*
PROUST TO HIS MOTHER
Dearest Maman: A disastrous dawn.
I woke to go to the lavatory, lost
the safety pin I use to close my drawers.
Went wandering through a dozen creaky rooms,
rummaging in your dressers for another pin;
only managed to get slightly chilled.
(Slightly! Hah, hah, what a joke!)
That was the end of sleep, so I picked up
my mother-of-pearl fountain pen
and the blue stationery
you gave me for my birthday
(I had asked for lilac).
People might find it odd
that we write letters to each other
though we live under the same roof.
But you and I understand.
You have a writer’s soul:
that’s why you made me a writer.
I have to dream for us both.
Thank you for the flowers and the thorns.
Why do you torture me? A month ago
you put me in such fury that I seized
a visitor’s new hat and stomped on it,
then mailed you the torn lining
as proof of what you do to me.
You know I can’t get up before seven
in the evening, and expose myself to drafts.
So what if I dine alone at the Ritz
at four a.m., or sit in two pair
of long underwear and a fur coat
in front of a blazing fireplace —
go to bed fully dressed, in gloves and slippers,
or use fifteen towels when I wash —
even that is my art.
Do you have talent? means
Are you abnormal enough?
You say many men could boast
more misfortunes than I,
yet they get out of bed,
kiss their wife and go to work.
But can they suffer as much?
— the first requirement for a writer.
And so I gasp for breath
in the echoes of your widow’s flat.
Another tram shudders by
and your cabinets ring
that high-pitched note that dissects my nerves.
I long for spring — tulips and narcissi —
but I feel so helpless around flowers . . .
As for the time when I broke
a crystal vase because you wanted me
to wear the yellow gloves
while I preferred the gray —
I treasure the letter you wrote:
May this shattered glass, as in the Temple,
be a symbol of indissoluble union.
Even my asthma
is a language between us.
But I must ration myself.
Tomorrow I’ll write in more detail.
A thousand kisses, Marcel.
~ Oriana
*
KILLING THE MOTHER WHO LOVES YOU
We kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause. ~ Marcel Proust
Proust had a great teacher of tropes – his mother, the inspiration and victim of this murder project – and it was thinking about his relationship with her that started me on the question of readerly craziness. I had in mind especially her extraordinary metaphor for the mending of that relationship after a quarrel she and her husband had with Marcel, where their repaired future is represented as a Jewish wedding. The Prousts were not a noisy family and this was one of the few real rows – as distinct from lots of niggling and moaning – they ever had. They were nice people, and very polite to each other; and are very polite again as soon as the quarrel is over. We may want to remember though what Proust says about nice people in a notebook: ‘In my novel, there is an ultra-bourgeois family, how many sick people in it?’ – ‘combien de malades dedans?’
What seems to have happened is that at the end of the episode of shouting, Proust slammed the door behind him so hard that the glass in its panels broke. He has written to apologize – that note is lost – and this is his mother’s reply in full. The date is not certain, but is thought to be some time in 1897:
My dear little one
Your letter did me good – your father and I were left with a very painful sense of things [une impression fort pénible]. I must tell you that I had not thought for a moment of saying anything at all in the presence of Jean [the servant] and that if that happened it was absolutely without my knowledge. Let’s think no more and talk no more about it. The broken glass will merely be what it is in the temple – the symbol of an indissoluble union.
Your father wishes you a good night and I kiss you tenderly.
J.P.
I do however have to return to the subject in order to recommend that you don’t walk without shoes in the dining room because of the glass.
[Another source states that Marcel “broke a cup made of Venetian glass in a fit of anger.”]
(Also, how interesting that she signs this note "JP" – initials for Jeanne Proust – rather than "Maman." And yet in the salutation she infantilizes Marcel – as if she couldn't quite find the right balances between affection and relating to each other as adults.)
There’s a fictional version of this event in Proust’s early novel Jean Santeuil, and late in life he told his housekeeper Céleste about it. Biographers have made various guesses at what the quarrel was about – Proust’s homosexuality, or his expensive lifestyle – and in the novel part of it at least is about the hero’s not wanting to get a job. The postscript about the glass in the dining room doesn’t require any kind of crazy reading, although obviously it is open to several interpretations, some kinder than others. Evelyne Bloch-Dano, the biographer of Jeanne Proust, thinks her subject’s forgiveness is ‘contradicted by the mock warning’.
I don’t think it’s contradicted, but clearly there is something about the postscript that makes it a sort of mockery, probably just a bit of what we would now call passive aggression: patent further talk about what we are not going talk about. But what about the allusion to the wedding, and the glass thrown to the ground by the groom and then crushed underfoot? This gesture has been taken to mean many things apart from indissoluble union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say:
'If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his father. But their consequences need not be taken so seriously. Psychoanalysis had not yet been invented; and moreover, the malady in Proust’s heart fed not on his present relationship with his mother but on the buried, unalterable fixation of his childhood.'
My suggestion would be that Jeanne Proust is not thinking, even unconsciously, of a mystic union with her son, but the extravagance of her analogy does mark a degree of continuing distress, does seek to contain and compensate for that distress, in a way that all the reasonable talk of forgiving and forgetting cannot. We need to go along with her extravagance in order to see how upset she is. The imaginary wedding turns a shattering into a unity, and the fantasized result is not a marriage between mother and son but something better and different: an endless maternal and filial intimacy for which marriage can only serve as an oblique hint. The result is not less crazy in this transposed form; but the craziness is what the case requires.
Some of the craziness that Proust and his mother instigated in and required of each other – and that we can follow in their letters – is very mild, and often there is no craziness at all, embodied or solicited. They report on hotels, travels, acquaintances, discuss the Dreyfus Affair, tell jokes, worry about each other’s health. Jeanne Proust, in particular, is given to quotations from the classics, especially Racine, Corneille and Molière, a habit that has produced some interesting divergences among biographers. Take the last entry in a collection of Proust’s letters entitled Correspondance avec sa mère, which also shows up in Contre Sainte-Beuve.
