Category: Uncategorized

Review: Long Day’s Journey into Night

Review: Long Day’s Journey into Night

Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My first experience of this play was of an audio recording. It did not make an especially deep impression on me, and I was on the verge of writing a review saying as much, when another reviewer alerted me to the literary importance of the stage instructions. Chastened, I decided I ought to actually read the play before I made a fool of myself, and I’m glad I did. O’Neill, after all, never intended for this work to be produced as a play. It is, rather, like Goethe’s Faust a kind of closet drama, more effective on the page than on the stage.

The play is a masterful depiction of addiction and familial dysfunction. Indeed, I found it to be almost clinical in its psychology. O’Neill was clearly writing from personal experience. He ably captures the mixture of love and resentment that an unhealthy family bond can give rise to—perpetual annoyance, an endless buildup of grievances, non-stop bickering, all built on an unshakable foundation of love. And the characters of this play do love one another, quite dearly, even if they are stuck in a vicious cycle of blame and abuse.

Woven into this dreadful dynamic is addiction. Every member of the family is an addict, and all display the tell-tale signs. They search for excuses—good new or bad news, loneliness or companionship, special occasions or recurrent problems—to justify their habit. And then there is the deferral of responsibility, most exemplified by the mother in this play, who manages to blame everything in her life—her husband, her sons, her doctors, her upbringing—except herself for her morphine addiction. Yet of course the self-deception is never really believed. This awful truth is always there, burning underneath, a gnawing feeling that the substance will never quite deaden.

These contradictions—of great affection and resentment, of excuses and self-knowledge—are so starkly on display in this play that I think even the most brilliant actor would struggle to do it justice. The shifts of tone are too abrupt, the push and pull of conflicting feelings and truths are too violent. But, somehow, it works when read. On the page, a jostled, confused, and depressing mess becomes something orderly, transparent, and deeply tragic. A potentially pathetic group of boozers and dope fiends are transformed into symbols of aching humanity.

Considering that this play is strongly autobiographical, it is frankly amazing to me that O’Neill was able to create such a masterpiece. To confront what must have been a painful and traumatic time in his life and turn it into such a drama—a drama that pulls no punches, and yet condemns no one—is deeply impressive. As this play amply demonstrates, life too often conquers art. Routine deadens us to it, money woos us from it, addiction numbs us to it, so that we lose both our sensitivity to its beauty and the time and energy to create it. But sometimes, art conquers life. And this play is an example of that.



View all my reviews

Letters from Spain #3: Halloween and History

Letters from Spain #3: Halloween and History

Here is episode three of my podcast on life in Spain:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/letters-from-spain-3-halloween-and-history/id1469809686?i=1000455436075

For the transcript, see below:

It has been quite an eventful past week.

Most obviously, and least importantly, Halloween is coming up. Though the origins of Halloween are properly European—hailing from the Celtic ‘Samhain,’ or summer’s end, and related to the Catholic All Saints’ Day—the holiday nowadays is quite justly considered to be an American invention. Geniuses of marketing that we Americans are, we have turned Halloween into a commercial extravaganza. And when money is to be made, people quickly follow suit.

Thus the so-called “Chinese” shops fill up with Halloween paraphernalia: costumes, masks, plastic weapons, and grisly makeup. (These shops, by the way, are somewhat similar to American dollar stores, and are often owned by Chinese immigrants—thus the name.) Pumpkins and witches can be spotted in the windows of bakeries and cafés, and the supermarket is selling giant tubs of gummies in the shapes of spiders and skeletons.

In a way, Halloween is a more sensible holiday in Spain than in the United States, since the following day, November 1st or All Saints’ Day, is always a holiday. (Most of the holidays in Spain are still Catholic.) But for most Spaniards, Halloween is totally unremarkable. College students don’t go to costume parties, adults don’t watch scary movies, and few people buy candy for trick or treaters. Indeed, Halloween’s main importance is in primary schools, where the holiday is embraced as a way of teaching American culture, not to mention giving teachers and students a fun event. 

