Packing for Mars

Posted on October 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

Packing for Mars: the Curious Science of Life in the Void
© 2010 Mary Roach
334 pages

It’s a long way to Tipperary. 

Humans are not extremophiles. We have very specific environmental requirements for not dying in all manner of unpleasant ways, and space doesn’t meet a single one. As a consequence, NASA has spent a great deal of time studying various aspects of life in space, asking questions and following up on them with studies: how does the lack of gravity effect human physiology?  What happens when you don’t shower for two weeks?  How long can two people live together in a confined place without doing something unfortunate to the other?   Mary Roach, full of irreverent questions of her own, tags along while scientists try to find out.

Many of the experiments have already been done, and so Roach is left with digging through archives and asking questions, but there are still a few avenues open —  in experiencing zero-gravity, for instance — for writers like Roach who prefer the direct approach.  Every human need on Earth — including eating, drinking, resting, and excretion just for starters — must be seen to, but life beyond Earth’s bounds has its own unique considerations. The aforementioned lack of gravity atrophies the bones, but when NASA began running experiments they were concerned it would do more. What if our hearts require gravity to function properly? Gravity is just the beginning, as scientists and engineers have fretted over the effect of G-forces and an extended diet of ‘astronaut food’.

Packing for Mars is a playful account of the history of human space exploration that contains more scientific discussion than either Spooked or Stiffed alongside Roach’s usual offerings of zany, off-topic footnotes. Most of her information is gleaned from the American, Japanese, and Soviet space campaigns, and the book stands to be relevant for the next few decades, given the inevitability of further human space activity. If human space exploration is of any interest to you, then Packing is definitely of interest — both illuminating and fun.

Related:

  • Any book on Skylab, the main purpose of which was to see what happened to humans who lived in space for  prolonged periods of time. My high-school library had a copy of a Skylab book which I read several times: I think this may be it.
  • Space Stations: Base-Camps to the Stars, a history of human attempts to establish habitats in space and a look at what the future might bring. I’ve read it in recent years, though it may have predated this blog. The book itself is a bit dated, having been written while the International Space Station was still in the planning phrase and known as “Freedom”. 
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The Life of Greece

Posted on October 6, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Life of Greece
© 1939 Will Durant
754 pages

Ancient Greece is the cradle of western civilization, and from my elementary school days on, this world occupied by serene columns and men in togas has fascinated me. That interest grew with age, especially after I began to study Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. If there were ever a city on Earth worth making a pilgrimage to, for me it would be Athens. I thus jumped into The Life of Greece, second in Will Durant” story=”” with enthusiasm.=”” />Ancient Greece is the nursery of Western civilization, and has fascinated me ever since childhood. That fascination grew with age, especially after I began to study Greek philosophy — so I dove eagerly into The Life of Greece. Like Our Oriental Heritage, it is impressively large, and for the same reason: it is a history of not only the political and martial history of Greece, but of its literature, philosophy, art, industry, and religion. Beginning with the migration of various peoples to the portion of the Med. that eventually became known as Greece, Durant follows the evolving cultures on the Greek islands and the cultures they influenced until the arrival of Rome. Nomads become farmers, trading posts become booming towns filled with industry and debate, and men sail into uncharted seas of thought.

Like Oriental Heritage, Life of Greece is most notable for Durant’s wide approach. No section is without chapters on poetry, sculpture, music, architecture, industry, economic approaches, and literature. His approach gives the reader an opportunity not just to examine literature or philosophy within the context of their time, but to track their development as the centuries pass.  The scope of Durant’s book allows the reader to gain a sense of a culture evolving through time, slowly changing. The book impressed upon me that every civilization is constantly haggling with the cosmos:  every approach the Greeks tried in ruling themselves had its   successes and weaknesses.

This is the essential strength of the book, although Greece remains a compelling subject no matter the approach taken. Additionally, Durant touches on the people the Greeks influenced, particularly the Egyptians and Jews in the days following Alexander. Greece has borne the world many gifts. Durant’s pragmatic appreciation of religious primacy and monarchy are a touch distasteful to the modern mind, and he continues with his odd use of ‘epicurean’ and the nebulous ‘stoic’. It’s decidedly odd in a book that dedicates a chapter to Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, in which Epicures is described several times as living stoically and creating a philosophy that was Epicurean “in name only”.  The poor man is denied his own name!

