Saturday, July 21, 2007

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller & Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

How do people cope with their fears; women’s rights and stresses; and class privilege? How different and too what degree is the Black vs. White experience during/after wars in Africa?

Below are some of our thoughts, starting with DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS…

The kids are incredibly whiney in the beginning.
Privilege is reinforced:
• Racial segregation.
• Calling kids “retards.”
• Closer to Black nanny than to mother.
When Apartheid ended in South Africa, the white “privilege” ended with tangible loses, things were actually taken away, unlike when racial segregation ended in America and there was no tangible lose for whites.
This book takes place during the time period in South Africa when the Black majority comes to power.
• “Truth” and reconciliation” in South Africa vs. “laws” which don’t really change thoughts.
Individual human process of needing to change identity when we are under a foreign power or losing our privileges under Nazi Germany or Apartheid.
She mentions being hungry and in a desolate land - the story is told form the child’s perspective and grows as she matures.

How do people cope with their fears; women’s rights and stresses; and class privilege? How different and too what degree is the Black vs. White experience during/after wars in Africa?

NERVOUS CONDITIONS
When she achieves, everyone thinks she is lying,
Water dish task show family hierarchy (who gets to wash their hands first),
No meat left for children who didn’t miss it.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

How is time travel "normalized"? How does the author make the time travel "work" and be believable? What do you think about the love relationship? How does this compare with other time travel books?

We had some discrepancy among us, some of us loved the book and some didn’t. The idea of an “old” man relating to a young child was highly problematic for some of us. For those of us who were reading it a second time, we paid more attention to the things Henry was doing to not get intimate with Clare when she was a child, of course, then we also noticed that she seemed quite obsessed with sex at a young age! Also, because Henry knows this is the woman he will marry, we seemed to be able to forgive the age difference more.

We helped each other understand some of the scenes that weren’t clear or didn’t make sense: Henry’s death in the woods, Ingrid’s suicide, the wedding, the miscarriages, and Christmas dinner. When you listened to the CD or tape, it was an abridged version and some scenes were missing: 9/11, the suicide.

We talked a lot about the time loops, time travel, and “what if” this could really happen. Stephen J. Hawkins has said that time travel will NEVER happen, because if it did, it would be happening right now – we’d be visited by time travelers from the future.

We compared how other books (and films) have done time travel. Here’s just a sampling of some of the things that came up. The Terminator also has folks traveling naked – can’t take anything with you. But the Magic Tree House books and Octavia Butler’s book Kindred have characters who can take all sorts of stuff with them. It seems Henry needed to have visited or know about a place in order for him to go there (and to have some stress in his life to trigger the time travel, which leads us to believe he could have probably controlled it more than he did). The DNAgers said an incantation and were sent into the body of an ancestor (whose own essence was then put into a “limbo”). The main character from the Butterfly Effect had to look at his journals (or home movies) and then he went to himself at another age and changed things (and that self experienced it as a “black out”). The idea of whether things really change or can be changed (the picture with or without the date on it) seems to be pivotal in time travel books. In this one, anything Henry does seems to have been “meant to be” like winning the lottery.

In our time travel discussion, we all love the “reveal,” also know as the “cage scene.” Seeing TWO Henrys certainly proves the point.

We acknowledge that if this was a reality (time travel was really possible AND people knew about it), that Henry would have been tested and studied, or some wacko cult would have followed him, but in essence, he would have lost control of his life.

It was pretty amazing how the author “normalized” his time travel, as well as how Clare took it all “like a good wife.”

We considered where the time loop didn’t seem to make sense. At the end, when Henry and Alba are in the museum and she talks about time travel and the genes and such, how come she doesn’t mention other time travelers she’s met? Wouldn’t that be happening? Are she and Henry still the only ones? It just seems there could have been a little more conversation from her to inform us of all those “gene infected time travelers she has met.”

The ending was disappointing. Clare didn’t seem to really “move on,” just like Henry’s father (after his mother’s death). Could that be an analogy for real life – we all repeat “loops” and do things we know aren’t good for us.

Here is a nice review by Dona Patrick

This book is breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad. However it is uplifting and I am envious of the love these two characters have for each other. The author writes it in such a way that the time-travel part of the story is believable.

I had a slightly difficult time with the ending, not the very ending, but what happened to Henry in the year before the book ended. The book was like a pleasant ride on a mild roller coaster, and suddenly it became, for a while, a jarring walk through an evil carnival fun house.

One last thing I liked about the book was the fact that many place names were real. I recently spoke to someone who said that she even went to some of the concerts mentioned in the book.

It is hard to believe that this is Audrey Niffenegger's first book. It is nearly perfect in every detail. I read an interview with the author that suggested she wrote the book in a different order than in which it was published.

I got the title first, and played around with it for quite a long time, slowly evolving the characters in my head. I wrote the end before anything else, and then began to write scenes as they occurred to me. TTW was written in a completely different order than the one it finally took. I understood early on that it would be organized in three sections, and that the basic unit was the scene, not the chapter. It has a rather chaotic feel to it, especially at the beginning, and that is deliberate-there is a slow piecing together, a gradual accumulation of story, that mimics the experience of the characters. I made a lot of notes about the characters. I had two timelines to help me stay organized, but no outline of the plot.

Questions from another website

1. In The Time Traveler's Wife, the characters meet each other at various times during their lifetime. How does the author keep all the timelines in order and "on time"?

2. Although Henry does the time traveling, Clare is equally impacted. How does she cope with his journeys and does she ultimately accept them?

3. How does the writer introduce the reader to the concept of time travel as a realistic occurrence? Does she succeed?

4. Henry's life is disrupted on multiple levels by spontaneous time travel. How does his career as a librarian offset his tumultuous disappearances? Why does that job appeal to Henry?

5. Henry and Clare know each other for years before they fall in love as adults. How does Clare cope with the knowledge that at a young age she knows that Henry is the man she will eventually marry?

6. The Time Traveler's Wife is ultimately an enduring love story. What trials and tribulations do Henry and Clare face that are the same as or different from other "normal" relationships?

7. How does their desire for a child affect their relationship?

8. The book is told from both Henry and Clare's perspectives. What does this add to the story?

9. Do you think the ending of the novel is satisfactory?

10. Though history there have been dozens of mediums used for time travel in literature. Please cite examples and compare The Time Traveler's Wife to the ones with which you are familiar.

The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing by Lori Alvord

What can we learn from Indigenous practices which would improve our own state of mind and health?

From Publishers Weekly
When Alvord, who is half Navajo, dissected her first cadaver, she broke an important rule in her culture: "Navajos do not touch the dead. Ever." In the process of becoming a "white man's doctor," Alvord discovered that among the indigenous customs her medical training forced her to ignore were valuable healing practices that are sorely needed in allopathic medicine. In this inspiring memoir, Alvord, assisted by Van Pelt, describes her endeavors to integrate a Navaho approach to healing with high-tech medical procedures. She left the pueblo at age 16 to attend Dartmouth on scholarship, survived the numbing vicissitudes of surgical training at Stanford and returned home jubilantly to work as a general surgeon at the local medical center, only to discover that her demeanor and her state-of-the-art skills frightened her patients. Working within her traditional culture, which strongly resists the removal of organs from the body, she soon realized that a trusting relationship with the patient and harmony in the operating room were as necessary as the correct procedure to the success of the operation and the recovery process. As an introduction to Navajo healing principles, this short book offers intriguing ideas about humane health care. While it is unlikely that many physicians will embrace the sacred bear spirit, which is a source of strength and courage for the author, Alvord's message about how to improve a patient's peace of mind is utterly credible.

Brief summary from a student:
Lori is Diné. This means that she is part of the Navajo Nation. She grew up on a Navajo reservation in the sixties. Her father was Navajo and her mother white. Her life path was an exception from her peers. Lori attended Dartmouth University and later went on to receive her medical degree at Stanford University. She became a respected surgeon, who practiced for many years at the Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico where she treated many patients from various nations including Navajo and Hopi. Lori was the first female Navajo surgeon. Her cultural and ethnic identity is at the center of her life story. Early in her medical career, Lori encountered a dichotomy between western medicine and her nation’s beliefs about wellness and healing. Daily, she questioned her belonging among the medical field. Through this story she reveals the challenges she faced while trying to incorporate Navajo philosophy into her patient care. She encourages “Walking in Beauty” a Navajo belief that promotes living in harmony and balance, and taking care of all parts of yourself, including your body mind and spirit. It also means keeping all relationships in balance with the animals, friends, family, and the earth. Her story is filled with both frustrations and hope. It allows the reader to see a glimpse of reservation life and the harsh realities of what has happened to native nations in our country. It also encourages the reader to think deeply about our current system of medical care for all American patients.

The film "Crash"

Wow, I don’t know where to begin – there’s so much to think about after seeing the movie, Crash. Deb and I were moved to make comments to each other during the movie in addition to afterwards. There are some very powerful and emotional scenes. I ended up watching it two more times (once alone and once with my brother), neither time did I have any more discussion, but I saw things I hadn’t noticed the previous time, like that some of the characters show up in other scenes in the “background.” I hope everyone gets a chance to see it soon.

