Monday, October 18, 2010
The New York Times
October 15, 2010
Toddlers’ Favorite Toy: The iPhone
By HILARY STOUT
THE bedroom door opened and a light went on, signaling an end to nap time. The toddler, tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed, clambered to a wobbly stand in his crib. He smiled, reached out to his father, and uttered what is fast becoming the cry of his generation: “iPhone!”
The iPhone has revolutionized telecommunications. It has also become the most effective tool in human history to mollify a fussy toddler, much to the delight of parents reveling in their newfound freedom to have a conversation in a restaurant or roam the supermarket aisles in peace. But just as adults have a hard time putting down their iPhones, so the device is now the Toy of Choice — akin to a treasured stuffed animal — for many 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds. It’s a phenomenon that is attracting the attention and concern of some childhood development specialists.
Natasha Sykes, a mother of two in Atlanta, remembers the first time her daughter, Kelsey, now 3 1/2 but then barely 2 years old, held her husband’s iPhone. “She pressed the button and it lit up. I just remember her eyes. It was like ‘Whoa!’ ”
The parents were charmed by their daughter’s fascination. But then, said Ms. Sykes (herself a BlackBerry user), “She got serious about the phone.”
Kelsey would ask for it. Then she’d cry for it. “It was like she’d always want the phone,” Ms. Sykes said. After a six-hour search one day, she and her husband found the iPhone tucked away under Kelsey’s bed. They laughed. But they also felt vague concern. Kelsey, and her 2-year-old brother, Chase, have blocks, Legos, bouncing balls, toy cars and books galore. (“They love books,” Ms. Sykes said.) But nothing compares to the iPhone.
“If they know they have the option of the phone or toys, it will be the phone, ” Ms. Sykes said
Brady Hotz, who will be 2 at the end of this month, was having a hard time getting out the door of his family’s home near Chicago the other day. He’d woken up late — 6:45 instead of 6:15. His mother, Kellie Hotz, was in a rush. She got him dressed, gave him milk and cereal, and announced, “We’re ready to go.”
Brady, not budging from his position near the couch, dug in. “Mickey!” he said plaintively. “Mickey!” (Translation: I’m not going anywhere till I get to watch “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” on TV.)
Ms. Hotz, a veteran of such standoffs, switched instantly to what she called her “guaranteed success tool.”
“What about Mickey on the phone?” she suggested.
That’s all it took. Mother swept up the now entirely cooperative toddler, cued up the show (via YouTube) on her little iPhone screen, and strapped him into her car, where he sang happily along with the video for the 15-minute ride to day care.
Then trouble began again. Brady wanted to stay in his seat with the iPhone. Finally he put it in his coat pocket and went inside — where Ms. Hotz was able to surreptitiously reclaim her gizmo and leave for work. But it’s not always that easy. “Sometimes I’ll need it because someone is calling, and he is not at all willing to give it up,” she said.
Apple, the iPhone’s designer and manufacturer, has built its success on machines so simple and intuitive that even technologically befuddled adults can figure out how to work them, so it makes sense that sophisticated children would follow. The most recent model is 4.5 inches tall, 2.31 inches wide and weighs 4.8 ounces: sleek, but not too small for those with developing motor skills. Tap a picture on the screen and something happens. What could be more fun?
The sleepy-eyed toddler who called for the iPhone from his crib is one of hundreds of iPhone-loving tykes starring in videos posted throughout the Internet, usually narrated by parents expressing proud wonderment at their offspring’s ability to slide chubby fingers across the gadget’s screen and pull up photographs and apps of their choice.
Many iPhone apps on the market are aimed directly at preschoolers, many of them labeled “educational,” such as Toddler Teasers: Shapes, which asks the child to tap a circle or square or triangle; and Pocket Zoo, which streams live video of animals at zoos around the world. There are “flash cards” aimed at teaching children to read and spell, and a “Wheels on the Bus” app that sings the popular song in multiple languages. Then there’s the new iGo Potty app (sponsored by Kimberly-Clark, maker of Huggies training pants), with automated phone calls reminding toddlers that it’s time to “go.”
Along with fears about dropping and damage, however, many parents sharing iPhones with their young ones feel nagging guilt. They wonder whether it is indeed an educational tool, or a passive amusement like television. The American Academy of Pediatrics has long advised parents not to let their children watch any TV until they are past their second birthday.
Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who is a member of the academy’s council of communications and media, said the group is continually reassessing its guidelines to address new forms of “screen time.”
“We always try to throw in the latest technology, but the cellphone industry is becoming so complex that we always come back to the table and wonder should we have a specific guideline for cellphones,” she said. But, she added, “At the moment, we seem to feel it’s the same as TV.”
Jill Mikols Etesse, a mother of two daughters, aged 3 and 8, outside of Washington, believes her younger daughter is further along in vocabulary, reading and spelling than her older daughter was at the same age, and she attributes this progress to the iPhone and iPad. The 3-year-old has learned to spell compound words like “starlight and fireworks” through an app called Montessori Crossword, her mother said. “She uses words that I don’t use, so I know it isn’t coming from me,” Ms. Etesse said. “She says ‘That’s peculiar.’ I don’t use the term peculiar.”
But Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist in Vail, Colo. said: “Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat.’ You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none.”
Despite Ms. Etesse’s generally positive experience, she and her husband decided to set limits when their two daughters spent six hours straight staring at the iPhone during a car trip. Now they allow each child no more than one hour a day of screen time. (That means the iPhone and the iPad; neither girl is interested in TV, she said.)
Tovah P. Klein, the director of Columbia University’s Barnard College Center for Toddler Development (where signs forbid the use of cellphones and other wireless devices) worries that fixation on the iPhone screen every time a child is out and about with parents will limit the child’s ability to experience the wider world. “Children at this age are so curious and they’re observing everything,” she said. “If you’re engrossed in this screen you’re not seeing or observing or taking it in.” (Though some, like Renee Giroux-Nix of Cedar Park, Tex., a suburb of Austin, applaud the iPhone’s photo function. She said her 3-year-old, Bella, took a series of photos during a shoe-shopping trip, focusing on her mother’s feet and legs. )
As with TV in earlier generations, the world is increasingly divided into those parents who do allow iPhone use and those who don’t. A recent post on UrbanBaby.com , a popular and often contentious parents’ Web site, asked if anyone had found that their child was more interested in playing with their iPhone than with “real toys.” The Don’t mothers pounced:
“We don’t let our toddler touch our iPhones ... it takes away from creative play.”
“Please ... just say no. It is not too hard to distract a toddler with, say ... a book.”
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University who specializes in early language development, sides with the Don’ts. Research shows that children learn best through active engagement that helps them adapt, she said, and interacting with a screen doesn’t qualify.
Still, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek, struck on a recent visit to New York City by how many parents were handing over their iPhones to their little children in the subway, said she understands the impulse. “This is a magical phone,” she said. “I must admit I’m addicted to this phone.”
