U.S. decline, from Paul Kennedy to Fareed Zakaria, have generally shared the same ambivalence as China. They see U.S. decline as relative, as gradual, and as something to be mourned in the absence of a viable alternative.
The same could be said of the Latin American nations that have long decried U.S. imperialism. The latest salvos in this conflict have concerned the Snowden affair and revelations of the NSA’s overseas surveillance. But like China, Latin America is heavily dependent on trade with the United States and thus also ambivalent about U.S. economic decline.
Some participants in this debate, of course, have no ambivalence at all. The 2008 documentary “The World Without U.S.” describes the state of anarchy that would result if a future progressive president trimmed the military budget and withdrew troops from around the world.
The film relies heavily on British historian Niall Ferguson’s rosy descriptions of American hegemony. At one point, Ferguson suggests that U.S. military withdrawal would likely send the world down the same path of destruction that Yugoslavia experienced in the 1990s.
The European Union was feckless back then, and continues to be so today. No other guarantor of peace has stepped forward. Only China looms on the horizon, and the film ends with images of nuclear blasts hitting Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, presumably from Chinese missiles launched in the wake of the U.S. military’s departure from the region.
In Alan Weisman’s book, the primeval forest takes over the once-civilised world. In "The World Without U.S.," the primeval forces of anarchy take over a world once made stable by U.S. military presence.
It is, in so many ways, a dangerously silly movie. The United States has supported plenty of dictators in the interests of stability. We have generated considerable instability – in Afghanistan, in Iraq – when it has served our interests. Our stability is often unjust; our instability is devastating.
Moreover, we have cut back on our military involvement in Latin America and the region has prospered. We’ve reduced our troop presence in South Korea, including the legendary “trip wire,” and no anarchy has been loosed upon the peninsula. We are finally closing down many Cold War-era bases in Europe, and Europe remains calm.
Remember, the real message of Weisman’s book is that there are still things we can do, as humans, to develop a more cooperative relationship with nature and prevent apocalypse. Similarly, the United States can take positive steps to avoid the global Balkans scenario.
It’s not a matter of appointing a successor as global guardian or duking it out with China to prevent Beijing from stepping into our shoes. It’s not about crawling into our shell and pouting because the world no longer wants to follow our orders.
We are in the world, there’s no escaping that. Just as humans must reconfigure their relationship with nature, the United States must reconfigure its relationship with the world. In both worst-case scenarios, the only winners will be the cockroaches.
Once upon a time, walking around shouting “The end is nigh” got you labeled a kook, someone not to be taken seriously. These days, however, all the best people go around warning of looming disaster. In fact, you more or less have to subscribe to fantasies of fiscal apocalypse to be considered respectable.
And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go.
Consider, for example, Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire investor, who has lately made a splash with warnings about the burden of our entitlement programs. (Gee, why hasn’t anyone else thought of making that point?) He could talk about the problems we may face a decade or two down the road. But, no. He seems to feel that he must warn about the looming threat of a financial crisis worse than 2008.
Or consider the deficit-scold organization Fix the Debt, led by the omnipresent Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. It was, I suppose, predictable that Fix the Debt would respond to the latest budget deal with a press release trying to shift the focus to its favorite subject. But the organization wasn’t content with declaring that America’s long-run budget issues remain unresolved, which is true. It had to warn that “continuing to delay confronting our debt is letting a fire burn that could get out of control at any moment.”
As I’ve already suggested, there are two remarkable things about this kind of doomsaying. One is that the doomsayers haven’t rethought their premises despite being wrong again and again — perhaps because the news media continue to treat them with immense respect. The other is that as far as I can tell nobody, and I mean nobody, in the looming-apocalypse camp has tried to explain exactly how the predicted disaster would actually work.
On the Chicken Little aspect: It’s actually awesome, in a way, to realize how long cries of looming disaster have filled our airwaves and op-ed pages. For example, I just reread an op-ed article by Alan Greenspan in The Wall Street Journal, warning that our budget deficit will lead to soaring inflation and interest rates. What about the reality of low inflation and low rates? That, he declares in the article, is “regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.”
It’s curious how readily people who normally revere the wisdom of markets declare the markets all wrong when they fail to panic the way they’re supposed to. But the really striking thing at this point is the date: Mr. Greenspan’s article was published in June 2010, almost three and a half years ago — and both inflation and interest rates remain low.
So has the ex-Maestro reconsidered his views after having been so wrong for so long? Not a bit. His new (and pretty bad) book declares that “the bias toward unconstrained deficit spending is our top domestic economic problem.”
Meanwhile, about that oft-prophesied, never-arriving debt crisis: In Senate testimony more than two and half years ago, Mr. Bowles warned that we were likely to face a fiscal crisis within around two years, and he urged his listeners to “just stop for a minute and think about what happens” if “our bankers in Asia” stop buying our debt. But has he, or anyone in his camp, actually tried to think through what would happen? No, not really. They just assume that it would cause soaring interest rates and economic collapse, when both theory and evidence suggest otherwise.
Don’t believe me? Look at Japan, a country that, like America, has its own currency and borrows in that currency, and has much higher debt relative to G.D.P. than we do. Since taking office, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has, in effect, engineered exactly the kind of loss of confidence the debt worriers fear — that is, he has persuaded investors that deflation is over and inflation lies ahead, which reduces the attractiveness of Japanese bonds. And the effects on the Japanese economy have been entirely positive! Interest rates are still low, because people expect the Bank of Japan (the equivalent of our Federal Reserve) to keep them low; the yen has fallen, which is a good thing, because it make Japanese exports more competitive. And Japanese economic growth has actually accelerated.
Why, then, should we fear a debt apocalypse here? Surely, you may think, someone in the debt-apocalypse community has offered a clear explanation. But nobody has.
So the next time you see some serious-looking man in a suit declaring that we’re teetering on the precipice of fiscal doom, don’t be afraid. He and his friends have been wrong about everything so far, and they literally have no idea what they’re talking about.
