Alan Jacobs's Blog

In one of my classes we’re about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, and we had an interesting conversation yesterday in which we tried to sort through what Ivan means when he says he has a “Euclidean mind.” One of my students rightly pointed out that my own explanation of the phrase did not seem to fit all his uses of it. So I came home and wrote up some thoughts that I emailed to the class. This is what I wrote to them.

Here’s how Ivan introduces the concept of a “Euclidean” mind:

… it is not for me to understand about God. I humbly confess that I do not have any ability to resolve such questions, I have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it, Alyosha my friend, and most especially about whether God exists or not. All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us….

That is: because our minds are earthly we cannot understand anything about God, since God is by definition trans-earthly. Therefore the only option is accept, by an act of will I suppose, what we cannot possibly understand.

So Ivan says

“I accept God” “I also accept his wisdom and purpose” “I do not accept this world of God’s”

Now, at first this seems nonsensical to me. If you do not accept the world that God created then how can you claim to accept “his wisdom and purpose”? But I think he means this: I know that God is God and I am not, I agree in principle that He is infinitely good and in comparison with him I am just a bedbug, but still, with my Euclidean mind — the mind God gave me, by the way — I look at the way children suffer in this world and I say: No thanks. I can’t accept that and I don’t want to accept that.

Then, at the end of his discourse, he comes back to the “Euclidean” theme and reaffirms some of his points made earlier — but adds some confusing ones:

I am a bedbug, and I confess in all humility that I can understand nothing of why it’s all arranged as it is. So people themselves are to blame: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, knowing that they would become unhappy — so why pity them? Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly one from another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself.

He goes on for some time in this way. The more I think about it the more confused I get. Some of it I can make no sense of at all: I have no idea what he means when he says “everything flows and finds its level.” But as far as I can tell he’s saying three chief things here:

Christianity teaches that “people themselves are to blame” for rebelling against God; But with his Euclidean mind he can only see that, thanks to the way God chose to make the world, “there is suffering” for which “none [that is, none of us human beings] are to blame”; Nevertheless, even if no human being is to blame, “I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself.”

So who will be the object of his retribution? We find out in the story he goes on to tell, the story of the Grand Inquisitor: the Son of God will be the one he punishes.

Ivan has a very complicated relationship to what he thinks Catholicism is: he believes it to be a power-hungry politically-motivated corruption of the Gospel, a network of manipulators using the appeal of Christianity to accomplish their own ends — but that’s precisely what he would do in the same circumstances, because he wants retribution here and now, not in some imagined hereafter. If Ivan could have been anything he wanted to be, he probably would have been a great Renaissance Pope: corrupt by the standards of the Gospel, but effective in worldly terms.

What Ivan tries to avoid seeing, what he can’t quite face or reckon with, is what we learn from Alyosha and Zosima: that God explicitly offers Himself to be the object of our retribution. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:18). 

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.) 

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form. 

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the late spring of 1942. 

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious? 

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced: 

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

The American cultural imperium!

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version: 

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story. 

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism. 

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness: 

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600. 

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea: 

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches. 

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) job was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now. 

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.) 

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form. 

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the lats spring of 1942. 

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious? 

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced: 

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version: 

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story. 

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism. 

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness: 

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600. 

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea: 

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few
inches. 

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) task was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now. 

Forty years ago, I attended a conference of literature professors at Christian liberal-arts colleges in which the keynote speaker was an esteemed Christian journalist, tasked with giving us advice, I guess. Whatever his task was, he lectured us about our narrow-mindedness, our parochial attitudes, our failure to introduce our students to the most challenging literary masterpieces. Instead of teaching them … well, whatever we did teach them, we should dare to assign Dostoevsky! 

As this harangue went on, the woman sitting next to me — my department chair, as it happened, Beatrice Batson, an impressive Southern lady of the old school who (inexplicably) spoke with the kind of mid-Atlantic accent I associate with Irene Dunne — was steaming. When the lecture finally ended and there was a Q&A session, she stood up and informed the journalist (Sir, pronounced “Suh”) that every student at Wheaton College was required to read The Brothers Karamazov. 

“Oh,” he replied. 

It was true. In the two-course introduction to literature that all Wheaton students were required to take, a teacher could assign either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the Greek tragedy of one’s choice; and you needed to do some of the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy but not necessarily all of either. But when the nineteenth-century novel rolled around, one had no options: The Brothers Karamazov ended up being the only work of literature that every Wheaton College student, regardless of major, was required to read from cover to cover. 

That edict remained in force for the first twenty years of my Wheaton teaching career, and in those two decades I taught Karamazov at least once each year and sometimes twice. There was a time I knew it better than any book in the world. I began by using this edition: 

(Despite the testimony of this cover image, the brothers in the novel are not in their fifties.) But when the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation came out and was clearly the Cool New Thing, I switched to that. And that’s the one I know best. The curriculum had changed and my teaching assignments had changed by the time the great Gary Saul Morson’s fierce critique of their work appeared, so I never taught any alternative to P-V. 

When I decided earlier this year that I would teach the book one last time, I thought long and hard about whether to go back to Constance Garnett’s version, which Morson likes, or whether to try a newer translation … but in the end I decided to stick with P-V, in large part because that allowed me to use the greatly-worn, much-annotated copy that I used all those years ago. 

However, I did not realize that a revised version of the translation had appeared in 2021 — and that’s the one the bookstore ordered for my students. If the text had remained the same, I probably would’ve used my old version and identified the page numbers of the key passages for the new edition. But sometimes the actual words are different, dadgummit. (For example, where in the previous version old Karamazov claimed to love his own “wickedness,” in this one he claims to love his own “filth.” I do wonder how many of the changes are responses to Morson’s critique.) So now I’m having to transfer all my annotations and highlights from the old copy to the new, which is tiresome but probably good for me. 

The book is as electrifying as ever, and I am delighted to be immersed in its strange world again. Reports from my journey will be forthcoming over the next few weeks. 

Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal says, 

Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would pose genuine challenges to his ability to write about anything — or he’s a transparently disingenuous writer and thinker. I’m not sure which is worse. 

I think what’s going on here is something more specific. My guess is that Coviello thought (a) David Brooks is a conservative and (b) this dumb dismissal of Foucault is just what a conservative would say. I think that also helps to account for the gleefully mocking tone of Coviello’s essay: though he claims to have “all but committed to memory” Brooks’s column, it seems more likely that as soon as he got the one sentence that fit his pre-existing caricature of conservative thinking he effectively stopped reading and certainly stopped thinking. 

This is a very common phenomenon. 

Recently the Telegraph of London did a kind of exposé of the BBC’s political biases, focusing on (among other things) a documentary that aired just before last November’s Presidential election. In it, Donald Trump’s words on January 6, 2021 were carefully edited and spliced to connect phrases that were not connected in his speech and to alter the timing of those words. When confronted with these facts, 

Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, even tried to justify the doctoring of the Trump speech, telling a meeting of the broadcaster’s standards committee that it was fine because it broadly reflected the truth about Trump’s actions. 

After all, it’s the kind of thing he would say. 

Similarly, in 2024, when it was pointed out to J. D. Vance that there had actually been no reports of Haitian immigrants in Springfield killing and eating people’s pets, he replied, 

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies. 

Maybe the Haitian immigrants didn’t kill and eat pets, but it’s the kind of thing they would do, or might do, and it calls attention to real problems. In short, “it broadly reflected the truth” about Haitian immigrants in America. 

To be sure, the BBC’s reports came much closer to reflecting the truth about Trump than Vance’s lie-spreading did to teaching Americans about Haitian immigrants; but all the parties mentioned above are on a down escalator to the sub-basement, and once you step onto that device it’s extremely difficult to get off.

If you report that someone said X, not because she said X, but rather because X seems broadly consistent with what you take her views to be, then X becomes your new baseline for interpreting her. Then if someone tells you she said something much more extreme, say 2X, well, that’s plausible, isn’t it? After all, she said X, you remember that. And now 2X is the new baseline, so when you hear that she said 3X…. And before too long the escalator dumps you off in the sub-basement, where you’ll say anything at all about those you believe to be your Repugnant Cultural Other, because, after all, you have so much evidence against them. 

I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take notes as well as keep a journal. I even tried Apple’s own Notes app, though I hate everything about it, starting with its ugly yellow color. Etc. (I’m not naming them all, so do not write me to ask “Have you tried … ?” Whatever it is, the answer is Yes: I have tried it.) My favorite was Notational Velocity, in its original form — I dislike all the supposedly more capable forks of it. 

After a long while, I finally came to realize that what all note-taking applications have in common, what they primarily feature, is for me a bug. What they all offer is a place to store text — and in some cases images, though that starts to take us into Everything Bucket territory. And yes, I’ve tried all the Everything Bucket apps as well, starting with Evernote and then moving to Yojimbo and then DEVONThink — among others. 

