Month: October 2020

I saw this trending on Twitter the other day.

Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man’s Bookshelf:
1. A Dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest
2. Too Much Hemingway
3. Any amount of Bukowski
4. AYN. RAND.
5. Goethe
6. “Lolita is my favorite book.”
7. “‘Fathers and Sons’ Is my favorite book.”

— Jess McHugh (@MchughJess) August 24, 2020

Okay, so there is a lot I want to unpack here.

First of all, for those of you unfamiliar with the books or authors mentioned above, I’ll try to give a brief summary of why Jess considers them “warning signs.”

The post-modern classic, Infinite Jest, is known for being notoriously long and difficult-to-read. The book has garnered a reputation for being adored by rich, over-educated white men who brag about the herculean task of actually finishing it. Some argue that the book is racist, that it trivializes sexual assault, and that the female characters are portrayed in an overly-sexual way.

Hemingway and Bukowski are frequently put into a box labeled: “drunk white man,” and are often associated with sexism, and overly macho rhetoric.

Ayn Rand is a pro-capitalist, libertarian-conservative. A philosopher with strikingly contrary opinions to the average liberal-progessive type in North America today.

Lolita is a novel about a pedophile, not to be confused with the advocacy of pedophilia. It’s also considered to be one of the greatest novels ever written, acclaimed for its beautiful and poetic style.

Fathers and Sons, which I actually read sometime in the last year or so, is the most puzzling to me. I can’t think of the reason why it’s on the list. I enjoyed it, and I took from the novel a thoughtful and relatable narrative about the generational conflicts that exist between parents and their aging children. It’s also a good introduction to Nihilism.

Full disclosure, I haven’t read any Goethe, nor have I had the courage to attempt Infinite Jest just yet.

Anyway, this “joke,” as far as I understand it, is an attempt at creating a particular male reader stereotype. Specifically, the misogynistic, egotistical, and pseudo-intelectual “bro.”

And yes, I agree that some of these books might have less than ideal fan bases, contain poor subject matter, and have questionable authors, they’re also known for so much more than that. It’s sad to see them get pigeonholed into these overly-simplified conjectures, and worse yet, their readers along with them.

Hemingway isn’t only remembered for his manliness. He also inspired a whole generation of writers with his technique of writing called the iceberg theory. It was his minimalistic style of deliberately obscuring and omitting certain aspects of a story to give it meaning.

Bukowski’s books aren’t something that men should model their attitude towards women on, sure, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t an amazing writer.

Ayn Rand’s, The fountainhead, was one of the first “serious” books that I ever read. I will admit, most of it probably went way over my head. But I can still remember the main character, Howard Roark. He made quite an impression on me. I remember being inspired by his stubborn and passionate refusal to let society mould him into something he wasn’t.

Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, was trilingual. He published a timeless work of fiction, applauded for its lyricism and word play, in a language that wasn’t even his first! I’ve been speaking English my whole life and I can only just now understand a total of nine words from A Tale of Two Cities. I can imagine some people saying Lolita is their favourite book. Why is that a warning sign?

Maybe it’s due to Jess’s own failure to understand the unique complexities of individuals, those who are capable of extracting alternative meanings from a book, different from her own, that she assumes the people around her are as shallow and easily defined as she is. It could be that she just had some bad experiences with the men in her life. I don’t know.

She doubled down and responded to criticisms like mine by saying: “Oh white men…tis a beautiful thing to watch! Their willingness to angrily defend other dead white men over a twitter joke!”

Heres the thing, I’m not upset about some dumb joke about an author or a book that I like. If her goal was to bait people like me into defending something they enjoyed, congratulations, it worked. You got me.

But this goes deeper than that.

I’m upset and concerned with her reducing them to these disparaging anecdotes, for them to be defined by their worst qualities.

It’s cancel-culture at its finest.

She is vilifying them, discouraging their potential readers, and creating a shallow, surface level opinion to be gobbled up and emulated. 17 thousand people ‘Liked’ her tweet. How many of them, encouraged by the other 16999 people who also approved, will take her word for it as an authority on the subject?

