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Annunciation

Annunciation

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In class this week, the professor said a scene from the novel we’re reading was an annunciation. I pictured a medieval painting, the rich oil pigments darkened from the smoke of candles burning. I pictured the painting hanging on the wall of a great cathedral,  cold stone and buttresses, echoes of chant and plainsong.

Today is the feast of the annunciation, the day when the Virgin Mary learned she was bearing the son of God via a message from the angel Gabriel. 

I see a painting again, Gabriel in rich reds, his white wings shining. I see Mary’s head inclined toward the light, gold halo above her head. 

Annunciation: an announcement, a message, a few words that can change your life. 

(The Annunciation depicted in a 15th century tapestry. Photo courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.)

The People Behind the Pill

The People Behind the Pill

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I’ve always been an earnest, note-taking reader, especially now that I’m in class again. But increasingly more I enjoy the sidetracks and detours of reading, the rabbit holes, the inefficient digressions. 

For the next paper, we’re analyzing the public reception of a specific scientific discovery, and I’ve chosen oral contraception. It’s a rich topic, so rich that I’m reading more than necessary. 

For instance, in The Birth of the Pill, author Jonathan Eig tells the stories of the four people who are most responsible for the development of the pill:

There is Gregory Pincus, a brilliant scientist with a flair for publicity searching for compounds in his ramshackle laboratory in Massachusetts; Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who coined the term “birth control” and crusaded for women’s freedom all her life; Katharine McCormick, heir to the Cyrus McCormick fortune, who funded the experiments; and Dr. John Rock, a gynecologist and devout Catholic who took on his church to help the women in his care.

Though a drug company was involved — G.D. Searle — the pill would not have been created without the  “courage and conviction of the characters involved,” Eig writes. The book is a vivid reminder of how human personalities forge the technologies we inherit. It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.

(Photo of Margaret Sanger courtesy Wikipedia) 

Lifespan

Lifespan

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Get ready to meet your great-great grandchildren, says David Sinclair in his mind-boggling new book Lifespan. Sinclair, a Harvard geneticist, makes a simple but earth-shattering claim: Aging is a disease, and soon science will be able to cure it. Sinclair is not just talking about extending life, but about prolonging health, as well.

It would be easy to laugh this off if Sinclair was a no-nothing diet and exercise guru, but he’s a serious scientist whose theory on aging is as brilliant as it is well-informed. 

Epigenetic changes drive aging, Sinclair says, and they can be reversed by certain supplements and by stressing the body in such a way as to trigger the survival response — intermittent fasting, low-protein diets, intensive exercise and exposure to hot and cold temperatures. 

I had long heard that one of the few ways known to prolong life was to consume fewer calories. This book helps me understand why. And though I’m not exactly eating one-third less than I usually do, I am skipping an occasional meal — and would love to get my hands on some of those supplements. The cost, after all, is relatively low — and the payback, enormous. 

(A two-foot tall, 90-year-old spruce tree from the Japanese Garden in Portland.)
 

Lessons for a Lifetime

Lessons for a Lifetime

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He stood behind the lectern on one leg, resting the other, knee crooked, on his desk. I’m still not sure how he achieved this position without falling over, but somehow he did. His sleeves were rolled up, and his voice was husky. 

Toiling in the vineyards of academia can be a lot of work. But Dr. James Ferguson did that work, and because he did, legions of Hanover College students fell in love with The Magic Mountain and The Brothers Karamazov, with Faulkner and Bellow and Eliot. 

Dr. Ferguson, who died May 12, was the kind of teacher you get once in a lifetime — if you’re lucky. Though I studied with professors who published more, whose names were more recognized in literary circles, Dr. Ferguson was the real thing: a man who loved the great books and thrived on helping others love them, too. 

The details of his life that I learned from his obituary — that he came from a family of Dust Bowl migrants who moved from Missouri to California and slept for a while in their car, that he served in Korea and got his Ph.D.  with the help of the GI Bill, that he took care of his wife, who had a chronic illness, and his mother, who lived to 102 — tell me that his didn’t just teach the great books, he lived the great life. 

But these facts don’t surprise me.  His respect for the written word seemed to flow from his whole being. What I took from him was to love literature not for where it could take me but for what I took from it—  lessons for a lifetime. 

(“The Point” at Hanover College, where Dr. Ferguson taught from 1963 to 1992.)

The Alignment Problem

The Alignment Problem

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Maybe it’s because I’m going back to school in September and must get some practice reading books I don’t totally understand, but for some reason I was determined to finish The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, by Brian Christian. I picked it up from the “New Nonfiction” shelf a couple of months ago, and thanks to my library’s liberal renewal policies, I have it still. 

I could tell from the beginning that I was in a bit over my head with this tome, which, though written engagingly, presupposes knowledge of artificial intelligence that I do not have at my fingertips. But it seemed like an important book on an important topic so I plowed through it. 

I finished it last night and, after using the index to flip back and forth to various definitions I spaced out while perusing the first time, was at least able to understand what the alignment problem is and why it’s important to solve it. 

