Christmas is Not an Unalloyed Good

Edward Scissorhands is my choice of Christmas movie. Here is why.

Christmas is the quintessential Belonging Festival. You'll know this from having watched every Christmas advert ever. You know - retired old person moping about an old-fashioned house in grayscale, casting unhappy glances at the driveway until out of nowhere the whole family turns up in bright Christmas jumpers, bustling and cheery like the cast from Home Alone. Next, in case you had failed to grasp the joy of companionship, family and togetherness, out goes the grayscale and in arrives the usual Dickensian palette of amber, gold, orange, green, yellow, red, mahogany and every other shade to be found by the light of a coal fire.

In that respect, for once the Tim Burton colour scheme makes perfect sense: Edward's black and white against the relentless pastel of suburbia. Individual: grayscale. Groups: colour. This is my first reason for loving Edward Scissorhands at Christmas: it reminds me that grayscale is not there simply to provide a negative contrast for the Dickensian Christmas palette - it has its very own charm. By being partisan to belonging, Christmas can inadvertently demonize solitude, needlessly making lonely people feel lonelier. "Christmas is for people with children or family and I have neither of those anymore", I was told last night by an elderly worker at the Fitzrovia Community Centre. Meh. I'm not fond of celebrations that leave people out. I side with Edward and the grayscale - and being just as fulfilled in my old-fashioned house watching Netflix as the Home Alone crew in their boisterous bustle.

My other reason is what I see as the film's moral. The story is this: mad genius creates Edward, a kindly childlike Frankenstein (played by Johnny Depp), but dies before it can replace its scissors hands with human ones. Some time later, a local saleswoman discovers Edward abandoned at his Gothic mansion and takes him home. Here his scissoring talents make Edward popular with the local crowd (he sculpts hedges and haircuts) and for a while things go well. However, before long he meets the dashing daughter of his adoptive family, falls in love, the usual conflicts ensue and in the end Edward is hunted out of the community with pitchforks (doesn't matter why). So no happy ending, no cheery family reunion, no jolly Dickensian Christmas palette. But what exactly is the moral?

It is, I think, this: that belonging is at best temporary and expensive.

Expensive, because most relationships, families, friends and communities never quite accept individuals in their true authenticity. Instead, membership is conditional - upon rules of behaviour, appearance, demeanour, manner of speaking, performance, wealth, endorsement of specific values, youth, fitness or any other you can think of. As humans, we are never fully secure in our belonging and in consequence few fears loom larger in the life of man than the fear of banishment. We don't wish simply to be, in a vacuum: we wish also to belong. Banishment is death on the ancestral savannas and the dread of it has never quite left us.

Temporary, because the price of belonging is conformity. When asked to obey rules, endorse values and sacrifice authenticity for the sake of fitting in, the temptation of rebellion is always there. Even belonging to that largest of circles, the human race, requires we forgo behaving like complete criminal psychopaths. Yet we all have our moments. And therein lies the tragedy. If all social membership is conditional, the threat of banishment is ever present. Present like Edward's black outfit among the pastels and beneath the alien, ill-fitting uniform of suburbia.

Most commonplace anxieties - about saying or doing or thinking the wrong thing, about dress, manner or accent, about income, success and being "good enough" - have their murky roots in this dark, inevitable, atavistic phobia. They don't normally occur in situations where we feel securely attached - amid close family (if especially lucky) or with a new lover (if luckier still). This is a pity, because to be secure in our sense of belonging is to invite all sorts of helpful attitudes: gentleness, kindness, generosity, openness - in short, all things Christmas.

This is all fine. Feeling connected may well underwrite all of life's meaning, for what else is there but people? Might as well have an annual Festival of Belonging to hurry along the bleak time of year - mulled wine, jumpers, presents and all. Yet belonging is temporary and expensive and leaves plenty of people out. Let Christmas celebrate it, sure, but let us also reserve some compassion for all those things which fall outside it. Like Edward Scissorshands.

Curatorial Talent

Last month I went to see Lygia Pape in SoHo at Hauser&Wirth. The whole exhibition consisted of but two installations, a video and a handful of drawings. It was refreshing. The headline work, Ttéia 1C, stood out in our minds stark and unobstructed. Indeed, my friend remarked, it is a remarkable curatorial talent to be so intelligently selective. To know what to leave aside.

Our acting instructor said it another way: if you try to do too much, the audience will get sea sick. If there is too much going on, people won't know where to look. They will feel overwhelmed. Improvisation theatre is to make choices. Be decisive. Do one thing. Be consistent.

Consistency is another key aspect of improvisation. On stage you must be consistent otherwise your fellow actors will have no idea how to interact with you, there will be too much happening and audiences will get sea sick. Note - consistency not predictability. You need not be rigid, only clear. Steady rather than chaotic, even as you change. Call it a personal brand.

Design too provides ready examples.

Simplicity is clarity. Clarity - the intelligence to distinguish signal from noise. Urgent from trivial. Relevant from inconsequential. It requires a certain neatness of understanding and an imperative economy of thought.

This is hard.

I for instance have poor curatorial skills. My mind is like the contents of a miscellaneous drawer. Only this morning I wanted simultaneously to write about: relativism and the grounds for making moral claims; originality and opinion as an organising principle; focus and the creative process; intrinsic motivation; enacting change in a bureaucratic society; Tolstoy, war and freedom - how settled societies are also more regimented ones; Kurt Vonnegut on why happiness is to want the inevitable; Sartre's No Exit and people as mirrors; and finally of role models and Renaissance Men based on a book by Studs Terkel I finished last month. What an incongruous mess.

Simplicity. Clarity. Consistency. A personal brand.

Yet choosing is hard. Doing so rapidly and decisively - harder still. This is because the choice between what to keep and what to leave aside is an act of definition. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word comes from the Latin definire which means to limit, determine, explain. It is a fusion of de- (expressing completion) and finire (expressing boundary or end). To define is to cut an identity out of the indeterminate fabric of existence. To choose is to bring into being.

Herein lies the difficulty. Any time you decide what book to read, what job to take, what event to attend, what friendship to pursue, what hobby to practice - at the expense of every other - any time you choose what to keep and what to leave aside, some doors will get closed forever. This is terrifying because who to be is just another way of asking where can I belong since people don't just want to be, in a vacuum. If nobody goes to see Lygia Pape, who cares? There will be other exhibitions. You, on the other hand, only get to live once.

Then again, perhaps choice is an illusion, and we should all grow to fill the space allotted to us by nature, nurture, culture and sheer chance. You are who you are. You choose a book from the few that happen to come your way. You take the job you get. You belong simply where you happen to be.

Freedom is a blessing and a curse.

Listening Is A Willingness To Be Changed

Every so often I will hear someone say something that substantially changes my perspective. The other day, our improv instructor explained that the chief requirement in improv is to listen. People, he would say, always try to appear interesting - but you cannot make yourself interesting. However, you can make yourself interested. And if you are interested then you are interesting. To be interested, though, you must listen.

Later, he said this: listening is a willingness to be changed.

I think herein lies something crucial. We are fond of our identities. We are not willing to allow just any odd person to change us in just any odd way. An article in the Harvard Business Review lists among reasons people resist change: fear of losing control, a resentment of the person suggesting the change, a simple bias in favour of habit. Unsurprisingly, we learn more from people we like. We are generally defensive about our beliefs when offering a new perspective often carries the implication that the old one (the one we are currently holding) is in some way deficient. Perhaps we may also fear a domino effect: that changing our minds in one regard will force us to change our minds in another. Then, before we know it, we might become someone else.

However, conversations can and often do change us. If we listen properly, we may learn, perhaps in quite a striking way, something about another person's perspective. We may experience what it would be like to 'climb into [their] skin and walk around in it' (as Atticus Finch tells Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird). We may, in consequence, become more sympathetic to their values and less suspicious of their beliefs. Their motives may come to seem less alien, less, selfish, less perplexing. In short, by listening, we may become - if only in a small way - a little more like them.

