Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 3)

“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.

“I wish none of this had happened.”

“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

J.R.R Tolkien

Saturday, October 3rd, will mark the ten year anniversary of my father’s death.

He would have been 65 today, a grandfather, and a retiree; casually enjoying his golden years in the presence of his family. Or perhaps even more likely, drinking Pilsners on a golf course somewhere.

I often wonder what type of grandfather he would have been. I wonder how he would feel about the world we live in now. I wonder what sort of advice he would have given me when I needed it the most. And I wonder if he would still be able to beat me at golf. I wonder so many things. You can do a lot of wondering in ten years.

That’s what hurts the most, that I’ll have to keep wondering.

That’s also one of the primary reasons that I started this blog. It’s why I wanted to leave a part of myself behind for my future children. I want them to be able to know my character, what I believe, how I think; things that only I could tell them, and things that I feel like I missed out on.

I was twenty-one years old when my father died. Too dumb, young, and immature to truly appreciate who he was, and as a consequence, we weren’t very close. But I feel like it was precisely because we weren’t close, that I was able to learn so much from him in the end.

There comes a time in most people’s relationships with their parents when they finally discover the all-too-human traits of their once imagined, all-knowing, and omnipotent benefactors; when they realize their parents don’t have all the answers to everything; that they make mistakes, have weaknesses, and make bad decisions.

Sadly, I’m sure this happens much too early for some. It might be, for example, that circumstances require that a child need to mature quickly in order to pick up the slack of negligent or absent parents. Or conversely, a parent might be too submissive or friendly with their children, shifting the power dynamic, and thereby resulting in the child’s subordination or arrested development.

Thankfully, I was privileged enough to have avoided experiencing either scenario. True, I might not have had the friendship that some people have with their fathers, but in return, my ignorance stayed intact. In my mind, my father remained my father. Unblemished and incorruptible.

As a result, our somewhat distant relationship had only allowed me to see his character from afar. But what I did see of him was morally upright and commendable. It was his patience and willingness to sacrifice for his family that are some of the first things that I associate with his memory. To me, he was the definition of toughness and resilience. Even now, I can only think of a few instances of my entire life where I saw him show any signs of vulnerability.

He was impressively forbearing, but I do remember asking him one afternoon when he was in the hospital if he was scared. It was sobering to hear his reply. It ran contrary to everything that I had imagined him to be up until that point. But I am grateful that he was able to mutter that bit of truth to me. His slow nod had, in its movements, spoken volumes. And the way he said the word: “yeahh,” was almost that of surprise at his own awareness; as if my question had put the idea of fear into his mind for the first time.

I imagine him feeling something like how George Eliot described in Middlemarch.

“Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death…When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die– and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.”

George Eliot

After his death, the amazing things that I was hearing his family and friends say of him, solidified my preexisting belief that his strong and dependable character would be etched into my mind forever.

All the love that I was receiving around me hardened my resolve to do justice to his name; not to be sorry that I didn’t have a father, but to live up to his character and turn their pity into pride. Proud to have known a friend or a brother or a son that was capable enough to pass on wisdom, courage, strength, and independence onto his children. What better legacy could someone hope to leave behind?

I feel now, somewhat controversially, that his death has changed my life for the better. Of course, I miss him terribly, and not a day goes by without my thinking of him, but I’m convinced that his death has taught me some of the most valuable lessons that we can ever learn in life.

One of which is something that the philosopher, Michel De Montaigne had helped me think about.

Montaigne recommended that we should imagine that there is some noble being within us, who is able to observe our innermost thoughts, and in whose presence even the mad would hide their failings.

He says by doing this, we will learn to think clearly and objectively and behave in a more thoughtful and rational manner. The noble being within me has been my father. He both acts as a check to my moral behaviour and has motivated me to honour his name by living in ways that would hopefully inspire others to think in laudable terms of his legacy.

I know some of you might be thinking: “but he was human, he was never as good as you make him out to be”. But I would ask: what good would it do to acknowledge his pitfalls? It’s the same reason Jesus was without sin; people are reluctant to follow in the footsteps of someone as imperfect as themselves.

That’s what being his friend might have changed for me. I might have lost respect for him, thought that I was better than him, or grown to resent him for something. All the things that I’m sure everyone has experienced in a relationship with an equal.

But whether or not he was a sinner or saint makes little difference now. My memory of him is permanently biased in his favour, and because of that, I look to loftier heights for guidance. It reminds me of a quote from Napoleon.

“If you build an army of 100 lions and their leader is a dog, in any fight, the lions will die like a dog. But if you build an army of 100 dogs and their leader is a lion, all dogs will fight like a lion.”

Napoleon

I understand my view might be an uncommon one, but I was happy to discover that my rationalizations were corroborated by the Stoic philosopher, Seneca.

“It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad, or spend a lot of time carefully going through your accounts and administering your estate, or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it.”

Seneca

That’s what I feel like I have accomplished. I have conquered my grief and I am better off because of it. I’m not angry that my father is gone, and I don’t feel sorry for myself. I am appreciative of the opportunity that I was given to turn adversity into advantage. His death has helped me lead a more purposeful life, and to him I am grateful.

“If you admit to having derived great pleasures, your duty is not to complain about what has been taken away but to be thankful for what you have been given…”

Seneca

I am a firm believer in the Stoic principle that there is always some trace of value in all misfortunes.

“Let us too overcome all things, with our reward consisting not in any wreath or garland, not in trumpet-calls for silence for the ceremonial proclamation of our name, but in moral worth, in strength of spirit, in a peace that is won forever once in any contest fortune has been utterly defeated.”

Seneca

Of all the wisdom that the Stoics have taught me, how they think about death has been the most meaningful, and practical. And not just how to deal with grief from the death of loved one, but how to think about our own inevitable visit from death.

Meditating on our mortality is a tool that can help us prioritize our lives and provide us with meaning. The phrase: Momento Mori, which is latin for: “Remember you must die,” has been one of the chief reasons that Stoicism has been such a substantial part of my ideology.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” 

Seneca

Death can offer us perspective. It provides urgency and direction. What else besides death can cause us to be grateful for life at the very mention of the word? And if you’ve read my post on gratitude, you know how impactful a reflection on that subject can be.

“Keep death and exile before your eyes each day, along with everything that seems terrible— by doing so, you’ll never have a base thought nor will you have excessive desire.”

Epictetus

Momento Mori also allows us to let go of trivial things. It is a constant reminder to us of what really matters in life. Dirty dishes in the sink? Do them, but don’t let their presence upset you. Would you want the last thing you ever say to your partner to be a complaint about dirty dishes? If you have a loved one that has died, what kind of bargain would you make to have them back for a single day? Would you diligently do dishes for the next ten years without objection? I know I would. So why do we let small things interfere with our precious little time we have with one another?

The following quote is from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ private journal. It’s interesting to think that he wrote these words for his eyes only, without the intention of making them public.

“Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, be like that of a dying person.”

Marcus Aurelius

Most of us however, avoid thinking about death because of fear. It is much more comfortable and easier to live in ignorance until our day finally comes. But in doing so, we are missing out on some of the most pragmatic wisdom that is available to us. Fortunately, Epicurus can help us think about death in a way that might assuage some of our fears.

“When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.”

Epicurus

Death should also be a reminder to us that it doesn’t matter how long we live, if our lives were of no benefit to anyone. The author John Steinbeck wrote that we should “try to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world”. Arthur Miller said, “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

Therefore, we should live with death as our moral compass, our final judgment, and the measurement of our worth, because as a wise man once said:

“It is not length of life, it is depth of life.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanks for reading.

On Saturday, September 5th, I had the unforgettable pleasure of marrying my best friend, Carly.

Amidst a global pandemic, two venue changes, and the restrictions on social gatherings, Carly and I followed our hearts and decided not to postpone our big day.

We did, however, have to make it much smaller than we had initially planned, which was both a blessing and a curse. We missed so many people that day, and we are both aware and thankful that everyone understands how difficult that decision was for us.

To us, our wedding day was an attempt to maintain some form of normalcy in this time of confusion and uncertainty. Who knows how long Covid-19 will continue to linger without a vaccine? How long will these restrictions be in place? Would waiting a year have made a difference? These were the questions we asked ourselves, and ultimately encouraged us to go ahead with our day.

Regina also happened to be boasting a stretch of zero positive cases and schools were opening that week, so that helped affirm our decision. When the day arrived, Nature too nodded in our favour by breaking her own stretch of chilly fall-like days by providing us with one final picturesque, summer afternoon.

The entire day was perfect.

But i’ll try and stick with the theme of this blog and share some of my favourite quotes and bits of wisdom about love and marriage that I’ve found. Trust me, when you’ve been married as long as I have, you can’t help but feel like an authority on the subject.

As I said in my vows, and I’ll repeat here, Carly has given me one of the most special gifts that any lover of literature could ask for; a sort of key to decipher the abstraction and meaning that plays beneath the surface of these authors words when they write about love.

Because of Carly, their words unravel as I replace the subjects of their poetry with her image. When I do, I feel like I’m able to fall in love with her all over again through someone else’s eyes.

One such set of eyes belongs to a character in Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace, who so adequately captures my spirit more so than any other person, fiction or not, that I have ever encountered.

Pierre Bezukhov is also regarded by many to be a reflection of Tolstoy himself. And I don’t know whether my attachment to Pierre is due to the ability of a master to manipulated his reader with sentiments and narratives into thinking and feeling a certain way, or if mine and Pierre’s characters are genuinely similar.

Regardless, it would be naive and selfish of me to assume Pierre and his didactic marriage with his wife Natasha cannot be gainfully emulated and absorbed by those who find no similarities to the protagonist.

“After seven years of married life, Pierre felt a joyful, firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt it because he saw himself reflected in his wife. In himself he felt all the good and the bad mixed together and obscuring each other. But only what was truly good was reflected in his wife; all that was not entirely good was rejected. And this reflection came not by way of logical thinking, but otherwise – as a mysterious, unmeditated reflection.”

Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy continues below with the theme of the absence of logic and reason in regards to love. Relationships can be messy things and the emotions that drive them are often irrational. But that is what makes them so special. It’s the deep, meaningful prejudice in the favour of another person, which allows us to think with our hearts instead of our minds, that makes love so powerful.

“Natasha, left alone with her husband, also talked as only a wife and husband can talk, that is, grasping thoughts and conveying them to each other with extraordinary clarity and quickness, in a way contrary to all the rules of logic, without recourse to opinions, conclusions, and deductions, but in a totally special way. . . As everything in a dream is false, senseless, and contradictory, except for the feeling that guides the dream, so is this sort of communication, contrary to all the laws of reason, it was not the words that were consistent and clear, but only the feelings that guided them.”

Leo Tolstoy

This last quote reminds me of Shakespeare. It seems to me that to be a great writer all one needs to do is extrapolate on the wisdom inherent in so many of his profound and pithy words.

“To hear with one’s eyes belongs to love’s rare wit.”

Shakespeare

Pierre is a fascinating character who spends the entire novel searching for some kind of meaning in his life. In the beginning of the book, he inherits a large fortune from his father and he enters society as a desirable but awkward, immature man governed primarily by emotion and carnal pleasures.

We follow him as he fights a duel, gets into politics, marries a woman who only wants his money, thinks he is destined to assassinate Napoleon, joins the Freemasons, and gets captured by the French Army, all the while attempting to make sense of everything happening around him. The following quote might be a bit off topic, but it’s indicative of Pierre’s search for meaning and his subsequent realizations.

“They say sufferings are our misfortunes. But if I was asked if I’d stay as I was before I was taken prisoner or go through it all again, I’d say for god’s sake let me be a prisoner again. When our lives are knocked off course we imagine everything in them is lost. It is only the start of something new and good. As long as there is life there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal still to come.

Leo Tolstoy

At the end of the novel, Pierre learns to appreciate the joy of living and that true happiness comes from within. The answers to his spiritual and moral questions are eventually revealed to him through his marriage to Natasha and the children they have together. He learns that:

“The questions of how to get as much pleasure as possible from a dinner, did not exist then, as they do not exist now, for people whom the purpose of a dinner is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is family.”

Leo Tolstoy

This idea of family is something another favourite author of mine has inspired in me. This is from Kurt Vonnegut:

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“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:
“You are not enough people!”

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In a fashion that only Vonnegut could have written, he reminds us of the importance of family. And not just family, but of friends.

There is the old axiom: “It takes a village to raise a child.” I think long lasting marriages follow the same logic.

Every single person that Carly and I know has, in some way or another, provided us with life’s unique variety of happiness. Through support, companionship, friendship, or just a pal to tell dumb jokes to, they have been the foundations that successful relationships are built upon.

Our family and friends have always been there to provide us with helping hands, thoughtful discussions, and sound advice.

They’ve gifted our relationship with the enriched soil that continues to nourish us with growth and inspires our hopeful intention of returning our warm affection in similar duties.

We want to thank everyone for being a perfectly adequate amount of people.

“With his heart overflowing with love Pierre loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving”

Leo Tolstoy

The next handful of quotes are some that Carly and I had written on our tables at our wedding reception.

“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This quote is especially meaningful to me because it links Stoic philosophy to one of my favourite authors of all time. It reminds me that even if you were to lose everything, there will always be something that life can never take away from you: Your ability to love and be loved.

 “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. “

Agatha Christie

There is something about being vulnerable that brings out our most sincere manifestations of love. Vulnerability is a gateway to understanding and honesty. Too often we lie to ourselves and our partners about how we really feel which will only push us further apart.

“To get the full value of a joy, you must have someone to divide it with.”

Mark Twain

Joy is amplified when its divided, whereas suffering is diminished when its shared. And because of that, there is nothing painful that you can ever experience that won’t be made less so by the presence of someone you love.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

George Eliot

Thanks for reading, and as usual, here’s Emerson.

 “Love is a perfume you cannot pour onto others without getting a few drops on yourself. “ 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”

Seneca

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you woke up this morning in a country that isn’t in some constant state of emergency or war. You probably have access to clean drinking water, clean clothing, a physician, a supermarket, and at least some opportunity for employment.

You’re also likely not starving and you have some kind of roof over your head. And as a bonus, because of the miracle of modern medicine, odds are you won’t die of rabies, or tetanus, or polio, or whooping cough, or measles, or smallpox, or the plague. So that’s fun!

To put it into perspective, it’s sobering to remember that at this very moment, there are at least one billion people in the world who would love to trade places with you right now. One billion. With a B.

You’d think we’d be counting our blessings everyday. But, like a spoiled child, we just take everything for granted instead.

We live in a society where the perceived emotional distress we receive from some micro-aggression has a bigger impact on us than the fact that our most vital requirements for survival are being met.

In economics, that’s called the paradox of value, or the diamond-water paradox. It is the contradiction that, despite water being essential for life, diamonds fetch a higher market price.

I’ll give you an example. Think about the last time someone was rude to you. Do you remember how you reacted? How it made you feel?

If you’re like most people, the situation still lingers in your thoughts. You can remember every detail about it. You’ve repeated the story to your friends and family and it amazes you how some people can be so insensitive.

Now, what would you say if I told you that you get to sleep in a warm bed tonight? You probably wouldn’t even bat an eye. So what? You’ve always had a warm bed to sleep in.

But what would happen if your bed suddenly disappeared? Do you think you would care about that rude person anymore? I doubt it, your only concern would be with finding somewhere to sleep.

So why aren’t we grateful for our bed everyday? Why is it only when something is taken away that it concerns us?

And why does the absence of a non-essential thing have a greater impact on our mood than the presence of an essential thing?

Hierarchy of Needs

In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow presented his theory of human motivation that we call Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s here we might find some answers.

Maslow argued that the needs at the bottom of the pyramid needed to be met before we become motivated to pursue the needs on the higher levels.

So once your bed is taken away, your physiological needs take precedence, and therefore, trump all of your other problems.

But what happens when all of our basic needs are consistently being met?

There is a concept called the Law of Familiarity, and it states that if we are around something long enough, we tend to take it for granted. So accordingly, if our needs on a given level are being met frequently enough, we might take them for granted and look higher for sources of happiness or fulfilment.

I used the following quote in my last post, so it might sound familiar. I think there is something significant here. It might help explain further the paradox of value and our behaviour regarding our hierarchy of needs.

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”

ALEXANDER Dumas

So if happiness is relative, and if we take for granted the first two levels on the hierarchy for example, then not having love or a sense of belonging can become our primary source of misery if we don’t have a greater misfortune to compare it to.

I had been thinking about this idea while I was reading some interesting articles online.

One such article claimed that surfing had a diversity problem. The author argued that the sport was over populated with straight white men who “fuelled misogyny and homophobia” by”dominating” the waves.

By the way, I’m not making this up.

Another article asked their readers: “Will curing the deaf lead to a ‘cultural genocide’? This one in particular came from The Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. They claim that the deaf are a distinct ethnic group and they would be losing their cultural identity if cured.

Finally, I recently saw this headline: “Are masks giving men a licence to leer? Women report a rise in ‘aggressive eye contact’ since face coverings become commonplace as an expert warns they ‘provide anonymity’ for threatening behaviour”.

It seems as if these authors have little else to worry about if aggressive eye contact is the extent of their troubles.

It amazes me how far some of these people will go to find some form of injustice in the world that they think needs to be addressed. It’s gross. Our culture is obsessed with the ‘virtuous’ pursuit of liberating ‘oppressed’ ‘victims’

This idea is harmful for a few reasons.

Firstly, by allowing people and groups to place blame on something outside their control, they’re denied the ability and potential to change their situation on their own.

Secondly, if we take Dumas’ quote to be true, and we understand the goal of social justice -that being equity for all- then we are unknowingly inhibiting our potential to be happy by allowing individuals to take for granted the higher levels on the hierarchy.

To put simply, if we try to remove and eradicate every single misery or injustice in the world, then anything short of pure emotional bliss will be thought of as excruciating.

Life’s suffering is not distributed equally or fairly, so teaching a society to be offended by the slightest instance of inequality is not going to end well.

“What would have become of Hercules, do you think, if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar – and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.”

Epictetus

You’re probably thinking: fulfilling the needs on the hierarchy is important and it’s a noble goal. Sure, but where do we draw the line? I would argue that it’s only when we take for granted the needs on the lower levels, that we feel the need to strive for more.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that we jumble up the hierarchy so that status or self-esteem for instance are treated as more important than our health or employment. This is what happens when we take everything for granted, we develop a habit of choosing the easier paths.

Look around you. Look at the consequences of a society that rewards that type of behaviour. We have an obsession with easy credit. Canadians’ household debt levels are now at 177% of disposable income. That means we owe $1.77 for every dollar of household disposable income! 30 years ago, that figure was $.090.

How about the fact that worldwide obesity has tripled since 1975. And instead of working on losing weight and being healthy, we spend our time at the top of the hierarchy, working on self-esteem issues and pushing the body positivity movement.

Our society is like a helicopter parent, hovering around us to make sure we don’t get hurt.

But the thing is, is that we need to get hurt. Like Dumas said: “We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”

“Constant misfortune brings this one blessing: those whom it always assails, it eventually fortifies.”

Seneca

Seneca’s idea seems to linger among the wisest individuals throughout history.

The research I had done for my previous post, “Race and Politics in African American Literature,” led me to the discovery of one such individual.

I recently finished reading his autobiography called Up From Slavery. It tells of his journey from a young slave; to the principle and educator of the Tuskegee institute in Alabama; to his address at the Atlanta Exposition that garnered him national celebrity status as a great leader and orator.

I am of course speaking of the African American leader, Booker T. Washington. And as I read his book, I found myself becoming captivated by his admirable, patient, generous, and impressively stoic character. This is from Up From Slavery:

“In later years, I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reach the conclusion that often the Negro boy’s birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his task even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.”

That might be a controversial view, but think about what an attitude like that is capable of? He believed in the power of the individual. He was able to teach his students to harness and appreciate the advantage of character that misfortune hides beneath its thorns.