One gets a sense here of the language and character of O'Connor's journals, and if needed of her stories to come. Most of all, one gets a sense of her relationship with God. Read the journals themselves, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
How was the crowd at
the Sermon on the Mount? When the son of God did stand-up for the multitudes,
were there hecklers? The Bible, in its reader-unfriendly way, disdains to tell
us. Jesus rips through that sequence of world-reversing one-liners, the
Beatitudes—“immense sarcasms,” Mark Twain called them, missing the point
narrowly but completely—and of the people’s reaction, we hear nothing at all.
He wraps up his set, and they are “astonished at His doctrine.” But what does
that mean? Groans, jeers? A wild surge on the clap-o-meter? Or dropped jaws and
rings of awe, spreading in silence from the source?
Had Flannery O’Connor been
on the scene, we can be sure, she would have reported it as some kind of freak-out,
a dusty near-riot, not Woodstock but Altamont—scuffles, bad vibes, mic
feedback. Where the Word was operational, for O’Connor, it was always
disruptive: in its presence, one’s head was supposedto explode. Her
short stories, especially, reengineered the Joycean epiphany, the quiet moment
of transcendence, as a kind of blunt-force baptismal intervention: her
characters are KO’d, dismantled, with a violence that would be absurdist, if
the universe were absurd. But the universe is not absurd. “There is an
interaction between man and God which to disregard is an act of insolence,”
wrote the rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, her contemporary, in The
Prophets. “Isolation is a fairy tale.” The upended moment, the breaking-in
or breaking-through of a vagrant, unbiddable reality: this is the grace of God
and the sign of his love.
In O’Connor’s story
“Revelation,” for instance, the pious Mrs. Turpin is attacked by an insane
girl in a doctor’s waiting room. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old
wart hog,” the girl tells her. Later, while hosing down her pigs—divinely
concussed, so to speak—Mrs. Turpin has a vision: a cavalcade moving toward the
crack of heaven, a “vast horde of souls” led by “white-trash, clean for the
first time in their lives,” and “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and
clapping and leaping like frogs.” These are the poor in spirit, coming into
their inheritance. Bringing up the rear, meanwhile, are the righteous, the
organized, the scrupulous and stainless, the people like Mrs. Turpin and her
husband. “They were marching behind the others with great dignity … Yet
she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were
being burned away.”
This month FSG publishes A
Prayer Journal, the contents of a devotional notebook that O’Connor—a turbocharged
Catholic—kept from January 1946 to September 1947, while she was a
student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It is a miraculous and rather terrifying
document, both a blueprint for her fiction and a prophetic dreaming-out of her
life’s purpose and pattern: letters to God, basically, from a woman in her
early 20s who would later tell a correspondent that she was a Catholic, “not
like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else
would be an atheist.”
Iowa was where spiky,
brainy Mary Flannery O’Connor from Milledgeville, Georgia, became Flannery
O’Connor, writer. Arriving in 1945 as a postgraduate student at the University
of Iowa, she promptly homed in on the creative-writing classes run by the poet
Paul Engle. Women were a minority at the time: by 1946, more than half of
Engle’s pupils were returning servicemen, many of them writing stories about
their experiences during the war. On the surface, as O’Connor’s biographer,
Brad Gooch, tells it in Flannery, she was a quiet but significant
classroom presence: “She scared the boys to death with her irony,” remembered
one visiting lecturer, Andrew Lytle. Beneath the surface, as recorded on the 47
and a half handwritten pages to which we now have access (A Prayer Journal includes
a facsimile), she was refining her vocation with the muscularity and spiritual
ferocity of a young saint-in-waiting. The first page or pages of the notebook
have been lost, and it begins—how poetic is this?—mid-sentence, with “effort at
artistry.”
“Smash the ego,” wrote
Peter Schjeldahl in a 1979 poem called “I Missed Punk,” “which always
reconstitutes / (and if it doesn’t, well, / your worries are over).”
For O’Connor, the space left by the destroyed ego—we can imagine it as a kind
of humming vacancy, drifting with pieces of burned paper—was holy because it
belonged to God. And she wanted it. Or, more precisely, and more poignantly,
she wanted to want it. “Dear Lord, please make me want You. It
would be the greatest bliss … to have the want driving in me, to have it
like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the
Fulfilment.” Electric with literary ambition, she prays to be erased. A
paradox? Hardly. “Don’t let me ever think, dear God,” she pleads, “that I was anything
but the instrument for Your story.”
Not much of everyday life
finds its way into the journal. A Mr. Rothburg gets a mention, evidently
because she was mean to him in class—“I got a good punishment for my lack of
charity to Mr Rothburg last year. He came back at me today like a tornado”—but
O’Connor seems to be more or less the only writer in the universe, which is
perhaps how she felt. She reads Kafka (“Mr Kafka”) and Bernanos, and alludes
warily to Freud, Proust, and Lawrence. But it takes a fire-breather like Léon
Bloy to really crack the crust. “Bloy has come my way … He is an iceberg
hurled at me to break up my Titanic and I hope my Titanic will be smashed.”
Bloy was a radical French Catholic and a street prophet, furiously mustached, a
denizen of fin de siècle literary Paris who turned upon the
world a face of almost interstellar indignation. A penny given “grudgingly” to
a poor man, declared Bloy, “pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the
earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the
universe.” Here, exactly, is the catastrophic moral context that O’Connor was
seeking to enter with her fiction. “To maintain any thread in the novel,” she
muses in one of the journal’s rare moments of literary theory, “there must be a
view of the world behind it & the most important single item under this
view of world is conception of love—divine, natural, & perverted.”
The boys in the classroom
were right to be scared of her irony. O’Connor’s was not the shifty, reactive,
and merely local variety that passes for irony today: sitcom irony,
skinny-jeans irony. It was vertical and biblical: the irony by which the mighty
are lowered, the humble exalted, and the savior dies on a cross. And she would
shortly be required to submit to it herself, in full. Within three years of
leaving Iowa, where she had prayed for desire of the Lord to claim her like a
disease, she was diagnosed with lupus. Stricken, she returned to her mother’s
farm in Milledgeville, her base of production for the novels Wise Blood and The
Violent Bear It Away, and the short-story collections A Good Man Is
Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, the
latter published posthumously. Health and sex and adventure had been taken from
her, and in their place was a vision, her world, blast-lit and still reeling
under the first shock of creation. “The air was so quiet,” she wrote in “The
River,” “he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.” It
was a gift. And we are left with a question: Without this terrible
narrowing-down, would she have achieved the greatness she prayed for? This
illness, this thing that confined her, that hauled her, crutches clanking, into
a premature spinsterhood, and finally killed her at the age of 39, can we call
it by the name of grace? Dare we?
O'Connor's
Ironic Inversions
“A Good Man Is Hard to
Find”
Was O’Connor the pioneer of
the now-popular serial-killer-as-moral-philosopher trope? The Misfit— antihero
of this, her most famous story—is a handy theologian: “Jesus was the only One
that ever raised the dead … and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown
everything off balance.”
“A Circle in the Fire”
Try to be nice and see what
happens. When three indigent boys arrive at Mrs. Cope’s farm, her most
anguished request is that they don’t burn down her woods. And so, with “wild
high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace,” they
burn down her woods.
“The Enduring Chill”
Asbury Fox—sweaty and sick,
his writerly Barton Fink aspirations in ruins—comes home. Dying, or so he
thinks, he still finds the strength to be horrible to his poor mother. Mercy
intrudes in the form of an unimaginative and half-deaf hulk of a Jesuit priest,
who upbraids him at bedside.
Thanks to Garrison Keillor's daily Writer's Almanac on NPR, we are able to celebrate Denise Levertov's birthday today — she would have been 90 years old today. (She died on December 20, 1997, at 77,) , one of America's finest poets.
Keillor shared this morning some of her development:
"[She was] born in Ilford, England (1923). She knew from the time she was a kid that she wanted to be a writer. And she said: "When I was 12, I had the temerity to send some poems to T.S. Eliot, even though I had not shown most of them even to my sister, and certainly to no one else. Months later, when I had forgotten all about this impulsive act, a two- or even three-page typewritten letter from him arrived, full of excellent advice. (Alas, the letter, treasured for many years, vanished in some move from one apartment to another in the 1950s; I've never ceased to hope it may one day resurface)."
When she was 17, she had her first poem published in Poetry Quarterly. She worked as a civilian nurse during World War II in London, and in 1946 published her first book, The Double Image.Then she moved to America and became very involved in American political causes as well as American schools of poetry. By the 1960s, she was helping to found the Writers' and Artists' Protest Against the War in Vietnam, and publishing regularly, books like With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959), O Taste and See (1964), and The Sorrow Dance (1967), and she was considered a thoroughly American poet, and an important one at that. She published more than 30 books, mostly poetry, but also essays and translations. And she remained prolific until the end of her life — in 1997, the year she died, she published two books of poetry: The Life Around Us, a collection of nature poems written over the course of her career; and The Stream and The Sapphire, a selection of poems with religious themes.
She wrote: "I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."
_______________________________
I've written recently in Reckonings of Levertov's evolving awareness of her Christian faith, and of the way she came, with such wonderful insight, to marry the worlds of prayer and poem, devotion to art and religious life as one integrated whole.
Come into animal presence No man is so guileless as the serpent. The lonely white rabbit on the roof is a star twitching its ears at the rain. The llama intricately folding its hind legs to be seated not disdains but mildly disregards human approval. What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track and into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do? That the snake has no blemish, that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings in white star-silence? The llama rests in dignity, the armadillo has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest. Those who were sacred have remained so, holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze, only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it. An old joy returns in holy presence.
Prefatory note: I spent my academic career helping students find a richer web of connection between a multi-disciplinary study of human development and a fuller, more empowering experience of their own growth into and through adulthood. So readers can imagine that the parallel enterprise of Professor Michael Puett, a student of Chinese history at Harvard, working in the domain of ancient Chinese ethical and political theory, fascinated me.
The author of the article reprinted below, having spoken with Puett and several of his students, puts Puett’s goal concisely: "[He] uses [his lectures on] Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life."
Puett’s and my choice of texts and methods of teaching differ, of course — I'm a psychologist and my natural choice of venue is the more conversational and intimate seminar; he's a professor of Chinese history, and his lecture class draws 700 students to Harvard's largest venue, Sanders Theater. Our texts do overlap: We come together in using two classic sources of Chinese wisdom, the Tao Te Ching and the stories of Chuang Tzu. More important, our goals are remarkably similar. "His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life." And most important, he appears to be succeeding, as this absorbing article suggests.
______________________
Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?
The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory claims, "This course will change your life."
Christine Gross-Loh
The Atlantic, October 8, 2013
Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.
It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.
Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.
Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”
His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life. Elizabeth Malkin, a student in the course last year, says, “The class absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I view the world.” Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’sAnalects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life.
Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago. A recent report shows a steep decline over the last decade in the number of Harvard students who are choosing to major in the humanities, a trend roughly seen across the nation’s liberal arts schools. Finance remains the most popular career for Harvard graduates. Puett sees students who orient all their courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical, predetermined career goals and plans.
Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan. Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to approach everything from relationships to career decisions. He teaches them that:
The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications.
Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers taught that the most mundane actions can have a ripple effect, and Puett urges his students to become more self-aware, to notice how even the most quotidian acts—holding open the door for someone, smiling at the grocery clerk—change the course of the day by affecting how we feel.
That rush of good feeling that comes after a daily run, the inspiring conversation with a good friend, or the momentary flash of anger that arises when someone cuts in front of us in line—what could they have to do with big life matters? Everything, actually. From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence, altering your own life as well as that of those around you, until finally “you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”
Decisions are made from the heart.
Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same. Puett teaches that the heart and the mind are inextricably linked, and that one does not exist without the other. Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one. Zhuangzi, a Taoist philosopher, taught that we should train ourselves to become “spontaneous” through daily living, rather than closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational decision-making. In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.
Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese philosophers are correct: Brain scans reveal that our unconscious awareness of emotions and phenomena around us are actually what drive the decisions we believe we are making with such logical rationality. According to Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale, if we see a happy face for just a fraction of a second (4 milliseconds to be exact), that’s long enough to elicit a mini emotional high. In one study viewers who were flashed a smile—even though it was shown too quickly for them to even realize they had seen it—perceived the things around them more positively.
