Jim Willis

Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2 

(not sure when I wrote this, late 90s?)

I don’t really know why I read. Usually i don’t even remember half the stuff that happens in a book that i read. It’s not even like i read all that quickly either. it’s more like i read a book the way I listen to a Coltrane solo. Coltrane started the idea of sheets of sound, where the individual notes were not quite as important as the flavor, the feel of the entire melodic phrase taken as a totality. Or maybe instead a better analogy is curry. you don’t notice any one particular spice, it’s the collection of spices as a whole that decide whether a curry is good or bad. 

That’s the way i read books. It’s admittedly, not the best way to read. I mean, i am horrible at remembering particular passages or events or whatever. but i don think that i get a pretty decent overall flavor from a book. I come away with something good that lingers around long enough to remind me how badly i need to find a new book when i haven’t read in a day or two. 

That’s how i came across Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. I hadn’t read in a few weeks. I was taking a break because nothing was appealing to me. I couldn’t find anything that would leave anything but the blandest most tepid sensation on my cortex after the first few sentences. So i didn’t read for a while and then i came across Powers’ book which pretty much seeks to answer the question: why bother reading? 

i think it does a really decent job at explaining why we keep picking up book after book after book. The premise of the novel appears to be a bit on the sci-fi end if you only read the dust jacket for the book. But it’s pretty far from being sci-fi, it just so happens to use technology in an effort to answer the questions about why we read. 

Powers’ is the main character in the book, it’s got a ot of autobiographical stuff that is worked in via some pretty cool narrative technique. He is hired as a Humanities Resident at some Institution where he is given the assignment of teaching a computer how to read. The computer not only has to be able to read, but has to understand well enough to pass something called a Turing test. Meaning that the computer (who is named Helen) has to go up against a graduate student in English. The test is administered via terminal and the answers are presented to the tester who then has to tell which is the computer’s answer and which is the real human’s. Powers reads Helen pretty much everything from Beowolf to Emily Dickinson and the computer does start dealing with some pretty interesting issues w/r/t reading and writing. 

One exchange between Powers and Helen is particularly cool: Helen, in the days before the Turing test, asks Powers how many books there are. He replies by telling her that the Library of Congress contained 20 million volumes and that the number of new books published increased each year, and would soon reach a million worldwide. He continues that a person, through industry, leisure and longevity might manage to read, in one life, half as many books are published in a day. 

Helen reached the conclusion that the more days that pass, the less likely that any particular book will be read and the less likely any one of us will run into someone who can have a conversation with us about a book we’ve just read because the chances that any two people will have read the same book will diminish over time. 

Consequently, Helen asks why do humans write so much or even at all. Powers is great here because he goes back to Nabokov’s afterward to Lolita and says that humans are each pretty much trapped in their own cage, and a book ?bursts like someone else’s cell specifications.” And the difference between the two cages completes an inductive proof of thought’s infinitude. He closes the conversation with Helen with a poem that i think is by Emily Dickinson: 

There is no Frigate like a Book 

To take us Lands away 

Now any Coursers like a Page 

Of prancing Poetry– 

The Traverse may the poorest take 

Without oppress of Toll- 

How frugal is the Chariot 

That bears the Human Soul!

I pretty much highly recommend that anyone who likes reading check this book out.

probably read this mid-90s

What follows are a slew of quotes by a book called Forgotten Truth it’s sort of like a grandparent of Power of Myth. I think what he’s getting at with all this stuff here is that we’ve got to believe that there is something bigger than us and that we are part of that something bigger.

The scientific gauge is quantity: space, size and strength of forces can all be reckoned numerically. The comparable yardstick in the traditional hierarchy was quality.

To the popular mind quality meant essentially euphoria: better meant happier, worse less happy. Reflective minds, on the other hand, considered happiness to be only an aspect of quality not its defining feature.

The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred…because for primitives the sacred is equivalent to power and in the last analysis to reality. The sacred is saturated with being.

Objects can be larger or smaller, forces can be stronger or weaker, durations can be longer or shorter, these all being numerically reckonable. But to speak of anything in science as having a different ontological status–as being better, say, or more real–is to speak nonsense.

Itself occupying no more than a single ontological plane, science challenged by implication the notion that other planes exist. As its challenge was not effectively met, it swept the field and gave the modern world it soul. For this is thew final definition of modernity: an outlook in which this world, this ontological plane, is the only one that is genuinely countenanced and affirmed.

