"The river of laughter in which we swim begins in infancy; it springs up simultaneously with the river of thought."

"Aristotle thought that human beings were distinctive because they were rational; Wittgenstein believed it was language that made us special; Sartre argued that our humanity flowed from the exercise of our wills. But the speed with which children embrace humor suggests that it, too, is fundamental to human nature. We laugh, therefore we are."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Why Are Kids So Funny? The emergence of humor so early in life suggests something important about human nature" (The New Yorker).

I think part of why little kids are funny is that they've got loving adults gazing at them all the time and responding with delight. The kids are playing to the audience. And the parents' reports are subjective. 

Then the other reason kids are funny is that they haven't been socialized yet. They're not holding back, worrying that something might be stupid or weird or disgusting. Adults need a little courage to be funny. We're inhibited and afraid of embarrassment and the loss of status. To be funny is to take some risk, but little kids are utterly blind to the risk. These are people who shit their pants on a regular basis.

I remember a blog post from December 6, 2021 titled "I remember...."

I remember it began: "I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from 'The Great Gatsby' and present it for discussion.... The sentence of the day was 'I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.'"

I'm looking back at that post because I just did a search of my archive for "Brainard," because I'm reading a new article in The New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, "What Do You Remember? The more you explore your own past, the more you find there" and it begins: "Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of 'I Remember,' an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, often single-sentence paragraphs beginning with the words 'I remember.'"

Writing about that "Gatsby" sentence, I'd said: "Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings.... This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping.... " And a commenter, gadfly, said: "Althouse is doing her Joe Brainard, 'I Remember' schtick - but she can't top the master." He quoted Brainard's book, and it was obviously my kind of thing — very sentence-y. I immediately read it. I'll read it again, now that I'm reminded of it.

But what is Joshua Rothman saying about it?

"Many basically ordinary activities conceal, or can conceal, vast amounts of effort. Packing, for me, has turned out to be like..."

"... staying fit, or being well read, or cooking a decent weeknight dinner for a family of four, in that it requires a surprising amount of consistent work over time. The effort isn’t just practical but intellectual. You’re a better packer, for instance, when you master the concept of a 'distinction without a difference'... there might be no appreciable difference between two distinctive-seeming garments.... Overpacking has the effect of deferring decisions, shifting them from your house to your hotel room. When you understand this, you become more motivated in your packing: it’s senseless to add not just to your physical load but to your mental one.... My new goal is to become as organized in life as I am on the road; my hope is that packing will end up being a kind of laboratory for the development of a more rational me...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, "Why Can’t You Pack a Bag? Our overstuffed suitcases burden us more than we realize" (The New Yorker).

Front-load your decisionmaking, and don't look back. You know, some people travel with just the clothes they wear and pack nothing at all!

"Along with three quarters of a million other people, I’m a member of r/AmIOverreacting, a forum on Reddit devoted to the problem of potentially freaking out too much...."

"If anything, r/AmIOverreacting is a kind of reactivity buffer zone—a place where reactions can be mediated, and so slowed down. In that sense, it’s part of a larger, society-wide effort.... Mindfulness is another way of managing one’s reactivity. Broadly speaking, mindful minds seek to replace the question “Am I overreacting?” with the neutral observation that, yes, a reaction is happening. In the pre-baby mindfulness workshop I attended, our instructor told us to imagine our emotions as locomotives. 'You can watch the train leave the station without getting on board,' she said. She encouraged us to react to our reactions with nonjudgmental attention...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are You Overreacting? How to survive when provocations are a natural—and inescapable—part of life" (The New Yorker).

"Taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence."

"Every evening, on the way home from work, I pass the same red-and-white fire hydrant, which is set into some reedy bushes on a little promontory overlooking a harbor. I often stop to take a picture of it: its red registers as warmer in summer and cooler in winter, and its white adopts the yellow of scorched grass in late summer and fall.... I think with some regularity of a remark made by the British-Irish comedian Jimmy Carr, who once told an interviewer that the meaning of life was 'enjoying the passage of time.' Everyday photography, with its implicit emphasis on what recurs, makes enjoying the passage of time a little easier.... [N]o, you’re not likely to wring transcendence out of the mundane on a regular basis. You can, however, learn something about yourself and your world by doing or attempting to do these things. Even amateur hour becomes golden hour, sometimes."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "What Can You Learn from Photographing Your Life? Pictures of the mundane can capture much more" (The New Yorker).