Washington’s philosophy was that merit, through labour, dedication, hard work, and usefulness, will reap rewards for anyone who chooses to demonstrate them, regardless of skin colour.

“The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of race” 

Booker t. Washington

Washington was motivated by a deep sense of generosity. He believed that the happiest of people were those who spent their time helping others. He was able to do the things he did in his life because he was able to let go of any feelings of resentment or anger.

Think of the activists now who are obsessed with our current social justice movements. Most of them are far too angry and resentful to create fundamental change. It’s important to remember that who we are, manifests itself into what we do. So if someone is full of negative energy; hell bent on destruction and revolution, they will re-create the same flawed system that they claim to tear down.

Even if by some miracle these people were given exactly what they wanted, can we realistically expect their characters to change too? They will still be the same ungrateful people that had taken advantage of the lower levels of the hierarchy, only now they will have been given another step on the pyramid to take for granted.

I’m reminded of a quote I saw recently.

“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

But what might happen if these people practiced gratitude instead? Would they still be fighting for surfing’s diversity problem? Or would they be happy that they live in a country where their oceans aren’t so polluted as to prevent them from partaking in the activity in the first place?

What if we all took some much needed advice from one of the greatest leaders of all time?

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

I want to be clear, I’m not saying that some change doesn’t need to happen. I’m only saying that positive change is more likely to come from a place of love and acceptance as opposed to force, bitterness, and resentment. This is from Washington again:

“I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done”

In order to find these praiseworthy actions, we need to have an eye for gratitude. I encourage you to think about the concept of gratitude for a while. Meditate on it, put its meaning in every conceivable context you can imagine and realize its potential. If you do, I promise that you’ll learn that:

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of all of the others.”

Cicero

When you feel genuinely grateful for your position in life, whatever it may be, you’ll find that there isn’t any room to take things for granted.

The path to happiness isn’t about moving higher on Maslow’s hierarchy, it lies in the appreciation of the foundations on which you are able to climb.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” 

Epicurus

We also need to understand that we don’t need to live in a world where misery and misfortune are removed. We need to learn to be grateful for them, despite how much they might hurt. We need to appreciate pain, and we need to understand that adversity builds character and that avoiding uncomfortable situations will only make us ungrateful and weak.

“The way to paradise is an uphill climb whereas hell is downhill. Hence, there is a struggle to get to paradise and not to hell.”

Al-Ghazali

“Amor Fati’ is a latin phrase and Stoic principle that I find helpful. It means to “love one’s fate.” Even if you find that your fate is plagued with difficulty, realize that you have a choice. You can choose to become a victim, and expect the world to change for you, or you can be grateful, to appreciate the opportunity you were given to strengthen your character. What’s not to love?

And as usual, here’s some more Emerson.

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanks for reading.

Featured Image: “Grace” by Eric Enstrom

“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”

Langston Hughes

In the years between 1916 and 1970, there was a massive movement in the United States called the Great Migration. It saw over six million African Americans relocate from the South and into the Northern States. Cities like Detroit, Baltimore, New York, and Chicago experienced huge shifts in their demographics. In 1910, 90% of African Americans lived in the south; after the Great Migration, only 50% remained.

The main cause of the movement was the increasingly widespread racist ideology in the Southern States. Racial segregation and discrimination, enforced by the harsh Jim Crow laws, led to the lack of social freedoms and economic opportunities for black people. Corrupt legal systems, unfair labour practices, and lynchings drove them north to search for a better life.

Another contributing factor was the shortages of labour in the northern industrial areas caused by the decrease of immigration from Europe after the start of the First World War.

This move into the densely populated cities would lead to a cultural eruption that started in one of the most popular destinations during the Migration; a neighbourhood in New York City, called Harlem.

The artistic, social, and intellectual movement which began there in the 1920’s would be called the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement. It was characterized by black artists and writers who were striving to create a new identity for themselves and to explore new modes of cultural expression.

Langston Hughes, one of the most prominent writers of the Renaissance, said that Harlem gave them an opportunity “to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”

This is from Wikipedia:

“The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and the world, viewed African Americans. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the African American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban, cosmopolitan sophistication. This new identity led to a greater social consciousness, and African Americans became players on the world stage, expanding intellectual and social contacts internationally.”

However, the personal aims of some of the leading figures varied. Some tried to challenge existing stereotypes and incite social and political change with their work, while others thought to inspire and uplift their race with optimism and to preserve African American cultural traditions, without referring constantly to racism.

Two of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, would embody these conflicts in two of America’s greatest novels: Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God published in 1937, and Wright’s Native Son, published in 1940.

These books were more than just stories. They were ideas, and what makes their author’s literary rivalry so interesting, is that much of what they disagreed on is still so relevant today. Together, the two classic works represent the lingering dichotomy of left and right wing politics.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

This is from the first line of Hurston’s novel.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”

Hurston’s opening paragraph echoes a sentiment felt by the ex-slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass in his autobiography:

“Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition… My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:– “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip!.”

Hurston’s continues with her second paragraph: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

Hurston cleverly words her opening line using “man’s wish,” “his dreams” and “the life of men” to be interpreted as humanity as a whole. It’s not until the second paragraph that we understand more clearly Hurston’s intentions.

It’s here we get an early glimpse into the theme of feminism that permeates through the entire novel.

Unlike her contemporary writers, Hurston chose to write about love, sexuality, womanhood and individuality, many of which were ideas that were downplayed and minimalized under the greater issues of racial inequality.

She was an anthropologist who dedicated much of her life studying African American folklore, language, and culture. The speech in Their Eyes is written in the dialect of the south, in early 20th century Florida, where the novel takes place.

The story follows a woman named Janie Crawford, and it begins as Janie returns to her home town and tells her story to an old friend.

The plot is broken down into three narratives, each representing a different lover in Janie’s life.

Her first marriage is to an older farmer named Logan Killicks. Their relationship is loveless and bleak and she’s treated like an employee rather than a wife. She was forced into it by her grandmother who, with good intentions, tried to situate Janie into a financially safe and secure relationship.

‘Taint Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it’s protection.”

Her grandmother was a slave, and her hope of a peaceful and uneventful life for Janie was influenced by the absence of safety and comfort during her own life. Janie on the other hand, not having had the terrible experience of living through slavery, dreams of a more fulfilling life for herself. It reminds me of a quote from Alexander Dumas, who said:

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.”

Alexandre Dumas

After two years with Logan, she runs away with man named Joe Starks. He is ambitious and charismatic and he takes her with him to the first all black community in the United States.

Fun Fact! Hurston actually grew up in this community in Florida, called Eatonville.

Joe is obsessed with money and status. He becomes the mayor of the town and builds a community that includes a general store and a post office. He gets rich and treats Janie like a trophy as he flaunts her as the mayor’s wife. Even though Janie has both wealth and power here, she’s excluded from attending local events and is kept from participating in the town gossip around the store.

The novel jumps ahead 20 years without much of a paragraph describing the interval. It’s suggestive of an uneventful and bland existence for Janie. Eventually, her second husband dies and Janie meets her third lover.

His name is Vergible Woods. Everyone calls him Tea Cake. He is several years her junior, but the two fall in love and they move to the Everglades to work in the muck and pick beans.

It’s a vivid contrast to her past marriages with Joe or Logan. Tea Cake doesn’t treat her like an employee like Logan had done, nor exclude her like Joe had done. He makes Janie feel free and liberated and even teaches her to play checkers, something Joe kept from her.

Tea Cake isn’t perfect though. At one time he steals Janie’s money, runs off, and gambles it away. He also beats her occasionally, not because he wants to, but because he feels his society demands it of him.

Still, Janie, Tea cake, and their community have fun, and they’re happy.

But the good times don’t last long. During a hurricane that storms through the Everglades, Tea Cake is bitten by a Rabid dog and gets rabies. Janie is forced to shoot and kill Tea Cake who, in his madness, tries to kill her.

After the trial, in which the judge takes pity on her and recognizes the genuine love she had for Tea Cake, she’s absolved of her crime. Janie then moves back to Eatonville, with money, freedom, individuality, and experience; satisfied, for the first time with herself and at peace with her existence.

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” 

Zora Neale Hurston

Throughout the novel, Janie is denied something in all three of her marriages, but she learns something about herself from each one of them. It wasn’t until her last marriage with Tea Cake, where she is finally treated like an equal, that she finds her sense of self and individual fulfilment.

Their Eyes is about love and self-discovery. Its optimistic and uplifting. Even though the ending is sad, we see a transformation that had taken place in Janie. After she tells her story, her friend phoeby declares: “Lawd! Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied with mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this.”

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches” 

Zora Neale Hurston

Unfortunately, Their Eyes wasn’t received very well at the time of its publication. Hurston lived in relative obscurity and poverty for most of her life. It wasn’t until the 1975, fifteen years after Hurston’s death, that Alice Walker (The Colour Purple) published an essay documenting her search for Hurston’s unmarked grave, and revived the literary classic.

Walker defended Hurston saying she was: “wildly in love with people of colour.” When people read her work they “saw this unstoppable joy, I mean, your not supposed to be joyful, your down there being lynched, you know, your supposed to be always picketing something, and if your not picketing at least you’ll be sending our leaflets and fighting. But to actually have joy in your life is a great victory. That is what I feel Hurston left us; this ability to understand what true success is. True success is about being happy, it’s about doing what you have to do to survive. You have your good times, you have your dances, you have music, this is it. She shared this with us, at great cost to herself.”

Walker found Hurston’s grave and had a tombstone with the words: “A Genius of the South” inscribed on it.

One of the novel’s most vocal critics was Richard Wright, who accused Hurston of “Voluntarily continuing in the novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘the white folks’ laugh.”

Wright felt that Their Eyes carried: “no theme, no message, no thought.” He claimed that: “her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”

Strong words, but it wasn’t all negative.

“Miss Hurston can write,” he admitted, “Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.”

Wright’s criticisms were borne out of his opposing political ideology. Hurston was a conservative and her political views, however subtle, shine through her work.

In the novel, one of the most influential black leaders of the late 19th century, Booker T. Washington, is mentioned. His name is brought up when a hateful and disliked woman calls him a: “white folks’ nigger.” Janie disagreed, she believed him to be a great man.

