Thought & Action

When you ask people if they would deliberately inflict pain on another person, almost none say they would ever do such a thing. In fact, in Milgram’s classic experiments on obedience to authority at least sixty percent (60%) of them were willing to inflict extremely painful shock on another person to gain a scientific understanding of the effects of punishment. Like so many others, I remember being stunned the first time I read these experiments. Since then there have been many experimental replications and even far worse, all too many real-world examples of the very same process.

These studies brought clearly into focus for me the gap between thinking and doing. Individuals tend to overestimate the degree to which they will act morally and they underestimate the degree to which they will succumb to situational pressures to act otherwise. We may intend to act help other people, but when confronted with a distressed person clearly in need of aid, a surprising number fail to render assistance.

I recall a classic example of this discrepancy in a far less serious, everyday setting. As students on a university campus were walking to the library, they were asked to respond to a short survey about environmental issues. The interview dealt with littering and the key question asked was “Should it be everyone’s responsibility to pick up litter when they see it or should it be left for the people whose job it is to pick up?” Ninety-four percent (94%) of the students answered that it was everyone’s responsibility.

Apparently there existed a uniformly positive attitude on the part of the students concerning what one should do about litter. The experimenter then observed 409 students as they passed the litter (crumpled newspaper) that had been placed on the pathway to the library next to a trashcan. Of this number, only eight (1.4%) picked up the litter.

In an article, Stumbling Blocks on the Path of Righteousness, in the Times last week Benedict Carey discusses this discrepancy between intentions and actions. He describes an interesting experiment on what he labels the “holier-than-thou effect." This refers to the tendency of individuals to be overly optimistic about their own abilities compared to others—to overestimate their standing in class, their self-control, their sincerity, etc. He says the “self-inflating bias” is even more pronounced on matters of moral judgment and behavior citing the following example:

251 students were asked to predict the likelihood they would buy a daffodil during a campus drive to benefit the American Cancer Society. 83 percent predicted that they would buy at least one flower and that only 56 percent of their peers would. Five weeks later, the researchers found that only about half 43% of these students actually bought a daffodil during the drive. Carey also reports “in other experiments, researchers have found that people similarly overestimate their willingness to do what’s morally right, whether to give to charity, vote or cooperate with a stranger.”

I have always believed that the many studies documenting this gap are only half the story. The other half concerns how to overcome it. Under what conditions do individuals resist the demands or authority, or behave more altruistically, or are they able to translate their moral beliefs into moral action? On these questions we remain pretty much in the dark, although Carey proposes the effect might diminish quickly if people have previous experience(s) in the situation that calls for action.

This suggests that practice or training might narrow the gap between belief and behavior. Currently, there are very few experimental tests of this hypothesis and those that have been undertaken have not been entirely confirming.

In The Call of Stories Robert Coles described this dilemma clearly in discussing the poem Paterson by his friend William Carlos Williams. Patterson, Coles says, “poses one of the oldest dilemmas: the sad commonplace that ideas or ideals, however, erudite and valuable, are by no means synonymous with behavior, that high-sounding abstractions do not necessarily translate into decent or commendable conduct. People can, as he puts it, "talk a big line" and "come out badly wanting in their actions."

Cafe Days

I am reading Rachel Cusk’s latest book, The Last Supper, about the three-month sojourn she and her family spent in Italy a while ago. It is one of those books that I do not want to end. She visits a café outside Rome. It is crowded and the people are engaged in lively conversation. I stop to recall the memorable café times in my life.

During lunch one day at the Bar Pasticceria Curatone in Florence, I observed a riotous display of friendship and camaraderie. A middle-aged man, sitting by my table on the terrace, was engaged in an animated conversation with the Bar's owner. Soon some old friends happened by and when they saw him, each one, in turn, seemed to explode with shouts of joy and delight, followed by spirited conversation. In time, others passed by who also recognized one or more of the assembled group. Jump for joy, long embraces, happy smiles, long tales of Where have you been? What have you been up to? How wonderful you look. Oh, let me show you the pictures of my baby. As if that wasn't enough, soon after that, I sat astonished as I observed a similar scene unfold at another table.

And then not so long ago I went to a café in Paris for afternoon tea. I went upstairs to have a drink. The café, near the Sorbonne, was filled with students and their professors conversing intensely about the latest intellectual crisis. The memory of that scene lingers.

I imagine a café, a literary café, where I can go at the end of each day. There are writers and readers. We talk about our work, the books we’ve read, the issues we are struggling with. We leave with a “See you tomorrow.” It is a Third Place, the concept discussed in Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day. He discusses the German beer gardens, the English pubs, French cafes and the American tavern.

The Third Place comes after the place you live and the place where you work. Oldenberg says it is a neutral ground, where the main activity is discussion. It is accessible and welcoming. There are “regulars” there, unassuming in appearance, offering the freedom to be yourself. It is a home away from home and being there is restorative.

He says that urban life increasingly fails to provide is a convenient and open-ended setting for socializing—where individuals can go without aim or arrangement and be greeted by people who know them and know how to enjoy a little time off. Oldenberg attributes much of the alienation, boredom, and stress of American life to the absence of such a Third Place to repair to when we wish. He says:

“The French, of course, have solved the problem of place. The Frenchman’s daily life sits firmly on a tripod consisting of home, place of work and another setting, where friends are engaged during the midday and evening apertif hours, if not earlier and later.”

I am sure there are such places in this country but I have never found one. I will keep looking, that is for sure.

I remember a blazing hot Sunday in a remote Tuscan village of Italy. No one is on the street. All of the stores are closed. The shutters of the surrounding apartment buildings are shut tight. I park my car in the single open square, get out, and am enveloped by the heat. It is startling. It is wonderful. I look for a place where I can get a drink. The local bar, which in Italy is also a place to get an expresso, a Panini, and cold drink is the only place that is open. The TV is on and a few old men are staring at it mutely. On the screen is a soccer game somewhere in Italy and the crowd is roaring. Otherwise, it is utterly silent in the café and on the street. And it is hot. It is perfect.

Darkness Visible

For the thing which I had greatly feared is come upon me,
And that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet;
Yet trouble came. Job

For years admired I have admired the essays and articles of Daphne Merkin. Never once did I sense she was engaged in a life-long battle with chronic depression. As she notes in her frank and brutally candid account of her experience in the Sunday Times Magazine, she was good at “adopting the mask of all-rightness that every depressed person learns to wear in order to navigate the world.”

She reports that as early as 5 or 6 she “had begun to be apprehensive about what lay in wait” and by 10 had been hospitalized for frequent bouts of crying. At times she has felt suicidal and at others times simply unable to escape from the darkness and despair that permeated every cell in her body, lying in bed for days at a time, unable to read, eat, or do anything but sleep. Merken confesses she had quite literally ground to a halt.