Anyway: the promise of the note-taking app is that you can jot down or copy bits of text, put them in folders or add tags or employ some other way to organize them, and then retrieve them later. But I didn’t retrieve them later. I dutifully tagged them and then … almost always forgot about them. If I happened to remember, then I could do a quick search and easily find them, but that was a rare event. Thus, the fact that all my little scraps of text were present and searchable did me no good at all. If I could have asked an app “Look through the hundreds of items in your database and find the five that would be of greatest interest to me right now,” and gotten a useful answer — well, then that app would have been tremendously useful to me. But technology hasn’t reached that point.

So for years I just kept on adding notes to apps and then forgetting about them. Lord knows what brilliant ideas of mine are hidden away in those now-neglected apps, because I have no idea how to search for them. I would just have to take time out to scroll through note after note after note, which of course makes the whole tagging-and-organizing thing pointless. 

My search for a proper notes app ended when I realized that what virtually all notes apps do is counterproductive for me. The answer, for me, turned out to be Tot. Tot is beautiful, simple, limited in its formatting possibilities, easy of access on all my devices, and — this is the absolutely essential thing — it allows me to make seven notes. Seven. That’s it.

What that means for me is this: when I want to store a chunk of text, written by me or by others, I put it in Tot. But then, after a few days, I’ve run out of storage spots. So then I take a look at my most recent additions to Tot and ask myself: What do I want to do with this? I can put it in a micro.blog post, put it in a post for this blog, create a draft of an essay containing it, add some task associated with it to my Reminders list, or delete it. Tot’s limitations force me into that decision, and for me that’s ideal. Textual things don’t just disappear into the depths of a database: they have to be dealt with, so I deal with them. Productive resistance for the win, once again! 

Edward Mendelson, writing in 2013 on two apparently very different novels, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

I have no way of knowing whether Pynchon has ever read Virginia Woolf, but it seems clear that both chose a similar problem and found a similar solution. Each experienced, as everyone does sooner or later, the great unanswerable questions that only get asked in solitude and silence, when the fuss and clatter of daily life suddenly falls silent and “the party’s splendour fell to the floor.” Each chose a more or less ordinary woman, with no special strengths beyond a sharp distaste for power-hunger and cruelty, as the reluctant hero of an inward quest for meaning and value. Each told a story with little outward drama, because the heroine faces a crisis that is invisible to everyone but herself.

Like all of Virginia Woolf’s novels and, despite their misplaced reputation for high-tech cleverness, all of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, including his latest one, both books point toward the kind of knowledge of the inner life that only poems and novels can convey, a knowledge that eludes all other techniques of understanding, and that the bureaucratic and collective world disdains or ignores. Yet for anyone who has ever known, even in a crowded room, the solitude and darkness that Clarissa and Oedipa enter for a few moments, that experience, however brief and elusive, is “another mode of meaning behind the obvious” and, however obscured behind corruption, lies, and chatter, “a thing there was that mattered.” 

A good passage to remember with the nearly-simultaneous release of a new Pynchon novel, Mendelson’s edition of Mrs. Dalloway, and his new monograph on that wonderful novel. 

Brian Eno, interviewed by Ezra Klein, recalled a moment some years ago when he was talking with the engineers at Yamaha about one of their synthesizers. Like most synthesizers, this one came with a series of preset tones but was also programmable, and Eno told the engineers that they should make the synthesizer easier to program. They replied that nobody ever programs the synthesizer, they just use the presets. There would be no value for Yamaha in investing the thought and effort into making programming easier, given the vanishingly small number of people who would benefit from the change.

In a sense, these people are not not using the synthesizer; the synthesizer is using them. You know the old line that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg? Well, a human being’s fingers are a synthesizer’s way of getting its preset sounds played. A human thumb is the TikTok interface’s way of getting itself scrolled. The human being is a means to the device’s end. And that’s ultimately what the device paradigm, as Albert Borgmann called it, leads to. When Eno told that story about his encounters with Yamaha Ezra Klein rightly commented that people who think they are using social media end up conforming themselves more and more closely to the affordances of whatever social-media platform they’re on.

I’m reminded of that passage in The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbits are trying to get through the Old Forest, and the one way that they don’t want to go is down into the valley of the Withywindle. But they keep being forced down there. The lay of the land, the affordances of the land push them towards the place they’re trying to avoid. And eventually they discover that resisting those affordances is just too exhausting. And that’s what it’s like when we use social media, and when we use chatbots: it’s characteristic of all of our currently dominant technologies to force us to become devices. The entire system is oriented towards the transformation of what had formerly been human beings into devices. Jaron Lanier says You Are Not a Gadget but, increasingly, you really are. Eventually you’re drawn head-first into the roots of Old Man Willow and in danger of being crushed to death.

