photo: Tommy Richardsen*
CHRISTMAS BELLS
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1863
*
Bing Crosby sings Christmas Bells:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMmRkimMBOE&fbclid=IwAR1qSelxjZDJw_cp0EbmVxM_Y7qiPVtHGXjiDBo3mCR3Qat5a8WKx54GDdo
Oriana:
Why this poem for Christmas 2020? Because it’s a poem that dares face despair. It was written during the American Civil War, regarded as the bloodiest civil war in human history. Each side quoted the bible, carefully picking passages that seemed to support or condemn slavery. This made it a holy war, and holy wars last longest and tend to be more ruthless, since each side feels it is their sacred moral duty to fight on.
Longfellow was on the side of the Union, so it’s not surprising that he writes
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
But the speaker is too wise to simply blame the South. He knows the problem of war is the universal problem of humanity:
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
But the very fact that the Christmas bells keep ringing is their reply. Longfellow makes it more explicit and poetic by actually having the bells speak — you can get away with it in poetry. The bells insist on hope:
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
Is this just wishful thinking? Not quite. We know that all tyrannical empires fall — it is just a matter of time. Blood-stained dictators die (or are helped to die, so to speak), and their successors, if any, don’t have the same ruthlessness. The Nazi Thousand-Year Reich lasted only eleven years. The Soviet Union collapsed after sixty-nine years. True, Putin described it as “the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century” and has taken some measures to restore a Soviet-style regime — and yes, he is a killer, but he’s no Stalin. Mao is dead, Fidel Castro is dead, Pol Pot died in prison, Idi Amin got deposed — and their successors, even if not democratically elected, seem to prefer a reign of peace and prosperity over a reign of terror.
Looking at history, we may indeed conclude that “the Wrong shall fail.” Indeed, we have to think that way, because life is unbearable without hope, and our brains are wired for “optimism bias.” Or as the Polish-American poet John Guzlowski says, “Hope is our mother.”
And ultimately there are more people of good will than those inclined to cruelty. Ultimately, human civilization is based on empathy and cooperation. 
Dali: Christmas Tree, 1953
*
DICKENS STRUGGLED WITH HIS DEMONS OVER CHRISTMAS
~ “If at the start of the Carol Scrooge is something of a self-parody of Dickens’s fears about himself—the solitariness, the unhappy childhood, the desire for money—by the end Dickens had successfully brought him into line with a far more optimistic view of himself, as he bursts out into the street ready to send himself abroad imaginatively as well as physically, as light-hearted as he is light-footed.
The Carol took Dickens a little over six weeks to complete, and he wrote the final pages at the beginning of December, following it with “The End” and three emphatic double underlinings. Then, he said, he “broke out like a Madman”: a whirl of parties, conjuring performances and dancing, as if he secretly worried that there would be something unhealthily Scrooge-like about staying in one place for too long during the festive season.
Dickens had chosen to publish the book at his own expense, hoping that he would make more money by receiving a percentage of the profits than he would by accepting a one-off payment, and his anxiety is clear in the strained mood of self-congratulation that starts to appear in his letters: the Carol was a modern fairy-tale that would drive out “the dragon of ignorance from its hearth”; it was a “Sledge hammer” that would “come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force.”
The critics were almost uniformly kind. One or two murmured that Dickens’s genial tone was maybe a little overbearing, his hospitality a little suffocating—a view later echoed by G. K. Chesterton, who noted that Dickens “tended sometimes to pile up the cushions until none of the characters could move”—but otherwise the reviews were full of praise for his skill in producing a conversion story that was also squarely aimed at changing the hearts and minds of its readers.
Francis Jeffrey applauded the Carol’s “genuine goodness”; the usually sharp-tongued Theodore Martin argued that it was “finely felt, and calculated to work much social good”; Thackeray described it with envy-tinged admiration as “a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness”; even Margaret Oliphant, who came up with the faintest praise of all, later characterizing Dickens’s book as “the apotheosis of turkey and plum pudding,” admitted that “it moved us all in those days as if it had been a new gospel.”
Many of the ways in which the Carol moved its readers have since passed into critical folklore. Jane Welsh Carlyle reported that “visions of Scrooge” had so worked on her husband’s “nervous organization” that “he has been seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality, and had actually insisted on improvising two dinner parties.” A Mr. Fairbanks, who attended a Christmas Eve reading of the Carol in Boston in 1867, was so moved that thereafter he closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every worker a turkey. “Dickens’ Christmas Carol helps the poultry business amazingly,” as one wag noted in Wilkes’s Spirit of the Times (December 21, 1867). “Everybody who reads it and who has money immediately rushes off and buys a turkey for the poor.” Wherever one looks in the period, in fact, there are examples of the Carol being read as a good book that also did much good.
[Some] observed that Dickens’s enjoyment of Christmas seemed more determined, even ruthless, than one might expect from someone with a genuinely boyish sense of fun: whether he was learning a new conjuring trick, or mastering the steps to a dance, his son Charles noted, there was always the same “alarming thoroughness with which he always threw himself into everything he had occasion to take up.”
