by Jalees Rehman

A book is a mirror: if a fool looks in, do not expect an apostle to look out.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Reading literary fiction can be highly pleasurable, but does it also make you a better person? Conventional wisdom and intuition lead us to believe that reading can indeed improve us. However, as the philosopher Emrys Westacott has recently pointed out in his essay for 3Quarksdaily, we may overestimate the capacity of literary fiction to foster moral improvement. A slew of scientific studies have taken on the task of studying the impact of literary fiction on our emotions and thoughts. Some of the recent research has centered on the question of whether literary fiction can increase empathy. In 2013, Bal and Veltkamp published a paper in the journal PLOS One showing that subjects who read excerpts from literary texts scored higher on an empathy scale than those who had read a nonfiction text. This increase in empathy was predominantly found in the participants who felt “transported” (emotionally and cognitively involved) into the literary narrative. Another 2013 study published in the journal Science by Kidd and Castano suggested that reading literary fiction texts increased the ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and emotions of other humans when compared to reading either non-fiction or popular fiction texts.

Scientific assessments of how fiction affects empathy are fraught with difficulties and critics raise many legitimate questions. Do “empathy scales” used in psychology studies truly capture the psychological phenomenon of “empathy”? How long does the effect of reading literary fiction last and does it translate into meaningful shifts in behavior? How does one select appropriate literary fiction texts and control texts, and conduct such studies in a heterogeneous group of participants who probably have very diverse literary tastes? Kidd and Castano, for example, used an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht as a literary fiction text because the book was a finalist for the National Book Award, whereas an excerpt of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was used as a ‘popular fiction' text even though it was long-listed for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction.

The recent study “Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction” led by the psychology researcher Dan Johnson from Washington and Lee University took a somewhat different approach. Instead of assessing global changes in empathy, Johnson and colleagues focused on a more specific question. Could the reading of a fictional narrative change the perception of racial stereotypes?

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by Dwight Furrow

Destruction of the Buddhas 2001 Creative Commons License

The pages of Aeon contained one of the most dispiriting articles I have ever read. The author, a budding screenwriter, falls in with advocates of the Effective Altruism movement. They proceed to half-persuade him to give up his artistic pursuit because it is not as useful to society as finding a “real job” and donating his salary to charity. He then poses the question which for him is existential:

Is your self-expression more important than human lives and suffering? Would you rather contribute to the culture of rich societies than work to reduce the suffering of the poor, or of future generations? Is it not arbitrary to fill the world with your own personal spin on things, simply because it's yours?

In the end, he is not sure if the arts are where he wants to be:

“For now, that will have to be my justification. I'm not ready to give up writing. I'm not ready to take up some high-paid job that I'd hate in order to reduce the world's suffering. Maybe that will change. For now, call me Net-Positive Man. “

Has the world lost another Shakespeare?

Effective Altruism is a movement devoted to the utilitarian notion that we are morally required to maximize the good we do in the world. According to this view, in our choice of careers and activities we should use empirical evidence and cost-effectiveness calculations to determine what will do the most good by reducing suffering. Thus, for someone with artistic talent they are obligated to sell their talents to the highest bidder and then contribute the bulk of their earnings to the most effective charities. Only in rare cases where a work of art directly contributes to reducing suffering (or perhaps to producing propaganda for Effective Altruism) would it be justified to devote time and energy to artistic production. It is not enough for a person to do more good than harm; you must make yourself irreplaceable by producing more good than someone else could have produced in your place.

I find this dispiriting because the vision of human life embodied in the Effective Altruism movement is profoundly ugly and dehumanizing.

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by Tamuira Reid

Bucharest, Romania, 2009. Madonna gyrates her way across a brightly lit stage in front of 60,000 screaming fans. Suddenly she stops, looks sternly out into the crowd. “It has been brought to my attention … that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and gypsies in general in Eastern Europe,” she says. “It made me feel very sad. We don't believe in discrimination [where I come from] … we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.”

And then it happens. Nearly all of the 60,000 adoring fans turn into a huge jeering mass. They boo her.

