Cyrano de Bergerac in Translation

I first read Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand in August 2015, and absolutely fell in love with it. I had seen the José Ferrer film of it back around high school age or so, and had always wanted to read it. But I’m very skeptical of reading poetry in translation and I’d always put it off, for fear of disappointment. Then finally one day I did some investigation, heard good things about the Brian Hooker translation, and went for it. And I was sorry I had waited so long.

Having Cyrano be both a brilliant poet and a master swordsman could have been enough for a good story right there. But what truly makes it great is how he so completely accepts and owns everything that life brings him. Whether his own brilliance and skill, or his poverty or ugly appearance, or the fact that the way to make the woman he loved happy was to give his words and assistance to her chosen suitor—everything, up to and including facing his own death, he met with all his energy, creativity, and even humor. That is what transforms the plot from merely heartbreaking to upliftingly cathartic. He made everything his own choice before it could be forced on him, and so earned de Guiche’s comment towards the end: “I say, do not / Pity him overmuch. He lives his life, / His own life, his own way—thought, word, and deed / Free!”

Given that it’s such a short book and I wanted to reread it anyway, I started trying other translations, and started recording them in what has since become a rather ungainly GoodReads review. By now, I figure it’s time to promote this to something a bit more formal and organized.

The translations are listed first here, in approximate order of my personal recommendation of them. More will be added as I get around to reading them. You can skip down to the films section for my notes on the (sadly few) video adaptations available. If you know of others, please tell me! I have not yet had the privilege of seeing a live performance, but I hope to some day. UPDATE: There is now a live performances section as well!

[Last updated: April 12, 2025]   

Translations

Brian Hooker (1923)
There’s a danger of a first-read bias here, but the more translations I read, the more I really do think this version stands alone. The poetry is elegant and unforced, only using rhyme where it works appropriately, without wrenching it out of a sense of obligation to the original French (which rhymes much more easily than English). If you manage to get an edition with Clayton Hamilton’s original preface, it describes Hooker’s approach—optimizing for the beautiful flow of words from voice to ear, and limiting alterations to the changing of various classical allusions to ones more recognizable to American audiences. My favorite lines and passages are all at their best in this version. Here’s a short one: 

I—I am going to be a storm—a flame—
I need to fight whole armies all alone;
I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms; I feel
too strong to war with mortals—BRING ME GIANTS!
(Act 1, Scene 7, though scenes unnumbered in this edition)

Louis Untermeyer (1954)
Untermeyer’s translation is quite good, the first I’ve found to rival Brian Hooker’s. My favorite parts from Hooker are still unmatched, but Untermeyer picks up the slack admirably in other areas. The balcony scene, for instance, is much improved, I think. And this was also excellent:

Don’t scorn the point, my friend. When I must die
I hope to meet death ’neath some rosy sky,
With a good-ringing word for some good cause.
No bed of sickness, no slow failing flesh,
But a quick end—a worthy foeman’s steel—
A pointed laughing word upon my lips
And the sword’s pointed answer in my heart.
(Act 4, Scene 3, though scenes unnumbered in this edition)

The edition I found in the library also includes a few illustrations by Pierre Brissaud, which is a nice touch. 

 

Anthony Burgess (1985, new edition 1991)
The preface here indicates helpfully that Brian Hooker’s translation sticks very close to the French, so that it “can very nearly be used as a key to the original,” which is nice to know. But he then goes on to detail all the many changes he (Burgess) made, to adapt it for modern American stage productions, and I’m not at all keen on his editing or removing of certain scenes. In particular, I think it was a very poor choice to allow Christian to die without being reassured that Roxane loved him, but it would have been hard to fix it, having removed the entirety of the scene in which she visits the army camp. To be fair, of course, it does say on the cover that this is not only a translation but an adaptation. Sigh.

Burgess claims that Hooker “rarely raises a laugh,” and though I disagree with that, I do admit that Burgess’ rhyming worked to good effect in many of the comic lines. And there are even many finer details throughout the play that he brings forward into greater clarity, which I appreciated. However, all of my favorite speeches from Hooker’s version came out more clumsily and less clearly in Burgess’, so I have to say the balance was not in his favor.

I’ll leave it there, but if you want a second opinion that agrees with me, here’s a much longer rant about it. I’ve placed this translation so relatively high on the list mostly because it’s so commonly used for performances now. (Though the ones I’ve seen have replaced the missing scenes, thankfully. Maybe this is what happened in the revised 1991 edition—I’m not sure now which one it was that I read.)


Carol Clark (2005)
This edition from Penguin Classics has an interesting introduction at the beginning and “Historical Note” at the end that are worth reading. There were one or two good lines, but most of the best bits were underdone, and a various moments of foreshadowing felt heavy-handed. I gotta hand it to her for these lines, though:

Your hair was my sunlight, and after I looked away
There were patches of blonde light all over the world.
(Act 3, Scene 7)

John Murrell (1994)

This translation, created specifically for performance, is mostly prose, but more freely adapted and better than Hall’s version (see below). I felt it resulted in some fairly clever lines but no gorgeous ones. I also thought it odd that for no apparent reason he cropped the ending of Act 3, when Cyrano promises that Christian will write to Roxane every day. It was a great end to the scene, and it’s even referred to in Scene 4, so why cut it?

Props to him for managing the entire Cadets’ song as a 32-line monorhyme, though. And here’s a good line that I liked:

It is my pleasure to offer you distinction, or extinction.
(Act 4, scenes unnumbered) 

Howard Thayer Kingsbury (1898)
The Pocket Books “Enriched Classic” edition has a lot of supplementary materials, including historical and biographical notes, excerpts from different critics over the course of a century, and footnotes on various classical allusions. So some of that was interesting (I didn’t realize Cyrano was based on a historical figure until I read this version, for instance). But it never said anything about the translation it uses. Turns out (thank you, internet) that it was the first English translation, in 1898. It’s in unrhymed blank verse, similar to Hooker’s, but I found it considerably less clear, and the poems much weaker. There were only a few places where I noticed a turn of phrase that was particularly nicely done, but for the most part it doesn’t have much to recommend it. Here’s one bit that I liked, though:

The letter I have thought out to myself
A hundred times, so that it now is ready;
And if I put my soul beside the paper
I shall need only to recopy it.
(Act 2, Scene 3)

There is one thing in the “discussion notes” I have to emphatically disagree with (and this is more the fault of Pocket Books than Kingsbury): they assume that in wooing Roxane for Christian, Cyrano is actually attempting to win her for himself. No. Just… no. First of all, Cyrano would never stoop to such betrayal. Second, even if he did believe she could love his ugliness, I don’t think he would want to forcibly or deceitfully wrest her heart from where she’s freely bestowed it. In fact, this translation puts it rather more clearly than many of the others: 

Ah, for your joy I’d gladly give my own,
even if you should never know.
(Act 3, Scene 6)

Christopher Fry (1975)
I read this just after reading Bolt’s translation (see below) so my main reaction was that Fry does a better job of rhyming throughout, though that’s a rather low bar to clear. He gets points, though, for managing a solid ending to the entire play on the word “panache,” which I feel is important but which is rarely done since it’s difficult to rhyme with well. I appreciate having the additional meaning of “panache” available to the reading, beyond just the literal “white plume.”

Here’s one of his rhymes that I particularly liked:

But there’s one crumb of comfort I can savour:
She kisses on his mouth the words I gave her.
(Act 3, Scene 10, though scenes unnumbered in this edition)

Gladys Thomas and Mary F. Guillemard (1898)

This is another one of the earliest translations. It’s in archaic and awkward blank verse, with not much to recommend it. I thought it was particularly bad form to have a line in the duel ballade that basically said “what rhymes with ‘o’?” Especially since it came before the line it needed to rhyme with.

Gertrude Hall (1898)
These last two on the list are completely different from each other except in the dubious shared distinction of being the least recommendable. Hall doesn’t attempt even blank verse, but leaves everything (aside from the explicit poems) as chunks of prose, and not even good prose at that. I don’t know if she was trying to go for a literal, word-by-word translation from French, or if she was just rushing in an attempt to beat Kingsbury to the first English edition, but it’s clunky, unclear, archaic, and studded with footnotes that could have been avoided.