If Christmas was a time for returning to the world of childhood, it was also a time for asserting control over it, measuring how far he had traveled from a period that he tended to look back on with the same self-pity that stirs Scrooge when he encounters his younger self: “a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge . . . wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.”
https://lithub.com/on-dickens-demons-and-weird-relationship-with-christmas/?fbclid=IwAR2JU1cr4gw4hmkpgT8SWqRn472cDs6I0lH8oir5a90ecXG4P7yWZ-jt4qE
~ When he sat down to write the “Carol” Dickens was deeply involved with an effort to help the smallest victims of the Industrial Revolution, the nation’s poorest children. Only a few months earlier, he had shared a stage with Benjamin Disraeli in an event that raised questions and offered answers about the care and education of poverty’s children. Tiny Tim stands in for some of these unfortunates, but their most memorable incarnations are the filthy boy and girl—“yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish” that the Ghost of Christmas Present introduces as Ignorance and Want. Dickens’ theme is sounded in trumpets when a horrified Scrooge asks, “Have they no refuge or resource?” and the Spirit quotes Scrooge’s own words: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
Dickens and the Victorians were responsible for putting children at the center of the Christmas celebration, and probably the most positive way to look at the modern holiday is to recognize that no amount of blinky lights, tinsel, or reindeer with neon noses can actually corrupt the impulse to give something wonderful to someone we love―perhaps a child—to turn love, for a moment or two, into something palpable and visible, to yield to an impulse that has no objective but to lift someone’s heart. This impulse existed before Christmas, and for a while it animated Christmas, and if you cut through the modern clutter, it’s still there. It’s something to look at closely; it’s something worth writing about.
Even if we’ll never do it half as well as Dickens. ~
Oriana:
I enjoyed giving lots of Christmas gifts to my mother -- she was such an enthusiastic receiver, though she'd ritually scold me, “This looks too expensive. You've spent too much.”
~ Santa doesn’t know Zoology:
Both male & female Reindeer grow antlers. But all male Reindeer lose their antlers in the late fall, well-before Christmas.
So Santa’s Reindeer, which all sport antlers, are therefore all female, which means Rudolf has been misgendered. ~
FAMOUS WRITERS ON OTHER FAMOUS WRITERS, CONT.
Katherine Mansfield on Howards End
From her journals: May 1917:
Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of Howards End and had a look into it. But it’s not good enough. E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.
And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.
Martin Amis on Don Quixote
From his review as printed in The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000:
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull. . .
Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 – the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relief but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.
David Foster Wallace on American Psycho
From an interview with Larry McCaffery published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993:
LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?
DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.
LM: But at least in the case of American Psycho I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.
DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other.
If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.–is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend Psycho as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.
Mary McCarthy on Franny and Zooey
In a review in Harper’s, October 1962:
Who is to inherit the mantle of Papa Hemingway? Who if not J. D. Salinger? . . . And who are these wonder kids but Salinger himself, splitting and multiplying like the original amoeba?
In Hemingway’s work there was never anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises, but at least there was only one Papa per book. To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger’s world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience — humanity; outside are the phonies, vainly signaling to be let in, like the kids’ Irish mother, Bessie, a home version of the Fat Lady, who keeps invading the bathroom while her handsome son Zooey is in the tub or shaving.
A great deal of attention is paid, too, to the rituals of cigarette lighting and to the rites of drinking from a glass, as though these oral acts were sacred — epiphanies. In the same way, the family writings are treated by Salinger as sacred scriptures or the droppings of holy birds, to be studied with care by the augurs: letters from Seymour, citations from his diary, a letter from Ruddy, a letter from Franny, a letter from Boo Boo, a note written by Boo Boo in soap on a bathroom mirror (the last two are from another story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”).
These imprints of the Glass collective personality are preserved as though they were Veronica’s veil in a relic case of well-wrought prose. And the eerie thing is, speaking of Veronica’s veil, a popular subject for those paintings in which Christ’s eyes are supposed to follow the spectator with a doubtless reproachful gaze, the reader has the sensation in this latest work of Salinger that the author is sadly watching him or listening to him read. That is, the ordinary relation is reversed, and instead of the reader reading Salinger, Salinger, that Man of Sorrows, is reading the reader.
Seymour’s suicide suggests that Salinger guesses intermittently or fears intermittently that there may be something wrong somewhere. Why did he kill himself? Because he had married a phony, whom he worshiped for her “simplicity, her terrible honesty”? Or because he was so happy and the Fat Lady’s world was so wonderful?
Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?
H.L. Mencken on The Great Gatsby
In a review published in The Chicago Sunday Tribune, May 3, 1925:
Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that. The scene is the Long Island that hangs precariously on the edges of the New York City trash dumps—the Long Island of the gandy villas and bawdy house parties. The theme is the old one of a romantic and preposterous love—the ancient fidelis ad urnum motif reduced to a macabre humor. The principal personage is a bounder typical of those parts—a fellow who seems to know every one and yet remains unknown to all—a young man with a great deal of mysterious money, the tastes of a movie actor and, under it all, the simple sentimentality of a somewhat sclerotic fat woman .
