Daniel Boorstin described the culture's shift from valuing the genuine to celebrating pseudo-reality.

Daniel Boorstin got it right in 'The Image'

The historian wrote 50 years ago that U.S. culture was moving away from substance toward sensationalism in an era of mass media. And so postmodernism was born.

By Neal Gabler, Special to the Los Angeles Times
April 15, 2012

Long before there were "real" housewives on television, actor-politicians and even potential celebrity politicians like Donald Trump, theme restaurants, virtual online vacations and Kim Kardashian, who makes her living by being Kim Kardashian, there was "The Image," historian Daniel Boorstin's prescient examination of a nation in transition, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its publication this year. When "The Image" first appeared, one critic predicted that it would join William Whyte's "The Organization Man" and John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" as one of those seminal books that not only capture the zeitgeist but change the American mind-set. He was right.

Even now on its golden anniversary, there may be no single book that has so shaped ideas about the country's cultural transformation in the era of mass media, no single book that has so well framed how the American consciousness was reformed from one that seemed to value the genuine to one that preferred the fake. In many ways, "The Image" invented what would later become known as postmodernism — the odd cultural Moebius strip by which so many elements of our lives become imitations of themselves.

Boorstin, who taught at the University of Chicago for 25 years, won the Pulitzer Prize and became the librarian of Congress (he died in 2004), was writing at a time when traditional culture was under assault from mass culture, and he didn't much like it. He believed in unalterable truths that had withstood the test of eons — things like heroism, art, primary experiences and high ideals. These were prima facie good. He also believed that anything that drew us away from these truths harmed ourselves and our culture. And he lamented that that was exactly what mass culture was doing to the country. It was substituting the false for the true, the dark arts of public relations and self-aggrandizement for the higher purposes of human existence.

Everywhere Boorstin looked, and he looked everywhere — at journalism, at heroism, at travel, at art, even at human aspiration — he believed that the eternal verities that had once governed life had given way to something cheap and phony: a facsimile of life. Of journalism, he would say, "More and more news events become dramatic performances in which 'men in the news' simply act out more or less well their prepared script." Of heroism, he would say that it had been replaced by celebrity, which he famously described as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Of travel, he would say that tourists increasingly demanded experiences that would "become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the image-flooded tourist knew was there all the time."

Of art and literature, he would say that if they were "to be made accessible to all, they had to be made intelligible (and inoffensive) to all," and he carped about what photography, movies and condensed books did to art, which was flatten it. And, finally, of human aspiration, he lamented that "like no generation before us," we believe that "we can make our very ideals" rather than respect preordained ideals that we have to live up to.

Clearly, Boorstin was a scold and a culturally conservative one at that. He detested the manufactured, the contrived and the confected, and he coined a term that was so widely embraced it would become the subtitle of the book's paperback edition: "A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America." The pseudo-event was a "happening" that was not spontaneous but that was designed precisely to be reported or reproduced. A news conference, a photo-op, a movie premiere, an award ceremony, even a presidential debate — all these are staged, in his analysis, simply to get media attention or, in postmodernist terms, to get attention for attention's sake. They have no intrinsic value or at least not the intrinsic value they purport to have. Similarly, a celebrity is a "human pseudo-event" — a personality who is devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.

Boorstin's chief example was aviator Charles Lindbergh, who, Boorstin wrote, "performed singlehanded one of the heroic deeds of this century" but who "became degraded into a celebrity" by media coverage that had nothing to do with his deed, only with the new narratives of his life, like his marriage to an heiress or the abduction and murder of his baby.

Boorstin wasn't oblivious to the lure of the pseudo. He understood that the entire society seemed in thrall to its own illusions and to its ability to entertain itself with distractions instead of having to engage in the actual mess of life. He knew that the pseudo could be more exciting, more dramatic, more accessible, more fun and less taxing than the real. He just didn't think it was worth the price, which was to sacrifice living in the real world with real issues, real emotions, real challenges, real experiences and real values — in effect, to give up the true for the gratifying, the exalted for the illusory.

What is impressive even now about "The Image" is its sweep. There is nothing timid about it. It is epic social history in which Boorstin hoped to provide a unified field theory of cultural decline. Where he led, almost every serious observer of popular culture has followed, from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to American social critic Neil Postman, to the point where today almost everyone acknowledges what Boorstin so persuasively presented: the emptiness of much of our culture. Whether we share his anger or not, we all know we live in a world of images, a world where everything seems planned for effect rather than substance, and Boorstin no doubt would have had a field day dissecting "reality" shows that have nothing to do with reality beyond the description. They are practically designed to the specifications of Boorstin's thesis.

