HinesSight

Oh, no! Just learned that yuppies were baby boomers. I'm crushed.

Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation.

And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am.

What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned the hugely annoying Young Urban Professional who worshipped money and conspicuous consumption. That was so not me or my hippie generation. We danced to the different drummer of liberal causes, caring for the planet, equality for all. 

Imagine my shock, then, when I read "What Happened to the Yuppie" by Louis Menand in the July 27, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. (Title in online edition is "When Yuppies Ruled.") This is a book review of Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppie: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.

In the first part of the article I came across some facts that undermined my confidence that I was part of a generation of hippies.

The demographic that the term was intended to pick out—professionals under forty living in cities—was fairly small in 1984, something like 1.2 million people. But there were not a lot of bona-fide hippies in the nineteen-sixties, either.

In 1967, only one per cent of college students said that they had tried LSD, and in 1969 Newsweek estimated that there were ten thousand people living in communes—probably a lowball estimate, but, whatever the number, it was not huge, and communes tend to have a short life span.

Hippies and yuppies signified not as political constituencies but as social types. A social type stands for something that people think is important to identify either with or against. As with the Swiftie. There are people who really want to be Swifties, and there are people who can’t believe that there are people who really want to be Swifties.

But, no matter how little you care about Swifties, you have to have an opinion. Even professing indifference is an opinion. And your view on Swifties says something about you. You’re the kind of person who says whatever it was you just said about Swifties—or yuppies or hippies. It all hangs together.

Okay, that left most of my hippie self-image intact. Sure, most people in my generation didn't identify as hippies, but at least we were highly sympathetic toward the elevated values of hippies -- which were ever so different from the crass materialism of the yuppies.

However, reading onward in the article, I learned something highly disturbing: the yuppies that I looked down upon were baby boomers, my generation. And they didn't change from being hippies to yuppies; they had yuppie-dom in them all along. Yikes! I felt self-image ground crumbling beneath my feet.

McGrath is insistent, even a little overinsistent, on making sense of the yuppies as baby boomers. The idea is that, having been dissidents and countercultural idealists in the nineteen-sixties, the boomers flipped in the nineteen-eighties to embrace capitalism and materialism.

McGrath presents this less as a sellout than as a colorful new chapter in the history of postwar America as the pig passes through the python.

But, once you do the math, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The baby boom began in July, 1946, and ended in December, 1964—representing approximately seventy-six million people. Almost none of those people were actively involved in the political, social, or cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties. They were much too young.

It’s the difference between listening to the Beatles and being the Beatles. Most of the baby boomers had nothing to do with the civil-rights movement or the launch of the women’s-liberation movement, and only a few who were born before 1950 had much to do with the antiwar movement.

When the first U.S. combat troops were deployed to Vietnam, in 1965, the oldest baby boomers were nineteen, and still in college. The youngest were not yet one, and teething.

On the other hand, the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers. The yuppie, not the hippie, is the baby boom’s contribution to postwar American social history.

Sigh... This is probably true. I hadn't thought much before about the leaders of the 60's social change movements being considerably older than us baby boomers, even those like me who were at the leading edge of the baby boom generation.

I always thought that we were revolutionary hippies. But the article argues that we're better thought of as traditionalist yuppies. Best I can come up with is that my generation is a mixture of each. I'm good at wishful thinking. 

I don't believe in free will. Here's why.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will.

This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion.

I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

To give you a feel for his general view of free will, here's an eight-minute interview featuring Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery.

I was worried that my passion for this subject wouldn't be shared by other members of the discussion group. I was wrong. We had a really interesting discussion of free will in which some people agreed with me that we don't possess it, and others presented reasons why they think we do.

Since I'm writing this blog post, not them, I'm going to focus on briefly relating some of my arguments for why free will doesn't exist. These aren't original, obviously. They flow from the books I've read by people arguing that free will is an illusion.

(1) Humans are part of the natural world. We are animals. Animals with powerful brains, to be sure, but animals. If a grizzly bear attacks someone, we don't consider that the bear had the free will to do otherwise. We just say, it was doing what bears do. So what makes us think that we stand apart from the natural world by possessing some sort of free will magic in our brain?

(2) The core argument against free will is simple. Everything about us, and the rest of the world, is determined. That's why Sapolsky's book has that title, Determined. Sure, we make choices. So do bears. And sea slugs. Those choices, those intentions, don't spring out of nowhere. They arise out of the goings-on in our brain, which is amazingly complex, yet still determined by causes and effects that range from a few seconds ago, to the moment of our birth, and even beyond given cultural and genetic influences on us.

(3) Recall something you've done that you regret. That's easy for me. Probably is for you also. We all have regrets. Often, or usually, that regret is made more painful by believing that we could have acted differently. But consider this. If every atom in your brain and outside world were in exactly the same condition as it was when you acted the first time, you'd do exactly what you did again. No doubt about it. Free will assumes that we have a choice to act differently. That can't be true if nothing has changed from when we acted initially.

(4) But as Sapolsky says in the video above, change does happen. All the time. Life and our world as a whole is nothing but change. People change. Animals change. Rocks change. Plants change. Free will, since it doesn't exist, can't change anything. Yet circumstances change. Every thought we have, every feeling we have, every action we take, all that changes us. So there's no fatalism involved in giving up a belief in free will. In fact, not believing in free will opens us to the reality that change can occur for countless reasons. Life is a never-ending series of surprises caused by determinism.

(5) Believing in free will fosters judgmentalism. We see someone in an unfortunate situation and think, "It's their fault." Giving up a belief in free will leads to a realization that, as strange as this may sound, no one is deserving of praise or blame. They're just doing what was determined that they do. So are we. Everybody is. Sure, society is justified in imprisoning dangerous people. But not to punish them. To protect others. And to change the prisoner for the better, if this is possible.

(6) There's no reason to think that people would go wild and crazy if they didn't believe in free will. Animals don't believe in free will, yet a wolf pack, herd of deer, school of fish, or flock of birds do just fine without such a belief. Us human animals have a strong sense of community and social cohesion. We generally want to get along with our fellow humans, notwithstanding our political, religious, and other sorts of divisions. Morality flows from a much deeper source than free will. It is embedded in our being thanks to evolution.

(7) Lastly, here's an excerpt from a post I wrote for my Church of the Churchless blog about Sapolsky's book. I loved this quotation from Determined. 

Finally, any contemporary view of determinism must accommodate a profoundly important point, one that dominates the second half of the book -- despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change. And that doesn't counter this being a deterministic world without free will. In fact, the science of change strengthens this conclusion; this will come in chapter 12.

With those issues in mind, time to see the version of determinism that this book builds on. 

Imagine a university graduation ceremony. Almost always moving, despite the platitudes, the boilerplate, the kitsch. The happiness, the pride. The families whose sacrifices now all seem worth it. The graduates who were the first in their family to finish high school. The ones whose immigrant parents sit there glowing, their saris, dashikis, barongs broadcasting that their pride in the present isn't at the cost of pride in their past.

And then you notice someone. Amid the family clusters post ceremony, the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair, the bursts of hugs and laughter, you see the person way in the back, the person who is part of the grounds crew, collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event.

Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate's genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that.

Get the graduate's childhood as well -- one filled with, say, piano lessons and family game nights, instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let's go all the way so that, in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate's past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's past.

Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism. 

AND WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because we all know that the graduate and the garbage collector would switch places. And because, nevertheless, we rarely reflect on that sort of fact; we congratulate the graduate on all she's accomplished and move out of the way of the garbage guy without glancing at him.

 

Caste is a marvelous book about our racial divisions

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn't heard of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, until I read a fairly recent TIME cover story by Wilkerson that provided an overview of Caste.

Somehow I'd missed the publication of the book in 2020. Making up for lost time, I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon. It took me a while to finish Caste.

For even though Wilkerson is a terrific writer with a smooth style that makes reading her a pleasure, her subject matter isn't cheery. So I'd read a short chapter on most days, rather than rushing through her book.

What blew me away in her TIME essay was the brilliant notion that caste, not prejudice, is a better way to understand the 400 year history of discrimination against African Americans in this country. 

Wilkerson makes her case for caste by not only describing how this means of maintaining power by a dominant class has been used in the United States, but also how caste has enforced hierarchies in India (no big surprise) and Nazi Germany.

This book opened my eyes to how caste explains a lot about social power dynamics that go beyond racial discrimination. For example, in a concluding chapter she speaks about a subject dear to my aging heart, how old people are treated in our country.

The challenge for our era is not merely the social construct of black and white but seeing through the many layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have. Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough.

They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death. A caste system spares no one. 

I'm not capable of doing justice to the book by attempting to summarize it. Others have done that hugely better than I could. Reading Caste, of course, is the #1 way to understand what Wilkerson has to say.

Here's a couple of lesser ways I found by some Googling: a NPR story, 'Caste' Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation is in Treatment of Black Americans, and a 6-minute PBS NewsHour episode on You Tube.

The book contains a lot that is disturbing. But we Americans need to be disturbed by how our homegrown caste system has caused so much pain and suffering and lost opportunity. One of Wilkerson's favorite metaphors, which I've heard her use on several interviews, is of an old house.

Old houses have many problems. She speaks from experience, being the owner of one. The roof may leak. The basement may have standing water. The electrical system may be outmoded. The porch may be rotting.

If a building inspector takes a look at the house and lists what's wrong with it, this doesn't mean that the current owner was responsible for the problems. But the problems are still problems. They don't go away just because someone says "I didn't cause them."

Likewise, those who want us to ignore the problems of caste and racial discrimination in this country -- I'm thinking Ron DeSantis and many other Republicans -- are like a homeowner who turns a blind eye to what's wrong with their house. We don't need to blame ourselves for the past. However, we have to take responsibility for fixing what's wrong with the United States that flows from our history.

Wilkerson ends up on a positive note. Here's how her book ends.

In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying aerobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute -- all of these should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe.

We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.

A world without caste would set everyone free.

My unusual joy in reading a big thick novel, The Magus

A few days ago I felt the satisfaction of climbing a large mountain. Exhausted. Exhilarated. Satisfied. Except my mountain was a big thick book, The Magus by John Fowles.

It isn't that I'm unacquainted with big thick books. They're just usually non-fiction. It'd been a long time since I'd tackled a literary novel like this one.

I'm not sure how The Magus ended up on a shelf where my unread books resided. I recall hearing that it was a classic thriller of sorts. This is the Amazon description.

Widely considered John Fowles's masterpiece, The Magus is "a dynamo of suspense and horror...a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul....Read it in one sitting if possible-but read it" (New York Times).
A young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. There, his friendship with a reclusive millionaire evolves into a mysterious -- and deadly -- game of violence, seduction, and betrayal. As he is drawn deeper into the trickster's psychological traps, Nicholas finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish past from present, fantasy from reality. He becomes a desperate man fighting for his sanity and his very survival. John Fowles expertly unfolds a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature.

Quite a few months ago I elevated The Magus to a row of books that I read every morning before I meditate. I'd only read a few pages a day from it, doing the exact opposite of what the New York Times recommended above: Read it in one sitting if possible.

Wow. I'm a fast reader. But it's hard to imagine reading the 656 pages of The Magus in one sitting, nor does this seem desirable. 

I savored the book. From the first pages, I highlighted passages that stuck me as particularly well-written or profound. These were the passages marked in yellow on the initial two pages.

I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.

I had long before made the discovery that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed. My father was through being the right age at the right time rather than through any great professional talent, a brigadier; and my mother was the very model of a would-be major-general's wife. That is, she never argued with him and always behaved as if he were listening in the next room, even when he was thousands of miles away.

Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility.

During my last years at school I realized that what was really wrong with my parents was that they had nothing but a blanket contempt for the sort of life I wanted to lead.

There were things, a certain emotional gentleness in my mother, an occasional euphoric jolliness in my father, I could have borne more of; but always I liked in them the things they didn't want to be liked for.

I went to Oxford in 1948. In my second year at Magdalen, soon after a long vacation during which I hardly saw my parents, my father had to fly out to India. He took my mother with him. Their plane crashed, a high-octane pyre, in a thunderstorm some forty miles east of Karachi. After the first shock I felt an almost immediate sense of relief, of freedom. My only other close relation, my mother's brother, farmed in Rhodesia, so I now had no family to trammel what I regarded as my real self. I may have been weak in filial charity, but I was strong on the discipline in vogue. 

Over and over as I read The Magus, almost on every page, I'd picture John Fowles tossing off sentences with seeming ease that I couldn't write in a thousand years of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

Maybe it wasn't that easy for Fowles. But I suspect it was. That led me to feel a curious combination of literary joy and envy as I made my way slowly through the book. I was hooked on the story, a marvelously creative plot with fascinating characters. 

And I badly wanted to be able to write even a semblance of the evocative passages that my highlighter displayed in yellow. Eventually, though, I realized that what Fowles possessed as a novelist, and I didn't, and never would, wasn't so much an exceptional ability to write, but an exceptional ability to understand people and human relationships.

Here's some excerpts from an early chapter that shows what I mean.

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car -- not so common among undergraduates in those days -- and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

I found my sexual success and the apparently ephemeral nature of love equally pleasing. It was like being good at golf, but despising the game.

At times I'd say to myself, "Man, The Magus would make a really great Netflix streaming series." I'd say this because Fowles was so adept at creating characters in his novel who were complex, flawed, and hugely interesting -- just what I look for in my TV watching.

I would like them not because they were likable. Few, if any were. But Fowles allowed me to get to know them as deeply as I've ever known another person, as strange as that may sound. Meaning, a skilled novelist is able to reveal what is in a character's mind more clearly than real people are able to do, or at least choose to do.

It was quite an adventure, reading The Magus over many months. I'd forgotten what a pleasure a marvelously written literary novel can be. Thanks for reminding me, John Fowles.

Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series is so good, I'm marrying it

At the (very real) risk of sounding like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, I'm announcing some Breaking News, Happening Now.

After my many years of passionate dalliances with other writers of spy novels -- notably the Gray Man and Mitch Rapp series -- I've decided to commit to a literary marriage to Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series.

I discovered Silva in 2018 after making the mistake of buying the book Bill Clinton wrote with novelist James Patterson, "The President Is Missing." 

The book was bad. Not the worst I've ever read, but poorly written with shallow characters. After buying it, I read a review in The New Yorker that said Clinton should have chosen Daniel Silva as his collaborator rather than Patterson.

That led me to purchase one of Silva's books in his Gabriel Allon series.

Right away I was hooked. Compared to other writers in the highly-skilled-spy genre, Silva has a rare ability to captivate the reader with thrilling action and finely honed characters who are both wonderfully human and exceptionally talented.

Gabriel Allon is a master Israeli spy who also is one of the world's top art restorers. Brilliant combo!

Allon is the guy you want if, as in the book I'm reading now, you're trying to save the honest wife of a Russian illicit arms dealer who has been captured by the modern equivalent of the KGB and you need someone who can calmly shoot three guards in the head even though they only have sight in one eye due to being repeatedly punched in the other eye by a Russian thug.

He's also the guy you want if you've got a precious painting that needs restoring to its original condition and only the best restorer will do.

Allon is thoroughly committed to defending Israel against its enemies. But I like how Silva often has Allon engage in conversations with Palestinians who he has to combat, yet have good reasons for why they're battling Israel. 

That sort of nuance typically is missing from other spy novels -- which I enjoy for the thrilling plot and action, yet disappoint me because Daniel Silva's writing is so superior.

I've read about half of the 20, I think it is, books in the Gabriel Allon series. It's my bedtime reading, what I read just before I turn the light out. Since I'm usually sleepy, my habit is just to read four pages or so.

Another reason I do this is to make the Gabriel Allon books last longer, since I enjoy them so much. However, the older I get (I'm 73), the more I worry that at the rate I'm going, I could die before I finish all of the series.

Hence, my decision to commit to reading a Gabriel Allon book not only at bedtime, but during my nightly hot bath where I've been reading the Mitch Rapp series by Vince Flynn and his writing successor, Kyle Mills, who took over the series after Flynn died.

Perhaps I'll change my mind. I tend to be fickle when it comes to my reading habits. Maybe the later Gabriel Allon books won't be as good as the ones I've read so far. I doubt it, though. 

Silva is such a skilled writer, the chance of him writing a lousy Gabriel Allon book seems slim. "The Cellist" was released in 2021. Here's part of an interview with Silva that shows how seriously he takes his craft.

Lots of books and movies use the “torn from the headlines” tag line. It’s usually just PR, but, in this case, it’s a literal description of The Cellist. 

It is. I was working on the book, and I got a call from my wife. She said, “Turn on the TV.” I did, and I saw our capital being overrun. I write about national security issues, and I’m not an intelligence officer but I have to think like one when I’m writing. I have to imagine current and future threats to our country. Twenty years after 9/11, and all the trillions of dollars spent to make our homeland safe, to see our capital overrun by our own people was really awful. I knew I had to write about it.

How did you work it in?

 It wasn’t easy. I had to rewrite most of the book in six weeks.

"Woke Racism" is a great book

Today I finished reading John McWhorter's terrific book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

McWhorter is black. He teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He's appalled at the excessive wokeness of both blacks and whites who inhabit the far left side of the political spectrum and view race relations through a biased perspective.

Many people will agree with what he writes in Woke Racism. I do. Others will disagree with him. That's fine also. My goal is sharing these excerpts from the book is to encourage people to buy the book and read it.

McWhorter makes a strong case for woke racism being a serious problem. He writes well in an engaging fashion. Enjoy these passages, understanding that a mere 1,000 words out of the entire book doesn't do justice to McWhorter's fuller arguments that are encapsulated below.

Author and essayist Joseph Bottum has found the proper term, and I will adopt it here. We will term these people the Elect.

They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons -- empathic learning, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.

"The Elect" is also good in implying a certain smugness, which, sadly, is an accurate depiction.

...One response to a book like this might be to own that Electism is a religion. You might consider it a better one than, say, believing that God's son died for our sins and was reborn, waiting to envelope you in his eternal grace if you believe in him.

This new religion is about countering racism. Who could be against that?

But we must ask whether the Elect approach actually shows signs of making any difference in the lives of black people, other than by making educated white people infantilize them. While purportedly "dismantling racist structures," the Elect religion is actually harming the people living in those structures.

It is a terrifyingly damaging business. Here is how Elect ideology does not genuinely care about the welfare of black people.

You are to turn a blind eye to black kids getting jumped by other ones in school.

You are to turn a blind eye to black undergraduates cast into schools where they are in over their heads, and into law schools incapable of adjusting to their level of preparation in a way that will allow them to pass the bar exam.

You are to turn a blind eye to the willful dimness of condemning dead people for moral lapses normal in their time, as if they were still alive.

You are to turn a blind eye to the folly in the idea of black "identity" as all about what whites think rather than about what black people themselves think.

You are to turn a blind eye to lapses in black intellectuals' work, because black people lack white privilege.

You are to turn a blind eye to the fact that social history is complex, and instead pretend that those who tell you that all racial discrepancies are a result of racism are evidencing brilliance.

You are to turn a blind eye to innocent children taught to think in these ways practically before they can hold a pencil.

...Electism calls for everyone who isn't white to found their primary sense of self on not being white and knowing whites don't quite "get" me. 

Electism forbids us non-whites from being individual selves, out of an idea that white racism is so onerous that our self-definition must be fashioned against it, despite that this vastly exaggerates the role of racism in most black lives -- including that police brutality, while appalling, is just one of thousands of types of experiences one goes through from cradle to grave, if at all.

Your Elect friend may claim that I am distorting what they believe. Ask them to specify just how it does so -- and the word-salad answer they craft while looking over your shoulder will show you that I am not.

...Let's pull the curtain back. Is the reason black kids often think of school as white that white people today don't like them, or that the system is somehow set against black kids learning? No. That analysis makes no sense, period.

Only a heedless, numb kind of fealty, a quiet refusal to engage the actual individuals we are talking about, would insist that "racism" is why a black kid, decades after 1966, gives a black nerd trouble for studying hard.

Racism sparked this problem originally, to be sure, but the solution today cannot be to wave a magic wand and "eliminate racism," because the teachers who exerted racism upon black kids three generations ago are now mostly dead.

...To be Elect is to insist that unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity, which is false. The misimpression misdirects our efforts at change, by inculcating in us a blindness to how a society actually operates. The insistence on this mantra makes us dumb.

...On racism, Elect philosophy teaches black people that cries of weakness are a form of strength. It teaches us that in the richness of this thing called life, the most interesting thing about you is that the ruling class doesn't like you enough.

It teaches us that to insist that black people can achieve under less than perfect conditions is ignorant slander. It teaches us that we are the first people in the history of the species for whom it is a form of heroism to embrace the slogan "Yes, we can't!"

Elect philosophy is, in all importance, a form of racism in itself. Black America has met nothing so disempowering -- including the cops -- since Jim Crow.

