“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke

I was not sure I would enjoy a thousand page novel about magicians set in a slightly skewed Napoleonic England. But to call this playful historical fiction would not be a stretch. British ministers like Wellington and Canning all dip into the story, but Norrell and his pupil, Strange, take center stage throughout. By the turn of the nineteenth century, all of British magic had been lost and forgotten. People still remembered the tales of the Raven King, John Uskglass, who swept down with his fairy armies to conquer the north of England, but the practice of contemporary magic had long ceased. The fun thing about Clarke’s novel is it is interspersed with footnotes for the reader to dig deeper into the history of magic in England. For instance, in chapter 23 footnote 6, we learn, “There have been very few magicians who did not learn magic from another practitioner. The Raven King was not the first British magician. There had been others before him—notably the seventh-century half-man, half-demon, Merlin—but at the time the Raven King came into England there were none.” Active magic dipped into and out of the realm, preserved only in the realm of fairies. In another footnote we learn, “Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic come very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.” Clarke’s dedication to the backstories and fake histories of magic is what makes this novel so memorable. She really builds the edifice on which the story of the novel rests. It becomes just one story within the history of magic in England.

By the nineteenth century, there were only a handful of theoretical magicians, who only studied the history of magic, and a few more charlatans, who claimed to read futures and conjured simple love spells. Norrell was the first practicing magician of his age. A country gentleman, he had acquired every book on magic he could get his hands on from the old aristocratic libraries and made it his task, not just to study, but to do magic. Norrell also hid his books and his spells from almost everyone. That changed with Strange. The brilliantly talented, but unread, Strange became his first pupil. The relationship was always tense. “The silence which followed was peculiarly awkward. Here sat the only two English magicians of the Modern Age. One confessed he had no books; the other, as was well known, had two great libraries stuffed with them. Mere common politeness seemed to dictate that Mr Norrell make some offer of help, however slight; but Mr Norrell said nothing.” Nonetheless, Strange slowly improved his skills through trial and error and was eventually sent to the Peninsular War to help Wellington in action. ““Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”” Throughout the book, fairies play tricks, ladies return from the dead, and widows speak to cats. Eventually, there would be a falling out between the two magicians. Strange kept pushing the limits of practical magic further than Norrell was comfortable. Nonetheless, even after their parting, Strange admitted, “One can never help one’s training, you know. As a magician I shall never quite be Strange—or, at least, not Strange alone—there is too much Norrell in me.”

“Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy” by Wolfram Eilenberger (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

This is popular philosophical biography at its finest—a group portrait of four of the twentieth century’s most profound Germanic philosophers. Eilenberger weaves back and forth between the four men, comparing and contrasting their lives, their struggles, their thoughts on metaphysics, and their place in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and the world of the 1920s at large.

Eilenberger begins with Ludwig von Wittgenstein, “The Tractatus is a therapeutic contribution to the question of what one can meaningfully talk about as a human being and what one cannot.” As Wittgenstein, himself, concludes his book, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein was not the most easy man to deal with, either personally or philosophically. Initially, he also had a high idea of the Tractatus. In fact, after he finished writing the book, he thought that it had solved all of philosophy’s problems. Nonetheless, he realized that it would be hard to comprehend, even for great minds like Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” He is even more explicit in the forward to the Tractatus, but also states the essential limits inherent in all philosophy. “I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in showing how little has been done when this problem has been solved.” Trying to explain more to his publisher, Wittgenstein continues that the “meaning of the book is an ethical one: the present one, and everything that I have not written. And that second part, [the part not written,] is the important one. The ethical is delimited by my book so to speak.”

Wittgenstein clarifies what he feels is the difference between science and philosophy, as well as the limits of both. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” Wittgenstein remains enigmatically esoteric to the last, “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions, then he sees the world rightly.” Eilenberger explains Wittgenstein’s thoughts at the time. “The conviction that language, out of its internal logic, bears within itself at every stage and every state of culture the forces needed to heal those very misunderstandings and misinterpretations that language itself constantly provokes and creates was already the foundation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic program in the Tractatus.”

