Transcendentalism at Home & Abroad

I've held off commenting on Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard while I finished Henry David Thoreau's Walden, since the two ended up connecting. Snow Leopard was something I stumbled across at a used bookstore and Walden was background reading for my upcoming New England vacation -- yes, I will be one of those annoying tourist people and yes, I will be posting afterward.

I expected Snow Leopard to be more of an adventure thrill-read and was surprised to find almost all the action was internal, an autobiography of the author's spiritual journey across the Tibetan Plateau in the 1970s. Matthiessen, who died last year, was a naturalist writer, a CIA agent, and the co-founder of The Paris Review -- what a guy. He sets out on a journey across Tibet with renowned biologist and conservationist George Schaller (still living, still renowned) to observe elusive blue sheep and hopefully catch a glimpse of the snow leopard. The underlying second reason is to seek peace and meditate after the early death of his wife from cancer. This isn't dealt with in great melodramatic chapters, but rather in a few scattered paragraphs among straightforward travel prose, which I thought was very affecting. A few notes:

"In other days, I understood mountains differently, seeing in them something that abides ... they appalled me with their 'permanence', with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life ..." (p.256)

"Left alone, I am overtaken by that northern void ... This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning here than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once ..." (p. 179)

Bharal (blue sheep) in Tibet; photo by George Schaller, source

Both of these quotes speak to the existential power of the "sublime" in nature; see my previous entry on de Botton's The Art of Travel, which really hit the nail on the head. Further:

"The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life." (p.257)

Mindfulness, yes! And now let's rewind over 100 years and see what Thoreau had to say about that: "... we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us." (p.77, Walden) Side question: is it easier or harder to do this today, in the abundance of Instagram and Twitter as-it-happens updates? Does it detract from reality or illuminate reality?

Matthiessen spends a lot of time discussing Buddhism and Thoreau throws in several references to "Hindoo" beliefs. I guess Eastern spiritualism has a more intuitive connection with nature than Western religion? Or at least lends itself more easily to environmental philosophy? For more on transcendentalism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In minor contrast to Matthiessen, Thoreau goes into the woods seeking to live on his own, in solitude, as a test of his independence/resourcefulness and a way to "stick it to the man" (not a direct quote). A man living off the land and bucking conformity -- the most Americana thing ever. Thoreau also includes chapters on personal economy, the importance of reading, and "the ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor" (why hello there, Sartre!). In both books, Matthiessen and Thoreau embrace a temporary apart-ness from modern society in the interest of enlightenment. One goes all the way to remote Tibet while the other goes two miles down the road, so I guess it's all about your mindset. See also: thoughts on Into the Wild & the case of Chris McCandless. While Matthiessen and Thoreau avoid McCandless' romanticizing nature, I'd like to point out that Matthiessen leaves his now-motherless young son behind to go into the wilderness. I give that some side-eye.

More naturalist works remain on the reading list, Thoreau's mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson included, and it'll be interesting to compare the individual nuances on transcendentalism and environmental philosophy.

Parting quote: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is." (p.78, Walden)

Bottom line: Two transcendental journeys, one into his backyard and the other halfway across the globe. Introspection and nature like peanut butter and jelly. 

Summer Reading: Selections from the Smorgasbord

1. The Jungle Book

I started David Grann's The Lost City of Z thinking it was a work of fiction and was pleasantly surprised and intrigued to find it was historical non-fiction. The book follows renowned jungle explorer Percy Fawcett on his ill-fated Amazon expeditions in the early 1900s, when the age of traditional exploration was coming to a close. Similar to the Oliver Sacks book from earlier, I kept pausing to check Wikipedia because ... REALLY? That REALLY happened? Way more entertaining than anticipated and full of disgusting tidbits about the effects of Amazonian insects and climate. Even more exciting than the book (published in 2010) is that the storyline has since advanced in real life (spoiler alert: Amazon's Lost World).

Bottom line: Highly recommend! A fast, fascinating read. David Grann is a cool dude and a talented journalist; I would totally read more of his work.

