book report catch-up

As you can see, the book report project is not going well. I'm duly impressed by everyone who writes reviews on Amazon and Goodreads because I find it enormously difficult to write about books I've read. Either it's too early and I still have Things to Work Through, or it's too late and I've forgotten what I read... BUT the reading project itself is actually going swimmingly, I've read four books and most of two more! And acquired nearly that many...but let's ignore that part. (I was on vacation in the UK, what else was going to happen?)

Trip report to follow. I've missed London so much that even this part was kinda fun!

Speed reviews:

Love and Limerence by Dorothy Tennov (1979): Limerence, for the uninitiated, is Tennov's term for the experience of being [obsessively] in love. Which I have been, with various people, for all of my adult life and a good chunk of my childhood. So tons of Things to Work Through here, which is why I started reading the book in the first place. But - surprise! - towards the end it takes an unexpected turn away from talking about limerence generally to talking about limerence very specifically between female patients and their psychoanalysts. Turns out that she wrote another book, entitled Psychotherapy: The Hazardous Cure. UH-OH. Will report back when I've made any progress here at all?!

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (2020): Fungi. They're cool. But maybe not cool enough to make these essays about them feel like a coherent whole? The most thought-provoking parts of the book, for me, were Sheldrake's discussions of anthropomorphism and "the altruism problem." Fungal networks can solve problems, but if we say they "think" we're on thin ice. They can support other forms of life, but if we say they're "generous" we're implicitly denying Darwinism. Ugh. Get down from your pedestal and get over yourselves already, homo sapiens.

Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003): Does everything wrong from the rationalist point of view that Sheldrake worries so much about, and is the better writer by far. Of course we humans are going to understand things through human metaphors, we're not capable of anything else (!) and to pretend otherwise is delusional. Through an accident of bedtime I've started reading this to the kids and they are loving it.

On the Move by Oliver Sacks (2015): in which a brilliant mind comes out as a writer first and a neurologist second, which I did not expect. (Here again - news flash to the scientific community: unbiased research is all well and good but ultimately we understand the world through story and metaphor, not facts and figures.) The initial chapters about Sacks finding his way as a young adult are fascinating; the end of the book kind of degenerates into name-dropping anecdotes. Spoiler alert: he was on a first-name basis with anyone who's anyone. Vanishingly few women make this list.

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag (2021): Between landing at Heathrow and taking the train to Glasgow I just had time to run into the amaaaazing Waterstone's bookstore near University College London (how had I never been there before?) to look for a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James...which I didn't find (I was looking in the wrong section, it turns out), but grabbed this instead. It was so good I didn't even care that the trip to Glasgow took two extra hours. John Kaag's thesis is that William James developed his philosophy of pragmatism as a way to grapple with his own dark thoughts of suicide. He says pragmatism has been misinterpreted as a philosophy of moral relativism, when in fact it's about the complex interaction between the stories we tell ourselves and the lives we lead: our stories govern our actions, the results of which become part of our stories, and so on.

These days, when I peer down from great heights, in addition to experiencing vertigo, I almost always think about Steven Rose, the young black man who threw himself off William James Hall in 2014. Perhaps James's "maybe" could have saved him - the suggestion that he was still in charge of his life, that the decision to end it all might be reasonable, even respectable, but so too was the possibility to live. The possibility was right there - still, always, even in the shit and rancor of it - for him to explore. Perhaps he thought that choosing to die was the only free decision at his disposal, but James suggested there might be other options.

For the majority of people, free will can be exercised in any number of ways, which don't have to include committing suicide, and in many of these cases one can choose to embody new habits of thought and action. This is the case, even when all is lost. If meaningful freedom seems evasive or unrealistic, most of us still have a choice about what to see and what to look past. This too can be worthwhile. "The art of being wise," James suggested, "was knowing what to overlook." Maybe these possibilities could have kept Steven Rose alive for even longer than they did. Maybe not. I refuse to presume.

I think one surefire way to send jumpers off the edge is to pretend that you know something they don't: that life has unconditional value and that they are missing something that is so patently obvious. On the ledge, I suspect they'd detect some deep insecurity or hubris in this assertion. And they might jump just to prove you wrong. Because you would, in fact, be wrong. In James's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness," he reminded his readers that they often don't have a clue about how other people experience the meaning of their lives. Better leave it at "maybe."

Amen.