After returning to Cambridge in 1929 and debating with Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa daily, Wittgenstein would largely repudiated his whole masterwork. “I used to believe that there was the everyday language in which we all speak normally and a primary language that expresses what we really know, namely phenomena…. Now I would like to explain why I no longer maintain that view. I believe that in essence we only have one language and that is ordinary language. We do not need to find a new language or construct a set of symbols, rather everyday language is already the language, provided that we can liberate it from the obscurities that lie within it. Our language is already completely in order if only we are clear about what it symbolizes. Other languages than the ordinary ones are also valuable… for example artificial symbolism is useful in the depiction of the processes of deduction…. But as soon as one sets about considering real states of affairs, one sees that this symbolism is at a disadvantage compared to our real language. Of course it is quite wrong to talk about a subject-predicate form. In reality, there is not one, but very many.”

Much of Eilenberger’s book builds up to the famous 1929 debate at Davos between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Eilenberger builds it as a clashing of two worlds. And philosophically speaking, it was the staid and dull Neo-Kantism of Cassirer being challenged and usurped by a full frontal phenomenological attack by Heidegger, which even paid no respect to his friendly predecessors like Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s former mentor.

But first, Cassirer’s philosophy, “According to Cassirer, the human being is above all a sign-using and sign-making creature—an animal symbolicum…. We give ourselves and our world meaning, support, and orientation through the use of signs… symbolic forms in Cassirer’s terminology—those of myth, art, mathematics, or music. These symbols, be they linguistic, pictorial, acoustic, or gestural, are never self-explanatory; they need interpretation by other human beings. The process by which signs are placed into the world, interpreted, and augmented by others is the process of culture, and it the ability to use signs that enables human beings to ask metaphysical questions.” Cassirer writes, “If all culture is manifested in the creation of specific image-worlds, of specific symbolic forms, the aim of philosophy is not to go behind all these creations, but rather to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle.” Eilenberger expands, “Cassirer sees philosophy more as one innovative voice among many, and one with the function of connecting different disciplines…. One of philosophy’s essential tasks lay in identifying, beyond different disciplines, a common core that runs from one era to the next…. This culture is a continuous process of symbolically guided orientation.”

Heidegger was a protege of Husserl. Heidegger also “stresses the importance of the medium of language in human existence. He sees the actual foundation for humanity’s metaphysical essence as lying not in a distributed system of signs, however, but in a distinctly individual feeling—anxiety. More precisely, the anxiety that grips individuals when they become fully aware that their existence is essentially finite.” The human, gripped with that inescapable fact, then starts “working toward a goal that Heidegger calls authenticity.” According to Heidegger, “it is the role of philosophy to keep human beings open to the true abysses of their anxiety and thus, in an authentic sense, to liberate them.” Eilenberger explains further, “For human Dasein, in the end, there is only one fact that is truly unavoidable and at the same time always certain: the approach of death, which accompanies us as a possibility at all times…. The essential characteristic of Heideggerian “Dasein” is the fact that it is not and cannot ever be plural. “Dasein” is always only something individual, discrete, or, as he puts it, “in each case mine” (Jemeiniges).” Eilenberger stresses that Heidegger’s metaphysics was profoundly a “metaphysics of experience, the experience of Dasein, finite and aware of the fact…. What underlies our metaphysical questioning and hence metaphysics itself is not a foundation but an abyss…. Only the gaze of the abyss produces authenticity.”