2.  Hideous Men

Yes, yes, another David Foster Wallace entry.  Unlike the previous short essay collections I've read (Consider the Lobster & A Supposedly Fun Thing), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was all semi-related short stories. It was also my least favorite, sadly. I thought the tone was depressing and dark, lacking all the YES! moments and hilarity of the other two collections, and while the writing was inventive, it just didn't do it for me. I also kept falling into the author biography trap, where I'd be reading a story thinking, "Is this what the author thought of himself? Is this a transcript of his inner monologue? Because he was depressed? And on meds? And maybe this is how he felt and what he thought about?" It was impossible to read the collection without going through that filter, and I wonder how I would've felt about the book had I NOT known the author's back-story. 

Bottom line: Mostly I agree with this article, The Last Book I Loved:

"... you might add that the word “joy” is not one you would necessarily use to describe the book. Try explaining all this while wondering to yourself if you give David Foster Wallace a pass because it’s such, like, a thing to discuss his books and be seen reading them on the bus."

Two Readings on Perception: Part II

Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel has been on my reading list for years and I finally found it tucked away at an independent bookstore this summer. Similar to Oliver Sacks' book from Part I, this was the first book of Botton's I've read, after hearing recommendations and accolades for ages. It's an easy read and a little gem; not so much travel essays as musings on travel and the philosophy behind it, with many YES! moments that pretty much guarantee I'll be reading more of his work.

"I had inadvertently brought myself to the island." (p.19) I find this becoming more true in the adult world, where I need to worry about what I've booked for when and what's going to happen at work while I'm gone and also check my text messages and email and Facebook and the news. There's a joy in vacation planning and anticipating escape from the daily grind, but, as Botton points out, the daily grind follows you in habits. It takes a conscious effort to not think about work and not constantly check the smartphone. This was significantly easier on my most recent vacation due to lack of an international roaming plan and overpriced pay-by-the-hour wifi. I had also spent a chunk of change to get where I was going and god damn it, I was going to pay attention to the present moment.

And about that "being present in the moment" thing: I liked Botton's suggestion that we try to adopt a travel mind-set to more local places. Our own neighborhoods seem boring because we see them every day on autopilot and just tune out. When I first moved into the city, sitting at a street-corner cafe and reading was almost thrillingly new. Living the life! While still enjoyable today, it's less of a novelty and I catch myself focused more on where I need to go next and what time is it and wow it's hot outside ...

I LOVED Botton's take on the beauty of nature. LOVED. IT. There was so much YES! and spot-on prose, like this quote: "We may see in nature certain scenes that will stay with us throughout our lives and offer us, every time they enter our consciousness, both a contrast to and relief from present difficulties." (p.151)  He also discusses nature as a way to connect with a "greater power" in a society increasing disillusioned with religious institutions, summarized perfectly here:

"If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus ... [they] gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger ... it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us." (p.176)

cited by Botton: The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak (Albert Bierstadt, 1863)

Other odds & ends: 
- Flaubert cameo
- relation to art
- why we take souvenirs

Botton line: Come for the relatable themes, stay for the profundity of the prose.

Two Readings on Perception: Part I

Fresh off The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, I picked up a collection of clinical stories that had been recommended by a friend, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. This is the first book of Sacks' I've read, but I had high expectations as he consistently gets excellent reviews and had a moving NYTimes op-ed piece about his cancer diagnosis a while back: My Own Life

This book blew my mind. I never realized how little I knew about neurological disorders, and how bizarrely interesting they could be. Every chapter had a "WHAAAAT?" moment, to the point where I was getting distracted by Wikipedia tangents related to right hemisphere brain damage. And this book was published back in 1985! I would love to: 1) read an updated equivalent, 2) find out what happened to the patients, 3) what (if any) progress we've made with the disorders, and 4) see what else Sacks has written. So fascinating!

