Putting the Internet Into Perspective

internet“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something you have always done a little easier than before.”
-Marshall Poe
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What Science Can’t Teach Us

Thanks to science, we are confronted with new discoveries every day. But there are some things that science can’t teach us, and which we need to learn without its help. This point was made marvelously in an essay in the Atlantic monthly by Clancy Martin, who was discussing the increasing number of popular books written by philosophers. In that essay, Martin supplied a wonderful quote from Soren Kierkegaard which I thought I would share with you:

Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing … Thus, no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.

I would add to this that no adolescent seems to want to learn any of these lessons from their parents either. But that would be changing topics.

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Why I Read

shksprI read for lots of reasons, of course. For entertainment. For information. For intellectual stimulation. To fill up a rainy day, since I can’t play piano for eight hours at a time. But another reason to read is to make me a better writer. In a wonderful essay in the Atlantic monthly, Richard Bausch makes this point eloquently. Here is a tidbit from that essay, in which he laments the huge industry that has blossomed to provide people with “how to write” manuals. He thinks those manuals are a bad idea:

There are too many “how-to” books on the market, and too many would-be writers are reading these books in the mistaken idea that this will teach them to write. I never read such a book in my life, and I never will. What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers. If you really want to learn how to write, do that. Read Shakespeare, and all the others whose work has withstood time and circumstance and changing fashions and the assaults of the ignorant and the bigoted; read those writers and don’t spend a lot of time analyzing them. Digest them, swallow them all, one after another, and try to sound like them for a time. Learn to be as faithful to the art and craft as they all were, and follow their example. That is, wide reading and hard work.

I suggest you check out the rest of his essay. Maybe reading it will make you into a better writer!
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Humbling Words from Carl Sagan

saganThe Cornell Alumni Magazine had a wonderful article recently, on its famous former professor, Carl Sagan. Here is my favorite Sagan quote from that article:

Look again at that dot. . . . On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. . . .
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner; how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. . . .
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

And I guess there is no better way to demonstrate the folly of me ever trying to be a great writer than to peruse those profound paragraphs.
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On Parenting Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Shooter

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Andrew Solomon wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker recently about Adam Lanza’s father and his search for answers to his son’s awful behavior. The piece included a quote I thought I would share with you today:

All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the child must learn to eat vegetables).

As a parent of two teenage boys who do not like vegetables or homework, I can totally relate to this idea.

On Being a Parent to Someone with Schizophrenia

I have been pulling a lot of quotes, recently, from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree.  The book is wonderful, although too long. It could have used a more aggressive editor.  Nevertheless, it is chock full of great stories and great ideas.  Here is a Solomon quote I feel compelled to share, which captures how good the book can be when it is good. He has already finished writing about Down syndrome and Autism, and is now tackling Schizophrenia:

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 “The trauma of Down syndrome is that it is present prenatally and can therefore undermine the early stages of bonding. The challenge of autism is that it sets in or is detected in the toddler years, and so transfigures the child to whom parents have already bonded. The shock of schizophrenia is that it manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, and parents must accept that the child they have known and loved for more than a decade may be irrevocably lost, even as that child looks much the same as ever.”

Hard to imagine a situation worse for parent and child. Yet good parenting is still so important in this setting, as Solomon later acknowledges:

“Schizophrenia cannot be cured with encouragement and love alone, but it can be hugely exacerbated by neglect.”

This book is worth owning, so you can pick up a chapter at a time, and see what Solomon has to say.

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How Parents Get Caught Up in Their Children's Identities

Another great quote from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree:

“My mother didn’t want me to be gay because she thought it wouldn’t be the happiest course for me, but equally, she didn’t like the image of herself as the mother of a gay son. The problem wasn’t that she wanted to control my life—although she did, like most parents, genuinely believe that her way of being happy was the best way of being happy. The problem was that she wanted to control her life, and it was her life as the mother of a homosexual that she wished to alter. Unfortunately, there was no way for her to fix her problem without involving me.”

Now I see why it bothers my parents so much that I’m no longer a Republican.

PeterUbel