Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, by Eric Fromm

Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

Eric Fromm’s views on the Buddhist Philosophy

by Dr Ruwan M Jayatunge, Lanka Web, February 27, 2011

"Buddhism helps man to find an answer to the question of his existence, an answer which is essentially the same as that given in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and yet which does not contradict the rationality, realism, and independence which are modern man’s precious achievements. Paradoxically, Eastern religious thought turns out to be more congenial to Western rational thought than does Western religious thought itself" - Erich Fromm

Colombo, Sri Lanka -- The Social Psychologist and Humanistic Philosopher Eric Fromm was vastly influenced by Freud and Karl Heinrich Marx. He became a follower of Neoanalytic tradition.  In later years Fromm started reading Zen Buddhism in depth.  He saw Buddhism as a philosophical-anthropological system based on observation of facts and their rational explanation. (Buddhism and the Mode of Having vs. Being – Erick Fromm 1975). Fromm believed that Buddhism is a completely rational system which demands no intellectual sacrifice.

Fromm’s interest towards Buddhism was obvious. Among the Western scholars Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids was one of the pioneers to conceptualize canonical Buddhist writings in terms of psychology. Professor William James was making some comparisons between the consciousness and thought process that was described in the Western Psychology and what the Buddha had taught two millenniums ago.  Many former members of the Freud’s Psychoanalytic society were reading Buddhist philosophy and making evaluations. By this time Carl Jung had highlighted the mind analysis in Buddhism. Therefore Fromm’s interest towards Buddhism was not an abrupt event.

In his 1950 work Psychoanalysis and Religion Eric Fromm profoundly analyzed Buddhist Philosophy.  He made a distinction between the authoritarian and humanistic religions and interpreted Buddhism as an antiauthoritarian religion that provides for personal validation and growth.

As Fromm viewed, in the Buddhist philosophy there is no surrender to a power transcending figure and as a virtue; obedience does not play a key role.  Buddhism is   centered around man and his strength. Man must develop his power of reason in order to understand himself, his relationship to his fellow men and his position in the universe. Fromm further says that a humanistic religion like Buddhism is geared to achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest powerlessness; virtue is self-realization, not obedience.

Like Carl Rogers Fromm believed man’s ability for self growth. He refused to believe the Freudian concept that explains man is geared by innate primary destructive forces of libido. Fromm realized that unlike in the Viennese Victorian society   sexual repression plays no major part in the Contemporary Society. Fromm once stated that in the modern society people mostly repress their true thoughts and feelings rather than the sexual urges.

Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

The psychoanalytical components in Buddhism have been emphasized by many scholars like Martin Wicramasinghe D.Lit, Laurence W. Christensen etc. The Buddhist Jathaka stories from the Khuddaka Nikaya contain 550 stories and Rev Buddhaghosa, translated most of the Jathaka stories into Pali about 430 A.D.  In most of these Buddhist Jathaka stories a powerful psychoanalytical   fraction can be detected.