Washington had controversial views about the path to equality. He felt that blacks had to accept discrimination for a while and should concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity.

In a rivalry, much like Hurston’s and Wrights, W.E.B. Du Bois, a black intellectual and political thinker disagreed with Washington’s ideas. He said that they would serve only to perpetuate white oppression. Du Bois fought for political action and a civil rights instead.

Hurston didn’t believe in what she called the: “sobbing school of Negrohood,” nor did she feel, in her words: “tragically coloured.”

She believed in empowering individuals to obtain economic and social justice on their own, without the help of liberal government interventions. Despite her novel only lightly touching on race and politics, she was frequently vocal about her opinions in letters and other writings:

“Suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit.”

“If I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.”

She rejected, mockingly, the need of social welfare: “We were brought here against our will. We were held as slaves for two hundred and forty-six years. We are in no way responsible for anything. We are dependants. We are due something from the labours of our ancestors. Look upon us with pity and give!”

“Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Three years after Their Eyes was published, Richard Wright would publish his Novel, Native Son. Wright would say in a speech given after the novel was published that “The birth of Bigger Thomas (the main character) goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect.”

Native Son

In a striking contrast between the two novels, Native Son is violent, angry, and hateful. It’s a gripping and tense train wreck of psychologically descriptive and harrowing accounts of racism in the early 20th century.

Wright would comment that after he had seen some reviews come in of a previous book of short stories that he had written called Uncle Tom’s Children: “I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”

Wrights intention with the novel was to awaken the realities of racism in America. He felt that the nation faced a great danger, one that would destroy the country if it wasn’t properly addressed.

“I felt that if I drew the picture of Bigger truthfully, there would be many reactionary whites who would try to make of him something that I did not intend. And yet, and this is what made it difficult, I knew that I could not write Bigger convincingly if I did not depict him as he was: that is, resentful toward whites, sullen, angry, ignorant, emotionally unstable, depressed, and unaccountably elated at times, and unable even, because of his own lack of inner organization which American oppression had fostered in him, to unite with the members of his own race.”

“The more I thought of it the more I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, if I did not try to make him a living personality and at the same time a symbol of all the larger things I felt and saw in him, I’d be reacting as Bigger himself reacted: that is, I’d be acting out of fear if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me.”

In the novel, Bigger, his mother, sister, and brother live in a cramped, one bedroom apartment on the south side of Chicago in the 1930’s. Wealthy real estate owners refuse to rent out apartments to black people in white neighbourhoods, because of that, the south side, or the”black belt,” is overpopulated and the rent is artificially inflated.

Wright’s descriptions of Bigger’s thoughts are somber, and hopeless.

“…he hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.”

Bigger gets a job as a driver for the Daltons, a wealthy, white family who want to give twenty-year-old Bigger an opportunity. On his first night, Mary, the daughter, asks Bigger to drive her to the university. However, she skips class and makes him pick up her boyfriend instead, a man named Jan. The three of them go to a restaurant in the black belt. Throughout the night, Mary and Jan treat Bigger like an equal, but it’s humiliating to him.

“Did not white people despise black skin? Then why was Jan doing this? Why was Mary standing there so eagerly, with shining eyes? What could they get out of this? Maybe they did not despise him? But they made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him… He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to black skin. It was a shadowy region, No Man’s Land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood upon.”

“At that moment he felt toward Mary and Jan a dumb, cold, and articulate hate.”

His treatment by Mary and Jan confuses him. It runs contrary to his entire understanding of socially acceptable behaviour at the time.

“The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.”

Bigger drives the couple around and they get drunk together. They drop Jan off and he takes Mary home. Because she is intoxicated, she needs to be helped up the stairs and into her room. As Bigger is putting Mary into bed, Mary’s mother is heard calling for her. She is blind and she slowly approaches Mary’s bedroom. Bigger, fearing that he would be accused of raping Mary if he was caught upstairs in her room, holds a pillow over Mary’s head to keep her quiet. Bigger unintentionally suffocates Mary. When Mary’s mother approaches, she smells the liquor and thinks the unresponsive Mary has just passed out and she leaves the room.

Bigger burns Mary’s body in the furnace and plans to blame the whole thing on Jan, who was a communist and was viewed with the same sort of animosity and suspicion as Bigger was.

“Though he had killed by accident, not once did the need to tell himself that it had been an accident. He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said. And in a certain sense he knew that the girl’s death had not been accidental… His crime seemed natural; he felt that all of his life had been leading to something like this.”

The story continues with Bigger murdering his own girlfriend, Bessie, because he felt that she would reveal too much. Eventually he is caught and goes on trial for the death penalty. In court, the people seem to care less about the death of the Bessie than they do Mary.

Like Hurston, Wright would also face some hard criticism for his novel. His most noteworthy critic was the author James Baldwin. This is from an article from PushBlack.org: “The Revealing Conflict between Baldwin and Wright”:

“Baldwin’s main critique of “Native Son” was that it reinforced dangerous racial stereotypes about Black people. He argued that Wright used these disgusting depictions of Blacks to appease his white audience and sell more books. In essence, Wright “sold out” his own community by giving his characters stereotypical traits to make them palatable for whites in hopes to elicit their sympathy. Bigger Thomas, the story’s protagonist, was a murderer and rapist motivated by animal-like impulses while his supporting characters were petty criminals, mammies, and Negroes satisfied with an average life in the ghetto.”

“Representation matters in more than just novels, and that is why Baldwin took the time to address Wright. He understood that these were more than mere words on a page; these words carried consequences. If Blacks are perpetually portrayed as urban, criminal, lazy, and aggressive, people may truly believe that all Blacks fit those descriptions. This leads to a public that devalues the lives of Blacks and sees us as expendable. And ultimately, Baldwin believed Wright contributed to these destructive narratives.”

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

James Baldwin

In the novel, Bigger’s lawyer is a communist named Max, his defence is based on the unconscious effects of systemic racism and segregation. He points out all the unfair prejudices that Bigger had faced his whole life and he accuses society as a whole of killing Mary and Bessie.

“We are dealing here with an impulse stemming from deep down. We are dealing here not with how man acts toward man, but with how man acts when he feels that he must defend himself against, or adapt himself to, the total natural world in which he lives.”

Wright himself was a Marxist, and his ideologies are channeled through Max in the novel.

Marxism is a philosophical and economic theory that suggests that human societies and their development are the result of material conditions rather than ideals. It opposes private property and our current capitalist system. Marxists argue that our actions, our thought processes, and our ideas are caused by the existing class struggles present in our society.

Critics of Marxism claim that unlike socialism, capitalism isn’t a man made system at all, but is the beneficial consequence of the assumption that individuals are primarily motivated by self-interest; a variable that Marxists ignore.

I was surprised to learn that the founders of the current Black Lives Matter organization have stated publicly that they are “trained Marxists.” The mission statement on their website says that, in addition to liberating black people, the they want to, “alongside comrades,” “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

For Wright, it was a way for humanity to exist on equal terms. He would write that “I was a communist because I was a Negro. Indeed the Communist Party had been the only road out of the black belt for me.”

CONCLUSION

Despite Hurston and Wright both striving for equality for themselves and their race, why do their books contain such opposing ideologies? Although Hurston might have avoided politicizing her works, she was still aware of the racial inequality present in society, she just believed in a different solution.

The economist Thomas Sowell, who was himself a Marxist early in his career for the same reasons as Wright, wrote a book called A Conflict of Visions to help simplify and explain the root of these political conflicts.

In it, he breaks down two concepts that he calls the “unconstrained vision” and the “constrained vision.”

This is from Wikipedia:

“Sowell argues that the unconstrained vision relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially good. Those with an unconstrained vision distrust decentralized processes and are impatient with large institutions and systemic processes that constrain human action. They believe there is an ideal solution to every problem, and that compromise is never acceptable. Collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection. Sowell often refers to them as “the self anointed.” Ultimately they believe that man is morally perfectible. Because of this, they believe that there exist some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.”

It’s this “morally perfectible man” that is absolutely necessary for Marxism and socialism to work. In this view, intention matters more than consequences. Social change and public policy are implemented with the ideal solution in mind, not real world outcomes.

“Sowell argues that the constrained vision relies heavily on belief that human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition. Compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs. Those with a constrained vision favour solid empirical evidence and time-tested structures and processes over intervention and personal experience. Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest.”

According to the constrained vision, Wrights novel, despite illustrating the justified resentment and hate that Bigger felt, might have negative real world consequences. What message is he sending to his readers? If we remove accountability for our actions, what might the ramifications of that look like?

Alternatively, when we look at Hurston’s novel with the lens of the unconstrained vision, she seems to be suppressing the potential of her race. By painting a simple and joyful picture, she’s accused of encouraging satisfaction with the status quo and inhibiting growth through inaction.

Who do you agree with? Wright? or Hurston? Which vision do you believe in?

Thanks for reading.

Featured image is called Aspiration (1936), by the Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas.

Photo Credit: De Young Museum

This was a speech given by the author David Foster Wallace as the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.

Photo credit: Kenyon College.

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

If at this moment you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete…

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue-it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home-you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

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

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

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to. But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

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

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

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

I wish you way more than luck.

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other people’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for.”

Socrates

This will be my tenth post! It’s hard to believe how quickly time passes sometimes. I’d like to thank everyone for reading, and for the kind words. A few of you have even told me that I’ve inspired you to read more. It’s hearing encouraging words like that that make this all worth while for me.

It’s a difficult thing to put your heart and soul into something like this. To have it be aired out like dirty laundry, for it to be criticized and ridiculed.

Every post that I’ve written so far I’ve had to fight with. I’ve had to overcome enormous amounts of debilitating self-doubt and fear. Everyday I wrestle with some nagging voice that tells me that I’m embarrassing myself, that I’m not good enough, and that I should quit.

So why continue? Why put myself through that? Life is too short to be doing things that make you unhappy.

It’s that type of attitude that makes us even more unhappy in the long run, not the other way around. It’s exactly why we have a hard time creating good, long lasting habits, because the pay-off isn’t immediate. If we don’t see results quickly enough, we get discouraged and we lose our motivation.