Ranjit Bolt (2007)
The ebook version I bought from Kobo contains no introduction or other potentially interesting information about this version, and it isn’t even formatted properly, so I don’t know what the deal is here. Google tells me Bolt has translated a number of plays into English, and has even written a book titled, The Art of Translation, which would seem to bode well. Unfortunately, I can’t say I care much for his take on Cyrano. I admit I’m impressed at how thoroughly he stuck to rhyming verse throughout. But it gets to be just too much after a while. And he often uses rather crude language, or modern-sounding slang, sometimes clearly just to get a rhyme to work (e.g. saying “yup” for “yes” just so it could rhyme with “up”). So I don’t like the feel of it overall, and nothing comes out particularly lovely. Most versions have at least a few exquisite lines, but not this one. He also significantly abridged the “man from the moon” scene, which is too bad. I’ll acknowledge that he does manage a very solid ending on “panache,” but I’m afraid it’s not enough to redeem the whole book. So overall, not recommended.

Film Adaptations

(These are ranked rather less precisely than the translations.)

José Ferrer (1950)
This is the first version I ever saw, and I’m very fond of it, though I wish it had stuck more precisely to the original text. The screenplay was based on Brian Hooker’s translation (definitely a point in its favor), but was extremely adapted by Carl Foreman. Some cuts I think were fairly reasonable (e.g. speeding up the opening), some were probably just for the sake of getting in more fight scenes, and some just disappointed me. There were also various small additions, some of which really just covered for something removed, but worked well enough. And I actually liked the added scene in which Roxane says that if she must be relegated to a woman’s role in society, she would be so on her own terms. A nice parallel there with Cyrano himself. I was a little annoyed with a number of the actors’ voices being much too American. (British at least would have been better if they couldn’t have French accents.) But José Ferrer will always be the quintessential image of Cyrano for me and I also liked Mala Powers as Roxanne.

Kevin Kline (2008)
This is a film of a stage production with a live audience, which I always think is decidedly more fun than just a movie. It mostly uses Anthony Burgess’ translation, though I was glad to see they fixed his two most egregious scene alterations (and I don’t know what text they used for that). I can see how well this version works on stage in front of a live audience, especially in how it highlights the humor, as Burgess was explicitly trying to do. But I felt it might actually have gone a bit too far in that direction. Some of the laughter (part of the fun of a having a live audience, of course) seemed to leak over into moments that I would have preferred to remain more romantic or tragic. I thought Kevin Kline was an excellent Cyrano, though I wanted to see a bit more of a difference in him for the final act. Daniel Sunjata would have been the weakest link as Christian, were it not for Jeniffer Garner who, as Roxanne, was just trying way too hard for it to be enjoyable. Everyone else did a perfectly serviceable job.

Derek Jacobi (1985)
I watched this in low resolution on YouTube, which didn’t show it off to its best effect, but it was still a good production. Jacobi was generally excellent, though he gets a bit incoherent when he gets too overwrought. I appreciated the music, particularly at the end of Act IV. The translation is Anthony Burgess’, which I’ve commented on before, though it does include the cut scene of Roxanne visiting the battlefield. The cinematography was an interesting blend of play-like staging and movie-like filming (forgive my awkwardness of the vocabulary, but hopefully that gets the idea across). And Scottish accents were used very effectively in place of Gascon. 

Gérard Depardieu (1990) (French)
I was actually hoping the English subtitles would be a relatively literal translation, without anyone trying to get poetic about it, so I could see what it’s “really” saying. But I think the subtitles are based on Anthony Burgess’ translation, so oh well. And I don’t have enough French (hardly any) to get much out of the actual soundtrack. I also have to say I don’t care for Depardieu so much as Cyrano. I think the first scene soured me on him for the rest of the movie. He seemed less in control of the situation and more carried away by his anger.

Peter Dinklage (2021)

I went into this one equal parts interested and terrified, and... I was right. I thought it was a pretty neat idea to cast Dinklage in the role, even if it did mean you had to change all the nose references. I liked having someone real, rather than a fake nose. He even has an interesting singing voice, and I think the music was well tailored to it. (He particularly sounded nice in the duets.) But... unfortunately nothing else was good. The script was painful, the music was uninspiring, I kept wondering whether I was supposed to laugh at the dancing or not, and the whole thing was confusingly anachronistic. There were a few lines that I think would have been funny had they not been said over incompatible music. They threw away the opportunity to have a fun song about falling from the moon, in favor of a boring villain song from de Guiche (and especially inexplicable, given that Roxanne specifically tells Cyrano to delay de Guiche and he simply doesn’t.) They even butchered the final scene, removing the murder (why did his wound just decide to take him down now, after three years?), making it way too kissy for the nature of their relationship at this point (not to mention the fact that, hey, he’s dying here), and completely robbing him of his final stand against all his old enemies, Pride, Cowardice, etc. So... sigh. All I can hope is that this rekindles enough interest in Cyrano to get us some more live performances, or a new movie of the real play. 

Steve Martin (1987)
Okay, so as long as I’m piling in everything I can get my hands on, I might as well include the movie, Roxanne. I remember seeing it ages ago, before I knew the book, but I didn’t remember much about it, so I was able to watch it fresh, but knowing the inspiration behind it now. And as horrible as it sounds to turn Cyrano into a modern-day Steve Martin comedy, I actually very much enjoyed it. The complete change to a happy ending for Cyrano is the biggest difference, obviously, and necessarily cuts out some of the most touching parts, but on the other hand, it’s kind of nice to visit an alternate reality where it works out that way. (And the whole movie is far enough removed from the original that I’m more comfortable letting it be its own thing.) Most of the other classic scenes were recognizably included (even the “fallen from outer space” scene), and I particularly liked the listing of insults, which was very well adapted. Oh, and I loved the line: “I was afraid of WORMS, Roxanne!” That can just keep me laughing for days.

Live Performances

Maria Giere Marquis (2025)

I’d wanted for ages to see a live Cyrano production, and one finally showed up practically next door at the Los Altos Stage Company, so naturally I had to go. 

This was very much an adaptation of Cyrano, rather than a translation. For starters, Cyrano is a woman rather than being ugly. I’m alright with that change in and of itself, though it does handicap certain other aspects of the play. (E.g. I think they had to skip the whole “better insults” speech, because there probably would have been no way to do that non-mysogynistically.) I think that trying to shoehorn in the Count de Guiche’s wife with another lesbian subplot was a bit much, though, and complicated some things unnecessarily. (Was this why there had to be the whole confusing bit about Roxanne’s father’s charities? I don’t know.) 

But aside from that one core change, I also felt like they had simply taken the structure of the plot and then rewritten it from scratch. It followed all the main points of the story, but with none of the beauty that so many of the translations had. The combination of period costumes and more modern diction and jokes was funny sometimes, and awkward at others. On the whole, the humor was most successful, and I quite enjoyed the first half. The latter half, when things get more serious, was much more tedious. And none of the lines were as outright beautiful as so many of Rostand’s are, so it didn’t feel worth such a rewrite to me. 

I will say that Maria Giere Marquis did a very good job as Cyrano, and the supporting ensemble cast was very entertaining as well. And there were some clever things done with translucent curtains adding depth to the stage. Overall, it was fun and worth seeing, though I would still prefer to see a more traditional direct translation. 

War and Peace

This is a long book so I’m going to let myself indulge in a long review. Consider yourself warned: you can either settle in or skip out.

First, how did I decide to take this particular plunge? Well, basically it all started because I didn’t read (or watch) Game of Thrones. With the show recently wrapping up, it’s been on my mind, because I had really wanted to get into it, just for the huge, complex, sweeping expanse of epic fantasy. But I read the first couple books years ago and, while yes, they were completely engrossing and addictive, they also just felt horrible and made me feel horrible. There are still icky images burned in my mind that I wish I could get rid of. So anyway, I was again wishing it could have been something I liked, and it occurred to me that if I was in the mood for something sprawling and epic, I could finally tackle War and Peace. I didn’t expect there to be any dragons, but still….

The biggest hurdle, aside from the mere decision to read this at all, was deciding on a translation. I picked up the Maude translation first, because the Maudes were friends with Tolstoy who liked their work (though he didn’t live to see this particular translation). But honestly, the anglicization of names really annoyed me, and so I moved on to my other top contenders: Dunnigan, Briggs, and Pevear & Volokhonsky.

P&V are very clear about their approach to translation, in which they really try to nail the word-by-word meaning, and maintain as much of the original sentence structure as possible, even if it seems unusual or awkward. Many translators try to even everything out into what they generically think of as “good writing,” thus losing the original author’s peculiar style (which, in Tolstoy’s case, includes more convoluted sentences and more repetitions than some people are comfortable with). The downside often attributed to P&V is that their translations aren’t as “readable.” Dunnigan seems like a good balance in that respect, being a more traditional translation but maybe not as archaic as Maude, and somewhat more accurate. Briggs is much more modern and takes many more liberties with the text.

