I am republishing my initial comments, made in December 2008, when I checked The History of the Ancient World out of the library then discovered I didn't have time to read it. Now, nearly two years later, I have finally read the book, and my additional comments are added below.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, by Susan Wise Bauer (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007)
Despite having some initial negative reactions to Susan Wise Bauer, I've continued to find her work delightful and invaluable. (See my reviews of The Well-Trained Mind, The Story of the World, and The Well-Educated Mind.) I haven't read more than a small part of The History of the Ancient World, but borrowed it from the library in order to determine whether or not to buy it for myself. I've so enjoyed—and learned from—listening to Jim Weiss read The Story of the World, which was written for elementary-age children, that I wondered if Bauer could bring as much delight into a history book for adults.
Time does not permit me to read through the book, much less review it properly, but let's just say I wish I didn't have to take it back to the library as soon as possible to remove temptation. The History of the Ancient World is delightful to read. Much of the delight, I think, comes from the philosophy of her approach, which she explains much better in the introduction than I have time to write, or even to copy, here. Bauer is interested in people: their lives, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams, actions, and relationships. She minimizes the general and the theoretical in favor of the personal, and includes the myths and stories of a culture as well as verifiable facts. The stories that have come down with a people from before recorded time should inform our historical speculations as much as potsherds from an archeological dig.
This approach no doubt will anger many, some because she finds historical value in passages from the Bible, and others because she gives similar respect to the ancient stories of other cultures. To me, it makes for great story-telling. The History of the Ancient World has earned a place on my wish list, perhaps for the next time Borders offers me a 40% off coupon, and I certainly hope Susan Wise Bauer is working on a sequel.
UPDATE, 1 September 2010. Bauer was, indeed, working on a sequel, and managed to finish writing The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade before I finished reading its predecessor. I've already purchased it, and am looking forward to diving in. But first, some thoughts on this one.
I enjoyed The Ancient World a good deal, though I expect to enjoy the Medieval book more because of the time period. I find stories of kings and battles and political intrigue interesting up to a point, but ancient times take me to that point rather quickly, as often that's about all we know about them. Bauer does a good job of trying to put flesh on the bare bones, but it's still pretty much "second verse, same as the first." And third, and fourth, and nth.
I can't help feeling the same way about the Old Testament of the Bible at times, too. One thing Bauer's book has done is to give me a much better feel for the context in which the Old Testament events took place, and the knowledge that as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as they sometimes are, it helps to know that the OT stories are nowhere near as gruesome and cruel and bizarre as stories from the rest of the ancient world. There's a limit to how much improvement even God can make in human beings all at once, I guess. Or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, before you can judge where someone is, you have to know where he came from.
Speaking of the Bible, in parallel with Ancient World I've been reading the Chronological Guide to the Bible, as part of Thomas Nelson's review blogger program. (So you'll see a review here when I'm done, but I've only just started the New Testament section.) That was a brilliant move on my part, as the books dovetail and complement each other nicely.
But back to Bauer's book. My head is swimming with dates and places and unpronounceable, highly forgettable names. It will take a lot more learning before I can say I have a good picture in my head of the ancient world. But I now have a good sketch, and that's better than any of my history teachers were able to give me. I especially like Bauer's attempt to cover more of the world than just the Middle East and Mediterranean countries, though if I can't keep the Roman rulers straight there's no hope of remembering China's and India's. Helpful parallel timelines attempt to provide mental links from one culture to another.
I'd give The History of the Ancient World an R rating for sex and violence, but anyone likely to be overly disturbed by reading what those ancient kings did to their enemies—and with their friends—probably won't be reading an 800-page history book.
How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, by Robert Greenberg; a Teaching Company lecture
I've said it before: For accessible, serious, high-quality, adult-level educational materials (DVD, CD, mp3 download) it's hard to beat The Teaching Company. Robert Greenberg is one of my favorite lecturers, and this—so far—my favorite of his courses.
Here are the titles of the 48 lectures, as you can buy the course today. It is now onto its third edition; our version, which is so old we bought it on cassette tapes,* differs in minor ways.
- Music as a Mirror
- Sources—The Ancient World and the Early Church
- The Middle Ages
- Introduction to the Renaissance
- The Renaissance Mass
- The Madrigal
- An Introduction to the Baroque Era
- Style Features of Baroque-era Music
- National Styles—Italy and Germany
- Fugue
- Baroque Opera, Part 1
- Baroque Opera, Part 2
- The Oratorio
- The Lutheran Church Cantata
- Passacaglia
- Ritornello Form and the Baroque Concerto
- The Enlightenment and an Introduction to the Classical Era
- The Viennese Classical Style, Homophony, and the Cadence
- Classical-era Form—Theme and Variations
- Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio: Baroque Antecedents
- Classical-era Form—Minuet and Trio Form
- Classical-era Form—Rondo Form
- Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 1
- Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 2
- Classical-era Form—Sonata Form, Part 3
- The Symphony—Music for Every Person
- The Solo Concerto
- Classical-era Opera—The Rise of Opera Buffa
- Classical-era Opera, Part 2—Mozart and the Operatic Ensemble
- The French Revolution and an Introduction to Beethoven
- Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 1
- Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67, Part 2
- Introduction to Romanticism
- Formal Challenges and Solutions in Early Romantic Music
- The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 1
- The Program Symphony—Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Part 2
- 19th-Century Italian Opera—Bel Canto Opera
- 19th-Century Italian Opera—Giuseppe Verdi
- 19th-Century German Opera—Nationalism and Experimentation
- 19th-Century German Opera—Richard Wagner
- The Concert Overture, Part 1
- The Concert Overture, Part 2
- Romantic-era Musical Nationalism
- Russian Nationalism
- An Introduction to Early 20th-Century Modernism
- Early 20th-Century Modernism—Claude Debussy
- Early 20th-Century Modernism—Igor Stravinsky
- Early 20th-Century Modernism—Arnold Schönberg
Forty-eight lectures of 45 minutes each sounds long and intimidating, but even at that length this is a brief, introductory, whirlwind tour of music history—and it never drags. I find it easy to listen to while driving, and well worth hearing more than once.
My recommendation for this course is as high as I can give, with one small caveat. Greenberg gears his lectures to adults, specifically college students, and he has obviously learned how to keep the attention of the teenage boys in his classes: his brief composer biographies sometimes include their sexual proclivities, and if there's musical reference he sees as orgasmic, he doesn't hesitate to mention it. (He also describes musical stomach rumbles and heartbeats.)
As music history, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music has received the endorsement of our favorite graduate of the Eastman School of Music, so I know it's good. 
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (Penguin, New York, 2001)
For now, I can't do any better than to refer you to Janet's review of Getting Things Done. I found it a difficult book to read, even unpleasant, because it's not well written, and makes my mind feel like a hamster on a wheel: running a lot but not getting anywhere.
But if Allen's book is disappointing, his ideas still inspire me—even if I did have to come at the ideas the wrong way around, from what other people have said about them. Most inspirational was seeing Janet's version of the system in action, though I know I would have gotten more out of her explanations—and maybe out of the book—if I'd attempted to implement some of the ideas myself, first.
The book wasn't nearly as much fun to read as Don Aslett's books on controlling clutter, but I think they have a lot in common. Getting Things Done is a lot about controlling the clutter in our minds.
"What's the next action?" The answer to Allen's favorite question is, "Implementation." But that's not really an answer, since "implementation" isn't a discrete action, but a mammoth project. I hope to accomplish some baby steps this week, and—eventually—report back on the results.
Common Sense 101: Lessons from G. K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2006)
I tried to take a shortcut. With only three days before leaving the J&S Library behind, I chose this instead of a book by Chesterton himself. Although somewhat unsatisfactory, it was probably the right thing to do: The summary has left me thirsting for the Real Thing.
Many times throughout the book I found myself wanting to say to the author—as I wanted to say to the editor of Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils, which I reviewed in January—"Enough of what you think Chesterton is saying; I want to hear more of what he has to say!" But Chesterton can be tough sledding at first, so reading a historical and contextual introduction is not a bad idea. Dale Ahlquist is the president of the American Chesterton Society, which might be another good place to begin.
Although there is much I could quote from Common Sense 101, I'll refrain until I have the direct words from one Ahlquist would freely admit is the better writer. Instead, I'll include a Christmas poem, not by Chesterton, but by his wife, Frances Blogg* Chesterton.
How far is it to Bethlehem?
Not very far.
Shall we find the stable-room
Lit by a star?
Can we see the little Child?
Is He within?
If we lift the wooden latch,
May we go in?
May we stroke the creatures there —
Ox, ass, or sheep?
May we peep like them and see
Jesus asleep?
If we touch His tiny hand,
Will He awake?
Will He know we've come so far
Just for His sake?
Great kings have precious gifts,
And we have naught;
Little smiles and little tears
Are all we brought.
For all weary children
Mary must weep;
Here, on His bed of straw,
Sleep, children, sleep.
God, in His mother's arms,
Babes in the byre,
Sleep, as they sleep who find
Their heart's desire.
Covenant and Communion: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI by Scott W. Hahn (Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2009)
I read this book quickly, because it's a book to be read slowly. I should have guessed from the names on the dust jacket quotes—names like David L. Jeffrey, Hans Boersma, and Tremper Longman—that Covenant and Communion would be more like a book from a seminary library than the local Christian bookstore. There's a lot of heavy theology here, and I currently have neither the time nor the inclination to do it justice. However, that didn't stop the text from grabbing me occasionally and slowing me down enough to pull a few quotes. Quotation marks set off Pope Benedict's actual words.
The church is the living voice, the viva vox, of the Word of God.... Scripture is at the center of the Church's tradition, but tradition is properly understood as the whole of "the responsive Word of the Church"—a living dialogue in which the Church constantly listens to the Word addressed to her and responds to the claims the Word makes on her through her preaching, teaching, doctrine, and liturgy. More than that, tradition is a participation in the power of God promised to the Church by Christ. It is nothing other than the fulfillment of Christ's promise to be with his Church in the Spirit until the end of the age.... Tradition, then, is nothing less than Christ's living and saving and interpretive presence in the Church.
It is important to keep in mind...that revelation for Benedict is not limited to the written word of Scripture.
"A God who cannot intervene in history and reveal himself is not the God of the Bible."
The Christian faith is not faith in a series of propositions but faith in a historical person.
What is important for us is to recognize that Benedict's theology and exegesis presume as absolutely vital the unity of salvation history—reflected in the unity of the Old and New Testaments—and the principle that Jesus Christ is both the culmination of that history and the interpretive key of God's revelation in the Scriptures.
As the words of Scripture, by their very nature, must admit of more than their literal meaning, the same is true of the historical events recorded in Scripture.... Thus while the events recorded in the Bible are factual, their meanings far transcend "historical facticity" because God in his Spirit is their author. Indeed, because God is acting in the biblical narrative, "...the events carry within themselves a surplus meaning...giving them significance for all time and for all men."
Benedict rejects as unbiblical the sharp dialectic between Law and Gospel introduced by Martin Luther.... Benedict establishes from his close readings of the texts "the inner continuity and coherence of Law and Gospel" and the "deep unity between the good news of Jesus and the message of Sinai." The hinge on which this unity depends is...the figure of Jesus Christ.
"The church is there, not for her own sake, but for mankind."
"We can see in [Acts 2:42] a sketch of the primitive Christian service of worship, which starts with the teaching of the apostles, that is, with the proclamation and hearing of the faith of the Church, of the Word of God that is alive in her and that thus becomes the basis for liturgical and living fellowship: it reaches a climax in the eucharistic encounter with the Lord, who gives himself to us as bread, and resounds in songs of praise. The Church is adoration."
Benedict demonstrates that the New Testament portrait of Jesus is that of a person in constant prayer. The prayer of Jesus is not abstract or monologic. Rather, the prayer of Jesus is an intimate, intense, and sustained dialogue with the God he calls "Father." The Church's earliest confessions and hymns, which profess faith in Jesus as the Son of God, only confirm the witness of the apostles and the testimony of the Scriptures—that Jesus lived in unbroken "primal conversation with the Father."
The Father that Jesus prayed to was "the God of the fathers," the patriarchs of Israel, and Jesus prayed as a child of these patriarchs, as a son of Abraham. He was part of this ancient family, this people of God. This, too, is vital to Benedict's theological understanding. Jesus prayed with his people, in conversation with the Scriptures of Israel, as is vividly depicted in the Transfiguration, where he talks personally with Moses and the prophet Elijah.
We can speak to God bcause God has spoken to us—because he has come to us as a Word and because in his inmost life in the Trinity he is a relationship. The prayer of Jesus reveals that the heart of the Trinity is a familial, filial relationship of love. God in his inner essence is a dialogue of love, and our prayer, both corporately in the liturgy and privately, is a participation in this filial and familial dialogue.
[The Lord's Prayer] illuminates this point. Even when the believer prays the "Our Father" privately, he or she prays as a member of the family of God. It is never my Father. The prayer of Jesus is always personal and simultaneously the prayer of one who knows himself to be part of a family. "Prayer is always praying with someone," in the communion of the Church, in the body of Christ, in the family of God.
As our prayer is never alone, neither is it something we can do of our own initiative. Prayer and worship are our response to the God who has first spoken to us. God's Word to us is a gift, the gift of himself; it is the opportunity to participate in his familial dialogue of love.
"What had always been intended and could never be achieved in the Old Testament sacrifices is incorporated in [Christ]. God does not desire the sacrifice of animals; everything belongs to him. And he does not desire human sacrifice, for he has created man for living. God desires something more: he desires love, which transforms man and through which he becomes capable of relating to God, giving himself up to God. Now, all those thousands of sacrifices that were always presented to God in the Temple at Jerusalem and all the sacrifices performed in the whole course of history, all this vain and eternal striving to bring ourselves up to God, can be seen as unnecessary and yet, at the same time, as being like windows that allow us, so to speak, a glimpse of the real thing, like preliminary attempts at what has now been achieved. What they signified—giving to God, union with God—comes to pass in Jesus Christ, in him who gives God nothing but himself and, thereby, us in him."
The Liturgy of the Word in the Mass presumes the unity of salvation history and in fact tracks and unfolds that history, beginning with readings from the Law and the prophets, a song from the psalms, and then readings from the Gospels and the apostolic writings. Yet it is a mistake to regard the Scriptures used in the liturgy as historical readings or even ethical lessons. They are the Word of God, the voice of revelation that speaks to us in the present with creative and life-changing power.
Divine worship implies that we ourselves have become beings of the Word, that we conform ourselves to the creative Intellect. But once more it is clear that we cannot do this of ourselves, and thus everything seems to end again in futility—until the day when the Word comes, the true, the Son, when he becomes flesh and draws us to himself in the exodus of the cross. This true sacrifice, which transforms us all into sacrifice, that is to say, unites us to God, makes of us beings conformed to God, is indeed fixed and founded on an historical event, but is not situated as a thing in the past behind us—on the contrary, it becomes contemporary and accessible to us in the community of the believing and praying Church, in its sacrament: that is what is meant by the "sacrifice of the Mass."
