Reimagining ordinary words for a deeper sense of belonging
The inspiration for Consolations was born in 2010 with an invitation from The Observer to write a short essay on regret. The limit for the piece was 300 words - barely enough, David exclaimed, for an Irishman to catch his breath. But he took up the challenge and met it with the full power of the poetic imagination, writing of regret’s haunting ability to make us appreciate just how high the stakes are in any human life, describing regret as “an elegy to lost possibilities, even in its brief annunciation.”
Over the next few years, David turned a poet’s eye for evocative imagery and a philosopher’s reflection on meaning and context toward 52 ordinary words - coincidentally and somehow appropriately, a deck of cards. Beginning with Alone, and concluding with Withdrawal, the collection inspires and nourishes, offering the deepest consolation a human being can experience - a profound sense of belonging and connection to the world.
Breq has found someone in the snow: a stranger to everyone on this planet, a thousand years old, a relic out of time — but despite all that, Breq remembers.
Breq used to be the ship that carried them both.
The assured, gripping and stylish Ancillary Justice is, in its broadest strokes, the tale of an empire, and in its smallest a character study, and part of debut novelist Anne Leckie's achievement is how she handles her protagonists in both of those contexts.
Justice of Toren is a living ship far beyond AI, spending millennia carrying officers and troops for the Radchaai Empire's endless planetary annexations. Those troops are ancillaries — sometimes called corpse soldiers — reanimated bodies that now share a single consciousness and act as one. Breq was once the ancillary One Esk and the ship Justice of Toren. But now, separated in a moment of trauma, she's autonomous. It's a condition so rare no one suspects what she is.
It's an advantage: She's out to kill the Lord of the Radch, and her only hope is that no one remembers her.
Though framed like '70s grindhouse — there was a setup, and someone's out to clean the slate — things unfold studiously, reminiscent of the deliberation underscoring Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. (Several chapters take place during negotiations over a single gun.) Each character adds texture to the picture that slowly emerges: Skaaiat, cynical noble caught in political wheels; many-bodied dictator Anaander Minaai, Lord of the Radch; Awn, One Esk's last commander; and Seivarden, the dissolute exile she rescues, who joins her suicide mission.
Ancillary Justice is Ann Leckie's first novel.
missionphoto.org
The story moves in and out of perspectives and time periods, from the millennia-long view of Justice of Toren to the solitary Breq, looping this space opera from long history back to the immediately personal and highlighting Breq's double motives: Toren wants to disrupt a cycle of corruption; One Esk is out to revenge a friend.
It won't be easy. The universe of Ancillary Justice is complex, murky and difficult to navigate — no bad thing, as Leckie's deft sketches hint at worlds beyond, none of them neat. Most obvious are the linguistic disconnects: Breq's home tongue uses only "she," reinforcing her otherness as she constantly guesses at genders in other languages.
Then there are disconnects of culture when she returns to the heart of the Empire and contends with loaded expectations of dress and behavior. There are cruelties and power differentials between colonizers and colonized that make easy resolution impossible. And cleverly, personal disconnects that are never directly stated — because despite knowing thousands of protocols designed to smooth social interaction, Breq herself doesn't yet recognize her own emotional reactions.
Instead, her inner life thaws slowly, making for a protagonist who's sometimes oblique but never opaque; her fondness for singing is considered a quirk of programming, but there's a reason she thinks so often about a children's song of hidden hearts.
A space opera that skillfully handles both choruses and arias, Ancillary Justice is an absorbing thousand-year history, a poignant personal journey, and a welcome addition to the genre.
Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.
With its seven interrelated parts--rich in story, character, and imaginative range--"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) is the novel that brought Czech-born Milan Kundera his first big international success. Aaron Asher's new translation, commissioned and monitored by Kundera himself, conveys beautifully into English the nuances and the tone of the author's original text. " Part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography" (as the New York Times described it), "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is, above all, the wonderfully integrated stories of men and women living in a world of public oppression and private longings, a world in which history may be rewritten overnight and in which love may fall victim to either political intrusion or personal betrayal.
