Novels of Ideas

What is a novel of ideas? In the March 6th Wall Street Journal Rebecca Goldstein writes briefly about five examples that she admires—Herzog, Middlemarch, The Holy Sinner, The Black Prince and Einstein’s Dreams. How are these novels distinguished from those that are not?

In writing about Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince she says, “Like all the novels of ideas I admire, this one hides its high purpose under well-developed characters and an organic plot.” She notes that Mann’s The Holy Sinner “buries its seriousness beneath the seductions of story telling.” Hides its high purpose? Buries its seriousness? I think she can be more explicit than that, although in fairness I am sure that was not her purpose in compiling this list.

She says Herzog blends “high-mindedness and low farce” and that George Eliot’s Middlemarch is “imprinted with many of Spinoza’s ideas. Finally she notes that Einstein’s Dreams concerns the nature of time “The play of ideas is heady as Alan Lightman wrests irony, pathos and poetry out of the abstractions of physics…”

On my understanding, a novel of ideas is quite simply a work of fiction that treats the issues normally considered by philosophers, e.g. moral, existential, metaphysical, etc. It is a novel of where issues are raised and questions asked. You reflect on the problems it poses, stop in mid-sentence or at the end of a paragraph to ponder something the author has written or you make a note in the margin or discuss the book’s concerns with another individual. And you do all these things and more with a really notable novel of ideas.

Goldstein’s characterization of Lightman’s novel comes closest to this conception. Yet she never frames her discussion of this novel or any of the four others in terms of how the reader might respond to the ideas or questions in the various ways I’ve indicated. Time. What is time? The abstractions of physics. What are they and is there any hope that I can understand them? Where can I learn more out about them?

Ideas and problems abound in Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon and it is why I liked the novel so much. There is very little narrative in this novel and but there are a great many questions, most of them unanswered. In my view this is a novel of ideas at its best and is the heart of the reading experience for me.

In an interview in the latest Paris Review (#192) Ray Bradbury expresses a rather different and to me unusual view. “Science fiction is the fiction of ideas... Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”

Bradbury wonders why this type of novel is so neglected and he gives an example his Fahrenheit 451, a novel I never read but a story I remember vividly in its film version. In talking about the novel he says:

“Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires…and you start him on the adventure of discovery…. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.”

Bradbury’s interview opened my eyes to broader conception of the novel of ideas, one that also includes utopian and dystopian fiction, and to a view of science fiction that I’ve not taken seriously before. In their own way they are just as much novels of ideas as those Goldstein mentions or, indeed, that she writes.

Why Do We Read?

Why do we read? In her recent book, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Maureen Corrigan responds that we read“…to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things and sometimes even a few good sentences…can crystallize value feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or sometimes, profound epiphanies.”

Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why concurs. “Ultimately we read—as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree—in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.” Yes, we don’t have an easy time knowing ourselves. Sometimes a good book makes our task a little easier, to say nothing of the multiple pleasures it provides.

We read ourselves into literature without concern, as we are in science, for whether or not it is true for others, and if so, for how many and to what degree. Instead, the truth of any literary expression is immediately true for the reader because it corresponds to his or her experience or provides a language for it in a way that had not been available before.

In a letter to Melvin Tumin published in this week’s New Yorker, Saul Bellow expressed the relationship between literature and science this way, “The work of an artist…sets up the hypotheses and tests them in various ways, and it gives answers but these are not definite. However, they need not be definitive; they sing about the human situation.”

Yes, we might say, that is true for me, true to my own experience. This is my story. I have no idea if it is anyone else’s story. But it is the way the way I felt. Or I had not realized its truth until I saw it on the page. That is what a good book is all about, what I seek in a good book anyway and because they are not hard to find, why I keep reading.

Of course, there are more personal reasons why we read, reasons that are not always acknowledged and that change over time, especially for those who have read from their youth. A friend has written to me:

“There is no one answer as to why I read. I first read from loneliness. I read from desperation and to fill my empty time. I had no friends, no playmates. Books were like insulation—filling the empty spaces, protecting me from the chill of loneliness.”

Again Harold Bloom has written: “Imaginative literature is otherness and as such alleviates loneliness.” Does reading literature really have this effect? I am dubious. Enjoying the company of my literary friends is not the same as lessening my isolation. Indeed, sometimes great literature makes me feel all the more isolated when I realize that I will never be able to create such a story or think so brilliantly as the author of the book.

A character can startle and provoke me by something he says and I can derive some consolation from our common views. Yet knowing I am not alone in my belief is one thing, loneliness is something else and its reduction bears no necessary relationship to the recognition of shared belief.

My friend continues, “As I got older, I needed an escape, not only from loneliness, but from my limited surroundings. I read to see other places, to meet other people, to become a larger person. Life didn’t seem to be helping me with this goal, so I turned to books. I felt wise, worldly-wise. I knew the thief, the adulterer, the junky. I’ve always felt an urgent need to experience everything. Yet I am timid at reaching for actual experience. Call it what you will—fearful, cowardly, nervous--I prefer to take much of life at second hand. This has led to some odd contrasts in my life—such as the wide knowledge I had of sex before I had experienced so much as a kiss.”

She concludes, “Now, why do I read? I read for all of these reasons and more. I read to find my own unexpressed thoughts. I read to find answers. I read to find questions. A life without answers is an anxious one. A life without questions is a deadly boring one…”

How eloquent. How wonderful to know that there are others who read for the questions not caring so much if they are answered but simply for the pleasure of thinking about them for a while. And how rare to hear someone speak so honestly about why they read.

Why people read is a mystery and why people read what they read is even more mysterious. In the final analysis it is a highly personal thing and I think it is good to ask yourself these questions every once in a while.

A Novel of Ideas

More than one critic has called Frederic Tuten’s The Green Hour a novel of ideas. Yet the reviewers then proceed to describe the story and leave out the ideas. I want to talk about the ideas. Are they to be found in the story itself?

In college Dominique falls in love with the free spirit, political radical Rex. It is a mutual life-time devotion. While Rex wanders the earth, Dominique buckles down and becomes a highly regarded art history professor, spending much of her time in Paris where every once in a while she bumps into Rex and together they resume their romance. Then she meets Eric who courts her with his millions. She is torn between the chaotic, impoverished Rex and the stable, wealthy Eric.

Meanwhile she overcomes a bout of cancer, travels back and forth between Europe and America, and eventually tries to find a life with Eric at the mansion he built for her on Long Island. (“We’ve been fine,” he said, “but I’ve never been in your heart.”) As much as I enjoyed the story, in fact, I enjoyed it immensely as it is a beautifully written romantic fairy tale, it is clear that Dominique’s conflict is without a solution

Are we to understand that this is the central idea Tuten wishes to impart? That maturity requires abandoning idealism and accepting the fact that a life of reflection does not come for free? “Her lofty ideas had taken her where she could live among a painting’s pillars and columns, in a temple where miracles happened, but they could not pay the mortgage on the house or caulk a sinking boat.”

