Sapiens: The Finale

I finished reading Sapiens early this morning, just in time to return it to the library tomorrow. This will be the third time I've written about the book, but why not?

As I wrote last week, ignorance helped propel Sapiens to science, but it was science, capitalism and empire together that gave us the modern world. Science lent empires an ideological justification for exploration and discovery. The capital used to finance these explorations was made possible by credit, which is made possible by a belief that the future will be better than the present. "The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. This idea was soon translated into economic terms."

But science, capitalism and empire can only take us so far. Already, Harari argues, they have brought us unprecedented prosperity and peace (though not necessarily contentment). "Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war."  Harari admits that his views are skewed by the year in which he was writing them. "If this chapter had been written in 1945 or 1962, it would probably have been much more glum."

I know Harari has a new book out, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in which he describes what happens when "old myths are coupled with new godlike technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering."

He gives us a sneak preview at the end of Sapiens: "Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem as discontented as ever. ... Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. ... Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?"

Farewell Tour

They dart, they pounce, they charge each other with a bravura that far exceeds their body weight — given that their body weight is barely 11 ounces.

Today I spent more time than was practical trying to photograph a hummingbird in flight. A fluttering tail behind the feeder is the only still I could snap. 
This time next week these little guys will likely be gone, winging their way south as they always do this time of year. So today I refilled their feeder and tried to chase away the ants that were swarming it in their orderly, ant-like way. The hummingbirds need to stoke up, and I needed to help them.

I'll miss their antics and their beauty. But I know they'll be warm and comfortable. And before I can turn around twice it will be late April again — and they'll be back.

Five months of hummingbirds a year. Not bad.

Faded Rose

We're at that point in the season when the bright hue of autumn leaves has not yet arrived and the muted palette of late summer prevails. Sedum and asters, the faded rose of late-blooming crepe myrtle.

All that's left of clematis paniculata are the spent blossoms of the tiny white flowers.

And then there are the shaggy meadow flowers, the golden rod and Joe Pye Weed.

It's easy to wander long amidst the subtle shades of this subtle season.

Shoe Story

While I've never worn stiletto heels, I've always tried to look presentable at the office, footwear-wise. This has entailed keeping shoes at the office, since there's no way I can walk long distances in pumps or even flats.

When I worked at McCall's magazine years ago, my nickname was "Imelda" for the file drawer full of shoes I kept on hand. That was for Imelda Marcos, wife of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose 3,000 pairs of shoes were the stuff of legend, and which I learned today, take up the entire second floor of a shoe museum in the Philippines.

Back then, I had only about six pairs, not 3,000. And now, I have only three pairs, two black and one brown, no heel higher than an inch and a half.

Last week the shoes gathered dust because I bopped around the office in my tennis shoes every day, due to a taped-up right foot. It was delicious. My feet felt fantastic — and no one gave me a second glance.

I'm aware that wearing tennis shoes in the office is a slippery slope, though. What's next? Slippers? Those big black shoes that grandmas used to wear in the old days? I've been telling myself to shape up. We must suffer to be beautiful, yes?

Which is all to say that I'm back to pumps and flats this week. It's the only way to go.

Evening Musicale

The players were beginners, but they were not. Beginners at music, but not at life. And so the music they made, while tentative, was full of life and experience. It was brave and it was beautiful.

There was the violinist who tackled a duet with Latin flair. A clarinetist who brought Mozart to life. The cellist who played "The Swan." Two pianists, one who played simple notes, the other more complex ones. "I just don't want to have to start over," the latter admitted before she began. She didn't have to.

Tonight is the first fall rehearsal of the Reston Community Orchestra — the sessions I attended this summer were open to all — so this will be a beginner night for me. I've tuned and practiced and hope that I'm ready.

But as the players this weekend showed me, sometimes you're as ready as you'll ever be. The only thing left ... is to play.

Fall Wish List

On this first day of fall, I wish for ...

Blue skies,

Brilliant fall foliage,

And a crispness to the air,

Which is more difficult to picture, but which means ...

It needs to stop raining for a while!

