ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER ON READING AND BOOKS 

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is the same as the pupil, in learning to write, following with his pen the lines that have been pencilled by the teacher. Accordingly, in reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us. This is why we are consciously relieved when we turn to reading after being occupied with our own thoughts. But, in reading, our head is, however, really only the arena of some one else’s thoughts. And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal — that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk. Such, however, is the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid. … And just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.

EVERY WOMAN SHOULD TRAVEL ALONE
By: Sarah Hepola
Salon, July 23, 2012

It was three months into my solo road trip when I grew genuinely scared. I’d been pitching my tent across the country, but I had rolled into Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 4 only to discover all the campgrounds and hotels were full. Wouldn’t you know: The grand celebration of our freedom left me with nowhere to stay. So I parked my car in Acadia National Park, because I figured serial killers wouldn’t bother with the entrance fee, and I curled up in the backseat with the only protection I had: A ball peen hammer, and a teddy bear.

Yes, I carried a teddy bear with me on my swashbuckling Jack Kerouac adventure. It was a gift from my high school boyfriend, and it reminded me of being loved, and I had dragged it along the ground of the previous decade, across college and my first career and various romantic disappointments. That bear was a kind of battle armor, even as it squished up against my face.

And I needed it that night, because my mind was a haunted house of broken glass and men in ski masks lurching from the shadows. There were so many reasons to be frightened while traveling alone – 18-wheelers, lightning storms, roadside motels that reeked of death – but the most formidable was my own imagination. I told myself I’d be fine, that no one would find me here, but I was wrong, because I was startled awake by a flashlight flooding the window at 3 a.m.

“Ma’am, you can’t sleep here,” said the park ranger. I tumbled out of the car, barefoot, and how strange I must have looked to him: the ball peen hammer swinging from one hand, the teddy bear from the other. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see his face, a mixture of amusement and disbelief. What the hell are you doing here?

The truth was, I didn’t know.

At the age of 27, I got in my aquamarine Honda and drove 26,000 miles around the country for five months by myself. It was foolish and lonely and 10 years later, I still think it might be the best thing I’ve ever done. I wore clothes till they were filthy and lived on baked beans and peanut butter, but the luxury of that time is unimaginable to me now, because I woke up every morning with no one’s agenda but my own. What did I want to see today? Where did I want to go?

I’ve been thinking about that trip recently, because I’ve been reading Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” an account of her foolish and lonely solo walk along the Pacific Crest Trail at the age of 26. As far as feats of fortitude go, Strayed blows me out of the water. She loses her toenails. She swallows her own mother’s ashes. Meanwhile, I visited the Cereal Museum at the Mall of America (and I highly recommend it).

But what we shared was a reckless sense of adventure and a grandiosity to believe we could make such a journey in the first place, when many people were ready to convince us we could not. A woman traveling alone threatens tradition and propriety. And because women often doubt themselves, we stay toward safe harbors and soft landings, hiding behind the needs and wants of others.

I spent my mid-20s in this crouch of safety. My friends scattered to both coasts after college, but I stayed in the same city where we went to school, in the same state where I’d grown up. I got a good job at an alt weekly. I learned to shoot pool. But I hid behind 20 extra pounds and a pyramid of empty beer cans. I would get these honking crushes on guys at work — I lived lifetimes with them in my mind — but I would run into them at the printer and be all blank stares and whatever.

My female friends were not like this. They were crashing against the rocks of 20-something relationships in a way that was thrilling and age-appropriate – living with boyfriends, dating older men, dating women. But I spent the ages of 23, and 24, and 25 drumming my fingers on the table, waiting for a big romance that never arrived.

Men had always been the instigators of adventure for me. It was my older brother I stumbled behind as a little girl, tripping along the ground to try to keep his pace. It was my college boyfriend who whisked me out to Colorado two weeks after we met, where we drove all night and slept under the stars. I kept thinking if I met the guy, then I would lose the weight, I would stop drinking myself into a coma, I would crawl out of my hidey-hole.