How many will actually read those books mentioned and formulate their own opinions on them? Probably not many. But at least now they can have some vague conviction about them without having to actually read them. Maybe they can even crack some joke at a dinner party about how their ex-boyfriend read too much Bukowski and was a total asshole because of it.

A wise man once said that servitude is the enemy of reason. That’s exactly what we need to be reminded of right now. We need skepticism, not blind adherence to some influencer. We need to be able to make decisions for ourselves, not to be policed by public opinion.

Stuff like this is dumbing us down. Instead of creating a dialogue about why something is contestable, we just remove it. We avoid it, and we oppose those who disagree with us.

We attach our identities to something rigid and immovable, and we turn a blind eye to anything that the most woke members of our society deem unfit for our consumption.

We’re obsessed with finding faults with everything, with judging everyone based on some unobtainable moral purity.

Can we not acknowledge the bad in a particular thing, while at the same time appreciating the good? Can we not understand that times change, that public opinion changes? Should we really be holding the past accountable for the moral climate of the present?

I feel like an angry grandpa yelling at a crowd. I know, it was just a tweet. Get over it right?

Except its not just a tweet.

It’s a thinly veiled attempt at something that is happening on a bigger scale in our society. You watch, the next thing you know, we’ll be taking down statues of our first Prime Minister, Sir John. A. Macdonald.

Oh, wait…

I get it, he was an asshole. Actually he was worse than that. He was cruel, brutal, and heartless, specifically toward Canada’s indigenous population.

He also helped build the country we know and love today.

It’s like the people who toppled his statue can’t accept the fact that a person can do good things, while at the same time, not have them invalidated by their moral failings.

It reminds me of a quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sounds about right.

Maybe too much peace, freedom, multiculturalism, free healthcare, free education, clean drinking water, fair labour laws, and higher life expectancies made these people’s lives so bad that they were forced to be the first generation in years to finally do something about that asshole John A.

What about every individual prior to the 20th century who wasn’t actively fighting for a women’s right to vote? Were they all complicit in misogyny? Should we therefore discredit anyone prior to 1916?

Fun Fact! In the 1880’s, Sir John A. Macdonald was one of the first national leaders to attempt to grant women the right to vote.

The point is, can we agree not to celebrate him but at the same time not erase him from Canada’s history? Maybe we can put a plaque beside his statue that acknowledges his genocidal past instead.

I know Jess’s tweet is a little different, but the fundamental principles are the same. Most of us don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of public opinion, so we conform. It’s easier and safer that way.

Except it’s soft tyranny, and it’s cultural censorship.

What if instead, Jess chose to educate her followers, rather than criticize and stereotype? What if she, like so many people like her, chose to build something up, instead of tearing something down? What if we all spent more time appreciating the positives instead of obsessing over the negatives?

Read those books and authors for yourself. Understand that they have much more to offer than what our present moral climate considers problematic. Read a wide variety of books. Be skeptical. Come to your own conclusions, and be weary of public opinion.

Nietzsche has some good advice for us:

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

There, I’m done yelling now.

Thanks for reading.

Illustration by Rika Otsuka

Post by That Anxious Dude.

He’s an incredible writer, and he captures how I feel about writing better than I could even articulate myself.

I hope you enjoy, and don’t forget to check out his website for more of his work.

…

I’m not super serious about a great many things. 

I usually find humour in things other people consider awkward, dark, or straight up taboo. I’m frequently irreverent, cheeky and cynical, often to the point of making even myself uncomfortable – not because I’m striving to be edgy, but because I believe in the sublime power of humour. 

But here’s the twist – I’m kinda serious about writing. As a matter of fact, let’s drop the “kinda”. 

I am serious about writing. 

Which doesn’t mean that I start behaving like a medieval monk as soon as the conversation turns to literature, but that the creative use of language occupies a special place in my heart – a fact I’m defensively proud of precisely because I’m so immune to other sacred cows of society.

My love affair with books began at the end of high school, when I became free of drab, mandatory class readings and suddenly found myself devouring novels like a castaway, frantically trying to feed his starved mind. 