"Just reading [Scripture[ does not mean necessarily that we have truly understood the Word of God. The danger is that we only see the human words and do not find the true actor within, the Holy Spirit. We do not find the Word in the words.... We stop at the human words, words from the past, history of he past, and we do not discover the present in the past, the Holy Spirit who speaks to us today in the words from the past. In this way we do not enter the interior movement of the Word, which in human words conceals and which opens the divine words. We must always look for the Word within the words."
As one whose religious beliefs and experiences have been either atheistic or Protestant, I found it startling to read arguments about where Luther went wrong. That's not at all the focus of the book, but the few instances caught me by surprise. However, Pope Benedict's focus on Christ, his obvious knowledge of the Bible, and the marriage of his impressive intellect with his strong faith, make Covenant and Communion a book worthy of serious Protestant attention. It's probably not a good place for an atheist to begin, unless he's seeking evidence that intellectual, rational, academic thought is not incompatible with Christian faith.
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (Tor, New York, 1991)
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (Tor, New York, 1991)
The short story version of Ender's Game was written back in 1977—more than 30 years ago—and even the novel is 25 years old. That was right when my reading interests veered sharply from science fiction to children and education, so I missed Orson Scott Card entirely until now. Extended visits for the birthing of grandchildren put me in contact with other people's libraries: it was at the birth of another grandchild that I discovered The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and finally learned the significance of 42.
Both Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are riveting stories. Although the author feels the latter to be more important, and indeed chose to expand the original short story of Ender's Game only because he needed a prelude to Speaker for the Dead, I liked the former much better.
Card claims Isaac Asimov as his inspiration, but I detect more than a few traces of Robert Heinlein. The respect for the abilities of children, the school settings, and the military motifs in Ender's Game remind me of much of what I liked best from Heinlein, notably Space Cadet, Tunnel in the Sky, and especially, Starship Troopers. (I've not seen the movie version of ST, but it doesn't surprise me to hear that you shouldn't judge the book by the film.) The amalgam of humanist and New Age worldviews at the end of Ender's Game and throughout Speaker for the Dead remind me of Heinlein's works that I did not like, such as Stranger in a Strange Land. Like Heinlein, Card is a better storyteller than philosopher.
That Ender's Game must have had a special hold on me will be obvious to those who know how much I dislike both the boarding school genre (the early Harry Potter stories won me over in spite of their setting, not because of it) and reading about battles and military strategies (I haven't yet made it past the beginning of The Iliad). The hook was Card's obvious (personal?) knowledge of the problems of bright children in a world that is more likely to abuse or exploit than to understand, help, or befriend them. Adding boarding school woes—of the sort that made C. S. Lewis write, "If the parents in each generation knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different"—exaggerates the problem, but sometimes a situation must be overstated to be noticed.
I like books that inspire me, and Ender's Game does—much more so than Speaker for the Dead, which I'm sure was intended to be the more inspirational. Knowing little about leadership, as a subject, I found Card's treatment of it fascinating, and even the game-playing and battle-winning strategies were educational. Perhaps what affected me most was Ender's skill at turning everything that happened to him into something that made him stronger and better, and the way he patiently endured pain as long as it enabled him to learn.
As I've said before, Isaac Asimov has long been one of my favorite authors, from science fiction (of course) to science fact to history to mystery. But his fantasy falls flat, at least if judged by Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection, which I finished reading today.
Asimov is fond of quoting Arthur C. Clarke's assertion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; this may go far to explaining why I find his fantasy unsatisfactory. He is all-rational,* to the extent that even his demons and his dragons seem mundane. There is no magic in his magic. Some of the tales are good stories, but they lack the sparkle, the wonder, the life of a good fantasy.
Interestingly, Asimov had great respect for J.R.R. Tolkien as a writer and read The Lord of the Rings at least five times. Since I consider Tolkien to be a master at the elements that I find lacking in Asimov's fantasy stories, I wonder if those aspects of the LOTR, which in my opinion make it the monumental work that it is, were invisible to him.
Perhaps they were; certainly there is enough depth to the story to attract people on many different levels, as the makers of the movie version proved. Or...perhaps...he did catch a glimpse of the book's magic, which continued to draw him back, though he didn't know why.
Stained Glass Elegies: Stories by Shusaku Endo translated by Van C. Gessel (Tuttle Publishing, Tokyo, 1986)
When Basel records the highest temperature in Switzerland, and much of Europe has the temperatures of Florida in July without benefit of Florida's air conditioning, and a recent birth precludes visiting the local swimming pool, let alone fleeing to somewhere high in the Alps, then sitting in front of a fan and reading beats most other activities. It especially beats sitting with a hot computer on one's lap, so this will be a short review.
Endo is not an author I would have likely come across on my own, but that's the advantage of having someone else's bookshelves at one's disposal. I chose this book of short stories over the many Endo novels available, on the theory that they would work better in a household punctuated by random baby needs.
Although the themes are decidedly adult, and rather depressing, the stories were good to read and rarely objectionable, even to me. What I found most fascinating was the glimpse of life from a Japanese point of view. Recurring motifs, probably somewhat autobiographical, include tuberculosis; hospitals; internal doubts, fears and struggles; war; and the suffering of Christians, both martyrs and apostates, during the time when Japan attempted to stamp out Christianity—and the effect that era has on Japanese Christians today. "Would I be able to endure torture and death—and the torture and death of my family—without abandoning my faith?" is not a thought most American Christians give serious consideration, but apparently for Endo, a Japanese Catholic in a land where Christians of all sorts make up only 2% of the population, it was a haunting question.
In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity by Josef Pieper, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (St. Augustine's Press, South Bend, Indiana, 1999; original copyright 1963, translation copyright 1965)
Sometimes it helps to take a second look.
I wasn't halfway through the first chapter before I was disappointed with In Tune with the World. It was my own fault: Despite the book's subtitle, I had been expecting practical suggestions for recovering festivity in a society where abundance is commonplace. (See New Year's Resolution #2: Rediscover Feasting.) However, when Pieper says "a theory of festivity," that is exactly what he means.
What's more, the first few pages put me off because Pieper seemed to be dividing our lives between work and festivity, with work pretty much defined as what men do to earn a living, and I kept thinking, "But you still expect the women to cook and clean for your festivals; if they separated their work from the feast, it wouldn't be much of one!" He was writing in the early 1960's, so I can't say he's free from that attitude, but there's much more to what he is saying, and my preconceptions definitely distorted that first chapter.
Before I had finished the book, however, I realized that it deserved re-reading for what it is rather than for what I wanted it to be. I'm not generally one to read books of philosophy—largely, I'll admit, because I find them hard going, and true to form, this 88-page book with relatively large print is not something to be read in one sitting, even for a fast reader like me. I had brought it to Switzerland to read and leave with Janet (it was, after all, her suggestion and her birthday present), but as with The Brain that Changes Itself, I soon realized I'd have to bring it home with me. There is only so much of this kind of writing I can take without my eyes glazing over:
Human acts derive their meaning primarily from their content, from their object, not from the manner in which they are performed. Play, however, seems to be chiefly a mere modus of action, a specific way of performing something, at any rate a purely formal determinant.
The text is well worth working through, however—perhaps several times. Here are a few points I was able to glean on the second reading. Because of all the quotations, the rest of the post is very long. I think they merit the time it will take to read them, or I wouldn't have made the effort to type them in, but the ideas are highlighted so you can indulge in "Festivity Lite" if you wish.
Festivity is a joyous affirmation: Everything that is, is good, and it is good to exist.