But I knew in my heart that the opposite was true. No one could rescue me from my own isolation. The first line of “David Copperfield” kicked around my mind: “Whether I shall be the hero of my own life, or whether that position will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

If you are lucky, you stop seeing the world as a series of things you do not have — a boyfriend, a baby, an adorable terrier – and you start noticing the things you do have. A healthy bank account, unburdened by mortgages or school loans. No romantic ties. Loving parents who wanted nothing but happiness for me. Years to burn. That kind of freedom is like a command from the universe to get off your ass and do something amazing.

And so, at the age of 26, I quit my job and went to travel in South America for four months. It was amazing, although I don’t need to tell you about it now, partly because that is not the point of this essay, and partly because I am the kind of person who can’t read about someone else’s mind-blowing world travel without quietly seething with envy. Oh, I’m so happy you saw the face of God in the stones of Machu Picchu, I’ll just be over here dribbling this Chipotle burrito down the front of my shirt and dying inside.

The point of this essay is that I went by myself, and doing so made me wonder what else I could do alone. A map of the world became like a series of boxes unchecked. I kept thinking about my 401K — $7,000 gathering dust in a series of graphs and charts that arrived in the mail each month. I kept thinking about those swaggering tales of men blazing across American asphalt: Soaring down Route 66 with the windows down, sliding into some corner booth while a waitress called them “honey.” Travel can be an addiction, and five months on the road suited that greediness in me. I didn’t want to go to one place; I wanted to go to all places. I wanted to run my hands across the entire continent.

And so I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway. I drove to Alaska. I drove across Montana and up into Quebec. Some of my friends were so excited by my trip that they joined me on two-week legs. I wrote about my travels on a blog, and strangers emailed me tips for their cities before I’d even arrived.

Not everyone loved this plan. My parents, for instance. But my mother is partly to blame for my wanderlust in the first place. I had grown up hearing tales of her trips to Germany and Austria as a young woman. She traded the cost of an engagement ring to my father for a chance to hike around in the Black Forest, which I thought was the coolest thing ever – to commit to travel and marriage all at once. (My parents are still together.) So she sucked up my eccentric journeys, and settled for a call from every port. It wasn’t easy for her. The world is a wicked place, and no one likes the thought of their only daughter swallowing fear and vulnerability on a daily basis. But at some point, every one of us must stare down this calculation: How safe do we want to be? How much of ourselves are we willing to give up for it?

Yes, I was scared at times, but I had also been scared sitting on my futon watching “The Real World.” (Scared of the phone, scared of the future, scared of what people said about me.) The far more terrifying fate, as I saw it, was that I would fail to become the person I wanted to be. I still wasn’t sure what that was yet. I spent much of those five months feeling like a kite dangling on a string. Was I going to head to grad school? Write for television? Open my own school? My mind filled with clouds. But my God, it was fun. It was boring, too. I took eight-hour hikes and let my mind wander, or sang the “Xanadu” soundtrack for the 18 billionth time.

I also made incredibly stupid decisions. One night, while walking to my friend John’s house in Portland, Maine, I climbed in the car of a strange man who offered me a ride because he thought I was cute. I know better than this, but I was buzzed on five beers and the whiff of danger. He got lost almost immediately, and I grew nervous, and at some point, he started yelling at me, “So you think I’m a rapist? You think I’m going to kill you?” And the answers to those questions were yes, and yes.

But he did not. Instead, he called me a bitch and dropped me off at John’s place, where he had grown panicked with worry. “You can’t do that,” John said, pacing the floor as he spoke. “Promise me you’ll never do that again.”

And I felt bad, but I also thought he was being unfair: John spent his 20s hopping on rail cars and dumpster diving. He joined the Hari Krishnas. He was a wild-eyed wanderer, and now he lived in a comfy Victorian in Portland, Maine, and was giving me lectures about stranger danger. Why? Just because I was a girl?

I didn’t get it. And it took me years of harrowing escapades and narrow scrapes to get it. Climbing into that car wasn’t stupid because I was a woman. It was stupid, period.

So I had a lot to learn about taking care of myself, but I was on my way. In the years since, I feel a jolt of excitement whenever I hear about a woman traveling alone, whether she’s a single woman surfing in Costa Rica or a married journalist dropping into a war zone or a mother going to the wilds of Africa, discovering what quiet sounds like when it unfolds around her. Such exotic forays are out of reach for many people – including me, for most of my life. But I also think you can take a day hike by yourself, you can travel to the lake by yourself. And what you find is a reassurance that you can stand on your own in the world.