While not without weakness, the book’s subject ought to remain of interest to modern minds, especially those of Europe and the United States who can look to old Athens as an intellectual and cultural ancestor.

Related:

  • The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton. Hamilton uses literature to draw conclusions about the culture that created it. 
  • The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton. Emphasis on Athens. 
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Top Ten Favorite Authors

Posted on October 5, 2010 by smellincoffee
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday is about authors, and I’ve listed my favorites below in count-down order — not that this order is absolute.
Honorable mentions: Richard Dawkins, Steven Saylor. 
10. John Grisham (fiction, notably legal thrillers set in the American Southeast)
Grisham has a reputation for churning out popular legal thrillers. I first read him through The Firm, a mob story, and later read everything else he’d written. It’s become a tradition in my family for my parents to give my sister and me copies of Grisham’s latest on our birthdays or Christmas — whichever follows Grisham’s latest release day first.  (This works because our birthdays are only a week apart.) I can probably attribute some of my cynicism about the rat race to Grisham. My favorites? The Rainmaker and The Last Juror. 
9. J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter)
I didn’t grow up with Harry Potter. There were kids in my high school class reading the books,  but we were a few years ahead of him. I picked the books up in 2007, at the behest of several persistent friends and promptly fell for the books. They were funny, charming, and offered adventure that didn’t take itself too seriously. The latter books were more serious, but by then I was hooked proper and as big a Potter geek as I am a Star Wars fan.
8. Robert Harris (historical fiction, mysteries)
I first encountered Robert Harris with his Fatherland, an alternate history detective mystery set in 1970s Berlin.  Mystery-thrillers in diverse settings followed this, and I understand that one of them, Ghost, is being converted into a film. I prefer Harris’ Roman novels (Imperium, Pompeii, Lustrum/Conspirata) 
7. Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser (science, history of science)
They’re on the list as a pair because I’ve only read them as a pair. Spangenburg and Moser are a married couple who’ve written series on the history of science, series which also serve as a way of introducing lay readers to their given subjects. 
6.  David Sedaris (humor)
In 2006 I heard David Sedaris speaking on This American Life, describing his life living in Paris, and I nearly had to pull the car humor lest my laughter force me into the opposite lane of traffic. I looked for the book he was reading from, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and was reduced to tears. Sedaris has numerous essay collections about his life, and they combine dry humor and pathetic situations superbly. My favorite Sedaris collection is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. 
Five or six years ago while wandering aimlessly in a bookstore, I encountered Life in a Medieval City and purchased it.  I learned while reading Gies that the medieval world was far more livelier than I’d ever imagined, and I resumed reading from this couple a couple of years back. They have continued to enrich my perspective on the medieval period.  Especially notable is their Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel which toppled the idea that medieval Europe was intellectually stagnant. 
4. Neil Postman (social criticism)
I picked up a Postman book while reading on the Enlightenment (Building a Bridge to the 18th Century) and later moved on to his Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death.  Both of the latter take issue with pitfalls in modern culture, the latter addressing the rise of an entertainment mentality which trivializes everything  it touches, particularly political debate and intellectual discussions.
3. Howard Zinn (history, social criticism)
I first read Zinn in a book on American imperialism and followed that with A People’s History of the United States, Marx in Soho, The Zinn Reader, and A Power No Governments Can Suppress. Zinn focuses on the downtrodden of history, and the role of direct action in forcing governments to respond to the needs of their people.
2. Carl Sagan (science, Contact)
There were other pictures, but I chose this one because it makes Sagan look like a Skeptical Superhero. 
I imagine most people know Sagan as the host of Cosmos, but I first met him in the library. During my first year as a skeptic, I began looking for related books to read and was recommended The Demon-Haunted World. I’ve noted through the years that this book on the importance of skepticism and the virtues of the scientific method (the book’s subtitle is “Science as a Candle in the Dark”) remains a top recommendation for skeptics, but the book that sold me Sagan was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,  his take on anthropology and human evolution. 
1. Isaac Asimov (science fiction, science, history, mysteries, literature, etc.)
I never imagined having a favorite author until one summer I started reading Asimov and couldn’t stop. I’d read Asimov before — a book on our solar system in high school, and a book on extraterrestial civilizations a year or so prior — but his short stories took me, utterly. I enjoyed his simplicity and humor, and the ‘retro’ feel of his futuristic stories.  Scarcely a week went by without my reading one of his collections of short stories or one of his novels:  I started the Foundation series that summer, and finished it in the fall.  Asimov’s personality as revealed in his introductions and short-story forwards  made me an ardent devotee:  I loved him for his wit, his passion for humanity and his broad, general approach to learning. Later, I started seeking books by Asimov out because they were by the author: now I collect them, and gaze admiringly at my shelves of books by the good doctor. 
Works of interest: the Black Widowers, a six-book series of short story collections about the Black Widowers, a club of middle-aged intellectuals who get together for a monthly dinner and generally wind up having to reason through a mystery.  Familiar Poems, Annotated. 
So, who are your favorites? 
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Christine