Though man’s conversion to the scientific outlook is understandable psychologically, logically it involves a clean mistake. Insofar as we allow our minds to be guided by reasons, we can see that to try to live within the scientific view of reality would be like living in a house’s scaffolding, and o love it like embracing one’s spouse’s skeleton.

Norbet Wiener used to make the point by saying: Messages from the universe arrive addressed no more specifically than To Whom it May Concern. Scientists open those that concern them. No mosaic constructed from messages thus narrowly selected can be the full picture.

Ambiguity seems to be an essential indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words where maters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. . .Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better different point.

Science can tell us what men do prize but not what they should prize. Values, life meanings, purposes and qualities slop through science like sea skips through the nets of fishermen.

Since reality exceeds what science registers, we must look for other antennae to catch the wavebands it misses.

The Razor’s Edge Somerset Maugham

Monday, February 03, 1997

Finished reading this one last night. At by the time I put it down, my opinion of the book had done a huge turn around—from thinking it was a weak, well thought but poorly executed book, to a book that really did have something to say. One reason perhaps for the turnaround is that I realized I was trying to get the wrong information out of the book. I thought the book was telling a different story than the one printed on the pages in front of me. I was second guessing the author, thinking that I knew what he was trying to do and I judged that he was doing a poor job at it. Though eventually, I just started reading it as a story and stopped trying to see through the writer and it occurred to me that if I just read what was in front of me and didn’t go too much deeper behind the words, it was an ok book. 

I’ll propose a weak analogy here: it was a bit like star wars, which I saw this weekend. If you watch star wars and try to distill some life guiding principals from the Force, you’ll come away disappointed. On the other hand, if you just enjoy the story, the Force is an interesting, integral part of the movie and has its inspiring moments.

So is there anything wrong with a story that is just that: a story? I don’t think so. I mean, and even as stories go, this one had a lot more to offer than the regular time killing book. I mean it’s a success story done in a completely new way. It’s odd how its connection to the 20’s is pretty clear, but that connection is important in a way unlike the connection Gatsby has with that era. I think in a sense, Maugham uses the era in a way unlike Fitzgerald did and as such gives the reader a slightly different perspective of that era. I think that it would be wise for anyone teaching Gatsby to put this book up along with it for the benefit of the student. 

The epigraph that starts the novel illustrates this difference:The sharp edge of the razor is difficult to pass over;thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.Katha-Upanishad

I think that at first I was looking for some sort of connection between Seymore and larry. And while certain similarities exist, there is a historical difference between the two that spans like 20 or thirty years. Maugham doesn’t purport to know anything about what larry is talking about. It’s a good cop out, granted, but it’s also pretty understandable. But even for someone that doesn’t appear to know all that much about what larry is going through, he does have some good insight into the path that larry has chosen. Particularly this piece of dialog that appears much later in the book (269):

“But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality.” (Maugham speaking)

“You want to taste sugar, you don’t want to become sugar. What is individuality but the expression of out egoism? Until the soul has shed the last trace of that it cannot become one with the Absolute.( larry).

So it appears that Maugham raises the same objection to The Way as yours truly, and he does a hell of a job both expressing it and a damn good job of expressing larry’s argument against that objection.

His ending is suitable:For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: Elliot social eminence; Isabelle and assured position backed by a substantial fortune in an active and cultured community; Gray a steady and lucrative job, with an office to go to from nine till six every day; Suzanne Rouvier security; Sophie death; Larry happiness.

I would only fault him for stating so categorically that larry has in fact achieved happiness, because Maugham does seem to skirt the issue of whether individuality is a requisite of happiness. But, once again though, he has only aspired to write a success story about these people and in this universe he is perhaps correct. But in the larger universe of life, I have to wonder whether or not he sort of cheated. I mean what good is a story if the truths it expresses are only valid in the universe created by the author? This is where salinger clearly has the upper hand. Maugham does a damn good job of getting to the point that everyone wants something different out of life and that these people, elliot and gray in particular, should be judged by the criteria they set for themselves. It seems that maugham, by taking this position, is saying that (since a universal criteria is so arbitrary) it is impossible to apply any sort of universal criteria of success to every person’s existence, and each person is required to define his or her own criteria. While I disagree with this argument, Maugham does a really good job expressing it.