“The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” by Erving Goffman

Goffman is considered a founding doyen of American sociology, although originally hailing from Canada. This book, written in 1959, is an example of personal fieldwork mixed with broader anecdotal reporting. It is concerned with the public persona that all humans put on in the face of company. “This mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.” Goffman conceives of all public interactions as akin to performances. “A performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself and his products…. A performer often engenders in his audience the belief that he is related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case.” He quotes the authority of William James, “[An individual] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares…. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends.”

Goffman stresses the tenuousness of the public mask that we are constantly forced to maintain, “The impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps…. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs…. A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time…. A false impression maintained by an individual in any one of his routines may be a threat to the whole relationship or role of which the routine is only one part, for a discreditable disclosure in one area of an individual’s activity will throw doubt on the many areas of activity in which he may have nothing to conceal…. When one’s activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed.”

The performative Self is most often the Self that accrues status and recognition in society. “A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be realized.” Goffman furthers James’ observation that any one Self requires multiple masks for each of his multiple settings, which requires a fair amount of juggling. “The answer to this problem is for the performer to segregate his audiences so that the individuals who witness him in one of his roles will not be the individuals who witness him in another of his roles…. Incapacity to maintain this control leaves the performer in a position of not knowing what character he will have to project from one moment to the next.” Even in the most intimate of settings, we all still put on some type of mask. “There are very few friend relationships in which there is not some occasion when attitudes expressed about the friend behind his back are grossly incompatible with the ones expressed about him to his face…. Secret derogation seems to be much more common than secret praise, perhaps because such derogation serves to maintain the solidarity of the team, demonstrating mutual regard [within the friend group] at the expense of those absent.” In fact, roles and performances are always in flux and open for recalibration, based on the facts revealed and the interplay of the performers. “The performance given by a team is not a spontaneous, immediate response to the situation, absorbing all of the team’s energies and constituting their sole social reality; the performance is something the team members can stand back from, back far enough to imagine or play out simultaneously other kinds of performances attesting to other realities. Whether the performers feel their official offering is the “realest” reality or not, they will give surreptitious expression to multiple versions of reality, each version tending to be incompatible with the others.”

Goffman notes that the audience is an active member in any kind of public performance. They can be generous or biting in their understanding of the mask the performer seeks to convey to his public. They can give the benefit of the doubt or act as unbelieving skeptics. “This involves: the giving of a proper amount of attention and interest; a willingness to hold in check one’s own performance so as not to introduce too many contradictions, interruptions, or demands for attention; the inhibition of all acts or statements that might create a faux pas; the desire, above all else, to avoid a scene…. When performers make a slip of some kind, clearly exhibiting a discrepancy between the fostered impression and a disclosed reality, the audience may tactfully “not see” the slip or readily accept the excuse that is offered for it. And at moments of crisis for the performers, the whole audience may come into tacit collusion with them in order to help them out.”

Putting on this constant public performance is not always easy for the Self to maintain. The harder one tries to perform an unreality for the public, the greater the strain to the psyche. “To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” This is hard to pull off, in the sense that every Self cannot but help project some sort of public front when in the presence of other humans. The discrepancy might be small or large, but some performative aspect is always there. “When an individual appears before others, he knowingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part.” Goffman concludes, “The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited…. The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersome, of course, and sometimes breaks down, exposing its separate components.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction to the final book of the Torah, “The Book of Deuteronomy is the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Bible. It is presented, after all, as Moses’s valedictory address, which he delivers across the Jordan from the promised land just before his death.” Alter goes on to clarify, “If one tries to imagine, however, the actual audience for which Deuteronomy was first framed, it will begin to be evident that its impressive deployment of rhetoric serves another purpose. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, and the rhetoric of Deuteronomy is meant to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text—the national assembly in trans-Jordan that was a second covenant after the covenant at Sinai…. The midrashic notion that all future generations of Israel were already present as witnesses at Sinai is adumbrated, perhaps actually generated, by this rhetorical strategy of the evocation of witnessing in Deuteronomy.”

Alter relates some of the syntactical moves in Deuteronomy. He claims, “The role of stylistic indicators of temporal and spatial location and orientation—those “pointing words” that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to the creation of this general effect.” Specifically, he points to Deuteronomy 3:12, “And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.”

In Deuteronomy 5:12, Alter relates a midrash when explaining a slight variation of word choice in the Biblical text, “Keep the sabbath day. The Exodus version has “remember” (that is, be mindful of) rather than “keep.” The Midrash Mekhilta famously announced, “‘keep’ and ‘remember’ in a singular utterance,” and the two acts are, indeed, joined in a tight nexus: because we remember or are mindful of something, we keep it. But shamor, “keep,” “observe,” “watch,” is a recurrent term in the didactic rhetoric of Deuteronomy, and so it is hardly surprising that this verb would be favored here.”

Alter combines his knowledge of geography, superstition, and literary style in his exposition of Deuteronomy 11:29, “the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal…. In keeping with the orientation to the east, Gerizim is on the favored right hand and Ebal on the suspect left, and Gerizim is covered with vegetation whereas Ebal is desolate. The theology of Deuteronomy is beautifully concretized in the stark opposition of these two mountains, for the book repeatedly stresses the forking alternatives of prosperity and disaster.”

The Book of Deuteronomy is particularly harsh on the pagan practices that predated monotheism. In Deuteronomy 12:2, Alter relates, “You shall utterly destroy all the places…. There have been exhortations earlier in Deuteronomy to eradicate all vestiges of the local pagan cults, but here that imperative of iconoclasm is coupled with a revolutionary insistence on the centralization of the Israelite cult.… In point of historical fact, what the Israelite religion did was to take over places of Canaanite worship and adapt them for the worship of the God of Israel…. For the Deuteronomist, the very existence of such local places of worship carries with it the danger of syncretism—the mingling of pagan rituals and concepts with the worship of the one God, and, especially, a leakage of the adoration of natural deities (“on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree”) into the cult of YHWH. Thus, the whole apparatus of local cults must be utterly destroyed, and instead, one central, exclusive place is to be designated for the worship of Israel’s God.”