If the body leads, the mind will follow.
Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.
While all this might sound like hooey-wooey self-help, much of what Puett teaches is previously accepted cultural wisdom that has been lost in the modern age. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person. In research published inPsychological Science, social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her colleagues found that when we take a power stance (stand with our legs apart, arms thrust out, taking up space), the pose does not only cause other people to view us as more confident and powerful; it actually causes a hormonal surge that makes us become more confident.
At the end of each class, Puett challenges his students to put the Chinese philosophy they have been learning into tangible practice in their everyday lives. “The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.” Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings. In their papers and discussion sections students discuss what it means to live life according to the teachings of these philosophers.
Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we can become as human beings,” says Puett.
To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence. This might be one reason why, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education, interest in Chinese philosophy is taking off around the nation—not just at Harvard. And it’s a message that’s especially resonating with those yearning for an alternative to the fast track they have been on all their lives.
One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies. He told me, “I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”
Christine Gross-Loh is the author of Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us
I wrote a while ago about the growth of spirituality in human development, so it may be useful to describe something of my own experience, and my memories of that experience.
I grew up in a slightly more than nominally Episcopalian family — my parents did not go to church, and prayer was limited to one ritual occasion on which I depended more than I knew. My mother and father came to my bedroom to say goodnight, and stayed while I said my prayers, which were always two. The first,
Now I laid me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
I was uneasy with the last lines — too much loss shadowed our home, and I worried about dying, wondered what my soul was (I assumed somehow it was me or some critical part of me), and where in that event the Lord was going to take me. So my father taught me another pair of lines —
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Guard and keep me through the night,
And wake me with the morning light.
My second prayer was an omnibus petition for the well-being of those who most deeply composed my world, "God bless Mummy, Popsy, Sisty, Buzzy," and my few other closest companions.
My parents' presence was fragile and occasional—and as it turned out, their marriage, their love and work, were precarious—so the family was heavy with stress, and this bedtime ritual had great importance for me. The last question I asked them before they turned off my light and left my room was, "Where are you going to be?"
I suspect I learned some of my early sense of what I am comfortable calling God's presence from my nanny when I was very young, until I was five; that and roaming the woods, fields and lakeside near our home on Mercer Island. As Wordsworth says, it is the earth that is "apparell'd in celestial light" for those who have eyes to see.
My nanny's name was Marian. I have photographs but no real memory of her; she created a wonderful scrapbook of my life as infant and small child. I spent more time with her than with my parents. She put me to bed, played with me, dressed me, sat me on the pot (I was taught to shout "Finis!" to call her back), in effect raised me, along with the kind Secret Service agents assigned to our protection, Henry Hazen and George Carmody, who took turns driving me back and forth to school and kept a watchful eye as I explored.
Later, when I was a more grown up boy, in the autumn of my eleventh year, I had an impossibly long paper route. I took shopping news, not a real newspaper, from house to house along the streets of homes before the hill begins to rise above the town of Berkeley, California. It was a lonely time in my life, despite my mother's best efforts to offer companionship.
I was grateful for the times she and I spent together, especially when we set up a card table in front of the television, ate our meal - I especially remember ground lamb on a stick, a ground lamb drumstick, with mint jelly - and watched a drama called "Studio One." But there were too few of those times. My mother worked during the days I went to Garfield Junior High School, and she had a man friend, a doctor named Leo Doyle. I recall little of those school days. The most vivid recollection is of the school library and the librarian, Nell Stone, who befriended me. I used to sit with a book in the cubby under her desk. I also climbed trees, swinging from branch to branch like a monkey. And I loved to clamber onto people's house roofs at night, looking in at scenes of their lives, unobserved.
My father died that year in New York. He had suffered from recurrent depression for most of his life, and without work he respected, separated from the woman he loved, with almost no money other than a life insurance policy of which I was beneficiary (he returned his wife's check, unwilling to accept her assistance), he chose to jump from an eighth floor window of a hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Because of his connection with the Roosevelt family, the news of his suicide was in newspapers all over the country. Much later, I learned that he had left me a short note: "My dear Johnny, Goodbye my son. I love you dearly. I have faith and pride in you. You will make a great and useful man. I wish I could watch you grow. I love you. Pops"
I remember the telephone ringing in the early morning, my mother answering, the seriousness of her voice. Somehow I knew what she was hearing. I missed my father, and had received only postcards and Christmas presents from FAO Schwartz in the two years since we had last been together. I also feared him. Of his last visit to our home in Los Angeles, the only memory I have is that he drove a maroon Ford with a crumpled fender. Earlier, after he left our home in Phoenix, he took me to two dude ranches in Arizona. All my memories are of being frightened: his teaching me to shoot his pistol, waking in our cabin at night to see a figure standing over me, seeing a tarantula beside the swimming pool, feeding pigs that hungrily drove at me standing on a stump, an image of a wire stretching across a riding trail that seemed just the height to decapitate a boy on horseback.
I lay awake that morning of my eleventh year, knowing that my mother would come into my room to tell me my father was truly gone. I pretended surprise. She said I didn't have to go to school that day, but I saw no reason not to go. What good would it do to stay home? When I walked into my homeroom, the teacher said she was sorry my father had died. "That's OK," I replied, as if I wanted to comfort her. I just wanted to escape her attention, be by myself. That afternoon, my mother asked her friend Leo to come in and ask me if I wanted to talk. With him? I thought. No way. So for many years, my mother thought I would ask to hear about my father "when I was ready."
She wrote my father's widow Virginia, "For the present I have decided not to show Johnny the farewell letter his father wrote him or any of the other letters, because Johnny still hasn't reached the stage where he talks naturally and normally about his father. As you say, we can never be quite sure of what goes on deep inside a child, and Johnny has been almost completely 'bottled up' about his father since he died.... So, all I can do at present, it seems to me, is to bring John into our conversations whenever it seems natural and easy, hoping that before long, whatever bothers him about his father's death will come out in the open and can be talked out." That readiness was long in coming.