October 15, 2010
Toddlers’ Favorite Toy: The iPhone
By HILARY STOUT
THE bedroom door opened and a light went on, signaling an end to nap time. The toddler, tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed, clambered to a wobbly stand in his crib. He smiled, reached out to his father, and uttered what is fast becoming the cry of his generation: “iPhone!”
The iPhone has revolutionized telecommunications. It has also become the most effective tool in human history to mollify a fussy toddler, much to the delight of parents reveling in their newfound freedom to have a conversation in a restaurant or roam the supermarket aisles in peace. But just as adults have a hard time putting down their iPhones, so the device is now the Toy of Choice — akin to a treasured stuffed animal — for many 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds. It’s a phenomenon that is attracting the attention and concern of some childhood development specialists.
Natasha Sykes, a mother of two in Atlanta, remembers the first time her daughter, Kelsey, now 3 1/2 but then barely 2 years old, held her husband’s iPhone. “She pressed the button and it lit up. I just remember her eyes. It was like ‘Whoa!’ ”
The parents were charmed by their daughter’s fascination. But then, said Ms. Sykes (herself a BlackBerry user), “She got serious about the phone.”
Kelsey would ask for it. Then she’d cry for it. “It was like she’d always want the phone,” Ms. Sykes said. After a six-hour search one day, she and her husband found the iPhone tucked away under Kelsey’s bed. They laughed. But they also felt vague concern. Kelsey, and her 2-year-old brother, Chase, have blocks, Legos, bouncing balls, toy cars and books galore. (“They love books,” Ms. Sykes said.) But nothing compares to the iPhone.
“If they know they have the option of the phone or toys, it will be the phone, ” Ms. Sykes said
Brady Hotz, who will be 2 at the end of this month, was having a hard time getting out the door of his family’s home near Chicago the other day. He’d woken up late — 6:45 instead of 6:15. His mother, Kellie Hotz, was in a rush. She got him dressed, gave him milk and cereal, and announced, “We’re ready to go.”
Brady, not budging from his position near the couch, dug in. “Mickey!” he said plaintively. “Mickey!” (Translation: I’m not going anywhere till I get to watch “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” on TV.)
Ms. Hotz, a veteran of such standoffs, switched instantly to what she called her “guaranteed success tool.”
“What about Mickey on the phone?” she suggested.
That’s all it took. Mother swept up the now entirely cooperative toddler, cued up the show (via YouTube) on her little iPhone screen, and strapped him into her car, where he sang happily along with the video for the 15-minute ride to day care.
Then trouble began again. Brady wanted to stay in his seat with the iPhone. Finally he put it in his coat pocket and went inside — where Ms. Hotz was able to surreptitiously reclaim her gizmo and leave for work. But it’s not always that easy. “Sometimes I’ll need it because someone is calling, and he is not at all willing to give it up,” she said.
Apple, the iPhone’s designer and manufacturer, has built its success on machines so simple and intuitive that even technologically befuddled adults can figure out how to work them, so it makes sense that sophisticated children would follow. The most recent model is 4.5 inches tall, 2.31 inches wide and weighs 4.8 ounces: sleek, but not too small for those with developing motor skills. Tap a picture on the screen and something happens. What could be more fun?
The sleepy-eyed toddler who called for the iPhone from his crib is one of hundreds of iPhone-loving tykes starring in videos posted throughout the Internet, usually narrated by parents expressing proud wonderment at their offspring’s ability to slide chubby fingers across the gadget’s screen and pull up photographs and apps of their choice.
Many iPhone apps on the market are aimed directly at preschoolers, many of them labeled “educational,” such as Toddler Teasers: Shapes, which asks the child to tap a circle or square or triangle; and Pocket Zoo, which streams live video of animals at zoos around the world. There are “flash cards” aimed at teaching children to read and spell, and a “Wheels on the Bus” app that sings the popular song in multiple languages. Then there’s the new iGo Potty app (sponsored by Kimberly-Clark, maker of Huggies training pants), with automated phone calls reminding toddlers that it’s time to “go.”
Along with fears about dropping and damage, however, many parents sharing iPhones with their young ones feel nagging guilt. They wonder whether it is indeed an educational tool, or a passive amusement like television. The American Academy of Pediatrics has long advised parents not to let their children watch any TV until they are past their second birthday.
Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who is a member of the academy’s council of communications and media, said the group is continually reassessing its guidelines to address new forms of “screen time.”
“We always try to throw in the latest technology, but the cellphone industry is becoming so complex that we always come back to the table and wonder should we have a specific guideline for cellphones,” she said. But, she added, “At the moment, we seem to feel it’s the same as TV.”
Jill Mikols Etesse, a mother of two daughters, aged 3 and 8, outside of Washington, believes her younger daughter is further along in vocabulary, reading and spelling than her older daughter was at the same age, and she attributes this progress to the iPhone and iPad. The 3-year-old has learned to spell compound words like “starlight and fireworks” through an app called Montessori Crossword, her mother said. “She uses words that I don’t use, so I know it isn’t coming from me,” Ms. Etesse said. “She says ‘That’s peculiar.’ I don’t use the term peculiar.”
But Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist in Vail, Colo. said: “Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat.’ You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none.”
Despite Ms. Etesse’s generally positive experience, she and her husband decided to set limits when their two daughters spent six hours straight staring at the iPhone during a car trip. Now they allow each child no more than one hour a day of screen time. (That means the iPhone and the iPad; neither girl is interested in TV, she said.)
Tovah P. Klein, the director of Columbia University’s Barnard College Center for Toddler Development (where signs forbid the use of cellphones and other wireless devices) worries that fixation on the iPhone screen every time a child is out and about with parents will limit the child’s ability to experience the wider world. “Children at this age are so curious and they’re observing everything,” she said. “If you’re engrossed in this screen you’re not seeing or observing or taking it in.” (Though some, like Renee Giroux-Nix of Cedar Park, Tex., a suburb of Austin, applaud the iPhone’s photo function. She said her 3-year-old, Bella, took a series of photos during a shoe-shopping trip, focusing on her mother’s feet and legs. )
As with TV in earlier generations, the world is increasingly divided into those parents who do allow iPhone use and those who don’t. A recent post on UrbanBaby.com , a popular and often contentious parents’ Web site, asked if anyone had found that their child was more interested in playing with their iPhone than with “real toys.” The Don’t mothers pounced:
“We don’t let our toddler touch our iPhones ... it takes away from creative play.”
“Please ... just say no. It is not too hard to distract a toddler with, say ... a book.”
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University who specializes in early language development, sides with the Don’ts. Research shows that children learn best through active engagement that helps them adapt, she said, and interacting with a screen doesn’t qualify.
Still, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek, struck on a recent visit to New York City by how many parents were handing over their iPhones to their little children in the subway, said she understands the impulse. “This is a magical phone,” she said. “I must admit I’m addicted to this phone.”
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Students Are Different Now
NYT
Updated October 11, 2010, 10:54 PM
Linda Bips, a psychologist, is an assistant professor at Muhlenberg College and the author of "Parenting College Freshmen: Consulting for Adulthood."
