The Dish

“As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day,” – E. B. White responding to a letter-writer in 1973, Letters of Note.

(Hat tip: Maria Popova)

Exploring the power of stories in our lives, Elizabeth Svoboda explains that “we’ve known intuitively that stories alter our thinking and, in turn, the way we engage with the world,” but that recent research has “begun to shed light on how this transformation takes place from inside”:

Our mental response to story begins, as many learning processes do, with mimicry. In a 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, the psychologist Uri Hasson and his Princeton University colleagues had a graduate student tell an unrehearsed story while her brain was being scanned in an fMRI machine. Then they scanned the brains of 11 volunteers listening to a recording of the story. As the researchers analysed the data, they found some striking similarities. Just when the speaker’s brain lit up in the area of the insula – a region that governs empathy and moral sensibilities – the listeners’ insulae lit up, too. Listeners and speakers also showed parallel activation of the temporoparietal junction, which helps us imagine other people’s thoughts and emotions. In certain essential ways, then, stories help our brains map that of the storyteller.

What’s more, the stories we absorb seem to shape our thought processes in much the same way lived experience does. When the University of Southern California neuroscientist Mary Immordino-Yang told subjects a series of moving true stories, their brains revealed that they identified with the stories and characters on a visceral level. People reported strong waves of emotion as they listened – one story, for instance, was about a woman who invented a system of Tibetan Braille and taught it to blind children in Tibet. The fMRI data showed that emotion-driven responses to stories like these started in the brain stem, which governs basic physical functions, such as digestion and heartbeat. So when we read about a character facing a heart-wrenching situation, it’s perfectly natural for our own hearts to pound. ‘I can almost feel the physical sensations,’ one of Immordino-Yang’s subjects remarked after hearing one of the stories. ‘This one is like there’s a balloon under my sternum inflating and moving up and out. Which is my sign of something really touching.’

When he was a child in the 1960s, Simon Yisrael Feuerman’s father told him that Jews and African-Americans, though both minorities, were not oppressed “in the same way.” He reflects on how that ambiguity worked itself out as Jews joined the civil rights movement:

Most notably, our cousin Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously marched in Selma in 1965. For religious and secular Jews alike, the cause was a moral imperative. Their story, the African-American story, was in some way our story. We knew what it meant to be hated. What’s more, they had their very own Moses, Martin Luther King Jr., a man who quoted and infused life into scripture better than any rabbi I ever knew.

But the fight for civil rights also offered the Jewish community an opportunity. It dovetailed with a deep messianic urge that had been both reborn and transfigured in 20th century America. American Jews had become mesmerized, intoxicated even, by the idea that we no longer had to live life in humiliating passivity waiting for the Messiah. Instead, we, like our black brethren, could become active in ‘forcing the hand of the Messiah’ through overt action and protest. In other words, we could shape our lives with our hands, feet, mouths, and hearts as American blacks did the same. And so we marched with them.

Perhaps the rift between blacks and Jews that began in the late 1960s was rooted in the idea that some African Americans sensed that with all our good intentions we had piggybacked on them. We had used the muscularity of their cause not purely out of a Jewish love of righteousness, but because it gave us a chance to establish our own house in America, cashing in our secularized messianic yearnings on their backs….

Behold the ermine:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkemK00kPo4]

 

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate,” – Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

Wiesbaden, Germany, 2.15 pm

Micah Mattix lays into the celebrated American philosopher:

His central idea, of course, is “Trust thyself.” In his earlier essays, he encourages his readers to disregard the past, institutions, and dogma, and to obey “the eternal law” within. “I will not hide my tastes or aversions,” he writes. “I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.” But in a later essay on Napoleon, who seems to have embodied the “deep” self-trust Emerson lauds, he states confusingly (after praising Napoleon) that what made Napoleon’s egoism wrong was that it “narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him.” And whose fault is this?

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world which baulked and ruined him.

Read that again. It was the “world” that ruined Napoleon, not Napoleon who ruined the world.

To live “without moral principle” is a bad thing for Emerson. He writes in “Self-Reliance” that the “rejection of popular standards” is not “a rejection of all standards.” Yet he refuses to state how we are to decide which ones are good and which ones are bad other than by, again, looking within. The “law of consciousness abides,” he writes—except, of course, when it doesn’t, which is why Emerson concludes his essay on Napoleon with a confusing warning on the dangers of being (you guessed it) selfish: “Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual or selfish aim, will fail.” In short: “Trust thyself, but not always!”

(Image: Emerson in 1857, via Wikimedia Commons)

Robert Kiely praises Willibald Sauerländer’s The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs for reminding us that the painter’s “baroque passions” should not become “an excuse for ignoring his expression of religious and ethical sentiments and ideals”:

Many of his paintings are of religious subjects. Yet they are so bright and cheerful, so crowded with buxom women and muscular men caught in swirls of light and color, that his work, even his religious paintings, must be considered baroque (in the dismissive sense of the term)—decorative, theatrical, busy, pagan, and only superficially Christian. But, in the arts, as in life, simplistic classification gets in the way of actually paying attention. How refreshing it is, then, to read this scholarly, accessible, and beautifully illustrated book by the German art historian Willibald Sauerländer. …

According to Sauerländer, calling Rubens a master of “baroque passions” is not altogether wrong unless—as too often is the case—it becomes an excuse for ignoring his expression of religious and ethical sentiments and ideals. “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that art history has appropriated Rubens as one of its greatest figures by wresting his art free from the church”—that is, from theology, liturgy, history, and his own faith. Sauerländer’s project is to put the seventeenth-century church back into the picture by giving particular attention to Rubens’s paintings of subjects—the Eucharist, saints, and martyrs—that were criticized by Reformers and intentionally reemphasized by the church.

(Image: The Judgement of Solomon by Peter Paul Rubens, 1617, via Wikimedia Commons)

Christian Berthelot photographed babies born by C-section in their first 20 seconds of life: