A short fiction, with emotion

 A drill instructor was dressing down recruits in bootcamp. He woke the barracks up at 2 a.m. screaming. He stepped in front of each sleep-stunned teenager, nose to nose, and screamed.

Recruit A didn’t flinch. Before signing up, he’d taken a course in philosophy. As the drill instructor screamed, the recruit told himself he ought not to worry about the opinions of others.

Recruit B didn’t flinch either. He was a backwoods fellow whose family didn’t count an argument a feud until it had gone on for four generations. He quietly endured the berating but promised himself that if he were ever in the field with the drill instructor, he’d drop a grenade in his tent.

Recruit C swore at the drill instructor. This was exactly the type of undisciplined behavior that the drill instructor and the military were trying to ferret out. The recruit was assigned to Punishment Platoon.

Recruit D burst into tears. This, too, was one of those undisciplined behaviors that the military wanted to root out.

In my day, the military was not much interested in recruits, but it was interested in how individuals managed anger and fear.

What kind of grades would you give these recruits? All were subjected to the same stimuli. But what would you say of the responses?

I’d say two got angry — but in different ways. One lost his temper and got into a dustup. The other, in a cold fury, planned revenge. Of the others, one was afraid, perhaps, and one didn’t feel much at all, if the inquiry is limited to anger and fear.

This is my problem with talk of emotions. Each of the recruits in this story had some kind of feeling that was distinct from the others. But since we are social creatures and communicate with language, we must fit these feelings into categories.

I’m not sure it’s helpful to say that the fellow who lost his temper and the fellow who thought of murder were both “angry.” One was cool, and the other was ready to fight. Their vital signs were different. Would you expect to find neural activity in the same parts of their brains for such dissimilar thought processes, just because we use the word “anger” in both cases?

One of the basic errors in logic is called a categorical error. It seems to me that we’re prone to making such mistakes when we talk of emotions.

A catastrophe of everyday life

 A sweetgum fell across the fence in the woodlot — the one section, near the ravine, that’s made of hog wire. The falling tree would have taken the fence to the ground, but the trunk got stuck in the fork of a living tree, which a fence builder had used as a fencepost.

The crown of a sweetgum makes a remarkable mess. The limbs shatter easily.

But I’ve been filling the ravine with brush. For those seeking to restore eroded land, a fallen sweetgum is a gift.

I put on coveralls, laced up my boots, got an insulated bottle of coffee and spent the morning with a chainsaw. In addition to the erosion control, I have firewood.

A good friend said this catastrophe of everyday life invigorated me, and I suppose it did. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Before I was old enough to understand the idea of a generational divide, I was raised among men divided by generation. My grandfathers worked with horses, mules and tractors, but mainly with their hands. Their sons went to school and learned to work with their heads.

It was presented to me just like that: head or hands. But I never got the either-or.

A 90-minute read

 One more thing about Theodore Zeldin’s little book Conversations that I admire: its form. I wish I could interest other writers in it.

The book is about a topic I’m interested in, and it’s brief — about 15,000 words.

I can tell you how long it took me to read it: 90 minutes. I’m pretty sure of that because that’s how long it took Zeldin to read it aloud on the radio.

Zeldin’s book is six chapters long. Each was a 15-minute talk on the BBC.

Readers typically cover 150 to 160 words a minute.

Ballpark: 2,500 words per talk or chapter, 15,000 for all six.

In print, the book has about 250 words per page, meaning each chapter runs about 10 pages — about 60 pages of text. The book has 36 pages of pictures by the author, each of which is tied to a question about conversations. Throw in the list of questions and the usual introductory material, and you have a book of 103 pages.

I have some books of more than 500 pages on my shelves and wouldn’t part with them. But I wish writers and readers would come to an agreement that 60 pages of text is a good length for an introduction to a topic.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

What conversation is like

 I like Theodore Zeldin’s little book Conversation, but I want a better metaphor.

To me, a conversation is like browsing at the public library.

Our public library is small. I thought I’d picked over the collection. But on a recent trip, I found myself interested in several books. Until I started browsing, I wasn’t aware that the topics would interest me.

I’ve long been interested in how we form emotions, even trivial ones. How is it that I am delighted by Mozart and am irritated by Wagner? And since the music of these composers works on me every time, how is it possible that someone can change my emotions, even slightly, just by turning on the radio?

After reading Hume in college, I searched the stacks of the library, trying to get a clearer idea of how ideas and emotions are formed. I failed.

For decades, I’ve been aware that’s a topic I just don’t understand. When I’m reminded of it, I take another run at it, seek new ideas and new information. So I was delighted to see Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made at the library.

I think this little episode suggests how conversations work. I have some friends who have well stocked minds.

