On Solitude*, Michel de Montaigne

* On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne (Penguin Books, 1991, trans. M. A. Screech)

This is the first time I have read Montaigne, a little surprising since he is the originator of the essay form. I am not sure whether I will appreciate him…

Later: Montaigne’s essays are just not engaging me. But I am struck by the way he is engages in dialog with scholars and others who have come before. I don’t really resonate with the topics and language in play, but it would be interesting for me to try to do something similar with people who have influenced me.

E1: On Solitude

This eponymous essay Is written from the vantage point of a man in the “tail-end of life,” and explores the virtues of solitude. I was struck by how much, and how widely, he quotes from the classical literature. Hoarce, Seneca, Cicero, Erasamus, Socrates. The general theme is about the advisability and wisdom of withdrawing from public life, and the vices attendant in that and in the majority of people. Instead, he advocates turning inward, and cultivating one’s own happiness and virtue in a what seems to me a stoic fashion. This essay did not, in general speak to me, though there were a couple of quotes I liked.

“We have lived quite enough for others; let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being”

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

“If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess: but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train.

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

On Books

TBD

On the Power of the Imagination

TBD

On Sadness

TBD

On Constancy

TBD

On Fear

TBD

How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up

TBD

On Conscience

TBD

On Anger

TBD

On Virtue

TBD

On Sleep

TBD

On the Length of Life

TBD

How we Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

TBD

# # #

EP#20: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

* The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. 1984

The 20th volume in the Essays Project (co-reading with CT) gets us back to essays. Here we are continuing our side quest to read all of OS’s work. This is Sack’s fourth book, and its excellence is consistent with my belief that Sack’s somehow found his muse — at least for writing for general audiences — while writing A Leg to Stand On, his previous book. Hat, so far, seems to be about various forms of agnosia — the loss of knowledge or awareness of things. So far this includes face and object recognition, awareness of limbs (or the entire body), and portions of the visual field. Looking ahead, I now see that only the first section is on “Losses,” so there will clearly be a much wider variety of ‘neurographies.’

The Book

Preface to the Original Edition (1985)

There is also a 2013 Preface, but I find little of note, though if you are reading the book it is worth a quick perusal.

Sacks begins the 1985 Preface by reflecting on his epigraphs, which has to do with his practicing medicine as a physician also involving getting a view of the larger context of his patients’ troubles — he sees himself as as much as naturalist as a physician. He also says, interestingly, that: “animals get diseases; only man falls radically into illness.” In my view, this reflects his view that some (all?, almost all?) diseases have an ontological component. I love the comment in one of his letters: “What is so instructive about disease, like disaster, is that it shakes the foundations of everything.” He also discusses the value of broad accounts, even stories, and laments the modern tendency to eliminate or minimize the subject of ‘case histories:’ “To restore the human subject at its center — the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject — we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale….” (p. xviii) He also brings in myths and fables with their hero’s and archetypes — “travelers to unimaginable lands, lands of which we should otherwise have no idea or conception.“

Co-Intelligence*, Ethan Mollick

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, by Ethan Mollick. 2024

About the Book

I read this for my book club. It’s a well-written book, relatively hype-free, and very much worth reading for those who don’t know much about AI. I felt it was a bit verbose, but that might be appropriate for the more general audience he is trying to reach. I did not learn a lot from the book, but then I’ve been following the discourse on LLMs for a long time, and have also been getting Mollick’s newsletter in my in-box, so this is neither surprising nor a mark against the book.

But now I’ve gone through my various marginalia and underlining, and feel that I got more out of the book than I had realized when I wrote the previous paragraph. A few of the high-water marks for me:

The fourth ‘rule’ – assume this is the worst AI you will ever use – is a good reminder. We are used to software improving at a glacial pace, but that may not be true of LLMs. [C3]
I appreciated the confirmation of my belief that an AI cannot track the reasons for its responses, and that any explanation of a response is a hallucination. [C5]
It made me think more (in [C9]) about the consequences of the erasure of digital groundtruth by generative AI, and how that will undermine public confidence in ‘facts’ as presented online. Perhaps everyone will retreat into their own filter bubbles; or perhaps there will be a turn towards traditional curated media (though the phenomenon of Fox news makes this seem unlikely).
An interesting argument is that the speed of innovation has been dropping 50% every 13 years), presumably because one must know more and more to make progress. Perhaps AI can provide a remedy here.

That said, I didn’t think Mollick did a great job of delving into the potential of AIs to enable people to educate themselves. There is much to be said about the pros and cons of using AI in this way (e.g., AIs creating study guides, problem sets, etc.) Little of this is discussed.

Chapter by Chapter Notes

C!: Creating Alien Minds

A brief history of AI, particularly the way it is used in business; a slightly more in-depth history of the rise of LLM’s and generative AI.
An introduction to the Transformer architectures with its ‘attention mechanism’ and the resulting LLM’s
An interesting note on whether LLM’s violate copyright or not, since the LLM does not contain text, just weight-vectors.
A mention of RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. This is how LLM’s are ‘taught’ to avoid certain topics.
Some good examples of how slightly changing prompts can significantly change the response of the LLM.

C2: Aligning the Alien

Discussion of various ways in which AI can have detrimental impacts
More discussion of RLHF and guardrails, and how guardrails have been circumvented.

