On inspiration 26 Nov 2010 Being as I am swamped with boring, but remunerative, things to do, I haven’t blogged for a while. So another reflection. As I age, I find that I am no longer struck by the vivacity of books. When I was in my twenties, and discovering new fields and ideas for the first time, that there was a wider world than dreamt of in my high school, Horatio, passages would leap out at me and stick with me. I am reminded on this because just yesterday I was moved to quote one of my favourite books of all time, My Name Is Asher Lev (by Chaim Potok). The quote is this: Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to add to it or to rebel against it. This is told to the eponymous Orthodox Jewish hero by the secular cubist painter who is teaching him, and is almost the whole point of the book. When I read that, at about the age of 18 or so, it struck me, hard. It has in fact guided most of my thinking about culture, ideas and traditions ever since. Similar passages from other books have stayed with me as well. Later, as I became interested in history and philosophy of science, I found passages from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Toulmin doing the same thing. And especially the work of David Hull, whose massive book Science as a Process I almost memorised. It was exciting, this new way of looking at things. Then I discovered Darwin’s writings, and the same thing occurred again. I learned, from choice rather than a teacher’s instructions, large amounts of sayings, comments and observations. So why have I lost it now? I read a book, and it is a roughly grey experience of text, all alike. This, no matter whether the book is good or bad, clear or opaque, serious or not. I read what I must, not what I am excited about. It’s possible it’s just me, although Darwin reported something similar in his Autobiography (see?) about reading fiction (I also used to devour fiction of all kinds, particularly science fiction). But I think that there is a certain vivacity to what you first read; when you are working out how to see the world, and so I would advise students to read interesting books from the start. Don’t just get by reading secondhand summaries, textbooks or take the easy way and only read the Cliff Notes. Read the originals! Read the crap and the gold, and do it because it’s interesting. These will stay with you forever (and make you a boring fart when you get old, because you keep quoting from dry and dead books nobody in this current generation thinks are important). If you have any potential at all in a given field, reading the originals will help you develop into a creative person yourself. Not that I have, all that much, but others may. The year before last, I read, for the very first time, the entirety of Moby Dick. Even the boring bits. I read, unusually for me, every single sentence. I could not put it down. That is the last time a book excited me (not even my beloved Terry Pratchett does this for me now). I hope I get that experience again, but if inspiration is a fixed developmental stage, I may be past it. At the least, it may be unlikely. But I’ll keep trying. Administrative Rant Sermon Administrative
Rant I wonder how non-Christians will be less than human this Easter? 18 Apr 20192 May 2019 Every time religious leaders give Easter and Christmas sermons, they are reported as saying something like “only with Christ can one truly love” or “non-Christians do not experience the totality of life”. In effect this is a way to dehumanise non-Christians, and I have mentioned it before on this blog…. Read More
Administrative Nominate me for something 19 Jun 2009 I put a lot of work into some of my posts. I’d really love it if readers would nominate them for either Open Laboratory (see button to the side), or for a Carnival or something. I never get carnivaled and it’s giving me a complex. Otherwise I develop deep feelings… Read More
Administrative Happy new year 31 Dec 2007 It is midnight on January 1 here in Australia. There’s a loud party next door (young folks, heh). So I hope you all have a good year and thanks for reading me in 2007. Read More
I know, Star Trek just doesn’t do it for me like it used to. It’s age. You don’t see as well, hear as well, taste things as keenly, the world just looks that bit greyer. And then it’s all downhill. Am I cheering you up yet?
55? I can only dream of being 55. Try 61. ‘Course, things have been worse: we used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
We used to dream of living in a room, me and me three hundred close relatives. We had to live in box, in hole in road.
I’m an optimist. I do dream of being 55. I’ve got two more years of that wonderful dream. Then I will have to find a new goal for myself. (I’m thinking of either 57 or 58.)
As I age, I find that I am no longer struck by the vivacity of books. Welcome to wisdom and maturity. And I don’t mean that as sarcasm. I learned, from choice rather than a teacher’s instructions, large amounts of sayings, comments and observations. That’s the only way to learn. And I say that as a “teacher”. The students who attempt to learn from a teacher’s instructions are the ones who fail to learn much at all. A teacher is like a tourist guide, introducing students to the scenery. But it is the students who do the heavy lifting in the learning process. It’s all downhill from 50. I am 55. I’m well past that point. There is still a lot that keeps life interesting, but it is not the kind of thing that excited me in earlier years.
Hast seen the white whale? I have not, maybe you are more privileged. So be it. From Hell’s heart I stab at thee 😉
I got far with unabridged Moby Dick a decade ago, but had to stop after the chapter on why whales – with all the reasons they resemble mammals – after all are fish. Later on I learned that Melville had tricked me. Now I am looking forward to reading the whole thing when I’m sixty four. I’m savoring the anticipation of the strike.
Getting turned on by a book has its downside. I’m almost afraid to recommend a powerful book to anybody who doesn’t read very much. The same text that might merely impress somebody who has read thousands of books can easily become divine revelation to a non-reader. This phenomenon can be endearing in a Freshman who becomes successively a Platonist, Cartesian, Kantian, existentialist, and positivist as she works her way through the Philosophy 101 reading list. It’s less funny when a thirty year old finally gets around to reading Atlas Shrugged and decides they’ve learned a cosmic secret. Reading a lot does make it hard to get too excited by the nth book, but I think of the practice as something like the regimen of King Mithridates who sipped a bit of poison every day until he became immune to its effect.
