History of My Reading: Two Cultures (Part 1)

According to what I hear and read, a high school student selecting a college these days involves at least one family road trip to target campuses, follow-up visits to the short list and then serious negotiations with the top choice (or two), involving conversations in person and on the phone with administrators and teachers. Colleges often bus or fly "prospectives" to campus for group and personal tours, while prospective interest expressed in a particular field of study might mean texts, emails and a phone call from the relevant department chair.

 So my experience in choosing a college in the early 1960s might seem unbelievable. But when I committed to Knox College, I hadn't spoken to a single person there. Until I got out of our black Mercury station wagon in front of Anderson House, my first year residence, I had never set foot in Galesburg, Illinois. The first representative of Knox College I'd actually met was the student who ticked my name off his list and showed me my room at the back of the third floor.

 Nevertheless, I had carefully considered what college I would decide to go to. But my decisions were made mostly sitting at my old varnished wood desk in my room, reading. Or lying on my bed, staring up at the light fixture that had been there since the room was new, and I moved in at the age of five. The Roy Rogers bedspread of my childhood was gone by then.

Probably the brown linoleum with cowboy scenes that covered the hardwood floor of my room was gone by then, too. But the shade on the overhead light was still there: a gold colored fixture shaped like the wheel on the bridge of an old sailing ship, with a pearl white shade that had various nautical decorations on the sides. But facing down at me was a kind of compass, with the four cardinal directions marked in red. The question was: which way would I go?

I wasn't sailing east, down Route 30 a few miles to St. Vincent College, where many of my high school classmates were headed. But should I go south, to Georgetown in Washington, D.C.? That was unlikely. I only applied there to keep my Central Catholic high school teachers off my back--their only interest seemed to be that I go to a Catholic college. I deliberately chose a school that was unlikely to give me the scholarship I would need even to think about it. If lightning struck however, it was the one Catholic university I knew of that I might consider.

 But basically I wanted out of the stifling insistence of Catholic schools. I had some idea colleges wouldn't be as doctrinaire as high school but I didn't want to take the chance. I could go north, to Michigan State. The only person I knew who was actually in an out of state college, a second cousin, was going there, and she was enthusiastic. Plus it was pretty cheap. My shot in the dark was Columbia University in New York, which I had visited for a high school journalism convention, but  it was very expensive.

 Or I could sail west--either a little ways west, to the University of Pittsburgh. Or farther west, to this school nobody I knew had ever heard of, that liked to call itself the Harvard of the Midwest.

I'd only heard about it because I'd entered a Scholastic Magazine Writing Awards contest my junior year, and I placed in one of the categories (Dramatic Script.) It turned out that in addition to a small cash prize, this award made me eligible for a Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship at the two institutions of higher learning that gave one: the University of Pittsburgh, which I certainly knew something about (it was 30 miles away, and I'd been on campus several times) and this other place, Knox College, that I knew nothing about.

 They were both described as full four year scholarships--just what I needed. I wanted to go away to college. But any chance of college necessitated a scholarship.  So I applied for both.

 As for the choice, I was pretty much on my own. Neither of my parents had gone to college. I was the oldest in my generation on both sides of the family, so nobody else had yet gone through this. I literally did not know anyone who had gone to college, except my Aunt Toni (who lived far away in Maryland), my Uncle Carl, and eventually a few students a year ahead of me in high school who were just starting. (I don't count the priests and nuns who taught at my high school, at least some of whom presumably had degrees. They were useless.) Nobody I knew had experience in this process.  I talked about college a little with classmates, but college shopping was still basically yet another middle class mystery.

 My uncle and aunt had gone to the two local Catholic colleges, and had lived at home. Most of the students I knew from high school were going to these same schools. Those that weren't--who went off to Pitt or Carnegie Tech or Penn State--just seemed to disappear. I didn't have much of anyone to talk to about my strong need to seek a bigger world, let alone how best to accomplish it. So I researched the only way I knew how. I read. And most of what I read was what these institutions sent me.

  Probably in the spring of my senior year, and certainly by the time I was getting ready for college that summer, my parents presented me with two new matching Samsonite suitcases. They looked like this:

I used one or another of them on trips home, and for years of train, air, auto and bus travel. Decades later they became storage units, repositories of whatever improbably survived from high school and college. In one of them is stored a number of items relating to that college decision (though it was my mother who saved the important papers.)

Such as the letter received by my high school principal on May 3, 1963 from the Scholastic Awards announcing that I had won a second in the national writing awards.  In addition to a $25 check and a pen from the Sheaffer company sent three days later, I learned in a separate letter from the Scholastic Awards that the University of Pittsburgh and Knox College each gave a four year scholarship in connection with the Writing Awards, and as a junior I was eligible.  I could apply for either or both.

 The letter included forms to fill out and send to them in the fall (between September 15 and November 15), to be passed on to the respective schools. I applied for both. Junior and senior years involved taking a lot of tests related to college and eligibility for scholarship, the most important being the S.A.T.  There were few guides to taking these tests in those days--too much help was considered unethical. But we did take the PSAT and then the SAT in both junior and senior years.

I remember towards the end of this test-taking process being roused on a Saturday morning and driven to an unfamiliar school to take one.  I was drowsy and in a bad mood and I did badly.

 But fortunately I had a good day for the senior SAT, soaring over 700 in verbal and actually topping 500 in math--each being at least 50 points higher than my junior test.  Of course these numbers don't mean much now--the tests have apparently changed several times since then.  I didn't do as well on my senior Achievement Tests, and actually scored higher on American History than English.  Maybe those were the ones I took that Saturday.

 I have a December 1963 letter from Michigan State about sending them a deposit to confirm that I was coming, so I must have received the acceptance letter earlier. In early January 1964 I got a letter accepting me into the University of Pittsburgh, with a scholarship offer a few weeks later.

I don't have anything surviving from Georgetown, but I was accepted without scholarship.  I believe I was wait-listed at Columbia. In February 1964 I got a letter from Allan Christiansen, Director of Admissions at Knox, informing me that I'd been awarded the Scholastic Magazines Scholarship. I had until April 1 to notify them if I was accepting.  Pitt wanted to know by May. So then it was time to decide.

  I'd read somewhere--probably in some august publication like the Reader's Digest--that to make a big decision you should list all the pros and then all the cons.  So that's what I did, and I actually still have the three legal size card stock sheets I used.

