There was a time when the West was truly wild. I don’t mean the gun fights in saloons, the stampede of a thousand cattle, or stagecoach robberies on the high plains. But it wasn’t that long ago when every river from what is now Kansas to the Pacific Ocean ran its course without a dam or diversion, tens of millions of buffalo grazed on the rich grasslands, and beavers built thousands and thousands of ponds across the Rockies. It was but a blink of the eye since apex predators like Grizzly bears and Wolves ruled the land from north to south.
One man who witnessed a nearly virgin West was John K Townsend, the first trained naturalist to travel from St. Louis to what is today Oregon. In a book called Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, Townsend shares images of a trip that began in 1834, not long after Louis and Clark first made their expedition. Even in bustling St. Louis, where Townsend was provisioning, there were foretokens of what was ahead in the untrammeled country he was to cross. He describes the sight of a hundred Saque Indians with shaved heads and painted in stripes of “fiery red and deep black, leaving only the scalping tuft, in which was interwoven a quantity of elk hair and eagle’s feathers.”
Just a month into the trip, Townsend encounters a trapper who tells the story of having his horse and rifle stolen by Otto Indians in the middle of winter while still far from any settlement. When Townsend asks the trapper how he survived without food on his journey home, the trapper says, “Why, set to trappin’ prairie squirrels with little nooses made out of the hairs of my head.”
About six weeks into the crossing, Townsend describes the various wolves slinking about the camp looking for scraps of food. By his narrative, he does not seem a bit afraid of them but describes the encounters as “amusing to see the wolves lurking like guilty things around these camps seeking for the fragments that may be left.” The contrast of this naturalist’s comfort around wild animals camped out in the true wilds with just a horse, compared to some of today’s self-styled “mountain men,” is stark. For if you turn on most any AM radio station in Montana, Wyoming, or Colorado today, you’ll hear angry men sealed in 6,000-pound pickup trucks on major highways, calling in to talk shows to express their fear and loathing of wolves. My how soft we’ve become. Read more »
I did not expect to be watching so-called “reality TV” this weekend. It’s not a habit of mine; I’m not the kind of person who typically consumes that kind of media—at least, not willingly. There’ve been a few exceptions to this: back in the early aughts, I did watch almost all of Jersey Shore, and at some point in the ensuing years, a friend cajoled me into watching one episode of Real Housewives of Orange County. When one of the titular Housewives began to run water from their hyper-stylish tap in order to wash a whole (raw) chicken, I yanked the EJECT lever harder than a fighter pilot in distress. In most reality TV, I find there’s a kind of mise-en-abyme effect, one whose chasm can sometimes echo with l’appel du vide. How endlessly recursive, this construct of hyperreality—especially when those on-screen seem compulsively aware of the media tesseract to which they have surrendered.
image from Love is Blind (Season 8)
This is what led to my fascination with Love is Blind, during a recent visit to my friend Chelsea. Love is Blind, to be brief, is a reality television show predicated on stripping out the vector of physical attraction in the courses of the initial stages of dating. Contestants are limited to adjacent rooms (called “pods”) separated by a constantly-shifting panel of screen-saver pinks and reds—in some moments resembling the walls of a womb. There is no access to personal phones or computers, and when not in the “pods,” the contestants are divided into either the men’s quarters or the women’s quarters. These are only ever shown as communal spaces, with a variety of couches and chairs, and a kitchen area, seemingly used for the sole purpose of beverage preparation.
These beverages are seen constantly throughout the episodes, in uniformly brushed, metallic drinkware of different sizes and shapes. There are mugs, wine glasses, and tumblers, all of which shine dully under the klieg lights: burnished and yet tarnished simultaneously. When in the “pods,” contestants are often seen holding them while perorating blandly on the necessity of authenticity in relationships—either unaware of the irony or willfully ignoring it. (At one point, a contestant even had a total of seven of these vessels grouped around them in the shot, suggesting that quite a bit of imbibing had occurred during the “date.”) Read more »
Pieter Brueghel the Younger “Summer: The Harvesters”, 1623.
One often used metric by which the ‘complexity’ of societies is judged, is the level of logistic sophistication with which they self-propagate. While the engineering and logistical nuances of how modern society sustains itself are the fodder for endless analysis; equally complex is the almost-unconscious cultural framework within which this takes place.
One primary foundation of our cultural framework is how we perceive and construct The Commons; that is, lands or resources whose usufruct are held in some degree of common ownership. Historical examples include who may, and may not, take fish from the streams and oceans; who may, and may not, take firewood and game from the forest; who may, and may not, access pastureland for grazing animals, and so on.
For a modern city dweller, these examples are functionally abstractions. More pertinent would be, for example, the quality of air and water, access to public libraries, public transportation and medical care, or food banks and homeless shelters. These are of course common-pool resources as everyone has both rights to their access and responsibilities for their upkeep. The structure of our societies is such that when you’re wealthy, availability of The Commons is of negligible benefit. However, when your private command over resources is limited, i.e. you’re broke, the “cultural-infrastructure” determining which level of access to which resources is permissible, may set the entire course of your life. More than that, the ramifications of socially mediated access of individuals to natural resources, multiplied out across entire societies, can drive the evolution of entire cultures. Read more »
The Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded a few days ago. The prizes for peace, economics and sometimes literature have become so discredited in my lifetime–to the point of inspiring anti-Nobel prizes–that my response to their bestowal every year has usually consisted of a bemused scoffing, rather like when one continues to watch a movie to see how bad it can get. But my reaction to this year’s award was more like what I think I would feel if I witnessed someone run off the road right in front of me; there was a not insubstantial personal sense of violation attached to it, even though it didn’t directly affect me, of course. In terms of the recipient, as well as the circumstances surrounding the affair, I was so struck by an idea of the rottenness of traditional international institutions collapsing under the accelerating moral and intellectual decay of Trump and his aligned political movements that I decided I could justifiably waste one of my humble columns on it.
Most people are aware that Donald Trump has been, for an interminable amount of time, asserting that he deserves the peace prize for a number of things, especially the 7 or 8 wars he claims to have “solved”, including conflicts between states that do not, and never have existed, and involving countries even on different sides of the world that never had, in any case, much to do with each other. The pertinent fact here is that Trump was inaugurated a mere eleven days after nominations for the 2025 prize were closed, so his nomination was always going to be an exceptionally long shot, much as Trump’s jealousy of the pre-inauguration award to President Obama might inspire endless preposterous protestations. But they have made an award to him increasingly likely in 2026 (especially with the mid-term elections taking place a mere weeks after the Peace prize announcement in early-October). Norway is reported to be preparing to respond to tariffs and other measures Trump might impose in response to the Norwegian-based Nobel Peace Committee’s (a non-governmental organization, mind) giving the prize to someone other than himself, which testifies to the potential room for meddling, intrusion and influence-peddling in the seemingly independent deliberations of important and influential organizations operating in a traditional international system that happens to be crumbling. The fact that Norway is now an increasingly important member of NATO, whose ex-president and current finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, led the organization, serves to increase this likelihood. Stoltenberg has had an extremely complex and sensitive relation, to put it mildly, with Trump, whose views on NATO (and I do not say this as a fan of NATO, or of Stoltenberg’s), as in so many other things, range from erratic to incomprehensible.
But all this is only a small part of the story. The prize was ultimately bestowed upon Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela for keeping, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “the flame of democracy burning” in that country. Machado has been an opposition leader in Venezuela for a very long time, and when I say opposition leader, I am speaking of someone whose notion of opposition extends to active participation in and support for US-supported coups, that go back to the days of the government of Hugo Chavez from 1999 on, and continues under President Nicholas Maduro, including one as recently in 2018, under Trump himself. Read more »
I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship – a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action at all levels of the democratic system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be a missed opportunity, failing to engage with many potential larger ways in which AI might affect democracy.
The book’s strength lies in its meticulous and hyper-granular description of all the ways that AI might affect elements of a democratic society, from enabling citizen power, to assisting in court cases, to empowering politicians. It offers many examples of how AI has been, will be, or could be adopted, for good and for ill. It maintains an admirably balanced and neutral stance throughout, detailing both the ways AI can be used to empower individual citizens, as well as how it could empower powerful vested interests. It is thoroughly organized, with separate sections on politics, legislation, administration, citizen and courts, and a starting briefer describing the relevant AI capabilities for each before outlining use cases and providing examples. The book admirably outlines the need for Public AI – AI as a common infrastructure provided by government, akin to water and electricity.
On the whole, however, the book feels like a missed opportunity to take the authors’ highly detailed knowledge and push their conclusions further. These limitations come through on a few different levels. First, the book feels dated in terms of its conception of AI. Although some examples are from this year, such as DOGE’s attempted hollowing-out of government, many pre-date the LLM era and could easily have been included in a book written five years ago, which is an eternity in AI. Many examples relate to models trained on thousands of examples, not billions, and the authors do not distinguish enough between which examples are more relevant for pre-ChatGPT AI models, and which for today’s General-Purpose AI.
Second, the authors pull their punches. The authors make clear that they do not want to engage with the more speculative risks of “AI doomers”, but in staying away from anything that smells of speculation, they stay too close to the world of yesterday, thereby excluding many of the risks from AI to democracy that we are already seeing signs of. Read more »
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment—whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. —Carl Jung, lecturing on Nietzsche
L’amitie, Pablo Picasso, 1908. Permission of the State Hermitage Museum, US.
1. Friendship Born of Self
It is commonly, and truly, said that you can only love someone as well as you love yourself. For many of us, myself included, this is a hard teaching. As Jung says in the epigraph, we hope that we can love others without figuring out how to love ourselves, but eventually “it comes back on us.” The love I’m talking about is friendship. (It should come as no surprise that philosophers and psychologists haven’t looked to familial or romantic relationships as exemplars of enlightened love!) I want to explore how this curious relation between befriending ourselves and befriending others works. Along the way I show how we can use our discoveries to become better at both.
The notion that loving others depends on loving ourselves is not new. Aristotle discusses how the kind of friend we are to ourselves will be reflected in the kind of friendships we have with others. Where there is “internal conflict,” where, as he puts it, “souls are divided against themselves,” they will not be able to love themselves, or others. I think of people I’ve known who end up in therapy because a friend or partner made it clear that the relationship would be over if they didn’t address their depression or anxiety or addiction—examples of how internal discord causes troubles for others.
2. It’s Mutual, Actually
But friendships don’t just reflect who we are. Who we are, and how we show up in relationships, depends also on how we have been treated by others. If you grew up with a hypercritical rejecting mother, your attachment pattern and personality will reflect this. In other words, our way of being with others is informed by the way others have been with us; in particular, by how attentive and attuned (friendly) early caregivers were. Read more »
A recent news story about the fate of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance returns me to some reflections on a failing most of us exhibit to some degree: we find it convenient to invent people.
If the story of Shackleton’s grandiosely-branded Imperial Antarctic Expedition is not familiar, I recommend Alfred Lansing’s spare and compelling Endurance, followed by Caroline Alexander’s more detailed The Endurance, which is also graced with expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s original pictures. In summary: Amundsen having “beaten” Scott in a “race to the Pole” (see note), Shackleton — also beaten — decided that a transit across Antarctica might be the next big headline. His “exceptionally strong wooden ship” left England in the last days of 1914; the following month at 77°S it became trapped in pack ice. Held fast for eight more months and slowly drifting north, it was crushed at last. Shackleton and his men, unable to reach land, began a desperate fight against cold and starvation culminating in the legendary journey of the lifeboat James Caird across 800 miles of ocean to South Georgia. “The Boss” then organized the rescue of his remaining men from Elephant Island.
In 2022 an expedition using remotely operated submersibles located the wreck, perfectly preserved under 3,000 meters of cold Weddell Sea. One of the expedition members, Jukka Tuhkuri, wondered exactly why it had been crushed — a good question that few had bothered to ask because the answer seemed obvious. (“Wooden ship! Pack ice!”) On examination, a different answer was equally obvious: by 1914 shipwrights knew a great deal about constructing wooden ships so that they would not be crushed by Antarctic conditions; unfortunately Endurance was not one of them. Its hull had been designed for the entirely different sea conditions of the polar north.
So to the punchline: the record shows that Shackleton knew this. Had the sainted explorer taken the wrong ship, known he was doing so, and covered it up? Was he not the perfectly wise, honest and resolute leader after all? A chink in the myth perhaps? Read more »
About two weeks ago, on October 3rd, news broke that the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was no more. The NZBA was one of several business-led alliances convened by the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEP-FI), with the goal of helping the financial industry to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, with interim goals set for 2030. These various alliances (such as the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, which itself died in 2024, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, which suspended its activities earlier this year) were themselves grouped under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), founded by UNEP-FI at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 and co-chaired by former central banker and current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance), billionaire and erstwhile presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambitions and Solutions), and Mary Shapiro, former chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (Acronym-averse readers are in for a rough ride.) Membership in GFANZ was conditional on a commitment (and demonstrable efforts) to align business activities with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial temperatures.
At its founding in 2021, the NZBA’s membership comprised 42 banks representing about 28.5 trillion dollars. In 2024, membership had peaked at 140 banks representing about 74 trillion dollars. Its insurance equivalent, the NZIA, peaked in 2022 with 291 members representing 66 trillion dollars. How did these initiatives collapse, despite the participation of most of the world’s corporate financial power? American democracy ruined it. More precisely, Republicans gained control of the federal House of Representatives in the 2022 mid-term elections, and signalled that they would investigate companies participating in climate initiatives for anti-trust violations. This emboldened Republican-led state governments to launch their own “anti-woke” intimidation campaigns against financial companies flirting with ecological sustainability. Several Republican attorneys general threatened in 2022 to file anti-trust suits against participating financial institutions, prompting some NZBA member institutions on Wall Street to threaten to leave that alliance unless membership criteria were neutered to placate Republican climate change deniers and fossil puppets (the banks did not use such accurate language in explaining their predicament). GFANZ weakened its requirement that members move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their funded activities by 50% by 2030.
This would not, of course, be enough to appease the Republican-represented fossil cartels (to be fair, the Democrats are also quite adept and practiced at representing the fossil cartels’ interests against the interests of American citizens, humanity in general, and all extant terrestrial life). Read more »
Source: The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. New York: Walker. via Wikipedia
Artificial intelligence is generally conceptualized as a new technology which goes back only decades. In the popular imagination, at best we stretch it back to the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 or perhaps the birth of the Artificial Neurons a decade prior. Yet the impulse to imagine, build, and even worry over artificial minds has a long history. Long before they could build one, civilizations across the world built automata, thought about machines that could mimicked intelligence, and thought about the philosophical consequences of artificial thought. One can even think of AI as an old technology. That does not mean that we deny its current novelty but rather we recognize its deep roots in global history. One of the earliest speculations on machines that act like people. In Homer’s Iliad, the god Hephaestus fashions golden attendants who walk, speak, and assist him at his forge. Heron of Alexandria, working in the first century CE, designed elaborate automata that were far ahead of their time: self-moving theaters, coin-operated dispensers, and hydraulic birds.
Aristotle even speculated that if tools could work by themselves, masters would have no need of slaves. In the medieval Islamic world, the Musa brothers’ Book of Ingenious Devices (9th century) described the first programmable machines. Two centuries later, al-Jazari built water clocks, mechanical musicians, and even a programmed automaton boat, where pegs on a rotating drum controlled the rhythm of drummers and flautists. In ancient China we observe one of the oldest legends of mechanical beings, the Liezi (3rd century BCE) recounts how the artificer Yan Shi presented a King with a humanoid automaton capable of singing and moving. Later, in the 11th century, Su Song built an enormous astronomical clock tower with mechanical figurines that chimed the hours. In Japan, karakuri ningyo, intricate mechanical dolls of the 17th–19th centuries, were able to perform tea-serving, archery, and stage dramas. In short, the phenomenon of precursors of AI are observed globally. Read more »
In December of 2016 I hitchhiked from Dallas, Texas to Tucson, Arizona to visit my best friend.
It was the day after Christmas. I wanted to make it there by New Years – and I did.
Here are my stats:
Total days: 4
Total drivers: 12
Total miles traveled: 956
Shortest ride of the trip: 15 miles (the first one)
Longest ride of the trip: 350 miles (the last one)
People who didn’t pick me up: about a million 🙂
I was craving a little bit of adventure, and I certainly got it.
Hitchhiking the U.S. was fun, scary, and (at times) even made me laugh. But more important than these things?
Everything it taught me:
If somebody is nice, it doesn’t matter how weird they are.
One of my first drivers was a guy in a baseball cap. He smiled when I climbed in, nodded when I said thanks, and didn’t say a word the entire time.
Something else interesting about him? He had about 1,500 beer cans in the back of his truck. Before he dropped me off, I helped him unload them at the dump.
When I finally got out, he gave me one more nod, and then was on his way.
Weird?
Definitely.
But he gave me a ride, and that’s all that matters.Read more »
It has been over 200 years since Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in the stormy summer of 1816. Although she was only eighteen, she had already lost one child just days after giving birth; her second child, William, was a few months old. By the time Frankenstein was published, in 1818, Mary had given birth to a third child, Clara Everina, who would live for a little more than a year. It was within this context of rapid cycling between birth and death, welcoming and loss, joy and pain, that Frankenstein came into being. Mary’s own mother, the writer Mary Wollestonecraft, had died thirteen days after Mary’s birth.
The first edition was published anonymously on January 1, 1818, by the small London publishing house, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, with a dedication to Mary’s father, the writer and political philosopher William Godwin, and an unsigned preface by Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley.
The reviews, though mixed, could be searingly negative. Most of them assumed the author was a man. Several conjectured the author was Percy Shelley himself.
“Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents…Our taste and our judgment revolt at this kind of writing…it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners or morality…it fatigues the feelings without understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart….” The review ends wondering whether “the head or heart of this author is the most diseased.” (The QuarterlyReview, January 1818).
A review in La Belle Assemble, was more positive, “This is a very bold fiction.” So was Walter Scott’s review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine where he pronounced the book, “An extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination,” though he found the self-education of the Monster, “improbable and overstrained.”
Although The Edinburgh Magazine found the Monster to be “a very amiable personage” it encouraged the anonymous author to “study the established order of nature as it appears…than to continue to revolt our feelings by hazardous innovations.”
The British Critic also referred to the “diseased” and “wandering imagination” of the author and suggested the writer “might be disciplined to something better.” “The writer of it is, we understand, a female: this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel.” Read more »
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke recently at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. He was asked how he balances stare decisis with originalism, and he made the following remarks:
Well, if I find it doesn’t make any sense … I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.
[I]f [it’s] totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided.
I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel, and I do give perspective to the precedent. But … the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.
At some point we need to think about what we’re doing with stare decisis, and it’s not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say ‘stare decisis’ and not think, turn off the brain, right?
We never go to the front, see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, and you’re going to follow that? I think we owe our fellow citizens more than that.
To be clear, I have nothing good to say about Clarence Thomas. I think he’s a particularly bad judge, even relative to the rest of the bad judges on the Supreme Court. I think he (and they) are wrong on every significant issue. But I agree with him on this. If a decision is totally stupid, if it doesn’t make any sense, and there is an orangutan driving the train, we shouldn’t turn off our brains and go along.
The problem, of course, is that he and I disagree about which decisions are the stupid ones. Read more »
I can’t know for certain that you are a conscious being with an active mental life. I have access (I think) to my own internal states. I feel my own anxieties, indulge in my own joy, anticipate my own future, and remember my own past. I can’t do the same for you; indeed, for all I know, you might be a philosophical zombie: you might act in every observable way as a conscious human being would act, but, in fact, you might lack internal mental states entirely. Beliefs, desires, hopes, etc., might not happen inside of you. This is The Problem of Other Minds. It is an epistemic problem about what we can really know about human minds other than our own.
In ordinary contexts, though, we don’t think knowledge requires certainty. The idea that you might be a philosophical zombie isn’t a skeptical hypothesis I’m expected to take seriously, especially if I’m enjoying your company or consoling you about a loss. As Bertrand Russell wrote, let a philosopher “get cross with his wife and you will see that he does not regard her as a mere spatio-temporal edifice of which he knows the logical properties but not a glimmer of the intrinsic character. We are therefore justified in inferring that his skepticism is professional rather than sincere.”
In our everyday interactions with one another, we take behavior that is typically caused by certain mental states in our own case to count as sufficient evidence that the same or similar mental states are present in the minds of other people. If you pluck the fruit from the tree, it’s likely because you believe it is ripe. I am justified in drawing that conclusion because that’s likely the belief that would motivate me to pluck the fruit.
This reasoning is good enough for us most of the time in our interactions with other human beings. When it suits us, however, we treat non-human minds with much more skepticism, especially when it is in our interest to do so. Though philosophical behaviorism is no longer in vogue in human psychology, scientists still treat it as gospel when it comes to research on non-human animals. When discussing interactions with animals, a scientific approach involves making observations about stimulus inputs and response outputs without speculating about the inner states of animals whose internal lives we can’t access. We make similar judgments when thinking about the minds of animals that we kill for food. This is The Problem of Animal Minds, and it is much more than an epistemic problem. Read more »
Kazuo Ishiguro often talks about a scene from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that has influenced his writing. In an interview on the occasion of his Nobel Prize in 2017, he mentions how “the narrator hides from the reader and hides from herself in the Charlotte Brontë books,” and how he also writes first person characters in this way. Elsewhere, Ishiguro mentions a specific scene from Jane Eyre where she is crying but doesn’t tell this to the reader; instead, another character in the novel reveals this information. Here’s the passage form Jane Eyre, where Mr. Rochester, whom Jane is in love with, is speaking to her after she believes she has seen evidence that he is in love with another woman. Rochester asks her:
“What is the matter?”
“Nothing at all, sir.”
“Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?”
“Not the least.”
“Return to the drawing-room; you are deserting too early.”
“I am tired, sir.”
He looked at me for a minute.
“And a little depressed,” he said. “What about? Tell me.”
“Nothing—nothing, sir. I am not depressed.”
“But I affirm that you are; so much depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag.”
Rochester continues for a few more lines until the chapter ends, with Jane not saying anything else or commenting on the conversation. She is hiding from the reader and, as Ishiguro says, from herself, but the encounter with Rochester reveals her true feelings for him. In being forced to confront the world outside one’s head—the objective world, rather than her subjective one—the truth she would seek to repress comes to the surface.
Ishiguro most famously used this technique in The Remains of the Day with the butler Stevens, another character who spends the novel hiding from the reader and from himself. Read more »
While teaching English at a Yeshiva in the Bronx, I was surprised one day to become part of a theological thought experiment so creative and meaningful that it has stayed with me ever since. After recently learning that the universe may “die” much sooner than previously thought, I recalled that moment as it offered metaphorical depth and poignancy to a scientific truth.
One day, a rabbi came to speak to our teaching staff. I was touched when he singled me out with a friendly gesture, a small, personal act of welcome from a community that had warmly embraced me, and I was happy to be a part of, even though I came from a different religious background.
He said, genuinely smiling widely, “I heard this guy here is quite a mensch! Yes? No?” To my relief my kind and supportive colleagues smiled at me and nodded their heads. “So he’s a good guy? I heard the kids like him. OK.”
The rabbi continued, “Now here’s my question. If I were to put Dan, this good guy, in Antarctica, in a hut with food and water, but no life, no life at all, not even a cockroach, nothing alive for miles around, nothing living that Dan could see, so Dan would be completely isolated, would he still be good?”
It was a clever setup. Most nodded. Some said, “Yeah, of course he would. He’s good, period, wherever he is.” But the rabbi, still smiling, said, “Well, if you think about it, you can’t be ‘good, period’. Goodness without someone to be good to isn’t goodness.”
Then he offered a startling analogy: this, he said, was God’s condition before “creation.” Only with others, with creation, with humanity, could God be good. Goodness needs relationship. Without humanity, God was not good, and God needed to be good. God had just been itching to be good. Read more »
Jaffer Kolb. Lake Mývatn, October 13th, 12:08 am.
A recent news story about the fate of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance returns me to some reflections on a failing most of us exhibit to some degree: we find it convenient to invent people. 
Sughra Raza. Under Construction. December 2023.
Kazuo Ishiguro often talks about a scene from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that has influenced his writing. In an interview on the occasion of his Nobel Prize in 2017, he mentions how “the narrator hides from the reader and hides from herself in the Charlotte Brontë books,” and how he also writes first person characters in this way. Elsewhere, Ishiguro mentions a specific scene from Jane Eyre where she is crying but doesn’t tell this to the reader; instead, another character in the novel reveals this information. Here’s the passage form Jane Eyre, where Mr. Rochester, whom Jane is in love with, is speaking to her after she believes she has seen evidence that he is in love with another woman. Rochester asks her:
While teaching English at a Yeshiva in the Bronx, I was surprised one day to become part of a theological thought experiment so creative and meaningful that it has stayed with me ever since. After recently learning that the universe may “die” much sooner than previously thought, I recalled that moment as it offered metaphorical depth and poignancy to a scientific truth.