The British Psychiatrist and a renowned Psychoanalyst Dr Douglas H. Burns writes that “The realization of Nirvana requires the maximum possible goal of psychoanalysis—a complete laying bare of the subconscious, the total removal of repression, rationalization and all other defense” (Buddhist Thought – Dr Douglas H. Burns P.155)
Some contemporary psychologists see parallels between the Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis.
The primacy of experiencing for both disciplines, particularly concerning the experiencing subject’s momentary state of consciousness, forms a central theme for both Zen and psychoanalysis. (Cooper 2001)
Eric Fromm saw a larger perimeter in psychoanalysis and did not limit it to neuroses. Fromm criticized Freud’s patriarchal attitude as limiting the development of psychoanalysis as a science. (Maccoby 1994). Eric Fromm suggests that Zen Buddhism has a prolific influence on theory and technique of psychoanalysis.
“…[W]hat can be said with more certainty is that the knowledge of Zen, and a concern with it, can have a most fertile and clarifying influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis. Zen, different as it is in its method from psychoanalysis, can sharpen the focus, throw new light on the nature of insight, and heighten the sense of what it is to see, what it is to be creative, what it is to overcome the affective contaminations and false intellectualizations which are the necessary results of experience based on the subject-object split” (Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Eric Fromm p. 140).
The psychoanalytical module in Buddhism is very much evident. Buddhism provides psychological methods of analyzing human experience and inquiring into the potential and hidden capacities of the human mind. According to Buddhism mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. The verse 37 of the Dhammapada   explains the dynamics of human mind thus
The mind is capable of travelling vast distances – up or down, north or south, east or west – in any direction. It can travel to the past or the future.
Gerald Virtbauer of the University of Vienna makes comparisons between the Buddhism and the Western Psychology.
The first approach is to present and explore parts of Buddhist teachings as a psychology. As many teachers of different Buddhist traditions point out, Buddhism is not primarily a religion based on faith and worship, but a system, or an art to inquire into the human mind. (Buddhism as a Psychological System: Three Approaches Gerald Virtbauer 2008)
Search for Meaning
In 1959 Eric Fromm co authored an incomparable book titled Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis with D. T. Suzuki and Richard de Martino.  In this book Fromm postulates distinct relationship between the Western psychoanalyses and Zen Buddhism. Eric Fromm argued that the human being needs to find an answer to his existence and this urge to search for meaning differs human from other animals. In addition he highlights that   human has an inner dynamism that directed towards personal growth.  He viewed that living is a process that starts at birth and does not end at death. Fromm states that most of the people   die before they are fully born. The notion of fully born according to Fromm is becoming fully functional as a human being.
Eric Fromm in his book   Escape from Freedom asks series of questions that were originally based on Talmud.
1)    If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
2)     If I am for myself only, what am I?
3)     If not now, when?
These types of questions were evident in the Buddhist Philosophy.  Once when the lord Buddha was delivering a sermon a young girl showed up. Then the Buddha asked a series of questions from her.
1)    Where do you come from?
She said I don’t know Venerable Sir, and then the Buddha asked
2)    Where do you go?
She said I don’t know.
3)    Do you know?
The girl replied – “Yes”
 Finally the Buddha asked
4)     Don’t you know?
She said “No”
It was an enigmatic type of answers but the girl was referring to her previous existence when the Buddha asked where do you come from? She did not know from where she came to the present existence. When she was asked where do you go? She replied I don’t know, because she does not know   where she would go after her death. When the Buddha asked do you know? She said yes because she knew that she was a mortal and   she would certainly die one day. When she was asked don’t you know?  Her reply was no. Because she did not know when she would be dead.
The search for meaning has become the main theme of religion and philosophy.  The meaning of life constitutes a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of life or existence in general.  Dr Viktor E. Frankl in his influential book Man’s Search for Meaning states that the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected. (Man’s Search for Meaning- p.157) In 494 B.C the Prince Siddhartha renounced his wealth and went in search for meaning. He spent six years travelling, exchanging ideas with different mentors and practicing meditation.  When he attained the Enlightenment he realized that the meaning of life has been obscured by universal suffering. The Buddha states that….
1. All of life is marked by suffering.
2. Suffering is caused by desire and attachment.
3. Suffering can be stopped.
4. The way to end suffering is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Buddha explained that life is permeated with suffering caused by desire that suffering ceases when desire ceases.
Human Suffering
The Buddhist Philosophy deeply explains the causes of human suffering and path for freedom. Therefore Buddhism is not based on pessimism. It is based on realistic principles. The mundane understanding of suffering is related to bearing of pain, inconvenience, and distress that connected with hopelessness. According to the Buddha the word suffering has a deep existential meaning. It is an universal explanation of the true human condition.
To explain suffering, the Buddha used the term “Dukkha” which has an universal meaning. Many Western Psychologists misinterpreted the word “Dukkha” or universal suffering and they viewed it as an agonizing human condition. This was due to the mistranslation done by the French Philosopher Anatole France in the late Centaury. Anatole France translated the word “Dukkha” in to French as souffrance and then in to English as suffering.  Ever since many Western scholars grasped the concept of “Dukkha” incorrectly. Therefore many thought Dukkha symbolizes the dark side of human existence filled with pessimism and despair.
However Eric Fromm was able to grasp the deep philosophical notion of universal suffering or “Dukkha” and he saw human suffering in personal lives, in the society and in the Civilization.
In 1960 Fromm wrote that “Psychoanalysis is a characteristic expression of Western man’s spiritual crisis, and an attempt to find a solution”(Fromm et al., 1960, p. 80). Although Freud stated that Psychoanalysis is a method of medical treatment for those who suffer from neurosis (Five Lectures delivered by 1909 by Dr. Sigmund Freud at the Clark University) Fromm did not want to limit Psychoanalysis to the neurotic patients. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Fromm believed in experience rather than interpretation.