 I had apparently already eliminated Michigan State.  I'm sure one factor came in the envelope asking for my deposit.  It was my student punch card, the kind with the little holes.  The "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" cards that were even then a symbol of depersonalization. I was a little leery of such a big school anyway.  High school was claustrophobic, so a large university had some appeal.  But it was also overwhelming and hard to make judgments about.   Their academic programs seemed lost in skills and prep-professional majors, like hotel management. Anyway, once acceptances came in from elsewhere, I had no interest in Michigan State.

 So my decision sheets started with what had to be the first consideration: cost. Surprisingly, on paper, Georgetown was not more expensive that Pitt or Knox--in fact, even with room and board, it was slightly cheaper.  But no scholarship. Once scholarship offers came in from elsewhere, it wasn't a practical choice.

I'd marked Georgetown as "large, urban, fairly distant."  Pitt was "large, urban, close."  I actually did know someone who was a first year there, and she loved it.  But Linda tended to be enthusiastic about everything.

She showed me around one day. There were three new high rise residence halls shaped like cleanser cans.  They were officially designated buildings A, B and C, but the students had dubbed them Ajax, Bab-o and Comet. I'd been to the Pitt campus before (and a few more times at Forbes Field across the street, where the Pirates played.)

I was always impressed by the Cathedral of Learning--a building that should be more famous than it is--and the magic I felt the first time I walked into its small offspring, the Steven Foster theatre, never left me.  (I subsequently saw a lot of Shakespeare there.  And eventually, taught a writing course in the basement of the Cathedral.)  Still, I left that visit with the campus still a blank of buildings.

One day my Uncle Carl visited, and came into my room for a private chat.  We sat on my bed, under those four directions on the ceiling lamp.  He suggested that I would make a lot of contacts at Pitt that would be useful to me later.  He was assuming I would stay in western Pennsylvania, an assumption I wasn't making. But this was the best informed advice I got in my decision-making process.

Pitt Cathedral of Learning

Pitt had sent me a few sheets of information they distributed to Scholastic Magazines applicants, about the English and writing programs.  I noted that these looked good.  My comment was "could not make a mistake going here."  That was the ultimate consideration: the fear of making a huge mistake.

 Pitt made sense in many ways.  The campus was far enough away for some independence, close enough for whatever support I might need.  I knew of at least one high school friend who was likely to go, so I wouldn't be starting out completely alone among strangers. So for awhile, it must have looked like Pitt was it.

  I'd gotten my first letter from Knox in September 1963, when I'd first applied for the Scholastic Awards scholarship.  That's when they sent me several brochures and a course catalog.  I'd been looking at them for months, but now in the early spring it was time to give them one last examination.

Prof. Douglas Wilson from 1960s Knox Idea

Unfortunately I no longer have the actual material they sent me, though I picked up similar brochures in 1968.  In addition to the course catalog, the probably sent a brochure introducing Knox College, and they certainly sent the more substantive Knox Idea, and a thin brochure, probably four pages counting the title page and the back, on heavy cream white paper.  On the cover it said "The Writing Program At Knox."

The contents of the late 60s Knox Idea I have appears to be largely the same as the one I received in 1963, especially since the photos of students seem from at least a few years before my time (though I do seem to recognize one or two), and all the faculty are familiar, though perhaps younger. I remember the same photos of dorm rooms, which made them look improbably large, as students later complained.

I  remember the same photo of Everett Dirksen (Republican Senate leader from Illinois, who bowed to the Civil Rights bills with the quote about an idea whose time has come) in the section on guest appearances.  (And there were no examples of notable guests from my years or later.)  But the booklet itself is not as I remember it.   I recall the Knox documents I got as being on glossy paper with a unique but old fashioned typeface, and borders and backgrounds of purple and gray.

 One element that is definitely different is the trees.  The brochures/booklets I got had photos of the Knox campus, with many trees leafily lining the brick walks and sheltering the grass between earnest old buildings.  The trees were a comfort, a hope, as they were to me in my western Pennsylvania reveries.  Later editions don't have these photos, probably because most of the trees were cut down.

Those trees gave me an impression of the campus that was very important to its appeal.  But Dutch Elm Disease came.  Some of the trees were gone when I got there, and I awoke in Anderson House too many mornings to the portentous whine of chain saws several blocks away on campus. Still, many trees survived, including the persimmon trees in Standish Park that Mary Jacobson loved during our few walks there in a future year.

 What turned me towards Knox? The financials were slightly better than Pitt, enough to cite to my parents as a basis for my decision.  That cream white brochure on parchment paper called "The Writing Program at Knox" was modest but elegant, and gave me a sense of the writing program's independence, importance and its context.  That my scholarship was identified as the Scholastic Writing Awards Scholarship.  That it was a coeducational liberal arts college.  That it was an unknown land, and yet, in a town I might understand, in the Land of Lincoln.

The campus, the trees, and above all how they filled out the image of the Knox Idea: The Knox idea of education is to lead students to learn and to think. The Knox idea encourages students to enter into the spirit of free inquiry essential to a liberal education....Knox College wants its students, in and out of class, to question, to probe, to decide for themselves what is true--and to accept the responsibility for their decisions. The Knox idea emphasizes that the faculty has, as its principal concern, the intellectual development of Knox students. 

 Faculty members are firmly committed to the belief that the students' progress is most important and must be served by, rather than subordinated to, an interest in research or in books, buildings, or equipment.

 It said that Knox students are expected to "acquire certain abilities:" To think logically To speak and write clearly and effectively To be resourceful in obtaining further knowledge.... And so on. All of this represented the culture I wanted to be part of.

 It meant leaving the culture I was in.  Leaving the limited and deceptive "free inquiry" of  Catholic schools, and the limitations of the time and place that had brought me up so far. Though it was becoming economically middle class, the world I knew was culturally working class.  Most men didn't see the point of college, when there were secure and well-paid jobs in union plants.  But even those who saw college as a step up into professions, expected those students to return to home and family.

 It was a delicate dance at best.  Even those who got their education locally and stayed near would run into the attitude expressed in the phrase we all heard: "Who do you think you are?"  Improving your earning ability or even status was understandable, to a point.  But suddenly, betterment meant you think you're better than us, better than me.  Their sense of betrayal and alienation, or simply of inability to understand why, were never far off. My world had been expanded by television, newspapers, movies, magazines and books.  There was a world I saw in ideas and images, though had not yet touched. A world of principles and expression, of potential to be realized, of gifts to be developed and then given.

