Contentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Later he would tell his monks to do the same: When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, then below. Identify with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity. This mind of love is very wide. It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world. 8 Over time, the Buddha found that by constantly activating these positive psychological states he became free of the constrictions of hostility and fear, and that his own mind expanded with the immeasurable power of love. But before you are ready to “embrace the whole world,” you must focus on yourself. Begin by drawing on the warmth of friendship (maitri) that you know exists potentially in your mind and direct it to yourself. Notice how much peace, happiness, and benevolence you possess already. Make yourself aware of how much you need and long for loving friendship. Next, become conscious of your anger, fear, and anxiety. Look deeply into the seeds of rage within yourself. Bring to mind some of your past suffering. You long to be free of this pain, so try gently to put aside your current irritations, frustrations, and worries and feel compassion (karuna) for your conflicted, struggling self. Then bring your capacity for joy (mudita) to the surface and take conscious pleasure in things we all tend to take for granted: good health, family, friends, work, and life’s tiny pleasures. Finally, look at yourself with upeksha (“even- mindedness, nonattachment”). You are not unique. You have failings, but so does everybody else. You also have talents and, like every other being on the planet, you deserve compassion, joy, and friendship. It is only in the context of a kinder attitude toward ourselves that we can consider the importance of transcending the ego. The religions often speak of putting the self to death; Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion and teach a doctrine of “no-self” (anatta). Modern neuroscientists would agree: they can find nothing in the intricate activity of the brain that they can pin down and call a “self” or a “soul.” But anatta is primarily a mythos calling Buddhists to action: we have to live as though the self did not exist, cutting through the self-obsession that causes so much pain. When the masters of the spiritual life ask us to transcend the ego, they want us to get beyond the grasping, frightened, angry self that often seeks to destroy others in order to ensure its own survival, prosperity, and success. This is indispensable to enlightenment.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  If somebody had asked the ancient Greeks whether they believed that there was sufficient historical evidence for the famous story of Demeter, goddess of harvest and grain, and her beloved daughter, Persephone (Was Persephone really abducted by Hades and imprisoned in the underworld? Did Demeter truly secure her release? How could you prove that Persephone returned to the upper world each year?), they would have found these questions obtuse. The truth of the myth, they might have replied, was evident for all to see: it was clear in the way that the world came to life each spring, in the recurrent burgeoning of the harvest, and, above all, in the profound truth that death and life are inseparable. There is no new life if the seed does not go down into the ground and die; you cannot have life without death. The rituals associated with the myth, which were performed annually at Eleusis (where Demeter is said to have stayed during her search for Persephone), were carefully crafted to help people accept their mortality; afterward many found that they could contemplate the prospect of their own death with greater equanimity.1 A myth, therefore, makes sense only if it is translated into action—either ritually or behaviorally. It is comprehensible only if it is imparted as part of a process of transformation.2 Myth has been aptly described as an early form of psychology. The tales about gods threading their way through labyrinths or fighting with monsters were describing an archetypal truth rather than an actual occurrence. Their purpose was to introduce the audience to the labyrinthine world of the psyche, showing them how to negotiate this mysterious realm and grapple with their own demons. The myth of the hero told people what they had to do to unlock their own heroic potential. When Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung charted their modern scientific exploration of the psyche, they turned instinctively to these ancient narratives. A myth could put you in the correct spiritual posture, but it was up to you to take the next step. In our scientifically oriented world, we look for solid information and have lost the older art of interpreting these emblematic stories of gods walking out of tombs or seas splitting asunder, and this has made religion problematic. Without practical implementation, a myth can remain as opaque and abstract as the rules of a board game, which sound complicated and dull until you pick up the dice and start to play; then everything immediately falls into place and makes sense. As we go through the steps, we will examine some of the traditional myths to discover what they teach about the compassionate imperative—and how we must act in order to integrate them with our own lives.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  That same morning Willie recommended to me a pension kept by a Mrs. Gregory, an Englishwoman, the wife of an old Baptist clergyman, who would take good care of me for four dollars a week. Immediately I went with him to see her and was delighted to find that she lived only about a hundred yards from Mrs. Mayhew on the opposite side of the street. Mrs. Gregory was a large, motherly woman evidently a lady, who had founded this boardinghouse to provide for a rather feckless husband and two children, a big pretty girl, Kate and a lad, a couple of years younger. Mrs. Gregory was delighted with my English accent, I believe, and showed me special favor at once by giving me a large outside room with its own entrance and steps into the garden. In an hour I had paid my bill at the Eldridge House and had moved in: I showed a shred of prudence by making Willie promise Mrs. Gregory that he would turn up each Saturday with the five dollars for my board; the dollar extra was for the big room. In due course I shall tell