...Nota bene: Don't get sidetracked by that person on the other side of the dinner table who says that the Elect are not a real threat compared with overtly racist right-wing extremists. Revolutions are always "messy," one hears, with the implication that in the grand scheme of things, the Elect's current reign is just a matter of the left working out some kinks.

Few people settling for this view would call the alt-right just "messy," and my simple answer is: Imagine the Elect mob coming after you.

If your emotion amid the "mess" of that would be terror, then it's a conclusive demonstration that this is something we need to pay serious attention to. Terror becomes a good thing neither when it comes from the left nor even when it comes from black people. 

Reason must prevail. This is the heart of the Enlightenment. The abolitionists knew it; Civil Rights leaders knew it; today's liberals know it. Only the Elect propose that rationality, where it discomfits them, is mere "whiteness."

It is neither progress nor messy for people to lose their jobs and reputations for not putting the overturning of power differentials at the very core of every single thing they ever do, express, or feel.

It is neither progress nor messy for black people to be taught that our main value is not as individuals, but in how articulately we play victim in order to help whites feel good about themselves in feeling guilty about it.

The Elect is not merely some mess. The Elect is a scourge and must be treated as such.

Five reasons to buy Kelly Williams Brown's new book

I buy and read lots of books. So many, I deserve a bookaholic diagnosis.

But at first I had some reservations about getting a new book by Kelly Williams Brown, the Salem author who wrote Adulting (about becoming a grown-up) and Gracious (a modern etiquette book of sorts).

Even though I admired the writing Brown did when she was a Statesman Journal reporter, I figured that regarding Adulting, I was already so grown-up I have one foot in the grave, and regarding Gracious, I'm at the age when you just feel entitled to act however you damn well please -- because of that one foot in the grave thing.

Easy Crafts for the Insane, though, appealed to me instantly.

Not because I have even a slight interest in crafts. Because I have considerable experience with mental illness. (The book's subtitle is A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things.)

Aside from being raised by an alcoholic mother who drove me crazy once I reached my teen years, and struggling with various anxieties for much of my life, I was diagnosed with a serious depression about four years ago. 

However, you can be perfectly mentally healthy and still hugely enjoy Easy Crafts for the Insane, even if you couldn't care less about crafts. 

Here's five reasons why.

(1) Brown is an amazing writer. There are many sentences in this book that I would die for, if I didn't already have one foot in the grave. (Have I mentioned that before?) Like, "After all, I was a 31-year-old crone wandering through the world, my very footsteps turning fertile soul to ash. My uterus, I assumed, had dried up like a tumbleweed and blown away; surely it was rolling through Montana by now." I'm so envious that she can toss out lines like that, because I could write for a million years and never say something so perfectly.

(2) Honesty bursts on every page. No doubt some of the stories in this book are embellished to some extent. Or, a large extent. Doesn't matter. What matters is that Brown unfailingly comes across as being honest about the ups and downs in her life that ended up with her being admitted to a mental hospital after attempting suicide. She has an amazing ability to see herself and others clearly, though for all of us, in retrospect most things look less murky than they did in real time.

(3) Great insights into women. I've been married for 49 years, which would qualify me for a Golden Anniversary soon aside from the minor detail of needing to combine years spent in two marriages (18 + 31). Even so, women are still a mystery to me. That's why I enjoyed the "girl talk" in the book as Brown describes her relationships with female friends. It was a treat to feel like an eavesdropper on what women talk about when men aren't around. 

(4) Brown pulls no punches. Yes, she says that the names of people have been changed to protect the innocent. Along with the guilty. Yet I liked how she didn't change the names of two local hospitals. "So I will say this again, as everyone had always said it to me: If you are in Salem and you get injured, go to Silverton Hospital. The 30-minute drive is worth it!" Read the book and you'll learn why she had a good reason to say this.

(5) It's a book like no other. OK, I really am not qualified to make this claim, since I neither read memoirs, nor craft books. However, I'm confident that no one has written a book that simultaneously is... highly humorous, deeply moving, filled with step-by-step instructions to make various crafts, and carries the reader through the ups and downs of a woman's life in a gripping fashion.

During my morning reading time, usually I read from two or three books. But as soon as I started Easy Crafts for the Insane, this was the only book I wanted to read.

It was like Kelly Williams Brown opened up the top of her head and let me rummage through her mind, exploring the nooks and crannies of a creative psyche that was capable of great accomplishments and equally great downfalls. 

This was a gift from Brown that I'm deeply grateful for. Her book has helped me to take my own troubles less seriously. Or at least, to be better able to smile some through my tears even if I'm not able to laugh them away.

My mother lives on in the back of my books

OK, let me make this clear right off the bat.

Notwithstanding the title of this blog post, I don't believe my mother exists as an ethereal presence in my books -- even though she also was a huge book lover, so if she had a choice of an afterlife, this notion would have appealed to her.

My mother has been dead and gone since 1985. However, in a very real sense she does indeed live on in the back of my books. I'll explain.

Carolyn Lewis Hines

My mother was fond of writing notes in the back of books. After she died, most of her books were donated to the Three Rivers, California library. (She lived in Three Rivers for the last thirty years of her life, loving the view of the Sierra Nevada mountains from the large picture windows in our house.)

This is a photo of the back page from one of the few books of hers that I kept for myself, P.D. Ouspensky's "The Fourth Way." My mother didn't believe in God, but she was a spiritual seeker of sorts, at least in the sense of pursuing self-development.

She wrote the notes in pencil, a charming reflection of a simpler time. Her name and "1957" is written in the front of the book, so that must have been when she bought it.

For a long time I used small post-it notes to mark noteworthy pages in non-fiction books, after post-it notes were invented, naturally. I'd also use a pen to underline significant passages.

When highlighters came along, I switched to those and dumped the pen. It wasn't until I was in my forties, and maybe even older, that I started writing notes in the back of my books.

Strangely, it didn't dawn on me right away that this was something my mother had done. The idea just popped into my head one day to pen in a page number and the topic on that page that I viewed as particularly interesting.

If other pages discussed the same topic, I'd add in those page numbers also. Basically I was fashioning my own personal index as I made my way through a book.

Here's an example from a book I've read several times, "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright. (Great book, by the way.) I now use a highlighter to further emphasize back-of-the- book entries I've penned in, along with arrows, underlining, and circles.

What I'm getting at on this Mother's Day 2021 is how our parents live on within us even when we're not consciously thinking about them. 

I don't feel like I need to think about my mother today -- though I am, right now -- because she is such an intimate part of me, there's never any real separation between us.

Carolyn Hines is one half of my genetic heritage. My father, the man she divorced when I was a young child, is the other half.

But since I grew up with my mother, not my jerk of a father who I only saw in person for one hour in my entire life, her influence on me extends beyond the 50% or so of personality traits that is generally viewed as being inherited, or genetically determined.

Of course, I didn't inherit a specific inclination to write notes in the back of books. We humans don't have a whole lot of instincts. Compared to other animals most of of our behavior is learned, culturally determined. 

So the part of me that is my mother often isn't easy to identify. I don't knock on wood like she did so frequently. I've never stuttered like she did. 

It's more like many of my natural tendencies are hers.

Love of reading. Intellectualism. Admiration of science. Compulsion to write. Political junkie (albeit on the opposite side of the conservative spectrum she favored).

There's something beautiful about realizing that even though my mother is no longer physically alive, she lives on as me in a very real sense. I don't share her specific thoughts and emotions, but to a large extent I share her personality and interests. 

Same goes for my father, though to a lesser degree, since his contribution to my psyche is almost entirely genetic, not experiential. 

I look back at that one hour I spent with him in a Boston hotel room and wonder how that time could have been spent much more intimately than by me thumbing through General Electric manuals. Regret rises up within me when I think, "I blew that one hour with my father."

However, when I see how I've naturally taken up my mother's habit of making notes in the back of books, I realize that there's countless other things I do and am that flow from my mother, and yes, father, in a way that is inseparable from my very being.

I am them. They are me. We are still together. There's no way we can ever be apart. 

The Unwinding of the Miracle -- a marvelous book about cancer and courage

At age 37, Julie Yip-Williams was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, a very rare disease for someone her age. It took me a long time to finish reading the book she wrote about her journey from diagnosis to death, The Unwinding of the Miracle.

I'm not sure why. Maybe because... i have a fear of death; I have my own chronic medical problem, albeit much milder and not fatal;  her blunt honesty was both appealing and appalling, given that I, or anyone, could fall prey to a fatal diagnosis at any time.

At any rate, after I finished the book, it's been sitting on my desk for months, waiting for me to feel the spirit to write about it. Today was the day.

I highly recommend the book. It's a public diary, really, of how Yip-Williams looked upon the ups and downs of her battle against cancer from 2013 to 2018.

In the prologue, she writes:

Hello, welcome.

My name is Julie Yip-Williams. I am grateful and deeply honored that you are here. This story begins at the ending. Which means that if you are here, then I am not. But it's okay.

Here's some excerpts from the book that will give you a feel for how she approached her battle with cancer. She was an amazing woman who lived an amazing life. And was generous enough to leave behind an amazing book.

Being alone reinforced something I had been feeling -- and denying -- for quite some time now. As terrifying as it is, battling cancer is an individual journey, and the individuality of it is what I must come to embrace.

Sure, there are parents, siblings, cousins, friends, lovers, children, co-workers, and many other people who fill our lives, and sometimes their presence and chatter can make us forget that our journey is solely our own to make of as we will. 

But the truth is that we each enter and leave this life alone, that the experience of birth and death and all the living in between is ultimately a solitary one.

********************************

The sense that we ever had control over any of this seems nothing but a mockery now, a cruel illusion. And also, a lesson: we control nothing. 

Well, that's not exactly true. We control how good we are to people. We control how honest we are with ourselves and others. We control the effort we have put into living. We control how we respond to impossible news. And when the time comes, we control the terms of our surrender.

********************************

It is as John Donne wrote in his "no man is an island" meditation: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." 

Yes, I suppose my death will diminish you, but I also understand now that my living and fighting makes you greater than you are. We human are resilient little bugs.

And indeed, anyone who chooses to live and fight and show by example the power of the human spirit that we all share, and its determination to persevere against the brutalities of what life can bring, strengthens us all with a sense of the tremendous potential and fortitude that lie within each of us, a potential that is realized only when truly tested.

So I fight for myself, for my family, for the message that my war against cancer conveys to all of you, to all of humanity, about the incredible strength of which we are all capable. 

And by that same token, I urge all of you who face your own challenges that make you want to fall into the darkness to fight, too, because you, too, are part of humanity, and your fight matters and gives me and others strength when we falter.

********************************

A brave and strong person pulls herself out of the abyss with the help of those who have more strength, hope, and faith than she and goes about the business of living even though she doesn't necessarily want to.

A brave and strong person goes back to doing more research as she tries to figure out what to do next. She does all this knowing that there will be another abyss and many more moments and hours and days of darkness before she succumbs to the inevitable.

********************************

It took me two solid years of living with metastatic cancer to realize an important truth: barring some physical pain or other impediment brought on by cancer or its treatment, it isn't cancer that denies me my dreams; it isn't cancer that would prevent me from going on vacation or buying a new home or doing anything else that I long to do.

Rather, it is a paralyzed mind succumbing to the fear and unpredictability of cancer that would deny me my dreams. In its paralysis, it groups into one category all dreams that are truly gone (such as having another biological child) with dreams that can be reshaped and redefined, or even new dreams that are derivative of a cancer diagnosis.

In its paralysis, the mind cannot form contingency plans; it cannot be brave and bold and forward thinking; it cannot accept what is without running from what will be. 

In one of the many ironies that have come with having an incurable prognosis it is as if by accepting the inevitability of my death from this disease, I have freed myself from that paralysis.

Similarly, I can move forward now with some degree of certainty; I can plan for myself and my family, for as much as I emphasize living in the here and now, living and loving those whom we love by necessity requires some degree of planning, of thinking about what might be, of dreaming for them if not necessarily for ourselves.

I rejoice in my liberation, in my own courage to move forward, in the rebirth of a dream I once thought was forever lost to me.

Live while you live, my friends.

********************************

I am being brutally honest, as part of my commitment to give voice to all those I know who feel as I do, and to depict the dark side of cancer and debunk the overly sweet pink-ribbon facade of positivity and fanciful hope and rah-rah-rah nonsense spewed by cancer patients and others, which I have come to absolutely loathe.

I believe, as I have always believed, that in honesty -- a brutal yet kind and thoughtful honesty -- we ultimately find not vulnerability, shame, and disgrace, but liberation, healing, and wholeness. I hope my family and friends do not take offense at this honesty.

********************************

Usually, as expressive as I am in writing, I have the same compunction to verbally unload my heartaches to those closest to me in life (besides Josh), because I know that for me the process of verbalization is healing. But not now.

I didn't and still don't want to talk to people who have my disease, at least not anyone who is in a better position than I am, and I imagine anyone who is in a worse position doesn't want to talk to me. My self-imposed reclusiveness and isolationism is partly because of the jealousy and the hate.

I cannot imagine anyone saying anything to me that would be remotely helpful or comforting. I don't want to hear about the promise of immunotherapy. I don't want words of sympathy. I don't want sage words of advice about how to live the remainder of my life. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to answer any questions. I don't want to have to be forced to explain anything to anyone.

Whatever explanations I give and whatever information I divulge must be on my terms and at my initiation, not because someone asked or because I was forced into some social interaction.

Perhaps isolation, at least emotionally if not physically, is what happens as you get closer to death, as you understand more powerfully than ever before that this journey to the end is one that must be made absolutely alone. It feels as if whatever comfort there is will be found within, not without, from private conversations with my innermost self and, when I can muster belief, the gods.

********************************

In those moments of utter and complete emotional pain, I wanted the irrational and the impossible. I wanted to travel back in time to warn the little girl and the teenager I once was of her fate so she could change it. I wanted the unknowable; I wanted time to be circular rather than linear; I wanted the afterlife to hold the promise of second and third and fourth chances, the opportunity to live this life again and again and again until I could get it all right, until Josh and I could live out all our dreams together.

But most of all, I wanted to simply live out this life, also an impossibility, it seems. I never pray for myself, because I think to do so is supremely arrogant and selfish.

Why would God -- if there is indeed a God and if he does in fact intervene in our lives --spare my life and not the life of an innocent child who deserves to live more than I? I would never dare to suggest to an almighty being that I am somehow more special than others. 

But in those desperately painful moments, I prayed to a God I'm not sure even exists that I be spared from this cancer. 

********************************

We live every day not in the shadow of greatness and grandeur but within the confines of our small but seemingly enormous lives. It is a natural way to be; after all, we must live our lives.

And then things happen that jerk us out of our complacency and make us feel small and powerless again. But I have learned that in that powerlessness comes truth, and in truth comes a life lived consciously.

When the time comes, I will happily and with a great sign of relief climb into my bed knowing that i will never need to get up again. I will surround myself with family and friends, as my grandmother did.

I will eagerly greet the end of this miracle, and the beginning of another.

Self-publishing, like me? Check out ebookpbook.

I've written four books. Three have been self-published. Or, to use the term Amazon has on my Break Free of Dogma listing, "independently published." 

Last year I praised ebookpbook after this firm ably prepared for just $79 an electronic/Kindle version of a previous book I wrote. See: "If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook."

That book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, cost a lot for the paperback interior and cover design. Wanting to support a local graphic design firm, I paid them $3,000. That may seem like a lot, but it was in line with what book design companies I checked out via Google were estimating for a book like mine.

So with Break Free of Dogma I had the folks at ebookpbook do the interior design. They also made some adjustments to the cover that I fashioned myself courtesy of a Kindle Direct Publishing template. See above.

This is how much ebookpbook charged me: $249. Fifty dollars was for the cover work. Interior formatting and ebook preparation was $199. 

That's amazingly reasonable. You can check out how the interior design looks by heading to the Amazon listing and clicking on "Look Inside."

By the way, there are a few typos in the 85,000 word, 307 page book. I'm responsible for them. I didn't use the ebookpbook copy editing service, figuring I was capable of doing this myself. I just missed several typos and have vowed to be more careful with my next book.

Which I'm planning to have designed by ebookpbook also. Next time I'll probably have them design a custom cover, since most of the books in their "Portfolio" section look more attractive than the cover I created.

In case you're wondering how ebookpbook manages to do such a good job for such little money, the main reason is that they're located in Chennai, India.

But as noted in my first blog praise of this firm, I would never have known this if I hadn't asked Jason Pearce, the person I worked with last year, where he lived -- since he'd reply to my emails at times that indicated a decidedly distant time zone.

With Break Free of Dogma I worked with Vidya, who was equally competent, professional, timely, and organized. The only time her being in India came up was after I sent her this message:

Vidya, I just read a story about the horrible water problems in Chennai, India, and remembered that Jason said he’s lived there for 14 years. Don’t know if you are in Chennai, but if so, I wanted to express my sympathy for whatever problems you and others may be having. Global warming is causing temperature and precipitation extremes, and the world isn’t doing enough to stop carbon pollution. Very sad.

Vidya replied:

Thank you for your concern Brian. I do live in Chennai but fortunately managing with the resources available. Some parts of the city is very bad, especially the poor, who cannot afford to buy water. I live in an apartment here with three other neighbours and buy water of about 12,000 litres every 3-4 days.

It's marvelous that the Internet has made it so easy to communicate with people halfway around the globe. That said, I'm not recommending ebookpbook because they're in India, but because they make it possible for authors to get their book published at a very reasonable price with ease.

Break Free of Dogma consists of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog. I basically copied and pasted content from my blog, and sent ebookpbook a manuscript with minimal formatting. No matter. They fashioned a good-looking book from that material in just a few weeks.

Few authors make much money from their books. I'm certainly not raking in the dough from Break Free of Dogma sales. That book was a labor of love for me, not a personal profit center.

So being able to have ebookpbook fashion books at such a reasonable cost makes independent publishing feasible for authors who aren't willing or able to either design a book themselves, or pay someone thousands of dollars to do this.

And that's a gift to the entire world.

My book is a worst-seller. I'm fine with that.

I've written four books. My advice to people who want to ask an author, "How are your book sales going?," is the same advice I'd give to someone who wants to ask a woman how much she weighs. Don't do it!

Unless the author is Stephen King. Or the woman is Claudia Schiffer.

Five weeks ago I self-published my most recent book, Break Free of Dogma. (Amazon delicately calls it "Independently published," which does have a nicer ring to it.)

Currently my book ranks #2,098,091 on the Amazon best-seller list. 

At first glance that struck me as pretty damn low. But then I remembered that my book is called Break Free of Dogma, not Break Free of Rationalizing. 

So I just Googled the question, how many books does Amazon sell? I came across a wide variety of answers, so picked the highest number I could find: 58,407,108 as of December 1, 2016. There's got to be at least 60,000,000 now, so that puts me in the top 4%.

And if I bought a couple of copies of my own book, hey, I could easily make the top 2 million best-seller list.

My first book was published in 1995, though Amazon shows it in several places as 1765 for some reason. Back then, getting published was even more ego-deflating than it is now. 

I had to mail queries to dozens of potential publishers, then endure the agony of getting replies with painfully brief rejection notices. Such as "Thanks for your submission. It doesn't fit with our publishing plans. Not now. Not ever."

I eventually found a publisher who offered a pitifully low royalty and did next to nothing to promote the book. A spiritual organization I was a part of did buy thousands of copies for resale, but I got exactly zero royalties on all those books. 

Things are much more efficient now, thanks to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. A writer can get a book published quickly at little cost, which means they can see how few copies of their book are being sold much more rapidly. Progress! 

It's always exciting to get that first printed copy of a book in the mail. I eagerly flip through the pages to see if it looks OK. At which point my eye hits upon a typo that went unrecognized even after several close readings of the manuscript. That marks the beginning of reality replacing fantasy.

I always think that people are going to flock to what I've written with as much zeal as I felt while composing the book. That fantasy would make sense if everybody was me. Sadly, they're not. 

A friend recently told me that he heard an author say, "I write books that I'd want to read." That resonates with me. I've been slowly reading through Break Free of Dogma. I love it. It's fashioned out of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06.

I was struggling to make sense of the doubts I had about the spiritual path I'd been an ardent traveler on for 35 years. Re-reading what I wrote about some fifteen years ago made me realize how glad I am that I've made the jump to being spiritually independent.

As I note in the Introduction to my book, currently there have been about 4,600,000 page views on my Church of the Churchless blog. That's a lot. So I've had many readers, albeit ones who paid nothing to read what I've written. 

I don't write for money.

Few authors do. That's why book sales don't matter much to me. Sure, I'd be happier with more copies of my books being bought. But as with most things in life, satisfaction has to come with the doing, not with how others react to what's been done.

A quilter may spend a lot of time making a bedspread that few people ever will see. A jogger runs for the pleasure of exercising, not for the roar of a crowd at a finish line. A parent puts decades into raising a child, uncertain how their progeny will turn out, content simply to have done their parenting best.

