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For most of us, the title The Shining first calls to mind the Stanley Kubrick film, not the Stephen King novel from which it was adapted. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that the former has entirely eclipsed the latter, the enormous difference between the works’ relative cultural impact speaks for itself — as does the resentment King occasionally airs about Kubrick’s extensive reworking of his original story. At the center of both versions of The Shining is a winter caretaker at a mountain resort who goes insane and tries to murder his own family, but in most other respects, the experience of the two works could hardly be more different.
How King’s The Shining became Kubrick’s The Shining is the subject of the video essay above from Tyler Knudsen, better known as CinemaTyler, previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on such auteurs as Robert Wiene, Jean Renoir, and Andrei Tarkovsky (as well as a seven-part series on Kubrick’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey). It begins with Kubrick’s search for a new idea after completing Barry Lyndon, which involved opening book after book at random and tossing against the wall any and all that proved unable to hold his attention. When it became clear that The Shining, the young King’s third novel, wouldn’t go flying, Kubrick enlisted the more experienced novelist Diane Johnson to collaborate with him on an adaptation for the screen.
Almost all of Kubrick’s films are based on books. As Knudsen explains it, “Kubrick felt that there aren’t many original screenwriters who are a high enough caliber as some of the greatest novelists,” and that starting with an already-written work “allowed him to see the story more objectively.” In determining the qualities that resonated with him, personally, “he could get at the core of what was good about the story, strip away the clutter, and enhance the most brilliant aspects with a profound sense of hindsight.” In no case do the transformative effects of this process come through more clearly than The Shining: Kubrick and Johnson reduced King’s almost 450 dialogue- and flashback-filled pages to a resonantly stark two and a half hours of film that has haunted viewers for four decades now.
“I don’t think the audience is likely to miss the many and self-consciously ‘heavy’ pages King devotes to things like Jack’s father’s drinking problem or Wendy’s mother,” Kubrick once said. Still, anyone can hack a story down: the hard part is knowing what to keep, and even more so what to intensify for maximum effect. Knudsen lists off a host of choices Kubrick and Johnson considered (including showing more Native American imagery, which should please fans of Bill Blakemore’s analysis in “The Family of Man”) but ultimately rejected. The result is a film with an abundance of visual detail, but only enough narrative and character detail to facilitate Kubrick’s aim of “using the audience’s own imagination against them,” letting them fill in the gaps with fears of their own. While his version of The Shining evades nearly all clichés, it does demonstrate the truth of one: less is more.
Related content:
Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining
How Stanley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Seven-Part Video Essay
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies
The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I usually send out my newsletter at the end of each month. It’s just a collection of the posts published that month (you should subscribe if for some reason you don’t check this site every day). I thought it would be nice maybe to start each newsletter with some personal introduction of what has taken place over the month, and hey, I may as well make that a blog post. So here are some highlights and thoughts from June.
I went to the EDEN conference in Dublin, with Maren who was keynoting. Although I’ve been to a couple of conferences since lockdown, this was the first time meeting lots of international people who I hadn’t seen since the before times. It was a fun conference, lots of good talks, and well organised. I still feel as though my conference stamina is underdeveloped compared to pre-pandemic – it’s all that talking to people. And I’m not entirely sure I want to get back to that level either. Two or three a year seems a nice level now.
We gained a further round of GO-GN funding this month from the Hewlett Foundation, which is great news. This remains the best project I’ve worked on, and this year we celebrate 10 years since its founding.
I read 10 books this month, the pick of them was Fingers Crossed by Miki Berenyi (of 90s shoegaze group Lush). Her childhood is pretty messed up, and her account of the sexism of the music industry (particularly Brit pop) is scathing, but she tells it all with a dry sense of humour. After reading some male rock biographies, which think tales of blocking up toilets and hanging out with groupies are way more entertaining than they actually are, this was a refreshing entry in the rock biography genre.
It was also a delight to see Audrey Watters return with a Substack newsletter, Second Breakfast. I’ve paid up for a year, and it’s already a treat to have it ping into my inbox. I’ve missed her writing and insight.
AI angst continues to dominate much of the ed tech and beyond discourse. I’ve been in meetings at the OU where it is nothing short of outright panic, reminiscent of this scene:
Stay calm everyone.
Even though it's often employed innocently, there's an inherent element of tragedy in the phrase "ahead of their time" when it's associated with unsung or overlooked geniuses in a field. If one is "ahead of their time," odds are they'll never live to see the impact their existence inspired or receive the adulation they so richly deserve. — Read the rest
Helping verbs are curious, AND fascinating
English has a big bagful of auxiliary verbs. You may have learned these as “helping verbs” in elementary and middle school, since they are sometimes described as verbs that “help” the main verb express its meaning. There are even schoolroom songs about them. They are a curious bunch.
The auxiliaries include the modal verbs (can and could, shall and should, will and would, may and might, and must). The verb that follows a modal is in its bare, uninflected form: can go, could go, must go, and so on. There are also a number of semi-modal auxiliary verbs (such as dare, need, ought to, had better, have to, and used to). Some are compound words spelled with a space and several have unusual grammatical properties as well, such as being resistant to contraction or inversion. And in parts of the English-speaking world, modals can double up, yielding expressions like might could, may can, might should, and more.