When Deb and I watched, we couldn’t remember any names. Upon watching again, I really do think that none of the main characters are named for most of the movie. When we (the viewer) get to “know” them, when they become “real,” not just a representative from a racial group, then their names get used. Interesting. I went on line and found a site which lists of all the characters: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375679/fullcredits. I also copied some quotes from the movie at the end of this email.

Another thing we noticed was that many of the “key” issues for the racial/ethnic groups represented were shown. For me, needing to show your hands at all times when a police officer is there is something I was taught, but I was never kept up at night for fear of being shot, so that a parent had to have of a conversation about guns and bullets, but it appears that this is part of the experience for the Latino/a group. We were also reminded that we’ve all internalized the misinformation and use the stereotypes against everyone, so, for example, people of color mistreat other people of color just as easily. Only, as we know, white folks still benefit the most.

Some of the questions that came up and we discussed were:
What changed within people between the first interaction with a person from a different racial group to the next, as characters kept “crashing” into each other?
How does having a “relationship” with someone of another racial group affect your interactions?
The emotional component was huge. So much was motivated by anger, guilt, and fear. Was this due to assumptions we/the characters have? The history of institutional racism? Or our/the characters’ real experiences?
Who were the allies? Particularly, the white allies.

One thing to keep in mind for the future, is that movie night is a longer night than “just a book” night.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi & Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

What is morality? Who gets to define it? How does wearing “the veil” compare/inform such things as whether or not to require school uniforms to be worn?

We discussed Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks which takes quotes from the Koran and then discusses how people are interpreting the Koran and how women are impacted. We also brought in our understanding of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi.

In 9 Parts, we made an interesting connection between female and male circumcision as it related to literacy. Circumcision of girls is not in the Koran, but it is so culturally ingrained that people think it *is* in the Koran.

We looked at the question, “Why did Mohammed support polygamy?” When the Koran said the following:
1 – Husbands must treat their wives completely equally and with justice
2 – Husbands must not have more than 4 wives
3 – One can not treat more than one woman with justice

#3 is an “out” of #1, a loophole to help people transition from multiple wives to one wife, which appears to be what the Koran is *really* saying – you can really only take care of one wife.

In "Lolita," we confirmed that you didn’t need to have read all (or any) of the books she discusses with her classes in the novel in order to understand the story. This story takes place just as the Taliban is taking power and the viel becomes an instrument of oppression. It is amazing (yet again) how quickly people fall in to supporting patriarchy: husbands toward wives, brothers toward sisters, etc. Here are some thoughts and quotes:
• Islam was used as an instrument of oppression
• The novels provided a link between the open spaces in the stories and the closed ones we were confined to
• Why try criminals? They are not innocent until proven guilty, they are already guilty.
• Women who don’t wear the veil are prostitutes and agents of satin (you call that morality?)
• Women’s integrity is being compromised by veil, but it is not the veil, it is the freedom to choose to wear it or not
• She felt like an alcoholic drowning her sorrow in books
• The anxiety for her children was more than anything else
• The power of the veil coming off and becoming empowered happened when the women met to discuss books in private in her home

Other books and authors we brought into our discussion:

Where the Heart Is - Billie Letts (a pregnant woman makes her home in the Wal-Mart)

The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell (In 2019, humanity hears singing from a distant planet and the Jesuits organize a scientific expedition. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it leads them to question the meaning of being "human.")

Blindness - Jose Saramago (In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife) We thought about maybe including this book if/when we do a “healing” theme.

Toni Morrison – this author led to a discussion of the personal experiences we bring to reading books. I’ll use myself as an example, each time I struggle with a story, though I find the writing beautiful and/or the stories compelling, quite often I find the timeline of events confusing or the number of characters too great. I have come to realize (with some group member's help) that I will have a hard time getting everything out of some stories without help from all of you – and so it is that we each have our own quirks which will continue to be how we view certain stories.

Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingslover

No specific question, but we discussed “the culture of racism,” meaning, what is it about people (missionaries) that makes them feel that they can impose their ways on others.

We discussed the Poisonwood Bible. We had a lovely summer dinner and nice, long walk. Our interesting discussion focused on “the culture of racism,” meaning, what is it about people (missionaries) that makes them feel that they can impose their ways on others. Not every culture did this, so we compared other books (ie: Hawaii by Michener) and history that we knew to see if there was something about some people having a culture which contained racist ideology – and that those happened to be the cultures which colonized countries with People of Color.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

In what ways were the women in the novel oppressed? How did they demonstrate their resistance to the oppression (what kinds of actions did they take)? How does this novel compare with other stories people have read about Indian/Pakistani immigrants (such as Interpreter of Maladies or The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri).

Below are some quotes that floated to the top in our discussions of Brick Lane.

“If India is better, then go back. If America is better, then stop complaining.”
“Too soon ripe is too soon rotten”
“(You’re so lucky) I’m an educated man”

We had the thought that this book sounds very dramatic - having drugs, loan sharks, affairs, rape, and political protests. It was reminiscent of the author’s style in writing the book, “life just happened,” there was no dramatic build up, but the book contained drama nonetheless.

Women’s resistance was apparent in multiple ways: rolling up dirty socks, getting jobs, having affairs, doing personal hygiene even when it disgusted them, etc. We thought this might be related to how women honor themselves, especially in arranged marriages.

We also talked about the many different ways “religion” was enacted: spiritual, political, devout ritual, only in times of need.

We speculated answers about questions (which we really couldn’t answer). For example, a girl becomes a woman when her job changes, a man should get a promotion when he becomes a father. Is this something cultural? Does work bring honor, does family? – is the status of family as a result of arranged marriages? Do women wait for “release” from marriages? Why is it in these arranged marriages that women were so oppressed, when that did not need to happen?

TWO THEMES that emerged were:

Inside vs. Outside -
The house, the self-perception of adultery, working inside on sewing, all brought “protection.” The outside had the street, others not knowing what is going on inside, the sister working outside the home and having so much trouble – the outside seemed to represent danger.

Self-Deception -
Lies people allowed to exist in order to cope with reality
Idea that she will join husband in Bangladesh
Don’t talk about her father’s affairs
Dr. Azod and Chanu lie to each other
She is having an affair
Mrs. Islam is always “sick”
Son’s death as an infant in hospital

It was fascinating to consider other books we’ve read in comparison, and to note the similarities and differences cross-culturally (ethnic and religious). For example, it is interesting in this book that religion (Islam) took a back seat to Bangladesh culture – wearing or not wearing a burka wasn’t the main topic of conversation for people who had a sari.

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott & The Chosen by Chaim Potok

CHARMING BILLY by Alice McDermott (Irish American in America)
No specific question, but we discussed Irish American (vs. Irish) culture, and Irish immigrant history.

We had a great meeting last night. I, personally, feel like I understand Charming Billy so much better now that we have elucidated aspects of Irish American (vs. Irish) culture. And, I appreciate Irish history in new ways, like the power and pressure of The Church. I also loved getting to know our Irish heritage group members more through this book.

THE CHOSEN by Chaim Potok (Jewish and non-Jewish friendship)
No specific question, but we discussed the absence of female role-models and the present male-male relationships (father-son, boy-boy), the power/impact of silence, and being true to yourself, your choices, and your dreams.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Columbus by Orson Scott Card

Since reading this book, how do you now feel about Columbus and why? How do you feel/What do you think about Christianity being used the way it was in the book?

Specific quotes we noted are below.

10 – murderers, rapist, and thieves “suspension of any civil and criminal actions pending against him”

27 – Tagiri would find the “stories of those who has lost all choice”

46 - “to create a world where the destroyers did not triumph”

94 – “Just admit that there are some things worse than slavery. Just admit that maybe your set of values is as arbitrarily as any other culture’s values., and to try to revise history in order to make your values triumph in the past as well as the p[resent is pure cultural imperialism”

119 – “he had to believe that gold and great kingdoms were there to be found, even though he had no evidence for them”

150 – “Are you telling me that you aren’t a crazy, self-willed, time-wasting, donkey-headed fool after all? …I just don’t think you’ve caught the vision of what Pastwatch is all about.” J

“’I haven’t,” said Hanahpu. ‘I want to change the vision’”

156 - “only God can put such a fire in a man”

158 - “scholarly arrogance”

160 – “faith is for women, evidence for men… Christianity is for the faithful, and so there are more true Christians among women than among men,”

170 – hierarchy “The truth will still be true tomorrow, and everybody who needs to know it has an equal claim on learning it.”

191 – “his voice was a good as anyone else’s”

Maya civilization “would never have given rise to the democratic and tolerant and scientific values that eventually emerged from European culture”

192 – “’But outside the Americas, wherever the Europeans conquered, native culture survived,’ said Hanahpu. ‘Altered, yes, but still recognizably itself.’”

217 - “time is rational. Causality is irrational” sending a person back is a discrete event

224 – “we will sacrifice to create their history, as parents sacrifice to create healthy, happy children.”

242 – first we try to preserve ourselves, then our children, then our kin, then our village or tribe, then our memory, until finally we have the perspective trying to act for the good of humanity as a whole.

258 - There’s a difference and it’s damn hard to see between a hypocrite and Tagiri (moral ambiguity)

272 – “All I have to do is turn the Zapotecs into a great nation, link up with the Tarascans, accelerate the development of ironworking and shipbuilding, block the Tlaxcalans and overthrow the Mexica, and prepare these people for a new ideology that does not include human sacrifice. Who couldn’t do that?” J

277 – “now the property of” upon stepping on shore

284 – “slightly perverse spin …on the doctrine of Jesus” and 289

287 – “Let’s lay the groundwork of somewhat more egalitarian treatment of women now, at the beginning.

290 – “no captives, no slaves, no servants-for-life”

292 – “Earn my respect by your generosity and truthfulness.”

“His plans would all have to be adapted; only his purposes were unchangeable.”

294 – “such stories were needed in forging anew nation with a will to empire. The people had to have an unshakable belief in their own worthiness.”

304 – “pseudo-chaotic systems like weather were actually quite stable in their underlying patterns, and swallowed up random tiny fluctuations.”

312 – “this time technology would not outstrip the ability of human beings to understand it, to control it, to clean up after it.”

320 – “the idea that the stranger is not the person”

331 - “He lingered with her as long as possible and sometimes neglected his other tasks.”

362 – “Was there no justice? Could white men do anything to Indians, and no one would punish them?”

371 – “I would never forbid you to do anything, …I only ask you to wait and watch a little longer.”

377 – “if you weren’t helping, you were ignored.”

378 – “the gentleness of the Tainos was only one aspect of their character.”

“Solstice of 1493”

“They’re forgetting to be Spanish” “ But the Taino are also forgetting to be Taino” “They’re becoming something new, something that has hardly been seen tin the world before”

384 – “but to her there was little difference between Xibalba and Pastwatch. Call them gods or call them researcher, she didn’t see much practical difference. An you know, I can’t think of a significant difference, either.”

389 – “only an unworthy son would ask his father to apologize for coming home,”

RELATIONSHIPS – LOVE & ABUSE

142 – “She would never touch him, not really. She had his child, but the more she hungered for the man himself, the more she reached out to him, the more he would push her away; and yet if she did not reach out, he would ignore her completely; there was no path she could see that would lead her to happiness.”

“So he turned away, not wishing to hurt her and yet hurting her all the same, because he had to find a way to accomplish what God had given him to do.

“and spent the rest of the time haunting her own house”

143 – “She went to her bed and wept, for she was not part of his life at all, and she knew no way to enter it, and so she loved him all the more desperately, and knew all the more surely that it was some failing in her that made her unlovable to her husband.”

146 – Felipa knew that Columbus hated her now, and that she deserved his hatred, having given him nothing that he wanted.”

“when he talked to her of how sorry he was for his long neglect, she knew that this was said not because he wished her to live so he could do better in th3 future, but rather because he wanted her forgiveness so that his conscience could be free when at last her death feed him in every other way.”

147 – “And a small part of his dear father was far greater than all the love and attention of many lesser men. Or so he told himself to stave off the humiliation of tears during the loneliness of those first months.”

158 - “she will judge you as women judge men – not on the strength of their arguments, and not on their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of the passion, their strength of soul, their compassion, and – ah, this above all-their conversation.”

198 – “Is that was Beatrice is? My chance to amend my mistakes with Felipa? Or simply a away to make new ones?”

309 – “Love is random, fear is inevitable.”

315 – what a woman should do. they don’t always do what their husbands tell them, but they do almost everything that their husband asks them to do, especially when their husbands do everything the women ask them to do.

“the village that teaches the white men how to be human has to be different from all other villages.”

317 – “The men learned that rather than have the public humiliation of their wives taking refuge in the house of Diko or Putukam, they would control their anger.”

384 – “Who else but you would understand what I achieved? Who else but me could know how far beyond our dreams you succeeded?”

394 – “There is no good thing that does not cost a dear price. …Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”

QUESTIONS & SIDE NOTES:

What if it weren’t Christianity?

Were the Tarascan really about to work with iron?

No mention of driving the Jews from Spain (and getting their money), only the Moors. 172? 209? Vehement quote 330?

How did he prepare for China and Japan? He didn’t learn the languages 333 or bring a translator 276 or appropriate gifts for a king.

Arawak language

30 – “They don’t need death or blood to talk to gods” Taino cohoba ceremony

34 – “been woven into the same great basket of life” the basket of fish

116 – “The winds of the south will carry you west, and the winds further to the north will return you easily to Europe” – Columbus traveled faster at night

123 on – story of 1 artisan and 1 monkey (twins, again) and 1 and 7 death (names by calendar date), Popol Vuh (sacred text), Maya (not Mayan)

136 – “it was navigation that inspired him” Felipa brought him the boxes of charts and maps (did he really marry her because he knew these maps existed)

139 - He knew there was land 3000 miles away (he just thought it was Cipangu - Japan)

174 – “this is not a military expedition (that was his second voyage with 17 ships, chains, dogs, soldiers)

180 – large canoes and ships with rudders (and sails)

182 – “extensive contact between Mesoamerica and the Caribbean islands”

184-185 – human sacrifice

310 – Guacanagarí (and Anacoana)

188-189 – small pox and plague and carrier virus (284) and “to keep the Indies from being swept away in a tide of European diseases,”” 297 and “inability of the Indies to organize serious resistance.” 298

279 – assumptions that gold given by god, slavery, gold for Spain, and cultural misunderstanding

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

What is love, and why are some people un/able to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What do we do about it both logically and emotionally? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do? What makes one’s “narrative” authentic? or Who's real and who's a fraud? What distinguishes parental love from romantic love? Survival requires different tactics in different environments. What measures do the characters in the novel adopt to carry on?

THE ECHO MAKER – here’s our thoughts mingled with some quotes – a little preview – from GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE that helped to frame our thinking…

We talked about the two love triangles. Webber loves his wife, but is attracted to his “logic” equal, Barbara. Karin loves Daniel (her brother Mark’s friend), but attracted to Robert. Are we compelled to be with people who aren’t so good for us?
ECHO “People like people who make them feel more secure.”
THEORY “…people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.” p .86
THEORY “Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity.” p. 101

If you don’t believe something emotionally, you’ll never find any logic to support it.
ECHO “The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”
ECHO “How can I know the right thing to do if I can’t trust the way I feel?”
THEORY “While having emotions is under limbic control, speaking of them falls under the jurisdiction of the neocortex. That division of labor creates translation troubles.” p.57
THEORY “Even though subjects didn’t understand what they were doing or why it worked, they were still able to do it. They gradually developed a feel for the situation and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.” p. 108
THEORY Knowlton, Squire, Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory “…conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but now how well they did it. …They could only say they were using their intuition.” p. 110

We talked about the “identity” each character had and how the character’s changed throughout the story. Identity is formed/kept up through relationship and interactions with others.
ECHO “Mark stops recognizing his sister because he stops recognizing himself.”
ECHO “Mark liked her know, at least a little, even better, he liked what she’d been”
ECHO Karin says, “I’m a stand in …chameleon …nothing at the core …I am an imposter doing what others want”

What would it feel like to have the person you love not recognize you?
THEORY “Limbic regulation makes expulsion from the company of others the cruelest punishment human beings can devise.” (reference to banishment of Romeo) p. 87

How do we know a memory-injured person is better?
THEORY “If people form memories without realizing it, how could we ever know? Only by observing actions change from experience, and thus deducing what someone must have learned, regardless of what he says.” p. 107

We talked a bit about the metaphors/themes of birds, war, and water.
ECHO “Birds can’t love, they don’t have a self.”

Quotes we gleaned are below.

“A mad symphony on the fragility of human identity begins when 27-year-old Mark Schluter crashes his truck on a rural Nebraska road. He awakens convinced that his sister Karin — a vulnerable woman, desperately attached to her only brother — is an imposter. Mark's condition — Capgras syndrome — brings to town an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist, who, after the flop of his latest book, is beginning to question his own carefully cultivated identity.”

“Current theories suggest that this damage could lead to someone being able to recognize and identify a familiar face, while also having the feeling that something doesn't feel 'quite right', potentially causing a delusional belief that the person is an impostor if there are also impairments with reasoning.”

“Intact facial match generates memory with no emotional gratification. The cortex differs to the amygdala (which has a primary role in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events). It’s not what you think to feel, it’s what you feel you think.”

“Stops recognizing sister because he stops recognizing himself.”

“The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”

“People like people who make them feel more secure.”

“Clinging to medical science like her mother clung to Revelations.”

“How can I know the right thing to do if I can’t trust the way I feel?”

“The brain itself was a wash of one mood altering substance or another.”

“Mark liked her know, at least a little, better, he liked what she’d been”

“Maybe well being meant more than official sanity”

Birds can’t love, they don’t have a self.

Getting old is nothing more than accumulating apologies

Karin says, “I’m a stand in …chameleon …nothing at the core …I am an imposter doing what others want”

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

What happens when we find love and how do we cope with its loss?

From Amazon:
A story within a story that crosses generations and countries with a Jewish WWII experience in the backdrop/origin. The story spans a period of over 60 years and takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach. At the center of each main character's psyche is the issue of loneliness, and the need to fill a void left empty by lost love. Leo Gursky is a retired locksmith who immigrates to New York after escaping SS officers in his native Poland, only to spend the last stage of his life terrified that no one will notice when he dies. ("I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty.") Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer vacillates between wanting to memorialize her dead father and finding a way to lift her mother's veil of depression. At the same time, she's trying to save her brother Bird, who is convinced he may be the Messiah, from becoming a 10-year-old social pariah. As the connection between Leo and Alma is slowly unmasked, the desperation, along with the potential for salvation, of this unique pair is also revealed.