This doesn’t come from a letter at all, either his or hers, but from a notebook. ‘Mother sometimes had a great deal of sorrow,’ the note says, ‘but one didn’t know it, because she never wept except with gentleness and wit. She died making a quotation from Molière and a quotation from Labiche to me.’ The note also illustrates the mother’s wit by her use of a quotation from Corneille to cheer her son up, an exhortation to the French equivalent of a stiff upper lip: ‘If you are not a Roman, be worthy of being one.’
But then there is a sense in which these letters begin to look more like symptoms than a means of communication, or like a language in which an otherwise unspoken communication can take place. The mother constantly asks about the son’s health, and the son constantly, obsessively answers.
It’s hard not to put together the story they are enacting but not quite telling themselves. She is making sure her son remains an infant; and he is making sure she remains his mother. Both of them use political metaphors for this kind of relationship – she in her letters, he in his fiction – so they clearly understand something of what is happening. But they don’t, I think, quite understand the damage they are doing to each other, and what alternatives there might be to this tenderly stalled or frozen relationship.
. . . There the hero is in his room simmering with rage after the quarrel with his parents I have mentioned, and takes a coat out of a cupboard. It isn’t his coat, though, it’s his mother’s, one she wore long ago, and he suddenly sees the person she was then, ‘young, brilliant, happy’. ‘But this was not her any more ... she would never put on again this little coat too young for her age, too gay for her endless mourning, too slim for her plumpness, too dated for the new fashions.’ ‘And in a few years,’ the hero adds, ‘he would not find her as she was today either,’ the older woman would be even older, and then dead. The hero is not thinking about a magical causality here, though, ordinary time and living will do the trick.
There is one other important figure in Proust’s magical family scenario: the person who lives as long as she wants to, and not a day longer. Proust’s father died in 1903, his mother in 1905, and in letters written right after her death the son insists on a special sort of bereavement. His mother, he says, ‘wanted to survive’ his father for their sake (his and his brother’s), ‘but could not’. And more elaborately: ‘Alas, whatever will she had to live for me whom she knew to be so ill, so unarmed in life, she could not survive my father.’ Proust insists again and again on his ‘incapacity’ for life, as if his mother were a nurse who had abruptly resigned from her job, and clearly he wants both to sympathize with her and to blame her. She wanted to stay and she just couldn’t. But why couldn’t she, what was interfering with her ‘will’?
Better to kill the thing that loves you than to have it leave you of its own accord. This is how crazed reading works, how you get an emblematic inference out of real family crimes and imagined Jewish weddings. Only a figure like slow murder will express the guilt and helplessness Proust now feels. What he is saying here, and says more delicately, ironically in A la recherche, where the image also evokes a child’s exaggeration of his guilt, is not that he has killed his mother, but that his crime belongs in the ranks of murder, and that its horror is all the worse for arriving so late.
At the famous moment of the goodnight kiss in A la recherche, that scene so well known to everyone who has read even a little bit of Proust (and to many people who have never read Proust at all), once the mother has decided not only to confer the longed for kiss on the child but to stay the whole night with him, he thinks of himself as having begun his career as a matricide:
‘I ought to have been happy: I was not. It seemed to me that my mother had just made me a first concession which must be painful for her, that this was a first abdication on her part before the ideal she had conceived for me, and that for the first time she, who was so courageous, was confessing herself defeated. It seemed to me that, if I had just gained a victory, it was over her ... it seemed to me I had just traced in her soul the first wrinkle and caused the first white hair to appear.’
There is an epilogue, though, and we have seen a hint of it in the last quotation. Virtual parricides can survive, and even become novelists. They can unkill the mother, so to speak, which is not the same as resurrecting her, and find through loyalty and labor the independence they are now able to imagine the dead lady wanted for them. ‘Maman,’ Proust writes in 1908 when he is already at work on his great book, ‘gives me the strength not to see only through her’ – ‘par elle’, by her, with her help – ‘for I know that death is not an absence and that nature is not anthropomorphic.’ It’s the end of the pathetic fallacy. ~
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n06/michael-wood/proust-and-his-mother (excerpts)
Jeanne-Clemence Proust (née Weil)
Mary:
Thinking of Proust, according to his own measure he must have been full of talent — he was certainly "abnormal enough." I can't help but find the incidents in the poem and essay disturbingly creepy, with their infantilism and intensely intimate co-dependency between mother and son.
As a grad student I read his massive "Recherche" in its entirety, and my responses may well be the best of unintended critiques: 1. I now remember almost nothing of all those hundreds of pages, and 2. I wrote a paper on it, entirely in the passive voice. Neither one of these, the forgetting nor the passive voice, was the result of a conscious choice.
Oriana:
Yes, there is a creepiness here, a kind of emotional incest between mother and son. But the angle that fascinates me is that they preferred to communicate by letter, even as they lived under the same roof! And that was the mother’s only outlet for her writing talent, and her whole lively mind and sensibility.
My adventures with Proust are perhaps even more strange. I loved the introductory section (waiting for the mother’s kiss), and then Swann in Love. And yes, I remember quite a bit. But when it came to the next section, with adolescent Marcel and Odette’s daughter, Gilberte, I was totally unable to connect with those characters. And the long sentences with their excess of detail steadily got on my nerves. After about twenty pages, I stopped. One of my French textbooks has the most vivid excerpts from the later parts, and I tackled some of those, admiring how observant Proust was, reminding me of the realism of Tolstoy. But Tolstoy is a greater magician by far, making the reader feel as if they were present at the scene.
Still, Proust was a psychologist enough to have given us a few gems. The best known one of course is the “madelaine moment,” the description of a “trigger” of involuntary memory. But there is also “Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.” Somehow we must avoid the empty lives that most of Proust’s characters live; we need to feel useful, to have a purpose. Though his relationship with his mother was of course primary, Proust also admired his father, a physician who studied cholera and tried to propagate the principles of hygiene that protect people from infectious disease.
*
PROUST: ART ALLOWS US TO KNOW LIFE
~ The greatness of true art is that it allows you to find, allows you to possess, allows us to know the reality from which we live at a distance, that reality that we risk not knowing during life, and that is simply our life.
