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The Jonas Wergeland trilogy

Posted in books, from the reading room, tagged , , , on April 3, 2009| 6 Comments »

Kjaerstad

It’s about four years ago now since I stumbled across Jan Kjaerstad’s The Seducer (ISBN 978-1905147014). Kjaerstad is a Norwegian author and The Seducer was the first of his great trilogy to be translated into English. It hooked me from the very start. I loved it, wallowed it, swam in it, just became totally absorbed by it. Why? Well I’m quite clear why. It’s the quality of the writing. I’m a great lover of stories and the whole trilogy is not only one great web of hundreds, if not thousands of stories, but the whole premise of the books is that we understand each other and ourselves through the stories of our lives. Now that’s a theme very close to my heart. I am convinced that we construct a narrative self. Who I think I am is the result of the ever evolving, ever developing, intricate web of stories I tell myself about my life. And the way I communicate my self, my life, even my single experiences to others, is by telling them stories. That’s my first reason for loving these books so much. The second reason is the quality of the writing. On the back of The Seducer, Kjaerstad is described as a post-modern writer. I don’t know what the word “postmodernism” does for you. I know that for many people they have almost an allergic response to it, but I have the view that it’s had a bad press. I find the fundamental insights of postmodernism appealing and I really, really enjoy good postmodernist art, and, wow, can Jan Kjaerstad write great postmodernist art! What do I mean by that? Well, he is a complete master of telling a story involving an object, an event, or a particular word, then pages later, in another totally different story that same object or word arises again but now in a different context, but because it’s already gained a certain, particular significance from the previous story, in it’s second appearance it has a different meaning from what it would have had if you hadn’t read the story where it appeared the previous time. Then, later, in yet another story, up it pops again, and again with a new significance and meaning, related to the other two, but different, so echoes and ripples of the prior meanings deeply condition the third usage. And so it goes. Again and again. I find it exciting, thrilling, breath-taking even. This is how life is. Everything we experience has a unique meaning and significance for us which comes about through the precise and particular narrative of our life. It is absolutely true that none of us experience the same song, the same madelin, the same colour or scent even, in exactly the same way. Maybe if you’re not convinced of that then this trilogy might convince you. I do think this is writing which provokes, which challenges and which enlarges and deepens how we see ourselves, how we understand ourselves and how we might engage with our lives.
So what’s the main story? The Seducer is the first title, The Conqueror (ISBN 978-1905147168) the second, and The Discoverer (978-1905147366) the third. They tell the story of Jonas Wergeland, a Norwegian TV producer who makes the greatest series ever seen in Norwegian TV, Thinking Big. The series explores the lives of famous Norwegians and challenges the average viewer to give up his or her preconceptions in order to obtain a much deeper and clearer understanding of who each of these people were, and what made them tick. He designed the series to get his fellow Norwegians to wake up, to stop being passive observers of life, to think big! Yeah, I’m sure you’ve already thought it…..to become heroes not zombies! (he doesn’t use those terms of course, but he’s definitely writing about the same issue). At the outset of the first book, Jonas returns home to find his wife lying in a pool of blood, shot dead. As he stumbles about the house trying to make sense of what’s he’s experiencing we read story after story from his life. How did this happen? Who is Jonas? Who is Margrete who lies dead on the carpet? By the end of the novel, Jonas has been charged with her murder and he’s plead guilty. But did he actually do it? We still don’t know. In the second book, The Conqueror, Jonas is in jail, and a professor with the help of a mysterious, exotic woman, are writing a biography of him to try to uncover not just the truth of what happened but to answer the question, how could this great, creative man, also be a murderer? How is that possible? The third book, The Discoverer, opens with Jonas now having served his time, and it’s in this novel that we get to hear directly from him for the first time. Some of the chapters are his writings from his own notebooks, and with this element, he suddenly becomes much more real. I had the experience of feeling that although I knew a lot about Jonas from the first two books, I still didn’t know him. Now I get to know him. It’s only about three quarters of the way through the third novel that the truth is revealed. What actually happened? How did it all come about? I won’t tell you here of course but this was the point where suddenly the book hit my heart, moving me to tears.
This is a BIG read. The Seducer is about 600 pages long, and the other two about 450 pages each. Maybe The Discoverer could stand alone and be read without the other two, but I suspect the reader would miss a lot of full significance of many of its stories. However, for me, the best was left till last. I loved them all, but The Discoverer is my clear favourite.
I could say much more about these novels, about their overall structure, about the themes that he weaves together and the echoing questions he asks which are the essential questions in all our lives, but I’ll stop now. Let me just finish by making two further points. There’s a lot of very explicit sex in these books. Especially in The Seducer, (there’s a hint in the title!) If that would disturb you don’t read these books!  Secondly, this is not the kind of novel that will appeal to everyone. It’s not a thriller. It’s not a whodunnit. It’s a massive web of interconnecting stories which explore a man’s life.
In my opinion, I’ve never read anything better. I had to wait about two years between each of the books as they were translated into English and then published and I re-read both The Seducer and The Conqueror over the last couple of months while waiting for Amazon to send me The Discoverer on publication, then dived right into The Discoverer. I am seriously tempted to start reading it again straight away, and I have a notion I’ll go back to the beginning and read The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer one after the other yet again.