Knowledge and Numbers

The Scientific Revolution began not in knowledge but in ignorance, writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, which I'm more than halfway through now. (See last Friday's entry.)

"The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions," Harari says.

In the ancient or medieval world, the pre-16th-century world, there were two kinds of ignorance. An individual might not know something, in which case he or she would ask someone who did. (A peasant asks his local priest how the world begins; the priest will know the answer, which has been laid out for humankind in the Bible.)

The other kind of ignorance, says Harari, was that an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things. How spiders spin their webs, for instance. The answer was not in the Bible, and there were few if any spider scholars back then. But it was not important to know the answer to this question. God knows everything, the world has its order, and homo sapiens took comfort in that.

"The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge," Harari writes. "This has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies."

In his scientific manifesto, The New Instrument, published in 1620, Francis Bacon argued that knowledge is power and that the test of knowledge is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Science and technology have been connected ever since.

This is very good for science, for unlocking the secrets of the universe, but not always good for social order — and certainly not good for people who aren't good at math.

Because ever since the Scientific Revolution, darn it, the secrets of the universe seem to reveal themselves in equations. "Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics," Harari says. And this mathematifying (my word) of knowledge has moved from the hard sciences to the social sciences, even to fields like psychology.

"Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would have been bewildered if you told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illnesses you must first study statistics."

They aren't the only ones.

Cloudy

Cloudy, the sky is gray and white and cloudy
sometimes I think it's hanging down on me.

So begins a Simon and Garfunkel tune that was one of my favorites back in the day. It was an upbeat accompaniment to teenage angst:

Cloudy, my thoughts are scattered and they're cloudy.
They have no borders, no boundaries.
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinkerbell,
Down from Berkeley to Carmel,
Got some pictures in my pocket and a lot of time to kill...

It wasn't until I left home for college and work that I realized I'd grown up in one of the cloudier areas of the country — the Ohio River Valley. Then I moved to northern Virginia and realized how sunny one's days could be.

That was, until this summer ...

But ... we just broke a 10-day cloudy streak that began to ease up the late Tuesday afternoon and came to full fruition yesterday.

How sweet it was to sit on the deck, to walk without the umbrella, to feel the warmth of the sun on my face. It was like a tonic.

Hey, sunshine, I haven't seen you in a long time
Why don't you show your face and bend my mind.

My mind has been properly bent.

Twilight's End

A walk yesterday that began in darkness ended in twilight, the kind that appears all at once, as if the earlier lack of visibility had been a mistake, something that a shake of the head could remedy.

I marveled at this, thinking it must have been my change of direction, even though I'd turned to the west. But going back, I had the light behind me, so what little there was of it lit my way.

I snapped off the flashlight; its pale yellow cone hadn't helped much, but had at least illuminated the newly repaved street, the bumps and edges I'm just getting used to.

It's about that time again now. The crickets are singing, the birds just beginning their chorus. Trees and leaves gaining definition, stepping out of the shadows.  I'm itching to be back outside.

Post Florence

The hurricane we'd been hearing about for a week finally made its way to northern Virginia today. And from what I've seen of its tatters I'm thankful we were spared its brunt.

The rain fell with tropical fullness and vigor, thin, plentiful sheets of it. Rain that blew in from the south, gathered from a warm ocean and spewed back onto land. Rain that made puddles on the sidewalk and street, twin fins of water spraying up from the cars.

Has it rained every day for the last three months?  No, of course not.  It only seems like it has. Last weekend was actually drier than predicted. And our totals from Florence will be measured in inches not feet.

But a few days from now, when the Equinox happens , we'll say goodbye to a summer that's been the rainiest in memory. We met our yearly totals a month ago!

As I write these words the dehumidifier hums beside me. It's on overdrive these days.

(Rain from Florence streams down a bus window.) 

A Dose of Common Sense

Walk as much as you like, the doctor said. Since he was a podiatrist, I took him at his word and did long loops through the neighborhood the last three days.

Turns out that the rowing I thought would be OK for plantar fasciitis actually is not, and the walking I thought would aggravate the condition actually doesn't. Or at least it doesn't while taking high doses of ibuprofen with a taped-up foot shot up with cortisone.

But 76 hours later, I'm walking better and in less pain. When you're a walker in the suburbs, the temptation is to keep walking, even when it hurts. And when you're me, the temptation is to try and remedy things on your own. Even when weeks turn into months.

What I learned on Thursday is ... give the professionals a chance. They can do it in hours.

(Fun photo I took in Dublin that has absolutely nothing to do with podiatrists or walking.)

Sapiens

I only started reading this book a few days ago, but I'm already marveling at the knowledge it holds and the broad sweep of history it's providing. Sapiens is about Homo sapiens, our species, and the first chapter describes some of our earliest cousins:

There was Homo floresiensis, a dwarf species from the Indonesian island of Flores that grew to only three and a half feet tall; Homo denisova, a species just discovered eight years ago in Denisova Cave in Siberia;  Homo erectus, from East Asia, the most durable species ever, which survived for close to two million years. "It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now," writes the author, Yuval Noah Harari, "so two million years is really out of our league."

Now there's a line (the italics are mine) that caught my attention.  A thousand years is only 12 generations from now, give or take. And Harari, whose erudition is such that he doesn't need fancy language, casually drops in the fact that he doesn't think we'll be around that long.

The most fascinating cousin is Homo neanderthalensis, aka Neanderthals. As you might notice, we are the only Homo species on the planet now. Which raises the question, what happened to the others?  At first, Harari explains, it was assumed Sapiens just killed everyone else off. But there was also the theory that some interbreeding went on, especially with Neanderthals.

And indeed, that seems to be the case. DNA research has shown that 1 to 4 percent of human DNA in the modern populations of the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.

Still, we mostly killed off these and all our cousins. Tolerance is not one of Sapiens strong suits, Harari says, and Neanderthals were "too familiar to ignore, too difficult to tolerate."

Tune in for later posts as my feeble Sapiens brain makes it way through this fascinating book.

Category 6?

Hurricane Florence is so large and so strong and intensified so quickly that experts are wondering if ultimately there might need to be a Category 6 for hurricanes.

Apparently, other hurricanes have also been strengthening rapidly, and this has stimulated research that shows how fast they'll blow up 50 or more years from now.

Not to take away an ounce of concern for the people of South Carolina and North Carolina and all the states (including Virginia) that will be affected by this monster storm. Weather patterns are changing.

But ... it seems is that every storm is now the "Storm of the Century." Which means that hurricane coverage has already jumped to a Category 6!

(Photo: NASA)

Educated

When I picked up Tara Westover's memoir Educated, I knew I was in for a good read. The book had been recommended by others I trust, so I bought it for my Kindle (a sure sign I want to read a book badly enough to pay for it).

I knew the basic story — a young woman raised in a strict Mormon family, not schooled at all until she got herself to university.

What I wasn't expecting was the nuance, the side story, which maybe was the main story, and that is how her desire for education wars with her desire to belong, to be part of a family and a place.

"The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is close as anyone gets to seeing wind."

This passage is from the beginning of the book, when Tara introduces her young self and her family: the unbending patriarchal father, the resourceful but ultimately weak mother, the seven children, Tara the youngest. She and the brothers and sister closest to her in age didn't have birth certificates until they were half-grown.

As Tara teaches herself enough math, grammar, history and science to receive a high score on the ACT (which guarantees her admission to Brigham Young University), she begins to pull away from her family. She has to. And the more educated she becomes (ultimately receiving a Ph.D. from Cambridge), the more threatened her family is by her.

It's one of the oldest and saddest stories, the need to choose between family and accomplishment. But it plays out in lesser forms all the time.

"All my studying, reading, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?" she wonders.

What ultimately brings her back to family — not her parents or some of her siblings, who disowned her, but to aunts and uncles and cousins — is place. "I was of that mountain (she says of Buck's Peak in Idaho, where she was raised), the mountain had made me."

Before her formal education, there was education of another kind:

"I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning,  swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. ... I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain."

Seventeen Years

I work in a neighborhood of Arlington called Crystal City, a strip of office buildings and restaurants 15 minutes walk from the Pentagon. My bus ride every morning takes me past the building where 17 years ago today a jetliner crashed killing 125 people on the ground and 64 on the plane.

I remember that day as if it was yesterday. Who my age does not? It was also a Tuesday, but the weather was perfect, one of those crystalline early fall mornings that we used to have around here before being enclosed in a big wet sock.

It was Mom who alerted me. She knew I didn't often listen to the morning news. And then the other calls started. They came in all day. Rumors abounded, chief among them that the State Department was also under attack.

An editorial I read today made the argument that many of the problems that beset us now — high deficits, wars that kill our soldiers and drain our morale and coffers, loss of stature abroad, even the current administration — can be traced to the 9/11 attacks.

"The world will never be the same," I remember telling the children, who had returned home early from school that day. But they will never understand that. The world they know is the world wrought by 9/11.

(The Pentagon, moments after the crash. Photo: Wikipedia.) 

ISO Blue Skies

You know you've had a soggy summer when some of your best weather days have happened in Ireland! After a downpour Friday night, mist and spray Saturday and rain all day yesterday, I'm remembering the blue skies of the Emerald Isle.

As I walked into the office building this morning, I noticed the squeaking of my tennis shoes on the polished floor. That and "squish-squish" have become the soundtrack of our rainy days. The umbrella that I keep in my bag for emergency showers has been pressed into service more times than I can count.

And with a hurricane barreling toward the East Coast this may just the beginning of our wet weather woes.

For now, I'm going to think dry thoughts  — not sure exactly what those are ... but I'll come up with some.

(St. Stephen's Green, Dublin. Not a cloud in the sky.)

Above-It-All-Ness

Jet lag has finally had its way with me, waking me at 4:30 and sending me spinning out into the day. Luckily, it's Friday and the office is still empty, the only sounds are of blowing air and my fingers tapping the keys.

This weekend I'm hoping to let all of this sink in: the green hills and friendly people, the toe-tapping music (which I'm reliving in my car thanks to a CD by the sons of a man who ran the B&B on Inishmore). All of that mixed with what awaited me on return: lots of work and crazy national news to catch up on.

I'm trying to keep the "above-it-all-ness" of travel, the feeling of joyful skimming it can give you. The cessation of normal routine; the quick, bright glimpse of a world you thought you knew but can still surprise you — your own.

Cottage Dreams

I noticed the difference the minute we left the plane. The lilting voices were gone. I clung to the last few of them, people standing around the luggage carousel waiting for their bags. Maybe I'll have to hang out in Irish bars, though there's no guarantee you'll hear a brogue.

It's not just the Irish accent that I love, it's also the expressions they use. "Sure and you wouldn't be" or "just a wee bit of that now." That Ireland produces more than its fair share of writers is no surprise given the number of talkers Ireland produces. Our cabdriver to Dublin Airport yesterday was one Rodney Robinson. Told us most of us life story in 30 minutes.

Today as I make my way to work on Metro, I'll think of Rodney already driving. He lives in a little village in County Kildare. At 5 a.m. it only takes him 40 minutes to reach center-city Dublin. Seven hours of driving his cab (which he owns) and he's back for a late lunch in the village, picks his kids up from school (two daughters and a son), and has the rest of the day with them. Four days a week like this and the other three his wife works in the village pharmacy and he stays home.

It's a good life, a simple life, and it's one of the Irish lives I'm thinking about today, on New World shores. Wouldn't I love to find a cottage and try living in the Old World some day? Probably won't happen, but it never hurts to dream.

Leaving Ireland

I never like to leave a place, especially one as lovely as Ireland. But if you're going to travel, eventually you have to move on. So what are we taking away from this trip?

We've talked about this a lot, recalling long-ago jaunts when we returned all fired up about something: living a simpler life or drinking tea from china cups.

This time it's hard to define "the lesson." I'd like to travel more and work less, but that's not possible now. Finding myself taking notes during the walking tours reminds me how much I love to learn and would like to go back to school someday. Again, not possible ... yet.

