Silence

I don't really have anything interesting to say about Erling Kagge's little book Silence.  It's a thoughtful if a bit whimsical and scattershot reflection on the importance of silence, and more generally inner peace, from a guy who has spent some time by himself being quiet in extreme conditions.  Kagge's fame seems to revolve around the fact that he's gone to both the North and South Pole on foot; he describes the solitude of solo-skiing across Antarctica in several places in the book.  Does spending 50 days cold and alone make you an expert on silence?  I suppose more of an expert than most of us.  So what, then does Kagge actually have to say about the subject?  

Basically, the book is a long apology for the value of silence and solitude in a world increasingly obsessed with connecting everything together and making it move as fast as possible.  This speed, this noisy profusion, it sometimes seems, has become an end in itself, so that we no longer even ask why we wanted to clink 'refresh' yet again.  Kagge rightly argues that the key to breaking this cycle is to somehow find a moment in the midst of the color-coded traffic jam of our calendars to actively do nothing.  The silence he has in mind isn't a passive lack in our experience but an active engagement with what's before us here and now in itself, rather than as the mere representative of conversations past or future.  Without trying to experience the intrinsic value of a moment, we are never able to ask what all our ever-so-efficient activity is for.  Unfortunately, while I think this is ultimately a sneakily profound idea, I don't think Kagge's exposition of it really contributed all that much to my understanding of this concept.  So unless you haven't thought very much about the problem, you might want to pass over this one in ...

Dhamma Everywhere

At the Alexis Santos retreat last year, he gave all of us a copy of his teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya's little Dhamma Everywhere book.  It was interesting though strange to be encouraged to read a few pages of the book while on retreat; meditation and words still don't mix all that well for me.  But in retrospect, the exercise was very revealing.  Trying to bring the dhamma to everyday life in the simplest possible terms is the core of Tejaniya's teaching.  What good are fancy concentration techniques and exalted states if they fall apart the moment we have a conversation or even just pick up a book?  Instead of providing an elaborate theory or set of special practices, Tejaniya encourages us just to keep investigating what's happening in awareness right now.  While at first this might sound like mindfulness 101 or perhaps something similar to noting, it quickly becomes clear that awareness is a broader concept than attention or focus.  Tejaniya's goal is an awareness wide open and unfixated, even temporarily.  So instead of focusing on noting the details individual objects, he's really interested in our being aware of the moment to moment quality of our awareness itself.  Is there craving present in the way we're aware right now?  Is there aversion?  The idea is that if we just keep checking what we are aware of, we gradually build up a picture of the patterns in our mind, the habits of thought that dictate not only which objects we are aware of, but how we are aware of them.  Ultimately then, we become aware of awareness itself, so to speak. Which might just be the end.  Or the beginning.

The Overstory

I'd heard praise of The Overstory from several different people, and Richard Powers sprawling Great American Eco-Novel did not disappoint.  While the main plot is just another dose of sober realism about humans running amuck on a planetary scale, I enjoyed the way Powers broke the overall narrative up into what is effectively a novel bookended by two collections of short stories.  The device of introducing the characters individually by capturing the entire sweep of their lives in a sort of flip-book animation was particularly effective at making them sympathetic.  Which was important for me, because I found that the book dragged a bit once the main "trunk" of the story got under way and the characters began to cross paths.  Despite writing that at some times felt too heavy and details that felt unnecessary, the narrative picked up speed as it went.  I also enjoyed the greater abstraction of the denouement chapters, particularly their sidelong brush with the 4 noble truths.  Here again though, I felt like better editing could have tightened things up and left us with a book that, while perhaps less soaringly and breathlessly epic, would have been more philosophically pointed -- the meaning of life is something we don't possess, but merely participate in.  These minor gripes aside though, The Overstory is a book that will stick with me for a long time as another prompt to stop, take a deep breath, and see what's going on.