But motivation is only the half of it.

Everyday we have internal debates with ourselves about making positive changes in our lives, and most of the time we lose. The cynical and negative side always seems to have the best and most effective arguments.

In order to push yourself though hard times, or to pursue a meaningful goal, you have to be able to win that fight.

You have be confident and disciplined. You have to be able to not care what other people think, and it starts with how you think.

That’s why these quotes have helped me so much. They allow me to think about problems in a different way.

They have helped me change the way that I approach fear and doubt. They help me fend off the unhealthy mindsets that occasionally creep up on me, and they inspire me to take chances, avoid negativity, and give me the confidence to believe in myself.

I hope you enjoy them and that you find them as useful to you as they have been to me.

1.

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.” 

Thomas Hardy

A common thing our society does is measure success using the wrong metrics.

We praise people who are already successful, as if being successful makes them worthy of our approval.

Rather than wealth or fame, what if you measured success by a person’s character? Or their faithfulness to commitment? Or their generosity?

If you change your definition of success, you can save your admiration for the people who deserve it. You might also discover that failure might be less likely and confidence easier to obtain if you’re driven by integrity as opposed to greed or your own ego.

2.

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Calvin Coolidge

I read something similar recently from the comedian Steve Martin: “Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.”

Success is directly related to how much you want it. It’s as simple as that.

This is from an interview with Terry Crews on The Tim Ferris Show:

“Now, the way your life is, truthfully, you want it. Now, that’s hard to say because a lot of people are like no way. There’s so many other obstacles. There’s this and this and this and this. But the truth is, if you wanted something different, you’d change it. And that hit me. Like it’s scary because, if I failed, or if I showed up wrong or messed up on something, I was like I didn’t really do what it took to get it.”

“But that’s kind of the way fitness, success, any goal, any aspiration, you must be it now. That book, the thing you want to write, or that thing you want to accomplish, you have to be it now. You are an author. So, now, what do authors do? Authors write. And when authors write, they have a book. And I’m telling you, it sounds really, really simple. But once you get it, forever, you will never think of anything the same way again.”

3.

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

Seneca

This one pairs well with #4.

4.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, be better.”

Mary angelou

I don’t think my writing is very good. Actually, I know its not. But these words have consistently inspired me to continue.

I read a tweet once from a prominent blogger who said that: your first 99 blog posts will be bad, but your 100th will be great.

I’m ten percent there!

It’s all about re-framing how you think about failure. It isn’t something that you should avoid; it’s something that’s necessary in order to improve. As long as you continue to learn, it should be thought of as proof that your getting better, not worse.

5.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Winston Churchill

6.

“The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.”

Theodore Roosevelt

7.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Archilochus

There is a common saying that you hear often: “quality over quantity.”

Obviously, it has its value in certain contexts, but when it comes to personal growth, it can be detrimental. It encourages perfectionism, something that isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to learn.

Sometimes you can expect too much from yourself. You compare your abilities to the abilities of others who are at the top of their game. What you should be doing instead is comparing your abilities to theirs when they were at a similar skill level as you.

You need to understand that everyone was a beginner once.

8.

“Every activity that I engage in has to contain the possibility of internal growth, otherwise it ends up either, “Making a living” or “Passing time” – two ways of going through life that feel to me like a living death”

Alan Arkin

This one is not so much about actionable advice or a shift in perspective, it’s just a reminder to myself to keep learning; to not get stuck in the status quo.

Not progressing and developing personally, is to me, worse than failure.

9.

“Our doubts are traitors and cause us to miss the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

Shakespeare

Fear is an important and essential tool for your survival. The emotion is hard-wired into your nervous system. When you sense danger or feel threatened, your body reacts physiologically by triggering a fight-or-flight response.

Fear can be your best friend when you need it, but it can also be your worst enemy when you don’t. The hard part is, is that you can’t always tell the difference.

I’m fearful of sharing my writing with people. I feel like an imposter that will be found out and exposed, and I’m scared of the embarrassment that would accompany failure if I was to ever give up.

But re-thinking fear has allowed me to ask myself: whats the worst that could happen? Am I in any danger? Is it going to kill me? If not, it’s probably not worth being fearful about it.

I’m reminded of a Marcus Aurelius quote:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

This is a another way I frame things when I think about fear: When I’m long dead, are people going to remember me if I wouldn’t have had the courage to leave something behind? Probably not.

If you avoid uncomfortable situations you might be better off in the short term, but at what cost?

Life is bigger than you. Your time here is short, it’s not worth keeping your imaginary fears and apprehensions.

10.

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To overcome fear, the stoic philosopher Seneca, would willingly put himself in scenarios that he was most fearful of.

For example, to overcome a fear of being poor, he would go days at a time “content with the scantiest and cheapest fare.” By doing so, he proved to himself that life is never as bad as he imagined it. “We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.”

Another stoic philosopher named Cato, did something similar. He would dress in embarrassing clothes so that people would make fun of him. He was training himself to be comfortable in high stress situations. “He would accustom himself to be ashamed only of what deserves shame, and to despise all other sorts of disgrace.”

11.

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

I would have written sow. Don’t you think it would have sounded better? Plant. More like face plant, Robert.

Anyway, this is another example of how you can shift your perspective. Understand that things take time, that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Be patient. Learn to enjoy the journey and not just the destination.

12.

“If you wish to be out front, then act as if you were behind.”

Lao Tzu

The people who believe themselves to be at rock bottom in their lives are the ones with the clearest trajectory for success. They have nothing to lose. What’s the worst that could happen? They could fail and hit rock bottom?

Some of the most successful people have had to overcome impossible odds. They were abused, or bullied, or told that they couldn’t do something. Because of that, they we’re driven to succeed, to prove the world wrong.

Think about the amazing things that people accomplish when they’re told, for example, that they’ll never walk again after an accident. The world is full of personal stories like that. These people don’t let their handicaps hold them down. They use it as fuel.

The beautiful thing is that: it’s just a mindset. It doesn’t have to be influenced by experience alone. We can teach ourselves to think that way without all the negative external events.

13.

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

Frederick Douglass

I struggle with this one all the time. Especially now. It’s difficult to be honest without offending someone.

But to be encouraged toward truth by the people that are remembered for fighting for truth, makes for good company when the public may turn their back on you.

14.

“I do not care so much what I am to others, as I care to what I am to myself.”

Michel De Montaigne

Same idea as the Fredrick Douglass quote. Still, it’s worth repeating.

15.

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”

Henry David Thoreau

Jordan Peterson has a chapter in his book, 12 Rules For Life, titled: “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.” In it, he explains how we lack respect for ourselves because we alone are aware of everything about us that makes us imperfect. We don’t think that we deserve attention from others because of that awareness. On the other hand, when we think about other people, we think that they deserve the necessary support and care that they need.

Next time your being hard on yourself, ask if that’s how you would treat your partner or friend.

If you want success, you have to feel worthy of that success. You have to believe that you deserve it. And you do.

16.

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

Johann Von Goethe

17.

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in one’s own sunshine.” 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He could have said: you are your own worst enemy. We’ve all heard that one before.

But there is a subtle difference. You might not deserve to have enemies, and you might not be deliberately acting against your own best interests.

Emerson’s quote is different because it means you all deserve your own sunshine indiscriminately, and that you might just be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Meaning that you just haven’t learned to think about something in a more meaningful or helpful way.

18.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I would think about writing, I would ask myself “What do you have to say that hasn’t already been said?”

The answer was always discouraging, but I’m comforted by the idea that no one else will ever have my unique perspective. No one has or ever will have the exact same set of experiences in the same order that i’ve had them in.

Each of you has a story unlike any other. You might not re-invent the wheel, but you can put your own spin on it. See what I did there?

Many of the following quotes touch on these themes of individuality and non-conformity. They are some of the biggest obstacles we need to deal with in order to overcome self-doubt.

19.

“It is better to fail at originality than to succeed in imitation.”

Herman Melville

20.

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

Ralph Ellison

21.

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”

George Hegel

22.

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric”

Bertrand Russel

23.

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong”.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you haven’t already noticed, I included a heavy dose of Emerson. Most of his quotes are from a wonderful and powerful essay he wrote called Self-Reliance. Its had a huge influence on me. I’ll put the link Here if you want to check it out.

I’d also like to give a shout out to a good friend of mine, Dustin Ritter, who was generous enough to draw this awesome portrait of Emerson for me. You can visit his Instagram page @dustin.j.ritter to see his impressive body of work.

You might notice that Dustin is a dog lover. He’s honed his craft by providing personalized portraits of people’s pets as memorable keepsakes. Most of his other work consists of the portraits of comedians, actors, and musicians, of which the last category, he belongs to himself. You can listen to the newest Dustin Ritter Band album, The Weightless Effect, on Spotify.

24.

Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there.

Marcus aurelius

I interpret that internal strength to mean confidence.

We all have the potential to be confident, but most of us think it’s caused by something outside of ourselves.

When we come across a successful person for example, we often think that they’re confident because they’re successful. In most cases, the opposite is true: they’re successful because the are confident.

Confidence is a choice.

25.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Confidence might be a choice, but too much of it can be mistaken for arrogance.

The difference between the two lies in your intention.

It wasn’t long after I started this blog that I learned a valuable lesson about humility. I wrote a piece about Jordan Peterson recently, and after I published it, I sent the link to his daughter Mikhaila on Twitter. She told me that she loved it, and she re-tweeted it.

She has roughly 70k followers, and in the matter of a few hours I had over two thousand people reading my article.

This modest increase in readers was enough to seduce me into thinking more about growing my audience. My ego had momentarily caused me to forget the real reason that I created my blog; to share wisdom, practice my writing, and to leave something behind.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it would be nice to grow an audience and to have recognition, but I noticed how my mindset had changed. I was thinking about how to pander and appeal to readers as opposed to being genuine.

I learned that arrogance thrives off of external validation and comparing yourself to others.

Real confidence, on the other hand, means that your not afraid to be vulnerable. It means that your quest for success or truth is authentic and honest. It shows that you don’t care what other people think and that your willing to learn.