There is a poignant scene near the end of “Wild.” Cheryl Strayed’s mother is close to death, and she tells her daughter, “I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life … I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone else’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.”

God, that moment cut me. Boyfriends are nice, and careers are important, but I think this is all I’ve ever been after: to just be me.

I can’t travel much these days. I don’t have the money. I have acat I love beyond all reason, who is old and tired. But I also found that I had to stop moving every time I grew uncomfortable. Being in the driver’s seat of your own life is grand, but it requires knowing when you are out of gas. I try to keep a traveler’s eyes. I take expeditions to strange suburbs. I take expeditions to the 7-11.(Behold: Corn Nuts in their native environment!) After years of movement, my challenge now is to sit still.

But I also try to hold on to the girl who was young and stupid enough to believe in foolish adventures, the girl who was equal parts ready to fall in love with you and hurl a ball peen hammer into your front windshield. I had a strength I did not realize, but one I did not forget. When I am restless and defeated and scared again, I tell myself this: that the greatest trip of my life came because I did not get the things I wanted.

I wish you the same.

AWHILE AND A WHILE →

“Awhile” is an adverb. It modifies a verb and means “for a short time”: He chatted awhile and then left. “Awhile” should not be used as the object of a preposition, so constructions like “for awhile” or “in awhile” are wrong.

But here’s the tricky part: “while” is a noun meaning “a period of time,” and can be used with a preposition, preceded of course by the article “a”: He chatted for a while and then left. The meaning is the same. 

LOVE AMONG THE EQUATIONS →

Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.

As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.

Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Bob Dylan |  My Back Pages

BURNING THE DIARIES →

I JUST burned 40 years’ worth of diaries. I didn’t plan to — or rather, I had always planned to, once I knew I was dying, or so old that I would soon lack the energy to gather wood. But I woke one morning and knew it was time to let it all go.

I yanked open the flue, started a small log fire and began laying on the books. They burned slowly, at first, reluctant. A few pages caught, charred edges smoldered across my handwriting, plumes of thick smoke funneled lazily into the chimney. Small hard-covered volumes, bound with thread and taped up the side, most of them from an old French stationer, their plasticized glossy lapis blue or turquoise covers shrank and shriveled. I had thought that color would keep away the evil eye. The eye that would pry. The eye that would judge.

I didn’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever.

Diaries are irresistible. And I am an unregenerate snoop. I will read any diary left in my path. I’ve even bent my path toward diaries carelessly left lying around. I know it is horrid of me, but I can’t help it. I’ve even read diaries in other people’s homes, that’s how bad I am (and that’s as close as I’ll come to confessing the most outrageous violation of privacy I ever committed, which turned out to be a life-altering experience — karmic return — and I promised myself I would never, ever do such a thing again).

Privacy was, perhaps, the proximate cause of my recent pyromania. My sons were spending the summer with me, probably the last one at my home. They were on the verge of departing into their own adulthoods, moving into their own first homes. It had struck me, several years earlier, that once children get to a certain age, the age at which they start keeping their own secrets, becoming opaque to those who love them most, the age at which they start doing things they cannot dream of their parents ever having done, they (the children, that is) become voraciously curious about what exactly their parents did do, what were their secrets, who were they, anyway? Once children get curious that way, nothing puts them off the scent.

I should know. I spent years as an adolescent rooting around in my parents’ closets looking for letters, sorting through boxes of letters and photographs, riffling through sock drawers, searching for clues about who they were, how they came together, why on earth I was on earth?

There were plenty of people I wanted to smoke out of my life. Come to think of it, several months earlier, one of them, about whom I had written in my diaries copiously, tearfully, had recently popped unceremoniously back into my life after decades of absence, petulantly demanding to be returned to his pedestal, or at least to my bed. Perhaps a roaring fire would put to rest the Undead.