This story is obviously unimportant and, though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise. What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is not that they are false: it is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes—often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.
Vladimir Nabokov on Dr. Zhivago
From an interview fragment dated October 1972, republished in Strong Opinions:
Any intelligent Russian would see at once that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it ignores the Liberal Revolution of spring, 1917, while making the saintly doctor accept with delirious joy the Bolshevist coup d’état seven months later—all of which is in keeping with the party line. Leaving out politics, I regard the book as a sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, and trite coincidences.
I applauded [Pasternak] getting the Nobel Prize on the strength of his verse. In Dr. Zhivago, however, the prose does not live up to his poetry. Here and there, in a landscape or simile, one can distinguish, perhaps, faint echoes of his poetical voice, but those occasional fioriture are insufficient to save his novel from the provincial banality so typical of Soviet literature for the past fifty years.
Vladimir Nabokov on The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment
In an interview with James Mossman, published in The Listener, October 23, 1969, and reprinted in Strong Opinions:
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.
Vladimir Nabokov on Finnegans Wake
From a 1967 interview in The Paris Review:
I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.
From a different 1967 interview, this one conducted by one of Nabokov’s students at Cornell:
Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac! I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
https://lithub.com/14-classic-works-of-literature-hated-by-famous-authors/?fbclid=IwAR0dzEyRDFbMsfGwmyrvotkxyWbpdvhWVv1vvh9m1zD3fIYsLcDQBSpA3r4
Mary:
The Famous Writers pronouncements on other Famous Writers are interesting in that for me they raise the question of who was the intended or imagined audience, the readers, for any of these writers. Not many were like Dickens, writing for a general audience in installments published in the popular press. The most modern ones mentioned: Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Joyce, Salinger, Wallace and Nabokov all were writing for much narrower audiences. Joyce wrote for the literati and the critics, who might recognize and be interested in his verbal erudition and nimble shenanigans. Or Salinger, whose selected audience seems primarily adolescent, those who might be greatly concerned with the authentic versus the phony...at the same time I find the Glass family to be a set of irritating poseurs, with their angst, their "Jesus prayer" and Seymour's "Perfect Day for Bananafish."....Dickens gives us a conversion story with redemption through generosity and love, Salinger gives us Zen lite.
Perhaps the nineteenth century could still find hope in action that the twentieth century no longer could believe in...where the passionate struggles in Dostoyevsky can become distasteful for their melodrama and "sentimentality," and we have the whole development of the literature of despair, of the absurd, and eventually the kind of self-conscious, many layered, metafictions of David Foster Wallace. Here there is an attempt to find some kind of hope, some redemption, despite, and even through, all the many dehumanizing aspects of modern life, to include all the mad confusing worst of it and yet find and awaken and reanimate the human values buried at the core. Success, of course is not guaranteed, and maybe the whole quest is a fool's errand. Foster Wallace committed suicide, leaving his next work unfinished, a work about boredom, that seemed to be both unreadable and unwriteable.
And speaking of fool's errands, I have never been able to finish Don Quixote myself, finding it colossally, monumentally, boring.
Oriana:
Don Quixote provoked similar remarks from my classmates in my one and only (I think) World Literature class. Strangely enough, I found it psychologically interesting. The two protagonists were such clear archetypes — one could almost divide people into the Don Quixote type and the Sancho Panza type. I loved the ending, when it’s Panza who craves to go errant quests. The pair was meant to describe the Spanish people, but I think there is a universality here, even pertaining to each of us. The Don in me thinks, “I want a gorgeous plant,” while Panza advises a fruit tree — or just anything you can eat.
On the other hand, it was so much easier to read fiction — even quaint, antiquated fiction — back when I was a youngster in college. Now I’ve grown more restless, and don’t sink as easily into a book. I bless myself for having read giant novels such as Middlemarch or The Magic Mountain in my younger years — they enriched my life beyond measure.
Though I have a special affection for Catcher in the Rye because it was the first novel I read in the US, I too found the Glass family insufferable and ultimately not very interesting. They protest too much about their unique authenticity while putting down everyone else as a phony. Aside from Catcher in the Rye, very little Salinger remains in my memory, though I hugely enjoyed the phrase “with love and squalor.” It has stayed in my mind since my late teens. “Love and squalor” also happens to describe my young life, the years I also labeled “heartbreaks and hospitals.”
A good insight about the change of the reading audience. Dickens gave us an ageless treasure that anyone could understand and enjoy; Joyce ultimately degenerated into writing for a handful of scholars, his tale ultimately signifying nothing. 
*
ORWELL REVIEWS HITLER’S MEIN KAMPF, 1940
Orwell suggests the human animal is not fighting against socialism or capitalism, but anesthetizing comfort, and boredom.
~ Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. Hitler’s photograph published in Mein Kampf is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself.
The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do.
Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.
However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
When one compares Hitler's utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler's own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia's turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question. ~
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html
I once accidentally stumbled on a fascist website quoting an interview with Hitler, which presents Germany as a victim of Polish massacres of peace-loving Germans.
Of course now we have someone presenting himself as a victim of the lying media (Hitler too complained a lot about the "lying press") and other enemies of the people . . .
As for reading Mein Kampf, I strongly recommend it. It's an atrociously bad book, atrociously badly written. It's anti-Semitism taken to the absurd. And yes, the victim mentality is part of it. Reading Mein Kampf (or even just browsing through it) will put an end to any notion that Hitler was a genius, just as reading the Bible puts an end to the idea that it's a sacred, infallible text (this is not to equate these two very different books).
*
HAPPIEST PEOPLE PRIORITIZE TIME OVER MONEY, A HARVARD STUDY FINDS
~ The most obvious fact about work is that you spend time to get money. The idea being that the more money you have, the more secure you will be, and thus, the more happiness you will experience. But what if that premise was backwards? New research is arguing that's the case. Instead of spending time to get money, truly happy people spend money to get time.
The research, which was reported on by the Harvard Business Review, surveyed a group of 100,000 working adults. Of them, it was consistent that those who were willing to give up earning more money in favor of regaining free time experienced "more fulfilling social relationships, more satisfying careers, and more joy," and overall reported higher rates of general satisfaction.
Study author Ashley Whillans posits that people who prioritize time over money — perhaps turning down a more time-consuming promotion, or outsourcing tasks — have a better quality of life.
Whillans identifies this as something called "time affluence," which is as it sounds: the luxury of simply having enough time to do the things you want. She and her team analyzed data from the Gallup Institute on this, and saw a clear pattern: people who have enough time are happier, less depressed, experience more joy, exercise more, eat better, are more productive, and are less likely to get divorced.
However, it's not only the undervaluation of time that damages our well-being. It's also the underestimation of it. "We also suffer from future time slack; we believe we will have more time in the future than in the present moment," Whillans tells me. "Stated differently, we discount our future time. Interestingly, the value of a $100 is pretty consistent regardless of whether we are thinking about it today, tomorrow, or next week. However, with time we steeply discount how much our future time is worth.”
Why is it happening?
For a few reasons, almost all of which have to do with the way we perceive, and misperceive, what our time means and how much of it we have to budget.
People generally do prioritize money over their time, believing that having more will make them feel better. In reality, studies show that there's a happiness cap when it comes to earnings. Will you be happier if you make $1,000,000 as opposed to $100,000? Research says not really.
Some studies say the magic number is $75,000. Others say it's more in the range of $50,000. This is likely because when you jump from say $10,000 to $50,000, you notice a marked difference in your quality of life. You're more or less able to afford to take care of your responsibilities and pursue things you enjoy.
But beyond that? The charms of high earners don't translate into happiness, and largely do translate into more time committed to work, which has been proven to make people less satisfied. Extraordinary earnings don't mean extraordinary happiness... that is, unless you use that money to outsource your business modules and buy yourself back the hours in your days.
"It is worth noting that people who are struggling to make ends meet or who feel uncertain about their financial future often feel happier when they choose money over time," Whillens says. "But most of us have at least some discretionary time to spend and for those of us that do, we might need to rethink our priorities."
She went onto explain that it's easy to be misguided because, in culture, money is a symbol, and a powerful one at that. "Money is a sign of success, status, and social approval," she says. "Time signals a focus on being social over working but can also signal sloth and incompetence (or at least that's what most of us erroneously believe)."
Whillens went onto say that it's not really our fault for prioritizing money. "In America, people think that being busy signals higher status. And, feeling important is a powerful motivator," she adds.
However, when it comes to your overall well-being, it might be time to rethink what a high earning potential might realistically do for you. If you're going to use success to ensure that you have the time and mean to pursue other aspects of life outside of work, it will likely benefit you. But working for the sake of earning money — especially in exchange for preserving hours of your life — is proven to not be the wisest, or most effective, approach. ~
from another source: BUT TOO MUCH FREE TIME CAN MAKE YOU UNHAPPY
~ More free time is great, but too much free time is also a bad thing. Science and common sense tell us that people who sit around all day feel unfulfilled, discontent, and downright bored.
So where's that Goldilocks point, the perfect amount of free time to have to maximize your happiness? Another new study, as yet unpublished, claims to answer that question. And the results suggest that the optimum amount of free time is actually pretty doable.
Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and a team of collaborators analyzed data on how 35,000 Americans use their time and view their lives. After crunching the numbers a straightforward pattern emerged.
They "found that employed people's ratings of their satisfaction with life peaked when they had in the neighborhood of two and a half hours of free time a day," reports The Atlantic's Joe Pinsker. If you have more free time on your hands, your happiness is likely to go down.
The study wasn't designed to figure out exactly why this might be so, though a handful of experts offer speculations in Pinsker's piece, from one theory that if you have more free time than everyone else you're going to be pretty lonely spending it to the idea that more than the magic number starts to make you feel like a lazy layabout.
The exact mix of reasons for feeling time poor probably vary by the person (and a few of us are actually time poor, though statistically speaking it's unlikely you're one of them), but the central takeaway of all this science and expert advice remains constant — you probably have all the time you need to be happy. It's your mindset and your behavior that needs an adjustment more than your schedule. ~
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/exactly-how-much-free-time-you-need-each-day-to-maximize-happiness-according-to-a-new-study-of-35000-people.html
HOW MUCH FREE TIME DO THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE HAVE? TOO LITTLE, AND PEOPLE TEND TO GET STRESSED; TOO MUCH, AND PEOPLE TEND TO FEEL IDLE
~ Many Americans who work—and especially those raising kids—are pressed for time, wishing they had more of it to devote to leisure activities (or even just sleeping). At the same time, research has indicated that people who are busy tend to be happier than those who are idle, whether their busyness is purposeful or not.
A research paper released late last year investigated this trade-off, attempting to pinpoint how much leisure time is best. Its authors examined the relationship between the amount of “discretionary time” people had—basically, how much time people spend awake and doing what they want—and how pleased they were with their lives. (Some examples of “discretionary” activities were watching TV, socializing, going to the movies, spending time with family, and doing nothing.)
The paper, which analyzed data covering about 35,000 Americans, found that employed people’s ratings of their satisfaction with life peaked when they had in the neighborhood of two and a half hours of free time a day. For people who didn’t work, the optimal amount was four hours and 45 minutes.
[Past that optimal point,] the subjects started to say they felt less productive overall, which could explain why having a lot of free time can feel like having too much free time.
One theory: Having too much free time might challenge a person’s self-image. For a man who provides for his family, Hamermesh says, “if I have so much time that I can spend it on, I don’t know, watching television, maybe I feel I’m not a real man.” (This feeling could be related to the pressure many people feel to appear useful and in demand as they vie for work in a competitive labor market.)
While overall life satisfaction is a metric shaped by many variables, Hamermesh said there’s some research specifically on how stressed people are feeling about time. “Perhaps not surprisingly,” he writes in his forthcoming book, Spending Time: The Most Valuable Resource, “any switch that increases time away from work reduces stress.” Some of the biggest reductions in feeling stressed about time, he notes, come from substituting an hour of sleep or TV-watching for an hour of work. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/free-time-life-satisfaction/583171/
Oriana:
I decided to pursue the topic after reading the headline “Most people are unhappy for the same reason: free time” — meaning too much free time for those who don’t have fulfilling leisure activities. Free time that feels idle and meaningless is probably the most important reason so many go through a crisis when they retire. It’s also the reason that so many university professors continue to teach, at least part-time, well into their seventies, and editors may continue past eighty.
Writers never retire, though fiction writers may stop writing novels and switch to shorter forms: essays, reviews, online commentaries. The point is, they have to write something every day, or life feels meaningless.
Others may find meaning and fulfillment through volunteer activities. Some even find themselves so busy they can’t understand how they ever managed to work full-time. I call these extreme types the manic seniors — but it’s better to be too busy than not busy enough. Let's face it: being busy makes us feel happy.
“Life is both dreadful and wonderful...How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural — you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
SNOWFLAKES COME IN 35 BASIC SHAPES
~ While "no two flakes alike" might be an attractive metaphor, it isn’t entirely true. Yet that doesn’t stop us from peering at the intricate crystal structures caught on our mittens. It also doesn’t stop researchers from painstakingly cataloguing every type of crystal that might form.
You might wonder what the shapes of snowflakes have to do with chemistry. Actually, the study of crystal structures of solids has its own discipline, crystallography, which allows us to determine the arrangement of atoms in these solids. Crystallography works by passing X-rays through the sample, which are then diffracted as they pass through by the atoms contained therein. Analysis of the diffraction pattern allows the structure of the solid to be discerned; this technique was used by Rosalind Franklin to photograph the double helix arrangement of DNA prior to Watson & Crick’s confirmation of its structure.
The story begins up in a cloud, when a minute cloud droplet first freezes into a tiny particle of ice. As water vapor starts condensing on its surface, the ice particle quickly develops facets, thus becoming a small hexagonal prism. For a while it keeps this simple faceted shape as it grows.
As the crystal becomes larger, however, branches begin to sprout from the six corners of the hexagon. Since the atmospheric conditions (e. g. temperature and humidity) are nearly constant across the small crystal, the six budding arms all grow out at roughly the same rate.
While it grows, the crystal is blown to and fro inside the clouds, so the temperature it sees changes randomly with time.
Those temperature changes morph the arms into different shapes and give us the diverse snowflakes and crystals we see. Since all the arms endure the same fluctuations, they can grow symmetrically. In reality, most snow crystals are irregular, he writes.