Eilenberger writes of Walter Benjamin, “His worldview is profoundly symbolic: for him each person, each artwork, each object is a sign to be deciphered. And each sign exists in dynamic interrelation with every other sign. And the truth-oriented interpretation of such a sign is directed precisely at demonstrating and intellectually elaborating its integration within the great, constantly changing ensemble of signs: philosophy…. The most deviant statements, objects, and individuals, which were for that reason often ignored, contained the whole of society in microcosm…. Free human beings who thirst for knowledge must with every fiber of their being “open themselves up to remote extremes” and cannot “consider themselves successful” in their lives until they have examined, walked, or at least tried out all extremes of possibility.” Benjamin, unlike the other three philosophers, was never an academic. He was best known as a critic. But a very unique kind of critic, practicing what he saw as the only true kind of criticism. Eilenberger writes of Benjamin’s views, “The activity of criticism—if understood correctly—leaves neither the criticizing subject (the art critic) nor the criticized object (the work of art) unaffected. Both are transformed in the process—ideally toward truth…. The function of art criticism lies “not in judgment, but on the one hand [in] completion, consummation, systematization.” Second is the elevation of the art critic to the status of partial creator of the work of art. Third is the recognition that an artwork is fundamentally unstable, and changes and rejuvenates its nature and possible significance across history. Fourth, following from the thesis of the self-reference of all things, is the understanding that any criticism of a work of art can also be seen as the artwork’s criticism of itself. Critics and artists, correctly understood, thus exist on the same creative plane.” Benjamin expounds, “Thus, criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself…. Insofar as criticism is knowledge of the work of art, it is as its self-knowledge; insofar as it judges the artwork, this occurs in the latter’s self-judgement.”

Benjamin also paid the bills through translation. Similarly to criticism, he felt, “To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory…. No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.” Benjamin spent many years painstakingly translating Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Benjamin posited, “Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain?”

For Benjamin, to get to metaphysical truth one needs to dig deep into language and meaning. “Whereas all individual elements of foreign language—words, sentences, associations—are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction, in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of meaning it.” Eilenberger explains, “For Benjamin this ideal language is that of the Old Testament God… what he called “pure language,” or indeed “true language,” was the language of God.”

Davos, Switzerland: March 26, 1929. The debate at last begins: Heidegger opens,”What remains of philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided between the sciences? All that remains is knowledge of science, not of entity…. Kant sought not to provide a theory of the natural sciences, but to demonstrate the problems of metaphysics, and indeed of ontology.” Cassirer rebuts, “If we consider Kant’s work overall, major problems arise. One problem is that of freedom. That has always been the actual main problem for me: How is freedom possible? Kant says the question cannot be grasped, we grasp only the ungraspability of freedom…. The categorical imperative must be constituted in such a way that the law thus established applies not only to human beings but to all rational beings…. Morality as such leads beyond the world of phenomena. That is the decisive metaphysical aspect, that the breakthrough occurs at this point…. Heidegger has stressed that our cognitive power is finite. It is relative and it is bound. But then the questions arises: How does such a finite being come by knowledge, reason, truth?… How does this finite being reach a definition of objects which are not as such bound to finitude?… Does Heidegger want to give up all of this objectivity? Does he want to withdraw entirely to this finite being. Or if not, where does he see the breakthrough into that sphere as taking place?” Heidegger responds, “Cassirer, then, wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings. There is something in the categorical imperative that goes beyond finite being. But precisely the concept of the imperative as such shows the inner reference to a finite being…. This transcendence, too, still remains within creation and finitude…. Now to Cassirer’s question about universally valid external truths. If I say: Truth is relative to Dasein, that proposition… is a metaphysical one: truth can only be as truth and as truth has only one meaning, if Dasein exists. If Dasein does not exist, there is no truth, there is nothing at all. But it is only with the existence of something like Dasein that truth enters Dasein itself…. An inner transcendence lies within the essence of time; that time is not only what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has a horizontal character; that in future, recollected behavior I always have at the same time a horizon of present, futurity, and been-ness in general; that a… definition of time is found here, within which something like permanence of the substance is constituted for the very first time.” Cassirer again, “Philosophy must allow humans to become sufficiently free, to the extent that they can just become free. While it does that, I believe, it frees human beings—in a certain radical sense, to be sure—from anxiety as a mere disposition…. Freedom can properly be found only along the path of progressive liberation, which indeed is also an infinite process for him… I would like the sense, the goal, in fact the freeing, to be taken in this sense: ‘Anxiety throws the earthly from you.’ That is the position of idealism, to which I have always pledged myself.” Heidegger concludes, “Humans exist only in very few glimpses of the summit of their own possibility, but otherwise move in the midst of their entity…. The question of the essence of human beings… makes sense and can be justified only insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central set of problems, which leads human beings back beyond themselves and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to them there, with all their freedom, the Nothingness of their Dasein. This Nothingness is not cause for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity happens only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing human beings back, so to speak, into the harshness of their fate from the shallow aspect of human beings who use only the work of the spirit.”

Where did all these four great philosophers actually agree? Not in much, but in profound things. Eilenberger states, “A philosopher who had nothing to say about the role of language in knowledge and life in fact had actually nothing whatsoever to say. This was true for Cassirer, and if there was a conviction that Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Benjamin all embraced unreservedly and unconditionally at this stage (and every other stage) of their thought, it was this: The human form of life is one of speech. In this sense language is not one symbolic form among many, but the most important, and elemental, of all. It is the foundation of our understanding of the self and the world.” Benjamin, speaking of humanity through the ages, states, “At the height of their cultivation… [men] are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered, even if it may forever prove impotent to curb them.” Eilenberger expands, “Benjamin is thus expressing the suspicion, shared by Cassirer, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, that the modern subject’s emphasis on consciousness, precisely where it imagines itself to be entirely free and sovereign, masks only processes of repression and obscurity that, if they are not worked through, can only lead to misery, if not social destruction.” It all sounds a bit Freudian, which, of course, it is. Eilenberger reveals, “None of these thinkers ever wrote about ethics in the conventional sense, or even tried to do so.” Wittgenstein, at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club of the Heretics in November 1929, perhaps sums it up best, “My tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind, which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” All four of these men thought about the world a little askew from most. They were all geniuses in every sense of the word. But they were also all troubled (aside perhaps Cassirer). An anecdote that Hermine Wittgenstein told of her brother, Ludwig, perhaps, might sum them all up in some regard, “I told him during a long conversation that when I imagined him with his philosophically trained mind as a primary school teacher it felt to me as if someone were trying to use a precision instrument to open crates. Ludwig replied with an analogy that silenced me. He said, “You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passerby; he doesn’t know what sort of storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.””

“The Origins of You” by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, & Richie Poulton

This book uses case studies, natural experiments, and longitudinal data to identify and dig into a multitude of variations in human development. Its method is mainly prospective, gathering data in real time, as humans age, to be analyzed later, only using retrospective data to confirm results. It was co-written by four scientists, who primarily used the wealth of information from The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, supplemented by the British Environmental-Risk Study and The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. The scientists begin by recognizing that human development is a complex phenomenon. “There are many factors and forces to consider that interact in complex ways over time and space…. We focus on cognitive, social, emotional, behavioral, biological, and physical development, including health, from birth to midlife, while considering the influence of nature and nurture…. It is probabilistic, not deterministic science.”

One thing the authors stress is that people have agency in how they develop, but also that relationships interact back and forth. “The child’s temperament evoking responses from others… contribute[s] to maintaining and even amplifying the child’s early disposition…. The child can be said to be a “producer of his own development.”” When further discussing the development of temperament, the authors parse out the difference between reactive and proactive person-environment processes. In a reactive process, “individuals with different psychological and behavioral inclinations experience, interpret, and react to the same situation differently.” A proactive process “involves individuals selecting or creating their own experiences and thereby maintaining, perhaps even amplifying, their early dispositions.” The authors refer to this as “niche picking.” This proactive process “challenges notions of children as wet clay, shaped exclusively by experiences that others generate.” Genes also play a formative role in temperamental development, even as they interact with and help shape environmental choices. “Development is a dynamic, ongoing process whereby things occurring within the child and/or within the environment in which the child develops after childhood serves as a pathway that accounts for how childhood functioning comes to predict adult functioning.” Human development is continuous. “Because the effects of early life and most experiences growing up are not deterministic but instead are likely to exert their effects in a probabilistic manner, in part because of the role of various mediators in maintaining or deflecting established development trajectories, we should not expect a single intervention effort at any point in time to get the entire developmental job done when it comes to promoting future well-being.”

This book is filled with numerous examples of how genes and environment together shape human development. One particular finding that I found intriguing was the difference between how mothers and fathers raise their children, at least early on in life. “How mothers in our study who had three-year-olds behaved towards their children systematically related to their experiences as children in their families while growing up, but in the case of study members who were fathers, there was, somewhat surprisingly, no such evidence of intergenerational transmission.”

