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.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 519

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Tale of Two Cities," by Charles Dickens.

"If you hear in my voice--I don't know that it is so, but I hope it is--if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!"

“I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response to that written appeal of a fellow-countryman which lies before you. I demand no more than the opportunity to do so without delay. Is not that my right?”

“Emigrants have no rights, Evrémonde,” was the stolid reply.

 Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world--the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. 

"President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life. Who and where is the false conspirator who says that I denounce the husband of my child!"

"Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the Republic."

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and with warmth resumed.

"If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent!"

“If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me more courage.”

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young fingers, and touched his lips.

“Are you dying for him?” she whispered.

“And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.”

“O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?”

“Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.”

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent here there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

"Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little."

"Tell me what it is."

"I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in a farmer's house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she knows nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how should I tell her! It is better as it is."

"Yes, yes: better as it is."

"What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor, and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she may live a long time: she may even live to be old."

"What then, my gentle sister?"

"Do you think:" the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and tremble: "that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the better land where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?"

"It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there."

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Toni Morrison: The Last Interview."

HUNTER-GAULT: This book, Beloved, has received almost, uh, no, uh, critical, uhm, reviews. I mean, just total acclaim. But one of the things that critics have said both about this book in the character of Sethe and other works of yours is that you draw characters that are larger than life. Does that disturb you, or is that even a criticism as far as your concerned? 

MORRISON: It used to disturb me. But I realized that what they are saying is that life is small. My characters are not bigger than life. They are, in fact, as big as life. And life is really very big. We tend to cut it down these days, smaller and smaller and smaller, to make it fit—I don’t know what—a headline or a room.

JAFFREY: You don’t feel you need to protect yourself from listening to critics? 

MORRISON: You can’t. 

JAFFREY: You need to know what’s being said? 

MORRISON: I know there are authors who find it healthier for them, in their creative process, to just not look at any reviews, or bad reviews, or they have them filtered, because sometimes they are toxic for them. I don’t agree with that kind of isolation. I’m very much interested in how African American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It’s been a long, hard struggle, and there’s a lot of work yet to be done. I’m especially interested in how women’s fiction is reviewed and understood. And the best way to do that is to read my own reviews, for reasons that are not about how I write. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the work. I’m not entangled at all in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it, how I succeeded at doing it. So it doesn’t have that kind of effect on me at all. But I’m very interested in the responses in general. And there have been some very curious and interesting things in the reviews so far.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Metamorphoses," by Ovid.

Where other animals walk on all fours and look to the ground,

Man was given a towering head and commanded to stand erect, with his face uplifted to gaze upon the stars of heaven. 

Thus clay, so lately more than a crude and formless substance, 

was metamorphosed into the strange new figure of Man. 

But now the clouds that he needed to cover the whole wide earth 

and the rain to pour from the sky were lacking. So what was the answer? 

A thunderclap! Next a bolt was carefully poised by his right ear. 

Jupiter hurled it at Phaéthon, flinging both driver from chariot 

and life from body at once. He quenched one fire with another. 

The horses stampeded. Rearing up in different directions, 

they slipped the yoke from their necks and tore the reins as they broke loose. 

Here the bridle was tossed, and there the pole with the ripped-off 

axle, there the spokes of the shattered wheels and, scattered 

all over the ether, the fragments of metal which once were a chariot. 

Phaéthon’s corpse spun down head first, with the fire of the thunderbolt 

scorching his flame-red hair. He fell through the sky in a long trail, 

blazing away like a comet which sometimes appears in a clear sky, 

never to land upon earth, but looking as if it is falling. 

Callisto entered a forest whose trees no axe had deflowered, 

and here she removed the quiver she wore on her shoulder and 

loosened 

the string of her supple bow; then laid herself down on the 

greensward, 

resting her pure white neck on her painted quiver for pillow. 