For over four decades she has been going to psychotherapists and has tried every medication and combinations of medications that have been prescribed since her early 20s. None of the therapists or drugs had done much for her. “What’s more, after a lifetime of talk therapy and medication that never seemed to do more than patch over the holes in myself, I wasn’t sure that I still believed in the concept of professional intervention.”

“In some ways, the quiet terror of severe depression never entirely passes once you’ve experienced it. It hovers behind the scenes, placated temporarily by medication and renewed energy, waiting to slither back in, unnoticed by others. It sits in the space behind your eyes, making its presence felt even in those moments when other, lighter matters are at the forefront of you mind. It tugs at you, keeping you from ever being fully at ease.”

The precipitating events are never clear to her. As she puts it, they include “everything and nothing, as is just about always the case—some combination of vulnerable genetics and several less-than-optimal pieces of fate.” About her most recent return to a psychiatric hospital, she writes, “I wanted to die, but at the same time, I didn’t want to, not completely. Suicide could wait my sister said.”

She says the first night was the hardest, but then later says they never got any better. The lack of a reading lamp added to her panic. She writes, “the absence of a light source by which to read after dark represented the end of civilization as I had know it.”

Throughout this time (3 weeks) the major issue for Merken was whether she would undergo ECT, a treatment with a checkered history that currently finds some favor and was recommended by her psychiatrist to pull her out of her “neurovegetative” condition. Merkin resists. And then one day she says, “something shifted ever so slightly in my mind.” She had replaced one of her medications with a new one but really had no idea what led to the change. She speculates, “Maybe it was the fear of ECT, or perhaps the tweaked medication had kicked in, or maybe the depression had finally taken its course and was beginning to lift…”

Merken began to feel a little better, better at least to leave the hospital and try to reenter her life. “I had things I wanted to say” and new books to read and films to see. Still she said everything felt fragile and while her depression had taken a time out, she knew full well it could return at any time without warning. This is the underlying terror of chronic depression.

I have known people who have journeyed through life with this affliction, people who I have lived with and loved. And what I have observed is that there is no escaping the internal “dungeon” through which they must travel. Nothing they try works. Not the drugs, the new and the old, and their limitless combinations. Not the year after year of therapeutic treatments or the hospitalizations, regardless of how long or short or where they are located. And not the ECT no matter how often it is administered or how it is tweaked.

Chronic depression appears to come and go on its own. Merken writes, “Worst of all it honors no season and respects no calendar; it arrives precisely when it feels like it.”

Full Court Press

In Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell suggests that talent and hard work are two of the factors responsible for outstanding achievement in any field. Neither one alone is sufficient to guarantee success but in combination with three other factors—opportunity, luck and timing—they account for the notable achievements of the likes of Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer and The Beatles.

However, Gladwell “switches gears” a bit in his latest essay, How David Beats Goliath, in the May 11th issue of The New Yorker. Here he asks why is it that the underdog so often defeats a superior opponent. He cites statistics that this occurs in over 25% of the wars fought in the past two hundred years, where weak combatants defeated more powerful opponents. And when the weaker army chose an unconventional strategy, their winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63%

To account for this “remarkable fact” Gladwell turns to the Biblical story of David and Goliath. He says that David defeated Goliath because he didn’t play according to Goliath’s rules. Goliath was clearly the stronger of the two and David didn’t stand a chance in hand-to-hand combat. Instead, he did the unexpected, “reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” Gladwell says this broke the “rhythm of the encounter” which in turn “must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target.”

He discusses the surprising victory of the Arabs, led by the Englishman T. E. Lawrence, over the Turks near the end of the First World War. Gladwell explains how Lawrence led the Bedouin warriors in an unheard of march across six hundred miles of blazing hot desert to the port town of Aqaba. The Turks were expecting an attack from the British fleet patrolling off the water off the Gulf. Instead, Lawrence’s masterstroke was to attack from the rear following their audacious march across the desert. Here again Gladwell concludes, “substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.”

The life of T.E. Lawrence, his relationship with the Bedouins, and the desert march he led them is vividly depicted in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence) and Lawrence’s own The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence, by profession an archeologist (“a dreamy poet" according to Gladwell) was never accepted by British Army officers; “The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider.”

Much of Gladwell’s article illustrates this point by way of yet another example of defensive strategies for overcoming superior opponents—in this case, applying a full court press in women’s basketball. He writes about Vivek Ranadive, founder of a computer software company, who decided to coach his daughter’s Junior League basketball team. Ranadive knew nothing about the game and couldn’t understand why teams retreated to the opposite end of the court each time they scored a basket.

Instead, he wondered why didn’t they defend the players who were inbounding the ball at the other end of the court. He reasoned that a full court press, applied consistently throughout the game would give weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger ones. This required considerable endurance and constant pressure on the part of the weaker players, like those on his daughter’s team.

Gladwell concludes his discussion of successful applications of this technique by Ranadive and other coaches with this generalization: “We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability…because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.”

He also suggests that underdogs not only work harder than the Goliath’s, “But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable…”

You might wonder why the full-count press is not more widely employed in college and professional basketball games. Perhaps it is too exhausting. Perhaps it only works against players who are poor ball handlers. Or perhaps a team that knows how to pass quickly and thereby move the ball rapidly up the court can easily counter it. No doubt that is true for most first-rate college and professional basketball teams today.

Weekend Links

Go Where They Are
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/nyregion/09principal.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

A Single Grain of Sand
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/books/28kaku.html?scp=1&sq=Age%20of%20Unthinkable&st=cse

Slumbering Minds, Awake!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124079001063757515.html

Fifty Years Ago
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/jersey-boy/

Expatriate Tales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/06/best-books-expatriate-top-10

Suburban Enthusiast
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion/connecticut/03cheeverCT.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Enough

Enough is the title of one of the short stories in the latest issue of the Paris Review. The story is by Philip Gourevitch. At first, I am puzzled by its appearance. Gourevitch is the editor of the periodical after all. Is it above board for him to publish one of his own stories?

At first the tale seems fairly inconsequential and to be perfectly honest like something I might have written or have tried to write. So I am even more puzzled. But I continue reading and the story gets better, so I forget about the fact that Gourevitch is the editor.

Besides the story reminds me a little bit about myself, at least how I feel on some days. Perhaps everyone has such days. Jerry is a photographer. He photographs wars. He says in the beginning he went to photograph the wars out of curiosity. He was awarded prizes for this for but they never made any difference. The wars were never ending; there was always a new one for him to photograph.

But his work brought him no pleasure. “He saw that his work was futile, and his work was his life. Why write about things that nobody should ever have to know? He despised war and he could not live without it, and for this reason, when he lost perspective—or was it when he gained it?—he despised himself.”

And when he felt this way Jerry withdrew into himself. “He did not want to talk to anyone. He spoke only when he felt he had to, and the speech came in bitter outbursts that surprised him and gave him no relief.”