Dominique is writing a book on the French painter Nicolas Poussin that has taken her forever to complete and on more than one occasion has given her an excuse to return to Paris. Throughout the volume Tuten scatters ideas about Goya and Poussin’s paintings (passionate Goya—Rex(?) and calm Poussin—Eric(?).

“…she had moved her area of interest from Spanish painting and Goya in particular to Poussin, for her as an artist of greater formal and intellectual complexity, greater mystery, though lacking in warmth and perhaps wisdom.”

“She was in fact not sure of what Poussin had intended by that light, but in her writing she had matched it to what she considered The Arcadian Shepherds’ theme: the omnipresence of Death in the center of life.”

Most of the ideas I record while reading a book are scattered randomly throughout the text. In the case of The Green Hour, a good many were different than those I recorded when I read it a few years ago. However, the book meant as much to me on second reading as it did the first.

Here are a couple of ideas I made note of the first time around: “The idea was the act. Actions were ideas enacted but, for her, the idea was its fullness and existed sufficiently without need of the act to complete it. As when love, when first born, takes hold and gives body to all activity rushing from it, the conception lasting longer than its temporal manifestations, the conception enduring while the body falls away in repetition, in boredom, in aging, the draining away of everything corporeal.”

“Do you think poetry changes anything, anyone? Auden says no. I know it does. But he’s just protecting the sanctity of his craft, lest he admit that poetry may change us for the worse as well as for the better.”

And at second reading: “How hard, she would say in that future moment of wisdom for the young to understand how time and experience flatten out all pain, how even one’s suffering finds—if not purpose—some balance and redress in experience yet to be had.”

“There was always an imbalance in love—the one who loved and the one who was loved. Most of her life she had denied it, desiring above all a total equality in love. But nothing in her real experience proved her theory—her wish—correct.”

The Green Hour is assuredly a novel of ideas—ideas concerning art, love, and what it takes to live a scholarly life. While I have read other novels far more dense with ideas and wisdom, there is much to admire in this novel and much to recommend to those who have yet to read it.

And for those interested in the tradition and practice of keeping a commonplace book, I pass along once again one more treasure from The Green Hour:

“For some time since her operation, and without publication its goal, she had been jotting down without order or pattern, anecdotes gleaned from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting down those matters or events which moved her. One day these notes and fragments of thought might form a coherent mosaic and reveal to her her own spiritual autobiography as well as biography of her time.”

What Great Art Does

A few weeks ago Kevin Hartnett on The Millions asked a question that looms large in my thinking. Quite simply he wonders “…just what is it that great art does.” He prefaces the question by acknowledging that it is one thing to judge the formal properties of a work of literature and quite another to assess its effects.

The question is not unlike the one Sven Birkerts posed in his American Scholar essay on Reading in the Digital Age. For Birkerts the principle criterion of a literary work’s impact is what we recall from reading it. And the best Birkerts can say is that we retain is “a distinct tonal memory…” In contrast, Hartnett confronts the question far more concretely.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace? The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

In his essay Hartnett proceeds to amplify on each of these categories in discussing the various ways Tolstoy’s War and Peace affected him. In terms of the social consequences of reading the book, he starts talking to others who have read it. He learns that his father-in-law read the book in two feverish weeks, that his friend read it while he was serving as a Peace Corp volunteer, and he describes episodes of book to his friends. He claims he almost never tells anyone about the stories from the books he reads yet the vividness and range of experiences described by Tolstoy almost compelled him to describe them to others.

Then there are the intellectual effects of reading this great novel. Hartnett writes, “I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.” What better measure of the effects of fiction than a “lens” for making sense of the increasing complexity of ordinary life? Think of how a lifetime of reading great books can multiply and strengthen the ways we view the world. Those who doubt the impact of literary fiction on one’s life have to confront this widely voiced observation of dedicated readers.

In the end, Harnett admits he doesn’t read novels so he can talk about them with others or for their ideas, but rather for the “pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.” You are reading a novel and you come across a chapter or a page that moves you deeply, that gives you pause, and prompts you to read it again. The memory lingers and no doubt germinates over time and takes root like any other experience that exerts a powerful effect on your life.

I admired Harnett’s attempt to pinpoint the various ways literature can affect us. Rather that making vague claims about whether it does or doesn’t, he has given us three important markers to measure the consequences of reading. This is the issue that first drew me to literature and it continues to preoccupy me. If I didn’t think reading novels influenced my life and didn’t offer me more than a distraction for a while, I would give up worrying about its effects and might even stop reading altogether.

Re-Reading a Forgotten Book

The other day I chanced upon a volume on my bookshelf that I recall reading a few years ago. It was at the end of the row and so it was more noticeable than the other books on the shelf. It was The Green Hour by Frederic Tuten.

I took it from the shelf, looked at the inside back page, and saw that I had listed several page numbers where the passages I had marked were located. I checked my Commonplace Book to see if I had copied them and yes, they were there and that I had read the book in 2002--a mere eight years ago.

If you had asked me what was the book about, I could not have told you. I would not have been able to tell you the story, the names of the characters, what happened to them or really much of anything about the book. All I remember was that I had liked it and that I thought it was a quite special love story. So I took the book from the shelf and began reading it a few days later.

Nothing about it seemed familiar. Not Paris, Dominique, Rex, Professor Morin, Kenji—nothing. It was if I had just picked it up and started to read de novo. I am still reading it and once again enjoying it immensely. How could I have forgotten it, forgotten virtually all of it except that I liked it enough not to discard it along with so many others in deciding what books to save each time we packed up to move yet again.

A friend writes: Don't you love it when a book you have previous read and enjoyed seems totally new when you read it again? The book is the same but we are different which makes for a delightful and sometimes unsettling reading experience.

What is it that we remember in the books we have read? And if, in fact, we remember very little, how then do the books we’ve read influence us? Could it be that they scarcely affect us at all?

In his recent essay (Reading in a Digital Age) in the American Scholar, Sven Birkerts poses the same questions:

What—I ask again—what has been the point of my reading? One way for me to try to answer is to ask what I do retain. Honest answer? A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche. Certainly I believe I have gained something important, though to hold that conviction I have to argue that memory access cannot be the sole criterion of impact: that there are other ways that we might possess information, impressions, and even understanding. For I will insist that my reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it.

Here Birkerts argues that what we usually don’t recall anything specific in the books we’ve read. Rather we remember an impression, a “feeling” or a “sensation” and occasionally an idea or a character.

And so whatever influence books have upon us has to be very general, a non-specific effect that we sense but cannot identify with any precision. Learning without awareness. We no doubt learn a great deal but that derives from the cumulative impact of years of reading, book after book, one year after another.

Make a list of the books you’ve read. You might be startled. Now tell me what you recall from each one.

We learn styles, values, points of view, a certain sensitivity about matters of the heart and mind. We hear people voice views that are similar to our own and since we admire or respect them, our views are strengthened. We develop tastes and a way of being, and while we clearly don’t imitate the characters on the page or espouse the same ideas, we do learn to discriminate between ideas we do and don’t believe, between what is true and what isn’t. And what we learn continues to evolve over the course of our reading days so that what was true 40 years ago may very well not be today.

