The Fixer

I read Bernhard Malmud's Pulitzer Prize winning fictionalization of the Beilis Case simply because it was quoted in the initial lines of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

       "Let me ask you what brought you to Spinoza? Is it that he was a Jew?"
       "No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book-they don't exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were tak­ing a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man ..."
        "Would you mind explaining what you think Spinoza's work means? In other words if it's a philosophy what does it state?"
        "That's not so easy to say ... The book means different things according to the subject of the chapters, though it's all united underneath. But what I think it means is that he was out to make a free man of himself-as much as one can according to his philosophy, if you understand my meaning-by thinking things through and connecting everything up, if you'll go along with that, your honor."
        "That isn't a bad approach, through the man rather than the work. But ..."

The novel is the well written, if almost unremittingly bleak, story of the unjust imprisonment of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman in 1913 Russia.  Because the Czar is busy scapegoating folks of his ethnicity, he gets falsely charged with the ritual religious murder of a Kiev youth, and is jailed without trial for several years.   Potential readers are warned that the constant anxiety Bok feels before his arrest, the ludicrous charges leveled against him, and the brutal conditions of his imprisonment are all related in more than enough detail to keep you constantly alternating between despair, rage, and nausea.  It's almost as bad as reading the New York Times these days!  Truly, this is back when Jewish lives did not matter.  I hope we see more progress in the next 107 years.

From a literary perspective I felt like the writing was well crafted, but not really blow-you-away great.  In this respect, the most interesting parts were the way he handled the mixing of memory, hallucination, and real life as Bok spent more and more time in solitary confinement.  Also, PS. Spinoza appears as a name nothing more.  No attempt is made, by either Bok or Malmud, to grasp his philosophy beyond some vague stuff about atheism and freedom.  

Loving Kindness

I mostly picked up Sharon Salzberg's Loving Kindness simply because it was our shelf already.  It's a perfectly nice book with all kinds of thoughtful suggestions about how to have a more positive perspective on your self, others, and the world.  If you are primarily interested in meditation as a means of reducing stress and other negative emotions, it might especially appeal to you.  Since that's no longer really my primary motivation with meditation, the book didn't strike that much of a chord with me. 

In addition to the fairly general how-to-relate-to-the-world-more-positively type thoughts, the book details the basic phrase-based loving-kindness meditation, and gives various exercises surrounding it.  Maybe I'm overly focused on meditation technique these days, but these exercises seemed to me the most valuable part.  For example, I had not spent a great deal of time reflecting on the directedness of metta -- the way you are asked to orient your loving-kindness towards yourself, then towards a benefactor, a friend, a neural person, and a difficult person, and finally to all beings.  This always seemed to me like a sort of obvious great chain of being way of approaching the mystical oneness of the universe.  As if it was just the same metta drawn with a bigger and bigger circle.  While on some level, yes, that's the whole point, I found that following the exercises actually made me much more aware of a sort of spectrum of metta, as if it had different flavors or frequencies as the circles expand and contract.  Surely, there's a great deal of resemblance, but the good will you feel towards a friend is not the same as you feel towards a benefactor.  The idea of exploring these distinctions will be the biggest thing I take away from the book.

Growth

I've enjoyed a couple of Vaclav Smil's other books, so I was excited to dig into his latest, especially with it's promisingly broad subtitle: From Microorganisms to Megacities.  Unfortunately, while there's tons of interesting facts, and some interesting analysis, the book as a whole was a bit of a disappointment to me.  

The first problem may strike many netizens as churlish and old fashioned now that we live in the yolo age of tweets and gifs.  But the book is riddled with orthographic and grammatical errors and suffers from a lot of just plain shitty writing!  It's got the level of careful proofreading and editing of my blog (I mean not this, my original, blog, but the compromised second draft)  Which is to say none at all.  Now, with a live blog, you get what you pay for, but with a book I expect more.  This is annoying enough when it's just a simple typo that doesn't distort the meaning.  But that is merely a symptom of a more serious underlying condition -- nobody ever read this thing to make sure that the information and arguments were clearly presented!  Many sections are needlessly confusing.  They read as if each paragraph has simply been added in the order in which the author read the study that it cites.  Bob Loblaw said XXXX (Bob Loblaw, 1986), but this was based on some questionable assumptions.  Lorem Ipsum said YYY (Lorem Ipsum, 1973), but Bob Loblaw (Loblaw op. cit.) thought this was incorrect.  Eventually Foo Bar (Foo Bar, 1999) reestablished that YYY was actually a good approximation under certain conditions, but now that we've got more data we think ZZZ is true.  So, you know, the point is in fact ZZZ.  I am not exaggerating this.  Again and again it's liek readint he guy's wroking notes.  mAybe funnny as a one liner, but not something you;d like to spend 500 pages doing.