Real life, life finally discovered and explained and consequently, the only life actually lived is literature. ~ Marcel Proust, Time Found, 1927
A shameless digression: I love this anecdote: His first translator died before he was finished (and no wonder).
*
WHEN PEOPLE INTERACT, THEIR BRAINS SYNCHRONIZE
~ A study in which scientists drove mice to bond by zapping their brains with synchronized signals raises questions about a phenomenon that has been observed in humans: When two people interact, their brain patterns align in intriguing ways.
~ The tales we tell each other are an ideal means of exploring the social glue that binds. Neuroscientist Uri Hasson of Princeton University conducted seminal experiments in brain coupling by using storytelling. In one such study, he put an individual in a scanner and had that person tell a story. Then he put someone new in the scanner and had the volunteer listen to a recording of the story told by the first person. Hasson compared the brain processing of speaker and listener across time, matching activity moment by moment, and he found evidence of the two brains coupling. “The brain of the listener becomes similar to the brain of the speaker,” Hasson says. And the more aligned the brains were, the greater the listener’s reported comprehension. Says Hasson, “Your brain as an individual is really determined by the brains you’re connected to.”
Perhaps inevitably, neuroscientists have moved to studying not just two, but many brains at once. These experiments require the use of EEG because it is portable. Early studies showed that when we engage in group activities like concerts or movies, our brain waves become synchronized—the audience’s rapt attention means they process the symphonic finale or a love or fight scene in the same way. That is not all that surprising, but now scientists are applying the same approach in classrooms, where the findings could add to what we know about how students learn best.
In a series of studies in New York City high schools, a team of New York University researchers including Poeppel, Suzanne Dikker and Ido Davidesco took repeated EEG recordings from every student in a biology class over the course of a semester. They found that students’ brainwaves are more in sync with each other when they are more engaged in class. Brain-to-brain synchrony also reflects how much students like each other and the teacher—closer relationships lead to more synchronization.
Their current study is examining whether levels of brain synchrony during class predict retention of material learned. “I think what we’re doing is very useful,” Poeppel says. “How [do we] use these techniques in a targeted way for STEM learning?”
Schilbach believes interactive neuroscience has real-life applications in psychiatry as well. It could make it possible to predict which therapist will work best with which patient, for example. And the focus on real-life situations helps ensure that any findings have value for patients. “As a psychiatrist,” Schilbach says, “I’m not interested in helping a person to get better on a particular social cognitive task. I’m trying to help that person to lead a happy and satisfying life.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hyperscans-show-how-brains-sync-as-people-interact/
Oriana: COMMUNITY BUILDING OR DESTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE?
These findings have given rise to interesting "extended mind" discussions of consciousness. It seems that marching and singing or chanting together have been used to produce that "extended mind" (at least briefly) for a very long time in the history of humanity. Religious rituals and Nazi rallies have shown that this is a powerful technique. The positive side is an increased sense of community. The negative side is known as "destructive obedience."
Mary:
The discovery that brains synchronize when engaged in activities like telling/listening to stories, and singing/listening to music is fascinating, and has many implications. Of course there is the one mentioned, of crowds becoming part of an "extended mind" and swept up in collective actions manipulated by negative, even evil, leaders with false and destructive narratives. Religious experience of ceremonies and sermons, concerts and choirs and shared music, can all create positive social connections, but the same synchrony can occur with stories orchestrated by Hitler, Jim Jones, Manson and their like.
In terms of experiencing this synchrony, I wonder if reading the story works the same way as hearing it...that the shape of the author's thought is mirrored in the reader's experience of it. Certainly stories we read often impress us deeply so that the reading is an experience of the events that can feel as profound and direct as memories of our own experiences.
These become part of our own store of memories, our own stories. Thus reading amplifies experience and creates connections across both time and space. The feeling of reading something becomes very close to the feeling of living it.
Language is certainly essential to what makes us human, and so is what we do with it. I would say that among all the things we do with words, telling stories is one of the most important, most constant and most universal. The synchrony that comes with this storytelling may be crucial to forming social ties and connections...a community shares the same stories, and creates and recreates them over long stretches of time.
And we have only recently discovered how accurate our oldest stories can be. In societies with long oral traditions who only recently adopted writing, for instance indigenous groups unabsorbed by the historically modern culture encountered with colonialism, the oral tradition has recently proved astoundingly accurate about conditions and events in the extreme past. Indigenous groups in Australia preserved in oral tradition knowledge of lands they knew long ago as dry land, but that were covered by the sea millennia ago. This was not only remembered in the oral tradition, but it was remembered with remarkable exactitude, astonishing scientists who just recently discovered these submerged areas.
That is only one example indicating traditional tales are not vague mythical stories, but stories that preserve information over very long stretches of time. Stories are essential to being human, and stories are repositories of memory, as well as the vehicle of our connections both past and present. Telling stories may be not only our favorite but our most important activity.
Oriana:
It’s certainly interesting to wonder to what extent reading changes the reader’s brain rhythm. Yes, the mirror neurons are probably involved — especially if we feel empathy with what’s happening on the page. We know that people watching a movie together synchronize their brains. I think something very important is going on, and we have just barely, barely glimpsed the mystery.
*
*
TEN SURPRISING FINDINGS IN PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH
1. Under some conditions, paying people for their work makes them work less hard.
Classic work on the topic of cognitive dissonance has found that under many conditions, if you pay someone to do some task, they realize that they are only doing it for the money, and their motivation regarding the task itself reduces dramatically (see Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959).
2. Most people are easily capable of killing someone who is totally innocent if an authority figure requests them to do so.
In his classic research on obedience to authority, Stanley Milgram found that a substantial majority of regular Americans are capable of engaging in behavior that would kill an innocent man simply because an authority figure requested that they do so (Milgram, 1963).
3. Reactions to infidelity account for about one-third of homicides in the modern world.
An analysis of thousands of homicides from two large North American cities found that a full one-third of homicides are connected, in a significant way, with infidelity (Daly & Wilson, 1982).