When Jupiter spied her lying exhausted and unprotected, 

he reckoned: ‘My wife will never discover this tiny betrayal; 

or else, if she does, oh yes, the joy will make up for the scolding!’ 

So when his wife and her paramour entered the chamber together, 

the husband’s exquisite art and ingenious netting enabled 

the pair to be caught, unable to move, in the midst of their love- 

making. 

Instantly Vulcan threw open the ivory doors and admitted 

the other gods. There were the guilty ones lying together, entwined 

in their shame! The gods were amused, and one of them murmured: “If only 

I could be shamed like that!” Then all of them burst into laughter. 

This story went the rounds of the sky for a long time afterwards. 

He spoke without daring to look at the man he was begging to spare 

him. 

Then Perseus gave him his answer: ‘Phineus, you spineless coward, 

no need to be scared. I'll allow you all that I can — a handsome 

gift for a weakling like you. You shan’t be put to the sword, man. 

No, I shall make you a lasting memorial for all posterity. 

You’ll be on permanent view in the house of my father-in-law, 

that my wife may console herself with her former intended’s 

likeness.’ 

With that he quickly carried Medusa across to display her 

where Phineus had turned his quivering head. As the cowering villain 

attempted to shift his eyes away once again, his neck 

grew stiff and the tears running down his cheeks were hardened to 

stone. 

But still a coward’s face and the suppliant’s look were preserved 

in marble, along with the pleading hands and the cringing 

posture. 

The loser, who’d fought with Hector in single combat, who’d often 

withstood the assaults of fire and sword and of Jupiter, only 

failed to withstand his own anger. The hero whom no one had 

beaten 

was beaten at last by resentment. Grasping his sword he cried, 

‘This at least is mine! Or is this also claimed by Ulysses? 

It must be wielded against myself. The weapon so often 

stained with the blood of the Trojans must now be stained with its 

master’s. 

No one shall have the power to conquer Ajax, but Ajax!’ 

He spoke, and into the breast which had never been wounded before* 

he drove his murderous sword till he buried it up to the hilt. 

His hands were too weak to draw out the deeply embedded weapon; 

was only expelled by the force of his blood, which reddened theearth 

and there gave rise to a purple flower from the soft green turf, 

a flower which had once been born from the wound of the young 

Hyacinthus. 

Both boy and man were recalled in the letters inscribed on the petals, 

AIAI* for a cry of lament, AIAI for the name of a hero. 

To these advances Glaucus replied, 

‘While Scylla is living, my love for her will not alter, till foliage 

grows in the ocean and seaweed sprouts on the peaks of the 

mountains!’ 

In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays 

unchanged. 

All is in flux.* Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. 

Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. 

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, 

nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream 

by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, 

so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. 

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; 

every moment that passes is new and eternally changing. 

Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy — 

not Jupiter’s wrath,* nor fire or sword, nor devouring time. 

That day which has power over nothing except this body of mine 

may come when it will and end the uncertain span of my life. 

But the finer part of myself shall sweep me into eternity, 

higher than all the stars. My name shall be never forgotten. 

Wherever the might of Rome extends in the lands she has conquered, 

the people shall read and recite my words. Throughout all ages, 

if poets have vision to prophesy truth, I shall live in my fame. 

Recommended Reads, 55th in a Quarterly Series

 

Stuff I'd recommend from the past three months. 

Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), Native Son (Wright), War and Peace (Tolstoy), Metamorphoses (Ovid). No-doubter must-reads in the Western canon.

Abundance (Klein, Thompson). Must-read for contemporary economic and political discourse.

The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth (Algeo). Entertaining read if only because this would be utterly impossible today.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari). Covering the entirety of human existence is enough to score high, especially when done so well.

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (Moore). Beautiful, infuriating, gripping.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (Roach). She is laugh-out-loud funny when she corrals a topic, and this was a particular hearty one.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (Walker). Borderline 5, that's how impactful it has been to my view of the world.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Pollan). I stumbled into this amazing read.