In Deuteronomy 17:18-19, Alter gets into issues of literacy, the primacy of the written word, and the political structure of early Israelite society, “he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching. The king is to be actively engaged in personally producing a text of the teaching…. The location of religious authority in a text, a revolutionary idea, is made dramatically clear…. Many commentators have cited this whole section as a demonstration that the government of ancient Israel was in essence a constitutional monarchy…. This does not make his regime a constitutional monarchy, but one founded on theocratic authority, the Torah or constitution to be expounded by the priests at the central sanctuary.”

Alter notes another aspect of word choice in Deuteronomy 19:1, “the lord your God … the Lord your God. It is a stylistic peculiarity of Deuteronomy that the Lord, YHWH, very rarely occurs without “your God,” and even the substitution of a pronoun, as here, is generally avoided. This linguistic oddity reflects the didactic emphasis of the book, tirelessly reminding Israel that YHWH is its God.”

In Deuteronomy 27:3, Alter relates a bit of historical context, “write on them the words of this teaching. The most plausible reference of this phrase is to the code of laws (chapters 12-26) that has just been enunciated, although it could refer to the whole Book of Deuteronomy. Jeffrey H. Tigay notes that two steles the size on which the Code of Hammurabi are inscribed could contain more than the entire text of Deuteronomy…. Inscribing “the words of this teaching [torah]” on stone is a powerfully concrete image of the idea of the text as the enduring source of authority, which is the central ideological innovation of Deuteronomy.”

Alter makes the case that the Book of Deuteronomy seeks to link the people of Israel for all times—past, present, and future. To that end, in Deuteronomy 29:14, he states, “but with him who is here standing with us this day … and with him who is not here with us this day. This idea is paramount for the whole theological-historical project of the Book of Deuteronomy. The awesome covenant, evoked through Moses’s strong rhetoric, whereby Israel binds itself to God, is a timeless model, to be reenacted scrupulously by all future generations. The force of the idea is nicely caught by the rabbinic notion that all unborn generations were already standing here at Sinai.” Finally, Alter concludes with Deuteronomy 34:4, “the land that I swore to Abraham. This final mention of the promise to the forefathers links the end of Deuteronomy with the beginning of the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis.”

“Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

Jung relates his work on the traditional archetypes with a theory of the nature of the Self. He begins with the role of the unconscious in the human mind, “The contents of the collective unconscious are invariably archetypes that were present from the beginning…. The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego.” For Jung, an understanding of the archetypes is necessary for any understanding of Self, “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge…. Examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality…. It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting…. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

Much of Jung’s book relates archetypal symbols to Christian and Gnostic theology. Jung posits, “As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter.” Elsewhere, he expands, “Modern psychology is therefore confronted with a question very like the one faced by the alchemists: Is the self a symbol of Christ, or is Christ a symbol of the self? In the present study I have affirmed the latter alternative. I have tried to show how the traditional Christ-image concentrates upon itself the characteristics of an archetype-the archetype of the self…. The Christ-image is as good as perfect (at least it is meant to be so), while the archetype (so far as known) denotes completeness but is far from being perfect. It is a paradox, a statement about something indescribable and transcendental…. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect as also your heavenly Father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness…. Christ is the perfect man who is crucified. One could hardly think of a truer picture of the goal of ethical endeavor.”

Jung next explains the notion of the world-soul, “The ocean is the “spirit of the world”…. The “spirit of the world” is a somewhat unusual term, because the expression more commonly used was the “anima mundi.” The world-soul or, in this case, the world-spirit is a projection of the unconscious…. This idea is nothing more than an analogy of the animating principle in man which inspires his thoughts and acts of cognition. “Soul” and “spirit,” or psyche as such, is in itself totally unconscious. If it is assumed to be somewhere “outside,” it cannot be anything except a projection of the unconscious…. In alchemy “our sea” is a symbol for the unconscious in general, just as it is in dreams…. The symbol of the self appears here as an “extremely small” fish in the vast ocean of the unconscious, like a man alone on the sea of the world.”

In general, for Jung, the symbols in myth play a large role in digesting the meanings of the unconscious. “Cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness…. The dawn-state corresponds to the unconscious, in alchemical terms, it is the chaos, the masa confusa or nigredo…. Oxen stand for the motive power of the plough. In the same way, the fishes represent the driving forces of the coming world of consciousness. Since olden times the plough has stood for man’s mastery over the earth: wherever man ploughs, he has wrested a patch of soil from the primal state and put it to his own use. That is to say: the fishes will rule this world and subdue it by working astrologically through man and moulding his consciousness…. The alchemical work starts with the descent into darkness (nigredo), i.e., the unconscious.”

For Jung, alchemy was the precursor to modern science. He puts heavy stock into alchemy’s symbols and what they foretell about man’s probing of the unconscious and the Self. “Dorn was the first thinker to recognize with the utmost clarity the extraordinary dilemma of alchemy: the arcane substance is one and the same, whether it is found within man or outside him. The “alchymical” procedure takes place within and without. He who does not understand how to free the “truth” in his own soul from its fetters will never make a success of the physical opus, and he who knows how to make the stone can only do so on the basis of right doctrine, through which he himself is transformed, or which he creates through his own transformation…. Dorn came to realize the fundamental importance of self-knowledge…. The expectations you put into the work must be applied to your own ego…. The secret is first and foremost in man; it is his true self, which he does not know but learns to know by experience of outward things…. Anyone who seriously tries to know himself as an object is accused of selfishness and eccentricity. But such knowledge has nothing to do with the ego’s subjective knowledge of itself…. The distinction between “quis” and “quid” is crucial: whereas “quis” has an unmistakably personal aspect and refers to the ego, “quid” is neuter, predicating nothing except an object which is not endowed even with personality…. The difference between knowledge of the ego and knowledge of the self could hardly be formulated more trenchantly than in this distinction between “quis” and “quid.”… Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible so long as they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much.”

