And here is the envelope, ready to open --

Happy morning sight, courtesy of SUNSHINE!
 

My top nonfiction picks of 2023 -- so far (the year isn't over yet) -- are not rank-ordered or alphabetical, as I limited the list to four books. First is one I read most recently, but all four work together in my mind. Maybe they would do the same in yours.

But first I should delay the opening of the envelope, shouldn't I? Quack on about the weather a bit, draw out the suspense? You already see by my opening image that we have sunshine this Monday morning in Leelanau County -- and what a lovely gift it is! I took time out from a big cleaning-sorting-reorganizing-decision project to hang laundry outdoors on the line and get Sunny up to the dog park in Northport after picking up my mail. On our way to the village, we stopped along one of my favorite back roads, too, but I'll save that image for the end of my post and use cloudier photographs between beginning and end to highlight the contrast. 

Tamarack on the first of November

But now -- the books!

 

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, by Katherine May. 

 

Author Katherine May, though suspicious of groups, says she craves more and more being part of a congregation but doesn’t know where to start. “Nowhere has ever seemed to fit.” She doesn’t want to insult any religious community by making only a partial commitment, being a “wavering presence in the room,” and she is also “wary of stealing from traditions” and “cherry-picking the comforting parts of complex religious traditions – usually the aspects that tell us everything’s okay – and ignoring the counterbalancing obligations….”  But her strong sense is that we in the West have let ourselves lose childhood’s enchantment (“small wonder magnified by meaning”) by considering it “childish,” and let ourselves become indifferent to it. May wants enchantment back, and she courts it at the seaside, on hilltops, in the presence of stars and of fire. Who doesn’t want to be carried away, if only for a few fleeting moments? (Where do you court enchantment?)

Clouds, light, and color always enchant, don't they?

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein. 

At first Naomi Klein paid only peripheral attention to what she refers to as the “antics” of the “other Naomi,” but as Naomi confusion grew larger and larger, Klein gradually became obsessed with her double. You would be, too, if people kept attributing views to you that you had not only never expressed but never espoused! Klein is not, however, a shallow thinker, and her investigations went much deeper than the phenomenon of finding herself confused, on social media and elsewhere, with another writer with the same first name. “As I shadowed my double further into her world … I found myself confronting yet more forms of doubling and doppelganging, these ones [sic] distinctly more consequential.” In history, literature, and myth, a doppelganger is more than a confusing double. It can also be an unwelcome mirror, a warning. On social media, Klein points out, everyone presents a doppelganger of his or her real self, and while we in our 21^st-century doppelganger culture are paying attention to one another’s doubles and perfecting our own, we are distracted from and neglecting to notice more important changes in our world. This is a serious book, but it also contains funny moments. It is personal and at the same time important. I highly recommend it. (Did you ever wish you had a twin?)

Can you tell them apart? They don't care.

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, by Susan Cain. 

This book by the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is probably not for everyone. Maybe there is no single book that would speak to all readers, but Bittersweet certainly spoke to me last winter with its meditation on “longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world,” and I don’t think it was only because grief had entered my life (although grief does have a way of cracking one open to small beauties and pains of everyday life, as well as to the feelings of others). But I can’t remember a time in my life without an acute awareness of passing time. “Always at my back I hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” were lines that seem to have been with me always. (I wonder if there is a connection between introversion and feelings of life’s bittersweetness. If Cain addressed that question, I have forgotten her answer. What do you think?)

Sunny loves tart wild apples, both for play and for snacking.

 

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist. 

When this dense, heavy book first came into my hands, I skimmed the brain science and impatiently turned to the second part, focused on history. On my next reading, however, I determined to read more carefully from the beginning. There is a lot of repetition (for emphasis, I’m sure, not for “padding”), and not only does McGilchrist convince me, but I now read and look back on past reading through his lens. 

For instance: 

(1) I see May’s search for enchantment (see above) as a longing to recover the right brain’s “desire or longing … toward the Other.” 

(2) Tempting as it is to see those lost in Klein’s “mirror world” (see above again) as suffering under enchantment, I see them more as people who have abandoned enchantment and ambiguity for certainty, the left brain’s rigidity not allowing anything into the picture that would cast doubt on what it already “knows.” 

(3) Even Cain’s “bittersweet” feelings, it seems, would be rejected by the left brain, whereas the right brain has always realized that “light and dark, birth and death – bitter and sweet – are forever paired.”

Socrates and Plato prioritized ideas [of things] over “things themselves,” and while Hume declared that neither inductive reason, deductive reason. nor both combined were adequate to put together complete knowledge (implicit bodily/sensory/social background underlies all the rest, as Bergson and the phenomenologists finally realized, also), much of science to this day, and far too much of politics, continues to be ruled by the left brain’s hierarchies, rules, categories, etc. Even religious experience, when translated into theology and creeds, loses itself in left brain re-presentations of what was once known without mediation.

Leaves in the understory, overstory bare, sky cloudy

My favorite 2023 nonfiction list was longer at first, but I decided that these four will constitute my top recommendations for the year so far, because they came together for me, ideas from each strengthening and reinforcing and enriching ideas and thoughts from the others. I was reminded of my first semester in university, when everything I was learning -- drama, psychology, rhetoric, etc. -- seemed connected to everything else in a way that astonished and delighted me. 

 

I have yet to read either of the new books on private equity companies (my new self-study subject), books ordered for the bookstore and in stock now (one with “Plunder” as its title, the other with “plunderers” as part of its title), but one was featured in an interview on NPR with the author only the other day. 

There were also several other beautifully done and moving nonfiction titles in my reading since January. Among the latter group were: 

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts; Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, by David Abram; Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, by Andrea Elliott; My Venice and Other Essays, by Donna Leon; Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, by Marcia Bornerud; The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, by Florence Williams; Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, by Susan Page; and Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz. 

 

Every book in the longer list is worth reading, and as my short list is a highly personal selection, if my top recommendations leave you cold you may be more strongly drawn to titles in the unannotated list. Or perhaps you have (and I hope you do!) your own top nonfiction picks to share. Are there books of history, memoir, essays, science, politics, or economics that made strong impressions on you this year? Anything you wish everyone in the country would read? 

Glorious blue sky!

Of Two Minds

Clouds and chill do not dampen a dog's view of the world.

The grass is bright green, almost an unnatural-appearing green, so lush after recent heavy rain, but trees in the orchard, prematurely (from my perspective) shedding their leaves, had an almost wintry look recently against lowering grey skies. Not quite a contradiction, it was a scene to illustrate lack of demarcation between what we humans think of as one season and another – in this case, summer and fall. Seasons, like human emotions and states of mind, blend and interpenetrate more than they conform to any kind of calendar.

 

Which leads me – or, at least, I want to use it to try to lead you to think about fact and imagination, reasons and dreams, and the different ways our brains go at the work of knowing ourselves and the world. For Henri Bergson, my "main man" in philosophy (as the Artist liked to refer to him), two different ways of knowing came out as intellect/intuition. Gaston Bachelard's distinction was reason/imagination. It was psychobiologist Roger Sperry at Cal Tech whose experiments in the 1960s led to the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain specialized in different tasks, the left devoted to language, the naming of objects, and the right to visual construction of what we receive as “the world.” 

The left brain/right brain idea was grabbed up in simplistic dress by the general public, only to be rejected by science as myth and now resurrected in more nuanced form. There is more than one book on this fascinating subject, but the one I’ve been reading is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.

Reading is a good activity on a chilly day.

McGilchrist’s is as far as possible from a simplistic view. He stresses, for example, that mathematics (and by that we don’t mean simple bookkeeping) is creative as well as logical and that the “indirect, connotative language of poetry,” dependent on the brain’s right hemisphere, 

 

...underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art.

-      McGilchrist (p. 71)

 

It is the working together of the two hemispheres, he underlines, that allows us to put a world together at all. 

The sun returned!

Most brain scientists these days would have no quarrel with McGilchrist thus far. Where some dig in their heels and think he goes off the deep end is with his thesis that Western culture (going back to the 5^th century BCE and Socrates/Plato) has lost left/right balance (except for a few brief periods) and become overly dependent on – and dominated by – the left hemisphere’s narrowly focused rationality, its impatience and inability to deal with ambiguity and to make “big picture” connections. Although both parts of the brain deal both with units and with aggregates, he writes, the right hemisphere sees individuals and unique instances in holistic, always changing context, while the left categorizes and therefore can deal only with generic objects, types, and a fixed, static world.

Doggie nose prints on the inside of the windshield I just cleaned!

McGilchrist asked himself a question previous brain scientists seem not to have asked: why would mammalian brains, even brains of birds, divide their work in the first place? His answer is that life demands of us two different kinds of attention: first, a broad, flexible, sustained vigilance to everything around us; second, a focused attention on a task at hand (e.g., capturing prey). A machine model of animal behavior is a left-brain re-presentation. All left-brain re-presentations are based on what is already known. They are good at routine. They run as if on computer programs. They are, however, bad at revising in the face of the unexpected: what doesn’t fit is rejected. If McGilchrist hadn’t wanted to make as much reference as he does to Nietzsche, he might have called his book The Sorcerer and the Apprentice. (Don't miss Mickey Mouse in that link!)

 

The Master and His Emissary takes its title from Nietzsche, however, McGilchrist identifying the left brain as the “emissary” that has taken over the role of the “master” right brain, and it is a dense read at almost 600 pages, 54 of them notes and a hefty 67 pages of bibliography. The index, I must say, is disappointing and could have included much more than it does. This book is fascinating reading, though, for anyone interested in how we humans perceive and think.

 

That’s my nonfiction reading for sunlight hours. In the dark of the morning or evening dusk, I turn to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie and am amazed and delighted again and again. In fact, even my use of different times of day for these two books conforms to Bachelard’s idea that even words can have different psychic “weight” 

…depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or the language of daylight life (la vie claire) – to rested language or language under surveillance – to the language of poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

I don’t think I am stretching a point at all to seeing Bachelard in this passage agreeing with McGilchrist as to how the different brain hemispheres construct a world. And when he, Bachelard, uses Jung’s animus and anima language, again McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere distinctions, rather than any gendered differences, make sense of the distinction. Projects and worries, Bachelard says, belong to the animus, while “tranquil images” from the anima … “meld together in an intimate warmth.” And thus there are also two different kinds of reading, one in animus, the other in anima.

…I am not the same man when I am reading a book of ideas where the animus is obliged to be vigilant, quite ready to criticize, quite ready to retort, as when I am reading a poet’s book where images must be received in a sort of transcendental acceptance of gifts. Ah! to return the absolute gift which is a poet’s image, our anima would have to be able to write a hymn of thanksgiving. 

 

The animus reads little; the anima reads a great deal.

 

Sometimes my animus scolds me for having read too much. 

 

Reading, ever reading, the sweet passion of the anima. But when, after having read everything, one sets before himself the task of making a book out of reveries, it is the animus which is in the harness. Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limiting himself to dreaming it. 

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

And yet, I think to myself now, reflecting on these two books, on the work of the different hemispheres of the brain (my brain!), and on the expressions and statements of these two writers, I seem to sense the right and left brains, the anima and animus, in dialogue. Or is that the right brain, synthesizing facts handed to it by the left? At any rate, as I read, I take notes (left brain) and smile happily (right brain).

View without doggie nose prints --

And view without the road --

--

Today’s images have nothing to do with today’s text and are only included for relief from what might otherwise seem like overthinking.