Agnosia in the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Of particular interest:
- "idiot savants" (now called "savant syndrome" for obvious reasons) and prime numbers; generally the idea that you would perceive the world only through numbers as a compensation for lacking the capacity for "normal" emotional connections. The closest I could come to imagining this was the scene in The Matrix where Neo sees the world in code. Yes, this is the second consecutive blog post dropping a Matrix reference.
- The soothing appeal of music and nature for many of the patients, to where some were only able to function with a degree of "normalcy" while humming a tune.
- This quote, in reference to a woman who vividly recalled a childhood memory she had previously never been aware of, which "suggested to Penfield that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime's experience" (p. 137). See also: Hyperthymesia. Pause to consider that a moment. Is this how your life flashes before your eyes in a near-death experience? Why can't we access all these memories anytime? (Because it would be too overwhelming and swamp the present?) Is this still the current theory? Actually mind-boggling. I also enjoy realizing the limits of current science when studying the brain; it's the deep-sea of the body. Unexplored science is always inspiring and humbling.

Also of particular interest, with regard to having a scientific/biological explanation for a condition: "This does not detract in the least from their psychological or spiritual significance. If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoyevsky in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as "portals" to the beyond or the unknown?" (p. 130). A potentially dangerous point, yet interesting in the context of ayahuasca, or DMT, which traditionally has been used for religious spirit journeys and has some epic hallucination stories (DMT: You Cannot Imagine a Stranger Drug or a Stranger Experience).

Bottom line: The brain is powerfully weird, people.

White Noise and Postmodernism

My general perception of Don DeLillo's White Noise before reading it was something along the lines of, "It's weird and David Foster Wallace liked it, and a lot of people always seem to talk about Don DeLillo." I wasn't familiar with the author outside of seeing "Cosmopolis" -- yes, Robert Pattinson, that one -- which I thought was actually quite good if extremely strange. (I also saw it right after "Holy Motors"; another, better, movie involving limos and cryptic dialogue.) Looking through critiques of White Noise after I finished, people tend to fall into 'love it' or 'hate it' camps. I'm not sure I had particular feelings either way, but mostly because I spent the majority of the book trying to puzzle out what the heck the subtext was and getting distracted by the style.

White Noise is narrated by Jack, a renowned college professor in Hilter studies who lives in the suburbs with his family. The general plot revolves around his discovery that his wife, Babette, has been having an affair and taking experimental medication to eliminate the fear of death. And boy is White Noise about death.

This all takes place in a nihilistic, dystopian world where apparently everyone speaks with the same stilted, unnatural dialogue. Seriously, no character has a definitive "voice" except for the narrator. It's weird, but also the same as "Cosmopolis," so I can only assume this is how DeLillo usually writes. The book places heavy emphasis on the prevalence of TV, radio, ads and consumerism (cue the Franzen / DFW comparisons), which is particularly striking given that it was written in 1984 before Facebook and the smartphone, etc.  Don DeLillo saw the future, kids. Slate has an excellent White Noise podcast discussion related to this: listen here.

After Jack is exposed to an ominous "airborne toxic event" (no, not the band), he obsesses over his vague medical tests and the certainty of death ... in a couple decades. His fear drives him to further investigate Babette's medication, and the final act of the book descends into a very weird place indeed. If only someone had told him that we're all dying on the inside. At the same time I was compiling points for this post, I was reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee and was struck by this observation: "Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises ... the rot, the horror -- the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay -- was now relocated within the corpus of society and, by extension, within the body of man."

So what is white noise? The background noise that you usually tune out but is always present; the triads of ads and snippets from TV/radio that DeLillo randomly disperses throughout the book, the mindless consumerism at the grocery store scenes. At one point death is described as white noise, which, yes, it's always in the background of this book and life in general, and tuning in to (social) media is a way to ignore it. I think it could also relate to the strange dialogue in the book and Jack's effort to learn German. Rather than true communication it's just noise.