how he kept his promise and discharged his debt to me. For the moment everything was easily, happily settled. I went out and ordered a decent suit of ordinary tweeds and dressed myself up in my best blue suit to call upon Mrs. Mayhew after lunch. The clock crawled but on the stroke of three, I was at her door: a colored maid admitted me. “Mrs. Mayhew”, she said in her pretty singing voice, “will be down right soon: I’ll go call Miss Lily.” In five minutes Miss Lily appeared, a dark slip of a girl with shining black hair, wide laughing mouth, temperamental thick red lips and grey eyes fringed with black lashes: she had hardly time to speak to me when Mrs. Mayhew came in: “I hope you two’ll be great friends”, she said prettily; “you’re both about the same age” she added. In a few minutes Miss Lily was playing a waltz on the Steinway and with my arm round the slight, flexible waist of my inamorata I was trying to waltz. But alas! after a turn or two I became giddy and in spite of all my resolution had to admit that I should never be able to dance. “You have got very pale”, Mrs. Mayhew said, “you must sit down on the sofa a little while.” Slowly the giddiness left me: before I had entirely recovered Miss Lily with kindly words of sympathy had gone home and Mrs. Mayhew brought me in a cup of excellent coffee: I drank it down and was well at once.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For Chesterton, a good theory – whether scientific, ideological or religious – is to be judged by its capacity as a whole to accommodate what we see in the world around us and experience within us. Chesterton’s language echoes Plato’s view of philosophy as a theōria , an illuminating imaginative framework: ‘With this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them.’ Chesterton explained this point as follows: Numbers of us have returned to this belief; and we have returned to it, not because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere; because the coat, when it is tried on, fits in every crease… We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass. Chesterton argued that Christianity, when seen as a complete ‘spiritual theory’, was able to offer a better account of the coherence of human history and experience than its rivals. On being asked why he was a Christian, Chesterton replied: ‘Because I perceive life to be logical and workable with these beliefs and illogical and unworkable without them.’ 25 We see here Chesterton articulating a participatory approach to theory – namely, that it creates a conceptual space within which people can generate meaning and value. Religion is primarily a way of interpreting life, creating the possibility of existential meaning and moral values. An interpretation of human existence involves trying to answer questions of meaning – who we are and why we matter. As the German philosopher Walther Dilthey once remarked, ‘we explain nature, but we understand the life of the soul.’ 26 Within what story shall I locate myself? How shall I live? Who am I, and what am I meant to be doing? We therefore turn to reflect on the role of interpretation in religion and in science, focusing on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Scientific Interpretation: What Does Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Mean? Theories about how our world functions can be tested by the application of the scientific method; those dealing with what it means cannot. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose doctoral research was supervised by the philosopher Bernard Williams, made this point with particular clarity. We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists. But neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge … Almost none of the truths by which we live are provable, and the desire to prove them is based on a monumental confusion between explanation and interpretation. Explanations can be proved, interpretations cannot. 27 Scientific theories explain what we observe and discover in the world. Yet these also need to be interpreted . 28 Perhaps the most contested case of scientific interpretation concerns Darwin’s theory of evolution. What does this mean ? What are its moral and spiritual commitments ?

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We must look at our community with compassion, estimate its strengths as well as its weaknesses, and assess its potential for change. Let us start with the family. It is true, as the old adage says, that charity begins at home. As the Confucians have taught us, the family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. Family life involves self-sacrifice, because daily we have to put ourselves to one side in order to accommodate the needs of other family members; nearly every day there is something to forgive. Instead of seeing this as an irritant, we should see these tensions as opportunities for growth and transformation. Ask yourself what you really feel about your family. What makes you proud and happy about them? Make a list of the ways in which your family nourishes you. Perhaps you could write a letter to them outlining your history as a family, and your hopes and fears for each person in it. Does your family have a black sheep, and how has this situation come about? Can it be rectified? How do you conduct arguments and disagreements? What are your particular strengths in family life? Is there anything more you could do? The Confucians believed in the importance of ritual in family life. In ancient China, each family member had to subordinate his or her needs to another: the older son to his parents, a wife to her husband, and a younger son to his older brother. The system was so designed that there was an interchange of reverence and everybody received a measure of respect. The older son, for example, would probably become a parent himself and be served by his son in the same manner as he was serving his own father. You might have both an older and a younger brother, so you were nourished by the rituals of consideration at the same time as you were bestowing them. The li required a son to submit absolutely to his father’s wishes, but the father was supposed to behave fairly, kindly, and courteously to his children. Family life was seen as similar to the carefully choreographed ritual ballets of ancient China, a series of interweaving and reciprocal dances in which each person had a partner and contributed to the beauty of the whole. The li gave all family members training in empathy: when his father died, for example, the eldest son would withdraw from the family home and fast, sharing his father’s growing weakness and suspension between life and death. None of this, of course, will do today.