Jung expands his theory of the Self by further relating the symbols of fairytales, myths, and religious dogma, “That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairytales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated…. For the alchemist it was clear that the “centre,” or what we would call the self, does not lie in the ego but is outside it, “in us” yet not “in our mind,” being located rather in that which we unconsciously are, “the quid” which we still have to recognize. Today we would call it the unconscious, and we distinguish between a personal unconscious which enables us to recognize the shadow and an impersonal unconscious which enables us to recognize the archetypal symbol of the self…. The centre was paradoxically in man and yet at the same time outside him.”

Modernity and tradition do not mix. Today, there has been a tendency to toss out the irrational and the arcane. Jung states, “Like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.” He feels that modernity has gone terribly awry. “Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism.” Elsewhere, he expands, “The destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism with its utopian chimeras forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it.”

Jung puts great stake in the role of opposition in the formation of the Self. “Most people do not have sufficient range of consciousness to become aware of the opposites inherent in human nature. The tensions they generate remain for the most part unconscious, but can appear in dreams. Traditionally, the snake stands for the vulnerable spot in man: it personifies his shadow, i.e., his weakness and unconsciousness. The greatest danger about unconsciousness is proneness to suggestion. The effect of suggestion is due to the release of an unconscious dynamic, and the more unconscious this is, the more effective it will be. Hence the ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis. With the loss of symbolic ideas the bridge to the unconscious has broken down. Instinct no longer affords the protection against unsound ideas and empty slogans. Rationality without tradition and without a basis in instinct is proof against no absurdity.” Jung expounds on the symbol of the snake, “Since the shadow, in itself, is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other.”

Finally, Jung relates that the Self is ever-changing, “Consciousness and understanding arise from discrimination, that is, through analysis (dissolution) followed by synthesis, as stated in symbolical terms by the alchemical dictum: “Solve et coagula” (dissolve and coagulate)…. The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process.” The circle is the proper symbol, “The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail…. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.”

“Meno” by Plato (translated by G.M.A. Grube)

This short dialogue has Socrates speaking with Meno, a young aristocrat from Thessaly, about the nature of virtue. Particularly, they are interested in figuring out whether virtue is innate or whether it can be learned. In fact, Meno initially asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?” After some typically frustrating Socratic back and forth, Meno remains apoplectic, “But, Socrates, do you really not know what virtue is?” Socrates responds typically, “Not only that, my friend, but also that, as I believe, I have never met anyone else who did know.”

Before revealing his answer in his usual roundabout manner, Socrates delves into a couple fruitful asides. The first is on the nature of shape and color. Socrates states, “Let us try to tell you what shape is. See whether you will accept that it is this: Let us say that shape is that which alone of existing things always follows color…. From this you may understand what I mean by shape, for I say this of every shape, that a shape is that which limits a solid; in a word, a shape is the limit of a solid.” Secondly (and more famously), Socrates delves into the paradox of knowledge and learning, the so-called Meno’s Paradox, “Do you realize what a debater’s argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.”

Next, Socrates goes into yet another digression on the Sophists and their inability to teach virtue. He then recites a litany of the great men of Athens and pontificates on their inabilities to teach their own sons virtue, at one point even insulting Anytus, Meno’s host while in Athens. Socrates is not deterred, concluding by speaking about the Athenian statesman (not the historian), “Reflect that Thucydides too brought up two sons, Melesias and Stephanus, that he educated them well in all other things. They were the best wrestlers in Athens…. He belonged to a great house; he had great influence in the city and among other Greeks, so that if virtue could be taught he would have found the man who could make his sons good men, be it a citizen or a stranger, if he himself did not have the time because of his public concerns. But, friend Anytus, virtue certainly cannot be taught.” The implications for the sons of Athens (and their qualities) are left unsaid.

Socrates, finally, wraps up this debate (largely with himself), letting both Anytus and Meno off the hook. Socrates concludes, “True opinion is in no way a worse guide to correct action than knowledge. It is this that we omitted in our investigation of the nature of virtue, when we said that only knowledge can lead to correct action, for true opinion can do so also…. For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. And that, Meno, my friend, is recollection, as we previously agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion…. And that only these two things, true belief and knowledge, guide correctly, and that if a man possesses these he gives correct guidance. The things that turn out right by some chance are not due to human guidance, but where there is correct human guidance it is due to two things, true belief and knowledge…. Now because it cannot be taught, virtue no longer seems to be knowledge…. Therefore, if it is not through knowledge, the only alternative is that it is through right opinion that statesmen follow the right course for their cities. As regards knowledge, they are no different from soothsayers and prophets…. Virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Numbers” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter states that the Book of Numbers “returns to the narrative impulse that marks the first half of Exodus…. We are repeatedly reminded of the passing of generations as the story carries us to the border of the promised land…. But if Israel is on the move from chapter 11 to the end, it must be said that this text associates movement with trouble…. We have a repetition of the same scene involving the same actors—Israel, Moses, and God—manifesting a certain intensification more than significant variation from one recurrence to the next…. One suspects that all these repetitions of the scene of murmuring are introduced because the writers conceived it as a paradigm for the subsequent history of Israel: recurrent resentment of God’s rule and of the authority of His legitimate leaders, chronic attraction to objects of base material desire, fearfulness, divisiveness, and the consequences of national disaster brought about, in the view of the biblical writers, by this whole pattern of constant backsliding…. This generation that cannot free itself from the slave mentality it brought with it from Egypt also constitutes the beginnings of a people meant to realize a grand historical destiny.”