So… I started reading all three. Yeah. I would literally read Chapter 1 in each version in turn, then rotate through them all again for Chapter 2, etc. Thank goodness for ebooks, and luckily the chapters are very short. I actually went about 10% of the way through the book like this before I decided to jettison the Briggs. It felt like he was taking too many liberties and I didn’t feel I’d miss him.

At about 25% through, I decided I finally needed to narrow it down, largely because I was becoming so engrossed in the book that I didn’t want to reread chapters anymore but just wanted to keep going (even though it was interesting to see how I would notice different details in the different versions). I dithered a lot, but finally stuck with P&V. I had found by then that I like their style perfectly well, and I can only assume it’s closer to Tolstoy’s. Plus, they have some helpful footnotes. I also found it was relaxing to finally settle into one style and not switch back and forth.

Okay! So I actually read the book! What did I think?

I loved it. I was rather surprised, really, because I thought it would be the sort of book that we all know has merit but is still a bit of a slog. Instead, I found it to flow along beautifully. If you had just told me the subject matter, I would have expected it to be boring, but the actual experience of it was as an absolute page-turner. I can’t even say precisely why, maybe because I didn’t want to analyze it as I went along. But it was great, and I continually wanted to know what happened to everybody.

Speaking of “everybody,” I’ve heard the complaint that there are too many characters to keep track of. I didn’t feel that at all. Though there are lots of people, the core, primary characters are kept to a perfectly reasonable number. Also, Tolstoy uses a leitmotif sort of technique, having short, characteristic descriptions for many of the characters that are repeated many times, e.g. referring to someone’s “small, white hands,” or “downy upper lip,” etc. Far from being tediously repetitive, this actually feels completely natural, and instantly conjures up the right person in your mind, even if it’s been many chapters since you saw them last.

(I also enjoyed all the variations on people’s names—formal name, intimate or family name, French name, patronymics, etc. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not confusing. Makes me wonder what all my names would be.)

Also along the lines of describing people, Tolstoy takes a very expansive, non-judgmental view, throwing in positive and negative qualities alike for everybody, with seeming disregard to leading us to a particular opinion. Because, of course, everybody is a complete mix of qualities in real life. He will often describe thoughts and behaviors very sweepingly, in terms of someone manifesting something that “everybody” does. Again, if I just try to say what he’s doing, it sounds bad, overly generalizing or stereotyping, but that’s not how it comes across. I find these are always statements, as broad and sweeping as they are, that I can actually relate to, and therefore they ring true not just to the person described, but to humanity.

I’ve heard Tolstoy described as a “miniaturist,” which sounds ridiculous in the context of such an enormous book, but it’s true. He has so much ground to cover that in every moment he has to zero in on just the exact right details to make a character, event, or image “click.” In that sense, it’s a good study for poetry—how to notice the perfect individual details and focus on them.

Historically, it was interesting to read. I thought I had a general understanding of Napoleon’s march to Moscow, but it turned out I really didn’t, so I learned a lot about that. Tolstoy also gets into a lot of what you might call the “theory” of history—analyzing what historians typically take as cause and effect and why it’s inaccurate, and offering his own take on it, which the whole book is really an attempt to embody (though with the understanding that nothing finite could really do so).

Often these sections begin to sound rather fatalistic. But I find that they don’t feel that way, perhaps because his viewpoint just feels so expansive. It’s really the cosmic interweaving of karmic cause and effect that he’s describing, which we are each subject to but also an integral part of. And it’s good to understand our place in it all.

I’m going to say a few more specific things about the story here, so if you care about spoilers for a 150-year-old book, here they are. In particular, I’m going to talk about deaths and marriages.

First of all, not everybody dies. Yay! And those who do die don’t have gratuitous, GoT-style, kill-off-everyone-you-like deaths (I think I was subconsciously worried about that). Of the major characters who die, I think all of them have some sort of transcendent, uplifting experience shortly before their death. This is beautiful, because of course we know that everyone ultimately dies, but Tolstoy always shows us how it can be a positive transition, with everyone heading in the right direction. The next step in that direction is different and appropriate for everyone. (So some might not necessarily seem “transcendent,” but relative to where they are, it’s uplifting to some degree.) I also noticed that Tolstoy never lets us see the actual moment of death directly, as if death itself isn’t as significant as the personal transformation he does describe. Let’s look at the primary examples.

• Prince Andrei Bolkonsky: After having been so focused on achieving worldly glory earlier in the book, he has a period of a few days before his death in which he is explicitly detaching from the world. From a yogic standpoint, this is very good. Then he has his dream in which he experiences death as an “awakening from life.” (Again, very yogic!) (This is a death which we almost observe, but at the last moment, Tolstoy simply tells us that Marya and Natasha “were there” when it happened.)
• Old Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky: After having been such a horrible jerk to his daughter all her life, he is able to finally be kind and loving to her after his stroke and just before he dies.
• Petya Rostov: Petya was completely gung-ho to go to war and kill Frenchmen, but the night before his final battle he has that transcendent experience of a symphony of oneness in the forest. He still goes into battle, and we sort of observe his death, but at that moment we’re removed to someone else’s vantage point, and don’t realize at first what has happened until the almost casual statement that he had been shot. (As explicit as that final statement was, I had to go back and reread the whole paragraph to believe it.)
• Platon Karataev: A relatively minor character in terms of page time, but very significant to Pierre’s personal transformation. All we ever see of him, really, is a figure of sweet, simplistic enlightenment, but the night before he gets shot we get to hear him tell his story that ends with “God had already forgiven him—he was dead.”
• General Kutuzov: The commanding general died after “Russia was delivered and placed at the highest degree of her glory,” as he saw it. “And so he died.”
• Countess Helene Bezukhova: She’s a little trickier, but one could make the argument that her conversion to Catholicism was a positive step in spite of it being done cynically, to forward her own agenda. I’m thinking here of all the ancient Vedas of India that give prayers and rituals for every situation in life, even the fulfilling of selfish ends, on the theory that people should at least get used to turning to God for help, even if they aren’t ready to lead an otherwise more spiritual life.
• “Little Princess” Lise Bolkonskaya: Again, somewhat tricky, in this case because she died in childbirth, and it’s not clear that she herself had any sort of transcendent experience here. But the birth itself is received by the whole household in a spirit of awe in the presence of a sacred, miraculous event, so that’s the context in which we the readers experience her death. (If you wanted to make more of an effort, you might also say that, for someone consistently described as so childlike, giving birth was a particular rite of passage into womanhood for her.)

As for the marriages, Natasha and Nikolai are the ones we’re following the most in this respect over the course of the whole book. Honestly, I was a bit annoyed with them much of the time, with Natasha for so easily falling in love with everybody, and for Nikolai for so easily falling out of love (especially, repeatedly, with Sonya). I was really worried when he started getting interested in Marya, who I felt deserved much better (as did Sonya, but at least she knew what she was involved in). So I was actually pleasantly surprised when Tolstoy managed to bring us to the final pairings with everybody matured enough to be believable and to leave me content and satisfied in both their cases. Sonya is the only one I’m really sad about, and I wish things could have worked out better for her. I guess she was never enough of a “main” character to get more of her own arc, but I always felt she should have been.

Other beautiful things:

• Natasha’s singing, gorgeously described in several different scenes. “She did not think of anyone or anything at that moment, and from her lips composed into a smile sounds poured forth, sounds that anyone can produce for the same lengths of time, at the same intervals, but which leave one cold a thousand times, then for the thousand and first time make one tremble and weep.”
• The chapter describing the results of Pierre’s spiritual transformation—his inner state of consciousness, other people’s reactions to him, and even how it manifests in practical matters. “[H]e did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”
• The nearly divine rapture with which the army receives their emperor. “He stopped, looked about, and illuminated everything around him with his gaze.”
• Denisov dancing the mazurka. And in spurs, no less! “Only on horseback and in the mazurka did Denisov’s small stature not show, and he looked like the fine fellow he felt himself to be….”
• The simple elegance of the shortest sentence in the book: “Drops dripped.”

Swami Kriyananda talks about having an impression of the spiritual light emanating from the works of great authors. He never mentioned Tolstoy in that context, but in reading War and Peace I feel for the first time that I’ve experienced a bit of what he’s referring to. Throughout the book I very often had a sense of a sort of white-blue glow behind everything, which I feel is perhaps Tolstoy’s consciousness guiding the whole experience. This book is truly remarkable.

