I've named this cosmic blossom “the blue flower nebula.” Seretta suggested it's a morning glory.*
DUSHKA
Dushka, my Soul, don’t be so proud
of not being made of ordinary
stardust. When I go you too
will go, like a flame when the candle
is done with its prayer.
Some say it will feel just as it did
before being born. But Dushka,
before I was born — open any
history book — it was murder.
Dushka, do you remember
the red streetcars in Warsaw?
And the chestnuts rioting in bloom?
We walked down Wawelska Street,
the long way home so we could pass
the small park of the first kiss
under the green heaven
of dark-leaved chestnut trees —
Dushka dearest, I know, I know
it was New Year’s Eve,
snow on my eyelashes,
silence on bare branches.
For thirty years now I have lived
with a Norfolk pine. People say
it should be cut down, its roots
buckle the sidewalk. But one
high noon on its tip I saw
a mockingbird sing his imitation
of a car alarm, so how could I cut down
my thousand-green-fingered pine?
A neighbor said, “In another
thirty years it will be the tallest
tree in town.” I said in thirty years
I don’t think I will be alive.
I am taking the mockingbird
with me.
~ Oriana
mockingbird, Mimus polyglottus
*
GEORGE ELIOT’S WISDOM ABOUT ORDINARY, “FAILED” LIVES
~ In ordinary lives George Eliot perceived human nature’s “deep pathos, its sublime mysteries.” ~
~ Dorothea, who at the novel’s outset is nineteen, disdains her suitor, Sir James Chettam, an amiable, pink-faced baronet whose land is adjacent to the property that any future son of hers will inherit. Instead, she makes a spectacularly unwise marriage to Edward Casaubon, the pedantic scholar laboring on the interminable “Key to all Mythologies”—“Our Lowick Cicero,” as a dismissive neighbor calls him. Ultimately, she is united with Will Ladislaw, a passionate, idealistic lightweight, a journalist turned politician.
I relished the satire in Eliot’s “study of provincial life,” as the book is subtitled, with its amused depictions of minor characters like Celia, Dorothea’s more earthbound sister, whose marriage to the passed-over Sir James produces baby Arthur—“the infantine Bouddha”—whom everyone is obliged to adore. But I missed, more or less completely, the irony in the portrayal of Dorothea, with her righteous aspirations. (Her love of riding is so great that “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it,” and she imagines, when anticipating life with Casaubon, “It would be like marrying Pascal.”) I also failed to notice what Leslie Stephen, an early critic, described as “a slight touch of stupidity” about Dorothea. Rather, her formless desire for a life of the mind, and a life of meaning, struck not so much a chord with me as a symphony.
In my Penguin English Library edition, I marked what seemed to me particularly salient passages with a fluorescent yellow pen; the highlights have faded now to an almost imperceptible citrine. From Chapter 37, as Will enlightens Dorothea about Casaubon’s intellectual inadequacies: “Now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness.” From Chapter 64, where Lydgate—the high-minded, ambitious young doctor whose trajectory the novel charts in parallel with Dorothea’s—is in dire financial straits, and his relations with Rosamond, his willful, empty-headed wife, are at their most strained: “In marriage, the certainty, ‘She will never love me much,’ is easier to bear than the fear, ‘I shall love her no more.’ ”
In the subsequent decades, just about every love affair I had was refracted through “Middlemarch.” I spent far too much of my twenties helplessly, if resentfully, in love with a preoccupied man nearly two decades my senior—a distinguished professor who studied the classics and once told me that one of his greatest fears was to discover that he was Casaubon. It might have been like marrying Pascal, but the professor eventually decided that I was not fit to receive a proposal of the type that Casaubon, in an excruciatingly stilted letter, offers Dorothea: “I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated.”
Some years later, I gave an otherwise well-read boyfriend a copy of “Middlemarch,” on the principle that if he wanted to understand me he needed to read this; two years later, he still had not cracked its considerable spine, which should have made our parting less painful than it was. Soon after we broke up, he—of course—got around to reading it, and told me how much he admired the climactic scene of Will and Dorothea, hitherto kept apart by the terms of Casaubon’s will and by their own discretion, clutching each other’s hands, at last, as a thunderstorm rages. I find this the book’s one overwrought note, and his admiration confirmed that things would never have worked between us. When I did eventually marry, at the age of thirty-seven—older even than Eliot when she eloped with George Henry Lewes, the exuberant, omnicompetent critic who became her beloved companion for the next quarter century, despite being married to someone else—it was to a man who prized “Middlemarch” as much as I did, and whose name, by what I hope is only happy coincidence, is George.
I have gone back to “Middlemarch” every five years or so, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting. In my judgmental twenties, I thought that Ladislaw, with his brown curls and his callow artistic dabbling, was not entirely deserving of Dorothea; by forty, I could better measure the appeal of his youthful energies and Byronic hairdressing, at least to his middle-aged creator, who was fifty-three when the book was published.
My identification with Eliot’s heroine and my dismissal of her simpler sister was shaken when I became the besotted mother of a son. (To a friend, a professor of English literature, I giddily wrote, “All these years I’ve thought of myself as Dorothea, and now I’ve turned overnight into Celia.”) And as I grew older the unfolding of Dorothea’s life became less immediately poignant to me than the story of Lydgate, who at the start of the book has the bold aim to “make a link in the chain of discovery,” but who, thanks to his own misguided marriage, becomes a society doctor known for a treatise on gout—“a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side,” in Eliot’s pointed observation.
Rather than limning the inchoate hopes of youth, “Middlemarch” seemed to be about the resignations that attend middle age. It became a primer to the limitations on accomplishment that are, for the most part, the lot of even the most ardent and aspiring among us. (Lydgate dies at fifty, believing himself a failure: “He had not done what he once meant to do.”)