In my experience, freshmen today are different from those I knew when I started as a counselor and professor 25 years ago. College has always been demanding both academically and socially. But students now are less mature and often not ready for the responsibility of being in college.
Many students today lack resilience and are unable to summon strategies to cope.
Many of today’s students lack resilience and at the first sign of difficulty are unable to summon strategies to cope. The hardship can be a failing grade on a test, a cut from the team, or a romantic breakup. At the first sign of trouble many become unable to function and persevere. Often they even anticipate difficulties and their anxiety alone paralyzes them.
It is really too easy to point the finger at parents who protect their children from life’s obstacles. Parents, who handle every difficulty and every other responsibility for their children from writing admission essays to picking college courses, certainly may contribute to their children’s lack of coping strategies. But we can look even more broadly to the social trends of today.
How many people do you know who are on medications to prevent anxiety or depression? The number of students who arrive at college already medicated for unwanted emotions has increased dramatically in the past 10 years. We, as a society, don’t want to “feel” anything unpleasant and we certainly don’t want our children to “suffer.”
The resulting problem is that by not experiencing negative emotions, one does not learn the necessary skills to tolerate and negotiate adversity. As a psychologist, I am well aware of the fact that some individuals suffer from depression and anxiety and can benefit from treatment, but I question the growing number of medicated adolescents today.
Our world is more stressful in general because of the current economic and political realities, but I don’t believe that the college experience itself is more intense today than the past 10 years. What I do think is that many students are often not prepared to be young “adults” with all the responsibilities of life.
What does this mean for college faculty and staff? We are required to assist in the basic parenting of these students -- the student who complains that her professor didn’t remind her of the due date for an assignment that was clearly listed on the syllabus and the student who cheats on an assignment in spite of careful instructions about plagiarism and honor code work.
As college professors, we have to explain what it means to be an independent college student before we can even begin to teach. As parents, teachers and coaches we should expect young people to meet challenges. To encourage them in this direction, we have to step back and let them fail and pick themselves up and move forward. This approach needs to begin at an early age so that college can actually be a passage to independent adulthood.
NYT
Updated October 11, 2010, 10:54 PM
Linda Bips, a psychologist, is an assistant professor at Muhlenberg College and the author of "Parenting College Freshmen: Consulting for Adulthood."
In my experience, freshmen today are different from those I knew when I started as a counselor and professor 25 years ago. College has always been demanding both academically and socially. But students now are less mature and often not ready for the responsibility of being in college.
Many students today lack resilience and are unable to summon strategies to cope.
Many of today’s students lack resilience and at the first sign of difficulty are unable to summon strategies to cope. The hardship can be a failing grade on a test, a cut from the team, or a romantic breakup. At the first sign of trouble many become unable to function and persevere. Often they even anticipate difficulties and their anxiety alone paralyzes them.
It is really too easy to point the finger at parents who protect their children from life’s obstacles. Parents, who handle every difficulty and every other responsibility for their children from writing admission essays to picking college courses, certainly may contribute to their children’s lack of coping strategies. But we can look even more broadly to the social trends of today.
How many people do you know who are on medications to prevent anxiety or depression? The number of students who arrive at college already medicated for unwanted emotions has increased dramatically in the past 10 years. We, as a society, don’t want to “feel” anything unpleasant and we certainly don’t want our children to “suffer.”
The resulting problem is that by not experiencing negative emotions, one does not learn the necessary skills to tolerate and negotiate adversity. As a psychologist, I am well aware of the fact that some individuals suffer from depression and anxiety and can benefit from treatment, but I question the growing number of medicated adolescents today.
Our world is more stressful in general because of the current economic and political realities, but I don’t believe that the college experience itself is more intense today than the past 10 years. What I do think is that many students are often not prepared to be young “adults” with all the responsibilities of life.
What does this mean for college faculty and staff? We are required to assist in the basic parenting of these students -- the student who complains that her professor didn’t remind her of the due date for an assignment that was clearly listed on the syllabus and the student who cheats on an assignment in spite of careful instructions about plagiarism and honor code work.
As college professors, we have to explain what it means to be an independent college student before we can even begin to teach. As parents, teachers and coaches we should expect young people to meet challenges. To encourage them in this direction, we have to step back and let them fail and pick themselves up and move forward. This approach needs to begin at an early age so that college can actually be a passage to independent adulthood.
Monday, October 11, 2010
The New York Times
October 10, 2010
In Life’s Latest Chapter, Feeling Free Again
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON — Last year, when she was 91, the editor and writer Diana Athill moved from her beloved apartment into an “old person’s home,” as she calls it. It was the most painful decision she had ever made, and it might have been a terrible diminishment, the reduction of a long, full life into something small enough to fit into a tiny room off a communal corridor.
But it turned out not to be that way at all.
“You gradually become aware of how liberating it is,” Ms. Athill said. “Not a single domestic worry do I have.” That means no more shopping, no more electricity bills, no more laundry. And it means, she wrote recently in The Daily Telegraph, a rethinking of her relationship to her belongings.
“Everything, from the carpet to the biscuit tin and including of course the too-many pictures, ornaments and books, is here because, however uninteresting it might be to others, I love it,” she wrote. “It’s as though ‘possessing’ has been distilled down from being a vague pleasure to being an intense one. Less is more.”
Ms. Athill’s room turns out to be charming, with big windows through which the sun poured the other day. She has snow-white hair swept back from a broad, amused face; beautiful pink skin; and the plummy, proper voice of an old-fashioned aunt in a black-and-white movie, which makes a nice contrast to her sometimes wicked observations.
She holds a formidable place in the London literary world. Legendary for her ability to handle difficult manuscripts, not to mention difficult writers, she was one of the founding directors of the independent publisher André Deutsch (it has now been subsumed into Carlton Publishing Group) and worked for nearly 50 years with authors like V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Margaret Atwood.
She left the job at 75 and could have slipped quietly into retirement. Instead she found a second career, as a writer.
Since turning 80 Ms. Athill has published three memoirs about her life and her work, using crystalline, unflinching prose that seeks not to sugarcoat, but to get to the truth of things. All have drawn adoring reviews and good sales. The most recent, “Somewhere Towards the End” (W. W. Norton & Company), an unsentimental look at growing old that confronts issues like sex and dying and that came out when she was 90, was a best seller, winning both the Costa Biography award here and the National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography in the United States.
People tend to tell Ms. Athill that she is an inspiration, a word that gives her the willies. But her matter-of-fact, hopeful depiction of life as an elderly woman presents an encouraging antidote to the accounts of writers like Philip Roth, with their self-pitying fetishization of physical decline.
“I think getting old very often is horrible, really,” Ms. Athill said. “But if you’re lucky, if you keep your health, if your aches and pains are not too bad, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a perfectly agreeable life, in many ways, discovering new and nice things.”
