10 Things: Loving, living, and letting go

By popular demand, I bring you 10 Things inspired by this quote/meme, shared on Facebook this morning:

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” —Buddha

Apologies ahead of time for the rambling philosophization that gushed out. If you want to play along in the comments, skip over my bit and write your own 10 Things first, then come back and read mine. So, the first 10 Things that come to mind after reading that quote…

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1. I’m slicing up the three pieces of the quote and considering the value of love in all its forms as the foundation for all of our choices and actions. Quantity is implied here, but not the quantity of people or things we love but the amount we love, the amount we give love or put love into the world.

2. One aphorism leads to another. The more you give, the more you get.

3. I was thinking of the different ways we can love, and the marbles that started rolling around in my head were the Greek forms. I thought of eros and communitas, but then I couldn’t help myself and looked them up (I like to get things right; I have a hard time letting go of accuracy). Agape, eros, philia, storge. We are capable of loving in many ways. The deep, true love we hold rare and precious; desire and aesthetic and physical love; the love of friends and family and community that requires virtue, equality and familiarity; and, of course, tolerance (also with many forms). 

4. None of the three statements is explicit about their antitheses. Anger, hate, abhorrence, intolerance, contempt, etc. Is the first phrase — how much you loved — or the judgment implied in the opening, like a bucket that gets filled up by love and emptied by the detrimental emotions? Is it that simple/complex?

5. Gentle living reminds me of parenting babies and toddlers and preschoolers. Gently when you pet the cat. Gently when you hug your brother. Gently when you touch Gramma’s face so you don’t poke her eyes out. Gently. I don’t say that word out loud to the Sonars very much anymore. They have pretty decent self control, which is what we monitored with the word ‘gentle’ in their wee years. But perhaps I should still use it. Gently with your words to your peers who are entering an age of sharp-tongued anxiety. Gently with your brothers who will likely be your longest friends and fiercest allies, even though they may always know how to push your buttons. Gently on the earth. Don’t waste the water or the paper or the electricity. Gently with your mama who is both proud to watch you grow and gain your independence and fearful of seeing you stumble along the way. 

6. How gently you live can then be kindness or conservation or through word or action it can mean minimizing the damage that we inevitably do to the people and the world around us. So that if loving much is maximizing what we give, then living gently is minimizing the harm we cause. 

7. How gracefully we let go of what is not meant for us. In my clumsy understanding of Buddhism, letting go gracefully seems like the ultimate goal. Not allowing material goods to weigh you down. Not allowing negative thoughts or experiences or people to weigh you down. To release the weight of everything. Though in pragmatic terms for the normal human who feels angry and jealous and slighted and loves things and people and feels sentimental and attached, then letting go gracefully is challenging and requires a strong hold on the first two concepts. Maximize what we give, minimize what we take or harm. 

8. My hand is tired and far more minutes have slipped by than a traditional 10 Things exercise usually occupies. I suppose that is the nature of philosophical contemplation. It takes time and might hurt. 

9. The sky just turned much more dim and the wind is gusting. An imaginary line on a weather map is manifesting as a line of force in the sky that blusters across the coastal plains like a dust squeegee pulling cold air behind it. 

10. That dust-squeegee metaphor is both hilarious and terrible. I love it and I give it to you with love, letting go of any embarrassment I feel about it as I release it into a gust of wind and into your eyeballs. Gently, I hope, for the sake of your eyeballs. 

Book Randomness: Generosity, An Enhancement by Richard Powers

Generosity: An Enhancement

by Richard Powers

Ferrar, Straus and Giroux

(ARC from Twitter giveaway @FSG_Books) 

Nobody wants to write a dumb review of a smart book.  I finished reading this book several weeks ago, and have been pondering it off and on between other novels, trying to figure out how to talk about it.  To be sure, I really liked it.  It is a richly layered story, dripping with allusion, reaching out through science, literature, philosophy, and pop culture.  It is a book begging to be talked over with clever friends or peers or colleagues, and I have no doubt that it will be.  

Unfortunately, I’ve had neither the time nor the focus to put my thoughts together into a coherent communication about this book.  What follows are some of the ideas that wandered through my brain as I read and then pondered the book (as collected in margins and a notebook).  All of this will likely make more sense after you’ve read the book, which will be released on September 29.  Let me know what you think after you’ve read it.  

I’ve grouped Spoilery comments after some space at the end, for those who’d prefer to avoid hints at the ending. 

I wrote all of these things before I found Oprah’s Reading Questions for the book, but if you read those, you’ll see some overlap.

As an aside, I came across an article about genetic enhancement last week that points to the relevance of the discussion about what we can and should do to ourselves in this genetic age.  

Begin pondering:

My first try at a review

I’m stuck on the word ‘enhancement.’  This book isn’t tagged as a ‘novel’ or ‘allegory,’ though it could certainly bear either of those tags.  No, it is ‘An Enhancement’ right there on the cover.  National Book Award Winner Richard Powers builds a rich, realistic, and complicated world in which enhancements or the search for them pop out around every corner.   Aside from the sexually suggestive use of the term, the implication here is to make something appear bigger or better, or perhaps to make it more attractive.  Revision for improvement by augmenting or trussing.  Here Powers ponders the evolutionary necessity for misery, giving us a story in which he explores an outlier for happiness, a woman who experiences the world with extreme joy and generosity and who is unaffected by even minor malaise.  This Miss Generosity is juxtaposed to a writer who’s own struggle with depression has made him unable to write.  

Devolving into lists

Definitions

—What is Creative Nonfiction?

—Unlike other novels that bear the stamp of “Novel” on the cover, this one is branded “An enhancement.”  What’s the difference?  

 Themes  

—The inside and the outside, the public and the private, the popular and the academic, the phenotype vs. the genotype.

—Fiction is redemptive.  In fiction we can fantasize and revise and enhance.  This is iterated in the genomics of the novel, wherein DNA can be revised.  If the standard story tropes can be fiddled with and recombined, so can the DNA.  Evolution forgets the unviable.

—According to one character in the book, the secret of psychological survival is forgetting but this is a book of remembrance and revision.  

—Russell is a writer frozen by the destruction he has wrought with his pen.

—Human beings? Americans? can’t accept things for what they are.  We must understand what they are and how they work, to dissect and thereby destroy.  

 Complications and Observations

—Provocative, yes; playful, no.

—People self-medicate in many ways: drugs, sex, video games, food.

—We are constantly seeking drugs to heal our misery, but how viable is a life without misery? And what type of life would that be?

—Thassa is like The Giving Tree.  She is referenced in so many different ways, nicknames, first name, last name, full name, epithet. 

—Thassa or Candace are revisions of Grace, givers instead of takers.

—Allegory: Miss Generosity/Happiness (Thassa), Teacherman/Writer (Russell), Counselor/Psychology (Candace), Genetics (Kurton—Curtain?), Popular Media (Oona), Science Media (Tanya), Public, etc. 

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SPOILER comments:

—Thassa tries to kill herself with the drugs that many people need in order to live.

—From the outset, the narrator seems to be conjuring the characters, but at the end it comes across as a revised remembrance. 

—Russell is able to write again, this time not destroying his subject with the words, but rather trying to restore her after she has been otherwise destroyed.  

—Russell struggles with his own misery, but also unwilling to let it go and unable to trust someone without misery.

—Or… Spock tries to rape Thassa, but the narrator does rape her, and only then can Russell accept and love her, when she is broken like he is.