In his introduction, Alter reveals that the Book of Numbers incorporates much verse into the flow of its narrative. “It is the striking poetic insets in Numbers that account for much of its distinctive quality among the books of the Bible…. It is an interesting question why such scraps of old verse should have been incorporated in the Book of Numbers…. I would like to propose that these fragments of old poems are introduced into the narrative of Numbers at least in part in order to produce an “antiquity effect.” There is no way of knowing whether Hebrew audiences in, say, the ninth century B.C.E. were still familiar with the Book of the Battles of YHWH, or whether it was already a lost work…. The point, in any case, of the fragmentary quotation, triggered in context by the geographical references, would have been to evoke a distant moment in early Israelite history…. The biblical self-perception of the Israelite nation as a latecomer to the historical scene is palpably present here.”

In Numbers 5:2, Alter explains that impurity was not always an issue of morality, “by a corpse: Literally, “for a [dead] person,” lanafesh. All three of these categories of impurity are clearly cultic, not moral. Pathology and death are viewed as contaminants, and the camp of Israel in the wilderness, in which God’s presence dwells with a specific locus in the Tabernacle, must be kept free of them.”

Alter relates both the poetic and historic natures of the blessing in Numbers 6:23-27, “‘Thus shall you bless the Israelites. Say to them: May the Lord bless you and guard you./ May the Lord light up His face to you and grant grace to you;/ May the Lord lift up His face to you and give you peace.’ And they shall set My name over the Israelites, and I myself shall bless them.” This cadenced threefold blessing came to play a central liturgical role for both Jews and Christians, and probably began to serve that function even in the biblical period…. After the pronouncing of the threefold blessing, God’s name, a kind of divine proprietorship, will be set over Israel, and God Himself will carry out the blessing.” Alter relates how the Bible incorporates all the physical senses. In Numbers 10:2, Alter describes the introduction of sound, “two silver trumpets. After all the lists of the early chapters of Numbers, the visual pageantry of the Tabernacle furnishings, and the deployment of the tribal troops with their banners, sound enters the text—in essence, musical flourishes, a pageantry of sound. These particular sounds are in the first instance the signal for the forward movement of the camp, and so propel the whole story from the long stasis of the stay at Sinai into the narrative of wanderings that constitutes much of what follows.”

In Numbers 15:38, Alter details a historical tidbit, which also relates to the issue of word choice in translation, “an indigo twist. Though indigo may be a reasonable approximation of the color in question, it should be noted that the dye is not derived from a plant, as is indigo, but from a substance secreted by the murex, harvested off the coast of Phoenicia…. The extraction and preparation of this dye were labor-intensive and thus made quite costly. It was used for royal garments in many places in the Mediterranean region, and in Israel it was also used for priestly garments and for the cloth furnishings of the Tabernacle. One may infer that the indigo twist was a token of the idea that Israel should become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” and perhaps also that, as the covenanted people, metaphorically God’s firstborn, the nation as a whole had royal status…. The indigo twist—Rashi even seeks to link it with the color of the sky on the night of the Exodus—is thus a reminder not only of the commandments but of the liberation from slavery, prelude to the Sinai epiphany through which Israel took on the obligation to become a kingdom of priests. The once enslaved people is henceforth to wear a constant token of royalty and sanctity.”

The recurrent use of the envelope structure is once again used in Numbers 19:32, “you shall not bear offense for it . . . and you shall not profane the holy things . . . and you shall not die. This whole unit of instructions to the Aaronides closes in an envelope structure: the danger of suffering the consequences of violating the sanctuary, invoked at the beginning, recurs now on a note of reassurance: because these tithes of agricultural offerings are the priests’ just wages for their service in the cult, they run no risk of perishing for having eaten consecrated foodstuffs.”

Alter helpfully points out rare occurrences of all kinds within the biblical narrative. In Numbers 22:28, he notes, “And the Lord opened the ass’s mouth. This is the only talking animal, if one excludes the mythological serpent in the Garden story, in the entire Bible…. The talking ass is perfectly in accord with the theological assumption of the story: if God absolutely controls blessings and curses and vision, He can do the same for speech.” In Numbers 23:23, Alter describes a difference between the monotheism of Israel and their polytheistic neighbors, “Now be it said to Jacob/ and to Israel what el has wrought. This line of verse follows directly from the assertion that there is no divining in Israel. Other nations may foolishly have recourse to soothsayers and word-magic professionals like Balaam, but Israel is immediately informed, whether through prophets or direct divine revelation, what God’s designs are.” Alter admits when a smooth translation is a challenge. In Numbers 24:23-24, he states, “who can love more than El has set him,/ and ships from the hands of the Kittites. An honest translator must admit that the Hebrew text here is not intelligible, and that the nexus between the seemingly philosophical pronouncement of the first verset and the invocation of a Mediterranean fleet in the second verset is obscure.”

In Numbers 28:2, Alter details the issue of biblical chronology. He states, “My offering. The end of the previous chapter was clearly what should have been the penultimate moment of the Moses story: Moses summoned to the mountaintop where he will be gathered to his kin and where he is enjoined to pass the leadership on to Joshua. Now, however, the Priestly redactors, pursuing their own professional concern with the cult, introduce a large block of material stipulating regulations for sacrifices…. One could scarcely find a more emphatic illustration of the rabbinic principle that “there is neither early nor late in the Torah,” i.e., that the text of the Torah passed down to us does not exhibit consistent chronological sequence.” Finally, in Numbers 36:13, Alter concludes, “in the steppes of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho…. It is fitting that “Jericho” should be the last word in the Book of Numbers. Jericho will be the first military objective when the Israelites cross the Jordan, and so the concluding word here points forward to the beginning of Joshua.”

“The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

This essay deals with importance of ritual and its disappearance in the modern world. Han begins, “Rituals serve as a background against which our present times may seem to stand out more clearly…. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based…. Today, the world is symbol poor…. We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.” Han focuses on ritual’s role in lessening the importance of the Self and creating community, “Rituals are also symbolic practices, practices of symballein, in the sense that they bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community…. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.” Han also emphasizes the role of the physical, “Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.”

Han contrasts the modern notion of authenticity with the communal notions of ritual. “The society of authenticity is a performance society…. Authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community…. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual person. Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity…. Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself…. Today, the world is not a theatre in which roles are played and ritual gestures exchanged, but a market in which one exposes and exhibits oneself…. In the name of authenticity or genuineness, the semblance of beauty, the ritual gesture, is today discarded as something purely external. But this genuineness is, in truth, crudeness and barbarity…. We live in a culture of the affect. Where ritual gestures and manners decay, affect and emotion gain the upper hand.”

All rituals of politeness have been discarded by modernity. “A ritual of politeness is not an expression of subjective feeling; it is an objective act. It resembles a magical invocation that produces a positive mental state…. In a society of authenticity, actions are guided internally, motivated psychologically, whereas in ritual societies actions are determined by externalized forms of interaction. Rituals make the world objective…. Politeness is pure form. Nothing is intended by it. It is empty. As a ritual form, it is devoid of any moral content…. As a form of ritual, politeness is without heart and without desire, without wish. It is more art than morality. It exhausts itself in the pure exchange of ritual gestures…. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer…. The more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is.”

Han also laments the loss of pageantry, play, and festival. Today, all life is mere work. Modernity is the consumption society par excellence. One only stops to rest so that he may work some more. “Rituals and ceremonies are the genuinely human acts which allow life to appear to be an enchanting, celebratory affair…. As forms of play, festivals are self-representations of life. They are characterized by an excess, an expression of an overflowing life that does not aim at a goal…. In the festival, life relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to external purposes…. The time of the festival is time standing still…. It thus makes lingering possible. Time as a sequence of transient, fleeting moments is suspended. There is no goal one walks towards.” To linger and to contemplate has been lost in the hustle and bustle for ever more. “Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion…. Rest belongs to the sphere of the sacred…. It transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work…. Rest and work represent two fundamentally different existential forms.” Ritual, even in the everyday, marks the passage of time. “Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure…. Thresholds, as transitions, give rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time…. What must be won back is contemplative rest. If our life is deprived of all its contemplative elements, we become suffocated by our own activity.”

“Talent” by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross

The ostensible aim of this book is to give advice for those in positions of power to hire better talent. However, Cowen and Gross really just give useful tips for both spotting talent, as well as cultivating more talent in yourself and in others. They begin, “For both of us, the search for rare, transformative talent is so important…. Status-seekers focus on maximizing attention from the perceived elite. Idea-seekers, on the other hand, want to advance knowledge and stimulate curiosity, speaking to the entire room and holding the attention of the group. Intrigue is their reserve currency, and conjectures are often framed as questions, not statements…. Talent search is one of the most important activities in virtually all human lives…. But finding this talent is itself a creative skill, akin to music or art appreciation…. It is the understanding of context that breeds alertness to talent.”

One of Cowen’s favorite questions to begin an interview is, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?” This is not your everyday ice breaker. He claims, “In essence, you are asking about intellectual habits, curiosity, and what a person does in his or her spare time, all at once…. The question of spare time is a critical one. The very best performers don’t stop practicing for very long, and if you hear or sense that a person doesn’t do much practicing and skill refining in his or her spare time, they probably are poorly suited to assume a top position or to meet very high expectations…. Think of practice habits as one path toward continuously compounding learning and performance…. We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.””

When conducting an interview, Cowen and Gross suggest sniffing out what motivates the candidate. “Whom is this person responding to or used to performing for? Whom do they view as important to impress? Their parents? A particular peer? High school friends? A former boss? This is revealed at moments when they disclose some angles of their past successes and failures rather than others…. Be alert for the distinction between those who are stuck in their past and those who learned from it but are moving forward and seeking to expand the sphere of people they can impress.”

Cowen and Gross suggest throwing the interviewee off balance with unique questions in a frank style. “Do not be afraid to let a question hang in the air after you ask it; hold the tension as a way of making it clear that you expect an answer, and a direct answer at that…. If you are going to ask achievement-oriented questions, avoid the ordinary by continuing to ask for successive instances of candidate success until the respondent can’t come up with any more…. Ask it again. And again. And again, until the candidate can’t come up with any more answers…. The first time you ask this question, most candidates will draw upon their preparation. Sustained repetition, however, will get the person out of prep sooner or later, usually sooner. The previously cached answers will be exhausted, leaving time for the real meat. You will then see the depth of the candidate’s intellectual resources and emotional resilience.”

The pair also suggest going meta in one’s questioning. “Which of your beliefs are you least rational about? What views do you hold almost irrationally? These questions ask the respondent to give an account of their own self-awareness…. That is what we mean by “meta”—that the person is considering their own thought world from the viewpoint one level higher, more general, and more distant. You are testing their facility with ideas and also how readily they can identify alien viewpoints…. You are pulling the person into the human mode, into the self-awareness mode, into the awkwardness mode, and into a bit of weakness.” Other questions in this vein are, “Which of your beliefs are you most likely wrong about? [And] the most brutal of all the meta questions is: How do you think this interview is going?”

Another field of fruitful inquiry is judging a person’s own ambition. “How successful do you want to be? [Or] how ambitious are you?” Obviously, this has a lot to do with self-awareness as well. “The degree of a person’s ambition is pretty valuable to know, and it gives you a clear sense of their potential upside. It also offers you a sense of a person’s self-knowledge and of how they present and defend that self-knowledge when they are in an unexpected situation.” They do give this caveat, “As always, be aware of your cultural context.”

