Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 115

Toward Eternity

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me – 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring – 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – 
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed us – 
The Dews drew quivering and chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity – 

— Dickinson

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What is Willpower?

From a post by Scott Alexander: Toward a Bayesian Theory of Willpower

This is something that matters to us all a thousand times a day, right? So I can’t say that I immediately know what a “Bayesian theory” would be, except something that has to do with statistics and probability, but I’m certainly interested in what Scott has to say about this.

He starts this way:

Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney’s book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it’s a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate, and people who know more about glucose physiology say it makes no theoretical sense. … Robert Kurzban, one of the most on-point critics of the glucose theory, gives his own model of willpower: it’s a way of minimizing opportunity costs. But how come my brain is convinced that playing Civilization for ten hours has no opportunity cost, but spending five seconds putting away dishes has such immense opportunity costs that it will probably leave me permanently destitute? I can’t find any correlation between the subjective phenomenon of willpower or effort-needingness and real opportunity costs at all.

Dishes I don’t mind, but do you realize that if you put off folding and putting away clean laundry, eventually you’ll wear all those socks again and can throw them back in the laundry basket without ever having to fold them at all? So actually the opportunity cost attaches to folding socks rather than to leaving them in a heap on top of the drier. I’m just saying.

Scott goes on for a bit and then concludes his summaries of other theories like this:

I’ve come to disagree with all of these perspectives. I think willpower is best thought of as a Bayesian process, ie an attempt to add up different kinds of evidence. … At the deepest level, the brain … is an inference engine, a machine for weighing evidence and coming to conclusions. Your perceptual systems are like this – they weigh different kinds of evidence to determine what you’re seeing or hearing. Your cognitive systems are like this, they weigh different kinds of evidence to discover what beliefs are true or false. Dopamine affects all these systems in predictable ways. My theory of willpower asserts that it affects decision-making in the same way – it’s representing the amount of evidence for a hypothesis.

A long post follows, at the end of which Scott concludes:

I think the most immediate gain to having a coherent theory of willpower is to be able to more effectively rebut positions that assume willpower doesn’t exist, like Bryan Caplan’s theory of mental illness. If I’m right, lack of willpower should be thought of as an imbalance between two brain regions that decreases the rate at which intellectual evidence produces action. This isn’t a trivial problem to fix!

The lines here are perfectly straight – feel free to check with a ruler. Can you force yourself to perceive them that way? If not, it sounds like you can’t always make your intellectual/logical system overrule your instincts, which might make you more sympathetic to people with low willpower.

Those blue lines really are straight. I actually did get out a ruler and measure. I’m not actually sure this is a reasonable way to think about “making intellectual systems override instincts,” because in some ways instincts do seem like perception, but in other ways they really do not, and this is a visual perception illusion straight up. But it’s still a fun illusion.

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Do Not Stand at my grave and weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
(Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!)

— Mary Frye

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Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad

–Rossetti.

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Out our Bourne of Time and Place

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have cross’d the bar

— Tennyson

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Bereavement is part of life, I realize

I don’t particularly like sharing sad news publicly. But my dad passed away yesterday.

I’m fine. My mother is fine. It was a very peaceful death, at home. He just said he would lie down for a few minutes and then … just … fell asleep and passed away a few minutes later.

I had scheduled a good many posts ahead of Christmas Break. Some of those are still set to go live in the next few days. But I’m also going to schedule poems every day for a while, starting with this one, which is very appropriate.

REQUIEM

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

— RLS

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The Astounding Secret Behind Da Vinci’s Genius

So, here’s an intriguing title for a post: The Astounding Secret Behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Creative Genius

I mean, a secret? Other than: da Vinci was a creative genius because some people are, for mysterious reasons?

Well, let’s see where this post goes ….

In the book Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius, Shlain makes an excellent case that Leonardo da Vinci was biologically different from practically all other humans. According to Shlain, da Vinci’s brain was the perfect balance of right and left hemispheres. It was because of a one-of-a-kind abnormality in Leonardo da Vinci’s corpus callosum—the part of the brain responsible for controlling analytical left-brain observation and right-brain creativity.