At the time, I couldn’t quite explain my explosive thirst, even though I was implicitly aware of the fact that there was something very unique about literature, something that made it stand apart from all the other forms of art. Unlike theatre or movies or even video games, literature went beyond immersing you in a different world – it had the ability to transport you into another person’s mind. 

Even if you were reading a detached philosophical essay, the author’s formation of arguments, what she or he decided to omit, their choice of words, all of it betrayed the inner workings of a unique consciousness. This soul revealing quality held so much more true for the works of “pure literature”, for poetry and novels.

My already considerable respect for people who wrote grew exponentially when I started dabbling in writing myself. It quickly dawned on me that trying to put together anything remotely coherent wasn’t nearly as easy as the general public made it out to be. In fact, it was anything but. 

And yet to this day most folks still believe that just because they use language every day, writing is a simple act of turning what’s on the inside out, like pouring corn flakes into a breakfast bowl…

The rest of us, those who’ve tried our hand at writing rarely make this blunder. For us it’s obvious that without serious dedication to both reading and writing, there’s little chance of anything valuable ever materializing onto the page…

Thus armed with a love of books and a deep admiration for the skill it takes to produce them, I began to establish the Holy shrine of the church of one true writing, a personal credo that stated that writing should be either done seriously, or not at all. I argued that by adding anything other than the desire to convey meaning or using language in a creative fashion, you were committing the sin of wasting everybody’s goddamn time, most of all your own.

In other words, I strongly believed we should let writing be writing, and that was the end of it.

It’s no wonder then, that if you’d ask me about my opinion on the therapeutic quality of writing back then, I would have exploded into a fit of pure toddler rage. When I encountered the term, I was convinced it was a sordid new age conspiracy designed to bring down writing, as well as therapy. I firmly refused to give this abomination a second thought. If you want to do writing, I thought, then do writing, and if you want to feel better, do therapy, but for the love of God don’t pollute one with the other.

But boy, was I wrong.

Because a few years, and one mental crisis later, here’s good ol’ me doing an outrageous 180, not only publicly acknowledging that I’ve changed my mind, but also outright urging you to write for the sake of better mental health. 

Yeah, sorry about that.

…

Throughout the years I began observing the strange, yet undeniable fact that every time I began writing, I immediately felt better, which always left me mildly confused. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. 

Wasn’t writing supposed to be at least somewhat jarring, even taxing on your system?

Staring at the intimidating whiteness of a blank page was unquestionably unnerving (and still is), but once my fingers started doing their little keyboard shuffle, the multitude of fears in my mind seemed to retreat like a defeated army. 

At first I brushed it off as a byproduct of my ego, which becomes animated every time a task, no matter how small, is undertaken.

But then again, this type of nurturing focus never occurred when I was washing the dishes, cleaning my cat’s toilet, or going for a run.

It emerged exclusively when I began to type… As long as I let myself genuinely engage in the process of writing, even if I was merely scribbling some notes on a utility bill, I began feeling something.

Or should I say I felt an absence, as the weight of the world and it’s problems melted away like a puddle in the morning sun. 

…

As part of my general de-programming efforts which aim to reexamine some of my more toxic beliefs, I began to ponder my attitudes towards writing again, quickly realising the giant discrepancy gaping at the heart of this relationship. 

On one side, I still think of writing as a sombre process of bleeding onto the paper, but on the other, I can’t keep ignoring genuine relief every time I pick up the pen.

It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out that the first one operates from darkness, existing only to produce feelings of inadequacy (“Did you bleed hard enough? Is it even good?”). 

The second one doesn’t make any demands, It’s simply there, whenever I choose to write, regardless of the format, or the medium, or the intent. The only condition it requires is my genuine presence. 

This act of creation on the page, no matter how tiny or insignificant, proceeds to suck all the neurotic bits out of my mind like a celestial vacuum cleaner, before airing them out and letting them disintegrate in the open space. 

In this, giving life to one’s thoughts resembles a proactive form of meditation – even when the words come slow, even when I’m struggling with syntax, even when I’m chasing a deadline and calm is the farthest thing from my mind, writing never fails to administer its medicinal properties onto my jumbled psyche.

…

Sometimes the biggest favour we can do ourselves is renouncing further analytic drilling, choosing instead to remain pragmatic. Because in the end, it doesn’t really matter how and why writing heals. 