I write because I like to write.

If someone enjoys what I've written, so much the better. However, if no one reacts to my literary product -- the number of Amazon reader reviews for Break Free of Dogma now stands at precisely zero -- my heart is mildly disappointed, yet in no way broken.

After all, I can always turn to Vincent Van Gogh. While there's some dispute about how many paintings he sold while alive, a reputable number is... one.

Thus Van Gogh serves as an exemplar for every person whose artistic expression wasn't recognized in their own time. I like to envision my book becoming a best-seller. Sure, it'd be nice to have this happen while I was alive. 

Which is why you should head to Amazon and buy a copy of Break Free of Dogma now, since there's a good chance I'll still be breathing when my sales ranking falls under the 2,000,000 mark, thanks to you and others. 

Just think: every person who buys a copy of my book assures that I've sold more books than Van Gogh sold paintings during his lifetime. I'm not saying that I'll cut off my ear if my book sales don't perk up. But wouldn't you feel bad if that happened? (I'd feel worse, of course.)

UPDATE: As chance would have it, right after publishing this blog post I came across a New York Times piece, "Steal This Book? There's a Price." It says:

Since 2009, when eBooks and book piracy became a phenomenon, income for full-time authors has declined 42 percent, according to Rasenberger, with the median income from writing now so low — just $6,080 a year — that poverty level looks like the mountaintop.

Wow.

Half of full time writers make less than $6,080 a year, while half make more. This makes me feel a bit better. Amazon sends me about $90 a month in royalties, so I'm hauling in a bit over a thousand dollars a year in my decidedly part-time book-writing "career." Which keeps me in occasional non-fat vanilla lattes, but not much else.

Here's another all-too-true excerpt from Richard Conniff's opinion piece.

I tried to explain: Authors need to eat, too, and we get by (or not quite, these days), by showing up at our writing places at a designated time day after day and staying there till we have fretted out our quota of words, to be sent off, after a time, to a publisher, in the hope that, two or three years down the road, a few pennies may come trickling back under the ludicrously grandiose name of “royalties.”

I've written a new book: "Break Free of Dogma"

It feels great to have my new book go live on Amazon. My views about life, spirituality, God, and other Big Ideas have changed a lot since I wrote my previous three books. 

I still agree with much of what I said in them, but some parts make me sort of cringe. Break Free of Dogma is much closer to my current atheist philosophical perspective. 

It consists of 93 posts that I selected from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06. So it was pretty easy to fashion, since I'd already written most of the content. Just needed to add an Introduction, delete links, and make a few edits to the original posts.

I also added a brief comment on each post from my current perspective. That allowed me to feel more comfortable with posts that were considerably more God-friendly than how I look upon spirituality now.

Here's a selfie I took today after Amazon delivered a print copy of the book.

I chose to have a painting of my mother when she was sixteen in the background, with her looking over my shoulder, because she was a huge book lover who would have enjoyed my book, being a spiritual-but-not-religious person herself.

Stuff happens. Things fall apart. Such is life.

Sometimes the most obvious things about life need to be talked about.

It's easy to overlook them not in spite of their obviousness, but because the familiar tends to fade into the background, while new stuff grabs our attention.

So here's a few obvious truths about life:

-- Life is finite. It comes to an end for every living being. Including us humans.
-- Life is uncertain. We can hope for the best, but sometimes the worst happens.
-- Life is about caring. We care, because what we're concerned about is finite and uncertain.

I've been reminded about these truths by reading a fascinating book by Martin Hägglund, "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom." It's over 400 pages long. Yet Hägglund's core concepts are quite simple, three of which I shared above.

Now, I realize that many people believe in eternity, being religious. There's a lot of talk about eternity in this book. I'm going to ignore that subject, other than to say that Hägglund argues persuasively that even if eternity exists, it isn't something desirable.

At the very least, and I think this point is virtually inarguable, the life each of us is living now is in no way eternal, nor perfect (eternity presupposes a certain perfection, since nothing changes in eternity).

Thus whenever we care, whenever we exert ourselves to nourish and protect what we love -- whether this be a person, animal, cause, object, or whatever -- we do so because the object of our caring is finite, and it could fall apart if we don't act to help keep it together. Of course, it might fall apart anyway, even if we act.

Again, in no way is this news to anybody. It just bears repeating.

One reason this is necessary is that most of us have a strong desire to look on the bright side. Usually when I go grocery shopping, as I did today, a clerk will say something to me like, "So how's your day going? Got anything exciting planned later on?"

There's a social expectation that I'll answer in some positive fashion. It would be jarring to tell the clerk, though honest at times, "My day is going like crap. I've got nothing planned other than to hope tomorrow will be better." 

I'm not suggesting that we bare our souls at the checkout counter, since these brief chats while our credit card is being processed aren't the right time to share our most intimate secrets. Still, I've found that being as honest as possible often leads to a more interesting conversation.

Sometimes I'll respond to "How's your day going?" with "Fine, so long as I don't listen to the news. Then I get anxious and depressed." This is an exaggeration, though not hugely so. It usually elicits a reply like "I hear you. I feel the same way."

We're all in this finite life together. The boat of our body and mind is going to sink one day.

Keeping it afloat, and in decent working condition, for as long as possible, requires a lot of attention from ourselves and many others: friends, relatives, doctors, teachers, all of the people who interact in such complex and fascinating ways in the society that surrounds us.

To mix metaphors, no one is an island. We're all connected. We're all dependent. We're all caring. We're all in need of care.

A one-page article in the current issue of TIME magazine makes some of the same points that Martin Hägglund makes in his big thick book.

Here's some excerpts from "Tell kids the truth: hard work doesn't always pay off." It was written by Rachel Simmons, author of Enough as She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy and Fulfilling Lives.

The humbling, brutal, messy reality is that you can do everything in your power and still fail.

... Instead of allowing our kids to beat themselves up when things don't go their way, we should all question a culture that has taught them that feeling anything less than overwhelmed means they're lazy, that how they perform for others is more important than what actually inspires them, and that where they go to college matters more than the kind of person they are.

The point is not to give our kids a pass on working hard. But fantasizing that they can control everything is not really resilience. We would be wise to remind our kids that life has a way of sucker-punching us when we least expect it. It's often the people who learn to say "stuff happens" who get up the fastest.

(I wrote a post on my Church of the Churchless blog about Hägglund's book, "What sustains us is caring in time, not detachment in eternity.")

My "Return to the One" book gets a pleasing recommendation

I don't often plug my book about Plotinus, the 3nd century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic. Return to the One continues to have slow but steady sales, with good reader reviews on Amazon. 

Recently, though, my book got a pleasing recommendation from Christine McGinley, who founded a small book publishing company called Gleam of Light Press. Here's the email message I got from her.

Dear Brian, 

We want to let you know that the launch of Gleam of Light’s “Other Great Finds” is now up on the website: https://www.gleamoflightpress.com/ and we are pleased and proud to have Return to the One among our first offerings. 

One of the many things Emerson and the Transcendentalists have concretized for us is the recognition of intrinsic rewards as the greatest of riches. Please know that among the great rewards this project has yielded is the response from the authors and publishers involved – people who also appreciate intrinsic rewards.

We look forward to sharing many more great finds as we move forward slowly and thoughtfully.

Thank you so much for your graciousness and support.

Very best regards,  
Christine Mary McGinley

Gleam of Light Press has a web page called "Other Great Finds." Return to the One is in some excellent company there.

I enjoyed seeing my book's cover one row down from Emerson's Essays and Walden. Not that I in any way compare myself to Emerson and Thoreau. I'm just pleased to be on the same web page as them.

This is how Gleam of Light Press describes Return to the One.

Plotinus, the third-century Greek philosopher and mystic, considered himself a devoted follower of Plato. He has since been recognized as the ultimate Platonist and the embodiment of hundreds of years of Greek thought.

As scholars have pointed out, Plotinus shed new light on Plato’s philosophy minus the political and social elements. In other words, Plotinus dealt with the inner life, the life of the soul, and gave little attention to the worldly. This in itself is most telling of Plotinus’s philosophy, which many have described as an expansion of Plato’s mysticism.

As Brian Hines describes it, “Plotinus taught that no matter what we’re doing with our lives, it’s all pretty much worthless if we’re not yet in touch with our genuine beings.” And being in touch with our genuine beings has nothing to do with our outward identities or even the knowledge we accumulate over our lifetime. It has to do with the attention we give to the attainment of inner wisdom.

Plotinus believed that all of the urges we experience as human beings – to love, to create, to be moral – even to find our way as spiritual beings – are manifestations of the same primal yearning to “return to the One” – to be reunited with our true source, the source of all.

As Hines makes clear, Plotinus’s philosophy, which was a germinating force in major world religions, was in perfect alignment with the original root meaning of “religion”– religare – “to bind back to God.”

For those who wish to understand the spiritual teachings of Plotinus, Brian Hines’s Return to the One makes the “mystic Plato” thoroughly accessible. He explains Plotinus’s ideas about the nature of spirit, about the soul as the essence of identity, about the power of a contemplative life.

He also sheds light on the enormous role Plotinus and Greek philosophy have played in the formation of religious and spiritual thought throughout the world. He even explains why The Enneads, the writings Plotinus left behind, are impenetrable for those of us who have not spent years in deep study.

Plotinus wrote solely for his inner circle of disciples who were already deeply versed in his philosophy. He did not anticipate that one of those students, Porphyry, would one day publish The Enneads in their raw, unedited form.

Return to the One is a complete and inspiring introduction to Plotinus. One comes away from it with a deep sense of Plotinus’s philosophy, his unique presence in the evolution of spiritual thought, and the great value of his ideas for every seeker of wisdom.

The Gleam of Light Team

Return to the One
Brian Hines
2004, Adrasteia Publishing

I wish Bill Clinton had collaborated with Daniel Silva, not James Patterson

I'm a big fan of spy/thriller/espionage/solitary killer novels. Yeah, they fall into the category of "popular fiction" rather than literary fiction, but that's because...duh...they're popular. 

I read lots of non-fiction because I want to learn something. I read popular fiction because I want to escape into an entertaining alternative world.

Recently I've had two books sitting by my bed for nighttime reading: "The President Is Missing," by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, and "The English Spy" by Daniel Silva. 

I tried to alternate reading each book on successive nights. But it didn't take long before I read Silva's book every night, because it engrossed me, and the Clinton/Patterson book didn't -- at least not in comparison to "The English Spy."

Amazingly, currently 68% of Amazon reader reviews give a 5-star rating to both books. My suspicion is that many of those who bought "The President is Missing" don't know what a really well-written thriller novel is all about, because Silva is a vastly better writer than Clinton and Patterson.

"The English Spy" is (1) believable, (2) complex, (3) populated with interesting characters, and (4) a page-turner that's hard to put down. So far, and I admit that I'm only about a third into "The President is Missing," I haven't found the Clinton/Patterson book to be any of these things.

The New Yorker review of "The President is Missing" was titled High Crimes, with this apt subtitle: Bill Clinton pens a thriller, sort of. 

My feeling exactly! But the online version of the review omitted that snarky saying. Maybe Clinton and Patterson objected to this bit of truth-telling.

Anthony Lane's positive, but not ecstatic, review of "The President is Missing" contained a cogent question:

Yet the puzzle remains: why James Patterson? Why not Daniel Silva?

Indeed. The answer to that question probably is contained in this excerpt from Lane's review:

But the gods are just, and although they denied the gift of literary grace to Patterson, they bestowed on him an even rarer skill. As a collaborator, he’s the top. Barely can he sketch an outline without reaching for a sidekick. So numerous are his assistants that one has to ask, less in snotty disapproval than in ontological awe, how many of Patterson’s books are actually “his,” and to what extent he is a writer at all, as opposed to a trademark or a brand.

I don't know if Daniel Silva has ever co-written a book with someone else.

I suspect that he hasn't, because Silva is so skilled at writing a thriller novel (I love his Gabriel Allon character, "legendary spy and assassin" according to the back cover), being forced to collaborate, as Patterson did with Clinton, seems as unlikely as Shakespeare saying, hey, dude, let's each write part of this Romeo and Juliet play I've got an idea for.

(And not just because "dude" wasn't in Shakespeare's lexicon.)

Anyway, I'm going to turn my attention to "The President is Missing" now that I've finished "The English Spy."

But I've got another Silva book on hand in case I feel a pang of Daniel Silva withdrawal symptoms: "House of Spies." Which, interestingly enough, is mentioned in The New Yorker review as one of Clinton's favorite books.

In 2003, in downtown Little Rock, there was an exhibition devoted to Bill Clinton’s favorite books. It was solid fare, and doughtily unmodish. T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Orwell, Sophocles, and Marcus Aurelius were present, and also Reinhold Niebuhr (of whom Barack Obama, likewise, is a devotee). There was a face-off between biographies of Lincoln and Leopold II of Belgium. There was even something entitled “Living History,” by Hillary Rodham Clinton. How on earth did that make the cut?

Then, last year, on Facebook, the former President issued a fresh roster of recommendations, this time with extra quirks: Oliver Sacks and Carly Simon, a book about the making of “High Noon,” and “House of Spies,” by the indefatigable Daniel Silva, whose recurrent leading man, over seventeen books, displays a knack for espionage, judicious homicide, and art restoration.

If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook

If you're an author who is looking for a competent firm to get your book self-published in both electronic and print versions, I highly recommend ebookpbook, and an associated entity, Newgen KnowledgeWorks. 

Jason Pearce is the guy I worked with after finding ebookpbook listed as a resource on Amazon's CreateSpace web site. For quite a few years CreateSpace offered interior design and cover design services on a fee basis.

But fairly recently CreateSpace stopped doing this, so publishing a book via CreateSpace's print on demand process now requires that an author find a way to get interior design and cover files prepared by someone else.

Believe me, it isn't wise to do it yourself, unless you're well-versed in book designing. I've written three published books, so I know how tricky it is to fashion a book that's easily readable and looks good, both inside and outside.

Pearce, via Newgen, worked with CreateSpace on book design services, so now is doing the same thing directly. 

We are proud to have partnered with Amazon CreateSpace for several years to help independent authors see their work published. Now, with CreateSpace’s decision to no longer offer paid services to authors, we hope that we can work with you directly to get your book to market.

Here's the "pitch" that sold me as soon as I read it on the ebookpbook home page.

As an independent author self-publishing a book, you want to know that you are in experienced hands. For 20 years, we have been helping both independent and conventionally published authors get their books to market.

During that time we have learned editorial and formatting conventions that are centuries old, and we have ridden waves (both the ebb and flow) of new technologies in print and electronic publishing.

As a team, we have worked with some of the world’s largest fiction and nonfiction publishers and with many independent authors self-publishing their first book. We are members of the International Digital Publishing Forum and work directly with the major retailers and distributors, including Amazon CreateSpace, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Books on Demand.

For all this experience, we treat every book as a new journey. Our role is to guide you through the self-publishing process as effortlessly as possible, to produce a final book that you are completely satisfied with. And we’ll charge you only when we reach this destination.

We offer interior formatting, ebook conversion, cover design, and editorial self-publishing services. We consult with you throughout to ensure the best services fit for your timeline and budget. We don’t sell “packages” or services that don’t add value or produce results, and we promise not to sell services you don’t need.

We respect your copyright and will always keep your content secure. All the files we produce for your book belong to you. We collect only the minimum personal information we need to provide services to you, and this information will never be given to any other company.

Now, my situation was a bit unusual, because my book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, already had been published in print form on CreateSpace, and I was looking for someone who could produce an e-book/Kindle version. A p-book, by the way, means a print book. 

After I contacted ebookpbook and sent the interior design file to Jason Pearce, he emailed me with a very reasonable price for converting my 200 page book to an e-book format: $79. 

Pearce also noted that after looking at the interior design, there were some things that could be "tweaked." Understand: all Pearce said was the following. There was absolutely no pressure put upon me to redo the interior design.

I'd also be inclined to open up the spacing a little, to allow the text to breathe. Publishing conventions would remove the running head from chapter opening pages, and set the first line of any paragraph after a heading flush left. But these are all minor tweaks that can be easily made. And all that said, the book is easy to read as it stands.

I followed up with a message that said, "I'm into tweaking," because I hadn't been all that happy with the interior design that a local graphics firm did, which apparently was their first foray into book designing. It looked OK, but to me it just didn't appear as professional as it should have.

Jason Pearce did an excellent job with his tweaking, which required that the page count remain the same, as otherwise I would have had to republish the book on CreateSpace. He sent me a new file. I uploaded it via my CreateSpace account. Bingo! A better looking book.

And here's what really impressed me.

Pearce refused to charge me for the interior design changes. I offered to pay him, but he told me that since I didn't ask for those changes when I first contacted him, being interested in an e-book conversion, he didn't feel right charging me for the interior design work.

I'm planning to use ebookpbook and Jason Pearce from the start for my next book project, because I found Pearce to be so competent, honest, and easy to work with. He lives in Chennai, India, but this made zero difference to me, since we communicated exclusively via email. 

(I mention this only because until I asked Pearce where he lived, I thought he kept some very late hours, since I'd get a message from him at midnight here on the West Coast, which is the middle of the day in India.)

"How Democracies Die" advises against hardball tactics with Trump

Well, it wasn't the most fun reading I've ever done, not by a long shot, but today I finished "How Democracies Die" by two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

A basic message of the book is summarized in the final chapter:

When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted -- mutual tolerance and institutional forebearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one's institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to. 

Trump, of course, is pushing hard against what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the "guardrails" of democracy.

He's notoriously prone to denigrating his political opponents, going so far as to threaten Hillary Clinton with jail time, which Trump's supporters applauded with cries of Lock her up!

And Trump not only ignores the forebearance of former presidents who acted in accord with historical precedent, he takes childish pride in behaving as unpresidential as possible, wrongly viewing this as some sort of authenticity rather than as what it is -- boorish behavior. 

After reading the scarily cogent descriptions of how Trump is acting like other authoritarian national leaders, I was fully prepared for the Saving Democracy chapter to be full of hard-hitting advice about how to resist the dangers of Trumpism.

I wasn't disappointed. However, I was surprised. 

Probably I shouldn't have been, since what Levitsky and Ziblatt call for in that chapter is fully commensurate with the tone of their entire book. I guess it was my own desire to give Trump and his GOP enablers a taste of their own medicine that caused me to anticipate a harder-edged tone regarding how our democracy is to be saved.

In short, to do what Trump should be doing, but isn't: engage in mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Here's some passages from the Saving Democracy chapter on this subject.

In our view, the idea that Democrats should "fight like Republicans" is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. 

And they unify pro-government forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising opposition. And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.

...Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic -- for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails. 

If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce -- and perhaps hasten -- the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.

As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump's impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy -- maybe even as a coup. American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.

And here's a passage that resonates particularly true given yesterday's marvelous win of Democrat Conor Lamb over his Republican opponent in a Pennsylvania special election for a House seat. Lamb took some positions at odds with liberal orthodoxy, but that's what was needed to win in a district that had voted Republican for many years.

Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues we care deeply about. 

If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights or single-payer health care a "litmus test" for coalition membership, the chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives will be nil. 

We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground. 

"Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved" is a great book

Kate Bowler has written a book about her struggles with several serious health problems, with the worst being a stage 4 colorectal cancer diagnosis. It is funny, sad, moving, inspiring, and so much more. From the first page to the last, I was deeply engrossed in her story. 

"Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved" is one of the most moving books I've ever read.

Even though I don't believe in God, and Kate Bowler does, I felt wonderfully close to her as I finished her marvelous book in a few transfixed sittings. She and I have much more in common -- our shared humanity -- than what divides us, our theological worldview. Like Bowler, I have a chronic health problem, though one that isn't nearly as serious as hers.

I'm so thankful that Bowler had the talent and courage to write a book with so much heart. She is so honest, so truthful, I found every sentence she wrote to be captivating.

What I admired the most was her willingness to look at her Christian beliefs with such openness and sensitivity.

Bowler accepts what makes sense to her, such as God exists and loves us. She rejects the nonsensical aspects of Christianity, notably the Prosperity Gospel ridiculousness. As someone who read and scoffed at The Secret, which similarly posits that we can create our own reality, I loved her putdowns of those who tried to find meaning in the tragedy of her cancer diagnosis.

I struggle every day with my much milder chronic condition. Thank you, Kate Bowler, for writing a book that has made it easier for me to carry on in the present moment, which really is all any of us really has -- despite our predilection to stare at the past and future rather than what is right before us.

One of my favorite passages is this:

Beverly lived in the apocalyptic future, and the scholar lived in the past. I think I believed that I was living in the center, but I rarely let my feet rest on solid ground, rooting me in the present. My eyes shifted to look for that thing just beyond, the next deadline, the next hurdle, the next plan.... I would not say it was simply that I didn't stop to smell the roses. It was the sin of arrogance, of being impervious to life itself. I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead. I must learn to live in ordinary time, but I don't know how.