That is terrifying. Why would anyone want to become - even in a small way - more like someone unpleasant, weird or beneath contempt? Humans everywhere, liberals as well as conservatives, have a certain instinct for purity. This may have evolved as the urgent reflex to recoil from contaminants, but a similar drive may be observed in our moral behaviour. If listening to someone detestable can make you more sympathetic to them, perhaps this is because you have already allowed their values and their worldview to "infect" you. A later endorsement would merely come as the natural symptom of such a contamination. The process need not always be negative: when we like someone, we may just the same hope that, by talking to them and spending time with them, we too can become a little better. In a way, this is one of the principle fantasies of love: that by getting close to this person, we may be lifted and refined into a better version of ourselves.

Listening really is a willingness to be changed.

This year has been a highly polarising time in politics. Many people lament the breakdown of communication, the isolating effects of social echo chambers. We all, it would seem, wish everyone listened more to everyone else. However, listening is a willingness to be changed. Perhaps then, the problem has more to do with an exaggerated attachment to our own identities, to our values as they currently stand. Listening is easier to preach than to practice:

In the end, however, societies are only possible among people who have agreed to have certain things in common. That is: to be, in some fundamental ways, a little bit like each other.

In Praise of Popular Philosophy: Great Thinkers

Why would anyone not read Great Thinkers, the encyclopedia from School of Life which curates and summarises for busy working people famous philosophical ideas still urgent and relevant to modern life? It has high production values (just holding the volume and turning its pages is a treat), each entry is no more than a few pages long (making it an ideal coffee companion) and its contents are compelling, insightful, practical and consoling.

One reason, I would propose, is a certain rigid aversion many thinking people seem to reserve for anything popular or easy. 'Popular science' and 'popular philosophy' have a peculiarly derogatory ring, implying such content might be suitable for children or the masses, but surely no self-respecting intellectual. I'm thinking for example of this 2013 review in The Guardian for a series of books on philosophy by School of Life (the closest I could find to an actual review of Great Thinkers), in which the writer deemed it necessary to maintain throughout the entire evaluation a tone of unrelieved, if benevolent and sympathetic, condescendence. Smart people don't require summaries or simplifications, clear prose or - if such an absurdity even bears consideration - pictures in their books. Most of us, it seems, hate nothing with as much bitterness and knee-jerk outrage as we hate being patronised. This article in The Independent has Alain de Botton reporting that "Simon Blackburn (...) sells lots of copies, but he has to be careful not to reveal how many to his colleagues at Cambridge because it's seen as not quite acceptable." This is very intriguing.

However, I do not think one should dismiss this attitude as simply snobbish, elitist, incomprehensible or fuelled by status anxiety. It must signal some legitimate concerns. For instance, oversimplification. To take an example from history, saying that the Second World War was "caused" by Hitler is to dismiss the wider historical, cultural and socio-economic causes of that war in favour of a jauntier if probably misleading Bad Guy narrative. Reality is never that simple. "In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events" Tolstoy would argue. Another valid concern might be dilettantism. People who think they understand things even when they do so only superficially can do more harm than those who recognise their own ignorance and agree to defer to experts. "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" quipped Winston Churchill, an observation which must sound accurate and bitter-sweet to anyone in the aftermath of an election - regardless of side. Finally, there is the concern over actual deception. How can you really trust that what you are being taught is valid, comprehensive, balanced, accurate, sensible and free from ulterior motives without yourself becoming an expert in each field? This is the wider issue of trust (in experts or authority), a singularly modern malady. Since God has died and Science is becoming increasingly specialised and inaccessible, what can be the rational basis for accepting anyone's point of view, ever? These and many others are valid and entirely sensible concerns.

Computer science is intimately familiar with a version of this problem, which it calls ranking. Google's PageRank famously proposed a ranking system based on counting the number and quality of references for each site (the problem of calculating relevance or how well a set of sites matches a user's query, is closely related but separate). Everyone is all too familiar with the failings of technology on these issues, from the ills of click-baiting to those of social echo chambers.

With all this in mind then what can be said in defence of reading something like Great Thinkers?

In a recent entry on how to get the news when there is far too much of it, I was arguing that what helps with choosing between 75 types of salad dressing helps here too. Brands exist to advertise consistency and to help people choose and find their way back to helpful and high-quality products reliably. School of Life is a brand as is its founder, Alain de Botton. Getting to know the brand a little, you can generally guess what are its blindspots and agenda. So you might conclude that the good people of School of Life are neither stupid or evil, cynical or deceptive, but in fact genuinely convinced by and invested in their brand's mission statement.

Here is George Orwell: "Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him [her, they] is talent, which is probably another name for conviction". Great Thinkers is sane, logical and honest. Add to that the beautiful and fluid prose, the genuinely interesting content and (let us not forget) the pictures (:O) and you have a book worth reading.

How To Get The News

To learn about the world beyond their direct experience, even cave dwellers would have had to sift relevant facts from self-interest, gossip, speculation and delusion. Yet modernity did manage to invent its very own challenge - volume.

Relevance used to be a simple function of proximity (‘The farther it is from Kansas City the less it is news’). Stories were about individuals nearby, politics, war and celebrity gossip featuring the upper classes. Yet for people in a globalised world there is no ‘nearby’ - politics halfway around the planet might cost them their jobs. This world is also far more complicated. Numbers, to take just one example, which are relied on heavily in any modern society, can bewilder and deceive without appropriate context; ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ quipped Mark Twain. Nowadays news serves not only to inform, but to make the world intelligible. It is more abstract, more reliant on data and expertise and more concerned with context, explanations, trends and making predictions. Storytelling about the individual is now the ‘anecdotal lead’ and journalists, too, have had to specialise (‘Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent’ would not have been funny a century ago). Many act themselves as commentators (think ‘we turn to our business editor to see why’). In 1985 the Pulitzer board awarded its first prize for explanatory work. Meanwhile, critics worry that news has a tendency to turn audiences into consumers and citizens into spectators, cynically feeding people the brain equivalent of deep fried Mars bars: power, fame, scandals, accidents, disaster, sex. And since advertisers moved online, where news sources are two a penny and stories bounce around in social echo chambers, a certain visibility system has replaced the old authority system. How is the news you care about to be fished out?

One idea is to get to know the brands - what helps to decide between 75 types of salad dressing helps here too. Anyone operating in the public space will have a brand and brands, by definition, advertise consistency: it is no likelier to read about the release of Overwatch in The Economist than to find praise for Hillary Clinton in Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Being consistent, brands can act as handy abstractions over large chunks of ongoing reality. You need discover which brands are best for which information. A well curated Twitter feed of niche, trusted brands may serve better than a single news source of general interest - the larger the audience needing to be satisfied, the less room left for nuance and specific concerns.

Another strategy is learning to spot what Alain de Botton calls ‘archetypes’. The world does not change at the pace of headlines. In reality, there are relatively few primary ideas, like colours, that news stories circulate. Some archetypes might be that all establishment politicians are corrupt or at any rate incompetent, that in a bureaucracy nothing ever changes, that work and romantic love alone can lead to happiness, that everyone is free to achieve anything, that human life is precarious (most stories of accidents, disasters, terrorism and disease fall under this last headline), that nevertheless science and technology are gleefully employed in bringing about the end of history. Or you may discover your own. The point is only to notice that there are far fewer narratives than there are individual news stories. This reduces cognitive overload. Asked to memorise a chessboard in seconds, grandmasters consistently recall the board better than novices because, rather than individual pieces, they notice their commonly occurring configurations.

A third idea is to use persistence, rather than proximity, as an indicator of relevance. If something keeps coming up it might be worth investigating. Anyone ignorant of Brexit, Syria or the US election has more interesting concerns than a lack of skill in keeping up. Important stories linger. The most important move from newspapers into history books, true to the notion that news is a rough draft of history.

Yet in a world of ubiquitous information what may matter most is the ability to make people care. It can be hard to regret tragedies that befall people you never knew existed or engage, without a narrative, the dry facts of modern economics. Human psychology still requires art and storytelling to file away the deluge of information about the world beyond. Longform and other types of realist news can lay the ground for better news absorption, as can books, comedy and other people. If prisons and retirement plans sound dull, try first to learn about them from comedian John Oliver. If foreign lands bewilder, make an immigrant friend. Facebook feeds not only filter news, but filter the ability to care. Heed the cave dweller within and get the news, at least sometimes, by talking to someone you wouldn’t normally talk to.