With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together the stories of Leo Gursky and 14-year-old Alma. This extraordinary book was inspired by the author's four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss — Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.

Leo Gursky is barely surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: 60 years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn't know it, that book survived; inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love.

I thought this was kinda cool (it's described in the book):
Universal Edibility Test (when finding food in the wild, how do you know it’s not poison?):
1. Don’t eat for 8 hours.
2. Divide the plant into its parts: roots, flower, stem, leaves, and bud.
3. Test a crushed piece of plant on the inside of your wrist.
4. Place a crushed piece of the plant to the inside of your lip for 3 minutes.
5. Hold a crushed piece of plant on your tongue for 15 minutes.
6. Chew a piece of plant for 15 minutes – DO NOT SWALLOW.
7. Swallow a piece of plant and wait 8 hours.
8. Eat ¼ cup.
9. Then it is edible

“Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

“Sometimes you need a stroke of genius and low and behold, genius comes and strokes you.”

“I was a locksmith. I could unlock any door in the city but I couldn’t unlock what I wanted.”

“It was years before I’d spent all the joy and pain born in me in that less than half a minute.”

Loneliness – “The immigrant who can’t speak English and is afraid of being depressed.” He keeps a copy of a one-night stand’s key to “pretend” he has a girlfriend.

“In my loneliness, it comforts me to think that the world’s doors, however closed, are never truly locked to me.” He then refers to Jews who can’t stay invisible forever, “Show me a Jew that survives, and I’ll show you a magician.”

“Forgive me, you mother didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved, perhaps I didn’t love her the way she needed either.”

“This is how they send the angel, stalled a the age when she loved you most.

“Bruno – he’s the friend I never had, the greatest character I ever created.”

“It’s strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving the directions.”

“This is part of the history of love, too.”

The History of Love
Nicole Krauss

Discussion Questions from a website:

1. Leo Gursky and Alma Singer make an unlikely pair, but what they share in common ultimately brings them together. What are the similarities between these two characters?

2. Leo fears becoming invisible. How does fiction writing prove a balm for his anxiety?

3. Explore the theme of authenticity throughout the narrative. Who's real and who's a fraud?

4. Despite his preoccupation with his approaching death, Leo has a spirit that is indefatigably comic. Describe the interplay of tragedy and comedy in The History of Love.

5. What distinguishes parental love from romantic love in the novel?

6. Why is it so important to Alma that Bird act normal? How normal is Alma?

7. When Alma meets Leo, she calls him the "oldest man in the world." Does his voice sound so ancient?

8. Uncle Julian tells Alma, "Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it." How does this philosophical take on the artistic process relate to the impulse to write in The History of Love?

9. Many different narrators contribute to the story of The History of Love. What makes each of their voices unique? How does Krauss seam them together to make a coherent novel?

10. Survival requires different tactics in different environments. Aside from Alma's wilderness guidelines, what measures do the characters in the novel adopt to carry on?

11. Most all of the characters in the novel are writers–from Isaac Moritz to Bird Singer. Alma's mother is somewhat exceptional, as she works as a translator. Yet she is not the only character to transform others' words for her creative practice. What are the similarities and differences between an author and a translator?

12. What are the benefits of friendship in the novel? Why might Alma feel more comfortable remaining Misha's friend rather than becoming his girlfriend?

13. The fame and adulation Isaac Moritz earns for his novels represent the rewards many writers hope for, while Leo, an unwitting ghostwriter, remains unrecognized for his work. What role does validation play in the many acts of writing in The History of Love?

14. Leo decides to model nude for an art class in order to leave an imprint of his existence. He writes to preserve the memories of his love for Alma Mereminski. Yet drawings and novels are never faithful renditions of the truth. Do you recognize a process of erasure in the stories he tells us?

15. Why might Krauss have given her novel the title The History of Love, the same as that of the fictional book around which her narrative centers?

A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon

What is love, and why are some people un/able to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What do we do about it both logically and emotionally? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do? What makes one’s “narrative” authentic? or Who's real and who's a fraud? What distinguishes parental love from romantic love? Survival requires different tactics in different environments. What measures do the characters in the novel adopt to carry on?

So, we all loved A General Theory of Love. It’s a “keeper.” I have six pages of quotes below, and another page with just some of the research highlighted.

We shared stories on our childhood/parent relationships, our current relationships (who we attract into our lives), drugs and friendships (not necessarily in combination), children, and therapy. And, in general, what we know and self-reflect about ourselves.

We talked about the changes in the brain which psychotherapy causes being the same changes that pharmacology can provide. The therapist relationship redoes the neuropathways. A therapist takes on a lot of sadness sand emotion and has to use boundaries, act as witness, and check themselves to not share too much of their own emotion.

We reflected on the importance of the infant attachment relationship. A child looks to their parent and asks, “Am I okay?” because they haven’t figured out those limbic emotions/feelings yet. No one cares for you like parent (or other important relationship). As a result, a child can grow to be extremely whiney or distant and not securely independent. When the attachment is “broken” therapy can help repair it.

I can’t capture the richness of the discussion, but Sex in the City seems to sum it up “If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone who loves the parts of you which you like the best” and they won’t discourage or stop you and might even encourage you to be those best parts.

Get out your dictionary; these authors are highly intelligent, eloquent thinkers who combine art and science facts to understand love. They use research and emotional real life experiences to explain love. The writing, for three doctors, is amazing and beautiful, not to mention all the technical information. This book is a powerfully humanistic look at the natural history of our deepest feelings, and why a simple hug is often more important than a portfolio full of stock options. Their grasp of neural science is topnotch, but the book is more about humans as social animals and how we relate to others--for once, the brain plays second fiddle to the heart.

The first sentence is:
What is love, and why are some people unable to find it? What is loneliness, and why does it hurt? What are relationships, and how and why do they work the way they do?

Here is the Table of Contents (also known as CHAPTERS) with some quotes to capture the content

Preface
“The book demonstrates that where intellect and emotion clash, the heart often has the greater wisdom.” p. viii

“As individuals and as a culture, our chance or happiness depend on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves – invisibly, improbably, inexorably – around love.” p. viii

“Love makes us who we are, and who we can become.” p. viii

The Heart’s Castle: Science Joins the Search for Love

“It has been said that neurotics build castles in the sky, while psychotics live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent. But it is the psychiatrists and psychologists who have been living within a palace of theory suspended over a void. When they build their understanding of the emotional mind, the brain was a cipher. The foundations of the edifice had to be fashioned out of the only substance in plentiful supply – the purest speculation.” p. 6

“And so the towers and walls of the Freudian citadel sprang into midair, where they remain: the looming turret of the censoring superego, the lofty arches of insight, the squat dungeon of the id.” p. 6

According to Freud (the authors will dismantle this thought), “the heart binds love inextricably to sexual pleasure and perversion – indeed, it holds that love is but a convoluted representation of forbidden, repellent, incestuous urges.” p. 7

“Freud’s logic was a veritable Mobius strip of circularity… equating denial with confession… such revolving door reasoning could corroborate any proposition, no matter how faulty.” p. 8

“Freud’s collapse in the last decade of the twentieth century has rendered our yearnings, desires, and dreams, if not inexplicable, then at least unexplained.” p. 10

“Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind’s Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage – including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.” p. 10.

“…only a few things worth knowing about love can be proven, and just a few things amenable to proof are worth knowing at all.” p. 11

“One must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the improvable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.” p. 12

“Before we were through scavenging, we had gathered together elements from neurodevelopment, evolutionary theory, psychopharmacology, neonatology, experimental psychology and computer science.” p. 12

“Those who attempt to study the body without books said an uncharted sea, William Osler observed, while those who only study books do not go to sea at all.” p.13

“Within that structure, we found new answers to the questions most worth asking about human lives: what are feelings, and why do we have them? What are relationships, and why do they exist? What causes emotional pain, and how can it be mended – with medications, with psychotherapy, with both? What is therapy, and how does it heal? How should we configure our society to further emotional health? How should we raise our children, and what should we teach them?” p. 13

“The evidence of that pain surrounds us, in the form of failed marriages, hurtful relationships, neglected children, unfulfilled ambitions, and thwarted dreams …these injuries combine to damage our society, where emotional suffering and its ramifications are commonplace. The roots of that suffering are often unseen and passed over, while proposed remedies cannot succeed, because they contradict emotional laws that our culture does not yet recognize.” p. 13

“No multilettered neuroanatomical diagrams lurk within these pages. We have set out not to map the mind in numbing detail, but to lead an agile reconnaissance over landscapes that lie hidden within the human soul.” p. 14

Kits, Cats, Sacks, and Uncertainty: How the Brain’s Basic Structure Poses Problems for Love

Heisenberg “introduced scientists to an uncomfortably indefinite world – where the extent of the knowable disappointingly dwindles, and such intangibles as point of view and method questioning permeate previously solid truths.” p. 17