Another issue the authors raise is the metrics by which traditional human developmental researchers measure success. “For most psychologists, sociologists, economists, educators, policymakers, and parents, life is about health, wealth, and happiness. This leads many to conceptualize development as healthy versus unhealthy or “optimal” versus “compromised.”” This does not necessarily make sense from an evolutionary perspective. “What succeeds in passing on genes to the next generation is best, and, critically, that depends on the context or circumstances in which a living organism exists, including those in which it develops…. What will prove most successful in passing on genes to descendants when growing up under one set of conditions, such as in a well-functioning harmonious family, should not be presumed to do so under different conditions, such as when there is much family conflict and limited attention paid to children. This evolutionary-biological view of life implies that the forces of Darwinian natural selection have adapted our species to respond to its experiences growing up in a manner that would increase the chances of the developing child surviving, maturing, and reproducing…. From this perspective, what has long been regarded as evidence of “compromised” development may be actually anything but…. What many today regard as compromised, troubled, or problematic development may well have evolved as a strategic response to adversity…. Our species, like many others, evolved the capacity to vary its development depending on early-life experiences and exposures…. Because evolution typically takes a great deal of time, we retain the responsiveness built into our species over the eons even though it is no longer as reproductively beneficial as it once was…. The fast [female] developer should… produce more children, even while “investing” less in them in terms of energy, time, and economic resources.” The authors suggest this is why, empirically, they found that girls who grew up in dysfunctional homes experienced puberty, on average, one to two years sooner than more advantaged girls. “The more parents regarded and treated their four-and-a-half-year-old harshly, the earlier their daughters had their first period…. By age fifteen, girls who matured earlier had engaged in more sexual risk taking than other girls…. They were not more likely, however, to engage in other risk-taking behavior, such as drinking and drug taking.”

The authors next tackle the issue of genotype relating to phenotype. “There is a long chain of biological (and sometimes psychological and behavioral) events linking genotype with phenotype.” Environmental exposures and experiences are often necessary before a phenotype manifests. The authors refer back to niche-picking in suggesting agency is critical to human development. “Central to the niche-picking idea is an appreciation that individuals are often producers of their own development.” They use the particular example of intellectual development. “In the niche-picking case, genetics and intelligence may go together because those with certain genes find reading and learning more interesting, fun, and thus attractive than do others of a different genetic makeup. As a result, they end up more intelligent not simply because it is in their genes but rather because there is something about their genes that inclines them to do things—such as go to the library and be attentive in school—that foster intellectual development.” Again, the authors also stress the back and forth interplay with others in their environment. “How others react to a person’s behavior and how this feeds back to shape the person’s development and functioning” reinforce each other. “How genotypes can require certain contextual conditions to develop into phenotypes make[s] clear… that genes operate in an environmental context.”

The authors stress that any one individual gene plays a minimal role in almost all phenotype expression. “Because whole-genome research is identifying so many genes related to virtually all phenotypes investigated, there is ever more reason to believe that many genes exert only a very small effect on the phenotype in question, if it is actually causally influencing the phenotype [at all] (and not just correlated with it)…. Many, even most, genes are systematically related to many different phenotypes. Pleiotropy is the scientific term used to refer to this biological reality…. Given pleiotropy, even if specific genes are associated with a particular phenotype, it does not logically follow that all these genes are exclusively associated with that one phenotype.”

The book backtracks somewhat to discuss single gene-environment interaction (GXE). Particularly, they look at the effect of serotonin on depression as expressed through the gene 5-HTTLPR. “Not everyone reacts the same way to the same adversity…. Serious negative life events are a “risk factor” for depression…. Such risks are typically realized when other risk conditions co-occur…. Because of differences in their genetic makeup some people succumb to adversity whereas others do not.” This is called the diathesis-stress (or dual risk) model of psychopathology. “Instead of thinking about genes for this or that illness or psychopathology, we thought about genes for susceptibility to potential environmental influences…. Some individuals are more susceptible than others to both positive and negative environmental exposures and developmental experiences. Thus, imagine a science that sought to identify not just genes that supposedly “code” for some illness or malady but also genes that shape the way we respond to environmental insults—such as toxins or life stressors—and/or supports, such as high-quality schooling or positive life events.”