‍The important thing is that it does. 

When I was younger, I thought that by “defending” writing from anything I believed impinged on its holy mission, I was protecting it’s most sacred attribute – the creative soul. 

Little did I know that writing is powerful enough to accommodate different  modes of being without needing me to foster silly, self-sabotaging beliefs. Whichever adjective I choose to describe it, therapeutic or not, is completely beside the point. 

Because I’m finally at a point where I’m capable of brushing off the hubris, and doing what needs to be done.

Which is of course, to write.

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American poet, essayist, naturalist, and philosopher, born on July 12th, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau was a fervent abolitionist, a passionate writer and speaker for the movement, as well as a conductor involved in the Underground Railroad.

He is also famous for having spent a night in jail for the non-payment of a poll tax on the grounds that the money was being used to fund a war against Mexico. It inspired him to write his essay titled, “Civil Disobedience,” which would influence such activists and prominent figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

But Thoreau is most commonly remembered as a major figure of the Transcendentalist movement, which included writers like Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Transcendentalists aimed to discover the nature of reality by investigating the process of thought rather than the objects of sense experience. They believed in the purity of the individual, of self-reliance, and the capabilities of man to generate insights intuitively, free from the corruption of institutions and society.

Thoreau’s most famous work, Walden, published in 1854, is an account of his experiences living alone in a cabin he built for himself near Walden Pond, just outside of Concord. He lived there for two years and two months as a sort of a self-experiment and spiritual journey.

This is from Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

Some argue that Walden is the product of a self-obsessed narcissist, that Thoreau was a hypocrite, his ideas arrogant, and his prose dry and condescending. It’s true, you’ll soon learn, that he had strong opinions about society and how he thought we should live, but we shouldn’t let that discount any positive messages that we might find in his words.

It could be simply that his most butt-hurt critics are those on the receiving end of some uncomfortable truths that Thoreau pointed out.

Regardless, most find it hard to argue against the positive impact he’s had on the world. The following is taken from Analysis and Notes on Walden: Henry Thoreau’s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary by the scholar, Ken Kifer:

“Thoreau’s careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time, becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced … Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. Today, Thoreau’s words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.”

Our current society could use more people like Thoreau right now, those who are capable of crossing such hard political lines.

Thoreau himself, in some of the first pages of Walden, admits that his philosophies are not a one-size-fits-all. He believed that each person should take from his ideas their own personal messages, that what might be true for him, might not be true for everyone. He hoped “that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.”

So lets slip our arms through the sleeves of some of the wisest words of the 19th century, and see if we haven’t outgrown them yet.

1.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

Henry David thoreau

Thoreau said this in 1854, long before the hyper-consumerist trends of the 20th century.

These were his some of his observations while walking down the main street in Concord:

“The Traveller had to run the gauntlet…Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller’s; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor.”

I wonder what he would say today about our billboards, television advertisements, and internet ads.

I bet it would sound something like this:

We are constantly nudged, persuaded, or rather charmed even, by those who hold our best interest as secondary importance, those whose icons we wear proudly on our shirts, unpaid and unwittingly, those who ruthlessly wrap their chubby and greedy fingers around our necks, 5,000 times a day, and beckon us with a contemptible smile and nod toward that mean and insidious term, delicately clothed in wool, that we call comfort.

We are coerced with promises of easy living with items of luxury and extravagance, but according to Thoreau, they only weigh us down with their burdens.

They have power over us, he warns, we spend so much of our valuable time and effort preserving them that we find ourselves neglecting more important aspects of our lives. It’s this emotional attachments to our stuff that Thoreau says denies us true wealth.

2.

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.”

HEnry DAvid Thoreau

This reminds me of a scene in the movie American Beauty, where Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, a husband and wife who’s marriage has gotten stale and distant, begin to have a rare moment of intimacy. As Spacey inches toward Bening, whispering nostalgic memories of their former affection, Bening comments that Spacey’s beer he is holding is almost spilling onto the couch. “It’s a $4000 sofa” she protests, “upholstered in italian silk.” Spacey, who is visibly upset, stands up and responds with the unforgettable line: “It’s just a couch! This isn’t life! This is just stuff. And it’s become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that’s just nuts.”