The urge to burn may have been born, long ago, of the old prayer I said on my knees every night as a child: “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” My soul lived in my diaries, and that weighed on me; by the time I was in my 40s, if I died before I woke, I wanted Someone to snatch my diaries before anyone else did.

I started keeping journals when I was 14. I was compulsive about it. I scribbled daily — and as I went through college, I filled hundreds of pages with dense, colorful ink, going right to the edge, ignoring the light threads of red margin markers, denying paragraphs their breaks, my nib flattening under the pressure of the stream of soul pouring forth. A psychiatrist once told me that I was obviously trying to psychoanalyze myself, which, professionally speaking, is considered impossible. But there certainly was — and has always been — a form of therapy in keeping journals. It is a way of self-soothing, as an adult, a way of rubbing the satin corner of your blankie against your finger when you’re anxious about separation, or too worked up to fall asleep.

As I raked up my burn pile that fateful morning, reaching for old journals secreted in hatboxes, piled in trunks, smothered at the bottom of dress bags, I riffled through the pages, reading. I was shocked that even things that had happened 20, 30 years ago felt as familiar and as raw as if they had happened yesterday. That so unnerved me that I stopped reading. I didn’t want to wade back into those depths, where a powerful riptide still churned. Worse, I was struck by the repetition of patterns over the years: the way hurt yearning in 1977 sounded like pained longing in 2007.

I wrote about the bad boyfriends, the mean girls, the lying and cheating knaves I loved. I wrote about the wrenching pain of postpartum depression, the confusion and fear of becoming a mother, when I didn’t have a clue how to do that gracefully, kindly, compassionately; I mulled over the unalloyed sadness of a dying marriage and the pure misery of mourning the passing of a hope that, before it fled, sowed the seeds of two beautiful boys. Certainly not the sort of detritus I wanted those boys to sift through if I died before I woke.

Life really is like a game of Chutes and Ladders, I thought, taking the long view while nosing around, and burning up, my life. You work hard to climb, and you get lucky, too; you’re ambling along when suddenly, wham, you roll wrong, you make a stupid move, and you’re perilously upside down the slide. You’ve got to pick yourself up and start the climb over again. It gets wearying after a while.

That’s the starkest pattern in all of our lives. It takes so long to get the hang of it, the slipping, sliding and starting over, that by the time we’re old enough to know that the climb is everything, the whole story, the destination doesn’t matter, we’re tired enough to let wisdom in, to move efficiently, thoughtfully, to finally stop and enjoy the view along the way.

Burning those diaries, I realized I didn’t want my sons to know how profoundly I had suffered from the slides down the chutes, the tumbles through the holes that gaped open in the scaffolding of my life. That would be too hard for them. I wanted them to remember me as one who clambers back. That’s the person they grew up with. A person who picks herself up and gets going again.

Back through the years, I threw journals onto the pile. I couldn’t stop. The fire became huge and hot and loud; the pages didn’t smolder but burst into lashing flame, the books buckled and popped. Embers rocketed across the hearth; ashes blew sideways and drifted into the room.

The heat became so intense I had to back off. It was thrilling, in an atavistic, cavewomanish kind of way. I wondered if I were going to regret my spontaneous combustion — when it was too late to do anything about it. Another old pattern.

I write memoirs. And I write about my life in a blog. But as I’m constantly saying to people who wonder how I can reveal so much about myself (especially as, at heart, I am a shy person), I’m not publishing my diaries. I’m not revealing so very much, when I write, that isn’t in all of us. It is kind of like the old saw about having it all. Readers never get it all. They get some of all of it. Everything I write is true. But I don’t write about everything true. I shape, I cut, I feint and dodge; I want to get to something that is uniquely mine, and at the same time ours, too.

As the journals burned, I watched in horrified fascination, as if it were some other person laying the books onto the fire, to entertain or torture me. The fire had a violent beauty. And I did think, whoa, there goes a lot of material. But I also thought, good riddance. I’ve made what I could of that material.

I’d like to tell you that it was a profoundly, mystically cleansing experience, that I laid a lot of pain and anger to rest on that funeral pyre. Oddly, I felt only a numb relief. And a certain amount of anguish that now it was time to clean up the mess I had made of my heart. I mean, my hearth.