(By the way, who on earth is in charge of book design at Arcadia Books? I’m sure it’s very clever how the front covers of books two and three fit together but just how does the cover of book one fit in with that design??!)

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The Wonder Room

Posted in books, creativity, from the living room, from the reading room, tagged , , on March 26, 2009| 5 Comments »

I’m reading The Discoverer, by Jan Kjaerstad (ISBN 978-1905147366) just now and a few pages back he mentioned something called a “studiolo”. This was a secret room hidden deep within a palace (usually not even on the architect’s drawings, and often windowless), in which a Prince would keep a private collection. The key to the collection was anything which induced a sense of wonder. Now, there’s a VERY appealing idea. I’ve written before about how wonder, amazement, or, “emerveillement“, can bring a very special quality to everyday life, so the idea of having a collection which would stimulate such an attitude is really very interesting. As The Discoverer is a novel, I wasn’t sure if the author had made the idea up, or if such rooms ever really existed. Well, guess what? They did!

Wikipedia has an entry about such rooms. They were also known by the German word “Wunderkammer”, or from the French “cabinet” as a “cabinet of curiosities”, or “cabinet of miracles”. Some people have misinterpreted the “cabinet” as an item of furniture, but it was actually a room. A particularly spectacular version was the Studiolo of Francesco I de Medici, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Sadly, all the objects in that one are long since gone, but the room itself looks stunning. The contents, we are told, would be natural objects, shells, crystals, horns and so on, and art objects such as paintings and sculptures. What held the collection together was the collector. Whatever he, or she, (usually he!) found made him wonder was a worthwhile item for inclusion.

These rooms were probably precursors of museums as well as being laboratories of discovery and sources of inspiration. They were catalysts to the imagination, to creativity and to understanding.

I love this concept, and was therefore intruiged by the description of some contemporary manifestations of “cabinets of curiosity”, or “wonder rooms”.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, uses this idea.

There’s an Italian cultural organisation dedicated to the concept.

And a quarterly Arts magazine called “Cabinet“.

Interestingly, there’s a mention in the wikipedia article of some bloggers describing their blogs as “wonder rooms”. Well, I haven’t exactly made my blog that way, but it’s not far off it, is it? Quite often, I browse through my old posts at some of the photos, references, or reviews and they stimulate my “emerveillement”. I hope browsing through them might do the same for you. But I’m inspired now. Maybe there’s a photobook project in this? Maybe there’s a website project? Maybe I could start a physical collection somewhere in my home! Does this idea inspire you? If you come across such rooms (physical or virtual) please let me know!

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The Night Train to Lisbon

Posted in books, from the reading room on February 17, 2009| 1 Comment »

I read a lot of non-fiction. Something to do with my being insatiably curious. I often post about the non-fiction books I read, both as reviews which you might like to read, and to share what I learned or what thoughts they provoked for me. But what about fiction? I’ve decided I don’t read nearly enough fiction. So, I’m not going to have any days this year without a novel, or collection of short stories, on the go. I typically read several books at the same time so this shouldn’t mean I won’t be reading any non-fiction for a while.

One of the novels I’ve just read is “The Night Train to Lisbon”, by Pascal Mercier (ISBN 978-1-84354-712-9). If you google it, you’ll find a wide range of extremely divergent reviews. Some people loved it and some found it boring. On the front cover, Isabel Allende says it’s “a treat for the mind”. I agree with her. For me, this book was a treat.

The novel tells the story of a classicist who lives in Bern and who one day encounters a Portuguese woman on a bridge. The encounter is brief but it makes a huge impression on him so when he stumbles across an old Portuguese language book in a second hand bookshop, he just has to buy it. The book he buys is by a Portuguese author named Amadeu de Prado and is a collection of his reflections on his life and his self. Gregorius, the classicist does something impulsive for the first time in his life and walks out of the lecture theatre at work and takes a train to Lisbon, determined to learn Portuguese and find out all he can about Prado.