Ms. Athill’s life has been unconventional, courageous, and for decades, she felt, clouded by shame. As she described in “Instead of a Letter,” which was published when she was in her 40s but recently has been reissued, she became engaged to her first love, a young man who went off to war and then, inexplicably, fell silent. She heard nothing from him for two years, feeling a pain like “a finger crushed under the door, or a tooth under a drill,” Ms. Athill wrote, until he announced that he was marrying someone else. He was killed soon afterward, consigning her to the peculiar humiliation of feeling both rejected and without the standing even to mourn properly at a time when marital status meant everything.
There followed years of misery, in which her “soul shrank to the size of a pea,” she wrote. She was saved by work; becoming an editor brought her a new kind of joy. And though she embarked on numerous love affairs, she turned down all offers of marriage, remaining faithful, really, only to her job. “I had been so damaged in my sexual self that if a man wanted to marry me, I thought there was something wrong with them,” she said during the interview.
Ms. Athill’s writing is characterized by an extraordinary generosity of spirit. She refuses to feel sorry for herself, always finding a way to redeem even the most distressing circumstance.
In reflecting on her life, she wrote that André Deutsch, her employer and friend, paid her a pittance, barely enough to live on. She took in a tempestuous, manic writer she calls Didi, who subjected her to the endless ups and downs of his paranoiac personality, recorded in his journal that he was disgusted by her (she reads the passage, in one of the more unsettling parts in her book “After a Funeral”), and then killed himself in her house.
Her longtime lover, the playwright Barry Reckord, moved in with her and then, their relationship having evolved into something more like friendship, brought his young girlfriend in too, for six years in the 1970s. They all got along famously. “He was very against possessiveness, and so was I,” Ms. Athill explained.
Ms. Athill’s gift is the ability to examine events and motivations in the round, to get to the heart of them without sparing her own feelings. Writing of “Instead of a Letter,” the British author Ian Jack said that “the reader feels that what he is reading is as true a portrait of the writer and her experience as any words on paper can achieve.” By using such precision, “by letting us see how she appeared to others,” Mr. Jack wrote, Ms. Athill “opened up what could have been a narrow story of injury and self-absorption into a book that takes pleasure in the world.”
Ms. Athill protests that she is not generous, but rather has what Graham Greene described as the “sliver of ice” that resides in the heart of writers, the thing that allows them to examine events with forensic analysis.
“I’m really very interested in what is happening, even when it involves oneself,” she said. “One’s watching all the time.”
And now Ms. Athill is watching herself live in a home for the elderly. She still writes every day and has an idea or two in mind for a book, though she is not sure she will write another one. She has friends, nephews, a car, an active life on the literary-festival circuit.
And she has enjoyed meeting the other residents. “One of the things about this place is that they’re not snobbish class-wise, but snobbish jobs-wise,” she said. “They choose people who had interesting careers.” Most of her neighbors, she said, “are pretty philosophical about dying, pretty well accept the fact that they won’t be here much longer.” As for herself, “I’d like another two years,” she said.
“One of the things I think I owe to that early unhappiness, it was a hard lesson, was that I learned that I could be alone,” she said. “I can. I like my own company.”
October 10, 2010
In Life’s Latest Chapter, Feeling Free Again
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON — Last year, when she was 91, the editor and writer Diana Athill moved from her beloved apartment into an “old person’s home,” as she calls it. It was the most painful decision she had ever made, and it might have been a terrible diminishment, the reduction of a long, full life into something small enough to fit into a tiny room off a communal corridor.
But it turned out not to be that way at all.
“You gradually become aware of how liberating it is,” Ms. Athill said. “Not a single domestic worry do I have.” That means no more shopping, no more electricity bills, no more laundry. And it means, she wrote recently in The Daily Telegraph, a rethinking of her relationship to her belongings.
“Everything, from the carpet to the biscuit tin and including of course the too-many pictures, ornaments and books, is here because, however uninteresting it might be to others, I love it,” she wrote. “It’s as though ‘possessing’ has been distilled down from being a vague pleasure to being an intense one. Less is more.”
Ms. Athill’s room turns out to be charming, with big windows through which the sun poured the other day. She has snow-white hair swept back from a broad, amused face; beautiful pink skin; and the plummy, proper voice of an old-fashioned aunt in a black-and-white movie, which makes a nice contrast to her sometimes wicked observations.
She holds a formidable place in the London literary world. Legendary for her ability to handle difficult manuscripts, not to mention difficult writers, she was one of the founding directors of the independent publisher André Deutsch (it has now been subsumed into Carlton Publishing Group) and worked for nearly 50 years with authors like V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Margaret Atwood.
She left the job at 75 and could have slipped quietly into retirement. Instead she found a second career, as a writer.
Since turning 80 Ms. Athill has published three memoirs about her life and her work, using crystalline, unflinching prose that seeks not to sugarcoat, but to get to the truth of things. All have drawn adoring reviews and good sales. The most recent, “Somewhere Towards the End” (W. W. Norton & Company), an unsentimental look at growing old that confronts issues like sex and dying and that came out when she was 90, was a best seller, winning both the Costa Biography award here and the National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography in the United States.
People tend to tell Ms. Athill that she is an inspiration, a word that gives her the willies. But her matter-of-fact, hopeful depiction of life as an elderly woman presents an encouraging antidote to the accounts of writers like Philip Roth, with their self-pitying fetishization of physical decline.
“I think getting old very often is horrible, really,” Ms. Athill said. “But if you’re lucky, if you keep your health, if your aches and pains are not too bad, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a perfectly agreeable life, in many ways, discovering new and nice things.”
Ms. Athill’s life has been unconventional, courageous, and for decades, she felt, clouded by shame. As she described in “Instead of a Letter,” which was published when she was in her 40s but recently has been reissued, she became engaged to her first love, a young man who went off to war and then, inexplicably, fell silent. She heard nothing from him for two years, feeling a pain like “a finger crushed under the door, or a tooth under a drill,” Ms. Athill wrote, until he announced that he was marrying someone else. He was killed soon afterward, consigning her to the peculiar humiliation of feeling both rejected and without the standing even to mourn properly at a time when marital status meant everything.
There followed years of misery, in which her “soul shrank to the size of a pea,” she wrote. She was saved by work; becoming an editor brought her a new kind of joy. And though she embarked on numerous love affairs, she turned down all offers of marriage, remaining faithful, really, only to her job. “I had been so damaged in my sexual self that if a man wanted to marry me, I thought there was something wrong with them,” she said during the interview.
Ms. Athill’s writing is characterized by an extraordinary generosity of spirit. She refuses to feel sorry for herself, always finding a way to redeem even the most distressing circumstance.
In reflecting on her life, she wrote that André Deutsch, her employer and friend, paid her a pittance, barely enough to live on. She took in a tempestuous, manic writer she calls Didi, who subjected her to the endless ups and downs of his paranoiac personality, recorded in his journal that he was disgusted by her (she reads the passage, in one of the more unsettling parts in her book “After a Funeral”), and then killed himself in her house.
Her longtime lover, the playwright Barry Reckord, moved in with her and then, their relationship having evolved into something more like friendship, brought his young girlfriend in too, for six years in the 1970s. They all got along famously. “He was very against possessiveness, and so was I,” Ms. Athill explained.