C3: Four Rules for Co-Intelligence

Didn’t learn anything here, but mainly because I’ve been experimenting myself and following Mollick’s newsletter. He also had a not unreasonable piece of advice: “Become the world expert in how to use AI to do a task you know well.“

For the record, the four rules are:

Always invite AI to the table
Be the human in the loop
Treat AI Like a Person (but tell it what kind of person it is)
Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use

This is not bad advice. I particularly like the last rule.

C4: AI as a Person

A discussion of how AIs can appear to be sentient. Possibly a useful for those who have never interacted with an LLM, but otherwise I don’t think the chapter did much in the way of making useful points. Not sure that there are useful points to make here.

C5: AI as a Creative

Returns to the point that LLMs don’t store text, they only store weights. So in a sense they don’t know anything.
Nor can they actually give a real account of why they gave a particular answer, though of course they can generate a plausible explanation. This seems like an important thing for people to understand.
LLMs are trained on text. The training does not take quality into account; it does not even distinguish between fiction or non-fiction. All it is doing is learning weights.
We are back on the topic of hallucination, a term I very much dislike. But it does make a good point, which hadn’t sunk in for me: “Anything that requires exact recall is likely to result in a hallucination.”
And this is a nice quote:

It [an AI] is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the Al will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result. The system has no way of explaining its decisions, or even knowing what those decisions were. Instead, it is (you guessed it) merely generating text that it thinks will make you happy in response to your query. LLMs are not generally optimized to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have enough information. Instead, they will give you ananswer, expressing confidence.

—Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence, p 96

A lot of talk about creativity, which did not interest me.
Cites studies (his own? and colleagues?) that show that using AI greatly decreases the time to perform creative tasks. …I agree this is likely.
Makes the interesting point that ‘ceremonial tasks,’ such as writing recommendation letters, are likely to be rendered meaningless, or at least greatly reduced in value, as the letter no longer necessarily represents a significant time investment.

C6: AI as a Coworker

Distinguished between jobs and tasks — AI may radically change the way job-related tasks are carry out, but may not necessarily eliminate the job.
Argues that the systems within which a job takes place play a crucial role in shaping the job — but I don’t think the argument is taken very far re implications….
Discusses different types of tasks: delegated tasks, and automated tasks. And different types of workers: Centaurs (with a clear strategic separation of tasks) and cyborgs (a more blended approach).

C7: AI as a Tutor

Talks about using AI in education. Uses example of introduction of calculators in classrooms to think about this. I suspect some readers will find this very useful.
Talks about flipped lectures and how AI might be used in the classroom.
A rather disappointing chapter: I think there is huge potential in individuals using AI to educate themselves, and a lot to be said about the pros and cons of using AI in this way. There is also the prospect of AIs creating study guides, problem sets, etc. None of this is discussed.

C8: AI as a Coach

Begins with a favorite point of mine about the danger of AI eliminating the on-ramps to expertise — it can do the tasks that were formerly assigned to interns, and eliminate the possibility of apprenticeship.
Offers the prospect of AI’s as coaches that will help novices and journeymen do the difficult reflective practice that builds expertise. Interesting, but he is just making all this up, as far as I can tell.
Cites a study of his own that claims that the quality of the middle manager explains 20% of the revenue that a video game eventually produces. This would be a very difficult study to operationalize, and I’m a bit skeptical. But hard to say since I don’t understand how video game companies work, or the role middle managers play in them.

C9: AI as our Future

This chapter offers four scenarios on the future of AI (==LLMs)

1. As Good as it Gets.
AI will not improve significantly from here on out, either because of technical limitations (running out of text to train on), or because of regulatory intervention. He argues that this isn’t a very likely future, but it is what most people and organizations are planning for. I agree that regulation is unlikely; less sure about the certainty of significant improvement.
- Makes the point (not sure why it is relevant to this scenario) that the erasure of digital groundtruth will undermine public confidence in ‘facts’ as presented online. Perhaps everyone will retreat into their own filter bubbles; or perhaps there will be a turn towards traditional curated media (though Fox news makes this seem unlikely).
2. Slow Growth.
The exponential growth in AI capability will slow to 10%-20% a year. He cites various reasons for this, from cost of training, to technical limits for large LLMs (apparently LeCun, chief AI person at Meta has argued this), and my own favorite, not-enough-high-quality text. In this scenario, tasks will change more than jobs, and more jobs will be created than destroyed.
- In my view it may be that LLM’s have ‘used up’ the supply of high quality information, and trying to train LLMs on broader swaths of material will introduce ‘semantic pollution.’
- Mollick also talks about the decline in the ‘speed of innovation’ (dropping by 50% every 13 years), and the fact that most major scientific contributions are made by scientists over 40 (whereas the opposite used to be the case). You must know more to make progress, and that slows progress. He suggest that perhaps AI can help here.
3. Exponential Growth. In this scenario the speed of AI growth continues. AI-assisted hacking, targeted marketing, AI-assisted law enforcement (and military, which, interestingly, he does not address) proliferate, and government policies/regulations can not keep up. But maybe AI and robotics eliminate the need for a lot of human work, and things like basic income, shortened workweek, and so forth usher in a post-scarcity economy.
- He also comments on AIs becoming better and more interesting companions than other humans, and the possibilities of a decrease in loneliness, but a rise in new forms of social isolation.
4. The Machine God. AI becomes sentient. There is not a lot to say here. Could be horrible, could be wonderful.