What Do I Use LinkedIn For

 

A few years ago I bumped into a work colleague who I hadn't seen in a while but who I'd sent an article to via LinkedIn message. They apologized for not seeing it, saying "I don't check LinkedIn that often, I mean it's not like I'm looking for a job right now so what's the point?" I guess back then, at least for them, LinkedIn was for finding work, and was therefore unneeded when you are gainfully employed.

I guess this summer I'll be joining the ranks of those on the job hunt, a rare occurrence in my career in which I've only had two jobs in my life so not much experience finding a job. (And, the last time was 20+ years ago before, when I was not yet on LinkedIn.) But, I have used and will continue to use LinkedIn for many other things besides seeking employment.

I should note that many uses are related to my current occupation as a consultant, in a role in which bringing in business and being helpful to my clients is paramount. But I suspect I will continue to do these things even after I've left my firm.

First, much like Facebook is a curated feed of what my friends far and wide are doing, thinking, celebrating, and raging against, LinkedIn is that for my professional network. So it's a convenient and efficient way to keep tabs on promotions, job changes, work successes, and industry insights. For my personal pleasure and for my ongoing professional relevance, I need to keep tabs on all of these things, and reading my feed is a pretty easy way to do just that.

On a related note, LinkedIn is an efficient way to publicly praise people for a job well done. Affirmation and recognition fuel all of us, and it's great to be able to privately and then publicly congratulate people for a big closing, a work milestone, or just being their awesome selves.

Similarly, sharing insightful news and articles, along with some commentary that gives folks a window into how I process it, is a low-friction way to exercise thought leadership. It's good to be seen as a reliable and thoughtful source of contemporary trends, which requires keeping up with and having an informed opinion of such trends, which LinkedIn is a great platform for.

Finally, let me celebrate the "strength of weak ties," which is to say that knowing a lot of people shallowly is a good thing in business because it expands your pool from those in your inner circle to those much further afield, with attendant benefits in gaining new perspectives and penetrating broader networks. I don't particularly like to send or accept invites from complete strangers, and I will decline invitations from folks who are clearly interested in putting the hard sell on me for their work product. But, if we've met even just once, then you've cleared my low bar for being someone I want to stay in touch with. I've even lowered the bar further, in that if someone invites me to connect who I've never met but who has 10+ shared connections, that's someone I think is worth being in my network. Because having a large network then increases your chances of knowing someone when something comes up, where for example you need a team member in the Dallas area who has experience with tax policy. 

Needless to say, I get a lot of utility out of LinkedIn, even though I've never had to use it to find a job. And now I do! So maybe I'll be on it even more?

The Myths We Like to Tell Ourselves

 

 

Something I’ve learned since making an effort to read the classics, both fiction and non-fiction, is that historians back then treated history differently than we do today. Sure, modern-day historians still aim to craft facts into narratives and lessons. But ancient historians tended to take more liberties in bending or altogether forsaking facts, feeling that it was more important to elevate certain people and events, connect them to contemporary mythology, and drive home closely held values, and to heck with inconvenient facts that didn’t quite support those agendas. 

Mythology is deeply important to all cultures. And most people would acknowledge, even with their most dear beliefs, that there is an element of uncertainty, selective emphases, and even out-and-out deception involved in that mythology. As important as we claim “truth” is, we hold more dearly many other things. And why not? When “truth” gets in the way of existential things like identity, superiority, and redemption, it’s easy to brush truth aside. 

Leave aside that pure, unvarnished truth is hard to come by nowadays. People who are supposed to be honest and objective arbiters of information have been coopted for one cause or another. Technological advances mean you can consume direct audio or video and still not know what actually happened. And, young people in particular, with the least amount of time to develop wisdom and resilience, have had to endure wave after wave of trauma such that it’s understandable their ability to process what’s happening and their willingness to take facts at face value is compromised. 