Why spend all this time classifying snowflakes? As Libbrecht explains, this is really the study of how crystals form. And that knowledge can be applied to making crystals for a host of other applications—silicon and other semiconductors in computers and electronics are built of crystals, for example.
Plus, they are stunning. ~
THE AVOCADO MYSTERY
~ Since fruits propagate by seeds, their progeny doesn’t grow far from the tree, as the proverb goes; their only chance of spreading their seeds across the land, then, are the animals who eat the fruit, along with its seeds, then “plant” those elsewhere when they poop. The avocado’s abnormally giant seed presents anything from a severe digestive hazard to a death sentence for contemporary earthly species but, apparently, avocados coevolved with ground sloths and were originally eaten by gomphothere — elephant-like creatures that lived during the Miocene and Pliocene, between 12 million and 1.6 million years ago, who happily reaped the fruit with their hefty trunks, crunched them with their massive teeth, and passed the seeds comfortably through their oversized digestive tract.
Avocado’s strategy for propagation made a great deal of sense throughout the long life of its lineage — until the present moment. Even after thirteen thousand years, avocado is clueless that the great mammals are gone. For the avocado, gomphothere and ground sloths are still real possibilities. Pulp thieves like us reap the benefits. Homo Sapiens will continue to mold the traits of the few species of genus Persea it prefers. Ultimately, however, wild breeds will devolve less grandiose fruits, or else follow their animal partners into extinction. ~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWW5OuxlKec&feature=emb_logo
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IS WESTERN CULTURE A PRODUCT OF CHRISTIANITY?
~ Tom Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of the Christian revolution. He is haunted by St Paul’s claim that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong, and to drive the point home he might have looked at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. We encounter there an obscure young Jewish woman called Mary who is pregnant with Jesus, and Luke puts into her mouth a cry of praise that some scholars believe is a Zealot chant. It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. It is this which must be weighed in the balance against the killing fields of Christendom.
What distinguishes the Judeo-Christian idea of love from the romantic, erotic, touchy-feely sense it has acquired in modern times is that it has nothing to do with feeling. Love for the New Testament is a social practice, not a sentiment. Only a love of this ruthlessly impersonal kind, which couldn’t care less about the gender, rank, skin color or personality of whoever needs your help, could prove equal to what St John darkly calls the powers of this world: Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro and their lackeys.
These men are nationalist bigots, which suggests another sense in which Christianity can be subversive. Holland remarks that the early Christians’ refusal to identify themselves with a homeland was a cause of scandal. They were branded as rootless vagrants who delighted in being alien, and thus made a boast out of what should have been a source of shame.
Christianity started life as an eastern, not western phenomenon, but rapidly left its birthplace behind. What held it together was faith, not territory. One was no longer to grovel before the idols of state, tribe, nation and household. And as for household, almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is deeply hostile. Kinship and blood ties no longer matter, and Jesus’s treatment of his mother is by no means always that of a good Jewish boy.
You can, however, make a fetish or idol out of anything, as Freud instructs us. Such false gods fill every chapter of this illuminating study. Yet Holland is surely right to argue that when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/21/dominion-making-western-mind-tom-holland-review
Crucifixion, Sano di Pietro, 1400s
Oriana:
The very title, “Dominion,” made me think of the project of world conquest (Catholic meaning “universal”) — but it's the cultural dominion that is proposed here, and some of it is positive, based on ideas that were radical in their time. (We need to remember that, barring the extremes, nothing is all good or all bad.)
Perhaps the greatest surprise is that the author is an atheist. “Tom Holland is an unbeliever and also someone who was raised a Christian. And he too is someone who abandoned that belief early in life: he blames a fascination with dinosaurs — a gateway drug for many a budding young historian and religious skeptic. But in his latest book he turns his attention to Christianity’s impact on western thinking and to what will be, to many, an uncomfortable thesis. He argues that most of the things that we consider to be intrinsic and instinctive human values are actually nothing of the sort; they are primarily and fundamentally the product of Christianity and would not exist without the last 2000 years of Christian dominance on our culture.”
That's perhaps too sweeping. Humans are a very social species, and have a sense of fairness, for example, that seems essentially biological — it can be found in other primates, elephants, dogs, etc.
There is also the matter of cultural evolution -- e.g. the turning away from the worst kinds of legally sanctioned cruelty, disapproval of "might makes right," etc. The progress has been painfully slow, but evolution favors cooperation and the "good dad" over the bully.
Mary:
The idea that Christianity is responsible for the moral and social norms of western culture is interesting to me primarily in seeing the way these core principles have been inverted and distorted by the Christian right in the US. Here they have turned "the poor shall inherit" into "blessed are the rich." And reversed the "relentless" principle of Christian love in society into doctrines of division and hate. The opposite of Christianity is presented as truly Christian without blink or apology.