Ms. Athill’s gift is the ability to examine events and motivations in the round, to get to the heart of them without sparing her own feelings. Writing of “Instead of a Letter,” the British author Ian Jack said that “the reader feels that what he is reading is as true a portrait of the writer and her experience as any words on paper can achieve.” By using such precision, “by letting us see how she appeared to others,” Mr. Jack wrote, Ms. Athill “opened up what could have been a narrow story of injury and self-absorption into a book that takes pleasure in the world.”
Ms. Athill protests that she is not generous, but rather has what Graham Greene described as the “sliver of ice” that resides in the heart of writers, the thing that allows them to examine events with forensic analysis.
“I’m really very interested in what is happening, even when it involves oneself,” she said. “One’s watching all the time.”
And now Ms. Athill is watching herself live in a home for the elderly. She still writes every day and has an idea or two in mind for a book, though she is not sure she will write another one. She has friends, nephews, a car, an active life on the literary-festival circuit.
And she has enjoyed meeting the other residents. “One of the things about this place is that they’re not snobbish class-wise, but snobbish jobs-wise,” she said. “They choose people who had interesting careers.” Most of her neighbors, she said, “are pretty philosophical about dying, pretty well accept the fact that they won’t be here much longer.” As for herself, “I’d like another two years,” she said.
“One of the things I think I owe to that early unhappiness, it was a hard lesson, was that I learned that I could be alone,” she said. “I can. I like my own company.”
Friday, October 08, 2010
November 2, 2009, 8:25 pm
Happy Ending
By TODD MAY
NYT
In the spring of 2004 I took a flight from my home near Greenville, S.C., to New York to visit my dying step-grandmother. We had been close, and it would be one of the last times I would get to see her. As the flight was about to land, it abruptly ascended and headed toward the Empire State Building. The passengers on the plane became quiet; the aura of 9/11 was hanging in the air.
We flew over the Empire State Building (but too close to the antenna for my comfort) and circled back to La Guardia. As it turned out, a small commuter plane had decided to land without taking account of our aircraft, so the pilot had had to make a quick move. But in those moments when it seemed I was aboard another human missile, I revisited my life. I realized, almost to my surprise, that I would not have traded it in for another life. There had been disappointments, to be sure, but my life appeared to me to have been a meaningful one, a life I did not regret. This is not to say that I was not nearly paralyzed with fear. I was. At the same time, strangely, my life appeared to me as worth having lived.
There are two lessons here. The first, and most obvious one, is that death is terrifying. Here in the United States, we have the technology to defer death, so we often pretend it will never really happen to us. There is always another procedure, always a cure in sight if not in hand. But in our sober moments we recognize that we will indeed die, and that we have precious little control over when it will happen.
The harm of death goes to the heart of who we are as human beings. We are, in essence, forward-looking creatures. We create our lives prospectively. We build relationships, careers, and projects that are not solely of the moment but that have a future in our vision of them. One of the reasons Eastern philosophies have developed techniques to train us to be in the moment is that that is not our natural state. We are pulled toward the future, and see the meaning of what we do now in its light.
Death extinguishes that light. And because we know that we will die, and yet we don’t know when, the darkness that is ultimately ahead of each of us is with us at every moment. There is, we might say, a tunnel at the end of this light. And since we are creatures of the future, the darkness of death offends us in our very being. We may come to terms with it when we grow old, but unless our lives have become a burden to us coming to terms is the best we can hope for.
The second, less obvious lesson of this moment of facing death is that in order for our lives to have a shape, in order that they not become formless, we need to die. This will strike some as counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous. But in order to recognize its truth, we should reflect a bit on what immortality might mean.
Immortality lasts a long time. It is not for nothing that in his story “The Immortal” Jorge Luis Borges pictures the immortal characters as unconcerned with their lives or their surroundings. Once you’ve followed your passion — playing the saxophone, loving men or women, traveling, writing poetry — for, say, 10,000 years, it will likely begin to lose its grip. There may be more to say or to do than anyone can ever accomplish. But each of us develops particular interests, engages in particular pursuits. When we have been at them long enough, we are likely to find ourselves just filling time. In the case of immortality, an inexhaustible period of time.
And when there is always time for everything, there is no urgency for anything. It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments. It would become boring, but more deeply it would become shapeless. Just one damn thing after another.
This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.
I prefer to think that the paradox of death is the source not of despair but instead of the limited hope that is allotted to us as human beings. We cannot live forever, to be sure, but neither would we want to. We ought not to mind the fact that we will die, although we really would rather that it not be today. Probably not tomorrow either. But it is precisely because we cannot control when we will die, and know only that we will, that we can look upon our lives with the seriousness they merit. Death takes away from us no more than it has conferred: lives whose significance lies in the fact they are not always with us.
Our happiness lies in being able to inhabit that fact.
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death.”
Happy Ending
By TODD MAY
NYT
In the spring of 2004 I took a flight from my home near Greenville, S.C., to New York to visit my dying step-grandmother. We had been close, and it would be one of the last times I would get to see her. As the flight was about to land, it abruptly ascended and headed toward the Empire State Building. The passengers on the plane became quiet; the aura of 9/11 was hanging in the air.
We flew over the Empire State Building (but too close to the antenna for my comfort) and circled back to La Guardia. As it turned out, a small commuter plane had decided to land without taking account of our aircraft, so the pilot had had to make a quick move. But in those moments when it seemed I was aboard another human missile, I revisited my life. I realized, almost to my surprise, that I would not have traded it in for another life. There had been disappointments, to be sure, but my life appeared to me to have been a meaningful one, a life I did not regret. This is not to say that I was not nearly paralyzed with fear. I was. At the same time, strangely, my life appeared to me as worth having lived.
There are two lessons here. The first, and most obvious one, is that death is terrifying. Here in the United States, we have the technology to defer death, so we often pretend it will never really happen to us. There is always another procedure, always a cure in sight if not in hand. But in our sober moments we recognize that we will indeed die, and that we have precious little control over when it will happen.
The harm of death goes to the heart of who we are as human beings. We are, in essence, forward-looking creatures. We create our lives prospectively. We build relationships, careers, and projects that are not solely of the moment but that have a future in our vision of them. One of the reasons Eastern philosophies have developed techniques to train us to be in the moment is that that is not our natural state. We are pulled toward the future, and see the meaning of what we do now in its light.
Death extinguishes that light. And because we know that we will die, and yet we don’t know when, the darkness that is ultimately ahead of each of us is with us at every moment. There is, we might say, a tunnel at the end of this light. And since we are creatures of the future, the darkness of death offends us in our very being. We may come to terms with it when we grow old, but unless our lives have become a burden to us coming to terms is the best we can hope for.
The second, less obvious lesson of this moment of facing death is that in order for our lives to have a shape, in order that they not become formless, we need to die. This will strike some as counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous. But in order to recognize its truth, we should reflect a bit on what immortality might mean.
