Check Your Blind Spots

 

Everyone who bikes regularly invariably has one or more scary incidents, which they hopefully live to tell about with little to no damage to life or property. One of mine, a relatively harmless one thankfully, involves racing down the street perpendicular to the Market-Frankford elevated line in West Philadelphia to make it through an intersection before the light turned red. I was even with and close to a car on my left, so while I had it in my mind that I could make the light, I also wanted to make sure I steered clear of this car that was trying to do the same. So I slowed to let it get ahead of me and put some distance between me and this two-ton steel box. But then it slowed too. So I slowed some more. Only to have it slow some more. And which point, somewhat suddenly and without using a turn signal, it swerved to its right and clipped me. Somehow I fell gracefully even though I’m usually pretty clumsy, and popped back up, just as the driver got out of the car, put her hands on her head, and said with panic, “oh my gosh, I didn’t see you, I’m so sorry!” 

This obviously could’ve been a lot worse, so I’m grateful I could emerge with a few scrapes and a vivid story. But the possibility of tragedy is amplified by the fact that the person at fault, the driver who did not see me, obviously did not intend to harm me. She simply did not see me and so took actions that were innocent to her but dangerous to me. If I had been more seriously hurt, I suppose I could’ve been upset that she was not more careful to check her blind spot. But I could not hold it against her that she was being malicious or hateful. The point I'm making, in this thankfully non-existent parallel situation, is that that wouldn’t have mattered, because I would’ve still been injured or worse. 

I think about metaphoric blind spots all the time. How many times are we driving down the lane of life, meaning no harm to others and yet taking actions that, because of our not having checked our blind spots, are putting others in peril, and perhaps causing them great and even grievous damage? 

In another context, it has been said that the most important things to mind are “the unknown unknowns,” or to elaborate, “we don’t know what we don’t know.” This saying was first used in a military intelligence setting, and it informed both what needed to be done to collect more information and how to think about the information we already did have. Meaning that, we know what we know, and we know what we don’t know, but we must understand that there is more to the world than just that, because there are things we don’t know, and we don’t know that we don't know them, and those are the very things that are harder to figure out and plan for and are therefore potentially most damaging to us. 

In a time of war, collecting intelligence and making decisions is literally life and death, so people are sober and thorough in response. For the rest of us civilians going about our day, we can find ourselves being oblivious to our blind spots. And, the fact that we don’t know they exist and we don’t know what they are is made worse by the fact that we often don’t care. Imagine, for example, the driver that clipped me, only her swerving caused me real damage. And, imagine, even worse, that after hitting me, she either saw and didn’t care or didn’t see and therefore had no reason to care, and after all that just drove off. According to our sensibilities and the laws on our books, that would literally be criminal. 

And yet we do this all the time in our lives, which is to harbor blind spots, and even worse, to do nothing to acknowledge their existence let alone change our angle of sight to see if there is anything in those blind spots that is in harm’s way. We may actually then do harm and not see or not care or both. And we do this over and over again, or at least I know I do. 

Perhaps this is a dated analogy, since newer cars have safety measures to mitigate against blind spot problems, like special cameras and beeping lights. But perhaps the analogy still holds: we have become more sophisticated as we travel through life, and it gives us a false sense that we no longer have any blind spots because we have rigged our metaphorical cars in ways that render it impossible to plow over someone without seeing them. And yet we continue to have blind spots, put people in harm’s way, and care not that we are complicit. 

If you’re wondering why I work so hard to expose myself to people different from me and then really try to understand and appreciate the different perspectives that they hold because of those differences, it is because I know I have blind spots and I can therefore harm others around me unknowingly. I may think that my vehicle is blind spot proof, but it is not. For example, my social circle is racially diverse, and while I am pretty well off I certainly don’t wall myself off in upper crust enclaves where my only social interactions are in high-power boardrooms and fancy country clubs. But that does not mean I can even get close to empathizing with the life experience of the typical Philadelphian. I may have seen all the shoes out there, but I have walked a mile in a very small subset of them! 

Sorry to mix metaphors but hopefully you get my point. I am like that driver who clipped me, going about my daily business with no desire to harm others around me but also with insufficient awareness of the existence of those around me. It takes work to check for blind spots. But they do exist, and so we must if we want to do right by our fellow man.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 526

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Frankenstein," by Mary Shelley.