Or do I?

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING

WHY SOME SECONDS SEEM TO LAST FOREVER →

Though our perception of time can be stunningly precise — given a beat to keep, professional drummers are accurate within milliseconds — it can also be curiously plastic. Some moments seem to last longer than others, and scientists don’t know why.

Unlike our other senses, our perception of time has no defined location in our brain, making it difficult to understand and study. But now researchers have found hints that our sense of time stems from specialized units in our brain, channels of neurons tuned to signals of certain time lengths.

“We know keeping track of time is incredibly important, it allows us to coordinate movements, interpret body language,” said optometrist James Heron of the University of Bradford in the U.K., lead author of the study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Aug. 10. “We know the brain does this routinely and accurately, but we’re not sure how. Our evidence strongly suggests the presence of neural units in the brain that are tuned to different durations.”

Heron and his colleagues believe our mental chronometer runs, at least partially, on neuron channels that respond to a specific “frequency of time.” The new experiment exposed people to one hundred beeps or flashes of a certain duration, which adapted the people to signals of that length.

Researchers who study the brain’s perception of time have previously proposed several ways our mental clock might work. It could be like a metronome, ticking at a regular rate, allowing us to keep track of time by unconsciously counting the clicks. Or it may judge time based on the amount of energy needed to process a signal. The more attention we give to something, the longer the processing seems to take.

They then tested the participants’ time judgment by giving them a beep and a flash and asking which had lasted longer. What they found was flashes and beeps that were close in duration to the signals the people had been adapted to were consistently judged to be significantly longer than they really were.

“If I present you with lots of flashes that last 150 milliseconds, then a 300 doesn’t feel like 300, it feels more like 400,” Heron said.

The closer the signals were to the duration they were adapted to, the further off peoples’ guesses were.

“The channel-based system seems the best explanation for this,” Heron said. “It was as if we fatigued the channels tuned to that duration, and the channels near it, but the channels further away were still fresh.”

While not changing our understanding of psychology, Heron’s conclusions give an intriguing “peek at the machinery under the hood,” said neuroscientist David Eagleman, director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine.

“What we know about vision and hearing suggests that different populations [of neurons] in the brain are tuned to different properties,” said Eagleman, author of Incognito, “so the idea that there may be populations of neurons tuned to different durations is plausible and in line with previous electrophysiology data.”

The workings of the brain are far from simple, however, and the channel-based model doesn’t explain why, for example, time seems to pass more slowly when we are in a life-threatening situation like falling off a roof or a car crash.

“There is a lot going on in the brain,” Eagleman said. “You’re not just passively tracking the river of time. You’re actively constructing it.”

G IS FOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER →

“The vast majority of designers make ugly things for incompetent people.”

Thanks to Mad Men and the countless ads on TV for schools that “allow you to express your creativity to its fullest potential,” the thought is that every design job is a sexy glamorous job. Once you’re through with school, you’ll land a job at Leo Burnett, BBDO, Nike, Apple, or another company that has a pool table, sexy promiscuous secretaries, very entertaining socio-political drama, or something your parents and friends would recognize on the shelf.

The reality of it is the vast majority of designers will work to make ugly things for strategically incompetent people only to have more people still think very little of you. The GAP logo for instance, was more than likely the victim of a long line of vice presidents, product managers, communication directors, marketing chiefs, and other people with business degrees who think themselves experts in design solely because they work for a company that is reputed to care about design. Even designers across the world joined the flogging though they, by personal experience, know how little it takes from a VP to completely destroy the integrity of a project.

There is also the myth that by sheer virtue of your talent, you will receive adulation and recognition. That is the most accurate theme in Mad Men that can translate to today: we are an industry of networking and meritocracy. Who do you know? What clients have you worked for you? If you went to a fantastic school like SVA, Parsons, SCAD, SAIC, ACD, or another acronym that none of your friends or family will recognize, it won’t matter till your portfolio can reflect where you want to work. You are an ant in a colony with many queens.

Most clients are small, so your work will likely go unnoticed. Nobody who looks at a can of Coke thinks a big agency hired a small firm who in turn assigned an underpaid designer to typeset the word “classic” on the can. The credit goes to one hotshot designer that billions of people cannot and should not be able to name. I say they shouldn’t because the biggest myth about design is about recognition.