Whenever he felt this way he found himself starting to write and like so many others overcome with despair he found that writing helped him, although for both Jerry and others, the relief never lasts for long. “It came in small fragments at first, half-formed thoughts that gradually fit together into a coherent mood--that is, a mood he could inhabit.”

One day he wrote: "Narcissists should be shot and it occurred to him that if he were to shoot himself that would make a very funny suicide note. It felt good to laugh. He asked his wife “Should I be shot?” She said, “Whatever makes you happy.”

During one of the wars he covered a photographer friend gave him a key to a house on an island in the Hebrides saying, “Giving you those keys made me feel free to die.” It made little sense to Jerry and then again, maybe it did.

In the next war, the photographer was killed. Jerry goes to the island where there are virtually no inhabitants without a soul anywhere near his house. I have also come to an island, a warmer one to be sure and there are all too many souls living here.

He wrote to his wife every day. He wrote about the things he saw and his experiences living by “the sky, sea grass, peat.” One day he wrote in the notebook that he was keeping, “The entire vast view is socked in fog, a fine drizzling mist, the sky a solid blanket the bright blue-gray of skim milk.” That was it.” But he never sent her anything he had written.

After being on the island a month, he left to return to the latest war. His wife found the notebook with his writings the next year when she came to see the house he had left here. Grourevitch writes, “The last thing he’d written was, “Enough.”

And so in the end I thought it was a good story and I’m glad I forgot about the author-editor issue. I recognized a little bit of myself in Jerry and wonder how many other readers did as well or whether that even matters. And then I recalled something Patrick Kurp wrote a while ago: “Even as adults we’re looking for correlatives to our lives in everything we read. How else could it be?”

The Wall

In the New York Review of Books (April 30, 2009) David Hare, the English dramatist, writes a monologue about the Wall. The Wall stretches for 486 miles, the length of Israel’s eastern border. Hare reports 84 percent of the Israelis are in favor of the Wall. He asks: “Have you ever known anything of which 84 percent of people were in favor?”
I think the figure is even more astonishing given the legendary disputatiousness of Jews.

The Wall does not run along the so-called Green Line, the border that was established in 1949 between Israel and Jordan. According to Hare “…85 percent of its intended route is inside the West Bank [and in places] goes far inland to collect up and protect Israeli settlements established far inside the occupied territory. Sometimes it takes in fertile Palestinian agricultural land and water wells, leaving Palestinian farmers without access to their own fields.”

It is also a huge inconvenience for the Palestinians who wish to travel within their own lands, as well as those who are employed in Israel. The Arabs view the Wall as a land grab; most Israelis view it as a security measure. One of Hare’s Arab friends says: “the wall is the perfect crime because it creates the violence it was ostensibly built to prevent.”

An Israeli friend says: “I hate the wall. I regret it. I am ashamed of the wall. I drive for miles so that I don’t have to see. But it works. 80 percent of terrorist attacks against Israel have stopped….Am I not meant to be pleased about that?”

I think if this Israeli drives so far to avoid seeing the Wall, think how far and how long the Palestinians have to drive and wait at the checkpoints to get to where they are going.

Hare gives further information about the Wall. He reports it varies in width between 30 and 150 meters and is a combination of “trenches, electronic fences, ditches, watchtowers, concrete slaps, checkpoints, patrol roads and razor coil…”

Hare meets with an Israeli intellectual who speaks of the defining paradox of Israel: “To the world it seems powerful and aggressive, yet to itself it seems weak and frail.” He says “Israelis have a very fragile sense of the future. It is incredible but the country itself still feels provisional….You might say we have imported from the Diaspora the Jewish disease—a sense of rootlessness, an ability to adapt and make do, but not to settle. After sixty years, Israel is not yet a home.”

Hare quotes Einstein: “If we do not find the path to honest cooperation and honest negotiations with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing from over 2,000 years of suffering and we deserve the fate that will befall us.”

He meets with an Arab friend in Ramallah who comments: “What is so shocking about Israel is that these days it doesn’t even have a protest movement. In the old days, there were peaceniks on the streets and long-haired students. Now they have almost no peace movement at all. What can you say? A country which loses its hippies is in deep trouble.”

On another day Hare talks with David Grossman, the Israel novelist whose son was killed on the last day of the Lebanon war. Hare says that Grossman’s home is “charged with grief.” Grossman speaks eloquently and contrary to his friend in Ramallah, is a vocal representative of the Israeli peace movement.

“We squandered our chance to make the state permanent in 1967. Instead of using the conquered territories as leverage in negotiation, instead we became addicted to occupation…Now we have terrible trouble imagining any other reality than the one we live in. You become habituated, you cannot believe there is another possible way of life. And so effectively you become a victim of the situation….we hand our fate over to the security people, we allow the army to run the country, because we lack a political class with a vision beyond the military….I want to begin to live. I want some gates in the wall.”

The Palestinians want to live too. They also want some gates. Here we have two areas of agreement. Let the negotiations begin with living and the gates.

Detroit of Higher Education

In a New York Times op-ed piece last week, Mark Taylor, Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia, called for a major restructuring of graduate programs in this country. Because graduate education plays such a central role in the intellectual life of our country, his concerns deserve to be considered. Professor Taylor considers graduate education “the Detroit of higher education.”

He writes “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research…publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”

Taylor does not only criticize. In addition, he proposes a complete overhaul of graduate and, in turn, undergraduate studies tailored for the 21st century.

1. Replace the obsolete departmental structure with an integrated, interdisciplinary network of disciplines. “Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.”

2. Create problem focused programs around a broad range of topics such as “Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time Media, Money, Life and Water.”

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. Taylor comments: “With these tools [teleconferencing and the Internet], I have recently team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.”

4. Transform the traditional dissertation modeled on the medieval dissertation, into analytic treatments from hypertext and Web sites to films and other theses formats.

5. Expand the professional options for students since “Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.”

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure with seven-year renewable contracts. This will avoid the current situation in which there is little turnover among professor with many “impervious to change.”

Taylor writes “For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with what I could never imagine doing…” He concludes: “My hope is that colleagues and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academic to a future we cannot conceive.”

For one not far removed the academic fray, I can only affirm the merits of Taylor’s portrait of graduate programs and the need for their radical restructuring. It was only after I began teaching that I learned anything about my discipline and it was only after I began teaching that I realized the great value of interdisciplinary, problem focused, courses. I taught better and the students learned more when I could offer them. And along the way they gave rise to research programs in which both my students and I learned a great deal and even nudged forward a little bit the areas we investigated.

I might add that I turned down the offer of indefinite tenure hoping to replace it with a renewable contract subject to periodic evaluation. I was duly informed that I could not remain at the college under those conditions. Since the college was in my mind a little Utopia, I had to settle for a permanent arrangement. However, in the end I departed from the college long before it was necessary, so in reality it wasn’t very permanent at all.