Heisenberg the questions we ask change the world we see.” p. 18

“When people say that someone is afflicted with a ‘chemical imbalance’ (now synonymous with 'undesirable behavior beyond voluntary control’) they refer to one half of the signaling process, an unintended slight to a neuron’s electrical potency.” p.19

“…the planet’s longest-lived organism – the giant redwood tree of northern California, with a span of four thousand years – lives every minute of its nearly interminable life without the ability to react quickly to anything.” p. 20

“Mammals, in other words, take care of their own. Rearing and caretaking are so familiar to humans that we are apt to take them for granted, but these capacities were once novel – a revolution in social evolution. The most common reaction a reptile has to its young is indifference; it lays its eggs and walks (or slithers) away. Mammals form close-knit, mutually nurturant social groups – families – in which members spend time touching and caring for one another.” p. 25

Mammals have “limbic hardware” p. 26

“Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system in moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so.” p. 31

Einstein says “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.” p. 32

“A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right things, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. …Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.” p. 33

Archimedes’ Principle: How We Sense the Inner World of Other Hearts

“Our society underplays the importance of emotions. Having allied itself with the neocortical brain, our culture promotes analysis over intuition, logic above feeling. Cognition can yield riches, and human intellect has made our lives easier in ways that range from indoor plumbing to the Internet. …modern American plows emotions under – a costly practice that obstructs happiness and mislead people about the nature and significance of their lives.” p. 37

“…feeling deeply is synonymous with being alive.” p. 37

“In the mid-1960’s, however, a handful of researchers revived Darwin’s original concept of emotion as a heritable neural advantage.” p. 38

Ekman found “culture doesn’t determine the configuration of facial expressions: they are the universal language of humanity.” p. 39

“…a mood is a state of enhanced readiness to experience a certain emotion. Where an emotion is a single note, clearly struck, hanging for a moment in the still air, a mood is the extended, nearly inaudible echo that follows.” p. 45

“Children born today with a diminutive level of worry – those whose emotional physiology undereacts to stress, novelty, and threat – grow up to become criminals much more often than average. Criminality has long been known to be particularly heritable, and a worry volume set to low in the reptilian brain is part of the mechanism. Anxiety deters people from high-risk acts. Thos who do not experience the emotional weight of adverse consequences will not be sufficiently warned off.” p. 49

“…in response to limbic stimulation, small muscles on the mammalian face contract in precise configurations. The face is the only place in the body where muscles connect directly to skin.” p. 52

“The sensory experience flashes to the limbic brain, which will sift the event for its significance and prepare physiology to meet that singular moment.” p. 53

“…it takes neocortical genius to formulate the theory of relativity, but not to be sad after a loss, or to be thrilled at seeing the person you love across a crowded room. But while the neocortical brain does not produce emotionality, it does have a role in modulating feelings and integrating them with some of its own symbolic functions.” p. 57

“While having emotions is under limbic control, speaking of them falls under the jurisdiction of the neocortex. That division of labor creates translation troubles.” p. 57

“It isn’t just his mother’s beaming countenance but her synchrony that he requires – their mutually responsive interaction.” p. 62

A Fiercer Sea: How Relationships Permeate the Human body, Mind, and Soul

Lorenz “used the word imprinting for the tendency of birds and mammals to lock on to an early object.” p. 68

Frederick II found that “all infants died before uttering a single world …children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” p.69

Réne Spitz rediscovered in the 1940’s that “a lack of human interaction – handling, cooing, stroking, baby talk, and play – is fatal to infants.” p. 70

John Bowlby in the 1950’s produced attachment theory, a model that draws parallels between the bonding behavior of humans and animals.” p. 70

Harry Harlow worked with monkeys and found “Milk, whether a reinforcing reward or an id-satisfying elixer, failed spectacularly to establish any bond. In trial after trial, the more a doll could be made to resemble a mother monkey, the more infatuated the little monkeys became.” p. 72

“An identical mechanism weaves the ties between people who share a traumatic experience, as in wartime or a disaster. Designers of boot camps, and fraternity and sorority initiations, with varying degrees of consciousness exploit the same process to forge affiliations between dissimilar strangers who must be made to cohere.” p. 73

People hug each other on departures and arrivals – an act so familiar we might think it nothing more than a custom. But this style of embrace contains silent evidence of attachment; an imposed separation, or the threat of one, reflexively makes people want to reestablish skin-to-skin contact.” p. 73

p. 74 is about secure child, insecure-avoidant child, and insecure-ambivalent toddler.

Mary Ainsworth proved “that what a mother does with her baby matters.” p. 75

“Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair. p. 76

“Grief can give some insight into what it is like to have a major depression. Despair and depression are close cousins, enough so that despair in laboratory animals is often used as a model for human depressive illness. The disease state we call major depression in human beings may be a twisted variant of the despair reaction.” p.79

“Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decision on a rumored phantom like attachments (support groups). The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” p. 80-81

“…people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.” p. 86

“Limbic regulation makes expulsion from the company of others the cruelest punishment human beings can devise.” (reference to banishment of Romeo) p. 87

“Monkeys reared without their mothers often survive, but their neural systems are permanently maimed.” p. 87

Gary Kraemer found that “monkeys raised alone cannot engage in reciprocal interactions with normal monkeys, who consistently reject them (isolation syndrome).” p. 88

“The lack of an attuned mother is a nonevent for a reptile and a shattering injury to the complex and fragile limbic brain of a mammal.” p. 89

p. 92-96 “crucial chemical players: serotonin, opiates, oxytocin.” Serotonin helped a woman “leave her lover without intolerable suffering.” “People who deliberately injure themselves in minor but stinging ways …have one thing in common: an exquisite, lifelong sensitivity to separation’s pain. …Opiates provoke the lesser pain to trick the nervous systems into numbing the unendurable one. …human contact also generates internal opiate release.”

Gravity’s Incarnation: How Memory Stores and Shapes Love

Ewald Hering says “Memory collects the countless phenomena of our existence into a single whole; and as our bodies would be scattered into the dust of their component atoms if they were not held together by the attractions of matter, so our consciousness would be broken up into as many fragments as we had lived seconds but for the binding and unifying force of memory.” p. 100

“Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity.” p. 101

“First a memory is not thing. Cardiac muscle fibers are objects but the heartbeat they generate is a physiologic event, a collective flutter that propels life but nevertheless has no mass and occupies no space. …Memories are the heartbeats of the nervous system.” p. 103

“New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain areas as imagination.” p. 104

“A healthy mind flees backward in time every second… The hippocampus is a key player in creating explicit memories, but the memories themselves reside elsewhere.” p. 106

“If people form memories without realizing it, how could we ever know? Only by observing actions change from experience, and thus deducing what someone must have learned, regardless of what he says.” p. 107

“Even though subjects didn’t understand what they were doing or why it worked, they were still able to do it. They gradually developed a feel for the situation and intuitively grasped the essence of a complex problem that their logical brains could not crack.” p. 108

Knowlton, Squire, Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory “…conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but now how well they did it. …They could only say they were using their intuition.” p. 110

“When confronted with repetitive experiences, the brain unconsciously extracts the rules that underlie them.” p. 111

Antonio Damasio found that when forced to choose whom someone would ask for gum or cigarettes, a person stuck with “Good Guy” more often than chance predicts. Without event memory, without the ability to remember a name or a face, a person retains an emotional impression. p. 115

“If a child has the right parents, he learns the right principles – that love means protection, caretaking, loyalty, sacrifice… If he has emotionally unhealthy parents, a child unwittingly memorizes the precise lesson of their troubled relationship: that love is suffocation, that anger is terrifying, that dependence is humiliating, or one of a million other crippling variations.” p. 116

“All things appear to us as they appear to us, and it is impossible for them to appear otherwise.” p. 119

A Bend in the Road: How Love Changes Who We Are and Who We Can Become

“One manifestation of these orchestral evocations is the immediate selectivity of emotional memory. Gleeful people automatically remember happy times, while a depressed person effortlessly recalls incidents of loss, desertion, and despair. Anxious people dwell on past threats; paranoia instills a retrospective preoccupation with situations of persecution. If an emotion is sufficiently powerful, it can quash opposing networks so completely that their content becomes inaccessible – blotting out discordant sections of the past. Within the confines of that person’s virtuality, those events didn’t happen. To an outside observer, he seems oblivious to the whole of his own history.” p. 130

“Other people are troubled by emotional-memory networks that are simply too ready to pass around the signals that comprise negative feelings. Such a person finds he can’t shake an unpleasant emotion once it gets going. Rather than dwindling within minutes as they should, an emotion and its associated repercussions may drown out the rest of his mind for days. That kind of limbic sensitivity make the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to well nigh unbearable.” p. 131

Ulric Neisser interviewed forty-four students the morning after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, then repeated the questions two and a half years later. None correlated. One third were wildly inaccurate. In a neural network, new experiences blur the outlines of older ones. The reverse is also true the neural past interferes with the present. Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see. p. 135

“In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love." p. 144

The Book of Life: How Love Forms, Guides, and Alters a Child’s Emotional Mind

“The limbic systems has discernible emotional attributes – a disposition to chronic depression, an inability to assert oneself, a lifetime spent loving inattentive partners.” p. 146

“Certain stains of mice are thirty times more anxious than others; so are some human families. One brain’s blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive.” p. 152