[S]uch affirmation [is not] shallow optimism, let alone...smug approval, of that which is.... [It] is not won by deliberately shutting one's eyes to the horrors in this world. Rather, it proves its seriousness by its confrontation with historical evil. ... [The Christian martyr]...never utters a word against God's Creation. In spite of everything he finds the things that are "very good"; therefore he remains capable of joy, and even, as far as it concerns him, of festivity. [O]n the other hand, whoever refuses to assent to reality as a whole, no matter how well off he may be, is by that fact incapacitated for either joy or festivity. Festivity is impossible to the naysayer.
To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.
It is the nature of festivity to be non-utilitarian.
To celebrate a festival means to do something which is in no way tied to other goals, which has been removed from all "so that" and "in order to." True festivity cannot be imagined as residing anywhere but in the realm of activity that is meaningful in itself.
With the death of the concept of human activity that is meaningful in itself...[it] becomes a sheer impossibility to establish and maintain an area of existence which is not preempted by work. For there is only a single justification for not working that will be acceptable even to one's own conscience. That is, dedication of leisure to something meaningful in itself. It is more important not only "socially" but also on a higher human level to work than to kill time; and if we contrast the laboring society and its totalitarian planning for utility with a civilization dedicated mainly to entertainment, the former seems without question overwhelmingly superior.
The antithesis between holiday and workday, or more precisely, the concept of a day of rest, tells us something further about the essence of festivity. The day of rest is not just a neutral interval inserted as a link in the chain of workaday life. It entails a loss of utilitarian profit. In voluntarily keeping the holiday, men renounce the yield of a day's labor....The day of rest, then, meant not only that no work was done, but also that an offering was being made of the yield of labor. It is not merely that the time is not gainfully used; the offering is in the nature of a sacrifice, and therefore the diametric opposite of utility.
Extravagance is appropriate for festive celebrations. Here is a foreign concept that rings true. Surrounded by plenty, yet endowed with a great sense of thrift, it is hard for me in good conscience to be lavish—with money, calories, or enthusiasm—even for a celebration.
A festival is essentially a phenomenon of wealth; not, to be sure, the wealth of money, but of existential richness. Absence of calculation, in fact lavishness, is one of its elements. Of course there is a natural peril and a germ of degeneration inherent in this. The way is open to senseless and excessive waste of the yield of work, to an extravagance that violates all rationality.... But this potential perversion cannot be included within the definition of festivity.... [T]he fact remains that the paramountcy of a calculating, economizing mentality prevents both festive excess and festivity itself. In the workaday world all magnificence and pomp is calculated, and therefore unfestive.
True festivity is inseparable from religious experience. Pieper writes as a Christian, and clearly views Christian festivals as the highest and best of celebrations. Yet the theory of festivity he posits has its roots firmly in pagan, primitive, Jewish, Roman, and other practices as well, and the book is rife with quotations from sources many and varied. He would probably agree with the concept, which I first encountered in C. S. Lewis, that Christianity did not come so much to abolish the old religions as to fulfill them.
[T]o celebrate a festival is equivalent to "becoming contemplative, and, in this state, directly confronting the higher realities on which the whole of existence rests."...Bustle does not make a festival; on the contrary, it can spoil one....[A] special spice, essential to the right celebration of a festival, is a kind of expectant alertness. One must be able to look through, and, as it were, beyond the immediate matter of the festival, including the festal gifts; one must engage in a listening, and therefore necessarily silent, meditation upon the fundament of existence.
A festival without gods is a non-concept, is inconceivable. For example, Carnival remains festive only where Ash Wednesday still exists. To eliminate Ash Wednesday is to eliminate the Carnival itself. [This is nowhere so obvious to me as in Orlando, where the Universal Studios theme park "celebrates" Mardi Gras throughout Lent. It is an excuse for partying, or more accurately for profit-making, and nothing else.]
Secular as well as religious festivals have their roots in the rituals of worship. Otherwise, what arises is not a profane festival, but something quite artificial, which is either an embarrassment or...a new and more strenuous kind of work.
[F]estivals are doomed unless they are preceded by the pattern of ritual religious praise. That is the fire that kindles them. But it is that very thing—praise of God—which constitutes almost the entire content of Christian ritual....[A]ffirmation is the fundamental form of Christian liturgy. Christian liturgy is in fact "an unbounded Yea-and-Amen saying."...St. Augustine has defined worship in the same terms: "Worship takes place," he says, "by the offering of praise and thanksgiving." Indeed, the Church itself uses the name "thanksgiving" for the sacramental offering which is the source and center of all other acts of worship. The Mass is called and is eucharistia. Whatever the specific content of this thanksgiving may be, the "occasion" for which it is performed and which it comports with is nothing other than the salvation of the world and of life as a whole....Of course, everything depends on whether or not we think the historical world and human life are "made whole" or at any rate "capable of being made whole" by Christ. This is the all-important question....Christian worship sees itself as an act of affirmation that expresses itself in praise, glorification, thanksgiving for the whole of reality and existence.
The purpose and fruit of a festive celebration is an other-worldly phenomenon, which cannot be attained by effort, but only received as a gift.
Language harbors a variety of names for this phenomenon: renewal, transformation, restoration, rejuvenation, rebirth. But they all mean the same thing, even though it does not lend itself to clear definition and description. There are many ways in which the gift is experienced. It is recreation; it is, as Goethe put it, release from the pressure of daily obligation. Passing time stands still....Men are swept away from the here and now to utterly tranquil contemplation of the ground of existence; to happiness, as in absorption in beloved eyes. Everyday things unexpectedly take on the freshness of Eden; the world, again in Goethe's words, is "glorious, as on the first of days."
[T]he fruit of the festival, for which alone it is really celebrated, is pure gift; it is the element of festivity that can never be "organized," arranged, and induced. The will is bent on action; however easy it may seem, we have far less talent for relaxation, slackening effort, letting ourselves go, than for the hard task of work. To be sure, relaxation can be learned and practiced to a certain degree. But no amount of effort, no matter how desperate, can force festivity to yield up its essence. All we can do is prepare ourselves to receive the hoped-for gift; and perhaps the idea of "ritual purity"...should be rethought and recaptured. All these considerations, however, do not in any way nullify the nature of the gift, which is in no way pledged, predictable, or meritable, and descends only of its own accord. "In order for a festival to emerge out of human efforts, something divine must be added, which alone makes possible the otherwise impossible." This is an ethnologist's conclusion, but it applies not only to primitive peoples. It suddenly makes us realize the very real sense of the statement in both the Psalms and the Platonic Dialogue that the festival is the day God has made.
Thus, when a festival goes as it should, men receive something that it is not in human power to give. This is the by now almost forgotten reason for the age-old custom of men wishing one another well on great festival days. What are we usually wishing our fellow men when we send them "best wishes for Christmas"? Health, enjoyment of each other's company, thriving children, success—all these things, too, of course. We may even—why not?—be wishing them a good appetite for the holiday meal. But the real thing we are wishing is the "success" of the festival celebration itself, not just its outer forms and enrichments, not the trimmings, but the gift that is meant to be the true fruit of the festival: renewal, transformation, rebirth. Nowadays, to be sure, all this can barely be sensed behind the trite formula, "Happy holidays."
The fine arts are necessary, though not sufficient, for festive celebration.
[A] festival without singing, music, dancing, without visible forms of celebration, without any kind of works of art, cannot be imagined.
[T]he artistic act is like festivity itself, something out of the ordinary, something unusual, which is not covered by the rules governing the workaday world. This is true not only of the artist's creative act, which gives rise to the work of art, but also of the secondary act of the person who (for example) reads a poem poetically.
[T]he invisible aspect of festivity, the praise of the world which lies at a festival's innermost core, can attain a physical form, can be made perceptible to the senses, only through the medium of the arts.