One night during my college years, a decade later, I was living with my grandmother Eleanor. Her grandchildren called her Grandmère. I had given her that morning, as I was leaving for my summer job with a publishing house (pasting reviews into scrapbooks), a short essay I had written on the United Nations. At 1 or 2 AM, when I returned home, Grandmère was still up, at her desk dealing with a small mountain of correspondence, the only light a small gooseneck lamp over her desk. She was playing Gregorian chants on the phonograph.
When I arrived she asked me in. She told me that she had read my essay and enjoyed it, and said — this was what I was waiting for without knowing it — "Johnny, your writing reminds me of your father's writing." She asked me to join her sitting by the fireplace, and finally I began to learn about my father. My grandmother told me she had loved him. She was still troubled, a decade after his death, that she had been able to do nothing to save him.
I write all this because it was in a sense prelude to my experience of that endless paper route. Walking along, bored, throwing shopping news onto front porches, I began to talk with God. I suspected I was wishing I could talk with my father, imagining I could, if I made up his voice in my head. I did that a lot in the years to come. But this time felt different. How was I to know if I was talking with God, or my father, or my imagination, and what was the difference? The solution came to me with the plainness of self-evidence. If the voice I heard used the word "altar," it was God speaking. No one else would know—or had the authority—to use that word in talking with me. So I talked with God. I have no memory of what we said to each other, but I felt real companionship. I was less alone.
Why "altar"? I have a glimmer. I've thought of an altar not as a place of sacrifice but as a gathering place for life-giving, a sacred place — the cross, a chalice of wine, a plate of bread, the body and blood of Christ, which I knew in some mysterious way became mine — all of ours — in the symbolic transsubstantiation that is communion, the eucharist.
I suppose I complained about the tedium of my paper route, because soon after I took to leaving bundles of shopping news in the hedge, rather than delivering something that was so useless. It didn't occur to me that my sense of utility might have been different from the families along my route. One day the director of paper distribution came to our door, explained to my mother what I'd been doing, and I had to go with him and pull the sopping bundles out of the hedge. I was summarily dismissed from my job, which I may have thought God's will.
In fact, I didn't think that. I don't recall God's speaking to me about my practice. In my shame at the time I suspected he didn't approve, but I no longer believe that.
The memories of those conversations stayed with me, are still with me more than sixty years later. My often rational mind sometimes says the presence, the voice that kept me companion, was my imagination (or, reductively, my wish for my absent father), but I've learned that does not deny or lessen its reality. Imagination for me, like poetry, meditating with the Gospels, hikes into the hills and mountains, being with my loved ones, is a way of walking with God. I loved and continue to love going to church. I often went to St. James Church in Hyde Park with my grandmother when no one else in the family staying with her would go.
The music, the prayers, the incense, the very words of the liturgy, the sign of the cross, the portraits of Mary with her son, the crucifixion, the mystery of the trinity, especially the ceremony of communion, all drew me. Later I liked to find a church, most often a Catholic church, to sit alone in contemplation.
I feel almost as much at home in a Zen Buddhist sangha, or in the congregation of which my son Joshua is rabbi. I remember significant moments: going early in the morning and serving the priest in a small service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a time in Berkeley when I was asked to speak one of the passages from the Bible. I shook with nervousness. A hand reached out, touched my back from behind in reassurance, like the touch I described in the Zen story I wrote yesterday.
I no longer talk with God as openly and directly, unmediated, as I did in my youth. But that companionship endures. I read recently these words of a Stanford anthropologist, T. M. Luhrmann,
To experience God as walking by your side, in conversation with you, is hard. Evangelical pastors often preach as if they are teaching people how to keep God constantly in mind, because it is so easy not to pray, to let God’s presence slip away. But when it works, people experience God as alive. Secular liberals sometimes take evolutionary psychology to mean that believing in God is the lazy option. But many churchgoers will tell you that keeping God real is what’s hard.
So I pray. I meditate. I go to church. I keep the Christian sabbath, and have reflected on the spirit of shabat often here in Reckonings. God's presence continues to move in mysterious and ordinary ways. I bear my enduring anxiety, doubt and longing, and no longer imagine them without grace. There are many who in my adult years have had—and continue to have—a formative role in enriching my spiritual experience. Naming them is an impossible task, but they include Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, poet and scholar Christian Wiman (especially, as I have written here, his extraordinary book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer), Zen teacher Norman Fischer, two of my sons, Rabbi Joshua Boettiger and Paul Boettiger, the great Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the Hasidic stories of the Baal Shem Tov and his followers, translator and poet Stephen Mitchell (particularly his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus, his poem "Jerome," and his translation of The Book of Job), the scholar of Jewish mysticism Abraham Joshua Heschel, the monks of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, my dear friend and founder of the Cornerstone Forum, Gil Bailie, the congregants of St. Olav's Church at Modum Bad, in Vikersund, Norway, Isak Dinesen's tales, particularly "Babette's Feast" and the extraordinary film made from that story, Beethoven's crowning achievements, his Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony and late string quartets, Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine, and the songs of Leonard Cohen.
Christian Wiman is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine. He was born in West Texas in 1966, forty-seven years ago. He graduated from Washington and Lee University, and has published two books of poetry as well as an eloquent and widely admired collection of reflections on the relation of poetry and religious faith, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus Giroux,
2013). The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead, wrote that Wiman's poetry and scholarship "have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same."
In 2012 Christian Wiman joined the Yale Divinity School Institute of Sacred Music as a senior lecturer in religion and literature.
Wiman's essay "Love Bade Me Welcome," was widely reprinted on the internet and evoked much response from readers. It is available on Krista Tippet's website, On Being, along with the text of Tippet's conversation with Wiman in 2012, and first appeared in Wiman's book, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007).
In his preface to My Bright Abyss, Wiman writes of "Love Bade Me Welcome,"
"It was about despair: losing the ability to write, falling in love, receiving a diagnosis of an incurable cancer, having my heart ripped apart by what, slowly and in spite of all my modern secular instincts, I learned to call God. It was my entire existence crammed into eight pages. The essay detailed a radical change in my life, and then it seemed—or the reaction seemed—to demand a further one."