Rereading Autobiography of a Yogi

Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi is a quintessential “desert island” book—one to be read and reread, enjoyed and re-enjoyed, with always something new to learn or experience from it. For those of us who are disciples of Yogananda, it can become almost his very living presence.

I’m not a big re-reader of books, usually being more prone to feeling panicked about how many books there are out there to keep up with. But I’m on about my 12th time or so through the Autobiography now, and it’s interesting to look back and see what the rereading experience has been like so far. Each time through is unique, often surprisingly so.

On one reading, I was particularly struck by this passage early in the book:

[Lahiri Mahasaya’s] picture had a surpassing influence over my life. As I grew, the thought of the master grew with me. In meditation I would often see his photographic image emerge from its small frame and, taking a living form, sit before me. (pp. 9-10)

My reaction to this was to think, “Hey! I have a photo of Lahiri Mahasaya on my altar!” Initially this was in the sense of “Why doesn’t this happen to me?” but luckily it didn’t stay there. Aside from being a reminder of the importance of our gurus’ images, this also inspired me to read the entire rest of the book differently. Instead of thinking of the “I” in this autobiography as someone else telling me his story, I decided to hear these words as coming from myself, actually being the first-person narrator and experiencing these stories, rather than just hearing about them. That can be a very powerful attunement practice for anyone who wants to try it.

The more obvious opposite approach works perfectly well, too, of course. Let Yogananda be the “I,” but really try to experience that as a direct, living reality, as if he were sitting down with you, telling his story in person.

On other re-readings, I’ve found other themes to naturally arise within the first few chapters and color my experience of the rest of the book. In one case, I simply reveled in the delightful use of language (his style can be a bit of an acquired taste, but I absolutely love it). In another, I became very keenly aware of the humor, and laughed my way through all the nearly 500 pages. In still another, I found myself feeling comforted and loved.

This year’s Living Wisdom School play was on the life of Yogananda, and having attended all three performances (and some rehearsals) not long ago, I still have it fresh and clear in my mind. Many of the lines were taken verbatim from the Autobiography, and I find myself rewatching those scenes in my mind as I come to them in the book. Though the play might seem to be an extra step removed from the book itself, I find it adding an extra joyful dimension to the reading, not only from the love I feel for the kids performing it, but from the experience of Yogananda’s life as a continuing, vibrant reality, all these years after the death of his body.

Over time, the relationship with the book takes on a reality of its own. As with a favorite movie, I can recite from memory many of the best lines as they come up, and find them more, rather than less, delightful for the familiarity. Various scenes will resonate back to the point in my life when I last read them. Particular teachings will stand out as having been applied in new ways since the last reading, or perhaps as being particularly pertinent at the moment. The book, the guru, and my own life weave together into an ever richer tapestry with every turn of every page.

If you haven’t read this book, read it. If you’ve read it, read it again. I think that should cover everybody.

Three and a Half Lessons from a Nine-Day Seclusion

I was really ready to go on seclusion. I’d been looking forward to it for ages. I had my days all planned out: plenty of meditation, extra energization exercises, starting a yoga habit again, spiritual reading, the works. I did that on my seclusion last year, and loved it. So when I arrived at the Ananda Meditation Retreat a week and a half ago, I just hit the ground running. Or so I thought.

I stepped right into my routine on day 1. It feels so easy to arrive at the Retreat and just leave everything else behind. That’s part of the blessing of having meditating devotees on that land for over four decades. But after a few days, I found myself feeling more and more confused. I was doing everything right, but I wasn’t feeling right. And I kept spiraling down into an ever-deepening malaise with no clear cause.

Lesson #1: “It takes money to make money” applies metaphysically. By Wednesday, the exact middle of the trip, I was in such a funk that I spent most of the afternoon just slumping around going “blahhhhh.” I realized I had to do something, but couldn’t think what, since I felt like I was already doing everything I should, or at least could. But if I wasn’t feeling right, I had to somehow fix my mood first. As Swami Kriyananda says, if we want to feel joy in meditation, we should meditate with as much joy as we can muster right from the start. My problem was that what I could muster wasn’t cutting it.

This brings me to Unofficial Lesson #1.5: Never leave home without a book of P.G. Wodehouse stories. Luckily, I keep a well-stocked ereader to aid in all manner of book-related emergencies. But I still struggled with it for a bit. I had specifically wanted to focus on reading spiritual books during my seclusion. But I finally reminded myself that (1) Swamiji also enjoyed Wodehouse, (2) I was coming up with no other options, and (3) if God wanted me to spend my seclusion reading Jeeves and Wooster stories instead of, say, the Bhagavad Gita, then so be it. They were hilarious.

My overall mood started improving from that moment, and my meditations stated getting better that evening. I also cut back on the number of kriyas I was trying to do, skipped a couple rounds of yoga, and just generally relaxed a bit more.

Lesson #2: The attitude of nishkam karma applies even to seclusions. We do our best at all times, but leave the results to God. If I hand over 9 days of my life as a free gift to Him, they are now His to do with as He pleases. As soon as I lightened up about what I thought was supposed to be happening, things started getting better.

This was rubbed in just a bit more a couple days later. The day after my Wodehouse-assisted mood change, water from the hot water taps in my cabin started coming out all brown and icky. I ran lots of water all day to flush it out, with no result. Only the one cold water tap in the kitchen was crystal clear (turns out it’s on a different filter).

I didn’t particularly want to go find someone to notify about this, because it was a seclusion after all, and I was really perfectly happy being alone for a week, not talking to anyone, and I didn’t want to break the thread. I figured I’d just deal with having only cold water for two more days until I left. But the next morning I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable about it, until I realized something just had to be done. So I flung up my hands, called “nishkam karma” on the whole seclusion again, and went to the office to give them a friendly alert about it. By the time I’d walked back to the cabin, Brannon had already gotten there in his truck and was running the tap saying “it just does this sometimes and goes away if you flush it out enough. Look, it’s clear again already.” And it was.

That was just one of those moments I had to laugh and tell God, “okay, I got the joke.”

Lesson #3: Asking for guidance. While all this was going on, there was a parallel story playing itself out. I like to hike up the Bald Mountain trail in the morning, sit on a rock to eat my breakfast, and get back before the day gets too hot. The first morning there, I went and tried to find my favorite breakfast spot from last year. It had been slightly non-obvious to find, but not that bad, since there’s only so much of the mountain that’s actually accessible, not totally overgrown. But that day I just couldn’t find it for the life of me. So I went down another nice trail and had breakfast there. But it still struck me as very unusual, and very much as though I’d been somehow kept from where I’d wanted to go.

So I made a new habit, which was that every morning, when I reached the first fork in the trail, I’d stop and ask God which way to go. I should really do this more in general, in all contexts, so it was fun just to have a clear practice point. If I didn’t feel any actual guidance to turn right and look for the old spot again, I’d just go off to the left, to my new spot.

It was the day after my mood change that I just knew it was okay now to turn right. And I did, and I found the place I was looking for. I would say “right where I left it,” except that it wasn’t. I had actually written down how to get to it last year, and when I went back and checked what I’d quite clearly written, it was quite clearly wrong.

And I realized that this little theme ties in with all the rest of it. I had jumped into the whole trip with my own plan, which I just assumed was good because, well, it sure seemed good. But what do I know? I never actually stopped to ask God what should actually be happening. Until I came about it all the long way around.

- - - - - -

For those of you who read this all the way to the end, your reward is my favorite passage from that first Jeeves story I read:

"Sir?" said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.

Experiments: Food, Sleep, and Energy

A few months ago a new book in the Wisdom of Yogananda series was published: How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality. It’s packed with useful tips and ideas, enough to seem overwhelming until you remember to just relax, find the ones that seem relevant to what you need right now, and focus on those. I’m not often one to drastically tweak my daily habits, but this book got me inspired into a few interesting experiments.

In the food department, the idea that most intrigued me was that of eating monomeals. In spite of my spell-checker’s insistence, these are not one-term algebraic expressions, but rather meals in which you eat only a single (raw, natural) food, and as much of it as you like until you feel satiated. It’s actually much easier for your digestive system to handle a consistent batch of a single food than to deal with a mix of many different ingredients that digest at different rates and in different ways. It takes less energy for your body to process the food, and you’re also better able to tell when you’ve actually eaten an appropriate amount.

I’ve always liked the idea of fasting as a cleansing “vacation” for the digestive system, but I really don’t like fasting itself at all. Monomeals seem like a good compromise to me. I’m currently doing one or two a day, most often with apples, bananas, melons, or other fruit. I’ll usually throw in a “monosnack” of almonds or something similar in between, too. If I save a full “regular” meal for the evening, I manage to skip most of the afternoon energy slump.