It's really difficult for me to summarize Bowler's book.

She writes so well, with such heart, I feel like I'm doing a disservice to her if I substitute my words for hers. So my main piece of advice is Buy This Book. She has a web site, a blog, and a Twitter feed if you want to sample her writing that way.

Here's some other passages from her book that I loved:

My in-box is full of strangers giving reasons. People offer them to me like wildflowers they picked along the way. A few people want me to cultivate spiritual acceptance. "We have had millions of births and deaths in different life-forms," explains a Hindu woman gently. "Don't worry, this life shall pass and your soul will move forward to its next step."

This world is a place of suffering, they write, a garden full of weeds that we tend as best we can.

But most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain. They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos. Even when I was still in the hospital, a neighbor came to the door and told my husband that everything happens for a reason.

"I'd love to hear it," he replied.

"Pardon?" she said, startled.

"The reason my wife is dying," he said in that sweet and sour way he has, effectively ending the conversation as the neighbor stammered something and handed him a casserole. 

Christians want me to reassure them that my cancer is all part of a plan. A few letters even suggest that God's plan was that I get cancer so I could help people by writing the New York Times article. There is a circular logic to these attempts to explain the course of my life.

If you inspire people while dying, the plan for your life was that you would become an example to others. If you don't and you die kicking and screaming, the plan was that you discover some important divine lessons. Either way, learn to accept God's plan.

...These are the three life lessons people try to teach me that, frankly, sometimes feel worse than cancer itself.

The first is that I shouldn't be so upset, because the significance of death is relative. I like to call the people with that message the Minimizers... A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first. And atheists can be equally trite by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning.

...The second lesson comes from the Teachers, who focus on how this experience is supposed to be an education in mind, body, and spirit. "I suppose that this is the ultimate test of faith for you," one man muses, hoping that I will have the good sense to accept God's will... Sometimes I want every know-it-all to send me a note when they face the grisly specter of death, and I'll send them a cat poster that says HANG IN THERE!

...The hardest lessons come from the Solutions People, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. "Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!" says Jane from Idaho, and I am immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.

...There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain. Those letter writers are not simply trying to give me something. They are also, always, tallying up the sum of my life, sometimes for clues, sometimes for answers, always to pronounce a verdict. But I am not on trial.

...This is the problem, I suppose, with formulas. They are generic. But there is nothing generic about a human life... There is no life in general. Each day has been a collection of trivial details -- little intimacies and jokes and screw-ups and realizations. My problems can't be solved by those formulas -- those cliches -- when my life was never generic to begin with. 

God may be universal but I am not. I am Toban's wife and Zach's mom and Karen and Gerry's daughter. I am here now, bolted in time and place, to the busy sounds of a blonde boy in dinosaur pajamas crashing into every piece of furniture.

Our town's attractiveness, like perfection, is mostly in the mind

I wish life was perfect. It isn't. The Buddha taught this. Life is suffering. We're born, we grow old, we die.

Our goal shouldn't be to try to eliminate suffering in a vain attempt to make life perfect, but rather to look upon things as they imperfectly are without unduly reacting to them with thoughts and feelings of  Ugh! So wrong! Horrible! Can't be!

Likewise, the place where we live has to be accepted as a blend of positives and negatives that will forever dance together in an intertwined dance of opposites that both attract and repel.

Take our current home in rural south Salem, Oregon. When my wife and I think about the pros and cons of where we've lived for 27 years in the course of questioning whether we should move at some point, our ponderings end up pretty much like this:

Like
No close-by neighbors
Large landscaped yard
Surrounded by nature
House with lots of room
Out in the country

Don't like
No close-by neighbors
Large landscaped yard
Surrounded by nature
House with lots of room
Out in the country

Well, damn, our likes and dislikes are the same!

I like that we can barely see only one other house. But often I feel isolated from other people. It's great to have so many trees and other vegetation on all sides of us. But taking care of all of this naturalness can be a big pain in the butt. The drive into town is pleasant. But it'd be nice to be closer to stores, restaurants, entertainment, and other attractions in Salem. We enjoy 3200 square feet of spaciousness. But every square foot needs to be cleaned and cared for.

And the same would be true, yet in a different way, if we moved into the Salem city limits.

Now the likes and dislikes would be reversed. We'd have plenty of neighbors close-by. Almost certainly, some would do stuff that'd irritate us. Urban delights would be near at hand. Yet we'd miss our nature trails. Etc, etc.

This might seem strange -- that what we like also is what we dislike -- but it's really no different from how I feel about my wife, Laurel, who I love deeply. The qualities that attracted me to her really are the same qualities that irritate me at times. 

For example, she's strong and independent. So she isn't shy to disagree with me, to tell me that I'm wrong. She's organized and neat. So when I'm not, I hear about it. 

The same is true for our own selves.

Isn't it the case that our greatest strengths also are our greatest weaknesses? I'm good at writing and speaking. However, I also can be horribly verbose. I'm an energetic citizen activist. However, I also can be excessively pushy and confrontational.

With age (I turned 69 this month) comes a bit of wisdom.

I've stopped believing that if I only lived here rather than there, everything will be great. I've also stopped believing that if my wife, or myself, was this way rather than that way, everything will be great. It won't be, because life always is a mixture of good and bad, pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness.

Still, each of us has the ability to look upon where we are, who we are, and how other people are with varying degrees of acceptance. On the where front, I'm a big fan of what Melody Warnick talks about in her book, "This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live."

(See my previous blog post about the book, "I'm attached to Salem, Oregon. Check out this 'place attachment' scale.")

Here's some excerpts from Warnick's opening chapter:

We always want the postscript to stories like these [of moving to a new place] to be "and they lived happily ever after." Though only some of us will move in a given year, mulling the possibilities is practically a national pastime, especially because of the long-standing habit of conflating geography and happiness.

As Eric Weiner points out in The Geography of Bliss, "We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations in an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills. 

Anyone who has taken a vacation to, say, some Caribbean island and had flash through their mind the uninvited thought I could be happy here knows what I mean.

If the idea that a place can make us happy is a fantasy, it's both sweet and pervasive. 

...Researchers who measure place attachment don't try to examine the objective magnificence of one's city -- the soaring beauty of its skyscrapers and statues, the leafy depths of its parks. That would be like measuring a couple's love for each other by posting their photos on Hot or Not.

Instead, scientists study residents' emotions by asking whether or not their town feels like home. When it comes to place attachment, our towns are what we think they are. That means your city doesn't need to be the Platonic ideal of a city in the same way you (thankfully) don't have to be particularly goregous, clever, or wealthy to love and be loved. 

...Ethan Kent, a senior vice president with the nonprofit Projects for Public Spaces, told me that Americans are emerging from an era of thinking of towns and cities as products for residents to consume.

"Now," he says, "the energy is more around the idea that the cities that succeed are the ones that allow people to help create them. That's how they become better places, but also how people are going to become more attached to them. When people help create their place, they see themselves reflected in it. It reflects their values and personalities and becomes more an extension of themselves."

So let's help create wherever we are.

Get involved with your city government, neighborhood association, civic organization, volunteer group, or whatever. Become friends with people who live nearby. Greet strangers with a hearty "hello." Pick up litter. Display a bit of beauty. Patronize local businesses. 

These are just a few of the commonsense ideas Warnick talks about in her book.

The place where we live never will seem anywhere close to perfect if we view it as a detached object to be viewed from the outside, rather than as an intimate subject that's part and parcel of our own mind. 

"But What If We're Wrong?" Great question. Great book.

Browsing through the terrific bookstore in Sisters, Oregon -- Paulina Springs Books -- I knew that I'd buy Chuck Klosterman's newest literary offering as soon as I saw the upside-down title on the front cover.

But What If We're Wrong?  I've been wrong about so much, so many times, over so many years, this theme immediately resonated with me. Turning the book over, the subtitle was almost equally appealing: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. 

I already do this in a certain sense, since I'm unable to keep up with the magazines that we subscribe to. Unread issues get put in a bathroom drawer. Then newer issues get piled on top of them. 

Catching up some on my magazine reading recently, I found myself picking up copies of TIME magazine from around the November 2016 presidential election. When those copies came in the mail, the news and analyses in them were close to being in the present.

Now, all that stuff is more than half a year in the past.

It takes me much less time to read old news magazines because (1) so much has happened since they were published which alters the relevance of the stories in them, and (2) almost always the confident reportorial prognostications about what will happen in the future has turned out to be closer to guesswork than accurate predictions.

As a cultural critic, Klosterman uses rock music, literature, and such to illustrate his central thesis. Which is pretty well summed up in the final paragraphs of his first chapter.

It's impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.

This is no brilliant insight, and only a fool would disagree. But it's remarkable how habitually this truth is ignored. We constantly pretend our perception of the present day will not seem ludicrous in retrospect, simply because there doesn't appear to be any other option.

Yet there is another option, and the option is this: We must start from the premise that -- in all likelihood -- we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent.

The problem is with the questions themselves. 

Klosterman doesn't directly elucidate what he meant by that last statement. (His book is a collection of essays, which fit together well, but by design, not highly logically.)

A few chapters onward he talks about Moby-Dick. Having read this book as a teenager, and not having thought much about it since, I found these observations intriguing.

A few pages back, I cited Moby-Dick as the clearest example of a book that people were just flat-out wrong about, at least during the life span of the author. But this doesn't mean that no one thought it was good, because certain people did. That's not the point. This has nothing to do with personal taste.

What any singular person thought about Moby-Dick in 1851 is as irrelevant as what any singular person thinks about Moby-Dick today. What critics in the nineteenth century were profoundly wrong about was not the experience of reading this novel; what they were wrong about was how that experience would be valued by other people.

What Klosterman seems to mean is that the concept of what a novel is supposed to be about shifted in the twentieth century. Moby-Dick wasn't hugely popular after Melville wrote and published it, with under five thousand copies sold by the time of Melville's death.

Now, though, we have different criteria for what makes a "great novel." Great isn't objective. Great is a subjective cultural determination. 

Klosterman observes that a hundred years from now, the same will apply to rock music. Likely the classic bands we revere now -- Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cream (my personal favorite) -- won't earn the same regard from people in the future. 

But if we think we're clever enough to break out of our current cultural biases and be able to foretell how our present will be looked upon in the future, we're almost certainly wrong. 

This is my favorite excerpt from Klosterman's book, in part because I love the teenage crackhead metaphor. He's just tried to figure out what currently unrecognized literary genius will be revered by the future. 

So this is one possibility -- a Navajo Kafka.

But here's where we taste the insecure blood from Klosterman's Razor. The mere fact that I can imagine this scenario forces me to assume that it won't happen. 

It's a reasonable conclusion to draw from the facts that currently exist, but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don't even enter into the conversation. They are, by definition, impossible to quantify. They are groups of people whom -- right now, in the present tense -- it is still acceptable to dislike or discount or ignore. 

They are groups not seen as needing protection or support, which makes them vulnerable to ridicule and attack. Who are they?

As already stated in this paragraph, I am in no position to say. If I try, I can only be wrong. Any argument in their favor is an argument against my premise.  

"On Tyranny" is a disturbingly great read for these Trumpian times

On Tyranny by historian Timothy Snyder is a small 126-page book that I read in about ninety minutes. But it's impact on me was huge. 

Yes, good things come in small packages. And in this case, only cost $5.26 (from Amazon). 

Snyder never mentions Donald Trump by name. But his frequent references to "the president" make it clear about the tyrant he's warning us about. 

This is the most astounding thing about Snyder's book: that he wrote it. 

Now. After Trump's election. To alert Americans to the danger of tyranny arising in our liberal democracy that, until recently, was generally felt to be immune to what befell Germany in the 1930's. 

Being 68, I have memories of many U.S. presidents. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. And now, Donald Trump. 

Before these Trumpian times I never worried seriously that our democracy was in danger.

I opposed much of what Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush (the W. variety) sought to inflict on our country. But this all seemed within the bounds of normal political goings-on. Conservative presidents try to achieve right-wing ends. Liberal presidents try to achieve left-wing ends.

Back and forth we go between right and left while the all-important institutions that guarantee our constitutional democracy carry on regardless of who is in power.

Well, Snyder shocked me out of that complacency -- even though I already knew that Trump was a whole different sort of president. Here's an excerpt from his final chapter:

Until recently we Americans had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. 

After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989-91, we imbibed the myth of an "end of history." In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

Unfortunately, they're back. And not in some third-world country led by an autocratic ruler.  Snyder uses historical examples in his 20 short chapters to show that right here in the United States we face authoritarian dangers in this Age of Trump. 

I encourage you to read "On Tyranny."

Even if you think you're aware of the threat Trump poses to our liberal democracy, believe me, Timothy Snyder will wake you up even more, big time. Here's some additional excerpts from the book that I especially liked.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.
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Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If  nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
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Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.  

Life lessons I've gotten from the "Gray Man" novels

Last year I wrote my first blog post about the Gray Man, "Lessons for living from a fictional assassin, the 'Gray Man.'"

Now I've read two more books in the six-part series about Court Gentry, so it's time to update the life lessons I've absorbed from the astoundingly engrossing novels.

What I said last July still holds:

But something about the Gray Man appeals to me on a deeper philosophical level. Again, this is weird, because the fictional Court Gentry seemingly isn't much like the real person Me. 

Seemingly. 

This excerpt from "The Gray Man" points to the main thing I like about Court Gentry. He goes through life largely clueless about why stuff is happening to him, but he manages to carry on just fine anyway.

...Sure, Court Gentry knows a lot about the shadowy world he inhabits after being betrayed by his CIA handlers. But in his day-to-day efforts to complete a mission for hire, and stay alive while doing so, he often has no idea what is going on. Yet this doesn't stop him from dealing in a marvelously spontaneous way with whatever is happening without an evident why.

...Court Gentry does what needs doing. He is motivated by what he feels to be right, not by anyone else's conception of rightness and wrongness. Sure, he makes mistakes. But the Gray Man learns from what goes wrong and keeps on doing what is right. With boundless confidence.

Not a bad philosophy of life, not bad at all.

Having just finished "Dead Eye," the fourth book in Mark Greavey's Gray Man series, I've gained additional insights into what motivates Court Gentry. Here's a passage that describes his appealingly honest moral perspective.

"I guess in the back of my mind I always knew I was damaged goods."

"What does that mean?"

"Never mind. I need to see this thing with Whitlock and Kalb all the way to the end to prove to myself he was wrong about me. There's right and there's wrong. Sometimes I teeter on the edge, like I could fall off in either direction. So I fight it. I fight against falling off on the wrong side, by doing right whenever I can. It doesn't make me pure. It just...it's just better than the alternative."

Gentry is worried that his CIA psychological assessment showed that he was psychopathic, or at least sociopathic. He doesn't feel that he fails to care about people; he just knows that he has no qualms about killing people who deserve to be killed.

Yet Gentry realizes that he, like almost everybody else, is capable of going in either direction: toward right or wrong, good or bad. What makes him different from his fellow ex-CIA operative, Russell Whitlock, an almost equally skilled assassin whose code name is "Dead Eye," is that Whitlock makes no attempt to resist his psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies.

I like Gentry's observation that this "doesn't make me pure."

Court Gentry doesn't live in a world of black and white, but of shades of gray. Which is one reason why his own code name, Gray Man, is so fitting (along with his ability to hide out in plain sight, so to speak).

Gentry and Whitlock do share this characteristic: they are repeatedly described as "singletons."

Meaning, they operate independently, even though they take on missions on behalf of organizations, groups, cartels, agencies. They'll play by other people's rules until the game doesn't make sense to them. Then they go their own way. And usually the solitary path they take is the better way, since their instincts are so sound.

There's nothing wrong with being a team player. But there's also something appealing about Court Gentry's determination to march to the beat of his own drummer, as Thoreau put it. 

One reason Gentry is so skilled at finding his own way is his hyper-sensitivity to his surroundings.

I'm glad that I don't have to worry about being tracked around the world by numerous spy agencies, criminal cartels, and such. However, the Gray Man books make me realize how much more aware I'd be of what is going on around me if potential danger lurked around every corner.

Court Gentry notices things. His life depends on it.

By contrast, most of us -- me certainly included -- go through life largely clueless about who is doing what around us. I'm not saying that we should be as wary as a rogue intelligence operative being sought by highly skilled agents with vast tracking resources at their disposal.

However, I should be able to remember if I turned the burner off on our stove before I left the house. Or if I locked the door of my car after I parked it on a downtown street. 

I was hooked on the Gray Man series after reading just a few pages of Mark Greavey's first book. It isn't just the action and intrigue that is so appealing. It's Court Gentry's personality, demeanor, and philosophy of life that makes these novels so gripping. 

I like the guy, though I wouldn't want to be him.

Believe me, if you think your life is too stressful, read one of the Gray Man books. What Court Gentry often goes through in one day is more than most of us could handle in a year, or even a lifetime. Yet he always makes it through and lives to fight another day.

(Well, I'm assuming so. Hopefully there isn't a nasty surprise at the end of book 6.)

My memories of growing up with books in the 1950's and 60's

Listen up, you youngsters who read blog posts like this (if you exist): an old man is going to tell some tales of what it was like in the Old Days when books -- yes, books, of the paper variety -- were way more important in people's lives than they are now. 

These memories were stimulated by the donation I made today of eight boxes containing 201 books to the Friends of Salem Public Library. 

Needing to downsize my collection, I spent quite a bit of time culling through a bunch of books, deciding which of them I'd fallen sufficiently out of love with to warrant boxing up and offering for adoption through the Friends online bookstore and annual sale.

When I handed off the boxes at the Salem Library this afternoon, I couldn't help but think of how different my first exposure to a library was after my recently divorced mother moved to Three Rivers, California in 1955, when I was seven years old.

Three Rivers nestles in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains near the entrance to Sequoia National Park. It features, not surprisingly, three branches of the Kaweah River, the South, Middle, and North Forks. Back then, the population likely was around 700 full-time residents.

There wasn't a "real" library.

But I recall my mother taking me to two libraries in private homes. Each was run by a elderly lady. Ida Purdy, I'm pretty sure, was one. A Google cache says she was a pioneer woman who settled in Three Rivers in the 1800's (born 1877, died 1968), which fits with my memory. 

We'd knock on the door. The homeowner would let us in. A couple of rooms were devoted to the lending library. I learned to read well at a young age, so this was a treat for me.

My mother liked to tell the story of how, when she moved to El Paso, Texas immediately after splitting up with my father, she applied to have me admitted to a parochial school kindergarten. To help demonstrate my qualifications, she brought along the front page of the local newspaper, handed it to me, and said "Read it, Brian." Or, Briney, as I was called at the time.

I could. I distinctly remember learning about the non-existence of Santa Claus after getting a toy and asking my mother, "Why does it say Made in Japan on it?" To her credit, she came clean about the whole North Pole and Santa's Workshop thing on the spot.

Carolyn Hines, my mother, was an avid book lover and seeker of truth. I've found myself adopting her habit of making copious notes in the back blank pages of non-fiction books: a page number, followed by what she found meaningful in that part of the book. 

There's no way I could bring myself to give away any of her books that I inherited after she died. Like, "The Fourth Way" by P.D. Ouspensky. Some pencil notes in her barely legible handwriting (like mother, like son) are in the back.

I understand the allure of e-books. But I am completely incapable of reading anything other than books printed on paper. I need to feel the heft of the book, turn the pages with my fingers, highlight passages with a marker, write in the margins and end pages. 

I'm a creature of my upbringing. Young people today, I'm pretty sure, won't have the same relationship with paper books. Which isn't a bad thing. Just different. 

With financial help from my grandmother, my mother was able to build a house in Three Rivers several years after we moved there. The bookshelves in the living room were built to perfectly fit the Great Books of the Western World on a single shelf. I still have those books. They no longer fit on a single shelf.

No big deal. What's important is that I have these books. When I want to read Plato, Hume, Descartes, or other authors, I can pick up a volume that my mother cherished, and I now do. That can't happen with a book on a Kindle.

Yeah, I know that I sound like someone nostalgic about using a big black corded telephone on a party line, another memory of mine. Or getting up on the roof of our house to change a TV channel by turning the antenna, something I also did as a child. Believe me, I much prefer my iPhone and our DirecTV satellite dish.

Books just have a different hold on me, because of my upbringing and history with them.

In the 1950s, at least for my mother and many of her friends, the release of a long-awaited novel was greeted with the same fervor as a blockbuster movie is today. I recall how excited she was about getting a copy of "Dr. Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak. Publishing of the book in this country was a Really Big Deal.

Now... there's no longer any similar widespread buzz about a newly released novel. This isn't sad. Times change. It's just different.