The fate of Dorothea, who becomes a supportive wife and mother, sits ill with some readers, particularly those reared with feminist preconceptions about autonomy and success; they chafe at her lack of scope. But with each reading I became only more grateful for Eliot’s wise, consoling grace, and only more admiring of the quiet celebration of the unremarkable that infuses the book’s unforgettable conclusion: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
*
The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of George Eliot’s birth, in 1969, occasioned a revival of interest in her, and by 1980 the fellowship had persuaded the authorities at Westminster Abbey to honor her in Poets’ Corner, with a memorial stone. In the nineties, the fellowship’s ranks were modestly swollen by what the British papers called “Middlemarch mania,” following the BBC’s dramatization of the novel; at its height, the fellowship had more than six hundred members, including a Japanese chapter, based in Osaka. These days, there are about four hundred members—a figure that compares unfavorably with the popularity enjoyed by Jane Austen, whose society in North America alone has four thousand members, and whose works are the inspiration for bankable spinoffs, from “Clueless” to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
Austen’s greater current popularity is understandable: she wrote crystalline, comic novels of medium length. Eliot’s work was more varied in its attainment, and more verbose: one publisher recently released a volume called “The Mill on the Floss: In Half the Time,” an abridgment for those unable to countenance a six-hundred-page book. Even among Eliot’s devotees, many will agree that once is enough for reading “Romola,” her often tedious excursion into Renaissance Florence. Eliot admired Austen: she and Lewes read Austen’s novels aloud to each other in 1857, when she was embarking upon her own first effort at fiction—the stories that became “Scenes of Clerical Life.”
But George Eliot, as she became known when that collection was published, went on to surpass her precursor. She is as adept as Austen at the ironic depiction of high and middle-class society: Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s muddle-headed uncle, is a not too distant cousin of Mr. Bennet; and Mrs. Vincy, the exquisitely banal mother of Rosamond, might easily have found her way to Middlemarch via Highbury.
But Eliot’s satire, unlike Austen’s, stops short of cruelty. She is inveterately magnanimous, even when it comes to her most flawed characters; her default authorial position is one of pity. Rosamond Vincy is foolish and intractable—her husband refers to her in his later years as his basil plant, because it was “a plant that had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.” But the sequence of chapters in which self-involved, trivial Rosamond realizes that Will Ladislaw is in love with Dorothea, not her—she is “taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own, hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect”—is a masterpiece of sympathetic imagination. A reader marvels at Jane Austen’s cleverness, but is astonished by George Eliot’s intelligence.
Eliot’s imaginative life blossomed with the arrival of domestic and conjugal happiness. At the end of 1857, when she was thirty-eight, she wrote, “My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year; I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment; a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past; a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties than I remember at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily.” She added, “Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.”
But “Middlemarch” is not about blooming late, or unexpectedly coming into one’s own after the unproductive flush of youth. “Middlemarch” suggests that it is always too late to be what you might have been—but it also shows that, virtually without exception, the unrealized life is worth living. The book that Virginia Woolf characterized as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” is also a book about how to be a grownup person—about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness.
In “Middlemarch,” when the newly wed (and newly disappointed) Dorothea defends Casaubon’s sterile intellectual efforts by declaring, “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure,” she is expressing a notion that is at the center of much of Eliot’s work: that individuals must make their best efforts toward a worthy end, but it is the effort toward a goal, rather than the achievement of it, that makes us who we are.
I also thought of something that Dorothea tells Rosamond toward the end of “Middlemarch,” as she struggles toward her own comprehension of the complexity of intimate human relations: “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.”
*
In her journals, which were not published in their entirety until twelve years ago, Eliot writes with anguish about her limited accomplishment, and a sense of too often falling short of her capacities. “Horrible scepticism about all things—paralyzing my mind,” she wrote in 1864. “Shall I ever be good for anything again?—ever do anything again?” In 1868, the year before she embarked upon “Middlemarch,” she wrote, “I am not yet engaged in any work that makes a higher life for me—a life that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old.” In response to the enthusiastic reception of the first volume of “Middlemarch,” Eliot wrote, “Hardly anything could have happened to me which I could regard as a greater blessing than this growth of my spiritual existence when my bodily existence is decaying. The merely egoistic satisfactions of fame are easily nullified by toothache, and that has made my chief consciousness for the last week.”
*
For all the satisfaction that her success provided her, she was periodically haunted by the question of whether it was too late to be all that she might have been. “As the years advance there is a new rational ground for the expectation that my life may become less fruitful,” she wrote on December 31, 1877. The previous year, she had published “Daniel Deronda,” her final novel, in which she portrays the new international social scene—prefiguring the work that Henry James went on to produce—and gives the first serious rendering in fiction of European Jewry.
The novel also depicts with flawless psychological comprehension one of the most awful marriages in literature, that of Gwendolen Harleth and Henleigh Grandcourt: “One belief which had accompanied her through her unmarried life as a self-cajoling superstition, encouraged by the subordination of every one about her—the belief in her own power of dominating—was utterly gone. Already, in seven short weeks, which seemed half her life, her husband had gained a mastery which she could no more resist than she could have resisted the benumbing effect from the touch of a torpedo.”
In her plaintive journal entry, Eliot went on, “The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state.” She had “many conceptions of works to be carried out,” she wrote, “but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must have already done my best.”