The two intertwined themes of the book are what hooked me. The first is how we can get to know someone through their text. Throughout the novel are scattered Gregorius’ translations of passages from Prado’s book. You could just skim through the novel reading only these italicised passages and be both inspired and stimulated to reflect on your own life and on how you’ve become who you are. But the other theme is equally fascinating, and it’s how a person is revealed through the stories told by others. Although Prado himself is long since deceased, Gregorius meets up with as many of the people who knew him as he can. They all tell stories of what they remember about Prado and each story reveals something else which helps to Gregorius to understand who Prado was and how he became that person. This is such an interesting truth……how different people have different views, different insights, memories and impressions of one person….and how it’s the collection of these diverse stories which ultimately reveals the reality of that person.

I was also hooked by more personal issues and memories. Like Prado, I’m a doctor who thinks and who writes about his thoughts. Like Gregorius I’m fascinated by books, by language and by stories. I’ve only visited Lisbon a few times but one afternoon particularly stands out in my memory. My trips to Lisbon were to participate in teaching sessions for Portuguese doctors, and on one visit I had a free afternoon while one of my colleagues took the class. An old professor of archeology looked after me for the afternoon. He took me wandering around Lisbon’s old town showing me how the history of the city was revealed in its architecture and its archeological uncoverings. I spoke no Portuguese and he spoke no English. Like all Portuguese of his generation, his second language was French (just as Gregorius discovers in the novel), and my second language too (poor as it is!) is French. So we spent the whole afternoon together, a Portuguese man and a Scot, exploring Lisbon in French! The novel brought those memories flooding back.

The most enjoyable books are like that I think. There is something about them which can be appreciated by many readers and there’s something about them which resonates personally, or connects with the reader’s own experience or memories.

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The stories that emerge from little observations

Posted in books, from the living room, life, narrative, writing, tagged on February 1, 2009| 3 Comments »

Let me tell you a story.

Last week, when visiting my parents, my mum said she was looking for her collection of Robert Burns poetry (it was Burns Day), and she came across her aunt Wilhelmina’s “Burns Birthday Record”. Here it is
Burns Birthday Book

I’ve never seen a book like this before. You can see it was owned by my great aunt. Here’s her name and the date she got the book
Burns Birthday Book

25th February 1907. Wilhelmina Rosie was my mum’s father’s sister. Here she is with my gran and grandpa and their first born (my mum). This is taken in Orkney in front of Evie Primary School where Aunt Mina was schoolmistress all her working life.

mum, gran and grandpa and great aunt mina

I started to browse through her Burns Birthday Record
Burns Birthday Book
entries in the Burns Birthday Book

You’ll see that the idea of the book is to enter someone’s name at the date of their birthday, opposite the little quote from Burns. The first thing that struck me was the surnames. There are lots of names here I’ve never come across in all my life. Apparently that’s because many of the names were typically Orcadian but I’m still a little surprised. My grandfather was, for example, Orcadian but moved south to Stirling. Did a lot of these families never move out of Orkney?

entries in the Burns Birthday Book

The next thing I noticed was that they weren’t all written by the same person. Maybe she wrote most of them herself but sometimes her friends would write in their own names? I browsed the entire book, wondering about all these people and their strange names. Several had the same surname so there were clearly a few families represented. Then I came across this entry in December.

entries in the Burns Birthday Book

This entry stands right out.

It’s the only entry in the whole book which gives the person’s full date of birth and the date they died. And it’s the only entry with a quote from the Bible added. Here’s why. George Folsetter was Wilhelmina’s love. They were engaged to be married but he fell from his horse, aged 26, and died. She never married. You’ll see the date of George’s death was 1903, but Aunt Wilhelmina only got her book in 1907.

Look up the quote from Numbers Chapter 18. I had trouble finding it. I assumed that in her day, she’d have a “King James” version of the Bible but in fact the quote comes from the “Revised Standard Version” which was only published for the first time in 1901, six years before she got her Birthday book. I’m not terribly clear why she picked this particular verse, but the chapter as a whole is about tithes and giving the first of the best of all you have to God.