I’m sure you have all heard of “playing hard to get,” or “fake it ’till you make it,” but these “tricks” will usually only get you into trouble. Eventually, other people will realize that your actions are inconsistent with the rest of your character.

True confidence is being comfortable with who you are. Being honest, and being true to yourself.

26.

“Because of self confidence with which he had spoken, no-one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”

Leo Tolstoy

You also have to be somewhat foolish to be confident. It’s like taking a leap of faith.

You have two minds: an individual mind and a societal mind. Everything you do gets filtered through those two.

Often times to fit in, you ignore our own mind so that you can blend in with the crowd.

But when you do focus on your own mind, you lose that safety net that society provides.

As a consequence, your contrasting opinions can becomes vividly transparent, and they can seem foolish in comparison. But if you believe in what you say, and you say it with conviction, people just might believe you.

It’s like that quote from Peter Pan:” The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease to be able to do it.”

27.

“I have great faith in fools – self-confidence is what my friends call it.”

Edgar Allen Poe

28.

“All you need in this life, is ignorance and confidence, then success is sure.”

Mark Twain

29.

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, your’e right.”

Henry ford/matt lowry

30.

“The obstacle is the way.”

Ryan Holiday

This is a common stoic principle that I think about often. When we are confronted with doubt and fear, the best way around it, is through it.

Seneca said that: “Misfortunes are virtues opportunity.”

Marcus Aurelius said: “Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not “This is misfortune,” but “To bear this worthily is good fortune.” 

Epictetus said that: “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”

31.

“It had long come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things”

Leonardo Da vinci

And they don’t have to be big things either. This is from Naval Ravikant: “Play Iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

Gary Keller is the author of the best-selling book titled, The One Thing. The book breaks down the benefits of asking ourselves continuously: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

It’s also an especially helpful tool when life gets overwhelming and stressful.

32.

“Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.”

Les Brown

Learning from success is just as important as learning from failure. Giving up too early on compounding interest defeats the whole purpose of it.

33.

“Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.”

George Eliot

Thanks for reading.

Before you go, I’d like to quickly mention a few bloggers/writers that have inspired me lately.

Scott Bryan writes a weekly newsletter called 1-2-3 Miscellany. In it, he breaks down: an interesting ethical dilemma, a random news story, and a random oddity. He’s an excellent writer and the subject matter is always super interesting. His last one talks about the disconnection of humanity in the language used by tech companies when they think about their users. He argues that it lacks empathy and respect citing terms like “targets”, “viral”, “engagement,” and “funnels.” Check his site out Here. Or follow him on twitter @ScottDbryan.

Another great writer who I’ve stumbled upon is Joshua Nzambimana. You can visit his site Here, or follow him on instagram @joshuathinks. He’s incredibly smart and he makes the most interesting observations on subjects like imagination, solitude, death, and perception. He’s worth checking out.

 

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” 

Franz Kafka

In December of 2015, I would begin to understand the significance of Kafka’s words.

During an intense and sobering three month period, I would read six of the greatest war novels ever written. I would came to know on an intimate level the remarkable power of books and their transformative capabilities.

These books would slowly chisel away at the previously held ideas I had on the subject, much of them vulgar, misinformed, and naive.

Up until that point in my life, my shallow understanding of war was partly made up of the empty facts, figures, and dates that I memorized in history class. The boring stuff like politics and statistics, which were to me at the time, emotionally disconnected and meaningless.

The majority of the rest of my experience came from television, movies, and video games. Most of them were violent, and aggressive, and probably much more gruesome than they needed to be. It’s no wonder why they piqued the interest of so many young men like myself.

Its been shown that testosterone is associated with risk-taking and competitiveness, which are linked to aggression. That might explain men’s fascination with war and perhaps why over 90% of prison inmates are men.

It’s not surprising either then that, historically, war has been predominantly male. A successful soldier was one who embodied our cultures most revered masculine traits: Leadership, strength, courage, independence, and confidence.

They are the very same traits that mark the hero in these movies I grew up watching. Valiant and triumphant; they represented the glorified ideals of selflessness and bravery.

The thing I didn’t know then, that I know now, was that most of it was socially engineered propaganda aimed to feed a narrative of patriotism. If you read my last post, What Can We Learn From Dystopian Fiction, we know what our governments are capable of. It’s something they do well, and often. 

This is from the CBC: How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military. “No country in the world churns out as many images of itself as the military hero… like the United States does. That is a unique cultural phenomenon.”

That’s where people like me acquired much of their distorted view of war, from the people who are in the business of profiting from it. Here’s another quote from the article:

“The head of the Office of War Information was Elmer Davis who said, ‘The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize they’re being propagandized,'”

Unfortunately, compared to books, movies are largely devoid of deep meaningful emotion. Filmmakers manufacture phoney emotion using sensationalized music and visuals to create artificial feeling. Think of how often it rains when a character is sad. Pay attention to the rhythm and tone of the music when the character is happy. Lighting is another technique used to generate a desired sentiment.

When we watch something, we’re corralled into thinking a certain way. The speed at which an audience is exposed to new ideas doesn’t leave much time for us to consciously examine them as they happen.

Reading on the other hand, allows us to think. We have time to pause and reflect on the information were taking in.

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” 

Voltaire

These novels provided me with an alternative understanding of war. They gave me powerful and articulate accounts of its horrors and realities from the perspectives of the people that it affected the most.

Maybe besides A Red Badge of Courage, these books don’t focus on glorified ideals of bravery and patriotism. Instead, they contain raw displays of humanity, profound concepts of love, life, and death, centered around a backdrop of conflict.

I wrote this piece to highlight some the most memorable passages and quotes from these novels and to show how their ideas changed me, and my world view, forever.

The books are fiction, but the events and the actions of the characters were based on real experiences. Non-fiction gives you facts and theories, but it’s fiction that gives you the emotions to pair them with; they don’t just tell you information, they show it to you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it well when he said that: “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” Albert Camus said something similar when he said: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

To me, literary fiction is to a painting, what a non-fiction book is to a photograph. A great artist can make a painting look as real as a photo, that’s what these authors do with truth.

Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge Of Courage, is highly regarded and praised for its realism, which is interesting, because he didn’t actually fight in the war. It’s been said that he interviewed veterans for their experiences. He might have also gotten information from The Century Magazine’s Civil War series. It was a collection of stories written by those who experienced battle.

In the novel, a young soldier named Henry Flemming struggles with his idealized concepts of glory and courage. He continuously questions his own character and thinks that he will run when the fighting starts. He is jealous of the wounds that the other soldiers have. He wishes he had a ‘red badge of courage’ like them that would allow him to avoid the fighting and to win glory for himself.

As he marches toward the front line, he encounters the bodies of dead soldiers, and he has mixed feelings of fear, confusion, and disgust.

“The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.”

The valour and glory that he expects the dead to have earned by dying in battle doesn’t look very dignified and glorious to him. He soon finds out the ugly truth of how chaotic and messy battle is.

“The men dropped here and there like bundles. The captain of the youth’s company had been killed in an early part of the action. His body lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting, but upon his face there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn. The babbling man was grazed by a shot that made the blood stream widely down his face. He clapped both hands to his head. “Oh!” he said, and ran. Another grunted suddenly as if a club had struck him in the stomach. He sat down and gazed ruefully. In his eyes there was mute, indefinite reproach.”

Towards the end of the novel, Flemming ends up fighting valiantly and he wins the respect of his officers. In the heat of the moment, the fighting works him into a frenzy. He becomes callous and bloodthirsty. He shows us how war can bring out the worst in us.

“His fingers twined nervously about his rifle. He wished that it was an engine of annihilating power. He felt that he and his companions were being taunted and derided from sincere convictions that they were poor and puny. His knowledge of his inability to take vengeance for it made his rage into a dark and stormy specter, that possessed him and made him dream of abominable cruelties. The tormentors were flies sucking insolently at his blood, and he thought that he would have given his life for a revenge of seeing their faces in pitiful plights.”

There are debates as to whether Crane’s novel is pro or anti-war. I could probably be convinced either way. It has moments where it details the grim realities of battle, but at the same time shows us the emotional and psychological toll it takes on its participants. Compared to the rest of the novels in this post however, I would say it’s pro-war.

Like Kafka said, this book affected me like a disaster, and it was working at the frozen sea within me. I was grappling with these heavy philosophical questions that it caused me to reflect on.

What kind of soldier would I have been? Would I have been brave enough to venture away from cover, out of my trench or fox hole, while bullets and shells were wizzing by my head?

It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that often times bravery is just the product of dumb luck. Death could just mean being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Another question I would ask myself was, if under similar circumstances, are we all capable of such cruelty and apathy? Would I have be able to cope with the knowledge of having committed acts of violence like these?

We’re told that killing is wrong, morally and lawfully. Is necessary war a satisfying justification?

I think to be a good soldier, you have to be extremely comfortable with the unknown. Maybe thats why these books hit me so hard, precisely because I would have been a bad soldier. I’m not even comfortable with not knowing the answers of these questions, let alone if was going to live or die every day.

“So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed.” 

STEPHEN CRANE

Next I read All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a short novel published in 1920. It was written from the perspective of a German soldier named Paul during World War One. It’s a chilling and somber description of the disconnection and loss of innocence that young men were subjected to.

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.” 

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

The following quote comes from a scene in the book where Paul gets a temporary leave of absence from the front line. He goes back home to visit his family, but he feels isolated and distant from the life he once knew.

“I breath deeply and say over to myself: ‘You are at home, you are at home.’ But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there is my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.”

Erich Maria Remarque

Interesting Fact! Gertrude Stein would famously refer to the men that fought in WW1 as The Lost Generation. The name would eventually become attributed to a group of talented young writers including Gertrude Stein herself, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, and Sylvia Beach.

There is a particular scene from the book that feels as real to me now as one of my most vivid memories. I will never forget it.

Paul gets lost on the battlefield, and seeks cover in a shell hole. A french soldier jumps into the hole that Paul is in, and Paul stabs him with his beyonet. The man manages to stay alive for a few hours as Paul tends to his wounds and gives him water. In quick succession Paul goes from anger, to fear, to guilt, to empathy, and sorrow. As he lays next to the body, the author describes his emotions.

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?” 

 ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

He opens the dead man’s wallet and looks at pictures of his family. Because of the deep remorse and pity he feels, he vows to send money to them to make amends. Eventually, the reality of his surroundings jar him from loose from his revery. He admits that he likely won’t do the things that he promised the dying man. He makes his way back to his comrades to fight another day, as life, and the war, rages on.

“Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;–when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.” 

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

These books show in violent detail the unglorified side of war. They show the deep psychological trauma and lingering effects of the war even after it’s over. They dont’t feel so much like propaganda. They’re not about big explosions and action or patriotism. They show the lunacy and irrationality of war, themes that are covered thoroughly in the next book I read.

Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel, Catch-22, is an anti-war comedy about a witty and stubborn World War Two bomber named Yossarian. It’s a hilarious and clever book that pokes fun at the chaos of military bureaucracies and the logical irrationality that is inherent in war.

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. ‘That’s some catch, that catch-22’.”

The novel frequently uses ridiculous, circular logical reasonings like that. Another example is a scene where a character is accused of a crime and interrogated. The men interrogating him don’t know what the crime is. They think by asking him questions, he will reveal to them what it is that he’s guilty of.

Another is about the dead man that shares a tent with Yossarian. A man’s belongings are shipped to the air-base and put in Yossarians tent, but the owner died in combat before he could claim them. He isn’t yet declared dead on paper by the army so his luggage can’t be removed and sent home. He and his belongings represent a sort of bureaucratic limbo in the novel.

Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.

Joseph Heller

Heller also critiques capitalism and the Military Industrial Complex (the informal alliance between a nations military and the defence industry that supplies it).

These themes are embodied by one of the novels most fascinating characters, a mess officer named Milo Minderbinder. While on the air-base he creates a company called M&M Enterprises. The first “M” stands for Minderbinder, he adds the second “M” to make it seem like his operation isn’t a one man show. Eventually, his company earns enough money – by buying an selling goods on the black market – to equip his own fleet of bombers. He contracts missions out to the germans, who end up bombing and killing some of the Americans on his own base. He gets court-marshalled for treason, but he hires an expensive lawyer with the large amount of money his company made. He gets off the hook by defending capitalism and citing it as the source of America’s current economic prosperity.

Despite the laughs, the novel still has one of the most chilling and gruesome images of war that i’ve ever read. It could be the striking contrast between the relatively light subject matter and comedy of the rest of the novel that made it seem much more horrible to me at the time. If you have a weak stomach, i’d recommend skipping ahead past the second line. 

---

“But Snowden kept shaking his head and pointed at last, with just the barest movement of his chin, down toward his armpit. Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the coveralls just above the armhole of Snowden’s flak suit. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. 

A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God’s plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared – liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. 

Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away dizzily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat. The tail gunner woke up while Yossarian was vomiting, saw him, and fainted again. Yossarian was limp with exhaustion, pain and despair when he finished. He turned back weakly to Snowden, whose breath had grown softer and more rapid, and whose face had grown paler. He wondered how in the world to begin to save him. ‘I’m cold,’ Snowden whimpered. ‘I’m cold.’

‘There, there,’ Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. ‘There, there.’ 

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. 

The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

 ‘I’m cold,’ Snowden said. ‘I’m cold.’ 

‘There, there,’ said Yossarian. 

‘There, there.’

He pulled the rip cord of Snowden’s parachute and covered his body with the white nylon sheets. ‘I’m cold.’

‘There, there.’ “

---

That passage was based on Heller’s own experience as a bomber in WW2. He flew 60 missions. On his 37th his own B-25 was hit by flak, wounding a gunner.

“Until then, it was all play,” he said. After that, he became terrified of flying. “I was so brainwashed by Hollywood’s image of heroism that I was disappointed when nobody shot back at us.”

Next I read two of Hemingway’s books: A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

A Farewell to Arms is a novel about an ambulance driver named Frederic Henry who is on the Italian front during World War One.

There is a quote that is attributed to Jospeh Stalin, who said that: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” To me, thats what this novel drilled into me in a profound way.

There is a scene where a group of soldiers are hit by a mortar shell, several of them are wounded or dead.

“Outside the post a great many of us lay on the ground in the dark. They carried wounded in and brought them out. I could see the light come out from the dressing station when the curtain opened and they brought some one in or out. The dead were off to one side. The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were as red as butchers.”

When Henry makes his way into the the tent he’s asked by a doctor if he was hit badly.

“In the legs.”

“It’s not serious I hope. Will you have a ciggarette?”

“Thanks.”

“They tell me you lost two drivers.”

“Yes. One killed and the fellow that brought you.”

“What rotten luck. Would you like us to take the cars?

“Thats what I wanted to ask you.”

“We’d take good care of them and return them to the villa. 206 aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a charming place. I’ve see you about. They tell me you’re American.”

“Yes.”

When Henry is finally taken away in the ambulance, he feels blood drip on him from a haemorrhage of the man above him. The man is dead.

“The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone. It was cold in the car in the night as the road climbed. At the post they took the stretcher out and put another one in and we went on.”

The rest of the novel follows Henry as he spends time in the hospital. He meets a beautiful nurse named Catherine Barkley. The two fall in love while she takes care of him. After he recovers, he returns to the front.

The Italians are being pushed back and are forced to retreat. There is a traffic jam and Henry and his men take their vehicles off road to avoid an aerial assault by the enemy. As they escape they encounter their own military police who are interrogating the soldiers and assassinating them. They are accusing them of betraying their country. Henry escapes by jumping into a river.

He later finds Catherine, and they manage to escape to the bordering and neutral country of Switzerland. They live in peace for a while and Catherine gets pregnant. There are complications when she gives birth. The child is stillborn. Catherine suffers a haemorrhage and dies herself.

“You can’t come in now.”

“Yes I can,” I said.

“You can’t come in yet.”

“You get out,” I said. “The other one too.”

“But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-bye to a statue.”

The novel explores the duality of war and love. The characters fall in love during war time, and their relationship is destroyed in peace time.

The deaths of the soldiers on the front and the death of his wife and child show the striking contrast of emotions we feel during war and peace. Henry and the doctor seem to be making small talk when he is on the dressing table. Death doesn’t have time to be mourned when its happening in war. Like Paul’s attitude in All Quiet in the Western Front after he kills the French soldier, everything gets blanketed over and trivialized by the subject’s vast scale. Something that i’ll be returning to later.

 “Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.” 

 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hemingway’s 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls is about an American named Robert Jordan who is fighting in the Spanish Civil War during the late 1930’s. He is part of a group of Guerrillas that are supported by the Soviet Union to fight against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The Spanish nationalists are supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Jordan is tasked with destroying a bridge that is crucial for the advancement of the Fascist troops.

The story describes the changing political climate in Spain at the time. It shows the horrible gravitation toward atrocity that is inherent in uncivilized man as a result of war’s lawlessness. One of the Guerrillas hiding in the Spanish mountains that Jordan meets is a young woman named Maria. Her parents were murdered by the fascist regime. Her hair had been cut off, and she had been brutally tortured and gang-raped.

I remember reading this book around the time I heard of the Winter Soldier Trails. They were a group of young men from the Vietnam War. They came forward and revealed publicly the horrors that they had seen during combat. Here is a link to trailer of the documentary. They tell of their harrowing experiences of watching innocent civilians be killed and their homes destroyed.

In his book Men at War: What Fiction Tell Us About Conflict, Christopher Coker points out that women are the chief victims of war. The mothers and wives that were left behind. The women who were subjected to the shocking and ruthless tendencies of men at war. See the Rape of Nanking for further proof of the evil that lurks beneath the surface of so many men.

After Maria tells Jordan her story he tries to rationalize the irrational, needing, as we all do sometimes, somewhere to place the blame.

“There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder people and no crueler. And who understands them? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all. To understand is to forgive. That’s not true. Forgiveness has been exaggerated. Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain has never been a christian country. It has always had its own special idol worship within the church. Otra Virgen Maś. I suppose that was why they had to destroy the virgins of their enemies. Surely it was deeper with them, with the Spanish religion fanatics, than it was with the people. The people had grown away from the Church because the Church was in the government and the government had always been rotten. This was the only country that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the Inquisition now, all right.”

“They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. ‘But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.”

Leo Tolstoy

In march of 2015 I finally ended my journey into war with Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace. When I look back now, I realize I couldn’t have picked a better book to close that chapter in my life. Tolstoy would become a pacifist later in his life, and it shines through the end of his novel.

“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.”

LEO TOLSTOY

Tolstoy’s monumental novel, published in 1869, is one of the world’s greatest titans of literary achievement. It follows several different families in Russia and chronicles their lives during the Napoleonic Wars, from 1805 to 1812.

It’s praised for its depth, realism, complexity, historical accuracy, and writing. In a single piece of work, Tolstoy captures the vast social and cultural realities of an entire country from hundreds of different perspectives. He creates accurate, carefully descriptive, and detailed accounts of the military strategies and events of the Napoleonic War. He understood human life on a level that I can’t even begin to comprehend.

Tim O’Brien, The author of the The Things They Carried once said that: “In the fog of war story-truth can get closer to actual truth.”

This is from the other Russian Literary giant, Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“My strong conviction is that a writer of fiction has to have most profound knowledge—not only of the poetic side of his art, but also the reality he deals with, in its historical as well as contemporary context. Here [in Russia], as far as I see it, only one writer excels in this, Count Lev Tolstoy.”

One of the most valuable things I learned while reading the book was from its enormous scale. There are 559 characters in the novel.

When you become intimate with these characters, when you hear their backstories, their lives become three dimensional and complex. They cease to become statistics, as Stalin put it.

Think about of your own life for a moment, you’re the center of your whole universe; the whole world revolves around you. Think about how important relatively small mundane things are to you. Think of the planning and saving you’ve done. Think about how hard you’ve worked for the things you care about. Think about the story you’ve created and the life you’ve put together. Think about your children. Think about the other people in your life that care about you.