Nevertheless, the compulsion to work, and the awareness of the gratification to be derived by working well, remained irresistible. “My mind is embarrassed by the number and wide variety of subjects that attract me, and the enlarging vista that each brings with it,” she wrote. To think of the mind of George Eliot embarrassed by its own range is almost unbearably poignant, in its uneasy balance of aspiration and diffidence. By the time she wrote those words, Eliot had become better than anyone at what she did; but she could not have done so any earlier, or any more easily. It took all that she had been to make her all that she was.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/middlemarch-and-me?utm_campaign=falcon&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_source=facebook&utm_brand=tny&utm_social-type=owned&fbclid=IwAR3WuhStImgmCv_69LwWm2xaHHwTLkgCmjXhTd7TZiyv6FdrDTAMONKwNFQ
George Eliot, 1849 Oriana:
Reading Middlemarch was one of the high points of my intellectual life. Not that I found it a perfect novel; it was at times too wordy, too slow, almost Proustian. But it struck me as deep; there were no predictable reader-pleasing witticisms here, nor simplistic responses to unsolvable complexities of how, due to youthful choices, we may find ourselves mired in so much less than we wanted. Here and in other Eliot novels, every significant character is a flawed being who fails to find the grail of his or her life — but is granted some high moments, and gains our compassion rather than condemnation.
I almost want to take back what I said about witticisms when I remember that Celia is described as “needed no more salvation than a squirrel.” Eliot has been accused of resentment of pretty women whom she presents as foolish and shallow— and, in the case of Rosamond, as fatally seductive, alarmingly capable of ruining a man’s idealistic ambitions for the sake of their own materialistic desires. But that was also a respite from the traditional young female characters, who never failed to be beautiful and irresistible, pursued by rich villains, yet passing the test by being attracted only to the high-minded hero.
Above all, I see Eliot as a moral philosopher. This is joined to her powers of observation and psychological insight — but ultimately there is a moral clarity to her writing. She is a moralist, but one seasoned by the wisdom of discerning complexity.
Leonard:
One of my favorite sentences in Middlemarch:
“She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.” ~ George Eliot
Oriana:
Human, all too human . . . and similar to Eliot's observation that the pleasure of fame can be totally erased by a toothache. Realist writers astound me with their capacity to illuminate human contradictions.
Leonard:
Also this, spoken by the 50 year-old scholar Casaubon to the 20 year-old Dorothea upon hearing that she accepted his marriage proposal: “Hitherto I have known few pleasures save of the severer kind: my satisfactions have been those of the solitary student. I have been little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in my hand, but now I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your bosom.”
No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook.”
Oriana:
We can easily imagine how Dickens would depict Casaubon, what contempt he’d heap upon him. He’d be a crude caricature, a stereotype of the dried-up, emotionally repressed scholar. But Eliot, herself an intellectual, is far more subtle.
The French National LibraryMary:
In the discussion of Middlemarch the author says she periodically reread the book, and could trace her own development in her changing reactions. Several years ago I decided to revisit favorites I had first read as a teenager, not anticipating I would find great differences...but oh my, did I ever!! The most dramatic change was in my response to Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea” — a romantic epic ending with the hero's noble gesture of renunciation and suicide, sacrificing himself to allow his beloved an escape with her true love...who was unfortunately someone else.
At 15 I found this incredibly romantic and tragic, and cried at the ending as though at the funeral of my own dreams. Rereading the novel in my sixties I found the whole premise not tragic but ridiculous — a total fantasy created by the hero, that draws him into a terrible and prolonged struggle with the indifferent forces of nature, which he survives, only to fall victim to his own fantasy of himself as romantic hero, sacrificing himself to ensure the beloved's happiness. The beloved he had never spoken with, never touched, never interacted with. Like Dante with Beatrice, but Dante was smart enough to make her his muse, create the Commedia, and leave it at that. No big suicidal gesture...that had to wait for the Romantics and their particular nonsense, their Young Werthers and Gilliats.
The distance between my two readings was the distance of maturity. Other books I returned to were interesting in other ways — for instance, in some I found glaringly obvious racist language and attitudes that I had not noted or remembered at all. Rereading books after a long time lets you not only discover new things about those books but about yourself.
Oriana:
One of the most interesting aspects of Middlemarch is that it's based on a marital mismatch: Lydgate should obviously be married to Dorothea — these are soulmates, and their marriage would be "made in heaven." Eliot is almost cruel to the reader in depicting the mismatches so realistically. I'm tempted to say that genuine realism in novels is cruel
— just as in life, the main characters marry the wrong persons, and the reader is doomed to watch their unhappiness unfold. That Eliot can take that premise and make a fascinating novel out of it speaks extremely highly of her skills as a writer.
**
"There's only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the artsthe payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that's real, that's truth, that's life, that's the way things are. There it is." ~ Robert Stone
*
HOW CAMUS AND SARTRE SPLIT OVER FREEDOM AND COMMUNISM
~ They were gleaming icons of the era. Newspapers reported on their daily movements: Sartre holed up at Les Deux Magots, Camus the peripatetic of Paris. As the city began to rebuild, Sartre and Camus gave voice to the mood of the day. Europe had been immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world. Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like. ‘We were,’ remembered the fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, ‘to provide the postwar era with its ideology.’
It came in the form of existentialism. Sartre, Camus and their intellectual companions rejected religion, staged new and unnerving plays, challenged readers to live authentically, and wrote about the absurdity of the world – a world without purpose and without value. ‘[There are] only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch,’ Camus wrote. We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are free and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically.
If the idea of freedom bound Camus and Sartre philosophically, then the fight for justice united them politically. They were committed to confronting and curing injustice, and, in their eyes, no group of people was more unjustly treated than the workers, the proletariat. Camus and Sartre thought of them as shackled to their labor and shorn of their humanity. In order to free them, new political systems must be constructed.
In October 1951, Camus published The Rebel. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn ‘philosophy of revolt’. This wasn’t a philosophical system per se, but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free, but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation, ‘calculated risk’; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist, and a betrayal of yourself.
