So literary reading can deepen and extend experience by improving understanding of the self, the world and other people. One of the greatest gifts in a writer is the ability to create characters who behave atrociously but are entirely sympathetic. The supreme example is Falstaff, who is a compendium of everything most contemptible in human nature – he is a thief, a coward, a liar, a braggart, a glutton, a drunkard and, worst of all, a callous mercenary happy to send men to their deaths for money. Yet everyone loves him. As an exercise in intellectual and moral discipline, I once listed Falstaffs faults before going to see Henry IV: Part II and was determined to disapprove but, like everyone else, laughed and loved the old reprobate. And when Prince Hal was about to become king and rejected his former drinking companion as, of course, was essential – such a corrupt man could never be allowed anywhere near power – like everyone else I ached for poor Falstaff and loathed Hal for being a cold-hearted prig. Hal’s six words of rejection are among the most grievous in literature: ‘I know thee not, old man.’204
So, although there can be no prescriptions for writing, as there can be none for living, here is a prescription nevertheless. A work of fiction should be plotless but compelling, surprising but inevitable and full of appalling characters who are entirely sympathetic.
And there is such sensuous pleasure in lifting a book in the left hand to feel the satisfactory theft, then allowing it to’fall voluptuously open and release its unique fragrance, and finally taking a group of pages in the right hand and allowing them to riffle past the right thumb, with a pause now and then to permit the leisurely perusal of a random page. This is the sovereign, ruminating pleasure of the sultan. And the reading itself is as sensuous. Reading is a contact sport – physical, strenuous, a grappling with another of superior strength, trickery and speed. Another who may become a close friend. Postmodernism attempted to remove authors and make literature only a set of ‘texts’ – but true readers agree with Proust that reading is friendship. Writers are such friends, a secret social network extending throughout time and space.
And the stereotype of the reader as a dysfunctional, short-sighted, body-hating, effete wimp unable to face the world is disproved by the regular and extensive surveys of readers carried out by the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. According to the NEA, readers are more likely than non-readers to take exercise, become actively involved in sport, go to museums, theatres and concerts, engage in voluntary work and vote in elections.205 The beauty of the contact sport of reading, according to Proust, is that this form of contact provides the benefits of conversation with none of the tedium, because it is ‘a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately’.206 It is an encounter of depth with depth, undistracted by social conventions and froth, and more rewarding than any encounter in the flesh (which is why meeting writers is usually disappointing).
This is also why skipping is acceptable but skimming is not. Skipping is disengaging for a breather, but skimming means that the challenge is proving inadequate, that the contact is with a superficial, lazy, coarse, uninteresting mind. Any book that encourages skimming should be immediately thrown away. And our brains seem to understand this. Brief skim-reading causes more severe eye strain than long, concentrated reading.
The reading experience has been investigated by neuroscien-tists, who also seem to have a thing for Proust. There is even a book called Proust was a Neuroscientist. 207 And, in Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf explains that reading, unlike speech and vision, is not genetically programmed and therefore must be learned by each individual, and that this learning process creates in the brain distinctive connections, which depend on the language used. Doctors treating a stroke victim bilingual in English and Chinese found that, as a consequence of specific brain damage, the patient could no longer read English but could still read Chinese. So, in a real, even physical, sense, ‘we are what we read’. And, when children are learning to read, major areas of both brain hemispheres are involved but, as reading skill improves, activity is mostly concentrated in a small area of the left hemisphere, though the right may be activated anywhere in unpredictable ways. In other words, the left hemisphere develops a dedicated reading function and the more parallel right hemisphere, which produces insights, is set free to speculate and associate, to romp and gambol like the mind of God. ‘The secret at the heart of reading,’ Wolf concludes, is ‘the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those which came before’. And the problem with skimming is that it loses this ‘associative dimension’, ‘the profound generativity of the reading brain’.208
This potential for ‘Aha!’ insight distinguishes reading from viewing. The pace of reading may be varied by the reader, but the pace of viewing is set by an editor (and this editing has become increasingly frenetic). Viewers do not have the luxury of looking raptly into the far distance while the right brain performs its associative magic. If they hold a screen on pause, it is usually to get another beer from the fridge.
Deep reading creates attentiveness; heavy viewing destroys it. And this may have consequences at both ends of life. In early childhood, heavy viewing inhibits the development of brain networks for attention and reflection209, and heavy viewing in later life encourages brain deterioration and Alzheimer’s disease.210
So, reading is not only intensely pleasurable in itself, but is also crucial in developing and maintaining the associative brain. And it is so much more satisfying if it also enhances experience. Flaubert: ‘Do not read as do children, to amuse yourself or, like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.’ 211
10
The Loss of Transcendence
Unusually for an ageing rocker, Bruce Springsteen has retained both creative and performing vitality so that his new songs are as good as his classics and he belts them out for a generous three hours with undiminished gusto and relish. But the young couple next to me sit in what appears to be frozen misery. In the row in front, four men suddenly stand up and leave with grim I-demand-to-see-the-manager expressions. Are these people genuinely disappointed? What more could they want? And those who appear to be still in good humour talk, laugh and drink beer all through the performance, as though they are out for the evening in a bar and the music is on a high screen in a distant corner. It is true that The Boss is indeed a long way off – this is a stadium concert – but, of the many thousands standing in the playing area, closer to the stage and with plenty of free space, few are disposed to dance. Compare and contrast this with the early days of rock and roll when audiences went crazy, smashed up theatres and ran riot in the streets. This evening is summed up by a family a few rows in front, all with bleached blonde hair and new designer leisurewear, who are entirely ignoring the performance to photograph each other on mobile-phone cameras.