It's the Water, Stupid

David Foster Wallace began his widely discussed and recently published (This is Water) commencement address at Kenyon College in May 2005 with a parable. In the parable two young fish happen to meet an older fish that says to them “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on a bit until one says to the other “What the hell’s the water?”

Wallace writes: “The point of the story is that the most important, obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

To the graduating students he says that the really significant education they have received isn’t “really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” Later he adds this means: “…being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

He says that in his experience the most dangerous consequence of an academic education is the tendency to “over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right of front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” It’s the water parable again.

Much of the talk is a warning to the students about what adult life is really like. “Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.”

Wallace then proceeds to unpack what that means. You get up, you go to work, you are there eight or ten hours, you are tired and exhausted and now you are stuck in traffic on the drive home, and then you have supper if you are lucky enough to have someone prepare it, otherwise you stop at the market and try to find something to eat and wait a while longer in the check out line, and get back on the freeway, where the traffic is as bad as it was when you got off, and then you try to unwind a bit after your lean cuisine, whereupon you hit the sack early because you have to get up early again the next day and go through it all again.

“Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates actual life routine, day after week after month after year….The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.”

“This I submit is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

For Wallace being educated is being able to recognize the importance of attention and awareness and discipline and he adds “being able to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty unsexy ways every day.” These are not our default settings. They have to be learned and the learning isn’t easy and it is readily forgotten in the midst of all the distractions that usually take control of our lives.

Wallace concludes that his remarks (“stuff”) isn’t your normal inspirational, optimistic, commencement speech. He reminds the students again that the real value of their education has little to do with knowledge “and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water.”

Even if his remarks are far from cheerful, they are pretty inspirational in my book. Even more, they are true.

It Happens All the Time

More on the books that changed people’s lives as described by Canfield and Hendricks in You’ve Got to Read This Book! An overwhelming majority of the changes brought about by books were in a person’s beliefs, commitments, or intentions to act. In addition, each such change was usually preceded by a dilemma in the person’s life that the book dealt with and offered a solution.

Ten readers described relatively specific changes the book motivated them to undertake including being more sociable or goal directed and, in the case of five individuals, emphasizing the importance of controlling the course of one’s life and taking responsibility for one’s actions.

I pulled it [Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz] off the shelf, started reading, and found it was easy to read and made a lot of sense. It took the book home and read it cover to cover, and then started again at the beginning. One message stood out for me: You are in control of your destiny. Your mind is very powerful; what you think is your reality. Rudy Ruettiger

Fifteen readers described a wide range of effects including “lightening up,” “doing what is right,” trusting your instincts or desires, taking risks and being more courageous. The most frequently noted effects were spiritual/cognitive changes that were noted by 17 contributors. Gaining understanding or insight about an event in their life was the most often mentioned (8), followed closely by those who turned toward a more spiritual life (7) with 2 individuals reporting a book that helped them to “find the real me” or gain a greater sense of their own identity.

I had been trying to control things that were fundamental uncontrollable and the cost had been the moment-by-moment disruption of my peace of mind. …But now with the help of Epictetus [The Book of Life] I realized the pointlessness of trying to control my emotions. They have a life of their own, and they will last as long as they last. Applying the wisdom Epictetus conveys in his first sentence, I relaxed my resistance, letting go of my effort to wish my feelings away….That brief moment in time exerted such a powerful positive influence on me that it has affected the way I live my life and practice my profession ever since. Gay Hendricks

In spite of their limited representativeness, these anecdotal accounts leave little doubt that books can be powerful agents of change for a wide range of individuals. It is also abundantly clear that a multiplicity of books can have this effect--from the Sears Catalogue to, Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer, Don Quixote to Homer’s Odyssey and Aristotle’s Ethics. This indicates that whatever influence the experience of reading a book might have, it will be highly idiosyncratic.

The wide range in the age when an influential book is read is also evident from these accounts. Readers recalled books that they read early in their childhood, adolescence and throughout their adult life. In addition, most indicated they were surprised by the book’s impact; it was unexpected, more a matter of happenstance than one intentionally planned. In this respect the experience of reading an influential book is much like the process that occurs when any kind of fortuitous event alters behavior.

You never know when it will happen or what book will have this effect. The only thing you can do is keep reading. Perhaps one day a book will meet you right where you are and point you in a new direction. We don’t often think that a book can change a person’s life but it seems to happen all the time.

Weekend Links

Video of the Week
http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/the-situation-of-climate-change/

How to Be a Genius
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

On Neuroenhancers
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/04/cognitive_enhancement_and_crea.php

A Letter You Can Write
http://writeaprisoner.com/

It’s About Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/world/europe/02poet.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The New Literary Café
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/05/age-of-remembrance.html

You've Got to Read This Book!

Do you recall a book that has changed your life? This question is currently being discussed at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Earlier this week a panel of writers was asked to describe a favorite classic that had inspired their own work and to read a passage from it.

In You’ve Got to Read This Book! 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life, Jack Canfield and Gay Hendricks write about the books that changed the lives of a much more diverse sample of individuals (“transformation leaders, business consultants, and authors”) who had gathered together to discuss ways to make “the world a better place.” During a break, the topic of books came up and several members spoke of the books that had a major influence on their life.

When the group reassembled, Gay Hendricks asked each person to describe a book that had changed their life. Hendricks notes, “What happened next was wonderful to behold.” Each person spoke with an enthusiasm that “absolutely glowed.” This experience led Canfield and Hendricks to conduct in-depth conversations” with 55 people about the books that had this sort of impact on their lives. In turn, the conversations were edited and reorganized by an associate into short essays about the way these books had shaped their life.

It is not entirely clear how the 55 individuals whose edited accounts are presented in You’ve Got to Read This Book! were selected. They appear to be chosen because they had some acquaintance with the authors and in one way or another because they were “all doing valuable work in the world.” They were from a variety of fields with the majority in the “self-help movement” including spiritual counselors, personal coaches, and motivational speakers. A large number came from the fields of marketing and technology and several were either writers or publishers.

It is also evident that a goodly number wore many hats, combining work in business and writing and personal training etc. For example, Pat Williams, the senior vice present of the NBA’s Orlando Magic is described as a motivational speaker, author of numerous books and marketing guru. He and his wife are also the parents of 19 children, 14 of whom have been adopted from foreign countries. Another contributor, Tim Ferriss, is characterized as “an accelerated-learning researcher, world traveler, and guest lecturer at Princeton University.” He is also said to be fluent in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, German and Spanish and holds a title in Chinese kickboxing and a Guinness world record in tango, coached more than 80 “world champion athletics and the author of several books. We should all have such talent.