This explains why, in the face of varied but always vociferous complaints, the big tech companies keep shoving their AI programs in our faces, keep building out data centers in the face of protests, keep stealing people’s electricity and water, etc. etc. People say, You can’t force this on us against our will, and the techlords reply, Of course we can, we always have. Eventually down into the valley of the Withywindle we’ll go — unless we don’t enter the Old Forest in the first place.

And for now, anyway, we have that choice. The other day I happened to read this piece by Charlie Warzel on the deluge of AI slop that he encounters every day. “This Is Just the Internet Now,” the title says. But it isn’t. I’m on the internet every day, and I haven’t seen any of the crap he describes. Almost all of it comes from the major social-media platforms and I’m not on any of them — and you don’t have to be either. The hobbits had good reason to take the great risk of entering the Old Forest; I don’t.

UPDATE: A friend wrote to disagree with this post, but I think he misunderstood both Eno and me. So I’m pasting in some of my reply here in case I’ve confused others also.

Eno didn’t [criticize people who use] presets. He just said that he thinks it would be better if people had a legitimate option to program if they want to. They shouldn’t have to be technical wizards in order to program. Yamaha could have made it easier, so that someone might think, Hmmm, what could I do with this?

Similarly, with social media, Instagram for example, there might be very legitimate reasons for people to choose an algorithmic timeline rather than a chronological one — but they don’t have the choice. Meta doesn’t make it difficult to view posts chronologically, they make it impossible. With Substack, if I don’t want to see Notes — and I damn sure DON’T want to see Notes — I have no way to opt out. (I just have to avoid the Substack homepage, which I do. That’s something, I guess.) An algorithmic timeline by default is fine, a Notes view by default is fine, but when the defaults become the only option then that technology is undergoing enshittification.

And when you make your synthesizer so that choosing anything but the presets is impossible, or impossible for you if you’re not a wizard, then that’s the same kind of enshittification. [I should add here — I didn’t put this in my email — that I don’t think it’s nearly as bad for an individual instrument to be enshittified in this way, because no single model of any instrument has the kind of dominance that the big social media platforms have in their domain. You can usually, if not always, buy other instruments with different features. The enshittification of the really big social-media platforms is more consequential — though even then we are other options, e.g. for posting photographs, that aren’t enshittified in the way Instagram is.] 

Eno’s point is not a criticism of the users of technologies, it’s a criticism of the makers of technologies.

Lauren Walsh:

Thomas Mann’s four-part novel, Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), a tremendously important book to [Albert] Murray’s thinking, enacts this mix of gravity and lightness, in this case even desolation and resilience. In the titular character, who was sold into slavery, Murray saw a rascally figure of the hero who endures despite the odds. One day, Murray and I read together the opening of Joseph in Egypt (the third book of the novel), where Joseph yammers on to one of his captors, waxing rather philosophical about the interwovenness of individual destinies. Murray laughed in response to the scene, delightedly calling the protagonist a “cocky, conceited S.O.B.” Indeed, even Joseph’s captor notes that he talks too much. But it’s a spirited moment and Murray admired the character’s spunk and intellect, as well as the author’s decision to craft a hero who is arrogant but at times also humbled. After his laughter broke, and in a tone both serious and full of exuberant zest, Murray went on to talk about how “Mann is singin’ it” in his exploration of the human condition and his allegorical confrontation of contemporary problems.

Joseph and His Brothers was foundational to Murray’s aesthetic philosophy and theories of culture. As Murray explains in The Hero and the Blues (1973), “to make the telling more effective is to make the tale more to the point.” In other words, literary craft — sophisticated, textured, allegorical style that elevates prose to fine art — serves socially committed writing that educates, while still “singing.” He also regarded Mann’s Joseph as a timeless and universal hero, a blues hero before there was the blues: one who rises above the obstacles in his path through improvisation and wit, a highly developed figure of unbroken human spirit. For Murray, there was no dissonance in linking this European retelling of a Bible story with the American blues idiom. Joseph, an “excellent epic prototype,” was of a piece with the American blues hero because he “goes beyond his failures in the very blues singing process of acknowledging them.” 

This makes a lovely and thought-provoking connection between my 2023 essay on Murray and my series of posts on Mann — from the same year! 

John Ruskin, from Unto This Last (1860):

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

A strange political economy; the only one, nevertheless, that ever was or can be: all political economy founded on self-interest being but the fulfilment of that which once brought schism into the Policy of angels, and ruin into the Economy of Heaven.

David Graeber, from “Bullshit Jobs” (2013):

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it. […]

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.