Online interviews require a different skillset and expectations. “With an online interview it is much harder to use body language and eye contact to bond and establish trust…. Screen calls can be relatively impersonal…. It is likely that the interviewee will find it harder to take risks…. When interviewed, often we start an anecdote or story and rely on implicit visual feedback to encourage or discourage us from proceeding further…. So interviewees will often be more boring, risk-averse, and homogenized…. When you use distance communications you are missing out on at least three distinct sources of knowledge: social presence, information richness, and the full synchronicity of back-and-forth…. The online medium raises the influence and stature of people who can get to the point quickly.”

Cowen and Gross spend a great deal of time parsing out the Five Factor Personality Theory and how it applies to employment success. They claim, “One of the essential skills in thinking about personality is to be able to take a claim about personality and job and realize how that claim is context-dependent rather than universal.” Another caveat, “Our main enterprise is prediction of talent, and in that sense we can learn something from correlations without always understanding the underlying causal processes.” Age matters too. “Personality traits correlate more strongly with income beginning when workers are in their early thirties, and the correlations peak in strength between the ages of forty and sixty, after which the correlations dwindle significantly.” They cite Marc Andreessen on one major hole in the personality-correlation literature, “Ethics are hard to test for. But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid. Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.” Cowen and Gross continue, “This advice is so universal because bad ethics in a workplace can spread like cancer…. In part because of the contagion effect, it seems that the costs of having a single toxic worker are greater than the benefits of replacing an average worker with a superstar worker.” In general, remember that “what predicts well for the median worker is not always what predicts well for the top performers and the stars.” Finally, they argue, “Five Factor theory is useful because it is a “sticky” language, one that your co-workers can readily adopt, share, and eventually innovate upon…. Simply having such a common language in the hiring or talent search process is most of the value in the concept.”

Stamina is one trait Cowen and Gross rate highly. “Many high-status professions, such as medicine, law, and academia, put younger performers through some pretty brutal stamina tests in the early years of their career…. So if we meet an individual who exhibits stamina, we immediately upgrade the chance of that person having a major impact, and that the individual will be able to invest in compound returns to learning and improvement over time…. What you want is a kind of conscientiousness directed at the kind of focused practice and thus compound learning that will boost intelligence on the job.”

Sam Altman suggests, “The rate of improvement is often more important than the current absolute ability.” This is more and more important the younger the hire. Cowen and Gross return again and again to the relevance of compound returns. “You might think that other evaluators already understand the power of compound returns to self-improvement, but there is good evidence that most individuals do not think very effectively in terms of exponential processes…. One of your most significant skills as a talent evaluator is to develop a sense of when people are moving along a compound returns curve or not. So much of personality theory focuses on observing levels or absolute degrees of personality traits. You should instead focus on whether the person is experiencing positive rates of change for dynamism, intellect, maturity, ambition, stamina, and other relevant factors.” Another question Cowen likes to ask is, “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales? Tyler likes to think of many jobs in a way that a professional musician or athlete would find natural…. By asking this question, you learn what the person is doing to achieve ongoing improvement…. You also learn how the person thinks about continual self-improvement, above and beyond whatever practices they engage in.”

Finally, Cowen and Gross have their own list of personality quirks that they find predict well for success. “Sturdiness is the quality of getting work done every day, with extreme regularity and without long streaks of non-achievement. Sturdiness seems to be especially valuable in people working on longer-term projects…. Some will call it ambition, some will call it extraversion, but there’s a certain vitality to individuals that can be striking. They talk quickly, move quickly, and in general seem to be enthralled with life. They run all possible combinations of ideas through their heads, if only to better understand the possibilities. Along these lines, they tend to be high in openness as a personality trait. We call this quality “generativeness.” If you hang around people like this, you are likely to come up with new ideas from your interactions…. Generative people are valuable whether or not you agree with them…. Insecure overachievement, as we call it, is the (somewhat neurotic) quality of never quite feeling comfortable with your output, despite knowing at a deep level that it is good…. Happiness is, in our opinion, an underrated quality to look for in people, at least when it comes to predicting their success. Always having a smile and a sense of amusement can be a powerful quality, ensuring that the person is almost always invited to participate in another endeavor…. The trait of adhesiveness, which overlaps with the concept of a “team player,” is increasingly important as production grows more complex and roles become more specialized…. Social intelligence is at a premium, above and beyond whatever import you might assign to intelligence more generally…. Teams skills add as much to productivity as does the overall intelligence of the group…. One trait we would draw your attention to as especially important is the ability to perceive, understand, and climb complex hierarchies…. Too often people will stick with the tasks they feel comfortable with. If someone is good at identifying, tackling, and climbing hierarchies, it is a sign that they know how to allocate their efforts and that they don’t let their insecurities blind themselves to the larger picture…. Other individuals choose goals that are too large and too indistinct, or which do not have useful intermediate outputs, test points, and checkpoints along the way…. Knowing how to perceive and climb the right hierarchies is one of the most stringent but also most universal tests available. It requires emotional self-regulation, perceptiveness, ambition, vision, proper sequencing, and enough order in one’s activities to actually get somewhere.”

“Don’t Trust Your Gut” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Stephens-Davidowitz is a self-described nerd and data scientist, who tries to quantify all the mysteries of life. In fact, he describes this book as “Moneyball” for your whole life. He has poured over reams of collected data to tease out what the averages say make the most statistical sense—sometimes the advice is intuitive and sometimes not. On dating, he reveals, “The qualities that are most valued in the dating market, according to Big Data from online dating sites—almost perfectly overlaps with the list of traits in a partner that don’t correlate with long-term relationship happiness…. In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.” On parenting, Stephens-Davidowitz suggests, “the overall effect of most of the decisions that parents make add up to less than most people expect…. If parents face thousands of decisions and the parents who make far better decisions only have kids who turn out some 26 percent more accomplished, each of the thousands of decisions, by itself, can’t make a large difference.” However, the one decision that does make a lot of difference is what neighborhood one lives in. “Some 25 percent—and possibly more—of the overall effects of a parent are driven by where that parent raises their child…. The three biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child’s success are: >> Percent of Residents Who Are College Graduates >> Percent of Two-Parent Households >> Percent of People Who Return Their Census Forms…. The right adult role models appear to be more influential than the right schools or booming economies…. Quite simply, it makes sense to expose your kids to adults whom you would want them to emulate.”