Time Out

Marks in the Margin will be taking an indefinite break in order to devote myself to other projects waiting in the wings. I am most grateful to everyone who has read and commented on the blog during the past two years.

During that time I have come to think of blogging as much like a classroom. In the beginning there were only a few students but gradually the class grew larger and became more interesting, especially to me.

Like any new class, it became a learning experience for the teacher who learned far more about literature than he ever had before. And it was fun, as well as a bit of a test for me, an unschooled student of literature, to try to write a page or so each day about a book or article I had read or about an idea that for one reason or another was important to me.

I also came to know a few of my readers who, I hope, will continue to be my friends during the forthcoming hiatus. And I found other literary bloggers who I now regard as friends who gather together in this strange new place to talk about the books they’ve read and what the experience meant to them.

Throughout much of last year I was ensconced in Honolulu, where I had come for what I had hoped would be the rest of my life. At least, that was the plan, a plan soon discarded as the year went by. And I have wondered to what extent simply living in the benign climate of the tropics, where I felt so utterly relaxed, contributed to the outpouring of words that year.

I had worried that I would succumb to surf boarding and sun bathing. But like most of the worries I have, nothing came of it. Does it matter where a writer lives or what the weather is like there? The life that Dostoyevsky led in Russia gave him a subject matter that ultimately led to his masterpieces. But it did not guarantee he would write them.

Would he have written about something else if he had fled wintery Moscow for the tropics? While I not even close to qualifying for Dostoyevsky’s league or have the slightest idea how to write novels, at least I did not altogether loose my stuff among the waving palms and flowering bougainvillea of Oahu. Indeed, as Jonah Lehrer comments in his recent blog, Mood and Cognition, "sometimes being relaxed “promotes a more freewheeling kind of information processing which leads to more creative insights.”

Just the other day a Facebook Friend sent me a request to join the fray at Sticky Books. The rules of the game go like this: List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. And then I was supposed to tag 15 Friends who I thought might like to know my favorites. Tagging remains a mystery to me, but I very quickly came up with the following list arranged in no particular order.

Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran
Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening,
David Denby Great Books
Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
Michael Cunningham The Hours
Elliot Perlman Seven Types of Ambiguity
Michael Ondaatje The English Patient
J. M. Coetzee Youth
Lawrence Durrell The Alexandrian Quartet
Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin American Prometheus
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon
Philip Roth Exit Ghost
Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
Ian McEwan Saturday
John Williams Stoner

I believe I have blogged about most of these books and in doing so I came to appreciate the extent to which reading and writing are inseparable. They always will be for me, but for now I am going to turn that undertaking in a slightly different direction.

The Science of Melancholy

Louis Menand is a professor of English at Harvard and “Critic at Large” for the New Yorker. He is also knowledgeable across a wide range of disciplines including psychology and psychiatry. In the March 1st of the New Yorker, he writes about current research on depression, therapy, and antidepressants. His discussion centers around six topics:

Depression
Menand claims there is scarcely any agreement on the causes or most effective treatments for depression. Indeed, it may never be known what the source(s) of depression are, largely because it is almost impossible to distinguish a genuine depressive pathology (if there is one) from a sadness or long-lasting melancholy from naturally occurring events.

Diagnosis
There is also considerable disagreement about the definition of depression and a very low agreement among trained psychiatrists in diagnosing a mental patient who appears to be suffering from depression.

Therapy
Psychotherapy for depression has highly variable results with outcomes that are often not significantly different than no-treatment or placebo conditions. There is also little evidence that “…supplementing antidepressant medication with talk therapy improves outcomes.” Further, patients often get better over the course of time without clinical interventions

Antidepressants
In spite of the advice--“Take the meds.”--of a number of well known individuals (William Styron in Darkness Visible, Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon, etc), there is also little evidence that antidepressants lead to enduring recovery or that they are superior to placebos

Drug Companies
While the understanding of depression languishes in uncertainty, the drug companies are thriving. “Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A, and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant.”

Coping
There is a strain of pharmacological and psychotherapeutic Calvinism in this country that underscores the importance of learning how to cope with adversity. “We think that sucking it up and mastering our fears is a sign of character.” Or that we don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t experience sorrow or distress. These are questions beyond the scope of research and, for Menand, will forever remain matters for philosophy and literature to grapple with.

If the confusion and disarray among those who study and treat depression wasn’t already clear to you, it surely will be after reading Menand’s review. I believe it gives an accurate account of the current state of depression research and analysis. There is scarcely any certainty about what to do if you become depressed and if you are in some way professionally qualified, how to go about treating it.

As one who has spent much of my life observing and studying depression, as well as spending many long hours thinking about the depressed people I have known and loved, I wonder if we will ever be able to understand and effectively overcome what has become an increasingly common problem for all too many individuals

Medicine and Literature

John Updike once wrote, “Life is a very strange thing, in a way, compared to life in a novel. People in novels rather rarely eat; their health is not often of concern to them; earning money isn’t nearly as important to them as it is to those of us in the real world.”

Virginia Woolf also expresses this view in her well-known essay “Short of Breath” that has been reprinted as a slim volume On Being Ill. It begins with a memorable paragraph.

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous, the spiritual change that is brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, …when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed, that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

Even though she spent most of her life battling depression and debilitating physical symptoms, she never wrote about them. She wonders why illness has not been as popular a subject for literature as love. Why has the “daily drama of the body” not been recognized by writers?

She admits it might simply be due to the poverty of language. “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Her essay was written in 1926; in the eighty-four years since then, much has changed.

Late last year the first Wellcome Trust book prize was awarded for “outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine.” The winning book was Keeper, Andrea Gillies memoir of caring for a relative with Alzheimer’s that apparently had not been publically reviewed. In writing about this award Chris Powers discusses other works of literature that treat medical themes.

He discusses Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. He mentions writers who were trained as doctors—Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Somerset Maugham, Walker Percy, a topic about which I have previously blogged.

I think of books I’ve read about individuals with Alzheimer’s, a topic that is being written about with increasing frequency these days. There is Still Alice by Lisa Genova a novel that describes the experience from the point of view of an individual diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Much earlier there was Elegy for Iris, John Bayley’s moving account his wife, Iris Murdock’s, descent into Alzheimer’s.

…Iris’s inability to summon the words she seemed to want. Her delivery had always been slow and thoughtful and a little hesitant, and at first I was not perturbed, sure that she would recover in a few minutes, when she got the feel of the gather. It was hard to say how conscious she was of her own difficulty, but the effect soon became paralyzing, for the listener as well as for her.

Alzheimer’s is, in fact, like an insidious fog, barely noticeable until everything around has disappeared. After that, it is no longer possible to believe that a world outside fog exists. First, we saw our own friendly, harassed GP, who asked Iris who the prime minister was. She had no idea but said to him with a smile that it surely didn’t matter.

