Jay
This is the kind of book that I've anticipated for a very long time without knowing it. So it feels like this book came out of nowhere for me. I don't even remember how I stumbled upon it. It might as well have appeared on my dresser after a night of lucid dreaming. And thankfully, it has retained that sense of peculiar existence even after reading.
I really think the conception of this essay collection is perfect. Upon reading the synopsis my mind shot off into an expanse of possibilities. There is easily an entire genre of interpretations latent in this one idea, which I'm only at the beginning of sussing out.
With that said, I placed way too many expectations on this one book. I went into it expecting an entire genre's worth of exploration, recounting, revelation, and discovery. While there certainly are instances of each, they come off in a similar vein to Daniel's prescriptions, microdoses.
These essays are a wonderful display of being present in an aesthetic experience and reflecting on the consciousness that arises from that presence, but there are very few instances where the author connects those aesthetic experiences to anything else in his life. For such an intimate subject I came away feeling like I do not know much about the author, or even the chemical compounds and the process of their curation.
Despite all this, I truly enjoyed reading The Museum Dose, and highly anticipate Daniel's second book. I hope this book becomes an entry-point for similar exploration to many others.
I went into this expecting magic and was disappointed in finding mere admiration. I wanted the planets to feel alive of their own accord, not by the breath of their teller.
Ackerman's writing is exquisite and imaginative. You will certainly feel the depth of wonder and energy that went into these poems, but sadly they do not emit that same life.
Incredibly insightful, but I wish Steiner offered more depth in defining each of the temperaments.
Sara's honesty and humility in sharing the trials and tribulations while learning how to homestead while also raising her first child sheds light on the practicality and planning required in successful permaculture design, rather than conveying a romanticized dream of living off the land.
I found her summary on the United States' shifting away from home economics most insightful:
“The government cannot focus on your household, and so they consistently fail to support the best interests of the home. If we accept the national model of what success looks like, then we cannot focus on our households either. A government that demands production and consumption on an endless cycle of growth undermines the very notion of household security. Growth and stability are at odds with one another as long as more human and natural capital is required to generate growth. In the end, you're left to your own devices when it comes to fighting for the integrity of your household. As an alternative to the growth of financial and other types of capital, we can focus on the growth of human capital—education, community and security as valuable investments for our homes.”
Tomi's illustrated journal of life in Nova Scotia reads like one of his peculiar stories. The lives there as ephemeral and acerbic as the tides, leave the people feeling more like apparitions. Their intermittent visits an offering of comic relief in a place where humor's only service lies in making light of loss. And that loss in Gull Harbor, steady yet unpredictable, becomes an immutable fixture of the landscape, taking on a life of its own.
Life in New York City (what drove Tomi and Yvonne to Nova Scotia) favors callous, and that callous shelters a burgeoning romanticism for reclusion. If you're feeling the hermit's itch, this book will indulge with a hearty scratch and makes for an especially poignant read in winter.
“I had often heard the expression ‘a car wrapped around a telephone pole.' Well, we actually saw one. This car had missed a curve and hit a simple, modest, unpretentious little pole. The pole did not break, but the car, an American whale of a thing, had its chassis bent so that the front bumper literally met the rear bumper. That vehicle must have practiced yoga for quite a while to be able to accomplish such a feat. The driver, his pals, and the telephone pole walked out unharmed.”
“As my wife said the other day, ‘One always exaggerates by telling the truth.'”
In Lewis Lapham's “Preamble,” he likens the enigmatic state of intoxication to a “house with many mansions,” of which we are offered the full-scale tour—told through first-hand accounts, from hallucinatory grandeur and theatrical revelry through political protest and crestfallen destitution. Broken into three parts—“the urge,” “the high,” and “the hangover”—the polychoral compilation yearns, awes, and then writhes through a singular experience of intoxication sung by the voice of the many who experienced it.
In “the urge” we hear from Harpo Marx with drinking buddy, John Barrymore:
“No matter where Barrymore stood, you had the illusion that he was under a spotlight. He was every inch, ounce, and fiber a masterful actor. He was also a masterful magician. By the time we sat down to eat, he was fried. He had stolen two drinks from me alone, before I'd had a sip of either one. I was under his spell and didn't know what had happened until it was too late.
