The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin

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

wECclub: 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. This is the first book that I will have read, but the second in the club series. The first is “I Robot,” by Isaac Asimov. I suspect I will go back and read that.

Author’s Note

A very nice opening note by Le Guinn, worth seeking out if you do not have a 1976 or later edition. She argues that SF is not about primarily about extrapolating from the present (though she admits extrapolation can play a role), but rather it is primarily a description of a thought experiment.

About extrapolation, she says memorably “Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing…” ibid. xvi

About the androgynity in the book, she says she is not predicting, but rather:

I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at it us at odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.”

—ibid., xvii (1976)

Nice turns of phrase:

A flaw of rain runs sparse and hard upriver (p 7)
the crowds began to move like a rocky shingle rolled by a slow tide (p 7)
Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes when circling the sun.” (p 86)
One is respected and judged only as a human. It is an appalling experience. (p 95)
The door squealed open and it was broad day, the sun like a knife in the eyes, bright and frightening. […] …and I was no longer a refugee. I was set apart from those nameless ones with whom I fled down a dark road and whose lack of identity I had shared all night in a dark room. I was named, known, recognized; I existed. It was an intense relief. I followed my leader gladly. (p 110-111)
I was glad to be driving sedately at twenty-five miles an hour through vast, straight-furrowed grainlands, under an even gray sky, towards a capital whose goven-ment believed in Order. (p 112)
…roofs pitched steep as praying hands… (p 113)

The Book – Précis

C1: A Parade in Erhenrang

Genly Ai, the narrator participates in a royal parade, during which he has ample opportunity to describe himself, his role (an ambassador of sorts from the Ekumen), the people and society he is visiting, and the extremely wretched weather of this world.

We also see awkward conversation with Estraven, his primary supporter and informant, that show, in spite of months (or more?) of that communication, though fluent, is hampered by very basic understandings that are not shared — the mutual only partially-understood incomprehension reminds me of CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series, though of course Le Guinn is preceding this by a couple of decades. In any case, it gradually becomes clear that Estraven is warning Genly Ai that he has fallen out of favor (and/or is perhaps abandoning him). The last line of the chapter: “I was cold, unconfident, obsessed by perfidy, solitude and fear.

C2: The Place Inside the Blizzard

This is a story or legend (the book is a collection of accounts, one a memoir, and others seeming anthropological documents assembled by investigators). This story describes a relationship (kemmering) between two brothers, the goes wrong. One brother commits suicide, the other curses their region; at the end, the brother relents, and lifts his curse.

C3: The Mad King

Genly Ai has an audience with the mad King, just before which he learns that Estraven has been exiled and condemned to death. During the audience, he learns that he has not been condemned and is granted freedom of the realm, but at the same time he is not believed, or, if he is believed, is feared and shunned. Genly Ai decides that he is going to leave the capital city, and visit some of the remote fastnesses to exhibit the odd non-religion that practices foretelling.

C4: The Nineteenth Day. This story is about a person who purchases a fortelling of the day of his death, but is dissatisfied with the answer, which is analogous to “On a Wednesday.” He falls into a depression, and so his lover purchases a foretelling of how long his lover will live, but again the answer is unsatisfactory: “Longer than you.” Disappointed, the first kills the second, and then goes mad and hangs himself a week later (on a Wednesday). Again we are exposed to the concept/state of kemmering.

C5: The Domestication of Hunch

It is becoming clear that Genly Ai is, if not an outright misogynist, attributes a lot of negative characteristics to women. Well — what else is a misogynist — he’s clearly one… it will be interesting to see the intensity and nature of it. We see more of the world, its larger structure and modes of transportation, and get an introduction to Fastnesses and the Handdarata religion. Nusuth — the ubiquitous ambiguous negative of the Handdarata. Genly Ai has a foretelling and the ritual occurs and he is told that Winter will join the Ekumen within five years. At the end, we learn from Faxe. the Weaver. that the purpose of foretelling is “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” And the chapter ends with this statement, again from the weaver: “The only thing that makes life possible permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. “