The seven parts of Kundera's novel explore different aspects of human existence in the twentieth century, particularly as they are affected by life in the police state of the narrator's fictionalized Bohemia. In 1971, three years after the Russian occupation of his homeland, Mirek--under surveillance by the not-so-secret police--seeks to retrieve his love letters from his former lover, Zdena. Marketa and her husband, Karel, must cope with Karel's increasingly childlike mother while at the same time dealing with the amoral Eva and memories of past desires. At a small French summer school, two American girls learn the lessons of laughter. Displaced to a provincial town in Western Europe, Tamina (" all the other stories are variations on her own story" ) urgently tries to retrieve memories of her husband and their past together in Bohemia, memories recorded in notebooks that she left behind at her mother-in-law's house in Prague. And forty-five-year-old Jan prepares to cross several borders--geographical, existential, erotic--for a new life in the United States.
Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal, memories. Milan Kundera (1929– ) traces the interrelated lives of a handful of characters who are each trying to recover or banish poignant memories. Much of the novel is based on Kundera’s own knowledge of totalitarianism; following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kundera lost his teaching post at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, saw his books removed from the shelves of public libraries, and was banned from publishing in his homeland.
Divided into seven parts, the first section of the novel follows Mirek, a once-celebrated researcher who has been forced to leave his job and is surrounded by undercover agents. The character observes that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Yet throughout the novel, Kundera demonstrates that historical revision occurs not only at a national level but in private, everyday life as well. Kundera alternates between presenting characters’ interior monologues and the narrator’s reflections on philosophical and theoretical questions that arise, including: What constitutes history? Where do memories adhere and how are they recovered? What are the origins and characteristics of laughter? As usual, he presents these brief narratives using flashbacks, authorial asides, and other frameworks. The novel is comprised of revealing episodes, often of a sexual nature, that function as studies of larger, pervasive themes.
Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfully―he is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his books, and his daily life behind. But he’s also gathering material for his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction to yoga.
Four days later, there’s a tap on the window: something has happened. Forced to leave the retreat early, he returns to a Paris in crisis. Life is derailed. His city is in turmoil. His work-in-progress falters. His marriage begins to unravel, as does his entanglement with another woman. He wavers between opposites―between self-destruction and self-control; sanity and madness; elation and despair. The story he has told about himself falls away. And still, he continues to live.
This is a book about one man’s desire to get better, and to be better. It is laced with doubt, animated by the dangerous interplay between what is fiction and what is real. Loving, humorous, harrowing and profound, Yoga hurls us towards the outer edges of consciousness, where, finally, we can see things as they really are.
As much as we might try to resist, endings happen in every moment—the end of a breath, the end of a day, the end of a relationship, and ultimately the end of life. And accompanying each ending is a beginning, though it may be unclear what the beginning holds. In How We Live Is How We Die, Pema Chödrön shares her wisdom for working with this flow of life—learning to live with ease, joy, and compassion through uncertainty, embracing new beginnings, and ultimately preparing for death with curiosity and openness rather than fear. Poignant for readers of all ages, her teachings on the bardos—a Tibetan term referring to a state of transition, including what happens between this life and the next—reveal their power and relevance at each moment of our lives. She also offers practical methods for transforming life’s most challenging emotions about change and uncertainty into a path of awakening and love. As she teaches, the more freedom we can find in our hearts and minds as we live this life, the more fearlessly we’ll be able to confront death and what lies beyond. In all, Pema provides readers with a master course in living life fully and compassionately in the shadow of death and change.
My Notes (EWR)
Her writing seems to reflect a lifetime of dedication to her practice. What comes through is that she took and takes her practice very seriously and wants to share what she has learned with others. There's a certain kind of earnest compassion that comes through. Wholesome is another word that comes to mind.
As I read the descriptions of the various Bárdos I found myself thinking once again of the similarities between Buddhism and Catholicism. In Catholicism it was heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo. In both cases the lessons are how you live your life now will determine what happens in the afterlife.
I was appreciative of the fact that she tackles head on the issue of reincarnation, which is mostly ignored in the Buddhist literature that I am familiar with. It's a challenging concept, full of contradictions, suppositions, what looks like some very active imaginations. She suggests a way to deal with it is to suspend judgment and open yourself up to whatever lessons you might derive. That was a good advice because it allowed me to suspend my skepticism long enough to read through the descriptions, despite the fact that they seem bizarre and otherworldly.