During dinner I noticed that he was drenched with sweat. His shirt and jacket were soaked through, and sweat was streaming down his face. I told him to go ahead and take his coat off, if he was too warm. When he found my eyes, he gave me the piercing, pained look of a wounded eagle. “My dear Marx,” he said. “To perspire is a gift of Providence. It saves me the trouble of pissing.”
And what's not to love about Honoré de Balzac's madness for coffee:
“Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quickly march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”
Followed by a sober view of the effects of alcohol addiction on Native Americans—Little Turtle, from a speech to the Baltimore Annual Meeting of Friends:
“Brothers, when our young men have been out hunting and are returning home loaded with skins and furs, on their way, if it happens that they come along where some of this whiskey is deposited, the white man who sells it tells them to take a little and drink. Some of them say no. I do not want it. They go until they come to another house, where they find more of the same kind of drink. It is there again offered. They refuse, and again the third time; but finally the fourth time, one accepts it and takes a drink, and getting one he wants another, and then a third and fourth till his senses have left him. After his reason comes back to him, he gets up and finds where he is. He asks for his peltry. The answer is, you have drank them. Where is my gun? It is gone. Where is my blanket? It is gone. Where is my shirt? You have sold it for whiskey. Now, brothers, figure to yourself what a condition this man must be in—he has a family at home, a wife and children that stand in need of the profits of his hunting. What must their wants be, when he is even without a shirt?
This, brothers, I assure you, is a fact that often happens among us. As I have before observed, we have no means to prevent it. If you, brothers, have it in your power to render us any assistance, we hope the Great Spirit will aid you.”
Fredrick Douglas spoke of similar disenfranchisement among enslaved African Americans through the employment of holiday intoxication as a means of crowd control:
“From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation, and woe betide the slaveholder the day he ventures to remove or hinder the operation of those conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a spirit will go forth in their midst, more to be dreaded than the most appalling earthquake.”
From “the urge” we move on to the glory of “the high”:
“Now, little by little, I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.” —Albert Hoffman on LSD, 1943
Dennis Covington while investing snake handling in West Virginian churches:
“It occurred to me then that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite—as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that's why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss.”
And even an amputation facilitated by mesmeric trance:
“The operation was now commenced. “Mr. Ward, after one earnest look at the man,” in the words of Mr. Topham, “slowly plunged his knife into the center of the outside of the thigh, directly to the bone, and then made a clear incision round the bone, to the opposite point on the inside of the thigh. The stillness at this moment was something awful; the calm respiration of the sleeping man alone ... Yet, notwithstanding all this, the patient's “sleep continued as profound as ever. The placid look of his countenance never changed for an instant; his whole frame rested, uncontrolled, in perfect stillness and repose; not a muscle was seen to twitch. To the end of the operation, including the sawing of the bone, securing the arteries, and applying the bandages, occupying a period of upward of twenty minutes, he lay like a statue.” —John Elliotson, 1843
One of my favorites comes from Walter Benjamin on the riddle of trance:
“To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of intoxication, just as it is to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein—isn't that the joy of all productivity, at least in prose? And under the influence of hashish, we are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power.”
In “the hangover,” John Addington Symonds ponders having an actual Experience after the effects of chloroform and laughing gas have worn off:
“To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. Yet, this question remains: is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?”
And from a closing essay by Sven Birkerts on how intoxication helps pierce the veil of superficial experience to taste the underlying essence:
“For Emerson, the intoxication is not escape but access, a means of getting closer to “the fact,” which might, with heartfelt imprecision, be called life itself. What he means by “public power,” I think, is something like what Carl Jung and others later meant by the phrase collective unconscious , the emphasis falling on the unconscious , that posited reservoir of our shared archetypes and primordial associations—that which reason by itself cannot fathom, for it is, in essence, antithetical to reason. Only through this other communion, through short-circuiting of the mediations of the day self—the order-making Apollonian ego structure—can the poet reach what is the truer immediacy. For this to happen, the tyranny of time—the feeling of being trapped in a forward-moving sequence of moments—must be banished. Intoxication is, among other things, the destruction of the timekeeper, a release into the duration state.”
Quite the mix of insight! If you're curious to know more about the lot of the inebriated, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better compilation.