How many of you have placed an emotional attachment to objects at the expense of a loved one, of living in the moment, of truly appreciating what life has to offer, or of leaving the furniture of your minds undusted?

I know I have.

And it gets even more complicated when we understand that, as consumers, we are brainwashed into thinking that our possessions are an extension of our identity. It’s bad enough to love an object so much that our emotional well-being is tied to it, but we go one step further and blend our self-worth with what we own.

Thoreau offers us some advice: “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”

3.

“The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode.”

Henry David Thoreau

And It isn’t just our culture’s shallow material obsessions that Thoreau criticizes, he tells us how society represses the depth of our conversations as well.

4.

“Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbour; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.”

Henry David Thoreau

Replace “newspaper” with Facebook article, tweet, or the newest Netflix show, and it’s more relevant than ever.

5.

“In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”

Henry David Thoreau

Replace “letters” here with likes and you have our plugged-in societies dependance on external validation and lack of self-esteem.

6.

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labours of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

HEnry David Thoreau

This one reminds me of a George Eliot quote that I try to explain to my wife when she asks me to do chores while I’m reading:

“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”

Just kidding. She would probably roll her eyes out of her head if I said that.

Thoreau isn’t saying not to do chores either, he was himself fond of “honest, manly, toil,” he is just saying that we create many of our own problems, which only distract us from what is meaningful.

He encourages us to shift our perspective, however slightly, so we can appreciate the simple things in life that we tend to ignore when we get corralled into routine.

Take a deep breath. Contemplate. Listen. Find solitude.

Thoreau believed in the power of Nature to inspire in us spiritual self-reliance. We don’t need to complicate our lives with unnecessary complexities, Thoreau argued, we only need “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

7.

“…in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Henry David Thoreau

8.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Henry david thoreau

Can you see now why Thoreau’s critics disliked him so much? I agree that some of his words come across as self-righteous and preachy, but in our age of consumerism-everyone-gets-a-trophy-victimhood-cancel-culture, it’s important to be reminded of all the things that we could be doing wrong that might be hurting us and our ability to be happy. They can be hard pills to swallow, but there is something so empowering in shouldering blame instead of putting it on others.

But don’t worry, not all he says is negative.

9.

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.” 

Henry David Thoreau

10.

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” 

Henry David Thoreau

11.

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”

Henry David Thoreau

12.

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices… What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.”

Henry david thoreau

This is a quote that our increasingly politically polarized world needs to hear daily, including myself; to not have a death-grip on your convictions. Emerson put it well when he said: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

How often, when we have an opinion, do we look for evidence to validate our initial claim instead of learning about the opposition’s, and thereby, either strengthening our own argument by noticing its weaknesses, or changing our minds by acknowledging its strengths?

Not often. Most of us prefer the deafening insulation of an echo chamber instead.

These next few quotes are what make Thoreau extra awesome in my opinion. But I might be a tad biased.

13.

“Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.”

14.

 “For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave.

Henry David Thoreau

15.

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. (Haha) There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.”

I especially love these quotes because Thoreau is not only articulating beautifully some of the strongest arguments in favour of reading the classics, but we consider him a classic author now, and we read his books for the same reason that he read others before him.

Sadly though, he died at the early age of 44 from Tuberculosis, so we will never know how many more contributions he might have made to the literary world.

Emerson wrote this after his death, reminding us that despite Thoreau being gone, his memory will live on forever:

“The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. . . . His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

Thanks for reading.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Sigmund Frued

That quote is attributed to the famous neurologist and founder of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Frued. Although there isn’t any actual evidence that he ever said the words, once you understand him and his theories, it becomes clear as to why he was given the credit for saying them.

Frued was known for frequently using references to sex in his explanations about human behaviour. Therefore, according to his theories, smoking a cigar might represent an oral or phallic fixation that emerged during an impeded stage of psychosexual development.

He was also known to regularly have a cigar in his hand or mouth, so it makes sense that some people attribute the phrase to him.