More and more fiction and non-fiction books are being written about old age and the infirmities of growing old. I think of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a memoir that documents the author’s struggle to cope with the effects of a massive stroke that left him totally paralyzed with the exception of his left eye-lid that allowed him to communicate. I think David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death about his mother, Susan Sontag that portrays her persistent, but always painful, struggles to overcome three bouts of cancer. And then there are two recent works of Philip Roth, Everyman and Exist Ghost that depict in agonizing detail the “massacre” that is old age.

It is clearly no longer correct to say, as Virginia Woolf and John Updike did, that literature has ignored illness and matters of health. To the contrary, it now appears we are being inundated with more and more volumes of literary works that treat these issues in considerable detail. I sense we have only seen the beginning.

Econ 101

The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is growing increasingly pessimistic about the chances for recovery from the current recession. In her March 1st New Yorker profile Larissa MacFarquhar states that Krugman “pulled out of the stock market ten years ago never went back.”

Krugman believes that stocks at their current price earnings ratios are currently overpriced. “They were a good deal when the average price earnings ratio …was thirteen or fourteen, but now, except at the very bottoms of recent swings, its been over twenty.”

The stock market is a fairly reliable, although imperfect, predictor of future economic conditions. So any investor might want to take his views seriously. The same holds for anyone planning a major expenditure based on their current financial condition or that of the economy.

Should I buy a house now? Will interests rates continue to be so low? Are we about to see another bust in the housing market? Krugman also believes that being a highly developed industrial country is no guarantee against the forces that give rise to major economic downturns. “Finland and Sweden…suffered slumps as long as Indonesia’s.” So did Japan the long recession of the 90s.

Yet he is the first to admit he doesn’t always get it right. “The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”

As Krugman has noted over and over again in his column in the New York Times, the Obama administration bailout plan does not go far enough. He believes much more needs to be injected into the economy to produce a sustained, stable return to better economic times and avoid a much more serious recession with the potential to develop into major depression-like crisis. (Reflecting an increasingly heard concern, David Leonhardt, in yesterday’s Times, asks, “Could the economy be at risk of a double-dip?)

Krugman is a busy man. He writes for the Times, teaches at Princeton, has conducted several landmark research studies, and written a good many books, and in collaboration with his wife, Robin Wells, also an economist, an introductory economic textbook.

Krugman also faults Obama for not being as forceful in moving forward on his agenda, particularly on health care. (Perhaps he would think otherwise in light of Obama’s latest proposals.) He believes given the current political makeup of Congress, it is hopeless to expect there will ever be any consensus on the difficult issues that the nation confronts today. Anyone who expects he can “…achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world.”

It has been many years since he has been able to do the kind of serious research that led to his Nobel Prize. Yet he worries that “I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”

The increase in financial inequality in the US is one of the problems Krugman would like to look more deeply into now. “…he believes that the increase in inequality in the U.S. since the sixties is a product less of economic factors—the development of technology, say, leading to the greater importance of skills and education—than of political decisions about taxation and unions.”

He is also interested in problems associated with economic geography, why for instance “…were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley.” Chance, history, geography, or something else?

MacFarquhar concludes her profile with a sentence that I think would characterize most, if not all scholars who devote themselves to a life of research and study. “If there is a sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better and it would be really nice if we were able to.”

A Cento

A cento is a form of writing that is created from the works of other writers. It can be a poem, series of statements, an interview and, in principle, a book-length volume. The word cento is based on the Latin word for patches, as in a patchwork quilt or collage.

In its purest form it consists entirely of lines from other works of literature. I first encountered the term in doing research on commonplace books that are also a remix of quotations from other books, periodicals, poems, speeches, etc. It is said that early examples of centos can be found in the works of Homer and Virgil and other writings from antiquity.

The staff of the American Academy of American Poets has composed the following cento composed of lines written by Charles Wright, Marie Ponsot, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Samuel Beckett:

"In the Kingdom of the Past, the Brown-Eyed Man is King
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree
Day after day, I become of less use to myself,
The hours after you are gone are so leaden."

Does that make any sense? I suppose about as much as many contemporary works of poetry. Patrick Kurp once wrote a cento on his blog Anecdotal Evidence, “A Noble Part of the Joy of Life,” in the form of a Q and A about the relationship between life and literature. I found it quite amusing.

In its less pure forms the cento has recently become an extremely controversial subject. The issue concerns the extent to which it is legitimate for a writer to use the work of other writers in their own work. It ranges on the one hand from outright plagiarism, to occasional appropriation from other sources, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, to a subtle blending of quotations into a larger body of writing.

Consider the following examples: David Shields has written a novel, Reality Hunger, that presents a collage of ideas and quotations deliberately drawn from other writers that according to one reviewer “casts new light on ideas of ownership, appropriation, and reality.”

Helene Hegermann, a teenage German novelist, is embroiled in a controversy over her novel about the Berlin club scene that she admits incorporates a fair amount of writing from another novelist’s work. She says it was her plan all along to incorporate passages from other books in her own work. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” she said.

Andre Aciman acknowledges he has done a little bit of remixing in his recent novel, Eight White Nights. In a letter responding to a brief review in The New Yorker, Aciman admits that, “…quotations frequently crop up in my novel whenever the narrator tries to grasp what is happening to him. Because this is more or less standard procedure in my novel, I wouldn’t want knowledgeable readers of your magazine to be under any misguided impressions about my work when they pick up snatches s from William Wordsworth, Paul Verlaine, Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, or Stevie Smith.”

However, it is unclear from Aciman’s letter if these passages are acknowledged or not, whereas in Shield’s novel, the quotations from other works are apparently cited in a detailed Appendix.

Isn’t this remixing much like the commonplace books of antiquity where individuals collected the notable writings of others into a manuscript that they could use in their own speeches, writings, and instruction? Indeed, isn’t this collage-like practice also necessary for investigators in any discipline that builds upon the work of previous writers and researchers and draws upon it in guiding their own inquires, as well as supporting its findings? Quoting Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Try writing a cento sometime. It is a bit like playing Scrabble, only instead of letters, a sentence or series of short passages from other authors are combined to create a poem or paragraph(s) of your own. It isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do and I am confident it isn’t going to replace Scrabble as the board game of choice for the linguistically nimble.

On Depression

Could depression be an adaptive response to painful life stressors? You might wonder how anyone might think anything as unpleasant could be the least bit adaptive. However, if you think the question makes little sense, consider the fact that 1 in 18 or 14.4 million people in USA are estimated to become seriously depressed during their life.

What possible function could such distress or even mild suffering have? This is the question Jonah Lehrer considers in his article “Depression’s Upside” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. The question emerges within an evolutionary psychology framework that tries to account for human thought and action in terms of natural selection processes.

Darwin himself suffered from periodic bouts of depression that he came to believe allowed him to focus on his work. Lehrer quotes Darwin: “Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me.” And later sadness “…leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” “The darkness was a kind of light.”

The light it might shed has been taken up by a psychiatrist, Paul Andrews and an evolutionary psychologist, J. Thomson in their controversial paper “The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems.” According to Lehrer they began by focusing on rumination, one of the dominant thought processes of a depressed person. They wondered what purpose rumination might serve.