Even setting that objection aside though I still feel like the good lord gypped me a little with this one.  True to its title, the book is a survey of the growth trajectories of all kinds of different things.  First there's an introductory chapter on the mathematics of growth -- distinguishing linear, from exponential, logistic, and hyperbolic growth.  This is followed by successive chapters looking at the growth of various characteristics of natural organisms (the mass and size and populations of microbes, plants, and animals) the growth of human energy convertors (size and efficiency of waterwheels, windmills, various engines, all the way up to PV and nuclear energy sources) the growth of human-made artifacts (tools, buildings, modes of transport, electronics) and the growth of human societies (the size and extent of human populations, cities, economies, and empires).  While there's an enormous wealth of interesting detail in all these chapters, a survey so broad can't help but feel a bit summary and even somewhat arbitrary; you just can't cover everything.  

By the time you get to the last chapter, What Comes After Growth, the logic of what Smil chose to cover is already evident.  Exponential, and especially hyperbolic growth simply cannot go on for very long on a finite planet.  Every curve he's shown us in the past 400 pages is some variety of S-curve.  Some, such as the growth of transistors per chip or the output of the largest gas turbine, can look exponential over a surprising number of orders of magnitude.  Like 12 in the case of Moore's Law to date.  Which is pretty impressive growth.  But eventually, even this growth has its range and its limit.  And while we can debate what limits might apply to the growth of a completely human construct like GDP, insofar as there are physical constraints -- like mass and energy consumption and waste products and yields of photosynthesizing crops -- growth always comes to an end.  The points in his survey intend to show us the bounded growth and eventual plateau of everything humanity crucially depends on for its survival and comfort.  The inescapable conclusion is that all forms of human growth will also eventually come to an end.  We won't ever grow to be 12 feet tall.  There can't be 100m people on the planet.  We can't indefinitely continue to convert old dinosaurs to new heat, light, and motion, in order for ever more of us to consume ever larger houses and cars and Carl's Jr. ½ lb. Guacamole Bacon Thickburgers.

Which, but, really?  You needed 500 pages to tell me this? I mean, maybe some of the singularity obsessed tech brethren need to hear this stated as a long technical argument about the limits to the dematerialization of the economy.  Not that this is likely to convince them that the singularity has left the building.  For the remainder of our society, which is indeed unhealthily obsessed with growth, a book like this is not going to change their outlook.  Not least because they won't understand it.  So who, then is the book aimed at?  

Not me at least.  I needed no convincing.  I was instead hoping to gain a better understanding of mechanisms of plateau, of maintenance, of managed decline.  Or perhaps to at least understand exactly which limiting factors might bite first, so as to contemplate the consequences in detail rather than simply wave my hands around and warn that society will "collapse".  Smil at least cannot be accused of falling into this facile trap.  Since his discussion of growth was driven by quantitative data, he would like his discussion of "collapse" to be as well -- which variables collapse, and when and how, according to what mathematical function?  Unless you're going to describe all 9 circles in detail, hell is just a fairy tale to scare children.

Unfortunately, Smil is actually pretty vague on what comes after growth.  He only emphasizes that fitting curves and extrapolating unchanging trends has proved to be a terrible way of predicting the future.  This is an improvement on the hyperventilating Club of Rome view, which he heavily criticizes while sharing their concerns, but it doesn't leave us with much else to go on.  The closest he comes to exploring the issue is a few pages reflecting on Japan's "economic stagnation", which actually is entirely a function of their population decline and lack of immigration -- per capita GDP growth in Japan has been almost identical to the US over the past 30 years.  So I respect his caution and neutrality.  I too think that it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.  Yet the future always happens.  But what he offers us here seems like nothing more than a prequel to a longer discussion.

Notes from Underground

We don't normally think of the classics of world literature as page turners, but I found especially the second half of Dostoevsky's novella to be exactly that.  It's a bit like watching a slow motion psychological train wreck, at first from a safe distance that makes it seem like someone else's melodrama, but then, as the wreckage careens towards you, increasingly as another potential casualty.  As you might imagine, the pages move faster and faster the closer things come. 

The book relates, in two parts, the first person tail-chasing anguish of a hyper-self-conscious misanthrope.  First, we get a short summary of his ... aborted nihilism? ... I'm not quite sure what to call his description of his philosophy of life.   Afterwards, we hear the story of how he arrived at this life of self-imposed underground isolation.  Overall, we come to feel the way that our own consciousness can become a labyrinth and a sickness.  We learn to distrust the only tool we have for our self-knowledge.  We begin to suspect that thought itself is there merely to torment us and send us in circles.  All this may sound hysterical, and it certainly is.  But simply calling it 'madness' doesn't make it go away, and won't prevent us from slipping into its tortured circular logic.  Instead it forces us to truly ask the question of whether there is any happiness at all in being a modern human.