A further such radical change, which in turn gave birth to the deeply insightful and thoughtful book, My Bright Abyss.
The title of Wiman's essay is drawn from George Herbert's poem, "Love."
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'
'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.
Here is Christian Wiman's "Love Bade Me Welcome":
Though I was raised in a
very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn't been to church in any
serious way in more than 20 years. It would be inaccurate to say that I have
been indifferent to God in all that time. If I look back on the things I have
written in the past two decades, it's clear to me not only how thoroughly the
forms and language of Christianity have shaped my imagination, but also how
deep and persistent my existential anxiety has been. I don't know whether this
is all attributable to the century into which I was born, some genetic glitch,
or a late reverberation of the Fall of Man. What I do know is that I have not
been at ease in this world.
Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by
contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it
is with sound. I don't have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry
replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that
assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though,
that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because
I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power
that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep
betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism
of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I've written in the
past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather,
His absence.
There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important
to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary
confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of
time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way
to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but
it is also the only means they have of communicating. "It is the same with
us and God," she says. "Every separation is a link."
It's probably obvious why this metaphor would appeal to me. If you never quite
feel at home in your life, if being conscious means primarily being conscious
of your own separation from the world and from divinity (and perhaps any
sentient person after modernism has to feel these things) then any idea or
image that can translate that depletion into energy, those absences into
presences, is going to be powerful. And then there are those taps and
scratches: what are they but language, and if language is the way we
communicate with the divine, well, what kind of language is more refined and
transcendent than poetry? You could almost embrace this vision of life — if,
that is, there were any actual life to embrace: Weil's image for the human
condition is a person in solitary confinement. There is real hope in the image,
but still, in human terms, it is a bare and lonely hope.
It has taken three events, each shattering in its way, for me to recognize both
the full beauty, and the final insufficiency, of Weil's image. The events are
radically different, but so closely linked in time, and so inextricable from
one another in their consequences, that there is an uncanny feeling of unity to
them. There is definitely some wisdom in learning to see our moments of necessity
and glory and tragedy not as disparate experiences but as facets of the single
experience that is a life. The pity, at least for some of us, is that we cannot
truly have this knowledge of life, can only feel it as some sort of abstract
"wisdom," until we come very close to death.
First, necessity: four years ago, after making poetry the central purpose of my
life for almost two decades, I stopped writing. Partly this was a conscious
decision. I told myself that I had exhausted one way of writing, and I do think
there was truth in that. The deeper truth, though, is that I myself was
exhausted. To believe that being conscious means primarily being conscious of
loss, to find life authentic only in the apprehension of death, is to pitch
your tent at the edge of an abyss, "and when you gaze long into the
abyss," Nietzsche says, "the abyss also gazes into you." I
blinked.
On another level, though, the decision to stop writing wasn't mine. Whatever
connection I had long experienced between word and world, whatever charge in
the former I had relied on to let me feel the latter, went dead. Did I give up
poetry, or was it taken from me? I'm not sure, and in any event the effect was
the same: I stumbled through the months, even thrived in some ways. Indeed — and
there is something almost diabolical about this common phenomenon — it
sometimes seemed like my career in poetry began to flourish just as poetry died
in me. I finally found a reliable publisher for my work (the work I'd written
earlier, I mean), moved into a good teaching job, and then quickly left that
for the editorship of Poetry. But there wasn't a scrap of excitement in any of
this for me. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life rather than living
it, an old silent movie, no color, no sound, no one in the audience but me.
Then I fell in love. I say it suddenly, and there was certainly an element of
radical intrusion and transformation to it, but the sense I have is of color
slowly aching into things, the world coming brilliantly, abradingly alive. I
remember tiny Albert's Café on Elm Street in Chicago where we first met, a
pastry case like a Pollock in the corner of my eye, sunlight suddenly more
itself on an empty plate, a piece of silver. I think of walking together along
Lake Michigan a couple of months later talking about a particular poem of
Dickinson's ("A loss of something ever felt I"), clouds finding and
failing to keep one form after another, the lake booming its blue into
everything; of lying in bed in my highrise apartment downtown watching the
little blazes in the distance that were the planes at Midway, so numerous and
endless that all those safe departures and homecomings seemed a kind of secular
miracle. We usually think of falling in love as being possessed by another
person, and like anyone else I was completely consumed and did some daffy
things. But it also felt, for the first time in my life, like I was being fully
possessed by being itself. "Joy is the overflowing consciousness of
reality," Weil writes, and that's what I had, a joy that was at once so
overflowing that it enlarged existence, and yet so rooted in actual things
that, again for the first time, that's what I began to feel: rootedness.
I don't mean to suggest that all my old anxieties were gone. There were still
no poems, and this ate at me constantly. There was still no God, and the closer
I came to reality, the more I longed for divinity — or, more accurately
perhaps, the more divinity seemed so obviously a part of reality. I wasn't
alone in this: we began to say a kind of prayer before our evening meals —
jokingly at first, awkwardly, but then with intensifying seriousness and
deliberation, trying to name each thing that we were thankful for, and in so
doing, praise the thing we could not name. On most Sundays we would even
briefly entertain — again, half-jokingly, — the idea of going to church. The
very morning after we got engaged, in fact, we paused for a long time outside a
church on Michigan Avenue. The service was just about to start, organ music
pouring out of the wide open doors into the late May sun, and we stood there
holding each other and debating whether or not to walk inside. In the end it
was I who resisted.
I wish I could slow things down at this point, could linger a bit in those
months after our marriage. I wish I could feel again that blissful sense of
immediacy and expansiveness at once, when every moment implied another, and the
future suddenly seemed to offer some counterbalance to the solitary fever I had
lived in for so long. I think most writers live at some strange adjacency to
experience, that they feel life most intensely in their recreation of it. For
once, for me, this wasn't the case. I could not possibly have been paying
closer attention to those days. Which is why I was caught so off-guard.