Aside from the modals, semi-modals, and double modals, the primary auxiliaries are forms of have, be, and do, which are inflected for tense (is versus was, has versus had, do versus did), number (is versus are, has versus have), and person(is versus am versus are, do versus does). These auxiliaries help to indicate verbal nuances like emphasis, the perfect and progressive aspects, and the passive voice. Here are some examples, adapted from Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:
Those who did catch sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove … (emphatic do and perfect aspect had)
The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. (progressive aspect)
His shirt was patched so many times that it was like the sail … (passive voice)
The primary auxiliaries come before the negative adverb not and allow contraction to it.
They didn’t catch sharks.
His shirt wasn’t patched.
He hadn’t taken the sharks.
And they play a role in questions by hopping to the left over the subject
Did they catch sharks?
Was his shirt patched?
Had he taken the sharks?
or by being copied at the end in a tag question.
They caught sharks, didn’t they?
His shirt was patched, wasn’t it?
He had taken the sharks, hadn’t he?
Main verbs like see and go and walk don’t do any of those tricks.
Things get even curiouser, however, because the helping verbs have and do have doppelgangers that actually are main verbs.
The old man did his chores.
His shirt had a tear in it.
How do we know these are main verbs and not helping verbs? Well, for one thing, they are the only verbs in the sentence. For another, they can occur with other helping verbs:
The old man had done his chores.
His shirt had had a tear in it all day.
And if you make the sentences questions or negate them, you have to add a form of auxiliary do.
Did the old man do his chores?
Did his shirt have a tear in it?
The helping verb be also has a doppelganger main verb, but the forms of main verb be behave pretty much just like the helping verb. More curious behavior, keeping us on our toes. The first sentence below has past tense main verb was followed by an adjective; the other two have the past tense helping verb was.
The shark was tenacious. (main verb was)
The shark was never caught. (auxiliary was)
The old man was trying his best. (auxiliary was)
But all three was forms hop to the left in questions.
Was the shark tenacious?
Was the shark ever caught?
Was the old man trying his best?
The curious behavior of helping verbs goes on and on, with different dialects doing different things. If you’ve read many British novels or watched British television you might have noticed forms of helping verb do popping up in elliptical sentences. Here’s an example from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers: “Sam frowned. If he could have bored holes in Gollum with his eyes, he would have done.” (For a study of these forms, check out Ronald Butters’s 1983 article “Syntactic change in British English propredicates.”)
In African American English, the auxiliary done lends a completive meaning to events. You can see it in these dialogue examples from August Wilson’s Fences and from Walter Mosely’s Blond Faith: “Now I done give you everything I got to give you!” and “Didn’t she tell you that Pericles done passed on.” For more on this use of done, take a look at the chapters by Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk and by Charles E. DeBose in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language.
We’ve just scratched the surface of auxiliaries. I hope you’ve become curious about these curious words.
Featured image by Alexander Grey via Unsplash (public domain)
When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” And yet, both as a species and as individuals in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic culture, we are living under the tyranny of more — a civilizational cult we call progress. We have forgotten who we would be, and what our world would look like, if instead we lived under the benediction of enough.
How we got here, and what we might do about it, is what photographer, writer, illustrator, and wilderness guide Miriam Körner explores in Fox and Bear (public library) — a love letter to nature disguised as a modern fable of ecological grief and hope, partway between The Iron Giant and The Forest, yet entirely and consummately original, painstakingly illustrated in cut-out dioramas from reused and recycled cardboard, narrated with poetic tenderness and a passion for possibility.
Every day, Fox and Bear went into the forest to gather what there was to gather and to catch what there was to catch.
Day after day, the two friends forage and hunt together, watch the sun set and listen to the birds sing.
Life was good, thought Bear.
Picking berries and mushrooms,
hunting ants and mice,
catching rabbits and birds
kept them busy day after day.
But eventually, these joyful activities turn into tasks and the two friends get seduced by the trap of efficiency — that deadening impulse to optimize and operationalize doing at the expense of being.
As Bear and Fox begin gathering more and more seeds, catching more and more birds, laboring to water the seedlings and feed the birds, they suddenly find themselves with no time to watch the sunset or listen to birdsong.
This is how the allure of automation creeps in — Fox sets about inventing mechanical means of accomplishing the daily tasks, in the hope of liberating more time for leisure: an egg collector, a bird feeder, a water sprinkler, a berry picker.
Instead, the opposite happens as the forest begins to look like an industrial palace evocative of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s cautionary observation that “we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely.”
All this enterprise ends up consuming the time for leisure, subsuming the space for joy, affirming Hermann Hesse’s century-old admonition that “the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”
Every day now, Fox and Bear cut down more trees to burn in the steam engines, so the egg collector could collect eggs and the water sprinkler would water the plants. At night, they filled the bird feeder and fixed the berry picker and built more cages until it was almost sunrise.
As Fox keeps dreaming up bigger and bigger engines, faster and faster machines, Bear finds himself “so tired he had no imagination left.”
Suddenly, he wakes up from the trance of busyness and remembers how lovely it was to simply wander the forest “and gather what there is to gather and catch what there is to catch.”
And, just like that, the two friends abandon the compulsions of progress and return to the elemental joy of simply being alive — creatures among creatures, on a world already perfectly tuned for every creaturely need. We have a finite store of sunsets in a life, after all.
