Words&Dirt

Introduction: A Portent of Chaos

Those who know me well understand that my vision of humanity’s possible futures runs the gamut from wildly optimistic to oppressively grim. My cynical tendencies are received from my father, a man many have called “Eeyore” after the droopy donkey that doled out gloomy auguries to the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood in Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Due to an unhappy combination of biology and circumstance, my father’s brilliant mind has never struggled to expose the world’s flaws, but has always struggled––often successfully––to face them without succumbing to despair.

My optimistic streak comes from my mother, an ebullient creature whose life has been a symphony of good deeds and compassionate thinking. In my three decades of life, I’ve never seen this woman face a challenge she could not overcome, all the while keeping a spring in her step and a smile on her face. While my intellectual default favors my father’s pessimism, I seem to have inherited the biochemical foundation of my mother’s energetic, can-do spirit. This concoction of qualities has served me well thus far in life, but I worry that the harmonious balance between my oppositional experience filters will one day fail me, giving way either to maudlin misanthropy or sightless sanguinity.

This fear gets compounded as I feel the world around me becoming more chaotic, and 2017 contained nothing if not a portent of chaos. Whether it was the horrorshow of American politics, extreme weather events, financial hardships, professional perils, personal struggles, or any combination of such challenges, last year did not seem like a year in which humanity was poised to begin solving its many problems. Even for those of us tucked away in pockets of stability and privilege, our platforms of prosperity seem more tenuous by the day. Good news is rare and fleeting. Perplexing indeed would be the individual who bade 2017 goodbye with a teary eye.

My Year of Bookish Wisdom 2017: An Examination of Suffering

At this point, I’ve probably spent enough time contemplating why it’s so easy to feel shitty these days. Pivoting toward the act of reading, I long to preserve it as a form of salvation and peaceful defiance. As the responsibilities of life and modern distractions multiply, uninterrupted reading time becomes harder and harder to come by. I read far fewer books in 2017 than in previous years––a fact about which I can make a lot of excuses but cannot feel any pride. Still, this year has taught me that a drop in quantity needn’t also be accompanied by a drop in quality.

When looking back on my favorite reads of 2017, I can see that my preoccupation with and anxiety about human suffering drove my engagement more than anything else. Regardless of genre, the author’s quest to confront and articulate suffering is an enduring human tradition––one we made need more than ever right now.

Nonfiction

My year in nonfiction was dominated by a pair of books whose authors share many overlapping interests but approach them from radically different angles. The first of these was Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, the delightful follow-up to Sapiens, my favorite nonfiction book of from 2015. Homo Deus picks up where Sapiens left off, examining humanity’s current predicament through a set of broad historical lenses, and offering insights regarding which lessons from history remain relevant and which have become obsolete. Harari stares down the problem of human suffering with a hard-nosed, pragmatic tone, wielding his sharp intellect to craft valuable suggestions about how suffering might be mitigated in the turbulent years to come.

Despite some unhelpful predilections for oversimplification and concept conflation, Harari does a remarkable job of weaving together observations from myriad fields of study, zoning in on some of the hardest problems facing modern humanity. Harari’s explication of the looming automation crisis is especially germane for those interested in the future of labor and wealth distribution. Homo Deus also contains caustic critiques of both humanism and liberalism––arguments that caused me to seriously rethink my allegiance to both of those ideas. Most notably, Harari understands the profound and disconcerting implications of our increasing ability to realize the humanist project:

The rise of humanism also contains the seeds of its downfall. While the attempt to upgrade humans into gods takes humanism to its logical conclusion, it simultaneously exposes humanism’s inherent flaws…The same technologies that can upgrade humans into gods might also make humans irrelevant…Once we come nearer to achieving these goals the resulting upheavals are likely to deflect us towards entirely different destinations. (66)

This passage reflects Harari’s open-ended attitude regarding the developments that will shape the future, but the overall message is not a hopeful one. Even the sunnier outcomes are sure to bring much suffering, and while Harari is more than aware of the pervasive presence of suffering throughout history, he presses the reader to acknowledge that the stakes––for civilization and the planet itself––have never been higher. Homo Deus is an invaluable text for anyone trying to comprehend the modern moment and find a place in it.

Homo Deus was poised to become my favorite nonfiction book of 2017, but in the end it was edged out by a far more complicated and rewarding text: Robert M. Sapolsky’s Behave.

Behave is without doubt the best science book I read this year, and upon reflection, probably the best science book I’ve read since college. Delving into an almost inconceivably vast array of scientific topics, Sapolsky wrests insights of the highest caliber from troves of dense, esoteric, and often-contradictory research on the numerous factors that influence human behavior. The resulting text is a monumental achievement––a worthy descendent of Edward O. Wilson’s groundbreaking Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.  As one of my friends rightly commented, “This book really does present the strongest argument yet that we are all ‘determined.'”

