Thoughts for the Day: Monday 19 April 2021

 

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

[Henri] Bergson, we remember, argued that the brain's function was essentially eliminative, and by the brain he meant by and large the cerebral cortex.

Language and Myth

Ernst Cassirer

Furthermore, the mythic consciousness does not see human personality as something fixed and unchanging, but conceives every phase of a man’s life as a new personality, a new self; and this metamorphosis is first of all made manifest in the changes which his name undergoes. At puberty a boy receives a new name, because, by virtue of the magical rites accompanying his initiation, he has ceased to exist as a boy, and has been reborn as a man, the reincarnation of one of his ancestors.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The goal of ethical philosophy must be to bring personal preferences and aversions into harmony with those of the ruling principle of the universe, variously called “Zeus,” “Reason” (Logos), and “Nature.” As Cleanthes wrote in his “Hymn to Zeus,” “Zeus leads the willing person, the unwilling he drags.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark? “By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,” he writes, “than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.”

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

Kant’s view, then, comes to this: the proper object of scientific knowledge is not God or mind or things in themselves, but nature; the proper method, of scientific knowledge is a combination of sensation with understanding; and since nature is that which we know by this method, it follows that nature is mere phenomenon, a world of things as they appear to us, scientifically knowable because their ways of appearing are perfectly regular and predictable, but existing only in so far as we take up the point of view from which things have that appearance.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

What we have called the “bourgeois” is the modern man of the masses, not in his exalted moments of collective excitement, but in the security (today one should say the insecurity) of his own private domain. He has driven the dichotomy of private and public functions, of family and occupation, so far that he can no longer find in his own person any connection between the two. When his occupation forces him to murder people he does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.

On Writing

Stephen King

 Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him).

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 6 December 2020

 

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King (@StephenKing)
From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Working With Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman

The new measure [of job suitability & performance] takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.

The Anatomy of Peace

The Arbinger Institute

"Seeing an equal person as an inferior object is an act of violence, Lou. It hurts as much as a punch to the face. In fact, in many ways it hurts more. Bruises heal more quickly than emotional scars do.

Three conditions are indeed indispensable to the working of a liberal dynamic society. People must believe strongly enough in truth and fairness; they must trust that their opponents effectively share these ideals; and these ideals must in fact be valid. The great moral and material achievements of modern liberal societies testify convincingly that they fulfilled the first two conditions and that they rightly relied on the presence of the third. There is ample evidence also that whenever any part of a society denies the effectiveness of these ideals in public affairs, it cuts itself off from the rest and engages it in mortal combat.

--Michael Polanyi

The utilitarian theory that social harmony is based on mutual interests is false; mutual interests can be discovered and brought into operation only on the grounds of existing social harmony. This is the principle on which a progressive liberal society actually works. … The beliefs of liberalism are ancient, but their acceptance has recently passed through a deep crisis. In earlier days it was thought that a belief in reason and justice was self-evident. But today we have learned that it is not. Modern man can hold this belief only as an act of faith, as I do myself.

--Michael Polanyi

A tip o' the hat to Nicholas Gruen for both Polanyi quotes.

I and Thou, Trans. Kaufmann

Martin Buber, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Humans sense the world in two different processes: perception, or signals that come in from the outside world; and conception, or internal understandings that define the world from the inside.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Pyrrhon, according to Timon, held happiness to be the goal of philosophy, and recommended that a person who would be happy should consider the following three questions: What is the nature of things? What is our position in relation to them? What, under the circumstances, should we do? The answers appear as a formulaic series of negations in the tradition of Democritean athambia [imperturbability: a calm and unruffled self-assurance] and Cynic apatheia [“being without passions”]. Questions one and two are answered by three negative adjectives: Things are adiaphora, “nondifferent,” or “without distinguishing marks”; astathme-ta, “nonstable,” or “without fixed essence”; and anepikrita, “nonjudgeable,” or “unable to be reached by concepts.” As a result, Timon quotes, “Neither our perceptions nor our opinions are either true or false.”