Couple Fox and Bear with the Dalai Lama’s illustrated ethical and ecological philosophy for the next generation, then revisit the forgotten conservation pioneer William Vogt’s roadmap to civilizational survival and Denise Levertov’s stirring poem about our relationship to the natural world.
Illustrations courtesy of Miriam Körner
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. And yet the more we learn about how the mind constructs the world, the more we see that our experience of reality is a function of our emotionally directed attention and “has something of the structure of love.” Philosopher Martha Nussbaum recognized this in her superb inquiry into the intelligence of emotion, observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”
A century before Nussbaum, the far-seeing Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (February 16, 1891–June 21, 1976) took up these questions in a series of BBC broadcasts and other lectures, gathered in his 1935 collection Reason and Emotion (public library).
Macmurray writes:
We ourselves are events in history. Things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us.
They happen primarily through our emotional lives — the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves.
Three decades before James Baldwin marveled at how “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” Macmurray considers the universal resonance of our emotional confusion, which binds us to each other and makes our responsibility for our own lives a responsibility to our collective flourishing:
All of us, if we are really alive, are disturbed now in our emotions. We are faced by emotional problems that we do not know how to solve. They distract our minds, fill us with misgiving, and sometimes threaten to wreck our lives. That is the kind of experience to which we are committed. If anyone thinks they are peculiar to the difficulties of his own situation, let him… talk a little about them to other people. He will discover that he is not a solitary unfortunate. We shall make no headway with these questions unless we begin to see them, and keep on seeing them, not as our private difficulties but as the growing pains of a new world of human experience. Our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind. When we see them steadily in this universal setting, then and then only will our private difficulties become really significant. We shall recognize them as the travail of a new birth for humanity, as the beginning of a new knowledge of ourselves and of God.
At the heart of this recognition, this reorientation to our own inner lives, lies what Macmurray calls “emotional reason” — a capacity through which we “develop an emotional life that is reasonable in itself, so that it moves us to forms of behaviour which are appropriate to reality.” The absence of this capacity contributes both to our alienation from life and to our susceptibility to dangerous delusion. Its development requires both a willingness to feel life deeply and what Bertrand Russell called “the will to doubt.” Macmurray writes:
The main difficulty that faces us in the development of a scientific knowledge of the world lies not in the outside world but in our own emotional life. It is the desire to retain beliefs to which we are emotionally attached for some reason or other. It is the tendency to make the wish father to the thought. .. If we are to be scientific in our thoughts… we must be ready to subordinate our wishes and desires to the nature of the world… Reason demands that our beliefs should conform to the nature of the world, not the nature of our hopes and ideals.
In consonance with Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s insightful insistence on the courage to disillusion yourself, Macmurray adds:
The strength of our opposition to the development of reason is measured by the strength of our dislike of being disillusioned. We should all admit, if it were put to us directly, that it is good to get rid of illusions, but in practice the process of disillusionment is painful and disheartening. We all confess to the desire to get at the truth, but in practice the desire for truth is the desire to be disillusioned. The real struggle centres in the emotional field, because reason is the impulse to overcome bias and prejudice in our own favour, and to allow our feelings and desires to be fashioned by things outside us, often by things over which we have no control. The effort to achieve this can rarely be pleasant or flattering to our self-esteem. Our natural tendency is to feel and to believe in the way that satisfies our impulses. We all like to feel that we are the central figure in the picture, and that our own fate ought to be different from that of everybody else. We feel that life should make an exception in our favour. The development of reason in us means overcoming all this. Our real nature as persons is to be reasonable and to extend and develop our capacity for reason. It is to acquire greater and greater capacity to act objectively and not in terms of our subjective constitution. That is reason, and it is what distinguishes us from the organic world, and makes us super-organic.
And yet reason, Macmurray argues, is “primarily an affair of emotion” — a paradoxical notion he unpacks with exquisite logical elegance:
All life is activity. Mere thinking is not living. Yet thinking, too, is an activity, even if it is an activity which is only real in its reference to activities which are practical. Now, every activity must have an adequate motive, and all motives are emotional. They belong to our feelings, not our thoughts.
[…]
It is extremely difficult to become aware of this great hinterland of our minds, and to bring our emotional life, and with it the motives which govern our behaviour, fully into consciousness.
This difficulty is precisely what makes us so maddeningly opaque to ourselves, and what makes emotional reason so urgent a necessity in understanding ourselves — something only possible, in a further paradox, when we step outside ourselves:
The real problem of the development of emotional reason is to shift the centre of feeling from the self to the world outside. We can only begin to grow up into rationality when we begin to see our own emotional life not as the centre of things but as part of the development of humanity.
In a sentiment evocative of E.E. Cummings’s wonderful meditation on the courage to feel for yourself, Macmurray adds:
There can be no hope of educating our emotions unless we are prepared to stop relying on other people’s for our judgements of value. We must learn to feel for ourselves even if we make mistakes.
An epoch before neuroscience uncovered how the life of the body gives rise to emotion and consciousness, Macmurray echoes Willa Cather’s insistence on the life of the senses as the key to creativity and vitality, and writes:
Our sense-life is central and fundamental to our human experience. The richness and fullness of our lives depends especially upon the richness and fullness, upon the delicacy and quality of our sense-life.