Immortality lasts a long time. It is not for nothing that in his story “The Immortal” Jorge Luis Borges pictures the immortal characters as unconcerned with their lives or their surroundings. Once you’ve followed your passion — playing the saxophone, loving men or women, traveling, writing poetry — for, say, 10,000 years, it will likely begin to lose its grip. There may be more to say or to do than anyone can ever accomplish. But each of us develops particular interests, engages in particular pursuits. When we have been at them long enough, we are likely to find ourselves just filling time. In the case of immortality, an inexhaustible period of time.
And when there is always time for everything, there is no urgency for anything. It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments. It would become boring, but more deeply it would become shapeless. Just one damn thing after another.
This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.
I prefer to think that the paradox of death is the source not of despair but instead of the limited hope that is allotted to us as human beings. We cannot live forever, to be sure, but neither would we want to. We ought not to mind the fact that we will die, although we really would rather that it not be today. Probably not tomorrow either. But it is precisely because we cannot control when we will die, and know only that we will, that we can look upon our lives with the seriousness they merit. Death takes away from us no more than it has conferred: lives whose significance lies in the fact they are not always with us.
Our happiness lies in being able to inhabit that fact.
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death.”
October 6, 2010, 7:30 pm
The Spoils of Happiness
By DAVID SOSA
NYT
In 1974, Robert Nozick, a precocious young philosopher at Harvard, scooped “The Matrix”:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 3)
Nozick’s thought experiment — or the movie, for that matter — points to an interesting hypothesis: Happiness is not a state of mind.
“What is happiness?” is one of those strange questions philosophers ask, and it’s hard to answer. Philosophy, as a discipline, doesn’t agree about it. Philosophers are a contentious, disagreeable, lot by nature and training. But the question’s hard because of a problematic prejudice about what kind of thing happiness might be. I’d like to diagnose the mistake and prescribe a corrective.
Happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you.
Nozick’s thought experiment asks us to make a decision about a possible circumstance. If things were thus-and-so, what would you do? Would you plug in? Some people dismiss the example because they think the very idea of that sort of decision, with respect to a hypothetical situation, is somehow bogus and can’t show anything. “These are all just hypothetical! Who cares? Get real!”
But the fact that a scenario is hypothetical doesn’t make it imponderable or worthless. Compare a simpler case: Suppose there were a fire in your building and you could either save your neighbors, who’d otherwise be trapped, by dragging them outside, or you could save your pencil, by holding on tight to that as you escaped, but not both. What would you do? I hope the answer’s easy. And that’s the point: We can, sometimes at least, answer this sort of question very easily. You are given a supposition and asked whether you would do this or that; you consider the hypothetical situation and give an answer. That’s what Nozick’s example is like.
So, would you plug in?
I think that for very many of us the answer is no. It’s Morpheus and Neo and their merry band of rebels who are the heroes of “The Matrix.” Cypher, who cuts the deal with the Agents, is a villain. And just as considering what we would grab in case of emergency can help us learn about what we value, considering whether to plug into the experience machine can help us learn about the sort of happiness we aspire to.
In refusing to plug in to Nozick’s machine, we express our deep-seated belief that the sort of thing we can get from a machine isn’t the most valuable thing we can get; it isn’t what we most deeply want, whatever we might think if we were plugged in. Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. There’s an important difference between writing a great novel and having the experience of writing a great novel. On the machine, we would not parent children, share our love with a partner, laugh with friends (or even smile at a stranger), dance, dunk, run a marathon, quit smoking, or lose 10 pounds in time for summer. Plugged in, we would have the sorts of experience that people who actually achieve or accomplish those things have, but they would all be, in a way, false — an intellectual mirage.
A drug addict is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire.
Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine — you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend. But what’s striking is that even that fact is not adequately reassuring. On the contrary it adds to the horror of the prospect. We’d be ignorant, too — duped, to boot! We wouldn’t suffer the pain of loneliness and that’s a good thing. But it would be better if we weren’t so benighted, if our experiences of friendship were the genuine article.
To put the point in a nutshell, watching your child play soccer for the first time is a great thing not because it produces a really enjoyable experience; on the contrary, what normally makes the experience so special is that it’s an experience of watching your child, playing soccer, for the first time. Sure it feels good — paralyzingly good. It matters, though, that the feeling is there as a response to the reality: the feeling by itself is the wrong sort of thing to make for a happy life.
Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.
Here’s one provocative consequence of this perspective on happiness. If happiness is not a state of mind, if happiness is a kind of tango between your feelings on one hand and events and things in the world around you on the other, then there’s the possibility of error about whether you’re happy. If you believe you’re experiencing pleasure or, perhaps especially, pain, then, presumably, you are. But the view of happiness here allows that “you may think you’re happy, but you’re not.”
One especially apt way of thinking about happiness — a way that’s found already in the thought of Aristotle — is in terms of “flourishing.” Take someone really flourishing in their new career, or really flourishing now that they’re off in college. The sense of the expression is not just that they feel good, but that they’re, for example, accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments. If they were simply sitting at home playing video games all day, even if this seemed to give them a great deal of pleasure, and even if they were not frustrated, we wouldn’t say they were flourishing. Such a life could not in the long term constitute a happy life. To live a happy life is to flourish.
A stark contrast is the life of the drug addict. He is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire; it is often quite a pitiful existence. Well, one might think, it has its displeasures, being a user. There are withdrawal symptoms and that kind of thing—maybe he’s frustrated that he can’t kick the habit. But suppose that weren’t the case. Suppose the user never had to suffer any displeasure at all—had no interest in any other sort of life. How much better would that make it?
Better perhaps, but it would not be a happy life. It might be better than some others — lives filled with interminable and equally insignificant pain, for example. Better simple pleasure than pain, of course. But what’s wrong with the drug addict’s life is not just the despair he feels when he’s coming down. It’s that even when he’s feeling pleasure, that’s not a very significant fact about him. It’s just a feeling, the kind of pleasure we can imagine an animal’s having. Happiness is harder to get. It’s enjoyed after you’ve worked for something, or in the presence of people you love, or upon experiencing a magnificent work of art or performance — the kind of state that requires us to engage in real activities of certain sorts, to confront real objects and respond to them. And then, too, we shouldn’t ignore the modest happiness that can accompany pride in a clear-eyed engagement with even very painful circumstances.
We do hate to give up control over the most important things in our lives. And viewing happiness as subject to external influence limits our control — not just in the sense that whether you get to live happily might depend on how things go, but also in the sense that what happiness is is partly a matter of how things beyond you are. We might do everything we can to live happily — and have everything it takes on our part to be happy, all the right thoughts and feelings — and yet fall short, even unbeknownst to us. That’s a threatening idea. But we should be brave. Intellectual courage is as important as the other sort.
David Sosa
David Sosa is Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is chair of the department of philosophy. He is editor of the journal Analytic Philosophy and author of numerous articles. He is now completing a book, “A Table of Contents,” about how we get the world in mind.