I regularly go out at sunrise, and when I go, I always take photographs. But then I also, with almost equal regularity, go out for a second walk, and I rarely take photographs. But I did take one yesterday — the forest at noon:

"In 'Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts,' Oliver Burkeman... argues that we ought to give up a little more often, and more pervasively...."

"Many people, he argues, refuse to give up: they are perfectionists who strive ceaselessly to get control of their lives as workers, parents, citizens, and friends. Unfortunately, Burkeman writes, experiencing life 'as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer' has the effect of turning it into 'a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.' As a counterbalance, Burkeman advocates 'imperfectionism.'... [Y]ou should try less planning and more doing.... Should we, as a general matter, see giving up as a sign not of weakness but of imagination, acceptance, or wisdom?... I’ve set aside projects that can never be resumed, or friendships that will never be rekindled. I gave up on a troubled relationship with a relative who later had a disabling stroke, after which our bond could never be repaired. Sometimes we give up wrongly, or with devastating results; we might not even know the costs of what we’ve foregone...."

Write Joshua Rothman, in "Should You Just Give Up? Sisyphus couldn’t stop pushing his boulder—but you can" (The New Yorker).

Oddly, as I was writing this post, I got a text from my son Chris, pointing me to an article — "Ernest Shackleton’s 'Stunning' Footage Comes To Life 110 Years Later with Nat Geo’s "Endurance'" —  and I immediately spotted this:

"Shackleton is still considered a hero today because, although he lost Endurance to the pack ice, he never gave up, and through his incredible grit, courage and inspirational leadership saved all his men."

"Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral controversies over whether emotional-support animals belong on airplanes..."

"... in the recent, charged debate over whether Israeli or Lebanese people invented hummus; in Disney’s 'remixing' of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unifies these phenomena, he thinks, is that they unfold in a cultural vacuum. In the past, a society could rely on 'a shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on' to govern all sorts of situations. Today, in the absence of that shared background, we must constantly renegotiate what’s normal, acceptable, and part of 'us.' ... [Roy writes] 'Here we are on a terrain in which culture has no positive aspect, since the old culture has been delegitimized and the new one does not meet the necessary condition of any culture, which is the presence of implicit, shared understandings'.... Around the world, cultures aren’t being replaced by other cultures; the idea of 'Westernization' is a red herring, he suggests, because, despite the worldwide popularity of pizza and 'Succession,' what’s actually ascendant are 'weak identities' constructed through that 'collection of tokens.' It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to a faceless suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions, if they have any, but they don’t—they’re just a random collection of people who happen to live near one another. 'You do you,' they say...."

From "Is Culture Dying? The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that 'deculturation' is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences." The article, by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker, reviews Oliver Roy's book "The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms."

Rothman writes "I’m one of those people who is 'spiritual, but not religious'" — people who is?!! I'm one of those people who remember when The New Yorker had a noble tradition of meticulous editing. Has that degenerated into a nonculture of if it sounds good, write it? But we've already analyzed this grammar issue and come up with the answer. It's a rule. If you don't follow it, your venerable institution is crumbling. You're just a random collection of scribblers who happen to publish under the same cover.

Rothman's last paragraph gestures at the struggle over immigration that's roiled American politics:

"How should we create things?"

"One popular idea is that we ought to 'make' things. In books like Robert Pirsig’s 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and Matthew Crawford’s 'Shop Class as Soulcraft,' we encounter the notion that there’s something special about making things yourself, to your own specifications, with a particular goal in mind and in a particular state of mind—a kind of elevated craftsmanship. 'Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right,' Crawford writes. He’s thinking mainly about making tough, hefty things with your hands—furniture, engines, houses, and so on.... Eno has a different way of imagining creativity.... Demonstrating some of the software he uses for creating generative music, he shows how a few elements can be designed and then put into motion—a keyboard melody, for example, can be fed through a program that randomly skips some of its notes, so that the melody renders differently as it repeats.... The idea is that the music isn’t finished. It will continue growing without him.... Applying a little Eno to my writing can loosen it up, shifting it from the precise, controlled, responsible 'making' track onto the playful, surprising, impersonal 'growing' track...."

Writes Joshua Rothman in "How Should We Create Things? In a new documentary, the musician Brian Eno shows that playfulness can substitute for inspiration" (The New Yorker).

