The Comfort of Saturdays: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

This is my third adventure with Isabel Dalhousie after The Sunday Philosophy Club and Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. I found The Comfort of Saturdays at the most orderly, spacious, and well-lit, bookstore that I’ve yet  found in India (via some mall-walking in Chennai). I try to read these in order, but I find that I’ve skipped a couple. In one sense, this is quite alright because Isabel is Isabel, but she has undergone some major changes in her life that give her even more to think about and to act upon. 

In this book, as well as the others, Isabel “meddles”, as she calls it. Asked by someone to look into a situation, she dives in. As a detective (of sorts) she arrives at seeming conclusions much too quickly. She’s often surprised by wrong assumptions and conclusions, yet she wears her mistakes lightly. I do wish that some of her philosophy training would have included more on hypothesis formation and testing, probabilities, and the like. I’m tempted to send her a copy of Sherlock Holmes and The Black Swan (Taleb). She’s too much Watson—but such a lovely Watson. In addition to looking into whether a doctor has committed the misdeeds he’s accused of, she has to deal with a contribution to her journal by an old nemesis and her visceral dislike of a new acquaintance. The joy of McCall’s writing is that he lets us share Isabel’s struggles to do the right thing. She strives to think like a philosopher, but her instincts prompt her to act as a human being, with all our foibles in the face of all the ambiguities that the world presents to us. 

Besides struggling with how the deal with the dislikes of her life, she must also deal with her love life and the insecurities attendant to it. I marvel at McCall’s ability to display this woman’s pride, intelligence, and beauty (inner and outer), yet also her vulnerability and insecurity. Even Isabel, who seems quite the rock in many instances, struggles with these issues. 

I’ll keep reading about Isabel Dalhousie because I like her company. That’s no small compliment in my book. 

Side Note: One of my other favorite series is set in Edinburgh, the John Rebus novels of Ian Rankin. Dalhousie’s and Rankin’s experiences of the city differ, to put it mildly. How would an “Isabel Dalhousie meets John Rebus” novel work? Like “Bambi meets Godzilla”, I suspect. But together they do put Edinburgh on my “to visit” map.

The Divided Brain & the Search for Meaning: Why Are We So Unhappy by Ian McGilchrist & RSA Animate “The Divided Brain”

 

I don’t recall how I discovered RSAnimate, but I did, and you should, too. RSA stands for “The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce: an enlightenment organization.” And if I’m not mistaken, when they say enlightenment, I think that they mean Enlightenment, as in going back to the time of Newton. But whatever their pedigree, they’re providing some first-rate programs. For value and quality, they rival and sometimes exceed TED Talks. I especially enjoy the animations, which make the learning visual as well as fun. 

I recall that the first animation that I discovered is this one by Dr. Iain McGilchrist about “The Divided Brain”. The short summarizes the work that McGilchrist has done in writing The Master & His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (my on-deck list). McGilchrist argues that the earlier split-brain theory is wrong in positing that the left side of our brain is all logic and language and the right side all visual and imagination. Functions involving language, vision, and other processes are spread across both hemispheres. However, our brain is clearly divided into two hemispheres. Something is going on even though the initial split-brain theories were off the mark. In fact, we learn from the animation (as only animation can teach it), our brain doesn’t sit symmetrically within our skulls, but it’s torqued so that the right front and the left rear receive more space, and in social mammals, the right side is larger. What gives? 

McGilchrist posits that the divided brain reflects two functions: one a holistic (my term, not his) monitoring of our surrounding environment that prompts a desire for understanding and the other (left) side features the ability to focus narrowly on objects, allowing us to abstract and manipulate them, giving rise to such things as language and tools. Thus one side of the brain acts as a flood light and the other as a search light. These two necessary, separate, and complementary functions allow us to grasp wholes in a more intuitive manner (although he doesn’t use the term in the book or short, it sounds like gestalt to me). And the left side allows us to abstract and manipulate tools, language, and persons. Gilchrist notes something that I’d learned many years ago from psychiatrist and student of mysticism and meditation, Dr. Gerald May: the large frontal lobes of the brain—unique to humans—serve foremost as an inhibitory device. It prevents us from acting compulsively on our desires or fears. Consider this premise: what makes us most human is our ability to say “no” to our whims or compulsions, our ability to restrain action. This ability allows us to step back, as it were, and to act strategically (represented in the animation bit about Machiavelli) and to act empathically (represented by Erasmus). 