I've never read anything about ‘nomadic furniture' before this, so I have nothing to compare this to. The manuscript layout design and minimalist ethos reminded me of Be Here Now. I was expecting an expansive collection of DIY furniture designs, but was surprised to find that nearly half of the book serves as a catalog for where to purchase pieces, i.e. both the ‘Sound' and ‘Light' sections. I found the seating and storage designs most interesting and wish they were expanded.
In conception this book sounds wonderful, but in execution the insights felt abbreviated. I wanted to learn more about each member's personal history—what brought them to The Design Office, what projects they were most proud of, what they struggled with, and what they've gone on to after leaving—but each entry is around 500 words or less. Just enough space for a platitude about collaboration. Oddly enough, I felt that the more insightful and personally revealing stories came from members who spent the least amount of time at the office.
The elegant layout design feels inline with the ethos of the space—a clean, simple structure that carries throughout the book. I also enjoyed the photography, which is interspersed in a way that provides illustration to some of the stories. At standard paperback size the book is very portable and feels like an intimate conversation. I just wish enough space was provided for that intimacy to carry through in the writing.
In caring for us, our parents not only bestow our livelihood but imprint upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, their worldview, belief system, and biases. In this way, parents shape not only how we perceive reality, but also our personal identity. Eventually most children realize that their parents are not gods—they are ordinary, fallible people. And while this can be a traumatic realization, coming from the supple gossamer of childhood dependency, it is integral to adulthood.
On a much broader scale, governments produce a similar effect in their citizenry. For want of nationhood, local governments employ compulsory schooling as a means for creating a cohesive populace. A sense of national identity is imbued through the careful discipline of historiography outlined in American history textbooks used in schools across the country.
Loewen lays out some of the narratives underlying American history texts, and deconstructs them to illustrate how they contribute to unconscious biases that lead to racism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, and even genocide.
The analysis begins with the process of heroification—illustrating the ways in which history texts flatten our understanding of historical figures such as Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and Woodrow Wilson into decontextualized anecdotes. Taking Wilson as an example, the majority of history texts share his involvement in forming the League of Nations and support of women's suffrage, but leave out his racial segregation of the federal government and how under his command, US-involvement in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas. Students also will not find this quote in their history texts, from Wilson's “An Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association,” made while President of Princeton University in 1909:
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
Loewen builds from the individual to the collective process of heroification, showing how it fortifies our sense of American exceptionalism:
“As part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero, for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why 1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth. Could the other 99 percent of us be that lazy or otherwise undeserving? To go on to include some of the mechanisms—unequal schooling and the like—by which the upper class stays upper would clearly involve criticism of our beloved nation.”
“Textbook authors seem to believe that Americans can be loyal to their government only so long as they believe it has never done anything bad.” As we become aware of this educational movement we are left to infer that “criticism is incompatible with citizenship.”
After exposing the effects of selective history, Loewen then investigates the causes:
“In interviews with me, publishing executives blamed adoption boards, school administrators, or parents, whom they feel they have to please, for the distortions and lies of omission that mar U.S. history textbooks. Parents, whether black militants or Texas conservatives, blame publishers. Teachers blame administrators who make them use distasteful books or the publishers who produced them. But authors blame no one. They claim credit for their books. Several authors told me that they suffered no editorial interference. Indeed, authors of three different textbooks told me that their editors never offered a single content suggestion. ‘That book doesn't have fifty words in it that were changed by the editor!' exclaimed one author. ‘They were so respectful of my judgment, they were obsequious,' said another. ‘I kept waiting for them to say no, but they never did.'”
“The American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Reviews in American History do not review high school textbooks. Thus, the authors' academic reputations are not really on the line.”
“There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.” —Marc Ferro, Historian
Quite disconcerting, yah?
Much like the traumatic realization of the mortality and fallibility of our parents, the same realization must be made in relation to our country, our government. If we are to pursue a democratic society, we have a civic duty to seek a critical understanding of our nation's sordid past and how it inevitably shapes the events of today. If any of this sounds worthwhile, then this book is a great start.
“In history, accuracy is political.”
Don't judge me. No, no, please do. That's what these reviews are for ... Like many curious young boys, I too went through a “magic phase” although in late-blooming fashion, I entered that phase at the ripe age of 20.
I read this book during the holidays after experimenting with some card tricks and slight-of-hand with my cousin. Details from this book evade me (perhaps that was the intention), but I do remember being entertained enough to read it in two sittings. The most enjoyable parts were the recounting of the lives of Blaine's heroes Max Malini and Harry Houdini.