Consistent with the backgrounds of the contributors, about a third (32%) of life-changing books came from the non-fiction self-help genre. That includes those intended to provide inspirational direction, overcome a personal problem, or encourage innovative business practices. Examples include The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (cited twice), Learning to Love Yourself by Gay Hendricks, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel (also cited twice), etc.

Fiction, both classical and contemporary, ranked second (22%) in the type of books chosen. That included 2 classic novels, e.g. Don Quixote, Siddhartha, and 10 contemporary novels, e.g. The Alchemist, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, etc. Clearly the great 19th Century novels of inspiration and devotion didn’t do much for these individuals, nor did the great Russian novels of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or those modern classics of Hemingway or Joyce. Readers admired those novels, but they didn’t report they were life-changing.

The remaining collection of influential works were drawn from a variety of fields including 7 biographies, e.g. Ghandi, Veeck—As in Wreck: The Chaotic Career of Baseball’s Incorrigible Maverick, Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, etc., general science, e.g. The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau, On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, Psycho-Cybernectics by Maxwell Maltz etc., and 1 each in History (The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas), mythology (The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell) and politics (Mein Kampf). The Bible, the most popular book of all time, was mentioned only once. And in spite of the popularity of contemporary memoirs, only one was cited, Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary by Jerry Kramer.

If a book or a set of books has changed your life, I would enjoy hearing about it.

Put a Poem in Your Pocket

The poet wrote:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

April also National Poetry Month, a celebration of poetry started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. As part of the celebration, today (April 30th) is the second national Poem in Your Pocket Day. Put a poem in your pocket today and read it to your friends, family, and co-workers and a few other times to yourself, as well.

I’ve been pondering the poem I will put in my pocket today. Since I usually have a couple of extra pockets, I am going to carry around the following three, leaving open for now the reasons for my selections:

Czeslaw Milosz An Honest Description of Myself with a Glass of Whiskey at an Airport, Let us say, in Minneapolis

My ears catch less and less of conversations, and my eyes have weakened, though they are still insatiable.

I see their legs in miniskirts, slacks, wavy fabrics.

Peep at each one separately, at their buttocks and thighs, lulled by the imaginings of porn.

Old lecher, it's time for you to the grave, not to the games and amusements of youth.

But I do what I have always done: compose scenes of this earth under orders from the erotic imagination.

It's not that I desire these creatures precisely; I desire everything, and they are like a sign of ecstatic union.

It's not my fault that we are made so, half from disinterested contemplation, half from appetite.

If I should accede one day to Heaven, it must be there as it is here, except that I will be rid of my dull senses and my heavy bones.

Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the proportions of human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at dawn, all of it incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things.


Mary Oliver The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Harold Pinter A Poem (To A)

I shall miss you so much when I’m dead
The loveliest of smiles
The softness of your body in our bed

My everlasting bride
Remember that when I am dead
You are forever alive in my heart and my head

What poem(s) will you carry in your pocket today?

A Skeptical Eye

The central concern that Grayling expresses in his essay, Pressing Questions for Our Century, (discussed yesterday) is the responsibility that each of us has to keep abreast of developments in science and technology. To me, this not only means being well informed about scientific research, but also knowing what is required to evaluate the findings reported in the press and in the books that we read. This isn’t easy for a layperson to do. It requires considerable education and careful research.

So for example when you read one of Malcolm Gladwell’s extraordinarily popular book about decision making (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) or his latest (Outliers: The Story of Success) on the sources of distinguished accomplishment, you know how to approach his claims critically, judge their accuracy, and, determine whether or not the evidence that he cites or that you find on your own, is adequate grounds for his assertions.

This means knowing something about the methodology of scientific research and the techniques one employs to identify alternative accounts of research findings. The first step in achieving this is in asking the “right” questions, in knowing what questions to ask and what not to ask. This is always the hardest part. It is like composing the first sentence in a book or story you wish to write. Often a writer will struggle with that first sentence for months but once it clear what it will be, the tale often takes off on its own.

In Blink for example, Gladwell claims the rapidly made decisions (“in the blink of an eye”) are every bit as reliable and sometimes more so than decisions made more deliberately. However, that is not exactly the finding reported in the experiment he discusses in support of this claim. What is reported are judgments of teaching effectiveness made by female subjects only, from repeated video clips that lasted as long as several seconds each, and that the female students never actually rated the teacher’s overall effectiveness but instead a set of verbal behaviors that, aggregated together, were presumed to measure it.

Nor does he fairly describe studies suggesting that predictions of marital happiness can be accurately made after observing an hour of a couples’ interaction or that a decision-making algorithm for predicting cardiac arrest can be made on “very thin slices of evidence.” In fact, research in both areas developed after long and complicated testing procedures that involved sifting through a good deal of data and many hours of personal experience. These were not snap judgments or carried out in the blink of an eye.

So it isn’t only the reader has the responsibility to approach science critically. It is also the science writer who has an obligation to report accurately and know how to carefully evaluate the generality of the reported primary studies. A science writer also doesn’t create a very deep understanding of a phenomenon on the basis of a series of (unrepresentative) anecdotes, as Gladwell often relates, no matter how colorful they are.

In the press we often read about a relationship between what we eat and behavior, or between some type of experience and a disease. But we rarely read about the strength of the relationship or whether it might be due to any number of other factors. Nor do we read for whom the findings hold and for whom they don’t. And most such press reports are framed in the language of causality when it fact one can never presume there is a causal relationship from correlational data

No doubt I can say all this because of my research background and training. Nevertheless, I believe any reader can approach press reports and books about science with a critical eye. It takes a certain style of thinking and of questioning to do this. But with practice it can become “second nature” to anyone. Just keeping asking questions, read with a skeptical eye, and be mindful of how the findings were derived and for whom they do and do not hold.

What is the Question

As Gertrude Stein was on her deathbed, Alice B. Toklas asked her “What is the answer.” Stein is said to have replied: “In that case, what is the question.” Is not the question more important than the answer? Are not the answers for the most part embedded in the way the questions are formulated? I have always believed the best kind of reasoning, the best analysis or research starts with a good question. Knowing what question to ask is the critical antecedent to obtaining a good answer.

In a recent essay, Pressing Questions for Our Century, A. C. Grayling writes about some of the questions that loom largest in his thinking now and why they cause him the greatest worries. Grayling is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of London who has recently written Ideas that Matter: Key Concepts for the 21st Century. His central concern is how are we to make individuals more aware and better informed about the discoveries of modern science, discoveries that he believes are the greatest achievements to date in human history.

I admire Grayling’s essay for the way he gives serious thought to the questions that really matter to him now or as he puts it what are the most pressing questions of our times. How often do we ask ourselves what are the questions that matter most to us? Here are the five that he regards as most critical.

1 How are we going to involve more people “in the conversation about what’s happening in science—trying to understand it, be informed about it and to be a participant in deciding how we go forward with these developments?”