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Beliefs are important in grounding our frameworks of meaning – those complex webs of opinion that let us determine ‘how things are in the world’. I experienced this when I was drawn to Marxism as a teenager. Looking back on that distant and bygone cultural world of the 1960s, I can now see that I was tuning into the three elements of meaning – comprehension, purpose and mattering – proposed by George and Park, without consciously framing my response to Marxism with those specific terms. Marxism seemed to make sense of the complex and seemingly random flux of history; it gave me a sense of purpose as an agent of change who could end the oppression of the working classes, allowing me to feel I had significance in the grand scheme of history. I experienced both the ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ aspects of meaning, taking pleasure in being able to make intellectual sense of the world, and experiencing a sense of peace or fulfilment resulting from this perception of meaning and personal mattering. How does this work in a religious context? How does the threefold account of meaning set out by George and Park work out in practice? Given the diversity of religious beliefs, I shall explore how a Christian might respond to this, and leave space for others to make their own connections. 1. Comprehension . We want to make sense of our world, grasping the oneness that lies behind the plurality of our experiences and weaves them into a coherent whole. Christianity has a deep belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things in God, who is seen as the focal point of its threads of meaning (a major theme in Dante’s Divine Comedy ). The letter to the Colossians, a New Testament writing thought to date from around 60 CE, speaks of all things ‘holding together’, having a fundamental coherence grounded in the Christian faith (Colossians 1.17). No matter how fragmented our world of experience may at times seem, there is a half-glimpsed bigger picture which holds things together. 2. Purpose . A core theme in the outworking of Christianity is the idea of a ‘calling’. This articulates the principle that doing something purposefully for God or for Christ invests the action with a deeper value that transcends – without diminishing – its utilitarian functions and benefits. The poet George Herbert engages this theme in his poem ‘The Elixir’: A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine. 55 3.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The stars in the night sky are a long way from the surface of the earth, so even the nearest seem to move little, if at all. They appear to be fixed against the firmament from day to day and year to year, permitting us to think them into shapes and symbols. But astronomers know that every star is in motion, that each moves along its own trajectory, according to its own properties. The constellations we see are temporary creations, our effort to draw order and meaning from a mostly unknowable universe, to tell ourselves stories, to guide our way home across oceans. Marriage is like that too: a method we’ve devised to protect against the disorder of the outside world, to make sense of the wonderful nonsense that is love. My husband and I would be two individuals who loved and supported and believed in each other, and in so doing, we’d choose to link arms for the long haul. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I don’t know if I believe in marriage, I confided to a friend, but I feel somehow that the things we could do together, and the people we could become, will be better than anything we could do on our own. I still believe in that. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We never lived together before we got engaged, not even in the same city, not even on the same coast. It wasn’t intentional; it was our chronology. We fell in love and proceeded accordingly. Being together in the literal sense was a foregone conclusion: we’d get there. Brandon happened to propose before we did, because he was excited, because we were in love. The timing was a surprise, but the fact of it wasn’t. Of course now I want to break into the scene, wringing my hands: But did you talk about kids? Did you talk about values? Did you talk about money? Did you sit across from each other and share your visions for life together? Did you make sure those visions aligned, wielding your scrutiny like a carpenter’s level? Do you know you could have done that? Do you think your story would be different? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon finished his master’s that spring and was accepted to a doctoral program at the University of Washington. In June, he landed in Seattle for good, and we began searching for a new apartment to rent, someplace that would belong to both of us, a place to start our life together.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  As for myself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliotheque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. Without the slightest hesitation, and never making any corrections, he filled in one after another of his index cards in tiny copperplate handwriting, subsequently setting them out in front of him in meticulous order. Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliotheque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading rooms to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn. I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais. Even before then my mind often dwelt on the question of whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of a quiet humming, rustling, and clearing of throats, I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony, and that conundrum, said Austerlitz, was going round in my head again on a day which has lodged itself with particular tenacity in my memory, a day when I spent perhaps as much as an hour in the manuscripts and records department on the first floor, where I was temporarily working, looking out at the tall rows of windows on the opposite side of the building, which reflected the dark slates of the roof, at the narrow brick-red chimneys, the bright and icy blue sky, and the snow-white metal weathervane with the shape of a swallow cut out of it, soaring upwards and as blue as the azure of the sky itself. The reflections in the old glass panes were slightly irregular or undulating, and I remember, said Austerlitz, that