And now that I think about it, there was supposed to be a treasure hunt with clues hidden in the text revealing where $100,000 have been hidden somewhere in the United States. I never did find out what happened with that contest or Blaine's career post-2002.
—-
“You'll wonder when I'm coming, you'll wonder even more when I'm gone.” - Max Malini
“Human beings don't like to see other human beings lose their lives, but they do love to be on the spot when it happens.” - Harry Houdini
Bill Coperthwaite, syncretic journeyman extraordinaire, was a man who lived his life as if it was his greatest work of art. A Handmade Life is the testament—a beautifully designed distillation of his philosophy of education (centered around the home), insight gleaned from mentors, cultural wisdom acquired from excursions abroad, and practical instruction on home-building.
Here is one of the more poignant summarizations:
“There was absolutely no way, that I could see, that society could avert catastrophe. Everywhere there was pollution of air, water, minds; everywhere there was crime, poverty, political corruption, war, land and food poisoning...I viewed the mass humanity as easily duped, with people willing to sell themselves for material gain, while remaining provincial and violent. Democracy had become a system in which the many were manipulated by the few. Yet slowly it became clear to me that the basic human stock was sound and that the “democracy” I saw was not democracy but a distortion of it. As I became aware of our untapped potential as human beings, I began to grow in optimism and belief in our latent ability to solve problems...Only a minute percentage of our abilities has been developed...[I was not] concerned with what economic, political, or social system is best.. I [was] concerned with education—the development of human beings, their growth.”
Out of this despair Coperthwaite began a quest compiling the world's cultural wisdom necessary for living a life of simplicity, nonviolence, and the pursuit and dissemination of education.
What I most enjoyed were the wry commentaries on the absurdities of modern life interspersed throughout the book, i.e:
“We started leaving the home to go to work in order to support the home. We have been doing this for so long that we have forgotten the purpose for which we sold ourselves in the first place.”
“...machines can be used to create any form of chair we like, but commercial interests can make more chairs (and more money) if the simplest designs for the machines is chosen for production. So we end up surrounded by furniture designed to fit the needs of machines.”
“Wouldn't it be grand instead of jogging, to pedal exercisers that generate and store electricity? ... Why not seek a way to build up your body and help others at the same time?”
“Are we so afraid of becoming one with the earth that we need to fill dead bodies with poisons and seal them away in caskets to slow their return to the soil? To deny our nature in this way demonstrates a fundamental insecurity and lack of appreciation for life and its cycles.”
“In the past, success has generally been relative and competitive—measured by the failure of others. It now behooves us to think in terms of cooperative success, wherein we feel happy as the group about us succeeds. After all, what does it gain us to be “successful” in a failing society or, as J. Goldsmith has said, “To win in a poker game on the Titanic?”'
If you enjoy the writing of Wendell Berry, Buckminster Fuller, and Dick Proenekke you'll find kinship in Coperthwaite's words.
“How one lives is fundamentally a political act.”
“My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.”
I think this quote gets at the essence of The Principles of Uncertainty, a collection of insightful musings while traveling, each with their own signature eccentricities and transcendent delight.
“We see trees, what more do we need?” Perhaps Maira to paint them. <3
“...and yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one subject to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
This sounded like everything I'd want in a sci-fi compilation, but it didn't pan out for me. For the expansive fields of writing it's pulling from, it felt oddly near-sighted—the research writing in particular. The AI-generate poetry felt like soulless novelty, even after being edited. The most imaginative pieces, I felt, were the oldest writings in the compilation. Part 1 of Quinzinzinzany (1935) was my favorite. It's worth the price of the magazine and the reason why I'll purchase issue #2 (it's being published in two parts). I also enjoyed Robert Sheckley's Cost of Living (1953) and Bruno Munari's musings on traditional Japanese homes, written in 1971. Out of the contemporary pieces, I enjoyed Hannah Gersen's “Dud Planet.”
The Road Less Traveled begins with two very basic premises—suffering is integral to life and avoidance of challenge is a characteristic of human nature. What follows is a selection of case studies from M. Scott Peck's pyschotherapeutic practice. Each of them illustrating the remarkably creative ways we let our emotions circumvent rationality in decision-making, from the mundane to the life-altering. We so easily choose the path of myopic, infantile, self-destructive behavior, because remaining unconscious, passive actors in our own lives is less painful than confronting the difficult path we are required to traverse in order to achieve mental health.