Ah! Well, that is indeed interesting. Personally, I immediately want someone like Scott Alexander to do a book review. I would trust him to know plenty about (a) brain anatomy, and (b) theories about brain function, and (c) evidence, and what it is, and how to think about it. These are all topics Scott knows a whole lot about. I don’t know if I can trust this guy, Leonard Shlain, to know what he’s talking about. I wonder who he is?

Here is Shlain’s Wikipedia page. He was a surgeon, inventor, and writer, it says. So I still don’t know, but that’s at least a somewhat relevant background.

Shlain postulates that da Vinci saw universal interconnectedness in everything… everywhere. Biologically advantaged by some quirk of nature, da Vinci elevated his mind to a higher state of consciousness than achieved by other people. Leonardo da Vinci—according to author Leonard Shlain—evolved into a superhuman

I hope Shlain didn’t use that phrase. Individuals do not evolve. Populations evolve. Here we see why that is so. Let’s stipulate for the moment that da Vinci did in fact have peculiar brain anatomy and was for that reason super-intelligent and super-perceptive. This intelligence and creativity is not attributed to genetics, did not occur in the midst of a “great family,” and was not passed on to descendants or collateral kin. This kind of one-off exceptionalism is so not what evolution is about.

If you are interested — I suddenly found myself interested — here is an article about da Vinci’s living relatives. They are not, of course, especially close relatives.

In 2016, the researchers identified 35 living relatives of Leonardo’s, including the film director and opera designer Franco Zeffirelli. …

Of the 14 descendants referenced in the study, just one had previously known about their links to the Renaissance icon. Some still live in the towns neighboring Vinci and “have ordinary jobs like a clerk, a surveyor, an artisan,” Vezzosi tells ANSA.

Back to the original post:

Leonardo da Vinci’s brain was so evolved—author Shlain writes—that his mind easily accessed information not readily there for normal people. Da Vinci’s brain/mind power was so special that he “thought” his way to fantastic ideas. It also let da Vinci observe what was going on in the universe and record it. That might have been simplistic beauty as in the Lady With an Ermine, an anatomical analogy like Vitruvian Man or a geometric complexity seen in the Rhombicuboctahedron.

Shlain WAS using the word “evolved,” apparently. I do wish he had not. I suddenly find it difficult to take him seriously.

Well, despite that, this is an interesting post.

A lot of writers have found Leonardo da Vinci an intriguing character — I mean, in a fictional sense as well as a historical sense.

Manly Wade Wellman (Silver John, you’ve all read those stories, right?) apparently wrote a time-travel novel featuring da Vinci. Amazingly, this is available on Kindle for a reasonable price.

DWJ, in A Tale of Time City, offers an possible nod to da Vinci, when a villain named Leon is exiled to 15th century Italy. I did not actually notice that when I read this book, but someone pointed that out to me and it’s stuck in my head.

It turns out — this is something I didn’t realize until I just googled “da vinci in science fiction” — that there are so many stories that include da Vinci references that these are called “vinciads.” Here is an encyclopedia entry about this. I had no idea.

Popular in literary fiction too, I see: here’s a list of five novels that feature Leonardo da Vinci as a protagonist, such as this one:

Leonardo’s Swans, by Karen Essex
What makes Essex’s portrayal of da Vinci interesting is that she views him through the lens of other characters in this complex and subtle fictional biography of the competitive Estes sisters in 15th century Italy. Placed into politically motivated marriages, the sisters see their happiness and fortunes wax and wane, but are ultimately drawn to the brilliant artist and thinker for different reasons: one wants him to pursue the projects that will improve the lives of the people, while the other wishes only to be made immortal as the subject of one of the master’s portraits. In Essex’s skilled hands da Vinci is much more than a figure from history, and seeing him at a remove clarifies the personality hinted at in historical accounts and, ironically, makes for a stronger sense of the person than in some more intimate portrayals.

It turns out that once you start looking for nonfiction and fiction related to da Vinci, there’s no end to the rabbit hole. I guess that’s only right. Regardless of his brain anatomy, da Vinci was certainly one of a kind.

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Why all long sentences must come to an end

A post at Visible Thread: Why all long sentences must come to an end

In a meta sense, I enjoy the title of this post. Why, yes! All sentences, no matter how long, must eventually come to an end. Either this will happen at the end of the paragraph or at the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

Of course, I also think the sentiment expressed is … how shall I put this? … largely wrongheaded.

Here is that sentiment:

Long sentences breed complexity and confusion. Short sentences will resonate more. … A longer sentence is harder to understand than a short one. 

You can click through and read the whole post if you like. I’m pretty sure readers of this blog are not particularly likely to agree that all sentences should be short. However, this turns out to be largely a post about communicating with customers, so that’s not particularly relevant to fiction. This idea is, however, still mostly wrongheaded. In particular, short sentences only have punch in contrast to the longer sentences that surround them. Given a setting of longer sentences, yes, a short sentence may resonate with power. Otherwise, not particularly. Here’s a good post about that: The power of short sentences:

Time and again the shortest sentence in a professional paragraph is brought up against the longest, or at least lodges among some much longer. This smallest sentence is often a basic sentence both grammatically and semantically, stating in simplest terms the central idea of the paragraph. … Narrative prose may be fashioned on a somewhat different principle, a more dramatic one. It is still disposed into paragraphs most of the time, but short sentences when they do appear are less often a condensation of the topic than some narrowed, relaxed point of departure or a slamming start, a later point of rest, an abrupt turn or climax, or a simple close. 

That’s a nice paragraph right there. It’s by Virginia Tufte, in her 1971 book Grammar as Style. I wonder if that is still available. Ah, I see it is, sort of. Outrageous price. Here is a possibly updated version: Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, that is actually available. This does sound like an excellent and fun book if you like to look at great sentences. Which of course we all do, right?

I mean, sentences such as this one:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And, as it happens, the above sentence is also a fantastic illustration of how to write a really long sentence that is also easily understood by the reader, including the so-called modern reader with the presumptive short attention span: It’s a set of dichotomies until you get to the dash. That means the sense of the whole first part of the sentence comes through effortlessly. Only that last bit requires thought.

While on this topic, that one sentence from A Tale of Two Cities also constitutes the entire first paragraph. In this case, that makes for a paragraph of about average length, but of course generally speaking a one-sentence paragraph will be short. Or at least short-ish. Still, starting a book with a single sentence set off as a paragraph by itself can be quite effective, no matter how long that sentence may be.

I start my books with one-sentence paragraphs pretty often. Let me see. Looks like I’ve done this six times, which means about 25% of my books. Here they are:

Tuyo: Beside the coals of the dying fire, within the trampled borders of our abandoned camp, surrounded by the great forest of the winter country, I waited for a terrible death.

Nikoles: Nikoles Ianan’s appetite for vengeance wavered and dimmed and finally wore itself out long before the execution was meant to end.

Tarashana: The first arrow missed only because the gods were kind.

The Mountain of Kept Memory: They were talking about her.

Door Into Light: Three weeks before the spring solstice, one week after the door to Kaches had first appeared in this whimsical, unpredictable, willful house where he had lived for the past month and more, Taudde stood before that door, his hand on the knob, recruiting his nerve to open it.

The White Road of the Moon: There were more than twenty-four hundred people in the town of Tikiy-by-the-water, but only one of them was alive.

Wow, a lot more variation in sentence length than I really expected.

I do think “They were talking about her,” standing all by itself, constitutes a pretty effective first paragraph. But it’s hard to beat the first sentence of Tuyo (in my opinion, which may not be entirely objective). I’ve always liked the first sentence of White Road too, and worked very hard to keep that sentence through every possible revision. That’s why the story starts with this line and then almost immediately provides a flashback: I was willing to put in some background to orient the reader, but only if I could do it in a way that would preserve the first sentence.

Regardless of sentence length, if you’re polishing up a novel, I do recommend trying the first sentence of your book as a paragraph all by itself and seeing how that looks and feels.

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It’s always the Story

A post that’s up today at Book View Cafe

It’s always the story. Even for readers who love beautiful language and care about style. Even for readers who enjoy worldbuilding and love constructing a world bible. Even for readers who love clever puzzles and plot twists. If you’re writing fiction, it’s always the story that has to come first.

Click on over to read the whole thing …

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Word of the Day

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this word used in a sentence, and I’m almost sure I’ve never personally used it in my life, but that’s too bad because it’s a cool word:

Velleity

vel·le·i·ty / vəˈlēədē, veˈlēədē / Learn to pronounce noun

A wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action.“The notion intrigued me, but remained a velleity”

How about that? Have any of you ever used this word or heard it used? I need to start watching for chances to drop velleity into an ordinary conversation.

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