I’ll let you fill in the specific mythologies your side and the other side give into, which are varying degrees of justifiable, and none of which are completely and unassailably correct. None of us can truly stand outside of any mythologies and simply process information in raw form and make informed judgments from that. Nor am I asking anyone to. But do know that you, me, and all of us have myths we like to tell ourselves, just like those ancient historians covering emperor’s reigns and marital scandal and war heroism.

I Like My God More and More, and Wish More People Truly Knew Him

 

 

I recently read “Metamorphoses” by Ovid. Written over 2000 years ago, it is a long-form poem in the Greek classic tradition, at times sensual or absurd, creating or evoking contemporary mythologies that remain popular to this day. 

As a person of a specific faith persuasion, when I read the classics I take great interest in how gods are portrayed. And, whether it is Ovid or Homer or Virgil, there seems to be a common thread, which is, on a shallow level, these gods are hilarious, and on a deeper level, these gods are troubling. 

The theme of “Metamorphoses,” naturally, is “change.” And usually what that means is that some god has decided that, even though they are supremely powerful, a pretty girl catches their eye and lust takes over, and then afterwards either they or their wife punish the pretty girl by turning her into a tree or a bird or a rock. There’s a lot more to the poem than this, but suffice to say that the gods in this book were not the kind of people you would want to introduce your daughter to. 

Vain, impulsive, vindictive, power-mad, violent, and unrepentant: these are not good characteristics for anyone, let alone a god! On a surfacey level, gods as described thusly are the kind of people who immature frat bros would say would be fun to hang out with. And, I suppose for many people, taking religion too seriously is uptight or worse, and life is about having fun so what’s the harm in having gods like this?   

Of course, if you harbor serious beliefs about the divine, you aspire for your god to have more noble traits. Which is why I lament how much we have defiled the image of the God I believe in. Not that I wonder why people harbor such foul opinions, given how royally we His followers have mucked up His reputation through violence, oppression, and abuse in His name. 

Which is such a shame. Because if you take the time to get into the original texts, and spend real time in community with others who seek to represent His presence among us today, you will experience things we humans long for, like acceptance and redemption and affirmation and instruction and correction and love. Each day I walk this way, I like my God more and more, and wish more people would truly know Him too.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds," David Goggins.

Steam billowed all around me. It rippled off my skin and poured from my soul. What started as a spontaneous venting session had become a solo intervention. 

“It’s on you,” I said. “Yeah, I know sh*t is fucked up. I know what you’ve been through. I was there, b*tch! Merry f*cking Christmas. Nobody is coming to save your *ss! Not your mommy, not Wilmoth. Nobody! It’s up to you!” 

By the time I was done talking, I was shaved clean. Water pearled on my scalp, streamed from my forehead, and dripped down the bridge of my nose. I looked different, and for the first time, I’d held myself accountable. A new ritual was born, one that stayed with me for years. It would help me get my grades up, whip my sorry *ss into shape, and see me through graduation and into the Air Force. 

The ritual was simple. I’d shave my face and scalp every night, get loud, and get real. I set goals, wrote them on Post-It notes, and tagged them to what I now call the Accountability Mirror, because each day I’d hold myself accountable to the goals I’d set. 

See, most civilians don’t understand that you need a certain level of callousness to do the job we were being trained to do. To live in a brutal world, you have to accept cold-blooded truths. I’m not saying it’s good. I’m not necessarily proud of it. But special ops is a calloused world and it demands a calloused mind.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 515

 

Here are a few excerpt from a book I recently read, "War and Peace," by Leo Tolstoy.

"Ah, my friend!" said he, taking Pierre by the elbow; and there was in his voice a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in it before. "How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I am near sixty, dear friend... I too... All will end in death, all! Death is awful..." and he burst into tears.