The Wedge: Evolution, Consciousness, Stress & the Key to Human Resilience by Scott Carney

 

Published in 2020

I read The Wedge as a sequel to Carney's earlier book What Doesn't Kill Us, which reported about his dive into the Wim Hof Method. The Wim Hof Method involves a combination of cold exposure and intense breathing and breath-holds that seem to allow the nearly impossible in terms of control over autonomic functions in the body. What Doesn't Kill Us was intriguing, to say the least, as Carney had begun his inquiry with the idea of debunking the wild-eyed Dutchman. But by the end of his time with Wim Hof, Carney concluded that Wim Hof was on to something, and Carney was all in. And when I say "all in,' this includes a climactic climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro in near-record time while dressed only minimally--and even in the heart of Africa, it gets mighty cold there. This experience triggered Carney to look more deeply into what happens with the Wim Hof method and how it might be duplicated in some measure by other techniques. And thus, The Wedge.

Carney lays out his hypothesis upfront in clear, simple (but not too simple) prose: 

So what is the Wedge, exactly? The most comfortable way to think about the Wedge is that it is a choice to separate stimulus from response. . . . The Wedge is the measure of control that we all have to insert choice into the space between sensation of the outside world and the physiological responses that it triggers. . . [I]nevery situation a human might get themselves into, there’s always a tension between the challenge (stress) and the built-in automatic reactions. The Wedge intercedes and introduces a measure of control in things that otherwise feel uncontrollable.

Carney then compares this "wedge" space with our normal ego as it functions: 

The tricky thing about understanding the Wedge, and what makes it so incredibly difficult to explain, is that you—or rather, your ego—is not always the thing in charge. Remember, there is no self. All the parts of an individual and environment work together to generate an illusion of a self. Ego is just a perspective on the reality that we’re part of a superorganism.

Carney continues with some greater in-depth thoughts about how the wedge may work, and he notes three different pathways by which the wedge might operate: at the point of stress (from the environment), at the point of (bodily) sensation, and in our "mindset" or "orientation;" that is, "your mental attitude, expectations, emotions and disposition at the time that you receive sensation from your nervous system." From this deployment of a mindset, one can in some sense pre-load one's responses to stresses and sensations to allow a wedge to form. Carney also makes an important point about emotions, writing that

Emotions create a symbolic link between what’s happening in the world and what occurs inside of our bodies. And because evolution is a rather slow process, it would be hubristic to think that the sensory and emotional tools that Homo sapiens have access to appeared fully formed when the first member of our species started walking the Earth between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Indeed, Carney argues 

Inserting a wedge requires learning the language that your body uses to communicate information about the environment. Its syntax and grammar aren’t made of words; they’re sensation, emotion, and keen observation of the links between your mind and the external world. 

Before I conclude this summary tour of Carney's thoughts and theories about the Wedge before he jumps into a series of concrete instances of its manifestations, I must note his discussion of fear, that most potent and often vexing emotion.

How we resolve the tension between risk and reward defines who we are. And fear is a guidepost for how we use the Wedge. It is as much an involuntary response to a prediction of the future as it is a sensation that immobilizes our biology and stops us from taking action. Mastering fear doesn’t mean ignoring danger, but rather finding a reason that makes danger worth it—separating the stimulus from the response.

Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist, uses video from divers who investigate great white sharks to elicit fear in test subjects in his lab. (It would work for me.) Carney quotes and summarizes comments from Huberman about fear:

Fear would have meant he [the diver] was out of control. No choices. So maybe he wasn’t exactly afraid in the moment. It was something else. Huberman decides to paraphrase the great horror writer Stephen King: Fear has a lot to do with time frames. Before the event, a person experiences the dread of anticipation; during the event, there’s terror when they’re helpless in the moment; and after it’s over, a person remembers the experience as horror.