A few final memories:

My mother was deeply conservative, a loyal Republican through and through. However, these were the days of intellectual, fact-based, scientifically-minded Republicanism. I grew up reading William F. Buckley's National Review. The articles were thoughtful, well-written, persuasive. 

Maybe they still are.

But the Republican party of today doesn't pay much attention to truth and reality. My mother would be aghast at Donald Trump and his unceasing stream of lies. The GOP, and America as a whole, used to honor truth-telling. Unfortunately, no longer.

I can't claim that the decline of books, and the rise of the Internet, is responsible for this. But it must play a part.

When I was growing up, we had the Encyclopedia Brittanica and World Book Encyclopedia in our house. I referred to these books often in elementary and high school. They contained solid factual knowledge about the world, as did the yearly World Almanac my mother bought every year.

These days, people can manufacture their own realities out of the multitude of unreliable cyberspace sources. Digital information can be altered on a whim. The content of books can't. Again, I realize this makes me sound old-fashioned, but so be it. 

Lastly, I deeply admire my mother's respect for unfettered access to books. 

At some point during my Three Rivers Elementary School (1st - 8th grade) education, our town got a real library. Which still exists. 

After it opened, us students would walk from the elementary school to the library, since the school didn't have one. I was the only child in my class who had a permission slip from a parent allowing me to check out any book I wanted. Including the books in the adult section with "good parts." 

Which made me popular with my guy friends.

Naturally my mother bought the popular novel "Lolita" when it came out. Vladamir Nabokov's story of a man's sexual relationship with his 12 year old stepdaughter was scandalous at the time, and maybe still is. But my mother made no attempt to hide the book from me. 

I read the "good parts." Several times. They weren't as titillating in reality as my pre-adolescent mind would have imagined them to be.

Such is the power of books: reality and truth-telling always is preferable to illusion and falsehoods. A lesson to remember in these truth-challenged times.

"Listen, Liberal" is a must-read book for progressives

I'm finding my progressive views being challenged by Thomas Frank's new book, "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?"

He's the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" which took shots at Republicans. Now he's aimed his considerable rhetorical and intellectual skills at Democrats.

To great effect. 

I'm about halfway through with the book. Though I'm still a Hillary Clinton supporter in this year's presidential primary contest, I can now better understand why Bernie Sanders' supporters feel like the Democratic Party has screwed over ordinary people. 

I couldn't resist peeking at the last pages of "Listen, Liberal." As suspected, Frank doesn't cut Democrats any slack in his conclusions.

Now, all political parties are alliances of people with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the "party of the people" even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class.

Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Agreed. 

This is why I've come to feel that if Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee, as she almost certainly will be, infusing her policy positions with a Big Dose of Bernie will be the best course for both this country and her campaign against Trump. 

Not that Sanders has got everything right. But I've read enough of Frank's book to feel convinced that much of what Democrats have done over the past few decades has been misguided -- even though it seemed justified at the time. (Frank himself admits that he has changed his views over the years.)

I want to finish "Listen, Liberal" before I weigh in on Frank's overall conclusions.

So far, I think his general viewpoint is right on: Democrats have been, and are, way better than Republicans at standing up for ordinary people, the "99%," but still -- in many ways us Democrats have failed the non-professional, non-creative class, non-kale eating/latte drinking citizens of this country.

A few things are bothering me about what I've read so far, though. Frank has a habit of criticizing Democratic policy-makers for doing this-and-that without making much of a case for an alternative approach. 

For example, he castigates President Bill Clinton for assuming that globalization was akin to a force of nature that couldn't be stopped, so the United States needed to adjust to the trend as best we could. Hence, NAFTA and other trade pacts.

Question is, though, how else could this country have dealt with globalization? Trade wars, higher tariffs, and such aren't exactly recipes for economic success. Further, globalization has helped hundreds of millions of people in other countries escape extreme poverty.

Sure, much needs to be done to make their working conditions more fair and equitable. And those hurt by the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country need more than a (Bill) Clintonesque, "The world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn." (direct quote in the book)

But globalization is a ship whose course is pretty much set. Democrats need to adjust important details about where the ship is heading, while recognizing that business is going to be increasingly conducted across national borders -- and this is a good thing, overall. 

I also am finding Frank's critique of "new urbanism" folks like me to be a bit off-putting.

Yes, it isn't enough to have cities with marvelous bike paths connecting mixed use areas with art galleries, coffee houses, restaurants, and other attractions for those with enough disposable income to enjoy these amenities. However, there isn't an inherent contradiction between a city being "cool" and being "socially equitable." 

Meaning, we can take care of the less fortunate in this country while also making communities in the United States much more livable. European countries have shown that social democracy and livability go well together. Bicycling isn't just for hipsters; it also is a low-cost, green way to get around. 

In general, though, I like Thomas Frank's style and substance. He presents a way of looking at the Democratic Party which is making me rethink the history of the Clinton years, and onward. These two paragraphs are typical of Frank's blunt prose:

On the financiers, the real Clinton legacy came down to four words: Grab what you can. For them, there were bailouts and trade deals that protected their interests and tax cuts and a timely shot of "liquidity" whenever stock markets seemed to be flagging. And a little deregulation should the laws of the land not meet with their favor.

But the poor needed to learn discipline. That seems to have been one of the ideas behind NAFTA: People employed in manufacturing had to accept working harder for less or else watch their jobs depart for Mexico. Discipline was the point of the '94 crime bill too: The poor were to live in a state of constant supervision where there was "zero tolerance" for those who stepped out of line. Mercy was to be a luxury item now, a thing reserved for those who could make big donations to the Clinton presidential library. 

OUCH! Anyone who thinks my political blog is snarky, read Frank's book for some real snark. 

Greek island wisdom for old men: Cialis yes, testosterone no

Back in my college days, the summer of 1968 it was, I spent some time on a Greek island. Wonderful experience. Bright sun. Blue ocean. Whitewashed buildings. Laid back.

I just finished a book by Daniel Klein, "Travels With Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled life." 

Reading it also was a wonderful experience, in large part because I could relate so easily to its central themes.

Klein is nine years older than me, in his seventies. He went to the island of Hydra, armed with a bunch of philosophy and psychology books, to ponder what it means for a man to grow old. Which, he says, is different from growing old-old. 

Old is when you're still pretty much the person you've always been. Just, well, older. You likely have some physical problems, but they're not incapacitating. Your mind isn't as sharp as it was before, but you're still in command of yourself.

Old-old is a whole different aging animal. That's when you're on the steep descent that leads to your demise. Your body and mind are failing you, big time. 

Klein wants to better understand what it means to be old, with the goal of enjoying this stage of life as much as possible before that damn old-old stage takes most of the joy out of living. He learns a lot from some old men he gets to know on Hydra. 

They spend much of their time sitting at an oceanfront taverna, eating, drinking, talking about this and that, admiring beautiful women. (Here's a photo of such a scene I cribbed from Google Images.)

There's a lot to like in "Travels With Epicurus."

Klein doesn't come up with many conclusive answers about how a man is to grow old gracefully. His Greek experience leads him to find some persuasive guidelines, though, which I might talk about in another blog post.

Here I wanted to share some excerpts dealing with the above-mentioned group of old men who hang out at the taverna. I found these parts of the book highly appealing, probably because I also like to talk, eat, drink (especially coffee), and ogle the ladies. 

Seems like a great lifestyle for an old man to pursue. Of course, my wife just had to come up with a killjoy remark after I'd read some of the passages below to her.

Laurel said, "So who is doing the laundry, cleaning, and other household chores while the old guys are chatting away at the taverna? Their wives! Sure sounds like a typically sexist society where the elderly men sit around enjoying themselves while the women do most of the work."

To which I replied, "And that's a problem? Doesn't sound like one to me."

Not to Klein either, who pleasingly ignores practicalities such as how the men at the taverna get their clothes washed, groceries bought, and food prepared when they're not hanging out together. Hey, this is a book about how old men should grow old gracefully. 

(Which probably includes, though Klein doesn't say this, find a good woman to take care of you.)

Read on for several taverna-related passages from "Travels With Epicurus" that offer a good feel for how Klein approaches his search for a fulfilling old-man life. Tasso, as should be evident, is a Greek local.

His name is Tasso and he is seventy-two years old. I have known him for many years now. Although Tasso looks every year his age -- his face and neck are covered with a fine crosshatch of deep lines -- here he is still considered a handsome old man. 

He is said to "wear his age on his face," a compliment... The islanders say that on a man who has weathered challenging experiences, a finely seasoned face will emerge in old age. It is the face he has earned, and its raw beauty is in the fully lived life it expresses.

I eavesdrop on Tasso and his companions. As is their habit, they sit side by side and speak loudly to one another, so I have no difficulty hearing them. 

Although my Greek is rudimentary, I can catch the drift of their talk, a conversation that began before I arrived and will continue until the sun begins to drop behind the Peloponnese, just across the sea. It is aimless, cheerful chat, for the most part mundane.

They talk about the sunlight, which is unusually hazy today, the new owner of a cheese stall in the port market, their children and grandchildren, the state of political affairs in Athens. Occasionally one tells a story from his past -- usually one his companions have heard before.

The talk is punctuated by leisurely, comfortable silences as they gaze out at the Peloponnesian straits.

...He and his friends are again seated at their table, chatting amiably, so far exclusively about the weather and what it portends. Then quite abruptly, they all go quiet. To a man, they are gazing up at the top step of the stone stairs that lead down from the coast path and past the taverna's entrance.

A young woman has appeared there, and the wind is pressing her blouse and skirt against her splendid, voluptuous body. For a moment, she pauses there, perhaps enjoying the warm breeze, but more likely enjoying the effect she is having on the men looking up at her -- her personal sirokos-effect indulgence.

A few seconds later another woman appears, an older woman swathed in the traditional black garments of a reverent widow. She sizes up the situation immediately and brusquely grasps the young woman's arm and leads her down the steps.

The young woman is named Elena. She is nineteen years old and is a classic Greek beauty with lustrous jet-black hair; clear, light olive skin; and large, dark, flashing eyes. The matron is her grandmother.

The old men unabashedly keep their eyes on Elena as she and her grandmother draw near to where they are sitting. When Elena and the old woman are directly in front of them, all the men rise slightly from their chairs and greet them.

While saying, "Good day," Tasso offers an elegant bow from his none-too-supple waist. It is clearly a bow of admiration and gratitude for Elena's beauty.

A moment later, grandmother and granddaughter gone, the conversation at Tasso's table resumes, but it is no longer about the weather. Flushed and animated, the men talk about beautiful women they have seen and known in their lives.

Tasso takes the lead this time; he has traveled the most and married later than his companions. He begins by declaring that there is nothing more beautiful than a young woman and that is because youth itself is incomparable in its beauty. 

There is more than a hint of the philosopher-poet about Tasso on this subject. I am reminded of a friend of mine who, in a similar situation, riffed on Keats, saying "Youth is beauty and beauty is youth."

...I am not suggesting that any of us are "dirty old men," still preoccupied with sexual fantasies and future exploits. The closest Tasso comes to that is when he confesses to his friends that for a brief moment while gazing at Elena at the top of the stone stairway he felt a tingling in his groin; said Tasso, smiling, "The sleeping giant awakened. But then he yawned and went back to sleep." 

No, I will leave such lusty, virile fantasies to my seventy-three year-old friend who wears a testosterone patch and consumes seventy-two hour Cialis.

Thinking again about this forever youngster with the testosterone patch helps me sort out my evolving philosophy of a good and authentic old age. It is one thing to have an active libido but a listless phallus; in that case Cialis seems like a perfectly wonderful solution.

But it is quite another to don a testosterone patch for the express purpose of reactivating one's libido. Th latter amounts to wanting to want something that you currently don't want. And that is a very peculiar mind-set in which to be.

...I suppose a testosterone patch advocate could argue that the hormone supplement will not turn him into someone else but will simply add vigor and vitality to who he is now, much as an energy drink might. In fact, he might even contend that choosing to become horny again is a supreme act of self-creation, the height of authenticity.

Maybe.

But I keep thinking that there are discrete stages of life, each with its own qualities, and that fudging these stages is to fudge the inherent value of each of them. It feels more authentic to me to recognize that human desires and capabilities change from one period of life to the next, and that to deny that they do is to miss out on what is most fulfilling about each stage.

I am not about to try out for the role of the local young lothario; that would make about as much sense as trying out for third baseman in the local Little League --even if I were on steroids.

Why Cialis, yes, but testosterone, no?

I admit I am making a somewhat arbitrary distinction here -- generously, Sartre leaves loads of room for arbitrary distinctions -- but taking Cialis seems more like getting treatment for a broken bone, so to speak, while the testosterone patch seems like tampering with what makes a man who he is at this particular point in his life.

His libido isn't broken; it has run its natural course. Wanting to want something that he doesn't really want that much, and in his eighth decade, no less, just seems counterfeit, untrue to himself.

I don't know what to make of my sixty-eight-year-old friend who had her bosom beautified. Heaven knows, her surgeon did an impressive job. This friend told me that she now feels younger and more attractive, both of which make her happier, and it is always hard to argue with happiness.

Buddhism explains the "angry white men" phenomenon

Happens to me all the time: I say something to a group of people that makes so much sense and is so eloquent, when I stop talking I expect a standing ovation. (Guess I don't have a self-esteem problem.)

Last Saturday I made some observations about "angry white men" that filled this bill. It was during a meeting of our monthly Salon discussion group.

One of the members, Steve, has been reading Michael Kimmel's book, "Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era." Here's part of the Amazon book description:

Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.

Listening to Steve talk about the book, fueled by a powerful mental-mix of strong coffee and a large glass of Oregon Pinot Noir, I suddenly realized the foundational cause of not only white men anger, but that of everybody. 

Including me. 

I get angry frequently. Not frothing mad anger. More like seething resentment anger -- a feeling that stuff is happening which shouldn't be, whether to me or someone else (including society in general). Heck, this is the emotional source of many blog posts. Such as this recent one.

But as self-serving as this may sound, I see a considerable difference between my anger and that of the angry white men described by Kimmel. They are, as noted in another part of the book description, trying to stop the tide of history.

The future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The choice for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem the tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future, or whether they will walk openly and honorably – far happier and healthier incidentally – alongside those they’ve spent so long trying to exclude.

I told the discussion group that it isn't surprising when people who are divorced from reality get angry. After all, reality is hugely stronger than any individual, any group, any nation, any anything that denies what is. 

I cited a book that I'd recently finished reading: "Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science." 

The author, David Barash, persuasively argues that both science and Buddhism agree about three important aspects of reality: (1) There is no such thing as an enduring "self" or soul; (2) Everything changes, except the laws of nature that produce the ever-changingness; (3) Interdependence and interconnectedness rules the reality roost.

(See this post from my Church of the Churchless blog.)

Thus it isn't surprising that angry white men are feeling the way they do. They are at odds with reality. And reality has a way of kicking butt. People can scream "this can't be happening!" Yet, if it is real, it is. Deal with it.

Whether someone is an angry white man or anyone else, they're going to be chronically disappointed if they fail to recognize those three above-mentioned truths of science and Buddhism.

There's no enduring "I" inside our heads. There's no way to escape change. There's no entity that stands alone unto itself. Everything and everyone is part of a complex, interrelated, ever-changing river of reality that never stops flowing. 

Angry white men want to stop the music, freeze the dancing, keep culture as it was in the not-so-good old days. 

Which isn't possible.

Societies evolve, like everything else. There's nothing wrong with wanting to try to change things; this is a part of ever-changing interconnected reality: self-less beings are drawn to act in certain ways by causes and effects beyond their understanding or control.

Staying calm when things don't go the way we want them to, though, seemingly is possible. Such is a teaching of Buddhism. Along with common sense as expressed in the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

(I'd leave out "God," substituting "reality.")

What modern women want... spanking and submission?

A blindfolded woman, bright red lipstick, with the title of the Newsweek cover story above her right breast: "The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream."

Looking at the issue I thought, "This is why print magazines are going to survive. Glad I've stuck with our Newsweek subscription after The Daily Beast took it over."

The old Newsweek wouldn't have had such a provocative article. Kudos to the new Newsweek.

Many of the online comments on the story appear to be from feminists who aren't surrendering to the notion that what successful, powerful, confident, independent women want is..

To be spanked into submission. Which, I gather, is a central theme of "Fifty Shades of Grey," the hugely successful novel by E L James (a woman).

Wow. Amazon shows 1,557 customer reviews at the moment, most decidedly positive -- though there are a considerable number of disappointed readers. For various reasons, such as described in this excerpt from the first 1-star review I came across.

~ The writing was too sterile. There was no depth and I found it hard connecting to any of it. There was a whole heap of - I touched him, he touched me, I did this, he did that. And it wasn't engaging at all. When I read I want to be able to feel the emotion, not be told how a scene is playing out as if the heroine is actually an observer.

~ The sex - it wasn't hot at all. I wouldn't even classify it as erotic. For some strange reason I have the opinion that you need to be able to refer to your vagina as something more erotic than 'down there' before you can pull off a significant hotness rating.

~ Christian - ok, he was relatively hot but not enough to get my blood pumping. He wasn't alpha enough for me. One moment he is trying to be hard core the next he is gasping because she is wearing his underwear. Now if that was my dominant alpha, he would have given me a cocky smile, licked his lips and gave that 'how you doin' look, But no, he gasped like a little girl.

~ The price....I don't get it. How can a publisher charge this much for a book written so badly??

The Newsweek story drew me in (so to speak...) in part because I find the whole romance novel thing intriguing.

Whenever I head to the magazine section of the south Salem Fred Meyer store to thumb through car magazines, I walk past several rows of paperback books featuring the romance genre. There's lots of them. 

As Stephen Colbert likes to say, "the market has spoken."

Women buy tons of books featuring a heroine who is swept off her feet by a macho, albeit sensitive, alpha male. Fifty Shades of Grey is #1 on various NY Times bestseller lists, so this also points to what many modern women are looking for in their romantic/sexual fantasies.

The Daily Beast conveniently extracted fourteen of the "naughtiest parts" for those of us, a.k.a. men, who aren't interested in reading all 528 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey. Here's some samples.

“At the touch of leather, I quiver and gasp. He walks around me again, trailing the crop around the middle of my body. On his second circuit, he suddenly flicks the crop, and it hits me underneath my behind … against my sex … The shock runs through me, and it’s the sweetest, strangest, hedonistic feeling … My body convulses at the sweet, stinging bite. My nipples harden and elongate from the assault, and I moan loudly, pulling on my leather cuffs.”

“His arms are wrapped around me, and he’s pulling me to him, hard, fast, gripping my ponytail to tilt my head up, kissing me like his life depends on it … He drags the hair tie painfully out of my hair, but I don’t care. He needs me, for whatever reason, at this point in time, and I have never felt so desired and coveted.” 

I've got to agree with the Amazon reader quoted above; these don't seem very erotic to me. But, hey, I'm not a woman. Whatever turns you on.

That's one of the messages in Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story. Human desire/sexuality is amazingly mysterious. There aren't any hard and fast rules (though "hard and fast rules" sounds like something Fifty Shades of Grey has in a sex scene).

Feminism and independence can go hand-in-hand (or hand in something else) with surrender and submission.

It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in 10 working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under 30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when—in hard economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before.

...In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.”

The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Timesarticle, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said. One of the researchers he interviewed preferred to call them “fantasies of submission”; another said, “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought.”

But why, for women especially, would free will be a burden? Why is it appealing to think of what happens in the passive tense? Why is it so interesting to surrender, or to play at surrendering? It may be that power is not always that comfortable, even for those of us who grew up in it; it may be that equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring.

Hmmmm. Maybe that's too much analysis.

A woman put up a You Tube review of the book that ends with "I really enjoyed it." Nice and simple.

She helped me understand why Fifty Shades of Grey appeals to so many females. Apparently the young innocent Anastasia Steele helps rich entrepreneur Christian Grey explore his secret, damaged side, bringing out untouched aspects of himself through his passionate relationship with her.

Sounds like Romance Writing 101. Here's the video review:

 

Reality doesn't register in the Republican brain

Yesterday Amazon delivered Chris Mooney's new book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality." 

I've only read a few pages so far, but I can tell that I'm going to like it. And not just because Mooney agrees with how I see the two major political parties, Republicans being way more reality-denying than Democrats. 

I want to understand why Republican science-deniers do what they do. Like all human behavior, they really can't help themselves. Something in their brains causes them to look upon facts in decidedly unfactual ways. 

Us liberals will be ineffective in changing conservative minds if we don't grasp how the Republican brain distorts reality. In his introduction, Mooney promises that he'll give advice along this line.

Here's some right-on quotes from what I read last night.

What's more, no matter how much the fact-checkers strive to remain "bipartisan," it is pretty hard to argue that the distribution of falsehoods today is politically equal or symmetrical. It's not that liberals are never wrong or biased; a number of liberal errors will be described and debunked in these pages. 