Fromm’s psychoanalytic technique was essentially different from Freud’s psychic archeology. Fromm attempted to create what he called a more “humanistic” face-to-face encounter. He believed the analyst must understand the patient by empathy as well as intellect, with the heart as well as the head. (Maccoby 1994)
Freud assumed that hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain traumatic experiences. When Freud went in to individual level Fromm applied Psychoanalytic theory to social and cultural problems.
Eric Fromm saw the human suffering in the individual level as well as within the society. He saw the collective suffering. Fromm was on the view that psychological problems often result when an individual feels isolated from society. Describing individual suffering Fromm wrote…………
“The common suffering is the alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature; the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand, and that one will die without having lived; that one lives in the midst of plenty and yet is joyless” (Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis- E. Fromm et al. pp. 85-86).
Fromm Further says that one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if man had no monetary or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
Fromm saw extensive suffering in the society that was resulted from centuries old socio economic systems and loss of meaning. Fromm’s book The Sane Society looks in to the dilemmas caused by the industrialization. Many Psychologists believe that Fromm’s publication The Sane Society was a respond to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. In the Sane Society Fromm looked in to a new form of human suffering and man’s escape into over conformity and the danger of robotism in the modern industrial society.
In his book Escape from Freedom Fromm describes how freedom can be frightening and therefore, many people run from freedom. For average men freedom is not an emancipation it is a burden. Fromm further postulates that man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Know Thyself
Eric Fromm strongly believed that “Know thyself” is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness. Fromm’s notion “Know thyself” was stated by the Buddha over 2600 years ago. The story of   Bhaddawaggiya Princes reveals the importance of knowing thyself.
The Bhaddawaggiya Princes where looking for a woman who stole their valuable possessions. When they met the Buddha the princes asked “Venerable Sir, did you see a woman? The Buddha answered “What is more important whether look for a woman or to look for thy self? (means know thyself). The princes replied that more important is to know thy self.
Knowing thyself or achieving self realization   is one of the virtues of Buddhism. The young apprentice Angulimala was ill-advised by his teacher and he became an addictive killer.  He killed nearly 999, men and collected the fingers of his victims.  When he saw the Buddha he thought that he could have his next victim. Angulimala ordered the Buddha to stop. The Buddha replied “ I have already stopped therefore you should stop too” The Buddha meant that he does not harm anyone and he was able to stop the cycle of Sansara or the continuous flow of birth, life , death and reincarnation. This phrase created a cognitive revolution in Angulimala.   Angulimala had a self realization that led to a dramatic transformation his personality. He renounced violence.
Finding thyself was one of the key ideas of Eric Fromm. Fromm once expressed that man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.  Fromm deemed that attempts should be made to create harmony between the drives of the individual and the society.
 Human Freedom
The idea of freedom was unique to Fromm. He assumed that freedom is the central characteristic of human nature.  According to Fromm often people escape from freedom. He described three ways in which people escape from freedom:
   1. Authoritarianism (either submitting power to others becoming passive and compliant or becoming an authority by applying structure to others)
   2.  Destructiveness.
   3.  Automaton conformity.
In his 1968 book  The Revolution of Hope Fromm writes that man has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.
Michael Maccoby in his 1994 article The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: the Prophetic and the Analytic points out that Fromm’s model of the healthy individual who transcends and transforms society is the “productive character,” the individuated person who loves and creates. Unlike his other character types – receptive, hoarding, exploitative and marketing – the productive character lacks clinical or historical grounding. It is a questionable ideal. (Maccoby 1994)
Eric Fromm believed that human is capable of determining his freedom. He saw Zen Buddhism as a way from bondage to freedom. In his own words Fromm explains………
“Zen Buddhism is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being; it is a way from bondage to freedom; it liberates our natural energies; … and it impels us to express our faculty for happiness and love (p. 115).
Eric Fromm introduced five basic needs and the 5th need he called -A Frame of Orientation – The need for a stable and consistent way of perceiving the world and understanding its events.
The Buddha explained that the virtuous man perceives the world and its events in realistic manner. He achieves self realization the highest plane in the human intellectual structure.
The Ven.Dr. Walpola Rahula explains this condition more gracefully in his book What the Buddha Taught.
 He who has realized Truth, Nirvana, is the happiest being in the world. He is free from all ‘complexes’ and obsessions, the worries and troubles that torment others. His mental health is perfect. He does not repent the past, nor does he brood over the future.  He lives fully in the present. Therefore he appreciates and enjoys things in the purest sense without self-projections. He is joyful, exultant, enjoying the pure life, his faculties pleased, free from anxiety, serene and peaceful.
Eric Fromm saw humanistic religion such as Buddhism could help people achieve self-fulfillment and understanding.  Fromm concluded that the Buddhism could see man realistically and objectively, having nobody but the ‘awakened’ ones to guide him, and being able to he guided because each man has within himself the capacity to awake and be enlightened.
 References
 1)    Cooper P.  (2001). The gap between: being and knowing in Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis. American Journal of Psychoanalysis
 2)    Fromm E.(1941)  Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart
 3)    Fromm E.(1955)  The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart
 4)    Fromm E.   Suzuki D. MartinoR. (1974)   Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.    Souvenir Press Ltd
 5)    Jayatunge R. (2005) Buddhism and Psychology . AHAS Publishers Sri Lanka
 6)    Maccoby .M (1994) The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic. Retrieved from