“While genes are pivotal in establishing some aspects of emotionality, experience plays a central role in turning genes on and off. DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the card in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play” p. 152

“The inverse also holds: inadequate nurturance can disrupt a healthy limbic inheritance, imposing anxiety and depression on someone who had the genetic makings of a happy life.” p. 153

A child trusts his parent’s assessment of his tumble more than his, he can feel his pain and fright and disappointment but cannot gauge them. p. 155

“But a person cannot know himself until another knows him.” p. 157

“The child of emotionally balanced parents will be resilient to life’s minor shocks. Those who miss out on the practice find that in adulthood, their emotional footing pitches beneath them like the deck of a boat in rough waters. They are incomparably reactive to the loss of their anchoring attachments – without assistance, they are thrown back on threadbare resources. The end of a relationship is then not merely poignant but incapacitating.” p. 158

“Letters and phone calls are a salve on the wound, but they are insubstantial substitutes for the full-bandwidth sensory experience of nearness to the ones you love. To sustain a living relationship, limbic regulation demands sensory inputs that are rich, vivid, and frequent… limbic regulation operates weakly at a distance.” p. 158-159

“If a parent loves him in the healthiest way, wherein his needs are paramount, mistakes are forgiven, patience is plentiful and hurts are soothes as best they can be, then that is how he will relate to himself and others. Anomalous love – one where his needs don’t matter, or where love is suffocating or autonomy intolerable – make its ineradicable limbic stamp. Healthy loving then becomes incomprehensible. p. 160

“A relationship that strays from one’s prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation. Loneliness outweighs most pain. These two facts collude to produce one of love’s common and initially baffling quirks: most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a “nice” relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect.” p. 161

“Some people carry that tale (boys meets girl like mother and they fight and resent each other) in their hearts, and whether they find a player for the part of not, the piece can only come to grief… a child can form influential Attractors from relationships not just with mother and father, but also with siblings, nannies, even the family as a whole. In a home with ten children, for instance, each may extract a version of the local truth that there isn’t enough love to go around in the world, that you must fight fiercely and ceaselessly and still your heart will go hungry.” p. 162

“The plasticity of the brain – the readiness of neurons to sprout fresh connections and encode new knowledge – declines after adolescence… New lessons must fight an uphill battle against the patterns already ingrained…” p. 163-164

Between Stone And Sky: What Can Be Done to Heal Hearts Gone Astray

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

“The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy IS physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn’t beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness. Evolution has sculpted mammals into their present form: they become attuned to one another’s evocative signals and alter the structure of one another’s nervous systems. Psychotherapy’s transformative power comes fro engaging and directing these ancient mechanisms. Therapy is a living embodiment of limbic processes as corporeal as digestion or respiration. Without the physiologic unity limbic operation provides, therapy would indeed be a vapid banter some people suppose it to be.” p. 168

“Therapy should not seek to overrule the primeval forces predating civilization, because, like love, therapy is already one of them.” p. 169

“When people are hurting and out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations: groups, clubs, pets, marriages, friendships, masseuses, chiropractors, the Internet. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. Together, those bonds do more good than all the psychotherapists on the planet.” p. 171

“Depression often leads a person to shun social contact, nullifying the regulatory impact of his affiliative ties. Even when he does interact, a depressed person is likely to avert his gaze, cutting himself off from the interchange of emotional signals. And depression shuts down limbic circuits…” p. 172

“A person cannot choose to desire a certain kind of relationship, any more than he can will himself to ride a unicycle, play The Goldberg Variations, or speak Swahili.” p. 177

“A determined therapist does not strive to have a good relationship with his patient – it can’t be done. If a patient’s emotional mind would support good relationships, he or she would be out having hem. Instead a therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open into whatever relationship the patient has in mind – even a connection so dark that it touches the worst in him.” p. 178

McClelland’s work with r-l in Japanese demonstrates not only that the adult brain retains sufficient plasticity to encode fresh Attractors, but also that a specialized experiential environment can instill neural lessons when ordinary life cannot. Psychotherapy performs the same process on emotional discriminations.” p. 180

“Therapy does not clarify the object of desire so an intoxicated traveler can spend the rest of his life dodging it. Therapy worthy of the name changes what he wants. When he finishes, his heart tends in a healthier direction, the allure of former pathology diminishes and what once was barely noticeable becomes his new longing.” p. 181

“People who bond share unspoken assumptions about how love works, and if the Attractors underlying those premises need changing, they are frequently the last people in the word who can help each other.” p. 181

Freud says “The physician should be opaque to the patient, and like a mirror, show nothing but what is shown to him.” p. 184

A therapy’s results are particular to THAT relationship. A patient doesn’t become generically healthier; he becomes more like the therapist. New-sprung styles of relatedness, burgeoning knowledge for relationships and how to conduct them… dogma may determine what a therapist THINKS he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he IS. Thus the urgent necessity for a therapist to get his emotional house in order. His patients are coming to stay, and they may have to live there for the rest of their lives.” p. 186-187

A Walk in the Shadows: How Culture Blinds Us to the Ways of Love

“Twenty years of longitudinal data have proven that responsible parenting confers apparently permanent personality strengths. Primate rearing studies have detailed the neural devastation that follows early isolation, as well as the subtler derangements that persist in a young monkey’s brain from placing his mother under emotional stress.” p. 199

“Who but an enthralled parent will attend so closely that he learns all of a child’s subtle cures, picks up on the tiniest signals, and enters into the creation of a personal limbic dialect? Who else will feel the spontaneous ardor, fascination, and patience that are the requisite attendants to every complicated, creative endeavor?” p. 200

“Parents who receive inadequate love have less to give – to anybody, including their children… And youngsters who grow up without knowing the fullness of love will be fighting the odds when they mount their own struggle to establish a life bond with another. The emotional fate of children is inextricably bound to the ability of their parents to love one another…” p. 204

“In this time and place, our culture promotes as self-evident the notion that employable adults must have jobs and careers that children do fine with less… If we ask a parent to consider that modern lifestyles may deprive his child of a vital limbic ingredient, a neural vitamin, an emotional vaccine against later illness – then we risk arousing guilt and distress… The implication is clear: love doesn’t accomplish; it does nothing we need done… On one side, conservatives dismantle welfare so that single mothers must set children aside and return to work – not the labor of raising children, but the REAL world our culture values and upholds. On the other hand, liberals champion child care initiatives calling for an expansion in institutionalized surrogate care.” p. 202-203

“The skill of becoming and remaining attuned to another’s emotional rhythms requires a solid investment of year.” p. 205

Jean Giraudoux: “If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows – it becomes a month, a year, a century, it becomes too late… And when a relationship is ailing from frank time deprivation, both parties often aver that nothing can be done.” p. 205

Couples… are encouraged to achieve, not attach… our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being IN LOVE while discounting the importance of LOVING… IN LOVE rewrites reality as no other mental event can… True relatedness has a chance to blossom only with the waning of its intoxicating predecessor… adult love depends critically upon KNOWING the other.” p. 206-207

“…regulated people feel whole, centered, alive. With their physiology stabilized from the proper source, they are resilient to the stresses of daily life, or even to those of extraordinary circumstance.” p. 208

Withholding reciprocation cripples a healthy partner’s ability to nourish him; it poisons the well from which she draws the sustenance she means to give. A couple shares in ONE process, ONE dance, ONE story. Whatever improves that ONE benefits both; whatever detracts hurts and weakens both lives.” p. 209

A culture wise in love’s ways would understand a relationship’s demand for time. It would teach the difference between IN LOVE and LOVING; it would impart to its members the value of the mutuality on which their lives depend. A culture versed in the workings of emotional life would encourage and promote the activities that sustain health – togetherness with one’s partner and children; homes, families, and communities of connectedness. Such a society would guide its inhabitants to the joy that can be found at the heart of attachment – what Bertrand Russell called ‘in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.’” p. 209

“Close early relationships instill a permanent resilience to the degenerative influence of stress, while neglect sensitizes children to those effects.” p. 211

“But the real battle our country fights is not against drugs per se but limbic pain – isolation, sorrow, bitterness, anxiety, loneliness, and despair… Study after study has shown that children with close familial ties are far less likely to become entangled in substance abuse.” p. 212-213

“The insouciance of Just Say No assumes that the human brain and will are separable. They are not.” p. 214

“Gathering like people together to share their stories imbues a wordless strength, what Robert frost called in another context ‘a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but a momentary stay against confusion.’ The limbic regulation in a group can restore balance to its members, allowing them to feel centered and whole.” p. 214

“Natural limbic inclinations include loyalty, concern, and affection. ‘When you love,’ wrote Ernest Hemingway, ‘you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.’ Within their designed environment – a family – these impulses make fertile ground wherein healthy relatedness takes root and grows. The workplace bears strong resemblance to the home – indeed, for most of humanity’s history, the work environment WAS the home. In both settings, one encounters amiable companions, authoritative overseers, shared travail.” p. 215

“…most of what makes a socially functional human comes from connection – the shaping physiologic force of love.” p. 218

American medicine has come to rely on the intellect as agency of cure… The ‘alternative’ healers proliferated in response to the demand for a context of RELATEDNESS. These limbically wiser settings are friendlier to emotional needs – they involved regular contact with someone who participates in close listening, and often, the ancient reassurance of laying on hands.” p. 219-222

The Open Door: What the Future Holds for the Mysteries of Love

“Limbic resonance, regulation, and revision define our emotional existence; they are the walls and towers of the neural edifice evolution has built for mammals to live in. Our intellect is largely blind to them. Within the heart’s true edifice, those who allow themselves to be guided by Reason blunder into walls and stumble over sills. They are savants who can see too little of love to escape painful collisions with its unforgiving architecture.” p. 229

JUST THE RESEARCH

“And so the towers and walls of the Freudian citadel sprang into midair, where they remain: the looming turret of the censoring superego, the lofty arches of insight, the squat dungeon of the id.” p. 6

According to Freud (the authors will dismantle this thought), “the heart binds love inextricably to sexual pleasure and perversion – indeed, it holds that love is but a convoluted representation of forbidden, repellent, incestuous urges.” p. 7

“Freud’s logic was a veritable Mobius strip of circularity… equating denial with confession… such revolving door reasoning could corroborate any proposition, no matter how faulty.” p. 8

“Freud’s collapse in the last decade of the twentieth century has rendered our yearnings, desires, and dreams, if not inexplicable, then at least unexplained.” p. 10

“Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind’s Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage – including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.” p. 10.