Afterword: AI as Us

Brief essay on how AI has grown out of our knowledge, includes our own biases, etc, etc. Not very interesting.

# # #

A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks

June 2024

The 19th volume we’ve read in the increasingly poorly named Essay Project, this being (another) book that does not contain essays. But we’ve become fascinated by O.S. from reading his two autobiographies and the edited collection of his letters, and just can’t stop.

About the Book

This is the third book that Sacks published (1984), following Migraine and Awakenings. To me this is the book where he found his narrative voice, or at least the voice that has proved so engaging to non-medical readers. It is a breakthrough in his writing style. And it is a gripping narrative, with lucid and beautiful writing. Gone are the clinical passages and case histories that were interspersed throughout his first two books. It will be interesting to see if his subsequent ‘neurographies’ continue in this more narrative and engaging voice.

Migraine*, Oliver Sacks

*Migraine (Revised and expanded), Oliver Sacks, 1992

This is the 18th volume in the “Essays Project.” While the Essays Project has focused mainly on essays, we became intrigued with Oliver Sacks and are taking something of a detour to read his complete work, essays or not.

[[More to come…]]

Front Matter

There are prefaces to the original edition, and, to this, the 1992 edition. There is also a forward by William Gooddy, a migraine specialist whom Sacks praises in his prefaces. There is also a historical introduction, which summarizes over 2,000 years of medical writing on migraine; I will pass on summarizing this.

The following, from the ’92 Preface, is Sacks’ comment on the aims of the book; I think his thoughts on why humans may need to be ill, for a brief time, will be very interesting.

Migraine, of course, is not just a description, but a meditation on the nature of health and illness, and how, occasionally, human beings may need, for a brief time, to be ill; a meditation on the unity of mind and body, on migraine as an exemplar of our psychophysical transparency; and a meditation, finally, on migraine as a biological reaction, analogous to that which many animals show.

–Oliver Sacks, Migraine, xv

How to Do Nothing…, Jenny Odell

*How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell, 2019

I found this book to be quite a disappointment. For the most part, it is not about the attention economy; nor does it say much about how to resist it. It is really just a lament about the state of late-capitalist-resource-extrative-modernism. And while there is certainly much to lament, I don’t really find much in the way of strategies on how to resist the various forces that are having such negative effects on the environment and world.

The book seems very undisciplined — or perhaps self-indulgent — to me. It meanders from polemical to anecdotal. In the smaller potion of the book that did seem to be about the attention economy, I was bemused by the author’s inclination to delve back into history (quoting Seneca for example), but not recognizing that the ability to reach so far back to find apropos material suggests that the malaise that she is investigating seems to have been present, at least in the west, for centuries.

A bit cynically, I wonder if the publisher insisted she tack on the ‘Attention Economy’ bit of the title to garner attention and thus up sales. To my eye the book is more about mindfulness and focus, and while I actually am in sympathy with many of the ‘lessons,’ I can’t say I learned anything. Mostly, when the book turns to the entrancement of people by Twitter or Facebook or some other form of broadcast media, I want to say, ‘Come on, just get a grip. Show a little character and self-discipline by recognizing that you don’t like the way this slice of the media is effecting you, and do something different.

And speaking of the media, it seems to me that much of what Odell inveighs against not digital media in general, but broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook. It is a failure of analysis to fail to differentiate among media (digital or otherwise) that work in different ways, and shape discourse in different ways.

Later in the book she takes on the notion of western ‘progress’ — which she somehow ties to the attention economy — and the damage that technodeterminism and extractive capitalism have done to environment. And it has done damage, but she does not offer any convincing or compelling remedies, other that to suggest a label — “manifest dismantling” — for the various efforts to mitigate or reverse eco-system damage that have been in play for decades.

I could go on, but it feels like too much work to try to distill crisp arguments from her prose and then critique them.

# # #

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

(with a a little bit on the sequel, Parable of the Talents)

May 2025

I read this book for the Elle Cordova SF book club; it is number 3 in the sequence. I was familiar with some of Butler’s earlier work, the Xenogenesis stories, which I liked, and at some point had read Parable of the Sower, which I did not care for.

To step back a moment: Octavia Butler is justly lauded for her impact on late 20th century and later science fiction. Though by no means the first black author to make a name in the genre (Samual Delany is, I think, the progenitor), she is among the first to really foreground themes related to black experience — characters experiencing racism, dominance/repression, resistance/survival, and (loss of) bodily autonomy. As I write this, I balk, because I am by no means a scholar of SF, and so I should preface the foregoing with “In my limited experience.”

In re-reading Sower, I found myself recapitulating my initial unfavorable reactions. The first being, ‘I don’t think this is really science fiction.’ [Clearly SF writers disagreed with me, as this novel was awarded a Nebula.] Still, it seems like a straight-forward post-apocalyptic novel — I was going to write, “in the vein of Cormac McCartney’s The Road — but on pausing to look it up, I find that this pre-dates Road by at least a decade. I didn’t care for The Road, either, so at least I am consistent here. In both cases, we don’t have much in the way of science happening, just an extrapolation of current trends that are leading / have lead to the breakdown to the climate, environment and society, and protagonists living off scavenged food amid a world filled with violent and destructive bands. Sower does give its protagonist, an odd disability/delusion called hyperempathy caused by a mother’s use of a drug during pregnancy, but, although complicating life for the protagonist, this problem does not seem to me to fundamentally shape the story.