But how about when an author writes a book? If an author simply intends for a work to entertain children, do we have any right to infer a deeper meaning or interpretation from it, different from what the author meant? Or is sometimes a story just a story?

When asked about The Lord of the Rings, the author J.R.R Tolkien, had this to say:

“As for any inner meaning or ‘message,’ it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical…. “

So why do scholars still claim that his inspiration for orcs came from Nazis, or that he was making references to WW1, or that the One Ring represents the atom bomb? The last one is particularly puzzling, considering the books were written several years before the manhattan project.

Intelectuals have been debating this topic for hundreds of years. Some even go so far as to say that the “author is dead”; meaning that only the text matters. They claim there will be things that will be revealed about an author and the world they live in regardless of their intentions. One of the proponents of such an idea wrote the following in his essay, The Death of the Author:

“Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

Roland Barthes

The point is, can we always trust the authors? Does what they say even matter? Could it be that they want their true intentions or inspirations to remain unknown, or perhaps that they aren’t even aware of them? Maybe their ego or pride gets in the way of their true meaning; as if admitting outside inspiration would undervalue their perceived creative genius. Or maybe there was a stigma attached to admitting that their inspiration came from a contemptible source.

Lewis Carroll is someone who might have disagreed with all that and admitted that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” It’s commonly said that his beloved classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was just a story written for the entertainment of three young girls.

That could be true, but I think there’s much more to it than that. And I have good reason to think so. So pack some snacks, we’re going down the rabbit hole.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

When I was ten years old, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS), or Todd’s Syndrome. Named after the British psychiatrist, Dr. John Todd, who first recorded symptoms of the syndrome in 1955.

The following is from Wikipedia:

People (with AiWS) may experience distortions in visual perception of objects such as appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or farther (teleopsia) away than they actually are. Distortion may occur for other senses besides vision as well.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AiWS) is often associated with migraines, brain tumors, and psychoactive drug use. AiWS can be caused by abnormal amounts of electrical activity resulting in abnormal blood flow in the parts of the brain that process visual perception and texture.

Interestingly, AiWS is most common among children, with the average age of the sufferer being 6 years old, many of whom don’t have symptoms that carry on into adulthood. I’ve also read that the distortions most commonly happen at night.

This is from Wikipedia again:

A person affected by Alice in Wonderland syndrome may also lose a sense of time, a problem similar to the lack of spatial perspective brought on by visual distortion. Time may seem to pass very slowly, akin to an LSD experience, and the lack of time and space perspective can also lead to a distorted sense of velocity. For example, one could be inching along ever so slowly in reality, yet to an affected person, it would seem as if one were sprinting uncontrollably along a moving walkway, leading to severe, overwhelming disorientation.

I can remember experiencing deja-vu on what seemed to be a daily basis, it being another symptom of (AiWS). It’s one of the strangest sensations I’ve ever felt. Characterized by the unshakable feeling that a specific moment in time happened once before. Everything about it feels exactly the same, your thoughts, your movements, your location, all of your senses replaying to you a strangely familiar part of your past.

All of this happened so long ago, and I haven’t had any symptoms since I was a teenager, so I decided to request my medical records to see if I could find some more information.

The following has been taken verbatim from a letter I acquired from the child psychologist that I saw in May of 1999. I was ten years old:

“I am writing in regard to this young boy who was referred to me due to some concerns about him hearing voices and having a sense of derealization. He described to his mom that he had heard voices talking in his head, people laughing and that on occasion while riding his bike and staring at the spinning front wheel he felt like he was far away from the situation and everything looked like it was going faster. On the other occasions he has noticed especially in his room at night that he will feel very far away from things and feel very small. He describes how sometimes his homework looks like it is far away as well. Review of other symptoms of depression and other mood disorders anxiety, OCD and psychotic symptoms show that these really are the only things that have been noticed. They are quite disturbing to this young boy, however, there has been absolutely no change in school behaviour or his behaviour at home and in fact had he not told his
parents they wouldn’t have noticed any difficulties in their son.”

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you might be wondering about the connection between the book and the syndrome. The story is about a young girl and her adventures after she chases a rabbit down a hole. She eats and drinks things that make her shrink and grow, she meets and has conversations with various strange characters, and experiences a number of absurd and unusual incidents.