Lygia Pape: Ttéia 1C

A brief but vivid encounter with a physical sense of wonder at Hauser&Wirth London.

It is a dark, still, windowless gallery. High ceiling. Concrete floor. The only sounds: steps, shuffles, an undulating hum of ocean waves from a video installation in the adjoining room, murmurs, the thumping throb of traffic outside. The only light: white recessed downlights casting faint shafts of cold white at various angles. In the middle, ten square feet, a dark gray platform: a sort of stage whence spring or whereto land, in neat square bundles, the silver threads of Ttéia 1C. They could be sunrays piercing through a handful of abandoned vents in the roof of a derelict silo, or holes in the deck of a disused submarine. The whole space feels subterranean, mysterious, sequestered, yet peaceful - like a lost world. The light shifts softly from one vantage point to another, at a single stroke revealing and concealing, and at every moment transforming what is seen.

It is a peculiar but intensely satisfying illusion. The still silver threads are at once solid, firm, tangible - and ethereal. They appear and disappear against the unreflecting darkness. The visual deception is stark and satisfying, manifest yet unspoiled by the clarity of deception.

It is a peculiar way of experiencing, feelingly, how something can be two things at once. It rather reminded me of Simon Blackburn discussing sentences in everyday language which, unlike those of formal logic, do not carry a clear, binary truth-value. In Anton Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog, he points out, Anna Sergeyevna tells her husband that her regular visits to Moscow are to see a doctor about an internal complaint - "and her husband believed her, and did not believe her". How many a thought exhibit this duality. And here is Lygia Pape's Ttéia 1C giving a physical reality to this odd, illogical, quantum way of being.

Besides this, there is also a sense of wonder at the strangeness of what is usually perceived as boring everyday physical reality. A glimpse at the uncanny absurdity of the world, but also its exciting versatility. The physical reality of cities is normally very plain, familiar, normal and boring: dull the entrance gates to the Underground, dull the seats on the train, dull the cars and the buses, dull the uniform buildings, dull the people, dull the shops. No encounter with the sublime on a daily commute into central London. Yet here is wonder: simple, unassuming, still. A very honest trick, no less effective for its honesty. I was very glad.

How To Have Better Conversations

First, be more attractive. Second, earn more money. Third, accrue more power and/or fame. Whatever the strategy, try always to convince others that you hold the higher-status position in every interaction. Then, naturally, they will listen. Fail and you'll find yourself browsing self-help titles in a bookshop at the other end of town. Or reading this blog post in incognito browsing mode, placing all your hope in the effectiveness of strategy number four: be more philosophical.

Here is how.

Step one. Remember that fear is the quintessential human emotion. As Hermann Hesse might put it, fear looms large over the life of man. Everyone is afraid, paranoid or anxious more or less always. There are two broad categories of fear. First, there is the fear of sheer bad luck - plane crashes, house fires, cancer, old age. It stems from our awareness of the Universe's majestic indifference to human affairs and our susceptibility to accidents, disasters, illness and the melancholy passing of time. Second, there is the fear of people. This is at heart the point of Halloween, a festival celebrating our deepest darkest fears: that everybody else is a monster and that at any point they are liable to turn up at our doors, unannounced, demanding things under the threat of repercussions. Worse still, we need the little gremlins because we have evolved to require affection, love, validation and esteem.

Step two. Realise that the knee-jerk reaction to fear is control. Every superhero story ever is at its core a form of power porn. It is our number one fantasy: that we control our environment, that we exercise agency and self-determination, and that those we love behave how we expect them to. We have evolved a whole sleuth of psychological tricks that enable us to exercise control upon one another: shame, infatuation, intimidation and so on. There are two broad categories of control. First, there is control by seduction. By attempting to seduce people, we inadvertently attempt to control them: to make them be nice to us, stick around, offer us their time, attention, energy and genes. If this person is infatuated with me, the logic goes, then I have some measure of control over them; and if I can control them, then they can't hurt me. This also applies to lesser degrees of seduction, such as when we merely attempt to make ourselves liked or popular. Second, there is control by status play. This is where status anxiety comes in. Earn more money, accrue more power, gain more fame and, the logic goes, people will do what you want them to. They will offer you love, affection, validation and esteem, or leave you alone, or listen to you without interruption. That is the high-status strategy, though it is worth noticing that a low-status strategy can be just as valid: if we look frail, insecure or poor we may obtain the desired outcome by signaling that we are happy to concede the high-status position, or that we are happy to receive love, attention etc as a form of patronage, or are not worth troubling with and ought to be left alone. High-status people might be better respected, but low-status people are better liked. The point is only to notice in what ways we try to control people: do we try to seduce them, intimidate them, appease them?

(One method of control that I think is worth noticing, chiefly because it is so subtle yet so pervasive, is the tendency not to listen to people, or to listen to them but not take their words at face value. In doing this, we essentially substitute our own image and interpretation (read: prejudice) for the actual human before us. Instead of believing them when they say they didn't want that job or that promotion, we imagine they're lying to us or to themselves in order to avoid admitting failure. Instead of treating them like individuals, with their infinitely unknowable otherness, with a rich and deep experience of existence, we reduce them to single dimensions: their job, their social status, their accent, their family and friends, their relationship, their hobbies, their political leanings, whether they're a cat or dog person, whether or not they read the same books or favour the same ideas. Everybody does this. Very rarely, if ever, do we try to imagine ourselves walking around in their skin or feel curious about their real needs, truest values or most defining experiences. This is probably only natural, since that level of empathy costs time and energy which we simply don't have enough of. Yet we could do better. At present, it seems to me the only person whom we offer this level of empathy to is a lover  -and even then for a limited period only. This I think is why most people seem to have lost faith in "just" friendships achieving anything like a meaningful connection. This is a pity. It both puts too much pressure on that single romantic relationship and deprives us of a certain richness of experience that can only come from empathising with a diverse number of people. But back to the main point.)

Step three. Become self-aware. Now that you know how fear looms large over the life of man and that the knee-jerk reaction to it is control, pay attention to yourself in every interaction. Breathe. Relax your shoulders, let your shoulder blade carry them (it is what they are for). Bend your knees slightly to remove pressure off the knee caps. Balance your head on your shoulders. Breathe again. Be aware of your body language: are you signaling high-status (body stretched into the surrounding space, neck and torso exposed, steady eye contact) or low-status (constant jerking of head and shoulders, asking for permission, apologising for no reason, making self-deprecating remarks) or a combination of both. Are you trying to seduce or intimidate? How does this person scare you? Are you secure in your own sense of self? Do you feel certain of your own values? Is imagining yourself through their eyes causing you to cringe or feel proud? Do you consider the "lense" through which they view you or the world superior or inferior to your own? And breathe. Again breathe. Always breathe. It's the only thing which will stay with you forever.

Step four. Become aware of others. How are they breathing? What is their body language signaling? Are they trying to seduce you or intimidate you? What are they likely to be afraid of? What are they actually saying? Are you listening to them and believing them or substituting your own interpretations for what is being said? What do they look like? How do they see themselves? What do you suppose they do first thing in the morning? How do they make you feel? Above all, be curious. You will be surprised how effective that is. Some of the most appalling words and behaviours can be deflected if met with curiosity - why do you suppose they are checking their phone while you're in the middle of making a sensitive point? what could they be afraid of? what might they be concerned about?

And now, for the fifth and final step, the secret ingredient to having better conversations. Ready?

Step five. Stop trying to control them. This might sound simple but in fact requires an astonishing level of intellectual and emotional maturity. To make it easier, imagine you're God: you want everyone to love you and worship you and maybe not have any other Gods besides you, but you must accept the existence of free will. Imagine you could force them into a sense of love, loyalty and awe (you are after all God), yet at the same time realise that unless they are offered willingly, these offerings would be pretty meaningless. You don't just want these people to love you, you want them to choose to love you. Otherwise, it doesn't count. Right there is the necessity for a certain level of intellectual and emotional maturity. You must bow before others' right to their own agency. No matter how firmly you believe it would increase their own happiness and bring about their own utmost good, no matter how painful to watch them mistakenly ignore you and single-mindedly pursue their own destruction, in the ideal world the only person you should ever desire to control is yourself. Not your loved ones, not your enemies, not your children. Think of it like the free-will defense to the problem of Evil, but with the nice upshot that it isn't a fallacy on account of how you are not, in fact, omniscient/omnipotent. Now, of course this is a fantasy - we will always try to control one another, that is just what members of a social species do. Yet it is a useful notion to bare in mind.

