Drawing Outside The Lines: Marginalia and E-Books

I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I stopped using it several years ago.  The books I most wanted weren't (and many still aren't) available for it, and it was hard to use it as I like to use books.

You see, I am an annotator.  I draw in books.  

Everyone told me when I was a kid that you should NOT draw in books.  But I can't help it.

Last summer my sister-in-law, seeing me read with a pencil in my hand, asked me if I always do that.  I hadn't really thought about it as unusual until then, but yes, I guess I do.  That way my reading becomes a kind of conversation with the book.  The author writes, and I write back.

It is becoming a bit easier to annotate e-books, but we have a long way to go, perhaps because we have structured our computers to think in a linear fashion.  Computers think in stoichedon, in lines and ranks, like soldiers in formation.  Which is a good way to organize information, but it's not the only way, because it's not the only way lines can move.  "Idea mapping" or "mind mapping" is another way.  This can be expanded to three dimensions or more, as well.  Think of a way a line can move and you have another way of taking notes. 

Over the years I have devised my own shorthand for note-taking.  For some things, I borrow old conventions of abbreviation and expand them, like this:

could - cd
would - wd
should - shd
something - s/t
everything - e/t
nothing - n/t
because - b/c
nevertheless - n/t/l

And so on.  Some words, like selah, have entered my annotative vocabulary because they say so much so briefly.  (See footnote 3 here, about "selah.")

At times, I've also found it helpful to invent new symbols, pictograms of whole ideas, sentences that can be written a single picture.  I can do these with a flick of the pen, but they're much harder to incorporate into a digital text.

I draw lines from one page to the next to connect ideas.  I circle names when they first appear in a text so that I can find them again.  I draw vertical lines beside paragraphs to quickly highlight long sections of text.  A double line emphasizes that highlighting.

I draw maps, and sketch pictures.  Sometimes I write in other languages, other alphabets, when those other languages get the idea down more quickly, or more carefully.  I haven't written music in books, but I don't see why you couldn't. 

And all of that becomes an icon of a conversation.  The annotated page is no longer text; it is an image, and a symbol of a set of relations between ideas and authors.

When I was in grad school, José Vericat (who did not know me from Adam) kindly gave me a list of books belonging to Charles Peirce and housed in one of Harvard's libraries. Peirce died in 1914, but his lines and words still illuminate his reading of those pages.

Another bit of scholarly generosity was shown to me a few years ago when I was working on my book on the environmental vision of C.S. Lewis at the Wade Center.  The director, Christopher Mitchell, learned of my interest in Lewis's reading of Henri Bergson.  Mitchell brought me Lewis's copy of Bergson's Évolution Créatrice to peruse.  Every page is covered with marginalia written by Lewis as he recovered from his war injuries.

I think my favorite part of Thomas Cahill's book, How The Irish Saved Civilization, was seeing the facsimiles of marginal paintings - including some racy self-portraits - by monks who copied books in Ireland in the middle ages.

My point in this long blog post?  Keep drawing in books.  And maybe I'll get another Kindle someday if they can figure out a way to make it easy for me to draw outside the lines.  And to preserve those drawings for posterity.

Locking Up The Neighbors

This week the South Dakota Senate made a good decision for a bad reason.  The Senate approved a welcome set of changes to the way the state treats convicted criminals, effectively reducing prison sentences for a variety of offenses.

South Dakota's prisons are nearly full to capacity, and the state was forced to choose between building more prisons and reforming its sentencing laws.  The latter choice was the less expensive one, and that appears to be the main reason for the reform.

I've read that in the USA we now have more prisoners than farmers.  I'm also told we have more prisoners than any other country in the world, and a much higher per-capita incarceration rate than any other developed country.   Either we produce more criminals than other countries, or we are more aggressive in our incarceration policies.

I've argued before that our criminal code should not be devised along economic lines, but along the lines of love.  Jens Soering similarly argues forcefully that our prisons are "an expensive way to make bad men worse."

We don't need to make men worse but to give them every opportunity to better themselves. 

I'm not saying we shouldn't be tough on crime; we should be very tough on crime.  But our current policies are not so much tough on crime as they are tough on criminals.

What I am saying is this: we should not regard criminals as people with a past but as people with a future.  Many need to be incarcerated, yes, but if a man is to be locked up, let us lock him up as a neighbor.  As they enter the prisons, let it be our first and guiding thought that they will soon emerge as our neighbors.  And let us therefore do all we can to allow them to emerge as better men and women, not as worse ones.