I dutifully went myself to the shop this past weekend and bought a costume for school, as I prepared myself for the rush of Halloween activities that this week will bring.

But, to repeat, Halloween is probably the least important event in Spain during these past weeks. In fact, I was amused the other day to see a sign in my local supermarket saying that “Christmas is finally here.” In America, we have Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday to slow down the approach of Christmas season; but in Spain, Christmas is already in the air in late October. Much to my delight, they are already selling the typical Spanish Christmas sweets. I love turrón with chocolate. 

The most important event from this last week has to do with Spain’s past. The government made history this last Thursday by exhuming the remains of dictator Francisco Franco from his burial place in the Valley of the Fallen. As you may recall, after winning the Spanich Civil War in 1939, Francisco Franco ruled Spain for 36 years until his death in 1975—a dictator of a repressive, reactionary regime. The Valley of the Fallen is a tourist destination for many foreigners, but for Spaniards it remains deeply controversial. The place is undeniably impressive. Situated in the pine-covered mountains north of Madrid, it is a basilica built into the base of a granite outcropping, topped with a 150 m (or nearly 500 ft) tall cross. 

The Valley of the Fallen was ostensibly built as a place of reconciliation after the Civil War. But it is difficult to accept it as a truly neutral monument. For one, part of the labor that went into building it was performed by prisoners of war. Moreover, a great many of the over 33,000 fallen soldiers buried in the crypt of the basilica were moved there without the families’ permission. They lie entombed in an enormous vault, unmarked and inaccessible to visitors. The only two marked graves in the Valley belong to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a leader of the proto-fascist Falangist party whose murder helped to trigger the Civil War, and Francisco Franco himself.

The exhumation was the fruit of a long and bitter legal struggle between the socialist government and Franco’s family. When the courts finally decided in the government’s favor, the exhumation was quickly scheduled to proceed. The authorities were wisely afraid of sparking a violent protest—Spain has had enough of that in recent weeks, with the riots in Barcelona—and so took pains to make the event as quiet as possible. The body, housed in a coffin draped with a cloth and crowned with a wreath, was born by his relatives to a hearse waiting at the foot of the stairs. A priest sprinkled holy water on the remains, before the car drove a short distance to a helicopter waiting nearby. This mode of transport was thought convenient, so as to avoid and disturbances along the way. It flew the dictator’s bones to a cemetery north of Madrid, where Franco was re-interred next to his wife in a private ceremony. 

All things considered, the event was surprisingly calm. About 500 Franco supporters appeared outside of the gates of the basilica, but there was no violence. The Civil War is still quite a touchy subject in Spain. It is very much an open wound in the country’s psyche, since naturally people are divided on the topic. Virtually every Spaniard alive has relatives who fought and died on one side or another, and the conclusion that Franco was an evil man is far from universally accepted. 

As an American, I can sympathize with this situation. Our own Civil War, almost one hundred years older than Spain’s, is still the cause of political tension in our country. And the removal of Franco’s body from the basilica is very much akin to our own removal of Confederate flags and statues of Southern generals from our public spaces. Now, it is easy to be jaded about this. After all, such symbolic victories are good publicity for politicians—cheap, easy, and ultimately involving no real change for living people. Franco’s bones were not hurting anyone. That being said, I do think that the heroes a country chooses to honor constitute a tacit statement of values. If we publically honor men who fought for slavery, or men who trampled democracy underfoot, we condone these actions.

A sophist might respond that Jefferson owned slaves, and that king Philip II of Spain was also against democracy. So where do we draw the line? First, it is worth noting that the answer to that question is always: somewhere. The necessity of making a decision is not an argument against decisions. Where we collectively choose to draw this line will inevitably be a matter of debate for every generation to come. But I hope that we can agree not to publicly honor men who deliberately fought against their own country with the aim of limiting human freedom. That statement applies just as readily to General Custer as it does to the Generalisimo Franco.

Thanks to its Civil War, and the deep code of silence which followed, Spain remains (after Cambodia) the country with the most mass graves in the world. The Valley of the Fallen is the largest mass grave of them all. The country has a long way to go in dealing with this legacy, and this basilica is at the epicenter of this question. My own vote is to deconsecrate the place and to preserve it as a museum. But if that ever happens, it is many years off. For now, the exhumation is a historical step in the right direction, painful as it may have been.

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

Review: Le Morte d’Arthur

Review: Le Morte d’Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table

Le Morte d’Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table by Thomas Malory

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It happened one Pentecost when King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table had all assembled at the castle of Kynke Kenadonne and were waiting, as was customary, for some unusual event to occur before settling down to the feast, that Sir Gawain saw through the window three gentlemen riding toward the castle, accompanied by a dwarf.

I fully expected to dislike this book. The prospect of five hundred pages of jousting knights struck me as endlessly tedious, and I only opened the book out of a sense of respect for its status as a classic. But immediately I found myself entranced. This is a thoroughly engrossing read. And I should not have been surprised, since it delves so heartily into the two staples of popular entertainment: sex and violence. Indeed, one of the most amusing aspects of this book is how completely out of harmony is the chivalric code with the Christian religion; the characters do nothing but mate and slaughter, while the name of “Jesu” is on everybody’s lips.

Sir Thomas Malory assembled Le Morte d’Arthur out of several pre-existing legends, some of which he translated from French manuscripts, with a few stories of his invention thrown in. His major innovation was to arrange these traditional tales into a semi-coherent order, beginning with Arthur’s ascension to the throne and ending with his death at the hands of his son. The result is a patchwork of stories nested within stories, all told at a pace which, to a modern reader, can seem ludicrous. Major developments occur on every page, one after the other, in a staccato rhythm which can make the stories appear bluntly humorous, even if it was not Malory’s intention.

The world depicted in these pages is so frankly unreal, the level of violence so constant and gratuitous, that its final impression is that of a cartoon: “They fought once more and Sir Tristram killed his opponent. Then, running over to his son, he swiftly beheaded him too.” Daily life is entirely hidden from view. There are no peasants, no merchants, no artisans; there are no friends or happy families. There are only questing knights, heavily armed men who are obsessed with challenging one another. And though they profess a knightly code of conduct, even the most chivalrous of knights are seen to be unscrupulous murderers and, with few exceptions, unrepentant adulterers. The hero of this book, Sir Launcelot, feels very few pangs of guilt for continuously sleeping with his liege’s wife, Gwynevere; and he is the best of knights.

But the characters are so flat, their actions so stereotyped, their lives so monotonously dramatic, that I found it impossible to view them as moral actors, praiseworthy or damnable. They are, rather, centers of this bizarre world that Malory constructs. And it certainly is an exciting place. Monsters, magicians, enchantresses, prophesies, curses, visions, and of course endless combat and manic love—the small isle of Britain can hardly contain it all. Sure, there are parts of the book that drag, particularly during the tournaments. Malory’s descriptions of combat are heavily stylized, consisting of the same basic elements over and over again; and, as in the Iliad, large engagements are pictured as a series of individual contests between heroic foes. But for the most part Malory combines his traditional motifs together dexterously, enlivening larger stories with innumerable episodes, creating a raucous forward momentum.

As a result of all this, I greatly enjoyed Le Morte d’Arthur, even if it was not for the reasons that Malory intended. I found the book delightfully absurd, almost parody of itself, a sort of whimsical fantasy novel. What Malory hoped to convey with these stories—whether they are supposed to represent a model of heroism, an ironic comment on violence, or a response to the Wars of the Roses—I cannot say; but his book is better than any television show I know.



View all my reviews

Review: Essays of E.B. White

Review: Essays of E.B. White

Essays of E.B. WhiteEssays of E.B. White by E.B. White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is really no way for a man to put his arms around a big house plant and still remain a gentleman.

E.B. White’s name, along with Will Strunk’s, is now synonymous with good style. If that isn’t a compliment to a writer, I don’t know what is.

My first encounter with the duo was in my high school English class of junior year. My teacher was old-fashioned enough to believe that we should learn how to use punctuation. This came as a shock, since none of her predecessors had spared so much as a moment on a semicolon. It was with bewilderment and wonder, then, that I opened up The Elements of Style and encountered this sentence: “The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash.” How often is so much instruction packed into so few words?