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In mid-fifteenth-century Italy, the sculptor Donatello famously chose the latter option. [89] And, of course, a family needs a home. It is a phenomenon of the late Middle Ages that the Holy House of Nazareth, scene of Jesus’s childhood with Mary and Joseph, decided miraculously to reproduce itself in locations more convenient to Catholic Europe than Galilee: in England at Walsingham and in Italy at Loreto. Walsingham’s story dates to the eleventh century – a rebuilding of the Holy House in Norfolk inspired by a dream or vision – but it is clear from an accumulation of royal visits there that the devotion is actually two centuries later in date, from much the same time that Francis of Assisi was inventing the Nativity Crib. Loreto is a more miraculous transaction involving angels: its story of angelic transportation from Galilee dates it to the 1290s. That suggests a relationship to the European humiliation of the loss of the last Crusader footholds in the Holy Land, but references to Loreto multiply in the fifteenth century, when both Holy Houses had their first major glory-days. [90] By the late Middle Ages, therefore, the Holy Family was in place, gathering together many strands of the Gregorian revolution to provide a more or less symmetrical model for lay sexual activity paired with clerical celibacy: a Catholic family for Western Christendom, though one where Jesus’s brothers and sisters seem discreetly to have absented themselves. Canon lawyers, having in the eleventh and twelfth centuries obstinately revived the assent theory of St Paul’s ‘marital debt’ in the face of unenthusiastic marriage-broking parents, helped the ideal relationship between husband and wife monopolize and legitimize all the strands of sexual love that had emerged alarmingly undisciplined into the consciousness of twelfth-century Europe. Marital sexual love, in contrast to all those untrammelled emotions, was not always sinful, though often previous writers during the Gregorian revolution had asserted that it was.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Moving OnIn this chapter, we have explored the idea of a ‘big picture’, a way of understanding this world and our place within it that is attentive to its particularities, while still attuned to the grander vision of reality that lies behind or beyond them. It creates specifically an imaginative space within which beliefs can be interconnected and enriched, enabling not simply an explanation of how our world works, but an interpretation of that world that enables its meaningful habitation. For Wittgenstein, authentic meaning and happiness arise when we think and live in accordance with something deeper and greater than ourselves – something to which we are accountable for our beliefs. ‘In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world.’48 Similar views can be instanced from Chinese or Japanese philosophies of life and spiritual traditions. Confucianism, for example, stresses the importance of enacting a way of life that is in harmony with the way of the world.49 To believe is not to be religious (though that is certainly one possible outcome); it is rather to have discerned ‘an unseen order of some kind’ or grasped an intuited scheme of things, that enables us to understand our world and live a meaningful life. The case for faith or belief in sustaining meaningful human existence does not need to be made on religious grounds, nor is religion the sole example – or even the best example – of a way of thinking that requires faith. Yet since many consider that religion is the most obvious instance of something that is characterised by beliefs, we will explore the question of specifically religious belief in the next chapter, before moving on to consider how we might assess the reliability of our beliefs. Chapter 3The Case of Religious BeliefIt is fatally easy to believe that something that has been named is something that is understood. Everyone thinks they know what ‘religion’ is. Perhaps this is why it remains such a viable category in public discourse and everyday life. But cultural familiarity is not the same as intellectual stability. We are all familiar with the term ‘love’, but people profess and embody this notion in vastly different ways from one culture to another, across age groups and even within the same home. What is Religion?Religion, we are often told, is a universal human phenomenon. This may be true, but the popular conceptualisation of ‘religion’ is decidedly western, shaped by the social and intellectual history of modern western Europe and North America. Allegedly ‘global’ definitions of religion are generally based on the views of present-day WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) populations, overlooking the views of as much as eighty-eight per cent of humanity today, and reflecting a disturbing disregard for how the concept was understood in the past.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  I took hundreds of such photographs at Stower Grange, most of them in square format, but it never seemed to me right to turn the viewfinder of my camera on people. In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long. Gerald enjoyed helping me, and I can still see him, a head shorter than I was, standing beside me in the darkroom, which was dimly illuminated only by the little reddish light, holding the photographs in tweezers and swishing them back and forth in a sink full of water. He often told me about his family on these occasions, and most of all he liked talking about the three homing pigeons who would be expecting his return, he thought, as eagerly as he usually awaited theirs. Gerald’s Uncle Alphonso had given him these pigeons a year ago for his tenth birthday, said Austerlitz, two of them a slaty blue, one snow-white. Whenever possible, if someone was going to Bala or Aberystwyth by car, he would send his three pigeons to be freed at a distance, and they always infallibly found their way back to their loft. Once, towards the end of last summer, Tilly the white pigeon did stay away much longer than the homeward flight should have taken her, after being dispatched on a test flight from Dolgellau only a few miles up the valley, and it was not until the following day, when he was on the point of giving up hope, that she finally returned—on foot, walking up the gravel drive with a broken wing. I often thought later of this tale