Carney continues:

Fear is an excellent inflection point to demonstrate the physiology of the Wedge. It’s powerful, visceral, has a strong influence on our behavior, and yet also preserves our ability to make choices about our actions. We experience fear on both a biological and psychological level. It triggers the fight-or-flight response just as reliably as the cold does, issues a burst of adrenaline, secretes sweat, dilates pupils and ramps up the heart rate. However, with fear, our bodily reactions are based on sights, sounds and our own idiosyncratic assessment of how things are changing around us in a bad way. It starts in the mind, not the body. And this is why I hope that his research into fear can help me dissect every other emotional and environmental interface that contributes to the Wedge. 

I spend a good deal of space quoting Carney on fear because it seems to me that in our world--and certainly its always been so in the human world--fear drives much of our behavior. Indeed, even though we no longer face man-eating beasts or the like, we suffer less tangible but more chronic fears that lead to more subtle reactions, such as "anxiety." Perhaps we do live in "The Age of Anxiety" as suggested by the W.H. Auden poem and the Scott Stossel non-fiction book. My own conclusion is that fear is an excellent and necessary warning system but a terribly unreliable guidance system. But because it's such a primal emotion, it's not easily corraled by the thinking brain. If Carney's book proves to have any value--and I certainly believe that it does--it's because his theme of dealing successfully with fear is the crux of the Wedge.

Lest I give you the wrong impression, Carney's book isn't simply an extended essay conjecturing about how the world and our bodies work. The other part of the book is a series of personal experiences and reporting on ideas and techniques about how we can deal with our world, especially fear-creating or uncomfortable experiences, in a manner that improves our resilience. One of the activities that Carney experiences and reports upon is playing catch with a heavy kettlebell. (A kettlebell is an iron ball with a handle attached that allows the user to swing it and thereby create a ballistic motion. It's an increasingly popular form of exercise imported from Russia, and, I must add, an excellent addition to any home gym.) Playing catch with a heavy object that will wreak havoc if it lands on the wrong place (such as your foot) requires an intensity of mind that must move beyond fear to successfully negotiate such a high-stakes game of catch. Carney also explores a variety of breathing techniques in addition to the standard Wim Hof method that he's been working with now for several years. He explores "the potato diet" and the use of saunas (in Lithuania, no less), flotation tank experiences, and two drugs: MDHD (Ecstacy) and ayahuasca. In undertaking the latter to experiences, Carney expresses the most hesitation. As he notes with all of his other wedge experiences and experiments, he could bail at any time, such as simply halting a breathing technique or quitting a game of kettlebell catch. But during a drug trip, Carney knew he couldn't simply stop and get off at any time that he wanted. He was therefore prudent. With the MDHD (Ecstasy), he took the drug along with his wife and under the guidance of two experienced therapists. They used the occasion as an opportunity for couples therapy. Carney also went to Peru to try ayahuasca, and again Carney expresses and practices what seems a reasonable degree of prudence in dealing with a substance in a land and culture far from his own.

I found the two experiences with the two different drugs the least informative, but I don't say that to denigrate those experiences or to criticize Carney. From what he says and my understanding of those types of experiences in general, I believe that they are the most complex to predict and describe. Most of the other experiences that he undertakes to explore and expand his wedge hypothesis are simpler and easy to "do at home," and he provides self-practice advice in a section on the end about "Techniques" for the (non-drug) practices.

At one point in thinking about writing this review, I was going to describe the book as having two parts: one part, which is represented by the several quotes at the beginning of this review, center on the wedge hypothesis and its grounding in science, and the other part about Carney's experiences and observations. But I realized that the book is too integrated to describe it this way. Carney's self-experimentation, observations, reporting, conjectures, and hypotheses are distributed throughout the book and make it an integrated whole. This scheme makes the book a delight to read and ponder. I believe that Carney is on to something here (and "it" has been "here" for all of human history), and he's bringing what has been largely lost (especially in modernity) back into focus. Thus, it's a book that is at once enlightening and entertaining, and well worth the read.

The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life by James Hillman

I’ve recently sang the praises of James Hillman in my review of Kinds of Power, so I won’t repeat that here. This book deals another big topic: aging. Like power, we sometimes wish it would go away and we try to ignore it. But remember: only the lucky get to age.