Nevertheless -- and as I will show -- politicized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.

...The cost of this assault on reality is dramatic. Many of these falsehoods affect lives and have had -- or will have -- world-changing consequences. And more dangerous than any of them is the erosion of a shared sense of what's true -- which they both generate, and perpetuate.

...Science. This is the area I care about most deeply, and the denial here is particularly intense. In a nationally representative survey released just as I was finishing this book -- many prior surveys have found similar things -- only 18 percent of Republicans and Tea Party members accepted the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by humans, and only 45 and 43 percent (respectively) accepted human evolution.

In other words, political conservatives have placed themselves in direct conflict with modern scientific knowledge, which shows beyond serious question that global warming is real and caused by humans, and evolution is real and the cause of humans. If you don't accept either claim, you cannot possibly understand the world or our place in it.

The evidence suggests that many conservatives today just don't.

Sam Harris' "Free Will" says liberals understand role of luck

It's pleasing to my progressive self when modern science confirms one of the foundations of Democratic/liberal political philosophy. Such as, that we humans don't have free will. It's an illusion.

Such is the message of Sam Harris' captivating new book, the pleasingly short (66 readable pages) "Free Will." Harris is a neuroscientist whose first book was "The End of Faith," which brought him a lot of well-deserved attention. 

I hope "Free Will" reaches even more people. On my other blog I've talked about the dizzying joy of being freed from a belief in free will, and how free will is a limiting, destructive belief.

Harris talks about the political aspects of free will in a next-to-last Politics chapter.

What he says is highly relevant to our nation's current debates over whether the goal of government should be to let people alone to pursue their own supposedly freely chosen routes to success and happiness, or whether efforts aimed at leveling out the "bad luck" playing field are justified.

Science comes down solidly on the second option. No man or woman is an island. Our successes and failures, our joys and sorrows, are all tightly tied to other people, genetic influences, culture, education, and many other kinds of social experiences.

Here's the entire three page chapter:

For better or worse, dispelling the illusion of free will has political implications -- because liberals and conservatives are not equally in thrall to it. Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.

Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.

Consider the biography of any "self-made" man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary. 

There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren't born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.

Even if you have struggled to make the most of what nature gave you, you must still admit that your ability and inclination to struggle is part of your inheritance. How much credit does a person deserve for not being lazy? None at all. Laziness, like diligence, is a neurological condition.

Of course, conservatives are right to think that we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can. And it is wise to hold people responsible for their actions when doing so influences their behavior and brings benefit to society. 

But this does not mean that we must be taken in by the illusion of free will. We need only acknowledge that efforts matter and that people can change. We do not change ourselves, precisely -- because we only have ourselves with which to do the changing -- but we continually influence, and are influenced by, the world around us and the world within us.

It may seem paradoxical to hold people responsible for what happens in their corner of the universe, but once we break the spell of free will, we can do this precisely to the degree that it is useful.

Where people can change, we can demand that they do so. Where change is impossible, or unresponsive to demands, we can chart some other course. In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with.

Books are made to be highlighted and written in

Jeez, just what I needed...another outrage that demands my attention, energy, and blogging time to complain about.

I've already got my hands full with climate change, cougar hysteria, Republican filibustering, and getting Cafe Yumm to come to Salem.

Now I'm forced to react to an opinion piece in yesterday's Oregonian that was horribly, insanely, unforgivably wrong:

Douglas Yocum's ridiculous "Spare the scribbles and leave those pages pristine." Is he serious? Is this a joke, a put-on?

Don't ruin books by writing in them. 

More books probably are ruined at Christmas than any other time of the year. Instead of buying a gift card, parents, grandparents and friends jot down a holiday greeting in the front endpapers of the book. 

This is a no-no.

...Sadly, there are worse book sins than signatures. Some owners deface books by writing on the edges, scratching notes in the margins, underscoring or leaving check marks so information can be found easier at a later time. 

Argh! 

Hey, Douglas, Argh! back at you. I hope this drives you crazy -- photos of my copy of one of the best 2011 non-fiction books, Daniel Kahheman's terrific "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

I highlight passages on almost every page.

Plus, I write notes on blank pages in the back of the book. Just like my mother did. Just like I hope my daughter does. And just like I'll be teaching my granddaughter to do as her "book-defacing" (according to Dwight) duty.

Books are made to be highlighted, marked-up, written-in, annotated, whatever. Reading isn't passive. It is active, the more active the better.

I use my highlighter to put "!" marks by passages I like or agree with. In the margin I also put "?" by passages I don't like or disagree with. Sometimes "!!!" or "???" Like I said, my mother was a habitual book scribbler, and I'm proud to be continuing the tradition.

But like I said, maybe Douglas isn't serious. I can't believe he is, because every book lover I've known has considered pages to be a conversation pit, not a lecture hall. Reading isn't passive listening; it is a conversation between the author and me.

I enjoy talking back with my highlighter and pen. I'm pretty sure almost every author of the books I read appreciates my conversing with him/her. If Douglas doesn't, tough. 

Feel free to comment on this blog post if you read it, Douglas. You can even print it out and scribble "Stupid!" all over it. I won't mind.  

Keep independent bookstores alive! They can't die.

I'm a long-lapsed Catholic, but it still felt right to call my purchasing of a book in the wonderful Paulina Springs Books a penance.

That's what I said to my wife after we met up again in charming Sisters, Oregon. Laurel had returned from her clothes shopping safari, and me from a bookstore exploration. (We do this a lot, having different material desires.)

I showed her my big, thick, intellectually meaty/tofuy copy of David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity." I knew I was going to buy this book almost as soon as I read the subtitle: Explanations That Transform the World

I love reading about modern science. I love scientific explanations. I love being transformed. So for the relatively small sum of $30 (the book is hard cover), I'd brought home a lover! Conveniently, one which my wife had no problem driving home with.

Leaving Sisters, I told Laurel how much I liked going into a physical bookstore filled with old-fashioned paper books, where the staff had affixed cards containing personal reviews to some of their favorite titles, appealingly printed out in a typewriter'ish font.

Handing over my credit card, the Paulina Springs Books woman behind the counter added another "like" when I mentioned the cards. "Every book in our store is here because one of us chose to order it; we don't have a central buying service in New York City."

No, they wouldn't. Because Paulina Springs Books only has one other store, in nearby Redmond.

I buy lots of books from Amazon. Lots. In my home town, Salem, there aren't any genuine independent bookstores. Jackson's Books, sadly, went out of business quite a few years ago. People like me are responsible for that.

Hence, my penance.

Every time we pass through Sisters I go into Paulina Springs Books. Almost always I buy something. I find books there that I never would have known about without being able to see them, touch them, hold them, leaf through them.

Yes, I appreciate how skillful Amazon is at saying, "Since you liked X, may we suggest Y?" Quite often their introduction results in a book marriage, me falling in love with another literary object of desire.

But I'm old-fashioned. Not to mention, old. (Though sixty-two no longer strikes me as the Super Geezer age that it used to denote to my younger mind.)

I told the Paulina Springs Books woman that I never want my four year old granddaughter to say, "What was a bookstore like, Grandpa?" And for the moment I'm deeply attached to being able to hold paper pages in my hand, highlight the words on those pages with a marker, and stick scraps of paper in pages where I want to remember where an important thought is.

That's my hand, holding my new book. Also, that's my computer.

Paulina Springs Books is wisely attempting to marry the two -- books and electronic devices. For the first time, I noticed on the bookmark that was stuck in the book: "Think Local when shopping online! www.paulinasprings.com for your eBooks and online ordering."

Excellent idea. The bookstore has partnered with Google to sell Google eBooks. I don't know much about Google eBooks, as I don't have an electronic book reader other than my computer and iPhone, and they aren't pleasant ways to read a book.

But if I ever get an iPad, or whatever, for ebook reading, I'll do my best to send my business to Paulina Springs Books. I searched for an electronic version of the book I just bought and found that it was half the cost of the $30 hardcover I've started to read.

If I learned to highlight via an eReader, I could buy twice as many books!

Anyway, be sure to visit Paulina Springs Books if you're in Sisters or Redmond. Sisters is one of our favorite places, as friendly as its name.

Self-publishing loses its stigma. So...write a book!

Ah, the times they are a'changin, just like Bob Dylan said they would. What was shameful not so long ago has come out into the open, standing tall and proud. And I'm not talking about homosexuality.

Rather, self-publishing.

My print on demand (POD) loving soul was thrilled to read in a recent issue of Newsweek, " Who Needs a Publisher?"

Until recently, reviewers and booksellers looked down on self-published authors the way Anna Wintour scorns Dress Barn. Now new writers and established authors alike are increasingly taking publishing into their own hands, and the publishing establishment is paying attention.

According to a recent Bowker report, the market for “nontraditional books” in the United States grew by more than 750,000 new titles in 2009—a 181 percent increase over 2008. Five of the top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store—which now produces more sales than Amazon’s hardcover list—are currently self-published.

Which shows that my soul is behind the times, because when I think "self-publishing" POD comes to mind (with print on demand, books are printed...surprise!...on demand, one at a time; this makes publishing much easier to accomplish on a minimal budget).

Yet the rise of e-books means there's another way other than POD for a writer to self-publish his or her book. Back in the old days, 2004, when my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus was published in a print on demand fashion, e-books were just a speck on the publishing radar.

Even when I got back the rights to the book and published it via Create Space, an Amazon subsidiary, I didn't think about making "Return to the One" available in an e-book format. Now, I am.

However someone self-publishes a book, it's all good. As the Newsweek article says, "in the DIY [do it yourself] era, putting out your own book is no longer an act of vanity."

Well, I don't think it ever was.

But that was the bad rap self-publishing had back when my first book was published in 1996, and it persisted until recently. Irrationally, because a painter wouldn't be considered vain if she sold her work by some means other than exhibiting it in a major gallery.

Are all the creative types who set up booths at art fairs engaging in "acts of vanity" because they choose to distribute their work themselves, rather than trying to get stores to buy their stuff at wholesale and sell it at retail?

This is a big advantage of self-publishing: cutting out the middleman to a large extent. I used to only get $1.25 or so from the sale of a "Return to the One" copy. Now I get $5.26. And I have the satisfaction of being my own publishing house, Adrasteia Publishing.

I came up with that name (adrasteia means "inescapable" in Greek) when my first POD publishing service thought we needed to disguise the self-published nature of my book. At that time most reviewers wouldn't look at a "vanity" title. And most bookstores wouldn't stock it.

Again, that's ridiculous.

My wife is an avid earring connoisseur. She doesn't care where she finds an attractive pair of dichroic glass earrings. If it's a rickety table at an art fair, great; if it's a fancy display case in a department store, also great.

So what difference does it make if a well-written book is distributed by the author, or printed and marketed by a publishing house? Sure, a lot of self-published books are crappy. Yet a lot of books published through traditional channels also are crappy.

There's nothing like seeing your book in print. Holding the first copy in your hands makes all the work put into it seem more than worthwhile. Viewing a nicely formatted e-book undoubtedly brings its own satisfaction, albeit less physical/sensual.

If you've got a book idea in mind, this is a great time to make it a reality. With the rise of blogs and other means of Internet self-expression, self-publishing increasingly is viewed as just another way of expressing one's creativity.

Once in a while I get emails from people who want to know if I'd recommend Create Space as a self-publishing option. I tell them, absolutely. I like Create Space a lot. But there are other POD and e-book services to consider, such as Lulu.

Just do it. (Living in Oregon, I've got Nike on my mind.)

If seeing your book in print is a dream for you, make it a reality. For $500 or less, it can happen. Write what you want, then publish how you want. There's a whole new world of books now. Become a part of it.

Nook is appealing, but lacks tactile reality

Damn. I want a Nook, Barnes & Noble's new well-reviewed eBook reader. Just like I wanted Amazon's Kindle.

I love high-tech gadgets. Heck, I just got a computerized (sort of) flashlight, the marvelous Fenix LD 20. It's terrific.

But last February I returned a Kindle 2 without even trying it. And even though I spent quite a bit of time yesterday trying to talk myself into buying a Nook, I figured that I'd end up not being happy with it -- mostly for the reason I wrote about before.

I love my MacBook laptop. And my iPhone. Reading on a screen feels natural to me. But only for transient information. Email messages, web browsing, stuff that comes and goes.

I read mostly non-fiction. I keep almost all of my books, partly because I'm a habitual highlighter and used book stores shun my heavily yellow-marked pages. Every morning I read before I meditate. Most recently, a book that I'd read and re-read.

I loved looking at the artifacts of my previous readings.

Originally I'd highlighted in green, then yellow. I'd written notes on the inside back cover. I'd penned in question marks next to statements I disagreed with and round approving circles next to sentences that brought forth a right on.

I realize that the Kindle has some sort of highlighting and note-making features. But it dawned on me that this wouldn't be the same as holding a book with paper pages and marking it up the way I'm used to.

Plus, with the Kindle I wouldn't be able to go to a bookcase and fun my finger along the spines of previously read titles, looking for an old friend that I wanted to become reacquainted with.

 
Maybe I'm old-fashioned. For sure, I'm old (61, though the older I get, the less old sixty seems).

Perhaps I'll never read books on a screen because I'm too hooked on turning paper pages, running a highlighter along printed text, sitting on my meditation cushion with a cup of coffee balanced on the edge of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism" (good book), feeling the heft of processed wood pulp on my lap.

If so, I'm not going to feel like a Luddite.

There's a place for high-tech in our lives. And there's also got to be a place for low-tech. Otherwise we run the risk of losing touch with one of the most satisfying things in life:

Touch.

This is what bothers me the most about Nook, Kindle, and other eBook readers. They're too divorced from touchie-feelie reality.

Technology doesn't have to be that way.

I'm typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro laptop. An iPhone is sitting in my computer bag. I don't feel distanced from either of these gadgets because each is operated with a lot of hands-on fingering.

The MacBook has a great multi-touch trackpad. And the iPhone is controlled by pressing on the touch screen. (I don't have a protective case on my iPhone -- just a screen protector-- because I enjoy the feel of it's naked metal and plastic in my bare hand.)

I like the Nook more than the Kindle at the moment because it has an auxilliary full color touchscreen, which seems nicely iPhone'ish.

However, reading on the Nook, as on the Kindle, still is in grayscale. And pixelated. Sadly, since I'd like to have a new cool piece of technology, eBook readers are going to have to become a lot more like a real book before I'll start using them.

My review of "The Ego Tunnel"-- 5 stars

I buy lots of books from Amazon. I don't post many reviews about them. Just four, something I'm not proud of.

Because I love to peruse the Amazon reader reviews when I'm trying to decide whether to purchase a book. Often what someone has said determines if I click the buy button. So it's sort of strange that I usually don't take the time to offer up my own impressions of a book.

Guess I figure that all of my blogging, which frequently includes a mention of books I've been reading, fulfills my review-karma. But once in a while I'm drawn to give kudos to a title that particularly moves me.

Tonight it was "The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger. I loved this blend of neuroscience and philosophy. I wrote a succession of posts about it on my other blog (see here, here, here, here, and here).

It's surprising that mine was the first reader review. "The Ego Tunnel" deserves more attention than it's getting. I suspect this will change as more people buy the book and recommend it to other people.

I noted in my review that after seeing a mention of Metzinger's book on a Twitter feed I follow, I read about it in New Scientist -- which I subscribe to. Owen Flanagan's review of "The Ego Tunnel" was pretty negative.

And undeserved, as I found after I said "to hell with Flanagan's opinion; this book seems interesting to me" and bought it via Amazon. That's partly why I wanted to post a reader review: they often reflect a book more accurately than some academic's take on a title.

Having written a philosophical book myself, and anxiously waited for Amazon reader reviews to dribble in, I have some understanding of Metzinger's probable state of mind as the days go by and the Amazon listing still has "no reader reviews" showing.

Well, now there is one. May the reviews prosper and multiply, and all be five stars, Dr. Metzinger. You and your book deserve it.

Why I don't want a new Kindle 2

I must be one of the first people to get a Kindle 2 in my book-loving hands and return it the same day. Namely, yesterday.

Amazon sent me my order for its upgraded electronic reading device much more quickly than I expected. I'd been leaning toward canceling my purchase, but figured I had some time to do the deed, since Amazon said it was giving preferential Kindle 2 treatment to owners of Kindle 1.

So after I got an email saying my Kindle was on its way, all I could do was wait for its arrival. I felt sort of sorry for it after the UPS guy dropped off the box. Came all this way and now I was sending it back, unwanted.

I took a photo of my briefly owned Kindle 2 before the return authorization slip was tucked into the box and the cover resealed. Looked nice.

And I'm sure the device itself is as cool as its many satisfied users say it is. I was glad that Amazon's zipped-up packaging didn't allow me to slip the Kindle out and give it a try, because I was afraid that my gadget-loving soul would irrationally scream "Keep it!"

Here are the main reasons I decided to send the Kindle 2 back:

(1) There's nothing like a real book.

I love my MacBook laptop. And my iPhone. Reading on a screen feels natural to me. But only for transient information. Email messages, web browsing, stuff that comes and goes.

I read mostly non-fiction. I keep almost all of my books, partly because I'm a habitual highlighter and used book stores shun my heavily yellow-marked pages. Every morning I read before I meditate. Most recently, a book that I'd read and re-read.

I loved looking at the artifacts of my previous readings.

Originally I'd highlighted in green, then yellow. I'd written notes on the inside back cover. I'd penned in question marks next to statements I disagreed with and round approving circles next to sentences that brought forth a right on.

I realize that the Kindle has some sort of highlighting and note-making features. But it dawned on me that this wouldn't be the same as holding a book with paper pages and marking it up the way I'm used to.

Plus, with the Kindle I wouldn't be able to go to a bookcase and fun my finger along the spines of previously read titles, looking for an old friend that I wanted to become reacquainted with.

(2) The cost savings don't pan out.

First, there's the steep $359 cost of the Kindle itself.

At first I rationalized forking out that amount of money because most e-books for the Kindle on Amazon cost around $10. With the list price of hardcovers running much more than that, seemingly the Kindle would pay for itself.

But I don't read a whole lot of newly released books. And when I checked into a few books featured in a recent issue of Newsweek, I realized that copies usually were available for less than the cost of a Kindle version.

For example the Kindle edition of "Nudge" costs $10.88, while new paper copies are available from non-Amazon sellers for $7.75. Even with shipping, I could have a "real" book for about the same price as an electronic book.

Further, many of the books I like aren't available for the Kindle. Including one I wrote.

I asked my book designer about a Kindle edition. He was down on the idea, saying that he has never seen a book that looks decent on the Kindle, and complexly formatted books like mine are especially difficult to covert to a Kindle edition.

So I've decided to stick with my practice of ordering used books from Amazon whenever I can. Often I find that I can get a new $17 book in a used "like new" condition for $7 or so, shipping included.

(3) The technology needs to be even cooler to grab me.

I'll leave it to those more geeky than me to describe what the Kindle is lacking (color, touch screen, genuine web connection, etc) -- see here, here, and here.

Some techno-stuff I hear about and instantly say, "I've got to have it!" Like, the iPhone and the Flip Video camcorder. The Kindle...I've been going hot and cold with it.

Having settled into lukewarm, that isn't reason enough to add $359 to our VISA bill for something that doesn't elicit a strong Wow in me.

"Return to the One" published under new imprint

In case you're wondering what happened to my best-selling book (in the admittedly narrow Greek philosophy: Plotinus category), "Return to the One" is still available on Amazon.

I've published it under my Adrasteia Publishing imprint, having gotten the rights back from Unlimited Publishing as of January 1, 2009.

So now the book is in a transition zone.

The old Amazon listing doesn't show any decently priced new copies available, because that edition is out of print. But the positive reader reviews are still there.

The new "Return to the One" listing lacks the reviews, which hopefully will be copied over by Amazon soon. Correction of a single typo is the only difference between the 2004 and 2009 editions, aside from changes to the title and copyright pages.

Remember: it's never too early to start your Christmas shopping.

That special someone in your life who has always wanted a book about the third century Greek mystic philosopher, Plotinus, would be thrilled to find "Return to the One" under the tree come December.

I'm pushing for increased sales because Amazon should give my book more visibility once the new edition starts selling as well as the first edition did.

Yet currently the Adrasteia Publishing version is still largely hidden from an Amazon "Plotinus" or "Brian Hines" search view. Amazon listings take a while to automatically update, but I suspect that books which sell better get more rapid Amazonian visibility.

Happiness is a new mountain bike. Maybe.

My birthday has begun. Actually, it started five days ago. It’ll culminate on October 7, which used to be known as my “birthday.” I’ve decided to celebrate it like Ramadan—a full month of honoring what I reverence most: me.

This makes perfect sense, because the older I get (have started to become 58), the fewer birthdays I have left to celebrate. Therefore the celebration should get longer as I age, to make up for fewer future celebratory opportunities. If I live to 100, I suppose I’ll be celebrating continuously.