"Valiant says that he tries not to use the word 'intelligent' to describe people (in fact, he is 'sometimes taken aback' when he hears others use it)..."

"... instead, he is drawn to 'valuable abilities that somehow involve learning and are not well captured by conventional notions of IQ.' An educable mind, he writes, can learn from books, lectures, conversations, experiences, and Zen koans—from anything, really—and notice when relevant aspects of almost forgotten knowledge reveal themselves.... To a degree, the connections, recombinations, and new applications of knowledge involved in being educable are useful precisely because they aren’t obvious.... A civil-engineering class I took in college, which focussed on the structural forces shouldered by bridges and skyscrapers, comes back to me with great regularity when I think about all sorts of things. Wind exerts its force along the length of a skyscraper, causing it to bend. Similarly, a new source of stress in your life can’t be compartmentalized; it increases the pressure everywhere. It’s interesting to see one’s mind through the lens of educability. It makes you wonder what other cross-pollinations have occurred.... Reading widely about things that don’t seem immediately or practically useful, in the hope that what you learn now may prove meaningful later—that’s pretty much the definition of a liberal-arts education. Who knew that one of its best defenders would turn out to be a computer scientist?"

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "What Does It Really Mean to Learn?/A leading computer scientist says it’s 'educability,' not intelligence, that matters most" (The New Yorker).

Valiant =  Leslie Valiant, the computer scientist. His book is “The Importance of Being Educable.” 

"Like Dr. Frankenstein, we are neglecting the monster’s point of view. What will our possible children think of their existence?"

"Will they be glad they’ve been born, or curse us for ushering them into being? Having children, [the philosopher Mara] van der Lugt argues, might be best seen as 'a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible.' We are deciding 'that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted,' and we 'must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.'..."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should We Think of Our Children as Strangers? A new line of inquiry asks us to imagine them as random individuals who just happen to live in our homes" (The New Yorker).

Based on the title alone, I presumed I was about to read some anti-natalist material. Who would commit to accepting a random stranger into one's home — with no option to kick him out? To ask the question in that form is to undercut the pro-natalist propaganda that is — unless women are coerced — needed to keep humanity from becoming extinct. 

And, indeed, Rothman gives short shrift to the pro-natalists (though he does say a little more than that they include Trump and Vance, which, I suspect, would be enough to put off most New Yorker readers):

"... I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud...."

"My head isn’t entirely word-free; like many people, I occasionally talk to myself in an inner monologue. (Remember the milk! Ten more reps!) On the whole, though, silence reigns. Blankness, too: I see hardly any visual images, rarely picturing things, people, or places. Thinking happens as a kind of pressure behind my eyes, but I need to talk out loud in order to complete most of my thoughts. My wife, consequently, is the other half of my brain. If no interlocutor is available, I write. When that fails, I pace my empty house, muttering.... My minimalist mental theatre has shaped my life.... I’m scarcely alone in having a mental 'style,' or believing I do. Ask someone how she thinks and you might learn that she talks to herself silently, or cogitates visually, or moves through mental space by traversing physical space...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize" (The New Yorker).

Rothman quotes questions — from psychologist Linda Silverman — that test whether you're a visual thinker (but don't seem to test whether you are a verbal thinker):

"[T]here’s a wide range of ways in which people can relate to time in their lives. 'Some people live in narrative mode'... and others..."

"... have 'no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development.' But it’s not just a matter of being a continuer or a divider. Some people live episodically as a form of 'spiritual discipline,' while others are 'simply aimless.' Presentism can 'be a response to economic destitution—a devastating lack of opportunities—or vast wealth.”... There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the field, mystics and people who work hard in the present moment. . . . Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are consistent in their inconsistency, and feel themselves to be continually puzzling and piecemeal.'..."

Writes Joshua Rothman in "Are You the Same Person You Used to Be? Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what you’re like isn’t who you are" (the internal quotes are from Galen Strawson).

"I know two Tims, and they have opposing intuitions about their own continuities. The first Tim, my father-in-law, is sure..."

"... that he’s had the same jovially jousting personality from two to seventy-two. He’s also had the same interests—reading, the Second World War, Ireland, the Wild West, the Yankees—for most of his life. He is one of the most self-consistent people I know. The second Tim, my high-school friend, sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so. When I first met him, he was so skinny that he was turned away from a blood drive for being underweight; bullied and pushed around by bigger kids.... But after high school Tim suddenly transformed into a towering man with an action-hero physique. He studied physics and philosophy in college, and then worked in a neuroscience lab before becoming an officer in the Marines and going to Iraq.... He shared a vivid memory of a conversation he had with his mother, while they sat in the car outside an auto mechanic’s: 'I was thirteen, and we were talking about how people change. And my mom, who’s a psychiatrist, told me that people tend to stop changing so much when they get into their thirties. They start to accept who they are, and to live with themselves as they are. And, maybe because I was an unhappy and angry person at the time, I found that idea offensive. And I vowed right then that I would never stop changing. And I haven’t stopped.'"

Writes Joshua Rothman in "Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?/Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what you’re like isn’t who you are" (The New Yorker).

"Do the two Tims have the whole picture? I’ve known my father-in-law for only twenty of his seventy-two years, but even in that time he’s changed quite a bit, becoming more patient and compassionate.... And there’s a fundamental sense in which my high-school friend hasn’t changed. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been committed to the idea of becoming different..... There’s a recursive quality to acts of self-narration. I tell myself a story about myself in order to synchronize myself with the tale I’m telling; then, inevitably, I revise the story as I change.... We change, and change our view of that change...."

The anti-natalist.

"David Benatar... believes that life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion," writes Joshua Rothman (in The New Yorker).

In Benatar’s view, reproducing is intrinsically cruel and irresponsible—not just because a horrible fate can befall anyone, but because life itself is “permeated by badness.” In part for this reason, he thinks that the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether....

He provides an escalating list of woes, designed to prove that even the lives of happy people are worse than they think. We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort”—we are too hot or too cold—or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches, allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes. Life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations”—waiting in traffic, standing in line, filling out forms. Forced to work, we often find our jobs exhausting; even “those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled.” Many lonely people remain single, while those who marry fight and divorce. “People want to be, look, and feel younger, and yet they age relentlessly”....

Death is worse, he says, so killing yourself is no answer. The only way to avoid the badness of death is never to have been born. Too late for that!

There are 2 serious books out right now about a man trying to live like a particular nonhuman animal.

These are nonfiction books, and they are being taken seriously. I read about them in Joshua Rothman's article in The New Yorker, "The Metamorphosis/What is it like to be an animal?"

Two men — Thomas Thwaites and Charles Foster — independently conceived of their projects. Thwaites, an artist, tried to be a goat and wrote about it in "GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human," and Foster, a veterinarian/lawyer/columnist, tried to be a fox and a badger and wrote about it in "Being a Beast."

These projects were entirely different from fictional efforts at inhabiting the existence of a nonhuman animal, such as Tolstoy's "Strider" (about a horse) and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (with a bit about a rat). As Rothman sums those up:

In these pastoral and sensual portrayals of the animal self, different critiques of the human self are embedded. For Tolstoy, the problem with people is that they’re marooned in their egos. The clearheaded directness of animals is a remedy for that self-obsession. For Joyce, the problem is that people are sleepy, numb, and incurious. We could learn, he thinks, from animals’ eager sensuality. Tolstoy’s animals teach us to be good; Joyce’s teach us to be alive.

What Thwaites and Foster were doing was different from that: They were using the animal not to understand humanity but as an escape from something they already believed about human beings. Thwaites finds "human personhood... stressful, absurd, and—worst of all—narcissistic" and wants to lose his ego. Foster finds human personhood dull and seeks a more vivid existence.

Rothman ends his essay like this:

There is an irony to these books: the more Thwaites and Foster try to change into animals, the more fully they become Thwaites and Foster. That’s not to say they never transform themselves... “Real, lasting change is possible,” Foster writes, “to our appetites, our fears, and our views,” and despite that change the self persists. This ability to endure through change is the miracle and mystery of selfhood. Rethinking who we are; dreaming up new ways of living; taking ourselves apart to build ourselves back up—for human beings, these activities are natural. They are our never-ending hunt.

That is, thinking beyond what is natural and trying being what you are not is even more human than continuing your conventional ways. A nonhuman animal would never even think of such a project, let alone attempt to execute it. And, that's why these projects are, on their own terms, incoherent. You're never less like a nonhuman animal than when you are trying to be a nonhuman animal. Only a human being would do such a thing.

"Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. I even know which ones."

A line from Saul Bellow's "Herzog," quoted by Joshua Rothman in a New Yorker article titled "The Impossible Decision," about deciding whether to go to grad school.