"Surrendering to the Logic of a Book is the Way One Learns"

A fascinating take on the differences between reading a book and reading online.

An excerpt:

Writing in The New Republic in 2005, Johns Hopkins University historian David A. Bell described the often arduous process of reading a scholarly book in digital rather than print format: “I scroll back and forth, search for keywords, and interrupt myself even more often than usual to refill my coffee cup, check my e-mail, check the news, rearrange files in my desk drawer. Eventually I get through the book, and am glad to have done so. But a week later I find it remarkably hard to remember what I have read.”

As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.

Packing for a Journey

From my collection of Matchbook cars, which I have had since I was 8. I still keep them in their original collectors' case in my office.

On Fear and Anger, Love and Play

From the inspiring 2007 book Younger Next Year by Crowley and Lodge


Reproduction of a fossil of a scarab, 1984, collection of the author's wife.

"Your physical, reptilian brain has the control centers for fear and aggression, our deepest and most primitive emotions. Killing prey, territorial defenses, sexual predation and ruthlesss self-interest are the legacy of our earliest ancestors...

The brilliance, the absolute triumph of mammals, is that we took the same chemistry, the same neurological wiring, and turned it around to create positive emotions. Reptiles run purely on negative reinforcement emotions. Mammals invented love, joy, pleasure, and play, all of which are enshrined in our DNA.

But the reptiles were doing pretty well with anger and agression. Why go further? What's the biological point of love or friendship, of being happy, sad, optimistic or enthusiastic? Why invest extra energy in building a whole new level of brain structures? The answer is, to work together.


Tile of a Lion. White Glazed Terra Cotta, Christmas gift from my wife, 2008

Nature hardwired our reptilian ancestors for their own individual survival. Apart from a drive to have sex, reptiles have no parental instinct. Most of them cheerfully eat their young, which is why they're programmed to lay eggs and get out of town before they hatch. Our limbic brain gives us two critical advantages over the reptiles. It lets us love our young and work in groups.  (some people are better at this than others -- perhaps an indication of the development of their limbic brains -- CHE).


Bronze Lion on oak base. Going-away present from Occidental College, 1997

Luckily for us, although the limbic brain responds to both positive and negative reinforcement, it responds best to the chemistry of pleasure. We feel good about our offspring and about being part of a working group. (again, this is true for the most successful -- indeed, most 'human' of us -- but certainly not all of us).  Back in nature, packs let us forage with a collective eye out for predators, hunt more effectively and share child-raising.


Clothespin from The French Laundry. Gift from the restaurant at my 40th birthday party there, 1999.  Trophy commemorating my hole-in-one my first time on a regulation golf course, Sierra View Country Club, June 11, 1999.

Think of the physical reaction you have to anxiety. That's the limbic brain kicking your reptilian adrenaline into action, like a rider on a big, powerful horse with a mean streak. If the rider is good, he has a lot of control, but the horse will always be a bigger, stronger animal. If the rider isn't so good, or if the horse spooks, he can get thrown and the horse will take off without him. The same holds true for your primal instincts. If you work at it, your limbic brain can become a good, even great rider, but the horse will always outweigh you by a thousand pounds; you will never be as firmly in control as you would like to think. In practical terms, that means you will pay a steep physical price if you don't get the emotional structure of your life into fairly good shape."

Another, but Consistent, Perspective

From Jovito R. Salonga's Journal:

What, then, is the educated man? Is he the man who has read a lot? Partly yes, because his reading is serious and discriminate and uplifting. Is he the man who remembers many facts and events? Partly yes, because the training of memory is a wholesome discipline that requires effort and application and because one cannot make a sound judgement without respect for remembered facts. Is the educated man, then, one who because of his skill is able to provide for himself and his family? Partly yes, since education should teach us how to make a living. But there is one thing we should always remember and it is this — that far more important than the making of a living, is a living of life — a good life, a meaningful life, an abundant life.