When I talk with them, I always come away with something valuable. That is, I find or discover or am given something wonderful. Usually, I wasn’t even aware I was looking for it.

Maybe that’s why we read blogs too. It’s another way of browsing the stacks, looking for ideas we’re not fully aware we need.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

Zeldin: 'Conversation'

 Theodore Zeldin says that we can talk about the weather. When we exchange information, that’s a talk. But when we have a conversation, we open ourselves to changing the way we see things.

Zeldin, a historian, says this has happened several times in humanity’s history. One example is the way we have talked about women. The conversations we’ve had on that subject have changed the way we see women and have changed the “we” of that conversation, including women in the concept of humanity in ways that were once unthinkable.

Zeldin says the history of that conversation is instructive. Originally, women were something to be won. A show of power was preferable, but brute force would do. Then women were something to be wooed, courted, won over.

This way of looking at women eventually led to the notion of romantic love — that what happened between men and women was inexplicable, beyond the control of individuals. The feelings couldn’t be understood, much less expressed.

That idea has not worn well, and Zeldin says new conversations are needed to find new ways of seeing relationships between people.

If we can see the possibility of something better, we can act on it. And Zeldin sees conversations as a useful response when we found ourselves stuck. If we’re stuck, we need to broaden our conversation, inviting people who might offer views we haven’t considered before.

I read Zeldin’s brief book because I treasure conversations. I like sitting across the table from someone who might change the way I see things. The idea that a friend might say something that changes the way I think — that changes me — is one of the thrills that doesn’t fade with age.

I still talk to the neighbors about the weather and the garden. But conversations seem especially valuable now. Even as an old man, I begin a conversation with hope.

• Source: Theodore Zeldin, Conversation; London: The Harvill Press, 1998.

An immigrant family's tale

 Imagine this tale of an immigrant family. The teller said his grandfather came to America, looking for better opportunities.

The teller was educated in American schools and raised on American books, music, drama and ideas. It didn’t dawn on him that he wasn’t an American — that in some way he was a foreigner.

But the teller’s grandfather was from Germany. During World War I, people of German descent were targeted. The government, although it represented a democracy, used the tools of power, including the Justice Department, to make life miserable for many.

The teller of this tale was H.L. Mencken. He said the experience cleared his head about democracy, at least the kind practiced in this country. It made him realize he was an outsider — in some way a foreigner.

He also said that he thought his grandfather, the hopeful immigrant, had made a mistake.

You can read the story in Andrew Holter’s Mencken Day lecture, which was published in the Boston Review.

Mencken wrote some wonderful things and some hideous things. Holter argues that the part of Mencken we ought to hold on to is his capacity for “social outrage.” (The phrase is from Murry Kempton, another newspaper guy for Baltimore.)

I like the word social, where we might expect political. As outrageous as our politics can be, it’s our social attitudes that get us into trouble — the kind of trouble that no political system can salvage or redeem.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” is code that all the old social attitudes that created such horrific problems are really OK, even virtuous. That we shouldn’t feel guilty about exploiting others to satisfy our greed. That we shouldn’t hesitate to trample the civil rights of people we don’t like.

This social movement is an argument that we should, like the proverbial dog, return to our vomit.

The proper response is to decline.

• Source: Andrew Halter, “Mencken Agonistes”; Boston Review, Oct. 6, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/mencken-agonistes/

Names, ages, identity

 Baisaō spent almost 40 years as Gekkai Genshō. The Buddhist names were given to him when he became a monk at 11.

He was known by Gekkai, or Moon Ocean, to his fellow monks. Genshō was his true name, given to him by his teacher. It wasn’t used routinely.

When Gekkai Genshō resigned his Buddhist names, he called himself Kō Yūgai or Layman Yūgai. Kō is literally high, with high-minded understood. Yugai suggests some kind of search beyond.

Later he called himself Baisaō, a kind of nickname, pen name, stage name. I learned in a footnote that he was known as Kikusen, or Chrysanthemum Spring, as a child.

In reading Norman Waddell’s biography, I was struck by how differently a person’s identity was viewed in 18^th-century Japan.

In addition to religious, secular and pen names, there were posthumous names. When their mother died, The Old Tea Seller and his sister began referring to her using a different name, reflecting a different relationship or a different way of relating.

The differences in the way people thought about identity go beyond naming. Age is part of identity. In The Old Tea Seller’s culture, a child was a year old at birth. (How else do you account for time in the womb?) The poems celebrating The Old Tea Seller’s 80^th birthday were written when he was 79, in our way of reckoning.

The Western idea of a birthday did not become common in Japan until the 1950s. In The Old Tea Seller’s day, you — and everyone else — became a year older on New Year’s Day.

The year was common — the way the community reckoned time. Everyone gained an extra year at the same time.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.