Finally, the authors sought to establish links between childhood socio-economic class origins and adult health. “Results revealed that three of four measurements of physical health—body-mass index, waist-hip ratio, and cardiorespiratory fitness, but not systolic blood pressure—showed a graded, dose-response relation with a child’s social-class origin…. The same proved true of dental health, indexed by amount of plaque on teeth, bleeding of gums, periodontal disease, and decayed tooth surfaces…. The fact that all these detected effects of childhood economic disadvantage on physical and dental health remained even when study members’ own occupational status at age twenty-six was controlled meant that the findings could not be the result of their social-class “destination.”” However, the authors caution that there could be confounding variables involved and, again, not to assume causation. “Even though adversity in childhood predicted poorer objective health in midlife, the possibility remains that other factors—third variables—might have influenced both the predictor and outcomes.”

The scientists also focused their analysis on the pace of aging versus chronological age. “Cells “turn over,” with existing ones eventually dying and being replaced by new ones through a process of cell division and thereby replication. Every time this occurs, that cap on the end of the chromosome—the telomere—shortens…. A cell line exists for only so long, and after enough cell divisions have occurred, the telomere no longer caps the end of the chromosome and cell death occurs…. [Therefore] the shorter the telomere, the older the cell and thus the older the individual…. It also turns out that they are shorter in adults suffering from age-related diseases than in their healthy counterparts of the same chronological age…. Children whose childhoods are characterized by adversity have shorter telomeres than those of other children of the same chronological age…. [Even] newborns whose mothers have experienced more stress during pregnancy have shorter telomeres than other newborns…. [Furthermore,] our study was the first to shed light on how adversity affects the development of telomeres…. Exposure to adversity in the form of psychological and physical violence predicts the actual shortening or erosion of telomeres over time…. Cells were aging, biologically speaking, faster than their agemates’ cells.” The authors conclude by cautioning, however, that, in general, although “individual differences in children within the first decade of life can forecast how they will function decades later, the power to predict later development from childhood measurements is often, though not always, limited…. The predictive power of any one force or factor will be limited most of the time.”

“Answer to Job” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this short book, Jung brings his close reading of Biblical texts to an esoteric interpretation of the story of Job. He begins by putting himself in Job’s head. “[Job] has to admit that no one except Yahweh himself is doing him injustice and violence…. This is perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this difficulty, he does not doubt the unity of God…. As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is equally certain of the good…. [Yahweh] is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence.” This dualism in no way contradicts monotheism, the opposites are contained within one god. “The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heavily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents his case to the eyes and ears of the world. It is amazing to see how easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought, and made unsure of Job’s faithfulness.” Jung makes the case that Yahweh wantonly chooses not to consult his own omniscience and, instead, is swayed by his son, Satan. “His faithful servant Job is now exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job’s faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience.”

Jung goes into more detail about the nature of God. “It is behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not a man.”” In a footnote, Jung expands, “The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic…. Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.” This god-beyond-morality is how Jung allows evil and suffering into our world.

Job is singled out as the scapegoat. As with the Girardian scapegoat mechanism, here the scapegoat is the most innocent among men. He is the victim and the one who is wronged. “One cannot doubt Yahweh’s connivance. His readiness to deliver Job into Satan’s murderous hands proves that he doubts Job precisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat…. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him, with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith subjected to a grueling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his own faithfulness…. Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself…. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh’s nature.”

Man was first corrupted when he chose knowledge over faith in the Garden. Wisdom has become a corrective for Yahweh’s wrath. “Fear of God is regarded by man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all wisdom.” Jung posits that after Job, Yahweh has changed. He wants to feel human. “There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself, or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only one significant exception—the despairing cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer…. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.”