Oriana:
Protestants in general have had a great deal of trouble with the idea that “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” They even invented a gate in Jerusalem that was supposedly called “the eye of a needle.” No, Jesus spoke in hyperboles like that, and no way can one twist the New Testament as the “prosperity gospel” — except that that’s exactly what has been done in the US, never mind what Jesus actual taught. You are right to speak about the total reversal. 
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THE PRIEST AND THE JESTER (the quest for the absolute versus skepticism)
A Dionysian celebration of postmodern ideas is found in the early (1959) work of the Marxist revisionist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. His famous essay “The Priest and the Jester,” published in the early 60s, speaks about “chronic conflict in philosophy which seems to be able to marshal its history: the conflict between the quest for the absolute and a flight from it [dogmatism and skepticism].
In every era the jester’s philosophy exposes as doubtful what seems most unshakable, reveals the contradictions in what appears obvious and incontrovertible, derides common sense and reads sense into the absurd . . . The attitude of the jester consists in constant reflection about whether perhaps the opposite may not be right. . . . There are more priests than jesters in a king’s court.”
The jester, representing this postmodern flight, is puer eternus: a sceptic observer of social order, one who is active, critical, and questioning all that appears self-evident. He stands for imagination, pluralism, individuality, playfulness and points to the tension between ideals.
The priest is the senex, a believer in a harmonious system of values; he guards the absolute, defends orthodoxy, tradition and sanctity. “The priest and the jester both violate the mind: the priest with the garotte of catechism, the jester with the needle of mockery,” Kolakowski concludes.
“The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of truths accepted by tradition as ultimate and unquestionable. The jester is the impertinent upstart who questions everything we accept as self-evident. If he belonged to good society, he could at best be merely a purveyor of dinner-party scandal. In order to point out the unobviousness of its obviousnesses and the nonultimacy of its ultimacies, he must be outside it, observing it from a distance; but if he is to be impertinent to it, and find out what it holds sacred, he must also frequent it.”
The essay asks how we approach the facts and events of our everyday lives: as the absolute and final reality, to be taken at its direct, empirical value, or as sections of a broader path at the end of which lies peace and consolation: pennies in a piggy-bank, saved up toward our (or mankind’s) eternal retirement. In the latter case we run the risk of dismissing present facts and present values as insignificant; in the former, of dismissing those that go beyond the present and require, for their fulfillment, a certain amount of effort and preparation on our part.
~ The Postmodern Challenge: Perspectives East and West
Laughing Jester, circa 1500; I’ve decided to repost the “priest and jester” entry from the past because it seems to have timeless relevance.Oriana:
My father was an example of a jester, though once in a while he’d be a bit of a priest, trying to get at a general truth — it would be an exaggeration to call it an absolute, unless we are dealing with mathematics (he was a theoretical physicist, which is basically mathematics).
I think it’s much easier to be a jester. There are also secular priests, e.g. those who are really serious about ecology — anyone devoted to a “holy cause.”
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AUTOPHAGY: ONE REASON RED GRAPES, POMEGRANATE, AND TURMERIC HELP US LIVE LONGER
~ Autophagy literally means “self-devouring” – something our cells are doing constantly, breaking down damage and toxic waste products – and Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi has just been awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for his work in uncovering the complex mechanisms that underpin this remarkable internal recycling system.
So how does autophagy keep us healthy? Why might dysfunctional autophagy contribute to diabetes, dementia, leukaemia and Parkinson’s disease? And will our new understanding lead to any cures?
The process of autophagy involves gathering up cellular junk and waste, sealing it in the cellular equivalent of a bin bag and transporting it to the cellular rubbish bin, called the lysosome, where enzymes break down the contents. “I often call autophagy the recycling van that delivers the rubbish to the recycling centre,” says Professor Katja Simon, of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in Oxford. It plays a key role in health, disease and aging, she says: “It is very important to degrade toxic waste for the survival of the cell, and a cell without autophagy cannot survive. But it has also been shown that it is important in disease development, such as in Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by the accumulation of protein aggregates in neuronal cells. Furthermore, autophagy levels fall in the aging process. The characteristics of old age, such as wrinkles, hearing loss or cancer, are actually due to falling autophagy levels and the accumulation of toxic wastes in the cells.”
Simon’s work is particularly focused on red and white blood cells and disorders such as leukemia, in which autophagy doesn’t work properly. She is delighted that Ohsumi has been awarded the Nobel prize. “In the 1960s, he used an electron microscope to see structures and no one knew what they were. He discovered the molecules involved in the process.” Ohsumi’s lab mainly works with yeasts, and has uncovered key genes involved in autophagy. The science has come a long way since the 60s and researchers such as Simon can now measure autophagy by tracking the flow of labelled molecules associated with the process.
Mopping up damaged mitochondria – the powerhouses of cells that release energy – seems to be especially important in preventing diabetes and obesity. When this particular form of autophagy, called mitophagy, doesn’t work properly, toxic chemicals build up that cause further mitochondrial damage. This vicious cycle damages cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, and diabetes can set in. A drug that can fix diabetes and obesity by sorting out disordered mitophagy is an attractive idea, but we’re not there yet.