Hillman looks at aging through his unique lens, paying heed to the literal but focusing upon the figurative—the images of aging. And as he often does, he provides us with a fresh perspective on this age-old topic. In the end, it may not make you happy about aging, but you’ll realize that it has its benefits, prerogatives, and even some blessings.  

Without further fanfare, and in the style of Brain Pickings, below is an array of quotes with comments that should provide you with opportunities for reflection and a taste of the book.

It is not old age as such, but the abandonment of character that dooms later years to ugliness. We can’t imagine aging’s beauty because we look only through the eyes of physiology. As Aristotle said, “The soul’s beauty is harder to see than beauty of the body.” 

Hillman, James (2012-11-07). The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life (Kindle Locations 558-560). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The further back you can reach in imagination, the more extended you become. 

Id. 743-744

This, I think, is the value of history: it extends our thinking, ourselves, back in time; imagination extends us forward in time. But because of its reality, history provides the more secure anchor.

Her character must consist in several characters—“ partial personalities,” as psychology calls these figures who stir your impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange town. Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That’s why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight. 

Id. 819-822

Hillman established archetypal psychology, a descendant of Jung's project, with an emphasis on images and “polytheism”. This view highlights the multiplicity of reality, including the multiplicities in us and outside of us.

Access to character comes through the study of images, not the examination of morals. 

Id. 847-848

This is why the idea of character is so needed in a culture: It nourishes imagination. Without the idea we have no perplexing, comprehensive, and long-lasting framework to ponder; instead we have mere collections of people whose quirks have no depth, whose images have no resonance, and who are distinguishable only in terms of collective categories: occupation, age, gender, religion, nationality, income, IQ, diagnosis. 

Id. 921-926

Old is one of the deepest sources of pleasure humans know. Part of the misery of disasters like floods and fires is the irrecoverable loss of the old, just as one of the causes of suburban subdivision depression— and aging and death— is the similar loss of the old, exchanged for a brand-new house and yard. 

Id. 959-961

As the owner and occupant of a house for a quarter of a century  that approached its centenary by the time we sold it, and now as the first occupant of a new apartment, I can attest to the difference, even as we’ve tried to old this apartment.

Time is not only destructive; it toughens as well as weakens. Time lasts; it keeps on going and going and going and therefore is no enemy of age or of old. But time is indeed destructive to youth, which it eats away and finally stops dead. So when we hear of the corruption caused by time, we are listening to youth speaking, not age. 

Id. 1031-1033

 Certainly you know of someone that you'd describe as a "tough old bird". 

In old age, interest shifts from information to intelligence. By this I mean that information brings news, while intelligence searches it for insight. 

Id. 1164-1165

You just have to hope that the insight doesn’t come too late.

The words describing our approach will change: instead of “explanation,” “understanding”; instead of “new studies,” “old texts”; instead of “improvement,” “necessity”; instead of “health,” “soul”; instead of “experiment” and “statistic,” “philosophy”; instead of “information,” “intelligence,” “insight,” and “vision”; and instead of “empowerment” and “entitlement,” “idiosyncrasy,” “passion,” and “folly”. 

Id. 1235-1240

I don’t believe that Hillman is a scientific Luddite—not at all—but he perceives the limits of our scientific worldview. Where most of the culture followed Descartes, Hillman hearkens us back to the alternate path pointed out by Vico (among others).

All human evil comes from this, man’s inability to sit still in a room.
Pascal 

Id. 1477-1478

Dry souls are wisest and best.
Heraclitus
 Id. 1514-1515

“It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.” 

Id. 1602-1606

Anyone quoting and appreciating Pascal, Heraclitus, and Eliot is on the right track.

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. 

Id. 1630-1632

St. Augustine (via Hannah Arendt): Sedis anima est in memoria (The seat of the mind [soul] is in the memory.) Science deludes and cripples itself when operates without an appreciation of history. It lacks depth.

Memory is always first of all imagination, secondarily qualified by time. 

Id. 1645

All the while we are losing acuity, we are intensifying Yeats’s “fantastical eye.” We can spin out from one wild strawberry a whole northern summer, from one tasty tea cake a vast French novel. 