[T]he fine arts keep alive the memory of the true ritualistic, religious origins of festivals when these begin to wither or be forgotten. And this memory may at some moment succeed in blasting open again the buried entrance.
On the other hand, the very overestimation of the arts can also obscure this knowledge.... [The arts] are not themselves the festivals. Rather, the arts, like pleasure itself, are derivative and secondary; they are a contribution, the adornment and medium of the festival, but not its substance. As soon as festiveness itself becomes unachievable, the arts are inevitably left without a home; their necessity and even their credibility fade away.... It is not too surprising that under conditions of tyranny the arts fall into the service of the political power and are subjected to utilitarian ends—quite often with the acquiescence of the artists themselves.... [H]omeless art looks for a new home.
Gloomy diagnosticians told us long ago that in an existence founded on negation, festivity becomes a caricature of itself.... If assent to the world can no longer be celebrated festively at all, then every one of the fine arts becomes homeless, useless, idle, unbelievable, and at bottom impossible. To be sure, such refusal can exist side by side with the greatest technical skill. That is precisely what complicates the matter. For wherever truth in form is achieved, no matter how "formalistic" it may be, there exists...in some sense harmony, concord with a pre-established image of order—and thus inevitably a grain of affirmation. Complete negation is necessarily formless; it presupposes the shattering of form; whereas negation proclaimed in perfect form is only a half-negation, inherently a contradiction of itself.
Unfestive, sham, made-up festivals will proliferate when true festivals are absent.
Worse than clear negation...is mendacious affirmation. Worse than the silencing and stifling of festivity and the arts is sham practicing of them.... [P]seudo-art is related in a variety of ways to pseudo-festivity. The sham is inherent in the fact that the affirmation and assent compatible only with true reality is falsified into a smug yea-saying, whose basic element is a desire to fend off reality, so as not to be disturbed, at any prices. A deceptive escape from the narrowness of the workaday utilitarian world is found in the form of entertainment and "forgetting one's worries." And the same mendacious message also reaches men through the medium of the pseudo-arts, whether trivial or pretentious, flattering or entertaining, or intoxicating like a drug. Man craves by nature to enter the "other" world, but he can attain it only if true festivity truly comes to pass. For it appears—but it is appearance only—that this other dimension of reality can be produced with ease and at will; it appears to stand at the disposal of the harried or bored man who needs "entertainment" and a "change."...But the man who by such devices is the more imprisoned within a workaday world now made amusing no longer misses real festivity; he does not notice the emptiness. And thus he even stops grieving over his loss—and the loss thereby is finally sealed.
[T]he place in life which should naturally be occupied by real festivity cannot remain empty. And when real festivals are no longer celebrated, for whatever reasons, the susceptibility to artificial festivals grows.
[T]hings have not reached their sorriest pass as long as men are concerned over the disappearance of the festive principle from life....[T]he grumblings of cultural critics and the plaints of pets are the very opposite of hopelessness. But when, unnoticed and almost unnoticeable, sham festivals foist themselves on men in place of true festivity...then the situation is really bad....
Naturally enough, in the past as well as in the present, the festivals most prone to such corruption have been those whose public character is unassailable. Even secularized society cannot—not yet—ignore Christmas. However, as everyone has observed , the real festival is almost disappearing behind the commercialized folderol that has come to the fore. The true content sometimes becomes distorted to a degree that is really grotesque. In Japan the opinion has been voiced in all seriousness that commercial advertising is not misusing the symbols of the Christmas festival, but rather that the Christian holiday has borrowed the various motifs so successful in the department store displays, in order to exert a more powerful influence on the public.
Compared with the falsification...of festivals already existing as institutions, the creation of completely new festivals...is a relatively unambiguous problem, although those closely involved may find it difficult to see through the illusion. Granted, all festivals are in some sense "made" by men...from the fixing of a particular calendar day to the specific forms.... While man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating. The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of all things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death—all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no one can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival.
This habit of inventing festivals took a serious turn only when, in the course of the French Revolution, entirely new festivals were initiated by the state. These were intended to displace and replace the traditional religious holidays....
The entire section on the French Revolution is worth reading; you'll never look at the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games in the same way again.
The fundamental vapidness of these artificial festivals is clearly exposed when we try to find out what they are actually celebrating. What is the object, the reason, the occasion? A phrase that recurs so constantly...as to be virtually a classic formula maintains that the people themselves are not only the "ornament" of the festival and its organizers, but also its object....[The phrase] goes back to Rousseau. The object of the festivals celebrated by "happy peoples," he says, is, "if you willl, nothing at all"; strictly speaking, however the people themseves are the festive spectacle....[W]hat is really being celebrated is human "happiness"....
There can be no festivity when man, imagining himself self-sufficient, refuses to recognize that Goodness of things which goes far beyond any conceivable utility; it is the Goodness of reality taken as a whole which validates all other particular goods and which man himself can never produce....He truly receives it only when he accepts it as pure gift.
Festivity IS.
[T]here remains the indestructible...gift innate in all men which impels them now and again to escape from the restricted sphere where they labor for their necessities and provide for their security—to escape not by mere forgetting, but by undeceived recollection of the greater, more real reality. Now, as always, the workaday world can be transcended in poetry and the other arts. In the shattering emotion of love, beyond the delusions of sensuality, men continue to find entrace to the still point of the turning world. Now, as always, the experience of death as man's destiny, if accepted with an open and unarmored heart, acquaints us with a dimension of existence which fosters a detachment from the immediate aims of practical life....Consequently, for the sake of what prospects there are for true festivity in our time, it is essential to resist the sophistical corruption of the arts, the cheapening of eroticism, [and] the degradation of death.
The core and source of festivity itself remains inviolably present in the midst of society....[T]he festive occasion pure and simple, the divine guarantee of the world and of human salvation, exists and remains true continuously....
The Christian...is convinced that no destructive action...can ever corrode the substance of Creation. "Miraculously founded and more miraculously restored," it cannot be corrupted by the "will to nothingness." Thus there always remains the "festive occasion" which alone inspires and justifies celebration. It remains in force, forever undiminished.
Warning: You can read In Tune with the World in under an hour, but the ideas you encounter therein may never leave you.
The day I arrived in Basel on this trip, I felt in need of some "chill-out" reading that wouldn't tax my jet-lagged brain cells. Fortunately, Janet and Stephan's bookshelves are well stocked, even after eliminating the books in German, French, and Japanese.
For much of my life, Isaac Asimov was one of my very favorite authors, first for his science fiction, and later for his non-fiction. (I had the pleasure of astonishing him once at a science fiction convention by presenting to him one of his American history books for autographing.) Asimov kept writing—surely he must hold some record for the quantity and scope of his works—but life took me in different directions and I neglected him for many years, except for re-reading his delightful Black Widowers mystery stories.
But there on the bookshelf was Gold, a collection of some of his last short stories and essays, and it was just what I wanted.
So far, I'm still impressed with Asimov's writing, though his own opinions and philosophies intrude somewhat annoyingly into the stories. I suspect that was always the case, but I was less aware, both because of my lack of experience and because his prejudices did not then conflict in any significant way with mine. In any case, his worldview is part of what makes an author who he is, so I don't mind much.
In the essay on women in science fiction, however, Asimov's sharp wits seem to have deserted him. How else to fathom his casting blame on puritanical attitudes toward sex for the fact that early science fiction stories were all about men?
In most cases, non-recognition of the existence of sex was treated as though it was the law. ... But if there's no sex, what do you do with female characters? They can't have passions and feelings. They can't participate on equal terms with male characters because that would introduce too many complications where some sort of sex might creep in. The best thing to do was to keep them around in the background, allowing them to scream in terror, to be caught and then rescued, and, at the end, to smile prettily at the hero.