The Tao of Walt Whitman, by Connie Shaw and Ike Allen

The Tao of Walt Whitman

Introduction

Walt Whitman was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, whose mysticism, lyricism, and great heart has made him beloved by many. He is the poet of the people: “The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy.” And he was—we would like to profess—Taoist in spirit, whether he called himself that or not.

We aren’t Whitman scholars, but we know a good poet when we read one. And Whitman has all the elements we love: gorgeous language, a fearless ability to dive into the center of mystery, and an all-embracing attitude toward life. Neither are we Taoist masters—rather, pilgrims on the bumpy path of insight who appreciate a hardy fellow traveler like our poet. Here’s how he describes himself: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He was a man exhilarated by the sublime beauty of nature, who celebrated eternity in the everyday—and this is why we call him Taoist.

Taoism is the ancient Chinese philosophical and spiritual tradition that emphasizes compassion, humility, and moderation. (Whitman had the first two in abundance; but the third, one could argue, was not his forte.) Tao is the energy of life, and so it encompasses both the practical and the mystical. The key is to find the balance between them, and this is our objective in The Tao of Walt Whitman.

Says the literary critic Harold Bloom, “If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson’s two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson’s, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”

So in this volume we have applied the Whitman scriptures to daily life, to Tao. We’ve chosen a Taoist principle for each week of the year, and a Whitman verse that expresses or comments on that principle for each day, Monday through Saturday. We’ve given you something to do or reflect on for the day with the aim of plumbing the depths of Taoist Whitman wisdom and fully experiencing the beauty and truth therein. On Sundays we offer our own experience of, or reflection on, the weekly adventures.

Please use this book in any way that is useful to you. It isn’t meant to be a taskmaster. Don’t feel as though you must proceed in a linear fashion if that is not your wont. Poetry, and Taoism, and most certainly Whitman, are agents of freedom above all. He was certainly one to shake things up; it is our hope that you will question the need for anything stale and no longer vital in your life as you contemplate his words and take these actions.

You can switch the actions around to suit your schedule, the seasons, or your whims. Sunday is a day to reflect on the week’s passages and actions. If you haven’t completed them, however, you can take the time to do so on Sunday. You can also go to dailytao.net to write about your own experience of the week and read what others have to say.