My second unfavorable reaction has to do with the unrelentingly grim world of the book. The closest the book gets to hopefulness are a few periods of stability in the midst of a long, seemingly inevitable decline, which the protagonist tries, inadequately, to prepare for. Of course, this is perhaps a realistic portrayal of the challenges we face, but it does not make it a fun read (except, perhaps, in contrast to its sequel Parable of the Talents, which is grimmer.

It is true that the book suggests that kindness and inclusiveness is at least a middle-term effective strategy, and that people can overcome interpersonal obstacles to work together. It also posits an interesting belief system — essentially a new religion being constructed by the principal protagonist — that, it is argued, is more suited to the needs of the post-apocalyptic world,.

The belief system is called Earthseed, and its central tenant is that God is Change. It argues both the one can not resist change, but that one can, in small ways, shape the change. The evolution and spread of this religion is described in the second book, “Parable of the Talents.” Talents is, as noted, even less of a pleasant read than Sower, but it does provide closure for Sower in the establishment of Earthseed as a widespread belief, though that occurs quite rapidly in the last few chapters.

The book is thoughtful and well-written, but I’m still not convinced that it should be called science fiction…

# # #

I Robot, Isaac Asimov

It is possible I read this over five decades ago, but if so, I don’t recall any of the stories. I know I read some ‘three laws’ stories, but that may have been in some other book/collection, possibly Caves of Steel. I read this because it was a pick for Elle Cordova’s SF Book Club, even though this one was picked and discussed before I joined. But, I was curious as to how I’d experience this very old story (circa 1950), and probably a little motivated by the ‘collect-the-whole-set’ phenomenon, as I picked up the book club on its second book.

Though I don’t remember any of these stories in particular, Asimov’s three-laws stories are sort of a one-trick pony: there is some kind of mystery or inexplicable event involving a robot, and the resolution turns on realizing that the three laws are not being interpreted or executed as intended, and thus the problem is that the robots are being too literal. Thus, in one story, a robot lies to various humans in the story because it is telepathic and knows what they want to hear, and so it can’t tell them the truth because that would ‘harm’ them. So, they are all essentially puzzle-stories.

Asimov’s characters are not terribly well developed. It feels as though he has carefully chosen a stereotype for each, and few physical or behavioral features of each character as a synecdote for their individuality. We’ve got the hot-headed, angry red-headed Irish engineer, and his cool and more reflective partner. And of course, Susan Calvin, the brilliant but plain woman who has repressed everything but her mind to make it in the world of science. But kudos to Asimov for creating a central female character in the 1950’s, and making her as well developed (which is to say, not very) as any of the male characters.

If these stories are from the golden age of science fiction, they are also from the golden age of smoking — it is astonishing, to 21’st century eyes, to see how many people smoke, even on space ships. It is also interesting — and characteristic of the time of writing — to find that unions have played a significant role in keeping robots off of earth and out of the workforce, as have religious movements.

I wondered reading these stories would whet my appetite for more of Asimov’s robot books, but the answer is no. Although, it could be interesting to read some of the other books where more modern writers — David Brin being one — filled in some of the gaps in Asimov’s world.

# # #

The Catalyst: RNA…*, Thomas Cech

*The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets, Thomas R. Cech, 2024. Cech won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 (with Sidney Altman) for the discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA, which means that in addition to carrying genetic information, RNA could also act on other molecules.

Reading this with the inaccurately-named “26-minute book club” in the Spring of 2025.

When the Moon Hits your Eye, John Scalzi

A new SF novel by John Scalzi. The premise is that all of a sudden, with no warning or explanation, the moon turns into cheese. This has various ramifications, and the novel — which hasn’t much of a plot — is how various people react to this event, and its consequences.

I did not care for it. In fact, it is by far my least favorite Scalzi. I will be surprised if many people do, though of course Red Shirts won a Hugo even though I didn’t like it.

# # #

The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin

* The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin, 1969. 50th Anniversary Edition.

w/EC-SF-bookclub: I am trying out this online book club run by the delightful musician-science-literary nerd Elle Cordova. You can find out about the club here, as well as back her many creative activities.

My Thoughts on the Book

I am happy to have re-read this, after, I would guess, about five decades. I did not remember a lot about it, and the heart of what I remembered was wrong: I had remembered Genly Ai and Estraven having become lovers, if somewhat unwillingly driven to it by the pressures of Keemer and isolation. But they did not, though they did achieve a certain degree of understanding through forced intimacy. I did recall, of course, the hermaphroditism and short period of sexual dimorphism for a few days every month, and I recalled, but with few specifics, that it was clear that it changed how the culture worked.

EP #17: When I was a Child…, Marilynne Robinson

When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson, 2012. This is book #17 in the Essay Project, a series of reading I am doing with CT. It marks a return to literary essays after an epistolary detour into the letters of Olive Sacks, and only a temporary return as we have plans to finish the rest of Sacks’ work…

My Thoughts on the Book

I must say, having just read the Preface and the first essay, I am beginning with a rather unfavorable impression. However, I will hope that her initial writing, which seems to me to quite polemical, will give way to more measured and approachable topics.