2. How are we going to preserve, defend and expand civil liberties and human rights throughout the world and avoid their erosion in so many countries, including those where we believe they are widely practiced?

3. How can we best understand the nature of consciousness, perception, thought and memory? How can be best further our understanding of these cognitive process and what is going to “come out of it?”

4. What determines the practice of reading and how will we be reading and reflecting in the future. “What underlies our ability to be good conversationalists with one another, to be reflective…and have a good knowledge of the classics but also be open to new ideas across all the disciplines—history, the sciences, philosophy, and the literary arts?”

5. “How do we keep the best of the past while remaining flexible and receptive to this new world that our technologies are opening to us? Keeping alive the questioning, skeptical, fact-hungry, curious attitude towards the world that the best people in the past have exemplified?”

Grayling begins his essay by saying “I am asking myself a lot of questions at the moment…” I attach considerable importance to that statement and the process it entails. I would hope that we would all begin to identify our own most pressing questions and then proceed, insofar as we are able, to answer them.

I suspect if you take this enterprise seriously what you will end up with more questions that will be just as pressing. This will give a momentum and a direction to your thinking that may be languishing in their absence. Here I speak from personal experience, one that I am presently encountering as I seek to identify the next big project and try to recharge my muse.

Power of Pen

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is an epistolary novel, a literary form with a long and at times popular history that extends to the current day. I think of Helene Haff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, and Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, as well as novels by Jane Austen (Lady Susan), Samuel Richardson (Pamela) and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein).

A few years ago I tried to read a novel consisting of the e-mails of an online romance. While it was in vogue with contemporary epistolary trends, it quickly put an end to my epistolary novel reading days. That is, until the recently published The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. I waxed and waned about reading book but in the end I succumbed and I very pleased I did. The novel is a charming account of the life of Guernsey islanders during World War 2 when the Germans occupied the island. It also affirms the power reading to sustain people enduring harsh times.

“We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.”

“I came to love our book meetings—they helped to make the Occupation bearable. Some of their books sounded fine, but I stayed true to Seneca. I came to feel that he was talking to me—in his funny, biting way—but talking to me alone.”

The farmer, Dawsey Adams, writes a letter to Juliet Ashton whose name he finds on a volume of Charles Lamb’s essays. Since there are no bookstores on Guernsey he wants to know if she might suggest dealer to write to in London. She replies by sending him a copy of Lamb’s letters and asks about the strange name of the literary society mentioned in his letter. In turn, this gives rise to a cascade of letters between Dawsey and Juliet that are soon followed by other correspondents on the island who wish to chime in about the their experience during the German occupation and how the literary society got them through the war.

Juliet is enchanted by these simple people and thinks their story may just be the very topic she will write about for her next book. She goes to the island, gets caught up in the lives of these people, learns about the occupation and ends up adopting the orphan child of a heroic woman, Elizabeth McKenna, who was sent away to a concentration camp for befriending a German soldier. The islanders wonder if she will ever return; sadly she never will be able to. But Juliet stays on the island, falls in love with Dawsey, whom she marries, and together they raise Elizabeth’s child.

“Sea air, sunshine, green fields, wildflowers, the ever-changing sky and ocean, and most of all, the people seem to have seduced her from City life.”

Unfortunately Mary Ann Shaffer did not live to see her book become such a widely read bestseller; her niece, Anne Barrows, completed it. However, before Ms Shaffer died, she penned the following wish for the book’s Acknowledgement:

“I hope these characters and their story shed some light on the sufferings and strength of the people of the Channel Islands during the German Occupation. I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art—be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music—enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.”

Weekend Links

Book ATM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches

A Mind at Peace
http://www.conversationalreading.com/2009/04/new-book-a-mind-at-peace-by-ahmet-hamdi-tanpinar.html

Where It Happens
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/writersrooms

The Book Channel
http://www.thebookchannel.tv/

Green Decision-Making
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19Science-t.html?_r=2

A Little Moral Philosophy
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/24-6

A Cloud of Snippets

The growing popularity of reading electronic versions of books continues to be a topic of widespread discussion. The latest observer to weigh in on the matter is Steven Johnson in his article, How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write, in the Wall Street Journal.

Johnson describes a recent “aha” moment, courtesy of the Kindle, when he realized that the migration of printed books to the digital realm would change the very nature of reading profoundly. “It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social.”

Johnson is not a proponent of this development. Rather, he does “fear that one of the great joys of books reading—the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas—will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines an newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

What is most worrisome to me is his claim that we will no longer read in a sustained, concentrated fashion. “Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of liner, deep-focus reading.”

I shudder when I think that electronic devices are going to extinguish the process of “deep-focus reading.” I see that happening. I read about some of its effects on young individuals, on the educational system in general. And I become alarmed.

Johnson suggests that we will buy more books in this new world which is good news for publishers but bad news for readers who aren’t going to finish most of them. Readers he suggests will create snippets of books or a “booklog” where they will select various passages or sections of books to read rather than the entire volume. This is even more worrisome to me.

In a comment on this prediction in the New York Times blog about books, Jennifer Schuessler writes: “What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books will be written with search engines in mind…” so that you’ll be able to create “playlists of [your] favorite literary moments.”

John Updike anticipated all this a few years ago. In an article in the New York Times he bemoaned the transformation of the book into a collection of short snippets, calling it “a pretty grisly scenario.” He continued:

“The printed bound and paid-for book was—still is, for the moment [this was three years ago]—more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter …Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surely hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village.”

Later he concludes: “The book revolution, which from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparking cloud of snippets.”

What will the bookshelf of the future look like? What do short snippets of text look like? Do they have covers? Do they smell musty? Do they have words? Do you imagine wanting only to read the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms or the first sentence of Anna Karenina? Yes, a pretty grisly scenario? Grim, too.

Third Person, Present Tense

“His refuge from IBM is the cinema. In a film called L’Eclisse a woman wanders through the streets of a sunstruck, deserted city…. The woman is Monica Vitti. With her perfect legs and sensual lips and abstracted look, Monica Vitti haunts him; he falls in love with her. He has dreams in which he, of all men in the world is singled out to be her comfort and solace…”

The passage is from Noble Prize winner J. M. Coezee’s Youth, a portrait of a young man growing up in South Africa who eventually takes flight to London in the early 1960’s. I have enormous respect for Coetzee’s works, both his novels and essays on literature and the arts. Youth is among my favorite of his novels and like others he has published is written in the third person, present tense. It is a lively style that is fun to read and just as much to write.

John, the narrator of Youth, dreams of being a poet. To support his apprenticeship, he leaves his home in South Africa and takes a job at IBM’s office in London. He believes “The artist must taste all experience from the noblest to the most degraded. Just as it is the artist’s destiny to experience the most supreme creative joy, so he must be prepared to take upon himself all in life that is miserable, squalid, ignominious. It was in that name of experience that he underwent London--the dead days of IBM, the icy winter of 1962, one humiliating affair after another: states in the poet’s life, all of them, in testing of his soul.”