Feel free to extend any action, insight, or inspiration for another day, week, month…or the rest of your life. Whatever you do, we hope you enjoy, and find inspiration and benefit from the words of this great American poet.

Week 1 Truth

Monday

All truths wait in all things,

They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,

The insignificant is as big to me as any,

What is less or more than a touch?

If you’re open to the pedestrian moments along with the larger revelations as you go about your activities, perhaps you will discover some heretofore hidden truth. And you might try answering Whitman’s question as well.

Tuesday

Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so

What are the bedrock principles, truths, or realities you live by? Can they be denied by anyone? Do you think Whitman is right?

Wednesday

O truth of the earth! O truth of things! I am determined to press the whole way toward you,

Sound your voice! I scale mountains or dive in the sea after you.

How committed are you to the truth? To paraphrase Tracy Chapman, “If everything you think you know is wrong, would you change?” Write about 3 things that you’re lying to yourself about and what steps you can take to change things.

Thursday

The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,

The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either,

They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,

They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly

Give a try at expressing one of “the truths of the earth” in some way other than through words. Perhaps paint a picture, dance a dance, create a melody…

Friday

All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world,

There shall be no subject too pronounced

Take one of your most firmly held beliefs and go through your day imagining that the opposite is true. For example, if you sincerely feel that someone in your daily sphere presents a challenge to your wellbeing, take every opportunity to notice ways in which this may not be so.

Saturday

What do you suppose creation is?

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God?

And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?

Spend time contemplating the meaning of this. Is this true?

Sunday

I spent this week continuously asking myself what I could actually say was true. What was true for me? I noticed that my truth was not necessarily true for others. By the end of the week, I noticed that the only thing it seemed everyone could agree on was that we were all having a common experience. Beyond that, it seemed we each translated truth in our way to support us in this experience. What is true for me is that I create my own truths and I choose to create ideas that make my experience here filled with joy by whatever name. I invite you to enjoy your truths and embrace the truth others share with you. –iKE

Connie Shaw is a publisher and poetry lover who lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Ike Allen is co-creator of the film Leap! and other movies about consciousness. He leads transformational seminars internationally, and also lives in Boulder.

Here and Now, by J.M Coetzee & Paul Auster

The New York Times Sunday Book Reviews

Pen Pals‘Here and Now,’ by Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee

It’s an odd moment for literary letters as a genre. The proliferation of letter volumes published over the past few years (Beckett, Bellow, Wodehouse, Gaddis, with Calvino and Wallace on the way) might be considered post-mortem in more ways than one, putting to bed a form that is already effectively dead, along with its authors. For while the ­e-­revolution means changes in how we read any sort of book, the move from epistles to ­e-­pistles is, for better or worse, a fundamental redefinition of the genre itself. And while there are probably plenty of contemporary writers saving up their best e-mails on external hard drives for later publication, it’s difficult to imagine those looking or acting like a volume of letters. Since you will read these collected e-mails on your electronic device, there’s a fairly good chance they will look like, well, your in-box. 

Arriving at the end of the print-letter tradition, Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee’s collected correspondence, “Here and Now,” is all about new beginnings. The two writers met for the first time in February 2008, and shortly thereafter Coetzee wrote to Auster proposing an exchange of letters as a way to “strike sparks off each other.” The book’s inaugural letter, from Coetzee in July 2008, skips any preamble and goes straight to talking about friendship, a topic Coetzee says he’s been thinking and reading about. Auster responds with his own thoughts on friendship, and thus begins a three-year correspondence between Auster’s home in Brooklyn and Coetzee’s across the world in Australia. The letters range in length from a couple of sentences to several pages, sometimes sent in quick succession, other times with months between. They’re mostly mailed but occasionally faxed, even less occasionally e-mailed (to Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt, since Auster doesn’t use e-mail). The authors also see each other in person during these years, referring fondly in their letters to visits in Portugal, Italy, France. They write in passing about their families, their travels, various books and films, their own novels. But mostly what they do is pose topics for discussion and then see where those topics lead, from friendship to sports to ­Derrida to handbaskets to international politics and various points between.
For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not.
They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.” Auster takes off from this “need for heroes” to relate one of the book’s many anecdotes, about how as a child his mother bought him a complete football outfit that he never actually played in, but simply wore to pretend. His interest in football, he writes, “was all about the outer trappings.” The sports conversation continues on from here, the authors ultimately approaching this topic from five or six different angles and with stimulating results.