Andrews and Thomson claim there are real benefits to be derived from ruminative thinking even though it occurs while a person is suffering. They are the insights gained in thinking analytically about their depression. They call their view the “Analytic Rumination Hypothesis.

“The analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis proposes that depression is an adaptation that evolved as a response to complex problems and whose function is to minimize disruption of rumination and sustain analysis of complex problems.”

Andrews and Thomson respond to the many critics of their view by admitting depression cannot be so easily encapsulated into a single formulation, that it is a highly variable phenomena that takes many forms, often without any discernable benefits and that it has numerous alternative theoretical accounts. “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful.”

I am sympathetic to Thomson’s view of the critical test for the AR Hypothesis, namely, “Do these ideas help me in my practice?” To find out he began cutting back on anti-depressive medications in the belief that they were actually making it harder for individuals to resolve their dilemmas. He relates the response of one patient who, when asked if her anti-depressants were working, said, “Yes their working great. I feel much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.”

Lehrer proceeds to discuss the mounting evidence that anti-depressants do not lead to lasting improvement and that the relapse rates for those on them is as high as 76 percent, whereas for those receiving the increasingly popular cognitive therapy it is 36 percent. In addition, he discusses recent research on the effects of negative moods (a sad video, gray/rainy days, negative performance feedback, etc.) that often lead to better decision-making and improved writing.

In one study he showed that unhappy writers write better than happy ones. This is consistent with the large body of research assembled by Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched with Fire that creative achievement in the arts is often associated with depression or manic-depressive illness.

The relationship between depression and improved writing skills seems like a paradoxical quirk of evolution. In an experiment he conducted on abstract-reasoning Andrews found that, “Depressed affect made people think better.” At least it did for some depressed individuals. A seriously ill depressed psychotic is clearly not going to think better or show any benefit from ruminating about their misery.

Lehrer concludes, “The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness….even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.”

Telling someone then to embrace the tonic of their despair is easy. Getting them to do that is another matter. Perhaps one way writers try to escape from their despair is by writing about it. Since that rarely works for very long, is it any wonder our bookshelves are filled with so many unhappy novels and memoirs.

William Styron

Soon after it began publishing, the Paris Review interviewed William Styron who was then living in Paris. The interview was conducted in early autumn on a sunny afternoon at a cafe on the boulevard du Montparnasse—parfait. The interviewer begins by asking Styron if he enjoys writing.

“I certainly don’t. I get a fine, warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.” This is spoken by the author of Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness that describes Styron’s battle to overcome depression.

Styron’s account of his struggle to write should give some consolation to all those aspiring writers who are about to abandon ship. But like Roth, who said every writer needs his “poisons,” Styron also thought of writing as somewhat therapeutic for “people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.”

While admitting his work has been influenced by the notables—Joyce, Flaubert, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, “the strongest influences are out of the past—the Bible, Marlow, Blake, Shakespeare.” Again, this leaves unanswered the question of how the work of one writer can influence another. No doubt, it is a matter of considerable subtlety and may be nothing very specific, but rather a vague, indefinite form of learning without awareness.

Styron is then asked about his view of the critics, of which he had many. He replies, “From the writers point of view, critics should be ignored, although it’s hard not to do what they suggest.” He then notes how hard it is to have critics who are also your friends. He reads their reviews…but they don’t really help him much, at least in ways that he can pinpoint.

“Look there’s only one person a writer should listen to, pay attention to. It’s not any dam critic. It’s the reader….The writer must criticize his own work as a reader. Every day I pick up the story or whatever it is I’ve been working on and read it through. If I enjoy it as a reader then I know I’m getting along all right.”

What do I expect to learn or find in reading a critics review of a book? It is really one and only one thing—I want to find out if I might enjoy reading the book. I am far less interested in placing the book in the context of other works by the writer or much of anything about his or her life.

Nor am I the least bit interested in what the book reviewer thought about its literary excellence—its structural or post-modern features. Rather, I want to know what the book meant to the critic and how it might have affected him. I look for the experience the reviewer had in reading the book, what insights it gave him, if it led him to identify with any of the characters or their situations and the significance that might have had for the reviewer.

In short, I want to know if it is worth my time to read the novel and head down to the bookstore to buy it. I confess, I rarely get this kind of information from most reviewers. Like Styron, I have to start reading the book and if I like what I read in the beginning, it is likely that I’ll enjoy the rest of it.

As a totally unrelated but profoundly relevant footnote, I would like to cite a passage from the interview with Paul Auster that is also included in Volume IV of the Paris Review Interviews. It was conducted in 2003 when Auster was then 56. Even at that relatively young age he could say,

“Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you—many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren’t there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It’s hard for a young person to understand this. It’s not that a twenty year old doesn’t know he’s going to die, but it’s the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can’t know what the accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself.”

Physicality of a Book

A book is more that the words on the page, the story that is told, and the way it is written. A book is also possessed of sheer physicality. How heavy is it, how thick, or how many pages, what is the cover like, does the paper have a distinctive odor, is there room in the margin for comments, what is the typeface, etc?

Of course, these features, as well as other ancillary features of reading a book are relatively minor compared to the real reasons we read a book, although they cannot be entirely discounted. Recently there has been some discussion of these matters on the various Web sites I visit.

Dust Jacket
There is the matter of dust jackets. Some books have them, some books don’t. Are they necessary? I am reading two books now, neither of which has one. What purpose do they serve? Can they be met without a dust jacket? Some dedicated readers believe one of the major downsides of the new e-books is the absence of a dust jacket or a book cover.

Deckle Edge
Then there is the matter of the edge of the page—rough, smooth, or deckle edge (uncut). I remember returning from France a long time ago with a load of deckle edge books. A knife was required to cut open the pages; there was something rather special about these books, as if they were in someway more authentic than their smooth edged counterparts.

Sustainable Highlighting
For those who don’t like to write in their books, there is now a way to avoid doing so by placing a “verdant sticky” next to passage you would normally underline or highlight. Simply place one of these Japanese designed stickies next to the passage and later remove it to reuse again after you’ve added the passage to your collection.

Bookshelves
How do you arrange the books on your bookshelf--randomly, alphabetically by author, color of cover, fiction, biography, poetry, culinary, etc? Lately, I simply add the book to whatever open space I can find. And when I search for a previously read book, I am more often than not able to find it simply by the color and design of the book cover.

Dollars and Cents
There is the cost of a book, a matter that cannot be easily dismissed these days. Shall I wait for the paperback edition? Or hold off until one comes into the library? Or planning ahead, why not buy a Kindle or a Nook, or the forthcoming iPad and start downloading them “in less than a minute” for $9.99 or, in an increasingly number of cases, for nothing.

Roth on Roth

I’ve been reading Volume IV of the always intriguing Paris Review Interviews with writers—poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists, journalists and critics. In the introduction to this volume Salman Rushdie calls the set “the finest available inquiry into the how of literature.” They began over fifty years ago in the first issue of the periodical (1953) with an interview of E. M. Forster. A year later an interview was conducted with William Styron, then only 27, who was one of the Paris Review’s founders.