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  To counter the arrogant self-sufficiency of jahiliyyah, Muhammad asked his followers to make an existential “surrender” (islam) of their entire being to Allah, the Compassionate (al-Rahman) and Merciful (al-Rahim), who had given “signs” (ayat) of his benevolence to human beings in all the wonders of the created world.80 A muslim was a man or woman who had made this surrender of ego. One of the first things Muhammad asked his converts to do was to prostrate themselves in prayer several times a day; it was difficult for Arabs imbued with the haughty jahili spirit to grovel on the ground like a slave, but the posture of their bodies was designed to teach them at a level deeper than the rational that the “surrender” of islam entailed daily transcendence of the preening, prancing ego. Muslims were also required to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor; this zakat (“purification”) would purge their hearts of residual selfishness. At first the religion preached by Muhammad was called tazakkah, an obscure word related to zakat, which means “refinement, generosity, chivalry.” Muslims were to cloak themselves in the virtues of compassion, using their intelligence to contemplate God’s “signs” in nature in order to cultivate a similarly caring and responsible spirit that would make them want to give graciously to all God’s creatures. Because of Allah’s bountiful kindness, there was order and fertility where there could have been chaos and sterility. If they followed this example, they would find that instead of being trapped in the selfish barbarism of jahiliyyah, they would acquire spiritual refinement. Islam is not a pacifist religion; Muhammad had to fight a war of self-defense against the Qurayshi establishment of Mecca, who had vowed to exterminate the Muslim community. Aggression and the preemptive strike were strictly forbidden. Sometimes fighting was necessary to preserve such humane values as religious freedom.81 But it was always better to forgive and to sit down quietly and reason with your enemy, provided that this dialogue was conducted “in the most kindly manner.”82 Tragically, Muhammad found that war had its own deadly dynamic; in the desperate struggle, atrocities were committed by both sides. So as soon as the tide turned in his favor, Muhammad adopted a nonviolent policy, riding unarmed with a thousand unarmed Muslims into enemy territory. There, having narrowly escaped being massacred by the Meccan cavalry, he negotiated a treaty with the Quraysh, accepting terms that seemed to his outraged followers to throw away all the advantages they had gained. Yet that evening, the Qur’an declared that this apparent defeat was a “manifest victory.” While the Quraysh had behaved according to the violent jahili spirit, harboring “stubborn disdain in their hearts,” God had sent down the “gift of inner peace” upon the Muslims, so that they had been able to respond to this assault with calm serenity.83 The treaty that had seemed so unpromising led to a final peace: two years later, in 630, the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to the Muslims.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I am starting to believe that the particular queerness of our family suits us. Brandon and I have gone from being two people in love—one version of “family”—to two divorced people with a child in common. This is family too: people bound together by history, even if they don’t always like each other a lot. How bleak, and how great. [image file=image_rsrc2FU.jpg] 34In the opening pages of Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg draws up a list of five ways by which we humans know what we know about the world around us. The first is clear enough: we are taught. Then there’s a subtler kind of teaching: what others say, if we hear it enough, will come to sound like truth. Emotion also educates us; feelings tell us about our surroundings and ourselves. And we learn by doing, in the gauntlet of experience. But one of his categories always catches me up. It is difficult to intuit, because it runs directly against intuition: “What you don’t know,” he writes, “and why you don’t know it, are information too.”61 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In grad school for anthropology, I got very into Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I thought it was so sexy, how he shot clean like an arrow through concepts that I, in lessons overt and subtle, had learned as truth. Our understandings of bodies, of sexuality, of sex, writes Foucault, are shaped through the ways we talk (or don’t talk) about them. Such concepts are not solid at all, but fluid, like clay slip in a plaster mold. Like most of us—I venture to guess—who are into Foucault in grad school, I read his theories as an invitation to interrogate the world around me, but not so much myself. Principles are sexy when you can use them against someone or something; applied to oneself, the effect is less appetizing. I’m the same pliant substance as everyone else. But this is a slipperiness I find I want to study now, and study gently: observe it as it moves, start to put language to it. There’s relief here, in admitting how little I know about myself. I want to believe that there’s value in even the attempt to understand. An answer is, in a sense, the result of repeated attempts to seek it, even when those attempts are mistaken; astronomers and mathematicians call this a theory of errors. Determining the position of a moving object like a star or a comet takes repeated observations over time, and each observation will yield slightly different results. Multiple observations tend to conform to a bell-shaped curve, distributing themselves more or less symmetrically around a mean: the likeliest position of the star in question.62 To ignore my inconsistencies, my pliancy, my “errors,” would be a mistake, because at their center is me.