White Noise is considered "postmodern" and I had to do some digging to try and get a grip on what that meant. I came away thinking I need to read an entire separate book on postmodernism and then come back to critique it in White Noise. Confusing things are confusing. A helpful resource is the Jean Baudrillard page in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (referenced below), if you really want to have a head-scratching journey. Relevant to this post, one of the key components of postmodernism is the idea of a simulacrum, which Wikipedia helpfully defines as a "representation or imitation of a person or thing" ... Think of those crazy mirrors where you own image repeats itself again and again and again into infinity.

Gratuitous yet apt screencap from "Supernatural".

For Baudrillard:

 "Postmodern societies [are] organized around 'simulation' by which he means the cultural modes of representation that 'simulate' reality as in television, computer cyberspace, and virtual reality ... In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people ... In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the 'desert of the real' for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience."  

So, this blog exists in a postmodern world. I'd like to point out that, once again, this was written BEFORE Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, and that Morpheus welcomes Neo to "the desert of the real" in "The Matrix" (wait, there are even MORE levels to that movie!?). And clearly, yes, this is the vibe of White Noise.  

Bottom line: Lots of interesting philosophical overtones, little to no character development or plot. 

Notes on "Vivre Sa Vie"

"Lend yourself to others; give yourself to yourself."  -Michel de Montaigne, as quoted at the start of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie

As part of my continuing and wandering journey through Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Other Essays, weird movie night was an encounter with Jean-Luc Godard's 1962 film My Life to Live / Vivre Sa Vie.

Sontag (in a glowing review): "The film eschews all psychology; there is no probing of states of feeling, of inner anguish." & "Being free means being responsible." (p. 205)

Roger Ebert (also glowing, slightly different reasons and a good analysis of the camera work): here

I disagree with Sontag's assertion that the movie explains nothing. Nana doesn't narrate how she's feeling, but the actress isn't a blank monotonous slate either. The linearity isn't crystal clear, but you can generally pick up the hints about how one thing leads to another. I'm not sure I particularly agree that Nana's "free" either; I mean, she's managed by a man and ends up dead because of a transaction between men. Ummm ... not exactly a ringing endorsement for #YOLO, 1960s style.

Other tidbits of interest:
- Carl Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc -- clearly included to draw parallels between Joan and Nana, kinda heavy-handed in my opinion, ah male oppression and female martyrdom, etc -- but let's pause and appreciate the wholly unexpected appearance of crazy Antonin Artaud as the priest (WHAT?)
- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" -- reference makes sense once you realize the actress who played Nana was Godard's wife (perfect lifelike depiction, thus, death)

Bottom line: The best philosophical film about a 1960s Parisian prostitute.

Nihilism & Working

I've hit a slog stretch lately and, while having put away The Leopard by Lampedusa, Working by Studs Terkel, and The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, I haven't felt inspired or gripped by any of them. I did enjoy Working more than the other two because of 1) the novelty of reading interviews with people who worked now-obsolete jobs and 2) reinforcing the truth that, generally, your job is no "better" than the next person's. 

The juxtaposition of reading Sisyphus right after Working:

"The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks ... But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious." (p.90)

"I create for myself barriers between which I confine my life." (p.43)

See also: nihilism and my previous entry on Sartre's Nausea

While reading through Working, probably half of the interviewees said something to effect of their job being boring/monotonous/pointless; sortof a nihilism at the workplace. When faced with the absurdity of their jobs, some confronted it through passion (the lady who actually loved waitressing, the guy who actually loved valet parking cars) and others through family (they kept working to give their children a better life, oh hay there "Death of a Salesman" undertones).  I suppose this dovetails with the "revolt" that Camus advocates for, in opposition to suicide as the ultimate acceptance of nothingness. To revolt is to live with the knowledge of the absurdity of life. 

Other miscellaneous notes:
- reference to The Plague in Camus' short story "The Minotaur" about Oran (wait, that's a real place?)
- loved the sumptuously descriptive "Summer in Algiers"
- Justin O'Brien, I am calling you out for how shitty your French-to-English translation was. And this wasn't even a Barnes & Noble translation edition. 

Bottom line: Sub-par winter reading