4. Basic facial expressions of emotions cut across all cultures of the globe.
The way that people express and understand emotional facial expressions varies almost zero percent across all human groups that have ever been studied (Ekman & Friesen, 1986). A smile is a smile wherever you go.
5. We tend to see people who are in "other" groups as all the same as one another relative to people in our own groups.
When we think of people as being members of some "other" group from our own, we literally are unable to see variability among them; we literally tend to see them as "all the same" (Haslam et al., 1996). This phenomenon is known as outgroup homogeneity.
6. Our psychological connections with dogs and cats have strong roots in the human evolutionary story.
Next time you look at your dog or your cat, realize that our psychological connections with these creatures actually go far back into human evolutionary history. They joined us in this journey for very specific, evolution-based reasons.
7. The same five basic personality traits characterize people across the globe.
Research into basic personality traits, which shows much variability from person to person, has found that the same basic personality traits—extraversion, emotional stability, open-mindedness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—characterize how people differ from one another in all corners of the Earth (see Schmitt et al., 2007).
8. Situational factors account for more "evil" behavior than do dispositional factors.
A mountain of research on "evil" or anti-social behavior points to this conclusion: Evil behavior is much more the result of situational factors than dispositional factors. Thus, it is more accurate to talk about environmental conditions that facilitate evil behavior than it is to talk about "bad people" (see Zimbardo, 2007).
9. Anxiety actually has an important role in human functioning.
While on the surface, we tend to think of anxiety as simply problematic and as something that we need to reduce, in fact, anxiety acts very much like a Darwinian adaptation, leading to benefits such as success at all kinds of tasks. A moderate degree of anxiety is, in fact, a good thing (see Nesse & Williams, 1994).
10. There really is something to the idea of true love. And we can see it in people's brains.
True love really is a thing, and it can be observed in neural activity in the brain. Helen Fisher has dedicated a lifetime of intensive research that ultimately points toward this conclusion.
*
WHY AN ASTEROID STRIKE IS LIKE A PANDEMIC
~ Imagine the following scenario. Scientists identify a potential global threat, but initial data are spotty—not enough to spur drastic action. Rapidly, relentlessly, the threat grows. What once was preventable becomes inevitable. The world has no choice but to endure the disaster at the cost of trillions of dollars and millions of lives.
This is the story of COVID pandemic—but it could equally well be the story of a catastrophic strike by a large asteroid. As we emerge from the worst of COVID-19, we should heed this lesson: low-probability, high-impact events do occur; but they can be mitigated if we prepare and act early enough.
Asteroids are like viruses in a sense: they number in the tens of millions but only a few types pose a threat to humans. For asteroids, it’s the “near-Earth” variety—those with orbits that come close to our own—that we must worry about.
Also as with viral outbreaks, the likelihood of a catastrophe is unlikely in any given year, but almost inevitable over time. And just as we can in principle develop vaccines against emerging viruses before they cause too much damage, creating immunity without making people sick, we can similarly use modern technology to develop a level of global immune response to asteroid collisions. But this requires ongoing investments in research and preparedness—and while the U.S. spent more than $6.5 billion dollars on pandemic preparedness over the past decade (with admittedly mixed results), the nation spent less than a tenth of that on the work of asteroid detection and deflection. This is far too low.
In fact, impacts from space happen all the time, but they are generally small and harmless. The Earth is peppered with meteors throughout the year that are mere inches across or less, which burn up as shooting stars when they enter our atmosphere. The threat comes from the bigger ones, which are house-sized or larger. These strike less frequently, but they do happen. In 2013, a 60-foot-diameter meteor exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring thousands of people. The really big ones—miles across—are even rarer, occurring every few hundred million years or so. But the damage they do can be catastrophic. Think of the mass extinction 65 million years ago that wiped out most of the dinosaurs. The good news is that we’ve found most of those and, fortunately for us, Earth is not in their crosshairs.
But there is a middle ground that demands our attention: “city killer” asteroids that are about around the size of a football field and could unleash 10,000 times the energy of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. They seem to hit us every few thousand years, on average. There are likely many tens of thousands of them with orbits near Earth’s, yet we’ve only found about one third of these.
And finding them is hard. Even the big ones are tiny, cosmically speaking, and are camouflaged against the blackness of space by their charcoal-like dark surfaces. Ground-based telescopes, which measure reflected light, struggle to see these small, dim objects. Only a few hundred are discovered each year. To significantly improve the rate of detection we need to move off the Earth, to the realm of the asteroids. We need a telescope in space.
The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is a modest space telescope currently under consideration by NASA. Instead of looking at reflected light, it would seek out heat signatures of asteroids, which glow with infrared radiation against the cold background of space. And in space, where there’s no bad weather and daytime that limit observations, the NEO Surveyor could find more city-killer asteroids in the next 10 years than have been discovered by all the telescopes on Earth over the past three decades.
The mathematics of orbital mechanics that characterizes asteroids can be as heartless as the exponential growth that goes with viral outbreaks. And as with broad testing regimes that have been used during COVID, a dedicated effort to discover potentially hazardous asteroids will be the key to preventing disaster. It’s possible to alter an incoming asteroid’s orbit to protect the Earth, but that becomes increasingly more difficult depending on how close we are to impact. It is far easier to act years (if not decades) in advance.
After more than a decade in bureaucratic purgatory, where the NEO Surveyor has struggled to gain approval, the project appears ready to move forward. The Biden administration recently proposed to fund this mission in its latest NASA budget; Congress should support this request. It will take years to build and launch, but as early as 2026 we may see the start of the first dedicated effort to understand the scope of the asteroid threat.
We also need to invest in deflection technology, the “vaccine” of the asteroid response. Fortunately, NASA is close to launching a mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). In 2022, the spacecraft will ram into the tiny “moon” that orbits the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, slightly changing its orbit. Scientists will compare the exact degree of change to their predictions, which will help them understand how to alter asteroid orbits more effectively in the future. This is only a test, but it could serve the same function as the years of basic research into the field of mRNA vaccines that ultimately paid off when applied to COVID.