[…]
Living through the senses is living in love. When you love anything, you want to fill your consciousness with it. You want to affirm its existence. You feel that it is good and that it should be in the world and be what it is. You want other people to look at it and enjoy it too. You want to look at it again and again. You want to know it, to know it better and better, and you want other people to do the same. In fact, you are appreciating and enjoying it for itself, and that is all that you want. This kind of knowledge is primarily of the senses. It is not of the intellect. You don’t want merely to know about the object; often you don’t want to know about it at all. What you do want is to know it. Intellectual knowledge tells us about the world. it gives us knowledge about things, not knowledge of them. It does not reveal the world as it is. Only emotional knowledge can do that.
Emotional reason thus becomes the pathway to wholeness, to integration of the total personality — a radical achievement in a culture that continually fragments and fractures us:
The fundamental element in the development of the emotional life is the training of this capacity to live in the senses, to become more and more delicately and completely aware of the world around us, because it is a good half of the meaning of life to be so. It is training in sensitiveness… If we limit awareness so that it merely feeds the intellect with the material for thought, our actions will be intellectually determined. They will be mechanical, planned, thought-out. Our sensitiveness is being limited to a part of ourselves — the brain in particular — and, therefore, we will act only with part of ourselves, at least so far as our actions are consciously and rationally determined. If, on the other hand, we live in awareness, seeking the full development of our sensibility to the world, we shall soak ourselves in the life of the world around us; with the result that we shall act with the whole of ourselves.
A generation after William James made the then-radical assertion that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” and an epoch before science began illuminating how our bodies and our minds conspire in emotional experience, Macmurray considers what the achievement of emotional reason requires:
We have to learn to live with the whole of our bodies, not only with our heads… The intellect itself cannot be a source of action… Such action can never be creative, because creativeness is a characteristic which belongs to personality in its wholeness, acting as a whole, and not to any of its parts acting separately.
This wakefulness to the sensorium of life, he argues, is not only the root of emotional reason but the root of creativity:
If we allow ourselves to be completely sensitive and completely absorbed in our awareness of the world around, we have a direct emotional experience of the real value in the world, and we respond to this by behaving in ways which carry the stamp of reason upon them in their appropriateness and grace and freedom. The creative energy of the world absorbs us into itself and acts through us. This, I suppose, is what people mean by “inspiration.”
And yet we can’t be selectively receptive to beauty and wonder — those rudiments of inspiration — without being receptive to the full spectrum of reality, with all its terrors and tribulations. Our existential predicament is that, governed by the reflex to spare ourselves pain, we blunt our sensitivity to life, thus impoverishing our creative vitality and our store of aliveness. Macmurray writes:
The reason why our emotional life is so undeveloped is that we habitually suppress a great deal of our sensitiveness and train our children from the earliest years to suppress much of their own. It might seem strange that we should cripple ourselves so heavily in this way… We are afraid of what would be revealed to us if we did not. In imagination we feel sure that it would be lovely to live with a full and rich awareness of the world. But in practice sensitiveness hurts. It is not possible to develop the capacity to see beauty without developing also the capacity to see ugliness, for they are the same capacity. The capacity for joy is also the capacity for pain. We soon find that any increase in our sensitiveness to what is lovely in the world increases also our capacity for being hurt. That is the dilemma in which life has placed us. We must choose between a life that is thin and narrow, uncreative and mechanical, with the assurance that even if it is not very exciting it will not be intolerably painful; and a life in which the increase in its fullness and creativeness brings a vast increase in delight, but also in pain and hurt.
The development of emotional reason, Macmurray argues, is the development of our highest human nature and requires “keeping as fully alive to things as they are, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, as we possibly can.” It requires, above all, being unafraid to feel, for that is the fundament of aliveness. He writes:
The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it, and is the subordinate partner in the human economy. This is because the intellect is essentially instrumental. Thinking is not living. At its worst it is a substitute for living; at its best a means of living better… The emotional life is our life, both as awareness of the world and as action in the world, so far as it is lived for its own sake. Its value lies in itself, not in anything beyond it which it is a means of achieving.
[…]
The education of the intellect to the exclusion of the education of the emotional life… will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life, in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself. When it is the persistent and universal tendency in any society to concentrate upon the intellect and its training, the result will be a society which amasses power, and with power the means to the good life, but which has no correspondingly developed capacity for living the good life for which it has amassed the means… We have immense power, and immense resources; we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely. I should trace the condition of affairs almost wholly to our failure to educate our emotional life.
In the remainder of the thoroughly revelatory Reason and Emotion, Macmurray goes on to explore the role of art and religion in human life as “the expressions of reason working in the emotional life in search of reality,” the benedictions of friendship, and the fundaments of an emotional education that allows us to discover the true values in life for ourselves. Complement it with Dostoyevsky on the heart, the mind, and how we come to know truth and Bruce Lee’s unpublished writings on reason and emotion, then revisit Anaïs Nin on why emotional excess is essential for creativity.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Lying” in computer-generated texts: hallucinations and omissions
There is huge excitement about ChatGPT and other large generative language models that produce fluent and human-like texts in English and other human languages. But these models have one big drawback, which is that their texts can be factually incorrect (hallucination) and also leave out key information (omission).
In our chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Lying, we look at hallucinations, omissions, and other aspects of “lying” in computer-generated texts. We conclude that these problems are probably inevitable.