But this doesn’t faze Madonna. She dusts off her thigh highs, clicks her heels and goes on with her show, resuming the usual bumping and grinding that has made her so famous. She did what she set out to do – to give a “shout out” to her gypsy peeps, seeing as she has recently become an admirer of several Gypsy dancers, even going as far as to invite them on her tour. Maybe the pop icon will inspire others to jump on the “Gypsies are cool” bandwagon (no pun intended).

First things first, Madonna: never call a Gypsy a gypsy.

_____

There are somewhere between 8-10 million Roma or Romani (derogatively referred to as “gypsy”, the lowercase “g” insinuating that it’s not a proper noun) currently living in Eastern Europe. It’s impossible to get an accurate count because of the number of Roma who are undocumented by governments that still refuse to claim them or to acknowledge their existence as anything other than outsider.

With the resurgence of hate crimes against the Roma throughout Eastern Europe, the Western World is starting to ask, “Who are these people exactly?” Even though the Roma have been persecuted and murdered in droves since well before WWII, it has taken the general global public decades to become interested.

Roma did not have proper representation in the EU until fairy recently and no one has been held accountable for them — they’ve been left to fend for themselves — and this lack of belonging only heightens their status as outsiders.

They have been forced from their homes, whether burned out, bombed out or physically dragged out, and have had no choice but to live in a parallel universe, existing on the periphery of a society that does not and will not claim them. They are travelers not driven by wanderlust, but driven out by hatred.

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by Madhu Kaza

After I heard the recent news that Gabriel García Márquez had died, and after I'd read the obituaries and tributes, and reminisced about my own early encounters with his fiction, I knew it was time to read another great 20^th century writer: and so this week I finally read Mercè Rodoreda's novel La plaça del Diamant. Rodoreda had become one of my favorite writers on the basis of a few short stories I'd read a couple of years ago in the collection My Christina. But I hadn't delved more deeply into her work. I knew that García Márquez had been a champion of her writing, and that a month after her own death in April, 1983 he wrote a moving tribute to her in the pages of the Spanish daily, El Pais.

In the piece titled, “Do you know who Mercè Rodoreda was?” García Márquez wrote of his grief at hearing the news of her death, not only because of his great admiration for her work, but also because outside of Spain her death had not been widely noted, and she hadn't received what he felt were her due honors. Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908 and began publishing at a young age. After the Spanish Civil War, when the Catalan language was banned in public and the culture harshly supressed, Rodoreda went into exile. For nearly twenty years, until 1957 she published nothing. In 1962 she published La plaça del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves by David Rosenthal in 1981), widely regarded as her masterpiece and a masterpiece of Catalan literature. García Márquez wrote of her as an “invisible woman who wrote tough, beautiful novels in splendid Catalan.” Reading Rodoreda's work for the first time was as dazzling for him as his first encounter with the work of Juan Rulfo. Of The Time of the Doves, he remarked, “In my view, it is the most beautiful novel that's been published in Spain after the Civil War.”

The Time of the Doves narrates the experiences of Natalia, a young shop assistant in Barcelona in the bleak years before, during and just after the Civil War. Natalia is neither ambitious, nor assertive. At the beginning of the novel she goes to a dance only because, as she says, “It was hard for me to say no if someone asks me to do something.” It almost seems that Natalia marries the carpenter Quimet for the same reason; at the dance he announces that by the end of the year she will be his wife, and shortly thereafter, with little resistance, Natalia breaks off her previous engagement and marries him.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

The Great North American Lime Shortage of 2014 has people panicked. As the heat of the summer looms, the national media is running frenzied articles, families are being ripped apart, bartenders are at each other's throats and lime hoarding is rampant. The causes of this terrible situation read like a list of contemporary American anxieties. Consumption (of limes) has risen dramatically since the 70s, and people have been living beyond their means, delaying the inevitable reckoning with citrus-fueled bacchanalias. Globalization and the destruction of lime farming in the U.S. now means that most limes here come from Mexico. And this production has been severely damaged by a combination of bad weather (probably caused by global warming), bacterial infection (no doubt drug resistant) and, of course, drug cartels[1], who are supposed to be hijacking supply.

When asked excessively metaphysical questions (“Is the world finite?”), the Buddha would not answer and instead told the story of a man shot with a poisoned arrow, who refused to have a doctor attend to him until he knew who his assailant was, why he had been shot, what kind of bow was used and which animal's feathers were used to make the arrow. Taking a similar pragmatic stance, we will not inquire further into the ultimate causes of the lime shortage and simply discuss coping mechanisms (or, if you prefer, routes to salvation). And to fortify ourselves we will remember that possibility emerges within constraints and it is hard to create anything interesting without them.

To replace the lime we must first know the lime and understand its particular role. At least to a first approximation, this rests on its utility as a source both of acidity and of fragrant citrus oils[2], and so these are the dimensions we will seek to replace.

Much of what makes citrus fruits distinctive (as opposed to just generically sour-sweet) comes from particular aromatic oils and the oil glands in the peel are especially rich sources of these. The classical citrus aromas result from compounds like limonene which, unsurprisingly, smells like lemons and is extracted for use in both fragrances and cleaning products. But the peels also contain piney and herbaceous oils, in line with the general observation that almost nothing has a simple aroma. A nice way to introduce yourself to these aromatic oils (if you haven't already) is to use a vegetable peeler to cut a swath of lemon rind and twist it, which breaks the glands and releases the oil. This is a deservedly popular garnish for cocktails. Note that by “peel” I just mean the superficial yellow part; the white pith that lies underneath is bitter and should be avoided (though as in marmalade, small amounts of this bitterness can nicely complement added sugar).

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by Kathleen Goodwin

In the spring of 2012, I spent four weeks in Delhi conducting interviews for my senior thesis, an analysis of the systematic massacre of 3,000 members of the Delhi Sikh community in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination by two Sikh members of her own security detail in 1984. While I had vaguely contemplated comparing the events of '84 to the pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, which entailed organized killing of over 1,000 Muslims, I found that every single interviewee was unable to discuss Delhi in '84 without an immediate comparison to Gujarat in '02. What is striking, as I comb through the transcripts of my interviews today, is the shared view of my interviewees that it was unlikely that Narendra Modi would manage to become Prime Minister of India. This list includes venerable political commentators including Madhu Kishwar, Hartosh Singh Bal, and Ashis Nandy, among others. And now as I click through the home pages of India's English language newspapers and weekly publications, there is an excess of articles already analyzing the effects of Modi's assuming the Prime Minister's office. The predictions of those in Western periodicals was most succinctly captured in Modi's inclusion on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014 that was published this week. Fareed Zakaria writes, “Narendra Modi, who — if the opinion polls are accurate — is poised to become India's next Prime Minister, and thus the world leader chosen by the largest electorate on the planet.”

Of course, Modi has not won yet, and stranger things have happened in politics than a last minute upset, but nearly all signs point to the May 16 announcement that the next Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy is a man who was unequivocally complicit, if not directly responsible, for mass murder of a minority group. This outcome was unfathomable to many acutely politically attuned (albeit left leaning) Indians just two years ago. What precisely has changed to allow the rise of Narendra Modi, whose taint from 2002 was thought to be crippling? The answer is that both circumstance and individual cunning have allowed Modi to exploit a deeply frustrated Indian populace. As Zakaria admits, Modi, “has a reputation for autocratic rule and a dark Hindu-nationalist streak. But those concerns are waning in a country desperate for change.”

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by Ahmed Humayun

The causes of contemporary militancy in Muslim majority societies are many and complex, but one of the important factors is a virulent ideology that glorifies violence as a means to achieve political and religious ends. This ideology draws upon various historical inspirations—some Islamic and some Western, some local and some global—and can boast intellectuals, activists, and propagandists operating across different Muslim cultures and languages.

My concern here is not in tracing out the intellectual history of militant ideology. Nor am I seeking to precisely determine the importance that can be placed on ideology relative to other factors—a partial list of which might include a particular interpretation of Islamic doctrines about just war, the colonial legacy, the repression and failures of the authoritarian modern state, the consequences of the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran and the corresponding Sunni reaction in Saudi Arabia, Western alliances with authoritarian Muslim states or occupations of Muslim lands, and the systemic tendency of a wide range of states to utilize militant groups as proxies to advance their narrow interests. I am interested instead in exploring some of the consequences of militant ideology for Muslim societies today.

There is a tendency in the West to primarily view the activities of militant Islamist groups from the perspective of the danger that they pose to Western homelands. This is natural as a matter of pragmatic policy and national interest. Cataclysmic events like 9/11 in the United States or 7/7 in Britain have underscored the fact that the element of anti-Westernism in militant ideology is deeply ingrained. And yet it is clear that the greatest danger of militant ideology is posed to Muslims living in Muslim majority societies. This can be seen in the endless, gruesome wave of violence that has yielded enormous death tolls in recent years, mostly civilian, in countries as varied as Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen, and many other places besides. (In Pakistan alone, militant violence may have claimed as many as forty to fifty thousand lives since September 11^th).

As the drawdown of Western military forces from Muslim lands proceeds—Iraq having been vacated, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan imminent—the level of danger seems greater than ever. Militant groups show no signs of disbanding once Western military forces depart (though that departure may weaken the force of some militant arguments, and is therefore a positive development). Instead, militant ideas that emphasize the use of slaughter to advance political and religious change, and that target minorities and Muslims deemed beyond the pale of Islam—that is, the overwhelming majority of them—is on the rise. Militant ideology can boast many more factions today than it did on September 11^th, with hundreds of them fueling sustained campaigns of terrorism and insurgency, and a general resistance to state authority, across the Middle East and South Asia.

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by Yohan J. John

No one knows exactly how life began, but a pivotal chapter in the story was the formation of the first single-celled organism — the common ancestor to every living thing on the planet. I like to think of the birth of life as the creation of the first boundary — the cell membrane. That first cell membrane enclosed a drop of the primordial soup, creating a separation between inside and outside, and between life and non-life. Through this act of individuation the cell could become a controlled environment: a chemical safe zone for the sensitive molecular machinery needed to maintain integrity and facilitate replication. The game of life consists in large part of perpetuating the difference between inside and outside for as long as possible. Death, then, is the dissolution of difference. But the paradox at the heart of life is that the inside cannot survive without the outside. The cell requires raw materials — nutrients and energy — to sustain itself and to reproduce, and these must be sought outside the safe zone, in the wild and unpredictable outside world.

The cell membrane has a dichotomous role. It must preserve the cell’s identity as an entity that is distinct from everything outside it, but it must not be an impenetrable wall. It must be a gateway through which the cell can absorb raw material and eject waste, but it cannot allow the inside to become inundated by the outside. It fulfills this challenge by being selectively permeable, carefully overseeing the traffic between the inside and the outside. The cell membrane must also be flexible, because it serves the roles of locomotion and consumption. In a single-celled organism, the cell membrane is therefore a primitive sense organ, a transportation system and a digestive system, all rolled into one.

The birth of life was a moment of cleaving: when the first cell membrane enveloped its drop of primordial ooze, it cleaved the inside from the outside, but it also became the conduit through which the inside could cleave to the outside. Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings, of doors and passageways, the cell membrane is a sentry looking in two directions simultaneously. Given its role in cellular transaction, transition and transformation, the cell membrane’s function might even be described as a precursor to intelligence.

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by Tamuira Reid

Duck into the nearest bar, grab a stool, roll-up your sleeves. Get down to business. Take a shot. Take another. Take a third. Drink a glass of wine, a glass of beer, a glass of vodka. Rinse. Repeat. You remember how to do this. A pro never forgets.

You should call your sponsor but you won't. You should probably feel guilty but you don't.

Drink with the ones who have nothing to lose because they've lost everything already. Or maybe they never had anything to begin with. Some people are dealt a shit hand in life. You are not one of them. You had it all and fucked-it up.

It doesn't matter if you have seven hours or seven months or seven years. IT is always there, waiting. Disguised as a good time. A giant Band-Aid. The best lay of your life. Up the five flights of stairs to your studio in Harlem, or your loft in Soho, or in the family room of your green-shuttered craftsmen in Stamford. Right behind you.

The anticipation is over. The “what if” becomes the “what now”. You drink and drink and drink until body and mind unravel and you want nothing and feel nothing and coming undone like this is better than air. It's better than life. It's better.

Across town your family is getting ready for the party. Pink balloons hang from streamers stretched across doorways. Bowls of M & M's and potato chips are placed on a table next to the Dora the Explorer sheet cake you ordered, a massive number “5” candle jetting out of its middle.

Remember when she was born. All conehead and piercing scream. How she spread across your chest and fell asleep. How you felt your dark heart open up for a split second, then close again.

Let the man next to you buy another round. Don't stop him when he puts his hand on your thigh. Don't stop him when he leans over and breathes into your neck, face buried in your hair. Remember when your husband used to do this. Remember when he stopped.

You met him at a coffee shop on Bleeker Street five days into your sobriety. Talked about books and shitty local poets and how no one writes anything worth a damn anymore. Six months later you married. You wore a black dress and wrote your own vows and watched as your aging parents held hands and cried, relieved you'd finally found someone who could put up with your shit.

Let the man kiss you now. Hard. Let it remind you of how wild you were back then. How all of that crazy has been replaced by a certain brand of peace others mistake for weakness. But addicts are never truly peaceful. Not down in the soul where it matters.

The jukebox spits out some music and everything in you moves, shifts. The mute button on your life suddenly lifted.

Go home.

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by Brooks Riley

As I hover over my life in cyberspace, I look down at the various trails emanating from me that find their way across the globe to multiple destinations, known and unknown, whether or not they were ever intended to travel that far. Interconnectivity has increased exponentially since 2009 when I bought the notebook whose recent demise forced me to confront a sea change. Up to now, I’d left a line of breadcrumbs, for Windows, for McAfee, for Google, for the NSA, for my e-mail contacts, for who knows who else. Now those breadcrumbs have become loaves and like the parable they have multiplied.

I loved my old notebook: Except for the odd update or security scan, it was just it and I, two symbiotic pals going about our business. Now I find myself constantly confronted with geek issues such as OS updates, software compatibility, multiple preference settings and cloud management. Is Microsoft my new best friend because it greets me (Hello from Seattle) and promises to guide me? Is Apple my new best friend because it promises chic design? Is Google my new best friend because it finds things, shows me where I live and offers to hardwire my nest? Is Amazon my new best friend because it delivers? None of the above. They fall into the category of useful acquaintances to whom I turn when I need them. My new best friend turns out to be my old best friend, Wikipedia, without which the world would be a poorer place for one who wants to know everything.

What does it mean to leave behind such spoors (to borrow language of the hunted), when most of the billions before us left only genetic traces in the form of offspring and descendants? An electronic version of each one of us will haunt the internet after we’re gone, as immutable and indestructible as the risus rigidus of a Guy Fawkes mask on the trash heap after the party’s over.

Facebook is beginning to deal with death, but only with issues of access, not with the fate of the pages themselves. Nearly 3 million Facebook users worldwide were predicted to die in 2012 alone, their pages achieving an immortality denied to their progenitors. Will famous last words be replaced by famous last entries? Will Stephen King write a ghoulish story about a Facebook user who updates his page from heaven? Will some start-up create a ‘dropped box’ in cyberspace for the dearly departed? And what about all those other clouds? Your stuff is safe and backed up. You are not.

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by Charlie Huenemann

In 1746, Hume returned to London after touring Europe as tutor and caretaker of the mad Marquess of Annendale. He was not sure what was next in his life. He was already 35 and somewhat ashamed of not having yet made a career for himself. He resolved to return to Scotland, but at the last minute he received an unexpected invitation to serve in a military expedition to Canada. The invitation came from Lieut.-General James St Clair, a distant relative of Hume whom he had recently met. The opportunity hit Hume at just the right time, and he wondered if this was the beginning of a career in the military.

The plan for the expedition was to approach Quebec by way of the St. Lawrence River in August. Hume set his affairs in order and reported for duty. But what followed was not the exciting onset of an adventure at sea, sails rippling in the wind, but three months of fits and starts. When the wind was not favorable, they were stuck in one harbor or another; when the wind was favorable, the orders from the Navy changed and kept them from going anywhere.

By the end of August, the orders changed dramatically. Forget Canada; the new plan was to invade the French coast and cause a distraction from the campaign taking place then around Flanders. But winds were unfavorable once again, giving St Clair the opportunity to remind the Navy that for this new assignment he had no maps, no military intelligence, no horses, and no money.

The Navy sent along a major and some ship pilots to help plan for an invasion – though, as it turned out, none of them could provide any helpful information. Thus, as Hume put it, the company “lay under positive orders to sail with the first fair wind, to approach the unknown coast, march through the unknown country, and attack the unknown cities of the most potent nation of the universe”.

On September 15th, they undertook to do just that, setting out for Lorient in Brittany with about 50 ships and 4500 men, with the guidance of a map bought in a shop in Plymouth. They arrived at the French coast in the evening of September 18th. But instead of invading right away, the commanding admiral waited to land until the following morning, and on the morning they encountered winds that prevented their landing for two more days. This of course gave the French plenty of time to see them, sound alarms, and prepare a defense of some 3,000 militia, plus cavalry. The wind finally relented and the invading British troops landed, diverting at the last moment to an unoccupied section of the coast. They chased some French soldiers into the hills and issued a general declaration to villagers in the area that they would not be harmed if they did not oppose. Hume was apparently so excited that he simply co-signed this declaration “David,” forgetting to supply his last name.

What followed then was the sort of comedy of errors one could easily see coming. The British troops began to poke around the unfamiliar territory, engaged in some minor skirmishes, sacked a village, and entered into a firefight in which they ended up shooting at each other. Rain kept pouring, morale was low, and many soldiers just wandered off into the French countryside.

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“Did you like your father,” my friend asked?

The Tongues of His Black Boots Say

as my father sleeps the world goes on
his black boots are by the door
he left them there unlaced
the right run down at the heel
the left toe scuffed
his blue shirt hangs on a hook
wrinkled below the belt line
where every morning
its tails were tucked
there’s no forgiveness in pasts
just now and here, defeat
is the hardest epiphany
the tongues of his
black boots say
.

by Jim Culleny
4/13/14

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

All my life, I've been called a Madrasi. This is false, funny, and ironic. For those that live north of the Vindhyas in India, all four of the southern states connote a ubiquitous “Madras”, or in other words the land where people speak Madrasi (otherwise knows as four distinct languages Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil). But Madras, or to call it by its current, official, and always locally more kosher name Chennai, was never home to me. I visited Madras, and I lived in Bombay. Madras was heat, provinciality, incoherence, and conservatism. For the longest time, it occupied the second position on a list of cities that I vowed to never inhabit. Number One is still held by New Delhi, and I hope it doesn't indulge in similarly stymieing my life plans. Hush I tell myself, lest the Gods have sharp ears. Evidence indicates otherwise, but you never know.

Madras, I am told by the many books I peruse in the hopes of gaining intellectual familiarity, is where modern India began. This old colonial outpost that had the likes of Robert Clive, Elihu Yale, and Arthur Wellesley pass through dates back to the 1640 settlement of Madraspatnam. For those seeking a primer, I highly recommend Bishwanath Ghosh's Tamarind City and of course, S.Muthiah's Madras Discovered.

Seeking this selfsame city of sepia fame, I wander off one bright Madras morning, dragging a friend and relucatant early riser to Fort St. George, one of the arteries of the colonial enterprise. Disembarking from the train at Beach station sharp at seven am, bright and caffeinated, we walk past a still sleeping old town through NSC Bose Road, and the various Chetty streets, named after differently famed members of the Chettiar community. Each street differentiates itself by the goods it sells; electrical appliances in one, upholstery in the other, plumbing equipment in yet another.