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” —Carl Jung
So we trudge along, carrying all of our unresolved disorders imprinted upon us by our parents, their parents' parents, and on. There are certain people we do not get along with. We know them well. They fit a “type.” So we avoid all characters that fit the bill. There are certain situations we do not get along in. We also know them well. They also fit a “type.” So we avoid all situations that fit that bill. There are even certain thoughts we do not get along with. We've got their type marked and we do pretty damn well at avoiding them too. People, places, things—all covered. With our neurotic blueprint in hand we know exactly how to raze all the walls in the labyrinth.
At last we are secure in our comfort zone where resistance is our path of least resistance. It's a quiet place. Low humidity. Warm, but not too warm. Occasionally it rains, but we've got buckets for the leaks. We learn to keep tempo to the drips. All good news comes in quarter notes. Then one day, in the budding ennui, perhaps over a bowl of Cheerios, while changing the kittie litter, or hitting reply-all, you lose your vision. Complete darkness. Then your hearing, touch, smell, and finally taste—your most dear friend, gone without a trace. And there you are, lying in the middle of the room, waiting. Time must be passing, but you're not sure, there's no dripping. You feel like you're shaking, like you're heating up, like you smell smoke, like you hear a voice...
“Oh, how happy I am to see you.”
Your eyes flick open, the light registers, and you see the face. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. It's a human face and it's terrifying. This is the face of Satan and you are going to die.
“SATAN IS GOING TO FUCKING KILL ME!”
“Shhh. Shhhh. Come, come. You are in no harm.”
“I'M DYING! SATAN IS KILLING ME RIGHT NOW!”
“That is not true at all. Look, just take a deep breath.”
“FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!”
“You will close your mouth and breath in deeply through your nose.”
...
“Now exhale through your mouth.”
...
“Very good. Welcome back. Now, it took me a long time to get here. You on the other hand have been lying on the ground in this dingy hovel for, a while. So I am going to do the talking. You may answer my questions. Otherwise, you will remain silent.”
...
“Perfect. Now, before I got here. Were you in discomfort?”
“Yes.”
“And now that I am here. Are you still in discomfort?”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you again, but first take another deep breath.”
...
“Now that I am here. Are you still in discomfort?”
“No.”
“Perfect. Now, do you like the sensation of this feeling?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to remain this way?”
“Yes.”
“Then you will do exactly what you were doing before I arrived.”
“But—“
“What did I say earlier?”
...
“Yes, that was a rhetorical question.”
...
“I repeat. You will do exactly what you were doing before I arrived. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now if you see me again, you did something wrong and our conversation will go a bit differently.”
...
OK, so that definitely was not Satan. [PeeWee Herman laugh] It was an excerpt from an inner dialogue at a moment of crisis. Those lovely moments where we are shown how much power we have through our ability to make decisions for ourselves. How funny that we often feel completely impotent in those moments, right?! That's the pain of freedom. If we truly want to rid to ourselves of dysfunction, we must accept responsibility for our own problems, inherited and self-inflicted, so that we may confront them and work through them.
“...the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. Nor is this assessment and reassessment painless if performed adequately and conscientiously. To perform either process adequately we must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination.”
“Does that sound like fun?”
“Nope, no fun to be had there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I'm good. I think I hear the drips calling my name.”
Turns out there is more than fun to be had by accepting responsibility for our disorders and committing to working through them, there is joy:
“What transpires then in the course of many years of loving, of extending our limits for our cathexes, is a gradual but progressive enlargement of the self, an incorporation of within of the world without, and a growth, a stretching and a thinning of our ego boundaries ... we become identified with the world. And as our ego boundaries become blurred and thinned, we begin more and more to experience the same sort of feeling of ecstasy that we have when our ego boundaries partially collapse and we “fall in love.”
So this silly little thing called love is the vehicle for transmogrifying pain and suffering into spiritual evolution. Love, the fundamental ordering process, working against the fundamental disordering process, the force of entropy:
“The process of evolution is a miracle, because insofar as it is a process of increasing organization and differentiation, it runs counter to natural law—the downhill flow of energy toward the state of entropy.”
