Read Or Read?

     Those two words are an odd pairing, aren't they?  It's not as if they are words that sound the same but mean something completely different: heard and herd, or stayed and staid.  Such pairings are called homophones, or homonyms, or homographs, explained Grammerly.  Wait, what?  But when you think of most other words, especially when it comes to describing our senses, there are separate words used to describe something in the present tense vs. something in the past tense: hear and heard, or see and saw, or feel and felt, or smell and smelled.  But when you read something, you may find that you had already read it.  Huh?  Dang English language* (a good online "test" of this sort is the daily game from the NY Times, Connections).

      But reading.  I tend to do a lot of it and as many of you readers may know, my preference for reading is heavily slanted towards non-fiction. That said, I do try to pick up a book of fiction at least once a year, often finding such books not captivating enough to hold me; a quick skim or a few chapters of such a book and I am usually disappointed, done until I decide to tackle next year's solo entry (my wife is the total opposite, rarely even picking up a non-fiction book).  So it was quite the surprise for me to read There Are Rivers In the Sky and find myself transported into this award-winning author's imagination.   In her notes, she wrote: Fiction allows us to grasp important and sensitive subjects from multiple angles -- a freedom we are steadily losing in the age of slick media and unfeeling algorithms...They say as a novelist you must fall in love with your subject matter, but, as much as I admire the intellect and appreciate the realm of ideas, I do not believe you can write a novel solely from the rational mind.  The heart must also be in it, and, once the heart is in it, who knows where it will take you.  This novel is where my heart led me. This novel is my love song to rivers -- those still living and those that are long gone. This book, as with so many books of both fiction and non-fiction, was not for everyone as noted by reviewers in many respected papers such as The Guardian and Kirkus Reviews.  I ignored them all and dove in, and by doing so renewed my faith that good writing comes in many forms and sometimes succeeds and sometimes is overlooked.  For me, this was a rare jewel in the fiction world which closed some of the barriers between being blinded by science and being swept away with imagination.

     It took awhile, those 400+ pages, and not because it was lengthy but because I read it slowly, absorbed it in a sense: what a good book --fiction or nonfiction-- can and should do, but doesn't always accomplish (re: my skimming practice of fiction in general).  But this time, as happened when I read The Goldfinch by Donna Tart, and The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy,  I allowed the story to carry me away, to put me in a stupor while sending me to a place and to peoples I knew nothing about.  As Oliver Burkeman wrote: Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future --though it might do that too-- but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive. 

     As of late, it seems there has been almost too much to read or see or hear. It's as if we're at the point of shutting off the power or closing the book, plugging our ears or taking another blood pressure pill. What’s going on?  Are we getting close to ushering in another era of Marvin Gaye?  When the NY Review asked a few of its regular contributors to write op-eds after the election, Andrew O'Hagan noted: ... certain voters can feel remote, can feel worthless, looking for someone to blame, looking for someone to save them.  That is how a sociopath gets to be president.  He rises like a Leviathan out of people's worst feelings.  And that is how true oppression works, by harnessing the unconscious disgust and prejudice of the vulnerable, marrying it to the ambitions of the mighty, who are ready to say, "Come and be part of our solution."  Yikes.  Then came this by the historian Rashid Khalidi on people seeing the violence done in Gaza: ...you have to be very careful in assuming that the entire public is exposed to those images.  There is a segment of the public --the older, more conservative element-- who wouldn't know how to use Instagram or TikTok if their lives depended on it...Everyone who's young enough and independent enough from mainstream media sees what you [the interviewer] just described and is horrified.  They know that the mainstream media is lying through its teeth and that every politician is lying.  That's true of many older people as well.  But again: the older, the richer, the whiter you get --in the United States, at least-- the less likely people are to see or believe those images.  Double yikes.  Stepping back, I began to wonder if the harsh and emotional rhetoric was coming from the far right or the far left.  As with being in a library, I could almost hear someone telling me, "shhh, be quiet!"