*****

UPDATE:  I did not know it at the time, but as I was writing this post above, a family in my city was pleading with a judge to have mercy on the man who killed one of their family members.  Their words, which you can read here, show a remarkable ability to look past their desire for vengeance and exemplify concern for the criminal.  It is possible.  It is possible.  It is possible.

Finding One's Way: Three Questions About Vocation

My students often ask me, "What should I do with my life after I graduate?"

The simple answer I usually give is this: you should pursue your vocation.

In answering that way, I hope to encourage students not to accept others' stories about how their lives should go, and to begin to give them some tools for answering their own question.

My reason for caution is that the word "vocation" is a tricky one.  It has tendrils that grow in many directions, and some of them don't need much fertilizer before they reach into some messy metaphysical and ethical questions. 

There's an important lesson in all those stories about magic that have been handed down through the ages: words have real power to change the world and to swerve the direction of others' actions.  Which means they should be handled with care. "Vocation" is one of the strong words.  It's got a kind of magic to it because it has the power to enchant our lives by drawing a lot of ideas together into one place, and by drawing some long arrows leading towards and away from the place where you stand right now.  Its root, the Latin word vocatio, means "calling."  This is what I mean by the "tendrils" and the messy metaphysics they can grow into: if you're called, that might imply a caller, which might imply some strong obligations. 

Here are some suggestions for how to handle the idea of vocation with care: 

First, don't tell other people what their vocation must be.  Imposing strong narratives on others' lives is what we do when we pretend to be God.  I don't recommend trying to play that role.  Read some Milton before you do, anyway.

Second, no matter how strong your sense of your own calling, remember that we see as in a glass, darkly.  You can't judge a voice except with your own ears, so remember the limitations of your hearing. 

Third, and along those same lines, don't make rash decisions about the last step of your journey; look instead to the next step. This means having some humility, and a lot of patience with yourself and with your own life.  It means not knowing how the story of your life will unfold, but reading it - and writing it - one page at a time.

With those caveats in mind, here are three questions that I offer students who are trying to figure out what their calling may be.  I recommend taking the time to consider them thoughtfully.  Write your answers down, and after a while, ask trustworthy friends who know you and love you if they agree with your answers.  As you consider these questions, don't think about jobs and careers, lest that limit your answers.  The aim in asking each of these questions is this: to know yourself better.

First, what are you good at?  What are your skills and your strengths? Don't just think about the things you enjoy doing here; include all your gifts and talents.

Second, what do you love to do?  Don't just think about what you're good at, but include those things you love but haven't any talent for.

Third, what do you want to accomplish? How would you like the world to be changed when you are done with it?  How would you like to be known?  What do you most want to do, or be?  What would you write in your autobiography?

Do any patterns appear?  As you answer these questions honestly, do you discover anything about yourself that you didn't see clearly before?  Answering these questions won't sort everything out for you, and I know I can't tell you what your calling is.  But I do think that getting to know yourself, your loves, your talents, and your aspirations can help you to avoid simply doing what others want you to do.  And they just might shed some light on the path ahead.

Rejoice!

When I was an undergraduate studying Classical Greek, one of the first Greek words I learned from Professor Eve Adler was chaire! It's the common greeting in Attic Greek, the "hello, there!" of the ancient Greek world.*

We can translate it as "Hail!" or "Hello!" but it literally means "Rejoice!"

There are a lot of ways to greet someone.  You can announce your own presence, or acknowledge the presence of others; you can offer a command, or express a wish; you can arrive with a blessing. 

I like the idea of greeting someone by wishing them joy.  Wherever we're going, it's good to arrive with a desire to see others rejoice, with a blessing on our lips.

******

This Sunday the Gospel reading in the Revised Common Lectionary was the story of the Wedding in Cana.

The story goes like this: Jesus is invited to a wedding.  The wedding guests drink all the wine, and it looks like the party might be over.  Jesus' mother, Mary, tells him "They have no more wine."  Jesus makes lots more wine.  And it's good wine.  The party goes on.

And people wonder why I'm a theist.  This is a good God.

Because whatever else is going on in this story, this is a God that arrives with a desire to see people rejoice.

It's easy to forget that.

*****

Miroslav Volf posted something on his Facebook page this week that reminded me that in some ancient cultures, wedding parties lasted a whole week.  I wonder, how long had these people in Cana been drinking?

And then I think: would I even know how to throw a party that lasted for a whole week?  What would such a party be like?  I admit I don't know.  But I like the idea of trying.

How would that change the way we saw the world?  What if the aim of life was not prosperity but mutual enjoyment and living towards times of rejoicing?  What if we made it our purpose to prayerfully complain, on behalf of others, "They have no more wine!"