Heisenberg “introduced scientists to an uncomfortably indefinite world – where the extent of the knowable disappointingly dwindles, and such intangibles as point of view and method questioning permeate previously solid truths.” p. 17

Heisenberg the questions we ask change the world we see.” p. 18
“Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system in moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so.” p. 31

Einstein says “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.” p. 32

“In the mid-1960’s, however, a handful of researchers revived Darwin’s original concept of emotion as a heritable neural advantage.” p.38

Ekman found “culture doesn’t determine the configuration of facial expressions: they are the universal language of humanity.” p. 39

Lorenz “used the word imprinting for the tendency of birds and mammals to lock on to an early object.” p. 68

Frederick II found that “all infants died before uttering a single world …children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” p.69

Réne Spitz rediscovered in the 1940’s that “a lack of human interaction – handling, cooing, stroking, baby talk, and play – is fatal to infants.” p. 70

John Bowlby in the 1950’s produced attachment theory, a model that draws parallels between the bonding behavior of humans and animals.” p. 70

Harry Harlow worked with monkeys and found “Milk, whether a reinforcing reward or an id-satisfying elixer, failed spectacularly to establish any bond. In trial after trial, the more a doll could be made to resemble a mother monkey, the more infatuated the little monkeys became.” p. 72

Mary Ainsworth proved “that what a mother does with her baby matters.” p. 75
Knowlton, Squire, Seth Ramus tested the limits of implicit memory “…conscious attempts at problem-solving got in the way of burgeoning intuition and actually impaired subjects’ performance. Another experiment demonstrated that carefully explaining the significance of the clues in advance improved how well subjects understood the task, but now how well they did it.

Antonio Damasio found that when forced to choose whom someone would ask for gum or cigarettes, a person stuck with “Good Guy” more often than chance predicts. Without event memory, without the ability to remember a name or a face, a person retains an emotional impression. p. 115

Ulric Neisser interviewed forty-four students the morning after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, then repeated the questions two and a half years later. None correlated. One third were wildly inaccurate. In a neural network, new experiences blur the outlines of older ones. The reverse is also true the neural past interferes with the present. Experience methodically rewires the brain, and the nature of what it has seen dictates what it can see. p. 135

McClelland’s work with r-l in Japanese demonstrates not only that the adult brain retains sufficient plasticity to encode fresh Attractors, but also that a specialized experiential environment can instill neural lessons when ordinary life cannot. Psychotherapy performs the same process on emotional discriminations.” p. 180

Freud says “The physician should be opaque to the patient, and like a mirror, show nothing but what is shown to him.” p. 184

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

What does having a disability means to the individual as well as to the family. Do we have any "disabilities" which other people need to accommodate when they are with us?

We watched an Autism video clip

I have an excerpt below on literary techniques, but first, our thoughts! Christopher seems to have figured out the REAL rules of human relationships – you DON’T really tell the truth. We talked about how parents (and spouses) really have to support someone on the spectrum. Someone needs to love and guide them. Kids can internalize strategies and rules (be trained), but it takes a very understanding person to find the underlying ways autistic kids think. And, some parents, change their behaviors so automatically, that they may not know they are doing it. For example, they may cue polite respectful behavior more constantly or they may prepare food in particular ways. Christopher remembers his teacher’s words.

We talked about our own experiences with children who exhibit autistic/Asberger behaviors and whether schools have good supports (professional development, aides, people who know what they are doing). We also talked about dealing with the parents of those children, as well as being friends with people whose children exhibit symptoms. Some researchers predict 5 kids per class by 2010 will have spectrum behaviors, and if we’re lucky, we’ll have learned a lot more about how to help them. Ten years ago, we didn’t know as much as we know now, and keeping jobs and relationships was incredibly difficult for people with these symptoms, but now teachers know much more about the necessary “scripts.”

We wondered what the level of emotional connection with other people is for an autistic child. One example which was shared was about how a girl imagined index cards in her brains with facial expressions to help understand people’s reactions and figure out what is going on. She has a lot more now and we guessed she probably added and updated some by herself and some from other people telling her.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME
This novel won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Its title is a quotation of a remark made by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1893 short story, "Silver Blaze".

The story is written in the first-person narrative of Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old boy living in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1998, who has Asperger syndrome. Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

Christopher Boone goes to a school for students with special needs because he has a form of autism. Although it is never definitively stated within the story which autistic spectrum condition Christopher has, the summary on the book's inside cover states it to be Asperger syndrome. Christopher is a mathematical savant, has a photographic memory, and is extremely observant. However, he has difficulty understanding human behaviour, gestures and relationships. He dreams of being an astronaut and takes a deep interest in mathematics. He owns a pet rat named Toby, which he feeds with food pellets.

Christopher has many traits that set him apart from others because of his perception of life. He is unable to recognise and comprehend facial expressions besides 'happy' and 'sad' and also has difficulty in understanding metaphors. He likes lists and facts, has a fear of strangers and new places, and his favourite dream is one in which everyone except people similar to him dies. In addition, he is over-sensitive to information and stimuli. For this reason, he screams and reacts violently to people who touch him. However, he doesn't mind pressing his fingers against those of his parents' as a gesture of love. He curls up and groans to protect himself against overwhelming noise or information.

Christopher hates the colours yellow and brown, but loves red. This extends to adding red food dye to brown- or yellow-coloured food (and being unable to eat two different kinds of food that are touching), and also his belief that seeing three, four or five red cars in a row means it's a "quite good", "good", or "super good" day respectively, while four yellow cars signify a "black" day. Finally, he dislikes eating food from new places and the furniture being moved.

CHARACTERS
* Ed Boone: Christopher's father, who is a boiler maker. He lied to Christopher that Christopher's mother died of a heart attack. He is usually patient with Christopher.

* Judy Boone: Christopher's mother, who left Ed and Christopher for Mr Shears. She is short-tempered and this was a factor in her leaving the family.

* Siobhan: a staff member at Christopher's school, who understands Christopher well and encourages him to write his account.

* Roger Shears (Mr Shears): he lives near the Boones and has an affair with Judy, and the two run away together to live in London.

* Eileen Shears (Mrs Shears): a woman whose dog, Wellington, is killed by Ed. For a time after Judy leaves the family, Ed tries to assimilate her into the family.

* Mrs Alexander: one of Christopher's neighbours, who tells him about the affair between his mother and Mr Shears.

* Rhodri: one of Ed's colleagues

* Mrs Gascoyne: headteacher at Christopher's school who (reluctantly) allows Christopher to take A-level mathematics

* Reverend Peters: the invigilator for the A-level maths exam. He becomes involved in a discussion with Christopher regarding the existence of God.

* Mrs Peters: Christopher's art teacher


PLOT
Christopher discovers the dead body of Wellington, his neighbour's poodle, speared by a garden fork. Having been blamed for it (and later acquitted of the crime), he decides to investigate to clear his name. However, he is severely limited by his own fears and difficulties when interpreting the world around him. Throughout his adventures, Christopher records his experiences in the form of a book, entitled The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

During his investigation into Wellington's demise, Christopher meets people whom he has never before encountered (even though they live on the same street). He eventually discovers that Mr Shears, who used to inhabit the house opposite from his, had an affair with his mother, Judy. Christopher chronicles this and other discoveries in his book.

Ed, his father, discovers the book and confiscates it from Christopher, after a brief fight between them. In his search for the hidden book, Christopher uncovers a trove of letters to himself from his mother, dated after she allegedly died — which his father had also concealed. Christopher had been told by Ed that she died of a heart attack. Christopher concludes that she is still alive and that his father has lied to him. He is so thoroughly shocked by this fact that he is unable to move, curls up on the bed, vomits, and groans for several hours till his father returns home.

Ed realises that Christopher has read the letters and cleans Christopher up. He then confesses that he had indeed lied about Judy's death and also that it was he who killed Wellington, stating that it was a mistake due to his anger after a heated argument with Mrs Shears.