The final segment of the animation and the main focus of The Divided Brain addresses the significance of this information about brain architecture and function. Without this final perspective, this would be just another book and animation about how our brains work. Fun and interesting, but of no great consequence. However, McGilchrist, before becoming a psychiatrist, taught English literature at Oxford. He bridges C.P. Snow’s two cultures. He argues that the architecture and functions of the brain affect how we live and act. McGilchrist believes that from the time of Greek civilization to the European Renaissance, a balance existed between the functions of the two sides of the brain. But with the advent of modernity, the West became enamored of left side functions that emphasize tools and manipulation, literal language, logic, and abstraction— at the expense of the right-side functions that concern the wider context of the embodied, changing environment in which we live. This, McGilchrist contends, accounts for the fact that despite our unimaginable wealth and material well-being, we’re often profoundly unhappy and hold a feeling being stuck in a trap of our own making. 

The Divided Brain is a 10,000 word essay written as a follow-up to The Master & His Emissary. (Yale U Press commissioned The Divided Brain as an e-book to complement the paperback edition of The Master & His Emissary.) In this essay, McGilchrist fills in some of the holes or questions that have arisen from his big book (and he whets my appetite to read the longer work). He brings extreme good sense to the issues posed. For instance, he writes: 

I take it that we bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

McGilchrist, Iain. The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (Kindle Locations 120-122). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

(By the way, I made a note of this in my copy of this that it contradicts the patter that I hear from so many (young) yoga teachers: “It’s all in your head”, “you just need to believe”, and so on. I notice that I never hear this nonsense coming out to the mouths of 60-year old bodies.) 

In another gem of insight, he writes: 

There is no royal road to certainty about what the world is, or what it is like. We all, whether we are poets or scientists, or just going about the business of daily life, have to begin somewhere, by a leap of intuition, as to what kind of thing it might be we are dealing with – not just any leap, of course, always a guided one, but nonetheless fallible and uncertain. Depending on where and how we leap is what we find. And depending on what we find is what we will find in due course, since it begins the process of hardening things up into what we call a certainty. What we do not expect to find, we just will not see: much elegant research demonstrates that we are essentially blind to what we do not think is there. 

Id. at 124-129.

In this quote, he offers a succinct summary of the differences in the functions and modus operandi of the two sides of our brains: 

[I]t is the left hemisphere that controls the right hand with which we grasp something, and controls the aspects of language (not all language) by virtue of which we say we have ‘grasped’ the meaning – made it certain and pinned it down. The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation.

Id at 144-147.

He goes on: 

What are the key distinctions? One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere's is to open them up into possibility. In life we need both. In fact for practical purposes, narrowing things down to a certainty, so that we can grasp them, is more helpful. But it is also illusory, since certainty itself is an illusion – albeit, as I say, a useful one. There is no certainty.

….

Another way of thinking of the difference between the hemispheres is to see the left hemisphere's world as tending towards fixity, whereas that of the right tends towards flow. All systems in nature, from particles to the greater universe, from the world of cellular processes to that of all living things, depend on a necessary balance of the forces for stasis with the forces for flow. All existing things could be thought of as the product of this fruitful tension. But again, stasis itself is an illusion, helpful though it is in grasping the world on the wing.

Id. at 154-158; 192-196. 

I could go on with these quotes, but I think that you grasp (manipulation on the left-brain) the meaning (located on the right). His essay is full of these insights. I will leave you with this one last thought from McGilchrist: 

[S]ince the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally. Appeals to the natural world, to the history of a culture, to art, to the body, and to spirituality, routes that used to lead out of the hall of mirrors have been cut off, undercut and ironised out of existence, and when we look out of the window – we see more of the world we had created in our minds extended in concrete all around us.

….

Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.

Id. at 440-443; 445.

Think on these things.

A Short History of the Twentieth Century by John Lukacs

Do you want a Joe Friday ("Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts") history of the 20th century? Go elsewhere. Do you want to read an extended essay on the crucial events of the century by a master writer and historian? Then read this book. Do you want someone who will mouth common platitudes? Go elsewhere. Do you want the reflections and insights of a man who's studied and written about the 20th century in as much detail and with as much insight as anyone I can think of. Then read this book; in fact, you'd do well to read the rest of John Lukacs's work, too. 