Other interests and opinions they find they have in common, and discuss with varying degrees of success, include: Kafka and Beckett; liberal politics; disappointment in American poetry since the 1960s; doubts that their own books will endure; the belief that humanity “would rather live through the misery of the reality we have created . . . than put together a new, negotiated reality”; that linguistic signifiers are essentially arbitrary (although not meaningless, Auster adds); that everyone’s relationship to the food we eat is more complicated than we generally acknowledge; that the German writer Heinrich von Kleist is an example (Coetzee writes) of “an A league of writers, which has very few members and in which the game being played is very different from the game in the more comfortable B league to which one is accustomed”; that novelists should not respond publicly to their critics; that being interviewed is far less engaging than having a real conversation; and that writers, in order to remain vibrant, must always attempt something new, which of all of the above seems the one shared belief most responsible for their embarking on this correspondence in the first place.
In fact, the sheer amount of agreement in the pages of “Here and Now” eventually becomes a problem for the book, as their dialogical back-and-forth starts to read more like a monologue. Perhaps two-thirds in, the general mood of the letters shifts from “striking sparks” to something more like commiseration, and for a while the discussion loses steam. It’s fine as far as it goes — yet when ­Coetzee starts romanticizing Aus­ter’s writerly struggles, and when ­Auster writes that “griping can be fun,” then offers, “Let the young roll their eyes when we speak. Let the not so young ignore what we say,” as a reader, I was tempted to take him up on it. Instead, I found myself wondering what “Here and Now” would have been like if each author had corresponded with someone he agreed with less often. That would’ve been a different book, of course, and perhaps more important for its authors, a different sort of friendship.
Because friendship is really the point of “Here and Now.” They did not set out to make a book, but to make a friendship, and this fact accounts for many of the book’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. Starting with their first letters — or ­earlier, with the decision to correspond at all — friendship is the book’s overarching subject, and the various topics that come and go are before all else attempts at finding that common ground upon which friendship can flourish. In the early pages, Auster writes that friendship offers “a position of absolute equality. You are both giving more than you receive, both receiving more than you give, and in the reciprocity of this exchange, friendship blooms,” and three years of correspondence later, the two authors do seem to feel they have realized some version of this ideal. They’ve come to occupy each other’s thoughts, Auster referring to ­Coetzee as an “absent other,” and ­Coetzee responding that he feels “a certain fraternal tenderness for you and your dogged, unappreciated bravery.” That “unappreciated” may be an adjective in need of a reality check; but taken as a whole, as a series of collaborative inquiries and an extended meditation on the processes of friendship, the book has something substantive to offer.

Martin Riker teaches English at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Baron in The Trees, by Italo Calvino

The Baron in The Trees 

The New York Review of Books

Effrontery & Charm
NOVEMBER 21, 1968D.J. Enright

Italo Calvino’s novel, The Baron in the Trees (Random House, 1959), concerned an Italian nobleman who took to the trees as a boy and never came down to earth again. Within the story’s charming premises there was space for Calvino’s highly developed and humanistic imagination to accomplish quite a lot. In the interests of credibility, we were shown how eminently possible it was for Cosimo to lead “a normal life,” all the way from performing his daily duties in a decent, hygienic manner to performing the act of love in a comfortable as well as sometimes a rather acrobatic fashion. (The blurbwriter was inspired to an unusual wittiness on this occasion, remarking that women were quite ready to go out on a limb for Cosimo.) Our hero studied the Encyclopédistes, fought a duel with a Spanish Jesuit, led successful campaigns against wolves, forest fires, and Mohammedan pirates, acquired a press and printed pamphlets composed by himself (such as The Magpie’s Gazette), became Master of an unorthodox Lodge of Freemasons (“he who had never wanted nor built nor inhabited any house with walls”), was visited by Napoleon (“Were I not the Emperor Napoleon, I would like to be the citizen Cosimo Rondò”), etc., etc. Cosimo forswore the earth as an act of rebellion against his family, and even when he dies, he does not return. The old dying man is swept out of the branches by the anchor of a balloon belonging to some English aeronauts and his body is never seen again. Between these two eccentric events, Cosimo has led a reasonably full life, it occurs to us, and a more than usually satisfying one. He has lived according to his lights, he has never compromised, yet neither has he renounced his species.