It is easy to understand why so many commentators talk of the flattening tendency of contemporary culture. Constant exposure to entertainment has left many incapable of sustained interest, never mind transcendence.
And there is an equivalent indifference in high culture, caused by the neutralising effects of relativism, which makes everything equally meaningful and therefore equally meaningless. To praise writers, musicians or artists extravagantly is considered naive, childish, certainly embarrassing. For a critic to express simple liking would be unforgivably gauche. In popular culture the tyranny of cool has the same deterrent effect. The language is different but the strategy is the same – to pass off indifference as the height of sophistication. Enthusiasm is not acceptable because it is an affront to indifference.
As well as chronic general indifference there is chronic general ingratitude – an inevitable consequence of the era of entitlement. If everything is deserved there is no reason to be grateful. Yet gratitude is the basis for affirmation and transcendence.
But what is transcendenc
e? The term covers a wide range of imprecisely defined and overlapping beliefs, feelings, attitudes and states, including religious faith, mysticism, exaltation, joy, ecstasy, zest and delight, on down to humble enthusiasm and absorption, and then right down to drinking a pitcher of margar-itas and dancing on the table on Saturday night.
The common factor in various forms of the feeling is escape from the self – and this can range from a spiritual desire to lose yourself in God to a more materialistic desire to get out of your head at weekends. The paradox is that the most intense experience of the self is loss of the self. This is why transcendent states have to be short-lived. Being out of your head is fun but not practical – and the longer you stay out the harder it is to get back in. So, the more intense the experience, the shorter the duration. Low-level loss of self in absorption can last for hours; ecstasy is sadly brief (though adepts of tantric sex may disagree).
Transcendence is important because it seems to be necessary to escape every now and then from the burden of self-consciousness. Even the earliest cultures sought this escape. In ‘primitive’ societies around the world there were remarkably similar rituals involving face painting and group dancing to rhythmic accompaniment.212 Complicated circle and line dances were especially common – and it is heartening to know that, when my in-laws have one of their ‘big nights’ culminating in the hokey-cokey and a conga, I am participating in a ritual at least ten thousand years old. Western observers of the ‘primitive’ dances were often alarmed by what they interpreted as abandonment and frenzy intended to work up a mood for orgies – but most of the rituals were carefully planned, tightly disciplined, chaste and took place only at certain periods in the calendar as a reward for community endeavour. Primitive cultures understood that there were no easy, free highs. The ecstasy had to be learned and earned.
In Europe this ritual ecstasy persisted into the carnivals of the Middle Ages but was ruthlessly suppressed by both Calvinism and the Counter-Reformation. Dancing, originally a group practice, diminished to an activity for couples in the nineteenth century and by the late twentieth century was almost entirely a solo performance. Now you have to become your own shaman and invent your own shamanic dance.
In the modern world theistic religion became the acceptable form of transcendence – and when this faded in the twentieth century there was the secular religion of international socialism. But it has become increasingly difficult to believe in a paradise above the world or a Utopia ahead of it.
An alternative is to locate the transcendent ideal not above or ahead but in the world itself – pantheism. To escape the wrath of the faithful, pantheism has often pretended to be a version of monotheism – but it is essentially pagan. For instance, the Sufi tradition, a version of Islam that flourished in Persia at the end of the first millennium CE and still has a contemporary presence, justified its pantheism by claiming that God created the world in order to be known through it, explaining to His prophet, ‘I was a Hidden Treasure and I desired to be known, so I made the Creature that I might be known.’213 Perhaps craving for recognition is not so modern after all – God may have created the world to be worshipped as the ultimate celebrity. For the Sufis, everything in the world was an epiphany and the world was not merely enchanted but divine – a belief that inspired the poet Jelaluddin Rumi to create the dance of the whirling dervishes and poetry with an equivalent wildness.
There’s a light seed grain inside.
You fill it with yourself, or it dies.
I’m caught in this curling energy! Your hair!
Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane.214
Spinoza was also a pantheist and spoke of ‘that eternal and infinite being we call God or Nature’215, though ‘God’ may have been added to the phrase to placate believers. And poets from Wordsworth to Rilke have espoused forms of secular pantheism, which inspires the most ecstatic affirmation, because the escape from self is into a mystical unity with everything.
The most intense and lasting forms of happiness seem to derive from pantheism. I should found a Church of Latter-day Pantheists with, as prophets, Rumi, Spinoza, Wordsworth and Rilke. This religion would have the advantage of constant, serious difficulty. No one would find it easy to feel divine presence in a multiplex foyer or a departure lounge – and only Rumi himself could believe the Beloved immanent in a shopping mall. These places are more likely to encourage a Manichean belief in man as a fallen creature and the world as the realm of eternal darkness.