Well you can always give that 30 year old a copy of Plato’s Republic as a counterbalance. I have had Objectivists come into my office with a Grand Plan for the final solution to this or that philosophical conundrum. I treat them a little like a special nephew who we all like and do not want to upset. But I think the task of books is occasionally to come across as divine revelation, so long as we remember Aquinas’ dictum: hominem unius libri timeo.
Well, maybe one’s capacity to be impressed and excited by profound and original works diminishes as one ages, but I think that one’s capacity to appreciate humble and vulgar productions grows. It was only when I was in my thirties that I grew to appreciate the excellences of the Three Stooges, for instance (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk).
I get excited by two sorts of books: ones that give cheap thrills and you know will be forgotten in a week, and those that give you a new way of looking at the world. the first category is more of a drug- and like an addict you need more each time. the second is more satisfying, but there seems to be a limited amount of ways to see the world, at least without breaking your whole worldview. The last book to do it for me was Peter Turchin”s book Historical Dynamics, applying maths to history. Geek… I bet there are new ideas to be found in randomly pairing up things that nobody has thought relate to each other. But then you have to write the book!
Hmm… do books excite me these days? I think they continue to, although I too find not many of them stick the way Darwin, Gould, or Steinbeck did the first time I read them in my youth. Is it because I’ve become jaded? Just getting old? Or because I’m reading a lot more books but perhaps not as deeply? I dunno. I do find myself going back to those formative texts. Your description of that excitement reminds me right now of the first time I read MacArthur’s “Geographical Ecology”, which too I’ve been known to thrust upon many an unsuspecting student.
I’m glad to know that I’m not alone. I have read all of my life at all times and overall. I even used to read whilst riding my bike. I’ve always said that I will and do read everything from the back of cornflakes packets to the Bible and everything in between. I have read thousands of novels in my life and I can still intensely remember the physical thrill of discovering Jean Genet, Hermann Hesse, Steinbeck and many, many others. I have also always read fact books with as much enthusiasm and enjoyment as novels when the same thrill on first discovering Popper, Lakatos, Koestler, Christopher Hill and also many, many others. I stopped reading novels several years ago and feel no desire what so ever to restart. I still read fact books, almost exclusively history of science, but the number of book that really catch my attention and pull me in are few and far between, although I must say this happened recently when I read Rebekah Higgitt’s Recreating Newton, which is why I wrote a very positive review of it on my blog. At the moment I’m reading James Voelkel’s The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia Nova and although it’s a well researched and well written book and I find Voelkel’s main argument important and interesting and I’m glad that I discovered this book I still find myself plodding through it rather that revelling in it. Some times I worry about my lost enthusiasm and at others I just think I’m getting old!
I think it’s not so much losing your capacity to be inspired, as it is that you kind of stop running into significant novelty. As an educated person, you’ve run into most of what you’ll ever see as far as profound thoughts that have been expressed in the usual contexts you place yourself in. You may find yourself inspired again if you expose yourself to something that’s truly unfamiliar. This puts me in mind of an idea I’ve long held about humor: You can lose your appreciation for a specific humorist or even genre of humor through sufficient exposure to it, because it loses its ability to surprise and challenge you. On the up side, your sense of humor has become more sophisticated and thus more potentially rewarding by taking that influence on board and surpassing it; on the down side, however fondly you remember what you once found so funny, you won’t laugh at it again. This has happened to me a few times (with Gary Larson and Douglas Adams, for example), but there’s also more to laugh at (adult swim still does it for me).
I am surprised at how much more I have read since I bought an e-reading device. So many public domain books and so little time! Right now I am in the midst of reading “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. Give a copy of that to your objectivist friends so that they have a dose of reality. I have downloaded “Moby Dick” for a re-read, as well as others by Melville that I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with. I have many others. Reading is “fun-damental” once again. Plus, Kakalios has another book out, this one on Quatum Mechanics which should fill me in on some of the things that I missed from Greene’s “Elegant Universe.”
Of course, I am only a whippersnapper at 50. Perhaps when I reach your age I will lose interest in everything except warm slippers and a daily snifter of brandy.
Yes! I’ve gone through lots of obscure Kipling just because it was free and the kindle store works on the droid. (It’s not very good Kipling, but that’s why it’s obscure.) Latest find was Anthony Collins’s “A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing” (1729). That’s heavy going; probably won’t finish it.
I recently started reading an author whose works are new to me, who writes fiction I really like. A few days ago, I found out that he holds political views with which I strongly disagree. No, I will not name him, don’t want to start that argument. Do I stop borrowing his books from the library so they won’t buy any more of them since I don’t want to indirectly support his political work? Do I keep reading since nothing I do will make a difference. Will I be able to read any more of his books without thinking about Real Life?
If I didn’t read fiction authors whose political views I disagree with, I’d only read the shipping news. And maybe the weather.
Am I the first one to notice that your Sythese article contains the answer to your question? “Generally, once we have embedded an epistemic commitment in our conceptual set, it is unlikely to revert in proportion to how embedded it is, as we develop. The last in will be first out, but as you go deeper and deeper, it gets less likely that you will abandon that commitment in proportion to the number of other commitments that depend upon it. Conceptual development is mutually supporting, and a deeply embedded belief may only be revisable at the cost of many other beliefs, rendering the cogniser temporarily confused and conflicted.” I’d only amend that to say “confused, conflicted, and possibly inspired”. Define “inspiration” as the overthrowing of previous beliefs and what you have is, at your high level of mastery, a large collection of well-sifted beliefs that are no longer changing much (hopefully because they’re converging on correctness). Perhaps you’re getting fewer “A-ha!”s per page, which is much of the joy in reading. As to what to do with this information, I have no idea…