Excuse me? Female characters are good for nothing but sex? If they can't have sex, they can't do anything? And you can't have male and female characters together in the same story without having them jump into bed?
What makes this statement all the more absurd is that Asimov himself succeeded many times over in doing what he just said was impossible. As he stated in a later essay, "I use no gutter language or sex in my juvenile books, but then I use no gutter language and very little sex in my adult books."
Robert Heinlein, another of my once-favorite SF authors, was also adept at writing stories with strong—i.e. normal—female characters and no sex scenes, although to be sure he also wrote plenty of books that were objectionable and even bizarre in that department.
Asimov clearly knew better, and wrote better. Why he would say something so irrational escapes me completely. He's right that science fiction, along with most stories of adventure, daring, and heroism, failed their female readers miserably. I know, because as one of them in my impressionable childhood, I couldn't help noticing that, with few exceptions, the only characters worth admiring or emulating were male.
But it wasn't the censors' fault. It may, in many ways, have been society's fault. I'll easily believe that the problem reflected a poor general attitude towards women and girls—but to imply that a story with female characters must have a romantic interest, let along a sex scene, is the more offensive error.
Permalink | Comments
Category Reviews Travels Everyday Life
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
Thanks to Netflix, we're reprising the 1960's. Just a little. Contrary to popular, romantic belief, the 60's and 70's were a difficult and painful time for our country, and while there was some progress made in important arenas, I see those times as watershed years, in which our society turned rapidly for the worse in many ways. I never did like Forrestt Gump; it cuts too close to the bone. Nonetheless, while searching for some clean comic relief, I chose to look backwards, at some "best of" takes on two shows that made me laugh in my high school days.
My memory was confirmed that of the two the Smothers Brothers show was by far the better. I've removed from our queue the remaining Laugh-In disks in the series, but kept two more of the Smothers Brothers. They make me laugh still. Only now, I cry as well.
It's hard to imagine calling anything from the 1960's "innocent," but in comparison to today's show, that's the proper adjective. Yet the seeds of today's hard-edged, cynical depravity were clearly there for those with eyes to see. Even now it stings to realize that the cautionary words of our old-fashioned elders were right, and our insistence that it was all harmless fun was wrong.
Don't misunderstand me: there was a lot of harmless fun in the shows, and even some important social commentary. But in attitude and innuendo there was the beginning of a darker trend, a crack in the foundation as it were, which has now widened into a breach.
One thing I like about the Smothers Brothers show is all the music, especially when Tom plays his acoustic guitar and Dick his string bass. They both had beautiful singing voices, and frequently sang lovely old folk songs. Also interesting is seeing the beginnings of later-famous groups, such as future country star Kenny Rogers singing psychedelic rock with the First Edition. Less amusing was an early performance by the Who, who smashed not only their own instruments but (unexpectedly) Tommy's guitar as well. Tommy did an amazing job of staying cool about it, though that may have been because all were reeling from the explosion of a cannon in the drum set. It had unintentionally been loaded with a triple charge and literally blew the set apart, injuring the drummer with shrapnel and causing permanent hearing loss in one of the guitarists. In the spirit of "the show must go on," it's not obvious to the viewer that all didn't go as planned.
Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michale Pollan (Penguin, New York, 2009)
Food Rules is a condensation of what journalist Pollan has learned from his investigation of what's wrong with the American diet and how it can be improved. If this is the only Pollan food book you will read, or if you want to introduce his ideas to a skeptical friend with a short attention span, it rates five stars. Half of the 140 pages are merely pictures, and the other half are short and very easy to read.
I enjoyed reading through it, but am glad I borrowed it instead of buying it, as for my purposes The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food are better. (On the other hand, at $6.60 from Amazon, the book costs no more than one of those fast food meals Pollan wants us to avoid.)
From #1 Eat food (as opposed to edible food-like substances) to #63 Break the rules once in a while, following these succinct suggestions would go a long way towards improving most people's diets. Best of all I like Pollan's relaxed attitude that reminds us that eating well isn't rocket science, nor is it onerous. It's a basic birthright that we have lost and must reclaim for ourselves and our children.
The Dark Ages (The History Channel, 2007, not rated)
Having worked for a number of months in New York City, Porter had the opportunity both to explore the History Channel on television and to observe throughout the city the advertising placards proclaiming, "The History Channel: Where History Is Made Every Day." If he were a vandalizing sort of person, New Yorkers would have soon seen a slight alteration in the slogan:
With my expectations sufficiently lowered, I found The Dark Ages not to be too bad. (Thanks, Netflix.) It's not my favorite approach to a historical documentary—Ken Burns set a standard that is hard to beat. The tone is unpleasantly sensationalistic, and the re-enactments almost painfully unprofessional. But the facts are consistent with what little I know of the time period (as consistent as historians get, anyway), and without doubt the show packs an amazing amount of history into 94 minutes.
I believe history needs to be taught using many sources, and many approaches. Not only does this help balance out the inevitable bias each historian brings to his work, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who needs to hear a fact at least three times before it sticks with me. The Dark Ages is not a great show, but it works well in this context.
The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge (Penguin, New York, 2007)
Neuroplasticity.
The idea that our brains are fixed, hard-wired machines was (and in many cases still is) so deeply entrenched in the scientific establishment that evidence to the contrary was not only suppressed, but often not even seen because the minds of even respectable scientists could not absorb what they were certain was impossible. Having been familiar since the 1960s with the work of Glenn Doman and the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the idea that the human brain is continually changing itself and can recover from injury in astonishing ways did not surprise me. In fact, the only shock was that in a 400 page book on neuroplasticity and the persecution of its early pioneers I found not one mention of Doman's name. But the stories are none the less astonishing for that.
In Chapter 1 we meet woman whose vestibular system was destroyed by antibiotic side-effects. She is freed by a sensor held on her tongue and a computerized helmet from the severely disabling feeling that she is falling all the time, even when lying flat. That's the stuff of science fiction, but what's most astounding is that the effect lingers for a few minutes after she removes the apparatus the first time, and after several sessions she no longer needs the device.
Chapter 3, "Redesigning the Brain," on the work of Michael Merzenich, including the ground-breaking Fast ForWord learning program, is worth the cost of the book all by itself.
Sensitive readers may want to steer clear of Chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," or risk being left with unwanted, disturbing mental images. But it is a must read for anyone who wants to believe that pornography is harmless, or that our personal, private mental fantasies do not adversely affect the very structure of our brains.
The book is less impressive when it gets away from hard science and into psychotherapy, as the ideas become more speculative, but the stories are still impressive.
Phantom pain, learning disabilities, autism, stroke recovery, obsessions and compulsions, age-related mental decline, and much more: the discovery of neuroplasticity shatters misconceptions and offers hope. The Brain that Changes Itself is an appetizer plate; bring on the main course!
For those who want a sampling of the appetizer itself, I'm including an extensive quotation section. Even so, it doesn't come close to doing justice to the depth and especially the breadth of the book. I've pulled quotes from all over, so understand that they are out of context, and don't expect them to move smoothly from one section to another.
Neuro is for "neuron," the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for "changeable, malleable, modifiable." At first many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notions. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many "circuits" and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior—surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.
In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must re-think our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing. ... The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.
In Chapter 2, Building Herself a Better Brain, a woman with such a severe imbalance of brain function that she was labelled mentally retarded put her own experiences together with the work of other researchers to design brain exercises that fixed the weaknesses in her own brain ... and went on to develop similar diagnostic procedures and exercises for others.
The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant." But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation—the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.
Here are several (but not enough!) from my favorite chapter, "Redesigning the Brain."
