“Houdini’s Box- The Art of Escape” by Adam Phillips

In this short book Phillips switches back and forth between chapters “analyzing” Harry Houdini and an unnamed male patient with a sexual fetish and commitment issues, while ruminating on life as continual escape. In the life always focused on escape there is a constant basic tension. “What we want is born of what we want to get away from.” Phillips also reminds that the act of escape is a verb- a doing. “Getting free was the adventure, not being free.” There are two parts to every successful escape- a beginning and an end or a before and an after, if you like. “A person running away from something, the psychoanalyst Michael Balint once remarked, is also running towards something else.” What we are running away from maybe more known to us than what we are running to. We may be more sure of that (and the why). “Phobias remind us, in all their unreasonable urgency and their frantic commitment to safety, just how fundamental a sense of our avoiding things is to our sense of ourselves…. It is as though if we can keep ourselves sufficiently busy escaping, we can forget that that is what we are doing. The opposite of fear, one could say, is choice.” Sometimes escape is the easiest option. Sometimes that is because it is no option at all. Whatever escape is, however, it is only a beginning. “One can escape into doubt about what one wants, or one can escape from doubt about what one wants.” Escape is the easy part. It is only then that one’s options truly begin. Phillips concludes by pondering the fate of Emily Dickinson. No one knows what she was escaping from. Her escape was inward, into seclusion- physically, emotionally, and intellectually. “There is, she seems to say, no freedom in the notion of escape; it merely reveals what the prison is really like.”

“Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev’s novel takes place in the landscape of 19th century Russia, a place and time undergoing rapid change as enlightenment ideas flowed eastward from Europe and gradually began to affect the Russian landed gentry and intelligentsia  This novel is largely about the generational divide in these changing times. It was a time when the young were exerting themselves and the old felt their time had come and gone. New scientific and political ideas ruled the day. The serfs were now free and were paying rent on their newly granted lands. Masters bent over backwards to think of themselves as liberal and servants walked about with an air of self respect bordering on haughtiness. However, this novel is about even more than all of that. It turns on the universal nature of man, his eternal needs, the meaning of life, and on love itself. Turgenev was himself pulled in competing directions- not liberal enough for the reformers and dangerously free thinking for the conservative establishment. He sometimes tried to have it both ways, but firmly considered himself an enlightened mind. Belinsky was his mentor, friend, and inspiration. This novel successfully depicts the changing times in Russia, while doing credit to both the old guard and the new fashions of thinking, just like the author himself.

“Untimely Meditations” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This collection of four of Nietzsche’s essays broadly revolve around the theme of culture. The writings reflect on the characteristics of a cultured man, the role of the philosopher in society, truth and art, the uses of history in modern life, and, specifically, German culture after the Franco-Prussian war. “Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it.” In his next essay, Nietzsche discusses the difference between the everlasting and the historical, “With the word ‘the unhistorical’ I designate the art and power of forgetting and of enclosing oneself within a bounded horizon; I call ‘suprahistorical’ the powers which lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and stable, towards art and religion. Science—for it is science which would here speak of poisons—sees in these two forces hostile forces: for science considers the only right and true way of regarding things, that is to say the only scientific way, as being that which sees everywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowhere things that are, things eternal.”

Nietzsche delves into the purpose of true philosophy in his essay championing his predecessor, Schopenhauer, “The truthful man feels that the meaning of his activity is metaphysical, explicable through the laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest sense affirmative…. So it is that all his acts must become an uninterrupted suffering…. He will, to be sure, destroy his earthly happiness through his courage; he will have to be an enemy to those he loves and to the institutions which have produced him; he may not spare men or things, even though he suffers when they suffer; he will be misunderstood and for long thought an ally of powers he abhors; however much he may strive after justice he is bound, according to the human limitations of his insight, to be unjust; but he may console himself with the words once employed by his great teacher, Schopenhauer: ‘A happy life is impossible: the highest that man can attain to is a heroic one.’”

