Inside the dream

Then, he busied himself with his dream. I'm at the center of the world, he thought. And, looking out at the skyscrapers, he sat and waited for the sensations of enthusiasm, of emotion, of fulfillment, of happiness. It became clear that the wait, however, was just a wait, nothing more. A straightforward wait, with no surprises. The more he looked at the skyscrapers in search of a certain kind of intensity, the clearer it became that he wasn't going to feel any special sensation whatsoever. Everything in his life was still the same, nothing was happening that might seem different or intense. He found himself inside his own dream, and at the same time the dream was real. But that was all. 

- Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

Via even*cleveland.

Things to be grateful for #n

I could have been a stair racer.

Still, the stair racers don’t experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. “Some stairwells turn to the left,” she said. “Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they’re steep. And the number of floors always varies.”

Cards, chunks

And the future of the book:

Around that time, Holliday’s company came out with a publishing platform called Citia, which breaks up a book into modules, pared down, CliffsNotes-style, “without so many illustrative examples,” she said. Citia has two book-chunk collections on the market now—“What Technology Wants” and “Predictably Irrational”—with a few more in the works. Speaking on the panel, Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel “the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages,” as publishers see it. “Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line,” she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. “They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book,” she said. “Is that so bad?”

Good lord. And, yes.

Pratchett as ethical advice

Eskarina Smith to Tiffany: "I said you weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and will always be high."
- From I Shall Wear Midnight

States, parsons, gold and silver armies

A couple of things on tangential comments by Daniel Dennett in his Edge interview:

(1) On "systematic hypocrisy". He talked about a project he and Linda LaScola did, interviewing pastors who didn't believe or no longer believed in what their parishioners believed, but still had churches. How it could happen: pastors don't want to shake the beliefs of their parishioners. So they employ a kind of "doubletalk" in their sermons, so that those parishioners who believe in the literal truth of the Bible can hear something in the sermon for them, and those who think that the Bible should be taken more metaphorically or symbolically (reminds me of Pratchett here and things which are symbolic, full stop) can hear something for them. And eventually the pastor loses track of what it means to tell the truth, and/or comes to think that are many different kinds of truth, and lapses into a lazy relativism, the kind Dennnett thinks was sanctioned by post-modernism. This "systematic hypocrisy" could have started in the seminary, where students learned that there was what you could talk about in the seminary, and what you could say from the pulpit, and those were different things. And it's this hypocrisy that's "the structural problem in religion today". 

It reminds me of the government. I suppose any large organization has some kind of doubletalk, to some extent; stuff you only say behind closed doors, and stuff you say to the public. It's entirely understandable. As is the likely reaction - the kind of lazy relativism Dennett talks about, which could easily accompany a lazy cynicism (lazy in the sense that cynicism is called the wisdom of the mediocre), or a growing belief in one's own propaganda. Either way, it's hard to remain in two minds, or hard to live with cognitive dissonance, depending on your preferred vocabulary. 

(2) Dennett goes on to give a hypothetical example of the problem:

Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here's two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I'll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They're all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it's as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

Which army do you want on the front lines? It's very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you're saying is we'll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It's extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they're doing the right thing? What if I'm clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It's a dilemma that I don't know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.

This seems to me to be the space in which political theory operates. More specifically, the space between his two extremes is the space of liberal political theory of some kind - any theory that acknowledges a plurality of opinions and interests and beliefs and looks for some kind of public accommodation for them (some kind of public sphere, public reason, institutional structures that can accommodate a pluralistic political culture, etc). We do confront this problem, every day (well quite frequently anyway), in our public lives, though arguably we might not be confronting it very well (look at the arguments over guns here).

Elsewhere in the interview Dennett mentions Plato's analogy between the city and the soul. Plato also thought that just about everyone should be indoctrinated with certain myths designed to explain and reconcile them to their position in the social and political structure and corresponding duties. I suppose most people and most nations operate on myths of some kind, implicit or explicit, but I agree with Dennett here - the idea that we should indoctrinate people against thinking is repulsive, as is the arrogance behind the idea (in the thought that only some people are capable of thinking clearly and still acting in socially good ways).

Lines for Winter

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

- Mark Strand

One of those moments

Michael Ignatieff on Isaiah Berlin's first serious romantic encounter: "he had reached one of those moments where cleverness and a way with words was not enough. As he ruefully confessed to a friend, he was no longer 'the observer and Figaro of situations' but 'an active agent', forced at last to declare himself." (From Ignatieff's Life of Berlin)

Happy New Year!

Something like a sky

Something in us has suddenly cleared.
Like a sky.
Like a still-life, alive.
Behind us, our footsteps and voices.
Beyond the walls, a wide silence.
The air is white and open, ready for snow.

- Robin Fulton