C6: One Way into Orgoreyn. xxx

This chapter begins with Lord Estraven learning of his exile, and needing to leave quickly without money or supplies, and eschewing aid so as not to endanger his friends. His (former) kemmering, Ashe, tries to aid him, but he rejects him and the aid and hurries on on his own. He reaches a port city, where he had hoped to catch a foreign vessel, but as none are in port he steals a rowboat and heads across a gulf towards Orgoreyn. Injured by a sonic gun as he escapes, he is picked up by a ship that takes him to Orgoreyn, headless of the price on his head. He is cared for in a hospital, and then released to do manual labor as an indigent; at some point, he comes to the notice of government officials who know him, and he is ‘adopted’ into the household of Commensal Yegevy and his partner Obese. They know him from past diplomatic contacts, appear to trust him, and discuss his fears about what is going on between Charade and Orgoreyn and how it may lead to conflict — in the course of this discussion we get some glimpses of shifgrethor (primarily by it being waived).

C7: The Question of Sex

A report by a member of the first landing team on the nature of the Gethen hermaphrodites (it is theorized that the planet was an abandoned experiment) and the way sex and gender works in their society. This both provides a lot of basic information that will be useful as the novel unfolds, but also provides a way to provide some commentary on sex and gender roles relative to the rest of the Ekumen which embodies what we view as ‘normal’ gender roles. Speculations about the absence of gender roles include:

More equality — anyone can do anything
No psychosexual complications between child and parent
No unconsenting sex; no rape, and seduction must be very well timed.
No division into dominant/submissive, strong/weak, etc
A lack of ambition — ‘What would a society of eunuchs achieve?’
Perhaps the goal of the ‘experiment’ was to eliminate war.

“Our entire pattern of sociosexual interaction is non existent here. They can’t play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. … One is respected and judged only as a human. It is an appalling experience. ” (p 94 … 95)

Interestingly this report is identified as being written by a woman.

C8: Another Way into Orgoreyn

Genly Ai spends the summer in rural Karhide talking to people. Towards the end of the summer he learns the King is pregnant, and that his regent will be Tibe, Estraven’s enemy. Fearing that this will lead to bad things, and knowing he has to cross the passes before winter, Genly Ai sets out for Orgoreyn. He crosses into that country, but is caught in a raid by Ehrenrang people just after he enters Orgoreyn. After a brief period of imprisonment (he has lost his papers), he is recognized*, and brought to the capital and put up in Commensal Shusgis’ luxurious home. There he begins to talk to various members of the ruling class, and also encounters Estraven.

* Genly Ai is recognized, and everything changes at that moment. He leaves those he spent the night with, without a backward glance or further thought:

The door squealed open and it was broad day, the sun like a knife in the eyes, bright and frightening. […] …and I was no longer a refugee. I was set apart from those nameless ones with whom I fled down a dark road and whose lack of identity I had shared all night in a dark room. I was named, known, recognized; I existed. It was an intense relief. I followed my leader gladly.

ibid., p 110-111

This chapter contrasts Orgoreyn with Karthig, presenting the former as a a dull but well-ordered bureaucracy, where having an identity is everything, as we just saw above. “I was glad to be driving sedately at twenty-five miles an hour through vast, straight-furrowed grainlands, under an even gray sky, towards a capital whose goven-ment believed in Order.“

The chapter ends with this reflection regarding Estragen:

And it crossed my mind, though I dismissed the idea as baseless, that I had not come to Mishnory to eat roast blackfish with the Commensals of my own free will; nor had they brought me here. He had.
— ibid., 121

Clearly Le Guinn often ends her chapters with a bit of a punch.

C9: Estraven the Traitor

An old story about a love affair between the descendents of two rival lords. One was murdered, but not before he had slept with the other, who bore a child. The child was returned to his grandfather (the father of the murdered one), and eventually became the heir. Later, he made peace with the other Lord (his other grandfather). for this he was called a traitor.