We must also continue to support sky surveys by ground telescopes, which can support the work of space-based missions. The Vera Rubin Observatory, for example, now under construction in Chile and especially good at finding fast-moving objects in the solar system, will greatly assist in asteroid detection. (The proposed “megaconstellations” of Earth-orbiting satellites by Amazon, SpaceX, OneWeb, and others threaten to overwhelm our view of these dim objects and make asteroid detections more difficult. There is no easy solution to this, beyond further confirming the need for space-based detectors located in quieter regions of the solar system.)
The coronavirus pandemic has many humbling lessons for humanity. But let this be one of them: low-probability, high-impact disasters do occur; and there is no higher impact disaster than a large asteroid collision with the Earth. We know that early awareness enables early action. Big problems later on can be prevented by small investments now. Let’s not be caught off-guard again. ~
*
LEARNING TO LOVE THE GMOs
~ On a cold December day in Norwich, England, Cathie Martin met me at a laboratory inside the John Innes Centre, where she works. A plant biologist, Martin has spent almost two decades studying tomatoes, and I had traveled to see her because of a particular one she created: a lustrous, dark purple variety that is unusually high in antioxidants, with twice the amount found in blueberries.
Martin has long been interested in how plants produce beneficial nutrients. The purple tomato is the first she designed to have more anthocyanin, a naturally occurring anti-inflammatory compound. “All higher plants have a mechanism for making anthocyanins,” Martin explained when we met. “A tomato plant makes them as well, in the leaves. We just put in a switch that turns on anthocyanin production in the fruit.” Martin noted that while there are other tomato varieties that look purple, they have anthocyanins only in the skin, so the health benefits are slight. “People say, Oh, there are purple tomatoes already,” Martin said. “But they don’t have these kind of levels.”
The difference is significant. When cancer-prone mice were given Martin’s purple tomatoes as part of their diet, they lived 30 percent longer than mice fed the same quantity of ordinary tomatoes; they were also less susceptible to inflammatory bowel disease. After the publication of Martin’s first paper showing the anticancer benefit of her tomatoes, in the academic journal Nature Biotechnology in 2008, newspapers and television stations began calling. “The coverage!” she recalled. “Days and days and days and days of it! There was a lot of excitement.” She considered making the tomato available in stores or offering it online as a juice. But because the plant contained a pair of genes from a snapdragon — that’s what spurs the tomatoes to produce more anthocyanin — it would be classified as a genetically modified organism: a G.M.O.
That designation brings with it a host of obligations, not just in Britain but in the United States and many other countries. Martin had envisioned making the juice on a small scale, but just to go through the F.D.A. approval process would cost a million dollars. Adding U.S.D.A. approval could push that amount even higher. (Tomato juice is known as a “G.M. product” and is regulated by the F.D.A. Because a tomato has seeds that can germinate, it is regulated by both the F.D.A. and the U.S.D.A.) “I thought, This is ridiculous,” Martin told me.
Martin eventually did put together the required documentation, but the process, and subsequent revisions, took almost six years. “Our ‘business model’ is that we have this tiny company which has no employees,” Martin said with a laugh. “Of course, the F.D.A. is used to the bigger organizations” — global agricultural conglomerates like DowDuPont or Syngenta — “so this is where you get a bit of a problem. When they say, ‘Oh, we want a bit more data on this,’ it’s easy for a corporation. For me — it’s me that has to do it! And I can’t just throw money at it.”
Martin admitted that, as an academic, she hadn’t been as focused on getting the tomato to market as she might have been. (Her colleague Jonathan Jones, a plant biologist, eventually stepped in to assist.) But the process has also been slow because the purple tomato, if approved, would be one of only a very few G.M.O. fruits or vegetables sold directly to consumers. The others include Rainbow papayas, which were modified to resist ringspot virus; a variety of sweet corn; some russet potatoes; and Arctic Apples, which were developed in Canada and resist browning.
It also might be the first genetically modified anything that people actually want. Since their introduction in the mid-1990s, G.M.O.s have remained wildly unpopular with consumers, who see them as dubious tools of Big Ag, with potentially sinister impacts on both people and the environment. Martin is perhaps onto something when she describes those most opposed to G.M.O.s as “the W.W.W.s”: the well, wealthy and worried, the same cohort of upper-middle-class shoppers who have turned organic food into a multibillion-dollar industry. “If you’re a W.W.W., the calculation is, G.M.O.s seem bad, so I’m just going to avoid them,” she said. “I mean, if you think there might be a risk, and there’s no benefit to you, why even consider it?”
The purple tomato could perhaps change that calculation. Unlike commercial G.M.O. crops — things like soy and canola — Martin’s tomato wasn’t designed for profit and would be grown in small batches rather than on millions of acres: essentially the opposite of industrial agriculture. The additional genes it contains (from the snapdragon, itself a relative of the tomato plant) act only to boost production of anthocyanin, a nutrient that tomatoes already make. More important, the fruit’s anti-inflammatory and anticancer properties, which seem considerable, are things that many of us actively want.
Nonetheless, the future of the purple tomato is far from certain. “There’s just so much baggage around anything genetically modified,” Martin said. “I’m not trying to make money. I’m worried about people’s health! But in people’s minds it’s all Dr. Frankenstein and trying to rule the world.”
There are some signs that the future of small-scale, bespoke G.M.O. produce may already have begun. In late April, Cathie Martin told me that the U.S.D.A. had recently updated its regulations to allow more G.M.O. plants to be grown outside, without a three-year field trial or in tightly contained greenhouses. (The exceptions are plants or organisms with the potential to be a pest, pathogen or weed.)
In the wake of this change, Martin and Jones are planning to make the purple tomato available first to home gardeners, who could grow it from seed as soon as next spring — well before the commercially grown tomato reaches grocery stores. (U.S.D.A. approval is expected by December.) They’re currently testing six different varieties, to find the most flavorful. “When we first developed the purple tomato, it was home gardeners who were most interested in it,” Martin noted. “And with home gardening, it’s an opt-in system. It’s up to you whether you want to grow it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/magazine/gmos.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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JUNG: MODERN PEOPLE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN IMITATING CHRIST
“The modern man does not want to know in what way he can imitate Christ but in what way he can live his own individual life, however meager and uninteresting it may be. It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways. All such roads for him lead in the wrong direction.” ~ C. G. Jung
Considering the book’s popularity since the late fourteen-hundreds, perhaps we should wonder if there is something of value in it.
From Wiki: ~ Kempis writes one must remain faithful and fervent to God, and keep good hope of attaining victory and salvation, but avoid overconfidence. Kempis gives the example of an anxious man who, oscillating between fear and hope and with grief went to the altar and said: "Oh, if only I knew that I shall persevere to the end." Immediately he heard the divine answer, "What if you knew this? What would you do? Do now what you would do then, and you will be very safe." After this the man gave himself to God's will, and his anxiety and fear of future disappeared (Chap. 25).
Jesus says that spiritual progress and perfection consists in offering oneself to the divine will and not seeking oneself in "anything either small or great, in time or in eternity" (Chap. 25). Jesus says not be anxious about future—"Do not let your heart be troubled and do not be afraid." Jesus advises the disciple that all is not lost when the result is not as planned, when one thinks he is farthest from Jesus, it is then that Jesus is nearest, when one thinks that all is lost, it is then that victory is close at hand. Jesus says not to react to a difficulty as if there were no hope of being freed from it (Chap. 30).
The Imitation of Christ is regarded as the most important devotional work in Catholic Christianity and is the most widely read devotional work next to the Bible. Apart from the Bible no book has been translated into more languages than the Imitation of Christ.
CRITICISMS:
The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote:
It rejects and eliminates every speculative element not only of scholasticism but also of mysticism, and yet, at the same time, it abstracts from the colorful multiplicity of the Bible and – since it is written for those who have turned from the world – disregards the world, in all its richness, as a field for Christian activity... In place of the openhearted readiness of a Catherine of Siena, a subdued and melancholy resignation runs through the book.... [T]here is an excess of warnings about the world, the illusions of egoism, the dangers of speculation and of the active apostolate. In this way, even the idea of the imitation of Christ does not become the dominant perspective. There is no mention of the mediation of the God-man, of access through Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to the Father. The mystery of the Church, therefore, does not come into view either. The individual is unaware that his love of God can only be fulfilled if it expands into love of neighbor and into the apostolate. All [that] remains is a flight from the world, a world that has not been brought home in Christ.
René Girard wrote: "Neither does Jesus propose an ascetic rule of life in the sense of Thomas à Kempis and his celebrated Imitation of Christ, as admirable as that work may be.”
an 1878 edition**
Oriana:
The book has come into my hands, but could never sustain my interest. It was not, as Jung suggests, because a modern person doesn’t like the idea of imitating someone else. It was the constant nagging and the belief that only the afterlife counted. Nevertheless, in the brief discussion of it in Wiki, I find a peculiar echo of self-help books, which often advise the reader to imagine themselves already having won the victory — how would you act then? And that is a thought-provoking question.
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BEST RUNNERS SPEND MORE TIME IN THE AIR
~ Almost two decades ago, in a news release about his landmark paper, "Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo" (Bramble & Lieberman, 2004), Dennis Bramble explained how "long legs, which chimps and australopithecines lack, led humans to take huge strides when running." He also notes that our long Achilles tendons act "like springs that store and release mechanical energy during running."
Additionally, Bramble and Lieberman found that "the arrangement of bones in the human foot creates a stable or stiff arch that makes the whole foot more rigid, so the human runner can push off the ground more efficiently and utilize ligaments on the bottom of the feet as springs."
A recently published systematic review of running biomechanics and styles (Van Oeveren et al., 2021) notes:
"In order to bring about a flight phase, the runner needs to generate a force that at least exceeds the force required to support body weight. The flight phase therefore reflects the runner's ability to generate power during the relatively short [time on the ground]. To generate sufficient force for a flight phase, it is necessary to 'compress' the leg spring."
"Some runners seem to hardly touch the ground, while others appear to have difficulty becoming airborne," Ben van Oeveren and co-authors explain. "Indeed, marked differences exist in the [flight time] between runners. For example, high-performance runners distinguish themselves from recreational runners by having longer flight time at given speeds.”
Another recent paper (Burns et al., 2021) compared the "bouncing behavior" of elite runners (sub-four-minute milers) to highly-trained but not quite elite-level runners, who couldn't run a mile in less than four minutes.
Burns et al. found that the "underlying spring-like physics of running" in the elite-level running group looked more like a "beautifully coordinated bounce" than someone forcibly pushing off from the ground. The elite runners who mastered this "bouncing behavior" spent much less time on the ground and more time in the air.
"When running, muscles and limbs coordinate to act like a giant pogo stick, and those muscles, tendons, and ligaments interact to recycle energy from step to step," Geoffrey Burns said in a July 2021 news release. "With their 'stiffer' spring behavior on each step, [elite runners] may be better recycling that gravitational energy from the time in the air to quickly and efficiently bounce along."
Burns suggests that "running on different surfaces (pavement vs. grass vs. dirt) will force you to change your body's bouncing behavior" and that "challenging your body to interact with the ground differently will likely promote some sort of beneficial adaptation, if dosed responsibly."
However, he cautions against casual joggers saying to themselves: "I'm going to try and spend as little time on the ground and as much time in the air as possible for this whole run." Trying too hard to increase flight time between each stride could be a recipe for disaster if a runner's unique biomechanics don't support an extended flight phase.
As Burns sums up, "Broadly speaking, when we run, our bodies choose the movement patterns that tend to be most efficient and safest for us at that time." This is great advice. Nonetheless, there's nothing wrong with "wishing you could fly" and visualizing yourself taking flight on your daily jog—even if it's just a state of mind. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202107/why-top-runners-keep-their-feet-the-ground
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OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS MAY INCREASE LONGEVITY
The recent study involved the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) in Barcelona, Spain, and the Fatty Acid Research Institute (FARI) in Sioux Falls, SD.
The researchers’ goal was to find out what role omega-3 plays in life expectancy. They tracked 2,240 participants over 11 years and analyzed omega-3 levels in the participants’ blood.