Even if you’re not a determinist, Behave is essential reading for anyone interested in human nature and how science can be wielded to create a better world. Two qualities that make Sapolsky stand out are his playful wit and compassionate nature; when mixed with his undeniable brilliance, these characteristics produce a tone that is authoritative without becoming overly didactic and sensitive without descending into histrionics. He is truly a sui generis thinker of the modern moment.

Behave has a lot to say about the problem of suffering, examining its root causes as well as possible ways to alleviate it. Unlike Harari, one gets the impression that Sapolsky truly cares about this issue in a personal way, that he actually feels for the suffering of the world rather than treating it as merely a mechanistic problem to be solved (although I think he’d admit it is surely that!). One of his most important findings is that our capacity for empathy and its attendant emotions––the bedrock of ethics in many respects––can also compromise our ability to intelligently respond to our direst discontents:

Why is this person in pain, and whose fault is it? This is obvious when pain is rooted in injustice, when disgust, indignation, and anger sweep in because we know that this pain could have been prevented, that someone profited from it. Even when it is unclear that a cause of pain lies in injustice, we seek attribution––the intertwining of the ACC [anterior cingulate cortex] with the insula and amygdala is our world of scapegoating. And that pattern is so often there even when pain is random, without human agency or villainy––literal or metaphorical tectonic plates shift, the earth opens up and swallows someone innocent, and we rail against the people who deprived that victim of a happier life before the tragedy struck, against the God behind this act of God, against the mechanistic indifference of the universe. And as we will see, the more the purity of empathy is clouded with the anger, disgust, and indignation of blame, the harder it is to actually help. (531, emphasis his)

This final assertion, which Sapolsky supports with much evidence, cannot be overstated in this moment of national and global outrage. Books like Behave teach us that the best thing we can possibly do in the face of suffering is keep our cool, breathe deeply, and chart a course that balances our imperfect-but-unavoidable emotional instincts with our more level-headed cognitive and strategic capacities:

From massive, breathtaking barbarity to countless pinpricks of microaggression, Us versus Them has produced oceans of pain. Yet our generic goal is not to “cure” us of Us/Them dichotomizing. It can’t be done…If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. (423-4)

I found no better lessons on any page of any book in 2017. Three cheers for this lovable guy!

Before moving on to fiction, I’d like to mention three other works of nonfiction that shaped my political thinking in 2017. These are J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, and Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash. Like many other Americans, I’m deeply concerned about the future of my country, and am particularly dismayed by the widening rhetorical and ideological divides between “liberal” and “conservative” Americans. These divisive labels mean less and less to me the more I examine them, and these days I think of myself as a political centrist or rationalist. The books above helped facilitate that transition by lifting the lid on the perspectives of people I’d previously written off or dehumanized because I didn’t agree with their religion, politics, or general worldview.

This was also the year that I discovered Sam Harris’s Waking Up, a podcast that challenged me to consider the internecine nature of extreme formulations of identity politics, to reprioritize humanity’s shared capacity for reason as the most important focus of political life, and to strive toward better modes of thinking and communication that befit an enlightened inhabitant of the 21st century. Waking Up is also an amazing resource for up-to-date information on an impressive range of important scientific and cultural topics.   

Fiction

My year in fiction was dominated by a trifecta of female authors who touched my heart through complex and fearless explorations of human suffering. I’ll begin with Italian author Elena Ferrante. After hearing oodles of praise for Ferrante on various podcasts, I decided to try out My Brilliant Friend, the first of her acclaimed Neapolitan Novels.

In a stripped-down yet intellectually rich voice, Ferrante lays out the story of two girls––Elena and Lila––who grow up together in postfascist Naples. Focusing on the horrors and joys of adolescent friendship, My Brilliant Friend invites the reader to contemplate the painful process of unfavorably comparing oneself to a childhood companion: “I was blind, she a falcon; I had an opaque pupil, she narrowed her eyes, with darting glances that saw more; I clung to her arm, among the shadows, she guided me with a stern gaze” (loc. 3399).

Elena, the narrator, feels constantly inferior to Lila, who seems to effortlessly surpass Elena’s best bids for intellectual and social success at every turn. This form of suffering, made palpable by Ferrante’s precise language, is equal parts sophomoric and profound. As the girls mature into young women, their life-paths become tangled in a complex web of affection and resentment, their talents and personalities blurred by a powerful and vicious bond. I find it hard to articulate exactly why the climax of My Brilliant Friend was so moving, but the book had a resounding emotional impact––one that still echoes several months later.