Stephens-Davidowitz peppers his book with numerous interesting tidbits. For instance, “Each additional inch nearly doubles one’s chances of reaching the NBA.” Also, “NBA players are more likely to come from middle-class, two-parent backgrounds.” On Americans’ income levels, he notes, “Wholesale beverage distribution is among a select group of industries in which a large percentage of owners enter the top 0.1 percent of earners.” The reason, “great business fields allow for the existence of many local monopolies.” A bit of a counterintuitive notion is that entrepreneurs are often more successful the older they start, “The average age of a business founder in the United States is 41.9 years old…. A sixty-year-old start-up founder has a roughly three times higher chance of creating a valuable business than a thirty-year-old start-up founder.” In life, looking attractive is important. “The person whose face was judged as more competent by the majority of subjects won 71.6 percent of the Senate races and 66.8 percent of the House races…. The biggest predictor of [a West Point] cadets’ career success was how dominant their faces appeared.” On wealth and happiness, “Doubling your income can be expected to increase your happiness by about one-tenth of a standard deviation.” Stephens-Davidowitz concludes, “The data-driven answer to life is as follows: be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.” Simple life advice.

“The Hebrew Bible: Leviticus” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter suggests that in Leviticus, “the central concern of the book is the conduct of the cult” and that “purification is a paramount consideration in all of this.” Alter points to Mary Douglas’ conception of biblical writings as based on analogical representations. Following her lead, he posits, “Reality is conceived as an elaborate system of correspondences—correspondences between Sinai and the cosmos, on the one hand, and the Tabernacle, on the other, and between all three of these and the body segments of the sacrificial animal.” Alter claims, “there is a single verb that focuses the majors themes of Leviticus—“divide” (Hebrew, hivdil).” Finally, he puts forward a conception of the nature of biblical ontology. “Israel, in turn, by accepting these categorical divisions in the realm of appetite, sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God. This last element of imitation dei suggests that God’s holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world, a concept that sets off biblical monotheism from the worldview of antecedent polytheisms, where at least the king could serve as mediator between human and divine…. The chief instruments for protecting the separation of ontological spheres are fire, blood, oil, and water…. Fire as we have seen abundantly in Exodus and will see even more emphatically in Deuteronomy, is associated with the deity…. Blood, as Leviticus emphatically reminds us, is the very life (nefesh) of the living animal…. Oil (it is specifically olive oil) has, by contrast, an association with the quotidian and with the social and political realms in ancient culture…. Finally, the efficacy of water as a purifying agent is self-evident and universal…. Fire is linked, as we have seen, with the divine; blood courses through the veins of living creatures, animal and human; olive oil is a product of agriculture, of the land, which sets it over against water, a manifestation of nature without human intervention (it is fresh running water that must be used for purification), recalling the primordial realm that must be set apart from dry land so that the world may come into existence.”

Alter points out that much of Leviticus is prescriptive. In Leviticus 3:17, Alter relates one such command, “no fat and no blood shall you eat. The prohibition on consuming blood is grounded in the idea of the sacredness of life (see Genesis 9:4). The prohibition on eating fat seems strictly related to the fact that it is reserved for the deity alone in the sacrificial rite—and, if one follows Douglas, because it marks a barrier of exclusion in a system of analogies between body and sacred cosmos. It is instructive that when the seventeenth-century antinomian messianic leader Sabbatai Zebi wanted to demonstrate to his followers that he was empowered to abrogate the Torah, he chose to demonstrate this by the public consumption of suet—the violation of a seemingly arbitrary prohibition, and a violation that could scarcely have given him much pleasure.”

In Leviticus, allowances are often given for the poor to participate equally in the priestly blessings through sacrificial offerings. Alter comments on Leviticus 5:7, “if his hand cannot attain. The primary sense of the verb is “reach.” “Hand” in biblical idiom is often used, as here, metonymically to indicate power or capacity. The law that follows here is what the rabbis called “an ascending and descending offering” (qorban ‘oleh weyored), that is, a sliding-scale offering which is devised to accommodate people of limited means.”

The Hebrew Bible returns to similar syntactical structures repeatedly. In Leviticus 8:4, it is the envelope form, “And Moses did as the Lord had charged him. A variant of this clause recurs at the very end of the chapter, framing the whole in an envelope structure. What is noteworthy is that in this chapter the Book of Leviticus for the first time moves from lists of cultic regulations to narrative.”

Leviticus 11:7 deals with dietary prohibitions. Alter explains, “the pig. It is only later, in the Hellenic period, that the pig becomes the prohibited animal par excellence, although the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile whose words are recorded in Isaiah 66:17 brackets eaters of pig and rat as participants in some unspeakable pagan rite. Pork was a common food among the Philistines and was also sometimes eaten by Canaanites, as archaeological inspection of the bones of animals consumed has determined. Interestingly, in the high country in the eastern part of Canaan, where [the] Israelite population was concentrated toward the end of the second millennium B.C.E., the percentage of pig bones discovered is only a fraction of what it is in the Canaanite lowlands. This suggests that the taboo was already generally embraced by the Israelites at an early period (well before the composition of the Torah) and also that some Israelites chose to disregard it.”