His relationships with women are uniform failures: “Surely there is a form of cohabitation in which man and woman eat together, sleep together, live together, yet remain immersed in their respective inward explorations. Is that why the affair with Jacqueline was doomed to fail: because, not being an artist herself, she could not appreciate the artist’s need for inner solitude?”

Jacqueline suggests he should consider psychotherapy. He thinks that would ruin forever his poetic sensitivity. “In fact, he would not dream of going into therapy. The goal of therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting…”

Aside from the tale of John’s struggle to carve out an artistic life in London and aside from all his defeats with women, work and writing, the most striking feature of Youth is its style. It may be the first book, surely the first presumed autobiography I’ve read written in the third person, present tense. It is a seductive style, one that gives the writer a certain distance from his subject matter, in this case, Coetzee.

In a review of Youth, Giles Foden writes: “What Coetzee mainly draws from Conrad, however, is a method. The technique of both novelists depends on that “nice ironic distance,” a discrepancy between the manifest and latent content of words on the page, a way of saying without asserting.”

This technique, at least as practiced by Coetzee in Youth also lends itself to a sly, ironic humor that at times is very funny.

“What are his true thoughts anyway? Some days he feels happy…Other days he feels differently. Is the truth the happiness, the unhappiness or the average of the two?”

“Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?”

“Having mistresses is part of an artist’s life…Art cannot be fed on deprivation alone…”

“Is that the moral of the story of himself and Jacqueline: that it is best for artists to have affairs only with artists?”

In the third person, present tense, I find it is much easier to write about myself than say, in the first person, past tense. I can admit features of my life that are less than commendable and do so without embarrassment. No one will ever know it is me anyway. Of course, that isn’t true but it seems that way as the words roll out onto the page. And in this respect writing in the third person, present tense can present a truer account of one’s life, a more complete one I think, than when you write about your life with some degree of restraint and concealment.

The Inner Life of Letters

It is widely claimed that an e-mail differs from a written letter in several notable respects. In The Inner Life of E-Mail (Salmagundi Winter-Spring 2007), Philip Stevick claims that a “highly stylized, ritualized performance” takes place when we write an e-mail but not in writing a letter.

“Although the recipient is obviously not present, a rather considerable range of performance strategies are available. Writers of letters would seem to be free to manipulate their texts, disarranging lines, marking emphases in various ways, drawing little pictures. But writers of conventional letters almost never do. It seems vulgar and indecorous to do so in a letter….But all writers of e-mail know that their texts are remarkably malleable and many people do indeed manipulate their texts unthinkable in a letter.”

Is this the case? In a letter to Nadejda von Meck, Tchaikovsky wrote:

“It seems to me that letters are not perfectly sincere—I am judging by myself. No matter to whom I am writing, I am always conscious of the effect of my letter, not only upon the person to whom it is addressed, but by any chance reader. Consequently, I embroider…I am not quite myself in my correspondence….When I read the correspondence of great men, published after there death, I am always disturbed by a vague sense of insincerity and falsehood.”

Isn’t this true for almost any form of communication? A friend wrote to me:

“…the same could be said of all evidence. Do you not think that the same thing could be said of many a diary keeper? …No biographical or historical evidence should be taken as fact in isolation. The historian or biographer can only say if it all adds up to a coherent picture. …is anyone ever really writing JUST for themselves when they write a diary? I don’t think so—even when they think they are. I think, even if just unconsciously a writer has to be aware of the potential “audience” as soon as the mental becomes physical.”

There is also reason to doubt the claim that e-mails are sent without much deliberation or, as Stevick suggests, in a rather “casual, improvisational” manner that is “unthinkable in a letter.” It certainly isn’t characteristic of messages composed offline, which I often do, especially when I want them to be written carefully. They are not necessarily written in a frenzy or carelessly edited.

I have known others who do the same. A friend writes: “I can assure you that I spent ample time crafting those expression [sent in an e-mail] that was equal if not greater than most of my paper letters.” In turn the recipient may take just as much time and care in replying, so that the entire exchange may take several days or weeks to complete. In this way, an online exchange can mirror the delicate temporal features of sending and receiving a traditional letter sent through the mail.

Thus, I find wanting the claim that an e-mail message differs significantly from a letter. In some cases, they are functionally indistinguishable. An e-mail message does not simply disappear after they have been sent if the writer takes pains to print a copy. Nor must they be replied to or composed instantly. There is nothing about an e-mail message per se that prevents it from being every bit as literate as a traditional letter often is.

Do we write e-mails when we should be writing traditional letters instead? I grappled with this problem a few years ago in writing to the parents of the woman my son became engaged to marry. I spent a good deal of time crafting my letter. Naturally, this was done on the computer. When I had finished, I puzzled over how to send it.

Should I print the letter, put it an envelope and post it in the mail? Or simply e-mail it to them? Yes, the posted letter still seemed the proper thing to do and I didn't want them to think I didn't know my manners. But I wanted to communicate with them right away. I knew the letter would take the better part of a week to reach them. What would be so wrong about e-mailing it to them? In either case, the message would be identical. "Get with it, Richard," I declared. I e-mailed the parents my letter. They replied in kind the very next day. We have been e-mailing each with pleasure ever since.

Losing Permanence

When was the last time you received a personal letter in the mail, one written or typed from a person you know? When was the last time you wrote such a letter? In the days before the Internet this is the way we communicated. I miss those days. I miss getting a letter in the mailbox once in a while.

And those who wish to study the past and learn more about it will miss the treasure chest of such letters if the practice of writing them succumbs to the lure of e-mails. What will happen when it becomes time to write the histories of our era? No more letters to be found in the archives. What will happen to the biographers of the future? No more letters between the poets and their writer friends. Who saves their e-mails these days?

I am writing this note because I wish to encourage a return to fine art of writing letters, to what Yeats called one of the excellent old ways. I am also writing this note while reading a delightful new book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, written in the manner of an epistolary novel, a literary form that could claim some degree of popularity a century or so ago.

In the introduction to The Oxford Book of Letters published in 1995, the editors, Frank and Anita Kermode, make the following claim. “Most of us write at least half a dozen letters of one sort or another every week, so that in the fifty or sixty years of a normal letter writing life many people must dispatch 18,000 letters.”

Who in the world could they be talking about? Since they are English, they are no doubt referring to people who live in Great Britain. But it is hard to imagine the British are much different in this respect than individuals who live in the United States. I suspect most of us are lucky if we write less than half a dozen genuine letters in a year.