Enjoying John Lukacs is the equivalent of enjoying a fine wine. Lukacs is a vineyard that keeps producing superb fare, now in his 90th year. Each new work provides a unique blend of insights. I'm a Lukacs connoisseur. But some do not care for what I consider an exquisite vintage. I read one review of this book that referred to him as "cranky", and in a charming sort of way, I can see that. Others find his opinions too harsh, dated, or limited in his perspective. I don't think so, but perfection isn't my primary concern. 

Lukacs sets forth many propositions, some of which he's stated before. For instance, his 20th century runs from 1914 to 1989 (the collapse of Communism). This is foremost a political history, and many historians will agree with the shortened scope of the century about which he writes. He centers his concerns on Europe and America. He acknowledges that he gives short shrift to Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia (Japan the primary exception). But he argues, rightly I think, that in this century, with some exception for Japan and China (near the end) has centered on Europe. The main focus of U.S. policy has centered on Europe. In the short 20th century, Europe was at the center of the action, including the horrible killing fields of the two wars. Lukacs notes that we've now reached the End of the Modern Age (the title of an earlier work, by the way), which also marks the end of the European Age. We don't yet know what follows; just as those who lived in (what we now call) the Middle Ages didn't know what would follow from the changes they saw as thheir age waned. Lukacs also states that "the twentieth century was--an? the?--American century". (2-3).

Lukacs sees Democracy as the great movement, but Democracy (as popular sovereignty) was shaped in no small part by nationalism (different from patriotism, as Lukacs has often written) and populism, which differs from classical liberalism. Given his quote of Burkhardt near the end of the book, one senses that he feels uneasy about the continued success of Democracy subject to the demands of nationalism and populism. 

Lukacs most blatantly transgresses popular dogma by contending  that some individuals still guide history. He contends that World War II was Hitler's war. No Hitler, no war. He believes that the ascension of Churchill over Halifax made the difference that allowed Britain to survive until "the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old." (Churchill). Likewise, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin play outsized roles (for good and ill) in the course of events. 

In addition to these perspectives and many others, Lukacs at the beginning and at the end of the book reflects on the project of history, knowing, and the human future. Of history as a discipline, he writes: 

     I have devoted much of my life to asserting, teaching, and writing that "objective" and "scientific" history are inadequate desiderata; but so, too, is "subjective" history. Our historical knowledge, like nearly every kind of human knowledge, is personal and participatory, since the knower and the known, while not identical, are not and cannot be entirely separate. We do not possess truth completely. Yet pursue truth we must. So many seemingly endless and incomplete truths about the history of the twentieth century are still worth pursuing, and perhaps forever. (1)

. . . .

    Historical knowledge, nay, understanding, depends on descriptions rather than on definition. It consists of words and sentences that are inseparable from "facts"; they are more than the wrapping of facts. "In the beginning was the Word," and so it will be at the end of the world. (1-2)

At the end of this book, he cites Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt, who, along with Johan Huizinga, are the predecessors who have most influenced Lukacs. Among twentieth century thinkers, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, formulators of the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, have influenced Lukacs. Lukacs writes of the uncertainty principle in human knowing: 

    The knower cannot be separated from the known. And with this is a greater and deeper meaning: that we, on our little, warm planet, are (again? anew?) at the very center of the universe. The universe was, and is, not our creation. But we human beings on this earth have invented it, and go on inventing it from time to time.

. . . . 

    Our twentieth-century recognitions, no matter how scattered and still hardly conscious, must, and will, issue not from human arrogance but from human humility. Perhaps just as important as our recognition of our central situation in the universe is our recognition that the limitations of our human knowledge do not restrict but enrich us. (212).

New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution by Colin Wilson

After writing my recent appreciation (and critique) of Colin Wilson, I found that one of my favorites books of his was available on Kindle, so I bought it and re-read it. I’m glad I did. It reminded me of what I find so valuable in Wilson (and it reminded me of some annoyances as well). This is Wilson at his best. He started the book as a biography of Abraham Maslow, with whom he met and corresponded, but it turned into more than that. In addition to it's appreciation of Maslow, it’s a history and appraisal of how psychology developed from the early moderns through the publication of the book in 1972. 