C10: Conversations in Mishnory

Genly Ai, ensounced in comfort in Mishnory, has various conversations with the political movers and shakers of Mishnory, especially the Open Trade faction, explaining his presence and goals. Some appear to believe him, and wish to use him for their own ends; others are skeptical, and/or believe he is a danger. He also meets with Estraven, of whom he has formed a bad opinion; but he is unsettled by Estraven’s warning that others will seek to use him for their own ends. He also learns of the Sarf, the internal police force…

C11: Soliloquies in Mishnory

A soliloquy by Estraven, in which he mulls over the situation, and comes to suspect that he and Genly Ai understood one another far less than he’d anticipated — this was triggered by the apparent failure of Genly to realize that the offering of advice Estraven was an insult to his shifgrethor. Now he imagines that Genly Ai’s shifgrethor must be “founded, and composed, and sustained altogether differently that ours.” Estraven is now able to live indendently due to the money Ai brought, and is working and re-learning and practicing various ‘skills’ — fasting, meditation, etc. — that he used to be good at. He reflects on the factions and purposes of the varoius players, at one point noting “To oppose something is to maintain it.” After a time Estraven grows increasingly worried that no news is being broadcast about Genly Ai or his mission. All communication channels are under control of the Sarf, and so no one wants to have Ai call his ship. Estraven believes that Genly Ai’s life is in danger.

C12: On Time and Darkenss

A myth about Meshe, sort of a a god of the universe, one who is at the center of time and know all things. A footnote suggests that this is a mythological version of the expanding universe theory.

C13: Down on the Farm

Estraven is arrested after failing to heed Estraven’s warnings and instead confiding in Shusgis. He is taken to prison, and injected with drugs and questioned. The he is put in a truck with other prisoners, and over a period of several days is conveyed to a prison farm. There he works without adequate food, and is drugged and questioned every few days; the drugs are bad for him, and he is slower to recover after each session. It seems clear he is headed towards death.

C14: The Escape

Estraven blackmails Shusgis and finds out where Genly Ai has been taken, and then goes to the embassy and has the information sent back to Argaven in Karhide. Then he forges papers and sets off to where Genly is being held, knowing that Genly will not survive the winter. He joins a party of trappers, gets to the vicinity of the prison and rescues Genly Ai. The chapter ends with Estraven telling Genly Ai that the wants to learn mind-speech so that they can trust one another.

C15: To the Ice

Genly Ai recovers somewhat; Estraven steals food and supplies; the set off across the ice. They will have to make a certain distance each day, on the average, to make it to Karhide before they run out food. In this chapter, they are doing pretty well.

C16: Between Drummer and Dremegole

xxx

Afterword by Charlie Jane Anders

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 — TBD

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.

Nice Phrases

Say we are a warm puff of breath in a very cold universe. By this reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or incalculably precious and interesting. p. 36
It [ideology] is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. p. 49.
It was also Mrs. Bloomsburg who trudged us through Cicero’s vast sentences, clause de pending from clause, the whole cantilevered with subjunctives and weighted with a culminating irony. p. 87
I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs… p. 88

Preface

In the preface, Robinson reflects on America and democracy, and offers a rather dispirited mediation on how things are going. She wrote this in 2012, and I can only imagine that she is far more disconsolate.

Robinson begins with a long quote from Whitman (circa 1870) about the greatness of America and Democracy, and about his worry that “savage, wolfish parties” acting from within will degrade the spirit and ideals of democracy. Robinson, writing in 2012, seems to find these concerns truer than ever, and comments on the decrease in tolerance for multiple viewpoints. “We have seen bad times and we will see more of them,” she laments. Well, that certainly seems apposite today.

Clearly, Whitman’s concerns were not realized, or are only being realized very, very slowly. Robinson admits the US has experienced a healthy and stable dynamicism, and attributes it to the long period of prosperity and advancement that is possible through domestic piece. She returns to Whitman, quoting his paen to Democracy, and suggests that his words highlight how far our vocabulary has drifted over the generations. She laments a shift to seeing capitalism as the dominant driver of our social history, and the loss of religious and spiritual language as a way of reflecting on our history and culture. She also sees capitalism, and its emphasis on economics and optimization as corroding everything it touches — this is a rare moment when I am in accord with her thinking.