It is cheering to deduce from the modest success of The Baron in the Trees that there is still interest in something quite other than the Great American Novel (and smaller British one), the Apocalyptic-Excremental or Sexual Variations without a Theme, that there is still interest in an art which is more concerned with life and growth than with decay and death. Calvino’s reviewers were forced to dip into a new (or perhaps old) word-hoard: “mellow,” “graceful,” “beautifully written,” “delightful,” “antique ease and enjoyment,” “a lovely book.”

Some of these epithets, I imagine, will be applied to Calvino’s new book, a collection of linked stories, or “evolutionary tales.” The narrator, old (indeed remarkably old, or ageless, or even young) Qfwfq, tells of his experiences at various stages of evolution, as a young vertebrate who is in process of deserting the sea for the land, as the last of the dinosaurs anxiously concealing his identity from the New Ones, for whom his sort are doubtfully mythical figures of dread, like giants in later history (“You looked as if you’d seen…a Dinosaur!”), and as a mollusk knowing love and jealousy. The opening story, which makes the film 2001 look about as …

The Voices of Marrakech, by Elias Canetti

          The Voices of Marrakech

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

The New York Times Review
 Jonah Lehrer strikes me as one of those young people who turn up in articles on how life is now so competitive that children no longer have time for jump-rope or adolescents for baby-sitting. At 25, he has already been a Rhodes scholar, worked in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and been a line chef in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He writes a blog on science issues affiliated with Seed magazine, where he is an editor, and now has written “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” a precocious and engaging book that tries to mend the century-old tear between the literary and scientific cultures.

In college, Lehrer did a double major in neuroscience and English. One day, during a break in molecular experiments on the nature of memory, which involved “performing the strange verbs of bench science: amplifying, vortexing, pipetting,” he picked up “Swann’s Way.” “All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences,” he writes. What he got instead was the surprise Virgil gave Dante: Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew 1) that smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) that memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual remembering. These were facts scientists didn’t establish until a few years ago. And here was Proust making the same point in 1913.

Quick as an ion opens a potassium gate, Lehrer began re-examining his favorite artists to see what they could teach us about the mind. He found that writers and musicians consistently lead the way to new theories with inspiration, while scientists mop up with hard data. Gertrude Stein’s experimental writing presaged Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar, while Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” anticipated discoveries by neurologists that what the mind at first rejects as ugly it later perceives as beautiful, once the underlying patterns have been recognized.

