He used to say that there was no book so bad that it was not useful at some point.

From an essay by Michael Dirda, reviewing The Letters of Pliny the Younger. See Wikipedia for background on Pliny the Younger and his uncle, Pliny the Elder.

Elder and Younger were both in the vicinity of Vesuivius when it began its eruption in 79AD. Pliny the Elder went off to investigate and died in Pompeii. I have never read either of the extant Pliny's works in their entirity but have read snippets here and there. I had forgotten just how accessible their works are, particularly the letters of Pliny the Younger. For all that language, culture, technology, and other contexts have changed, in the letters, Pliny the Younger comes across as a knowledgeable but amiable neighbor down the street, sometimes talking shop, sometimes speculating, sometimes gossiping.

What caught my eye in reading Dirda's review is his account of the activities of both Pliny Elder and Pliny Younger at the time that the eruption was first noticed - both were busy reading. Pliny the Younger was so engrossed in Livy's History of Rome, that he declined his uncle's offer to go investigate what was happening in Pompeii. I recall a stretch of reading in my late teens or early twenties when I fell victim to Livy's spell and read through his works. All of it was engaging and interesting but I was particularly fascinated by the contest between Rome and Carthage for mastery of the Mediterranean. The capacity of the Romans to suffer defeat and return to the field of contest was amazing. In one of the Punic wars I seem to recall the land-based Romans deciding to take the battle to the sea, the natural element of the Carthaginians. They built a fleet; the Carthaginians sank it. They built a second fleet; the Carthaginians sank it. They built a third fleet and this time won. Astonishing persistence.

Anyway, via Dirda, here is Pliny the Younger's accounts of that long ago day, August 24th, 79AD when Vesuvius entombed Pompeii.

According to his nephew, the senior Pliny had "a keen intelligence, astonishing concentration, and little need for sleep.. . . He used to say that there was no book so bad that it was not useful at some point. . . . He believed that any time not devoted to study was wasted."

On the day of the eruption, the younger Pliny writes, "my uncle was at Misenum, where he held command of the fleet in person. Just after midday on 24 August [79 CE] my mother pointed out to him the appearance of a cloud of unusual size and appearance. He had relaxed in the sun, had then taken a cold dip, had lunched lying down, and was at his books. He asked for his sandals, and mounted to the place from which that remarkable phenomenon could best be observed. A cloud was issuing up from some mountain which spectators from a distance could not identify; it was later established to have been Vesuvius."

Pliny goes on to tell Tacitus about the cloud: "The pine tree, rather than any other, best describes its appearance and shape, for it rose high up into the sky on what one can describe as a very long trunk, and it then spread out into what looked like branches. . . . Its appearance varied between white on the one hand, and grimy and spotted on the other, according as it had thrust up earth or ashes. My uncle, most learned man that he was, realized that this was important, and should be investigated at closer quarters."

In short order, the elder Pliny "ordered a fast-sailing ship to be made ready" and, continues his nephew, "gave me the option of accompanying him if I so wished. I replied that I preferred to work at my books." We later learn that the younger man, just 18, simply didn't want to tear himself away from his enthralled reading of Livy's history of Rome.



J.M.W. Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817

When the seas grew rough, the air dense with cloud, and stones began to fall from the sky, the older Pliny's ships made their way to Stabiaie. There, the seemingly untroubled Roman naturalist bathed and dined at a friend's villa, even while Vesuvius continued to pour out flames. He did his best to calm the people around him, going so far as to retire for a nap. "In fact, he relaxed in sleep that was wholly genuine, for his snoring, somewhat deep and loud because of his broad physique, was audible to those patrolling the threshold." Before long, though, "the courtyard which gave access to his suite of rooms had become so full of ash intermingled with pumice stones that it was piled high."

The sleeping Pliny was awakened, and a debate broke out over whether the villa's residents should stay indoors or venture out to the coast. By now "the buildings were shaking with frequent large-scale tremors, as though dislodged from their foundations" and "seemed to shift now one way and now another, and then back again." Pliny convinced everyone to make a dash for the sea, despite the rain of pumice and debris. "They used strips of cloth to fasten pillows on their heads as a protection against falling stones."