Later: After the discussing the first three essays, my reading partner and I decided that we would try to cherry-pick the essays, to see if we could find material we liked better. I proposed we read the title essay, and CT, after skimming the rest of the book, proposed we also read the final two. These are discussed below, but the bottom line is that while I can say that I enjoyed the title essay, the other two did not really grab me. I think, unless CT had a far different experience, we will stop after our next discussion, having read six of the ten essays.

The Disordered Mind…, Eric R. Kandel

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell us about Ourselves, Eric R. Kandel, 2018.

Kandel is an eminent neuroscientist, known for his work on the low-level mechanisms of learning and memory as demonstrated in Aplysia. He’s won a host of prizes, including the Nobel for this work. Interestingly, as an undergraduate he majored in humanities, and afterwards became a psychiatrist, before migrating into neuroscience. Now in his 90’s, he is writing about larger themes, and addressing himself to more general audiences.

Writing after having read four chapters: The book is interesting, but I wish it went into more detail. Though it is also possible that the detail is not available — i.e. we still not shockingly little about mental disorders.

The Innocence of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton

March 2025

I only discovered G. K. Chesterton a few years ago, through his essays which are generally excellent, and some which I would call brilliant. More recently I’ve dipped into his fiction. The Man Who was Thursday was superb, both surreal and funny, and laden with the striking descriptions — of landscapes, settings, people — of which Chesterton is a master. After that, just last month, I tried a second piece of fiction, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I wrote a brief review of that, and, as I said, I did not care for that at all — it was clearly produced by the same author, but there the surreal became simply absurd, and the humor farce. Suspension of disbelief failed.

Still, having liked so much of his writing, and having found so little recent fiction satisfying, I wanted to try again, and so turned to his Father Brown stories about a Priest-Detective. The friend who had initially brought GKC to my attention recommended the story, The Blue Cross, as his favorite, and sent me a link to this volume on Project Guttenberg. The Blue Cross was indeed excellent, and so I proceeded through the rest of the volume.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G. K. Chesterton

A couple of years ago I read Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday. I love it. The writing was beautiful in parts, and the story a blend of the absurd and surreal — it was funny, although I did catch on to what was happening pretty quickly. But still, it was quite delightful, and that was not dampened by the Chestertonian moral/religious overlay.

All that is to say that I picked up The Napoleon of Notting Hill with anticipation. Written circa 1903, the story was set in a future London — 1984 — where almost nothing had changed in terms of class, society or technology, with the exception that instead of having a hereditary monarchy, a monarch was selected at random. The story is about the selection of a new monarch who is deeply unserious, and for his own amusement decrees that the various neighborhoods of London should function as independent nations, with their own heraldry and uniformed guards (which the new King designed), and their own traditions and customs. All this is intended to restore some of the ‘romance’ of medieval times, and, to the King’s delight, soon results in armed battles between the neighborhoods — Notting Hill, in a surprise, becoming ascendant.

Anyway, that’s the starting point of the book, but I have to say it didn’t engage me much. Whereas ‘Thursday’ was funny and surreal, this was absurd and unbelievable. It took about 3/4 of the book (it’s short) for me to become at all engaged, and then it was more a matter of curiosity about how Chesterton would wrap it up, rather than caring about the characters or story. Towards the end Chesterton does make a case for his preference for romance and semi-feudal systems vis a vis modernity, but it was mainly interesting as reinforcing my understanding of Chesterton’s view of the world.

Too bad. …But I do intend to give a couple of his ‘Father Brown’ books — about his priest-detective, a try.

# # #

Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald

January 2025

I picked up this book, probably about a year ago at the recommendation of Dan Russell. In terms of single-author collections, I’ve liked this more than anything I’ve read in years, perhaps with the exception of Loren Eisley’s essays. Regardless, Macdonald is a superb writer, and in particular her descriptions of the natural world are remarkable. I intend to seek out her other books.

I like, as well, her view of what literature ought to do:

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. — Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights. p. ix

Favorites

2. Nothing Like a Pig
9. Ants
10. Symptomatic
12. Winter Woods
18. Deer in the Headlights
35 Eulogy
38. Dispatches from the Valley

The Craft of Writing — things I’ve learned here

Describing a Moment: “And then it happens: a short, collapsing moment.” This passage, by foregrounding the nature of the moment, and the movement from uncertainty to realization, does a superb job of highlighting and intensifying an epiphany. (In Nothing like a Pig.)
A beautiful resonating description: “a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.“
Use of incongruity for stream-of-consciousness. In Deer in the Headlights she does a great job of conveying the incongruity of two worlds — the forest and the highway — in a single sentence that juxtaposes glimpses of the nature of each. Similarly, in The Student’s Tale, the first sentence, with independent clauses connected by a series of “ands,” really conveys an immediate stream-of-consciousness experience, where the attention is hopping around, and making non-rational connections as it does so (.e.g, the grapes on the table are black, and so is the taxi out front).
Transforming dynamic movement into a pattern.“The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines…” (Ants). For me, this generates a pattern — a vault of sky circumscribed by imagined flightlines – that extends over time and creates a persistent space which frames other happenings…

1. Nests

This essay describes nests. She begins with her feelings about nests develop when she was a child, and encountered them in her yard. She then goes into the present, and reflects more on this than their meanings.

*2. Nothing like a Pig

This essay describes an encounter with a boar. She reflects both on the boar, and more in general on animals in particular, and how the conception of an animal differs from the reality of the animal

Then it happens: a short, collapsing moment as sixty or seventy yards away something walks fast between the trees, and then the boar. The boar. The boar.

– Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald, p 11.

A great bit of writing. The “short, collapsing moment.” The uncertainty about distance — “sixty or seventy yards” — and what she is seeing — “something.” The revelation: “and then the boar.” And the repetition: “The boar. The boar.“

3. Inspector Calls

A very nice short piece about an encounter with autistic boy, who is visiting her flat with his parents. In particular he connects with her bird and the bird with him.

4. Field Guides

“Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen.”

5. Terkels Park

An essay on the place where she grew up. A bit nostalgic, but it was unusual, and had interesting reflections, so I found it worth reading. Some very nice writing:

I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams.

— ibid. p 12

My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space,

— Ibid. p 13

6. High-Rise

About watching migrating birds at night from the top of the Empire State Building. An interesting discussion of how birds migrate — the height and speeds at which they fly, and the way they navigate — and the problems that the lights and tall buildings of the city give them.

7. The Human Flock

“Overhead a long wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky.“

Recounting the observation of large flocks of migrating cranes, and continuing to a discussion of the dynamics of swarms and murmurations. “Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching 90 miles an hour…” This segues into a concluding comment on refugees, and a plea to regard them as individuals rather than masses.

8. The Student’s Tale

An account of meeting a student who is a refugee and spending time in camps…

A great opening sentence:

There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket.

— The Student’s Tale, Vesper Flight, Kate Macdonald, p. 53

I think this is a marvelous stream-of-consciousness sentence, with the writers attention shifting from taxi to grapes to taxi to the woman and then to the student whose shoulders are hunched. The second person is also very effective.

*9. Ants

About the mating flights of ants, and the birds that prey upon them. Also reflects on the power of scientific understanding to enhance the beauty of things, rather than detract: “…it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving.”

A red kite joins the flock, drifting and tilting through it on paper-cut wings stamped black against the sky.

[…]

The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines, warm airspace tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant.

— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 63

*10. Symptomatic

Discusses her experiences with migraines. The writing is beautiful and ranges from describing the onset and symptoms of her migraine, to the way in which she has come to live with them. Ends with a partial analogy to earth undergoing climate change…

I was busily signing books when a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes like shorting fairy lights, spread downwards from the upper right-hand corner of my vision until I could barely see through them.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 66

11. Sex, Death, Mushrooms

On mushroom hunting: “It is raining hard, and the forest air is sweet and winey with decay.“

The air is damp and dark in here. Taut lines of spider silk are slung between their flaking trunks; I can feel them snapping across my chest. Fat garden spiders drop from my coat on to the thick carpet of pine needles below.
—Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 80

I like feeling the snapping, and the spiders dropping from her coat to the forest floor. It animates the scene, and tells us she is moving through it.

* 12. Winter Woods

Beginning with her custom of walking in the woods every New Year’s day, she reflects on the things that are distinctive about forests in winter. From the revelation of the landscape, to the bark textures and angled branches of leafless trees, to the sometimes transitory life that becomes evident. Winter woods, she suggests, are full of potential:

So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter woods teach me something else: the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the last five hours, the last five days, the last five centuries, all at once. They’re wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes. In them, potentiality crackles in the winter air.
—ibid., p. 85

13. Eclipse

On viewing a solar eclipse. The phenomenology of the event, but also the deep, irrational, fundamental, emotional impact. The essay is reminiscent of Joan Didion’s essay, and in particular the way in which the fading daylight alters the colors in ways that cast the landscape in an alien light. It ends, beautifully, with a description of the light returning, and the emotions that brings.

14. In Her Orbit

A description of a trip with an astrobiologist to study extremophiles at very high altitudes in the Andes. Some beautiful descriptions of desolate and unworldly environments.

15. Hares

A description of the phenomenon of boxing hares, their place in English thought and mythology, and their decline due to environmental change.

16. Lost, But Catching Up

A very short essay description her glimpse of a hound that was trying to catch up to the pack during a fox hunt.

17. Swan Upping Nestboxes

About the English tradition of “Swan Upping,” and her experience observing the activity; all interladen with reflections on the role of tradition and its uneasy releationship to Brexit, which had recently occurred.

18. Deer in the Headlights

Discusses her changing feelings about deer, from initially wishing to known nothing about them and valuing them as a source of surprise and delight, to a desire to understand them. She says it better, though:

Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 141

As the title suggests, much of the essay is about deer-vehicle collisions; and also about how people react to them, in the moment, and, sometimes in cruel ways, on the internet. It is a complex essay. It doesn’t really speak to me, but there are a lot of great turns of phrase and passages.

Here is how the essay begins:

The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 140

And here is a passage I admire for the way it highlights the incongruity of the two worlds: nature and the highway. It moves from the forest, to the road, to the forest, to the road, to her standing, embodied, on the bridge.

For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 141

19. The Falcon and the Tower

She is watching birds — falcons — in an abandoned industrial plant in Dublin. The essay discusses falcons, and how they have adapted to living in cities and their infrastructures. Moves from their behavior and natural history, to the ways in which people have viewed them, to their change in habitat given the ‘advance’ of civilization. Ends with a reflection on the brevity of life, and a note of hope.