[As] they trained an animal at a skill, not only did its neurons fire faster, but because they were faster their signals were clearer. Faster neurons were more likely to fire in sync with each other—becoming better team players—wiring together more and forming groups of neurons that gave off clearer and more powerful signals. This is a crucial point, because a powerful signal has greater impact on the brain. When we want to remember something we have heard we must hear it clearly, because a memory can be only as clear as its original signal.
Paying close attention is essential to long-term plastic change. ... When the animals performed tasks automatically, without paying attention, they changed their brain maps, but the changes did not last. We often praise "the ability to multitask." While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to abiding change in your brain maps.
Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of preschool children have a language disability that makes it difficult for them to read, write, or even follow instructions. ... [C]hildren with language disabilities have auditory processing problems with common consonant-vowel combinations that are spoken quickly and are called "the fast parts of speech." The children have trouble hearing them accurately and, as a result, reproducing them accurately. Merzenich believed that these children's auditory cortex neurons were firing too slowly, so they couldn't distinguish between two very similar sounds or be certain, if two sounds occurred close together, which was first and which was second. Often they didn't hear the beginnings of syllables or the sound changes within syllables. Normally neurons, after they have processed a sound, are ready to fire again after about a 30-millisecond rest. Eighty percent of language-impaired children took at least three times that long, so that they lost large amounts of language information. When their neuron-firing patterns were examined, the signals weren't clear. ... Improper hearing lead to weaknesses in all the language tasks, so they were weak in vocabulary, comprehension, speech, reading, and writing. Because they spent so much energy decoding words, they tended to use shorter sentences and failed to exercise their memory for longer sentences.
[Five hundred children at 35 sites] were given standardized language tests before and after Fast ForWord training. The study showed that most children's ability to understand language normalized after Fast ForWord. In many cases, their comprehension rose above normal. The average child who took the program moved ahead 1.8 years of language development in six weeks. ... A Stanford group did brain scans of twenty dyslexic children, before and after Fast ForWord. The opening scans showed that the children used different parts of their brains for reading than normal children do. After Fast ForWord new scans showed that their brains had begun to normalize.
Merzenich's team started hearing that Fast ForWord was having a number of spillover effects. Children's handwriting improved. Parents reported that many of the students were starting to show sustained attention and focus. Merzenich thought these surprising benefits were occurring because Fast ForWord led to some general improvements in mental processing.
"You know," [Merzenich] says, "IQ goes up. We used the matrix test, which is a visual-based measurement of IQ—and IQ goes up."
The fact that a visual component of the IQ went up meant that the IQ improvements were not caused simply because Fast ForWord improved the children's ability to read verbal test questions. Their mental processing was being improved in a general way.
This is just a sample of the benefits that made me want to rush right out and buy Fast ForWord, even if it were to cost as much as the insanely-expensive Rosetta Stone German software I'm also tempted to buy. From the description, it sounds like something everyone could benefit from for mental tune-ups. Unfortunately, the makers of Fast ForWord are even worse than the Rosetta Stone folks about keeping tight control over their product: as far as I've been able to determine, you can only use it under the direction of a therapist (making it too expensive for ordinary use), and even then you don't own the software but are only licensed to use it for a short period of time. :( It works, though. We know someone for whom it made all the difference in the world, even late in her school career.
Merzenich began wondering about the role of a new environmental risk factor that might affect everyone but have a more damaging effect on genetically predisposed children: the continuous background noise from machines, sometimes called white noise. White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.
"Infants are reared in continuously more noisy environments. There is always a din," he says. White noise is everywhere now, coming from fans in our electronics, air conditioners, heaters, and car engines.
To test this hypothesis, his group exposed rat pups to pulses of white noise throughout their critical period and found that the pups' cortices were devastated.
Psychologically, middle age is often an appealing time because, all else being equal, it can be a relatively placid period compared with what has come before. ... We still regard ourselves as active, but we have a tendency to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are learning as we were before. We rarely engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger. Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning. By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years.
That's why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving and maintaining the memory generally. Because it requires intense focus, studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds. No doubt Fast ForWord is responsible for so many general improvements in thinking, in part because it stimulates the control system for plasticity to keep up its production of acetylcholine and dopamine. Anything that requires highly focused attention will help that system—learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and material. Merzenich himself is an advocate of learning a new language in old age. "You will gradually sharpen everything up again and that will be very highly beneficial to you."
The same applies to mobility. Just doing the dances you learned years ago won't help your brain's motor cortex stay in shape. To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus. That is what will allow you to both lay down new memories and have a system that can easily access and preserve the older ones.
This work opens up the possibility of high-speed learning later in life. The nucleus basalis [always on for young children, but in adulthood only with sustained, close attention] could be turned on by an electrode, by microinjections of certain chemicals, or by drugs. It is hard to imagine that people will not ... be drawn to a technology that would make it relatively effortless to master the facts of science, history, or a profession, merely by being exposed to them briefly. ... Such techniques would no doubt be used by high school and university students in their studies and in competitive entrance exams. (Already many students who do not have attention deficit disorder use stimulants to study.) Of course, such aggressive interventions might have unanticipated, adverse effects on the brain—not to mention our ability to discipline ourselves—but they would likely be pioneered in cases of dire medical need, where people are willing to take the risk. Turning on the nucleus basalis might help brain-injured patients, so many of whom cannot relearn the lost functions of reading, writing, speaking, or walking because they can't pay close enough attention.
[Gross motor control is] a function that declines as we age, leading to loss of balance, the tendency to fall, and difficulties with mobility. Aside from the failure of vestibular processing, this decline is caused by the decrease in sensory feedback from our feet. According to Merzenich, shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brain. If we went barefoot, our brains would receive many different kinds of input as we went over uneven surfaces. Shoes are a relatively flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are increasingly artificial and perfectly flat. This leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control. Then we may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady ourselves. By resorting to these compensations instead of exercising our failing brain systems, we hasten their decline.
As we age, we want to look down at our feet while walking down stairs or on slightly challenging terrain, because we're not getting much information from our feet. As Merzenich escorted his mother-in-law down the stairs of the villa, he urged her to stop looking down and start feeling her way, so that she would maintain, and develop, the sensory map for her foot, rather than letting it waste away.
Brain plasticity and psychological disorders:
Each time [people with obsessive-compulsive disorder] try to shift gears, they begin ... growing new circuits and altering the caudate. By refocusing the patient is learning not to get sucked in by the content of an obsession but to work around it. I suggest to my patients that they think of the use-it-or-lose-it principle. Each moment they spend thinking of the symptom ... they deepen the obsessive circuit. By bypassing it, they are on the road to losing it. With obsessions and compulsions, the more you do it, the more you want to do it; the less you do it, the less you want to do it ... [I]t is not what you feel while applying the technique that counts, it is what you do. "The struggle is not to make the feeling go away; the struggle is not to give in to the feeling"—by acting out a compulsion, or thinking about the obsession. This technique won't give immediate relief because lasting neuroplastic change takes time, but it does lay the groundwork for change by exercising the brain in a new way. ... The goal is to "change the channel" to some new activity for fifteen to thirty minutes when one has an OCD symptom. (If one can't resist that long, any time spent resisting is beneficial, even if it is only for a minute. That resistance, that effort, is what appears to lay down new circuits.)
Mental practice with physical results:
Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played. Then members of one group, the "mental practice" group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played. A second "physical practice" group actually played the music two hours a day for five days. Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward. Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.
Pascual-Leoone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes. Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece. By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual players were on their third day.
The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however substantial, was not as great as in those who did physical practice. But when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group's performance at five days. Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.