So I set sail for Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Did I find any substance to the Knox Idea there?  It was never that pure, seldom articulated, often lost.  But in the end that wasn't the point.  It wasn't a question of whether Knox College believed in the Knox Idea and tried to live it.  It was that I did.

History of My Reading: Portrait of a Reader as an NCB

In my previous posts on childhood and adolescent reading, I was guided by musings on the books as artifacts and how I came to read them--childhood books at home, then from the public library, then my own paperback purchases.  But I neglected (or forgot) some other books that were important to me, that can also be viewed in light of a few personal characteristics and circumstances.

So let's review: My systematic reading began in school. Instruction was visual and sound-based, sounding out words, which came to be known as phonics.   I was in the top reading group in first grade (the Rosebuds), as we followed the unexciting adventures of Dick and Jane. By third grade I was excited by the expanding vocabulary, especially action words like "zipped" and "whizzed."  

Throughout the grades in Catholic school our major reading was the Baltimore Catechism, with its question and answer format. (Who made me?  God made me.)  We not only read it but recited, and were quizzed on it--our answers had to be verbatim.  Otherwise would be the near occasion of sin.  So it was for nice Catholic boys and girls.  But the ritual aspects and language probably prepared me for poetry.

I learned quickly, especially vocabulary.  But I was not a prodigy by any means.  I may have read often, but I had far too much physical energy to stick with reading for very long at a time.  I was an active, "free-range" kid.  I had bouts of childhood illnesses to thank for some of those reading experiences--even beyond comic books. But even by high school I had particular trouble with long narratives.

The worst were when our English courses included Silas Marner by George Eliot and Great Expectations by Dickens.  Even though they were probably abridged versions, they were excruciating.  I especially didn't enjoy being forced to spend so much time with such an awful and scary person as Miss Havisham.  That drudgery put me off nineteenth century English novels for a very long time.

But it is also true that I got some exposure to a breadth of literature, especially English and American, in high school English classes.  We were not assigned individual novels or poetry anthologies.  We were required to purchase sets of paperback collections, approved for Catholic school students.  But even though there was the usual Catholic slant in descriptions of authors and works, and Catholic authors like Cardinal Newman were raised to equal rank with more recognized writers, I did get a taste of a range of writers, including many not covered in any of my college literature courses.  In particular, I recall we read a lot of essays, by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (in fact, I recall one of the volumes was entitled "Shakespeare to Goldsmith:), William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb,  Thomas De Quincey and--yes--John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.  I did tend to think they were long-winded but it was how I learned that the essay is considered a literary form. 

Especially in my public library reading before high school, I got through other books if the story was exciting, even if I didn't understand all the other stuff.  I read some awful stuff, too.  I had a paperback copy of Strive and Succeed by Horatio Alger.  I think this is when I was a hotshot paperboy and fancied myself a businessman (even if my profits went largely to snacks at the neighborhood stores along my route.)  I now have a paperback reprint of that exact edition, and it is truly a terribly written book.

 Sometime before high school I enjoyed reading Tom Sawyer which encouraged me to go on to Huckleberry Finn.  That was a bit more difficult, though it was episodic enough to keep me going.  I may have tired a bit in the middle, until it got exciting again.

One author I recall reading, probably in high school, was William Saroyan.  I got his books out of the library: The Human Comedy, My Name is Aram (short stories), probably one or two more.  I may have seen on television the James Cagney movie adapted from his play, The Time of Our Lives.

 I really liked Saroyan, his small town stories about growing up, learning tolerance and integrity. I did not have the same kind of experiences but I could imagine them, and some of his characters were like some of the older people I encountered.

 Saroyan was a popular and prize-winning author from the 30s to the 50s, but has largely been forgotten.  He was never mentioned in any of my lit courses at college.  Probably judged as too sentimental.  Even Steinbeck (who I also read at this time, though sporadically) was a bit suspect. As was Sinclair Lewis, for stylistic reasons I suppose. I read Babbitt and perhaps Main Street on my own in high school, after I tried to read Kingsblood Royal, which was about racial prejudice.  It was one of his more obscure novels, which I read because a girl I had a crush on said she liked it.  I was excited by the satiric edge--satire, particularly political satire, was big in the early 60s. 

Possibly for the same satiric reason, I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, as did some of my high school friends.  We knew enough about Nineteen Eighty-Four to talk about it, although I'm not sure I read it.  I probably tried to.  I know I saw the 1956 film version on TV, which graphically presented the basics.  We couldn't miss such elements of it as the thought police in regard not only to totalitarianism we studied, but tendencies of the Catholic school environment we existed in. 

The Kennedy campaign of 1960 plunged me into politics, so in addition to the paperbacks I've mentioned (by and about JFK as well as the James Baldwin books that largely led me to the March on Washington in 1963) and the Reader's Digest Condensed Books version of the Washington novel Advise and Consent, I read two other novels about politics: All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's fictional portrayal of Huey Long, and The Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor's evocation of old style Boston politics. If I couldn't follow them completely, they left definite impressions.  

I read a number of popular novels with topical and political themes that got widespread media attention at the time, some after they were made into movies (The Ugly American) but some before (Fail-Safe in 1962, Seven Days In May in 1964, both of these likely as condensed books.)

 So by the end of high school, the recognized literary works I read (as opposed to tried to read but failed) were mostly poems, essays, short stories, short novels, or episodic novels, as described in my post on paperbacks: Updike, J.D. Salinger, etc.  

 I read the classic poems and essays mostly as school assignments (I was especially taken with Matthew Arnold and the few William Blake poems included in the anthology), but once I discovered The College Survey of English Literature (Harcourt Brace 1951) that had belonged to my uncle Carl Severini, I read poems and essays in that volume. In the winter of 1963 I found solace there when President Kennedy was assassinated, in two poems by Shelley: the long poem "Adonais" he wrote on the death of Keats, and a short poem, "Mutability."  I read Frost and was intrigued by E.E. Cummings, but for awhile "Mutability" became my favorite poem:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
  One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest--a dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise--one wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
  Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;

It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
  The path of its departure still is free;
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
  Naught may endure but Mutability.

 Mutability, but I copy this poem from the very volume I read in high school.

In trying to remember which classic adventure stories I actually read when young, as distinguished from encountering as movies or comic books, I only recently recalled The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.  Once I remembered it, the experience of reading it came back to me.