The alignment problem is a term in computer science that refers to the divergence between the models we have created and the intentions we have when creating them, often imprecise or incomplete. It is, Christian assures us, a problem that the AI community is working to understand and rectify, but is by no means solved. 

Instead, he says, “We are in danger of losing control of the world not to AI or to machines as such but to models. To formal, often numerical specifications for what exists and what we want.”

We must be concerned, Christian says, but not grim. “Alignment will be messy. How could it be otherwise? Its story will be our story, for better or worse. How could it not?”

In Praise of Clippings

In Praise of Clippings

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This morning’s newspaper included an article about books on D.C. I did what I do with all helpful articles I think I might want to read again — pulled it out and saved it. 

We live in a digital era, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at my files. They are stuffed full of newspaper and magazine clippings, everything from recipes to book reviews to especially fetching columns I want to read again. They are messy and unwieldy — but essential, too.

I could find the same articles and bookmark them on my computer. But there’s something to be said for the physical presence of the article itself. For the touch of the paper,  complete with ripped edges and, sometimes, with notes I scribbled in the margin. 

Clippings are outdated, I suppose. But I keep them around. They are tangible reminders of the ideas they hold. 

Balls in the Air

Balls in the Air

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After writing yesterday’s post I started thinking about how, if 2010’s Snowmageddon offered a few days off to clean a closet or start a blog, just think what 2020’s (and now 2021’s) lockdowns might produce. What novels and screenplays and landscapes and enchanted gardens will grow, have grown, from this enforced solitude?

A prodigious creative output for some, I’m sure … but not from me!  I can barely keep up with my paying work, the blog and the rest of my life. 

A 10-day snow storm does not equal an almost yearlong pandemic.  It lacks the fear and confusion; it lacks the duration. So while I have more time now to put words on paper, I’m keeping many of those words inside, hoping for time soon to process what we’ve been enduring. 

For now, I’m just trying to keep the balls I was already juggling in the air.  Maybe I’m alone in this — but I bet I’m not! 

(Starting my 12th year of blogging by adding a GIF. Will it work? It seems to on my end!)

Eleven Years

Eleven Years

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Eleven years ago today, on another snowy Super Bowl Sunday, I started this blog. It was something I’d been meaning to do for years, but the windfall of time made possible by a weather disruption gave me the space I needed to make the resolution come true. 

I still remember sitting on the couch, setting up the blog account, finding it easier than I thought. I had the title in mind, and a rough idea of what I wanted to say (though it would take months to learn how to size the photos), but it came together with the ease of something that was meant to be.  It seemed to me then, and on good days still seems to be … magic. 

Magic occurs when ideas have the room and reception to put down roots and grow. “Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest,” writes the author and memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert. “And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.” 

For eleven years, I’ve partnered with the idea of A Walker in the Suburbs, writing about walking and place and books and family life. I’m glad it came to visit me, this idea. But most of all, I’m grateful I chose to welcome it. 

The Mirror and the Light

The Mirror and the Light

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I just finished reading The Mirror and the Light, the 750-page conclusion of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant three-part reimagining of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal of England and Henry VIII’s right-hand man … until he wasn’t. 

In the final pages, Cromwell prepares for his execution. He ponders heaven and hell, thinks often of his father, Walter, a blacksmith and a drunk who beat his son and propelled him out from Putney into a life he could not have imagined from his beginnings, a life of service and, more than most, of influencing history. 

Still, when Cromwell confronts his end, he shudders and he trembles, he sees ghosts. He also realizes that life will go on without him, as it will, of course, for us all:

It occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day; it will be dinner time or nearly, there will be a bubbling of pottages, the clatter of ladles, the swift scoop of meat from spit to platter; a thousand dogs will stir from sleep and wag their tails, napkins will be unfurled and twitched over the shoulder, fingers will be dipped in rosewater, bread broken. And when the crumbs are swept away, the pewter piled for scouring, his body will be broken meat, and the executioner will clean the blade.

Mind and Body

Mind and Body

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Over the weekend I read an essay about the power of literary analysis in the college classroom — and, because of the unique times in which we live — also not in the college classroom.  Apart from the many excellent points made about education in the humanities — the lessons of the great books have never mattered more, the ability to think and analyze is prized in the workplace — the author, Carlo Rotella, made one that brought a crucial point to mind. 

While teaching via Zoom, Rotella said, he realized how much he uses visual cues in his class, figuring out who he should call on, who’s getting a concept and who is not. I ran this through my own, English-major memory, and sure enough, the same seems true from the student’s point of view. 

What I remember most about college literature classes is not just the ideas that seemed to be exploding in my brain as we discussed The Magic Mountain or The Brothers Karamazov, but the visual impressions my teachers left as well. 

I recall in particular my favorite college professor, Dr. Ferguson, who would curl himself around the podium when he lectured, one knee on the desk, one foot on the floor, while stork-like, he led us through the great books. It’s not that I don’t recall the ideas themselves — I think about them all the time — but until I read this essay I wasn’t aware of how closely they are linked to the physical peculiarities of the professors who introduced them to me. 

This essay triggered a dialogue in my brain, a conversation between the author and me, and the part that I supplied surprised me — as it should, when the “conversations” are deep and good.