By this point day had turned to night, and the little party discovered that the Mediterranean was still too "mountainous and hostile" for ships to cast off. Perhaps already starting to be overcome by the foul air, "my uncle lay down . . . on a discarded sail, and repeatedly drank cold water, which he had requested. Then flames and the smell of sulphur heralding the flames impelled the rest to flight and roused him. Leaning on two of his confidential slaves, he stood up and at once collapsed." Later on, it was concluded that "his breathing was choked by the greater density of smoke, and this blocked his gullet, which was often frail and narrow, and often unsettled. When daylight was restored, two days after his eyes had closed in death, his body was found intact and unharmed. It was covered over, still in the clothes he had worn. It was more like someone sleeping than a corpse."

Extrasomatic information coded in words, works, and behavioral models

From Contexts of Optimal Growth in Childhood by Mihaly Csikszentmahlyi, Daedulus, Volume 122, No. 1, Winter 1993.

As the importance of cultural values increases, our attitudes about children are bound to become more complex. When only biological evolution is at stake, the issues are quite simple: those individuals whose genes spread relatively more frequently in the succeeding generations are the most "successful." The prolific inherit the earth. But to the degree that culture makes us self-reflective, and the quality of life gains in importance relative to its sheer quantity, reproductive success begins to be defined in terms of the values our children learn, the skills they acquire, the happiness they experience throughout their lives. It is no longer enough to scatter one's genes into the future; it becomes important to project one's meme's as well. Reproductive success is not simply a matter of passing on chemical information coded on chromosomes, but involves transmitting extrasomatic information coded in words, works, and behavioral models.

Here is a slide from one of our TTMD presentations on reading which points out the coincidence of the development of reading and writing with the shift from settled agriculture to mercantile/urbanized economic systems circa 5-6,000 years ago. Csikszentmahlyi's observation would hold similarly true: the shift from settled agriculture to mercantile/urbanized economic systems would also mark some material changes in the nature of culture (capacity to mediate disputes differently arising from close quarters living, increased need for trust, etc.).

These observations together perhaps highlight why readers are so passionate about books and why there is so much energy invested in the quality of books to which children are exposed in schools and libraries. People wish to protect their children from bad literary seeds. Without couching it in extrasomatic terms, there is an instinctive recognition of the existential importance of books.

The fact that we poorly comprehend which values are core contributors to our culture's successes does not diminish the passion with which we seek to defend those values. Reflexive conservativism is not necessarily wrong (if we are successful then some elements of our cultural values must be differentially beneficial) but also not necessarily well informed (because we don't know which of those values make the most difference.)

Indistinguishable from magic

Arthur C. Clarke, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination, in Profiles of the Future

Clarke's Law:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Creativity and Productivity

From the blog site, Knowing and Doing - Reflections of an Academic and Computer Scientist there is a post, Creativity, Productivity, Discipline, Flow, capturing the author's thoughts about a presentation done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the presentation Csikszentmihalyi presented his model of the life cycle of ideas, particularly with regard to new ideas.

Per the notes:

The culture transmits information to people. Some people are happy to keep it at that, to absorb knowledge and use it in their lives. These folks accept the status quo.

The creative person, though, has the idea that he can change the world. He produces a novelty and pushes it out for others see. Only a small percentage of folks do this, but the number is large enough that society can't pay attention to all of the novelties produce.

A field of discourse, such as an academic discipline or "the art world", selects some of the novelties as valuable and passes them onto the culture at large with a seal of approval. Thus the field acts as a gatekeeper. It consists of the critics and powerbrokers esteemed by the society.

When there doesn't seem to be enough creativity for rapid change in a domain, the problem is rarely with the production of sufficient ideas but in the field's narrow channel for recognizing enough important novelties. I suppose that it could also come back to a field's inability to accurately evaluate what is good and what isn't. The art world seems to go through phases of this sort with some regularity. How about the sciences?

This would seem to work for books as well. Many books are written that are not published, many are published that are not sold, many are sold that are not remembered. What happens at each stage of the game? What are the variables that determine current and long term success?

The meaning of intellectual freedom

Peter Dickinson, In Defence of Rubbish.