The scapegoat and the mystery of Azazel occur in Leviticus 16:8, “one for the Lord and one for Azazel. As countless seals and other ancient inscriptions unearthed by archaeologists attest, the use of a proper name or title, prefixed by the letter lamed (“for”) as a lamed possession, was a standard form of indicating that the object in question belonged to So-and-so (as in lamelekh, “the king’s”). These words, then (in Hebrew, each is a single word, LeYHWH and la’azaz’el) are the actual texts written on the two lots. Much ink since Late Antiquity has been spilled over the identity of Azazel, but the most plausible understanding—it is a very old one—is that it is the name of a goatish demon or deity associated with the remote wilderness. The name appears to reflect ‘ez, goat.” Alter elaborates on Leviticus 16:10, “to send it off to Azazel in the wilderness. Approximate analogues to the so-called scapegoat ritual, using different animals, appear in several different Mesopotamian texts. The origins of the practice are surely in an archaic idea—that the polluting substance generated by the transgressions of the people is physically carried away by the goat. Azazel is not represented as a competing deity (or demon) rivaling YHWH, but the ritual depends upon a polarity between YHWH/the pale of human civilization and Azazel/the remote wilderness, the realm of disorder and raw formlessness…. It is as though the goat piled with impurities were being sent back to the primordial realm of “welter and waste” before the delineated world came into being, but that realm here is given an animal-or-demon tag.”

The unique nature of monotheism against the polytheistic paganism surrounding the Israelites is, again, stressed in Leviticus 18:3, “[Not like] the deeds of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled shall you do, and not like the deeds of the land of Canaan…. Egypt and Canaan are no doubt invoked because these are two pagan countries in which Israel has collectively resided…. The identification of both countries as theaters of sexual license may be attributed to a widespread reflex of projecting uncontrolled sexuality onto the cultural other…. This reflex would have been reinforced by the tendency to see the polytheistic world as a realm lacking restraint, in contradistinction to the Israelite conception of one God and one clear-cut set of binding restrictions.”

Alter notes when previously accepted translations might be in error. He suggests in Leviticus 25:10, “call a release in the land to all its inhabitants. One must regretfully forgo the grandeur of the King James Version, inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” In fact, the passage is concerned with the legal arrangements regarding property in the jubilee year, and modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated that deror does not mean “liberty” but is cognate with a technical Akkadian term, anduraru, which means a release from, or moratorium on, debts and indenture.” Alter digs deeper and goes on to explain the etymology and history of “jubilee. Though debate persists about the etymology of this word (which has entered English from the Hebrew) the noun yovel in Exodus 19:13 clearly indicates a ram’s horn (the alternate term is shofar), and thus it is plausible that the fiftieth year was called jubilee, yovel, because this was when loud blasts of the ram’s horn were sounded throughout the land.”

Finally, Alter returns to the Israelite covenant with God in Leviticus 26:25, “the avenging sword of the covenant’s vengeance. A covenant is both a promise and a threat. From those who violate the covenantal obligations, vengeance is exacted.” Referencing Leviticus 26:44, he continues, “My covenant. The envelope structure formed by the reiteration of this key term at the beginning and the end of the entire section is meant as a reassurance. God will respond in terrible wrath to Israel’s dereliction, but the commitment to the covenant He expressed at the beginning will in the end lead Him to rescue Israel from exile as He once rescued them from Egyptian slavery.”

“Last Letter to a Reader” by Gerald Murnane

This is supposedly Murnane’s last book. But he has said that before—twice. He has been writing so-called meta-fiction before that was even a term. In this book, the conceit is that he writes an essay purportedly on each of his previous books, after first rereading them. Indeed, the books often serve as jumping off points before the digressions begin. “In mid-2020, during a so-called lockdown in the state of Victoria, I wrote the first few of the pieces in this book — but only for myself and for future readers of my archives…. I had never sat down and tried to confront any book of mine as though for the first time…. I discovered early in life that the act of reading is much more complicated than most people seem to acknowledge…. I did what I’ve always preferred to do in the presence of a certain sort of text: I followed the workings of my mind…. I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind…. I learned long ago not to claim that I was talking about a book when what I was talking about were my memories or my impressions or my fantasies…. I know of no better way to appraise a work of fiction than to observe and then to report for one’s own benefit, or for others’, the extent to which the reading of the work has changed the set of one’s mind…. The reading of a work of fiction alters — sometimes briefly but sometimes permanently — the configuration of my mental landscape and augments the number of personages who are its temporary or permanent residents…. My reading — and not just the reading of fiction, but any sort of reading — is no search for facts or truths but rather an endless quest for elements in my unique mythology.”

Murnane is what his wife would call an eccentric. For decades, he has created an entire fictional world, comprised of two independent nations, where horse races are regularly run and winners randomly selected. Its history, the Antipodes, is all in his vast archives. His published fiction blends his real life, his past, and his imagination freely. He calls it true fiction. For him, the line between the real world and his fictional worlds is immaterial, “Each personage strides by day or broods and scribbles by night in his native city, but as though an invisible pane separates him from its other inhabitants and an invisible grip prevents him from living as they live.” Murnane views his mind as a vast physical landscape. “I often declare that I think of my mind as a place, but no place in this, the visible world, could be half so resistant to exploration as even the most familiar of mental landscapes. And if my sort of writing is a sort of mapping of mind, then my atlas should depict nothing more stable than images and feelings.” This leads to a unique process of writing. “Revelations of all kinds occur in the place that I call, for want of a better term, my mind and the benefits that I derive from these processes and from my knowing that these processes take place continually and are taking place even now as I write about them — those benefits are my true reward for writing fiction.”

Occasionally, Murnane does write something that one could almost be sure that he, the breathing author, and not he, the implied author or, he, the fictional narrator, actually believes. An example is his recollection of first reading Proust. “I myself, in that cramped room where I ate from cans and urinated into the sink and spent whole weekends talking to no one, learned from certain passages of Swann’s Way how to look out for what I later came to call the detail that winked: the one significant detail from among the many that appeared to me while I wrote.”

Murnane is not modest about his own writing. “I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages.” Finally, he concludes, “I’ve mentioned in my own writings my perception of mind as a sort of space the boundaries of which are far beyond my reach, and the image that most often occurs to me when I try to comprehend the significance of the million and more of my published words is of a vast and variegated landscape.”