Wilson reports that when he first came upon Maslow’s work he ignored it, only to have it come back to his attention at a later time. We should be happy for that second look. Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, and continuing through a cycle of books that bore the imprint of the first, explored the contemporary human dilemma. How do we successfully engage in life? In the Outsider cycle, Wilson examined the dilemmas of modern life through extraordinary individuals, many of whom failed to find a satisfactory resolution to their problem of existence, such as Van Gogh, Nietzsche, and T.E. Lawrence, to name but three. Wilson explored the European existentialists such as Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, but he found their responses unsatisfactory. Wilson went on the construct a “new existentialism” that gloried in choice and will. When Wilson got around to looking at Maslow’s work, he found a kindred spirit. Maslow’s most well-known contributions to psychology, his hierarchy of needs and the reality of peak experiences, fit with Wilson’s growing belief that we ignore opportunities and abilities to summon peak experiences at will.

After some initial reflections touching on many of Wilson’s favorite themes and examples, as well as a brief introduction to Maslow’s work, Wilson begins a summary of modern psychology and philosophy starting with Hobbes and Descartes. I found this brief history valuable and instructive. Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, despite their rationalist-empiricist differences, all premised their understanding of humans as essentially mechanistic with little (if any) room for free will. But there is another current of thought that blossoms later in the 19th century. It manifests in the work of Brentano and Husserl on the Continent and in America through the work of William James. Wilson quotes James a lot, and rightly so. Wilson finds James, especially in his essays, pointing in the right direction, although James doesn’t connect all the dots for Wilson. But while James was pointing in the right direction, Sigmund Freud was taking a different perspective in Vienna. 

Freud gave us depth psychology, but his “depth”, with its reference to hidden sexuality and Greek myths, overlays a deterministic and mechanistic outlook. While prying deeply into psychic injuries, Freud's theories reflected a rigid idea of how our psyche works. Freud, who had a deep personal rigidity about him, dismissed various disciples who tried to take the master’s work in different directions, like Adler, Jung, and Rank. Wilson does an excellent job of mixing biography and ideas in this section (something that he tends to do well). Each of the three apostates (Adler, Jung, and Rank) pointed psychoanalysis in new and promising directions, identifying different sources of psychic disturbance and motivation. But still, Wilson concludes, this viewpoint focused on the disturbed, unhealthy individual. 

After this informative and entertaining history of psychology and philosophy, Wilson turns to Maslow’s biography and work. I was surprised to learn that Maslow started in the rat and monkey business. Stimulus-response theory was all the rage at the time (1930’s), and Maslow worked that angle. He also came to terms with Freud and considered himself a Freudian. However, Maslow realized that Freud and his cohort focused on the sick individual, and Maslow decided to explore the psychology of the healthy. Maslow follows a path similar to Wilson’s in turning his focus from the sick to the healthy. Wilson explores and appreciates Maslow’s insights and how Maslow developed his theories. The down side of the tale is that Maslow died relatively young (bad heart) and wasn’t able to further develop his perspectives. 

In the final chapter, we get Wilson’s synthesis of his own insights, Maslow’s, and a host of others, especially those connected with “existentialist psychology”. Existential psychologists, such as Victor Frankel and Rollo May, draw upon Husserl’s intentionality and its concern with will to help put a patient back in control of his or her destiny. Meaning, intentionality, and will once again become important aspects of psychology. As Wilson does, he dances between psychology, literature, and anecdote to make his points. This trait is both delightful and frustrating, as Wilson can be. But Wilson is a man of ideas, not a scientist or academic who does the necessary grunt work of the lab or field, necessary as that is. Sometimes Wilson seems dated, as in his adherence to the right brain-left brain dichotomy or his understanding of schizophrenia, but I don’t think that these dated conceptions have much affect on his arguments. (I am interested to learn if Leah Greenfeld’s work Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Experience of Culture on Human Experience about mental illness or Ian McGilchrist’s work on the different brain functions in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World provide any vindication of Wilson’s larger perspective.) 

I’ve read about six or eight Wilson books, and other than perhaps the first two works in the Outsider cycle (The Outsider and Religion and the Outsider), this might be the best book to jump into. Wilson’s speculations—his strength and his weakness—are tempered by his commitment to Maslow’s project and by his exposition of the history of modern psychology. Thus, we get the best of Colin Wilson’s enterprise here in a balanced, informative, and thought-provoking work.

Stand by Me: Movie Review

I didn't see Stand by Me in the theater, and while I've seen the gist of it on television, as I mentioned it in my recent Stephen King On Writing book review, I decided I should see the film in full. Also, knowing the setting, I expected that King would capture the milieu of late 50's America as few can, as I'd read do so in 11.22.63 and On Writing. 