If she had such a dismal view of the future in 2012, I can hardly imagine her views now. That is not to say that she is wrong, of course.

Essays

Freedom of Thought, p. 3

Overall, I’m not quite sure of the point of this essay. She takes a lot of shots at science, does battle with what seem to me straw men with regard to scientific thought. I end up unimpressed by her arguments, and feel she casts herself in, to me, a rather bad light. All that said, I’m not sure where we end up. She doesn’t seem too pleased with current religious discourse either. She ends with “Science can give us knowledge, but not wisdom. Neither can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

Focusing a bit on her comments about ‘science,’ and the sort of thought it fosters:

She begins this essay remarking that she has spent her years of writing and teaching trying to free herself of constraints. By this she appears to mean that she has tried to move beyond the ‘narrow’ ‘scientific’ conception of human beings and human life. She draws examples from her undergraduate education, but her examples — “moldy theories … memorized for the test and never thought of again;” and (faux) research with rats in the behaviorist paradigm – seem to me to cast aspersions on the institution where she was educated, and on her own commitment to learning, rather than establishing the case that college somehow imposes constraints on thinking. Similarly, her claim that the curriculum held up Freud’s thought (and others) for admiration simply because it was thought by Freud, seems jaw-droppingly simplistic: Freud is important because he had a vast influence on the thought of his time, contributed many concepts to an emerging discipline, and influenced (and antagonized) a vast network of intellectuals during his lifetime and later. One might argue that other thinkers had less impact for reasons that had nothing to do with quality of their thought, and that it is a disservice to breadth and diversity to ignore them, but that is not the argument she makes. Anyway, this left me with a poor impression of her character, and her qualities as an intellectual.

She is also rather careless with facts. The nth hand account (‘I have read that…’) she gives of the use of infant rats as reinforcements in an operant conditioning experiment seems dubious, and, indeed, although there is plenty of research on rat ‘infants’ (or “rat pups”) as they are called in the literature, I can find nothing remotely similar to what she describes. I think this is a story that someone invented, and I have the sense that the truth of it is not of importance to her — it is simply a usefully shocking image that plays into her rhetoric. Another very trivial example is that at one point she says she has read that the number of neurons in the human brain is greater than the number of stars in the milky way. That’s not correct — what she probably read is that the number of interconnections in the human brain is greater, etc.. This does not impact her argument, but does illustrate a certain carelessness and the absence of an external fact-checker.

There is more, but I’m sufficiently unenthralled by the essay that I don’t feel like pursuing it.

Imagination and Community, p. 19

I liked this essay much more than her previous one, and it largely eliminated the poor impression I had formed based on her “Freedom of Thought” essay — although I still do not like that essay.

She begins by writing about what she likes about books, and libraries of books. Here she strikes a chord with me. Then she goes on and introduces the apophatic — knowledge or reality than can not be expressed in words. She is very attracted to this notion, taking, I think, as sort of a holy mystery and reveling in it: “the unnamed is overwhelmingly present and real for me.” I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Certainly words, narrative, stories, are not the same as the reality of nature, but… so what? Why should they be? Language, like any representational system, is good at representing some things, and not at others. The representational mechanism of the calculus does a fine job of allowing us to deal with the infinite and the infinitesimal, where words — for example, in Xeno’s paradoxes — founder in a seemingly paradoxical fashion.

What I like most in this essay are her reflections on community, and the imaginative aspects the underlie it. She does not appear to be familiar with, or at least does not cite, Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on “Imagined Community.” While there is resonance with that, she also reflects on her relationship — as an author of fiction — with wholly the thoughts, feelings and actions of wholly imaginary characters.

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of who knows it better than I?— people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

—ibid., p 21

Austerity as Ideology, p. 35

While I can’t say I enjoyed reading this essay, it exhibits her strengths as a writer and thinker. As I read, the thought that kept recurring was ‘If she was this disturbed in 2012, how must she feel now?’ It seems to me that every concern she has articulated seems to have intensified tenfold. Yikes.

