Available Light

  The evidence is there and it's not good. Most people break their New Year's resolutions. On average, people hold out 'til January 19, apparently although about 8% of people manage to abide by their self imposed strictures for a year or more.  We make New Year's resolutions because there's bits of us we don't like and because we fall for one of the most common misperceptions that people  have about themselves: that our failings are just a matter of  will power and that if only we had a bit of discipline we could all smarten our individual and corporate  acts up. Bah humbug, I say.  There's a French saying,  tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner . To understand all is to forgive all. This is profoundly true. Pretty much everything we do, we do for a reason. What trips us up is that a) our reasoning is faulty,  based as it is on inaccurate premises and incomplete information and b) our reasoning is usually completely invisible to us. So we notice t...

Our self perception is shaped by the way we see ourselves reflected back in the reactions of others. They smile at us and speak to us and we know we are valued and wanted. They look hurriedly away or move hurriedly on and somewhere inside we note the sinking feeling that accompanies a diminishment in our selves. Of course when we are mature and robust in our self perceptions these things matter less, but we are never unaffected. This is why the most important skills we can teach children are  social. This is why isolation exacts such a toll. This is why the Western fetish of individualism is such a destructive idea, and why we need each other: our very sense of self depends on it. Of course reflections are not always accurate. In fact they are not usually accurate and have as much to do with the current inner state of the other as they have to do with us. Which is why discernment and the ability to reflect on ourselves are right up there with social skills as necessary human ...

I drove home late this afternoon with a rainbow spanning the whole sky, moving ahead of me the way rainbows do. I stopped about a kilometre from home to take a picture and thought of a couple of times recently when I have heard the rainbow used as a metaphor for the way consciousness and reality interact.   For example, " For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them… But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the ‘internalists’ who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrop...

I have been reading Antony Beevor's Berlin , a book about the fall of the German capital to the Red Army in April 1945. It is a harrowing tale of atrocity by the Red Army, performed at least in part as revenge for the horrors earlier inflicted on occupied Russia by the Germans. A question that continually surfaces for me in reading such a book is Why ? Why did decent law abiding fathers and sons and husbands on both sides of the conflict behave so appalingly? Why would a man be a hard working farmer in the Urals and a rapist, thief and murderer once he entered Germany? Why would reasonable, intelligent people become fanatical Nazis? We can say, of course that the people who acted in the way they did chose to act that way, and that therefore, they are responsible for their own actions, but that only begs the question: why did they choose so? More tellingly, I ask myself, if I had been a twenty year old Red Army soldier would I have acted any differently? If I had been thirteen in pr...

I've had two pieces of news in the past 24 hours. One is a date for my operation: Saturday June 21. The odds are that they'll whip out the prostate and, apart from the possibility of some embarrassing and, I hope, temporary side effects, I should be good to go for another couple of decades at least. The other news is that I am sick. I have a piece of paper, signed by an actual doctor, which tells me so. Of course I already knew this but now, it's official and I am on sick leave not study leave. I'm an invalid, not a scholar. I marked my new found decrepitude by getting over -well, almost - the hacking cough which I've had for almost 3 weeks and by going for a long vigorous walk and taking some photographs. It's odd how different I felt walking out of the doctor's office with my envelope in my hand. I was free not to sit with my tricky books. I was free to think about this illness, and what the rest of my life might bring, and how I might reshape my lifes...

I found this little fossil pipi in a crumbling cliff face near Raglan. I am told it is from the Jurassic period. To think about that, imagine a time line with a space of 1mm for every year; OK? Now, the width of your computer screen would be about 1/2 a metre - that is, it would represent the time from Christopher Columbus until the present. Now imagine the line shooting off the side of your monitor, and continuing on for another 140 kilometres and you'd get an idea of the span of time since this little guy was filtering yummy tidbits out of the sludge on some Jurassic seabed. It was once a living thing, like the hand that holds it. Now it's not a live thing anymore but a stone; yet something of it remains: the pattern of it, the shape of it. Or at least a faint semblance of the shape of it has persisted across that vast, almost unimaginable chasm of time. The shape has outlived the transformation of every atom that once made it up. The hand too is just a pattern or a shape. I...