 I read an old hardback from the library, which added to the thrill. That book had a feature that leads me to my second point about my pre-college reading: I was the model of an NCB (Nice Catholic Boy.)  I went to Catholic schools for 12 years.  By high school I was starting to see the Church a bit more objectively, and eventually I was troubled by hypocrisies and lame rationalizations for activities like the Inquisition.  I remember being both uneasy and thrilled that the villains of The Three Musketeers were the Catholic Cardinal and his men.

In high school I read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in paperback, with just enough comprehension to get the basic story and mood.  The idea of being ostracized for dissenting behavior, being literally marked for going against the dominant beliefs of the community, was haunting, given the doubts I was starting to have.

I was also fascinated with Joseph Conrad. I must have read Lord Jim because I took a paperback with me to college, but the story I remember in particular was "The Secret Sharer." I felt a certain closeness to that.

 Many of the questions I had in high school questions came from actual Church history, and from applying principles we were learning in, say, Problems of Democracy class, to what we were analyzing in Religion.  I was attracted to the subject of individuality versus the conventional wisdom, and of the liberty to dissent.  This led me to books like David Reisman's Individualism Reconsidered, Edgar Friedenberg's The Vanishing Adolescent, and the work of John Stuart Mill.  I write more about these books in a subsequent post.

Where did I read?  Though I no longer have specific memories of this, I'm sure I replicated the parties that adolescent readers throw themselves: stacking up snacks, like peanut butter on Saltines, next to the couch or chair where I sprawled to also devour a Hardy Boys mystery or a Winston science fiction novel.  I read outside in the sun or the shade of the front porch.  I also recall being so excited reading J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories that I couldn't sit still to read the last one ("Teddy") so I just started walking in a frenzy, striding fast up the last hill of Hamilton Avenue while trying to read the bouncing pages.

  But my specific sense memories are almost all of books I read reclined on my bed, or actually in it at night: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, All the Kings Men,  and biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

   My interactions with classic literature were partial at best.  But there was one extraordinary reading experience, one literary novel, that became formative for me in a number of ways--and that also evokes memories of reading it deep into the night.   How I got my hands on it was perhaps the most extraordinary element.

   My sophomore year of high school I joined the Speech Club and began going to tournaments at other schools, giving extemporaneous speeches ("Extemp.")  My junior and senior year I participated in Debate.  My partner Mike and I won district championships our senior year in both the National Forensic League and Catholic Forensic League competitions. The speech club advisor was Sister Ronald.  Almost all of our teachers were nuns, of various denominations.  I believe she was a Sister of Mercy, which (along with the Sisters of Charity who taught me in grade school) were begun and/or headquartered in our local region.

GCCHS

I had a complex relationship with another of the Sisters of Mercy, who at first championed me--made me editor of the high school newspaper as a freshman (not quite as radical as it seems--we were a new high school with only two classes at the time, first and second years) and promoted me into the first bunch of the National Honor Society inductees.  Later she fired me from the newspaper and tried to get me thrown off the NHS, after lecturing me about my lack of humility.

  She also seemed particularly bothered by observing that I talked to too many girls. Her fixation on me even became a source of embarrassment for the school administration, as I learned when the principal asked me to "forgive and forget."  I answered with a quote from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whose biography I had recently read for some unknown reason.  "I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience."

 Anyway, Sister Ronald must have known about this situation, and my ongoing emotional turmoil.  She was a bit of a mercurial character as well.  One day out of the blue she slipped me an old, hardbound copy of a book.  She suggested I read it and return it to her, with the clear implication that I should not tell anyone else about it.

The book was A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce.  I knew pretty quickly why it had to be kept secret. Our Catholic high school strictly controlled what we read.

  Our textbooks, even the literature collections, all displayed the nihil obstat and imprimatur indicating the contents were free from doctrinal and moral error.  James Joyce, while not on the official Church Index of forbidden books, was not exactly approved either.

 Joyce's novel Ulysses had been notorious, even banned in the United States until a landmark court case.  His collection of short stories, Dubliners, was mostly considered acceptable--one of the stories may even have been in our paperback collection of modern authors.  A Portrait of the Artist was somewhere in between, but it soon became clear to me why we weren't encouraged to read it.

The novel follows the childhood and adolescence of Stephen Dedalus in and around Dublin in the very late 19th century.  The early set piece scene of a Christmas dinner exposes the tensions among Stephen's elders regarding the Church's treatment of a hero of Irish independence.  Stephen goes to a Jesuit school, where he is bullied by students and clergy, but also supported by other students and clergy.

from the 1977 film of A Portrait

At 16, Stephen becomes obsessed with sex and on one of his long feverish walks finds himself in Dublin's red light district.  He returns to prostitutes often.  Then his school holds a retreat: several days during which ordinary school work is suspended and students are expected to concentrate on spiritual contemplation when not attending lectures by a priest brought in especially for the retreat.

 This priest gives several sermons--fulsomely reproduced--describing the physical and mental torments of hell in great detail.  Stephen subsequently repents and becomes a saintly figure.  But when he is invited to consider whether he has a vocation for the priesthood, Stephen just as suddenly recoils against it.

By the last few chapters, he has rejected the Church and is preparing to leave Ireland, for a life of "silence, exile, cunning" to artistically "forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

 Anti-clerical diatribes, sex with prostitutes (though at best I only vaguely understood this section), rejection of the Church--no mystery as to why this book wasn't approved, or was treated like it didn't exist.  Why did Sister Ronald give it to me?  I'll never really know.  I remember that I just as secretly returned it to her.

 The Viking Library annotated edition of Portrait notes that the sermons on hell were very similar to those the Jesuits gave from the 16th through the 19th centuries.  Well, it didn't end there.  Sometime after I'd read this book, in my junior year of high school, we had the first of our retreats--and the priest engaged to give the lectures devoted one of them to an exact echo of these graphic descriptions of hell.

 I had my spells of being especially devout--I was an altar boy for several years--but I don't recall being particularly moved by this lecture.  Perhaps I'd been immunized.  But while the hell sermons stood out--I recall reading them at night in bed, my cold arms holding the book outside the bed covers--the influence of the book was probably subliminal, suggesting that I wasn't alone in questioning the immediate world pressing around me.

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man was the only book I read in high school that I subsequently read again for a class in college.  It had more of a direct impact that time, the fall term of my junior year in a course on modern novels with Howard Wilson.  James Joyce became a literary hero and model in the years immediately following.

 As for "silence, exile, cunning," I never got the silence quite right--I was a loudmouth, though I yearned for silence around me.  I was soon to learn that when necessary, I could engage the cunning--with mixed success. But exile I understood.  It was the future I saw for myself with increasing definition over those late 60s years.    

History of My Reading: The Comic Book Era

Since I've posted on the 80th anniversary of Superman, who appeared first in a comic book, I'm going to continue the "history of my reading" series with this post about comic books.

Comic books influenced the art world most conspicuously in the 1950s with American Pop Art (although Gertrude Stein maintained that Picasso loved newspaper comic strips which she said influenced Cubism.)

They became subjects of literary speculation if not yet actual acceptance as literary products in the 1960s when Marshall McLuhan started talking about them as emblematic of the new media.  The Batman TV show, with its interpolated "Bif!" and "Pow!" derived from comic book panels, reflected the comic book's sudden status as fashionably hip.

Later the countercultural Zap Comix became an integral part of the hippie scene.

The late 60s also saw the beginning of the Marvel characters that reinvigorated and revived comic books, especially Spider-Man, enthusiastically introduced to me in college by fellow Knox student Erica Overberger.

Since then, apart from becoming the source of major movie empires,  comic books have morphed into the literary form of the graphic novel. But my major comic books period was earlier in the 1950s.

 My first exposure was to the newspaper comic strips, which historically also preceded comic books.  These black and white comic strips of maybe five horizontal panels appeared on a page in the daily newspaper, accompanied by single panel vertical comics, and perhaps a crossword puzzle and the daily horoscopes.

 The Sunday newspaper however had an entire section of perhaps 6 or 8 pages of full color comic strips with many more panels each.  In my childhood, I saw the local Greensburg paper (the evening Tribune, until it merged with the morning Review to become the Greensburg Tribune-Review) but it did not then print a Sunday edition.  Instead we got the Sunday Pittsburgh Press.  Despite the difference, many of the comic strips were the same, though there were more on Sundays.

Usually leading the page in both papers in my 1950s childhood was the very basic art and story of Nancy, with her friend Sluggo.

One of the most famous comic strip lines often applied to other subjects but originally to environmental destruction.

Then I regularly saw many of the well-known newspaper comic strips of the time, including Peanuts, Archie and Jughead, Blondie, Pogo, Terry and the Pirates, the Phantom (one of my favorites), Dondi, Prince Valiant (Sundays only), Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon, Joe Palooka, Gasoline Alley, Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, and the one panel Family Circus and Our Boarding House...Among the detectives, fighter jocks and soldiers of fortune there were Rex Morgan M.D. and intrepid reporters Brenda Starr and Scoop Mallory.

 But there were others, particularly in our daily Tribune, that aren't as well known.

For example, I read Johnny Hazard for the jet airplane flying scenes.  Curly Kayoe was an obscure strip about a fighter. He once had an opponent called Phil O'Dendron who always wore a black t-shirt in the boxing ring to cover up some dread secret on his chest.  I kept waiting for it to be revealed, and felt cheated when the strip announced that the secret had been told to people who had written in, but the strip itself never said.  It remains a mystery in my life (though I can now pretty much figure out what it was.)

Historically, the first comic books were crude compilations of a particular newspaper comic strip.  Very soon they featured their own characters, and then their own stories for characters established in the newspaper strips. Superman was a creature of the comic books, just four years after they began.

 When it came to new current comics, Superman was not only my favorite but almost the only character I followed. That's partly due to the way I consumed this comics.  New comic books were a dime, which was not nothing in the 1950s, when a loaf of bread was 20 cents and a quart of milk was a quarter (at least at the neighborhood stores where I was sent to buy them.)  Fortunately I had a way to read comic books for free.

My grandfather's tailor shop was approximately half of a long, narrow building on Depot Street in Youngwood, about six miles from my Greensburg home.  My grandparents lived on the same street a couple of blocks down from the shop, towards the train tracks (and the depot.)  The other half was a barber shop, opened by Dominick Gelfo, who had offered my grandfather the space his shop still occupied. Dominick's son Sam ran the shop in the 1950s, and the Gelfo family and the Severinis were neighbors and friends.  So I was welcome in the barber shop.

My grandfather's tailor shop was relatively dimly lit, especially in the back where he worked the steam press.  The barber shop however was very bright, with white walls and those black and white checked floors.  Three or four barber chairs facing a wall of mirrors, with many colorful bottles and other containers on the marble shelf.

In the window that looked out onto the street there were chairs and benches for waiting customers.  There were magazines--and comic books.  Lots of comic books. So when I visited my grandfather's shop I usually managed to spend some time in the barber shop, invariably reading as many comic books as I could.

  Since my time was limited, I stayed mostly with the Superman titles.  And there were a lot of them: Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superman comics and separate comic books for Superboy, Supergirl, Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane, plus the World's Finest featuring Superman and Batman. I read them in great gulps, in a frenzy of red capes and blue-black hair.  The barbers got interested in how many I could read in an hour and often asked for a running count.

An entirely different set of comic books would come my way when I got sick and had to stay home from school.  Colds and their variations, plus measles, mumps and chicken pox--it added up.  Sometimes I could read actual books but often--especially with colds--I was too drowsy to do any more than follow a comic book story.

I would ask my father to bring some comic books home. My father worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and drove a Singer panel truck.  When he wasn't in the store, he was out on "calls" doing repairs and sales.  On his travels he might stop at the little stores that were everywhere then--they sold some grocery staples like bread and milk, soft drinks, candy and baked goods, cigarettes--a bit of everything.  Some sold comic books including the kind they weren't supposed to sell.  When comic books didn't sell out, a store could get its money back on unsold copies.  The owner tore off the top part of the front cover off (with the title and issue date) and returned that to the distributor for cash or credit.  He was supposed to throw the rest of the comic book away.

But some didn't.  They kept the mutilated comic books and sold them for five cents each, or maybe three for a dime.  These were the comic books my father often found and bought. They were sometimes titles and characters I'd never heard of.  And once, out on some country road somewhere, he unknowingly found comic books that were years old--perhaps decades.

 There were multiple issues, for example, that featured the Little Wise Guys.  Sometimes three, sometimes four kids and their adventures. There were comics about a baseball player called Swat Malone, and the various nefarious ways opposing teams would try to cheat and keep him from hitting home runs, which he always did anyway.

But the most amazing set were vintage issues of the original Captain Marvel.  Billy Batson, SHAZAM!  His sister, Mary Marvel. I was completely enthralled and wanted more.  But eventually I realized there were no more.  There hadn't been new Captain Marvels for years.  I'd even sent away for membership in the Captain Marvel club, but got a card back saying the club had been "discontinued."  Did that mean it might start up again?  I couldn't believe there would be no more Captain Marvel.

Part of Captain Marvel's specific appeal was that he was an ordinary pre-adolescent boy (Billy Batson) who could transform into this superhero by saying the magic word given to him by a wizard.  Better than Clark Kent and Superman any day!

 The original Fawcett Publications Captain Marvel stopped publishing in 1953 but based on the drawing style some of the issues I saw may have been from the 1940s. I was drawn to the drawing and the specific colors and look of it. The character was later revived in different forms by several companies--for awhile the two biggies, DC and Marvel both had versions.  But none of them stand up to the original.

According to this video I ran into on YouTube,  in the early 1940s the original Captain Marvel was the most popular superhero, superseding Superman.  Because of that, Fawcett spun off related characters: first Captain Marvel, Jr. and then, notably, Mary Marvel, one of the first and most prominent female superheroes.  She was created by Fawcett writer Otto Binder.

The Marvel Family, separately and together, were enormously popular.  So DC Comics sued them for copyright infringement of their Superman character. The suit dragged on for more than a decade but before it was decided, Fawcett was drained and dropped all their comic books in 1953.

DC then hired former Fawcett writer Otto Binder to write stories for--who else?--Superman.  He wound up creating both a number of classic super-villains who challenged Superman, and a female counterpart in Supergirl.  Ironically, she was a perfect copy of his creation for Fawcett: Mary Marvel. (He'd been so proud of creating Mary Marvel that he named his own daughter after her.) Mary Marvel was also a model for Isis, the first female superhero to star in her own TV show, in 1975.

In the years I was reading new comics in the barber shop, the superhero comics were beginning to get convoluted and fanciful. But the old rationale was often still there: they fought for the weaker, for fairness and justice for all.

It didn't take long for me to want to do more than read the comics--I wanted to write and draw them, too.  We got magazines in school, some with cartoons accompanying stories, and one that was pretty much a comic book.  In the back of at least one issue I remember a little tutorial on drawing cartoon figures.  I used these instructions to draw my own strips.

 My father was also a member of the county Democratic committee and before elections he would get what were then called "specimen ballots"--sample ballots with the approved candidates' boxes checked, to be given to prospective Democratic voters.  They were long pink sheets of paper, with blank backs. I would get the ballots left over from the ones he was supposed to distribute.  I drew my cartoon strips on the back.

 One of my characters was based on Captain Marvel.  Another was a comic character called Flatso.  Along with my ongoing drawings of an imaginary map--changing the borders of the countries to reflect the outcome of wars-- I was absorbed in these comics for awhile, usually in bed just before sleep.  But I wasn't very good at it, so eventually I stopped.  Still, there was a certain magic about doing those strips that I recall fondly.

Eventually I began acquiring and reading other kinds of comic books.  I liked science fiction ones--not just space adventures but actual science fiction, usually anthologies of stories with separate characters.  Stories might hinge on ultraviolet and infrared light, or the acidity of certain plants.

 But I also read war comics, suspense stories, and even horror comics, including the notorious one in which a husband, annoyed that all his wife did was eat chocolate from those Whitman sampler boxes, chopped her up and distributed her body parts in a similar sampler.  These led to stricter standards for comic books, many of which displayed the Comics Code of approval.  This is when my neighborhood friends and I passed comic books back and forth.  Some probably were inherited, like that horror comic.

Not to be neglected were the Classics Illustrated comic books.  I read my first Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories this way.  Classics Illustrated offered a wide range of stories: from the Iliad, Treasure Island, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Moby Dick to several Shakespeare and Dickens' stories.

  I don't remember which ones I read, outside of From the Earth to the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.  I do remember I was limited by the higher price--15 cents--and the fact that they were not readily available either from my friends or at the barber shop.  But I remember those three vividly, as comic books, apart from the movies and the original stories.

 Comic books were sort of midway between books and the animated cartoons I saw on TV and at the movies.  The drawings didn't move or talk but, like characters in books, they spoke in your head.  There was a visual vocabulary and language peculiar to comic books.  Mastering that was a skill that suggested that mastering the skills of reading print-only books was possible.

 Comic books also could be collected, displayed, lent out and traded.  But they were over pretty quickly. They didn't have the sustained worlds you could live in for weeks that books had. Eventually comic books in my life went the way of baseball cards and model airplanes--until that fit of Marvel mania in the late 60s and early 70s, with Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk.  Apart from that, I never got deep into the world of comic book mythologies, comic book collecting and so on.  Still, they furnish these memories.

Postscript: Another direct offshoot of the comic book are books that illustrate academic or otherwise complex subjects.  Probably the most prominent practitioner of this has been Larry Gonick, who I worked with on the Boston Phoenix in the early 70s.  His books like The Cartoon Guide to Physics and similar treatments in science, history and economics look to me like Zap Comix colliding with Classics Illustrated.  His most recent is a collaboration with Tim Kasser, professor of psychology at ye olde Knox College, titled Hyper-Capitalism (New Press, 2018.)

History of My Reading: Bookends

I'm going on with this intermittent series that now has its own label: History of My Reading.  I've added that label to prior posts, a series which began as a result of reading Larry McMurtry's memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.  He wanted to figure out how he, a boy in a rural small town in Texas, wound up owning the country's biggest used books store.  That inspired me to my own ruminations and inquiries about my history of reading and relationship to books in particular.

 I mentioned that my parents--principally, I'm sure, my mother--always had at least a shelf of books in whatever served as their living room, and that this was unusual for our time and place.  I don't remember seeing books displayed in other homes I visited as a child, though perhaps I'm forgetting one or two.  But it was rare, and I've been thinking more about it.  It must have taken a certain courage to do it, and the risk of seeming different when people visited--as they did a lot; my mother was very social, especially in that first decade.  In that time and place, being called different was not often a compliment. My mother was clearly committed to displaying books as a feature of her decor.

One indication is that she had decorative bookends.  The ones I remember most clearly were two golden lions.  They looked like metal and they were heavy, though they actually were painted plaster.  Still, they had a definite heft and presence. You can just make them out behind us in the photo above of my mother and I taken in our first home, an apartment at the top of a large house on College Avenue in Greensburg, PA.

Those lions were later displayed in proper bookshelves in the living room of our new home, on a hill just outside the city limits.  That sofa also made the transition--it was a deep blue upholstered sofa with a matching chair or two.  Two later sets of furniture replaced them, but the lions stayed until both my parents were gone and the house was sold.  I thought I had kept one of the lions--slightly chipped but unbowed. Maybe not, since I can't find it now.

 I believe that to some extent those lions and her books on display were a statement my mother made about herself.  Both of her younger siblings went to college, but as the oldest who graduated high school during the Depression, there was no money to send her--not even to the local Catholic colleges my aunt and uncle attended while still living at home. As a child visiting my grandparents, I slept in the room in which my mother and aunt had slept most of their childhood and adolescence.  The bed and large dresser with the oddly shaped mirror above it that gave me nightmares, didn't leave room for much else.  I wonder if she had space for her own books, as her personal possessions and personal statements.

Maybe that was part of the dream for her own home. There did seem to be a certain aspirational quality to the display in our home, which I think my father felt as well, at least at first.

But there was another weighty bookend in our living room that tells another story.  It's made of actual bronze.

It consists of an ornate platform on which is displayed a bronzed baby shoe.  In fact, mine: their first born. I don't know that people do this much anymore, but bronzing a baby shoe was once quite a thing, at least where I lived. The internet tells me that its popularity began in the US in the 1930s, and that one company in Columbus, Ohio did the bronzing.  This shoe was bronzed in 1948 or so, and Ohio wasn't that far away.

 That it serves as a bookend tells its own story.  The parents guide to the My Book House set suggests that in addition to reading to their children and giving them their own books, parents keep proper books in the house for children to see and get used to as objects, all to encourage them to read.  I'm pretty sure this was a factor in my mother keeping books on display. That's the story the bronze baby shoe bookend tells me.  I have it now on one of our living room bookshelves.

Chatwin's Remarkable Novel: On the Black Hill

On the Black Hill
by Bruce Chatwin
Penguin

Bruce Chatwin became famous for his travel book On Patagonia in 1977, but for On the Black Hill, officially his first novel (published in 1982) he's said to have decided to write about people who never went anywhere.  He became even more famous for The Songlines (1987), the first book of his I read, which he insisted on calling fiction but which was mostly regarded as a kind of travel book.

Though the location of On the Black Hill is both ordinary and exotic, there is no doubt that this is a novel--and an excellent one.  But it is not prominently mentioned in articles about Chatwin (he died in 1989), and if I hadn't accidentally run across a copy of it in a second-hand store I probably never would have read it.  It's astonishing, both in how different it is from the Chatwin I have read, and as an outstanding but relatively unknown novel.

(I wrote about The Songlines and a collection of short pieces, What Am I Doing Here, here.)

The novel chronicles the lives of twin brothers who experience most of the 20th century in rural Wales, living in the same house, sleeping in the same bed for more than 80 years (with some important exceptions.)

Without obvious literary contrivances or sentimentality--nor even romanticism--Chatwin tells the story of a family and rural community with unfailing detail, especially of place and time.  Why then is it so magical, reminding me of the experience of reading Garcia Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude?  For there are no insomnia plagues or even duels to the death in this earthy and uncompromising yet mesmerizing and surprising tale.

Certainly such effects are won by Chatwin's skills as a novelist in structure and storytelling.  His language is apt but not showy.  And he makes the right narrative decisions--for example, by staying with the omniscient narrator (who sometimes dips into the thoughts of the characters) and staying away from dialogue.  For when there is dialogue rendered in rhythms and language of these characters, it gives us the flavor but is so different that it would take us out of the story if done more.

There's also the strangeness (at once simple and extreme) of the place and its people.  Chatwin's travel narratives move in space, but this novel moves in time.  Time and history are always part of his narratives, but this has that same story magic of nearly a hundred years of solitude in this solitary place.  The unfoldings, the connections and fatal turning points, the reconciliations, some prompted by impinging outer events like distant wars, but others by personality and place.  The sweep of the narrative is anchored by detail and character specifics.

 But the magic perhaps resides most of all in the heightened intimacy of twins, and what their bonds suggest about what it is to be human.  The power of the bond, how the bond is tested, the differences that develop and yet the connection we failingly describe (and therefore ignore) as psychic--all of these are part of that magic, and the spell this novel casts.  If Chatwin had written nothing else, this book would be achievement enough.

R.I.P. 2017

J.P. Donleavy died this year, in September at the age of 91.  His first novel is his best remembered, The Ginger Man.  It was perhaps the last of the books that rose from a scandal to a classic.  I wonder if that will happen again.

Donleavy was born in the U.S. but moved back to his ancestral Ireland.  The adventures of a classmate at Trinity College in Dubin--no doubt mixed with his own--became the basis for The Ginger Man.  It was first published in 1955, though barely.  It didn't really get wide distribution until the 60s, which is when I first read it.  A charismatic classmate of mine (also an American of Irish extraction) at Knox College was its enthusiast.  He took to scribbling his favorite line as bathroom graffiti: "Bang on, wizard."

 I loved its verbal invention and Joycean updates.  I read and owned his 9 novels throughout the 1970s plus his collection of plays, but the only volume that seems to have survived in my current collection is his still hilarious The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners.

Since then he not only wrote more novels and other books but saw his work transferred to the stage and a song or two written.  In the 1970s I was working with a fledgling film director who contacted him for movie rights to one of his novels.  Donleavy did his own agent work so David talked to him, but he wasn't interested in having his fiction filmed, and I believe he stuck to that position for the rest of his life.  If he'd given us the rights in this case though, I would have had first crack at the screenplay.

 He also lived to reap awards, including the Irish version of a lifetime achievement award in 2015.  He accepted by reading an excerpt from his The Unexpurgated Code on the proper way to accept an award, which included how to hint that perhaps it could have be awarded earlier.  It's both a funny and a surreal wish-fulfillment moment, as seen on this video, which also includes biographical information and a few excellent tributes.