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  well, and so did the bed standing in an alcove with its white pillows stacked at a curiously steep angle. Marie immediately began settling in, opened all the wardrobes, went into the bathroom, turned on the taps and the huge old- fashioned shower to make sure they were working, and inspected the whole place very closely. It was odd, she said at last, but she had the impression that although everything else was in perfect order the writing desk had not been dusted for years. What can be the explanation, she asked me, said Austerlitz, of this remarkable phenomenon? Do ghosts haunt the desk, I wonder? I don’t remember what I replied, said Austerlitz, but I do recall that as we sat together by the window for a couple of hours that evening Marie told me a great deal about the history of the spa, of the forests which still covered the valley floor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the building of the first neo-classical houses and hotels set haphazard on the slopes, and the subsequent rapid rise in the fortunes of the resort. Architects, masons, decorators, tin-and locksmiths, and stucco workers came from Prague and Vienna and from all the corners of the Empire, many of them from as far afield as the Veneto. One of Prince Lobkowitz’s court gardeners began turning what had once been woodland into a landscaped park in the English style, planted rare and native trees, laid out lawns surrounded by bushes and shrubs, avenues, arbored walks, and pavilions from which to admire the view. More and prouder hotels constantly rose from the ground, and so did assembly rooms, baths, reading rooms, a concert hall, and a theater where all manner of eminent artistes were soon appearing. In 1873 the great cast-iron colonnade was built, and by now Marienbad was one of the most fashionable of European resorts. Marie claimed—and here, said Austerlitz, she launched, with her strong sense of the comical, into a positive verbal coloratura of medical and diagnostic terms—Marie claimed that the mineral waters and particularly the so-called Auschowitz Springs had gained a great reputation for curing the obesity then so common among the middle classes, as well as digestive disturbances, sluggishness of the intestinal canal and other stoppages of the lower abdomen, irregular menstruation, cirrhosis of the liver, disorders of bile secretion, gout, hypochondriacal spleen, diseases of the kidneys, the bladder, and the urinary system, glandular swellings and scrofulous deformities, not to mention weakness of the nervous and muscular systems, fatigue, trembling of the limbs, paralysis, mucous and bloody fluxes, unsightly eruptions on the skin, and practically every other medical disorder known to the human race. I can just see them in my mind’s eye, said Marie, a set of very corpulent men disregarding their doctors’ advice and giving themselves up to the pleasures of the table, which even at a spa were lavish at the time, in order to suppress, by dint of their increasing girth, the anxiety for the security of their social position

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And be nice to your waitress; chances are she can kick the shit out of you. Pizza is another subject on which New Yorkers have strong opinions. If you feel like humping out to Brooklyn, to Di Fara's, you can get the best of the best. But I like the white clam pizza at Lombardi's on Spring Street, when I don't feel like getting my passport punched for a pie. They serve only whole pies at Lombardi's, so if you want to master the manly New York art of walking down the street while eating a slice of pizza, you'll have to grab one at any of the ubiquitous mainstream joints. Just remember: feet slightly apart, head tilted forward and away from chest to avoid the bright orange pizza grease that will undoubtedly dribble down. Be aware of the risk of hot, molten "cheese slide," which has been known to cause facial injury and genital scarring. Everybody has seen Central Park on television, and yes, it is dramatic and beautiful, but I love Riverside Park, which runs right along the Hudson River from Seventy-second Street up to Grant's Tomb. On weekends during warm months, there's a large Dominican and Puerto Rican presence, huge picnics with radios blaring salsa and soca music, large groups of family and friends playing basketball, volleyball, and softball while slow-moving barges and tankers scud by on the river. Speaking of sports, the West Fourth Street basketball courts on lower Sixth Avenue host some of the best nonprofessional, street basketball in the world. Professionals have been known to drop by—and they get a game, much of it elbows and shoulders. A large crowd rings the outer fence three and four deep to watch some of the city's most legendary street players. When I've been home for a while and I need to treat myself to an expensive spirit-lifting experience, I always think sushi. And Yasuda on East Forty-third Street is the place to go for old-school Edo-style sushi and sashimi, the fish served—as it should be—near room temperature, the rice still warm and crumbly. I always book the omakase (the tasting menu, literally, "you decide") on a day when Yasuda serves up sublime, tasty bits of screamingly fresh, rare, hard-to-get, flawlessly executed seafood. I can spend a whole afternoon there, eating whatever comes my way, working my way through every available option: mounds of sea urchin roe; top-drawer fatty otoro tuna; sea eel; yellowtail; mackerel—and the occasional surprise.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The remainder of the meal explains why, using various foods – such as bitter herbs and unleavened bread – as symbols to evoke the memory of Israel’s exodus from bondage. Each element of the meal evokes the memory of this historical event, at which none of the participants in the Seder meal were physically present – and yet which defines and constitutes their identity. Rituals do not change the external world; their impact lies on the internal world of the believer – someone who inhabits a community of beliefs. As Xygalatas points out, while rituals have no impact on the physical world, they help human beings cope subjectively with a complex and sometimes senseless world. They enable us to ‘connect, find meaning and discover who we are’. Rituals are acts through which we create meaning and facilitate social connection to others. Some rituals are highly individual and idiosyncratic – such as Rafael Nadal’s complex preparations for tennis matches. 