Omissions are inevitable because a computer system cannot cram all possibly-relevant information into a text that is short enough to be actually read. In the context of summarising medical information for doctors, for example, the computer system has access to a huge amount of patient data, but it does not know (and arguably cannot know) what will be most relevant to doctors.
Hallucinations are inevitable because of flaws in computer systems, regardless of the type of system. Systems which are explicitly programmed will suffer from software bugs (like all software systems). Systems which are trained on data, such as ChatGPT and other systems in the Deep Learning tradition, “hallucinate” even more. This happens for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most obviously, these systems suffer from flawed data (e.g., any system which learns from the Internet will be exposed to a lot of false information about vaccines, conspiracy theories, etc.). And even if a data-oriented system could be trained solely on bona fide texts that contain no falsehoods, its reliance on probabilistic methods will mean that word combinations that are very common on the Internet may also be produced in situations where they result in false information.
Suppose, for example, on the Internet, the word “coughing” is often followed by “… and sneezing.” Then a patient may be described falsely, by a data-oriented system, as “coughing and sneezing” in situations where they cough without sneezing. Problems of this kind are an important focus for researchers working on generative language models. Where this research will lead us is still uncertain; the best one can say is that we can try to reduce the impact of these issues, but we have no idea how to completely eliminate them.
“Large generative language models’ texts can be factually incorrect (hallucination) and leave out key information (omission).”
The above focuses on unintentional-but-unavoidable problems. There are also cases where a computer system arguably should hallucinate or omit information. An obvious example is generating marketing material, where omitting negative information about a product is expected. A more subtle example, which we have seen in our own work, is when information is potentially harmful and it is in users’ best interests to hide or distort it. For example, if a computer system is summarising information about sick babies for friends and family members, it probably should not tell an elderly grandmother with a heart condition that the baby may die, since this could trigger a heart attack.
Now that the factual accuracy of computer-generated text draws so much attention from society as a whole, the research community is starting to realize more clearly than before that we only have a limited understanding of what it means to speak the truth. In particular, we do not know how to measure the extent of (un)truthfulness in a given text.
To see what we mean, suppose two different language models answer a user’s question in two different ways, by generating two different answer texts. To compare these systems’ performance, we would need a “score card” that allowed us to objectively score the two texts as regards their factual correctness, using a variety of rubrics. Such a score card would allow us to record how often each type of error occurs in a given text, and aggregate the result into an overall truthfulness score for that text. Of particular importance would be the weighing of errors: large errors (e.g., a temperature reading that is very far from the actual temperature) should weigh more heavily than small ones, key facts should weigh more heavily than side issues, and errors that are genuinely misleading should weigh more heavily than typos that readers can correct by themselves. Essentially, the score card would work like a fair school teacher who marks pupils’ papers.
We have developed protocols for human evaluators to find factual errors in generated texts, as have other researchers, but we cannot yet create a score card as described above because we cannot assess the impact of individual errors.
What is needed, we believe, is a new strand of linguistically informed research, to tease out all the different parameters of “lying” in a manner that can inform the above-mentioned score cards, and that may one day be implemented into a reliable fact-checking protocol or algorithm. Until that time, those of us who are trying to assess the truthfulness of ChatGPT will be groping in the dark.
Featured image by Google DeepMind Via Unsplash (public domain)
In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing. And yet happiness is as much a matter of how we inhabit the self — how we make ourselves at home in our own singular lives, in the dwelling-places of our own experience.
That is what May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995), who has written so movingly about unhappiness and its cure, explores in her poem “The Work of Happiness,” included in her indispensable Collected Poems: 1930–1993 (public library).
THE WORK OF HAPPINESS
by May SartonI thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
Complement with Bertrand Russell on the secret of happiness and Kurt Vonnegut on the one word it comes down to, then revisit Sarton’s poem “Meditation in Sunlight” and her magnificent ode to solitude.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Etymologists interacting with the public on a day-to-day basis usually receive questions about words like copacetic and shenanigans, but so many nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even prepositions and conjunctions not crying for attention are not less, perhaps even more, interesting. Over the years, I have written about summer, winter, ice, sheep, dog, live, leave, good, bad, red, and even such inconspicuous words as but and yet, to mention just a few. We use them like old trusty tools and never stop to ask where they came from. Somebody somewhere coined them, which probably means that once upon a time they were as transparent to speakers as giggle and hiccup. But today their origin is either debatable or unknown. Isn’t a dog called a dog because it looks like a dog, runs like a dog, and barks like a dog? This is what the naïve speaker thinks, though nothing in the group d-o-g suggests a muzzle, swiftness, or any kind of explosive sound. How did day and night get their names? Aren’t the words in some way associated with light and darkness? Dictionaries know a lot about the oldest history of both but do not always provide a clue to the “motivation” that might explain their origin.
Let us look at day. Its past is not totally hidden (no reference to or pun on clear obscure!). Day has exact cognates everywhere in Old Germanic, including of course Old English, as well as in Sanskrit, Celtic, Slavic, and elsewhere. In Old Icelandic, the proper name Dagr has been recorded. Similar names existed in Gothic and Old High German. Does this fact testify to the word’s significance in some religious ritual? We’ll never know. What conclusion will an etymologist two thousand years from now draw about our names June, Melody, and Makepeace? Day, it should be remembered, does not always mean “a period of twenty-four hours” (as in a few days ago) or half of this period (as in day and night or daytime): it sometimes refers to “a certain period or date” as in Doomsday, the day of reckoning, I’ll remember it until my dying day, and the like. Even if you were born at night, you probably celebrate your birthday. It follows that we are not quite sure where to begin our exploration, though day as “the period of light” looks more promising: after all, law-abiding citizens tend to make their arrangements for the time when there is enough light around, while at night most of us sleep.