I heard Eddie Reader, in an introduction to Burns’ song, “Ae Fond Kiss”, that the Nancy for whom he wrote the song, lived to her 80s and every year wrote in her diary on December 14th “This day I’ll never forget for this was the last day I saw Robert”

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illness by Havi Carel

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, philosophy on January 21, 2009| 8 Comments »

I’ve just read “illness” by Havi Carel (ISBN 978-1-84465-152-8). This is an excellent book and as Raymond Tallis says on the back “should be read and re-read by everyone who is professionally involved with illness, who is ill, or is likely to become ill; which is to say, by all of us”. I couldn’t agree more.

Havi Carel teaches philosophy at the University of the West of England. She has developed a rare but extremely serious disease – LAM – which quickly reduced her lung capacity by 50%. She brings her professional philosophical knowledge and understanding to the personal experience of this illness in a way which both challenges the way we think about illness, (chronic illness especially), and provides a useful framework for a positive engagement with such difficult life-limiting experiences as disabling disease.

I would like to see significant changes in the way health care is delivered based on the lessons revealed in this book. We need a fundamental re-humanisation of our ways of thinking about illness in order to bring about a sea change in the way doctors, nurses and other health professionals work.

Havi Carel writes with great clarity. Don’t be frightened off by the fact she’s a philosopher. Despite the fact that she draws on the work of philosophers from Epicurus to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (amongst others), there is nothing difficult to grasp or understand in this book. She skilfully uses the works of great philosophers to both illuminate and clarify our thinking about health and illness. Not only does she use clear, straightforward English, but the personal story woven into book makes it a profoundly moving and completely engaging read.

On a naturalistic view, illness can be exhaustively accounted for by physical facts alone. This description is objective (and objectifying), neutral and third-personal………Phenomenology privileges the first-person experience, thus challenging the medical world’s objective, third person account of disease. The importance phenomenology places on a person’s own experience, on the thoroughly human environment of everyday life, presents a novel view of illness.

Instead of viewing illness as a local disruption of a particular function, phenomenology turns to the lived experience of this dysfunction. It attends to the global disruption of the habits, capacities and actions of the ill person.

This consideration of the relationship between objective and subjective perspectives is I think central to the development of humane and humanly relevant medicine. Eric Cassell nicely explores this conceptually by unpicking the words “disease” and “illness”, and clinically by asking doctors to encourage patients to talk about their “suffering”. The fundamental shift is a change of perspective from the components of the body, to the socially embedded individual human being. Havi Carel’s consideration of the “biological body” and the “lived body” sets a wonderfully clear perspective from which to understand this.

Normally, in the smooth everyday experience of a healthy body, the two bodies are aligned, harmonious. There is agreement between the objective state of the biological body and the subjective experience of it. In other words, the healthy body is transparent, taken for granted……..It is only when something goes wrong with the body that we begin to notice it.

This is exactly the point made by Hans Georg Gadamer in his excellent collection of essays entitled “The Enigma of Health”. For me, reading his essays completely changed the way I thought about health and illness. Havi Carel has given me a new framework for these concepts and values and I find that very exciting.

One of the most useful parts of this book is the exploration of the idea of “health within illness”. We have a tendency to write off the chronically sick expelling them from the land of the healthy to the land of the ill (as Susan Sontag so clearly wrote). But life’s not like that. Having a chronic illness does NOT mean never being able to experience health again. In the last two chapters of the book, “Fearing death”, and “Living in the Present” she tackles this head on, drawing on advice from Epicurus, Heidegger and the contemporary French philosopher, Hadot. The wonder and the joy of the present is something I’ve posted about before – here and here – both times referring to Hadot in particular. I couldn’t agree more.

Let me finish this short review though by focusing on her other really important point –

Empathy. If I had to pick the human emotion in greatest shortage, it would be empathy. And this is nowhere more evident than in illness. The pain, disability and fear are exacerbated by the apathy and disgust with which you are sometimes confronted when you are ill. There are many terrible things about illness; the lack of empathy hurts the most.

Virtually every day I hear terrible stories of heartlessness and carelessness. Of patients who have experienced a total lack of humane care in the hands of health care professionals. Always those stories shock me. In one way I don’t understand them. Why work in a caring profession if you frankly don’t care? But in another way I blame the system. This exclusive emphasis on the biological body reduces human beings to cases of diseases. By ignoring or belittling the patients’ narratives, or by not paying attention to their subjective experiences of their “lived bodies”, we literally de-humanise our practice.

To think of a human being is to think of a perceiving, feeling and thinking animal, rooted within a meaningful context and interacting with things and people within its surrounding.

It’s time to re-humanise Medicine. This book is an important contribution to that project.