Design isn’t a job, a career, or a calling. It’s a total lifestyle. We dominate decision making that is about cultural construction and make-up: music, food, bikes, clothing. You can’t walk down the street and safely guess who’s a doctor or lawyer, but you can guess who has an interest in graphic design.

It’s not simply pushing a button and clicking a few functions in Photoshop. It’s a complicated industry with its own ecology made up of incredibly hard work individuals that is routinely undermined by its own customers.

I love what I do. I wouldn’t change much about what I do. Some people can’t go vegetarian, I can’t stop thinking or practicing design.

A DEATHBED STORY I WOULD NEVER TELL → 

We all tell stories. That’s how we share. That’s how we remember. Storytelling is what humans do. It’s part of our nature — but natures, I’ve noticed, differ. I am not a scientist. I don’t have a mind for what they do, which is to stick, doggedly, to hard facts, keeping emotion out of the room. It’s a discipline for them, a way of being, that makes them, well, scientists.

For example, I’m thinking about the great American physicist, Richard Feynman, sitting in New Mexico, at the bed of his dying wife. He’d been called, and told that she had only hours to live; he’d hitchhiked from Los Alamos, where he was working on the top secret atomic bomb project. It was 1945.

He walks to her bedside, kisses her; she is breathing shallow breaths. We are still at war and six weeks later, America will explode its first atomic bomb. He stands there, sits there, watches her, kisses her, and very quietly, the Hodgkin’s disease that had attacked her young body takes her. She was in her 20s, he was 27. They’d been married only two years. The nurse records the time of death: 9:21 p.m. He is empty with loss. What few things she had, he packs up; he arranges for a cremation, walks back into her room and sees that the clock had strangely stopped ticking. The hands are frozen at 9:21, the very moment of her death.

I know how this story would feel to me. It would be as though the universe had somehow noticed what had happened, that some invisible hand slipped into my world and pointed, as if to say, “We know. This is part of the plan.”

So many of us, I think, would have this sense. Lawrence Krauss, in his new biography of Feynman, Quantum Man, says, “We seem to be hard-wired to find that what happens to each of us naturally appears to take on a special significance and meaning, even if it’s an accident.” But Feynman, he says, was unable to think that way. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t.

Explaining That Clock

What he did was, he remembered that the clock had been fragile. He had been asked to fuss with it; he’d fixed it several times. In his memoirs (that is, in his version of this story), he says the nurse must have picked up the clock to determine the time of death, unsettled the workings inside, and the clock stopped. No miracle. Just an ordinary, accidental jostle. Here he is, describing a moment of enormous significance, and he won’t allow a Signifier.

I couldn’t do that. I would want to, almost need to, imagine a higher audience for a moment like that.

And maybe that’s a difference between scientists and those of us who make our living in the storytelling game. Scientists thrill at the testimony of hard facts. We (or should I say “I”) want to add a dash of warm color to the cold blacks and whites. I don’t want to make things up, exactly. I just want to imagine that the things that happen to me just might have — and deserve — the attention of the universe.

A Different Kind Of Vanity

Great scientists have a different kind of vanity. They seem to think that the thing to celebrate is the power of reason; to notice, to test, to discover nature’s secrets hiding in plain sight, with the best tools we have: logic and observation. For them, the most beautiful thing is our mind.

So, one last story. This one, also recounted by Larry Krauss, comes from the famous British physicist Ernest Rutherford, who told it to a great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr. It’s about a person who goes into a pet shop to buy a parrot.

He is shown a very colorful bird and told that it speaks 10 different words and its price is $500.

Then he is shown a more colorful bird, with a vocabulary of 100 words, with a price of $5,000.

He then sees a scruffy beast in the corner and asks how much that bird is. He is told $100,000.

“Why?” he asks. “That bird is not very beautiful at all. How many words, then, does it speak?” None, he is told. Flabbergasted, he says to the clerk, “This bird here is beautiful, and speaks 10 words and is $500. That bird over there speaks 100 words and is $5,000. How can that scruffy little bird over there, who doesn’t speak a single word, be worth $100,000?”