How does this lead to better conversations? Well, I think the ultimate goal of disinterested conversation (when we are not pursuing other ends) is to feel - if only briefly - connected. It is to be seen, really seen - heard, really heard - understood, really understood - and accepted. It is to escape the narrow confines of your own person.  It is to feel the thrill of another free intellect focus its own independent mind upon your separate and inevitably lonesome existence and relieve some of that loneliness, even if just a little. It is to have your own sense of self confirmed and your particular experience of existence recognised. It is to feel together. Yes, it takes two to tango, but someone has to make the first step.

Bilibin's Letter About the Campaign - War and Peace

I enjoyed reading this section so much that I have decided to share it here.

It is 1805. The Russians have recently lost the Battle of Austerlitz against Napoleon and have since been retreating. Despite this obvious retreat, the Russian aristocracy continues to believe in the myth of Russian invincibility and dismisses the facts of war as the fault of incompetent allies.

Bilibin is a wry, skeptical yet very talented Russian diplomat, here writing from the front to a friend back home - Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

For context - a few chapters before this letter was presented the following anecdote: a letter is received by the Russian Army from Napoleon; this letter causes some confusion because the chiefs of the army are unable to decide how to address the reply ('Your Majesty', 'Head of the French Government', 'General'?); finally, one character suggests, jestingly, to address Napoleon as 'Enemy of the Human Race'.

This is one of the funniest pieces of prose I have ever read.

Since the day of our brilliant success at Austerlitz, as you know, my dear prince, I never leave headquarters. I've certainly acquired a taste for war and it is just as well for me. What I have seen during these last three months is incredible. I begin ab ovo. The Enemy of the Human Race as you know attacks the Prussians. The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only betrayed us three times in three years; we take up their cause but it turns out that The Enemy of the Human Race pays no heed to our fine speeches and in his rude and savage ways throws himself on the Prussians without giving them time to finish the parade they had begun and in two twists of the hand he blows them to smithereens and installs himself in the Palace of Potsdam. 'I most ardently desire' writes the King of Prussia to Bonaparte 'that you should be received and treated in my palace in a manner agreeable to yourself and insofar as circumstances allowed I have hastened to take all steps to that end; may I have succeeded'. The Prussian generals pride themselves on being polite to the French and lay down their arms at the first demand. The head of the garrison at Glogau with ten thousand men asks the King of Prussia what he is to do if he is summoned to surrender. All this is absolutely true.

In short, hoping to settle matters by taking up a war-like attitude it turns out that we've landed ourselves in war and what is more in war on our own frontiers with and for the King of Prussia. We have everything in perfect order, only one little thing is lacking, namely a commander in chief. As it was considered that the Austerlitz success might have been more decisive had the commander in chief not been so young, all our octogenarians were reviewed and of Prozorovski and Kamenski the latter was preferred. The general comes to us, Suvorov-like, in a kibitka and is received with acclamations of joy and triumph. On the fourth, the first courier arrives from Petersburgh. The mail is taken to the field marshal's room, for he likes to do everything himself. I am called in to help sort the letter and take those meant for us. The field marshal looks on and waits for letters addressed to him. We search, but none are to be found. The field marshal grows impatien and sets to work himself and finds letters from the Emperor to Count T, Prince V and others. 

And he bursts into one of his wild furies and rages at everyone and everything, seizes the letters, opens them and reads those from the Emperor addressed to others. 'Ah. So that's the way they treat me. Ah. No confidence in me. Ah. Ordered to keep an eye on me, very well then, get along with you' so he writes the famous order of the day to General Bennigsen: 'I am wounded and cannot ride and consequently cannot command the Army. You have brought your army corps to Pultusk, routed: here it is exposed, and without fuel or forage, so something must be done, and, as you yourself reported to Count Buxhowden yesterday, you must think of retreating to our frontier- which do today'.

'From all my riding,' he writes to the Emperor, 'I have got a saddle sore which, coming after all my previous journeys, quite prevents my riding and commanding so vast an army, so I have passed on the command to the general next in seniority, Count Buxhowden, having sent him my whole staff and all that belongs to it, advising him if there is a lack of bread, to move farther into the interior of Prussia, for only one day's ration of bread remains, and in some regiments none at all, as reported by the division commanders, Ostermann and Sedmoretzki, and all that the peasants had has been eaten up. I myself will remain in hospital at Ostrolenka till I recover. In regard to which I humbly submit my report, with the information that if the army remains in its present bivouac another fortnight there will not be a healthy man left in it by spring. Grant leave to retire to his country seat to an old man who is already in any case dishonored by being unable to fulfill the great and glorious task for which he was chosen. I shall await your most gracious permission here in hospital, that I may not have to play the part of a secretary rather than commander in the army. My removal from the army does not produce the slightest stir - a blind man has left it. There are thousands such as I in Russia.'

The field marshal is angry with the Emperor and he punishes us all, isn't it logical? 

This is the first act. Those that follow are naturally increasingly interesting and entertaining. After the field marshal's departure it appears that we are within sight of the enemy and must give battle. Buxhowden is commander in chief by seniority, but General Bennigsen does not quite see it; more particularly as it is he and his corps who are within sight of the enemy and he wishes to profit by the opportunity to fight a battle 'on his own hand' as the Germans say. He does so. This is the battle of Pultusk, which is considered a great victory but in my opinion was nothing of the kind. We civilians, as you know, have a very bad way of deciding whether a battle was won or lost. Those who retreat after a battle have lost it is what we say; and according to that it is we who lost the battle of Pultusk. In short, we retreat after the battle but send a courier to Petersburg with news of a victory, and General Bennigsen, hoping to receive from Petersburg the post of commander in chief as a reward for his victory, does not give up the command of the army to General Buxhowden. 

During this interregnum we begin a very original and interesting series of maneuvers. Our aim is no longer, as it should be, to avoid or attack the enemy, but solely to avoid General Buxhowden who by right of seniority should be our chief. So energetically do we pursue this aim that after crossing an unfordable river we burn the bridges to separate ourselves from our enemy, who at the moment is not Bonaparte but Buxhowden. General Buxhowden was all but attacked and captured by a superior enemy force as a result of one of these maneuvers that enabled us to escape him. Buxhowden pursues us- we scuttle. He hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to the other. At last our enemy. Buxhowden, catches us and attacks. Both generals are angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhowden's part and an epileptic fit on Bennigsen's. But at the critical moment the courier who carried the news of our victory at Pultusk to Petersburg returns bringing our appointment as commander in chief, and our first foe, Buxhowden, is vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts to the second, Bonaparte. 

But as it turns out, just at that moment a third enemy rises before us- namely the Orthodox Russian soldiers, loudly demanding bread, meat, biscuits, fodder, and whatnot! The stores are empty, the roads impassable. The Orthodox begin looting, and in a way of which our last campaign can give you no idea. Half the regiments form bands and scour the countryside and put everything to fire and sword. The inhabitants are totally ruined, the hospitals overflow with sick, and famine is everywhere. Twice the marauders even attack our headquarters, and the commander in chief has to ask for a battalion to disperse them. During one of these attacks they carried off my empty portmanteau and my dressing gown. The Emperor proposes to give all commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders, but I much fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other.

Have you ever read anything more delightful? I love Tolstoy.

Knowing Feelingly

The other week I watched a video where composer Rob Kapilow quoted Yip Harburg as having once said "words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling but a song makes you feel a thought". I reckon design has a similar ambition. When you walk through a Palladian archway or use a Philippe Starck juicer or swipe to dismiss a notification, the design helps you feel a thought (calm, playfulness, ease). Successful design creates the satisfying sensation of innate mastery, of (to paraphrase King Lear) knowing something "feelingly".

This "knowing feelingly" is a wonderful and immensely useful idea because humans suffer grievously of forgetfulness. Our minds are like sieves. Names, facts, dates, aphorisms, the sorrows of loved ones, the humanity of others, the steps of formatting an Excel spreadsheet and the principles of a virtuous life - we forget and forget and forget.