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A passion for living…

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life on January 7, 2009| 4 Comments »

Mark Vernon posted about an interview with Diana Athill. She’s 91 years old and is the oldest writer to win the Costa Book Prize for her book, “Somewhere Towards the End”, which is about aging. I can see there is a lot of wisdom in her book and I was especially struck by this –

‘I remember when I was young once hearing my mother talking to someone and saying, thank God she hadn’t had to go to a dance last week. And I thought to myself that if I ever reach the stage when I thank God for not having to go to a dance, I shall kill myself.’

Sometimes I hear a doctor thanking God that a patient hasn’t turned up for his or her appointment and that always makes me think that’s a sad thing to be thanking God for. If I ever find myself thanking God that I don’t have to see patients today, I won’t kill myself, but I’ll go and do something else instead. Why keep doing what isn’t really your passion? And, the other side of that coin, doing what you are passionate about makes your life richer (and maybe even longer!)

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Light and dark

Posted in books, from the dark room, from the reading room, photography on November 25, 2008| 1 Comment »

evening clouds

  • The Celtic mind adored the light……….We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness. For we are sons and daughters of the darkness and of the light.
  • Every thought that you have is a flint moment, a spark of light from your inner darkness.
  • All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other.
  • Light is the secret presence of the divine. It keeps life awake.
  • Light is a nurturing presence, which calls forth warmth and color in nature.

All quotes from “Anam Cara”, by John O’Donohue. (ISBN 0-06-092943-X)

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theWarofArt

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, writing, tagged on September 12, 2008| 3 Comments »

On the plane from Edinburgh to Tokyo I read theWarofArt by Steven Pressfield (ISBN 9 780446 691437). It’s subtitled “Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles” and has a brilliant little Foreword by Robert McKee which really captures the essence and the scope of the book. It’s one of those books about creativity in general and writing in particular. There are no breakthrough insights here but it is a highly readable and very inspirational little book which is structured around three sections. The first is all about what stops us from actually creating – Resistance. This is a brilliant section. He describes Resistance as a force. A pretty malevolent force and one that can feel highly personal, but which, in fact, is an impersonal natural phenomenon. It’s what stops us from starting, what stops us from carrying on and what stops us from finishing. As he says right at the beginning –

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

Now there’s something you’ve heard before – that to write you need to turn up at the writing table, you need to sit down, stop sharpening the pencils, tidying the notebooks and post-its, stop browsing the web, and WRITE. It’s the getting started that’s hard.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Isn’t that so true? There’s the things we want to do, the things we feel we should do, the things we feel we were even born to do, and then there’s what we actually do. And as we all know……..it’s what we actually do that matters. The commonest form of Resistance, of course, is procrastination, and he nicely captures its power –

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

He reminds of the common stories of people who have been told they have cancer or some other serious disease and who change their lives from that day on; change their priorities; channel their energies somewhere else. And he reminds us how often these very same people end up surprising the doctors and everyone else by seriously overshooting their death sentence. Why, he asks, do we need to wait till Resistance faces us with disease and death before we pay attention and start to live the life we were born to live?

He’s great about the passive aggressiveness of victimhood. By victimhood he means that use of exterior loci of control so clearly described by William Glasser.

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

There’s really a lot of refined gold in this tight publication. Let me finish telling you about the first section with a reference to his comments about criticism. I often think there are two common attitudes amongst people – the commonest one is to criticise and complain. On any train, in any cafe, in every work place, every day you’ll hear people expressing righteous indignation. It never makes life feel richer and it never seems to solve anything either. The less common attitude is DO, to be creative, to solve or to heal.

Individuals who are realised in their own lives almost never criticise others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

The second section of the book is entitled “Combating Resistance. Turning pro”. This contains his advice for beating the phenomenon of Resistance and here’s the secret – it’s to “turn pro”. By this he means living your vocation.

The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time.

He cleverly takes everyday jobs as a model for becoming creatively professional. Here are ten characteristics or principles we can take from doing and everyday job and apply to the work of being creative –

  1. Show up every day
  2. Show up no matter what
  3. Stay on the job all day
  4. Commit over the long haul
  5. The stakes are high and real (it’s about survival, feeding our families, educating our children)
  6. Accept remuneration for your labour
  7. Don’t overidentify with your job
  8. Master the technique of your job
  9. Have a sense of humour about your job
  10. Receive praise or blame in the real world.

You’ll need to get the book to read the detail on those! But I’m sure you’ll agree they make sense.