Jung makes much of opposites in his discussion of Saint John’s Revelation and the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, he also brings the unconscious to the fore. “But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave.” John tries to see only a loving God, but must resign himself to his terrible nature, as well. “Just because John loved God and did his best to love his fellows also, this “gnosis,” this knowledge of God, struck him. Like Job, he saw the fierce and terrible side of Yahweh. For this reason he felt his gospel of love to be one-sided, and he supplemented it with the gospel of fear: God can be loved but must be feared.” God is the totality of consciousness and the unconscious. “God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite…. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite…. The God-concept, as the idea of all-embracing totality also includes the unconscious, and hence, in contrast to consciousness, it includes the objective psyche, which so often frustrates the will and intentions of the conscious mind. Prayer, for instance, reinforces the potential of the unconscious.” The human quest for enlightenment is bound to fail, because it can never be the complete totality of experience. “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowledge boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”

“Antkind” by Charlie Kaufman

It would not be hyperbole to say that I have never read a novel quite like this. It is Kaufmanesque in the very best sense. It is hilarious and intellectual and uncomfortable and very very weird. The pace is surprisingly plodding, because each scene is so disjointedly odd. The words need time to be savored. The novel is disorienting. Somehow, just like in Kaufman’s screenplays, the novel just works as a whole though. Did I mention it is over seven hundred pages long? The plot plays with the nature of time, of self, of memory, of consciousness, and of art.

The anti-hero of the novel is R. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a vehemently non-Jewish film critic living in New York City.  He is opinionated, well read, and woke. “What I do, what I give to the world, is that I watch. I observe. I perceive. I take it inside me. In this way, I represent the Universal Feminine. I am not ashamed to be a feminine man. I take creative work inside me like semen. I allow it to impregnate my egg-like mind, to gestate. And what is born is the intercoiling of these two consciousnesses. Without sperm, there is no impregnation, but without the egg, the sperm is useless, hardened into an old sock. I am receptive to true art, to true creativity.”

Traveling down to St. Augustine, Florida on assignment, Rosenberg bumps into his neighbor in a ratty apartment complex. An elderly man of mystery, Ingo, who has created a claymation movie over the course of ninety some years, offers to show Rosenberg his masterpiece, “The film runs for three months including predetermined bathroom, food, and sleep breaks. My idea is the restlessness of the movie will cause it to enter your psyche and thus infect your dream life. It is a filmic experiment of sorts that posits an equal relationship between artist and viewer, in that the viewer will not, after viewing it in its entirety, be certain where the film has left off and his own dreams have taken over. Or hers.” Ingo dies during the course of the screening, extracting a promise from Rosenberg, before they began, that he will never show the film to another living soul.

Ingo has also made a whole world of clay puppets who never make it into his actual three-month-long film, but who, nonetheless, exist, off camera, residing in his film world. Rosenberg extols, “That all these puppets are so delicately and tenderly animated in their pain and that they were meant never to be seen—as most of us are meant never to be—brings an overwhelming pathos to the imagery.” He recounts the words of Ingo, ““Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us…. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people…. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen. These [movie director] men have perpetuated a fiction. I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.”” Ingo poignantly echoes the end of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”.

One of Kaufman’s reoccurring gags is to have Rosenberg rip on Kaufman. He rips on his movies, his writing, and his comedy. “Who I do not honor are the comedians who condescend, the Charlie Kaufmans, the Pee-wee Hermans, the Robert Downey Seniors (Junior is a genius). These three men (and I use that term in the most derisively contemporary way) have sextuple-handedly corrupted the noble tradition of gentle humor that stretches back time immemorial, by inserting their toxic masculinity, their white cis privilege, their faux concern for the little man, their misogyny, into what was once a pure and delightful form that stretches back time immemorial. Why can’t they see women as a people rather than mysteries and saviors and manic pixie dream whatevers? Maybe they could start by having women as friends. Or maybe they need to get laid.”

Rosenberg’s bildungsroman ends as mysteriously as it began. A memory, perhaps false, of Ingo waxes philosophical, parroting Heraclitus, “Everything is different, always. That’s what I’ve concluded on this journey of mine. The trees along the road may look the same, but they’re not. They change. You can’t see again what you saw yesterday. It’s no longer here and neither are you. We are all of us the victims of the illusion of constancy. I may seem like a continuation of who I was a second ago, but that is only a trick, like a motion picture trick. And we humans do love to be tricked…. Look, you saw then what you could see then. After, you remembered what you could remember. Now you see what you can see now. This is what I call the human condition.”