     So one more, this one on China and it again becoming a hegemon (a what?...and yes, all of these rants and observations came from the same issue): The economic historian Charles Kindleberger wrote, in his classic The World in Depression, that an anarchic global economic system requires the stabilizing influence of a dominant economic power, known as a hegemon.  In Kindleberger’s account, Britain played that role for much of the nineteenth century, sponsoring a gold standard with fixed exchange rates, opening its own economy to the world’s exports, and supplying capital to the global economy.  After World War II the United States played much the same role...In the late nineteenth century globalist Britain was surpassed by nationalist Germany, just as globalist America in the late twentieth century lost industry after industry to a rising nationalist China.  The United States today is the world’s largest economy, but it is far from hegemonic...China’s global development finance totaled $498 billion between 2008 and 2021, almost equaling that of the Western-sponsored World Bank.  Its Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, sponsors multitrillion-dollar infrastructure investments across some sixty countries.  These include rail lines from Nairobi to Mombasa in Kenya and from Budapest to Belgrade in Europe, and routes linking cities in Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam with the rail hub of Kunming in China.  Chinese interests now own or partly own port facilities in Piraeus, Haifa, Antwerp, Bilbao, and, fittingly, Dunkirk.  China has bought large shares of national electrical systems, such as Portugal’s, as well as some European airports...Today the US has far less influence than it did in 1944, when it was the prime sponsor of the postwar global economic system (or even as late as the 1990s, when the WTO was formed). Sigh, do I feel U.S. version of Brexit around the corner?

     I took solace in the words of Burkeman who wrote that his book: ...takes it as a given that you'll never get on top of everything.  It starts from the position that you'll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick -- and that there will always be too much to do.   But none of this is because you're an ill-disciplined loser, or because you haven't yet read the right bestseller revealing 'the surprising science' of productivity, leadership, parenting, or anything else.  It's because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends.  It just means that the last of worthwhile things you could in principle do with your time will always be vastly longer than the list of things for which you'll have time.  It just means you'll always be vulnerable to unforeseen disasters or distressing emotions, and that you'll never have more than partial influence over how your time unfolds, no matter what YouTubers in their early twenties with no kids might have to say about the ideal morning routine.  Imperfection is the outlook that understands this to be good news.  It's not that facing finite isn't painful.  (That's why the quest for control is so alluring)...When you find it an unwinnable struggle to do everything, that's when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count.   When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that's when you're free to plunge energetically into them... you're able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is. 

    So Rivers In the Sky...part of the book noted: Grandma says time is a sentinel tree, marked with invisible rings inside, its straggly branches extending into the infinite sky, never perfect, never linear.  In the span of a sentence a storyteller can jump back and forth centuries, as if a millennium could pass in the blink of an eye.  But then it takes hours to describe a single event, every minute a stretch, an eternity.  "Remember, my heart.  Story-time is different from clock-time."  Clock-time, punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive.  It runs under the illusion that everything is moving forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past.  Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness.  That is why minorities do not live in clock-time.  They live in story-time.  

    That was me, living in story-time and allowing myself to end the noise, end the worry, end the fear that things were spiraling out of control.  What I enjoyed was that author Elif Shafak showed that even a tyrannical king that ran an empire in Mesopotamia was now buried in sand --as was his entire kingdom-- with not even his bones remaining, only hardened clay tablets that hinted at the history; and that people then and now still look down on slums and the poor, no matter their hidden intelligence; and that even self-made riches fails to bring any inner happiness when denyig one's roots; and that the terror of a changing religion or tribal affiliation knows no boundaries, no matter where you are in the world, past or present.  As Niall Ferguson noted: The dead outnumber the living...fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.  So I take pleasure in Oliver Burkeman's advice: ...think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.  Sometimes, perhaps in story-time, you may discover that it wasn't a stream...but a river.

*Languages: the debate continues as to whether our cognitive use of language is what separates us from other species, all in our quest to somehow verify ourselves as the "superior" species.  But wait, wrote a piece in The New Yorker, there are quite a number of studies out there that show that even among ourselves we are far from united in the use of language.  English as the main language in Europe?  France fought for decades to make French the "lingua franca" of the EU (they're still trying).  And while one in five people in the world speak English, it is grouped among two other widely used languages, Chinese and Arabic.  Said the article, English still has its limitations, particularly when it comes to describing senses such as smell (try to describe the smell of cinnamon, it asks).  As studies are finding, English is descriptive for sight and hearing, but nowhere near as good at describing the other senses (compared to other languages).  Another difference, even within the sense of hearing, was how we describe acoustic sounds (vertically -- high/low, loud/soft) and little else; other languages use as many as 35 additional descriptions.  But whether we're talking Swahili or Fang, Aymara or Zapotec, what struck me as a huge difference was how English and many "western" languages picture time.  While we look forward to the future, and back at the past, most languages are the opposite: the past is what you can see since you've lived it, so it is viewed as in front of you...forward.  The future you can not see so it stays behind you, out of sight, invisible.  The future is at your back.  As I said in the beginning, dang English...