In college I picked up the habit of rereading Strunk and White at least once a year. Probably I should do so more often, since verbal profligacy—Strunk’s sworn enemy, the capital sin of writing—is something that I can’t seem to shake, no matter how often I try. One of the reasons I picked up this book was the hope that, by observing White at work, his example might serve where his precepts failed.

With White, the style is the man; and any discussion of his works inevitably becomes an analysis of his prose. To begin with, White is not what I’d call a vocal writer. A vocal writer is one whose writing seems to come alive and speak, whose writing cannot be read in your own voice, only in the author’s own accent. White’s writing, while personable, charming, and full of feeling, does not leap from the page into your living room. It is writerly writing.

His style is conversational, not aphoristic. His sentences are not pointed, his wit is not barbed, his lines are not militantly memorable. His writing is loose; it breathes like a cotton shirt; it is drafty like an old wooden cabin. You might say that his essays are a controlled ramble, a balancing act that looks like a casual stroll. They take their time. Like a scatterbrained errand boy, they pause in a thousand places for momentary rendezvous and covert dalliances before reaching their destinations.

White seldom speaks in abstractions, and hardly makes an argument. His writing is held together not by the logic of ideas but by the tissue of memory. This is partly why the style is unfilterable from the content. There is no thesis to take away. He is not trying to make a point, but to communicate his perspective, to encapsulate a piece of his personality.

White’s personality is delightful. Modest and gently humorous, he is animated by a curiosity for the little things that comprise his world. He can study a train schedule with avidity, he can spend hours gazing at a spider’s web, he can write poetry on the life-cycle of a pig. This is what makes him such a consummate essayist. In the humdrum facts and quotidian occurrences of life he hears music and meaning, and spiderlike weaves his own web to stitch them into a delicate structure:

As I sat at table, gnawing away at a piece of pie, snow began falling. At first it was an almost imperceptible spitting from the gray sky, but it soon thickened and came driving in from the northeast. I watched it catch along the edge of the drive, powder the stone wall, and whiten the surface of the dark frozen pond, and I knew that all along the coast from Kittery on, the worst mistakes of men were being quietly erased, the lines of their industrial temples softened, and U.S. 1 crowned with a cold, inexpensive glory

There is not much to be said against these essays, except what can be said against all stylists. Since what White says is less important than the way he says it, upon finishing the reader is left with nothing but echoes and aftertastes. Yet it is a delicious aftertaste, tart and tangy with a touch of smoke, and it whets my appetite for more.

View all my reviews

Quotes & Commentary #35: Bacon

Quotes & Commentary #35: Bacon

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

—Francis Bacon, “Of Revenge”

The thirst for revenge is one of our ugliest, most satisfying, and most basic tendencies. It isn’t hard to see why.

The urge to revenge ourselves is a straightforward consequence of the urge to preserve ourselves. If somebody has hurt us in some way—by stealing a mate, by physical violence, or merely by a rude remark—then they have clearly shown themselves to be a threat, a dangerous person who can’t be trusted. The logical thing to do then becomes to neutralize this threat, to diminish or destroy his capacity to further hinder us.

This counter-attack will serve two purposes: first, it will harm the enemy, reducing his capacity to harm you in the future; second, by publically revenging yourself on an enemy, it will signal to others that you are not one to be trifled with, and that you will retaliate if anybody tries something funny. The practical benefits of revenge are thus preventative.

It is paradoxical, therefore, that revenge is not often thought of as oriented towards future security, but instead toward bygone injuries. The purpose of revenge, we feel in our bones, is to right the wrongs of the universe, to put the cosmic scale of justice back to zero, balancing a good action for a bad one.

When revenge is conceived this way, as retaliatory and not as preventative, then it can lead to absurdly unproductive actions, notable only for the resources they waste. In this connection, I can’t help thinking of Iñigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, whose obsessive quest to kill the murderer of his father consumed decades of his life.