Still, there are limitations to "The Image." For one thing, Boorstin was partly undone by his ambition. By putting things as disparate as news, art and travel into his gunnysack, he wrote a book that is less unified field theory than collage. You get a lot of ideas about cultural demise, but they don't always form a coherent whole. As one scholar once told me, " 'The Image' is the best book Daniel Boorstin didn't write." And for another, Boorstin didn't appreciate the adaptability of culture to circumstance. The fetish for images is not necessarily a blight on the world. It is its own thing — different from, not less than. Sometimes people don't want the original. Sometimes they want the imitation, not because they are culturally brain dead but because they want release from the heavy hand of reality that Boorstin so revered.

Boorstin may not have been able to admit that because he knew too much about humankind. He knew that you couldn't keep 'em down in reality once they had seen the image. We have been living out that observation for at least the 50 years since Boorstin first made it. Boorstin didn't invent Kim Kardashian, but he knew she was coming, and he knew what she would displace.

Gabler is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC and is writing a biography of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Roland Barthes: disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man (which is why we come across it so often).

The Blue Guide - from: Mythologies
by Roland Barthes


The Blue Guide (* Hachette World Guides, dubbed 'Guide Bleu' in French) hardly knows the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven. We find again here this bourgeois promoting of the mountains, this old Alpine myth (since it dates back to the nineteenth century) which Gide rightly associated with Helvetico-Protestant morality and which has always functioned as a hybrid compound of the cult of nature and of puritanism (regeneration through clean air, moral ideas at the sight of mountain-tops, summit-climbing as civic virtue, etc.). Among the views elevated by the Blue Guide to aesthetic existence, we rarely find plains (redeemed only when they can be described as fertile), never plateaux. Only mountains, gorges, defiles and torrents can have access to the pantheon of travel, inasmuch, probably, as they seem to encourage a morality of effort and solitude. Travel according to the Blue Guide is thus revealed as a labour-saving adjustment, the easy substitute for the morally uplifting walk. This in itself means that the mythology of the Blue Guide dates back to the last century, to that phase in history when the bourgeoisie was enjoying a kind of new-born euphoria in buying effort, in keeping its image and essence without feeling any of its ill-effects. It is therefore in the last analysis, quite logically and quite stupidly, the gracelessness of a landscape, its lack of spaciousness or human appeal, its verticality, so contrary to the bliss of travel, which account for its interest. Ultimately, the Guide will coolly write: 'The road becomes very picturesque (tunnels)': it matters little that one no longer sees anything, since the tunnel here has become the sufficient sign of the mountain; it is a financial security stable enough for one to have no further worry about its value over the counter.

Just as hilliness is overstressed to such an extent as to eliminate all other types of scenery, the human life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its monuments. For the Blue Guide, men exist only as 'types'. In Spain, for instance, the Basque is an adventurous sailor, the Levantine a light-hearted gardener, the Catalan a clever tradesman and the Cantabrian a sentimental highlander. We find again here this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man (which is why we come across it so often). The ethnic reality of Spain is thus reduced to a vast classical ballet, a nice neat commedia dell'arte, whose improbable typology serves to mask the real spectacle of conditions, classes and professions. For the Blue Guide, men exist as social entities only in trains, where they fill a 'very mixed' Third Class. Apart from that, they are a mere introduction, they constitute a charming and fanciful decor, meant to surround the essential part of the country: its collection of monuments.

If one excepts its wild defiles, fit for moral ejaculations, Spain according to the Blue Guide knows only one type of space, that which weaves, across a few nondescript lacunae, a close web of churches, vestries, reredoses, crosses, altar-curtains, spires (always octagonal), sculpted groups (Family and Labour), Romanesque porches, naves and life-size crucifixes. It can be seen that all these monuments are religious, for from a bourgeois point of view it is almost impossible to conceive a History of Art which is not Christian and Roman Catholic. Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one travels only to visit churches. In the case of Spain, this imperialism is ludicrous, for Catholicism often appears there as a barbaric force which has stupidly defaced the earlier achievements of Muslim civilization: the mosque at Cordoba, whose wonderful forest of columns is at every turn obstructed by massive blocks of altars, or a colossal Virgin (set up by Franco) denaturing the site which it aggressively dominates all this should help the French bourgeois to glimpse at least once in his life that historically there is also a reverse side to Christianity.

Generally speaking; the Blue Guide testifies to the futility of all analytical descriptions, those which reject both explanations and phenomenology: it answers in fact none of the questions which a modern traveller can ask himself while crossing a countryside which is real and which exists in time. To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness. By reducing geography to the description of an uninhabited world of monuments, the Blue Guide expresses a mythology which is obsolete for a part of the bourgeoisie itself. It is unquestionable that travel has become (or become again) a method of approach based on human realities rather than 'culture': once again (as in the eighteenth century, perhaps) it is everyday life which is the main object of travel, and it is social geography, town-planning, sociology, economics which outline the framework of the actual questions asked today even by the merest layman. But as for the Blue Guide, it still abides by a partly superseded bourgeois mythology, that which postulated (religious) Art as the fundamental value of culture, but saw its 'riches' and 'treasures' only as a reassuring accumulation of goods (cf. the creation of museums). This behaviour expressed a double urge: to have at one's disposal a cultural alibi as ethereal as possible, and to maintain this alibi in the toils of a computable and acquisitive system, so that one could at any moment do the accounts of the ineffable. It goes without saying that this myth of travel is becoming quite anachronistic, even among the bourgeoisie, and I suppose that if one entrusted the preparation of a new guide-book to, say, the lady-editors at L'Express or the editors of Match, we would see appearing, questionable as they would still probably be, quite different countries: after the Spain of Anquetil or Larousse, would follow the Spain of Siegfried, then that of Fourastié. Notice how already, in the Michelin Guide, the number of bathrooms and forks indicating good restaurants is vying with that of 'artistic curiosities': even bourgeois myths have their differential geology.

