A Little Civilization

From Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which I read (and liked quite a bit) a few weeks ago:

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable -- which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Go Obama!

From George Packer, writing in this week's New Yorker:

Obama’s ability to contemplate the contradictions in Americans of all colors without going mad—to be made stronger by them—accounts for his power as a politician. He also pays the electorate the supreme compliment of assuming that it, too, can appreciate complexity. ... But it was Nixon’s Checkers speech, with its cheesy confession that he owed his parents thirty-five hundred dollars with interest (and loved America), that carried the day in 1952, and has more or less defined successful campaign rhetoric ever since. It isn’t clear that Obama’s elevated dialogue last week is in the long-term interest of his campaign. ... Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim.

Girls, They Want to Have Fun

Why is this article in the Fashion & Style -- and not Health -- section of The New York Times? While you ponder that question, an amusing ditty from the Broadsheet archives:

Why block a vaccine? Here's our answer.
Gardasil is no values-enhancer.
To prevent HPV
Causes sex, don't you see?
And quite frankly, we prefer cancer.

What's So Amazing About Really Deep Thoughts

Yet the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined ... (Wallace Stevens)

For your consideration: Two articles (one from Mom) about making a science of observing the processes of consciousness. This first one is worth reading for Proust Was a Neuroscientist author Jonah Lehrer's earnest "surprise" at "how seriously all of these artists [Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein & co] took their art," (um, yeah); this second one for the "novelistic twist" (can't you see the film adaptation?) to the research sessions described at the end. There's a lot -- too much, really -- to be said on this subject. So I'll just say that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words and close with two visual recommendations. Book: Graphic novelist Charles Ware's very cool depiction of the mind in the first thirteen years of the life of a character named Jordan W. Lint (included in the terrific new anthology The Book of Other People). Movie: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (don't be put off by the blurbiness). But that's just what I think.