No Man Is An Island by Thomas Merton

You may have guessed from my review of Sam Harris' most recent book that I don't really believe in God. This is basically true! I say "basically" not because I haven't really thought about it, or because I don't care about the implications of that decision. Rather, I just think telling someone you are "an Atheist"--or worse, "an Agnostic"--may suggest some things that aren't necessarily so. As an example, I suspect some people associate Atheism with only having coldly rational interests, with a lack of capacity to appreciate beauty. That's obviously stupid!

Perhaps more fairly, though, I'm pretty sure most people don't think of Atheists as having particularly sophisticated Spiritual Lives.

But as a Non-Believer I still experience the numinous and the spiritual. Focusing your attention, singing hymns, belonging to strong communities, feeling genuine love, appreciating art and nature, humbling yourself in the presence of something greater than yourself, meditation, going to church... these things that have that particular and strange transcendental quality, that are powerful and personal and lasting are, as far as my money goes, basically the things that really make life worth living.

And that doesn't require a belief in anything truly supernatural.

It's a simple point, but something I don't hear many people talk about. So I'll say it one more time. My spiritual life and health are daily important to me despite the fact that I don't believe in the existence of any literal God. I've continued to read the writers from the Mystical and Contemplative traditions--Rumi, Meister Ekhart--long after deciding that God doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, and their work is as powerful and informative as it ever was when I thought a man in the sky cared about me.

That's right. Like a jerk, I decided that I get all the cool, rewarding parts of religious experience without all the weird non-factual baggage. I can do it. I can have it all!

Now: No Man is and Island.

This was my first dip into T-Mert. Having gone to a Jesuit college and having worked at a bookstore in a predominantly Catholic city, I've long been aware of his reputation, and some people who I respect a lot speak really highly of his writing. If you don't know: Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk in the 1940s-1960s. He entered the priesthood late-ish in life. He wrote extensively on pacifism and social justice and the monastic life, and developed a particular interest in Zen Buddhism. He was a pretty cool guy.

Although I skimmed several sections for which I decided I was not the intended audience, I wasn't at all disappointed with the book.

He had me at: "A happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy," which is the first sentence. The book spans several topics, some of which I found more relevant than others. Of particular interest to me were the sections and sentences about community/love for others and those about the need for individual actualization. The clash of independence and interdependence is (for me) one of the most interesting, most important struggles of life. While Merton doesn't quite talk about this issue specifically, his observations and insights into each of those aspects of life were really illuminating.

The truth is that I stopped taking notes after the first thirty pages or so. There's just too much there. It's a book that I'll need to buy, to store on a shelf and refer to when the right times come along the way I do a couple books of poetry. It's not meant to be digested in a week the way I did.

Anyway, here's a nice quote I wrote down:  "we must make choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. [...] when in fact our acts of free choices are largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from inordinate ideas of our own importance. Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves."

Happy New Year!

Mini Reviews December 2010

The Planets by Dava Sobel [link]

I've grown to love science for the same reasons I've always loved art and literature: because it has the capacity to grab you by the collar and shake you up and expose you to beauty and truth and make you seriously rethink your place in the universe. This is a very different sort of appreciation than the technological, practical, engineering kind--the idea that science is great because it gives us cool and useful stuff, because it gives us fMRI machines and toaster ovens. Don't get me wrong, I like pharmaceutical antibiotics as much as the next guy, but I'm much more enamored by The Symphony of Science than I am by nonstick frying pans.


The Planets is a book in which Sobel explores each planet of our solar system through a mix of poetry, science history, and bits of cocktail-party astronomy-trivia ("Did you know there's a gigantic hexagonal storm at the pole of Saturn!"). For example, the chapter on Venus, titled simple "Beauty," contains a line or two from a Great Writer every few pages and focuses thematically on the planet's aesthetic achievements. You would think that this book would be exactly my kind of thing. You would think that I would eat this up about a fast as I would kiss Carl Sagan on the mouth. But, for some reason... I thought it was throughly OK. It was just nothing special. Conceptually it was admirable, and Sobel is a very good writer. I don't know. Maybe it was just too meandering. It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm happy to have read it. But I think the chapters might have worked better on their own, generously trimmed, as essays in the New Yorker or something. As a book the thing just wasn't cohesive enough. Sorry Dava Sobel! Good try, though!

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell [link]

Now that I've read this, I've read every book by Gladwell. And he is great. I totes <3 him. It's weird that no one has ever heard of him or his books. (HA.) The aim of this particular book is to explore the science surrounding the Outliers of the social system, to answer the question "Why are some people successful far above and beyond all normal standards or expectations of achievement?" It's a book about people like Bill Gates, The Beatles, and Malcolm Gladwell. As I've understood it, the general thesis is this: Success comes from 1) lots and lots of hard work, 2) a threshold of natural ability or talent, 3) being born at an opportune place/time in history, and 4) having a good family.

Some problems with this. First, DUH. Everyone knows this! Only very dumb people seriously, consciously think that success is a function of talent or hard work only. Also, some of his implicit claims don't always seem to follow from (at least the presented) evidence. And also also, he explores each aspect of success one at a time, and it begins to feel weird to talk about, say, hard work for dozens of pages in a row, knowing that each example must have had innumerable lucky breaks in order to put that hard work to use.

Nevertheless, the stories and examples are all crazy fascinating. And while I said that only stupid people think that success is a function of only hard work or talent, a lot of people are stupid! That this book attempts to dispel the Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches myth is admirable. Good book!

Right Ho, Jeeves! by P. G. Wodehouse [link]

My first Wodehouse!

First, consider this: P. G. Wodehouse was a contemporary (that is he was publishing at the same time as) both Thomas Hardy and William S. Burroughs. Wow.

Anyway, I went into this whole thing with some baggage. First, know that I don't usually like funny novels. That's Douglas Adams, Christopher Moore, Terry Pratchett (though he's a little gentler). The whole business just seems to me like sitting there while the author conspicuously winks at you over the course of a few hundred pages. Snore. ALSO know that my only knowledge of the Jeeves series was that Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie had once played the principal characters on a TV show. And know that I have a particularly strong affection for a certain OTHER instance where Laurie took on the role of the hapless, foppish aristocrat with an unusually intelligent servant.

The book took some getting used to! Bertie is nothing like Prince George and Jeeves nothing like Blackadder.  I thought that I would be expected to "root" for Jeeves, but I found myself much more interested in and sympathetic to Bertie, though that may just be because I am silly and foppish and idle and drunk. And the book isn't really funny. It's... light, refreshing, genial. But not "funny." It's something to make you smile, but nothing to make you laugh. And once you settle down into the pace and the benign risks of Wodehouse's world, the whole thing is about as pleasant as a book can be.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy [link]

Do you remember the movie L.A. Confidential? A slick noir throwback with Kevin Spacey and Guy Pierce and Russell Crowe and Kim Bassinger? If you haven't seen that movie stop what you are doing and Netflix the shit out of it right now. It's one of my all-time favs, and it is the reason I read this book.

That movie, you see, is based on a novel that is part of a saga of hardboiled mysteries by James Ellroy, the first of which is The Black Dahlia. The book is good! I don't know what to say. I've typed too much already. This post is so long! Listen: if you like noir stuff, go read this book. Or better yet, go watch L.A. Confidential. That's mostly what reading the book made me want to do.

In fact, forget all the other stuff I said in this whole post. The movie L.A. Confidential is better than all of these books. What are you even doing? Go watch it!

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Hoo boy.

There is not much consensus among either writers or readers about what good literature is supposed to do. If you are feeling masochistic, dig up the forums on any amateur writing website and browse the clumsy threads about craft, about the difference between "entertainment" and "art," about "genre" and "emotional ressonance" and "style." You'll soon realise that people often want different things from their books, and that even when they want the same thing they are insistent about the language in which those things are framed.

I have my own specific, cranky, silly opinions, but the real answer to these butterfingered debates is a book called The Corrections by a guy named Jonathan Franzen. Whatever you want to call what happens over the course of those 530ish pages, that is what great literature does. And with the exception of the dream I had last night where Rashida Jones became my Facebook friend (Hi Rashida Jones!), picking up The Corrections is the best thing to happen to me in the last month.

The book is about a family, The Lamberts. It's about Enid, a Midwestern housewife, and Alfred, her emotionally-distant, retired-engineer husband, and their three adult children: 1) Chip, an ex-professor of "cultural criticism" who lost his academic position after seducing a student 2) Gary, a banker and mild alcoholic whose fragile, beautiful wife and three children are increasingly estranged from him and 3) Denise, a top-tier chef with a penchant for married men (and women).

There's not much of a story to go around. Much of the novel is, incredibly, told through long, expositional, summarizing flashbacks. One by one, the reader explores the life of each member of the family, watches them make mistakes, and the whole thing culminates at "one last" family Christmas back in the fictional fly-over-country suburb of St. Jude.

Things happen, make no mistake. You'll experience autumn cruise-liners, Lithuanian crime lords, investment fraud, and experimental psychotropic therapies. Also a scene involving a talking piece of human excrament (Whatever, Franzen. I guess you can do what you want!). But the real meat of the story comes from the observations of the human condition. Every one of the five characters is simultaneously repugnant and sympathetic, and it is painful to bear witness to their commitment to self-sabatoge and catastrophe. You could turn to any single page and come quickly to an uncomfortable truth about either yourself or someone you know well. Reading Gary's story, in particular, was almost too heartbreaking for me.

I'm learning that it's hard to write a long review of a piece of fiction. I can't discuss the details of the book because they would be nonsense, and the events would lose their emotional impact in summary. There's no thesis whose implications can be dissected like a non-fiction review might try to do.

So let's just be clear about one thing: This is one of the best books I've ever read. I mean that both in terms of its technical execution, and in terms of its poignancy. A piece of writing has never made me cry, but the end of this book sure made me choke up a bit on my tequila-and-Hawaiian-punch.



P.S. Oh, you can read a really exceptional essay by Franzen at (of all places!) Oprah.com, since his newest book is her BookClub book currently. The essay is called "My Bird Problem."

Mini Reviews November 2010

Oh, hey internet. I didn't see you there. I'm just writing a little blog entry. Nothing special!

I read a lot of things that are worth reading, but not particularly worth talking about for very long. So in between my long-form book discussions, I think I'll have little mini-reviews of exactly those kinds of things. I'm in the middle of graduate school applications, so it will probably be at least a month before I write another long book review. This should tide you over until then! (What more do you want from me, you monsters!)


The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

I <3 English mysteries. I love to read them, especially after a long day, or when I'm particularly tired. They are the doughnuts of my literary diet. That sounds condescending, but it isn't really. Doughnuts are great! Who doesn't like doughnuts? And like most doughnuts, The Body in the Library was pretty great and pretty forgettable. And I'm already ready for another one.

The Omnivoire's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

 I've been pretending that I'd already read this book for a LONG time. I didn't know if I would ever really get around to it. I figured most of its lessons had trickled down into the culture, and I sort of thought I "got" the essential features of the food movement. But apparently in the world of Food and Agriculture, the devil is in the details. The book is so much more than just an indictment of monoculture. It's also an expedition across the landscape of American food production in all its iterations, and all the stops on the trip are fascinating. Pollan's writing is even-handed, kind to all his subjects, and about as readable as non-fiction gets this side of Malcolm Gladwell.

The Word for World is Forrest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is my favorite science fiction writer, probably. Her writing is clear and fast, but also poetic and intellectually energizing. I found this little book one fall a few years ago. My girlfriend and I were driving around Green Bluff, an area of small farms and orchards north of Spokane, visiting pumpkin patches and apple orchards. We stopped at an old home that had been converted into an antique store. Tucked away inside of an old armoire or rolltop-desk I came across this little 90 page novella that I had never heard of. It sat on my bookshelf unread until a week ago. It's very good! Certainly, its worth the few hours or so it takes to read. The story will be exceedingly familiar if you saw Avatar last year. The book is charming and sometimes-obvious, and feels special and welcoming.

Open by Andre Agassi

This book was much better than I thought it would be. I couldn't care less about tennis, but I could not put this thing down. Agassi is an incredible character--a perfectionist driven by a monster father, a man who loathes the sport at which he excels. There's not much more to say about it. Philip Roth should just steal the character type for his next novel and win another Pulitzer.

Thanks! Bye!

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

In this climate of political contention--of attack ads and incendiary rhetoric, of uncertainty and mistrust, of "birthers" and "9/11 insiders" and "blame-America-first types"--it's satisfying to just sit back and celebrate the one thing we can all agree on as Americans: Atheists are just the worst. Am I right? With their tweed jackets and their gluten-free lattes and their This American Life podcasts. Oh man! Just the absolute worst! And I'm not saying that Sam Harris is the Antichrist for sure. But it's hard to deny the physical similarities.*

I've never read anything by Harris before, but I'm a big fan of his role in the Religious Debate circuit, much more than Dawkins, Hitchens or even Dennett, the other so-called "Four Horsemen" of "New Atheism." (I think Ringo is the cutest.) I became interested in his newest book after hearing his TED talk earlier this year, in which he introduced the thesis. Essentially, his argument is this: Contrary to popular belief, science can and should have something to say about morality, which is reducible to concerns about the well-being of conscious creatures, which is (at least in principle) a measurable phenomenon.

It's a simple enough conceit, but the lecture left me absolutely floored. Despite the fact that I still had opinions about the rightness or wrongness of certain behaviors... I deferred to the tide of otherwise-intelligent thinkers who maintained that morality occupied the sphere of Religions, and that in a material universe all actions were equally morally neutral. It never occurred to me to notice that though Morality may have no spiritual source, the concept need not be rendered meaningless. One could make claims about the morality of an issue by appealing to nothing more than the likelihood of it altering the well-being of those involved. Harris correctly points out in the book that this is essentially what we all do anyway, however we may choose to actually frame the idea.

I watched the video several times, shared it with friends, and posted it to my Facebook--twice. So it's an understatement to say that I was eager to begin the book itself.

Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed. In a way it's my own fault. As Harris notes, the central claim is a philosophical one (not itself a science claim, that is), and I understood it and was convinced the moment I heard his talk. Frankly, the concept seems fairly self-evident now. So, when passages in the book attempted to explain or elaborate on the thesis, I found myself thinking "DUUUH," and when it meandered across the more general topic of morality, I sometimes wondered when he'd return to the specific claim at hand.

It's a short book, 191 pages, not including notes and references, and a quick read. The material is interesting, and Harris has a refreshing, clear non-fiction style. He does not--yet--seem interested in making any particular moral claims. Instead, his goal seems to be to allow us to discuss the morality of our world using a new vocabulary. So, while I have no doubt that he would appreciate the book sale, in some sense he is advancing his goal every time someone simply reads the dust jacket (or browses a review on a hip new blog!).

I doubt I will often return to the book, but it's already changed the way I think about morality. Or, no. That isn't true actually, because I (like everyone) have always thought of morality in terms of the well-being of conscious creatures. But the book has changed the way I think about thinking about morality. Whoa.

*I'm kidding. We can have experiences that are mysterious and humbling and emotionally powerful. And the contexts of ritual and fellowship may add special meaning to these experiences. But, duh, that does not mean that the universe is run by some guy (it probably isn't), and it doesn't mean that Jesus or Mohammed were any more divine than you or I (they weren't), and it doesn't mean that the Bible is the word of God (it aint). Sorry!