Alan Jacobs

When people ask, “How are you not exploding with stress with everything on your plate?”, I know they only mean it in the best, most compassionate way. And for those who have beautiful healthy children and gleaming new stoves, I do not discount their heartaches and worries and crises. But what bothers me is the implicit expectation: that people are waiting for our inevitable breakdown, a breast-beating howl against fate that is sure to come once we realize we’ll truly never “have it all” – because of our imperfect son.

For all the people who are puzzled by my seeming happiness, I’ll be glad to let them know my “secret.” I’m not in denial, I’m not on antidepressants, and I don’t live in a fantasy world. I have a wonderful husband and I am pursuing a career I’ve dreamed of since I was nine years old. I have a beautiful son, friends, and a working stove. I am not paraplegic. I have parents who, through luck and fate, had me here in the United States, and not in North Korea. I live in a time where my awful vision can be corrected with glasses. I am a college graduate. I am never hungry unless I choose to be.

Do I have enough? Resoundingly: yes. And I ask you to take a moment: I suspect you might, too.

Such was the case with Daniels, the Massachusetts gentleman — his pet spaniel bit him. Curiously, Daniels’ wife, also bitten, survived. The case reminded Massachusetts that hydrophobia was still a threat; public hearings followed a few months thereafter. But it was not Daniels’ death but his wife’s survival that furnished ammunition to the vocal minority who believed that hydrophobia was not caused by contact with rabid animals, but stemmed from moral weakness of the individual, who, confronted with fear, succumbed to delusions.

These were not marginal views: In April 1877, the Boston Globe ran an editorial — “Death from Imagination” — citing moral failings as the cause of hydrophobia. In another report a few months later, the Globe announced that “the prevalent opinion among the doctors is that the [victim] did not die of hydrophobia, but of inflammation of the brain, brought on by worrying and excitement.” To some extent, such views persisted well into the 20th century. Thus, members of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) — who opposed rabies prevention measures like muzzling — were still linking hydrophobia to wild imagination as late as the mid-1910s, three decades after Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the rabies vaccine in 1885.

If digital cryptography isn’t enough to hide a book for ever, physical inks still might. Argentinian independent publishers Eterna Cadencia recently released El libro que no puede esperar (The Book That Can’t Wait), an anthology of new writers printed with ink that disappears in two months. As the publisher noted, books are patient, waiting for us to read them: good for us, not so good for new authors in need of attention. Most reactions to this experiment have been negative, not least because the proposal seems to invert the primary quality of the physical book: its persistence over time. While ebooks are often characterised as lightweight and transient, we are also horrified by aspects of their persistence, such as their ability to be “tracked” – see the controversy in these pages recently over analytics in ebooks. And the persistence of books is a myth in any case: acidic papers, weather and age conspire to yellow much of our literary heritage.

My favourite page on the music tracking site Last.fm is the one listing user’s deleted tracks: songs they’ve definitely listened to, but chosen to erase. Predictably, Adele and Lady Gaga figure prominently. If the internet is a medium of memory, what does it mean to forget a book? One of the advantages of ebooks might in fact be that they are easier to move on from, to delete, to forget, preventing us from getting bogged down in bad books and past selves, and, as Eterna Cadencia want us to do, move on and discover new things.

oldhollywood:

Son of Frankenstein (1939, dir. Rowland V. Lee) Expressionistic set design by art director Jack Otterson.

(via)

It may seem strange that anyone could look around the pornography-saturated, fertility-challenged, family-breakdown-plagued West and see a society menaced by a repressive puritanism. But it’s clear that this perspective is widely and sincerely held.

It would be refreshing, though, if it were expressed honestly, without the “of course we respect religious freedom” facade. If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.

There, didn’t that feel better? Now we can get on with the fight.

Oh, what the hell. Let’s go for it. Let us speak about great writing — not brilliant writing or clever writing or, most tempting of all, exquisite writing. Let us speak of Quixote writing, Lear and Deronda writing. Honor, heroism, decency, justice and “Ah, love, let us be true to one another” writing. Gaah! The very words are marzipan to the tongue.

And yet, at the end of the day — our own or days in general — what else do we seek from our books?

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly — because, thanks to the power, I was doing it — what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. I was also certain, though the conversation continued to be perfectly ordinary, that my three colleagues were having the same experience. (In the case of one of them, I was later able to confirm this.)My personal feelings towards them were unchanged — they were still colleagues, not intimate friends — but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.

I recalled with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me deliberately to injure another human being. I also knew that the power would, of course, be withdrawn sooner or later and that, when it did, my greed and self-regard would return. The experience lasted at its full intensity for about two hours when we said good-night to each other and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning, it was still present, though weaker, and it did not vanish completely for two days or so. The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do. And among the various factors which several years later brought me back to the Christian faith in which I had been brought up, the memory of this experience and asking myself what it could mean was one of the most crucial, though, at the time it occurred, I thought I had done with Christianity for good.

Rule No. 4: Never use three words when one will do. Be concise. Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how to “kill your darlings,” as they say. I’m reminded of the famous editor-author interaction between Gordon Lish and Ray Carver when they were working on Carver’s celebrated short story “Those Life Preservers Are Just for Show,” often considered the high-water mark of so-called dirty realism. You’ll recall the climax, when two drunken fishermen try to calm each other after their dinghy springs a leak. In the original last lines of the story, Nat, the salty old part-time insurance agent, reassures his young charge as they cling to the beer cooler: “We’ll get help when we hit land. I’m sure of it. No more big waves, no more sharks. We’ll be safe once again. We’ll be home.” If you examine the Lish papers in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, you’ll see how, with but a few deft strokes, Lish pared that down to create the now legendary ending: “Help — land shark!” It wasn’t what Carver intended, but few could argue that it was not shorter. Learn to kill your darlings, and don’t be shy about softening them up in the hostage pit for a few days before you do.

Finally this uncertainty drives Kandel, no less than Boyd and Pagel, back to the first principles of Darwinism, which are remorselessly utilitarian. And once again the connection of those principles to art is asserted rather than demonstrated. The “exercise in reading minds, which portrait painting provides, is perhaps not only pleasurable but also useful, sharpening our ability to infer what other people are thinking and feeling.” Or, again: “And that is why we generate, appreciate, and desire art: art improves our understanding of social and emotional cues, which are important for survival.” But could the amount of effort that goes into making a painting possibly be justified on these grounds, when each of us gets “exercise” in interpreting faces thousands of times a day? And don’t artworks regularly introduce us to faces we love because they are uninterpretable, or because they express things utterly beyond the domain of practical life? And what about landscapes and still lifes and abstract forms—what social cues do we learn from them? And does our experience tell us that people who spend much of their lives looking at art, or reading novels, or listening to string quartets—much less the people who make them—are better adjusted, more socially adept, and more likely to produce many children than those who do not?

The problem with Darwinian aesthetics and neuroaesthetics is not that art is like religion, something divine that can only be violated by bringing it back to the realm of biology. Aesthetics is different, in that the facts it has to work with are terrestrial, this-worldly. They are the feelings and the thoughts we have in response to works of art, and the feelings and the thoughts that lead us to want to create them in the first place. So it would seem that there is no reason, in principle, why these cannot be illuminated by evolution. But this can only happen if we begin with a full and accurate account of what we are trying to explain.

mwfrost:

(via Galileo Galilei, Drawings of the Moon)

Can I opt to only trust empirical claims from scientists who can do this with pen and ink?