It is true that in the case of Spain, the blinkered and old-fashioned character of the description is what is best suited to the latent support given by the Guide to Franco. Beside the historical accounts proper (which are rare and meagre, incidentally, for it is well known that History is not a good bourgeois), those accounts in which the Republicans are always 'extremists' looting churches - but nothing on Guernica - while the good 'Nationalists', on the contrary, spend their time 'liberating', solely by 'skilful strategic manoeuvres' and 'heroic feats of resistance', let me mention the flowering of a splendid myth-alibi: that of the prosperity of the country. Needless to say, this prosperity is 'statistical' and 'global', or to be more accurate: 'commercial'. The Guide does not tell us, of course, how this fine prosperity is shared out: hierarchically, probably, since they think it fit to tell us that 'the serious and patient effort of this people has also included the reform of its political system, in order to achieve regeneration through the loyal application of sound principles of order and hierarchy.'

Roland Barthes: Mythologies

 


It was on the recommendation of Susan Sontag, who talked a lot about Barthes, that I bought fifteen
volumes of his work—but the only book I read was Mythologies.  This confession might have displeased
the famous French semiotician, who disliked critics who gave up too soon. Mythologies (Hill and Wang, $28) has been reissued in a “complete” edition translated by Richard Howard, who sometimes seems to have translated the whole of French literature. Part One, the first “determinant,” contains fifty-three short commentaries on stuff Barthes sees or has seen. It might be wrestling matches, it might be toys, it might be steak frites. No example is too petit to be petit bourgeois.

Of Omo, a new washing detergent
he writes:
To say that Omo cleans in depth . . . is to suppose that linen is deep, which nobody had ever supposed,
and what then proceeds to magnify it beyond contestation, to establish it as an object flattering to those obscure impulses of caressing envelopment which are inside every human body. As for foam, its signification of luxuriousness is well known . . .

Of recipes published in a magazine:
Cooking in Elle is . . . a cuisine “of ideas.” But here invention, confined to a magical reality, must apply only to garnishing, for the magazine’s “distinguished” vocation precludes it from dealing with any real problems of alimentation (the real problem is not to stud a partridge with cherries, but to find the partridge, i.e., to pay for it).

And of plastic:
In spite of having Greek shepherds’ names (Polystyrene, Phenoplast, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, of which the products have just been concentrated in an exhibition, is an essentially alchemical substance.
. . . Thus, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation.

It is in Part Two, in which Barthes the philosopher attempts to frame a theory around his notes, that, I will frankly confess, he loses me. But the little examples are fun, and very finely observed. What Barthes
didn’t observe, unfortunately, was the laundry van that ran him down and killed him.

- Larry McMurtry
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2012

What to look for when buying olive oil, by Tom Mueller

From Tom Mueller's blog - EV (Extra Virginity) - Truth in Olive Oil

Key concepts

• Olives are stone fruits, like cherries and plums.  So real extra virgin olive oil is fresh-squeezed fruit juice – seasonal, perishable, and never better than the first few weeks it was made.
• Bitterness and pungency are usually indicators of an oil’s healthfulness.  Sweetness and butteriness are often not.
• There are 700+ different kinds of olives, which make thousands of different kinds of oil.  Asking “what’s the best olive oil?” is like asking “what’s the best wine?”  The answer is, “depends on what you’re eating it with.”
• Know the when, who, where of your oil:  When it was made (harvest date), who made it (specific producer name), and exactly where on the planet they made it.
• Read my book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
  to understand the bigger picture about where olive oil, great and bad, comes from, and who is making it.
• Like everything on Extravirginity.com, this guide is work in progress, and will be upgraded soon.

Buyer’s guide

• Unlike many wines, which improve with age, extra virgin olive oil is perishable:  like all natural fruit juices, its flavor and aroma begin to deteriorate within a few months of milling, a decline that accelerate when the oil is bottled, and really speeds up when the bottle is opened.  To get the freshest oil, and cut out middle-men who often muddy olive oil transparency and quality, buy as close to the mill as possible.  If you’re lucky enough to live near a mill (in California, but now also Texas, Oregon, Georgia, Arizona and Florida – and of course throughout the Mediterranean, Australia, South Africa and beyond), visit it during the harvest to see how olives are picked, crushed, stirred, and spun into olive oil.  I’ve included many profiles of millers and oil makers in the US, the Mediterranean, Australia and elsewhere to be found in my book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, which captures their remarkable craftsmanship and perfectionism despite a day-to-day struggle with fraud.