Also in support of the energy levels, I’ve been increasing my the Energization Exercises two or three times a day. In addition to the book inspiring renewed will power and concentration, I also discovered an interesting refinement to the mental technique. Instead of visualizing the energy flowing to the various body parts as I activated them, I imagined it moving just ahead of what my body was doing. If you can get into that flow, it becomes much more an experience of tapping into existing energy rather than generating it all from your own little self. Fun to play with.

The final area I’ve been experimenting in is sleep. I don’t think it was in this book, but I’ve read elsewhere Yogananda’s comment that six hours of sleep a night is plenty for most people, and you don’t want to spend more time subconscious than you need to. I’ve always felt very attached to my 7.5-8 hours a night, ever since Dr. Dement’s Sleep & Dreams class in college, but by the time I got through this book I felt like I might actually be able to change that habit.

So I’ve been gradually trimming down the amount I sleep, and have gotten to the point where I can do 6.5 hours a night pretty regularly without any trouble. Still working on the last half hour, but I feel like I’m almost there. And interestingly, even though I often took short afternoon naps before I had a full-time job, now I find that even if I try to nap on a weekend, I often can’t. It’s a little harder sometimes to get up in the mornings on weekends, but once I am up, I’m fine. And I can sense a difference now between needing sleep and merely wanting sleep, which I never particularly noticed before.

The concurrence of the food experiment has actually helped the sleep part a great deal. For instance, if someone brings cookies to work and I eat them (because I can’t help myself, even though I usually try to avoid sweets until the weekend) I can much more dramatically feel the sag in my energy level. But I can tell that it’s not due to lack of sleep (which might otherwise be my first assumption) because if I sleep the same 6.5 hours that night, without any extra, I still feel fine the next day. So I can tell the amount of sleep is sustainable in and of itself, but other factors can try to fool me into thinking its not.

It’s nice to have the extra couple of hours in the day, though I’m still getting used to being awake that much. I’m using some of the time for extra sadhana, including getting myself to a couple of the hour and a half morning meditations in the community temple, and doing some yoga on other mornings. I’m also spending a little more time reading just for fun, so it’s not all “virtuous and productive” as Mom would say, but it’s an okay balance at this point.

[Another intriguing sleep concept I came across recently is segmented sleep. Sounded to me a little trickier to make useful, though, and one sleep experiment at a time is enough.]

An interesting facet to everything in this post, aside from just the fun of experimenting with how human bodies work, is the sense of attunement. Taking instructions from my guru into the most basic aspects of my everyday life -- food and sleep -- is a good way to practice feeling the discipleship connection at all times. So it’s all worth it just for that perspective, even if nothing else.

A New Favorite Narrator

I just finished listening to Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, narrated by Humphery Bower, and I have to say I spent every one of those 43 hours completely enthralled with his voice.

First of all, he's Australian (appropriate for the first-person protagonist of the book) so everything is delightfully accented, even just the "base" narration. But it's the character voices that always really sell me on a good narrator. Most of the book takes place in Bombay, so there are umpteen different Indian characters, all with distinguishable, recognizable voices. Aside from that, though, there are numerous characters from other countries, with accents as diverse as French, German, Spanish, British (London and Liverpool versions), Canadian, American, Iranian, Pakistani, and Afghan. And as if juggling all that weren't enough, he also handles cases like British-educated Afghan, New York Pakistani, and an Australian faking an American accent while speaking Hindi. The guy is a genius.

And even beyond the accents, the overall narration is just exquisitely done. Every little shading and coloring of emotion and meaning is conveyed perfectly in the intonation. Not too much -- I've heard narrators that overdo it -- but just right. This goes both for matching explicit descriptions in the text and for applying his own interpretations to the rest of it. There have been a number of times when I could tell that I would have read something in a very different way in my head, but that Bower's version worked much better.

So if you're a connoisseur of good narrators, definitely listen to this. (Or I expect any of the other books he's read would be excellent as well.)

Karmic Actors, and Forgiveness

I've recently been listening to a lot of Asha Praver's talks and classes, which are all available to download from the Ananda website. A couple of points really caught my attention as a very elegant description of, well, everything that truly needs to be summed up:

1. The spiritual path is a continual process of becoming aware of and understanding the laws of cause and effect at progressively subtler levels. I find this fascinating for the sheer range of human experience it covers, i.e. all of it -- from a clueless jerk who doesn't understand why nobody likes him, to a guru who can describe the karmic path of your soul across lifetimes.
2. This learning is part of the overall quest to seek joy and avoid suffering. This sounds like a rather selfish cause, and at a lot of the lower levels it does manifest that way, but the point is that you eventually realize that only divine joy and not worldly joy will really achieve this fully. So it's okay. :-)

In the course of this quest, our souls try to have literally* every possible experience, trying to figure out what will make us actually, lastingly happy. The more we do so, the more we learn and the more we evolve spiritually. Paramhansa Yogananda teaches that if we have no desire to do a particular thing (e.g. commit murder) that is only because we have done it enough in the past that we've learned it doesn't work. And absolutely everything that people do, including both committing murder and being murdered, is a continuation of this learning process.

I like this because I try to make a habit of learning whatever I can from whatever happens in life, whether good or bad. But it also has important implications for the topic of forgiveness, which I think is a major lesson that's been trying to work its way through my life for some time now. David Praver spoke about this at the service today, specifically about just accepting whatever comes as being for our own ulitmate good, learning, and enlightenment.

This isn't to just completely condone any and all actions, of course. If someone hurts me, I should still find the best way to resolve the situation, and not just give up and take it. If I'm being cruel to someone else, I shouldn't justify it, but try to catch myself in it and make a change. But I suppose that's because I've already had -- somewhere in the past -- the experiences of just giving up, or of being mercilessly cruel, and now I'm ready to start doing better.

The important point in terms of forgiveness is to recognize the essential role other people play in this process, even if it seems horrendous or hurtful. Tormentor and victim are each going through their own necessary experiences, while at the same time acting as a foil for the other. And they will each flip and take on different roles for different experiences, if not in this lifetime then in another. A movie wouldn't be very interesting without a villain for some conflict, even though that actor isn't inherently an evil person and may play the hero in the next movie.

Deepak Chopra makes this point beautifully at the very end of Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment (a parallel to his Buddha book that I wrote about previously). The narrator is an old Himalayan yogi who met Jesus and has been sharing his story with us:

Sometimes I went to the bright line etched between this world and that. I met Jesus there. We never talked but simply bathed in the radiance that conquers all illusions.

I didn't tell Thomas about these journeys. He would have believed me. But he never would have believed that Jesus brought Judas along.

"You are a great soul," I told Judas. "You were willing to play the villain on earth. You must love Jesus very much."

Judas was modest about accepting praise. All he would say was, "The earth is God's child. How could I not help a child?" It was understood among us that without Judas, there couldn't be this new thing, Christianity.
[pg 249]

Isn't that a glorious way to look at Judas? "You must love Jesus very much." May we all aspire to see that level of good in everyone around us.

- - - - -
* This is one of those things that is easier if you accept the idea of reincarnation, but which still conceptually "works" even if you restrict it to just one lifetime. For instance, I've at various times noticed myself in one relationship acting out the reverse role of the same issue from a previous relationship. Even if one role felt very foreign to me, it was as if some part of myself had to check, and try it out, just to make sure.

Detachment, Unity, and Choice

[A bit more here on the subject of choice, since it seems to be a theme in my mind these days.]

When I was learning Vipassana at my first meditation retreat -- almost a year ago now -- I had one main concern about it. It seemed to me that if you really did manage to let go of desires and aversions, then you would end up never doing anything ever again. How would you make choices? Why would you bother taking any actions? I forget precisely what the teacher told me when I asked about it, and I don't think I fully got it at the time, though I decided it was enough to be getting on with, at least.

The idea is that detachment actually allows you to make completely free choices, unencumbered by fears, worries, selfish desires, etc. That leaves you open to base your decisions and actions solely on whatever knowledge, wisdom, and love you may have. Which is generally better than what we usually do.

I recently read a couple of excellent books by Deepak Chopra that illustrate this really well. The first is Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment. I was surprised to find a portion of the story that took place between Gautama losing his sense of self and his becoming fully enlightened. A peasant girl has found him emaciated and nearly dead, and is nursing him back to health. He's aware of everything around him, but is so detached that there's just nothing there -- no great spiritual leader, no nothing. I found it somewhat alarming but also fascinating at the same time, because that was exactly the fear that came to me last March.

So what is left to do at this point? The final change occurs when he stops identifying with nothing, and begins to identify with everything. That is what makes a Buddha.

But there's still the question of choice. If anything, the Buddha has far more choices after enlightenment, with knowledge and options far beyond what most of us realize. He could even choose to simply remain sitting under the bodhi tree and enjoy his oneness with everything forever. But in his omniscience he also realizes that there are countless other souls out there, still imagining themselves to be separate, alone, and suffering. And the same spiritual passion that drove him for years to find his own enlightenment now guides him to do the same for his newly expanded, universal "self." So he again picks up the body that "he" started in, because all the individuated souls will need that in order to understand how to relate to him, and he uses that to go forth and teach.

The other of Chopra's books I wanted to mention was The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. This is an incredible but very challenging book, because I think it takes you as far towards complete universal oneness as you can get through mere words and intellect.

But even if we don't get so far as believing/understanding that we are the universe, hopefully we can all agree that we're at least a part of the universe, simply by virtue of being in it. So our choices and actions at any level really are affecting, changing, and therefore creating the universe. We can't help it. Thinking about things that way gives us an interesting new framework of significance or even responsibility in which to evaluate what we do. How might we make different choices if we view them in terms of creating the universe we live in?

The Ghost in Love

The Ghost in Love, by Jonathan Carroll, is probably the most fun and fascinating magical fantasy novel I've read in a while. Cory Doctorow wrote a great review of it over on BoingBoing, which is how I found out about it, and I agree with everything he says there. There's something else that really colored the whole reading experience for me, though.

Normally when I read a fantasy or sci-fi book (or series), I expect to spend some extra time and effort in the beginning, just to get mentally situated. You have to get your bearings, figure out how this fictional world works, see what are the basic assumptions, structures, premises, etc. After that, you can coast a bit more, just absorbing the story as story.

That's not the case with this book. In terms of this particular quality, the entire book feels like a first chapter. You think you're okay once you've got the idea that a guy accidentally didn't die when he was supposed to, and then he coexists with his ghost, who can be seen by and communicate with dogs but not humans. But it just keeps going from there. You're constantly trying to figure out what's possible or not, and why on earth various things are happening. This could have been frustrating, but I found it more enthralling than anything else. It puts you in the same boat as the main characters, after all, who are also trying to figure out how their world is being rearranged. So it really sucks you in and makes you feel a part of it (similar to the way MirrorMask created such a good feeling of dreaming). I also like it just for the sheer flow of ideas. The author isn't going easy on us, or holding anything back, but just letting us drink from a fire hose of imagination. That's fun.

I'll mention one other interesting point, as long as I'm here. Carroll's writing style at times feels very simple, like very straightforward, fairy-tale storytelling. Overall, that's probably a good thing, since there's enough complexity in the content that you don't need more in the presentation. But every once in a while he'll come up with a real zinger of a line that just hits you right between the eyes, and is all the more powerful for the simplicity of its environment. Example: "Like any illness, when happiness has run its course, time is needed to recuperate from it -- sometimes an entire lifetime."

This was the first Jonathan Carroll novel I've read, but I'm thinking I should go find more. If anybody has any recommendations, let me know.

On MOMAs and Comics

Whenever I travel and get into "museum mode" I always enjoy visiting modern art museums. So it occurred to me recently that it was sort of silly that I'd never even been to San Francisco's MOMA. It turns out that the first Tuesday of each month is free admission day, so earlier this week I took the train up and had myself a little field trip.

I've written before about how I enjoy modern art in a "panning for gold" sort of way. I typically sift through a lot of stuff that doesn't particularly do much for me, until I find the one or two bits that I really appreciate. This particular trip didn't have anything that got me hugely excited (though there were some amusing bits) but that's okay. There were still some reasonably interesting things and I just consider it all the luck of the draw anyway.

But when it comes right down to it, what am I really looking for? A lot of it, I think, is really just about ideas. I like seeing things I haven't thought of before, sheer creativity in action, especially if they tickle my interest or my funny bone. Things like an alphabetized bible, or musical geography (my favorite from Helsinki's Kiasma museum).

Another thing I like is art that gives your brain something to work with, while not being too specific about what. Things that may be abstract, but are nonetheless detailed, not just splotches of paint. A lot of Kandinsky's work is a good example of this. His "Small Worlds" series of paintings is given a context by the name, but still leaves a lot of the construction of those worlds to the viewer's mind.

I found an unexpected parallel to this recently when I read Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. This is a fantastic book, with some really brilliant observations about comics, art, and storytelling in general. Highly recommended -- you'll never read comics the same way again.

One of the things that really struck me as a concept in this book was his discussion of artistic styles and how they range from realistic to iconic to abstract. Characters have been drawn all over this range, and he has a chart showing over 100 of them positioned according to these three qualities, but different positions in this range have different effects on the reader. A highly realistically drawn person is a very specific person, but the less detailed or more iconic it becomes, the more people it could potentially represent. In particular, the possibility of it being the reader's own self increases. The more blanks there are, the more we fill in from ourselves. The more we fill in, the greater empathy and connection we have with the character.

For an interesting example of this, take a look at any Tintin book. The guy's head is shaped like an onion for goodness' sake, and he's got dots for eyes. The backgrounds, however, are relatively quite detailed, realistic, and believable. The overall style is optimized for making the reader really feel part of the story.

I think what I like in art, beyond just comics, is that same sense of needing to contribute something to the full experience. It doesn't even have to be anything specific, just a sense of mystery, of not knowing exactly what's there and having the freedom to insert something of your own into it. That's what I'm looking for.

The Next Book in the Universe

Today I finished recording my first audiobook for Books Aloud, just in time before I leave for Romania. It's cool to have finished it, though I wish I could listen to the whole thing to hear how it turned out, e.g. to see how consistent I was with character voices, etc. (I think something I signed at the beginning said they wouldn't/couldn't give me copies of what I record.) Now the recording is going off to someone else who will transfer the whole thing to cassette tapes, since most of the patrons are blind and therefore have an easier time with tapes than CDs. I'm not sure how long it will take to actually make it into circulation.

They also gave me the next book I'll be reading: another young adult novel called The Last Book in the Universe, by Rodman Philbrick. (Hopefully it won't be the last book I read, though.) I've read a bit of it so far, and the story seems reasonably intriguing, though some of the post-apocalyptic slang feels a bit forced.

Recording for Books Aloud

One of the first volunteer events I did through Hands On Bay Area was with Books Aloud. Last week I auditioned for to be a reader for them, since I have time now to do that kind of thing.

For the audition I had to read 10 minutes each from a kids' book and an adult book, my choice. The kids' book was a no-brainer: The Phantom Tollbooth is one of my all-time favorites for reading out loud. Choosing a specific piece of it, though, was trickier. I eventually went with Chapter 5 ("Short Shrift") not because there was much exciting action going on, but because there were a few different voices, so it would be a good demo. For the other book, I chose The Once and Future King, specifically the amusing scene in Chapter 7 with King Pellinore and Sir Grummore meeting, discussing fewmets, and jousting. Anyway, they both went over pretty well with the committee and they decided to let me start recording for them.

I had my first real recording session today. They assigned me Flush, by Carl Hiassen. (They start all new readers out on kids' books, not that I mind in the least.) It's a decent book, though I have a bit of an issue with how the moral of it seems to be undermined at the end. It works well for reading out loud, though. It's definitely different reading in a little studio into a microphone, rather than actually reading to someone (the recording engineer in the adjacent room doesn't really seem to count). And I have to be a lot more conscious of little mistakes, compared to reading live, so we can go back and fix them. But it's still fun, and it'll be really neat to do a whole book and then be able to send it out for a blind kid somewhere to enjoy.

Unfortunately, their recording schedule is fairly full, so they may mostly be using me to plug up gaps from cancellations for a while. Plus I'm going on two trips in the next two months. So it may take kind of a while to actually get a book finished. I'm hoping to be able to put in more time on it at some point, though, since it's something I won't be able to continue once I eventually start working again.

Quirkyalone Thoughts

Today is International Quirkyalone Day, according to Sasha Cagen, who created the word "quirkyalone" and formalized the concept in her book: Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics. IQD is specifically not anti-Valentine's Day, but "just happens" to fall on the same day. Since I do happen to be single and quirkyalone on this particular V-day, it gets a post. Here's the basic definition from the beginning of the book:

quirk•y•a•lone n. a person who enjoys being single (but is not opposed to being in a relationship) and generally prefers to be alone rather than date for the sake of being in a couple. With unique traits and an optimistic spirit; a sensibility that transcends relationship status. Also adj. Of, relating to, or embodying quirkyalones.