She is good a diagnosing and describing, but I see little in the way of prescription or hope. Austerity and fear have fused into a single driving ethos, and are the motive force behind the destruction of various public institutions that were designed to benefit a broad range of people. While she notes an alternative approach at the end of her essay, it seems more wistful than hopeful. Of course, there is no requirement that she solve problems or offer hope.

Much of what she said was familiar to me, but I found a couple of her explorations thought-provoking. One had to do with the cold war period, and how threatening the US and UK must have seemed to the Russians. And, following on from that, the ‘competition’ between the US and the Soviets in arts, culture and science. The cultural competition, she thinks, helped us; the military competition was disastrous for both.

… reading break ….

Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism, p. 59

When I Was a Child, p. 85

My favorite essay so far. It has to do with growing up in the west — Idaho — and some of the perspectives that that gave her. In particular she has some interesting remarks about being unattached to particular traditions, and about loneliness being, if not a good thing, at least something with positive connotations. She suggests that loneliness and unattachment, while they have become associated with dysfunction in the general culture, still have positive associations that can be seen in the aloof heros of westerns, and the protagonists of country-western songs.

She segues into a discussion of Housekeeping, her novel (seemingly assuming that of course her readers will be familiar with it). I found that a little irritating, but not without interest.

We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates, or in Eden. At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.

ibid. 93

and

I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.

– ibid. 88

The Fate of Ideas: Moses, p. 95

Wondrous Love, p. 125

The Human Spirit and the Good Society, p. 143

Who Was Oberlin: Cosmology, p. 183

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.

Snow Crystals, Kenneth Libbrecht

Snow Crystals: A Case Study of Spontaneous Structure Formation, Kenneth Libbrecht, 2022

This is Libbrecht’s magnum opus, at least on snow; this goes deep into the science. …and I love that he has ordered the references by date, so you can see the history of the science leading up to Libbrecht’s work.

Notes still in progress…

Four Billion Years and Counting…

Four Billion Years and Counting: Canada’s Geological Heritage. Produced by the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences, by seven editors and dozens of authors. 2014.

November-December, 2024.

I am reading this with CJS. It is a nice overview of regional geology, and it is nice that all the examples come from Canada, and at least some of the discussion is relevant to Minnesota Geology. The book is notable for its beautifully done pictures and diagrams.

Through the Language Glass

by Guy Deutscher

October 2024

This is an excellent book; interesting well-documented science, and some beautiful and erudite writing as well. The basic argument — that grammar determines what must be specified, rather than what can be specified, and in that manner instills certain habits of mind that effect how people see the world — seems correct, if not quite living up to the subtitle of the book: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

Perhaps the most interesting and fun part of the book was to be introduced to languages that work very differently from English: The Mates language (in Peru) that requires speakers to specify whether the fact they report is based on personal observation, indirect evidence, or hearsay; and the Australian language that has no egocentric prepositions, but requires all positional information to be reported in terms of the cardinal directions, thus requiring their speakers to always be oriented.

This book was a pleasure to read. I plan to seek out other work by this writer.

Front Matter

On whether languages reflect the characteristics of their speakers, he writes:

Many a dinner table conversation is embellished by such vignettes, for few subjects lend themselves more readily to disquisition than the character of different languages and their speakers. And yet should these lofty observations be carried away from the conviviality of the dining room to the chill of the study, they would quickly collapse like a soufflé of airy anecdote-at best amusing and meaningless, at worst bigoted and absurd.

— p. 2

The basic argument of the book is this:

The effects that have emerged from recent research, however, are far more down to earth. They are to do with the habits of mind that language can instill on the ground level of thought: on memory, attention, perception, and associations. And while these effects may be less wild than those flaunted in the past, we shall see that some of them are no less striking for all that.

I think it is correct, but that the subtitle of the book – Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages – is a bit of an exaggeration.