‘Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate,’ Camus wrote, while ‘absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.’ The conflict between justice and freedom required constant re-balancing, political moderation, an acceptance and celebration of that which limits the most: our humanity. ‘To live and let live,’ he said, ‘in order to create what we are.’
Sartre read The Rebel with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it was possible to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of communism. Under capitalism, and in poverty, workers could not be free. Their options were unpalatable and inhumane: to work a pitiless and alienating job, or to die. But by removing the oppressors and broadly returning autonomy to the workers, communism allows each individual to live without material want, and therefore to choose how best they can realize themselves. This makes them free, and through this unbending equality, it is also just.
The problem is that, for Sartre and many others on the Left, communism required revolutionary violence to achieve because the existing order must be smashed. Not all leftists, of course, endorsed such violence. This division between hardline and moderate leftists – broadly, between communists and socialists – was nothing new.
The 1930s and early ’40s, however, had seen the Left temporarily united against fascism. With the destruction of fascism, the rupture between hardline leftists willing to condone violence and moderates who condemned it returned. This split was made all the more dramatic by the practical disappearance of the Right and the ascendancy of the Soviet Union – which empowered hardliners throughout Europe, but raised disquieting questions for communists as the horrors of gulags, terror and show trials came to light. The question for every leftist of the postwar era was simple: which side are you on?
With the publication of The Rebel, Camus declared for a peaceful socialism that would not resort to revolutionary violence. He was appalled by the stories emerging from the USSR: it was not a country of hand-in-hand communists, living freely, but a country with no freedom at all. Sartre, meanwhile, would fight for communism, and he was prepared to endorse violence to do so.
The split between the two friends was a media sensation. Les Temps Modernes – the journal edited by Sartre, which published a critical review of The Rebel – sold out three times over. Le Monde and L’Observateur both breathlessly covered the falling out. It’s hard to imagine an intellectual feud capturing that degree of public attention today, but, in this disagreement, many readers saw the political crises of the times reflected back at them. It was a way of seeing politics played out in the world of ideas, and a measure of the worth of ideas. If you are thoroughly committed to an idea, are you compelled to kill for it? What price for justice? What price for freedom?
Sartre’s position was shot through with contradiction, with which he struggled for the remainder of his life. Sartre, the existentialist, who said that humans are condemned to be free, was also Sartre, the Marxist, who thought that history does not allow much space for true freedom in the existential sense. Though he never actually joined the French Communist Party, he would continue to defend communism throughout Europe until 1956, when the Soviet tanks in Budapest convinced him, finally, that the USSR did not hold the way forward. (Indeed, he was dismayed by the Soviets in Hungary because they were acting like Americans, he said.)
Sartre would remain a powerful voice on the Left throughout his life, and chose the French president Charles de Gaulle as his favorite whipping boy. (After one particularly vicious attack, de Gaulle was asked to arrest Sartre. ‘One does not imprison Voltaire,’ he responded.)
Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980. Though Sartre moved away from the USSR, he never completely abandoned the idea that revolutionary violence might be warranted.
The violence of communism sent Camus on a different trajectory. ‘Finally,’ he wrote in The Rebel, ‘I choose freedom. For even if justice is not realized, freedom maintains the power of protest against injustice and keeps communication open.’ From the other side of the Cold War, it is hard not to sympathize with Camus, and to wonder at the fervor with which Sartre remained a loyal communist.
Camus’s embrace of sober political reality, of moral humility, of limits and fallible humanity, remains a message well-heeded today. Even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another. Absolutism, and the impossible idealism it inspires, is a dangerous path forward – and the reason Europe lay in ashes, as Camus and Sartre struggled to envision a fairer and freer world. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-camus-and-sartre-split-up-over-the-question-of-how-to-be-free?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
”One doesn't imprison Voltaire” — splendid!
I can see why the KGB would want to get rid of Camus: https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/.../was-camus-killed...
For more on Camus's anti-totalitarian attitudes, see also
https://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2019/05/hitler-was-not-evil-genius-but-lazy.html
Mary: ABSOLUTE AND IMPOSSIBLE IDEALISM ALWAYS SEEMS TO END UP IN BLOODY MURDEROUS OPPRESSION
Revolution and violence, Sartre and Camus. Is it possible to have fundamental social change without violence, or must revolution always come from the barrel of a gun? I think change can and does happen without violent action, but in smaller and slower steps. This never seemed acceptable to the hard line leftists I knew...the basic assumption was that armed struggle was essential.
Maybe in this assumption alone we can see where that dream went bad, led only to totalitarian regimes of terror and oppression, to Stalin and Mao, the gulags, the mass murders, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. One oppressive system replaced by another, at least as bad, and in many ways, far worse. The insistence on violent revolution was certainly big part of Maoism...part of that absolute and impossible idealism that always seems to end up in bloody murderous oppression.
Any time only one way, one answer, one idea, is "correct" and no others are allowed, no questions may be raised without punishment and eradication, you have the absolute oppression found in such states. It is inevitable. We have seen it in religion and politics, the dynamic and the results are the same. Oppression, terror, the outlawing of all opposition, the eradication of freedom, the weight of authoritarian power crushing the spirit, deforming its expression in art and ideas.....and creating with its brutality an inevitable resistance.
I just read McKeon's "All That is Solid Melts Into Air"..a novel about the Chernobyl disaster through its intersection with a few lives, one of them a Doctor conscripted into the response and cleanup. What is most impressive throughout is the suffocating weight of fear..fear of saying the wrong thing, anything that will raise suspicion one is not the most loyal and subservient citizen, anything that looks like a criticism. Because such suspicions could mean anything from losing your job to losing your life, in a most horrific way. There is no freedom of speech because every word must be carefully weighed, watched as carefully as the agents of the state are watching you. Reading this book was like reading a tragedy within a tragedy. It made me feel like I was suffocating.