One of the phaenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries. I revolved these circumstances in my mind and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome and almost intolerable. To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.

“I expected this reception," said the daemon. "All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”

"My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix appeared so miserable and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people. When I slept or was absent, the forms of the venerable blind father, the gentle Agatha, and the excellent Felix flitted before me. I looked upon them as superior beings who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love.

Tears streamed from my eyes. The rain had ceased for a moment, and I saw the fish play in the waters as they had done a few hours before; they had then been observed by Elizabeth. Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine or the clouds might lower, but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before. A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness; no creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single in the history of man.

The deep grief which this scene had at first excited quickly gave way to rage and despair. They were dead, and I lived; their murderer also lived, and to destroy him I must drag out my weary existence. I knelt on the grass and kissed the earth and with quivering lips exclaimed, "By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the dæmon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life; to execute this dear revenge will I again behold the sun and tread the green herbage of earth, which otherwise should vanish from my eyes for ever. And I call on you, spirits of the dead, and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work. Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him feel the despair that now torments me."

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 525

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know," by Malcolm Gladwell.

  

Is it any wonder why the meeting between Cortés and Montezuma has fascinated historians
for so many centuries? That moment—500 years ago—when explorers began traveling across oceans and undertaking bold expeditions in previously unknown territory, an entirely new kind of encounter emerged. Cortés and Montezuma wanted to have a conversation, even though they knew nothing about the other. When Cortés asked Montezuma, “Art thou he?,” he didn’t say those words directly. Cortés spoke only Spanish. He had to bring two translators with him. One was an Indian woman named Malinche, who had been captured by the Spanish some months before. She knew the Aztec language Nahuatl and Mayan, the language of the Mexican territory where Cortés had begun his journey. Cortés also had with him a Spanish priest named Gerónimo del Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatán and learned Mayan during his sojourn there. So Cortés spoke to Aguilar in Spanish. Aguilar translated into Mayan for Malinche. And Malinche translated the Mayan into Nahuatl for Montezuma—and when Montezuma replied, “Yes, I am,” the long translation chain ran in reverse. The kind of easy face-to-face interaction that each had lived with his entire life had suddenly become hopelessly complicated.

Cortés was taken to one of Montezuma’s palaces—a place that Aguilar described later as
having “innumerable rooms inside, antechambers, splendid halls, mattresses of large cloaks,
pillows of leather and tree fibre, good eiderdowns, and admirable white fur robes.” After dinner, Montezuma rejoined Cortés and his men and gave a speech. Immediately, the confusion began. The way the Spanish interpreted Montezuma’s remarks, the Aztec king was making an astonishing concession: he believed Cortés to be a god, the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that said an exiled deity would one day return from the east. And he was, as a result, surrendering to Cortés. You can imagine Cortés’s reaction: this magnificent city was now effectively his.

But is that really what Montezuma meant? Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, had a
reverential mode. A royal figure such as Montezuma would speak in a kind of code, according to a cultural tradition in which the powerful projected their status through an elaborate false
humility. The word in Nahuatl for a noble, the historian Matthew Restall points out, is all but
identical to the word for child. When a ruler such as Montezuma spoke of himself as small and
weak, in other words, he was actually subtly drawing attention to the fact that he was esteemed and powerful.

“The impossibility of adequately translating such language is obvious,” Restall writes:

The speaker was often obliged to say the opposite of what was really meant. True meaning was embedded in the use of reverential language. Stripped of these nuances in translation, and distorted through the use of multiple interpreters…not only was it unlikely that a speech such as Montezuma’s would be accurately understood, but it was probable that its meaning would be turned upside down. In that case, Montezuma’s speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.

You probably remember from high-school history how the encounter between Cortés and
Montezuma ended. Montezuma was taken hostage by Cortés, then murdered. The two sides went to war. As many as twenty million Aztecs perished, either directly at the hands of the Spanish or indirectly from the diseases they had brought with them. Tenochtitlán was destroyed. Cortés’s foray into Mexico ushered in the era of catastrophic colonial expansion. And it also introduced a new and distinctly modern pattern of social interaction. Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

That sounds callous, because it’s easy to see all the damage done by people like Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff. Because we trust implicitly, spies go undetected, criminals roam free, and lives are damaged. But Levine’s point is that the price of giving up on that strategy is much higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos and trusted no one, there would be no fraud on Wall Street — but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.

There are many people like my mother, equipped with a set of skills that make them good at talking to strangers. We do not encourage this kind of person to consider police work as a career. But maybe we should. I know my mother. Had she been in Brian Encinia's place that day in Prairie View, the outcome would have been very different. One minute into that traffic stop, she would have realized that this was a young woman with a difficult and complicated life, trying to make a new start. Two minutes in, she and Sandra Bland would have been deep in conversation. Do we want my unprepossessing mother arresting bank robbers? No we don't. But there is much, much more to police work than that. And the world would be a better place if we recognized the impossibility of the task we have given the police and took steps to rationalize their profession. They need our assistance. Let us offer it to them. After all, it is not just Brian Encinia who was bad at talking to a stranger. In one way or another, we all are.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 524

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Going to Meet the Man: Stories," by James Baldwin.

They hated him, and this hatred was blacker than their hearts, blacker than their skins, redder than their blood, and harder, by far, than his club. Each day, each night, he felt worn out, aching, with their smell in his nostrils and filling his lungs, as though he were drowning—drowning in ni**ers; and it was all to be done again when he awoke. It would never end. It would never end. Perhaps this was what the singing had meant all along. They had not been singing black folks into heaven, they had been singing white folks into hell.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 523

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "My Broken Language," by Quiara Alegria Hudes.

 

My brat pack came to wave me off and started in on the obscene gestures whenever mom turned her back. Chien was first-­generation Vietnamese. Ben and Elizabeth, first-­gen Cambodian. Rowetha lost her Amharic after leaving Ethiopia. We all spoke English, unlike our parents, who all spoke different languages from one another. This was my West Philly crew, my pampers–­to–­pre-­K alphabet soup. I assumed all blocks everywhere were like it — ­as many languages as sidewalk cracks, one boarded-­up home for every lived-­in, more gum wads than dandelions.  

Malvern was only an hour outside Philly, but it was a whole different universe. The woods, donkeys, and horses didn’t account for the half of it. We had moved to a monolingual, pale world. Its language uniformity was so complete as to be creepy, zombie-esque. How the shopkeepers and mailmen spoke English confidently and pronounced all their vowels the same exact way. How within houses I visited, the kids, parents, and elders shared the same language and never paused for translation or to remember a word. Though Malvern folks didn’t pray to ancestors like mom did, I could tell that if they did, even their ghosts would speak English. 

 

I determined to get dad's take straight up, like I'd done with god. He met he at the train for a weekend visit and with each curve of the country road I wrestled my nerves. Did you have an affair with...Too accusatory. Did you cheat on...Too blunt. Did you have sex with...No way. Finally, we pulled into the driveway and my time was up. "Did you take off your clothes and get under the covers with Susan?" Even I was embarrassed by the naive wording. For a second, I worried he's misinterpreted my question as a birds-and-bees inquiry. But the way he slumped when switching off the ignition meant he knew. 

“They have no idea what they’re calling me! How do you say ‘whore’ en el barrio?” mom asked. How do you say it?”

“‘Puta?’”

“How else? Now tell me, Quiara, what is a ho?”

“‘Ho!’”

“¡Exacto! Ho! Who’s shamed for her sexuality is a ho?”

“It’s the shame men have given us from the get-go. The shame that is written into the Bible. But think, Quiara, what else is a ho? I want you to make this connection yourself.”

I came up short.

“‘HO!’” she yelled, as if volume was a code-cracker. “AZADA! AZADA! AZADA! What is a ho, Quiara?”

“A gardening tool.”

“And what does a hoe do?” she asked.

“It digs.”

“It’s an ancient tool with a sharp blade for clearing and turning the soil. When the earth gets tired, you break the earth, you wound the earth, digging narrow troughs and trenches so you can do what?”

“Plant seeds.”

“Plant seeds!” she rejoiced, all affirmation. “They think they’re shaming us, but they have no clue that they’re praising me. We are not whores, but we are hoes. We plant seeds of potential! We plow the land, we plow our reality! I am hoeing the potential of my hoeing in Sedo’s community. I have been hoeing my potential since day one, hija!”   

Mom, if you ever read this book (and make it this far without disowning me), I ask you one favor: break this English language today and the day after and the day after and bestow it new life upon this cracked colonial tongue. You language genius. This is your English. You earned it. I am only a guest here.

 

 

 

I corrected her in the car. I corrected her in the living room. No cash register or playground was too public to fix her pronunciation and should. As if the others ought to lease a mystical giantess. It was embarrassing which I pretended was too possible to fix for her. Sometimes it was the know-it-all cockiness of youth, but I never once said, "Fuck you, child, stop colonizing my ass."But she never changed her pronunciation, either.

 

 

 

At some birthday, back in grade school when I still spent weeks at Carroll Lane, he remembered my birthday, he made an event of driving me to Circuit City. Together we mazed through television aisles and surround-sound displays to the most extraordinary corridor in retail history: word processors. “Give ’em a spin,” he said. I typed my name on one machine after another, all the way up and down the aisle. One model could do italics and bold. One had built-in memory and could print copies. One did the accent in Alegría. Another could erase words or even sentences: I pressed delete and Quiara vanished from the page. Each had a three-digit price and I knew money was contentious between him and Sharon, but dad said choose anything. He bought me paper, ink ribbons, font inserts. Happiness tickled us in the checkout line. It was levity by the time the register guy called next! I was dad’s first child, the only one who knew his long hair and twenty-something laughter. If he had since pushed me from the airplane, the typewriter was a parachute made of our composite dreams. I set it up that same afternoon, typed in a frenzy about teenage heartthrobs, short stories. Treacly poems, fan essays, short stories. There was no connective aesthetic or topical focus, simply the act of imagination as a way to pass lonely days. When I wrote, I soared. If I ran out of ideas, I typed Top 40 lyrics to keep the jubilant racket going full-tilt. Dad took pride in the clatter: noisy proof of a fatherly triumph. He'd peek into my room, keep it up kid, then disappear again.

I didn't cry when mom and Pop drove off the freshman quad and Gabi craned back for one last wave. But betrayal's heavy veil descended when they turned onto Elm Street, out of view. I was a sister-leaver. I was cold turkey in an indifferent world. College meant abandoning Gabi midcourse, entrusting her flourishing to sinister hands. My fears, it turned out, were dead-on. Mean teachers would taunt the Norf Philly in her cadence, declare her remedial, put her in an ESL class. Four years of schoolyard fat jokes would pummel her. And I would miss it all, offer no nightly antidote.

 

 

You are a child of three catastrophes. You are born of three holocausts. The Native. The African. And the Jewish. You are a descendent of the survivors. It’s in your blood. The resilience. The deep memory and experience of survival.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 522

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

I stood looking at him for a moment. For all his tattooing he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this I have been making about, thought to myself – the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us.

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs.

Just Fooling Around

 

Yesterday's post was an April Fools. "Old airplays of" is an anagram of "April Fool's Day." And I haven't yet figured out what's next for me after I leave my current job next month, not even close. Visiting Y's around the country would be absolutely dreamy though, so that's no fooling - and if anyone in Y USA wants to make this happen, call me!. No, I'm still at my current job and I still haven't figured out what's next, just living in the exhilaration and terror of the unknown in between.

Dreams Do Come True

 

I have an important personal update to announce. I had promised myself I would not seek my next job until after I finished my current one. But sometimes opportunities seek you out. And this one is perfect for me: "secret shopper" for the YMCA. That's right, I will be going to Y's around the country, partaking of the facilities, chatting up the staff, and then writing an evaluation for headquarters. 

I don't start until the summer and they're still working out my itinerary, but I do know that my first stop is a road trip away, so I'm looking forward to packing my workout gear (and my golf clubs) and firing up old airplays of 80's Top 40 countdowns to keep me company (is there a better accompaniment on a road trip than the voice of Casey Kasem?). If you know me, this job is an absolute dream come true!

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 521

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Native Son," by Richard Wright.

He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fulness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

He left her standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, exactly as he had found her. He did not know just how to take her; she made him feel that she would judge all he did harshly but kindly. He had a feeling toward her that was akin to that which he held toward his mother. The difference in his feelings toward Mrs. Dalton and his mother was that he felt that his mother wanted him to do the things she wanted him to do, and he felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do. But he did not want to go to night school. Night school was allright; but he had other plans. Well, he didn’t know just what they were right now, but he was working them out.

Holding up Blum ought not take more than two minutes, at the most. And it would be their last job. But it would be the toughest one that they had ever pulled. All the other times they had raided newsstands, fruit stands, and apartments. And, too, they had never held up a white man before. They had always robbed Negroes. They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes. For months they had talked of robbing Blum’s, but had not been able to bring themselves to do it. They had the feeling that the robbing of Blum’s would be a violation of ultimate taboo; it would be a trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an alien white world would be turned loose upon them; in short, it would be a symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them; a challenge which they yearned to make, but were afraid to. Yes; if they could rob Blum’s, it would be a real hold-up, in more senses than one. In comparison, all of their other jobs had been play.

“Bigger, you ain’t done nothing to that girl, is you?” 

He stiffened with fear. He felt suddenly that he wanted something in his hand, something solid and heavy: his gun, a knife, a brick. 

“If you say that again, I’ll slap you back from this table!”

He had heard that Mr. Dalton owned the South Side Real Estate Company, and the South Side Real Estate Company owned the house in which he lived. He paid eight dollars a week for one rat-infested room. He had never seen Mr. Dalton until he had come to work for him; his mother always took the rent to the real estate office. Mr. Dalton was somewhere far away, high up, distant, like a god. He owned property all over the Black Belt, and he owned property where white folks lived, too. But Bigger could not live in a building across the “line.” Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this.

“I hope Ma won’t be there.” 

“I asked her to come. I want the judge to see her,” Max said. 

“She’ll feel bad.” 

“All of this is for you, Bigger.” 

“I reckon I ain’t worth it.” 

“Well, this thing’s bigger than you, son. In a certain sense, every Negro in America’s on trial out there today.” 

“They going to kill me anyhow.” 

“Not if we fight. Not if I tell them how you’ve had to live.”

“Every time he comes in contact with us, he kills! It is a physiological and psychological reaction, embedded in his being. Every thought he thinks is potential murder. Excluded from, and unassimilated in our society, yet longing to gratify impulses akin to our own but denied the objects and channels evolved through long centuries for their socialized expression, every sunrise and sunset makes him guilty of subversive actions. Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!"

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 520

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe," by Brian Greene.

The purpose of this book is to provide that clarity. We will journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the beginning to the closest science can take us to the very end. We will explore how life and mind emerge from the initial chaos, and we will dwell on what a collection of curious, passionate, anxious, self-reflective, inventive, and skeptical minds do, especially when they notice their own mortality. We will examine the rise of religion, the urge for creative expression, the ascent of science, the quest for truth, and the longing for the timeless. The deep-seated affinity for something permanent, for what Franz Kafka identified as our need for “something indestructible,” will then propel our continued march toward the distant future, allowing us to assess the prospects for everything we hold dear, everything constituting reality as we know it, from planets and stars, galaxies and black holes, to life and mind. 

Across it all, the human spirit of discovery will shine through. We are ambitious explorers seeking to grasp a vast reality. Centuries of effort have illuminated dark terrains of matter, mind, and the cosmos. During millennia to come, the spheres of illumination will grow larger and brighter. The journey so far has already made evident that reality is governed by mathematical laws that are indifferent to codes of conduct, standards of beauty, needs for companionship, longings for understanding, and quests for purpose. Yet, through language and story, art and myth, religion and science, we have harnessed our small part of the dispassionate, relentless, mechanical unfolding of the cosmos to give voice to our pervasive need for coherence and value and meaning. It is an exquisite but temporary contribution. As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of earth’s cant. And though less sensational than a planetary collision, both the earth and the moon endured periods of significant pummelings by smaller meteors. The moon’s lack of eroding winds and its static crust have preserved the scars but earth’s thrashing, less visible now, was just as severe. Some early impacts may have partially or even fully vaporized all water on earth’s surface. Despite that, the zircon archives provide evidence that within a few hundred million years of its formation, earth may have cooled sufficiently for atmospheric steam to rain down, fill the oceans, and yield a terrain not all that dissimilar from the earth we now know. At least, that’s one conclusion reached by reading the crystals.

Every molecule of DNA is configured in the famous spiral of the double helix, a long twisting ladder whose rungs consist of pairs of struts, shorter molecules called bases, usually denoted A, T, G, and C (the technical names won’t matter for us, but these stand for adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine). Members of a given species mostly share the same sequence of letters. For humans, the DNA sequence runs about three billion letters long, with your sequence differing from that of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or William Shakespeare or anyone else by less than about a quarter of a percent, roughly one letter out of every string of five hundred.23 But while basking in the glow of possessing a genome so similar to that of any of history’s most revered luminaries (or infamous villains), note that your DNA sequence also has a 99 percent overlap with any given chimpanzee’s. Minor genetic differences can have major impact.

The functions that keep a typical cell alive for just a single second require the energy stored in about ten million ATP molecules. Your body contains tens of trillions of cells, which means that every second you consume on the order of one hundred million trillion (1020) ATP molecules.

As I sit here, typing out my thoughts, I am unfazed by the realization that at the level of fundamental particles everything I’m thinking and everything I’m doing constitutes the unfolding of physical laws that are beyond my control. What matters to me is that unlike my desk and unlike my chair and unlike my mug, my collection of particles is able to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviors. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m pleased they did. Sure, that reaction, too, is nothing but my particle army carrying out their quantum mechanical marching orders, but that doesn’t diminish the reality of the feeling. I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.

During our inquiry into the origin of language, one proposal featured the role of gossip in maintaining hierarchies and fostering alliances. Frivolous as such conversation may be viewed in the modern age, psychologist Jesse Bering places gossip at the nexus of religion’s adaptive role in the ancient world. Before we acquired the capacity to speak, a rogue in our midst might misbehave—stealing food, borrowing sexual partners, hanging back during the hunt—but if the witnesses to the transgression were small in number and weak in status the culprit could get away scot-free. Once language took hold, that changed. With even a single but widely discussed infraction, the culprit’s reputation would suffer and reproductive opportunities would plummet. Bering’s suggestion is that if a would-be transgressor imagines that there is always a powerful witness—hovering in the wind, or in trees, or in the sky—he would be less likely to transgress, less likely to be fodder for unfavorable gossip, and less likely to become a social outcast. Consequently, he would be more likely to have offspring and pass on his god-fearing instincts. A predisposition for religion protects his genetic lineage and so becomes self-perpetuating.

The light each galaxy emits does travel through space. And much as a kayaker will be stymied if she’s paddling upstream at a speed that’s less than that of the stream itself, the light emitted by a galaxy that is sprinting away at superluminal speed will fight a losing battle as it tries to reach us. Traversing space at light speed, the light cannot overcome the faster-than-light-speed increase in the distance to earth. As a result, when future astronomers look past nearby stars and focus their telescopes on the deepest parts of the night sky, all they will see is velvety black darkness. The distant galaxies will have slipped beyond the bounds of what astronomers call our cosmic horizon. It will be as if the distant galaxies have dropped off a cliff at the edge of space.

I’ve focused on distant galaxies because those that are relatively nearby, a cluster of about thirty galaxies known as the Local Group, will continue to be our cosmic companions. Indeed, by the eleventh floor, the Local Group, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, will likely have merged, an anticipated future union astronomers have christened Milkomeda (I would have lobbied for Andromilky). The stars of Milkomeda will all be close enough for their mutual gravitational pulls to withstand the expansion of space and keep the stellar collection intact. But our severed contact with the more distant galaxies will be a profound loss. It was through careful observations of distant galaxies that Edwin Hubble first realized that space is expanding, a discovery confirmed and refined by a century of subsequent observations. Without access to the distant galaxies, we will lose a primary diagnostic tool for tracing spatial expansion. The very data that guided us toward our understanding of the big bang and cosmic evolution will no longer be available.