Id. 2033-2035

 Robert Butler, the eminent researcher of old age, makes this telling point about heightened aesthetics in last years: “The elemental things in life— children, plants, nature, human touching (physical and emotional), color, shape— may assume greater significance as people sort out the more important from the less important.” Importance does not result from sensation only, or from simplicity. If it did, we would still prefer sugary childhood candies and the salty goo of fast-food pizza to the subtleties concocted by multistarred chefs. “Importance,” which Alfred North Whitehead placed among the first principles for understanding all human endeavors, governs our choices among values. “Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite.”
 Id. 2068-2073
 

Contrition redeems no faults. It is wholly an inward act, relieving guilt to the past by reliving guilt for the past, an appeasement of ghosts. It is not the past that is tempered by contrition, but the gnawing guilt about it. 

Id. 2198-2200

I like the way my favorite philosopher, Plotinus, makes the contrast, because his metaphysical speculations are more psychological. Plotinus says that “the forward path is characteristic of the body”; “the body tend[ s] toward the straight line.” The soul, however, moves in circles. It circles “towards itself, the movement of self-concentrated awareness, of intellection, of the living of its life, reaching to all things so that nothing shall lie outside of it, nothing anywhere but [is] within its scope.” Because of these different kinds of movements, the soul “restrains” the body’s forwardness, says Plotinus. 

Id. 2244-2249

I think that this Plotinus/Hillman insight quite accurate. In my thoughts and interests, I seem to keep circling around something, something that I can’t quite make out, but which acts with a gravitational attraction.

As our bodies shrivel, we become our faces. Feet, hams, arms, and shoulders lose their shapeliness, while the face gains distinction, even beauty. The old naked body is unsightly, yet its naked face is a subject for long contemplation. 

Id.2410-2412

Exhibit A: Rembrandt self-portrait

Have you ever contemplated a late Rembrandt self-portrait?

“After a certain age,” said Proust, “the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one’s family traits become.” Owning our own faces = becoming more individualized = owning our ancestry. 

Id. 2518-2519

As I’ve aged I’ve often experienced a shock of recognition the mirror. In my youth I looked a lot like my maternal grandfather in his youth, but now I glimpse myself and see more of my father in his old age. How strange and yet revealing.

To be left. This possibility haunts any intimate union, especially the close friendships that marriages often become. 

Id. 2648-2649

Yes.

I think the true agenda of the old is the agenda of the left: more fairness and less profit; more restoration and less development; community care, not more prescriptions; restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it; less wrangling over Medicare and more genuine nursing; more public transportation, fewer private enclaves; investment in schools to teach the young, not prisons that let them languish; more friendliness with people rather than user-friendly electronics; and peace, not guns. 

Id. 2694-2697

I long ago turned away from my Republican youth. And now I  have less patience with all types of nonsense. Fear drives so much of what we do and believe. Fear of loss of guns –fear of impotency? Fear of taking risks—“Iran might cheat”. Fear of changing the system even a little. Fear of reality—"climate change is irrelevant”—Republican flavor-of-the-week presidential candidate Ben Carson. How dreary!

In [character’s] place a bevy of substitutes appeared: the will, the individual, the subject, the personality, the ego. Each is a way of speaking about a characterless, unified subjective agent. This Objective Observer is what we believe to be our center of consciousness. The substitutes for character come empty. They are deliberately abstract, whereas the old idea of character presented rich and recognizable traits, a crowd of qualities. 

Id. 2760-2763

The one death that has caused so much death in the past century is the death of character. — The corpse invites an autopsy. It is hard, however, to isolate a single cause of death. 

Id. 2775-2777

This is a mighty tall statement, but one that demands careful investigation. If found true, it demands serious change. 

Current deficiencies of character, both as an idea and in behavior, result from epistemology, the study of how we know. If the character of the knower is irrelevant to knowing, or even interferes with truest knowing, then character does not belong within philosophy’s purview. Then knowledge and the methods of gaining knowledge can proceed unhampered by the character of the knower and by issues of value that are inescapably implied by the idea of character. Result: knowledge without value; valueless knowledge, which is euphemistically dubbed “objectivity.” 