They divided the study participants into four groups:
people with a high omega-3 level who did not smoke
people with a high omega-3 level who did smoke
people with a low omega-3 level who did not smoke
people with a low omega-3 level who did smoke
According to the study authors, “Kaplan-Meier survival curvesTrusted Source were used to estimate survival proportions by age given different risk profiles.”
According to their analysis, people with high omega-3 levels in their blood who did not smoke had the highest survival estimate. People with high omega-3 levels who did smoke and those with low omega-3 levels who did not smoke were almost identical in terms of survival estimates.
Finally, people with low omega-3 levels in their blood who did smoke had the lowest survival estimate.
“This reaffirms what we have been seeing lately,” says study author Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila, a postdoctoral researcher in IMIM’s Cardiovascular Risk and Nutrition Research Group.
“Being a regular smoker takes 4.7 years off your life expectancy, the same as you gain if you have high levels of omega-3 acids in your blood. Having higher levels of these acids in the blood, as a result of regularly including oily fish in the diet, increases life expectancy by almost 5 years.”
Speaking with MNT, Dr. Harris also wanted to make it clear that although people with high omega-3 levels who did smoke and people with low omega-3 levels who did not smoke had almost identical survival estimates, “this should not be taken to mean that somehow taking fish oil capsules ‘erases’ the bad effects of smoking.”
Kristin Kirkpatrick, a nutritionist, was not involved with the study but spoke with MNT about its findings. “It’s notable that this study not only looked at the benefit that overall omega-3 fatty acid intake may have in benefiting longevity, but also that it can lead to diet recommendations based on biomarkers, such as blood concentrations of types of omega-3s.”
“The article also recommended discussing consuming fatty fish as well,” said Kirkpatrick. “This is consistent with other studies, which show that fatty fish consumption can benefit brain health (including mental health outcomes) and longevity. I’m not surprised by the research but would love to see if outcomes are consistent between both supplemental and whole food forms.” ~
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RIGHT FAT
Eating avocado with tomatoes or carrots significantly increased absorption of beta-carotene 2.4 times and 6.6 times respectively compared to eating tomatoes or carrots without avocado.
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Eating avocado with carrots significantly increased absorption of alpha-carotene 4.8 times more than eating carrots without avocado.
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Eating avocado with tomatoes or carrots significantly increased the conversion of provitamin A (inactive form) to vitamin A (active form) more than eating tomatoes or carrots without avocado.
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THE CONTINUING MYSTERIES OF COVID
In India — where the Delta variant was first identified and caused a huge outbreak — cases have plunged over the past two months. A similar drop may now be underway in Britain. There is no clear explanation for these declines.
In the U.S., cases started falling rapidly in early January. The decline began before vaccination was widespread and did not follow any evident changes in Americans’ Covid attitudes.
In March and April, the Alpha variant helped cause a sharp rise in cases in the upper Midwest and Canada. That outbreak seemed poised to spread to the rest of North America — but did not.
This spring, caseloads were not consistently higher in parts of the U.S. that had relaxed masking and social distancing measures (like Florida and Texas) than in regions that remained vigilant.
Large parts of Africa and Asia still have not experienced outbreaks as big as those in Europe, North America and South America.
How do we solve these mysteries? Michael Osterholm, who runs an infectious disease center at the University of Minnesota, suggests that people keep in mind one overriding idea: humility.
“We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” he told me.
MUCH, MUCH MILDER
Over the course of this pandemic, I have found one of my early assumptions especially hard to shake. It’s one that many other people seem to share — namely, that a virus always keeps spreading, eventually infecting almost the entire population, unless human beings take actions to stop it. And this idea does have crucial aspects of truth. Social distancing and especially vaccination can save lives.
But much of the ebb and flow of a pandemic cannot be explained by changes in human behavior. That was true with influenza a century ago, and it is true with Covid now. An outbreak often fizzles mysteriously, like a forest fire that fails to jump from one patch of trees to another.
The experience with Alpha in the Midwest this spring is telling:
Even Osterholm said that he had assumed the spring surge would spread from Michigan and his home state of Minnesota to the entire U.S. It did not. It barely spread to nearby Iowa and Ohio. Whatever the reasons, the pattern shows that the mental model many of us have — in which only human intervention can have a major effect on caseloads — is wrong.
Britain has become another example. The Delta variant is even more contagious than Alpha, and it seemed as though it might infect every unvaccinated British resident after it began spreading in May. Some experts predicted that the number of daily cases would hit 200,000, more than three times the country’s previous peak. Instead, cases peaked — for now — around 47,000, before falling below 30,000 this week.
“The current Delta wave in the U.K. is turning out to be much, much milder than we anticipated,” wrote David Mackie, J.P. Morgan’s chief European economist.
True, you can find plenty of supposed explanations, including the end of the European soccer tournament, the timing of school vacations and the Britain’s notoriously late-arriving summer weather, as Mark Landler, The Times’s London bureau chief, has noted. But none of the explanations seem nearly big enough to explain the decline, especially when you consider that India has also experienced a boom and bust in caseloads. India, of course, did not play in Europe’s soccer championship and is not known for cool June weather.
RIP THROUGH
A more plausible explanation appears to be that Delta spreads very quickly at first and, for some unknown set of reasons, peters out long before a society has reached herd immunity. As Andy Slavitt, a former Covid adviser to President Biden, told me, “It seems to rip through really fast and infect the people it’s going to infect.” The most counterintuitive idea here is that an outbreak can fade even though many people remain vulnerable to Covid.
That’s not guaranteed to happen everywhere, and there probably will be more variants after Delta. Remember: Covid behaves in mysterious ways. But Americans should not assume that Delta is destined to cause months of rising caseloads. Nor should they assume that a sudden decline, if one starts this summer, fits a tidy narrative that attributes the turnaround to rising vaccination and mask wearing.
“These surges have little to do with what humans do,” Osterholm argues. “Only recently, with vaccines, have we begun to have a real impact.”