I have a hard time with lists: 4 of this, 5 of that, and I tend to skim over those descriptions without much consideration. Some of that may be that I already have a map in my head of how to categorize my life experiences, and it resists revision and learning a new system.
I was trouble by the amount of attention she spends on Chogyam Trumpga. Perhaps elsewhere in other books she deals with his less wholesome habits, alcohol and womanizing. But it raises for me a core issue: what do you do when you find out the people that you seek to admire and learn from have significant flaws. Call it the Woody Allen syndrome, there's a part of me that never feels quite the same about people after I'm exposed to their shadow side.
A couple of passages I’d like to discuss further:
“Ignorance” as a destructive emotion is a little harder to understand. It’s a dull, indifferent state of mind that actually contains a deep level of pain. It can express itself as being out of touch, being mentally lethargic, not caring what we’re feeling or what others are going through. When this state of mind dominates us, it can turn into depression.”
“The five buddhas and all the other brilliant appearances are not the product of our usual confused, dualistic mind. They come from our true nature, which is ineffable, unprejudiced, and nondual.”
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Anam Cara(Soul Friend)
I am only a chapter into this extraordinary book and already feel like it's going to take an honored and treasured place in my psychic library. I am listening to it and I'm grateful that I had the intuition that this would be a book better heard than read - all the better to let the spoken words sink in and work their magic unawares.
To stay that the language is poetic is to understate the experience. Read in a sonorous, Gaelic-tinged accent, it makes the most of the vast vocabulary of the English language, a language thatmostly does not lend itself easily to beautiful prose, save in the hands of exceptional writers. The recital is both firm and lilting. It silences the analytic, dualistic mind and seduces you into listening with your heart where, I’m led to believe, wisdom accumulates.
It begins with a paean to friendship, holding out the promise of restoring that word to to it’s hallowed place in this era of crude Facebook de-friendings and social media trivialization. And then it blossoms into a sublime elucidation of the word “love” so immediate and intimate that I felt my heart stir.
All this in the first chapter!
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
Rediscover the Promise of Enlightenment
As Western culture has embraced practices like meditation and yoga, has something been lost in translation? “What we see in America today in both the yoga boom and mindfulness fad,” writes Dr. Miles Neale, “is a presentation of technique alone, sanitized and purged of the dynamic teachings in wisdom and ethics that are essential for true liberation.” For anyone seeking a path dedicated to both authentic personal growth and the overthrow of the nihilism, hedonism, and materialism that are threatening our planet, this compelling teacher presents a well-conceived, sustainable solution with Gradual Awakening.
The core of this book is Tibetan Buddhism’s “gradual path”—or Lam Rim—interpreted with fresh insights from modern scientific research. Offering an illuminating new presentation of Tibet’s deep psychology, meditative techniques, and virtuous rituals, Dr. Neale presents a time-honored path of enormous transformational potential. Each chapter serves as a practical manual that will allow you to experiment with and actualize the benefits of role-modeling visualization, affirmations, contemplative themes, textual recitation, prayers, altars, offerings, and meditation. Here you’ll explore:
• Uprooting the “sickness of paradigm”—why a complete spiritual practice must directly confront the fundamental human suffering caused by the modern ethos of scientific reductionism • The Lam Rim path—the history, heritage, and power of this 30-step “hero’s journey” of awakening • Evolutionary self-care—understanding the Buddhist concept of renunciation as a form of self-love and healing • Radical altruism—awakening Bodhicitta, our innate aspiration to evolve fully in service to others • Quantum vision—how the teaching of “emptiness” allows us to pierce the illusion of materialism and accurately perceive the subtlest nature of reality • Dr. Neale’s MAPS process (Maturity, Acceptance, Possibility, and Seeds) to integrate and manifest key insights and skills in your everyday life
The mass-market dilutions of Eastern wisdom that focus on symptom relief and easy answers have left behind the ultimate promise of spiritual practice: enlightenment. “Enlightenment is an unfolding process—open to everyone.” writes Dr. Neale. For most of us, this path to awakening must be realized through a gradual process: building on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. Gradual Awakening will serve as a lifelong companion for anyone willing to embrace a new paradigm that integrates science with spirit, theory with practice, and personal meditation with the desire to transform the world.
A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit the Buddhist nuns of Kopan Nunnery in Nepal.
