Nov 2024 📚 Reading Stack
james baldwin, ian mcgilchrist, louisa may alcott, e.h. gombrich, james allen, thich naht hanh, edith lief, douglas harding
What Babies Can Teach Us #3
Speak! Memory
Sitting becomes crawling, crawling becomes standing. Standing becomes walking.
Cries become babbles, babbles become words. Phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages1. The milestones pile up, one by one, building on the last.
We say “he started walking at 11 months,” but it’s not true, not really. He took his first steps three weeks before that, and it’s not for another three weeks that he’ll be out in the driveway, wearing tiny white sneakers that barely fit his feet, stomping around like Frankenstein’s monster learning to walk on his own.
Like in Shelley’s story, Monster—a tiny human in this case—lifts his foot and remembers, kinetically, in his ‘bones’, the right way to step versus the wrong. He remembers that his dada will laugh when he shouts “all done!” and throws the bottle. That his Mom will melt when he says her name. Memory here is not passive. It is the literal expression of the body and the mind building pathways, adapting, rehearsing, solidifying memory into behavior.
We call it learning, development, growing, but really, it’s all memory. And not the conventional kind that people say lives in the hippocampus.
With a child, it’s a deeper kind of memory. A kind that’s tied to actions, outcomes, habits. It’s not localized to one almond sized hippocampal part of the brain. It’s everywhere, part of every network not just one, because memory is, more or less, everything. It’s emblazoned on who he/she is, the taproot for what they will think and do and say.
What is a memory, really?
My earliest experiential memory2: grayish octagon and dot tiles, natural wood handrails and stairs, bright ceiling lights, night outside the windows, the smell of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. The childhood kitchen before my Mom’s 40th surprise birthday party. “We’re just going to Blockbuster,” they told me—because I would have ruined the surprise.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize that memory is a fake. It’s a mental movie influenced by the stories I’ve been told and the photos I’ve seen. Memory, in this way, seems more like a compounding of lived-in experience and imagined thought than concrete fact.
So, trying to claim that is my first memory is like pointing to a carrot's leaves and calling it the carrot itself. A generalization, because generalizing is core to the human experience. Because generalization—of memories, facts, ideas—is how we shape chaos into order, fragments into narratives. Because it’s easier to feel like I recall a 40th birthday party than every attempted first step.
Memory, then, is more accurately: everything I I can’t recall: my first spoonfuls and finger paints and footsteps and babbles. Not the first phrase in the highchair, but all the sounds that led there.
Better not to generalize, I say. Because generalizing contributes to The Myth of Everything From Nothing.
A myth that lies us incessantly. Lies that are clean and compact, when the truth is messy, sprawling, incomplete.
I generalize a date for my son’s first steps not because it’s more true, but because it’s easier. Because it keeps the sweet tidy retrievably concrete illusion in tact: the illusion of the 40th birthday, in tact.
Better not to expect to get rich all of the sudden. Better to lean into the grind, the slow accretion of effort over a span. To live for the slow, plodding, mundane paces I don’t and won’t recall.
In his memoir3, Speak Memory, the great Russian novelist Nabokov writes:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Firsts and lasts tend to have an adolescent note. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”
But I think he’s saying what I feign to know, yet often forget. And finally just begin to remember again when I watch an 11 month old learn to walk: everything that matters comes this way: baby steps, as they say, baby steps.
The Books
Book #38 - If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
Like Mark Twain and John Steinbeck, James Baldwin is wasted on high schoolers. It’s an interesting conundrum: we want to expose young people to great literature but kids—myself included —view reading as a chore when they’re told to. I sign off these newsletters the way I do because to have the time to read literary titans like James Baldwin truly is a privilege.
We read Another Country for the podcast a few years ago and I’ve been eager to get back to James Baldwin. You might have seen the film adaptation from 2018, but I would recommend reading this before watching the movie. It is classic James Baldwin. Magnificently well written, freighted with social and cultural import, yet not a “race novel”. It’s a novel with race in it. To me, the difference cannot be overstated.
Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story is as earnest as it is stunning. Mixing the sweet and the sad, Tish and Fonny are engaged to be married when Fonny is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Their families—two very different sets of people—make to clear his name. It evokes exactly what the Harlem Renaissance came to represent: a world where passion and sadness are inextricably entangled. As always Baldwin creates characters so alive and so profoundly lived-in that they have become ingrained in the American canon. I could go on, but I’ll leave the rest for the forthcoming episode on Good Scribes Only.
#39 - The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist
What have you heard about the left-brain vs right-brain hypothesis? That right brained people are creative and left brained are analytical? Do you also know that is, more or less, complete hogwash?
I found this book at the Austin Public Library in February of 2020 and quickly became rapt by the science it debunks. I couldn’t resist: I marked up that copy, decided I was going to keep it and buy the library a new one.
This is a book of philosophy-neuroscience that parades as pop-sci. Iain McGilchrist—an English psychiatrist who reminds me a little of a British Harrison Ford from Shrinking—presents a expansive tramp through the hardwired biological and soft wired culturally induced differences between the brain’s left and right hemispheres. At bottom, he is attempting to explain how left-brain and right-brain differences have affected society, history, and culture.
