Aber die Sonne duldet kein Weißes
(but the sun will not suffer the white)

Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s sein
(Here I am human, may enjoy humanity)

— Goethe, Faust
tr. Walter Kaufmann 

There is no perception that is not full of memories.

— Henri Bergson

FAUST:

I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through —
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot,
For ten years almost I confute
And up and down, wherever it goes,
I drag my students by the nose —
And see that for all our science and art
We can know nothing. It burns my heart.

— Goethe’s Faust,
trans. Walter Kaufmann

Despite Mormonism’s entrenched homophobia, and Quinn’s unsparing, clear-eyed assessment of Mormonism’s faults, his faith in the religion of Joseph Smith remains undiminished. “I’m a radical believer,” he says, “but I’m still a believer.” He seems to be one of those rare spiritual thinkers, as Annie Dillard puts it, who possess “a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.”

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

By Richard Rhodes
wsj

Once a year I give a seminar on writing to a group of honor students at Stanford University. For the shock value, I edit a few pages of the senior theses that they’re writing. I cushion the blow—red correction marks and rewrites dense on every page—by telling them that my own work looks the same way after I edit it.

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed. Writing is a craft and, like all craft, proceeds by stages: conception, material selection, rough shaping, detailed shaping, sanding and finishing. (That’s for writing nonfiction, which feels like woodworking to me. Writing fiction is more like throwing clay, and writing poetry more like watchmaking.)

I’ve puzzled over the difficulty that students have with editing, and I think I’ve identified its source: It’s their self-talk. We all talk to ourselves, inside our heads. That’s what consciousness is.

Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking. But it doesn’t end there.

We don’t talk to ourselves in finished sentences. We use shorthand, code words, private references. We hear other voices in our head as well, the voices of those who have influenced us so deeply that we carry them around with us like phantom companions.

This internal monologue makes good sense to us but very little sense to a reader when it’s spilled onto the page. It’s like a strange dialect, only distantly related to the common tongue that we share.

When I’m teaching students, then, I focus first on voice. It’s never occurred to most of them that they use a constructed voice when they write. Because they’re transcribing their self-talk more or less, they think that they’re writing in their “own” voice.

I point out that they use different voices for different forms of writing, from school papers to emails home to cellphone texts. I tell them that the voice of a school paper is an invented voice, as much as the voice of the narrator in a novel.

The work of writing, I tell them, isn’t simply copying down their self-talk. If they think so, I say, try transcribing a conversation and see how much is redundant or extraneous.

No, the work of writing is deliberately choosing a voice, a fictional construct, in which to argue or narrate, and then, through draft after successive draft, composing and editing a translation of their self-talk into prose that others can read and understand.

This editing doesn’t mean that they have to leave out the personal or the idiosyncratic. It just means that they have to rewrite their self-talk to open up what’s private and eliminate what’s extraneous, using the voice that they’ve chosen to anchor the text in a specific point of view.

I tell them about the voice that I chose for my history “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” I knew that I would be writing a story that was both tragic and epic, and I wanted a narrative voice that could carry that much weight.

To shape it, I made two choices: to follow the style of the great English historians by using balanced, periodic sentences (sentences that unfold gradually, saving the subject and verb for the end) and never to use a contraction.

Miraculously enough, some of the students get the point and trim their self-talk to the wind of clear discourse. They write better as a result.

Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

— via

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time — or even knew selflessness or courage or literature — but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

— Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

“It’s amazing how gullible people are,” DeLoy continues. “But you have to remember what a huge comfort the religion is. It provides all the answers. It makes life simple. Nothing makes you feel better than doing what the prophet commands you to do. If you have some controversial issue you’re dealing with — let’s say you owe a lot of money to somebody, and you don’t have the means to pay them — you go in and talk to the prophet, and he might tell you, ‘You don’t have to pay the money back. The Lord says it’s Okay.’ And if you just do what the prophet says, all the responsibility for your actions is now totally in his hands. You can refuse to pay the guy, or even kill somebody, or whatever, and feel completely good about it. And that’s a real big part of what holds this religion together: it’s not having to make those critical decisions than many of us have to make, and be responsible for your decisions.”

. . . . “If you want to know the truth,” he says, squinting against the glare, “I think people within the religion — people who live here in Colorado City — are probably happier, on the whole, than people on the outside.” He looks down at the red sand, scowls, and nudges a rock with the toe of one shoe. “But some things in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

A genuine first-hand religious experience . . . is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second-hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it my foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which, in purer days, it drew its own supply of inspiration.

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

By one analyst’s calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species—about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.

— wsj