Oriana:
That’s exactly what I’ve concluded: idealism (or religion) taken to the extremes always spells disaster. And not just in terms of less or no freedom of thought and speech, though that’s certainly oppressive and bad enough. We’re talking about mass murder — millions of people killed in the name of the cause, it doesn’t particularly matter which one. When idealism turns into fanaticism, all means are justified by the supposedly glorious future, whether in earthly or heavenly paradise. How ironic: in the attempt to create paradise, they create hell.
**“For the mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives for. Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
*
“When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.” ~ Boris Pasternak
ONE BUDDHIST MONK’S TWO-WORD QUESTION TO STOP OVERTHINKING
~ Ajahn Brahm says that whenever he was engaging in imaginative conversations, he would ask himself “then what?” and repeat the question for as long as he needed to.
“When I was young I too used to have fantasies. I learned to stop them from grabbing hold of me by following them to their logical conclusion. I would think, “Then what? Then what?” and I wouldn’t stop until I had the full picture.” ~ Ajahn Brahm
Now let’s say you start thinking about how people will react to a new project you are working on. Ask yourself “then what?” Maybe you’ll continue the story and come up with how you are going to respond to their critiques, or thank them for their praise.
Ask yourself again what comes next. In just a few seconds, you’ll lose interest in your own story.
In his book, Ajahn Brahm explains how this method helped him and why it works:
“With fantasies such as falling in love, getting married, and riding off into the sunset, the “then what” took all the fun out of it, because the “then what” was just empty. There was no color, brightness, joy, or happiness anymore because the “then what” would be whatever everyone else experiences.”
So next time you feel like creating scenarios in your head, keep asking yourself “then what” until you realize you have better things to do. Or until you get really, really annoyed.
Either way, it works. You stop playing stories in your head in which you fight with people from your past or fantasize about happy endings you might never get.
After a while, the number of times you have to ask the question will decrease, and eventually, you’ll stop overthinking for good. ~
https://medium.com/invisible-illness/how-a-buddhist-monk-taught-me-to-stop-overthinking-15150d322b17
*
PERSONALITY TRAITS AND DAILY LIFE
If you say you’re more extraverted (on the personality test), what does that really mean in your daily life? Doing this for each personality trait was like unwrapping a series of gifts. No psychologists had combined this much data on the sounds of daily life before, and so the relationships we were about to uncover going to be the best description of personality and daily life (as captured by audio) available to the field. So what did we find?
Extraversion:
What Extraverts Do Most: Use more words! The strongest indicator that someone is an extravert is that they literally say more words in their day-to-day life.
What Extraverts Do Least: Cough and sneeze. This is a surprising one, and will probably require further study of chains of effects to really understand. One possibility: being lonely is related to poor health, so it might be that all that extra socializing extraverts do keeps them healthier—and therefore less likely to cough and sneeze!
Most “On the Money”: Extraverts talk more. This should come as no surprise, because it feels like it’s part of the definition of being an extravert. But it’s nice to have the science here to back it up. The more extraverted you are, the greater the percentage of your day spent talking.
Most Surprising Relationship: Extraverts complain more, and express anger and frustration more. Ok that’s two, but I think it’s important to note that there are some downsides to being an extravert. Being outgoing can also mean being more difficult to deal with.
Agreeableness:
What Agreeable People Do Most: Yawn. Yes, yawn. This is another surprising one, and one that will definitely require further research. My best guess at what it means? Yawning tends to be contagious, so agreeable people might be “catching” more yawns from those around them, since they tend to be more focused on pleasing others.
What Agreeable People Do Least: Spend time outdoors. Another strange one, but you have to report the data you have. What might be going on? If agreeable people want to please others, they probably are spending less time “getting away from it all” on hikes or other activities.
Most “On the Money”: Agreeable people express more gratitude. During conversations in their daily life, they’re more likely to tell people what they appreciate. Close second: using the word “we” (instead of “I” or “me”) in conversation, a good indicator of trying to connect with others.
Most Surprising Relationship: More than yawning and spending time outdoors? Maybe not, but it is interesting: more agreeable people tend to focus on the past more in their daily conversations. Maybe they’re connecting more with others by talking about things they did together.
Conscientiousness:
What Conscientious People Do Most: Eat and drink. In another surprising finding, conscientious people spend a greater proportion of their day eating and drinking. This could be because they are less likely to skip meals, because they are more likely to remember snacks to keep their blood sugar up, or for some other reason.
What Conscientious People Do Least: Commute! The more conscientious a person was, the less time they spent “in transit” from place to place. Maybe planning out your day efficiently is part of the magic of this trait?
Most “On the Money”: Conscientious people spend more time working. Part of what we think it means to be conscientious is that a person is more likely to just put their head down and get their work done—and this finding would certainly support that understanding. Interesting second: conscientious people spend less time blaming others. How’s that for taking responsibility!
Most Surprising Relationship: Use non-fluencies like “umm” and “uhhh.” You’d think that conscientious people might be more “orderly” in how they speak, like they are in other areas of their lives—but you’d be wrong. It could be that this indicates conscientious people spend more time pausing to consider their words or hedge their statements—and use the “umms” to indicate this uncertainty.
Neuroticism / Negative Emotionality:
What Neurotic People Do Most: Blame others. Neuroticism is thought of as a tendency to experience a lot of negative emotions, so it would make sense that some of these get visited on the people around a negative person.
Neurotic people express more negative emotion and swear more—but also express more affection.
What Neurotic People Do Least: Eat and drink. Another surprising one, but this might reflect a tendency by anxious or sad people to skip meals or forget to eat.
Most “On the Money”: Express negative emotion. The words that neurotic people use in their daily lives just tend to be more negative. Close second: swearing.