Ask anyone to tell you about their ex, and there’s a good chance you will be met with the same vengeful fixation. The revenge intoxicated man is something of a narrative cliche, repeated ten thousand times in novels and television and movies. I would guess that revenge is second only to romantic love as the emotional engine of drama.

The folly of orienting your life around getting back at an enemy is clear to anyone with healthy sense of perspective. The best form of revenge, after all, is being happy, and all-consuming quests for personal justice are not conducive to happiness.

Even as a preventative measure—to incapacitate an enemy and prevent others from springing up—revenge often backfires. This is for two reasons.

First, if you attempt to render an enemy incapable of harming you in the future, there is always a risk you will fall short of full incapacitation. This is dangerous because, if you don’t succeed in fully disabling your enemy—whether psychologically, politically, logistically, socially, or physically—then there is a good chance that you will only embitter him, who will then counter-attack after he recovers his strength.

The second risk, related to the first, is the question of third-parties. If you succeed in fully disabling your enemy, there is still the possibility that he may have powerful friends. The friend of every enemy is another potential enemy, and can be mobilized against you. After successful revenge, you may yourself be the victim of a vengeful act by one of the enemy’s allies. If this revenge against you is successful, then one of your friends might retaliate against this new foe. 

This logic of attack and counterattack is how feuds start. Every act of vengeance can breed another, until half the world is embroiled in a bitter, pointless war against the other half. The most emblematic of these vindictive conflicts was the feud between the Hartfields and the McCoys, but you see this sort of thing in every section and at every scale of human life.

Revenge, as you can see, is a strategy of limited utility. It would, however, be untrue to say that revenge is always futile. In a situation similar to Hobbes’s “State of Nature,” vengeful acts are hardly avoidable. If there is no structure in place to resolve disputes, no laws and thus no method to punish law-breakers, then each party must enforce their own version of right and wrong.

Remember that, for each individual, taken separately, right and wrong are products of self-interest. In other words, in the absence of law, “right” is simply what helps you, “wrong” what hurts you; and without any legal system, you must enforce your own version of right and wrong, since no one else will.

In order to survive in an anarchic world, you must retaliate against those who interfere with your self-interest. If not, it will send the message to those around you that you are a pushover, and that they can take advantage of you without any risk; and you can only expect more enemies to interfere with you in the future. (I teach adolescents, so I know something about an anarchic world.) Some retaliation is therefore necessary. But care must be taken not to take vengeance too readily or too forcefully, or you may be the victim of revenge yourself.

Humans were born into anarchy and we still have the instincts that helped us get through it. This is why revenge comes to naturally to us, and why it tastes so sweet. But this emotional armory does not help us when we live in a society governed by law.

Law is a substitute for revenge, with all of its advantages and none of its defects. With recourse to the legal prosecution—organized retaliation, approved by the community—then we can neutralize threats and protect ourselves from future harm, with only a minimal chance that our enemies’ friends will try to get back at us. Law replaces private desire with public safety; and because the will of the community sanctions the law’s consequences, the law is joined with overwhelming force, to protect its adherents and attack its antagonists.

Living, as we all do, in states governed by law, the emotional urge to take revenge becomes a hindrance rather than an asset. If you are wronged, you can seek legal retribution. But if that is not available, then it is usually unwise to take matters into your own hands, since this makes it possible that legal retribution can be used against you.

True, there are many things that fall outside the confines of the law, the most notable of these being romance. And as expected,  vindictiveness is alive and well in matters of the heart. You still find people revenging themselves on their exes and their rivals, waxing indignant at perceived wrongs and organizing their friends in concerted actions of revenge. Having no social structure to resolve disputes, people fall into anarchy.

Yet I would argue that, even in these cases, revenge is a poor strategy. The revenge mentality is only justified, I think, in anarchic situations, specifically when the consequences for not retaliating are potentially severe. But in the case of romance, there is no chance that you will be seriously damaged. Heartbreak hurts, but it is seldom fatal.

In cases like these—where you can be sure of surviving any enemy attack—then I think another strategy is called for: returning love for hate. This sounds Biblical, but its justification is logical.

Keep in mind that I am talking of a situations like romance, in which harm cannot incapacitate either you or your enemies. (By “incapacitate” I mean render them unable to do future harm.) Since harming your enemies cannot disable them, it can only embitter them and potentially create new enemies; and since you cannot be disabled by being harmed, you have nothing to fear by not retaliating.

Returning harm for harm is thus clearly a poor long-term strategy, even if it might be satisfying in the short-term. You are left with two options: do nothing, or return help for harm. The first option seems superficially like the more logical one. By doing nothing, you don’t risk creating new enemies, and you don’t use resources to benefit your enemy that could be used elsewhere.

The second strategy, returning help for harm, is quite obviously more expensive, not to mention less satisfying. (Who likes to see their enemies happy?) Yet I think it is wiser as a long-term strategy, since it is by returning help for harm that enemies are converted into friends. A friend, after all, is somebody who acts in our interest; and it would be a stubborn enemy indeed who could persist in hating somebody who showed them only love and kindness.

Revenge, born of anarchy, is both a social and a personal ill. It is rendered obsolete as soon as people begin living in a society governed by law. It is a waste of resources and a poor survival strategy, and has no place in a just legal system or in the conduct of a wise individual.

2016 in Books

2016 on Goodreads2016 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.
—Walter Pater

So ends 2016, already a proverbially bad year. Both in the world at large and in my private life, this year has been one of disappointment and disruption. Things previously taken for granted have crumbled and collapsed; the inconceivable has happened, the impossible is already normal. History, instead of ending, has been frustratingly persistent.

Yet this year has easily been one of the best of my life. And this, not in spite of the disappointment and disruption, but because of it. Now I feel immunized against life’s bitter flavor, or at least toughened against it, since I have come to terms with impermanence. By this I do not mean that I have become embittered and fatalistic; rather, I have learned to enjoy myself more, to drink life’s pleasures to the dregs, to take the cash and let the credit go. Endings will do that; and what has this year been but a series of endings?

The basic theme of this year’s reading has been practice. I have endeavored, as far as I could, to read things that applied directly to my day-to-day life. This endeavor has taken many forms. One has been to read about Spain, her history, her people, and her culture, and this has been one of my most intellectually rewarding projects. Another was a flirtation with spiritual practices, during which I sampled Christian prayer and Hindu meditation, and became a daily meditator. This emphasis on practice even influenced my reading of fiction, leading me to focus on the moral lessons that could be learned from novels.

The mirror-image of this focus on finding the practical in my reading was finding the stories in my actions. This took the form of travel writing. I traveled like mad this year, dragging myself through dozens of cities, climbing walls, ransacking castles, profaning cathedrals with my presence, sampling strange dishes, trying to find a wink of sleep on buses, trains, and planes, and walking, walking, always walking, through fields and meadows, down dark alleys and cobblestone streets, and after each trip I tried to write something about what I did. I am not especially proud of this writing. But the very act of writing was a form of meditation, when I put my memories into order and reflected on what I saw. And just as in book reviewing, this retrospective travel writing allowed me to appreciate my travels more keenly. Indeed, I think travel writing is much like book reviewing, each city a different volume in the world’s library.

The biggest event in my reading and writing life, however, has been learning Spanish. Although very far from fluent, and still bumbling and confused much of the time, I have managed to learn enough Spanish to read at a high level. True, this reading is painful, slow, and difficult, but every day it gets easier, and some of the best books I’ve read this year have been in my new language.

There has been another result of living in Spain. Because of the abundance of beautiful monuments and museums, and perhaps the clearer sunlight and unclouded skies of Madrid, I have belatedly developed an appreciation of visual art. Before this year, I derived very little pleasure from paintings, sculptures, and architecture; but this year I have been moved and shaken to the core by what I have seen.