The Spoils of Happiness
By DAVID SOSA
NYT
In 1974, Robert Nozick, a precocious young philosopher at Harvard, scooped “The Matrix”:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 3)
Nozick’s thought experiment — or the movie, for that matter — points to an interesting hypothesis: Happiness is not a state of mind.
“What is happiness?” is one of those strange questions philosophers ask, and it’s hard to answer. Philosophy, as a discipline, doesn’t agree about it. Philosophers are a contentious, disagreeable, lot by nature and training. But the question’s hard because of a problematic prejudice about what kind of thing happiness might be. I’d like to diagnose the mistake and prescribe a corrective.
Happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you.
Nozick’s thought experiment asks us to make a decision about a possible circumstance. If things were thus-and-so, what would you do? Would you plug in? Some people dismiss the example because they think the very idea of that sort of decision, with respect to a hypothetical situation, is somehow bogus and can’t show anything. “These are all just hypothetical! Who cares? Get real!”
But the fact that a scenario is hypothetical doesn’t make it imponderable or worthless. Compare a simpler case: Suppose there were a fire in your building and you could either save your neighbors, who’d otherwise be trapped, by dragging them outside, or you could save your pencil, by holding on tight to that as you escaped, but not both. What would you do? I hope the answer’s easy. And that’s the point: We can, sometimes at least, answer this sort of question very easily. You are given a supposition and asked whether you would do this or that; you consider the hypothetical situation and give an answer. That’s what Nozick’s example is like.
So, would you plug in?
I think that for very many of us the answer is no. It’s Morpheus and Neo and their merry band of rebels who are the heroes of “The Matrix.” Cypher, who cuts the deal with the Agents, is a villain. And just as considering what we would grab in case of emergency can help us learn about what we value, considering whether to plug into the experience machine can help us learn about the sort of happiness we aspire to.
In refusing to plug in to Nozick’s machine, we express our deep-seated belief that the sort of thing we can get from a machine isn’t the most valuable thing we can get; it isn’t what we most deeply want, whatever we might think if we were plugged in. Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. There’s an important difference between writing a great novel and having the experience of writing a great novel. On the machine, we would not parent children, share our love with a partner, laugh with friends (or even smile at a stranger), dance, dunk, run a marathon, quit smoking, or lose 10 pounds in time for summer. Plugged in, we would have the sorts of experience that people who actually achieve or accomplish those things have, but they would all be, in a way, false — an intellectual mirage.
A drug addict is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire.
Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine — you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend. But what’s striking is that even that fact is not adequately reassuring. On the contrary it adds to the horror of the prospect. We’d be ignorant, too — duped, to boot! We wouldn’t suffer the pain of loneliness and that’s a good thing. But it would be better if we weren’t so benighted, if our experiences of friendship were the genuine article.
To put the point in a nutshell, watching your child play soccer for the first time is a great thing not because it produces a really enjoyable experience; on the contrary, what normally makes the experience so special is that it’s an experience of watching your child, playing soccer, for the first time. Sure it feels good — paralyzingly good. It matters, though, that the feeling is there as a response to the reality: the feeling by itself is the wrong sort of thing to make for a happy life.
Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.
Here’s one provocative consequence of this perspective on happiness. If happiness is not a state of mind, if happiness is a kind of tango between your feelings on one hand and events and things in the world around you on the other, then there’s the possibility of error about whether you’re happy. If you believe you’re experiencing pleasure or, perhaps especially, pain, then, presumably, you are. But the view of happiness here allows that “you may think you’re happy, but you’re not.”
One especially apt way of thinking about happiness — a way that’s found already in the thought of Aristotle — is in terms of “flourishing.” Take someone really flourishing in their new career, or really flourishing now that they’re off in college. The sense of the expression is not just that they feel good, but that they’re, for example, accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments. If they were simply sitting at home playing video games all day, even if this seemed to give them a great deal of pleasure, and even if they were not frustrated, we wouldn’t say they were flourishing. Such a life could not in the long term constitute a happy life. To live a happy life is to flourish.
A stark contrast is the life of the drug addict. He is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire; it is often quite a pitiful existence. Well, one might think, it has its displeasures, being a user. There are withdrawal symptoms and that kind of thing—maybe he’s frustrated that he can’t kick the habit. But suppose that weren’t the case. Suppose the user never had to suffer any displeasure at all—had no interest in any other sort of life. How much better would that make it?
Better perhaps, but it would not be a happy life. It might be better than some others — lives filled with interminable and equally insignificant pain, for example. Better simple pleasure than pain, of course. But what’s wrong with the drug addict’s life is not just the despair he feels when he’s coming down. It’s that even when he’s feeling pleasure, that’s not a very significant fact about him. It’s just a feeling, the kind of pleasure we can imagine an animal’s having. Happiness is harder to get. It’s enjoyed after you’ve worked for something, or in the presence of people you love, or upon experiencing a magnificent work of art or performance — the kind of state that requires us to engage in real activities of certain sorts, to confront real objects and respond to them. And then, too, we shouldn’t ignore the modest happiness that can accompany pride in a clear-eyed engagement with even very painful circumstances.
We do hate to give up control over the most important things in our lives. And viewing happiness as subject to external influence limits our control — not just in the sense that whether you get to live happily might depend on how things go, but also in the sense that what happiness is is partly a matter of how things beyond you are. We might do everything we can to live happily — and have everything it takes on our part to be happy, all the right thoughts and feelings — and yet fall short, even unbeknownst to us. That’s a threatening idea. But we should be brave. Intellectual courage is as important as the other sort.
David Sosa
David Sosa is Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is chair of the department of philosophy. He is editor of the journal Analytic Philosophy and author of numerous articles. He is now completing a book, “A Table of Contents,” about how we get the world in mind.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
The New York Times
October 2, 2010
Found in Translation
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
AS the author of “Las Horas,” “Die Stunden” and “De Uren” — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book “The Hours," but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation. That is, translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well. “Translation” as a human act is, like so many human acts, a far more complicated proposition than it may initially seem to be.
Let’s take as an example one of the most famous lines in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” That, as I suspect you know, is the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” We still recognize that line, after more than 150 years.
Still. “Call me Ishmael.” Three simple words. What’s the big deal?
For one thing, they possess that most fundamental but elusive of all writerly qualities: authority. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
It’s a little like waltzing with a new partner for the first time. Anyone who is able to waltz, or fox-trot, or tango, or perform any sort of dance that requires physical contact with a responsive partner, knows that there is a first moment, on the dance floor, when you assess, automatically, whether the new partner in question can dance at all — and if he or she can in fact dance, how well. You know almost instantly whether you have a novice on your hands, and that if you do, you’ll have to do a fair amount of work just to keep things moving.
Authority is a rather mysterious quality, and it’s almost impossible to parse it for its components. The translator’s first task, then, is to re-render a certain forcefulness that can’t quite be described or explained.
Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?
They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.
Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound.
Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.
Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.
“Chiamami Ismaele.”