Most Surprising Relationship: Express affection. Neurotic people might tend to be negative overall, but that doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the people around them. They might have more to appreciate, because these friends are willing to put up with the blaming, negativity, and swearing that are part of their daily lives.
Open Mindedness:
What Open Minded People Do Most: Use conjunctions like “and” or “also.” This could be an indicator of open minded people’s tendency to make intellectual or artistic connections between different topics.
What Open Minded People Do Least: Use verbs. This is a pretty unusual finding, as verbs are a common part of speech. It’s not clear what this means psychologically, but it might be that open people tend to talk about ideas more—and actions less—leading to less verb use overall.
Most “On the Money”: Not saying no. It turns out openness tended to be related more to *not* doing things than to doing them, so it’s no surprise that the most intuitive indicator was not using “negation” words like “no” or “not” in conversation. Part of being open-minded is not dismissing ideas!
Most Surprising Relationship: Open people tend to talk about death more. This might be because they’re more willing to discuss taboo subjects, or it might be that exploring different ideas tends to lead them to have more philosophical conversations.
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What do we learn from all this? In science, we tend to treat the Ideal Study as one where we have a theory that we want to test, and the study will be able to support to disprove our theory. But in new areas of science—as the science of daily behavior is—you often need to start by just describing what’s going on in the world.
This study revealed some relationships that are consistent with theory about personality traits (or “on the money”), but it also yielded a lot of surprising results, too. These surprising results are interesting, because they suggest new directions for research—and can be the basis for coming up more specific theories. Did it surprise me that agreeable people yawn a lot? Yes! But that just means we need to do more work to try and understand whether that’s a reliable effect, and if it is, why the relationship exists. In the meantime, knowing what personality means in daily life will at least make our studies—and online personality tests—more interesting!
Charles:
I think I'm an extrovert but I don't think I use a lot of words and you are just the opposite. I also have sneezing fits. I also don't think I complain much or express frustration but I could be wrong. I think I'm agreeable but spend a lot of time outdoors. After reading this article, I'm not sure how scientific it is.
Oriana:
We are all a mix of traits; none of us fits under a single label. Most of the time I'm an introvert who needs a lot of solitude — but give me the company of someone with compatible interests, and you'd never guess it. So much depends on context. And of course we evolve all the time.
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“One day somebody asked Herr K. if there was a God. Herr K. replied: ‘I suggest that you ask yourself whether the answer would affect your behavior. If your behavior would remain unchanged, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of assistance to you by telling you that you have already decided: you need a God.”~ Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner
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“If you “Take no thought for tomorrow” as Jesus suggested, you very likely won't have a tomorrow to take no thought of.” ~ Matt Flumerfelt
Oriana:
We need to remember that for Jesus there was no tomorrow — the world was about to end any time, when many still standing would still be alive.
End of the World; John Martin, 1853*
BART EHRMAN: HOW ANCIENT PEOPLE CONCEIVED OF (A) GOD
~ A number of people have asked me how anyone could imagine a human being or becoming God in the ancient world, based on my claims that for Paul and other early Christian writers Jesus was a divine human. But if he was human, how could he be God? To answer that I have to stress a point I made repeatedly in my book How Jesus Became God. Anyone who wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, has to explain “in what *sense*” is he God?
Now is a good time for me to lay out how again how ancient people understood the divine realm. It was very different from the way most people today do – at least the people I run across.
People today think of God as completely Other than us humans. We are mortal and limited in every respect; he is immortal and unlimited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present. We are by comparison weak, ignorant, and in one place at a time. He is infinite and eternal; we are finite and temporal. There is an unbridgeable gap between us and God. (Although in Christian theology, it is Jesus who bridges that gap by being a divine being who becomes human; in traditional theology, he did that so that we humans could then become divine).
People in the ancient world did not think of the divine realm o that way– both pagans (more obviously) and Jews (less obviously). Stick with the multitude of pagan religions for now.
True, the major Gods were enormously powerful and knowing and were immortal (you couldn’t kill them, and they couldn’t kill each other. And they never died).
But there were lots of different gods with lots of different power and knowledge. And many of the gods (nearly all of them) came into being at some point in the past. They haven’t always existed, so they were *immortal* not *eternal*. Like us, they get born. And like us, gods have strengths and weaknesses, and rarely were gods imagined as all-knowing, and almost never as all-powerful.
But there were gods and there were gods. I try to illustrate the divine realm to my students by speaking in terms of a divine pyramid. ~
https://ehrmanblog.org/how-did-ancient-people-imagine-divinity/
Oriana:
The rest is behind a paywall. But this opening is enough to remind us that there always existed a wide range of concepts of divinity, with no single definition satisfying (or even clear) to all. God as “the ground of Being”? God as a process, i.e. humanity is building god? a Jungian god fusing both good and evil? Cosmic intelligence?
I think it’s high time to admit that theology doesn’t matter. All that matters is how kindly we treat one another, and what kind of world we leave to future generations.
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WHAT? NO ANIMAL SACRIFICES TO YAHWEH?
“William James opined at the turn of the twentieth century (1902): “Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to take seriously.”
But a century later, few would agree publicly with Thomas Nagel when he candidly says he would not want such a god to exist. . . .
If pressed, many people insist that the anthropomorphic languages used to describe god is metaphorical, not literal. One might suppose, then, that the curious adjective “God-fearing” would have faded into disuse over the years, a fossil trace of a rather embarrassingly juvenile period in our religious past, but far from it. People want a god who can be loved and feared the way you love or fear another person.
“Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in — whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually — agree with each other in recognizing personal calls,” James observed. “Today, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.”