In that spirit, I will leave you with an image with which I began 2016. Last January I visited Granada to see the Alhambra. On a sunny but chilly day, I stood in the gardens of the Generalife and looked out across the hill at the Moorish palace. The Alhambra is the flower of an entire civilization, the product of a people who built up their knowledge year by year, slowly accumulating sophistication and resources until, in their hour of decadence, they could leave that enchanted place as a monument. Those people are now gone, their civilization vanished; and one day, hopefully far in the future, the Alhambra will crumble too.

I thought about this as I looked at the decaying walls, crowded on the hillside, slowly succumbing to the tooth of time, and felt melancholy in the winter breeze. How tragic, I thought, that nothing lasts. But now I don’t think of this as tragic. I think it is the very principle of beauty.

Thanks to all of you for being a part of this terrible and wonderful year. I look forward to the next one.

View all my reviews

Quotes & Commentary #21: Dostoyevsky

Quotes & Commentary #21: Dostoyevsky

In fact, I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As part of my job as a professional American (being an English teacher in Spain is little more than being a professional American), I had to give a presentation on thanksgiving for my class.

Thanksgiving is really the quintessential American holiday. We watch American football—our defining sport, which involves taking land by force. We watch the Macy’s Parade—which consists of giant cartoons floating above our heads, a combination of our love of pop culture and excessive size. And finally we eat, and eat and eat. And then, the next day, we shop. No series of activities could more perfectly encapsulate the American identity.

The most conspicuous absence from this list of activities is being thankful. Theoretically, at least, we all know we’re supposed to be thankful; but we have no specific ritual of thanksgiving. In my classes, I tried to get my students to say one thing they’re thankful for. Some were very forthcoming, but most were extremely shy.

Why are people shy about thanking others? Being thankful is difficult because it requires vulnerability. To thank someone sincerely is to acknowledge a debt—not just a material but an emotional debt—a debt that perhaps cannot be repaid. To seriously communicate this gratitude requires that you let down your guard, something easier said than done.

For whatever reason, most of us go through life pretending that we are self-sufficient. We don’t like to think we owe anything to anybody. Instead, like Satan in Paradise Lost, we like to pretend that we are self-generated, self-sufficient, self-caused:

“I disdained subjection, and thought one step higher / Would set me highest, and in a moment quit / The debt immense of endless gratitude, / So burdensome still paying, still to owe; / Forgetful what from him I still received.”

Ingratitude is Satan’s principal sin. He does not want to live a life of gratitude, constantly and eternally singing a hosanna to God. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that he owes anything to anybody, not even the creator of the universe.

It must be admitted that owing a debt can be humiliating and crushing. Here I am reminded of the potlatch, a ritualized form of combat practiced by the natives of the Northwest Coast of Canada. During a potlatch, the headmen from competing groups would do symbolic battle by giving each other ostentatious gifts. The loser would be the man who received more than he could reciprocate.

This sounds bizarre, but consider: have you ever received a gift from somebody you’re not very fond of? I have, and I know that receiving gifts can engender bitterness as well as gratefulness. Being the recipient of a gift puts you under the giver’s power; and few people are grateful to be under somebody else’s power.

But is this necessarily true? Is gift giving necessarily aggressive? John Milton’s Satan goes on to say “And [I] understood not that a grateful mind / By owing owes not, but still pays, at once / Indebted and discharged.”

Here Satan realizes what many people forget. Being thankful is not a sign of weakness—although often appears so to the egotistical mind—but a sign of strength. It is a sign of strength because it requires sincerity, and being sincere always involved being vulnerable, letting your guard down. Being grateful means dispensing with the illusion that you’re self-caused and self-sufficient, and revealing your weaknesses to the world. Nothing requires more strength than showing weakness.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to personally thank the universe and everyone in it. I’m luckier than I could ever put into words.

Quotes & Commentary #20: Locke

Quotes & Commentary #20: Locke

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.

—John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

This passage is one of the most famous formulation of the tabula rasa account of the human mind. Tabula rasa is Latin for “blank slate,” which is the traditional metaphor used to explain the theory. At birth, the mind is like a blank chalk board, devoid of writing; our experience is the hand that writes upon us; and our knowledge is the end result.