Finally, in an essay on Wagner, he again explicitly mentions culture, aesthetic truth, and art. “Danger and despair lie in wait for every true artist thrown into the modern world…. We can see how the most serious artist will try forcibly to impose seriousness on the institution of which he is part, an institution which has, however, been constructed frivolously and demands frivolity almost as a matter of principle; how he partially succeeds but in the end always fails; how he begins to feel disgust and wants to flee, how he fails to find anywhere to flee to, and is again and again obliged to return to the gypsies and outcasts of our culture as one of them.”

Nietzsche concludes, “The history of the evolution of culture since the Greeks is short enough, if one takes into account the actual distance covered and ignores the halts, regressions, hesitations, and lingerings. The Hellenization of the world and, to make this possible, the orientalization of the Hellenic—the twofold task of the great Alexander—is still the last great event; the old question whether a culture can be transplanted to a foreign soil at all is still the problem over which the moderns weary themselves.” Finally, Nietzsche describes the fate of any true artist, as opposed to the lone philosopher, who has to live within his cultural milieu, “For it is, to be sure, a life full of torment and shame, to be a homeless wanderer in a world to which one nonetheless has to speak and of which one has to make demands, which one despises and yet is unable to do without—it is the actual predicament of the artist of the future; he cannot, like the philosopher, hunt after knowledge all by himself in a dark corner, for he needs human souls as mediators with the future, public institutions as guarantees of this future, as bridges between the now and the hereafter.”

“Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo (translated by Douglas J. Weatherford)

This novella, from 1955, is considered a Mexican classic of magical realism. Reading it also supposedly cured Marquez of a stubborn case of writer’s block. The story begins hauntingly, “I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. That’s what my mother told me. And I promised her I’d come see him as soon as she died….—Don’t ask him for anything. Just insist on what’s ours. What he was obligated to give me but never did . . . Make him pay dearly, my son, for the indifference he showed toward us.” Before long, real ghosts and spirits make there presence felt in the town of Comala. “If only you could see the horde of souls that roam the streets. They come out as soon as it gets dark, and we’re all afraid of seeing them. With so many of them and so few of us we no longer plead for them to be freed from their torment. There just aren’t enough prayers to go around. Maybe we could say a few lines of the Lord’s Prayer for each one, but what good would that do? And then there’s the matter of our own sins. There’s not a one of us still alive who enjoys the grace of God. We can’t even look toward Heaven without feeling our eyes soiled with shame.” The plot is almost as depressing as it is strange. “—This world grabs onto us so tightly it squeezes out fistfuls of our dust here and there, breaking us into pieces as if to douse the land with our blood. What did we do? Why have our souls rotted away?”

“In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki (translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker).

Tanizaki is well aware that his aesthetic proclivities cannot be sustained in a rapidly modernizing Japan. Still, he would like to fight the good fight. “For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a family and lives in the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life.” Tanizaki describes his ideal of beauty in its many forms. “The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.” He continues on his aesthetic ideal, “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates…. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. Our ancestors made of woman an object inseparable from darkness, like lacquerware decorated in gold or mother-of-pearl. They hid as much of her as they could in shadows, concealing her arms and legs in the folds of long sleeves and skirts, so that one part and one only stood out—her face.” 

Tanizaki contrasts aspects of Japanese aesthetics with those of the West. “Why should this propensity to seek beauty in darkness be so strong only in Orientals? The West too had known a time when there was no electricity, gas, or petroleum, and yet so far as I know the West has never been disposed to delight in shadows.” He continues, “Pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are as clear as glass. This is true too of our household implements: we prefer colors compounded of darkness, they prefer the colors of sunlight. And of silver and copperware: we love them for the burnish and patina, which they consider unclean, insanitary, and polish to a glittering brilliance…. We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.”

“Vita Nuovo” by Dante Alighieri (translated by Joseph Luzzi)

This is a short book written by Dante about the love of his life, Beatrice. “The sun had already circled the earth nine times since my birth when the glorious lady of my mind appeared before my eyes. Many called her Beatrice, she who blesses, even if they did not know her name…. So she was in the beginning of her ninth year when I saw her, while I was at the end of mine…. Then this awestruck animal spirit, which lives in the brain that receives he perceptions of all the other sensitive spirits, directed its words to the eyes and said to them in Latin, “Your bliss has now appeared.”” The personification of Love then speaks directly to Dante, “And since Beatrice has actually known the gist of your long-held secret for quite a while, I would like you to write some verses that describe the power that I, Love, have over you because of her, and how you have devoted yourself to her ever since you were a boy.”

This book is mix of prose and verse sprinkled together. However, as the chapters build in momentum the verse takes prominence, while the prose becomes explanatory. Dante begins a poem, “My lady brings love to the eyes,/ To see her is to feel her grace./ All men stare where she passes by,/ Her greeting causes trembling heart,/ So that, eyes down, a man turns pale,/ Lamenting over his defects,/ As she dispels all pride and wrath./ O ladies, help me sing her praise.” Dante has a premonition of his love, Beatrice’s, death. “Lord Love then said, “I hide no more:/ Now come to see your lady’s rest.”/ My wild fantasy conveyed/ Me to my lady’s sad remains,/ And when I found her body there,/ I saw her face covered by veil,/ She wore a look of modest grace,/ As if to say, “I am in peace.”” Alas, his foreboding proved all too prescient, “Time was, her beauty shed such joy—/ And now it’s fled the eyes for good,/ Transformed to loveliness of soul,/ Sending to heaven up above/ A light of love that angels see,/ Causing their lofty minds to stare/ In wonder at such female grace.”

“In Praise of Floods” by James C. Scott

In this short book, Scott uses the Ayeyarwady River in Burma as a lens to discuss the evolution of rivers across geological time, as well as, particularly, the effect that humans have had on their path and their health. “If we consider a river to be an assemblage of life-forms dependent on the flow of water, silt, sand, clay, and gravel—all the elements that we call a river—then our conception of the entity must necessarily include all of its upstream tributaries and all of its delta distributaries. Not only are they all connected as a system of moving water and floodplains, many of the life-forms that depend on the river migrate between the many watercourses and rely on the flood pulse for their nutrition and reproduction…. The annual flood pulse is the most consequential movement of a river for all the life-forms dwelling in and around it. Whether impelled by monsoon rains, snow or glacial melt, or seasonal rains, the flood pulse represents that part of the year during which the river overflows its channel banks and inundates the adjacent floodplain. It may, year by year, vary in its amplitude, its timing, and its duration. But it is a completely natural part of the annual cycle of a river’s hydrology.”

Over the centuries, agriculture has been, arguably, the largest source of anthropogenic destruction to a river’s natural flow. “Only rich, annually renewed alluvial soils could, given the constraints of transport in the ancient world, provide the concentration of manpower and taxable, storable foodstuffs that made even modest state-making possible…. The most common form of early agriculture is known as “flood recession agriculture” (in French: cultivation decrue). It is still practiced throughout the world because it has been shown to be the most labor-saving form of agriculture…. The flood does almost all the work…. All that remains for the cultivator to do is broadcast or insert seeds in the prepared soil, giving the crop a head start on other plants…. Along with clearing the land for crops (deforestation), the second founding act of floodplain agriculture is drainage. This is, in effect, the war to exterminate mud and replace it with well-drained soil. What remains are watercourses (drainage and irrigation ditches) and arable land.”

The formation of the nation-state was an integral part in the course of river modifications. “The early state is an ecologically invasive, artificial order. Fixed-field agriculture, irrigated wet rice, and aboveground simultaneously ripening cereals all require a simplification of the landscape…. The state is constantly modifying its environment, simplifying it…. Whereas the hunter-gatherer adapts to the complex rhythms of the natural world to subsist, the early state strives to subdue this movement and complexity—to create a state-serving habitat. A state-serving habitat is one stripped down to a narrow band of domesticated crops and domesticated animals…. The key to the nexus between cereals and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation and appropriation: they grow aboveground; their yield can be assessed; they are storable, portable, and can be used as rations; and most of the crop ripens at the same time. This last characteristic is crucial, for it means that tax and tithe gatherers can appropriate all or part of the harvest.”