Speakers of Modern English no longer realize that dawn has the same root as day. The verb to dawn means “to begin to grow light,” and the same reference is obvious in the phrase it dawned on me. I’ll skip the phonetic part of the story (why dawn? In German, unlike what we observe in English, the connection between the noun Tag and the verb tagen is immediately obvious). Will then a search for the etymology of day take us to the idea of “light,” as suggested above? Perhaps. But first, let us remember Latin diēs “day.” Its root occurs in the English words diurnal, dial “an instrument to tell the time of day by the shadow cast by the sun,” and diary, all three of course borrowed from Romance. Though diēs and day sound somewhat alike, they are not related (a fact often mentioned in dictionaries, to warn readers against what looks like an obvious conclusion), and as though to prove the absence of ties between them, language provides us with a word like Gothic sin-tiens “daily,” in which sin– means “one” and –tien– is a cognate of the Latin word. The correspondence d (Latin) ~ t (Gothic or any other Germanic language) is regular, by the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin duo versus English two.
This –tien- has unquestionable correspondences all over the Indo-European world: for example, Sanskrit had dínam “day.” In Latin, we find the word nun-dinum “market held every ninth day.” Also, Russian den’ “day” (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic) and many other references elsewhere to burning, ashes, and warmth belongs here too. On the strength of, among others, several Greek words meaning “appear” and “visible,” the root of all such words has been understood as “shining.” Since the Sanskrit dèvas (obviously related) means “god,” this idea looks realistic. The Indo-Europeans habitually referred to “god” as “shining” or “sky” (such was Latin Jū-piter “sky father,” known to the ancient Scandinavians as Týr, no longer a sky god; but the name reveals his distant past). Yet it is still odd that both the words related to day and those related to diēs, though unconnected, sound somewhat alike and not only mean “day” but also begin with d. Did d suggest burning, heat, or glowing or refer to things dry and arid? Such ancient sound-symbolic associations are beyond reconstruction. They are often hard to pinpoint even in our modern languages.
Another puzzling lookalike is Sanskrit áhar “day.” It almost rhymes with Proto-Germanic dagaz but lacks d-, to which, above, I ventured to ascribe magical properties. An incredible coincidence? The Sanskrit noun has no correspondences in Germanic, Romance, Celtic, and elsewhere. (At least, none has been discovered.) Did áhar once have d- and lose it? The fertile imagination of historical linguists reconstructed several processes that could be responsible for the loss. Initial d- does sometimes disappear for no known reasons. For instance, t in tear (from the eye), which, as expected, corresponds to d outside Germanic, is sometimes absent altogether: this is true of Sanskrit and Baltic, among others. We have enough trouble with s–mobile (it tends to turn up wherever it wants). Did d–mobile also exist? Most unlikely.
My point has been to show how intriguing some of our common words sometimes are. Copacetic is late (it was first recorded in the twentieth century), while day is older than most of the hills around us. But the problem of origin remains the same: people coin words and etymologists wander in a labyrinth of look-alikes, roots, fleeing initial, and final consonants, and emerge with the all-too familiar verdict: “Origin unknown (uncertain, disputed).” Yet day probably did refer to heat or a bright light. This conclusion sounds reasonable, assuming (and this a reliable assumption) that the word’s initial sense was “the time of light,” rather than “a certain period, date.” Plain as day? Almost.
Featured image by Ivana Cajina via Unsplash (public domain)
“A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is the most indescribable of the arts, and that may be what makes it the most powerful — the creative force best capable of giving voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of containing them and expanding them at once. It is our supreme language for the exhilaration of being alive.
I have come upon no finer definition of music than philosopher Susanne Langer’s, who conceived of it as a laboratory for feeling in time. Time, indeed, is not only the raw material of music — the fundamental building block of melody and rhythm — but also its supreme gift to the listener. A song is a shelter in time, a shelter in being — music meets us at particular moments of our lives, enters us and magnifies those moments, anchors them in the stream of life, so that each time we hear the song again the living self is transported to the lived moment, and yet transformed.
That is what the uncommonly insightful painter, poet, and writer John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) explores in his essay “Some Notes on Song,” composed in the last months of his life and included in his altogether wonderful final collection Confabulations (public library).
Berger considers how music, in bridging the universal and the deeply personal, illuminates the meaning of intimacy:
Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.
We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.
It is the luscious corporeality of song that lends music its extraordinary powers of intimacy. In consonance with Richard Powers’s arresting observation that “the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,” Berger writes:
A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body… Again and again the song takes over the body of the singer, and after a while the body of the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song, are remembering and foreseeing.
A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. While it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension, which is uniquely theirs. A song fills the present, while it hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere. It leans forward, farther and farther. Without the persistence of this hope, songs would not exist. Songs lean forward.
[…]
A song borrows existent physical bodies in order to acquire, while it’s being sung, a body of its own.