With downcast eyes she let her hands fall, and sat and pondered. She saw in her imagination what her husband should be: a man, a strong, commanding, and strangely attractive being, who would suddenly carry her off into his own world, so different from hers, so full of happiness. She imagined herself pressing to her bosom her own child, just such a baby as she had seen the evening before with the daughter of her old nurse. Her husband stood looking affectionately at her and at their baby—“But no, this is impossible, I am too homely,” she said to herself.

"Gently, gently! Can't you lift him more gently?" exclaimed the sovereign, apparently suffering more keenly than the dying soldier, and he rode away. 

Rostof saw the tears that filled his monarch's eyes, and heard him say in French to Czartorisky as he rode away:

"What is so terrible as war? What a terrible thing!"

And Rostof got up and began to wander among the watch fires, and dreamed of what bliss it would be to die - as to losing his life, he did not dare to think of that! - but simply to die in the presence of his sovereign. He was really in love, not only with the Tsar, but also with the glory of the Russian army and the hope of impending victory. And he was not the only one who experienced this feeling on the memorable days that preceded the Battle of Austerlitz: nine-tenths of the men composing the Russian army were at that time in love, though perhaps less ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the Russian army.

In spite of the fact that Boris had come with the intention of confessing his love, and had, therefore decided to be tenderly sentimental, he immediately began in a tone of irritation to complain of woman's inconstancy; pointing out how easy it was for women to shift from gloom to glee, and that their moods depended wholly on the one who happened to be dancing attendance upon them. Julie took offense at this, and declared that he was right; that women needed variety, and nothing was more annoying to anyone than to endure perpetual sameness.

"Then I advise you..." began Boris, with the intention of winging a sharp retort; but at that instant came the humiliating thought that he was on the point of leaving Moscow without attaining his wished-for end, and at the cost of wasted labor - a thing to which he was unaccustomed. He paused in the middle of his sentence, dropped his eyes to avoid seeing the look of disagreeable annoyance and indecision on her face, and said:

"However, it was not at all for the purpose of quarreling with you that I came here. On the contrary..." He looked at her to see whether she would encourage him to proceed. All expression of annoyance had suddenly vanished, and her restless, imploring eyes were fixed on him with greedy expectation. "I can always manage to keep out of her way," thought Boris. "Here I am in for it; might as well finish."

He flushed crimson, raised his eyes to hers, and said:

"You know my sentiments toward you..."

There was no need of saying more; Julie's face had become radiant with triumph and satisfaction; but she compelled Boris to tell her all that it is customary to say in such circumstances, to tell her that he loved her, and that he had never loved anyone else so passionately. She knew that in exchange for her Penza estates and Nizh forests she had a right to exact this; and she obtained what she wished.

The young couple laid their plans for the future establishment of a magnificent home in Petersburg, made calls, and got everything ready for a brilliant wedding.

"At first I was not particularly charmed with Moscow, because what a city ought to have, to be agreeable, is pretty women; isn't that so? Well, now I like it very much," said he, giving her a significant look. "Will you come to our party, countess? Please do," said he; and, stretching out his hand toward her bouquet, and lowering his voice, he added in French, "You will be the prettiest. Come, my dear countess, and, as a pledge, give me that flower"

Natasha did not realize what he was saying any more than he did, but she had a consciousness that in his incomprehensible words there was an improper meaning.

"Last evening my brother dined with me - we almost died of laughing - he eats nothing at all, and can only sigh for you, my charmer! He is in love, madly in love with you, my dear.

Natasha flushed crimson on hearing those words.

"How she blushes! How she blushes, my delightful one," pursued Helene. "Don't fail to come. Even if you are in love, that is no reason for making a nun of yourself. Even if you are engaged, I am sure that your future husband would prefer to have you go into society, rather than die of tedium in his absence."

Anatol was at the door, evidently on the lookout for the Rostofs. As soon as he had exchanged greetings with the count, he joined Natasha, and followed her into the room. The moment she saw him she was assailed, just as she had been at the theater, by a mixed sense of gratified vanity that she pleased him and of fear because of the absence of moral barriers between her and him.

Princess Maria, entirely bewildered and weak with fright, was sitting in the drawing-room when Rostof was brought in to her. When she saw his Russian face, and recognized by his manner and the first words he spoke that he was a man of her own class, she looked at him with her deep, radiant eyes, and began to speak in broken tones, her voice trembling with emotion.

Rostof immediately found something very romantic in this adventure. "An unprotected maiden, overwhelmed with grief, left alone at the mercy of rough, insurgent peasants! And what a strange fate has brought me here!" thought Rostof, as he listened to her and looked at her. "And what sweetness and gratitude in her features and her words" he said to himself, as he listened to her faltering tale.

"I had other obligations," he said to himself. "The people had to be appeased. Many other victims have perished, and are perishing, for the public good."

Not only did he not reproach himself for what he had done, he even found reason to congratulate himself that he had so happily succeeded in taking advantage of this fortuitous circumstance for punishing a criminal and at the same time pacifying the mob.

"Vereshchagin was tried and condemned to death," said Rostopchin to himself, though Vereshchagin had been condemned only to hard labor. "He was a spy and a traitor; I could not leave him unpunished, and, besides, I killed two birds with one stone. I offered a victim to pacify the people, and I punished an evildoer."

By the time he reached his suburban house and began to make his domestic arrangements, he had become perfectly calm.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 514

 

I came to bell hooks late. I was already in my 20s, already a parent, and firmly fed up with the ways that white middle class feminism Othered me. But I didn’t have the right words to express how I felt yet, and so for me reading bell hooks was less revelation and more confirmation. It was maddening to come to feminism as a young Black single mother and find people like me described as a problem to solve with no recognition of our humanity. So, the first time I read Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism I felt seen, more than that I felt validated. It was the feminism that hadn’t included me or women like me that was the problem, not my inability to connect with the words of white feminists. Even though they wrote books that were hailed at the time as necessary and relevant reads, hooks made it clear that they were not above critique. As she said in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, “we knew that there could be no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy.”

In this way bell hooks taught us another unforgettable lesson, that those who do some of the hardest work to make change possible will have missteps. The mythos that arises after an icon passes away hinges on their complexities being forgotten in favor of a handful of favorite and easy to absorb quotes. In the way of all icons, when that happens there is a danger of context being forgotten as well. But bell was more than her best quotes, more than her awards and successes, and the best way to honor her work is to think critically about what she said in her time as well as understanding that her experiences may not always be relevant. To remember the full, complicated person she was and learn from her is to wrestle with her growth, her flaws and understand that no feminism, no feminist could ever be perfect. As hooks herself said, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

bh: At the conference, I confessed that I have really violent impulses that sometimes listening to some panels I had wanted to come out and shoot people. The audience laughed, but I wasn’t being funny, and I wasn’t saying it to be cute or exhibitionist. I was acknowledging that the violent impulses don’t just exist out there in Black youth or in the underclass, but that they reside in people like myself as well—people who have our PhDs and our good jobs. But that doesn’t mean that my life is not tormented by rageful or irrational, violent impulses. It does mean that instead of shooting people, I go home and write a critique. My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex, clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless. I think Black people, across class, have many moments in our lives when we feel utterly powerless to change the direction of situations. And we don’t deal with this collectively, because we’re so in denial about it. 

LC: You’ve talked about how figures like Tupac Shakur and Ice Cube disrupt essential notions of Black masculinity. Your understanding of gangsta rap is very different from the dominant feminist line. 

bh: People presume that because I’m a feminist thinker they know I’m gonna trash rap, especially gangsta rap. I can challenge the sexism and misogyny of it, but I can embrace the rage that is implicit in it and the sense of powerlessness that undergirds it.

LJ: In Feminism Is for Everybody, you write, “If women and men want to know love we have to yearn for feminism.” Can you talk about this connection between love and feminism? 

bh: I keep telling people that I’m going to be the high priestess of love for the next few years, and so many people keep saying, “Oh, well, bell hooks is turning soft ‘cause she’s focusing on love.” And I think, Oh, no, not the love I’m talking about—because I’m really talking about a love that’s grounded in a vision of mutuality and communion and sharing; to me that is so deeply related to feminism because I feel like as long as we have gender inequality and inequity and sexism and patriarchy, we can’t have mutuality. What we have is a constant paradigm of domination, a constant sense that in the world there’s always a top and bottom in our relationships, there’s always a subordinated person and a person who is dominant. 

One thing that I have felt strongly over the years is that while I have seen relationships between heterosexual men and women change a lot, what I often see is that if the man assumes a more nurturing, more emotional and giving position, the woman is often cold and aloof and ungiving. We certainly see this in a lot of movies—even in a movie like High Fidelity, which I really enjoyed, we still see that you have a certain kind of warmth posited with the man and a coldness in the energy of the so-called New Woman, the young, professional career woman. It seems to me that this is still within the same old paradigm of every relationship [having] a submissive party and a dominant party. It’s just that people are more comfortable now with men taking on the submissive roles, but that’s not what feminist visions of true love are about, because those visions are about mutuality. They’re about a world where we can both be self-actualized in a relationship, whether it’s two men together or two women together or two transgendered people or whatever our arrangements. Mutuality is at the heart of this vision of a more politicized understanding of love as a force that transforms domination.

LJ: To me there’s something about that model of looking at things that very much naturalizes gender roles—it says that this is the way men are and this is the way women are. 

bh: When I go out into the high schools or just into an everyday world talking about feminism, the people from 6 to 25, that’s exactly what they bring up. That’s exactly their wall of resistance. I don’t even have difficulty with us saying that there’s some kind of hardcore biological determinism, because what we really know is that everything can be changed through socialization. So even if you want to say we start off in some kind of binary that is oppositional, it can be altered at birth. So let’s talk about why people have such resistance to altering that—[people] who believe in some kind of fixed biological destiny—since we’re quite willing to alter all other kinds of destinies. Sometimes when I think of the incredible revolution people have made with technology, moving from being fearful of technology to people of all classes in our nation believing everybody should know how to use a computer…we know that people can make incredible leaps away from anything that we call natural or biologically determined. And I find it interesting that whenever we’re talking about gender equality, people want to fix biology in some kind of absolute unchanging space rather than say, Nothing has been altered more in the scientific revolutions of modernity than this thing we might call biology.

SH: Do you think it’s true that writers carry around a great sadness? And do we have that sadness because we’re writers, or are we writers because we have that sadness? 

bh: It’s so interesting that you ask that, Silas, ’cause my morning meditation has to do with grief because I often feel such a tremendous sense of grief about what’s happening in our world, what’s happening to people around me, the disconnects, and my dysfunctional family and others. But I don’t know that I think it’s so much writers but people who are choosing to be aware. It’s hard to wake up, in the Buddhist sense. I mean, to open your eyes and see what’s happening in our world without feeling that grief. And the point that Thich Nhat Hanh always says—the Vietnamese Buddhist monk—is I gotta take that grief and use it as compost, you know, for my garden. That’s the challenge for me. I feel like that grief has been with me since I was a child facing the brutal racism of Kentucky, the extreme patriarchal sexism of my parents and our religion, and, you know, just trying to find that place of through the pain and the sadness to a place where one can say as Jackie Wilson in his song, “Your Love Has Lifted Me Higher.” That’s the thing, when I go out to my land and I look out at the hills and I think about that scripture that says, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” So there again we have that evocation of nature and the environment, and that which helps us, restores us, which gives us a way to keep a hold on life. For me, it’s keeping that grief balanced, but I don’t know an aware person who doesn’t have that grief.