Another favorite from my 2017 reading list is Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams. This visceral and devastating novel cut straight into my body and buried itself there.

As one might expect from the title, Anagrams is a hard book to pin down. In its simplest form, it is a novel about love and loss, and how those things are just as much imaginary as they are real. The story focuses on Benna and Gerard––two sometime-lovers locked in orbit, like galaxies colliding, their constituent parts too scattered for intimate contact even as they tear each other apart. Part One offers several scenarios where Benna and Gerard are both present, but with slightly different personal connections, locations, and occupations. Each of these anagramic iterations creates its own insular universe while still bleeding thematically and emotionally into the others. In Part Two, we get a more consistent (although still untraditional) storyline that carries the reader through the remainder of the novel. Such stylistic changeups often prove jarring, but in this case Moore transforms something already great into something undeniably brilliant.

At its core, Anagrams is a painstaking examination of human suffering. As she struggles to sort fact from fiction, Benna is bolstered and betrayed by the linguistic circus of her own mind: “All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can’t see because you don’t have your glasses on” (206). This image––a half-blind person fumbling for a sense of clarity that is just out of reach––is as good as any to sum up my feelings about 2017. I am grateful to have had such meritorious works of literature to help me through the tough days.

Lauren’s Groff’s Arcadia was probably the most emotionally-affecting novel I read in 2017. This is Groff’s second consecutive appearance in my Year of Bookish Wisdom series; her delightful book Fates and Furies made the cut last year.

Arcadia is one of those gems that hid its magnificence from me at the start, slowly building into a beautiful and heartbreaking tale of one man’s journey from childhood to manhood. Bit, the protagonist, begins his life as the eldest but most diminutive native son of Arcadia, a strange commune founded in western New York State during the 1970s.

I found the early sections of the book somewhat confusing due to the large cast of characters, and struggled with the obnoxious personalities communes tend to attract. But Groff’s superb writing kept me coming back, and quickly Bit’s tale became much more engaging and emotionally vast than I had expected from the opening pages. Straddling the line between past and future, the story reaches its climax in a harsh, near-future America where food shortages, disease, and ecosystem collapse have become the norm. Groff nobly refuses to disrespect the reader with grand gestures or false promises of renewal and redemption. Instead, Arcadia brilliantly examines the special kind of suffering that accompanies deep disillusionment, contextualizing Bit’s most intimate moments of individuated pain and elation within the global malaise that dominates our time:

Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath. (289)

Lastly, I’d like to mention the most challenging but also most impressive novel I managed to take on this year: Peter Matthiessen’s epic Shadow Country. 

This singular work of historical fiction, which explores the circumstances surrounding the murder of real-life outlaw Edgar Watson at the hands of his neighbors in early 20th-century Chokoloskee, Florida, is a testament to the human capacities for perseverance and suffering. Matthiessen plays masterfully with perspective in this novel, adopting a range of narrative points of view in order to generate unique moments of tension, mystery and revelation. Shadow Country is a harrowing journey into a world where even the best of intentions become overwhelmed by the power of tradition and history––a text teeming with dark truths about the nature of human existence:

I faced the fact that I had not always taken care of trouble the right way. I had never admitted, for example, that a lot of it was of my own manufacture…Some would say that Edgar Watson is a bad man by nature. Ed Watson is the man I was created. If I was created evil, somebody better hustle off to church, take it up with God. I don’t believe a man is born with a bad nature. I enjoy folks, most of ‘em. But it’s true that I drink too much in my black moods, see only threats and enmity on every side. And in that darkness I strike too fast, and by the time I come clear, trouble has caught up with me again. (806)

Conclusion: Into the Storm

I’ve wondered more than a few times recently if my preoccupation with artistic and intellectual depictions of suffering might be at least somewhat unhealthy. And I’ve battled with the first-world irony that colors my situation––the fact that I can only examine suffering in this way because I am not in a constant state of suffering or under immediate threat of becoming so. It is hard to say exactly why I am drawn to these kinds of books, but one possible reason is that, as a person to whom compassion does not come naturally, perhaps I need extreme examples of suffering to rouse me from complacency. Then again, my complacency is remarkably robust.

I guess the explanation that appears most valid is that old cliché: only by looking suffering in the eye can we learn how to defeat it. When we learn to see the suffering around us and to anticipate the hints of suffering on the horizon, we become better acquainted with the actual conditions within which our lives get better or worse. This may not lead to limitless prosperity or heavenly redemption, but could yet produce a tomorrow marred with less suffering than yesterday. Even that modest goal can feel like a tall order these days, but fuck it––I ain’t giving up.