The educated man lives this kind of a life, because he has opened the windows of his mind to great thoughts and ennobling ideas; because he is not imprisoned by the printed page, but chooses to make a relentless, rigorous analysis and evaluation of everything he reads; because he is less interested in the accumulation of degrees than in the stimulation of his mind and the cultivation of a generous spirit; because his interest is less in knowing who is right but more importantly, in discerning what is right and defending it with all the resources at his command; because he can express himself clearly and logically, with precision and grace; because he is not awed by authority, but is humble enough to recognize that his best judgment is imperfect and may well be tainted by error or pride; because he has a deep reverence for the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, as a creature of God; because he has a healthy sense of values, a breadth of outlook and the depth of compassion which a purposeful education generates; because whenever he talks about good government he is prepared and willing to sacrifice himself for it; and because he lives a life of relevance to the world in which we live, a sharing in the problems of his time and doing whatever he can with intelligence and fairness and understanding.

A Call for Comments and Suggestions

Two Sculptures of Dancers, IKEA, 2008. Heirloom Begonia in a Yogurt Cup, gift to the author from a friend, 2007.

Being educated is being open minded, never too sure that you are correct. To paraphrase my freshman philosophy professor, becoming educated is a neverending process, because knowledge is like filling a balloon -- the more knowledge you acquire, the larger the surface area of your ignorance becomes. So here is my call to you -- if you have found this blog and are interested in its content, then please share what it is you believe an educated person should know. Include specifics, and links and sources if you can. No polemics, please. Just a good faith effort to increase the surface area of my ignorance.

What an Educated Man Knows

These are weighty issues, but the first question that has been dogging me for a number of years, is, What should an educated person know?  I then went and shot some pictures of things in my office that inspire me.

Detail, Louis XV Candlestick, Ebony and Gold, circa 1740.  From the estate of James Reed Billman, American Foreign Services Officer (ret.) 2007.

From "Revisiting The Canon Wars"

Harold Bloom believed education should be transformative — that it should remove students from the confines of their own backgrounds to engage with books that open up new realms of meaning. “He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents,” Bellow wrote of Ravelstein/Bloom in his novel. “He was going to direct them to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality — anything but the arid kind.” In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Bloom himself wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with “four years of freedom” — “a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” Whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question. From Bloom’s perspective, “the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.”

Trojan Horse.  Cardboard, popsicle sticks and poker chips, Taylor Ellerman, 2003.  Pictures of Jana and me. Miscellaneous books I've read recently. Cigars for New Years that didn't get used (yet).

And From David Brooks: "Harvard Bound? Chin Up"

If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great education, no matter what college you attend:

Read Reinhold Niebuhr. Religion is a crucial driving force of this century, and Niebuhr is the wisest guide. As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if everyone read Niebuhr, "The devout would learn that public piety corrupts private faith and that faith must play a prophetic role in society. The atheists would learn that some people who believe in God are really, really smart. All of them would learn that good and evil really do exist — and that it is never as easy as it seems to know which is which. And none of them, so long as they absorbed what they were reading, could believe that the best way to divide opinion is between liberals on the one hand and conservatives on the other."

Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that the worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker ... can all too easily erode one's devotion to truth — a devotion that is critical to our integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about politics and punditry.

Statue of a Young Greek Warrior. Bronze, circa 1830, Romania.  Bronze reading lamp, New York Public Library Collection, 2007.  Wave machine, Discovery Store, 2007.  Cordless phone of indistinguishable and undistinguished provenance, 2007.

Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire," Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."

That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago, during a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was lost, the entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've got to find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who will serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use to measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."

Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My impression is that many students have turned into cunning little careerists, jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger stage."

Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland believes that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for students that lasts a lifetime."

Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the explanations you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.

Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to know what a standard deviation is.

Edgar Degas, The Dancer.  Polymer resin reproduction.  Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, 2004.  Photograph of the Seine in winter, faux sepia on paper, Winnie Ellerman, 2005

Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing the full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of that narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little subdisciplinary empires.

But you can do it. I have faith."