Music is so embodied an experience because it is made of the same substance we ourselves are made of: time. With an eye to how “songs put their arms around linear time,” Berger adds:
The tempo, the beat, the loops, the repetitions of a song offer a shelter from the flow of linear time — a shelter in which future, present, and past can console, provoke, ironize, and inspire one another.
[…]
Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.
Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and the fascinating science of how music casts its spell on us, then savor Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” brought to life in a Spanish flashmob of 100 musicians.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A funny thing happened on the way to the 15th century…
Dr. James Wade, a specialist in early English literature at the University of Cambridge, was doing research at the National Library of Scotland when he noticed something extraordinary about the first of the nine miscellaneous booklets comprising the Heege Manuscript.
Most surviving medieval manuscripts are the stuff of high art. The first part of the Heege Manuscript is funny.
The usual tales of romance and heroism, allusions to ancient Rome, lofty poetry and dramatic interludes… even the dashing adventures of Robin Hood are conspicuously absent.
Instead it’s awash with the staples of contemporary stand up comedy – topical observations, humorous oversharing, roasting eminent public figures, razzing the audience, flattering the audience by busting on the denizens of nearby communities, shaggy dog tales, absurdities and non-sequiturs.
Repeated references to passing the cup conjure an open mic type scenario.
The manuscript was created by cleric Richard Heege and entered into the collection of his employers, the wealthy Sherbrooke family.
Other scholars have concentrated on the manuscript’s physical construction, mostly refraining from comment on the nature of its contents.
Dr. Wade suspects that the first booklet is the result of Heege having paid close attention to an anonymous traveling minstrel’s performance, perhaps going so far as to consult the performer’s own notes.
Heege quipped that he was the author owing to the fact that he “was at that feast and did not have a drink” – meaning he was the only one sober enough to retain the minstrel’s jokes and inventive plotlines.
Dr. Wade describes how the comic portion of the Heege Manuscript is broken down into three parts, the first of which is sure to gratify fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
…it’s a narrative account of a bunch of peasants who try to hunt a hare, and it all ends disastrously, where they beat each other up and the wives have to come with wheelbarrows and hold them home.
That hare turns out to be one fierce bad rabbit, so much so that the tale’s proletarian hero, the prosaically named Jack Wade, worries she could rip out his throat.
Dr. Wade learned that Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe, was aware of The Hunting of the Hare, viewing it as a sturdy spoof of high minded romance, “studiously filled with grotesque, absurd, and extravagant characters.”
The killer bunny yarn is followed by a mock sermon – If thou have a great black bowl in thy hand and it be full of good ale and thou leave anything therein, thou puttest thy soul into greater pain – and a nonsense poem about a feast where everyone gets hammered and chaos ensues.
Crowd-pleasing material in 1480.
With a few 21st-century tweaks, an enterprising young comedian might wring laughs from it yet.
(Paging Tyler Gunther, of Greedy Peasant fame…)
As to the true author of these routines, Dr. Wade speculates that he may have been a “professional traveling minstrel or a local amateur performer.” Possibly even both:
A ‘professional’ minstrel might have a day job and go gigging at night, and so be, in a sense, semi-professional, just as a ‘travelling’ minstrel may well be also ‘local’, working a beat of nearby villages and generally known in the area. On balance, the texts in this booklet suggest a minstrel of this variety: someone whose material includes several local place-names, but also whose material is made to travel, with the lack of determinacy designed to comically engage audiences regardless of specific locale.
Learn more about the Heege Manuscript in Dr. Wade’s article, Entertainments from a Medieval Minstrel’s Repertoire Book in The Review of English Studies.
Leaf through a digital facsimile of the Heege Manuscript here.
Related Content
Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad
A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nosewise, Garlik, Havegoodday & More
Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts
– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
A little over a month ago Kansas City welcomed a new stationery store, May Day Paper and Post! While we do have a pen store and the ubiquitous Paper Source, this is an indie stationery store, one that I’m delighted to support. May Day bills itself as a place for all things snail mail.
This past Friday while Ana was at the St. Louis Pen Show, I drove up to check it out! The store is super cute, set in midtown Kansas City. It has a fun, curated collection of greeting cards, notebooks and notecards, journals, stickers, mugs, wrapping paper and other giftables. To be clear, this isn’t a pen store. They did have a fun selection of Gelly Roll pens and a few roller balls and ball points, but it’s primarily about the paper. It’s whimsical, and the owner definitely has a sense of humor.
I was restrained but found a few cute cards on the long wall. My selections were from Black and White and Red All Over and A Zillion Dollars. Both cards are printed nicely, and use recycled content for both the cards and envelopes.
I saw many of the familiar notebooks (Maruman, Kleid, Leuchtturm, and more), plus some from companies I hadn’t heard from. I did pick up one notebook – I’ll share my thoughts on it next week!
Overall it’s a cute shop, and if you’re in the Kansas City area, you won’t be disappointed if you stop by! And if you’re looking for a fun new shop to support, you can also shop online!
P.S. If you stop by, make sure you give shop dog Lucy lots of pets!
The post A new stationery store: May Day Paper & Post appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?
A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.
Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions.
Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”
Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.
I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither.
“Some US lawmakers suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with European countries. This is disingenuous, to say the least.”
My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.
It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops.
Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.
Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.
Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)
Joy is not a thing of the will, not subject to control and conquest. It comes when we least expect it, like a murmuration of starlings across the evening sky. It stays for as long as we are able to stay openhearted to the tender transience of life. Anaïs Nin knew this when she contemplated its elusive nature, and Beethoven knew it when he spent half a lifetime capturing it in music.
The secret pulse-beat of joy is what Jean-François Beauchemin explores in Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being (public library) — an invitation to “a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world” and an exultation at “earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves.”
In a passage Walt Whitman could have composed a century and a half ago, Beauchemin introduces himself:
I am simply a man who is always moved and amazed by the brevity of everything, and who strives to at least balance this brevity a little by way of the counterweights within my reach, be it joy, for instance, or otherwise the seeking of beauty.
Beauchemin begins his archive of joy with an encounter:
Every other day since the start of summer, an old deer with a grizzled gray snout has been wandering into my garden to dream away some of what little time he has left. The light around him pivots by a few degrees, arranging its photons as if to ready him for his passing into the beyond. As his body escapes him a little more each day, I think that he’s slowly coming around to a more abstract and somehow purer way of seeing the world. It’s as if his subconscious has fallen out of sync with him and the intricacies and intensity of his life in the forest. From the look in his eye, and the story of sorts that it seems to tell, one remarkably real thing emerges: joy. I know that joy.
It is an old joy he finds there, and an old touchstone at the boundary of the natural world and the numinous:
I have no theory to explain the sense of closeness and connection I have felt to deer… Perhaps I am so drawn to them because they defy all explanation. I am continually moved by these timid beings, steeped in wary, woodsy contemplation, graced with a playful spring in their step and a synchrony of memory. I am quite sure that their mind’s eye holds an everlasting, airy daydream of a big red sun with people whirling about in their finest new clothes and a cascade of colors, just like a Marc Chagall painting. Alas, I only have intermittent access to this metaphorical world. I try my best to stay awhile, but all I can manage are fleeting moments. The images in my memory and imagination are not terribly compatible with those I think I see swirling in the gaze of my elusive visitors. The wood-wormed doors, half-moored rowboats, and secret infernos of my mind will always be foreign to the concerns of these beautiful animals. Still, they and I walk in step, and at night we lift our gaze to the same stars.
Other beings figure centrally into Beauchemin’s invitation of joy. He roams the forest with his dog named Camus, rescues a coyote pup from drowning, sits daily with a neighbor’s grazing goat, administers first aid to a hummingbird that crashes into his window, holds vigil over a dying rabbit. Looking back on his life, he finds himself “a writer whose curious destiny is to cross paths with creatures abandoned, hurt, lame, or dying.” A generation after Henry Beston insisted that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals [who are] gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Beauchemin observes that, like us, animals “live a never wholly decipherable life — not as mystical as ours, but no less mysterious.” Remembering the death of the old donkey he grew up with — a creature into whom he confided his young heart’s tenderest tremblings — and how he rolled an enormous flat rock behind the stable to make a tombstone for him, Beauchemin reflects:
I understood that another reality set in once the last handful of earth was scattered over those thin flanks. It was, it seems to me, the reality of the imperishable memory left in my life by this being who came from I don’t know where as if to teach me what human presence is incapable of teaching me, and which might well be the true definition of happiness.
In consonance with poet Ross Gay’s conviction that “joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity,” Beauchemin discovers again and again that happiness is a function of the connection between beings — the nonhuman animals as well as the human. In another vignette, he writes:
The peaceful home of our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Chung, sits among the trees some distance away from ours. Some summer nights, when the weather is mild and the trill of the chorus frogs is sounding down by the pond, Mr. and Mrs. Chung come out onto their patio with their two daughters, and all four of them sing songs from their faraway Korean homeland. A startling melancholy takes hold of the surrounding environment. In the forest, the animals pause their usual activities for a moment and prick up their ears. The moon, thus far climbing skyward, hangs still among the branches. Even our cat, who usually seeks contact with things so keenly, looks out, barely touching a thing, at this fragile, ephemeral world. Later, once the voices of Mr. and Mrs. Chung and their daughters have fallen silent, we thread our way through the trees to their house with our kettle and share a steaming pot of tea with them. I’ve always enjoyed the company of happy people. I feel that by being with them, I’m increasing my chances of being contaminated by their happiness.
[…]
A considerable part of my happiness rests on the thought of an impression made on my life by that of others.
With an eye to his own mortality, he envisions a way of being where we come to see our transience not as a terrible error in the log of existence but as a form of intimacy with reality, tender and joyful. A century after Rilke exulted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Beauchemin writes:
I would like for something new to spark in people’s minds, for people to begin to love the elementary simplicity of their spiritual lives for what it is, to stop quaking with fear before the shadows, and to find interest for all the right reasons in the idea of infinity, so enigmatic, so harrowing, and so tumultuous, charged with a centrifugal joy, bestowed with a great magnetic force, and, no matter what people say, so profoundly connected to this earthly existence.
Couple Archives of Joy with Ross Gay’s radiant Book of Delights, then revisit the remarkable story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Columbia University Press are the greatest. I've known that since they worked with me on publishing the Wellek Lectures (Dark Ecology). Their enthusiasm for the new project is infectious and the assiduity of my editor, Wendy Lochner, is astounding. I'm truly grateful to them.
The book is now called
HELL: IN SEARCH OF A CHRISTIAN ECOLOGY
FreshRSS 