Anyway, here’s my first major gift to myself. A black 2007 Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike. My old Raleigh was cream colored. I like my new Ninja look. I also like how my riding happiness has increased since Sunday, when I picked up the bike at Eurosports in Sisters.

Just as I expected. Otherwise, why would I want a new bike? On the same day I bought myself this present, I received a few other gifts from myself after a visit to my other favorite Sisters store, Paulina Springs Books.

I saw “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert on the new non-fiction table. At first I figured that the book would tell me how to do just that. But as I thumbed through it I realized that Gilbert had a more tasty fish to fry. He’s out to explain why what we think will make us happy usually doesn’t. At least not in the way we thought it would.

A small still voice in the back of my mind said, “Brian, you just bought yourself a $500 mountain bike that you expect will bring you great joy. Isn’t it dangerous to now plunk down $24.95 on a book that promises to burst your happiness expectation bubble?”

I paused to ponder my small still voice. Then I told it to shut up. After all, I’d just read a blurb on the front cover from Steven Levitt that said, “This absolutely fantastic book will shatter your most deeply held convictions about how the mind works.” So why should I trust what my mind was telling me?

Screw it. I’ll buy the book. And the bike. And whatever else I want and can afford for the next 28 days. It’s my goddamn birthday month! I deserve it all!

Good decision. I’ve been enjoying “Stumbling on Happiness” just as much as my bike, even though it’s got a mostly white cover and doesn’t meld very well with my new Ninja nature. Gilbert is one of those authors who makes me think, “Dear devil, I’ll gladly sell my soul in exchange for being able to write as well as this guy.”

He had me hooked by the time I finished the first paragraph of his Acknowledgements.

This is the part of the book in which the author typically claims that nobody writes a book by himself and then names all the people who presumably wrote the book for him. It must be nice to have friends like that. Alas, all the people who wrote this book are me, so let me instead thank those who by their gifts enabled me to write a book without them.

Terrific. Then the hook was set, hard, by the first few pages of Gilbert’s Foreword. After that, I couldn’t put the book down.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of our hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps.

Great stuff. I was happy that I’d indulged me right now, instead of the future him that I so often sacrifice myself for. But then I read on. And began to see the Dark Side.

In fact, just about any time we want something—a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger—we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forebearance.

Yeah, yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless….How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year—or at least later this afternoon?

Seems like it. But Laurel already has listened to Gilbert’s book on CD, and she tells me that research shows we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy. (Well, I’ll believe it when I read it. The day my body listens to a book will be the day they pry my yellow fluorescent highlighter from my cold dead hands.)

So maybe, maybe, my new mountain bike isn’t going to bring me as much joy as I’m expecting it will. Yet I’m different. I’m special. I’m like no one else in the world. Other poor fools may not know what makes them happy, but I do.

Such is my fervent hope. And, likely, my fervent delusion, based on peeking ahead to the last line of the final chapter.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities—minds unlike any others—and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

Well, stay tuned. It could be that every single person who gets a new mountain bike from Eurosports, including me, is happy for the rest of their days. I’ll let you know if that’s true. (If it is, you'll be eager for this information.)

Osama Bin Laden’s mistress, a topless womanist

Kola Boof claims that she was Osama Bin Laden’s mistress in the mid-1990s. In her book Boof reveals juicy details about Bin Laden’s sexual and cultural predilections.

From a Harper's excerpt I learned that Boof’s Al Qaeda boy toy made her dance naked to Van Halen; he didn’t know the difference between being vicious and being tender (shock!); he enjoyed hitting the hookah before sex; his favorite TV shows were The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, and MacGyver; and he adored Whitney Houston so much, he wanted to give her a mansion in Khartoum.

I believe it all. Sure, there are skeptics who doubt her story just because of minor details like the fact that she claims she performed sex acts on a group that included Bin Laden and several of his lieutenants, some of whom were dead or in prison at the time.

Like I said, details, details.

Guess I’m a sucker for an African womanist who proudly poses topless on her web site. She says that publicity and vanity have nothing to do with it.

Rather, Boof explains, “"I am topless to honor my mothers and grandmothers, my own African womenfolk who were always bare breasted in the sun and who gave birth to this whole world.”

I definitely can get behind her religion (in front of it too). She writes:

They [her relatives] were naked because it pleases God…and I do believe that it's an abomination against God for any woman's breasts to be covered. So I have it written in my book contracts that I must appear topless on the back covers of my books. I also do it because it's not Christian and it's not Islamic. I truly want to plant a seed in favor of women creating their own institution of religion, because that's all religions are-institutions.

Ms. Boof, if you start up a religion where all the women are topless in church, sign me up as the first male convert. I’ll be happy to hold the collection plate as the worshippers pass by. With my eyes humbly cast downward, of course.

My satori is near at hand

Clearly my final enlightenment—satori!—is near at hand, for I have bought a book that will lead me there: D.T. Suzuki’s “The Zen Koan as a means of Attaining Enlightenment.”

The clerk at Salem’s Book Bin was suitably impressed with my purchase, telling me “We hope you’ll come back after your enlightenment and share your realization.” I said, “Absolutely. I plan to charge $8 for this dispensation of wisdom, which will enable me to realize a 50 cent profit from buying this $7.50 book.”

Obviously my spiritual motives are pure. So pure that a humble part of me continually whispers, “Brian, you are already enlightened.” I like that voice. I want to trust it. But I don’t want to take any chances with my satori. Though I may already have become one with Buddha nature, I figure it won’t hurt to add to my oneness.

Hence, my purchase of the book. Now, I don’t have a Zen Master, nor do I want one. My Zen transcends spiritual discipline and organized practice, which makes it so easy for me to follow. And also easy for me to confirm my satori, since I don’t have to go through the unappealing process of getting my enlightenment confirmed by someone else.

I’ll decide when my Buddha nature is fully Buddhaized, thank you. And I don’t need a Zen Master to give me a koan either. I’ve got plenty of koans lying right around the house that should work fine to top off my satori tank. Here are some examples of homey koans that defy rational explication.

If our dog has Buddha nature, then why does she always ask to go out just when I have settled down comfortably on the couch?

When my wife’s closet is filled to capacity, how is it possible that she can keep shopping and coming home with more clothes?

After a man has washed the cutting board and returned it to its place still wet, so the board can drip-dry onto the counter, if he does not hear the sound of a woman chastising him, is he still wrong?

And lastly, my favorite koan of all:

If a sentient being already has acquired countless books describing a myriad of spiritual practices, only a few of which are shown here, and each claims in its own unique fashion to convey the truth about ultimate reality, what are the chances of another book making any difference?

Anxiously analyzing Amazon’s text stats

Just what I didn’t need the first “work” (using that term in a writer’s sense, extremely loosely) day after a relaxing vacation in Maui. In the course of checking on my book’s miniscule sales status, I discovered that the geniuses at Amazon.com have added some new features to their already filled-to-the-gills web site that can make an author anxious:

Readability statistics for books included in their Search Inside the Book program (where authors/publishers send Amazon a book to be scanned, after which every darn word can be searched for and sample pages perused). Plus a concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. And a statistically improbable phrases feature helpfully described by Amazon in a pop-up window:

“Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or ‘SIPs’, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.”

I was thrilled to see that “Return to the One” garnered five SIPS: mystic philosophy, mystic philosopher, intuitive intelligence, first emanation, inward contemplation. I would have been disappointed if there weren’t any interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases in my book.

I also enjoyed looking at the graphically enhanced concordance (elsewhere on the page linked above). Of the 100 most common words in a book, Amazon apparently puts the most common of the common in a larger, bolder font. So I could quickly see that my book talked a lot about soul, Plotinus, spirit, and spiritual—which is absolutely true.

It wasn’t quite as much fun to anxiously analyze the readability statistics. At first I fantasized that my score of 14.6 on the Fog Index sounded admirably low. But then I saw that 7-8 is considered ideal, and anything over 12 means the book is difficult to read. OK, I’ll admit to “Return to the One” being more or less guilty as charged.

Yet let’s see the developer of the Fog Index write a really easy to read book about one of the densest and most profound philosophers of all time. (Oops, make that “mystic philosopher”—might as well use my special Statistically Improbable Phrases as much as I can.) So I decided to check out some of the related competition, a few of the Books on Related Topics that Amazon lists on my book’s page.

Yeah, baby. Let’s go head to head with Pierre Hadot’s “Plotinus or the simplicity of vision,” which is one of the most popular (in the sense of both best-selling and easy to read) books about this Greek philosopher.

Fog Index: Hines scores 14.6 and Hadot 17.5. Yay, a point for Hines!

Flesch Index (90-100 appropriate for 5th-6th graders, 0-30 means you need a college degree to understand the book): Hines scores 51.5 and Hadot 44.0. Boo, a point for Hadot.

We’ve got a tie, one point each. It all comes down to the Flesch-Kincaid Index, a refinement of the Flesch Index that relates the score to a U.S. grade level. You would think that Hadot would win out again here, but no…

Flesch-Kincaid Index: Hines scores 11.5 and Hadot 14.2. Yay, another point for Hines! He wins 2-1! If you just made it halfway through your senior year in high school, you can still enjoy “Return to the One”—no need to plow onward into the junior year of college just to be able to understand Hadot’s book.

Plus, take a look at Amazon’s Fun Stats: with my book you get a whopping 10,324 words per dollar; with Hadot’s book you just get a measly 2,755. Where can you get 10,324 of anything for just a buck? And here you get 10,324 words of profound mystic philosophy for your $1 (to work in another SIP; by the way, Hadot only managed to come up with two SIPS, “total presence” and “our true self”; you get five in my book.

Sure, you could get your philosophy from the “Tao of Pooh” and only need a 6th grade education to understand it. But come on: the concordance shows that you’re going to read “Pooh said” over and over and over. For about $4 more you can get almost 100,000 additional words in “Return to the One” and learn about a mystic philosopher who wrote that the nature of God, the One, can’t begin to be expressed in language.

To get at the root of that paradox you’re going to have to buy the book.

The mystery of suffering

Why do we suffer? There’s no better question to ask, because a search for the answer leads into the deepest mysteries of life, death, God, existence, body, soul, meaning, purposelessness—the whole shebang that philosophers ponder, mystics meditate on, scientists study, and preachers pontificate about.

Bill Long’s recently-published book, “A Hard-Fought Hope: Journeying with Job through Mystery,” examines suffering through a biblical lens, the book of Job. Yet Bill, a Salem resident and friend of mine, doesn’t take a traditional religious approach to understanding Job. He starts by laying out a legal complaint against God, Ruler of the Universe on behalf of Job, an individual.

The charges? Breach of contract, negligence, loss of consortium, intentional infliction of emotional distress. The prayed-for remedy? What we all want, relief. Since Bill is both an attorney and a religious scholar, his discussion of the book of Job is systematic and logical while also compassionate and devotional. Committed Jews and Christians who read “A Hard-Fought Hope” will find that Bill speaks their language.

I’m neither a Jew nor a Christian, yet I enjoyed learning about a perspective on suffering that was unfamiliar to me. I might have read the book of Job sometime in my life, but it hadn’t registered with me. So I appreciated how Bill breaks down Job’s response to God’s testing of his faith into well-defined “stages of grief,” so to speak, that comprise his book’s central chapters: “A Torrent of Emotions,” “The Grace of Job’s Anger,” “The Music of Job’s Grief,” “The Power of a Question,” “The Turning Point,” “Wisdom Seeking,” “Listening Differently,” “Living Differently.”

The problem I had with “A Hard-Fought Hope” didn’t have to do with Bill’s writing, which is highly readable, nor with the book’s subject of suffering, which is of intense interest to me—particularly when life doesn’t go the way I think it should (in other words, I’m interested almost all of the time). No, what gave me pause throughout my reading of the 160 pages was this: I couldn’t stop thinking, “Is all this dialogue in the book of Job between a suffering man and the God who makes him suffer anything more than literary fantasy?”

Lots of novelists have written about suffering. Why isn’t their message taken as seriously as the words in the Old Testament that Bill interprets for us? It must be because so many people consider that the book of Job really is a true description of how God sent suffering to a man, and how that man responded to the divine test. Otherwise, Job is just a fictional description of a guy with delusions that a unseen malevolent metaphysical force is out to get him: “He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me; he has gnashed his teeth at me; my adversary sharpens his eyes against me.” (16:9) “I was at ease, and he broke me in two; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces.” (16:12)

Personally, I think the book of Job is fiction. There really isn’t a God who gnashes his teeth, seizes people by the neck, and breaks them in two. But many believers think there is, which to me is the most interesting question about Job in particular and the Bible in general: Why does the notion of an external, supernatural source of suffering hold so much appeal? A short possible answer: Because a God who gives suffering can take away suffering, which lifts the responsibility for eliminating suffering off of my shoulders and puts it in God’s hands.

Near the end of his book, Bill writes: “If only Job could have believed in a God who did not intervene in human life, that would have solved all his difficulties.” Yes, in a sense it would have. Job still would be afflicted by all that he was suffering from, but he wouldn’t have the significant added burden of suffering from a belief that the God he loved so much had singled him out for special nasty treatment.

I know lots of people who believe that many, if not most, of the things that happen to them are for a reason. This isn’t a peculiarly Christian/Jewish doctrine. Some think that angelic beings or spiritual guides are directing the course of their life. Others, an ascended (or descended) guru, master, avatar, yogi, or other entity with a power to alter events. I can’t say for sure that they are wrong. Still, almost all the evidence of both science and common sense points toward natural, universal, and impersonal causes of life’s happenings.

My bet is that the only cure for suffering is what we prescribe ourselves. This is the basic Buddhist perspective, echoed in a little book by Paramhansa Yogananda that I re-read recently: “The Science of Religion.” I don’t agree with everything Yogananda says, but I find persuasive his essential psychological premises: “Desire, or the increase of conditions of excitations of the mind, is the source of pain or misery….Every human being is seeking to attain Bliss by fulfilling desire, but he mistakenly stops at pleasure; so his desires never end, and he is swept away into the whirlpool of pain.”

This may sound rather New Agey. Still, when I consider Yogananda’s well-reasoned arguments, which are more sophisticated than my two sentence summary here, they resonate with me more persuasively than does the book of Job. For Yogananda, Buddhism, and Eastern philosophy in general (plus the mystic neo-Platonism of Plotinus) locate the source of suffering in the human psyche, not God’s will. This means that we should look inward to our own self for answers to why life is so painful, not outward to a being in the heavens.

Still, what do I really know about all this? Not much. What I’ve just said is only one of many options on this interesting and amusing “Why Do We Suffer?” quiz.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any answers at the end of the quiz. Just more questions. Maybe that is the best answer.

Ranting reaps a review

Proving either that ranting results in a rapid response from the cosmos, or, more likely, that magical thinking is alive and well in my twisted mind, after yesterday’s posting I was pleased to find an email from the Radical Academy waiting for me when I turned on my computer this morning. My book had been reviewed!

My fingers were trembling slightly as I clicked on the link to Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty’s review. For while I have been eager to have “Return to the One” reviewed, naturally I was envisioning positivity at the end of the Review Rainbow, not negativity. Thankfully, a quick read through Dr. Dolhenty’s thoughtful analysis of my book about Plotinus allayed my anxieties.

He ends with these words: I highly recommend "Return to the One" to all those interested in the philosophy of Plotinus, the general history of Western philosophy, religious philosophy, or mystical philosophy. The subject is interesting and important and Brian Hines' prose is crisp, concise, and easily understood.

Well, I may have to revise my potential (and so far utterly unrealized) sales projections. As noted in the posting below, I’ve been considering that this book would appeal to enthusiasts of mysticism and Greek Philosophy. But, hey, if we open the door to “the general history of Western philosophy” and “religious philosophy,” a lot more readers could enter in.

The Radical Academy is an interesting website. On the home page it says, We discuss traditional philosophical, moral, and religious questions; contemporary political, social, and cultural problems and policies; current scientific and technological issues and speculations; challenges to the "conventional" wisdom, "popular" ideologies, and "accepted" paradigms of our culture; and the application of commonsense realistic principles to all human affairs.

Dr. Dolhenty lives in Port Orford, so the Radical Academy has Oregon roots. He is President and Webmaster of the Academy and its parent organization, the Center for Applied Philosophy.

A lot of people would consider a Center for Applied Philosophy about as useless an enterprise as you could think of, especially since it has a significant emphasis on classic Western philosophers. And a lot of people would be mistaken.

I’ve been re-reading what Thoreau has to say on this subject in his “Reading” chapter in Walden. Maybe one day the New Age Retailer reviewer who declined to write a review of my book because it was “not relevant to today’s issues” will read Walden’s words and change his or her mind:

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, because it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

…I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him, --my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate.

…How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhat uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

Since “Return to the One” was published I’ve been told by several people, “I’ve started your book, but I haven’t been able to get past the opening chapters. It’s heavy.” Well, yes, it is. And also exceedingly light if you allow yourself to soar with Plotinus’s spiritual vision. At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush, I’ll say that “Reading a classic philosopher is hard work. You have to be steadfast.”

Thoreau: To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Bumper sticker wisdom

Here’s some bumper sticker/wooden sign wisdom that I picked up in several artsy-crafty Sisters stores yesterday:

“My greatest fear is that there is no PMS, and this is my personality.”

“If life were logical, men would ride side-saddle.”

“Isn’t a smoking area in a restaurant like a peeing area in a swimming pool?”

“My wife keeps saying I never listen to her…or something like that.”

“If I want to hear the pitter-patter of little feet, I’ll put shoes on my dog.”

I started paying more attention to this pithy literary genre because I was looking for a way to entertain myself while Laurel pawed through seemingly endless bins of prints, searching for some artwork that we needed in our house for some reason that never quite registered on me (guess I should have bought #4 above.)

So I’d get out my always-handy notepad and pen and jot down sayings that struck me, figuring that this was more courteous and less likely to result in annoyed looks from the store owner than taking a flash photo of the bumper sticker or wooden sign whose message I wanted to remember but didn’t want to buy.

Now I have a shopping purpose in life, somewhat comparable but much less intense than Laurel’s quest for the ultimate pair of dichroic glass earrings. I shall continue accumulating the best short sayings I see until I have several hundred. Then I will publish them in a Best Bumper Stickers book, sit back, and wait for several hundred copyright infringement complaints to flow in, the cost of which to settle will suck up all of my royalties.

Better think of another book idea. Like the wonderful “Walter the Farting Dog” that Laurel bought yesterday. This is a great book and appears to be a best-seller, which isn’t surprising given the title. “Farting” is a guaranteed attention-getter, whether the word is spoken or written, and even more so when the action is enthusiastically indulged in.

A bit more about George W. Bush and bumper sticker wisdom: in the September 13 issue of “The New Yorker” there is an article on “Bush Speak—the President’s vernacular style.” The author, Philip Gourevitch, concludes what I have always thought myself. Namely, “He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence.”

Actually, says Gourevitch, Bush’s intelligence “is—if not especially literate—acutely verbal.” Bush clearly is a better speaker than Kerry, and I’m afraid he is going to clean the floor with Kerry in the presidential debates. One reason is that Bush knows how to put his points across as if he was reading from a series of bumper stickers. His words are simple, understandable, and strong. In contrast, Gourevitch observes, “John Kerry can speak rousingly for whole paragraphs without saying anything precise or concrete.”

Kerry would do well to spend some time as I did yesterday: reading bumper stickers and being exposed to writing that says a lot in a few words. I’m no one to talk, of course, as I love to spend a page saying what could be said in a couple of lines. But I’m not running for president. Kerry is, and we desperately need him to learn how to speak effectively. Now!

Sacrifice religion for God

It isn’t often that I recommend a 300 page book after reading just 30 pages. But I can already tell that “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” is a book well worth recommending. I’d been feeling listless all day until I took a first look at Sam Harris’ warnings against religion. Right away I felt energized. Brutally honest words can do that to you, especially when well-written, as Harris’ book is.

I sense that Harris is a kindred spirit. He’s working on a doctorate in neuroscience, so his mind is attuned to the scientific method. And he has a fondness for mysticism, judging by a concluding chapter, “Experiments in Consciousness.” Harris says, “Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is subject to rational discussion.”

A San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer takes issue with this elevation of mysticism over religion, but I agree with Harris. Consciousness is something directly accessible by every human. And the contents of consciousness also can be directly manipulated by any person who wants to experiment within his or her own psyche.

Sure, meditation is damnably difficult. Few people can successfully conduct the experiments in consciousness described by the great mystics. But at least we are dealing here with something concrete and undeniably real, as contrasted with religious talk of God—which is almost always hearsay, distant reports of what someone else supposedly experienced hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Harris says, “The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.” In the first chapter he suggests an interesting thought experiment: imagine that all six billion people in the world wake up one day with no knowledge of the world. Wisdom would have to be recreated from scratch. Where would we start? How would we relearn what we know now? Which currently widely-held religious tenets would be reincarnated, and which would have died, never to be reborn?