To put simply, all of the symptoms of AiWS are experienced by Alice in the book, hence the condition’s name.

The first symptom is given to us on the very first page:

“Nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural)”

She talks to animals and objects throughout the entire book, highlighting the symptom of auditory hallucinations, much like my own.

When Alice is falling down the rabbit hole, the narrator describes her sensations:

“Either the well was very deep or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time, as she went down, to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.”

This is the first glimpse into the temporal distortions in the book. Later at the tea party with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, the concept of time comes up again:

“‘What day of the month is it?’ he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
Alice considered a little, and then said ‘The fourth.’
‘Two days wrong!’ sighed the Hatter.”

Later, the Hatter and the Hare disclose to Alice that they quarrelled with Him (Him being Time), who won’t, “do a thing I ask. It’s always 6 o’clock.”

“A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?’ she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.'”

Theres the deja-vu.

Alice experiences the most common symptom of AiWS when she drinks an ominous bottle marked “drink me”:

“`What a curious feeling!’ said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope. ‘ And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high…”

Later she eats the cake labeled “eat me”:

“`Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); `now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!’ (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off).”

Could Carrol’s book just have been the consequence of an over active imagination, or could he have been the sufferer of the rare neurological condition?

According to scholars like Barthes, the text is all we need to answer questions like that, but things get far more interesting when we have a look into the authors life.

Charles Dodgson

Charles Dodgson, Carroll’s real name, was a teacher of mathematics at oxford, as well as a deacon of the anglican church. He grew up in a household with 11 children, telling his brothers and sisters stories, writing magazines for them, and creating games for them to play.

When he entered college, he took a vow of celibacy and remained living at the college, unmarried, for the rest of his life. There, he befriended the three daughters of the dean of the college. One of the girls, Alice Liddell, is assumed to have inspired the “Alice” in his book. Although he denied it later in his life.

Dodgson’s relationships with children is shadowy. He was a photographer, and he took thousands of photos, half of which were of children, some of them even nude or scantily dressed.

Photography was a relatively new technology when he began the hobby in 1856, and many parents understandably wanted their children’s likeness captured for posterity.

But the sensibilities of Victorian tastes were much different back then. Childlike innocence and purity was characteristic of fine art. We don’t look back now on a painting of Michelangelo’s, and think that all the naked cherubs are pornography.

Still, some argue that Dodgson might have had sexual desires, only he never acted on them. Others speculate that action was indeed taken, as evidenced by a series of pages ripped out of his diary after a boating trip taken with the three Liddell girls and the subsequent falling out with the family.

Some even, encouraged by the popularity of Frued’s theories in the 1930’s, use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as proof of his erotic tendencies. Citing the rabbit hole to be a symbol of sexual intercourse, among others.

But what intrigues me more than anything, is that he was know to suffer from migraines, a common symptom of AIWS. Could this also explain his fondness for children? Perhaps the stigma attached to mental illness in the Victorian age encouraged him to find more naive listeners for his strange tales of shrinking and growing.

Even when I was growing up, I must have been reluctant to tell people that I was hearing voices. It actually wasn’t until I received that letter from my doctor that I even remembered that I had auditory hallucinations at all. I must have forgot because I wasn’t repeating that part of my story over the years. I remember having no problem telling friends that I had experienced visual distortions, to me that seemed to be less psychotic.

It should be also be noted that Dodgson had a speech impediment. Maybe he found that children were more compassionate and unconcerned with his embarrassing stammer.

Conclusion

So could it be possible that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an autobiographical account of the authors undisclosed neurological condition, expressed in an inconspicuous way that might have kept him out of a mental institution?

Or can we admit that Dodgson created the story solely to entertain, while at the same time accepting that his inspiration came from AiWS?

Or is sometimes a cigar just a cigar?

I think it’s for us to decide, and if you’ve read the book, you know how much Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, appreciated ambiguity.

“‘Mine is a long and sad tale!’ said the mouse turning to Alice and sighing.”

“‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail, ‘but why do you call it sad?'”

Lewis Carroll

Thanks for reading.