What will remain with me from this trip to Ireland, which was very much what remained with me from the last one, is the beauty of the Irish landscape and the warmth of the Irish people. Much has changed in the decades since I was here last. The nation is far more prosperous and modern, and there seem to be 10 times more cars on the road — all of them barreling at us down a narrow, hedge-lined lane.

But the people are as kind and funny as ever. They made us laugh. They won our hearts.

Feasts and Famine

It's our last full day in Ireland, and there was much left to see: the Cong Cross and the bog people at the Archaeology Museum, reading from The Dubliners at Sweney's Pharmacy, St. Patrick's Cathedral ... and ... the famine museum.

The Jeanie Johnston is a replica of a ship by the same name, a ship that carried more than 2,000 Irish emigrants to the New World, 200 at a time, people who might otherwise have perished during the Great Hunger.

The people who traveled in the Jeanie Johnston were some of the lucky ones. More than a third of those who left their homeland in so-called "coffin ships" died at sea.  But the Jeanie Johnston has a staff doctor and required passengers to spend 30 minutes on deck a day (rather than 20 minutes every two weeks). None of its passengers died at sea.

Still, the voyage was no picnic. People crammed five to a bed, ate hardtack and tried to avoid dysentery and cholera. This after a year or two of existing on a starvation diet when a blight killed the potato crop.

It was a sobering reminder of the agonies they and so many (including my relatives) endured to reach the United States. And it made me appreciate all the more the lovely feasts we've had on this vacation.

Ancient Manuscripts

Dublin has treated us well so far. Apart from a few showers last night (conveniently timed for our walk home from the pub), we've had blue skies and reasonable temps for our first day in Ireland's capital.

It's a compact place, with history everywhere, even when you don't expect it. We were having a bite to eat before visiting the Book of Kells, the ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the Gospels. Turns out, the bite to eat was at the Chester Beatty Library, which I read about as I ate a yummy salad plate of carrots, hummus, grape leaves, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Chester Beatty was an American collector and expat who donated his remarkable library to Ireland. It contains treasures that rival if not exceed the Book of Kells, including fragments of papyrus on which is written some of the earliest known copies of the Epistles of St. Paul.

To see the Book of Kells requires standing in several queues and jostling with others to even catch a quick glimpse of the manuscript. But at the Chester Beatty collection I stood alone, almost in tears, in front of the Letters of St. Paul to the Corinthians.

Had I been able to decipher the Greek, this is what I would have read:

"Love is patient,
love is kind,
it does not envy,
it does not boast...
Love does not delight
in evil but rejoices in the truth.
It always protects,
always hopes, and
always perseveres."

(Top photo, a map of the world from the first modern atlas, 1570, from the Chester Beatty collection. Above, books in the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.)

Rock of Cashel

Home to the ancient kings of Ireland and reputedly the place where Saint Patrick baptized one of them, the Rock of Cashel looms above the fertile green fields of Tipperary. Though it  has been an important site since at least the fifth century, the buildings that remain are "only" from around 1101.

Ten days in Ireland has made me less likely to use quotation marks around that "only." The old ring forts of Dingle are 2,000 years old, for example. But I don't want to become an antiquity snob.

So I stood today in the ruined cathedral and looked up at Saint Patrick's cross, the round tower and and the blue sky through what's left of the cathedral windows. I let my mind run free, back to a dimmer, grimmer time, one of stone and chisel, blood and smoke.

Kinsale

It's not even 100 miles from Dingle (which I loved) to Kinsale, but what a difference. There's the weather, for starters, which is just the luck of the Irish. Though we arrived in mist, rain and fog, we've had a glorious day here, all sunshine and 70s. The water has been dancing in Kinsale Harbor and we've been peeling off layers as we walk.

A walk around town, then a hike out to Charles Fort, a British garrison for more than 300 years. Kinsale is a town quite essential to Irish history, where a decisive battle was lost in 1601 that eventually led to a divided Ireland and what the Irish call "the Troubles."

But it is also a place that's embraced modernity more than some of the others we visited. Just voted the best foodie town in Ireland, it's a sophisticated melange of pubs and wine bars. 

Most of all, like all of Ireland, it's drop-dead gorgeous.