On a technical note, I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation that a lot of folks online recommended.  I don't have anything to compare it to, but it seemed to read quite naturally to me, and had an interesting introduction that situates the novella in Dostoevsky's life and times.  Highly recommended.

 

#reread 

   

Buddhism Without Beliefs

After listening to this interesting lecture about a "Buddhist Reformation", I was excited to read Stephen Batchelor's modern agnostic take on Buddhism.  By analogy to Luther's more personal update of Christian dogma, Batchelor's, "Contemporary Guide to Awakening" (as the subtitle calls it) aims to rethink some of the standard ideas of Buddhism so that they appear more relevant to our modern secular culture.  This seems to me a truly noble enterprise.  Naturally, it risks pissing off traditional buddhists on the one side, and delivering a bunch of new age psycho-babble on the other.  Batchelor, however, is a clear thinker with a lot of traditional experience, and he is mostly able to steer a middle road.  Essentially, he ends up treating Buddhism a bit like a version of existentialist philosophy, which I think does some amount of justice to Buddhism, while also providing some amount of useful wisdom for living in the modern world.

Perhaps, then, it's mostly a reflection of how much our Western relationship to Buddhism has changed sine this was written in 1997 that it doesn't really feel important anymore.  There are a lot of interesting thoughts in the book, particularly regarding how to interpret Buddhist ideas like the Four Noble Truths outside of a religious context.  And yet ... it fell a little flat for me.  Maybe this existential and psychological version of Buddhism makes it more universally understandable, but robs it of some of its profundity?  Or maybe we've just incorporated a lot of this perspective already by domesticating "mindfulness".  I'm not clear quite what I'm looking for here, but I know that with the exception of some the couple of chapters at the beginning and towards the end of the book, it read a bit like the sort of sound and thoughtful advice you might get from any wise old grandfather type.

I did find the end of the book, focused on freedom as the liberation from the illusion of freedom and the role of perplexity and questions, quite interesting.  And I also thought it opened strongly, with a great discussion of how to think about the Buddha as an empiricist and an agnostic whose very last goal would have been to found some new religious authority.  These ideas resonate with my own experience of meditation as a sort of great experiment, insofar as they encourage us to think of Buddhism as a set of practices, rather than a system of beliefs.  I particularly liked the way he explained the difference between those perspectives, and what seeing Buddhism as an esoteric set of religious beliefs robs us of:

And the crucial distinction that each truth requires being acted upon in its own particular way (understanding anguish, letting go of its origins, realizing its cessation, and cultivating the path) has been relegated to the margins of specialist doctrinal knowledge. 

 

Runaway

Runaway is the title story is this great collection of Alice Munro short stories.  As you might expect of someone who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing exclusively short stories, Munro is complete master of the genre.  Almost all of them have that wonderful elliptical quality of great short stories where they allude to way more than they actually say, as if there were an orchestra accompanying the soloist from just off-stage.  While you might also expect it, the other exceptional thing about the stories is the variety of women they portray.  Smart, capricious, old, young, vapid, tough.  They are all women you've met, sketched quickly but essentially, in a way that makes you notice how rare it is for a male author to really capture the inner life of these characters.  I guess I'll have to make time to read some of her other story collections.

In Search of Lost Time

The first volume of Proust's epic is one of those classic masterpieces that actually turns out to be pretty good read as long as some overzealous college prof isn't force feeding it to you in a week.  Also, given that it's a deeply psychological book about the magic of memories built up over a lifetime, it helps not to be 19 years old anymore.  Remind me again why exactly they so often ruin the classics for us the way freshman rush ruins tequila?

The prose itself is truly described by that most overused of adjectives: lyrical.   In the first part of the book (Combray 1 and 2) it is so dense as to border on poetry and practically requires reading aloud to really hear properly.   It's not until you reach the second part (Swann's Way) that you find yourself following something more akin to the plot of a novel.  True, not much actually happens.  But then that's life in a nutshell, no?

What caught my attention even more than the craft of language though, were all the strange shifts in images -- houses that become faces, feelings that become songs, paintings that become people.  The novel has an interesting way of raising every piece of the world to an aesthetic height where it becomes related to every other piece.  This of course is probably the main theme it has to offer; the book in general is a reflection on how our imagination and memory are the submerged iceberg extending far below the surface of our experience and constantly shaping it.