...for the rest of the report, please click here.

That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere.

From A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid.

“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain.  For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere.  Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.  Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour.  But some natives – most natives in the world – cannot go anywhere.  They are too poor.  They are too poor to go anywhere.  They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go – so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself .” 

The Best Commencement Speech ever (no, it's not the one by Steve Jobs). David Foster Wallace - The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, May 21, 2005

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?], thanks, and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches: the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre...but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish.

The immediate point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course, the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff.  So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement-speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about, quote, "teaching you how to think." If you're like me as a college student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your complete freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time talking about, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket, for just a few minutes, your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other's an atheist, and they're arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God-and-prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I couldn't see a thing, and I was totally lost, and it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled: "Well, but you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive."
The atheist rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp. "No, man, all that happened was that a couple of Eskimos just happened to come wandering by, and they showed me the way back to the camp."

It's easy to run this story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice, of conscious decision.

Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally, obnoxiously confident in his dismissal of the possibility that the Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own interpretations too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. The answer, not surprisingly, is that it depends what kind of knowledge we're talking about.  Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education – at least in my own case – is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.  Instead of paying attention to what is going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now).  What you don't yet know are the stakes of this struggle.

In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand these stakes, and to see that the liberal arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth.  "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious of and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and banal on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in...the head. They shoot the terrible master.

And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember that there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacy people and ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college...but anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a macine, and then you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way the everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course ---but it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be.

And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.

Except that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply and personally unfair this is:  I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious, liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twent stupid feet ahead in the traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

Look, if I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way:  it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so traumatic that their therapisst have all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am --- it is actually I who am in his way.  Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people actually have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.  And so on.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line---maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible---it just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and who or what is reaaly important, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true:  the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.  This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted:  you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things---if they are where you tap real meaning in life---then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables:  the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power---you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart---you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they are unconscious. They are default settings.  They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.  And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.  The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away.

You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish.

But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees, and everything to do with simple awareness---awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.

And it commences---now.

I wish you way more than luck. 

Under a Certain Little Star - a poem by Wislawa Szymborska

Under a Certain Little Star   by Wislawa Szymborska translated by Joanna Trzeciak My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, staring, motionless, always at the same spot, absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. My apologies to large questions for small answers. Truth, do not pay me too much attention. Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. From Miracle Fair by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak.

Carl Sagan: The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, the astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, p. 6

Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 2011

From The Sorrow Gondola - the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer's first collection of poems after his stroke in 1990. Translated by Michael McGriff.

April and Silence

Spring lies deserted.

The velvet-dark ditch

crawls by my side without reflections.

All that shines

are yellow flowers.

I’m carried in my shadow

like a violin in its black case.

The only thing I want to say

gleams out of reach

like the silver

in a pawnshop.

Landscape with Suns

The sun emerges from behind the house

stands in the middle of the street

and breathes on us

with its red wind.

Innsbruck I must leave you.

But tomorrow

there will be a glowing sun

in the gray, half-dead forest

where we must work and live.

Midwinter

A blue light

radiates from my clothing.

Midwinter.

Clattering tambourines of ice.

I close my eyes.

There is a silent world

there is a crack

where the dead

are smuggled across the border.

From The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer.  Translated by Robert Bly.