I got the news that I was sick on the afternoon of my 39th birthday. It took a
bit of time, travel, and a series of wretched tests to get the specific
diagnosis, but by then the main blow had been delivered, and that main blow is
what matters. I have an incurable cancer in my blood. The disease is as rare as
it is mysterious, killing some people quickly and sparing others for decades,
afflicting some with all manner of miseries and disabilities and leaving others
relatively healthy until the end. Of all the doctors I have seen, not one has
been willing to venture even a vague prognosis.
Conventional wisdom says that tragedy will cause either extreme closeness or
estrangement in a couple. We'd been married less than a year when we got the
news of the cancer. It stands to reason we should have been especially
vulnerable to such a blow, and in some ways love did make things much worse. If
I had gotten the diagnosis some years earlier — and it seems weirdly
providential that I didn't, since I had symptoms and went to several doctors
about them — I'm not sure I would have reacted very strongly. It would have
seemed a fatalistic confirmation of everything I had always thought about
existence, and my response, I think, would have been equally fatalistic. It would
have been the bearable oblivion of despair, not the unbearable, and therefore
galvanizing, pain of particular grief. In those early days after the diagnosis,
when we mostly just sat on the couch and cried, I alone was dying, but we were
mourning very much together. And what we were mourning was not my death,
exactly, but the death of the life we had imagined with each other.
Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That's
exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in
each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting
aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between
us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and
who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed
to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it
seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though,
and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves
than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations
we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt
like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake
so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and
brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our
street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just
barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the
earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the
opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or
included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the
earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is
crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be
leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life
thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort
of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed
at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope.
This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a
hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things
one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness
creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us
toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul
called "hope toward God."
"It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,"
Weil writes, "in order to find reality through suffering." This is
certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe
that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no
untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in
thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this
realization is not to be suddenly "at ease in the world." I don't
really think it's possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and
comfortable. Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art
can tease our minds toward eternity and love's abundance make us dream a love
that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth, and the earth
we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would qualify Weil's statement
somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not
something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered
daily, and newly lost.
So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don't doubt
the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity
that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the
more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any
"existential anxiety" I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays,
not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state
of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged
this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit
more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying
to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction
between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts
at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to
write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only
language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a
cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find
myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first
anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am
trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I
am.
The cooks among you will remember Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook (1977) and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. She writes wisely about food:
"Being grateful for food, slowing down around food — that's what was sacred for me, and this was all in kashrut. Even a bowl of popcorn in front of the TV, I love to 'behold' the popcorn, not just mindlessly reach in and eat it."
As a poet, having faith in what Keats called "the truth of the imagination," Levertov's pilgrimage gradually led her to Christian faith. "I've come to see," she wrote, "certain analogies, and also some interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith." Beginning a work of art "resembles moving from intellectual assent to opening the acts of daily life to permeation by religious faith."
As she worked on a poem first intended as an exploration of the primal form of the Catholic Mass, she anticipated it as agnostic. "A few months later....I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form from that in which I had begun. The experience of writing the poem - that long swim through waters of unknown depth - had also become a conversion process." That long swim through unknown waters lasted the rest of her life, journey of art, doubt, faith, always fueled by the need
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
Among Levertov's last poems is a beautiful story of the "Conversion of Brother Lawrence," a 17th century monk who drew her again into that witnessing presence.
That I was given the opportunity to take this photo was a graceful privilege. I was starting an early morning walk, came around the first bend in the trail, and stopped to linger a short while with this extraordinary sight. "You come too," I wanted to say like Robert Frost to my friends who were still sleeping.
A useful perspective on the psychology and politics of inequality. By the time I had read Dan Goleman's thoughtful article, another psychologist, Kathleen Geier, had written a valuable reply to Goleman's piece for The Washington Monthly, drawing upon her own personal experience on the streets of Hyde Park in Chicago, and leading me to go in search of a Chekov story called "Misery." Sometimes the dance of the web is genuinely and astonishingly graceful. I include Geier's remarks below after Goleman's essay. Since these essays deal essentially with the presence and absence of empathy, I should add that I shared some of my own and Rebecca Solnit's reflections on empathy last June. The link to them is here.
Turning a blind
eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right
through them.
These metaphors
for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They
suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those
with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm
of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the
United States.
A growing body
of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant
attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed,
for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session,
where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like
nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express
disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the
conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
Bringing the
micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power,
researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.
Of course, in
any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a
given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the
more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations
we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay
less attention to those a rung or two down.
A prerequisite
to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social
psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of
California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about
difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The
researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of
suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships
described by the less powerful.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at
Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of
psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of
the research on social power and the attention deficit.
Mr. Keltner
suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the
wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value
their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from
the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The
financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are
better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and
the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.
While Mr.
Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly
attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the
most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with
the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal
rank — but not as well as those low of status do.
This has
profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to
the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in
turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right,
compassionate action.
In politics,
readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing
inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in
Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation
of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing
health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part
from the empathy gap. As political scientists have noted, redistricting and
gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in
which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival
party, much less empathize with them.
Social distance
makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put
a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.
Freud called
this “the narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik
D. Volkan, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University
of Virginia, who was born in Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers
hearing as a small boy awful things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he
points out, actually share many similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for
decades their modest-size island has been politically divided, which
exacerbates the problem by letting prejudicial myths flourish.
In contrast,
extensive interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from
hostile groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas
F. Pettigrew, a research professor of social psychology at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed more than 500 studies on
intergroup contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was born in Virginia in 1931 and lived
there until going to Harvard for graduate school, told me in an e-mail that it
was the “the rampant racism in the Virginia of my childhood” that led him to
study prejudice.
In his research,
he found that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed one
another through lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had close
friends within the other group exhibited little or no such prejudice. They
seemed to realize the many ways those demonized “others” were “just like me.”
Whether such friendly social contact would overcome the divide between those
with more and less social and economic power was not studied, but I suspect it
would help.
Since the 1970s,
the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality
is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and
have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the
financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused
by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing
the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
Daniel
Goleman, a psychologist, is the author of “Emotional Intelligence” and, most
recently, “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.”
Psychologist Daniel
Goleman has written a fascinating piece [2] for
today’s New York Times about social status and empathy. It seems that the
richer and more powerful a person is, the less empathy he or she is likely to
have for people who are lower in status:
A growing body of recent
research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to
those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance,
with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more
powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or
laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard,
through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation
and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
In 2008, social
psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of
California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about
difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The
researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of
suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships
described by the less powerful.
It’s not that rich people
are natural-born sociopaths — although some of them certainly give that
impression. Rather, says Goleman, while rich people can buy all the help they
need, people of modest means “are more likely to value their social assets”:
The financial difference
ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to
interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful
— than the rich are, because they have to be.
I see this in my own life
all the time. I live in Hyde Park in Chicago, a neighborhood with a great deal
of racial and economic diversity. It includes undergraduates wealthy enough to
attend the University of Chicago, professors who live in homes built by Frank
Lloyd Wright … and also a large population of working class African-Americans.
I don’t own a car, and sometimes I carry heavy shopping bags home from the
grocery store.
Every time I’ve schlepped
along with heavy packages, someone has offered to help, a fact that never fails
to move me. In every single instance, the people who offered to help have been
African-American men and women. To my more affluent neighbors, in those
moments, I became invisible — just as I, in turn, have no doubt failed to “see”
other people in distress, as I make the neighborhood rounds. Because they’ve
been in my shoes in that particular situation — carrying heavy packages, with
no one to help — my African-American neighbors have empathy for me. But because
they haven’t had that experience, my white neighbors don’t.
Goleman says that growing
inequality and the social distance it creates may be responsible for a “empathy
gap” that has led to the Republican party’s Scrooge-like politics: cutting food
stamps, denying health care, etc. I don’t doubt there’s something to that, but
political ideology is far more complicated than that. I have relatives whose
politics are awful but whose personal behavior could hardly be more generous
and empathetic. And I’ve also known people with great politics who behave like
cold-hearted bastards, particularly towards their social inferiors.
But I do agree that in
societies where there is more equality and less social distance, there does
tend to be more empathy. That was one of the points I was making in this
post [3]. As I wrote, “[d]eeply unequal societies like ours are …
breeding grounds for a host of simmering resentments, petty tyrannies and
everyday sadism.” That’s because, on the one hand, you have so many heartless
power plays and unthinking acts of cruelty on the part of the powerful. And on
the other hand, the experience of constantly being dehumanized and robbed of
one’s dignity doesn’t exactly improve one’s character. What it’s likely to do,
instead, is to cause you, in turn, to dehumanize others. It is not an edifying
spectacle. But it is inevitable when you create an economic system that allows
people to use human beings like objects.
Social democracy, which
creates more social and economic equality, can help minimize social
pathologies, and maximize empathy. Another recent New York Times article
suggests another route to increasing empathy: reading
literary fiction [4]. A study found that after reading literary
fiction, “people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception
and emotional intelligence.”
I am always somewhat wary
of these arguments about the morally improving qualities of literature. I’m
wary because literature is far more than its moral content, or lack thereof.
Literature is to be cherished for its aesthetic value as well — art for art’s
sake, etc. If you don’t see that, you’re missing something important.
Not to mention the fact
that reading the classics clearly has not done a bloody thing to improve the
character of any number of people I can think of.
And yet, as I say, I am
only “somewhat wary” of those moral arguments for literature, because I think
those arguments basically are kind of true. One of the most basic reasons we
read literature is to get a better understanding of human nature and human
experience, and often but not always, more understanding results in more
empathy. Educated people who don’t read literature probably are less empathetic
and more socially clueless than their better-read counterparts, all other
things equal. The fact that Larry Summers reportedly never heard
of One Hundred Years of Solitude [5] tells you quite a lot about the
man, don’t you think?
The Times article
specifically mentions Alice Munro and Chekhov as two writers who will improve
your empathy. I can’t vouch for that claim, but I couldn’t agree more
that everybody should read Alice Munro and Chekhov. Especially
Chekhov, who I am sometimes think is my all-time favorite writer. These days,
people seem to be far more familiar with his plays than his short stories, but
as much as I love his plays, the short stories are his most important
achievement, in my view. He wrote many volumes of them, and they are amazing.
One of the Chekhov
stories I love most, “Misery,” beautifully illustrates Goleman’s point about
empathy and social distance. It concerns the driver of a horse and cab, whose
little boy has died. He has been driven almost mad with grief. As he drives his
passengers, he keeps trying to find someone who will listen to his pain. All of the passengers are his clear social superiors — college students, army
officers, and so on. None of them pay him the least bit of attention as he
desperately tries to tell his tragic story. Finally, having found no human
being willing to lend a sympathetic ear, he pours out his grief to his horse.
The story is very short,
and absolutely devastating. It could be updated today with few changes. Chekhov
was descended from serfs and became a doctor. As a doctor working in Russia
just before the revolution, he saw the whole of Russian society, from the
aristocrats to the poorest peasants. He wasn’t a political writer, per se, but
he showed great empathy for the suffering of the poor, and was unflinching in
his depiction of the cruelties and hypocrisies of the powerful. He’s a writer
for all time, but he also speaks to our time in very interesting and specific
ways. Many of his stories can be found here [6], if
you’re looking for a place to start.
I haven't been active on Reckonings for over three months: a kind of mini-sabbatical.
No surprise, then, as I feel the stirrings of return to Reckonings, that I've been thinking about waiting and patience, how our Get-and-Go culture leads us to experience waiting as tedious at best, time wasted, lost rather than well used, absence rather than presence. Yesterday an elderly friend and I were musing about ways to understand—refocus through another lens—his increasing and often unsettling loss of memory—as part of the normal paring and slowing down and of aging. "God's way," he said, "of gently, sometimes not so gently, nudging me into Now."
On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work – one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college – with the subject line "brain pickings," announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. "It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read," I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of "materials of historical importance" and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!) Above all, I had no idea that in the seven years to follow, this labor of love would become my greatest joy and most profound source of personal growth, my life and my living, my sense of purpose, my center. (For the curious, more on the origin story 
Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write.