Volume IV includes an interview of Philip Roth conducted in 1984 when Roth, then 51, was well into his writing life, having recently published Portnoy’s Complaint and in 1983, The Anatomy Lesson. The interview begins with Roth describing his writing day and what he goes through each time he starts a new novel. He says he works almost every day, all day, morning and afternoon. “If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.”

Every writer knows that the beginning, sometimes simply the first sentence, is usually the hardest part of writing a new work. Even for Roth, a writer who has published countless works of fiction and non-fiction, it is a bit of an ordeal. He says, “I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive…that has some life in it.”

This is a tale told by many writers—those first hundred pages often end up in the recycling basket. I imagine that is an impossibly difficult thing for any writer. To be utterly frank, more than once I have thought of doing the same.

But there is another far more difficult struggle that Roth goes through when he embarks on a new book. That is the struggle for a problem, a dilemma, a predicament that makes for compelling fiction. When he begins, he claims he hasn’t the slightest idea what that will be. “What matters most isn’t there at all.”

He says the central character in his novels have to be going through a major transformation or “radical displacement” in their life. And to create this kind of person, Roth says he needs to be going a little bit crazy. He comments, “…a writer has to be driven crazy to help him see. A writer needs his poisons. The antidote to his poisons is often a book.” Does this suggest the novels he writes are Roth’s way of getting in a little writing therapy?

Roth has always downplayed the power of literature to bring about social or personal change. He reiterates his position in the interview: “I don’t believe that, in my society, novels effect serious changes in anyone other than the handful of people who are writers, whose own novels are of course seriously affected by other novelists’ novels. I can’t see anything like that happening to the ordinary reader, nor would I expect to.”

Here he leaves unanswered the question of just how one writer’s work influences another. Writers often say they have been influenced by one writer after another, by Tolstoy or Chekhov or Fitzgerald or Hemingway. I always wonder in what way. They may have greatly admired their work, but how was that admiration translated into their own work?

Roth’s view about the effects of literature on the ordinary reader is contrary to the abundant evidence, in some cases anecdotal in others empirical, that suggest otherwise. See, for example, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, the fascinating answers given by many well-known individuals to the question “What book did you read when you were young that most influenced your life?" at The Academy of Achievement Web site, the life-changing accounts given in Jack Canfield and Gay Hendrick's volume, You’ve Got to Read This Book: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life, Gordon and Patricia Sabine’s Books That Made the Difference, the “Changing Lives Through Literature Program,” etc.

The interviewer, Hermione Lee, who has written a study of Roth’s work, then asks him, “What do novels do then for the ordinary reader?” Roth replies as if he had not earlier said they don’t. “At their best writers change the way readers read. That seems to me the only realistic expectation. It also seems to me quite enough. Reading novels is a deep and singular pleasure, a gripping and mysterious human activity…”

Here we have Roth saying a novel does sometimes give rise of a reader’s pleasure and change the way they read, whatever he means by that. In this sense he does acknowledge the “power of the pen” to influence a person and if he is willing to admit these not insignificant effects, surely it is conceivable for a work of literature to have an even greater impact on some readers, if only to cause them to think more seriously about an issue or, in the most extreme, but far from unknown case, of changing the course of their life.

On Napping

Earlier this week a report was circulating on the Web about the benefits of napping. Since I am a serious napper, I read it with keen interest. It appears naps are good for the mind or as the BBC report headlined “Nap boosts brain learning power.” The study reported that 39 individuals who were allowed to snooze for a while after taking a “hard learning task” in the morning outperformed those who had to get through the day without a siesta.

However, we are not told how large the difference was or given much information about the process that led to the performance improvement. Dr. Matthew Walker of UC Berkeley who conducted the study said: “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at the neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap.” This doesn’t seem to help me much.

A few years before, Dr. Martha Mednick reported similar findings in a study in which a nap that included REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep led to nearly a “40 percent improvement compared to the pre-nap performance on a word-association test. Individuals who didn’t experience REM sleep improved slightly, but their pre-and-post nap differences were modest and not statistically significant

These results also agree with my many years of napping experience. Since I rise early, a nap has become a bit of a necessity. I am totally refreshed after a short, mid-day nap. When I do really conk out for even a very short time, I actually feel much better after the nap than I did in the morning after a full night of sleep.

In a way, a mid-day nap really creates two separate days for me. There is the morning day and then the afternoon day and perhaps yet another evening day if I can manage that, something I’ve never really been able to achieve even when I needed to.

After I read the BBC report, I recall reading a delightful essay by Joseph Epstein on “The Art of Napping.” I searched without success for a copy in my files and I searched for copy on the Web, again without any luck. In doing so, I learned that the essay was included in book of Epstein’s essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool.

I could order the book from Amazon but it would take weeks to arrive. Or I could walk a few blocks down to Powell’s to buy their one remaining copy. But it was rather too cold for me to venture out and besides the book would cost a fair amount and my bookshelf was running out of space anyway. What was I to do?

Lo and behold, Google Books came to my rescue. The complete essay is there and while I couldn’t print a copy or copy any passages, I could separately take notes while I read it, one page at a time. Doing that wasn’t so bad, at least it wasn’t reading the essay on my computer where note taking is easy. All this surprised me. Thank you Sergey and Larry. Perhaps one day it will be just as nice with some of the new e-readers that are currently making deep inroads on the reading experience.

Some well known individuals have been excellent nappers. Thomas Edison was said to be a superb napper and attributes much of his inventive energy to them. So was former President Bill Clinton, who was also known to be a voracious reader. No doubt, he also took advantage of his napping time to read for a while, as I do. Sometimes I think that is one of the reasons napping is such a treat for me

Other first-class nappers include Ronald Reagan, who seemed to be napping most of the day. Leonardo DaVinci for other much valued reasons also napped on and off during the day, but hardly slept at all at night. John D. Rockefeller also took a daily nap and for all I know may have regarded the experience as the royal road to wealth.

In his charming essay Epstein discusses the various ways napping affects his life. He recalls, “At the University of Chicago, I slept through the better part of the Italian Renaissance, or at any rate through a course in the history of art. As a teacher myself, I am now being justly repaid by having students fall asleep in my own classes.”

He also mentions some of the works of literature where it plays a lesser role. He cites Prince Bolkonsky’s comment in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, “A nap after dinner was silver, a nap before dinner golden.”

On Fragments

In the beginning was the fragment, and the fragment cast a shadow, and the shadow became the word.
—Carlos V. Reyes

Olivia Dresher, writer, publisher of Impassio Press, and director of the Life Writing Connection has also established an online magazine of fragmentary writing that publishes “…excerpts from journals, diaries and notebooks; vignettes; aphorisms; micro essays and notes; excerpts from letters; and various nontraditional short forms.” Her recent book, In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, seeks to establish fragmentary writing as an independent genre.