Nobody who has not spent a whole sunny afternoon under his bed rereading a pile of comics left over from the previous holidays has any real idea of the meaning of intellectual freedom.

American Corpus

And for the heavy duty word lovers out there, here is the American Corpus site, using 400 million words from spoken narrative and written word to determine word frequencies.

Define: Extrasomatic

From Contexts of Optimal Growth in Childhood by Mihaly Csikszentmahlyi, Daedulus, Volume 122, No. 1, Winter 1993.

Reproductive success is not simply a matter of passing on chemical information coded on chromosomes, but involves transmitting extrasomatic information coded in words, works, and behavioral models.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Main Entry: ex·tra·so·mat·ic
Function: adjective

What distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply . . .

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy

Once the relevant knowledge has been acquired, the skill follows. General programs contrived to teach general skills are ineffective. AI research shows that experts perform better than novices not because they have more powerful and better oiled intellectual machinery but because they have more relevant and quickly available information. What distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of diverse, task-specific information.

Probably the most dramatic illustrations of the knowledge-bound character of human skills came from some remarkable experiments conducted by Adriaan de Groot, a Dutch psychologist, who described his findings in a book entitled Het Denken van den Schaker (literally, "the thinking of chess players"). De Groot discovered that chess masters are astonishingly skilled at remembering and reproducing chess positions after a very brief exposure to them. The subjects in his experiments were players of various abilities, as indicated by their official chess rankings. In one experiment, de Groot displayed for five to ten seconds a chess position from an actual game in which twenty-five pieces were left on the board. Grand masters performed this feat with 100 percent accuracy, masters with 90 percent accuracy. Weaker players were lucky if they could correctly place five or six pieces.

Then de Groot varied the conditions of his experiment in one respect. Instead of placing the twenty-five pieces in positions from an actual game, he placed them on the board randomly. The results were unexpected. All his subjects - grand masters, masters, class A players, and class B players- performed the same as novices did, placing only five or six pieces correctly. This experiment has been duplicated in several different laboratories, and structurally in several other fields, including algebra, physics, and medicine, always with the same striking results.

Word Frequency Lists

Word Frequency Lists and Dictionary of American English. There are so many intriguing sites out there. On this particular page, they offer 90 words at ten levels of increasing word rarity. Of course I had to check myself and am pleased to report that I only missed one of the ninety. Mimetic apparently means imitative.

For the list of top 5000 most frequently used words, visit this page. Yes - maybe only a site a reader or word lover could enjoy but still; pretty neat.

The London of the Enlightenment

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. He is describing Samuel Johnson's London, (1737-1784, population approx. 700,000) and contrasting it sometimes favorably (in terms of intellectual dynamism) and sometimes unfavorably (in terms of cleanliness and safety) with Antonine Rome (138-180 AD) and Hangzhou, China (960-1279 AD).

In 1750, the population of all of England was roughly that of Atlanta, Georgia today - 5.5 million people. We have in Atlanta some great academic, commercial, intellectual, research, and artistic talents. I am prepared to believe that the overall intellectual IQ/capacity of Atlanta is massively greater than that of England in 1750. However, I don't think that Atlanta or any other community of 5.5 million in the US could cobble together a representation of intellects as described below and that would be comparably significant as seen from the year 2260.

Densely packed is the right descriptor for Johnson's intellectual London writ large. The city was jammed with men of immense accomplishment, sometimes resident, sometimes visitors, and they knew each other across disciplines and professions in a way that rarely happens today. In Johnson's London, this intellectual cross-fertilization was reified in The Club, which formed in the winter of 1763-1764. It was nothing like the imposing institutions that became the famous London clubs of 19C, just a group of men getting together every Monday night at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street. But those men included statesmen James Fox and William Wyndham, linguist Sir William Jones, naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, dramatists Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, actor David Garrick, Bishop Percy, historian Edward Gibbon, Johnson himself, and two men who together were to provide the intellectual templates for the Whigs and the Torries of British politics for the next century, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Other eras have had their roundtables and salons, but in 18C London they were peopled by men who would change the intellectual shape of the West, for Samuel Johnson's London was above all the London of the Enlightenment.