He is clearly extraordinarily well read, drawing on a vast body of research in neuroscience and psychology to illustrate that:
The left hemisphere is detail oriented and centralized
The right hemisphere handles the gestalt (breadth,) flexibility, and generosity
After supplying this generalization, McGilchrist departs on an 800 page history lesson that shows the tension between left-brain and right-brain dominant cultures. The jury is still out whether he is right on all counts, but it is a stimulating read without a doubt.
#40 - Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
I might catch some heat for this, but this is a rare case where the movie may be better than the book. This is one of those books young girls read. It’s moralizing and a fable about doing right, as far as the post enlightenment western civilization definition of rightness goes. At the risk of sounding like a plummy literary snoot: it reads like splenda tastes. Too sweet, saccharine.
The movie, on the other hand, is quite different. It’s crisp, like a good fuji. That’s because Greta Gerwig (of Barbie, Lady Bird) directed it, and roped in Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, and Florence Pugh to star.
In a sentence: it takes place in 19th century Massachusetts with the March sisters—Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth—working to make the “right” decisions as they go through the many ups and downs of young womanhood.
We’ll be discussing this one on the podcast in a few weeks. We’re not very funny, but you might have a laugh at me trying to defend it from scorn by my co-host, Dan.
#41 - A Little History of the World by EH Gombrich
A few years ago, I read Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy and loved it. I was hoping that A Little History of the World would be as engaging and lively, but I couldn’t get quite as into it. It certainly fits the description of being written for readers of all kinds, detailing history from the sticks and stones to atomic bombs, but I felt something wanting in the historian’s depiction of wars and conquests, of grand works of art, of the advances and limitations of science, of all the world’s most remarkable people and events. Gombrich did what he could to subvert the “western” bend to history, but I just couldn’t get past the notion that quite a bit of picking and choosing had to be done in writing the book.
I didn’t know much about Gombrich. Apparently, he’s the best-known art historian of his time, and there are more than 200 illustrations in this book, which explains why I didn’t love it. I mostly listened to this book on runs and walks, whereas many people suggest that this is more of an art book with fine paper and old school binding.
#42 - As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
Our thoughts form who we become—it seems obvious, and even a bit cheap at this point, but it’s hard to remember amid the rampage of thoughts that cascade through our heads at any given moment. Many give James Allen credit for popularizing this idea in what’s one of the first true “self-help” books. He talks about the way our thoughts shape who we are, from our finances to mental and physical health to appearance and social relationships.
I read some kind of self-directed book immediately when I wake up, even if just for a page or two, and this was that book for me. I wouldn’t recommend it per se, but it was interesting enough to finish reading.
#43 - Making Friends With Death by Edith Lief
I came across this book through one of my favorite yoga teachers in Austin. Edith Lief is a long time meditation teacher studied under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who I’ve read a ton from. In Making Friends With Death, Lief draws from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, showing that contemplation of death and mindfulness go hand in hand, changing the way we relate to everyday life, and helping us be more vulnerable because, after all, we are going to the same place.
I was excited to see where this would go, but I didn’t find as much forward moving oomph with it as others. It’s probably true that death is so ubiquitous, so infused in everything we see and hear and eat and do, that I shouldn’t compartmentalize it, like I have. When I was younger, strangely, death was a more frequent visitor in my family.
For now, as an uncle and a dad, life is more concerned with the lovely pains of growing a human rather than leaving one behind. I know that will change, and I hope not for some time, and maybe I’ll revisit this one then.
#44 - The Little Book of Life and Death by Douglas Harding
I don’t know why two mortality centric books came into my orbit at the same time; I didn’t even make the connection until now, having read a good deal of buddhist, stoic, and philosophically minded books, infused with suggestions to remember that “you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.4” I expected to love this Douglas Harding book as much as I have in the past, but I felt the same plodding-ness as with the book above. They are quite different: Harding is headier and more philosophizing while Lief is more matter of fact. And the fact that neither scooped me up may be more of a signal about me right now than these books generally. Perhaps, now that I have more to lose, it’s harder to think about losing them. Strange paradox I will have to get over.
📚 Years ago,
I committed to a life of books, and that choice led me to view reading and writing as a privilege and a practice. No matter how much time I dedicate to reading, there will always be great books I’ve missed. So I read what I want, what’s interesting to me at the time, and put down whatever isn’t. Books are magic. Learning is magic. And my biggest wish is that you treat your mind with the books it deserves.
See y’all next month ✌️
— Jeremy
The Boonies, Rhode Island, 11/29/2024
Next Month:
Determined by Robert Sapolsky
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Twain’s Feast by Nick Offerman
Harry Potter y el Prisonero de Azkaban
Sometimes even books.
I’m using the term to represent a memory you might have of, say, a wedding or a dinner or a time something went sideways in the past. Not memory in the ohhh-this-is-how-I-do-this sense.
When did the language shift from autobiography to memoir?
Marcus Aurelius