After a Death
Once there was a shock that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail. It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy. It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires. One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun through brush where a few leaves hang on. They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories. Names swallowed by the cold. It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Outskirts   Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch. It's a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city. Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap, but the clocks are against it. Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues. Auto-body shops occupy old barns. Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface. And these sites keep on getting bigger like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for burying strangers."   Allegro   After a black day, I play Haydn, and feel a little warmth in my hands. The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall. The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence. The sound says that freedom exists and someone pays no tax to Caesar. I shove my hands in my haydnpockets and act like a man who is calm about it all. I raise my haydnflag. The signal is: "We do not surrender. But want peace." The music is a house of glass standing on a slope; rocks are flying, rocks are rolling. The rocks roll straight through the house but every pane of glass is still whole. From The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems.  Translated by Robin Fulton. Allegro I play Haydn after a black day and feel a simple warmth in my hands. The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike. The resonance green, lively and calm. The music says freedom exists and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax. I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets and imitate a person looking on the world calmly. I hoist the Haydnflag - it signifies: "We don't give in. But want peace.' The music is a glass-house on the slope where the stones fly, the stones roll. And the stones roll right through but each pane stays whole. Allegro Jag spelar Haydn efter en svart dag och känner en enkel värme i händerna. Tangenterna vill. Milda hammare slår. Klangen är grön, livlig och stilla. Klangen säger att friheten finns och att någon inte ger kejsaren skatt. Jag kör ner händerna i mina haydnfickor och härmar en som ser lugnt på världen. Jag hissar haydnflaggan – det betyder: »Vi ger oss inte. Men vill fred.« Musiken är ett glashus på sluttningen där stenarna flyger, stenarna rullar. Och stenarna rullar tvärs igenom men varje ruta förblir hel. Ur Den halvfärdiga himlen, Bonniers 1962 Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer 1962 Återgiven med vänligt tillstånd av Tomas Tranströmer och Bonniers Dikten vald av Lars Rydquist, chefsbibliotekarie, Svenska Akademiens Nobelbibliotek The Half-Finished Heaven Despondency breaks off its course. Anguish breaks off its course. The vulture breaks off its flight. The eager light streams out, even the ghosts take a draught. And our paintings see daylight, our red beasts of the ice-age studios. Everything begins to look around. We walk in the sun in hundreds. Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone. The endless ground under us. The water is shinig among the trees. The lake is a window into the earth. Den halvfärdiga himlen Modlösheten avbryter sitt lopp. Ångesten avbryter sitt lopp. Gamen avbryter sin flykt. Det ivriga ljuset rinner fram, även spökena tar sig en klunk. Och våra målningar kommer i dagen, våra istidsateljéers röda djur. Allting börjar se sig omkring. Vi går i solen hundratals. Var människa en halvöppen dörr som leder till ett rum för alla. Den oändliga marken under oss. Vattnet lyser mellan träden. Insjön är ett fönster mot jorden. Ur Den halvfärdiga himlen, Bonniers 1962 Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer 1962 Återgiven med vänligt tillstånd av Tomas Tranströmer och Bonniers Under Pressure The blue sky's engine-drone is deafening. We're living here on a shuddering work-site where the ocean depths can suddenly open up - shells and telephones hiss. You can see beauty only from the side, hastily, The dense grain on the field, many colours in a yellow stream. The restless shadows in my head are drawn there. They want to creep into the grain and turn to gold. Darkness falls. At midnight I go to bed. The smaller boat puts out from the larger boat. You are alone on the water. Societty's dark hull drifts further and further away. Under tryck Den blå himlens motordån är starkt. Vi är närvarande på en arbetsplats i darrning, där havsdjupet plötsligt kan uppenbara sig – snäckor och telefoner susar. Det sköna hinner man bara se hastigt från sidan. Den täta säden på åkern, många färger i en gul ström. De oroliga skuggorna i mitt huvud dras dit. De vill krypa in i säden och förvandlas till guld. Mörkret faller. Vid midnatt går jag till sängs. Den mindre båten sätts ut från den större båten. Man är ensam på vattnet. Samhällets mörka skrov driver allt längre bort. Ur Klanger och spår, Bonniers 1966 Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer 1966 Återgiven med vänligt tillstånd av Tomas Tranströmer och Bonniers Open and Closed Spaces A man feels the world with his work like a glove. He rests for a while at midday having laid aside the gloves on the shelf. There they suddenly grow, spread and black-out the whole house from inside. The blacked-out house is away out among the winds of spring. 'Amnesty,' runs the whisper in the grass: 'amnesty.' A boy sprints with an invisible line slanting up in the sky where his wild dream of the future flies lika a kite bigger than the              suburb. Further north you can see from a summit the blue endless carpet of              pine forest where the cloud shadows are standing still. No, are flying. Öppna och slutna rum En man känner på världen med yrket som en handske. Han vilar en stund mitt på dagen och har lagt ifrån sig                          handskarna på hyllan. Där växer de plötsligt, breder ut sig och mörklägger hela huset inifrån. Det mörklagda huset är mitt ute bland vårvindarna. »Amnesti« går viskningen i gräset: »amnesti«. En pojke springer med en osynlig lina som går snett                          upp i himlen där hans vilda dröm om framtiden flyger som en drake                          större än förstaden. Längre norrut ser man från en höjd den blå oändliga                          barrskogsmattan där molnskuggorna står stilla. Nej, flyger fram. Ur Klanger och spår, Bonniers 1966 Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer 1966 Återgiven med vänligt tillstånd av Tomas Tranströmer och Bonniers The Nightingale in Badelunda In the green midnight at the nightingale's northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race towards the neon-line. The nightingale's voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cock-crow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn't notice it then, but I do now. Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tock-thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale's voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky's gleaming scythe. Näktergalen i Badelunda I den gröna midnatten vid näktergalens nordgräns. Tunga löv hänger i trance, de döva bilarna rusar mot neonlinjen. Näktergalens röst stiger inte åt sidan, den är lika genomträngande som en tupps galande, men skön och utan fåfänga. Jag var i fängelse och den besökte mig. Jag var sjuk och den besökte mig. Jag märkte den inte då, men nu. Tiden strömmar ned från solen och månen och in i alla tick tack tick tacksamma klockor. Men just här finns ingen tid. Bara näktergalens röst, de råa klingande tonerna som slipar natthimlens ljusa lie. Ur För levande och döda, Bonniers 1989 Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer 1989 Återgiven med vänligt tillstånd av Tomas Tranströmer och Bonniers The Couple   They switch off the light and its white shade glimmers for a moment before dissolving like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up. The hotel walls rise into the black sky. The movements of love have settled, and they sleep but their most secret thoughts meet as when two colors meet and flow into each other on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting. It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached. They stand close up in a throng, waiting, a crowd whose faces have no expressions. National Insecurity   The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has taken power. The mother-turtle flees flying under the water. November in the Former DDR The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over and the grass shook itself in the coal dust. Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams we board the train that stops at every station and lays eggs. Almost silent. The clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water. And someone’s inexorable cough scolding everything and everyone. A stone idol moves its lips: it’s the city. Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings among kiosk attendants butchers metal-workers naval officers iron-hard misunderstandings, academics! How sore my eyes are! They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm   lamps. November offers caramels of granite. Unpredictable! Like world history laughing at the wrong place. But we hear the clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water every Wednesday - is it Wednesday? - so much for our Sundays! The Indoors is Endless It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven hoists his death-mask and sails off. The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills. The wild geese are flying northwards. Here is the north, here is Stockholm swimming palaces and hovels. The logs in the royal fireplace collapse from Attention to At Ease. Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes, but the city wells breathe heavily. Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas are carried by night over the North Bridge. The cobblestones make them stagger mamselles loafers gentlemen. Implacably still, the sign-board with the smoking blackamoor. So many islands, so much rowing with invisible oars against the current! The channels open up, April May and sweet honey dribbling June. The heat reaches islands far out. The village doors are open, except one. The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence. The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience. It happened like this, or almost. It is an obscure family tale about Erik, done down by a curse disabled by a bullet through the soul. He went to town, met an enemy and sailed home sick and grey. Keeps to his bed all that summer. The tools on the wall are in mourning. He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter of night moths, his moonlight comrades. His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain against the iron-bound tomorrow. And the God of the depths cries out of the depths ‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’ All the surface action turns inwards. He’s taken apart, put together. The wind rises and the wild rose bushes catch on the fleeing light. The future opens, he looks into the self-rotating kaleidoscope sees indistinct fluttering faces family faces not yet born. By mistake his gaze strikes me as I walk around here in Washington among grandiose houses where only    every second column bears weight. White buildings in crematorium style where the dream of the poor turns to ash. The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imperceptibly becomes an abyss. Further In On the main road into the city when the sun is low. The traffic thickens, crawls. It is a sluggish dragon glittering. I am one of the dragon’s scales. Suddenly the red sun is right in the middle of the windscreen streaming in. I am transparent and writing becomes visible inside me words in invisible ink which appear when the paper is held to the fire! I know I must get far away straight through the city and then further until it is time to go out and walk far in the forest. Walk in the footprints of the badger. It gets dark, difficult to see. In there on the moss lie stones. One of the stones is precious. It can change everything it can make the darkness shine. It is a switch for the whole country. Everything depends on it. Look at it, touch it… The Tree and the Sky There’s a tree walking around in the rain, it rushes past us in the pouring grey. It has an errand. It gathers life out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard. When the rain stops so does the tree. There it is, quiet on clear nights waiting as we do for the moment when the snowflakes blossom in space. Winter's Gaze I lean like a ladder and with my face reach into the second floor of the cherry tree. I'm inside the bell of colours, it chimes with sunlight. I polish off the swarthy red berries faster than four magpies. At once, after this joyously sunny opening, the tone darkens: A sudden chill, from a great distance, meets me. The moment blackens and remains like an axe-cut in a tree-trunk. The Couple They turn the light off, and its white globe glows an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then a rising. The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness. Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, but their most secret thoughts begin to meet like two colors that meet and run together on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting. It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come. They stand packed and waiting very near, a mob of people with blank faces. After a Death Once there was a shock that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail. It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy. It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires. One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun through brush where a few leaves hang on. They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories. Names swallowed by the cold. It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armour of black dragon scales. Solitude (I) translted by Robin Robertson I was nearly killed here, one night in February. My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice, right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic came at me with their lights. My name, my girls, my job, all slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller, further and further away. I was a nobody: a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded. The headlights of the oncoming cars bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white. The seconds grew and grew – making more room for me – stretching huge as hospitals. I almost felt that I could rest and take a breath before the crash. Then something caught: some helpful sand or a well-timed gust of wind. The car snapped out of it, swinging back across the road. A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang, spinning away in the darkness. And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow to see what was left of me. TO CITE THIS PAGE: MLA style: "Tomas Tranströmer - Poetry". Nobelprize.org. 22 Oct 2011 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2011/transtromer-poetry.html