Of course, now we write e-mails instead of letters, a mode of communication that many commentators claim is indistinguishable from a traditional letter. In my view, electronic epistles bear only a distant relationship with such letters. They are shorter and usually far less serious or reasoned than a carefully composed letter, especially when they are drafted as rapidly as e-mails usually are.

In a New Yorker essay a few years ago Noelle Oxenhandler maintained they also differ greatly in the temporal features and in the rhythms associated with they way are composed and then sent. She wrote:

“....I used to love the feeling of dropping a letter into the box. For several days, the letter-in-transit would hover around the edges of my consciousness. This delay was an intrinsic part of the pleasure of letter writing. It had a special tense all its own: when the “must do” turns into the “just done.” And, as the letter hovered, I also savored a kind of prescience in relation to my friend. During those two or three days, I knew, at least in some small measure, what would befall her: a letter in the box! As Iris Murdock has written, “The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.” But now the old magic has given way to the new. And though a fax or an E-mail may lie in wait for its recipient, it nonetheless gets from here to there in a matter of moments, and its waiting has none of the sealed mystery about it that attends a letter in its envelope.”

Others have pointed out that letters have a degree of permanence that is quite different than messages sent over the Internet. In a review of M. F. K. Fischer’s A Life in Letters, Betty Fussell comments: “Had she lived in another decade, many of her letters might have been lost forever, flashed on screen to be read and discarded in a matter of minutes. A Life in Letters reminds one of what is lost in the magic of electronic mail: permanence.”

The Truly Correct Proof

The nature of friendship and love for that matter is at times elusive. One day we are friends and the next enemies or all but forgotten. This was certainly true of the former mathematics professor in Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor. The Professor in this novel, like all the other characters, is never given a name. Nor can he remember anything new for more than 80 minutes.

The Professor lost the ability to recall anything beyond that period following an automobile accident in 1975. A housekeeper cooks and cleans for him in the rundown cottage where he lives. Each time the housekeeper arrives she has to explain who she is as the Professor has completely forgotten about her overnight. And each time she does this, the Professor asks her what her shoe size is or the date of her birth or something strange like that, whereupon he always finds something rather remarkable about the number she comes up with.

In time, the Professor learns that the housekeeper’s ten-year old son waits for her mother at school until the workday is over. When he learns this, he insists that the boy come with her to work. He names the boy Root because of his flat head and informs him that the mathematical sign for square root looks like the top of his head.

The friendship that develops between the boy and the Professor is a tender, deeply felt one but is never fully explained. Perhaps the Professor had a son or lost one or always wanted one. We are never told. Regardless, the Professor routinely asks Root questions when he arrives and that are, in turn followed by others from the boy. The Professor

“…seemed convinced that children’s questions were much more important than those of an adult. He preferred smart questions to smart answers.”

And if the Professor or the young boy didn’t know the answer, it was important to admit it.

“For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn’t have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”

The Housekeeper and the Professor has a strange, serene quality about it. Nothing much happens other than a good deal of discussion of mathematics, including the mathematics of baseball.

Like the Professor, Charlie Mallory in John Cheever’s short story, The Geometry of Love, also looked to mathematics to understand his world.

“He might not, had he possessed any philosophy or religion, have needed geometry, but the religious observances in his neighborhood seemed to him boring and threadbare, and he had no disposition for philosophy. Geometry served him beautifully for the metaphysics of pain.”

“The afternoon’s geometry had proved to him that his happiness….suffered from some capricious, unfathomable, and submarine course of emotion…that had no regularity and no discernable cause.”

“Oh, Euclid, be with me now.”

The Professor and the Housekeeper has been extremely popular in Japan, selling more than 2.5 million copies. Even a book Oprah recommends would never find that many readers in this country. The story is also similar to several actual cases reported by memory researchers in which an individual is not able to remember anything new after a fixed period of time.

The tale also conveys much of the serenity and simplicity that we have come to associate with traditional Asian culture. I was drawn to this feature of the novel and the reason I found it so appealing. Ogawa beautifully conveys the peace that the Professor finds in math and then to Root and his mother as they eventually discover the truth of a math puzzle the Professor has set before them.

“The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it’s not something you can put into words—explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why the stars are beautiful.”

Weekend Links

Ten Books on Brothers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/14/brothers-fiction-top-10

Poems on Paintings
http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/assignments/paintings&poems/titlepage.html

Video Auditions
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/arts/music/17symphony.html?th&emc=th

Extraordinary Memoir
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102691854&sc=nl&cc=bn-20090416

If You Missed This, Now’s Your Chance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

The Future of the Book
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2009/04/in_our_digital_age_what_does_t_1.html

The Power of the Pen

In the early morning light on this island in the tropics, I drink my coffee outside on the lanai, as it is called here. The trade winds had moved on and the canal along the building where I live is calm. Dover Beach drifts into my mind.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Two stanzas later it concludes:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

And then I am reminded of a section in Ian McEwan’s Saturday where Dover Beach came to the rescue, indeed, saved the lives of Henry Perowne and his family. Perowne, a well-established London neurosurgeon, returns home after a harrowing Saturday in 2003 as America is about to launch its second war in Iraq. On the way to his early morning squash match, he is involved in a minor automobile collision with a criminal that Perowne immediately recognizes has an irreversible brain disease.

Later that day, the criminal returns to Perowne’s elegant home to take revenge on him and those who have gathered to welcome the return of his daughter, Daisy. Baxter, the criminal, is holding a knife to Perowne’s wife, Rosalind, and asks Daisy, whom he has told to strip, to read from her newly published book of poems. She is terrified, doesn’t know if she can begin or what to read, and looks to her poet grandfather, Grammaticus, for a hint. He senses her dilemma and tells her to read one that she used to recite for him. Daisy catches the hint at once and begins reciting Dover Beach.

Baxter is transfixed by the beauty of the poem. “You wrote that. You wrote that,” he says in amazement. He asks her to read it again. When she is done reciting, Baxter’s mood changes suddenly. He is thoroughly disarmed, overcome, as McEwan writes, by “a yearning he could barely begin to define.” He removes the knife from Rosalind’s neck, puts it back in his pocket, and tells his sidekick he has changed his mind; the tension is broken, the threat is over, and the eventual overpowering of Baxter can begin.

Here, in the extreme is the power of literature. In fact, it saved the life of Perowne and his family. The experience is not only the stuff of fiction. While not exactly a work of literature, reading from a book called The Purpose-Driven Life played a central role in saving the life of Ashley Smith, who was a year or so ago held hostage for hours in her suburban apartment near Atlanta by Brian Nicholas, on the run after killing two people during his escape from a courthouse trial for an earlier murder.

Smith claims that reading and speaking with Nicholas about the book gave her a chance to simply talk with him and begin the process of gaining his trust so that he would allow her to leave the apartment to see her daughter. Once out of the apartment, she called 911; Nicholas was captured moments later. Who knows what might have happened had she not been able to read sections of the book to Nicholas?