That is the Italian version of Melville’s line, and the translator has done a nice job. I can tell you, as a reader who doesn’t speak Italian, that those two words do in fact sound like something, independent of their meaning. Although different from the English, we have a new, equally lovely progression of vowel sounds — ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee — and those three m’s, nicely spaced.
If you’re translating “Moby-Dick,” that’s one sentence down, approximately a million more to go.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.
The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.
A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”
This brings us to the question of the relationship between writers and their readers, where another act of translation occurs.
I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.
I remind them, as well, that no one wants to read their stories. There are a lot of other stories out there, and by now, in the 21st century, there’s been such an accumulation of literature that few of us will live long enough to read all the great stories and novels, never mind the pretty good ones. Not to mention the fact that we, as readers, are busy.
We have large and difficult lives. We have, variously, jobs to do, spouses and children to attend to, errands to run, friends to see; we need to keep up with current events; we have gophers in our gardens; we are taking extension courses in French or wine tasting or art appreciation; we are looking for evidence that our lovers are cheating on us; we are wondering why in the world we agreed to have 40 people over on Saturday night; we are worried about money and global warming; we are TiVo-ing five or six of our favorite TV shows.
What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.
I should admit that when I was as young as my students are now, I too thought of myself as writing either for myself, for some ghostly ideal reader, or, at my most grandiose moments, for future generations. My work suffered as a result.
It wasn’t until some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., that I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.
Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, “That was wonderful.”
“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.
She added, “Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.”
“Yep.”
Then she paused. “But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.”
Although I didn’t necessarily agree with her about Dostoyevsky versus Turow, I did like, very much, that Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.
I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.
It also helped me to realize that the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.
One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book. We will all feel differently about a movie or a play or a painting or a song, but we have all undeniably seen or heard the same movie, play, painting or song. They are physical entities. A painting by Velázquez is purely and simply itself, as is “Blue” by Joni Mitchell. If you walk into the appropriate gallery in the Prado Museum, or if someone puts a Joni Mitchell disc on, you will see the painting or hear the music. You have no choice.
WRITING, however, does not exist without an active, consenting reader. Writing requires a different level of participation. Words on paper are abstractions, and everyone who reads words on paper brings to them a different set of associations and images. I have vivid mental pictures of Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, but I feel confident they are not identical to the images carried in the mind of anyone else.
Helen was, clearly, not reading the same “Crime and Punishment” I was. She wasn’t looking for an existential work of genius. She was looking for a good mystery, and she read Dostoyevsky with that thought in mind. I don’t blame her for it. I like to imagine that Dostoyevsky wouldn’t, either.
What the reader is doing, then, is translating the words on the pages into his or her own private, imaginary lexicon, according to his or her interests and needs and levels of comprehension.
Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.
I don’t mean to suggest that writer, translator and reader are all engaged in a mass exercise in disappointment. How depressing would that be? And untrue.
And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.
We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects.
Michael Cunningham is the author of “The Hours” and, most recently, “By Nightfall.”
October 2, 2010
Found in Translation
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
AS the author of “Las Horas,” “Die Stunden” and “De Uren” — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book “The Hours," but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation. That is, translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well. “Translation” as a human act is, like so many human acts, a far more complicated proposition than it may initially seem to be.
Let’s take as an example one of the most famous lines in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” That, as I suspect you know, is the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” We still recognize that line, after more than 150 years.
Still. “Call me Ishmael.” Three simple words. What’s the big deal?
For one thing, they possess that most fundamental but elusive of all writerly qualities: authority. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
It’s a little like waltzing with a new partner for the first time. Anyone who is able to waltz, or fox-trot, or tango, or perform any sort of dance that requires physical contact with a responsive partner, knows that there is a first moment, on the dance floor, when you assess, automatically, whether the new partner in question can dance at all — and if he or she can in fact dance, how well. You know almost instantly whether you have a novice on your hands, and that if you do, you’ll have to do a fair amount of work just to keep things moving.
Authority is a rather mysterious quality, and it’s almost impossible to parse it for its components. The translator’s first task, then, is to re-render a certain forcefulness that can’t quite be described or explained.
Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?
They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.
Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound.
Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.
Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.
“Chiamami Ismaele.”
That is the Italian version of Melville’s line, and the translator has done a nice job. I can tell you, as a reader who doesn’t speak Italian, that those two words do in fact sound like something, independent of their meaning. Although different from the English, we have a new, equally lovely progression of vowel sounds — ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee — and those three m’s, nicely spaced.
If you’re translating “Moby-Dick,” that’s one sentence down, approximately a million more to go.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.
The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.
A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”
This brings us to the question of the relationship between writers and their readers, where another act of translation occurs.
I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.
I remind them, as well, that no one wants to read their stories. There are a lot of other stories out there, and by now, in the 21st century, there’s been such an accumulation of literature that few of us will live long enough to read all the great stories and novels, never mind the pretty good ones. Not to mention the fact that we, as readers, are busy.
We have large and difficult lives. We have, variously, jobs to do, spouses and children to attend to, errands to run, friends to see; we need to keep up with current events; we have gophers in our gardens; we are taking extension courses in French or wine tasting or art appreciation; we are looking for evidence that our lovers are cheating on us; we are wondering why in the world we agreed to have 40 people over on Saturday night; we are worried about money and global warming; we are TiVo-ing five or six of our favorite TV shows.
What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.
I should admit that when I was as young as my students are now, I too thought of myself as writing either for myself, for some ghostly ideal reader, or, at my most grandiose moments, for future generations. My work suffered as a result.
It wasn’t until some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., that I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.
Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, “That was wonderful.”
“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.
She added, “Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.”
“Yep.”
Then she paused. “But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.”
Although I didn’t necessarily agree with her about Dostoyevsky versus Turow, I did like, very much, that Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.
I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.
It also helped me to realize that the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.
One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book. We will all feel differently about a movie or a play or a painting or a song, but we have all undeniably seen or heard the same movie, play, painting or song. They are physical entities. A painting by Velázquez is purely and simply itself, as is “Blue” by Joni Mitchell. If you walk into the appropriate gallery in the Prado Museum, or if someone puts a Joni Mitchell disc on, you will see the painting or hear the music. You have no choice.
WRITING, however, does not exist without an active, consenting reader. Writing requires a different level of participation. Words on paper are abstractions, and everyone who reads words on paper brings to them a different set of associations and images. I have vivid mental pictures of Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, but I feel confident they are not identical to the images carried in the mind of anyone else.
Helen was, clearly, not reading the same “Crime and Punishment” I was. She wasn’t looking for an existential work of genius. She was looking for a good mystery, and she read Dostoyevsky with that thought in mind. I don’t blame her for it. I like to imagine that Dostoyevsky wouldn’t, either.
What the reader is doing, then, is translating the words on the pages into his or her own private, imaginary lexicon, according to his or her interests and needs and levels of comprehension.
Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.
I don’t mean to suggest that writer, translator and reader are all engaged in a mass exercise in disappointment. How depressing would that be? And untrue.
And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.
We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects.
Michael Cunningham is the author of “The Hours” and, most recently, “By Nightfall.”