Id. 2795-2799

To know the world “out there,” philosophy constructed a knowing subject “in here.” As the world was conceived to be, ultimately, a characterless abstraction of space, time, and motion, so the knower had to be equally transcendent and objectified, that is, shorn of characteristics. The method of knowing the world had to be purified; otherwise our human observations would be all-too-human, qualified by individual subjectivity, merely anecdotal, therefore unreliable, therefore untrue. The ideal human as knower of truth must be a vacant mirror of purified consciousness. 

Id. 2803-2807

Compare the last two quotes with the John Lukacs’s essay “Putting Man Before Descartes” and OwenBarfield's idea of “participation”. I think that all three thinkers are on the same (correct) page.

Adjectives and adverbs are the actual forces at work in perceiving the world and in our behavior. Our speech would return to a correspondence with the world, which does not show a sheer unqualified cloud, a shrub, a mouse, but each cloud shaped, still or moving, related to the land below and to other clouds; each shrub a species and one of a kind; that particular mouse doing its thing in its singular way. Language would be creatively imagined to equal the imagination of the creation. 

Id. 2839-2842

But Stephen King and writing software like Hemingway counsel us to junk the adverbs! Perhaps this is an instance of the (borrowed) injunction: “When you meet the Rule on the road, slay him!” Or perhaps it shows the value of knowing the history of expression. Compare the richness of language and images in Dante and Shakespeare to most contemporary authors, even knowledgeable ones like King. P.S. Brain Pickings shares a piece by Stephen King--using adverbs! 

“The most salient characteristic of most of the languages of the North American Indians is the care they take to express concrete details which our languages leave understood or unexpressed.” 

Id. 2856-2857

This thought is beautifully displayed by meditations on American Indian language contained in Robert Pirsig’s Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.

In keeping with a characteristically American priority— judgment before curiosity— we still declare a phenomenon good or bad before we become interested in it. This shelters our innocence from deeper engagement. 

Id. 2917-2919

American Innocence! When will our nation moved beyond adolescence? Not soon enough, I fear. The current election process (vastly extended out from a real election) does not bode well for maturity.

“Grandmothers empowered the human species to become the planet’s dominant animal,” writes Theodore Roszak in his exposition of the “grandmother hypothesis.”  They also carry cultural knowledge.

Id. 3090-3092

Amen. 

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Published in 2014: A new twist for King

Stephen King has a way of writing about the mundane and the extraordinary, juxtaposing the two in a way that defies easy comparisons. In Mr. Mercedes, published in 2014, King enters the field of the hard-boiled detective novel, while both bowing to the past and updating the genre. In this book, King pits a retired, bored (almost to death) detective and a psychopathic young man, which America seems to produce far too often in recent times. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt the crazy cause that we allow almost unlimited armaments to anyone who wants to buy some.)

It’s a cliché, but I can’t help saying that King is a master storyteller. He draws in the reader by alternating between the twisted mind and world of a killer and more normal folks. I don’t know how accurate his portrait of a warped, young American male is compared to actual deviants of this type, but it sure seems real. And he creates ordinary, mostly good people who work to stop these evil deeds and restore some justice to the world. The main character, Bill Hodges, the retired cop, is a good, if flawed guy, who, like many of us, displays his best when engaged in doing what he knows best. And as in many a good detective story, the persons helping the detective provide contrast and aids to the hero-detective, in this case a bright young black man, a slightly crazy forty-something woman, and an attractive divorcee. King brings all of them to life, as persons you might meet in the course of day. Not extraordinary, but capable, sometimes in surprising ways when called upon to rise to a challenge.

King also provides a clean, well-connected plot and brisk pacing that gains tension and moves to thriller status as the story progresses. No wonder this guy sells millions and millions of books (not to mention the screen versions that they spawn). In this novel King has created an outstanding addition to the American version of the detective story, one that will certainly support more appearances of Mr. Hodges and his friends.