  Robert Pirsig also died in 2017 at the age of 81.  He developed his personal philosophy in two books, the first of which became very popular in the mid-1970s: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  In that book (if I recall correctly) he wrote that there are basically two kinds of people: the person who notices a dripping faucet and thinks it should be fixed but let's it drip, and the person who immediately fixes it.  There was no question which one I was, but I enjoyed the book anyway.

The style grabbed me and I learned from his point of view, even if motorcycle maintenance would never interest me.  (I'm also reminded that the paperback came in different colors--the first time that gimmick was used, to my recollection.) (Update: Maybe the second.  I think Future Shock was probably the first, a few years earlier.)

In 1968, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevthushenko--already the most famous Russian poet in the West--was a guest at the home of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then running for President.  The two quoted poetry at each other and attempted to toast in the Russian manner by drinking off a glass of champagne and throwing the glasses to break in the fireplace.  But the glasses didn't break--they were plastic.  Both took this as a bad omen.  Within months, Robert Kennedy was dead.  Yevthushenko lived another 49 years, until he died in 2017.

 I've shared thoughts on several other writers who died in 2017: poet John Ashbery, playwright Sam Shepard, columnist Jimmy Breslin, poet Derek Walcott as well as New York Review of Books founding editor Robert Silvers. Other writers who died in 2017 include Nancy Willard, Lillian Ross, Joanne Kyger, Richard Wilbur, John Berger, playwrights Albert Innaurato and David Storey, Dore Ashton, William Gass, Yu Guangzhong, Bette Howland, Nancy Friday, Eric Newman, Nat Hentoff, Anne Wiazemsky, Nora Johnson, Susan Vreeland, Kenneth Silverman, Thomas Fleming, Michael Bond, Sue Grafton, Hugh Thomas, Jean Fritz, Denis Johnson, Jean Stein, Robert James Walker, Paula Fox, Tzetan Todorov and Bharti Mukherjee.

 May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

Beyond the Self: Buddhism and Neuroscience

BEYOND THE SELF: Conversations Between Buddhism and Neuroscience
by Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer
MIT Press 

I remember seeing a public television documentary on the brain, in the early 1970s.  It was then orthodoxy that humans could not consciously affect internal workings of the body.  But the final shot was of a Buddhist monk in meditation, as the voiceover mentioned that meditators claimed to affect their own pulse rate and other functions, and this ought to be investigated.

Shortly after that, biofeedback and "the relaxation response" became New Age enthusiasms that by now have entered orthodox medicine.  The relationship of the brain and body continues to be explored, and for three decades now, the relationship of brain and mind has been explored through the agency of the Mind and Life Institute and the efforts of the Dalai Lama.  A series of gatherings of scientists and monks sparked laboratory research in which experienced meditators like Matthieu Ricard (a participant at several of the Dalai Lama's gatherings) wore sensors that recorded brain patterns, studied by neuroscientists (like Wolf Singer.)

These meetings resulted in a series of books (10 of which I've read and reviewed), with many of the more recent discussions viewable on the Internet.  This work profoundly affected some of the scientists involved, notably psychologist Paul Ekman, who wrote a book with the Dalai Lama.  But neuroscientists have also been fascinated by what they found, which clearly includes Wolf Singer.

The basis for dialogue between Tibetan Buddhists and brain scientists has been that both investigate the workings of the mind.  Tibetan Buddhist meditators have complied centuries of data and conclusions, based on what the meditators experienced.  This is the first person perspective, but with such elaborate data and systems that these scientists, wedded to the objectivity of only the third person perspective, could not ignore.  They also could not ignore how different the brains of very experienced meditators worked.

It's all come a long way and this book is one of the results.  It also turns out to be the  best book I've read on neuroscience, period, and the clearest explanation of Tibetan Buddhism and its approach to meditation.  More specifically, this is the clearest discussion I've read so far on the relationship of Buddhist meditation and the brain.  (I've tried to read James Austin but I failed.)

Ricard (in monks robes) at a Mind and Life dialogue in DC.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is speaking to the Dalai Lama.

Ricard, who is a trained scientist as well as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, has done a few of these dialogue books and he's very good at it.  He and Wolf engaged substantively and for the most part succinctly, which must be partly a product of the editing, as this book reflects dialogues over eight years.

 One impression I got is that at least the particular kind of Buddhism that comes from Tibet and neuroscience are very similar in their view of the brain.  Tibetan Buddhism as I observe from the Dalai Lama and others, and now Ricard, is highly logical.  It comports well with the mechanistic approach of neuroscience, though Wolf is pretty clear on where the mechanistic model runs up against limits.

There are six broad topics that expand to inevitable problems of epistemology and perhaps even (in "why is there something instead of nothing?") cosmology. That they agree on so much may surprise some readers.  The expected disagreement on on the ultimate nature of consciousness is minimized, and Ricard leaves it as an area for further research.

The logical rigor of Tibetan Buddhism may also be surprising.  I remember when as a Catholic boy I first read anything about Buddhist tenets (usually in popular literature), the romantic and mystical elements jumped out, like "enlightenment" and Zen koans.  The koan that seemed to capture everyone's imagination was: "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"  It promised such depths of paradox and maybe even, the Answer.

But Ricard uses it in a different context, to explain how a heated argument needs two participants.  "So, as the Tibetan saying goes, 'One cannot clap with one hand."  So it seems that for Tibetan Buddhists the answer to "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" is exactly what common sense tells you: silence.

Within the broad topics and technical discussions, I found at least one answer I've been seeking.  As Ricard says, the concentration of meditation is not rumination--in fact, ruminating is a distraction to be avoided.  I always wondered how a creative person reconciles meditational rigor with the creative fruits of rumination, daydreaming, imagination.

The answer is akin to the sound of one hand clapping--because the relationship is the contradiction it seems to be. Wolf surmises that unstable states (the wandering mind) could be a prerequisite for creativity.  Ricard agrees, citing a neuroscience study: "brain states favorable to creativity seem to be mutually exclusive with focused attention."

Which of course is not to say that writers and other creative people shouldn't meditate, for it certainly helps in many other ways which eventually contribute to the creative life.

For myself, even though Tibetan Buddhism presents the closest thing to a practical and congenial belief and value system, there are limits to its application. (Plus as much as the Dalai Lama laughs, I find Zen funnier, in that paradoxical way.) And there are many more limits to neuroscience, in my view.  It's interesting that to some this book is a revelation that Buddhism actually has something to say about the brain.  That's been clear to me for decades, but if its clarity finally gets through, then it has done its job, with elegant rigor.