The frailty of memory is a designer's worst nightmare because she desperately needs you to learn how to use her product, yet must teach you do to so in the design alone. Sure, there are user manuals, there are tooltips and forums and Google, but the most successful products are often those which don't require anything besides themselves. Somehow we guess to switch off the radio by rotating the volume dial anti-clockwise until it clicks; we pinch to zoom, we push to walk through doors without a handle. These designs succeed because they talk directly to the senses, make use of habits and meet our expectations, without placing additional burden on our already strained, exhausted conscious minds.

From reading 'The Design of Everyday Things' by Don Norman it would seem that in design the common trick for dealing with faulty human memory is to put some of the knowledge required into the surrounding world. Of course, planting memory cues around ourselves is common practice: we make use of notes, reminders, calendars, assistants and apps of every kind. Yet design does do something more. Where most of these signals still require an engagement of our conscious mind (we need to read the text from the note on our dressing mirror that reminds us to 'be kind today' and deliberately place ourselves in that frame of mind), design knows this is ineffective. Conscious thought is effort habitually shirked. So design uses external cues that talk primarily to the subconscious mind. Icons, art, photography, music, rituals, tattoos. Removing handles from doors which can only be pushed, embedding the notion of serenity into the very shape of a building. These are things which make us feel thoughts. It's the thoughts we feel that we remember longest.

Don Norman postulates also that great design works on three levels: visceral, behavioural, reflective. The visceral level is where our senses are intimately satisfied, because the thing is pleasurable to touch, smell, hear, hold or look at. Design at the behavioural level means that it makes good use of our existing habits (meaning skills) and expectations (meaning experience) so we can master it without extensive premeditation (meaning in flow, as satisfying and intuitive as playing an instrument or riding a bike). The reflective level is where we find the product embodies our values: an electric car with a low emissions footprint or a responsibly sourced piece of furniture.

I think these levels - visceral, behavioural, reflective - go from least to most forgetful. Advertising needs constantly to remind us that something is fair trade or organic or for a good cause, but the smell and taste and touch and look of a product are inherent. The more meaning can be communicated in the first two levels, the more immediate and longer lasting its understanding.

Furthermore, it occurs to me that the visceral, besides being more immediate and harder to forget, has yet another quality: it regenerates. By this I mean that although we become desensitised to physical sensations in the short term, going away for any length of time makes the sensations once more as fresh as ever. We might tire of feeling proud of our low-emissions cars or responsibly sourced bedsteads, but we can never tire of beauty, flavour, scent or sound. No matter how much sunshine we experience, we will always want more. Perhaps this is why art, as Proust will have it, helps us discern with new eyes: it is the visceral component that reminds us to perceive anew.

So we forget, but forget slower and tire less of those things which we get to know feelingly. Design, like art, embeds this knowledge in the surrounding world whence it may be readily retrieved any time we need to find our way reliably back to an important idea. And the most lasting representations are those which at once seduce the senses, engage habits and expectations and stir reflection in the conscious mind. So instead of that inspirational quote on the dressing mirror, perhaps we should instead surround ourselves with embodiments of thoughts - through art, design and certain other people.

Is software a good or a service?

To paraphrase The Hidden Complexity of Wishes - how would you ask an evil wish-granting genie to get your Mother out of a burning building? A gas pipe explosion will technically remove her body from the premises, but may not be quite what you had in mind. Such are the imperfections of language that all written law must ultimately be subject to intelligent human oversight. In their terms and conditions (T&C) software companies judiciously refer to themselves as ‘service’ providers. Are they?

Much of commercial law turns on the issue of accountability: when things go wrong, who pays? Broadly, three frameworks govern the question: contract law, common law for civil wrongs or ‘tort’ of negligence and statutory strict liability. Until the advent of mass production, contract law dominated. But industrialisation posed a new problem: privity of contract - the concept that no rights or obligations arising from one can apply to third parties - also meant no way for final buyers to make claims against producers since they rarely dealt with them directly. In Winterbottom v Wright (UK, 1842), Mr Winterbottom was denied compensation for injury when his poorly constructed mail coach collapsed because the Lords feared precedence: ‘the only safe rule’, they concluded, ‘is to confine the right to recover to those who enter into the contract’. It was not until courts introduced the concept of negligence, through pivotal cases such as Donoghue v Stevenson (UK, 1932) or MacPherson v Buick Motor Co (US, 1916), that buyers were allowed to get around privity. Yet negligence still requires plaintiffs to show ‘fault’, meaning blameworthiness and responsibility. In contrast, strict liability only requires that a tort occurred, regardless of culpability. If a product is defective, it does not matter producers followed the correct procedures: they are still liable. Product liability is the most important strict liability regime and it, crucially, applies only to manufacturers of products and not service providers. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers - all still handle liability under the frameworks of contract law and negligence. It makes sense that software companies should prefer to trade under strict T&C (i.e. contracts) and avoid strict liability as much as possible.

Yet buyers may have more rights if software is considered a good, not a service. Replacement, reimbursement and damages are all easier to claim. In the US, courts have made the distinction on a case by case basis: is the software bespoke or mass-marketed? Did the buyer claim investment tax credits? Did the sales aspect predominate? Most notably, when bundled with hardware (as in laptops, Fitbits, Tesla cars), software will almost certainly be considered a ‘good’ and subject to Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). Only this week, Microsoft paid $10 000 in a small claims court in California over a faulty Windows 10 upgrade. True, considering software a ‘good’ for the purpose of UCC has been more common than considering it a ‘product’ for the purpose of strict liability (‘good’ and ‘product’ are not perfect synonyms but the difference is still under debate). Yet invoking UCC makes invoking strict liability more likely. As the Internet of Things expands, expect more such rulings.

Already, in the UK, a key facet of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (an EU directive implementation which updated and standardised previous consumer legislation) was to deal explicitly with ‘digital content’ and confer upon it the rights and obligations buyers would naturally expect. Under it, T&C are no longer binding if they ‘exclude or restrict the trader’s liability’. Ultimately, evil genies and T&C might be a necessary part of life, but mere crafty wording will not amount to genuine, binding consent. To agree, stop reading this now.

Why We Still Haven't Cured Cancer

Almost half a century since President Nixon started the ‘war on cancer’, President Obama promised ‘a new moonshot’ so that America may become ‘the country that cures cancer once and for all‘. Yet serious problems have a knack for persisting despite high-minded -- if overly optimistic -- political speeches. Despite decades of research and billions of dollars in public and private funding, cancer remains one of the world’s likeliest killers. Why?

Broadly, cancer is caused by uncontrolled cell division, when the mutation of a small set of genes causes cells to multiply indefinitely and invade the space of healthy neighbouring tissue. But cancer is best understood as a chemical process. Each cell contains the full human DNA - around 24000 genes - and each cell division makes a full copy. A gene is a sequence of chemical bases that instructs cells to turn glucose and oxygen into energy and which amino acids and proteins to manufacture, encoding information such as when to multiply and when to self-terminate - the programmed cell death known as apoptosis. Carcinogens are anything that corrupt this chemical code: radiation that breaks ionic bonds, and substances and viruses that disrupt cell metabolism or bind to DNA directly and change its structure. Still, perhaps the most insidious carcinogen is sheer bad luck: chance mutations over a lifetime of cell divisions. While DNA can self-repair, it won’t if the mending instructions themselves are damaged. Therefore apoptosis is key in preventing cells with gene mutations from replicating. However, if the signal for self-termination too is altered, cells will both multiply indefinitely and continue to replicate the initial mutations, making further DNA corruption more likely. This is why in tumours mutations tend to accumulate. Fixing all this is hard for many reasons.

First, every cancer is a different disease. Not only is leukemia different from melanoma but every tumour is caused by a different set of genetic mutations such that no two cancers are ever the same. Every tumour follows a unique genetic path so that one person may live and another die having the ‘same’ cancer and taking the same medication. Second, surgery is not always feasible, radiation is difficult to target accurately and the drugs known collectively as chemotherapy cannot distinguish between rapidly dividing cells in tumours and cells whose rapid division is legitimate and vital, such as those in hair and stomach lining. Finally, the accumulation of mutations makes it hard to identify the genes that started the process. Without knowing those it is hard to develop personalised medication or predict the effectiveness of various drugs on individual people. This is a problem big data can solve. Alas, because genome sequencing has only been possible for little over a decade, some of the world’s biggest genome databases still have only thousands of samples. Many millions may be required.

