In and Out of Our Cages

Get ready. Get set.

The Big Day

 

Leelanau UnCaged! Such a happy day! Weather this year was perfect, too, but even a little drizzle in one or two past years didn’t manage to dampen spirits much. This is a day when everyone comes home to Northport. Or comes out. Or comes up! From wherever you start, our village is the destination on the last Saturday in September. Streets are closed off to traffic, so a little walking is involved. It’s good for you! You’ll notice big smiles on faces. Even the many dogs on leashes seem to be smiling. Note also that these shots were made before the start of the festivities.

12:30 p.m. The drums, the drums! Their hypnotic beat invites dancing and hand-clapping. The sun is shining, and the sky is blue over Northport….

Now it's underway....

…A woman buys a book on learning French, and when I ask if she’s going to France, she says, somewhat sadly, that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get there. I recommend Montreal (“You can drive there!”) and tell her a little about the trip the Artist and I made the year I turned 50, including an unprepossessing little town in the countryside that had the most beautiful Parisian pastries imaginable. She likes the idea and thanks me enthusiastically. 

 

A Canadian visitor … friends from Traverse City … A pair of women in the street on stilts with mushroom hats and bags ….

 

6 p.m. So many old friends, repeat customers, and newer acquaintances. Good conversations and good sales. Happy noises from the street. Now and then someone comes in looking frazzled, needing only to sit down quietly for a few minutes. I slowed down one young woman (not frazzled) long enough to photograph her book bag from NYC. I was at the Strand once!

Sorry for blurry image. I was hurrying.

What started to feel like a brief lull (interrupted several times—no problem) gave me a chance to eat the salad I’d brought from home and rehydrate with some Vernor’s. Have I mentioned that it was a summery day? That it felt like June? I barely got past my bookshop door all day but didn’t feel confined at all; with so many people flowing through the door and so many conversations, I felt very much a part of the day, so happily occupied that it was impossible to keep continuing tabs on the day hour by hour….

 

 

What Came After That?

 

I must admit Saturday was a long day, though. For me it began with a meditative minivacation in the interior of the county, because I knew it would be a long day for Sunny, too. (You can see scenes from one of our three Saturday morning walks here.) The next two days, also summery, were also very busy but more Sunny-focused, with dog park, extensive and relentless raspberry cane pruning, and grass mowing on Sunday, followed by our agility session with Coach Mike on Monday morning, afternoon autumn olive eradication (a never-ending program), and more mowing in the cool of the evening after dinner with a friend at the Happy Hour. Whatever yard work I do, you must understand, is done in spells alternating with tennis ball play, so my dog girl is not neglected.

Do all photos of Sunny look the same?
But cute, right?

We here in Leelanau are enjoying our “second summer” of 2025, this blessed respite—without humidity!—before cooler temperatures arrive and stronger winds strip the trees, preparing the scene for winter—.  Ah, but we have fall color yet to come, so let’s not run ahead of ourselves. 

Indoors

Outdoors

 

Reading It Differently

 

It appears that I have rejoined the old Ulysses Reading Circle after absenting myself from meetings for over three years. Recently we got together to talk about The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and naturally I needed to reread that slim classic, as it had been several years since Meursault and I were last together. Here is what I wrote about the novel nine years ago, as well as what I wrote about another novel springing from the first, the second one imagining the story continuing from an Arab perspective. 

 

The only thing different in how I read The Stranger this year was that I now see it as the work of a young writer. Looking into that, I found that Camus was only 28 when he wrote the novel, 29 when it was published, so perhaps—I really don’t know—he had yet to come to his humanist conclusion, a conclusion based on the premise of absurdity but not resting there. What do you think? I can imagine that. I can imagine a young man deciding that life is absurd and that nothing matters and then, as he matures, realizing that absurdity is not a conclusion but only the first step on the path of affirming the value of life. He was 39 when he published The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Whether or not the author based the character of Meursault on someone he knew, and whether or not that someone had Asperger’s Syndrome is really peripheral to the argument that took Camus, eventually if not right from the start, from absurdity to humanism. If only my friend Hélène were still alive! She knew Camus in North Africa during World War II.

 

 

O, the Irish!

Doesn't this scene look Irish?

 

My literary love affair with Irishman Niall Williams continued through History of the Rain. Can anyone deny that no one does words like the Irish? As for affirming the value of life, all the novels of Niall Williams that I have read so far do that, and what better reason to read fiction in these troubled and troubling days?

 

 

Thinking About Thinking

 

One of the privileges of having a bookshop is the opportunity to engage in conversations that go beyond small talk. Early this morning I was thinking about an exchange from last week. In the course of that conversation, a customer-friend whom I greatly respect expressed concern that today’s students don’t know how to think. I forget what led us to the topic, but I took exception to his tentative statement. Admittedly, my example was from a previous decade. Would results be different today?

 

My example: I was teaching a class of university freshmen. The assigned reading, which we discussed over several weeks, was John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which Locke presented in a series of numbered paragraphs. Anyone unaccustomed to 18^th-century writing would find the English of the Treatise somewhat challenging, so when one student asked if they could have it “in translation,” the rest of the class laughed appreciatively. Locke, however, is far from incomprehensible. It is simply that readers of his work have to do more than let their eyes take in a series of printed lines. Recognizing individual words is not sufficient. It is necessary to think along with the writer to understand his words. 

 

When the student asked his humorous question, I was moved to expand the assignment. For each numbered paragraph, I required my students condense its meaning into a single sentence. The shorter and simpler the sentence the better, as long as the one-sentence summary fully expressed the meaning of the paragraph. Each of these written assignments, as I recall, was given credit but not graded. 

 

The results? Excellent. My students could think. They could understand. Most of them would not have bothered if not required to do so, but they had the ability. 

 

No one picks up a musical instrument for the first time and is immediately able to play music. It takes work. It takes practice. Those who can’t be bothered to work will not achieve competence, let alone excellence. Not everyone will become a virtuoso, but anyone can make progress. 

 

The sentences generated by some of my students were elegant. Some were pedestrian. Some were awkward. But for every, say, twenty paragraphs, most students were able to get a pretty good idea of the author’s meaning, and when there was a particularly difficult paragraph, usually several students stumbled over it, and so we worked through it together. 

 

(Will “Artificial Intelligence” do away with the human need to think, in somewhat the way the internal combustion engine has done away with our need for horses, which in their time did away with our need to walk long distances? Already there are “thinkers” who tell us that AI is smarter than we are and that we should hand over the reins. Talk like this makes me happy to be closer to the end of my life than I am to the beginning, and I could digress endlessly on that point, but will resist the temptation….)

 

Yes, a different morning, but not long ago.

So this morning, thinking again about thinking and why we humans so often resist it, I decided that part of the answer could be called laziness, but I think that label puts an unnecessarily negative spin on the matter. As members of the animal kingdom, we are primarily creatures of action. To survive and flourish requires that we provide ourselves with nourishment and shelter, avoid danger, and cooperate on projects that none of us could accomplish alone. (It is that way with other social mammals like wolves and elephants. The longer the gestation period, the longer the dependence of young on adults, the greater the need for cooperation.) In the natural world—forest or plains, jungle or mountains—avoiding danger often means judging and acting quickly, and our brains and what we think of as our 'intellect' developed for those situations. (I wanted to give a link here to Henri Bergson and his explanation of the task of the intellect, but nothing I found online put what I wanted in a nutshell. You just need to read a whole book. I recommend Time and Free Will.) Now, facing the complex situations of advanced societies, it should not be surprising that we resist long trains of argument and want to “cut to the chase” and “get on with our lives.”

 

So without calling it laziness, let’s give as one reason that people—not only young but people of any age—resist deep thinking: They have lives to live. 

But that can’t be the whole story. I think often, especially these days, thinking is not only difficult but can be threatening. Again, our brains evolved to avoid threats, not to embrace them. So if some person or institution gives me simple answers and lays out my role, isn’t it safer for me to accept and follow? Who knows where independent thought might lead? Some of my most cherished beliefs and loyalties could be thrown into question! I could even find myself banished from my tribe!

 

I’d gotten that far in my thinking about thinking this morning when I found, by happenstance, an email message bearing on the very subject I’d been exploring. David Shapiro, in his most recent Substack, has identified another cognitive bias to be added to those put forward by Kahneman and Tversky a few decades ago and expanded on by others since then. Shapiro calls his new addition ‘apprehension bias.’ Put simply, if we don’t understand something, we tend to assume it must be wrong. In his words,

 

Apprehension bias is the mental shortcut where one equates intelligibility with truth and unintelligibility with falsehood. It’s a metacognitive miscalibration: confusing my ability to understand with the actual validity of the claim.

 

Shapiro opens his discussion with an example from the history of science, Alfred Wegener’s 1912 theory of continental drift, the first scientific statement of what later developed as plate tectonics. People, even in the scientific community, could not make sense of continental drift and ridiculed Wegener. They didn’t understand what he was saying, so they concluded, at that time, that he must be wrong.

 

Does this return us once again to my students and their desire to be able to read 18th-century Englishman John Locke “in translation,” i.e., simplified? Are we going around and around like squirrels in a cage? “Thinking” the same “thoughts” over and over and making no headway?

 

Postscript:

 

Coincidentally, a followup conversation later this morning with the same customer-friend as last week sparked for me the realization that ‘apprehension’ itself has a useful double meaning, which Shapiro probably intended but did not point out explicitly. In the word 'apprehension' are united ‘comprehension’ (understanding) and ‘fear.’ Can fear block comprehension? Can understanding do away with fear? Or can a person manage to avoid the bias and both understand and fear at the same time? If so, what is the payoff? 

Think about it—if you dare!

In closing, some shop scenes on this sunny Thursday, October 2, 2025:

Tolerance and Its Opposite Number

There is often worldwide unease when centuries turn. Certainly such was the case in Europe as the fifteenth century transitioned to the sixteenth. The showdown deciding that era's conflict was dramatized in history in the persons of two very different kinds of Roman Catholic clerics, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. Both men saw abuses in the Church crying out to be corrected, but their personalities and their ways of addressing conflict could not have been more different. 

Erasmus, ever the humanist and conciliator, hoped for reform from within the Church. In truth, he did not interest himself overmuch with theology – certainly not with dogma – and his definition of “Christian” had more to do with a way of life than a set of beliefs. “He alone does honour to the saints who imitates their virtues,” wrote Erasmus. To be Christian, he felt, was to live as Jesus lived. “The quintessence of our religion is peace and unanimity.” Moreover, “Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.”

As someone raised Lutheran, I was shocked to read about the historical founder. I have long disagreed with Luther’s complete dismissal of good works, the dogma of “salvation by grace alone,” but I had no idea – we were never taught in confirmation class – that Luther believed in predestination. No wonder he put no faith (if I may so phrase it) in good works! Theology aside, I was repelled by Luther’s unprincipled pragmatism, as I found it in this book. (I am a pragmatist myself, a romantic pragmatist, but for me pragmatism does not – cannot -- demand the rejection of principles.) Here is Luther, in his own words, telling what we might expect of him in a presidential campaign and what the people of Germany did get from him in his struggle against the Church and against mild-mannered, truth-loving Erasmus: “If you want to better humanity and reform the Church, you cannot afford to fight shy of a good, thumping lie.” Lies in the service of reform. How Socratic!

I have taken these quotes from Erasmus and Luther from Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Stefan Zweig. If you’ve ever wondered how the Enlightenment was pushed offstage by the Reformation, this little book makes a clear case.

Erasmus, the tolerant peacemaker and lover of truth, had no stomach for battle. He wanted only to be left alone with his books. Twice, first at the Diet of Worms, later at the Diet of Augsburg, he stayed away, leaving the field open to Martin Luther and his revolutionary followers. Had Erasmus gone to Augsburg, Zweig believes, reformation might have begun within the Church. There were those on both sides prepared to give ground. But Erasmus did not appear, and Luther’s bombast carried the day. In fact, according to Zweig, Luther by that time had had second thoughts but had lost control of his troops.

Thus inflammatory rhetoric carried the day, and the humanistic idea of the unity of mankind gave way to newly resurgent nationalism and the power politics laid out by Machiavelli in Il Principe. Zweig saw parallels between Europe in the time of Erasmus and Martin Luther and Europe in the 1930s.

Where are we headed now? Are we ever going to be ready to give peace a chance?

It occurs to me that I should say that I don't intend to characterize modern Lutherans as being in the mold of Martin Luther, either in character or in all aspects of his theology. Pace!

He Decided to Make a Difference, Part II

A few excerpts from Jack Orchard’s Extra Hands: Grasping for a Meaningful Life (2007):

“I am on my deathbed now, and the same age as Pascal was when he died at age thirty-nine. Unlike him, I feel no conversion coming. No bright lights, no Biblical voices. Just the ordinary sights and sounds of St. Louis, Missouri, where I have chosen to live my last days. Yet, like Pascal, as I approach death I can now reflect on the memorial moments and lessons learned that have informed my way.”

“With a few exceptions, like the well-paying jobs I had helped create in Moscow, I had spent most of my life working to improve my own prosperity. I didn’t think this was intrinsically wrong, from a moral perspective, because I planned to address it later in life. My long-term plan had been to make enough money not to have to think about it anymore, and then apply the experience I had gained from building new companies, especially raising money for them, in some charitable context. When I thought I had another fifty years to fulfill that plan, I saw nothing wrong with my choices. But what if it was more like three to five?”

“I had never looked for [meaning in my own life] through spirituality. Even when the neurologist handed down my death sentence I felt no urge to withdraw into faith. But still I needed to know that my life, however short it might be, had meaning.”

“For me, the simplicity of the Extra Hands model held vast potential to reach across religions and dissolve dividing lines between people of different belief systems. In fact, that is what I found most compelling about it. I realized then that if I could use my gifts, those ALS would not strip from me, to build something that would enact this simple philosophy and draw in people of all beliefs, I would be able to die with the knowledge that my time had been purposeful....”

“In my condition now, still and silent, I ask myself what I believe every day. And each day I feel more certain that I have found no new revelations. Instead, I have grown every more convinced that, working together, we are capable of magnificent acts of courage and fortitude to improve our individual and collective lives. It’s called humanism, the belief that we need only to look to ourselves in the search for answers to questions big and small, empirical and theoretical, experiential and ontological.

“Yes, humanism—with its commitment to the use of reason and scientific method in fashioning solutions to human problems, its steady quest for objective truth, its pursuit of principles of ethical conduct without a divine inspiration, and its concern for the fulfillment and enrichment of the lives of the individuals and their communities—is the source of my strength, the foundation of my faith.”

Jack Orchard died on July 4, 2009, at the age of 41. His work lives on.

He Decided to Make a Difference

Both as a reader and as a bookseller, I approach self-published books warily and have written about this topic in an earlier post. Too many such books are badly written in the first place and/or don’t get the editing they need, and even the best-produced can fall stillborn without a good marketing and distribution plan, also often lacking. A couple of northern Michigan mystery writers, Aaron Stander and Robert Underhill, are among the exceptions that prove the rule, but there are others, and yesterday, completely by chance (digging through a box of used books someone dropped off at the store), I came upon a nugget of gold, Extra Hands, by Jack Orchard, and very, very early this morning after half an hour sitting out by the meadow under moonlight and stars, I finished the story. Next obvious step was to go online, where I was not surprised that my search turned up the news that Orchard had died a year ago July (2009) at the age of 41.

What’s important and inspiring about entrepreneur Orchard’s story is not his illness, not his death but his decision to create a meaningful life, while he had time, by doing for others. Here is an excerpt from his obituary in the St. Louis Beacon, his hometown newspaper.

One of the most improbable things Mr. Orchard did was write a 183-page book after most of his body had ceased to function, including his fingers and his voice. He wrote his memoir, “Extra Hands-Grasping for a Meaningful Life,” with his eyes. He learned to use Eyegaze, a special computer that tracks eye movements and types the letters on a screen, at the highest speed possible. Proceeds from “Extra Hands” were used to fund the nonprofit foundation he founded, Extra Hands - ALS, that paired high school and college student helpers with people living with ALS because, he said, ALS can be a lonely disease.

He founded Extra Hands for ALS and the Jack Orchard ALS Foundation. His faith was humanism, and he lived it.