The book fleshes it all out in much more detail, and I find, naturally, that there are some parts I identify with more or less than other parts. In the aggregate, though, it's a model I can relate to fairly strongly. The part that makes us "uncompromising romantics" is the part about not dating for dating's sake. We're picky, and we believe that there are truly incredible relationships out there, and thus we have little patience for anything lacking that magic. I was lucky in my last relationship to have a partner that understood this. We both realized that while the relationship could continue, it didn't need to, and so it made more sense (all things considered) to refactor ourselves back into friends.

As the definition clarifies, the "alone" part of "quirkyalone" doesn't imply that one is always alone or single, but merely that they can be alone without a problem. The "quirky" part helps with this. The more interesting and varied your life is, the easier it is to keep yourself entertained. The book also takes the time to distinguish between different forms of being alone, and I particularly liked this quote:

Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
-Paul Tillich

Quirkyalones do get lonely sometimes, just like everybody else. But we also have a knack for experiencing aloneness as solitude instead. If loneliness is waiting dejectedly for the phone to ring, then solitude is being absorbed in creative endeavors, or being introspective, or otherwise independently directing our own lives without the need for other people. Some people need constant interaction to feel like they're fully living, but some of us have to have enough solitude to let us regenerate on a regular basis.

This independence also makes quirkyalones good at long-distance relationships. Once the spark is lit, our well-developed sense of romance helps keep us attached, but we don't necessarily need the constant physical presence because we keep ourselves so busy. (This isn't to say we don't miss each other or want to eventually be closer together, but c'mon, a little extra anticipation and longing just intensifies things.) I've certainly spent my share of time in this kind of a state, with many people not even realizing I wasn't single. Even in standard-distance relationships, attached quirkyalones (or "quirkytogethers") often have non-standard living arrangements, or other customized systems for maintaining appropriate amounts of independence within a committed, loving relationship. For a while, up until about a year ago, I was looking forward to figuring out how this would work once the distance shrank, but circumstances beyond my control have since closed down that particular life path.

And so, a tricky part of the definition for me these days is the part about "enjoy[ing] being single." While I can function perfectly well as a single person, and I certainly prefer it to various other possible states, I don't know that I'm yet at the point where I'm inherently happy with it. I have happy times -- it's not like I'm going around depressed all the time -- but I don't have an overall sense of rightness about my life, and so it's hard to feel truly happy as a real state of being. This could be simply because I haven't been single long enough to fully heal and realign. But I also feel that there's an essential part of my nature, the Knight of Cups part, that can't be expressed without a deep, romantic relationship. That's a hole that will take a while to fill.

Another issue for me is that I'm not only very good at being alone, but perhaps too good at it. Sasha Cagen's model of the quirkyalone lifestyle is still extremely social, just focused more on friends than couples. I make (close) friends as slowly and infrequently as I make romantic relationships. (See Wildflower Bloom for a good, relevant discussion about making friends.) That can mean that I don't always have a lot to fall back on when a relationship goes kaput, and it's aggravated by the fact that my natural defenses usually lead me to retreat farther into myself.

But I don't want to end on a down note. Embedded in the definition of quirkyalone is the "optimistic spirit" that lets us carry on come hell or high water. And so I will.

The Ecotopian Perspective

At the Green Festival last year I picked up a 30th anniversary edition copy of Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach. It imagines an alternative future (looking forwards from the 1970's) in which Washington, Oregon, and Northern California have seceded from the United States to form a new country called Ecotopia. After decades of little to no communication between the two countries, a US reporter travels to Ecotopia, and this book is made up of his journal entries alternated with the articles he sends back for his newspaper to publish. The country has completely remade its society and technology into a new, ecologically sound, stable-state system (hence the name).

I won't go into the details, since if all that sounds interesting, you should just read it for yourself. But here's why I particularly appreciate it. Whether you agree with all the ideas or not (and yeah, it's a mixed bag) it's the perspective that's important. It steps away from the question "how can we fix or adjust what we have to make it better?" to "what would an ideal system actually look like?" If you ever get bogged down looking at the trees in the first question, use this book to get yourself thinking at the forest level.

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This post is part of Blog Action Day. One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

Your Brain On Music

I just finished This Is Your Brain On Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. If you're at all interested in music and/or brains it's a fascinating read. I found a lot of concepts that I was familiar with from my cog. psy. classes in college, but it was fun seeing them applied so directly to our perception and experience of music. The book actually made me want to just sit down and really listen to music more than anything else, rather than just having it playing in the background like I usually do. But it also made me want to get back on track again with things like playing, composing, and developing my ear.

Particularly interesting to me was the information about perfect pitch. A number of studies have shown evidence that many people, even non-musicians, are able to store absolute pitch information in memory. E.g. they could be trained to recognize or sing back an assigned note that they learned. In other cases, when asked to sing a favorite popular song, they would do so in the right key without any prompting (or even awareness that they were doing so). My guess is that if we taught babies to recognize notes the way we teach them to recognize colors, a great many more people would have perfect pitch. It seems to be built into the brain, but most people just don't know how to use it or develop it. Granted, the people who seem to have it "automatically" make it seem inaccessible to the rest of us, but I think that's just a natural misinterpretation of ordinary person-to-person variability.

Another interesting concept regards what it takes to become an "expert" level musician. It seems that amount of practice time really is the biggest factor in becoming really good at something, even more so than perceived talent. Ten thousand hours is the usual amount of time you have to put in to really reach that top tier of world-class experts. And that same number seems to apply not only to music but to everything else that has been studied in this context: playing chess, figure skating, fiction writing, and more. Unfortunately, 10,000 hours is about 3 hours a day for 10 years. Sigh. But I guess that's why we're not all the best musicians in the world.

I was also amused at how well Levitin "predicted" the existence of Last.fm... a few years after its creation. Personalized radio stations mixing stuff you like with new recommendations to try? Yep, got that. :-)

Fixing My Sleep

I just finished re-reading Dr. Dement's The Promise of Sleep, which was good since I needed to learn different things from it now than when I last read it several years ago. I highly recommend this book to pretty much everyone, since I agree with Dr. Dement that sleep is one of the least understood but most important aspects of our physical and emotional health. The quality of your sleep affects so many other parts of your life.

What prompted this re-reading for me was coming back from my vacation last month with a severely screwed up sleep schedule/ability. Between jet lag, dance camp, Harry Potter, and various kinds of stress, I was a wreck. I had three days in a row at one point where I only slept a scattered handful of hours, and even after that I'd have nights where I was exhausted but unable to fall asleep for hours. Then I'd alternate nights of no sleep with nights of sleeping like a rock. So I started experimenting a bit with my sleep schedule (what did I have to lose at that point?) and also started reading this book to see if what I was doing made any sense. Luckily it did.

What I started by doing was just moving my bedtime later by one hour every night, while still getting up at the same time in the morning. Ever since I took Dr. Dement's "Sleep and Dreams" class in college, I've tried to be very aware of my sleep debt and of allocating enough time to keep it low. The problem is that sleep debt can actually be too low, to the point where it negatively affects your sleep efficiency, and allows other causes of insomnia (of which I have plenty) to come in and take over. My alternating nights of good sleep weren't erasing all my sleep debt, but just enough to cause this problem, given the state I was in. My idea with the first stage of this experiment was to try to regain/maintain a regular sleep schedule, but not let myself get quite enough, so that I could still fall asleep before my mind starts running away with me each night. After adjusting for a little while, this was fairly successful. (Moderately improving stress levels have helped as well.)

The downside to this, of course, is feeling sleepier than I'd like during the day. In the current phase of the plan, I'm alternating nights again, but in a much less dramatic way than when I had no control over it. I just switch between staying up the extra hour or not, so it's not a huge difference, but so far it seems to be balancing well between getting more rest and still falling asleep without too much trouble. There's also the plus that I can time my later nights so that I get more dancing (like the fact that I actually stayed at FNW all the way to the end last night). This does go against the standard advice of maintaining a rigidly consistent schedule of sleeping and waking, but Dr. Dement does stress in the last chapter of his book that it's really just important to understand the principles, and that different things will work for different people. My original idea was to eventually work back to having a fixed schedule, but I'm starting to reconsider this. If this alternating pattern continues to work out well, I may just tweak it a bit to make sure the total sleep time is enough, but then leave it there. We'll see.