Naturally, our own age prefers the fast and easy route to transcendence – drugs. According to neuroscience, the problem is that the feel-good drugs – cannabis, cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy – do not replicate exactly a natural high, but produce equivalent effects by prolonging or suppressing other effects, and these prolongations and suppressions permanently damage the brain network.216 The minor short-term gains result in major long-term losses – a physiological demonstration of the truth that there is no easy, free way to paradise. On the other hand, the earned, natural highs create beneficial new associations that endure.
The other popular form of transcendence – falling in love – is also believed to produce a high without effort, but it, too, has long-term complications (see Chapter 12 for details).
For me, as a non-believer, the high of highs is exaltation, better even than sexual ecstasy, though this is a close-run thing. Fortunately, these two supreme excellences are not mutually exclusive. It may even be possible to experience both simultaneously, and those blessed with such grace will not only mystically merge in the Great Chain of Being but also be one with God in eternity and paradise.
But exaltation is elusive and rare, one of a group of heightened experiences that includes artistic inspiration, epiphany (in the sense of a mystical but secular significance, as described by Joyce and Proust), insight, problem solving and intuition. These experiences cannot be willed, arrive abruptly out of the blue, provide absolute certainty though no explanation, and are intensely pleasurable but brief. They seem entirely random and gratuitous – but the apparently unearned gift is usually the reward for persistent hard work and patience. For artistic inspiration this hard work is the discipline of learning and practising the craft. For insight and problem solving it is prolonged but unconscious thought. For intuition it is observation and analysis of experience. For epiphany it is the habit of intense attentiveness to the physical world. But what prepares the mind for exaltation, an experience that provides the ecstasy of revelation without a revelation? My hypothesis is that the brain offers exaltation as a reward for previous endeavours – a sort of buy-six-get-one-free loyalty-card deal. In return for concentration in the past, the brain will grant the eureka feeling without a eureka product. So, in a way, even exaltation has to be earned.
Naturally, the era of entitlement would like a longer-lasting version of the experience at no cost. And an American neuro-scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, did indeed have such a durable experience, though it was not exactly free.217 One morning she woke up in a mood of extreme euphoria. This was the good news. The bad news was that she was also partially paralysed and incapable of speech. She had just suffered a stroke that knocked out her left-brain hemisphere but left the right side unimpaired. This left hemisphere operates more serially, is responsible for analysing the past and preparing for the future, and maintains the constant brain chatter that constitutes consciousness. So the stroke provided Taylor with natural transcendence, taking her out of the self by disabling the brain site of the self. The right hemisphere, until recently thought to be purposeless and inert, processes information in a more parallel way and provides coherence and meaning for the sensory data of the present. It is this combination of lighter workload and greater ability to make new connections that allows the right side to produce mystical experience, epiphany, inspiration, insight and intuition. And the fact that the right side also processes sensory data from immediate surroundings means that the eureka incandescence can also make the outside world sublimely vivid. This
is why mystical experiences are so similar to inspiration and insight and why the more intense the experience the stronger the accompanying pantheistic awe. Taylor described her euphoria as a profound sense of unity with all things.
But, as her left brain responded to her recovery regime, it reactivated the circuits for negative left-brain emotions such as anxiety, fearfulness, envy, resentment and anger. As psychologists have discovered, these are more powerful than positive emotions. But Taylor was not prepared to surrender her new-found sense of oneness and well-being and fought to suppress the mean left-brain effects, arriving, via a stroke and neuroscience, at a conclusion reached by the Stoics several thousand years earlier: ‘Nothing external to me had the power to take away my peace of heart and mind…I may not be in total control of what happens, but I certainly am in charge of how I choose to perceive my experience.’218 Her technique is to permit these instinctive reactions of the old reptilian brain their natural ninety seconds of life, but then to use detachment and analysis to identify them and prevent them from colonizing her mind. And she adds that, when she tries to teach her students this technique, they complain vehemently that it requires far too much mental effort – another example of the rejection of difficulty.
Taylor’s reaction to her misfortune is also the classic Stoic strategy of turning to advantage whatever happens. She is probably the only stroke victim to enthuse about the experience. But how to liberate the right brain without being paralysed by a left-brain stroke?
One possibility is meditation. There have been several brain-scan studies of experienced meditators and the research teams have reached similar conclusions – meditation increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, the executive controller responsible for focussing and maintaining attention, and decreases activity in the left brain.219 But there is no mention of increased right-side activity (although meditators themselves have often spoken of heightened awareness of immediate surroundings). This may be because meditators focus intensely on a single thing – a mantra, an image, breathing – and succeed in suppressing the fretting self on the left, but fail to make use of the liberated dreamer on the right. So rumination may be meditation plus, not only a curtailment of the nag but an encouragement of the dreamer. If I devised a suitable ritual and jargon I could make my fortune as a guru peddling Transcendental Rumination (TR).
The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) Page 15