21 Perhaps the most famous of these involves water bottles. ‘I put my two bottles down at my feet, in front of my chair to my left, one neatly behind the other, diagonally aimed at the court.’ Nadal dismisses any suggestion this is some form of superstition. ‘It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.’ 22 Yet most rituals are communal and social, involving people gathering together. The disruption of these and many other forms of social gatherings by the COVID pandemic of 2020–22 clearly demonstrated the social importance of these rituals. For religious communities, online worship services proved an inadequate substitute for face-to-face encounters, not least because of loss of the social support that is known to be important for human wellbeing. Communities and Traditions of Rationality In the ancient world, various schools of philosophy emerged, some of which anticipated aspects of what we now know as the ‘natural sciences’. Each of these philosophical communities developed its own distinct mode of thinking, alongside practising an understanding of how to live authentically that was grounded in those ideas. In classical Greece, Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean and Sceptical schools of thought emerged, each attracting followers to their visions of the good life. A similar pattern can be seen in China, with the emergence of the ‘three teachings’ of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  As is so often the case, the real joy is in the details. Here we have: A packed restaurant every night . . . a catastrophic service situation . . . a French laissez-faire personality managing the floor on busy nights . . . and an owner who is happiest ignoring both and fiddling with the dials on his stereo system . . . Or, . . . they've been giving too much food away. "Comping" your friends is one guaranteed way to keep food revenues to a minimum . . . It is a practice that is widely discouraged in the industry. It is not, however, a practice that has been discouraged at The Falls. And yet, in the opening days of the restaurant, no doubt feeling generous and expansive, [the owners] have frequently given away food and drink. How much? Difficult to say, in that no one particularly wants to keep a close count of the giveaways. One night in the first week, Henry guesses that [the owners] gave away half the meals served. And maybe some of you chefs have been here: [The chef] diligently follows Bruce and eagerly awaits his boss's latest brainstorm. Bruce gets straight to the point. "I've got a great new dessert idea," he says. "Banana cream tart!" "Banana cream tart?" [the chef] asks. "What exactly is that, Bruce?" "It would be like a banana cream pie," Bruce explains, allowing his hands to form an imaginary tart-like circle, "which is everybody's favorite dessert . . . only we'd make it into a tart, so it'd be smaller and healthier." [The chef] has no response except to roll his eyes, which he can do subtly yet with precision. After a long pause, he finally mutters, "I guess I can make that." Having worked in a few knuckleheaded operations like this in my time, I can tell you, it's fun reading Blum's account in the cold, clear light of years later. I may come home after a particularly hellish night feeling like a whipped animal, but hey, at least we're busy! My current bosses may take an unusual and annoying interest at times in unpleasantly gamey wild hare and less-than- universally-popular organ meats, but at least they love food. They know what the hell they're talking about! The vodka we're pouring at my restaurant is what it says on the bottle. The function of all four of these old friends, tattered and broken-spined as they may be, is ultimately to make me feel better about myself and the way things are going.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘ ’Old on!’ bellowed Williams, ‘What the ’ell be you doin’? Quick, shorten ’is bridle, yer not in a circus!’ And then seeing Stephen: ‘Beg pardon, Miss Stephen, but it be a fair crime not to lead that horse close, and ’im all corned up until ’e’s fair dancin’!’ They stood watching Raftery skip through the gates, then old Williams said softly: ‘ ’E do be a wonder—more nor fifty odd years ’ave I worked in the stables, and never no beast ’ave I loved like Raftery. But ’e’s no common horse, ’e be some sort of Christian, and a better one too than a good few I knows on—’ And Stephen answered: ‘Perhaps he’s a poet like his namesake; I think if he could write he’d write verses. They say all the Irish are poets at heart, so perhaps they pass on the gift to their horses.’ Then the two of them smiled, each a little embarrassed, but their eyes held great friendship the one for the other, a friendship of years now cemented by Raftery whom they loved—and small wonder, for assuredly never did more gallant or courteous horse step out of stable. ‘Oh, well,’ sighed Williams, ‘I be gettin’ that old—and Raftery, ’e do be comin’ eleven, but ’e don’t feel it yet in ’is limbs the way I does—me rheumatics ’as troubled me awful this winter.’ She stayed on a little while, comforting Williams, then made her way back to the house, very slowly. ‘Poor Williams,’ she thought, ‘he is getting old, but thank the Lord nothing’s the matter with Raftery.’ The house lay full in a great slant of sunshine; it looked as though it was sunning its shoulders. Glancing up, she came eye to eye with the house, and she fancied that Morton was thinking about her, for its windows seemed to be beckoning, inviting: ‘Come home, come home, come inside quickly, Stephen!’ And as though they had spoken, she answered: ‘I’m coming,’ and she quickened her lagging steps to a run, in response to this most compassionate kindness. Yes, she actually ran through the heavy white doorway under the semi-circular fanlight, and on up the staircase that led from the hall in which hung the funny old portraits of Gordons—men long dead and gone but still wonderfully living, since their thoughts had fashioned the comeliness of Morton; since their loves had made children from father to son—from father to son until the advent of Stephen. 2That evening she went to her father’s study, and when he looked up she thought she was expected. She said: ‘I want to talk to you, Father.’ And he answered: ‘I know—sit close to me, Stephen.’