Here’s Lehrer’s take on how the process works in the case of Proust and memory. Proust’s goal in “Remembrance of Things Past” is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists,” he writes, “after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone ... bear unflinchingly ... the vast structure of recollection.” Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory. This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.”
Similarly, Proust beat neuroscientists to the punch in discovering that memory is faulty and always changing. To remember is to misremember. For instance, in his narrator’s recollection, the location of Albertine’s beauty mark moves from “her chin to her lip to a bit of cheekbone just below her eye,” as Lehrer notes. Recently, researchers at New York University proved that Proust got the mutability of memory right. First they conditioned rats to fear a loud noise by associating it with an electric shock. Then they gave them a chemical injection to stop their memory of the shock just as they were about to hear the noise. With their access to the memory temporarily blocked, the rats went on to lose the memory itself entirely. Their brains had reset. “A memory,” Lehrer writes, “is only as real as the last time you remembered it.”
Lehrer is smart, and there are some fun moments in these pages. But while he is good at showing that Artist A’s work preceded Biologist B’s, he only rarely shows that A influenced B. So what he’s written is not quite intellectual history, more like intellectual patterning. At the same time, I’m not sure all his conclusions follow from his data. What the N.Y.U. memory researcher showed, it seems to me, is only that memories fade when they are not used, which we hardly need Proust to confirm. And Herz herself did not think she had proven the accuracy of Proust’s proposition: she found that smells produce emotionally intense memories but not particularly intricate ones. Proust’s “confidence in the precise contents of his odor-cued recollections may have been ill founded,” she concludes in her 2002 paper.
In 1959, C. P. Snow asserted that there were now two cultures in the educated world, the scientific and the artistic, separated by “mutual incomprehension.” Artists did not understand — or care about — science; physicists and biologists paid no attention to art. Today, scientists are making border raids. There is a literary-scientific movement called biopoetics, led by the Harvard professor E. O. Wilson, that wants the humanities, as he wrote in his 1999 book “Consilience,” “rationalized.” Biopoetics wants to know why literature is necessary. What is its evolutionary function? And what does it mean to say one book is “better” than another? They’d like to wire a reader with “Madame Bovary” on a gurney to see what parts of his brain light up when Emma Bovary has sex with Rodolphe and which when she commits suicide. Now here comes Lehrer, pushing back. You don’t need Newton’s Third Law of Motion to tell you that turnabout is fair play.

D. T. Max is the author of “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery,” which has just been published in paperback.

Here is Where We Meet, by John Berger

Here is Where We Meet

theguardian Review

If Alain Tanner's haunting In the White City is one of the best Lisbon films, John Berger's equally evocative "Lisboa" is one of its truly great stories. On a hot day at the end of May in Lisbon, John - Berger, we are implicitly invited to assume, since another story in the collection features his daughter Katya - sees an old woman walking across the park towards him. He recognises her walk as that of his mother, who has been dead for 15 years. "The dead don't stay where they are buried," she advises him.

"Lisboa", the opening story in Berger's new collection, Here is Where We Meet , is a magical evocation of the White City, its seven hills, labyrinthine streets and endless steps. The trams pass so close to people's homes, he writes, that you could reach out an arm and give a birdcage a gentle push. "Perhaps Lisboa is a special stopover for the dead," muses John, "perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city." But as the reader will discover, the dead show themselves off in many other locations, too - Krakow, Islington, Madrid. What's special about Lisbon, it's subtly suggested, are the trams. "It's not any place, John, it's a meeting place," his late mother tells him. "There aren't many cities left with trams, are there?" Berger then remembers the tram they took when he was a boy growing up in Croydon, the number 194. "We took it every day from East to South Croydon and back." The tram is more than a madeleine or a mnemonic; it's a spiritual medium.

In the collection's longest piece, "The Szum and the Ching", a river performs a similar function. Having travelled to a remote Polish village to open up a friend's house, John sits by the Szum river. He thinks of the River Ching, which ran at the bottom of the garden where he lived in the east London suburb of Highams Park until the age of six. "The Ching was my father's river." It eased memories of the trenches and brought son and father closer together, as John's father built a drawbridge for the boy. "When he lowered the drawbridge, he could borrow my innocence and so recall his own ..." By the Szum, John hears birdsong, yet there are no birds to be seen, as if the foliage itself is singing, an impression identical to one formed in Highams Park. "The two moments, instead of being separated by decades, belong to the same hour of the same season." What in another writer's work might be the associative work of memory becomes, in Berger's fiction, virtual alchemy. "A kind of vertigo overcomes me. Words make no more sense. Everything is a continuum."

"Islington", a tale of lost love, recovered memories and the end less flux of passing time and its effects on houses, gardens and people, appears in New Writing 13 and is by a long stretch the best piece in the anthology. Sad, reflective and peppered with unforgettable images, "Islington" does what all great short stories do: it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh. Makes us do a double-take. "Yet the density of the foliage was not like that of a jungle, but like the density of a closed book, which had to be read page by page."

A season of talks, exhibitions, readings and performances, bearing the same title as the collection, takes place in London from April 11 to May 18. It's hard to think of an author more deserving of this level of attention.