The third and final section of the book is the one Robert McKee takes some issue with in the Foreword. It’s entitled “Beyond Resistance. Higher Realm” and in it Steven writes about Muses – the spiritual forces which bring us inspiration and which work with our genius. He describes them as Angelic forces but is very clear that you don’t have to believe in Angels to benefit from the work of the Muses. He makes the point that just as we can think of Resistance as an impersonal force, so can we think of the Muse as an opposite impersonal force and he describes how he begins every writing session with a prayer to the Muses. I liked this section at least as much as the rest of the book. However you want to conceive of the Muses, I think he is completely right about them.

Let me finish this little review with one of Goethe’s couplets which he quotes –

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.

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Poets change the way we see the world

Posted in books, creativity, life, writing, tagged on August 21, 2008| 2 Comments »

I think poets have not only the keenest powers of observation but their words illuminate. The world looks different after reading poetry. I’m not referring to particular passages which have changed my perception or understanding of particular places or experiences. I’m referring to, well, what would you call it? The poetic stance? The poetic viewpoint? The poetic way of living maybe……

When I was a teenager (a LONG time ago) I bought a little book by the poet Stephen Spender. It was called “Life And the Poet”. It was a small paperback with a darkly yellowed cover. It was published in 1942 apparently. I’m sure I must have it somewhere but I can’t lay my hands on it right now and it’s almost 40 years since I opened it and read any of it. But I seem to remember two things he said. One was that he said poets should be like visitors from another planet. It was his way of saying a poet should approach the world with wonder and amazement (a bit like those French philosophers I read recently). I liked that a lot. It stuck. And he also said, I think (bare with me, this memory is a long way off!), that poetry taught us how to “make life anew” and that was a reason to live. That stuck too. (or maybe I’ve invented that for myself after all these years……I’ll need to find my old copy, or another one, and read it again)

I paid a visit recently to the lovely Watermill Bookshop in Aberfeldy
Watermill Bookshop Aberfeldy

As I browsed the shelves my eye was caught by a book entitled “Findings” by Kathleen Jamie (ISBN 978-0-954-22174-4). Never heard of the book before, and I’d never heard of the author either, but the back cover described her as an “award winning poet” who has an “eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland”. I opened the book and the paper under my fingers made me stop and wonder. It felt lovely. A soft roughness if you can imagine such a thing. Immediately it felt natural, and special, and thrillingly sensuous. This feels like a lovely book, I thought. Now that doesn’t happen often. I can enjoy the weight, the feel, the scent of a real book (no, computers will never replace the book), but I can’t remember when I ever before picked up an unknown book like this and felt transfixed. It caught me. Physically. So I sat down in one of the many comfy, leather armchairs and I started to read. Did I have any doubts? From the moment I held it in my hand, did I have any sense that I’d put it back on the shelf? I don’t think so. I think I knew I’d relish, yes, that’s the right word, relish this book. I bought it of course.

Findings

It’s not a book of poetry, but a book of essays – a poet’s living.

Some of the subjects she writes about are familiar to me. Orkney, salmon ladders, prehistoric stone markings, the Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh and the Edinburgh skyline. But even the familiar seemed brand new in her eyes, in her words. She’s a keen observer of nature, especially birds, and in the essay entitled, “Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes” she writes this…..

This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, “My God, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, its just a weird heron”. Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says “Don’t be stupid” and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.

That’s what I want to learn too – to notice, to look, to listen, without processing it all, but taking the experiences home and turning them over later. My camera helps me do that, but Kathleen Jamie’s words inspire me to write more down, to write it down as soon as possible……not the analysis, the experience, the perception, the observation. To relish the “emerveillement” of living.

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Two mindsets – fixed and growth

Posted in books, education, from the reading room, life, psychology on August 4, 2008| 8 Comments »

Stanford university psychologist, Carol Dweck has published a book entitled “Mindset. The New Psychology of Success” (ISBN 978-0-345-47232-8). Guy Kawasaki posted about it, and wrote a commendation which is printed on the front page. And Stanford Magazine did an article about it last year.

She’s identified two “mindsets” in relation to how people approach challenges and effort.

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world – the world of fixed traits – success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other – the world of changing qualities – it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

One point she made which struck me as surprising at first was that people with a fixed mindset often have had lots of praise. She makes the point that just telling your child they are clever, or wonderful, or whatever, sets up a belief system in them which can become fixed and she recommends instead praising children for their effort, for what they’ve learned. This is her key point really – that when you have a mindset about loving learning you can grow, but when you have a mindset where you think talents are fixed then you get stuck.

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.

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