And there we have it, the fundamental opposing forces: laziness and love. And we get to choose. All the time.
“Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. What they once perceived as problems they now perceive as opportunities. What were once loathsome barriers are now welcome challenges. Thoughts previously unwanted become sources of energy and guidance. Occurrences that once seemed to be burdens now seem to be gifts, including the very symptoms from which they have recovered.”
I've found The Road Less Traveled to be the most insightful synthesis of wisdom on spiritual growth and self-realization I have yet come across. The source of insights range from M. Scott Peck's personal experiences as a psychotherapist to Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, T.S. Eliot, William Johnston, Edith Hamilton, Joseph Campbell, Erik Erikson, Carlos Castaneda, P.D. Ouspensky, and Buckminster Fuller to name a few.
The essential message is nothing new, but what's most helpful is how that path is elucidated through rational analysis and real-world examples of people discovering, understanding, and ultimately changing their dysfunctional behavior. It's always easier to recognize our own disorders in the actions of others, and the patients' stories offer many entry-points for revelation.
My only criticisms are of occasional unnecessary language and the slave-owner analogy used for controlling one's emotions. Phrases like, “In a sense,” “By virtue of the fact,” “First of all, as has been pointed out,” are clumsy and do not add any clarity. The slaver-owner analogy comes off embarrassingly callous. For such a comprehensive conception, this one comes out of nowhere.
My favorite part of the book is Peck's speculation on the purpose of spiritual growth and where our collective evolution may lead. It's such a wild concept, I think learning of it is reason enough to read the book.
“The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life.”
“Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving.”
aka
“The mind drinks less and less.”
aka
“This age thinks better of a gilded fool than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school!”
aka
“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word “intellectual” became the swear word it deserved to be.
aka
“There's more than one way to burn a book. and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
aka
“I'm so mad I could spit!”
Sadly, I think high expectations spoiled the experience. And when you consider having already read the better part of Chuck Palahniuk's collected stories and experiencing the internet as a teenager, Venus in Furs tends to lose it shock value.
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“I now had the leisure to muse about the riddle of human existence, and about its greatest riddle of all-woman.”
Perfume is a wonderfully perverse character study of the dichotomy between being an acutely sensual artisan and a callous sociopath. His descriptions are as vivid, ethereal, and visceral as the scents the protagonist determined to capture.
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“For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words, but they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath.”
“If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time. If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.” - Ryokan
Ancient wisdom for the next time you lose your car keys.
I used this book to teach a design workshop for children (ages 6-9) as a jumping off point for them to design and prototype a way to protect a garden from being disrupted by squirrels. If you're leading any design-oriented classes for children in this age group I highly recommend this book.
S-P-O-I-L-E-R A-L-E-R-T!!!
The story has a nice twist—the squirrels, who were initially viewed as a nuisance, redeem themselves after designing their way into Mr. Fookwire's admiration. This happens through a series of design challenges where the squirrels have to figure how to out-smart Mr. Fookwire's way of preventing them from accessing the birdfeeders.
While the story itself is pretty unimaginative, the illustrations of the design challenges between Mr. Fookwire and the squirrels are a perfect way of introducing design methodology to children. The story also instills the significance of trial-and-error and experimentation in the creative process. It's a great setup for framing failure as a key to learning, growth, and accessing new ideas.
A cultural study on people who's basic instinct of self-preservation became secondary to the desire to produce original works.
“Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.” - Arianna Sstassinopoulous
The writing in this adult picture book is a sardonic rip at our culture's obsession with zombies through the lens of reappropriated artwork from (my guess is) the 1950-60's. It has the feel of a collection of New Yorker comics focusing on the theme of the Apocalypse:
“Sebastian is manning the Ventnor comms station on the Isle of Wight. An island is a safe place to be because it is easily quarantined, but supplies from the mainland can be irregular. If the islanders find out Sebastian is hoarding the last roll of toilet paper, they will break in and kill him.”
I expected a few laughs from the absurd juxtapositions, but was surprised to find an analogizing of our current paranoia over zombies with our history of casting indigenous peoples as primitive savages.
Social commentary on deeply ingrained racial biases gives this book more of a reason for being besides a few cheap jokes about how oblivious people of the 1950's seem to us today.
A succinct store of timeless insight into living rightly.
“Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.”