Simon James - Stumbling toward the singularity

This was submitted (unsuccessfully) to a journal and was written as a sequal to an Andrew David Stapleton short story.

Stumbling toward the singularity, my feet crash against the sleepers and rubble but my momentum keeps me upright. Even after I have passed 17 sleepers the view stretched out before me is the same: the shape of the tracks, the number of discernible planks, the reflection of the early morning sun on the steel. Altering my point of reference changes nothing. 

I wonder whether a train will come.
            I try to remember whether I have ever seen a train along these tracks. 
            The tracks’ convergence would force the train to derail.  I consider this and then try to stop.  Gravity or some other kind of acceleration finally gets the better of me and buries my knees in the blue rubble.  I rise quickly and dust myself off, glancing around, pre-emptively embarrassed, and ensuring that no-one has seen me pelt randomly down the train-tracks and dive just as suddenly into the space in-between.   

Only the cat.   

Motionless, I cast my eyes toward the horizon and imagine the train.  It does not derail.  It gets smaller.  At every point its wheels are as wide as the planks of wood that stitch these tracks together, and those stitches become infinitely smaller as they get closer to that point. 

I am smaller.

Turning around, I realize that the cat too is has become less of a cat – more so because of the distance between us.  

Carefully, (because I don’t want any part of my body to become smaller by itself) I bend down and grasp a handful of stones.  Once again turning my back on the town I hurl them toward the end of the tracks.  I watch closely as they rise, fall, and become tiny as they get further away.  

If I continue to convince myself that the tracks meet, how much will change?  The cat may have brought others, and I’m sure that it is at this point that they headed back, deciding, once and for all, that there was nothing so important she could show them that was worth jeopardizing a job, a lover or the start of a French play.  

I press on, perhaps less enthusiastically than before, knowing that by the time I reach the point of infinity both the cat and I will have diminished to almost nothing.  

So good i read it twice

Having seen the BBC series and the movie, it was difficult to realise that I was reading Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe unnecessarily, since I'd read it. It wasn't until some kind of "Gosh, by jove" statement from one of the kids that I realised I'd come across this before.

Since so many comparisons are drawn between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, I found it hard to be too sympathetic towards this book. It's nowhere near the poetic masterpiece written by Tolkien - although I suppose it's not intended to be... but I always remember something about Tolkien being ridiculed by his writing/reading friends for his ideas as he was writing.

This book is very English... very proper English, so it's easy to get annoyed at the characters. Some of the morals also seem a little dated, and it's hard to accept that the gender roles allocated to the children are only a fault of the time and not of the author - afterall, many of the females in LOTR are happy to get their hands dirty.

Having said this, perhaps the most resonating passage in this book is the folklore concerning the stone table - although it is a bit awkwardly phrased. But I like the parallels with the Christ story, and that since Aslan is goodness, he's not something you can get rid of - still a bit trixsy and deceitful one might say though.

Alain de Botton's own philosophy: Status Anxiety

A had heard of The Consolations of Philosophy from a few friends, but it seemed too introductory to be of interest. My Dad (A man quite interested in introductions and dot points) showed me the six-part TV series Philosophy: A guide to Happiness, which I did watch and found fairly interesting. Alain de Botton's take on philosophy is nice and accessible, allowing some of these thinkers to be introduced to those who may not usually take any interest in philosophy.

Where episodes concerned thinkers I knew more about (e.g. Nietzsche) however, I couldn't help but feel that aspects of their philosophy was being misinterpreted (or at least misrepresented). I'm not arrogant enough to think that I know more about these thinkers than de Botton, however it seems that in simplifying an idea (whose beauty may lie in its innate complexity), something may be lost - particularly the ideas of someone like Nietzsche - wasn't it a misrepresentation of his ideas that was used to promote fascism?. So whilst entertaining, the shows are about as interesting philosophically as a certain book-come-movie (about anagrams) is interesting mathematically.

However! Although, for an introduction to philosophy I would recommend Solomon, I was interested to see how rigorous Alain de Botton's own philosophy was - hence my purchase and subsequent reading of Status Anxiety. I had really hoped a lot from this book, as I believe the concept of status anxiety is important to the philosophical ideas concerning the individual and identity. For example, to create a sense of self, we associate many ideas with who we are and reject many others, which may or may not be true of ourselves. We associate ourselves with certain dreams, however these dreams are sometimes more associated with societal expectations or associations between happiness and the success of others: i.e. status anxiety - this is what I was hoping for anyway.

Unfortunately, the exploration is somewhat banal, lacking depth and originality. This is not to say I did not somewhat enjoy it - I just don't consider it to be a philosophical work, which is perhaps not the intention. Perhaps de Botton's main concern is with pop-society and issues like consumerism, in which case this book might be better considered alongside Affluenza, than The Gay Science. Some history to modern thoughts is given, and then philosphical anecdotes are used to guide the reading.

My main concern with Status Anxiety is this: Status anxiety is equated with the pursuit of material wealth. Especially today, status can be understood in many more forms. I think of myself, and how much of my dedication to obtaining a PhD is tied to my desire to be seen as intelligent. Think of people who believe "to travel" means "to be somebody" (interestingly, travel is presented as something which might assuage status anxiety). Consider people with little interesting in writing who feel they "must write a book", men who'd rather be seen with a pretty wife than one that makes them happy and that they are faithful to. This is perhaps a more important failure of the book than what is focused on by the philosophically inclined.

Status anxiety, in my opinion, is that complex of external influence and internal projection which leaves us wanting. It is where we orient ourselves towards achievements and experiences for reasons other than what they provide in of themselves. Status anxiety can be considered alongside that existential yearning to be someone of significance as we are faced with an indifferent and infinite universe.

wonderful wizard

Unlike most people my age... or younger, I don't think I've seen The Wizard of Oz (the movie) the whole way through. It was interesting, then, to read the book and understand the story. Baum apparently avoided writing the Wicked Witch as a haunting character - aiming the story at children, and believing he knew how a children's story should be.

As an important story culturally, I guess I focused on the elements of the story and symbolism that have subsequently pervaded other literature. Each of the characters is on a quest to see the wizard, to gain something about themselves they see as lacking. The Lion's desire for courage and the Tinman's yearning for a heart, I think are done particularly well - the sentiment that courage is to act despite fear, and that to love is to see the world beautifully and to care, come across nicely. Perhaps the only real reservation I have is that the Scarecrow gets a degree as a substitute for a brain... perhaps this idea was less loaded back in the day. By the way, there's an interesting story about the movie: on receiving his degree, Scarecrow decrees "The square of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side" - which is false in all cases. Obviously based on pythag. thrm which concerns right-angle triangles, and the square of the hypotenuse, not the square root... but there's some dispute as to whether this was deliberate, accidental, or just stupid.

The main thing I noticed here was the lack of description - particularly of action sequences. The group are surrounded by hounds, all of a sudden, the Tinman cuts their heads off, the end. Done deliberately to avoid frightening the young children. I remember writing a very similar descriptive passage in my story "The Three Missile Men", which I wrote at the age of 6.

The Wizard of Oz is not a story like The Hobbit, The Little Prince, or even Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, all of which are well crafted, interesting stories in themselves but also hold deeper meanings for adults. Perhaps of this lot, The Little Prince stands above the rest - but I am biased towards that particular book.

Audrey Hepburn doesn't play herself so well

I can't remember whether I read Breakfast at Tiffany's because I'd just seen Capote, or because I'd just read A Streetcar Named Desire. Must be the former, because I remember thinking of Audrey while reading Streetcar. I had not seen the film.

It was the sort of love story I could relate to - being in awe of a person, cherishing their friendship, not being able to help but love them but knowing that you don't belong together. An interesting, and relatively light read considering the content of In Cold Blood. I found a lot of parallels between the characters Holly Golightly, Sally Bowles (Cabaret) and Blanche from Streetcar. The latter two caught up in the tragedy of not being able to attain that Golightly presence in the world. There is still something sad about Holly - despite how beautiful she is, she seems to understand that everything's not quite as nice as it should be. The book's ending has her fulfilling the role of the undomesticated cat - far far more appropriate than the "you belong to me" ending sequence of the film. Indeed, the strongest them in the book is perhaps focused on the protagonist's longing for the unobtainable Holly, rather than she herself. In life, you just have to realise that some things must be let go.

The story of Blanche, however is more focused on her. Some people seem to ready to dismiss her credibility, getting caught up in her desperation to make an impression as representing her vanity and childishness. I don't know whether any discussions of this book have interpreted her character as one affected by Bipolar disorder (she exhibits most of the classic symptoms - especially leading up to her madness). Sometimes it feels like the difference between how characters like Sally, Blanche and Holly are perceived, merely depends on their success and apparent attractiveness. A Holly Golightly with a few more setbacks and disappointments could easily wind up like Blanche. In all characters there's a determined independence and a trend of compensating for unfulfilling emotional relationships with economic stability and excess. It's easy to admire and pity them all. For obvious reasons, I pictured Audrey Hepburn while reading Tiffany's - but then in the movie she didn't really seem to deliver with the same grace. And yet the part is her all over - so it's as if she doesn't play Audrey Hepburn as well as she might.

I do particularly like the titles of these books, and the framework they give for interpretation of the characters.

The Sarin Gas Attacks

I was oblivious to the historical event that is the Sarin Gas attacks before I started reading Underground. The book is a collection of interviews with survivors of the attacks, some only indirectly affected by it, as well as interviews with members of the cult that perpetrated the terrorist act.

Although I read some of it wanting to understand a little bit more about what happened, I feel like this is the most authentic way to write about such an important event in the Japanese psyche. Murakami makes only a few side-comments, concerning features of the individual he is interviewing rather than any commentary or judgment. I found some of the accounts terrifying (reading it, as I was, on the train), and some of them bizarre (admin workers dying of gas poisoning, just trying to get to work on time).

The book was released initially in Japanese without the accounts of cult-members, however I think the version published here, with these included, adds something important. Rather than detract from the victimhood of those involved, these latter interviews allow some kind of explanation to be cast over such a disturbing event - not explanation via excuse, but rather a deeper look into how things could go wrong.

I can't help but admire Murakami for collecting these essays. I don't know whether he has been criticised at all for glory-seeking or anything like that, but I think the book shows enough integrity to descredit any such attacks.

A History of mathematics

As part of a feeling that I "should" read more about the subject I seem to be dedicating my life to, I read A History of Mathematics. As there is a lot of history, the book is quite big and thick. It looks quite nice on my shelf - although I must admit that I did, in a way, steal it from the friend who I borrowed it from.

The telling of a mathematics story gives rise to a dilemma: how much maths does one need to explain? How interesting is a story about maths if you don't understand the maths? How uninteresting is a mathematics story when you remove any technical details?

I must say, that really getting into this book, for me, meant stopping every now and again to scribble some stuff down on the back of an envelope ("can that be right?"). Furthermore, some of the impressive achievements in mathematics are only impressive if you realise how difficult it was for them to come about (does it mean much to anyone that there's no general formula for solving cubics?). So whilst I found this book really interesting, widening my knowledge and allowing me to place myself in the mathematical realm, I do not think I will force anyone to read it. I do try, as often as I can, to retell the stories during my mathematics tutes - as you can imagine, this is often received with a standing applause.

Some of my favourite bits are the exceptional mathematics of the Babylonians, the romantic story of Galois (shot in a duel at age 21... cos of a girl... his theories were proved later), and the Alexandrian maps that didn't include the calculations of Eratosthenes.