So to you reading this, I have one word, a blessing on my lips for you: Chaire!  Rejoice!  And may you find joy that endures throughout your week.

***********

 * The Greek word is spelled χαῖρε, dual χαίρετον, plural χαίρετε.  I've transliterated it here on the assumption that most of my readers don't know the Greek alphabet.  The verb χαίρω, of which these words are several forms, means "rejoice."

Suspicion And Society

"If the officers and soldiers are suspicious of each other, warriors will not join up."*

*****

* Zhuge Liang, quoted by Thomas Cleary in his introduction to Sun Tzu's The Art Of War.

The Virtue of Virtue

Virtue ethics is problematic.  It certainly is helpful at times, but it is not helpful when it names virtues that others cannot relate to; or when we use it to describe virtues that only certain classes of people can ever attain; or when virtues entail a metaphysics to which others are unwilling to commit.   The very word “virtue” raises a red flag for some people because it is a gendered word, rooted in the Latin vir, meaning an adult male.  I often wish we had a better translation of the word Aristotle first used, arête, which means something like “excellence.”

At any rate, virtue ethics may have great value if we allow Aristotle’s description of arête to be a moving target, and if we appeal to it as an approach to governing our own conduct rather than as a way to make rules for others.  (Isn’t it the case that so often we write rules for others rather than for ourselves?  That should tell us something.)

Aristotle tells us that virtue is the mean between extremes, as the man of practical wisdom would determine it.  But which of us is the man of practical wisdom?  No one of us has that down.  So no one of us may be expected to understand virtue exactly.  This would appear to be an argument for a collective decision, and to some degree it is.  Our public deliberations about ethics, about methods of research, about law, about public conduct – all of these are, in a way, attempts by groups of people to figure out what a truly wise and prudent person would do.  

So to some degree, communities and their traditions are embodiments of decisions about virtue.  We must remember, however, that we’re always on the move, ever seeking, never fully finding. 

I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s citation of Lessing in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

“If God held all truth enclosed in his right hand, and in his left hand the one and only ever-striving drive for truth, even with the corollary of erring forever and ever, and if he were to say to me:--Choose! I would humbly fall down to him at his left hand and say: Father, give!  Pure truth is indeed only for you alone!”*

We live lives of unknowing, ever striving for what we might know.  "Now we see as in a glass, darkly; now we see in part."  And that's not so bad, is it?  Peirce might call the belief that we don't know fully a regulative ideal; or I suppose, in Rorty’s terms, we might call it a pragmatic hope.  If we take ourselves not to have arrived at perfect justice yet, that belief will drive us to keep seeking to improve our justice.

You’ve read this far, so you’re probably ready for me to make my point.  Here it is: as we talk about policies and politics, rules and laws—in short, when we are deeply concerned with governing others—let us not neglect governing ourselves, by reflecting on, and trying to enact, virtue in our decisions.  Life is uncertain.  We do not know what will come next, what we will be given, what will be taken away.  But no one can take away the small decisions we make, the small decisions that, one by one, make us.

******

*Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, Vol I) 106. The quotation is a citation from Lessing by Kierkegaard.

Evolution and Education

Sometimes I meet students who are afraid that evolutionary science poses a threat to their belief in God.  I think it is helpful for them to ask themselves this question:

Is God capable of creating through natural processes?

There are only two answers to this question.  If you say no, you make God too small to be worth worshiping.  If you say yes, then you see that there's no prima facie reason why belief in God and belief in evolution need to be opposed to one another.

Of course, this doesn't clear up all the obstacles to reconciling religious belief and confidence in science, but it's a start.

***** 

*****

If you're a teacher of students who also grapple with this, and you don't understand them, this might help.  Some of them will certainly be unreasonable.  For them, sometimes all you can do is be an example of reasonable beliefs and hope it sinks in someday.  But many of them are concerned about a few big questions, like these:

• The trust they've placed in their community.  Think about it: if your parents or your pastor or someone else you trusted taught you that there's an irreconcilable conflict between science and faith, you might distrust anyone who said otherwise.  It might help such students to go back to that community and ask the question I posed above.  This may take time, because there's a lot at stake here.
• An even bigger concern is the question of human dignity.  I think that's what's behind the old complaint that "I'm not descended from monkeys."  If the student is simply concerned about being descended from unwashed furry critters, they should probably look more closely at their family trees.  Monkeys are often nicer than our actual relatives.
• But there's another concern here that's actually quite positive, because it means that they care about ethics, and they're trying to preserve that in the face of a perceived threat.  Some students correctly intuit that what's at stake in evolution is not merely a theory of descent but a whole theory of knowledge, and of metaphysics.  Natural sciences rest upon an assumption of methodological naturalism.  That is, they assume that it is possible to explain natural phenomena by appeal to nature and nothing else.  So far, so good.  But sometimes we then make a little leap to saying that therefore whatever naturalism cannot explain is unknowable or nonexistent.  This is not just naturalism but a kind of reductionistic naturalism, and it's tricky territory, because it might imply that there is no real basis for ethics, or for valuing others' lives.  I'm not saying we're not free to value others' lives; I'm just saying that some of these students want to believe that there are good reasons to expect everyone to value everyone, not merely a world of subjective interests.  And many of them are reasonably suspicious that reductionistic naturalism cannot itself be supported by science; after all, how could natural science prove that what it can't see isn't there?  Such claims sound a bit like the misdirection of Wizard of Oz: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"  We'd be better off avoiding such claims, both because we cannot prove them and because they do a disservice to science.

Acknowledging your students' concerns will help them to see that you care about them as people and not just as names or numbers on a page.  Which will already begin to address their deepest concerns.

Safe and Sound: Guns, Fear, and Virtue

What do guns do for us?  Do guns make our lives better, or do they just make us feel stronger and safer?  I know those aren't the only two options, but I want to distinguish between two notions of salvation: on the one hand, we may be saved by what makes us more safe, while on the other hand, we may be saved by what makes us more whole.  I'm using a theological word, but I'm thinking more etymologically than theologically, connecting "salvation" with the Latin salvus, which can mean both "safe," and "well" or "sound." (I know word origins don't dictate meanings, but they do help us understand how our ideas developed.) 



So again, what do guns do for us?  It's probably true that in many circumstances guns make us safer, or at least make us feel safer, and that's not unimportant.  But I do wonder whether they make us better people.  I don't think this question is easily answered.  It's not hard to imagine someone developing great skill, self-control, and confidence through target-shooting, and I've known police officers who regarded their guns as tools that helped them to make their communities better places.  But this passage from Kerouac offers another possibility.  Kerouac's protagonist Sal Paradise (Kerouac's fictionalized autobiographical persona) describes what it was like to be alone in San Francisco, thousands of miles from home:  

“I tried everything in the books to make a girl.  I even spent a whole night with  a girl on a park bench, till dawn, without success.  She was a blonde from Minnesota.  There were plenty of queers.  Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said “Eh? Eh” What’s that you say?”  He bolted.  I’ve never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country.  It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun.  I had to show it to someone.  I walked by a jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann.  Then we could flee to Nevada together.  The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I’d go crazy.”* 

"I had to show it to someone."

 It's not the gun that makes him threaten strangers or that makes him want to steal; but the gun doesn't help, and it's not neutral.  It's a catalyst for something else, and when Sal feels lonely the gun becomes a way of expressing his pain.  It might make him safer, but it also affords an opportunity (which he seizes) to become less virtuous.  His trust contracts as his pain dilates. My eyes keep pausing on the line "I had to show it to someone."  Pointing it at strangers in the men's bathroom is at once a threat of violence and a plea to be known, a disclosure of a secret. 

 Hard times can make us wary.  Another novel, Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, comes to mind here, another novel about men drifting across America, searching for an elusive dream.  When Steinbeck's iconic drifters Lennie and George show up at a farm to look for work, the man who hires them remarks on how unusual it is for men to care for one another as they do: 

"Slim looked through George and beyond him.  'Ain't many guys travel around together,' he mused.  'I don't know why.  Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.'"**

Maybe so.  If you know the novel, you know the complicated ways guns, trust, love, and fear figure into it.  If you don't, I won't spoil it for you. Nor will I try to sort out what our laws about guns should be. Not here, anyway, because something else is weighing on my mind even more right now.  The question of laws, and of safety, is important.  But so is the matter of being not just safe, but sound. 

We certainly need better laws; we always do.  Just as importantly, we need to become better people. People who "travel around together" in difficult times, because it is better to do so than to spend our lives scared of the whole damn world. 

 *****

*Jack Kerouac, On The Road. (New York: Penguin, 1991) 73.  
 ** John Steinbeck, Of Mice And Men. (New York: Penguin, 1994) 37. 

*****

I am looking for a better word than "virtue," but haven't found one yet, unless maybe "excellence" fits.

*****

A longer version of this post was published by the Chronicle of Higher Education in both print and online in the Chronicle Review under the title "Armed In Anxiety."  A subscription (often available through your library) is required to see the online version.