Yet change is under way. In 2008, whole genome sequencing could be purchased for $350,000; today that cost is under $1000, with results in two and a half months (the Human Genome Project took 13 years). Further, people who use DNA testing companies can chose to share their genomes with researchers, helping solve the data problem. Together with better computing, this can make the development of personalised treatments feasible. In 2000, Bill Clinton declared it ‘conceivable that our children’s children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars’. Overly optimistic, perhaps. Yet replace ‘children’ with ‘grandchildren’ and it might just come to pass.

On Melancholia and Being Jollied Along

September is my favourite month. Summer, even in London, was torrid. Not continually and not so hot as might prevent people from venturing outside, but enough to bring to mind pictures of tropical beaches and to feel like Summer. Summer needs to have made itself felt for September to be properly celebrated and relished.

It happened yesterday when I went for a stroll in Victoria Park. It was a lovely day. Not a day of splendid sumptuous mid-Summer, with throngs of happy people crammed in pubs or sprawled in patches of shade with board games, blankets and beers, but a day of quiet, sober loveliness, with overcast skies yet still clear clement weather and a gentle breeze. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was balmy and placid and then, for a brief moment, I felt it. Beneath the bright sunshine, mixed in with the light puff of air, barely audible dissonance in the swift flow of harmony, a faint, noiseless, yet unmistakably distinct - winter chill.

Summer is over.

The name for what one feels before this change of season is not despair, nor apprehension, nor regret, but an emotion too often banished from everyday use and polite conversation: melancholy.

My Oxford Dictionary of English defines melancholy as a feeling of "pensive sadness" and sadness, even the pensive sort, seems to terrify people. The social norm is, at least outwardly, a state of more or less permanent excitement. Alain de Botton puts it best when he observes that people are relentlessly and without variation trying to jolly us along. A limited amount of amused frustration might on occasion, and only intermittently, be tolerated - so long as it's funny. But if anyone ever commits the social faux pas of admitting to any other kind of emotion, he is immediately met, depending on the audience, with either sternness, pity or concern.

This is a little crazy. It signals that we live in a society fundamentally unable to tolerate its own full range of emotions. And here is the thing: melancholy is glorious.

This is why September is my favourite month. Melancholy at this time seeps into the air and is to be breathed in and seen settling everywhere. It is the quiet comedown after the intense joy of Summer, when we wake up to the memory of winter to come. It is the sadness of letting go and the quiet joy of acceptance - because seasons pass and we too are one year closer to passing ourselves. September is the month to celebrate the dignity of Impermanence.

Yet this doesn't happen. People seem fixated, a bit manically, on the hope that science and technology are gleefully employed in bringing about the end of history and that immortality is just around the corner. Yay.

This may well be a noble pursuit and maybe the species will flourish and immortality is possible. But in our own lives, meaning the set of people currently alive, we do rather need to make a bit more room for melancholy. Because, and this is true, we will die. Let that sink in for a moment.

Before you cringe and hastily move along to more polite sentiments, take a solitary walk. Celebrate September a little. Allow a drop of pensive sadness to insert an inch of perspective into your daily grind. You might discover that melancholy, if quiet and understated, is in fact rather nice. It is tuna sashimi to the chocolate fudge brownie ice-cream of everyday life. Autumn is melancholic and life is pretty miserable most of the time. One may manage to enjoy both of them, nevertheless.

In Praise of Doing Nothing

I have been unemployed for 73 days and during this interval have been asked what on Earth I spend my time doing by at least one person, on average, about once a day. Compared to their own lives, most of everyone rightly feel that I am astonishingly time-rich and surely must have achieved something with all this wealth. How am I not immensely bored? I am reassured that they, surely, would be.

Alas.

Time is money so tracking how it is being spent can yield useful insights. For the past 3 years I have tracked my expenses purchase-by-purchase with a precision of two decimal points. The result has been a stark insight into exactly how much I require to live at precisely what sort of standard of living (in Dublin, Seattle or London) as well as some pretty good ideas for how to manage myself financially. For instance, I discovered that (up to a certain threshold) getting rid of belongings actually increases my disposable income by a good few hundred pounds a year and gives me at least 5 extra hours of leisure weekly.

For the past two months I have done the same tracking with time. Here is what I concluded.

First, that everything takes a lot longer than you imagine. However long you think something will take, it probably takes four times longer. The average book takes 7 hours spread over two weeks. Reading The Economist takes 9. An hour-long lunch with a friend in London actually takes four: two hours of travel, one hour at the actual rendezvous and one hour to shower, get ready, get distracted by someone completely different sending you a cat video and so on. While the fixed cost of social encounters tends to stay predictably at around three hours, any time alcohol is consumed the time spent in actual company will pretty much double. A good idea here is to schedule in advance hard deadlines for ending drinking sessions.

Second, we spend a ludicrous amount of time on, essentially, crap. Doing laundry, booking tickets to comedy shows, cooking, looking up things to do, shopping, commuting, washing dishes, looking after pets and plants and gardens, making sense of bills, paying them, running petty errands, arguing with people in call centers, planning holidays, planning parties, planning dates, planning work, reporting to others about the plans, more shopping, more laundry, more food preparation and so on. It takes me almost half an hour daily just to clean my teeth (I floss). About a third of every day is spent on nonsense - the sort of stuff rich people delegate to underlings. Next time you gush over how much Elon "Iron Man" Musk gets done in a day, remember he never has to spend an hour on the phone explaining to someone in Newcastle his precise employment situation.

Third, we are under permanent siege from things wanting our attention. Here is the unrelenting flow of news, over there some video or article or book or author your friend really really wants you to have a look at, next to them marketing and spam in every communication channel, on top the unbroken nagging of errands at every step and above all that constant voice: 'I should look into this'. And that's not counting any kind of cat videos. If your mind is a house then the world is a permanent flood pushing in an interminable quantity of debris and sweeping away everything that was there beforehand.

Take care.

Even in a state of unemployment it is possible to spend your entire time doing what eventually feels like nothing whatever. I have averaged only about four and a half hours of proper study daily and I'm counting certain YouTube channels in this.

This is not a complaint, really, just a simple observation. We all contribute to the noise. I certainly do (this post included). But it is important to remember we need time for introspection.

I don't just mean an hour in the evening while you struggle to fall asleep. I mean hours and hours of long walks thinking very hard and in a way that is systematic about what is going on with the world. Time set aside for contemplation; for appreciating the glory of a late Summer's day; for digesting everything that has happened to you (sometimes years and years ago); for trying to distinguish how to deal with other people and what is important, what is worth pursuing,  how to achieve your dreams and what those dreams are. You need an immense amount of time for all this.

It is only when you take this time that you realise how remorseless a deluge washes away unceasingly the precious time you have on this planet. As I write this, my phone has been making sounds in the next room almost without interruption. Ping ping ping. People and institutions sending terabytes of information at me and demanding attention. Even when you are not asked to do anything, you are asked for time - to open your mind to intelligence and data and opinion. This will besiege and crowd your own reflections out of existence. Insomnia and an inability to focus is how my mind likes to take revenge.

You must notice the constant harassment. Take a lot of care what information you allow to enter your mind. Be very conservative upon which things you bestow your attention. Don't let the world and its agenda trample over your own thoughts if you expect any of them to blossom.

Steppenwolf says Most People Have No Desire To Swim Until They Are Able To

The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It occurs to me that the consumption of art and the reading of horoscopes are two occupations with more in common than asunder. Since I have taken to enjoying my middle age crisis a few years ahead of schedule (I quit my job, moved in with people many years younger than myself and am about to splurge more than I can afford on a brand new road bike, of almost certainly red hue), Steppenwolf was a suitable enough read. Here is what I learned.

