Breugel and Auden

Auden is one of my favorite poets and Breugel among my favorite artists. Why did it take me so long to realize the connection between them? Just one of those things. Auden viewed Breugel's "Fall of Icarus" and wrote the following poem, the last couple of lines of which are so striking. And here is the picture itself.

Musee des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Between what matters and . . .

From the opening lines of E.C. Bentley's classic in British mystery writing, Trent's Last Case from 1913.

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely.

Trent's Last Case is available only as an audio CD.

Don't let the best be the enemy of the good

I became aware of this adage a few years ago and have always considered it one of the most revealing but challenging of adages. It encapsulates a conundrum we all find difficulty resolving.

Given a particular outcome you wish to achieve with particular attributes, you can always anticipate barriers to achieving that outcome. The nature of those barriers often means that you can get someway or even most of the way towards your goal with some relative ease but that getting the last few details right involves excrutiating effort or unpleasant trade-off decisions. Sometimes raw persistence can carry you to your outcome but at tremendous cost.

The adage counsels that you consider accepting something less than your ideal outcome in order to avoid the cost of getting just exactly what you wanted. Better to accept 90% of what you were shooting for at 30% of the cost than to achieve 100% of your desired outcome but at a much higher cost.

Well and good. But what are the trade-off percentages. Colin Powell once counseled that a General can never be effective if he always waits for all the information he needs in order to make a decision. I believe his number was 70%; when you have 70% of the information you want, the benefit of prompt action outweighs the risks associated with waiting to get 100% of the information.

In the end, there isn't a numerical answer. Like a good lawyer, consultant or Jesuit, the answer is that it depends. The adage is useful for predisposing you to action but it does not give you guidance as to when enough is enough.

Today, I came across a reference that seems to attribute this adage, which I thought to be just a piece of folk wisdom, to Voltaire, rendered as "the perfect is the enemy of the good." I'll have to investigate that at some point.

The brain is an engineering system

From the October, 2009 Popular Mechanics' article 4 People Who Faced Disaster by John Galvin:

"The brain is an engineering system," says John Leach, a former Royal Air Force combat survival instructor who now works with the Norwegian military on survival training and research. "Like any engineering system, it has limits in terms of what it can process and how fast it can do so. We cope by taking in information about our environment, and then building a model of that environment. We don't respond to our environment, but to the model of our environment." If there's no model, the brain tries to create one, but there's not enough time for that during an emergency. Operating on an inadequate mental model, disaster victims often fail to take the actions needed to save their own lives.

I wonder if this is why enthusiastic readers are able, on average, to achieve such markedly higher outcomes in terms of education, income, etc.? The hypothesis would be that through frequent and broad reading, their minds create a large volume of off-the-shelf models for all sorts of situations (emergency, social, career, etc.) and therefore are able to respond faster and with greater probability of success. It would be consistent with our Reading Hamburger model.

We live in networks, not communities

I just finished reading an essay (Why Schools Don't Educate, HOPE October 1996) from an author, John Taylor Gatto. An interesting experience. I am unfamiliar with his work but a quick web search seems to indicate a talented, passionate person of a distinctly iconoclastic nature.

Reading his essay was a disconbobulating experience. In the chain of his thinking from data to facts to interpretation to diagnosis to prescription, I found myself frequently in profound disagreement. And yet he writes passionately, well and with insight. I liked:

Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that.

But for all my disagreement, disconcertingly, I also find myself in committed agreement with some of his thoughts.

Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we've gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds.

In this last quote I recognize exactly what we are advocating for at Through the Magic Door. Opening the door of reading occurs within the family environment - teachers and librarians can help and sometimes, in some instances, even be the primary agents; but they can never replace the respect for and love of reading that is inculcated within the family.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley has been making the rounds in several blogs. First link in the chain appears to have been Ann Althouse's search for the source of an Aldous Huxley quote -

"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'"

Followed then by Kenneth Anderson's recollections of his reading of Huxley.

Huxley was never a seminal author for me though I did enjoy his works, particularly Brave New World, The Doors of Perception and The Perennial Philosophy. What impressed me most was not that that he might have the answers but rather that he seemed to embody the constant quester; always seeking and sort of issuing reports along the way.

I Have Tried the Upward and the Downward Slope by R.L. Stevenson

From R.L. Stevenson's Songs of Travel. For background see Lust, Vengeance, Exile & Loss.

I Have Tried the Upward and the Downward Slope
by R.L. Stevenson

I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
I have endured and done in days before;
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

Human exceptionalism

It is always a delight to come across a new book and/or author who can capture your interest. I picked up Martin Wells' Civilization and the Limpet. It is full of interesting titbits.

Small mammals always run through their lives at a pace in terms of footfalls if not furlongs - that would leave their larger relatives literally breathless. One can, in fact, be quite precise about it. The formula is: specific fuel consumption (food needed per gram per hour) falls with increasing body wieght as Weight (-0.25) (double the weight, metabloic rate rises by 84 percent, not 100 percent; at ten times the weight, the cost per gram is down to 56 percent). The Weight (-0.25) exponent applies to practically any activity you care to think about: heartbeats or breaths, time to digest a meal or reach sexual maturity, gestation and lactation periods, life expectancy. It means that all of us mammals get through just about the same number of heartbeats or square meals in the course of a lifetime. It is one of the universal laws regulating the life of mammals, and, amazingly, we have no clear idea why it should be.

Whatever the cause, it has some rather curious consequences, because all of us, of whatever size and rate of tick-over, inhabit the same planet, so that, like it or not, a day-night cycle lasts twenty-four hours, a tidal cycle runs over twenty-eight days, and seasons happen yearly. A twelve-hour night is inconveniently long for small mammals and for birds, which have to pack away enough food inside them to see them through what is, for them, a horribly long fast. Small birds in Europe or North America only just about make it in summer, when the days are long and the nights short. In the winter, most clear out and fly south. The very smallest, hummingbirds, couldn't even make it in summer in northern latitudes if they didn't go torpid and drop their body temperature at night, slowing down physiological time so that their reserves last until morning. Bats have the same trouble with days, and the smaller ones adopt the same solution. In winter, bats in temperate climates huddle together in some secluded roost and maintain a body temperature that is just sufficient to stop them from freezing. With a bit of luck their fat reserves will last them until the insects come out again in the spring.

Shrews and small mice just keep going, wake up and ferret around for food every few minutes. Most stash away supplies so that there are snacks available whenever they wake up. At the other end of the scale one might imagine that an elephant or a hippopoamus would appreciate a significant slowing of astronomical time.

Humans are unusual in this as in so many other ways, a difficult animal to fit into the general picture. One of our many outstanding features is that we live too long, by the standards of other mammals. Placed on the shrew-to-elephant weight scale, we fit in nicely in terms of metabolic rate, but ought to die off in our thirties; we've had our ration of heartbeats by then. The fact that we somehow contrive to live for twice as long is, arguably, a matter of brains, and looking after ourselves properly. But even animals in zoos, which typically live for a lot longer than their relatives in the wild, don't manage to beat the system by a factor of two or three as we do, so that the notion that we get by by coddling ourselves is unlikely to be the whole explanation.

Bright is the Ring of Words by R.L. Stevenson

From R.L. Stevenson's Songs of Travel. For background see Lust, Vengeance, Exile & Loss.

Bright is the Ring of Words
by R.L. Stevenson

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said -
On wings they are carried -
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried.

Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, 1927