Scott concludes his paean to the natural wild-flowing river, “The river is a living hydrological community that helps spawn, feed, and shelter large numbers of flora and fauna, from algae to insects to dolphins. The life-sustaining watershed system, if allowed to move as it will, is more productive of life and biodiversity than virtually any other natural system. Any intervention by hard-path engineering to maximize the return from a river is likely to damage its life-giving properties, making it far less productive over the long term…. The hubris embedded in cost-benefit analyses and their cousin ecosystem services is nothing short of staggering. Given our wealth of ignorance about the environment and interspecies connections, it seems presumptuous to assume that hard-path engineers know more than the river…. Soft-path engineering has the singular advantage of intellectual modesty with respect to what we actually know about river movement and its environmental effects…. Soft-path engineering accepts variability in the river’s movement as valuable until proven otherwise. Meanders, backwaters, ephemeral wetlands, braids and channels, swamps—all anathema to hard-path engineering—are presumed by soft-path engineers to be biotically important.”

“Moby-Dick or The Whale” by Herman Melville

Even for most who have yet to read this novel, people know that it is about a whale. Melville takes massive deviations from his plot, which is, at heart, a whale hunting voyage, to digress on the anatomy and history of the sperm whale, the details of the construction and everyday mechanics of a whaling ship, the ethnicity, background, personalities, and responsibilities of its crew, the culture, history of warfare, and dietary habits of Polynesians, and much more. But in the end, this is a novel about one man, Captain Ahab, and his obsession with one white sperm whale, Moby Dick, who took his leg in battle on the high seas.

The novel is told by Ishmael, a former merchant marine, who is on his maiden whaling voyage. “They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though…. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!”

Most American whaling ships, in Melville’s time, launched their multi-years voyages from Nantucket. “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.”

Melville stressed that the whaleman was born from particular stock. “And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm richer.” Melville describes Ahab’s ship in the midst of its hellish journey, “Then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” It is not until the last thirty pages of the novel that the Pequod, finally, gives chase to Moby Dick, “They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.”

“A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains” by Max S. Bennett

Bennett explicitly states at the beginning of this book that his discussion only details the path to intelligence that humans, specifically, took through the evolutionary process. That said, in his explanations, he references the commonalities that primates, mammals, vertebrates, and multi-celled creatures, etc shared with human development, when appropriate. “Breakthrough #1 was steering: the breakthrough of navigating by categorizing stimuli into good and bad, and turning toward good things and away from bad things. Six hundred million years ago, radially symmetric neuron-enabled coral-like animals reformed into animals with a bilateral body. These bilateral body plans simplified navigational decisions into binary turning choices….

Breakthrough #2 was reinforcing: the breakthrough of learning to repeat behaviors that historically have led to positive valence and inhibit behaviors that have led to negative valence…. Brains formed into the basic template of all modern vertebrates: the cortex to recognize patterns and build spatial maps and the basal ganglia to learn by trial and error. And both were built on top of the more ancient vestiges of valence machinery housed in the hypothalamus…. While trial and error does not explain all of animal learning, it undergirds a surprisingly large portion of it…. To solve the temporal credit assignment problem, brains must reinforce behaviors based on changes in predicted future rewards, not actual rewards. This is why animals get addicted to dopamine-releasing behaviors despite it not being pleasurable, and this is why dopamine responses quickly shift their activations to the moments when animals predict upcoming reward and away from rewards themselves…. Both disappointment and relief are emergent properties of a brain designed to learn by predicting future rewards…. In the brain, the result was the vertebrate cortex, which somehow recognizes patterns without supervision, somehow accurately discriminates overlapping patterns and generalizes patterns to new experiences, somehow continually learns patterns without suffering from catastrophic forgetting, and somehow recognizes patterns despite large variance in its input…. It is also not a coincidence that pattern recognition and reinforcement learning evolved simultaneously in evolution….