The art-deco buildings are magnificent, and often magnificently ratty. The politics of heritage preservation are apparently a nationwide phenomenon. I receive atmospheric consolation from this history that seems like so many other histories of so many other old towns. I do what any self-respecting debutante to urban studies might do, take many pictures. Fort St.George, the Armenian church with many buried Armenians and nary a community, Armenian Street, abandoned pushcarts, modernist architecture, all fodder for my newly obsessive need to know this city.

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by Michael Lopresto

Perceptual experience is a distinctly privileged way of knowing about the world. Not only is perceptual experience ultimately the bridge between mind and world, but it also trumps other ways of knowing. When another way of knowing about the world – inference, introspection, memory, and testimony – and experience disagree with one another, experience will be kept and the other will be dropped unless we have strong reason to believe that what we're experiencing contains an illusion or a hallucination. So, if you were to tell me that my sister is in Melbourne, and later that day I saw her walking across the street from where I am here in Adelaide, I would immediately drop the belief based on testimony that she is in Melbourne. However, an alternative situation may be this: I know that my sister has a doppelgänger who lives here in Adelaide. So in this situation, if I happen to believe that you're a reliable source of information, I'd probably believe instead that I'm actually seeing my sister's doppelgänger.

The moral is this: experience, privileged as it is, is still judged against what we already happen to know – as are the other sources of knowledge. When a proposition arrived at by inference or testimony disagrees with something I already know, I'm going to subject that proposition to much closer scrutiny than I otherwise would. Furthermore, experience, privileged as it is, always involves interpretation. In the first case, where I see my sister, and the second case, where I see my sister's doppelgänger, provide me with identical data. Each of the perceptual experiences are indistinguishable from my first-person perspective. The fact that interpretation is involved in perceptual experience is what explains how it's possible to come to different conclusions from identical perceptual experiences.

So, how are we to understand “interpretation” in the context of perceptual experience? It's certainly not anything like conscious deliberation, otherwise its presence would be salient to us (and it's not at all), and further, experience would be much more plastic than it actually is, in that it would be affected by interpretation in a much more thoroughgoing way. So our background knowledge influences our perceptual experiences in a way that is automatic and unconscious. Should this consideration lead to scepticism about the reliability of our perceptual faculties giving us objective knowledge of the external world? I think the answer is clearly not.

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by Mara Naselli

Minds cannot help but make meaning, even with only a suggestion of direction. When I taught manuscript editing, to put the mechanics of the work in perspective, I would write out a line of taspyograpgucal noasihfsnesnse theat qwe kcgan reasdsdo to illustrate the point. Your eye, reading the jumble above, found the letters to make the words. We make corrections and connections without thinking about them. We bend the contours of a line. We want order, not confusion, and will bring it into shape if we can.

This hunger for order applies to memory as much as it applies to reading. We know memory is plastic—it can even be invented. What interests me are the choices that occur someplace between consciousness and unconsciousness—our grasping letters that make sense and eliding the others so that the coherence of our interpretations and blindnesses are preserved. But what would a more careful reading look like? How do we allow a memory or fact to break into our consciousness and disrupt our domestic intellectual and emotional order?

On April 18, 1939, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa urged her to write her memoirs, before her memory might fail her. Woolf was ready for a diversion—she had been working on a biography of the painter Robert Fry, puzzling out the difficulties of writing about another human being outside of the events of his or her life. Who was I then? she asks, turning the question onto herself. For the next year and a half, she wrote her recollections, conjuring the dead and their vanished Victorian world. “A Sketch of the Past” was edited by Jeanne Schulkind and published posthumously in 1976.

Which is to say these writings are, for all intents and purposes, works in progress, and to read them is a bit like editing them, interpreting and weighting the content, discerning a shape that might give contours to the genius they contain. To read Woolf’s draft of a memoir is to sit with her at her writing desk, after she has gone for a walk, read Chaucer, made notes on Robert Fry, written instructions to the housekeeper, or heard the drone of German planes overhead. She settles in, and we watch her wade into the past. Woolf’s writing is not simply recollection, rather her encounter makes the convergence of past and present an altogether new thing—waters not yet crossed.

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