~ Daniel Dennett, “Breaking the Spell”
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INSIST ON MORE FASTING (what churches and the communist party have in common)
“Charisma is typically associated with a saint or with a knight, some personal attribution, and what Lenin did was remarkable. He did exactly what he claimed to do: he created a party of a new type. He made the party charismatic. People died for the party. It’s as if people would die for the DMV.
Most people don’t get too excited about the Department of Motor Vehicles because it's a bureaucracy. What Lenin did was combine the attributes of personal heroism and the efficiency of impersonal organization, and created a charismatic organization. That's been done before. It's been done by Benedictines, it’s been done by Jesuits, but it’s never been done by a political party before.” ~ Ken Jowitt
Thinking about the Jesuits and their high, elitist demands made me think that the Catholic church — all churches — are an attempt to create a charismatic organization. To be charismatic, an organization needs to make high demands of its members. Only the most severe fundamentalist churches have shown growth during this period of religious decline.
The more sacrifice people have to make, the higher the standards (“impossible to meet” in fact works very well), the more they will justify and glorify the organization, and the more ardently they will believe.
How foolish the Catholic church has been in abolishing not eating meat on Friday. What it needs is completely opposite: insist on more fasting.
I found the ritual "fish on Friday" quite special and satisfying. Later I discovered that was the closest we had to the sabbath supper, with the blessing of the lights and the blessing of the wine, knowing the words of the blessings by heart but no longer understanding them — that's special too, like Latin. the more the catholic church tried to modernize (or "protestantize") itself, the less appealing it grew.
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QUALITY SLEEP PROTECTS AGAINST DIABETES AND DEMENTIA
~ New research identified a system by which waste products are cleansed from the brain. It is called the glymphatic system, and according to Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and lead author of the study, “Sleep is critical to the function of the brain's waste removal system and this study shows that the deeper the sleep the better. These findings also add to the increasingly clear evidence that quality of sleep or sleep deprivation can predict the onset of Alzheimer's and dementia.”
The glymphatic system only works when we sleep. Basically, it operates by compressing brain cells and pumping cerebral spinal fluid into the brain. This fluid cleanses out waste products, including the protein beta-amyloid, which is implicated in Alzheimer’s.
Other studies show that lack of sleep can cause problems with everything from memory and processing emotions to learning and type 2 diabetes, as mentioned above. I hope this is a convincing set of reasons for guarding the brain and training yourself for a restful sleep.
If you haven't slept well for a while and don't believe it's possible for you to get a good night's sleep, think again. I have worked with former addicts (who had gotten in the habit of staying up all night) to retrain themselves to sleep normally—and this was a huge and promising signal to them that their lives were back on track.
Nighttime Sleep Ritual
I like to think of the bedroom as a sacred sanctuary for sleep, rest, and rejuvenation. Now, let’s consider how you could create a Nighttime Sleep Ritual that lets you prepare for sleep about an hour before bedtime. Try the sleep ritual below. You can always supplement it with the guided sleep relaxation practice in my book Simply Mindful—an easy-to-follow 5-minute practice.
Here are some important ideas and activities to consider before entering your “sleep sanctuary”:
Avoid electroluminescence, such as light from the TV, computer, cell phone, etc.—all of which can delay your body’s production of melatonin for up to two hours. If you have a TV or other media in your bedroom, start thinking about how you can create a tech-free zone for sleep.
Try drinking warm milk or chamomile tea at bedtime, which have known relaxation properties.
Listen to calming or soothing music.
Use a calming scent, such as lavender oil or rose oil.
Read something that is not mentally stimulating or frightening. Reading in bed may actually keep you awake longer. So, save the reading for before you go to bed.
Slip into comfortable sleepwear, a signal that you are preparing for sleep.
Avoid exercise or eating at least an hour before bedtime, because these activities stimulate the body.
Even if you have an existing sleep habit, your body will change and adapt to the new program if you give it enough time and are consistent. Craft a sleep ritual that best fits your personal needs. Do your best to sleep at the same time each night, and eventually you will train your body and brain to follow along. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/practical-mindfulness/202007/one-word-protects-your-brain-diabetes-and-dementia
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STRESS AND DEMENTIA
~ There are many contributors to dementia: environmental factors, health risks, neurological changes, and toxins in the body. Genetics plays a role, but in all but the most extreme cases, there’s not a simple gene that codes for dementia. As I researched these symptoms and biomarkers, the trail almost always led me back to physical or psycho-emotional stress. But in my mind, the answer had to be more complicated.
In 2010, researchers concluded that chronic stress significantly increased women’s likelihood of developing dementia. In 2013, researchers found that chronic stress quickens the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. In 2017, a meta-analysis pointed to stress as a likely contributor to dementia. In 2017, another study successfully used measures of stress to predict dementia onset.
Countless studies support the same conclusion: stress significantly contributes to dementia. That is not to say stress is the end-all-be-all of dementia. I’ve been researching this insidious syndrome long enough to know better than that. But no one can deny that stress plays an integral role in memory loss and cognitive decline.
What negatively impacts the gut-brain relationship? Stress.
What causes cytokines and other important proteins to become toxic? Stress.
What contributes to and induces demyelination? Stress.
Stress is the key to dementia.
There’s been an answer — albeit not a perfect answer but a pretty good one — sitting in front of us all along. The problem is that stress may be a simple answer, but it is not a simple solution. Our society wants to cure dementia, but it doesn’t want to change its lifestyle.
Scientists release study after study showing that stress exacerbates, accelerates, and predicts dementia. But we don’t listen because it’s not the quick fix we’ve been looking for.
In 2009, Dan Buettner published his book, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, which covered the lifestyle of a collection of communities across the globe with especially long life expectancies. In addition to longer life, these communities have significantly reduced rates of depression, dementia, cancer, and heart disease. Buettner’s book became a bestseller and was quickly followed by a series of books on how to live like a member of the blue zones. The blue zone people became a cultural phenomenon. They were the key to living longer, and we wanted to mimic them — almost.