At her suggestion, I’ve have been reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet to find out what the experience of reading fragments is like. It has taken forever to get past the first quarter of this volume. This by no means diminishes it greatness for it is a fascinating book to read. But it is without narrative or direction or momentum and so I read it for a while and then put it down in order to get into the next gripping novel that is going to take command of my life

Olivia and I have had periodic exchanges about the nature of fragmentary writing of which the following is representative:

To Olivia: Here is my concern about texting, tweets, and facebooking, and even short fragments. These forms of expression may discourage writers from formulating reasoned, well supported, and comprehensive statements about an issue or a question. Especially among the young, although not restricted to them, learning how to do this, and it does require a lot of learning, will take a back seat to shorter forms of expression. You really have to practice, practice, practice, writing a coherent statement in order to do it well.

Without abundant opportunities for such practice, it will become a thing of the past. It will also fail to be recognized as extremely important and valuable in its own right. I admit my view is simply a concern without any empirical evidence. But we do hear a lot of anecdotal evidence these days about poor writing among the young and their inability to sustain an interest in reading for very long. No doubt there are exceptions and no doubt I overgeneralize. But still I worry. I guess I worry about many things. Worry comes to me quite naturally.

From Olivia: I hope you don't think that I see them [fragments] as a substitute for other kinds of writing. I just want to help them develop a place that can be respected, especially since they don't really have a place. I want to explore their dimensions and possibilities.

I'm very interested in form, and I like all forms of literature. I happen to, personally, be drawn to short forms (I always have been). A lot of people don't know how to appreciate or write short forms. And perhaps people, in general, have leanings to write short or long forms rather than both, and perhaps it isn't just a matter of training, practice, and education. I'm glad that there are writers of novels AND writers of haiku. I also value traditional writing AND experimental writing. Both.

In the Introduction to In Pieces Olivia writes, “One quality of fragmentary writing is the lack of a traditional beginning or end. Instead, the two are merged into a brief and concentrated middle. A fragment is a “slice of life,” a short expression or description of a thought, memory, insight, mood, perception, image, or experience.”

She notes that journals, diaries, and notebooks are forms of fragmentary writing. Clearly then there are millions of us of all ages who really are fragment writers. Much of what we write is personal, usually written in the first person, and most often they are works of non-fiction.

Olivia concludes her introduction by saying, “It is my feeling that the fragmentary form, more than any other form, gives writers the opportunity to travel as far away from the boundaries of traditional genres as they feel they must in order to express their truths.”

Here are some fragments on fragments that Olivia has composed:

Fragments: because it's the very nature of perception to be fragmentary.

Fragments: the less there is, the more that's left to the imagination.

Our contemporary lives are fragmented...the fragmented form is a reflection of the way we think and live...

A fragment doesn't explain...it just is...it can be a few words or several pages long... It can exist by itself or in a series... It can be whatever the writer wants it to be... There are no rules...

"Stupid Little Checklists"

Did you ever go to the market only to find you left your shopping list at home? Who hasn’t? Who hasn’t made far more serious mistakes? Doctors make them all the time, airline pilots do on occasion, construction engineers are known to make them too.

Dr. Atul Gawande’s latest book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, is a study of mistakes, about making and preventing them and how to do so quickly and effectively, at least how to make a start in that direction. Gawande is a surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker, a professor at Harvard, and a MacArthur fellow. It is a mistake not to listen to him.

Early in the book he writes, “…the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.”

Consider the enormously complex situation an airline pilot faces as he sits in the cockpit getting reading to fly a massive 358,000 lb (that’s empty) Boeing 747 crammed with 545 passengers several thousand miles across the sea. At least a thousand things could go wrong causing the death of the passengers to say nothing of himself and his 33-member crew. How does he avoid making a potentially horrible mistake—a single one could be fatal--in a situation where countless things that could go wrong?

What he does is to start going over, one by one, a set of really simple checklists. There are the checklists he goes over as he inspects the outside of the plane, and those that he reviews before turning on the engines, and another set before pulling away from the gate, plus those before taxiing out to the runway, etc.

He also has a sizable notebook consisting of the “non-normal” checklists “covering every conceivable emergency situation a pilot might run into: smoke in the cockpit, different warning lights turning on, a dead radio, a copilot becoming disabled, and engine failure, to name just a few.” Gawande dramatically describes instances when a careful review of one of these checklists avoided a crash and a few when they weren’t looked at carefully that ended in a tragedy.

Gawande admits doctors don’t much like those “stupid little checklists,” that they aren’t much fun, and that physicians are often reluctant to employ them, largely because they raise doubts about their competence. Against this reluctance, he marshals one study after another to demonstrate how effective checklists are in reducing the alarming number of medical errors.

In one study the introduction of a checklist reduced infections when an intravenous line is inserted into patents in intensive care units (I.C.U.) to zero from its normal rate of 11 percent. Two years after the checklist was introduced it was estimated that it had prevented 43 infections, avoid 8 I.C.U deaths, and saved the hospital in which it was studied approximately $2 million.

Another study for the World Health Organization examined the effects of introducing checklists in surgical care at eight hospitals in both developed and undeveloped countries. “The rate of major complications for surgical patients in all eight hospitals fell by 36 percent after the introduction of the checklist. Deaths fell 47 percent. …Overall in this group of nearly 4,000 patients, 435 would have been expected to develop serious complications based on our earlier observation data. But instead just 277 did. Using the checklist had spared more than 150 people from harm—and 27 of them from death.”

The checklist may seem like a minor, relatively innocuous tool to employ in order to avoid making mistakes. The evidence that Gawande assembles from medical, construction, and aviation situations suggests otherwise. It is another mistake not to take these findings seriously.

Errors will continue to be made, accidents will occur, mental lapses are inevitable, but the use of a checklist will help overcome some of them. They are a start and only a start in confronting the fallibility of the human judgment in the face of the increasing complexity of modern life.

Isaiah Berlin

…he made readers appreciate “the charisma of the intellect. Nicholas Kristof

A few years ago I took an online course on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin offered by an Oxford University instructor. As a former philosophy student, Berlin had always interested me. I also took the course to get an idea of what online instruction was like and how it compared to taking a class in person.

The course consisted of a collection of Berlin’s writings and periodic discussions with the instructor and other students (N = 6). The readings were terrific; the online discussions were very strange, a series of rather awkward written comments, with none of the spontaneity of a classroom discussion and a maddening delay responding to a comment you or another student might have made a couple of minutes ago.

I haven’t taken another online course but I have continued to read about Isaiah Berlin and from time to time one of works. On the occasion of the recent publication of Berlin’s Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, Nicholas Kristof writes about Berlin in the February 25th issue of The New York Review of Books.

Berlin was born in Russia, the only child of a wealthy Jewish family that eventually migrated to England. He was educated at Oxford, during the era of analytic philosophy, and remained there for the rest of his life. I cannot begin to do justice to the range of topics he wrote and spoke about (he was uniformly regarded as an utterly charming conversationalist, witty, effervescent, scholarly)—political theory, concepts of liberty, epistemology, the history of ideas, ethical thought and values, etc. Instead, I will note a couple of ideas touched on by Kristof who befriended Berlin when he was at Oxford as a law student.