What are the 100 most common words in the English language?

The First Hundred
the of and a to in is you that it he was for on are as with his they I	at be this have from or one had by word but not what all were we when your can said	there use an each which she do how their if will up other about out many then them these so	some her would make like him into time has look two more write go see number no way could people	my than first water been call who oil its now find long down day did get come made may part

Taken From: The Reading Teachers Book of Lists, Third Edition; by Edward Bernard Fry, Ph.D, Jacqueline E. Kress, Ed.D & Dona Lee Fountoukidis, Ed.D.

 For the next 900 words, please see this list.

Three of the words come from Old Norse:  "they", "their", and "them"
One is derived from French:  "number"
The rest come from Old English.
This info is from   

Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton

Synopsis

What if religions are neither all true nor all nonsense? The long-running and often boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved forward by Alain de Botton’s inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are entirely false—but that it still has some very important things to teach the secular world.

Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religion, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from it—because the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, de Botton (a non-believer himself) proposes that we look to religion for insights into how to, among other concerns, build a sense of community, make our relationships last, overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy, inspire travel and reconnect with the natural world.

For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing some peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas. At last, in Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton has fashioned a far more interesting and truly helpful alternative.

Excerpt

from Part One: Wisdom without Doctrine
 
1.
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true – in terms of being handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets and supernaturally governed by prophets and celestial beings.

To save time, and at the risk of losing readers painfully early on in this project, let us bluntly state that of course no religions are true in any God-given sense. This is a book for people who are unable to believe in miracles, spirits or tales of burning shrubbery, and have no deep interest in the exploits of unusual men and women like the thirteenth-century saint Agnes of Montepulciano, who was said to be able to levitate two feet off the ground while praying and to bring children back from the dead – and who, at the end of her life (supposedly), ascended to heaven from southern Tuscany on the back of an angel.

2.
Attempting to prove the non-existence of God can be an entertaining activity for atheists. Tough-minded critics of religion have found much pleasure in laying bare the idiocy of believers in remorseless detail, finishing only when they felt they had shown up their enemies as thorough-going simpletons or maniacs.

Though this exercise has its satisfactions, the real issue is not whether God exists or not, but where to take the argument once one decides that he evidently doesn’t. The premise of this book is that it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling – and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm.

One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Eightfold Path and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inaccuracies in the tale of the seven loaves and fishes.

The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed. Once we cease to feel that we must either prostrate ourselves before them or denigrate them, we are free to discover religions as repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.

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Table of Contents

Contents


I.      Wisdom without Doctrine
II.     Community
III.    Kindness
IV.    Education
V.     Tenderness
VI.    Pessimism
VII.   Perspective
VIII.  Art
IX.    Architecture
X.     Institutions

About Alain De Botton

Alain de Botton is the author of essays on themes ranging from love and travel to architecture and philosophy. His most recent work, Religion for Atheists, came out in March on 2012. His best-selling books include How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel and The Architecture of Happiness. He lives in London, where he is the founder and chairman of The School of Life (www.theschooloflife.com) and the creative director of Living Architecture (www.living-architecture.co.uk). Visit him at: www.alaindebotton.com.

Author Q&A

Q+A: Religion for Atheists


1) One of the premises of your book is that living without God is dangerous, can you explain why? Which are the dangers?In my book, I argue that believing in God is, for me as for many others, simply not possible. At the same time, I do want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that open up - we don't need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the center stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to lose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour can be overlooked.
   Now, it is important to stress that it is quite possible to believe in nothing and remember all these vital lessons (just as one can be a deep believer and a monster). I am simply wanting to draw attention to some of the gaps, some of what is missing, when we dismiss God too brusquely. By all means, we can dismiss him, but with great sympathy, nostalgia, care and thought...


2) Is it possible to be a good person without religion?
The problem of the man without religion is that he forgets. We all know in theory what we should do to be good. The problem is that in practice, we forget. And we forget because the modern secular world always thinks that it is enough to tell someone something once (be good, remember the poor etc.) But all religions disagree here: they insist that if anyone is to stand a chance of remembering anything, they need reminders on a daily, perhaps even hourly basis.


3) What do you think of the aggressive atheism we have seen in the past few years?I am an atheist, but a gentle one. I don't feel the need to mock anyone who believes. I really disagree with the hard tone of some atheists who approach religion like a silly fairy tale. I am deeply respectful of religion, but I believe none of its supernatural aspects. So my position is perhaps unusual: I am at once very respectful and completely impious.