That is, we wanted to mimic the blue zone lifestyle as long as it didn’t interfere with our lifestyle. What was their diet? What herbs did they take? How often did they drink, sleep, exercise? But we rarely ask: How did they live?
Two years after The Blue Zones, a group of researchers at the University of Athens published a study on the sociodemographics and lifestyles of these people. While diet, sleep, and other healthy habits contributed to their longevity, the study concluded that long life in the blue zone is a product of regular socializing, a sense of purpose, and low stress levels as much as it is a product of physical health.
The lifestyle of the blue zone people vastly differs from the rat race culture pervasive in Western society. They live simply and emphasize community. In fact, microbiologist and health coach P.D. Mangan points out that “the factor that unites all of these [blue zone people] is either being less touched by modernity, or actively rejecting it.”
That is not to say we must reject modernity to live long, but there are elements of our modern culture that are undeniably toxic. As long as we are unwilling to eliminate these stressful components, we will be subject to their effects.
In addition to a collection of research studying how blue zone people live, testimonials from the individuals we’re seeking to mimic reflect the importance of stress on achieving a long life. The late George Burns, who lived to be 100, shared his secret to health and longevity: “If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.”
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Maybe we will find that shiny pill [that cures dementia] one day. I hope we do. But what if the only answer is to change our lifestyle? To simplify, change our priorities, and eliminate stress as well as can, even if that means giving up the big house and fancy car? Can we do that?
Or are we so entrenched in our keeping-up-with-the-Joneses lifestyle that we will continue to turn a blind eye to the mounting evidence incriminating stress?
https://medium.com/illumination/weve-known-how-to-combat-dementia-for-years-we-re-just-not-listening-4aa9fa9b757a
COVID IS AN AIR-BORNE INFECTION
~ A team at the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate in Washington DC found that environmental conditions play a big part in how long virus particles in aerosols remain viable. SARS-CoV-2 in mock saliva aerosols lost 90% of its viability in 6 minutes of exposure to summer sunlight, compared with 125 minutes in darkness. This study suggests that indoor environments might be especially risky, because they lack ultraviolet light and because the virus can become more concentrated than it would be in outdoor spaces.
Researchers who argue for the importance of aerosols say that governments and businesses should take specific steps to reduce this potential route of transmission. Morawska would like to see recommendations against air recirculation in buildings and against overcrowding; and she calls for standards that stipulate effective levels of ventilation, and possibly ones that require air systems to filter out particles or use ultraviolet light to kill airborne viruses.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02058-1
Oriana:
This is hardly news: we know that crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation are to be avoided, and that everyone should wear a mask, e.g. a 3-layer surgical mask or a cotton mask. Dr. Fauci said he would not step into an indoor restaurant or travel by plane.
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WHICH MASKS ARE MOST EFFECTIVE?
~ The most effective mask was the fitted N95. Three-layer surgical masks and cotton masks, which many people have been making at home, also performed well.
Neck fleeces, also called gaiter masks and often used by runners, were the least effective. In fact, wearing a fleece mask resulted in a higher number of respiratory droplets because the material seemed to break down larger droplets into smaller particles that are more easily carried away with air.
Folded bandanas and knitted masks also performed poorly and did not offer much protection.
"We were extremely surprised to find that the number of particles measured with the fleece actually exceeded the number of particles measured without wearing any mask," Fischer said. "We want to emphasize that we really encourage people to wear masks, but we want them to wear masks that actually work.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/08/us/duke-university-face-mask-test-trnd/index.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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WHY OBESITY IS A RISK FACTOR FOR POOR COVID OUTCOMES
~ The single most important risk factor is still age. But after age, obesity ranks high on the list of health issues that put a person at risk for severe illness if they develop COVID-19.
Early on, some obesity experts speculated that one reason obesity might increase the risks with COVID-19 might have something to do with respiration. Hypoventilation syndrome can be an issue for people with obesity. Back then, experts were looking at COVID-19 primarily as a pulmonary problem.
However, as the understanding of COVID-19 grew, so did the appreciation that life-threatening complications have much to do with a systemic cascade of inflammation – sometimes referred to as a cytokine storm. It’s this overwhelming inflammation that causes severe damage to lungs and other vital organs.
Likewise, experts in the physiology of obesity have long known that much of the harm of obesity comes from the inflammation that an excess of adipose tissue can promote. This is especially true of visceral fat and ectopic fat. Fatty liver disease is very much an inflammatory condition. ACE2 receptors are plentiful in adipose tissue. Those receptors also serve as a means for the virus to trigger inflammation.
So, researchers suspect that the inflammation that comes with obesity, along with an abundance of ACE2 receptors in adipose tissue, most likely account for the added risk for complications with COVID-19 for individuals with obesity. ~
https://www.patientcareonline.com/view/so-obesity-is-a-risk-for-poor-covid-19-outcomes-now-what?eKey=aXZ5MzMzQGNveC5uZXQ=
~ Ectopic fat is defined as storage of triglycerides in tissues other than adipose tissue, that normally contain only small amounts of fat, such as the liver, skeletal muscle, heart, and pancreas. Ectopic fat can interfere with cellular functions and hence organ function and is associated with insulin resistance. ~
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ije/2012/983814/
"Patients with severe obesity are 4-times as likely to die from COVID-19, a new study finds, with younger patients and men with obesity at highest risk."
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ending on beauty:
Here and everywhere
is my homeland, wherever I turn
and in whatever language I would hear
the song of a child, the talk of lovers.
Happier than anyone, I am to receive
a glance, a smile, a star.
~ Milosz, Mittelbergheim
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