He writes, “When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true?”

Along these lines, I have my own thought experiment that I often like to ponder. It leads to the same conclusions Harris comes to, but from another direction—from deep outer space. Imagine that beings from a highly advanced extra-galactic civilization make a visit to Earth. The challenge is to communicate with them. Where do you start with a being whose culture, history, experience, knowledge is so utterly different from your own? What common ground do you share? What is the Rosetta Stone that enables you to translate your concepts into their concepts?

Well, it seems obvious that this would be: reality. Earthly scientists likely would have little difficulty beginning to communicate with their extra-terrestrial counterparts. For even if their representation of a hydrogen atom, say, was unlike that familiar to human physicists, it wouldn’t take long to form a common understanding of a entity that exists both on our planet and in a distant galaxy: hydrogen.

But what of God? How would our religious leaders be able to establish any sort of common ground with these beings? Almost certainly they would have no experience of anything akin to our Bible, Koran, Adi Granth, Talmud, Upanishads, or any other scripture. Even more: I like to imagine that they would have no conception at all of religion as we know it. They would only be familiar with a single entity, reality, what exists. What doesn’t exist, but what earthly religions believe exists, would be utterly foreign to them.

So could there be any communication about religious or spiritual matters with these beings? Yes, since both they and we are conscious. In the realm of what we call metaphysics, pure consciousness would be our common ground, not the cultural/historical contents of consciousness that forms the foundation of the religions on our planet.

I like to think that the advanced mystics of Earth and these extra-galactic visitors eventually would have a grand old time sharing their experiences of God, ultimate reality. But there wouldn’t be a trace of religion in these communications of consciousness.

Religion has to be sacrificed on the Altar of Truth to know God. Such is how it always has been; such is how it always will be. Sadly, though, most people would rather worship Belief, which is why Harris’ call for an end to religion won’t be widely heeded.

Still trying to set my hair on fire

I was sitting outside on our deck this afternoon, working hard at avoiding doing anything productive, when that damned voice in my head spoke words that I’ve been hearing way too frequently lately: “This moment will never come again.” The message was so clear it almost made me go back to my computer and get back to compiling the footnotes for the rewrite of my first book. Almost.

Because, with a little more pondering of the Unfathomable Mystery that is our cosmos, I was able to tell myself: “So what matters is the moment, not what transpires in it.” Hence, lounging lazily in the warm sun is as momentous (using my special definition of the term) as is typing intensely at my desk, working on finishing the footnotes.

After all the news of the 9/11 hearings, where the phrase “hair on fire” was uttered many more times than it had any right to be, I paused before I used these words in the title of this posting. It seemed too much like meme-littering. But then I recalled the phrase’s noble Zen heritage. George Leonard says that these were words of instructions to a medieval samurai: “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”

Well, I’m still in the simmer stage. It’s amazing how often I walk away from my parked Volvo and then walk right back to it, not being sure whether I pressed the “lock” button on the key fob. Where’s my fire-in-the-hair concentration? Frequently, in a memory of a past moment or an anticipation of a moment to come. I’m missing the moment that is really here right now, the only moment that truly exists.

I’m an advanced student of the theory of momentology. However, I’m still a neophyte in the practice of this all-important discipline. Theory and practice go hand in hand, though, so I’m hoping that what I’ve read on this subject will someday translate into direct fiery experience. My favorite essay is Luther Askeland’s “The God in the Moment,” a chapter in his highly recommended book, “Ways in Mystery.” (Obtaining this link, I just saw my laudatory Amazon comment—one of the few I’ve written, which shows how much I like this book).

These excerpts I found on a web site don’t do justice to the complete essay, which nears an end with these words:

“The truth is that we are all too often back at the beginning, back where this essay and the Pascalian analysis begins, back, that is, with the moment itself and our unease about it, back with ourselves and our more or less confounded minds and divided hearts, back with the relentless impulse to just cover this discomfort, or pain, with sights and sounds, memories, experiences, actions, projects, dreams, other pain.

So it is that in our spiritual lives—the goal of which is an infinite journey toward God—it is the very first steps that we must repeat again and again. And so it is that we are continually brought back to the same dilemmas, conflicts, and choices. Shall I fill up the moment and simply blot it out with memories, or with the future, or just by doing anything at all, or shall I try to look directly at where I am right now and what my condition is right now?

...This is the choice we face, or evade, each moment. It is the choice between filling up the moment or attending to it. It is the choice whether we will have a life or something else, whether we will dwell stretched out across time, or somewhere else. It is the choice whether to live in what can be said and thought, or to seek the real.”

Moments.
Seemingly—
So many. So fleeting.
‘Always more where that came from.’
Yet really—
Only one.
So precious.

I’ve become the person I warned myself about

Partway through my martial arts class last night the head instructor, Master Allen, showed us some alternative moves in a kata that we had been practicing—it’s called Kanku Dai in Japanese, Kong San Goon in Korean. He said, “There is no one Way. There always is more than one Way. Anyone who believes there is one Way is limiting himself.”

Music to my ears, now. But it would have been heresy to my ears, then, during the nine years I was studying traditional Shotokan karate. In Shotokan karate there is one way to perform a kata: the sensei’s way, the instructor’s way. And even a high-ranking instructor, such as a fourth-degree black belt, is not going to perform a kata in a way different than Sensei Nishiyama, the ninth-degree leader of Shotokan karate, says it should be performed.

I used to believe that this was the right way to practice the martial arts: try to follow the One Way, the Master’s Way. Along with most of my Shotokan comrades, I used to belittle those poor deluded practitioners of “mix and match” martial arts systems that melded techniques and approaches from many different styles into a unique blend.

And now I find that I’ve become one of the people I used to belittle. Not surprisingly, my perspective is much different now. Yes, I understand why someone would want to study under a rigid “it’s my way or the highway” philosophy—which pretty accurately describes traditional karate—but I don’t think this is the best way to learn the martial arts. Or anything, for that matter.

My spiritual practice has evolved along similar lines. Thirty-four years ago I was initiated into a meditation path that goes by various names: Science of the Soul, Sant Mat, Path of the Masters, Surat Shabd Yoga. I’ve written several books that have been distributed by the organization behind this path—Radha Soami Satsang Beas. Over the past three + decades I’ve had many wonderful experiences, met lots of wonderful people, learned much wonderful stuff.

Yet…just as with the martial arts, the longer I follow a spiritual path the more I realize there isn’t just one Way. There may indeed be the One at the end of the Way (self-promotion interlude: in July 2004 my new book “Return to the One” will be released). But there are many Ways to the One, I’m increasingly sure of that.

So I find myself adapting my meditative practice in ways that I would have considered heretical just a few years ago. Here too, I’ve become the heretic that I used to warn myself about, one of those who thinks for himself and doesn’t follow the party (or Master’s) line simply because the word has come down from on high, “This is how it should be done.” Yes, I start with this. However, if that turns out to be more efficacious than this, I make the change. Such is the way of science. And also of nature. Flexibility. Adaptability. Openness. Evolution.

Systems are necessary. Without them, chaos rules. But without some chaos, rigidity rules. Dee Hock, the founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International, wrote a great book called “Birth of the Chaordic Age.” It describes both the chaordic way he got VISA going, and how chaordic principles can be applied both in organizational management and personal growth. “Chaordic,” says Hock, is defined as:

“1. the behavior of any self-governing organism, organization or system which harmoniously blends characteristics of order and chaos. 2. patterned in a way dominated by neither chaos or order. 3. characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature.”

Go Chaordic. It’s much better than going all Orderly, or all Chaotic. Each of us needs both in our lives. Order and Chaos. If you’ve got too much of one, embrace the other. It seems to be working for me (though my wife wouldn’t entirely agree, especially when it comes to the state of my t-shirt drawer.)

“You say you want a revolution…”

I’ve always loved these Lennon/McCartney lyrics: “You say you want a revolution…You say you got a real solution…Well you know you better free your mind instead.” It’s deep, man. And wonderfully applicable to so much in everyday life. Which in my life includes where the 275 acre Sustainable Fairview development is heading, and where I myself am heading.

Under the “Sustainability” category to the left I periodically rant and rave about the opportunities that so far have been missed to make Sustainable Fairview a truly world-class model of sustainability. Laurel and I are investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates, the limited liability company that has been stumbling along, crippled by poor management and a lack of vision, casting about for a way to be as Green as possible without losing the green stuff that we and others put into this cause several years back.

There are some glimmers of hope on the horizon. I’m looking forward to Chris Jones and his Eco-West Development company becoming more active in Sustainable Fairview—which needs a new name as desperately as it needs competent professional management (I still like “Terramore,” a name I suggested way back that got the most votes in an online poll I conducted of Sustainable Fairview Associates’ name candidates, none of which have been adopted yet).

Regardless, I think John and Paul hit it on the head. Sustainability won’t change the world if people just mess around with outward solutions. Recycling. Solar energy. Smart growth. Fuel cells. All these Green buzz words just point toward programs that fail to get at the real problem facing our Earth: us. What you, me, and everyone else wants out of life obviously is directly related to what we have to take from nature to get what we want.

I read in the Oregonian recently that Green buildings are a hot commodity in Portland now. People are willing to pay a lot to live and work in them. Real estate developers see sustainability as a new way to make more money, to feed the American Profit Machine that is one of the root causes of why our planet is in so much trouble. I find this deeply disturbing, the same reason I have found the direction of Sustainable Fairview Associates so disturbing. A commitment to sustainability should lead to business-as-unusual, not business-as-usual. Also thinking-as-unusual, not thinking-as-usual.

Tom Bender, who lives on the Oregon coast, and who I got to spend a pleasant few hours once discussing the Fairview vision, talks about the need for qualitative change in his book “Learning to Count What Really Counts.” Tom says, “Our present society and the sustainable one which we need to become operate on totally different principles and values.” Amen. This is what Russ Beaton, one of the founders of Sustainable Fairview Associates and a friend of ours, has been preaching to largely deaf ears in the company for several years. I’ve been echoing what I’ve learned from Russ, but it is hard to get through to people who see “sustainability” as something you can buy at the Green Technology Store rather than something you have to create within your own mind and heart.

Russ, me, and the other visionaries who tried to make Eco-Enterprises, Inc. a go wanted Sustainable Fairview to be founded on a whole different land ethic. We wanted these 275 acres to be owned by a Community Land Trust, with a generous share of the profits accruing from the land to be plowed back into the land—rather than being harvested by outside corporate interests, as will probably happen now at Fairview. We had a truly sustainable vision; we weren’t content with playing around with a few sustainable programs.

I’ve started reading one of Daniel Quinn’s books, “The Story of B.” There’s a lot to like and also quite a bit not to like in Quinn’s animistic philosophical perspective. I do resonate to his distinction between new visions and new programs, though. This is precisely what I’ve been railing on about since Laurel and I joined Sustainable Fairview Associates. Absent a new sustainable vision, supposedly sustainable programs are like spitting in the wind. Vision is the wind itself. It carries you where you need to go with hardly any effort. But it takes guts and a willingness to change to follow a vision, which is why most people are content with programs. Here’s a few excerpts from “The Story of B”:

“If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but a new program…Recycling is a program…Programs invariably run counter to vision, and so have to be thrust on people—have to be ‘sold’ to people…In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. My objective is to change the direction of the flow, away from catastrophe.”

If people get in their Toyota Prius’s (we’re proud owners of a 2004) to drive a thousand miles to Disneyland every year in search of plasticized fun, or ten miles every week to WalMart and Costco to bring home the next new gadget (made overseas) that relieves the boredom of their lives, we’re not really moving toward sustainability. We’re using less gasoline to do the same things, but that is something totally different.

I don’t know what a truly sustainable society would look like; I do know it isn’t what I see around me now, and what Laurel and I are living now (yes, we regularly go to WalMart and Costco). Well, at least we’re seeking the vision, which is more than most people are doing. And those who seek will find, or so we’re told.

“He is risen!” No, almost certainly not

Once again I brought too many books to Maui. Back in Oregon I forgot how enjoyable simply sitting on the beach is. I picture myself reading much more than I end up wanting to do. However, I’ve slowly been making my way through a wonderful book, “Think,” that I started reading several years ago, re-discovered on a shelf, and decided to throw into my suitcase.

With Easter tomorrow, I figured it would be appropriate to share some thoughts from the chapter on “God.” Simon Blackburn, the author of "Think" is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. His book, says an inside cover, is “about the big questions in life: knowledge, consciousness, fate, God, truth, goodness, justice.”

It isn’t a typical “beach book,” but Blackburn writes in crystal-clear, simple prose, and even throws in some understated humor. I admire any philosopher who can intersperse some digs about the reliability of Windows in a section on “The Problem of Evil”. Challenging the notion that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God can be deduced as lying behind the world’s obvious deficiencies, Blackburn says: “Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything.”

Tomorrow countless Christians will consider that they have been saved through their belief that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected several days later. Almost certainly they are wrong. Probably, both about being saved and about the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. I find Blackburn’s analysis of people’s beliefs about God highly persuasive.

He says that it makes sense for any thinking person to be skeptical of all the conflicting claims about miracles, one of which, of course, is the Christian claim that Jesus died and then bodily lived again—as also will, supposedly, the Christian faithful. “Which is more likely?” Blackburn asks: that something miraculous happens which is totally surprising, that in normal life just never happens (like the dead coming back to life), or that the purported miracle is the result of causes we encounter all the time: delusions, memory lapses, misunderstandings, metaphors mistaken for literal truth, deliberate fabrications for selfish ends, and so on.

He also observes, quite rightly, that every religion considers that its miracles are genuine, while the miracles revered by every other competing religion fall into one or more of the categories above: delusions, fabrications, etc. So religious believers have to admit that people are prone to error when it comes to believing things that really aren’t true. But somehow they consider that my religion, and only my religion, is immune from the errors that every other religion falls prey to.

I don’t accept this. If one religion is wrong, then all religions are wrong. And this, I strongly suspect, is indeed the case. Any religion that purports to explain the mysteries of God in human concepts has to be wrong, unless one assumes that the everyday human mind somehow is virtually identical to the essence of the Creator, which seems to be a very far reach given the inadequacies of Homo sapiens.

Absent miracles there still is plenty of mystery to keep anyone with a religious consciousness occupied. All anyone needs to do is look outward and behold the inconceivable vastness of the cosmos, or look inward and behold the inconceivable vastness of consciousness. Who needs miracles when the miraculous is all around us, and indeed is us?

“I” for an “eye”

Last night we watched an hour and a half Oregon Public Broadcasting fundraising program about the photographer Jim Brandenburg, blissfully shortened through the magic of our PVR (personal video recorder), which took out all the fundraising moments. Brandenburg is a highly successful nature photographer who felt burnt-out after twenty years of traveling the world and working for National Geographic and other magazines.

Searching for a way to rekindle his passion for photography (and, we must presume, life), he decided to do something amazing—for a professional photographer, at least. Rather than taking hundreds or thousands of photos a day and culling through them for the best shots, he decided to take one frame a day for ninety days and publish the results. Time: from the beginning of fall to the beginning of winter. Place: the wilds of northern Minnesota, where he lives.

Laurel saw a mention of this program in the OPB guide (we’re members, which allowed us to fast forward through all the dreadful fundraising pitches with no qualms). I reluctantly passed up my traditional Sunday evening taping of “60 Minutes” for what I thought would be a typical nature show. But “Chased by the Light” was anything but. Brandenburg brings a Zen sensibility to his photographic artistry, and limiting himself to a single photograph a day meant that whatever moment he chose to capture had to be just the right moment.

You can see his 90 photographs on his website. Last night we heard him describe how many of the shots transpired, which gave them much more meaning. His philosophical observations were equally intriguing. Consider the photo of Day 5, “Raven Feather.” Brandenburg said that on this day he had two choices (I seem to recall him saying that the sun was setting, so a decision had to be made quickly about that day’s shot). There was a beautiful rainbow over a lake, what he called “a calendar shot.” Safe, grand, familiar. And then there was the raven feather that had fallen on a rock. Brandenburg chose the risky, quirky, unique shot. He didn’t regret it. The road less traveled...

Brandenburg is an artist with a tremendous eye. Yet it is his “I” that makes possible his remarkable vision of nature and animals. He doesn’t imitate. Brandenburg is an original. As I watched the 90 days unfold I kept thinking, “What if I could see one ‘frame’ of life every day with the same freshness and passion that this photographer brought to his quest? What is my eye, outer or inner, not seeing because my ‘I’ is occupied with second-hand visions?”

This morning I got out “The Spiritual Emerson” and re-read Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance” along with a related essay, “The Divinity School Address.” Here are two excerpts from the essay on Self-Reliance that reminded me of Brandenburg’s central message: be your own “I,” and see with your own “eye.”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty…Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”

This is the gift of Jim Brandenburg who, like Emerson and Thoreau, finds the hand of God in the tapestry of nature. Most of us can’t see what Brandenburg sees, though we all have eyes like him. What is different about Jim is that he doesn’t have a borrowed “I” as most of us do.

May we all become originals rather than copies. Life is so much clearer and sharper when we aren’t trying to see through someone else’s lenses.

Refrigerator friends, art, and Emerson

An eclectic collection of topics, but it’s been a week since my last post, making it difficult to focus on a single subject.

Refrigerator friends…Laurel found a mention of such in an article she was reading a while back. This well describes Ron and Rita, from Seattle, whom we had the pleasure of hosting as weekend guests. A refrigerator friend is someone who unhesitatingly can walk into your house and open the refrigerator without asking, even saying, “What do you have to eat? I’m starving.” The author of the article said that everyone needs some refrigerator friends, because these are the sorts of people you can feel utterly comfortable with, since nothing (or, at least, little) is hidden behind the usual masks of faux politeness and chit chat that allow for superficial niceness, but prevent simple honesty.

Art…We took Ron and Rita to the Salem Art Fair on Saturday, an emerging annual tradition. The Art Fair is our favorite local event, which deserves the highest compliment one can offer, “This is as good as anything you could go to in Portland (or Eugene).” We Salemites have good reason to feel culturally inferior to our neighbors to the north and south, but the Salem Art Fair lets us stand tall for a few days.

Per usual, Laurel supported the arts by buying a print that cost more to frame than it did to buy, and wouldn’t be classed in the category of fine art—a humorous rendering (“Lazy Bones”) by J. Summer of a dog lounging on a couch. An empty bottle of bone brew is on the floor, tossed on a flattened hide of a cat with its tongue sticking out. A U.S. Mail cap with a bite out of it lies in one corner; dog-erotica (a Dalmatian butt and French poodle legs) paintings are on the walls. One of those works of art you can look at every time you walk by, and smile.

Laurel also bought a good share of the Fair’s stock of diachroic glass, or whatever you call those shiny earrings. She also went to the fair on Friday, to be sure that the earrings weren’t all sold out by Saturday (no worry there, mate, as our Visa statement will testify to). This made for a pleasantly personal walk around the fair, as earring artisan after earring artisan would call out, “How nice to see you again, Laurel. Come on over and take a look at our new stock.” I have a feeling that if news ever got out that Laurel couldn’t make it to the Art Fair some year, every diachroic earring maker would cancel their agreement with the Salem Art Association, figuring that now there wouldn’t be any way for them to realize their usual healthy sales.

Emerson…It’s close to the two-hundredth anniversary of Emerson’s birthday, which was marked by the publishing of “The Spiritual Emerson—Selected Writings.” I really like Emerson’s writing, and his philosophy. For a long time I’ve had a collection of his essays on my bookshelf. This title covers some of the same ground, as it includes the classic “Self-Reliance” and “Compensation,” but also has many Emerson writings that I had never encountered before. This morning I finished “Experience,” which is pure Emerson, great reading. He wrote this several years after the death of his five-year-old son. The book’s editor notes that this essay “is the record of Emerson’s coming to terms with irreparable personal loss and, in a larger sense, his philosophical reflection on a universe in which such loss is inevitable.” It draws you in with its unvarnished directness. Emerson lets you look right into his soul, a fascinating vision. Here’s a few excerpts that show Emerson’s ability both to think deeply about the big questions of life, and also turn a phrase with seemingly effortless ease:

“The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is…An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with…I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature…Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion… Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see...The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand…We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them…To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom…All good conversation, manners and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory [proceeding by leaps] and impulsive.”

So, if you pass by a good friend’s refrigerator door, and you’re hungry, for God’s sake, open it! And he or she will do you the same favor, giving the Emersonian gift of natural spontaneity, living well in the moment. When the siren song of diachoric glass earrings lures you to an artisan’s booth, for God’s sake, buy what they have made, now!, as you will never again meet up with this earring and this artist, at this place, again. Here’s one last Emerson quote from “Self-Reliance”:

“Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour…Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage [yes, just as I am doing now!] He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”