The clerk smiles and says, “That bird thinks.”- by ROBERT KRULWICH

Being in flight is one of the most unnatural, extraordinary, ordinary experiences of modern life. When we climb to 30,000 feet, our perspective looking down at the world becomes that of a deity, and the rules of time and space are altered as we rush over the earth. In flight we are able to view the most remote corners of the natural world and the vast spread of the world we have constructed. It gives us the unique perspective to look at the interaction of the natural and constructed in a truly holistic way. In its totality, the unnatural or extraordinary experience produces great fear and excitement. We confront death a little every time the doors close – and this closeness to death intensifies the extraordinary experience of being in flight. On the other hand, our ‘in flight’ experience is filled with the most unremarkable daily activities: reading a comic book, finishing a crossword puzzle, eating, sleeping. The cabin becomes our shared world, temporally removed from the world that we’ve left back on land. What connects the ordinary and the extraordinary is a powerful trust in the human capacity to take us beyond the mundane. The plane becomes a temple of humanism, where we put faith in all that get us and keeps us up in the air – engineers, pilots, researchers, air traffic controllers – a web of people, underwritten by collective knowledge, keeping us alive, together. -Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

WHY SADNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU → 
We know that our little toes help us balance, and the hairs on our head keep us warm. But what good does sadness do? How can such a miserable feeling have improved our ancestors’ chances of passing their genes on to the next generation? For some emotions, the benefits are pretty easy to see. Generally, fear is a signal to run away – something that’s going to save your skin when faced with a predator. Similarly, disgust is going to stop you biting into a mouldering pile of rotten food.

Forgas says his research shows that sadness brings benefits that often apply more in the social realm. He offers an example: “Let’s say you are in a group, and you feel that you are not getting on, you’re not being accepted. You would probably find this upsetting and it would put you into a negative mood and it would cause you to pay better attention to what everybody else is saying, pull back a little bit. If you feel sad, it’s basically like a signal, ‘Watch out, don’t push, adapt, pay attention.’ In a way it’s exactly the same kind of alerting signal as fear or disgust but it’s probably a quieter sort of signal.”

In a society where the quest for happiness has never been more intense, there are powerful questions to contemplate. None of us wants to be sad, but as science becomes more adept at manipulating the chemistry of our mind, we need to ask ourselves, do we want to eliminate normal sadness from our lives? Or can we somehow embrace it as an integral, and potentially useful, part of our selves?

"In twenty-five years of wandering the world, I have learned two things: the first is that when you travel, at some point you will find yourself in a dire predicament – out of money, out of food, unable to find a hotel room, lost in the big city or on a remote trail, stranded in the middle of nowhere. The second is that someone will miraculously emerge to take care of you – to lend you money, feed you, put you up for the night, lead you to where you want to go. Whatever the situation dramatic or mundane, some stranger will save you." -- The Kindness of Strangers

Good read this morning.
Five emotions invented by the internet:

*A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled.

*A sudden and irrational rage in response to reading an ‘@-reply’ on Twitter. 

*The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation.

*The car collision of appetite and discomfort one feels simultaneously when using the internet to seek and consume images or information that may be considered unseemly or inappropriate. 

*The sense of fatigue and disconnect one experiences after emitting a massive stream of content only to hit some kind of ‘wall’ and forget and/or abandon the entire thing.

EXPERIENCES

What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty - and it’s on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow. Friendships nourished solely by occasional dinners will never have the depth of those forged on a trek or at a university. Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will – unless one of them is eaten – be effectively bonded by what they have seen. 
- ALAIN DE BOTTON

NOTHING → Like all men, I purport to be able to think nothing. To be specific, if a man is asked by his significant other “what are you thinking”, then the best bet is that he will respond by saying “nothing.” It is, of course, tempting to infer that a man says this because he is aware that saying what he was really thinking will result in a look of disgust, a slap, or both. However, men do claim to actually be thinking of nothing (at least at times). This raises the obvious question of whether or not this is even possible.