John Locke held that there was nothing in the mind that did not originate in the senses. Yes, we could have abstract ideas, like our notion of a triangle; but these ideas were simply generalizations from individual triangles that we have experienced through our eyes. Thus all knowledge, however general, abstract, or theoretical, was just a summary of our experience.

In Locke’s own lifetime, this idea was contested by Leibniz, who wrote an entire book-length response to Locke’s Essay, arguing that the mind needed certain innate principles in order to acquire knowledge. And this puzzle—the respective roles of experience, sense data, induction, deduction, and abstraction in our knowledge of the world—forms the basis of Kant’s magnificent Critique of Pure Reason.

Locke was a philosopher, and thus his Essay is largely concerned with epistemology—the nature, limit, and acquisition of knowledge. Yet this debate—empiricism versus rationalism, the “blank slate” versus “innate ideas”—is often reframed, in today’s world, as a scientific controversy.

The most famous example of this that I’m aware of is the controversy in linguistics. How much structure must we posit in the human brain in order to account for language acquisition? These classic answer to this question was given by Chomsky. He argued that, contrary to Locke, we can’t imagine the brain at birth as a blank slate, but must assume an enormous amount of complex machinery.

Several arguments led him to this conclusion, the most famous of which was the “poverty of input.” This is the observation that, without some kinds of basic assumptions guiding their derivation, children are not exposed to nearly enough examples of language in order to derive the correct grammatical form. For the human infant trying to guess the meaning of an unknown sentence, there are an enormous number of logical possibilities. If the language learner had to eliminate each one of these possibilities one by one, then it would take far too much time. Thus some in-built, innate schema must allow them to guess intelligently.

Not only that, but for the learner attempting to divine the deep structure from the surface structure, they must contend with the fact that the surface structure of a language is often misleading. Consider these two sentences: (A) “I expected the doctor to examine John,” and (B) “I persuaded the doctor to examine John.” Now let’s say we transform the first sentence into the passive voice: “I expected John to be examined by the doctor.” Notice that the meaning of this sentence is identical with the earlier sentence.

Suppose the learner, reasoning by analogy, transformed sentence (B) the same way, resulting in “I persuaded John to be examined by the doctor.” Now notice that the meaning of this new sentence is different from the first one. In the active voice the doctor is being persuaded, and in the passive voice John is. And this, despite undergoing what, superficially at least, appears to be the same transformation as sentence (A). Clearly, there is more to the grammar than meets the eye.

From all this, Chomsky concludes that there must be a “Universal Grammar,” which is a schema in the brain that determines which types of grammatical rules are permissible. Put more simply, Universal Grammar is something that allows learners to guess intelligently, rather than randomly, about the structure of language. Clearly such a schema would be a lot of information to be born with. In this, Chomsky resembles Leibniz and Kant far more than Locke and Hume.

But you don’t really need any of Chomsky’s arguments to realize that there must be some innate organization in our brains that allow us to learn language. After all, almost every person learns a language, while dogs and cats, who also have brains, and who are exposed to about as much language, never pull it off. Computers are better at many cognitive tasks than humans; and yet a few minutes with Google Translate is enough to convince anyone that computers haven’t quite gotten the hang of language. Clearly there is something special about the human brain that allows us to acquire language, while cats and computers struggle.

Thus we are left with several interesting questions. First, how much information and organization does the human brain possess at birth? How much of this information consists of general learning strategies, and how much is specific to language acquisition? And what exactly does this information consist of? Chomsky’s model of Universal Grammar, for example, was an attempt to answer this last question, by proposing a set of conditions that all languages must abide by. But his model has of late been criticized, first, for positing too much organization, and second, for failing to account for the structure of certain rare languages.

I am not a linguist, and thus I cannot hope to solve this controversy, or even make an interesting contribution to it. I only want to point out that this debate, although new in form, harks all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato thought all knowledge was buried in the mind, and all philosophers had to do was uncover it; and Aristotle, like Locke, thought that knowledge derived from the senses. It is obvious to everyone by now that either extreme must be wrong. But apparently 2,500 years hasn’t been enough time for us to come to a conclusion.