In doing a bit of research, I read that King claimed that this was the first satisfactory translation of one of his books into a film. Hats off to the screenwriter who remained loyal to a strong story well told. The film really captures the goofiness of adolescent boys and of the era. Boys are weird creatures, given to bizarre beliefs, strange rites, and volatile emotions. The film captures this sense. The film works because the boys range from smart-ass know-it-alls to tearful little pups in the course of one scene to the next, as boys that age would. The strange fascinations of seeing a dead body (one of their peers), gaining fame, and claiming turf are all captured. Also captured is the adolescent boy infatuation with girls and grossness (the barf scene). This isn't adolescence seen through a gauze lens, it's adolescence as a rite of passage in 1959, as the boys get ready to go into junior high. 

The end is touching because the boys know that they will be split apart by the segregation to come. Three of them see themselves as headed into endless shop class, while the young writer (the King character you could posit) will go into the college track. In our junior high they tried to hide the tracking by not putting the "A" students in section 7A, but in section 7B instead. We were fooled for about two seconds. The "F Troop" (the title of a popular TV series at the time) knew who they were. But as the narrator reflects, it meant the end of friendships and bonds that had been forged across social boundaries, of oaths and secrets that each held dear. I had friends like that, and I share that sense of loss that you don't know quite what to do with. It's awkward at a time when everything in your life can seem awkward and unwieldy.

The young actors have the look and feel of the time and their age. Credit goes to director Rob Reiner as well as the actors for those outstanding performances. It's a fine film, well deserving of the praise it received. It's not all fun and games, although that abounds with little parental supervision. It was wilder time, in some ways more innocent, and in other ways more foolish. King and these film-makers have explored it well.

Harvest by Jim Crace

Jaipur Literature Festival author Jim Crace’s Harvest fascinated me. The book never specifies its setting of time and place, but we can discern an English village around the time of the enclosure movement. (The enclosure movement in Tudor England divided lands held in common into privately owned plots and brought sheep to replace row crops and other livestock raised on the commons.) “Walter Thirsk” tells the story of what happens in his adopted village during the course of one week during harvest time. Walter is an astute and intelligent observer of village life, his insight enhanced by the fact that he’s an outsider, having come to the village as an adult. He’s known and served the local grandee for many years, but he lives in the village with the local folk. The narrator portrays a sense of a stable equilibrium of life in the village when the book opens, although not without a sense of foreboding. Then strangers appear on the edge of the village, someone sets the grandee’s dovecot on fire, and a new claimant to the land arrives who wants to bring sheep. This cluster of events begins to eat away at the ties that bind the village into a community. 

This book might have been a novel of detection: crimes are committed, but Walther Thirsk is no William of Baskerville (The Name of the Rose). He is an intelligent but plain, common man. Walter’s narrative is that of a keen observer who attempts—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to untangle mysteries and reduce wrongs, but his efforts have only limited success. Events and intentions are too great for him to manage. He’s forced into the role of observer even as he hopes to shape events as a participant. 

I heard Crace speak a couple of times at JLF, and I recall that during the panel on the “historical novel” he said that Harvest doesn’t merit that that designation. He’s both right and wrong. Right in the sense that he never specifies the time and place nor does he reference any historical figures. But he nevertheless suggests a sense of village life that compels us back into a hazy past. Part of his success in doing so comes from his well-wrought prose, rich yet not pandering. He provides a sense of the sinews of village life and how they might be cut asunder, how a village reacts to loss, blame, and change. It’s quite a treat. I might also say it’s relevant. 

The contemporary world continues to experience accelerated change, especially for smaller, agricultural communities. In many nations, such villages still exist (I think here especially of Ethiopia), but of course also in India. These villagers will experience sudden and dramatic change—economic, cultural, social, and (therefore) political—and change does not occur easily. Many of the problems become visible in the cities. We see slums and crime. We know about the culture of unattached males that roam the streets. In India, we’re especially aware of the culture of rape, the thuggery, and susceptibility to demagoguery that have arisen among these unattached village males transplanted into cities like Delhi. But even Iowa has experienced dramatic changes with economic decline. Although separated by centuries from Crace’s imaginary village, one can appreciate the sense of disorder and loss that must occur. These ongoing events and processes make me think that Crace’s book is more than a journey into the past. It also serves as an appreciation of what still happens in the world around us.