On one hand, it does seem possible. First, a man could be involved in a profound consideration of the Nothing and its various metaphysical and theological implications. However, the likelihood of this will vary from man to man (and typically hovers just over nothing). Second, Buddhism puts forth the notion that there is no self and there is no world. The ultimate goal is, of course, Nirvana. If the Buddhists are right, then there are no men to think about nothing, but at least there is nothing to think about. So, perhaps all men are actually Buddhists. Third, maybe men have the ability to actually have their minds literally think about nothing. To use an analogy, think of the mind as a blender and thinking as blending. Now, imagine running the blender with nothing in it. If this analogy holds, which it almost certainly does not, then perhaps the mind can think with nothing to think about.

On the other hand, it might seem to be impossible. First, as Hume noted, the mind always seems to have something going on-some perception or another. Hence, a man is never really thinking about nothing-there is always something in the blender. Second, it could be argued that unlike a blender, a mind cannot engage in its function without some content. Thinking might be more like cutting-while one can make a motion with scissors, they are not cutting unless they have something to cut.

In the case of doing nothing, a man could be doing nothing in the sense that a blender could be blending nothing. Of course, the obvious reply is that while the blender is blending nothing, it is not actually doing nothing. After all, by doing it is doing something. Even thinking about nothing would be doing something, namely thinking about nothing. As such, as long as a man is doing, then he would be doing something-at the very least he is doing. What he is doing, of course, might not amount to much-hence we could be forgiven if we exaggerate and say we are doing nothing.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Title: Metal Heart Artist: Cat Power

BERTRAND RUSSELL ON THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY → If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton’s great work was called ‘the mathematical principles of natural philosophy’. Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology. Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.

 OUR LIVES ARE NOT WHAT WE THINK  Everything there is, everything we know, hinges on this one bizarre, transient condition — existence — which just happens to be your current reality. We regard the miracle of existence as a goldfish regards water, which means we don’t regard it at all. But if you think about it, it’s an exceedingly peculiar fact — that we exist.

Whenever you feel stuck in a backstory, in a corner turning in on itself… BOOM, some unknowable cosmic lottery has spit you out right here and now, in this chair, in this situation, in this form. Figure it out from here with whatever is given in the moment. The backstory is just mental dressing, not important, because you are alive and you can do things.

 ALAIN DE BOTTON ON LOVE  From within love, we conceal the haphazard nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been pre-written in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained face awaiting) and that whom we may or may not be meeting on airplanes has no sense beyond what we choose to attribute to it—in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

The Biggest Wave Ever Surfed

Bradshaw rode what was, at the time, the largest wave ever surfed. Later he told me it was like skiing down an avalanche chute in the mountains. He said, “You know that feeling you get when you’re going over a cornice and it’s just straight down after that?” He counted the seconds. He went, “One. Two. Three. Four!” Already it was a long drop, and the wave kept rising higher. “Five! Six! Seven! Eight!” He went, “Holy shit!,” and kept dropping. He went, “Don’t fade! Don’t even imagine it!” He got toward the base of the face, still well above the bottom, and rounded out of the drop as the surface curvature allowed. Bradshaw had never seen such wave expanses before-huge fields of sloping water to the right. He was aware of the mass gathering above and behind him. He went, “I gotta get out of here, now!” He dug his right rail in, banking the board hard against its will, and held it with all of his strength into a carving right turn. The turn was slow because the board was fast. Bradshaw kept at it, however, and went slicing up the wave face almost to the crest. He was briefly elated. Technically he had “made” the wave, but he wasn’t done with it yet. From the crest he turned again and went angling back down the face. He intended to perform a full cutback toward the break, but no sooner had he started than a roar erupted behind him as the wave formed a giant barrel. The barrel spat spray at him from its throat. There was no way into that barrel from his position, and it blocked any turn back toward the core of the wave. The ride was almost over for Bradshaw. It had lasted 30 seconds, or hardly more. He exited straight ahead and over the wave’s shoulder. He was angry with himself. He thought that he should have been in that barrel, and that he would have been if he had not shied away from the peak at the start of the ride. He did not care about having made history-and did not consider it until others began to insist on it that night. He did not even think that this had been a great run. He thought, Shit, I should have faded. ---Vanity Fair