Berlin never thought of himself as a philosopher claiming that its lack of progress “led him to move away from philosophy to become a historian of ideas.” In reality, what that meant was that he was never part of the analytic philosophy tradition that conceived the discipline as primarily concerned with language and logic.

Kristof then asks, “What exactly is Berlin’s legacy in philosophy? To me, it is his emphasis on the “pluralism of values,” a concept that suggests a non-ideological pragmatic way of navigating an untidy world.”

That is also why Berlin finds a sympathetic ear with me. He was skeptical of the grand theories, the single generalization, the paramount value, arguing instead for the acceptance and tolerance of a pluralism of values, values that are often times competing and incompatible with each other.

Kristof wonderfully compares Berlin’s view to a Chinese metaphor, mozhe shitout guo he, that is roughly translated as “as fording a river by feeling for the stones with your feet.” Kristof later describes this programmatic approach to problem solving as “a matter of feeling for the next stone and finding what feels comfortable, honest and just. That entails recognizing that there may not be a single best place to ford the river, and that others may prefer different stones—yet that tolerance should not extend to the ruler who tries to cross by building a bridge of corpses.”

Berlin argued that one has to recognize the one is often wrong, that most situations are complex and that mistakes are often made in groping our way through the these complexities. What is important is to make the mistakes as quickly as possible, “without letting appreciation of nuance emasculate one’s capacity to make strong moral judgments.”

Kristof finds Berlin’s approach a philosophy for adults in today’s uncertain world and concludes that “Berlin’s world view is that we are fated to grope our way along, making constant compromises, revising priorities, living with contradictions, trying to reduce suffering where we can.”

Reading Briefs

An E-book Convert
Charlie Brooker reports he’s an e-book convert mostly because “…no one can see what you're reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you're reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube. OK, so right now they'll judge you simply for using an ebook – because you will look like a showoff early-adopter techno-nob if you use one on public transport until at least some time circa 2012 – but at least they're not sneering at you for enjoying The Rats by James Herbert.”

Dictating Notable Passages
Dan Greco may be unique in the way he collect passages for his commonplace book. “When I find particularly memorable passages in the book that I'm reading I dictate those passages (and my comments relating to them) into a Microsoft Word file utilizing Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, with a separate Microsoft Word file for each book. Then later I use word indexing software to create word searchable index of the database of all those Microsoft Word files. I can then at a later date with a word or phrase search quickly identify all of the books for which I prepared abstracts and comments pertaining to the words or subjects that I'm searching for.”

Comparing Paper and On-Line Reading
Kenton O’Hara and Abigail Sellen report a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading the same document on-line. “Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing.” Case closed.

Hero of American Justice
In reviewing Melvin Urofsky’s Louis D, Brandeis: A Life, Anthony Lewis writes that “We see him now as a great mind, perhaps the most brilliant of all Supreme Court justices; as a crusader against oversized institutions; and as a luminously eloquent exponent of free speech and privacy—the right to be let alone.”

He concludes by quoting Dean Acheson’s remarks following Brandeis’ death in 1941: “Truth was less than truth to him unless it was expounded so that the people could understand and believe. During these years of retreat from reason, his faith in the human mind and in the will and capacity of people to understand and grasp the truth never waivered or tired….He handed on the great tradition of faith in the mind and spirit of man which is the faith of the prophets and poets, of Socrates, of Lincoln.”

Commonplace Books in the Classroom
From the very beginning commonplace books were conceived as an essential educational tool to collect and organize knowledge. Even today they can be used in guiding students to a more disciplined method of reading and as an aid in recalling more of what they have read. In her blog, Self Made Scholar Jamie Littlefield outlines a plan for creating a commonplace book in classroom settings. She cites Susan Wise Bauer on the process of using commonplace books while reading:

“The journal used for self-education should model itself after this extended type of commonplace book. It is neither an unadorned collection of facts, nor an entirely inward account of what’s going on in your heart and soul. Rather, the journal is the place where the reader takes external information and records it (through the use of quotes, as in the commonplace book); appropriates it through a summary, written in the reader’s own words; and then evaluates it through reflection and personal thought. As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot own specific phrases, sentences, an paragraphs as you come across them; when you’ve finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary of what you’ve learned; and then write your own reflections, questions, and thoughts.”

Discovery or Creation

As the winter drags on for month after month and the sun vanishes from view, my thoughts turn more and more to Italy and to those times when I have been basking in the warm sun of Tuscany and Umbria. So I am likely to devour any book or film about these places.

William Trevor published My House in Umbria in 1991. I don’t know how I could have missed it until I chanced upon it only a few months ago. And I followed it soon thereafter with the film version based on Trevor’s novel that is transcribed to the screen virtually unaltered and, given the magic of cinematography, is even more vivid.

After escaping a childhood of sexual abuse in England, followed by “career” as a prostitute in an African brothel, middle aged Emily Delahunty settles in a villa somewhere in the Umbrian countryside. We learn that she achieved some fame as a writer of romance novels that are difficult to distinguish from one another. And we learn she occasionally takes in tourists at her Italian residenza. Her days in Italy are familiar to every traveler:

“There are beautiful moments hidden away in corners. I have seen, near the Scala in Milan, a stout little opera singer practicing as he strolled to a café. I have seen a wedding in the cathedral at Orvieto, when the great doors were thrown wide open and the bride and groom walked out into the sunshine.”

During a train trip to Milan, a bomb goes off in the car Delahunty is traveling in. While she survives, the only other survivors are a young German, Otmar, whose lover is killed, a retired English general whose daughter and son-in-law are killed, and an eight-year old American girl, Aimee, who has lost her entire family. Emily Delahunty invites them to her home to recover.

Aimee does not speak after being traumatized by the attack and much of the story centers on her recovery. The general and Otmar undertake their own recovery by planting a garden on the on the villa’s run-down grounds. Meanwhile, Delahunty begins to weave her own, illusory stories about each of them, including Aimee’s uncle, Thomas Riversmith, who arrives to take her back to his family in America.

Trevor writes, “…we are all inside a story that is being composed as each day passes.” And Emily Delahunty’s a master at composing tales of her guests that are little else but fabrications. It is around Riversmith that Delahaunty weaves her wildest tale and whom she pathetically pursues.

Does it matter if our life differs from the stories we make up about it? Is there really a difference between what is true and what is false in these stories? These are the questions I think Trevor wishes us to consider in My House in Umbria.

Mrs. Delahunty doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about the fictions she creates of her own life or those of her guests. She says, “there’s not much to me” and that she is “not a woman of the world” both of which are patently false, if we can believe Trevor’s description of her previous life.

Trevor never tells us why Delahunty engages in such fictions. She was a romance novelist, after all. Perhaps more importantly, she too may have been traumatized by the terrorist attack, as well as the experiences she had before settling in the Umbrian countryside. Her fictional inventions then may have given her the resources to overcome her own traumas and reach some peace with her past—fiction therapy in a work of imaginative fiction, if you will.

Paraphrasing a comment in Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, understanding yourself may be just as much a discovery as a creation.