Christopher, having lost all trust in his father and fearing that he may also try to kill him, decides to escape from home and live with his mother. Guided by his mother's address from the letters, he embarks on an adventurous trip to London, where his mother lives with Mr Shears.

After a long and confusing journey, evading policemen who have been dispatched to find him (due to Ed, who called the police about his disappearance), and feeling ill due to the overwhelming information from the crowds and the signs in the trains, he finally finds his way to his mother and Mr Shears' home.

His mother is happy at his appearance and tries to keep him with her, despite the objections of both Mr Shears and Ed, the latter having tracked Christopher down with the aid of the police. His mother eventually leaves Mr Shears, their relationship apparently broken down because of the conflict over Christopher.

She then moves into a rented room in Swindon and, after an argument with Ed, agrees to let Ed meet with Christopher daily for a little while. However, at this stage, Christopher remains terrified of his father; he hopes Ed will be imprisoned for killing Wellington. The story ends with Ed promising that he will rebuild trust with Christopher slowly, "no matter how long it takes" in his daily brief sessions, and Christopher asserting that he will take further A-level exams and attend university. He had completed his first mathematics A-level with top grades, and just maybe he will eventually become an astronaut.

LITERARY TECHNIQUES
The book's autistic narrator, Christopher, is gifted at and focused on mathematics: this is reflected by his inclusion of several famous puzzles of maths and logic. The book's appendix is a reproduction of a question from Christopher's A-level examination, with annotated answers. The book also includes the unlikely incident of seeing four yellow cars in a row which is bad, an event which holds significance to the narrator, who has an aversion to the colour yellow.

Christopher's mathematical interests are reflected in his numbering his chapters strictly with prime numbers, ignoring composite numbers such as 4 and 6. So the first is Chapter 2, followed by 3, then 5, 7, 11, and so on. In addition, the contents in consecutive chapters alternate: Chapter 2 is about the unfolding story; Chapter 3 explores some aspects of the narrator's inner life not necessarily directly relevant to the immediate action; Chapter 5 returns to the narrative. This alternation continues throughout the book with the story often digressing into seeming unconnected subjects such as Christopher's atheism and the Cottingley Fairies.

Another technique used to emphasise the different perceptions of the world experienced by people with autism, is the switching of fonts and use of long, run-on sentences when describing the surroundings. Thus the book's overall structure as well as its content supports the literary device that what we are reading is a novel penned by the autistic narrator, Christopher, rather than the author. This general technique of fictional autobiography was exploited by Daniel Defoe in what is regarded as the first novel in English, Robinson Crusoe. But it really follows the Sherlock Holmes structure.

Christopher's narration is very precise and reliable with regard to objective facts but his view of the events of the story is often very different from what might be expected. For example, in one scene, Christopher is nearly killed by an oncoming train as he retrieves his pet rat, who has scampered onto the tracks of the London Underground. Through his narration, we see the scene unfold completely, but he himself remains unaware of the danger he is in, and of the closeness of his brush with death. This is also an example of dramatic irony, in which the reader understands more about a situation than the character does. Christopher also represents (what would not necessarily be obvious to all readers prior to reading the book) the fact that not every child will think in the same way — another thing that the book has been praised for. Nevertheless, some readers on the autistic spectrum have criticised it for giving an inaccurate portrayal of their identity.[1]

Discussion Questions from a website:

1. On pages 45–48, Christopher describes his "Behavioral Problems" and the effect they had on his parents and their marriage. What is the effect of the dispassionate style in which he relates this information?

2. Given Christopher's aversion to being touched, can he experience his parents' love for him, or can he only understand it as a fact, because they tell him they love him? Is there any evidence in the novel that he experiences a sense of attachment to other people?

3. One of the unusual aspects of the novel is its inclusion of many maps and diagrams. How effective are these in helping the reader see the world through Christopher's eyes?

4. What challenges does The Curious Incident present to the ways we usually think and talk about characters in novels? How does it force us to reexamine our normal ideas about love and desire, which are often the driving forces in fiction? Since Mark Haddon has chosen to make us see the world through Christopher's eyes, what does he help us discover about ourselves?

5. Christopher likes the idea of a world with no people in it [p. 2]; he contemplates the end of the world when the universe collapses [pp. 10–11]; he dreams of being an astronaut, alone in space [pp. 50–51], and that a virus has carried off everyone and the only people left are "special people like me" [pp. 198–200]. What do these passages say about his relationship to other human beings? What is striking about the way he describes these scenarios?

6. On pages 67–69, Christopher goes into the garden and contemplates the importance of description in the book he is writing. His teacher Siobhan told him "the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head" [p. 67]. What is the effect of reading Christopher's extended description, which begins, "I decided to do a description of the garden" and ends "Then I went inside and fed Toby"? How does this passage relate to a quote Christopher likes from The Hound of the Baskervilles: "The world is full of obvious things which nobody by chance ever observes" [p. 73]?

7. According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, Hans Asperger, the doctor whose name is associated with the kind of autism that Christopher seems to have, notes that some autistic people have "a sort of intelligence scarcely touched by tradition and culture --- unconventional, unorthodox, strangely pure and original, akin to the intelligence of true creativity" [An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks, NY: Vintage Books, 1995, pp. 252–53]. Does the novel's intensive look at Christopher's fascinating and often profound mental life suggest that in certain ways, the pity that well-meaning, "normal" people might feel for him is misdirected? Given his gifts, does his future look promising?

8. Christopher experiences the world quantitatively and logically. His teacher Mr. Jeavons tells him that he likes math because it's safe. But Christopher's explanation of the Monty Hall problem gives the reader more insight into why he likes math. Does Mr. Jeavons underestimate the complexity of Christopher's mind and his responses to intellectual stimulation? Does Siobhan understand Christopher better than Mr. Jeavons?

9. Think about what Christopher says about metaphors and lies and their relationship to novels [pp. 14–20]. Why is lying such an alien concept to him? In his antipathy to lies, Christopher decides not to write a novel, but a book in which "everything I have written . . . is true" [p. 20]. Why do "normal" human beings in the novel, like Christopher's parents, find lies so indispensable? Why is the idea of truth so central to Christopher's narration?

10. Which scenes are comical in this novel, and why are they funny? Are these same situations also sad, or exasperating?

11. Christopher's conversations with Siobhan, his teacher at school, are possibly his most meaningful communications with another person. What are these conversations like, and how do they compare with his conversations with his father and his mother?

12. One of the primary disadvantages of the autistic is that they can't project or intuit what other people might be feeling or thinking --- as illustrated in the scene where Christopher has to guess what his mother might think would be in the Smarties tube [pp. 115–16]. When does this deficit become most clear in the novel? Does Christopher seem to suffer from his mental and emotional isolation, or does he seem to enjoy it?

13. Christopher's parents, with their affairs, their arguments, and their passionate rages, are clearly in the grip of emotions they themselves can't fully understand or control. How, in juxtaposition to Christopher's incomprehension of the passions that drive other people, is his family situation particularly ironic?

14. On pages 83–84, Christopher explains why he doesn't like yellow and brown, and admits that such decisions are, in part, a way to simplify the world and make choices easier. Why does he need to make the world simpler? Which aspects of life does he find unbearably complicated or stressful?

15. What is the effect of reading the letters Christopher's mother wrote to him? Was his mother justified in leaving? Does Christopher comprehend her apology and her attempt to explain herself [pp. 106–10]? Does he have strong feelings about the loss of his mother? Which of his parents is better suited to taking care of him?

16. Christopher's father confesses to killing Wellington in a moment of rage at Mrs. Shears [pp. 121–22], and swears to Christopher that he won't lie to him ever again. Christopher thinks, "I had to get out of the house. Father had murdered Wellington. That meant he could murder me, because I couldn't trust him, even though he had said 'Trust me,' because he had told a lie about a big thing" [p. 122]. Why is Christopher's world shattered by this realization? Is it likely that he will ever learn to trust his father again?

17. How much empathy does the reader come to feel for Christopher? How much understanding does he have of his own emotions? What is the effect, for instance, of the scenes in which Christopher's mother doesn't act to make sure he can take his A-levels? Do these scenes show how little his mother understands Christopher's deepest needs?

18. Mark Haddon has said of The Curious Incident, "It's not just a book about disability. Obviously, on some level it is, but on another level . . . it's a book about books, about what you can do with words and what it means to communicate with someone in a book. Here's a character whom if you met him in real life you'd never, ever get inside his head. Yet something magical happens when you write a novel about him. You slip inside his head, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world" [http://www.powells.com/authors/haddon.html ]. Is a large part of the achievement of this novel precisely this --- that Haddon has created a door into a kind of mind his readers would not have access to in real life?

19. Christopher's journey to London underscores the difficulties he has being on his own, and the real disadvantages of his condition in terms of being in the world. What is most frightening, disturbing, or moving about this extended section of the novel [pp. 169–98]?

20. In his review of The Curious Incident, Jay McInerney suggests that at the novel's end "the gulf between Christopher and his parents, between Christopher and the rest of us, remains immense and mysterious. And that gulf is ultimately the source of this novel's haunting impact. Christopher Boone is an unsolved mystery" [The New York Times Book Review, 6/15/03, p. 5)]. Is this an accurate assessment? If so, why?