4) a) What is it you're most interested in in religion?
The secular world believes that if we have good ideas, we will be reminded of them just when it matters. Religions don't agree. They are all about structure; they want to build calendars for us, that will make sure that we regularly encounter reminders of significant concepts. That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten. Religions are also keen to see us as more than just rational minds, we are emotional and physical creatures, and therefore, we need to be seduced via our bodies and our senses too: this was always the great genius of Catholicism. If you want to change someone's ideas, don't only concentrate on their ideas, concentrate on their whole selves.

b) Is it really possible to distinguish, as you do, between faith and the “technicalities” of religion? To reject faith and to save something similar to pray, church, religious rituals?
I absolutely believe that this is possible. I am writing for the sort of reader who thinks, 'I really can't believe in anything supernatural, the supernatural side of religion is impossible for me BUT I love so much here: the ritual, the architecture, the music, the connection with the past...' Why should we be forced to make such a brutal choice? Why is it 'either you have to believe in all kinds of implausible things, but then you get some great architecture etc.' OR, you believe in nothing supernatural, and you are then cast out into a world dominated by IKEA and CNN... The choice doesn't have to be so brutal.

5) You also propose to reform schools and universities to teach humans how to deal with, not knowledge, but the most important existential problems, loneliness, pain and death for example. You even propose to abolish the teaching of history and literature, two basic humanities. Why? Is knowledge so unimportant? Can existential lessons be taught at school?The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature - and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of guidance and moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than the modern education system recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time - and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures.

6) Are you nostalgic for the deeply religious past?
Like many people, of course I feel nostalgic. How is it possible not to feel nostalgic when you look at 15th frescoes or the rituals of an ancient carnival? However, we have to ask: how should I respond to my nostalgia? My thought is that we can use it creatively, as the basis for a rebirth, for the creation of new things, for the creation of things that later generations will feel nostalgic about... So it frustrates me when people say things like, 'Well, they knew how to build in the 15th century, now it is impossible...' Why! Anything is possible. We should not sigh nostalgically over religion, we should learn from them. We should steal from them.

7) How do religions teach us?
Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people's lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.

8) You say that our society lacks of collective rituals, a network of secular churches, of vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and to focus on all that is beyond us. But what about the fact that whichever society tried to create an effective kind of propaganda in the name of virtue was, after the french revolution, a totalitarian regime in which the state itself became god?
We are too easily frightened here. So often, anytime that someone proposes a valid idea in this area, people say, but what about Hitler, or Stalin... This is not the choice. We can have public morality without fascism, we can even have certain kinds of censorship (for example, of pornography) without dictatorship, we can have great civic architecture which isn't done by governments for their own glory. It is right that people have been scared by certain tendencies in the 20th century, but we shouldnt' always be so unambitious about what we can do. We don't need to abandon ourselves to freemarket capitalism under the spiritual leadership of cable television.
   Much of modern moral thought has been transfixed by the idea that a collapse in belief must have irreparably damaged our capacity to build a convincing ethical framework for ourselves. But this argument, while apparently atheistic in nature, owes a strange, unwarranted debt to a religious mindset – for only if we truly believed at some level that God did exist, and that the foundations of morality were therefore in their essence supernatural, would the recognition of his nonexistence have any power to shake our moral principles.
However, if we assume from the start that we of course made God up, then the argument rapidly breaks down into a tautology – for why would we bother to feel burdened by ethical doubt if we knew that the many rules ascribed to supernatural beings were actually only the work of our all-too human ancestors?
The origins of religious ethics lie in the pragmatic need of our earliest communities to control their members' tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms. Injunctions to be sympathetic or patient stemmed from an awareness that these were the qualities which could draw societies back from fragmentation and self-destruction. So vital were these rules to our survival that for thousands of years we did not dare to admit that we ourselves had formulated them, lest this expose them to critical scrutiny and irreverent handling. We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.
   But if we can now own up to spiritualising our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of Hell or the promise of Paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves – that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) – who want to lead the sort of lives which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognising ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.


9) If we were to replace religion with a secular equivalent, who would be our gurus?
We don't need a central structure. We are beyond the age of gurus and inspirational leaders. We are in the age of the Wiki structure. This means that it is up to all of us to look at religion and see what bits we can steal and place into the modern world. We might all contribute to the construction of new temples, not the government, but the concerned, interested individual. The salvation of the individual soul remains a serious problem - even when we dismiss the idea of God. In the 20th century, capitalism has really solved (in the rich West) the material problems of a significant portion of mankind. But the spiritual needs are still in chaos, with religion ceasing to answer the need. This is why I wrote my book, to show that there remains a new way: a way of filling the modern world with so many important lessons from religion, and yet not needing to return to any kind of occult spirituality.  

10. Don’t you think that, in order to truly appreciate religious music and art, you have to be a believer – or, at least, don't you think that non-believers miss something important in the experience?
I am interested in the modern claim that we have now found a way to replace religion: with art. You often hear people say, 'Museums are our new churches'. It's a nice idea, but it's not true, and it's principally not true because of the way that museums are laid out and present art. They prevent anyone from having an emotional relationship with the works on display. They encourage an academic interest, but prevent a more didactic and therapeutic kind of contact. I recommend in my book that even if we don't believe, we learn to use art (even secular art) as a resource for comfort, identification, guidance and edification, very much what religions do with art.