20. Vesper Flights

The essay that gives the collection a title. Begins with her finding a dead Swift and not knowing what to do with it. Segues into a description of Swifts and how they are somewhat “magical” — “the closest things to aliens on earth.” After describing their natural history, describes the phenonmenon of “vesper flights,” where they gather in the evening and fly up to 8,000 feet. She describes how this behavior was discovered, and goes through the history of this behavior being observed and understood. Interleaved with this is her accounts of how, as a small child, she sought comfort in the evening (her own private vespers) by imagining herself as embedded in layers of the earth below her and the atmosphere above her. This comes together as we learn that vesper flights, for Swifts, help them take account of where they are and the oncoming weather conditions, and as Macdonald reflects on ways in which she (we) can adopt practices that enable us to locate ourselves and think about what comes next.

21. In Spight of Prisons

A very nice, short essay about her annual practice of going to see glowworms in a quarry.

* 22. Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres

About her efforts to observe Oriels at the single place in Britain where they can still be found. Over time, their habitat is degraded, and at last there is only one… but, at the last moment, she is able to get a glimpse of it. She has a lovely sentence where she describes the song (or a song) or the oriel: “Wo-de-wal-e, wo-de-wal-e, a phrase like the curl of the cut ends of a gilded banner furling over the page of an illuminated manuscript.“

In this essay, she excels at capturing the fragmentary, mosaical nature of perception.

…what I saw became something like looking into a Magic Eye picture. Here was a circle, and in it a thousand angles of stalk and leaf and scraps of shade at various distances, and every straight stalk or branch was alternately obscured and revealed as the wind blew. I began to feel a little seasick watching this chaos, but then, as magically as a stereogram suddenly reveals a not-very-accurate 3D dinosaur, the muddy patch just off centre resolved itself into the nest.

[…]

Finally, I saw my oriole. A bright, golden male. It was a complex joy, because I saw him only in stamped-out sections, small jigsaw pieces of a bird, but moving ones, animated mutoscope views. A flick of wings, a scrap of tail, then another glimpse – this time, just his head alone – through a screen of leaves. I was transfixed. I had not expected the joyous, extravagant way this oriole leapt into the air between feeds, the enormously decisive movements, always, and the little dots like stars that flared along the edge of his spread-wide tail.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 177 & 179

23. The Observatory

About swans, beginning with an odd experience she had with one approaching her, and sitting beside her, in a moment of grief.

24. Wicken

About a visit to a nature preserve with her young niece, and her niece’s puzzlement about why there were so many animals here — ‘did they bring them from a zoo?’ Reflections on the shift from a time when nature and animals were all around us, to the present, when they are mostly found in special preserves.

25. Storm

A short essay describing a thunderstorm, and also reflecting on storms as metaphors, in particular, in this essay, for the onset of Brexit.

26. Murmurations

Begins with getting a passport replaced at the last minute, and then moves to how birds were seen during war time, and the rise and evolution of the notion of birdwatching.

27. A Cuckoo in the House

On cuckoos, how people perceive them, and in particular a rather eccentric British intelligence agent — Maxwell Knight — who raised a cuckoo. Didn’t grab me, but others might well find it a fascinating tale.

28. The Arrow-Stork

About tracking migrating birds. Makes this interesting point:

Projects like this give us imaginative access to the lives of wild creatures, but they cannot capture the real animals’ complex, halting paths. Instead they let us watch virtual animals moving across a world of eternal daylight built of a patchwork of layered satellite and aerial imagery, a flattened, static landscape free of happenstance. There are no icy winds over high mountain passes here, no heavy rains, soaring hawks, ripening crops or recent droughts.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 217

29. Ashes

About destroying diseased trees, beginning with elms with Dutch Elm disease in her childhood, and ending with ash trees and the emerald ash borer.

30. A Handful of Corn

About feeding animals. Starts with a nice anecdote about an elderly woman who put out corn to attract badgers at night. Continues into the practice of feeding animals, and makes the interesting point that there are some animals it is socially acceptable to feed, and others — foxes, rats, pigeons — that it is not.

31. Berries

This short essay begins with her decorating a Christmas tree, and sprucing up its decorations with berries from outside, but feeling slightly guilty because berries exist as food for birds. Segues into natural history of both birds and berries.

A great bit of description: “…like a gravity stricken whirlwind, a pack of fat birds swirled down from the blank sky…“

32. Cherry Stones

About the return of hawfinches to Britain, the excitement it engenders, and the ways in which their behavior seems to be changing vis a vis what habitat they prefer. Also touches on the blurring of natural history and national identity.

33. Birds, Tabled

About the practice of capturing and keeping birds, which in England is mostly done by the working classes, and which is, it seems, looked down upon by others. She discusses the practice, how bird keepers feel about it and their birds, and the class differences and that this highlights. Interesting.

34. Hiding

An interesting piece about hides (what we in the U.S. call “blinds”). It touches both on the aims and experience of watching animals from blinds, as well as the human experience within blinds.

* 35. Eulogy

A eulogy for a friend: a description of the her friend is interleaved with a night outing to see nightjars. A beautiful piece of writing.

The essay begins with a description of the outing, setting out while it is still light, but with the darkness coming:

As night falls, our senses stretch to meet it. A roebuck barks in the distance, small mammals rustle in the grass. The faintest tick of insects. The scratchy, resinous fragrance of heathland grows stronger, more insistent. As we pass clumps of viper’s bugloss we watch the oncoming night turn their leaves blacker, their purple petals bluer and more intense until they seem to glow. The paths become luminous trails through darkness. White moths spiral up from the ground, and a cockchafer zips past us, elytra raised, wings buzzing.

– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 255

After this, she makes the connection to her friend: “Soon all color will be gone. The thought is a hard one.” And then, after writing about him: “Now, watching the slow diminishment of sense and detail around me, I’m thinking of Stu and what is happening to him, thinking of his family, of what we face at the end of our lives’ long summers when the world parts from us, of how we all, one day, will walk into darkness.“

A somber essay, but ending with a note of, not hope, but acceptance. Stu says, “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s not hard.”

It’s OK, he said. It’s not hard. Those are the words I am remembering as we walk onward, as the minutes pass, until night thickens completely and there is starlight and dust and the feel of sand underfoot. It’s so dark now I cannot see myself. But the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 259

36. Rescue

An account of a visit to the house of a friend who rescues and rehabilitates swifts. It begins with her friend feeding nestlings, and ends with the release of a swift, and a haunting description of the swift’s transformation as it is about to take to the sky.

37. Goats

A brief, funny story about her, her dad, and pushing goats. Wouldn’t call it an essay though.

* 38. Dispatches from the Valleys

A curious essay centered around her experiences in her first job out of college, working on a falcon conservation-breeding farm. She describes what it was like — it sounded unpleasant to me, but she clearly got to do many things she loved and valued. She describes what led her to leave the farm, and does a good job of creating tension by naming two incidents, first “the dreadful incident with the ostrich,” and then “the cattle on the hill,” and describing each played out.

The ostrich incident — euthanasia of a horribly injured bird — was straightforward, if unpleasant. The “cattle on the hill” incident is quite strange: it involves her spending hours sneaking up on them, and then jumping up and scaring them into stampeding, though she does not know why.

At the end of the essay, though, she recounts an epiphany, and, for me, it resolves not just the ‘cattle on the hill’ incident, but the whole essay:

And then I thought of the day I stalked the steers on the hill and it resolved into perfect clarity. For I had seen myself as one of those steers, one of a feral and uncared-for herd enjoying life in the middle of nowhere, not thinking about what would happen in the future, and not much worried about it, but knowing deep down that one day I was headed for the abattoir. There would be no escaping the deep sea for the shore. And my stalking and shouting was not mindless. It had been an inchoate attempt to knock them out of their contented composure. It had been a warning to make them run the hell out of there, because the valley we were all in was dark and deep and could have no good end.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 282

39. The Numinous Ordinary

An interesting essay with some nice passages in it, but it didn’t really resonate with me.

40. What Animals Taught Me

Discusses the author’s changing conceptions of and relationships to animals. She liked caring for them, as a child, but came to recognize that was about her feeling good about herself, rather than about the animals. As she grew older, she found that an intense focus on animals was a way to make herself disappear, to allow herself into a separate world that did not contain the difficulties she was faced with. Later, with respect to falconry, she speaks about how she learned that the other party in a relationship might see it very differently — a lesson she was slow to apply to humans. The “deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.” And “None of us sees animals clearly. They are too full of the stories we have given them.“

Towards the end of the essay, speaking of a rook, she comments that now what she enjoys is not imagining that she can feel what the rook feels, know what it knows, but that it’s slow delight in knowing that she cannot.

As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. We noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.
– Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights, p. 299

# # #

EP #16: Letters, Oliver Sacks

December 2024 – April 2025

This is book # 16 in the no-longer-very-aptly named Essays Project. Though perhaps, having detoured into the wilds of Shakespeare, a tour of the letters of Sacks, who is a formidable essayist, is steering us back towards the main track. Of course, letters are not essays, but their relative brevity and personal cast, as well as the wide-ranging nature of Sack’s epistles, give them a familial resemblance.

The book is edited by Kate Edgar, Sacks’ assistant and editor of several decades; she also contributes a brief preface which offers her perspective on Sacks’ compulsive writing process. Alas for her brevity; I believe she could offer a lot of insight on Sacks. But perhaps his letters will serve. Onward!

Preface and Editor’s Introduction

Sacks loved correspondence. He felt one ought to reply to letters, immediately if possible. He corresponded with, literally, thousands of people, from school children to Nobel laureates. Sacks took pains to preserve his letters with carbon sets, drafts, or later, photocopies, though by no means does all his correspondence survive. But that part which does runs to about 200,000 pages, or about 70 bankers’ boxes.

Cymbeline

Precis

Act 1: Cymbeline turns against Imogen and Posthumous; as does Iachimo; Queen plots.

Cymbeline, angry that Imogen has wed Posthumos, banishes Posthumos and imprisons Imogen. Posthumos, in Rome, encounters Iachimo who sets out to to prove Imogen unfaithful. Queen requests a poison from her doctor, who gives her a fake one.

The Winter’s Tale

An interesting one. The first part is a tragedy; the second transforms it into a comedy. There are a lot of loose ends that are, mostly, tied up in the penultimate scene, in a series of disclosures to Autolycus, offered for unclear reasons.

I find Autolycus are curious character — a villain who morphs into a trickster. Paulina is, in my view, the hero of the story, though it is disappointing that she is married off at the end after she declares she is going to morn for her dead husband. Apparently marrying everyone off is de rigueur for a comedy.