In an experiment that is as hard to believe as it is simple, Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole showed that imagining one is using one's muscles actually strengthens them. The study looked at two groups, one that did physical exercise and one that imagined doing exercise. ... At the end of the study the subjects who had done physical exercise increased their muscular strength by 30 percent, as one might expect. Those who only imagined doing the exercise, for the same period, increased their muscle strength by 22 percent. The explanation lies in the motor neurons of the brain that "program" movements. During these imaginary contractions, the neurons responsible for stringing together sequences of instructions for movements are activated and strengthened, resulting in increased strength when the muscles are contracted.
Talk about unbelievable.
The Sea Gypsies are nomadic people who live in a cluster of tropical islands in the Burmese archipelago and off the west coast of Thailand. A wandering water tribe, they learn to swim before they learn to walk and live over half their lives in boats on the open sea. ... Their children dive down, often thirty feet beneath the water's surface, and pluck up their food ... and have done so for centuries. By learning to lower their heart rate, they can stay under water twice as long as most swimmers. They do this without any diving equipment.
But what distinguishes these children, for our purposes, is that they can see clearly at these great depths, without goggles. Most human beings cannot see clearly under water because as sunlight passes through water, it is bent ... so that light doesn't land where it should on the retina.
Anna Gislén, a Swedish researcher, studied the Sea Gypsies' ability to read placards under water and found that they were more than twice as skillful as European children. The Gypsies learned to control the shape of their lenses and, more significantly, to control the size of their pupils, constricting them 22 percent. This is a remarkable finding, because human pupils reflexively get larger under water, and pupil adjustment has been thought to be a fixed, innate reflex, controlled by the brain and nervous system.
This ability of the Sea Gypsies to see under water isn't the product of a unique genetic endowment. Gislén has since taught Swedish children to constrict their pupils to see under water.
The fact that cultures differ in perception is not proof that one perceptual act is a good as the next, or that "everything is relative" when it comes to perception. Clearly some contexts call for a more narrow angle of view, and some for more wide-angle, holistic perception. The Sea Gypsies have survived using a combination of their experience of the sea and holistic perception. So attuned are they to the moods of the sea that when the tsunami of December 26, 2004, hit the Indian Ocean, killing hundreds of thousands, they all survived. They saw that the sea had begun to recede in a strange way, and this drawing back was followed by an unusually small wave; they saw dolphins begin to swim for deeper water, while the elephants started stampeding to higher ground, and they heard the cicadas fall silent. ... Long before modern science put this all together, they had either fled the sea to the shore, seeking the highest ground, or gone into very deep waters, where they also survived.
Music makes extraordinary demands on the brain. A pianist performing the eleventh variation of the Sixth Paganini etude by Franz Liszt must play a staggering eighteen hundred notes per minute. Studies by Taub and others of musicians who play stringed instruments have shown that the more these musicians practice, the larger the brain maps for their active left hands become, and the neurons and maps that respond to string timbres increase; in trumpeters the neurons and maps that respond to "brassy" sounds enlarge. Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains—the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others—that differ from those of nonmusicians. Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.
It is not just "highly cultured" activities that rewire the brain. Brain scans of London taxi drivers show that the more years a cabbie spends navigating London streets, the larger the volume of his hippocampus, that part of the brain that stores spatial representations. Even leisure activities change our brain; meditators and meditation teachers have a thicker insula, a part of the cortex activated by paying close attention.
Here's something completely different, and frightening.
[T]otalitarian regimes seem to have an intuitive awareness that it becomes hard for people to change after a certain age, which is why so much effort is made to indoctrinate the young from an early age. For instance, North Korea, the most thoroughgoing totalitarian regime in existence, places children in school from ages two and a half to four years; they spend almost every waking hour being immersed in a cult of adoration for dictator Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung. They can see their parents only on weekends. Practically every story read to them is about the leader. Forty percent of the primary school textbooks are devoted wholly to describing the two Kims. This continues all the way through school. Hatred of the enemy is drilled in with massed practice as well, so that a brain circuit forms linking the perception of "the enemy" with negative emotions automatically. A typical math quiz asks, "Three soldiers from the Korean People's Army killed thirty American soldiers. How many American soldiers were killed by each of them, if they all killed an equal number of enemy soldiers?" Such perceptual emotional networks, once established in an indoctrinated people, do not lead only to mere "differences of opinion" between them and their adversaries, but to plasticity-based anatomical differences, which are much harder to bridge or overcome than ordinary persuasion.
Think the North Koreans are the only ones whose brains are being re-programed?
"The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of 'practice' events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure—but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary 'tools,' etc." — Michael Merzenich, 2005
Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message. They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them. As Just put it, "The brain constructs the message ... differently for reading and listening. ... Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper." This finding refutes the conventional theory of comprehension, which argues that a single center in the brain understands words, and it doesn't really matter how ... information enters the brain.
Television, music videos, and video games, all of which use television techniques, unfold at a much faster pace than real life, and they are getting faster, which causes people to develop an increased appetite for high-speed transitions in those media. It is the form of the television medium—cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises—that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the "orienting response," which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement. We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings. ... Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can't keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend. Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orientating responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery. No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV. Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring. The cost is that such activities as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures become more difficult.
All electronic devices rewire the brain. People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand or dictate, because their brains are not wired to translate thoughts into cursive writing or speech at high speed. When computers crash and people have mini-nervous breakdowns, there is more than a little truth in their cry, "I feel like I've lost my mind!" As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.
Ouch!
"Use it or lose it" is a common refrain in The Brain that Changes Itself, whether talking about specific knowledge and abilities, or the capacity for learning and the very plasticity of the brain itself. (There is some hope given, however, that knowledge apparently lost is recoverable, even if its brain "map" has subsequently been taken over for another use.) Do you worry, as I did, that these new discoveries mean that it really is possible to learn too much, that we need to save our brains for that which is most important? That learning German will drive away what little I know of French? Relax; that doesn't need to happen, although I must be sure to keep the French fresh in my mind or it will get shelved.
As the scientist Gerald Edelman has pointed out, the human cortex alone has 30 billion neurons and is capable of making 1 million billion synaptic connections. Edelman writes, "If we considered the number of possible neural circuits, we would be dealing with hyper-astronomical numbers: 10 followed by at least a million zeros. (There are 10 followed by 79 zeros, give or take a few, of particles in the known universe.)" These staggering numbers explain why the human brain can be described as the most complex known object in the universe, and why it is capable of ongoing, massive microstructural change, and capable of performing so many different mental functions and behaviors.
I'm tired of typing. Get the book.
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (20th Century Fox, 1958, not rated)
A sympathetic and positive portrayal of a segment of the life of Gladys Aylward, the British Christian servant girl with a powerful love of both God and China. This small woman (incongrously but convincingly played by Ingrid Bergman) had great impact in northern China during the tumultous 1930's and 40's. Single-handedly leading nearly 100 children over the mountains to safety during the Japanese invasion, and persuading the remote villages to comply with the new law against the footbinding of women, were but a small part of her successes.
As movies go, this one is reasonably true to the story. I realize that's damning with faint praise, but I've learned to lower my expectations for truth from movies, which must alter events to make a convincing story fit in under three hours, and must include non-existent romantic scenes to please the audience. Perhaps its worst crime is in making Aylward's extremely arduous life look easy. In addition to the "normal" hardships of malnutrition and hard labor, she was beaten, tortured, shot, and severely injured in a bomb blast, but Bergman's hair is never mussed more than can be fixed with a quick flick of her fingers, and the journey across the mountains seems almost as easy as the end of The Sound of Music.
It's a fun and inspiring movie, worth watching if you also make a point of learning "the rest of the story." As much as can be learned, anyway: Aylward was old, with broken health and failing memory, when her story was finally written down, so much remains unknown.