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  We have to work with human nature as it actually is, and confront the fact that ‘tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition and that no group – not even one’s own – is immune’. 10 Evolutionary pressures have ‘sculpted human minds to be tribal’, leading to the potential for social antagonism and violence. The New Atheism suggested that religion is the cause of toxic social division; a more reliable view is that our instinct for tribalism often seizes on religion for its own ends. Like just about everything that human beings turn their hands to, this enterprise of believing can go wrong. As we have seen, beliefs can lead to discrimination, violence and prejudice. This, however, points to the need to be critical and reflective about those beliefs, and how they are enacted and embodied. We can’t change who we are – but we can try to live ethically and peacefully. Paradoxically, it is the belief that we should live in these ways that allows us to subdue and redirect our more fundamental human instincts – a point emphasised by Thomas H. Huxley in his famous 1893 lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’. For Huxley, ethical values – which human beings create – can help suppress our more fundamental primitive tendency towards violence, rooted in a distant past. The solution to toxic beliefs is not a crude abolition of the category of ‘believing’, but the search for better forms of believing that foster good lives, individually and communally. Much research has been carried out on the way in which belief systems are correlated with flourishing and resilience, at both the individual and communal level. This research often focuses on how beliefs help individuals cope with ageing, trauma and uncertainty; in recent times, its scope has been expanded to include indigenous communities, exploring how their beliefs and practices enable them to survive, particularly in the face of colonialism and the erosion of their traditional cultures. 11 A recurrent theme to emerge from this research is that existentially disengaged beliefs do not seem to encourage human flourishing or create resilience. We care about beliefs that make a difference to us. I was fascinated by the 2006 debate which led to Pluto being reclassified as a ‘dwarf planet’ by the International Astronomical Union. But did it impact on me in any meaningful way? No. It was interesting in a detached sort of way. I also believe that the atomic weight of the chemical element chlorine is 35.453 – not because I’ve checked this out myself, having outsourced this matter to the scientific community at large. But if it turned out it was 35.467, I would shrug my shoulders. It would be interesting, but not personally relevant to me, even though it might be important to theoretical chemistry. Yet other beliefs make a profound difference to how we understand ourselves, and feel about our lives. Human flourishing seems to rest on three broad pillars: truth, purpose and meaning.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  As The World's information channel informed us that winds were now approaching gale force and seas rising to eighteen feet, the captain's voice suddenly issued from hidden speakers over my bed (more shades of The Prisoner), assuring passengers in a casual, conversational tone that conditions would "probably" not get too much worse and chiding those among us who had apparently been complaining that the seas had been too calm and unexciting. This is another difference between you and me and the very rich: The very rich, among them most residents of The World, for instance, have previously owned yachts. They know what it feels like to have your stomach rise up into your rib cage every few seconds while the floor heaves and pitches around you. And they seem to like it. I have to admit, the ship managed the seas beautifully. Even when swells reached the occasional twenty-seven feet, my sleep was undisturbed by groaning or creaking, the shriek of protesting beams or stressed rivets. The hull, as if surrounded by shock absorbers, handled every crashing wave with a solid, well- muffled authority. Nothing in the apartment moved or dropped save an occasional book flopping onto its side. Pots and pans stayed on the stove, lamps stayed on tables, doors remained shut, cabinets closed. As the ship rose and fell, the most violent movements were inside my stomach as I was squashed and lifted (rather gently I confess) above and into my firm and expensive bedding. I don't know that I would ever buy a residence on The World, regardless of what lottery I might someday win, or that I would ever book lengthy passage in her rental suites or studios. Most of her residents own two or three homes, which suggests a net worth unattainable in my lifetime and the lifetimes of all my friends put together. As delightful as it sounds to drop by one's floating home- away-from-home in say, Sydney, sail for Ho Chi Minh City, disembark for a few weeks, then rejoin her at some other port of call by plane—or private jet, as some surely do—I am not, I think, a seafaring man. I wish The World well, and all the intrepid souls who sail within her. They know better than I the ways of the deep blue sea—and how cruel a mistress she can be. They are used to solitude and are, I think, surprisingly self-sufficient for a demographic no doubt used to much pampering.