Posted on October 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

Christine
© 1983 Stephen King
471 pages

Let’s go for a ride, big guy. Let’s cruise.

It’s 1983, and Dennis Guilder is just starting to get a handle on what happened four years ago, in that last and terrible year of high school when his best friend lost his mind and the university town of Libertyville, Pennsylvania was visited by ten murders.

It all started the summer before their senior year, when they drove by a ruined car marked by a “For Sale” sign. The car — a 1958 Plymouth Fury — instantly enraptures Arnie Cunningham, Dennis’ friend and pimply ward. To Dennis, the rusting wreck is a horror to behold,  a genuine money pit, and he pleads with Arnie not to buy it — but love is blind.  Renting garage space from a shady businessman, Arnie devotes himself to restoring the hulk named ‘Christine’ to its — her — former glory.  His devotion to Christine changes him. The timid high-school reject suddenly gains confidence, pride, defiance — and anger. The change unsettles those who know him, and it is only the beginning. As the months past, Arnie seems to be speaking with another man’s voice — a voice contemptuous and bitter.

And then there’s…Christine. Christine provokes an instant reaction from everyone who draws close. For Arnie, that feeling was love. To others — his parents, to Dennis, to his newly-found girlfriend Leigh — the car is spooky.It smells of death, and haunts those who are close to Arnie: they feel watched by cold eyes.  Everyone but Arnie knows there is something wrong with this car: it should have been left to decay. As the year develops, Dennis digs into the history of Christine and the man who sold it hoping to find answers and realizes there’s far more to this story than a young boy and his first love. This is a car possessed — by hatred, by implacable maliciousness, and those who cross paths with it and those it claims as its own are destined to a grisly fate.

I’m not one for horror, usually: as mysterious and creepy as horror stories can be, the bite is usually dulled by their reliance on the chaotic and supernatural. Even so, King had me with Christine. I read it in two sittings, listening to the fifties hits that Christine always seemed to be playing and glancing from time to time at a large image of Christine displayed on my computer monitor. Christine is…spooky; a car seemingly lost in time. Throughout the novel I puzzled over the relationship between Christine and Arnie — what was it that held them together, and to the Fury’s previous owner? Did the car possess the man, or the man the car? What lives on this murderous car?

Christine is compelling and creepy, drawing the reader into a world of deathly nostalgia. I don’t recall either The Stand or Firestarter having this effect on me, nor did I notice the way King sometimes throws the reader under the bus of his characters’ horrified thinking.  I’d recommend it if you’re in the mood for a little horror, although it’s a well-done novel even if you’re not in the mood for goosebumps.

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Teaser Tuesday (6 October)

Posted on October 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday!

Let’s go for a ride, big guy, Christine seemed to whisper in the summer silence of LeBay’s garage. Let’s cruise. And just for a moment it seemed that everything changed. 

(p. 32, Christine. Stephen King.)

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Stephen Fry in America

Posted on October 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

Stephen Fry in America: Fifty States and the Man Who Set Out to See Them All
© 2008 Stephen Fry
314 pages

While I am not familiar with Stephen Fry’s work,  his reputation for humor and science advocacy  lured me me into checking this book out. Fry introduces himself as someone who has always regarded America with a certain affection, having ‘almost’ been born there and having wondered since the age of ten what his life would have been like had he been in the United States.  When invited to do a series on America, he opted to take a tour of each of its fifty states over the course of nearly a year, meeting the people and finding the ‘real’ America from the cozy confines of a black London taxi.

Fry gives the obvious tourist attractions a miss, preferring to beat the bushes and immerse himself in people’s lives and local cultures, especially music. His direct approach takes him up in a hot-air balloon, on a tour of a body farm, into a coal mine, and into the depths of a submarine.  Few tourists would make the ruined Lower Ninth Quarter or spend a night with the homeless, but Fry does — and his celebrity allows him to access people and places far removed from poverty. He chats with Ted Turner at the Turner Bison ranch, hangs around with Morgan Freeman at the club Freeman owns, and participates in making an Oscar award. Most of the landscapes he visits are awe-inspiring, and the publisher indulges its readers with two-page landscape spreads.

I checked out the book in part because I wanted to witness an outsider reacting to America as he experienced it, and Fry provides reaction in abundance; reaction is the heart of comedy. Like Mary Roach, he plunges head-first into humiliating, awkward, and sometimes dangerous situations for the experience. The book isn’t all humor and rapt awe: Fry is honestly trying to get a handle on what America is, and concludes that understanding America means understanding the regional cultures. In general, Fry finds trends in urban geography unsettling (commercial strips and chain stores ruining downtowns) and American cheese disgusting, but is constantly impressed by the nation’s energy and optimism and ends the book a bigger fan of American than when he started.

Although the book is chiefly aimed at the BBC’s audience, Americans will find plenty here to enjoy. Fry is entertaining, and his journey reveals some things I never knew myself — like that Alaska is still influenced by its original status as a Russian colony,

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Spook

Posted on October 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
© 2005 Mary Roach
311 pages

Having so thoroughly enjoyed Stiff last week, I visited the library this past Wednesday with the intent of reading more by the same author. I’ve walked by this book hundreds of times and even contemplated it a time or two: though I’ve never been interested in afterlives, tales of ghosts have fascinated me my entire life. I used to read books of ‘real’ ghost stories as a kid, and every time I pass by a certain building rumored to be haunted on campus, I linger to see if some trick of the light causes me to see a phantom in the window, watching me as he, the old profiteer, searches for his buried treasure*.

Mary Roach is simply curious about the subject of the afterlife, and approaches it not with hopeful credulity or intent-to-debunk. She is more a skeptic than a believer, doing Occam’s razor proud and referring more than once to what is now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and its flagship magazine The Skeptical Inquirer. The book begins in New Delhi, where Roach tags along with a man who evaluates the claims of those who remember their past lives as specific individuals.  Her methods of research go beyond reading and interviews; as in Stiff, she prefers the direct approach, enrolling herself in a class for would-be mediums and practicing cold reading .(The secret, as she finds out, is make broad statements and rely on clues from the person’s speech and dress to make more specific statements based on their environment.) She briefly considers taking a drug to induce a near-death experience, but doesn’t like the idea of people watching her eyes roll backwards in her head while she has a seizure.

Because Roach’s approach is scientific, she avoids simply telling ghost stories and focuses on cases where scientific apparatuses and terminology were used by those who attempted to find the soul or otherwise gain information about the afterlife. Some cases seem as though they would be far removed from science — particularly the 19th century phenomenon of spiritualism — but Roach reminds the reader that stories of communicating to the dead through devices surfaced in the same period that people were being asked to accept electricity and telephone conversation.

Spook is fun, replete with odd stories in the human search for finding out what might lie beyond death and supplemented by Roach’s wit and hilarious devil-may-care forwardness. I don’t think it will give the hopeful-but-unconvinced anything to truly hope for, although some approaches gave me something to think about.  Roach almost seems to want to believe in the survival of our consciousness, but can find nothing to base that hope on.  Some near-death experiences — people recounting having floated above their bodies and “saw” things while they were unconscious —  were interesting, but I have great faith in the human brain’s ability to misbehave and so, like Roach,  require studies that eliminate odd occurrence common in anecdotes.

* He buried his savings in his peach orchard at the advance of the Federal army in 1865, the story goes, and continues to search for it ’til this day. Unfortunately for him, the peach orchard is long gone, replaced by a pretty building that used to be our library.

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This Week at the Library (15 Sept – 29 Sept)

Posted on September 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

Recent reads…

  • Casino, by Nicholas Pileggi, is the rise and fall of  of two real-life Mafia associates in Las Vegas.
  • The Mao Case is a detective story with political implications set in contemporary Shanghai: Qiu’s detective is likable protagonist, so much that I’m interested in reading the rest of this series. My library doesn’t have anything else by the author, though.
  • The King of Torts is a legal thriller by John Grisham criticizing the mass tort ‘industry’/profiteering scam by chronicling the rise and fall of a public defender turned multimillionaire.
  • Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is far from deathly, abounding in interesting tales and plenty of dry humor.
  • Barefoot Boy with Cheek is Max Shulman’s satire of college life at a liberal arts college in the 1940s, often surreal
  • African Exodus is an excellent history of human evolution by Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie. 

Selected Passages:

Now we come to the most important part of writing. Except for lady poets, writers must eat. In order to eat, they must sell what they write. But how? You must remember that thousands of manuscripts pour into editors’ offices daily. Make your manuscript stand out from the rest. Attach a cake to it, or a bundle of currency, or a nubile maiden. ” (Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size; introduction.)

“I stood that day and gazed at the campus, my childish face looking up, holding wonder like a cup; my little feet beating time, time, time, in a sort of runic rhyme. A fraternity man’s convertible ran me down, disturbing my reverie. ‘Just a flesh wound,’ I mumbled to disinterested passersby. “(Barefoot Boy with Cheek, Max Shulman.)

“‘It has been reported to me, and I have seen it myself, that Asa has been observed riding in a convertible in which the top was up, the seats were not filled, and nobody was yelling., I want to say, in a friendly way, naturally, that it’s things like that that can give a fraternity a bad name. When riding in a convertible, the top must always be down, no matter what the weather, and there must be no fewer than eight people in the convertible, and they must all be yelling. “

“I moved on to Czechoslovakia, tense as this was the third anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion. There my car was emptied out all over the road, and I was interviewed for four hours by border officials who made it clear that they found a long-haired, Western anthropology student about as welcome as a hippie at a regimental reunion. ‘Your visit is of no value to the people of Czechoslovakia’, I was told in response to my pleadings that my work was of international scientific importance”. (African Exodus, Stringer and McKie)

“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.” (African Exodus)

“We should not be overcome with a sense of our own organizational superiority, however, for it is wrong to equate survivorship with some form of worth. Extinction is the inevitable destiny of all evolutionary lineages. [..] ‘For every species alive today, a hundred now lie frozen into the rocket sediment of the earth,’ as Erich Harth, of Syracuse University, New York, puts it with some understatement.” (African Exodus)

“We sadly take our two-legged prowess for granted, says Gould. ‘It is now two in the morning and I’m finished,’ he concludes. ‘I think I’ll walk over to the refrigerator and get a beer; then I’ll go to sleep. Culture-bound creature that I am, the dream I have in an hour or so when I’m supine astounds me ever so much more than the stroll I will now perform perpendicular to the floor.'” (African Exodus)

Potentials for Next Week:

  • Barring a case of spontaneous combustion, I’ll finish off the essays of Emerson in the next couple of days.
  • I’ll also be reading with serious intent to finish The Life of Greece by Will Durant.
  • Spook: Science Takes on the Afterlife by Mary Roach is a definite.
  • Christine by Stephen King is a twofer: not only is it a challenged book, which I’m reading in observance of Banned Books Week, but it’s a horror novel that’s seasonally appropriate.
  • There are more possibilities swirling about, but I’ve been distracted from Greece for nearly a month now. Time to dig in!

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African Exodus

Posted on September 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

African Exodus: the Origins of Modern Humanity
© 1996 Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie
282 pages

“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history…”

Ever since Charles Darwin made that first and solitary reference to human evolution in The Origin of Species, people have wondered at our history as a species. It is a history that began not by the banks of the Tigris, with the use of writing and agriculture, but elsewhere and much earlier, when creatures who were human-like became human. Who where those ancestors, and when did we become human? These are questions which have spawned contesting ideas, two of which are discussed at length in this book: the multiregional hypothesis, which posits that humanity evolved in five distinct places throughout the globe and merged into a larger combined family with distinct ‘races’; and the Out of Africa theory, which holds that humanity evolved in Africa, expanding from there throughout the globe and diversifying in various ethnic groups. Stringer advocates the later in African Exodus, a history of human evolution and an examination of evolution’s consequences for humans living in the 21st century.