Another thing I've been doing -- independent of but beneficial to the sleep times experiment -- is working out and running more. Dr. Dement recommends regular exercise as being good for sleep, but adds that it's best to do it more than 3 hours before bedtime, so as not to keep you awake. This is another case, though, where it's important to really understand how I personally react to it. My favorite time to go running recently has been about 10 PM. Luckily, this not only helps tire me out, but it can be incredibly relaxing. Running is very meditative for me. Nowadays, my mind -- my sleep nemesis -- is never as calm as when I'm running. And when I'm done and cooled down, I can continue relaxing myself for a while afterwards and maintain much of that feeling until I'm ready to go to sleep. So for 3 or 4 nights a week, that's very helpful.

Deathly Hallows

***** WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
***** (Only the first paragraph is safe.) *****

I picked up my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at Books Inc. last night and started reading around 1:00 AM. Took a three hour nap in the wee hours of the morning, then dove right back in and finished around 8 this evening. I read it on my own, since Antonia and Ryan decided they wanted to go through it at a slower pace. I missed the reading-aloud, and the play-by-play discussions, but it was good to go at my own rate, especially considering I was stopping to cry after most of the last 7 or 8 chapters.

This book was intense all the way through. When Hedwig and Mad-Eye Moody died so early on, I knew it was going to be a rough ride, but in a way, the enormity of it really started sinking in for me when we learned what Hermione had to do to her family. The chapter where Hermione was tortured and Dobby was killed just tore me up, and by the time Fred, Lupin, and Tonks died, I was ready to be a basket case for the rest of the book. I was completely at J. K. Rowling's mercy when Harry was marching off to face death without even stopping to say goodbye to Ginny.

But on to the good things, too. I was so happy about the resolution of the Snape question, though the themes of uncertain trust and constant, unrequited love currently give me a real emotional yank. The fact that even Kreacher was redeemed, which I didn't remotely expect, was like a beautiful little gift. I even felt considerably more sympathetic to the Malfoys by the end. And Percy coming back. That was good. I thought it was wonderful that Luna could recognize Harry even through the Polyjuice potion, and that Neville got the heroic deed he deserved. Ron had me worried when he bailed on Harry and Hermione, but he pulled through and I'm very proud of him. The looks into Dumbledore's past were surprising, but I still love him. I didn't expect the "Nineteen Years Later" epilogue (because I didn't even let myself peek at the table of contents before I read) but I was very grateful for it. As much as she could have left us without an explicit happily-ever-after ending, I really needed it.

Anyway, that probably wasn't all too coherent, but it's about all I'm up for right now, given that I'm still pretty emotional about it all and don't yet have anyone who's finished it that I can talk it out with. Now I guess it's time to start coming to terms with a world devoid of future Harry Potter books and mysteries.

What Should I Eat?

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, was recommended to me by Antonia and made a good followup to The Omnivore's Dilemma. Some of the information in it is similar, but it also spends more time talking about things like free trade and economic considerations, and also explicitly addressing various ethical arguments about what we eat. So it did some serious work on the internal debate slowly going on in my head about whether I should become vegetarian or vegan.

First, here's my current situation: I eat beef and pork pretty infrequently, and fish only slightly more. The majority of the meat I eat is poultry, and I think even that is in reasonably modest amounts. A good portion of my meals are vegetarian already, thanks to the fine chefs at work providing veggie options. So why am I not vegetarian or vegan yet? I'll list my main reasons, and then further thoughts on them from reading Singer and Mason's book.

Human beings are omnivores. Why should I go against Nature?
This kind of a view may be somewhat supported by Michael Pollan's argument about domestic animals co-evolving into a symbiotic relationship with people. However, factory farms and such things go pretty violently against Nature, supposed symbiotic relationships or not, and it can be a lot of work to find and verify more humane sources of meat and animal products. And of course, just because we are something "naturally" doesn't mean it necessarily shouldn't be transcended. E.g. it would be right for a "naturally" belligerent person to learn to control his temper. So while I still do not feel that eating meat is outright wrong, in and of itself, there are so many other wrong factors involved in most meat eating today that I'm willing to let this go of this particular argument. It's just a lazy reliance on the status quo anyway.

Effort vs. Benefit
Vegetarian might be reasonably do-able, but going entirely vegan has always seemed like a great deal of work for me. Food is nice and all, but I've never really been interested in devoting much time or energy to it. That's why I've never learned to cook much and base a lot of my food choices on the "quick and easy" criteria. Being vegan seems like I would have to start allocating way more brain cycles, time, and effort into figuring what I can eat in any given situation, and I'm not crazy about that. It makes me wonder if the incremental benefit of cutting out animal products from one single person's diet is worth it, especially if I'm not a heavy meat eater anyway.

I'm still on the fence about this. However, there are a few points from The Way We Eat that can put the benefit into perspective. I will call them the three E's, just because I can.

• Efficiency: It takes 21 lbs of plant food to produce 1 lb of beef. The ratio is less dramatic for other meats, but the fact remains that we can feed more people far more efficiently if we use more plants and less meats.
• Environment: Due to all the factors involved in meat production, switching from an average American meat eating diet to completely vegan saves the atmosphere from 1.5 tons of CO2 a year. That's half again as much as the benefit of switching from a regular to a hybrid car.
• Evangelism: The more vegetarians and vegans that omnivores see out there "in real life," the more normal it will seem, and the more the ideas and practices will spread. So there would be some amount of a snowball effect, beyond simply my own personal decision (though unfortunately we don't have a good number to measure that).

Practicality and Social Factors
This is perhaps just a more specific example of the "Effort" point above, and can probably be addressed by the same benefit arguments, but I'll list it anyway. If I'm visiting an omnivore who is kind enough to host and feed me, I don't want to put them to extra work just to accommodate me. If I travel somewhere, I want to try the foods the natives eat. For that matter, I want to be adaptable, and not thrown off by places that may not have a lot of vegetarian options. Now that I think about it, maybe there's actually some primal survival instinct at work here, making me reluctant to artificially restrict my possible food sources.

Food I Like
I'd like to say my will power makes this a non-issue, but really, there's stuff I'd be sad to stop eating. I'm thinking fondly right now of some salmon I had on Friday, but I could probably deal with cutting out meat, I think. (And yes, fish are animals.) Cheese might be more problematic. I wouldn't much miss milk and eggs in and of themselves, but they do go into certain wonderful things that would be painful to give up, and here my sweet tooth begins clamoring about ice cream and cookies, though other things could fall in this category, too. Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of the book to address this issue, aside from the fact that there are more and more vegetarian/vegan animal product alternatives available now than ever before. Having tried some such things, I don't necessarily find them all convincing, though admittedly I don't have a wide experience. Though do they really need to be "convincing" substitutes, or just good in their own right? As an example, I got to help make vegan ginger apple ice cream with Antonia this afternoon. To me, it still seems significantly different from "real" ice cream. It was, however, very good. (Thanks, Antonia!)

Conclusions
None at this time. However, I am going to start experimenting a bit, first by paying more attention to how many things I regularly eat that contain animal products, and second by seeing how many of them can be eliminated without too much effort. (I'm thinking all meat here, at the very least.) At that point, I'll need to take another look around and see what kinds of things are left, how much of them I'm consuming, and what my alternatives are. We'll see where this takes me.

Peaceful Warrior

When I heard last year that Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman was being made into a movie, I didn't know whether to be apprehensive or excited. Unfortunately, it had a limited release and completely flopped -- because apparently nobody who reviewed it actually grokked it -- so I didn't get to find out. An interesting thing is going on now, though. They've decided to try re-releasing it, and they're also giving away free tickets for opening weekend (this weekend) as a different kind of marketing tactic, hoping it will then spread by word of mouth. (Story here, free tickets here.) So this is me doing my part for my free ticket.

Go see this movie if you enjoy: Buddhism, personal development, conscious living, "new-age" metaphysics, men's gymnastics, UC Berkeley, or, heck, gas stations. If you want to know more about it than that, go read about the book on Amazon.com or something, 'cause I'm bad at movie reviews. However, I will say that I ended up being quite pleased by the movie overall. It is by no means the equal of the book, but I think it's really about the best adaptation one could expect of it. While a lot was left out, they also added some scenes, most which surprised me by how good and "in character" they were.

Mom went to see it with me, and she was a bit worried because of what happened the last time I took her to a movie. The previews weren't helping, either. Apparently the theater had no idea who their audience was (or didn't have anything to fit us). Three in a row of the many previews were for The Condemned, Shrek 3, and Spiderman 3. Bit of a mix, that. Once the movie started, though, she realized it was safe and started trusting me again.

I recommend the book more than anything, of course (and as usual). But do go see the movie, too. There aren't enough movies like this around, so filmmakers need all the encouragement we can give them.