This habit of obsessing over coherent, first-person-singular storylines, necessarily of perpetual improvement - of who we are, what we have achieved and how we went about achieving it - really is a singularly boring and restrictive way to go about one's life. I remember reading a claim that the mass availability of novels was what originally spurred it. Someplace else, it was argued that this consciousness of ourselves as a singular being is but a useful evolutionary trick, perhaps come about for the better dodging of predators, or for reasoning about the minds of fellow humans, or for otherwise navigating the complex web of interactions in a social species. Hence, the notion of a 'personal history,' like a novel - with heroes, villains, worthy missions, challenges, setbacks and achievements - might be a natural extension.

Regardless, there is a scene in Steppenwolf that provides a visual for an alternative way of thinking about the self and one that I particularly enjoyed. Harry Haller is approaching the apex of his identity crisis when, after a night-long revel, he is guided by the mysterious, nebulous, bisexual, drug-dealing and enticing young Pablo to step into the 'Magic Theatre' - a wild, meandering, psychedelic ramble, through vast spans of time and space, in a series of introspective scenes. In one of these, a man sitting on the floor before a chess board will 'demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life'. The many individuals of Harry's personality are the game pieces.

With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small world. For a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through its evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making treaties and fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was indeed a crowded stage, a moving breathless drama.

Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist's skill, made up a new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships and entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first, it was the same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time changed, the motif was differently given out and the situations differently presented.

And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after another out of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself, and every game had a distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged recognizably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet each was entirely new.

I think this captures what Steppenwolf is about - the idea that our identity is chiefly a story we keep telling ourselves, over and over, and by being merely a story it can be anything. The notion of ourselves as having such-and-such a personality, ambitions, opinions, mannerism, aspirations, tastes and preferences is an illusion wrought by our habit of constantly repeating to ourselves a story which makes sense of our actions: I am not a morning person, I am monogamous, I am shy, I disapprove of taking drugs, I believe in personal freedom, I never buy organic food, I would never vote for a Democrat, I support gay marriage, I am selective with my friendships, I like to enjoy life, I hope to earn six figures within the next three years,  I will buy a house, I see family once a fortnight, I want to write a book, I have commitment issues, I love marmite. What if one morning you woke up and began telling yourself a wholly different set of things? Harry Haller is in the habit of thinking of himself as a deeply conflicted, haunted soul: half intellectual serving Platonic ideals, half antisocial, hedonistic wolf. This makes him unhappy and the Magic Theatre tries (unsuccessfully) to convince him to abandon this narrative.

What happens if you force yourself out of this staid, rehearsed notion that you are a coherent agency with a cogent story progressing unbroken through a linear time? It might sound fanciful, but really what if you woke up tomorrow and pretended to be a completely different person, acting as if your entire past was a story that happened to someone else? Feeling no duty towards your job, no affection towards your family, no compulsion from any habit and no interest in any of your connections?

You may notice three notable changes: that you are much freer than before; that you cannot derive your sense of self-worth from past achievements or present aspirations; and that what gives meaning to existence has to be firmly grounded in some kind of intrinsic enjoyment (whether of the sense or of the intellect).

That you should feel much freer to act in new and unprescripted ways should come as no surprise. We act rather a lot under the impulse of inertia: doing things because we've always done them, or because we feel some sort of connection to the past self that committed us to our current goals. There is also huge social pressure to act consistently, or else be branded as lying or mad or scatty-headed flakes, and other such denigrating labels. So we conform and submit, following the trajectory dictated by of our past actions. Where is the freedom of acting out of character? Or of swinging wildly from one state to another without being accused of bewildering everybody in the process? As a thought experiment, do question how many things you would do differently in a typical day if you woke up one morning in your body and life, yet completely unsentimental towards either.

That you cannot derive self-worth from past achievements or present aspiration is equally crucial. Without the unrelenting narrative of personal identity, you cannot feel either pride or shame over past events any more than you would feel these things over the contents of a film or novel. You cannot relish in your potential. You are only what you are right now. This bewilders most people and it bewilders Harry Haller: how can you be without a past and without committing to a future? Yet being you stand, perceiving and breathing in your body, and your existence certainly feels real enough. Do you have a right to be? This might seem a strange question, but most of us spend huge quantities of effort trying to establish self-worth, a notion whose very name suggests some sort of transactional requirement - as if the value of your existence necessarily has to outweigh its (imaginary?) cost. So once again: do you have a right to be? Can you feel entitled to your existence? I think this is the first question a human without a past or future must answer.

Finally, where do you go next, in the meaning-of-life sense? Many people derive meaning from external sources: religion, group affiliation or some other ideology. Others (existentialists) think the only meaning of life is what they give it. But all people require the accumulation of a past for meaning to flourish. Could life have meaning if you woke up a new person every day? Well, you could certainly live, maybe even enjoy the act of living. Even after dropping the illusory narrative of a personal identity, you may still become absorbed in the experience of existence. Indeed, when you are in flow, absorbed in the act of living, the mere notion of 'meaning' does not quite make sense, because interpretation implies stepping out of the experience and contemplating it. We give meaning to things in the past or future. In the present moment, we merely live. If we woke up a new person every day, we'd simply live a new life each time, like so many new games of chess: each equally compelling, wonderful and (in its short-span past and future) full of meaning.

Throughout his rambles in the Magic Theatre, Harry is continuously bewildered by his encounters with the great Immortals, timeless geniuses like Mozart and Goethe. He is bewildered because to his acute and harrowing inner turmoil they always make the same reply: laughter. Relax, they seem to say, you're trying too hard. The tragedy you feel yourself to be the hero of is merely an illusion, your illusion, of your own making. It is the personal identity tale you keep telling yourself over and over. But you are free to abandon it. You can tell yourself a different story. Or many different stories, in succession. Existence is a marvellous thing and you should revel in it, experiment with it, enjoy it. And laugh, relax, because what happens in the story does not ultimately much matter: from the vantage point of immortality all lives are wonderful, wondrous things that should be utterly relished. So have any of them. Better still, have several.

Anna Karenina: Being loved vs Feeling loved

There's nothing quite so tragic as those tragedies that seem both unnecessary and avoidable. It's perhaps this more than anything which makes Tolstoy's rendition of Anna Karenina's ruin a horror transfixing.

And what is the tragedy? It is her inability to feel loved in spite of being loved. It is the waking nightmare of a mind unable to live in a shared reality. If only Vronsky actually did not love her. But he does. If only her jealousy and vexation did not make quite so much sense. But they do. If only Vronsky and Anna could understand each other and merge their worldviews into one. But they remain segregated into parallel worlds, each telling a different story from the same set of "facts" in their relationship.

***

It has been almost a year since Anna, having survived childbirth, left Karenin for Vronsky. After an Italian honeymoon and some months spent at Vronsky's countryside estate, the couple is now in Moscow awaiting in vain for Karenin to grant her a divorce. Meanwhile, under the strain of Anna's jealousy, the relationship is perishing.

Her apprehension is mostly unfounded: Vronsky loves Anna, all in all. Vronsky is, arguments with Anna aside, more or less happy. His title, wealth and gender have allowed him to retain a position in society and while he has foregone a hitherto coveted military career, sufficient opportunities remain for him in politics and the management of his own estate.

Anna, on the other hand, is an outcast and a dependent. Prejudice has stripped her of social identity - as wife, mother, friend and fashionable lady - and she is denied or fails to acquire a new sense of purpose. Whether by lack of education or, as the moral of the novel would like to have it, spirituality, neither philanthropy nor motherhood manage to provide for her sufficient sense of self worth. Hence Vronsky's love becomes Anna's only source of validation. Soon,

She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it.

Resentment and suspicion follow swiftly and we see her failing to fight them off, trapped in a mary-go-round of tenderness and exasperation.

For everything that was difficult in her position she blamed him (...) in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence

What does he know of love for children, of my love for Seryozha, whom I’ve sacrificed for him?

“I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more at peace.”“Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled [the word of a previous quarrel which she interprets as insult to her nursing of their child] And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, (...) “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?”