After an opening chapter focused on Stringer’s graduate work (helping to establish that humans did not evolve from Neanderthals), he launches into a study of where both originated. After piecing together a history of human evolution beginning with the first hominid who took to walking upright in Africa’s savannahs, Stringer uses on fossils, DNA (particularly mitochondrial), and language studies to confirm that the epicenter of human expansion began in Africa. Time and again in reading this book, I was impressed by our species’ sheer virility. We are a people forged by hardship, who have spread across the globe so quickly that individuals from far-flung parts of the world are more genetically similar than two gorillas living in the same hundred–square-mile patch of forest. The three species of chimpanzees are ten times as genetically diverse compared to one another as all of our ethnic groups, despite the fact that we see the chimps as identical to each other and ourselves as radically different.

The ending chapters were a pleasant surprise, as Stringer wrote of the merits of evolutionary psychology. Although we continually imagine ourselves as distinct from the animal kingdom, we are animals even to our bones — and our evolutionary heritage continues to shape our behavior and our bodies’ response to living in the 21st century.  The book as a whole is quite a treat: Stringer and McKie have produced a book comprehensible to the lay reader which will undoubtedly enrich our understanding and appreciation for the history of our species. Especially interesting for me was the treatment of Neanderthals, who were as intelligent and cultured as early humans. They appear to have taken to the sedentary lifestyle before their sapiens contemporaries, but they were out-circled by the aggressive lightweights who were modern Europeans’ ancestors.

Recommended!

Related:

  • Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade
  • The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
  • The Naked Ape, Desmond Seward

I haven’t read the latter two, but I’ve read their authors and intend to get around to those works.

And we are scatterlings of Africa, both you and I
We’re on the road to Pheleamunga, beneath a copper sky
And we are scatterlings of Africa, on a journey to the stars
Far below we leave forever dreams of what we were.
(Johnny Clegg, “Scatterlings of Africa”)
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Top Ten Favorite Quotations

Posted on September 28, 2010 by smellincoffee

I forgot to post this last week, and decided to post it today instead of “Top Ten Favorite Book Couples“, which I can’t do as I don’t know that many book couples.

I drew from the books I’ve read since May 2007, since I tend to share favorite passages in the weekly review posts. I realized too late that I only included  quotations that have a point to make, rather than just being amusing. I included one of those as a bonus.

1. “It’s always easy to avoid other people’s vices, isn’t it?”
This comes from Star Wars: Yoda, Dark Rendezvous.

2. “But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth. [..] Atheism in its negation of the gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.”  (Red Emma Speaks, 245-248.)

3. “Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it, but it divides us from truth.” (Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam)

4. “Don’t become disgusted with yourself, lose patience, or give up if you sometimes fail to act as your philosophy dictates, but after each setback, return to reason and be content if most of your acts are worthy of a good man. Love the philosophy to which you return, and go back to it, not as an unruly student to the rod of a schoolmaster but as a sore eye to a sponge and egg whites, or a wound to cleansing ointments and clean bandages. In this way you will obey the voice of reason not to parade a perfect record, but to secure an inner peace. Remember, philosophy desires only what pleases your nature while you wanted something at odds with nature.” (The Emperor’s Handbook: Book 5, passage 9. A modern English interpetation of Marcus Aurelius’ Greek)

5.  “Is life worth living? Well, I can only answer for myself. I like to be alive, to breathe the air, to look at the landscape, the clouds, the stars, to repeat old poems, to look at pictures and statues, to hear music, the voices of the ones I love. I enjoy eating and smoking. I like good cold water. I like to talk with my wife, my girls, my grandchildren. I like to sleep and to dream. Yes, you can say that life, to me, is worth living.” (The Best of Robert Ingersoll)

 6. “There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumblings of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, [and] kindness. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently — this gives us the energy to act. Hope is the energy for change. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live in defiance of the worst of everything around us is a marvelous victory.” – Howard Zinn, The People’s History of American Empire

7. “There is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine, or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter what or who they are: ultimately these are all we need. So long as we practiced these in our daily lives, […] there is no doubt we will be happy.” (Ethics for a New Millenium, Tenzin Gyatso)

8. “The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than to destroy one’s spirit by worrying about them far in advance.” – Cicero, as quoted in Imperium by Robert Harris.

9. “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” – Spinoza, from Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things.

10. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” – Thomas Paine, The Crisis, quoted in Robert Down’s Books that Changed the World.

11. “But from that moment on, Hermione Granger became their friend. There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. Rowling.)

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