As I read these books, I had a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea that every single one of the millions who died fighting had lives of their own. It’s near impossible to imagine each unique life, separate from everyone else.

Try to think of someone new every Rememberance Day. Walk in their shoes for a moment. Imagine their hopes and dreams? What were they good at? Who did they love? Do it for ten people, or a hundred. Every year. You can do it for 1000 individuals every single year for the rest of your life and you’ll still have only scratched the surface.

Every year when I see the poppies fall from the ceiling during the memorial service, I think about this idea. It’s when we group them all together that they lose their significance.

Sometimes I imagine the dead saying to me: “Is this is what your choosing to spend your time doing? I died for you so you could do this? What a waste.” It’s a crude motivator.

It reminds me of a quote from Charles Bukowski:

“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”

Charles Bukowski

These books helped me learn to be grateful. They help us put things into perspective. I learned that most things don’t matter much when you compare them to war. Everything pales in comparison to death. Momento Mori, or remember death, is a helpful stoic principle that reminds us of our own mortality. 

I realize this went a little long, I apologize. For those of you who made it this far, thanks for reading. And as usual, when there is truth afoot, Emerson isn’t too far away.

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Further Reading

These are some other books on the topic that have made me.

The Illiad By Homer

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Last Convertible by Anton Myrer – Special shout out to the wonderful person that recommended this book to me. Thank you!

The featured image is Pablo Picasso’s – Guernica, 1937 – Depicting the Spanish Civil War.

“Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” 

Heinrich Heine

That was written by the German Poet in 1821, in his play Almansor. It was a reference to the burning of the Qua’ran during the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity in Spain in the 15th century.

Taken out of context, Heine’s ominous words are commonly misinterpreted to be a prediction of the Holocaust. He wasn’t a prophet, he just understood that: “thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder…”  He understood that repressing and destroying opposing religious texts would culminate in the destruction of the people that adhere to those religions.

Heine would make a more chilling prediction in 1834. This time however, there was no risk of it being misconstrued: “A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”

A hundred years later, In 1933, the German Student Union would set the stage for Heine’s play. They would conduct a nationwide book burning campaign. They would target books and materials that were opposed to Nazi ideologies, and anything they deemed to be: “Un-German.”

They were trying to synchronize German culture and language with the ideologies of the Nazi Party.

Joseph Geobbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, said at one of the public burnings: “The soul of the German people can again express itself. Those flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they light up the new!”

A decade earlier, something similar was happening in the newly formed Soviet Union.

In 1922, soon after the USSR was established, the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs was created. Its function was to censor any works of art or literature that they felt were harmful to their communist ideologies.

Books, for example, that dealt with themes of class struggle and food shortages were censored to prevent peasant uprisings. They also banned religious propaganda, and other “politically incorrect materials.”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” 

Haruki Murakami

The horrors of totalitarianism in Europe in the 20th century, would inspire the English author George Orwell to shift the focus of his writing towards politics. He would start with the satirical allegory Animal Farm, in 1945.

Four years later, he would publish his legendary novel, 1984.

Written as a cautionary tale, 1984 is an unrelenting story of total government control, censorship, mass surveillance, violent oppression, and the hopeless, forceful submission to power.

The main character, Winston Smith, works for the “Ministry of Truth”. His job is to doctor photos and censor newspaper clippings so that they align with the Party’s ever-changing political agenda. Orwell sums up the Party’s philosophy:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past”

George Orwell

Fun Fact! Orwell’s wife Eileen worked in the Department of Censorship in the Ministry of Information in London.

Censorship and language are major themes in the novel. Words like “unperson” and “doubleplusgood” are examples of the new language forced upon working class citizens, called Newspeak. It was created as a means to restrict vocabulary, limit self-expression, and inhibit thought.

Orwell explains the sinister purpose of using censorship and language to manipulate and control:

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

George Orwell

He elaborates on that idea in the novel by explaining how 2+2=5 can become objective truth if the Party desires it to be.

“And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?”

George Orwell

Orwell’s books, and even his name, carry on today as a warning to us. “Orwellian” is an adjective that describes a situation or idea that threatens the security of an open and free society.

Which is why it’s disturbing to realize that some parts of 1984 are still so relevant today. Think: Edward Snowden, government mandated restrictions of free speech, and an increasingly militarized police force.

Four years after 1984 was published, the American author Ray Bradbury would publish his own dystopian novel called Fahrenheit 451. The title gets its name from the temperature at which paper catches fire.

Bradbury wrote the novel to express concerns of potential book burnings in his own country during the rise of McCarthyism.

The protagonist of the novel, Guy Montag, is a “fireman” who’s job it is to find and burn books (which gradually became unpopular in the futuristic society anyway). The government eventually banned them. The reason given was that books were confusing and difficult to read, which was upsetting to the people.

While on the job one day, Montag witnesses a woman who chooses to die with her massive book collection. It causes him to reflect:

‘‘There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Ray Bradbury

Montag becomes curious as to why they are burning the books and he steals a few to take home to read. He questions the governments motives and quits his job. Unable to get support from his drugged-up, screen-obsessed society, he goes on the run. He meets stragglers like himself, likeminded people who all have the common goal to revive their culture through literature.

The city was bombed shortly after Montag escaped. Thats some pretty heavy symbolism, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.” 

Ray Bradbury

Margret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale, written in 1985, is another dystopian portrayal of an oppressive government. The novel is set in the not-so-distant-future of the United States, in a totalitarian state called Gilead.

The novel focuses on the brutal patriarchal society and the trials of the subjugated women who persevere despite their relentless sufferings.

Following the same formula as Orwell and Bradbury, books are illegal in the fictional Gilead.

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.”

Margaret Atwood

There is one more noteworthy book that is frequently grouped with the others in the genre: Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World.

The citizens in Huxley’s story are not violently forced into submission by their oppressors, instead they are active participants in the states control over them.

The year is 2450, the people are happy and content. They have no responsibility, no families, no children. Babies are developed in test tubes. They are genetically modified and phychologically conditioned from birth to fit into their predestined roles in society. They have been indoctrinated into embracing consumerism, mindless entertainment, sexual promiscuity, and drug use.

“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle.”

Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers who governs the “World State, explains their objective: “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy- to preserve you so far that is possible, from having emotions at all.”

The government also filters and censors information from academic institutions. This is Mond’s reasoning behind rejecting “a masterly piece of work”:

“It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge..”

The World Controllers don’t just use censorship and pleasure to control, they use something called “hypnopedia,” or sleep teaching. It’s the underlying source of everyone’s prejudices and ideologies. It works by having a recording of repeated words and suggestions broadcasted through speakers while the children sleep.

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…Suggestions from the State!”

The novel’s plot follows two people as they go on a holiday from the city to a reservation outside civilized society. There are still small traces of primitive man in these secluded villages.

They meet a man there named john (everyone will call him the Savage). They find out his mother was raised in civilized society but was lost and left on the reservation for 20 years. She gave birth to her son and raised him herself, something that hadn’t been done in the World State in centuries.

The Savage grew up worshiping primitive gods. He grew up reading Shakespeare, he grew up with tradition, language, ritual, fear, shame, anger and guilt. He grew up with everything that was kept from people in civilized society.

It wouldn’t be a very convincing dystopian novel if books weren’t banned. Mond justifies their absence: “There was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes.”

John was able to discover the power of language that the rest of society was being deprived of:

“He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same)–they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real.”

When john and his mother are found, they are taken back to the city. John is treated like a circus animal, something to be stared at.

John has a breakdown and makes a scene as he tries to get people to snap out of their soma filled stupors. He gets apprehended and has a discussion with Mustapha Mond.

The savage asks why the people don’t read Shakespeare.

“Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here.”

“Even when they’re beautiful?”

“Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.”

“That’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacfrificed high art.”

The savage gets fed up with to the fruitless discussion in which Mond seems to have all the answers. His response at the end of their conversations is one of the novels most memorable quotes:

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.”

Conclusion.

These Dystopian works of fiction take societies to their extremes in an effort to expose their flaws. They act as distant marks on the horizon. If we can see ourselves heading in their direction, even a little bit, we need change our course.

Huxley would write in 1958, that the ideas he expressed in his novel were approaching faster than he had initially anticipated. He would die a few years later in 1963.

I can’t imagine what he would think now.

I think he would be shocked at our society’s dependence on consumerism and convenience. Our lives revolve around abundance, comfort, ease, instant gratification, social media, and pop culture. We’re dumbing ourselves down with easy dopamine. We’re a culture that is obsessed with technologies that hinder our ability to think.

We don’t need a tyrannical government to censor our language and culture, we’re doing it to ourselves. It’s something the author of The Gulag Archipelago understood:

“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.”

Aleksandr solzhenitsyn

We are the villains in Huxley’s story. Someone else may be dictating the terms, but we’re accepting them with open arms. Bradbury puts it even more bluntly:

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury

According to the Official Journal of American Academy of Paediatrics, an average child is exposed to 40,000 advertisements a year on television alone. They estimate that 3000 ads can be viewed in a single day on the internet, television, billboards, and magazines combined.

If you want an eye-opening deep dive into the subject of marketing and public relations, I would recommend watching the four part BBC documentary, called The Century of the Self. You can watch it on YouTube, i’ll put the link here. It talks about how governments and corporations have used Freud’s theories and psychological techniques to control people in a time of mass democracy and individualism.

Heres a quick summary:

“To many in politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly, the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?” -BBC publicity.^[6]

We’re living in our own type of dystopia. But we can do something about it. We can take advantage of the freedoms that we still have. Reading is redemptive and literature is morally instructive. It increases our capacity for empathy and allows us greater freedoms of expression.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” 

NELSON MANDELA

During Nelson Mandela’s 27 year imprisonment, it’s been said that he relied on Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations to help him persevere.

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

Gustave Flaubert

Lets hear from Heine one last time, who reminds us why these dystopian novels have so much to teach us. Without books and knowledge, whether from burning or banning, or by choosing not to read:

“You are nothing but the unconscious servants of those men of thought, who, often in modest silence, have plotted out all your doings in advance”

Heinrich Heine

Thanks for reading.