Henceforth we see all the hallmarks of a looming disaster - the constant brooding, the obsessive reminiscing, her manner of arguing "partly repeating phrases she had prepared beforehand", the fixation on details (“From whom is the telegram? she asked, not hearing him"), the negative bias. What annoys her most, fundamentally, is Vronsky's own happiness and peace of mind. When he greets her cheerfully one evening upon returning home, she notes

There was something mortifying in the way he had said “Come, that’s good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife rising up in her again,

When Vronsky rearranges his errands so they might leave on the day demanded by Anna ("I shall go no later. Monday or never!" she had said) her first thought is: "so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished". When Vronsky tries to spare her the pain of news from Karenin, she suspects the telegram is from another woman and to her mind "his embarrassment confirmed her suspicion". She interprets his desire to have children as proof that he no longer cares for her beauty. Soon her suspicions descends into outright paranoia.

"He hates me, that's clear", she thought, and in silence, without looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. "He loves another woman, that's even clearer" 

She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to her lips. After drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his expression, she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound made by her lips.

Anna supplied, too, the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said to her, and she grew more and more exasperated. All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.

Their arguments are never resolved because the presumption of guilt is not falsifiable. Every new incident renews the old, down to Anna's arguing "recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel". As the crisis intensifies she loses the ability to empathise and to think in any categories other than her own ("Respect [what Vronsky values] was invented to cover the empty place where love [what Anna values] should be"). This escalated lack of empathy together with her paranoia collude to make Anna herself design situations which can only end badly, such as when the maid is instructed to tell Vronsky that Anna has a headache:

"If he comes in spite of what the maid says, it means that he loves me still. If not, it means that all is over, and then I will decide what I'm to do"

She dramatises and strips interpretation of nuance. It's all or nothing.

"I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.”

"Where love ends, hate begins" 

Finally, the paroxysm of pain and suffering leads her to crave revenge.

And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him. (...) she began musing with enjoyment on how he would suffer, and repent and love her memory when it would be too late.

In her final, semi-delirious journey from the house to Dolly's, to the train station, to her death, Anna's perception of the world grows steadily darker: the passers-by are loathsome, the train seats "dirty", the conductor "impudent", even children appear "hideous and affected". The world is universally abhorrent and pointless.

"Why these churches and this singing and this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other."

Finally, the delusion engulfs her: that Vronsky hates her, that she hates him, that she is an outcast, that her friends despise and hate her and would rejoice over her misery -these are now no longer "mere supposition". Rather, she "sees" it all "distinctly in the piercing light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations".

And all the while Vronsky loves her, Dolly loves her, her children love her.

***

This just goes to show that when we say we want love what we really mean is that we want to feel loved. And that, it appears, has more to do with our own sense of self-worth than with any other people.

Sergey Ivanovitch and Konstantin Levin or Why Everyone Always Lies

Sergey Ivanovitch used to say that he knew and liked the peasantry, and he often talked to the peasants, which he knew how to do without affectation or condescension, and from every such conversation he would deduce general conclusions in favour of the peasantry and in confirmation of his knowing them. Konstantin Levin did not like such an attitude to the peasants. To Konstantin the peasant was simply the chief partner in their common labour, and in spite of all the respect and the love, almost like that of kinship, he had for the peasant - sucked in probably, as he said himself, with the milk of his peasant nurse - still as a fellow-worker with him, while sometimes enthusiastic over the vigour, gentleness, and justice of these men, he was very often, when their common labours called for other qualities, exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, lack of method, drunkenness, and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked or didn't like the peasant, Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general. Of course, being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather than he disliked them, and so too with the peasants. But like or dislike "the people" as something apart he could not, not only because he lived with "the people", and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a part of "the people", did not see any special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and "the people", and could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted him, and for thirty miles round they would come to ask his advice), he had no definite views of "the people", and would have been as much at a loss to answer the question whether he knew "the people" as the question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew the peasantry would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, and he was continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of them and forming new ones. With Sergey Ivanovitch it was quite the contrary. Just as he liked and praised a country life in comparison with the life he did not like [Moscow], so too he liked the peasantry in contradistinction to the class of men he did not like, and so too he knew the peasantry as something distinct from and opposed to men generally. In his methodical brain there were distinctly formulated certain aspects of peasant life, deduced partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with other modes of life. He never changed his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic attitude towards them.

In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of the peasantry, Sergey Ivanovitch always got the better of his brother, precisely because Sergey Ivanovitch had definite ideas about the peasant - his character, his qualities, and his tastes. Konstantin Levin had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in their arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting himself.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karennina

Sometimes you talk to people and ten thoughts at once scramble for airtime. Halfway through every sentence you think of five more and you barely scrape enough patience to see your initial reply through. Verbal communication is so frustratingly inefficient. It is slow, it requires this absurd real-time encoding and decoding of messages at either end ("sulky" or "sullen", "testy" or "tetchy"?!), it is linear, contextual and only as good as the weakest link. But above all, unlike writing, it is time-bound.

If all communication is a representation of reality (the act of projecting meaning into some external vehicle) then verbal communication is the representation of reality with limited bandwidth. In other situations, more words might increase accuracy (like more pixels in a photograph), but in conversation this extra accuracy has quite the opposite effect: it is like trying to stream high-definition films over a patchy Wi-Fi.

Conversation, then, is a compromise between truthfulness and conveyance, between staying faithful to one's own meaning and getting some of that meaning across. Here is where Konstantin Levin and Sergey Ivanovich come in.

Sergey Ivanovich always gets the better of his brother in debates, not because he is necessarily right but because he is a better communicator. That "[Levin] liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general" is at once perfectly accurate and completely void of argumentative vigour. It is a complex idea and most people don't have time for complex ideas, especially if they require effort to understand.

Sergey's ideas win because they propose a representation of reality that is pithy, compelling and readily understandable, largely by doing away with nuance and variation, and the inconvenient messiness of real life. Levin might be right in reality but he is always wrong in conversation: the picture he holds of "the people" is simply too complex for jaunty delivery and, as a listener, his brother is incapable, or unwilling, to admit meaning that is poorly conveyed. An intellectual and public figure, for Sergey debating is a sport: winning is as much about content as about good form.

Also interesting is the observation that Sergey "never changed his opinion of the peasantry and his sympathetic attitude towards them" while Levin "was continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting people, (...) continually observing new points in them, altering his former views of them and forming new ones". It is as if holding a system of beliefs that is a steady structure of coherent, valid opinions, coexisting in a logical edifice like a well-constructed building, you must necessarily be conservative about changing individual views on a whim, lest you unwittingly bring the whole thing tumbling down. Levin's beliefs are more like tapioca pearls in a swirling drink of bubble tea: they can float and evolve freely, without the risk of invalidating, by their dynamism, every other aspect of Levin's life.

This is not to say that Sergey Ivanovitch is wrong or deceiving himself. In fact his opinions may be quite valid and possibly more useful than Levin's, who anyway refuses to get involved in politics altogether. The point is only to notice that perceiving reality in all its ever-changing complexity and communicating, making 'sense' of it are fundamentally opposing forces. When you take a picture, draw a sketch, record a sentence, form and voice a belief, you may capture a small drop of truth, but the very minute when it is captured, it is falsified: out of context, all representation of reality is a slight falsification of it. Yet representation of reality is what all communication is.

The only way we can talk about the real world is through some degree of falsification. Levin's falsification is minimal, so his communication poor.

There is, however, a possible escape from this conundrum: through empathy. Sergey fails to imagine what is not being said, he won't allow valid meaning if presented in bad form. He holds Levin up to his previous statements and exposes his contradictions. His style of communication is very much of the adversarial kind, of lawyers and politicians. He refuses to acknowledge meaning beyond what is submitted to the debate through explicit statements. This is not in itself a bad style: it is in fact quite useful when dealing exclusively in "visible" currency (like spoken words) helps to keep people accountable. But important things may be left out of it.

Empathy (as well as compassion, kindness, friendship, love) can bridge the rift between what is being said and what is being meant. Empathy allows people the freedom to be wrong, to change their minds, to go back and refine their statements, to say things which are contradicting or silly or incomplete, to misunderstand and be misunderstood, to ask and to stand corrected - and still, eventually, get themselves across.

Empathy allows people to communicate without lying.

Sergey and Levin never speak with genuine empathy and despite their frequent conversations, in the end, they never really understand one another. Eloquence and pithiness, precision and panache, alliterations, lilting and good form may all make great speakers, but great consensus-builders cannot succeed without a good measure of emotion. That is: empathy, patience, goodwill, compassion.