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.

Petty Peeves

All bad days start with a petty peeve.

I have just spilled half a coffee on myself trying to hold a feeble stick of an umbrella against a punishing December gale when my therapist calls - at 45 minutes' notice - to say he's running an hour late on account of another patient whose problems are evidently more important. I will be late for work but never mind. Have you read such and such that we talked about last time? I spent a good four days tinkering with the damn thing. No, he says, I couldn't find it.

Petty peeve.

Not that I don't appreciate the irony of being disappointed by the very person supposedly addressing my trust issues. It rather put me in the mind of this picture of a hamster in therapy - "and then I dreamt that I actually got somewhere in the wheel".

Of course it's all quite fine.

It's all just part of the normal process of life: like traffic and the fat guy on 1.5 seats that chews his sausage patty with his mouth open while spilling coffee on your shoes.

Also the bus driver - who sees you running, takes a moment to snigger and then drives off.

The point is that things like this don't matter when you're happy. Happiness is a sort of immune system for the brain.When it fails you get "an annoyance". One ought to be excused on that account: I don't want to give you any of my annoyance; I should keep my annoyance at home; I don't want to spread the annoyance; I don't want to make my annoyance any worse; Once I neglected my annoyance until it got so bad I had to stay home for a week after I slapped my project manager in the face.

So much for therapy making you feel better.