C1-5: <Reprise of history and status of color terms>

C1: Naming the Rainbow

This chapter reprises now-unknown work by William Gladstone (now remembered as an English prime minister) on Homer and his writings, and focuses in on particular on one chapter in Gladstone’s monumental 3,000 page work: a chapter on Homer’s use of color terms.

Gladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey revealed that there is something awry about Homer’s descriptions of color, and the conclusions Gladstone draws from his discovery are so radical and so bewildering that his contemporaries are entirely unable to digest them and largely dismiss them out of hand. But before long, Gladstone’s conundrum will launch a thousand ships of learning, have a profound effect on the development of at least three academic disciplines, and trigger a war over the control of language between nature and culture that after 150 years shows no sign of abating.

Gladstone notes that Homer uses color terms in odd ways — the famous “wine dark sea” (really “wine-looking” sea) being just one example.

Mostly Homer, as well as other Greek authors of the period, use color very little in their descriptions: mostly they use black or white; terms for colors are used infrequently and inconsistently. For example, the only other use of “wine-looking” is to describe the color of oxen.

Gladstone’s fourth point is the vast predominance of the “most crude and elemental forms of color”-black and white-over every other. He counts that Homer uses the adjective melas (black) about 170 times in the poems, and this does not even include instances of the corresponding verb “to grow black,” as when the sea is described as “black-ening beneath the ripple of the West Wind that is newly risen.” Words meaning “white” appear around 100 times. In contrast to this abun-dance, the word eruthros (red) appears thirteen times, xanthos (yellow) is hardly found ten times, ioeis (violet) six times, and other colors even less often.

C6: Crying Whorf

This chapter describes the origin, rise and fall of linguistic relativity. Sapir is depicted as respectable but making over-stated claims; Whorf comes across as a charlatan, for example, making claims to have deeply studied Hopi, when he only had access to a single informant in New York – and making broad claims that are entirely wrong (e.g. that the Hopi language does not have a future tense).

Deutscher traces the origin of linguistic relativity to Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1799, whose “linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrennes.” Deutscher encountered the Basque language, and found that it was radically different from the languages linguists tended to study. He then sought out other ‘more exotic’ languages, which he found by going to the Vatican library and studying the notes of Jesuit missionaries to South and Central America: “…Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shown from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.” p. 135 Although Humboldt’s ideas led to linguistic relativity, it should be noted that he had a much more nuanced and correct view: In principle, any language may express any idea; the real differences among languages are not what they are able to express but in “what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.” But this view was not carried forward, and instead: “The Humboldtian ideas now underwent a process of rapid fermentation, and as the spirit of the new theory grew more powerful, the rhetoric became less sober. ”

All that said, Deutscher argues it is a mistake to dismiss the idea that language has no influence over thought. But rather than taking the strong case the language constrains thought, he instead argues the habits of language may lead to habits of mind. In the case of the influence of language, and refers to the idea that Boas introduces and that Jakobson crystalized into a maxim: “Languages differ in what they must convey, and not in what they may convey.”

Phrases I like

“…has still the power to disturb our hearts.” [Sapir, referring to Homer, Ovid, etc.] p. 129

“[His] linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrennes.” p. 134

“…Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shown from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.” p. 135

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Reading on my own, circa Fall 2024.

This book or extended essay is based on a lecture on Women and Literature that Woolf gave, or at least that is the framing of it in the book. She approaches the topic by explaining how she came to develop her thoughts about it:

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial–and any question about sex is that–one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

She begins with an account of going to Oxbridge, and walking about the colleges. She notes that, being a woman, she is barred from walking on the grass, and is not welcome in the library. She has lovely descriptions of the landscape and colleges:

To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.

And as we accompany her, she recounts her thought process. I love her metaphor (more extensive than the excerpt I quote) of thinking as fishing…

Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Pausing in my account here, but passages that I like for various reasons follow:

“Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, ‘Tell me then how you wrote your essays?’ For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.“

“Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, old though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. “

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction — so we are told. “

“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me.”

“I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”

TBD –The first chapter is brilliant, and I have high hopes for the rest of the book, but have gotten distracted! But I shall return.

LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.