Another key role of autophagy is found in its link in proteins. In the body proteins are folded into 3D shapes. Aberrant proteins that aren’t folded up properly can form large clumps, or protein aggregates, that can be cleared by autophagy. When autophagy fails, the aggregates damage nerve function. This process is thought to contribute to the changes seen in Parkinson’s disease, including tremors, slow and stiff movement, loss of smell, and dizziness. The abnormal accumulation of proteins in the brain may be the common thread in different forms of dementia that cause debilitating loss of memory, language, judgment and cognitive and social functioning.
If scientists can stimulate autophagy, they could effectively stave off or even reverse the effects of aging. As Simon says, it’s not about making people live for ever, but about finding ways to stay healthy as we live out our lives. Studies on mice have found that stimulation of autophagy removes accumulated misfolded proteins, broken mitochondria and damaged DNA in hearts with age-related changes. But translating this lab work into effective treatments for humans is still a way off.
“Autophagy declines during aging and this has a major impact in our cells, since they accumulate toxic deposits,” says Ioannis Nezis, an associate professor at the University of Warwick. “This is especially harmful for neurons, since neurons do not divide, and the same cell keeps accumulating garbage. If we understand how autophagy is normally induced to selectively recognize and recycle these toxic deposits, we will be able to find compounds that can activate autophagy and keep its levels steady during the course of a lifetime and therefore avoid the accumulation of cellular garbage. These can be chemical drugs, or natural dietary compounds that can be used as supplements.”
So what can we eat to keep us autophaging efficiently? Nezis says lots of natural compounds have been tested in fruit flies, mice and test tubes, but we still don’t know for certain what works in humans and what amounts are needed. Pomegranates, turmeric, red grapes and red wine look hopeful, but Nezis says you may need liters of wine and kilos of grapes to get the required effect. Supplements containing distilled concentrates of the active molecules may prove more palatable.
Simon points out that cells switch on autophagy in response to starvation. Calorie restriction, such as intermittent fasting in the 5:2 diet or during Ramadan, may help us to live long and healthy lives. It is possible that reducing our calorie intake to 70% of what we have been used to eating will boost our autophagy and help to prevent a wide range of disease. Exercise also promotes more autophagy, as experiments that get mice to run on mini treadmills has shown.
Advice to feast on fruit, veg and red wine is hardly new. But thanks to this year’s Nobel prize-winner, our understanding of the science that underpins it is developing all the time. The next step will be drugs, supplements and interventions that could stave off the ravages of aging and a host of debilitating diseases. We are not there yet, but we are one step closer. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/10/pomegranates-turmeric-and-red-grapes-the-key-to-long-life
from another source:
~ Spoiler alert: Juice cleanses and detox teas don’t hold a candle to your body’s ability to detox. One of the ways it does this is through a natural process called autophagy, which is how your body cleans up cellular junk and keeps your systems humming. Early research suggests you can actually increase autophagy, which may reduce inflammation, protect against disease and even support anti-aging.
Autophagy means “self-eating,” but rest assured, this is a good thing. Autophagy is the method by which your body cleans out damaged cells and toxins, helping you regenerate newer, healthier cells.
Over time, our cells accumulate a variety of dead organelles, damaged proteins and oxidized particles that clog the body’s inner workings. This accelerates the effects of aging and age-related diseases because cells aren’t able to divide and function normally. (Note that autophagy is not to be confused with apoptosis, which is programmed cell death, a different process than the cleanup of the degeneration within the cells.)
This lysosome-dependent cell-regeneration process is critical to your overall health. In fact, the dysfunction of autophagy has been linked to several neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease.
A ketogenic diet gives you an edge when it comes to autophagy. The shift from burning glucose (carbs) to ketones (fats) mimics what occurs naturally in a fasted state—and this may increase autophagy in its own right.
Go on a protein fast. Once or twice a week, limit your protein consumption to 15g-25g a day. This gives your body a full day to recycle proteins, which will help reduce inflammation and cleanse your cells without any muscle loss. During this time, while autophagy gets triggered, your body is forced to consume its own proteins and toxins, versus incoming amino acids. ~
(the article points out intermittent fasting and exercise help induce autophagy.)
https://www.bulletproof.com/diet/intermittent-fasting/autophagy-for-longevity-detoxification/
Oriana:
MCT oil (medium-chain triglycerides, extracted from coconut oil) has also been found to promote autophagy.
However, one can't help but notice how mainstream diet advice keeps on changing: first it's lots of carbs and next-to-zero fat; then it's high protein and next-to-zero carbs; then someone discovers that excess protein is turned into glucose anyway, and the only nutrient that can't be turned into glucose is fat -- and we get the ketogenic diet, starring MCT oil and olive oil.
It seems that the optimal diet has been worked out for various animal species
(e.g. any zoo is certainly interested in keeping its animals healthy). But when it comes to human nutrition, debate still rages.
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ending on beauty:
The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
