A Multitude of Drops

Just finished David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. It's been a while since a book has affected me this deeply: the book is incredible, a tour de force. I know, I know, the phrase is tossed around so casually that it's almost been rendered meaningless, but I can think of no other way to describe the novel. It's like nothing I've read before and written so beautifully that I sunk into it depths, unable to put it down for the past week.

The problem, now, is getting out of it. Passages have wrapped themselves around my brain, permeating my daily thoughts. This wouldn't be a bad thing, per se, except that I found the book to be remarkably depressing. For instance, two separate conversations this weekend - one on Silvio Berlusconi's many scandals and how the Italian media covers them (or, perhaps more accurately, doesn't cover them) and another on whether Osama actually had porn on his computer - had me jumping to this passage:

"The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage... But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world's [corporate heads] can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by blinkering education, owning TV stations, paying "guest fees" to leader writers or just buying the media up. The media - and not just the Washington Post - is where democracies conduct their civil wars."

And how to think about the wars we're embroiled in without thinking of the following passage?

"Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be."

I know, though, that not everyone found the book so depressing. J took away the opposite message: one of optimism, citing the final passage. I don't want to spoil it - and I'm not sure if it even makes sense without the context of the story - but the narrator explains how he has made the decision to pledge himself to the Abolitionist cause, though he knows that his father-in-law will call him a fool and jeer that:

"He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

To which the narrator offers the most elegant of replies: "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

What indeed?

Rituals

     ... Angus turned to her suddenly and said, "Domenica, why are we doing this? Why are we having all these people round to dinner?"

      It might have been another occasion on which Mallory's reply would have been called for: because they're there, but she said instead: "Friendship."

      He had not expected that answer. "Just that?"

     "Yes. Because a dinner party provides the ideal opportunity to sit with people. To talk to them."

      "You don't think, then, that it's simply a bourgeois ritual?"

      Domenica smiled. "I might have thought that in the past," she said. "No more, though. I now realise, I think, how important these bourgeois rituals are. Or all rituals, for that matter, bourgeois or not."

A Guilty Glimpse

Christmas 2010: After several hours of partying at our firm's holiday dinner, a group of coworkers and I decide that we're not quite ready to head home for the evening. Instead, we go to my coworker's flat, where we can end the night with red wine and a dance marathon to Guns N' Roses' November Rain. After we finish cheering the guys' air guitar renditions, though, I get distracted by my coworker's bookshelves: they're teeming with books. I never knew. I end up asking -- okay, declaring -- that I'm borrowing two books and walk out of his flat with them tucked in my bag.

I've finished one of them: Junot Diaz's Drown. It's a collection of his short stories, and it's incredible. But that's not the point of this post.

My co-worker had underlined a single snippet in the book: "You can't be anywhere forever." It's not even the full sentence -- just those five words, highlighted by a single blue line.

I can't get the phrase out of my head. And, more than that, I find myself wondering why he chose to underline that particular phrase: was it because, as an American expat in London, he could relate? Maybe he disagreed with it? Or perhaps it made him think of someone he knew?

It's funny: I probably would have read the sentence without a second thought had I been reading a clean copy. Instead, it's haunted me for weeks now, and in a way, it makes me feel guilty, making me wonder if I'm now privy to thoughts that weren't supposed to be shared.

Ambition and Happiness

One more post on The Happiness Project. Going back to the idea of the relationship between happiness and work, how does ambition fit in? The author doesn't have any conclusion on the relationship between ambition and happiness, and discusses it briefly:

There's a common belief that happiness and ambition are incompatible. Many ambitious people I've known seem eager to claim that they aren't happy, almost as a way to emphasize their zeal, in echo of Andrew Carnegie's observation "Show me a contented man, and I'll show you a failure."

Studies show that many creative, influential people in the arts and public life score above average in "neuroticism" (i.e., they have a greater propensity to experience negative emotions); this discontent arguably urges them to higher achievement. Other studies, however, show that people tend to think more flexibly and with more complexity when they're feeling happy.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about this. A number of my friends and peers are people that I would characterize as 'ambitious' (even if they wouldn't necessarily describe themselves that way). But does that mean that they'll always be unhappy, striving for something more?

Perhaps the key is to find happiness in the struggle for higher achievement?

Poetry Mondays: La Reina

One of the highlights of living in Santiago was being introduced to the works of Pablo Neruda. He was a notorious womanizer, but reading his poetry, it's hard not to see why women fell for him so consistently.

******

La Reina

Yo te he nombrado reina.
Hay más altas que tú,
mas altas.
Hay más puras que tú,
más puras.
Hay más bellas que tú,
hay más bellas.
Pero tú eres la reina.

Cuando vas por las calles nadie te reconoce.
Nadie ve tu corona de cristal, nadie mira la alfombra de oro rojo
que pisas donde pasas, la alfombra que no existe.

Y cuando asomas
suenan todos los ríos
en mi cuerpo, sacuden
el cielo las campanas,
y un himno llena el mundo.

Sólo tú y yo,
sólo tú y yo, amor mío,
lo escuchamos.

******

Translated (Courtesy of Poemhunter)

I have named you queen.
There are taller than you,
taller.
There are purer than you,
purer.
There are lovelier than you,
lovelier.
But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.

The Happiness Project

I missed the boat on New Year's Resolutions this year. Normally, it's quite a production: I sit down and spend several hours of navel-gazing, trying to figure out what I learned over the past year and what I would like to change for the upcoming year. This year, I spent the holiday season traveling, and never had the opportunity for my annual journal entry.

Fast-forward two months, and I found myself at my local bookstore, searching for The Happiness Project. I had heard about the book courtesy of a few legal blogs: it's authored by a former lawyer, who left her law firm to become a writer. It was a little embarrassing to find myself in the Self-Help section, so I bought the book to read from the luxury of my couch.

And, in a way, it made me think of the 2011 resolutions that never happened. It might seem indulgent -- who spends a year devoted to the pursuit of happiness? -- but the author's journey made me think about my own, and what I can change to make myself, well, happier. It's also an amalgam of research studies; although, like Gladwell in Blink, she cherry-picks research studies that support her hypotheses.

One of the parts that resonated most, though, was when offered the following anecdote:

"Because work is so crucial to happiness, another person's happiness project might well focus on choosing the right work. I, however, had already been through a major happiness quest career shift. I'd started out in law, and I'd had a great experience. But when my clerkship with Justice O'Connor drew to a close, I couldn't figure out what job I wanted next.

During this time, I visited the apartment of a friend who was in graduate school studying education, and I noticed several thick textbooks lying around her living room.

"Is this what they make you read for your program?" I asked, idly flipping through the dense, dull pages.

"Yes," she said, "but that's what I read in my spare time, anyhow."

For some reason, that casual answer shocked me to attention. What did I do in my spare time? I asked myself. As much as I liked clerking, I never spent one second more on legal subjects than I had to."

She later continues:

"My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I'd become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success. People who love their work bring an intensity and enthusiasm that's impossible to match through sheer diligence. I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn't.

Enthusiasm is more important to master than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you're better off pursuing a profession that come easily and that you love, because that's where you'll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage."

It makes sense -- which then leads to the next question: How do you discover your passion?

Perspectives

Former editor-in-chief Tim Griffin, on publishing Artforum: "I want to go to art history and make it look contemporary and go to contemporary work and make it look historical."

See also, Calvino: "... for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new."