NO NEED FOR NIHILISM
I don’t want anyone to think that Osterholm is making a nihilist argument. Human responses do make a difference: Masks and social distancing can slow the spread of the virus, and vaccination can end a pandemic.
The most important step has been the vaccination of many older people. As a result, total British deaths have risen only modestly this summer, while deaths and hospitalizations remain rarer in heavily vaccinated parts of the U.S. than in less vaccinated ones.
But Osterholm’s plea for humility does have policy implications. It argues for prioritizing vaccination over every other strategy. It also reminds us to avoid believing that we can always know which behaviors create risks.
That lesson has particular relevance to schools. Many of the Covid rules that school districts are enacting seem overly confident about what matters, Osterholm told me. Ventilation seems helpful, and masking children may be. Yet reopening schools unavoidably involves risk. The alternative — months more of lost learning and social isolation — almost certainly involves more risk and greater costs to children. Fortunately, school employees and teenagers can be vaccinated, and severe childhood Covid remains extremely rare.
We are certainly not powerless in the face of Covid. We can reduce its risks, just as we can reduce the risks from driving, biking, swimming and many other everyday activities. But we cannot eliminate them. “We’re not in nearly as much control as we think are,” Osterholm said.
~ New York Times newsletter, July 30, 2021
Oriana:
On a related note: a “tsunami of suicide” was predicted as a result of the pandemic. In fact, the suicide rate declined.
Both jobs and school can be significant stressors for some people. Perhaps rather than trying to predict the suicide rate, we should focus on job-related and school-related stress?
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Joe: COVID WILL NOT DISAPPEAR; WE WILL NEED VACCINES
It seems strange how some journalists are trying to act as if the COVID 19 pandemic would run its course and disappear. Have they never read articles about polio, smallpox, measles, and a host of other diseases that vaccines brought under control? That doesn’t mean the disease disappeared from the face of the earth. It means that the disease affects a minimal number of people.
The COVID rates started falling in January for two primary reasons. First, as science predicted, mandatory mask-wearing needed about six months to be effective. At that time, society might expect lower infection rates. Dr. Fauci had been talking about it for months. Europe started two months earlier than the United States, and it took about six months for mask-wearing and social distancing to reduce the infection rate.
Second, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris always appeared in public wearing a mask. Journalists belittled Trump for not wearing a mask or taking the pandemic seriously; then, they ignored the positive effect of Biden’s and Harris’s actions. Political scientists and psychologists filled the airways with criticisms of the ex-president; then, they became silent about the Biden and Harris behaving well.
The author writes that the attitudes in the United States didn’t change as the disease continued. He is right. However, Biden’s and Harris’s consistent modeling had a positive effect on slowing the spread. The Republican conservative attitudes remained the same, but even those not taking the safety measures seriously began to wear masks. Finally, enough people practiced good hygiene to lower the spread of COVID 19.
Science claimed we would gain some control over the disease, but it stated there was no absolute control of the virus even when we reached herd immunity. The author ignores what science said about mutations. The medical community agreed that vaccination is the most effective way to fight the pandemic. Today polio and measles are re-establishing themselves in the West because of the anti-vaccine crowd’s refusal to vaccinate their children.
Within any pandemic, there is an infinite number of mutations along with the surges they produce. We give ourselves maximum protection by wearing a mask, vaccinating, and practicing social distancing. If we do these three things, the pandemic will diminish, but the virus will continue to exist and mutate.
With the current surge in Florida, conservatives are finally getting vaccinated. Their behavior has changed, even if their public attitudes remain the same.
Joe: COVID WILL NOT DISAPPEAR; WE WILL CONTINUE TO NEED VACCINES
It seems strange how some journalists are trying to act as if the COVID 19 pandemic would run its course and disappear. Have they never read articles about polio, smallpox, measles, and a host of other diseases that vaccines brought under control? That doesn’t mean the disease disappeared from the face of the earth. It means that the disease affects a minimal number of people.
The COVID rates started falling in January for two primary reasons. First, as science predicted, mandatory mask-wearing needed about six months to be effective. At that time, society might expect lower infection rates. Dr. Fauci had been talking about it for months. Europe started two months earlier than the United States, and it took about six months for mask-wearing and social distancing to reduce the infection rate.
Second, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris always appeared in public wearing a mask. Journalists belittled Trump for not wearing a mask or taking the pandemic seriously; then, they ignored the positive effect of Biden’s and Harris’s actions. Political scientists and psychologists filled the airways with criticisms of the ex-president; then, they became silent about the Biden and Harris behaving well.
The author writes that the attitudes in the United States didn’t change as the disease continued. He is right. However, Biden’s and Harris’s consistent modeling had a positive effect on slowing the spread. The Republican conservative attitudes remained the same, but even those not taking the safety measures seriously began to wear masks. Finally, enough people practiced good hygiene to lower the spread of COVID 19.
Science claimed we would gain some control over the disease, but it stated there was no absolute control of the virus even when we reached herd immunity. The author ignores what science said about mutations. The medical community agreed that vaccination is the most effective way to fight the pandemic. Today polio and measles are re-establishing themselves in the West because of the anti-vaccine crowd’s refusal to vaccinate their children.
Within any pandemic, there is an infinite number of mutations along with the surges they produce. We give ourselves maximum protection by wearing a mask, vaccinating, and practicing social distancing. If we do these three things, the pandemic will diminish, but the virus will continue to exist and mutate.
With the current surge in Florida, conservatives are finally getting vaccinated. Their behavior has changed, even if their public attitudes remain the same.
With the current surge in Florida, conservatives are finally getting vaccinated. Their behavior has changed, even if their public attitudes remain the same.
Oriana:
And now we also have Novavax, which seems the best of the vaccines: it's effective against the variants, and it has fewer side effects compared with the m-RNA vaccines. Slowly, we are learning how to protect ourselves, in spite of the fools who talk along the lines, "My freedom is more important than your health." Some people refuse to accept the fact that society is a cooperative enterprise. Bring back civics, please! And may the first lesson be on how civilization is possible only thanks to cooperation.
Back to the vaccines:
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ending on beauty:
