flexagon | How Should We Live? ... I mean, the book.

I read (and finished, and left in Montana) a fairly interesting book called How Should We Live?, which does its best to grab some good ideas on life from the dumpster of history. I liked the idea of this (history: just the good parts, please!), and agree with the author’s notion that some of what we’ve inherited in our cultural baggage is unhelpful and should be deeply questioned.

I initially bought it for its musings on the different types of love, and how these have become all balled up in the One Great Love we expect to find in Western culture today. The author stopped short of suggesting we pursue eros separately from the pragma of practical long-term marriage feelings, but I forgive him for the sake of his account of HOW all the loves got folded in over time. That was pretty fascinating.

A quote I liked for the purposes of minimalism: “Whenever we purchase anything beyond our essential needs, we should ask how we have come to acquire this desire.”

Hmmm, yes indeed, sounds quite useful. The book goes on to prod, “Can we honestly say that it is a free choice, or should we admit that the marketeers at Nike, Gap, L’Oreal or Ford have something to do with it?” I think it’s good practice, and maybe a more valuable practice the bigger the thing we want is. I’m quite sure I own the most valuable object I own because of a Tiffany & Co advertisement, which itself played off a long and successful De Beers campaign; nothing to be overly ashamed of, but nice to be aware of.

(My second most expensive possession is an ocicat kitten named Hyper, and that is the result of a slowly growing interest never fed by advertisers.)

And here’s one from the chapter on senses that I am stunned by:

'Seeing is believing’, we say, not realizing that the original expression from the seventeenth century was ‘Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth.’

WOW. This is huge! There’s starting to be a whole list in my head of “sayings that are twice as long as people think they are”. And as for the saying itself, it rings very very true. Yes, I am thinking about sex again.

There was other neat stuff in the book — the story of Kaspar Hauser, who was raised in the dark or at least held captive there for a long time and who briefly had astonishingly acute sensory perception. The learning that we probably have 10+ senses, rather than five; the idea that we have five is from Aristotle, who was trying to draw a parallel between the five elements and the human senses. Hey Aristotle, got some more for you: proprioception, nociception, equilibrioception, temperature sense. We might even have some sense of magnetic fields; we have a crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone behind our noses, just as many animals do. And I seem to recall, from some other source, that itching too is carried on its own sort of nerves. Is it a separate sense?

Oh — the book also told me that travel derives from ‘travail’, meaning to suffer or toil. No kidding. :-) But plane rides are good for blog posts, if nothing else.