Breakthrough #3 was simulating: the breakthrough of mentally simulating stimuli and actions…. [The] neocortex enabled animals to internally render a simulation of reality. This enabled them to vicariously show the basal ganglia what to do before the animal actually did anything. This was learning by imagining. These animals developed the ability to plan. This enabled these small mammals to re-render past events (episodic memory) and consider alternative past choices (counterfactual learning)…. If you have a rich enough inner model of the external world, you can explore that world in your mind and predict the consequences of actions you have never taken…. It is when the simulation in your neocortex becomes decoupled from the real external world around you—when it imagines things that are not there—that its power becomes most evident…. Habits are automated actions triggered by stimuli directly (they are model-free). They are behaviors controlled directly by the basal ganglia. They are the way mammalian brains save time and energy, avoiding unnecessarily engaging in simulation and planning…. Humans and, indeed, all mammals (and some other animals that independently evolved simulation) sometimes pause to simulate their options (model-based, goal-driven, system 2) and sometimes act automatically (model-free, habitual, system 1)….

Breakthrough #4 was mentalizing: the breakthrough of modeling ones own mind…. This in effect, meant that these primates could simulate not only actions and stimuli (like early mammals), but also their own mental states with differing intent and knowledge…. The bigger the neocortex of a primate, the bigger its social group…. Animals who fell into the strategy of group living evolved tools to resolve disputes while minimizing the energetic cost of such disputes. This led to the development of mechanisms to signal strength and submission without having to actually engage in a physical altercation…. Understanding the minds of others requires understanding not only their intentions but also their knowledge…. The best evidence for social projection theory is the fact that tasks that require understanding yourself and tasks that require understanding others both activate and require the same uniquely primate neural structures…. When a primate watches another primate do an action. its premotor cortex often mirrors the actions it is observing…. Teaching requires understanding what another mind does not know and what demonstrations would help manipulate another mind’s knowledge in the correct way…. Understanding the intentions of movements is essential for observational learning to work; it enables us to filter out extraneous movements and extract the essence of a skill…. Both theory of mind and anticipating future needs are present, even in a primitive form, in primates, but not in many other mammals….

Breakthrough #5 was speaking: the breakthrough of naming and grammar, of tethering our inner simulations together to enable the accumulation of thoughts across generations…. First, humans evolved bigger brains…. Second, humans became more specialized within their groups…. Third, population sizes expanded…. And fourth, most recent and most important, we invented writing. Writing allows humans to have a collective memory of ideas that can be downloaded at will and that contain effectively an infinite corpus of knowledge…. We synchronize our inner simulations, turning human cultures into a kind of meta-life-form whose consciousness is instantiated within the persistent ideas and thoughts flowing through millions of human brains over generations…. The emergence from language was as monumental an event as the emergence of the first self-replicating DNA molecules. Language transformed the human brain from an ephemeral organ to an eternal medium of accumulating inventions.”

“An Experiment in Criticism” by C.S. Lewis

Lewis pontificates on the art of reading well. “The first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement an furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before…. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience.”

Lewis steps back to describe what makes a reader a good reader. “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way…. The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it…. We must never assume that we know exactly what is happening when anyone else reads a book…. No novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary is disbelief and (what is harder) his belief…. Every episode, explanation, description, dialogue—ideally every sentence—must be pleasurable and interesting for its own sake…. It is very natural that when we have gone through the ordered movements which a great play or narrative excites in us—when we have danced that dance or enacted that ritual or submitted to that pattern—it should suggest to us many interesting reflections…. But we had better not feather on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it.” Lewis concludes, “And if it is worth while listening or reading at all, is is often worth doing attentively.”