Awesome post on David Hume, Desideri, Buddhism and how it helped someone's midlife crisis

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-david-hume-helped-me-solve-my-midlife-crisis/403195/

 How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis

David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment

• Alison Gopnik
• October 2015 Issue
• 
  

In 2006, i was 50—and I was falling apart.

Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy.
I knew who I was professionally. When I was 16, I’d discovered cognitive science and analytic philosophy, and knew at once that I wanted the tough-minded, rigorous, intellectual life they could offer me. I’d gotten my doctorate at 25 and had gone on to become a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley.
I knew who I was personally, too. For one thing, I liked men. I was never pretty, but the heterosexual dance of attraction and flirtation had always been an important part of my life, a background thrum that brightened and sharpened all the rest. My closest friends and colleagues had all been men.
More than anything, though, I was a mother. I’d had a son at 23, and then two more in the years that followed. For me, raising children had been the most intellectually interesting and morally profound of experiences, and the happiest. I’d had a long marriage, with a good man who was as involved with our children as I was. Our youngest son was on his way to college.

I’d been able to combine these different roles, another piece of good fortune. My life’s work had been to demonstrate the scientific and philosophical importance of children, and I kept a playpen in my office long after my children had outgrown it. Children had been the center of my life and my work—the foundation of my identity.
And then, suddenly, I had no idea who I was at all.
My children had grown up, my marriage had unraveled, and I decided to leave. I moved out of the big, professorial home where I had raised my children, and rented a room in a crumbling old house. I was living alone for the first time, full of guilt and anxiety, hope and excitement.
I fell in love—with a woman, much to my surprise—and we talked about starting a new life together. And then my lover ended it.
Joy vanished. Grief took its place. I’d chosen my new room for its faded grandeur: black-oak beams and paneling, a sooty brick fireplace in lieu of central heating. But I hadn’t realized just how dark and cold the room would be during the rainy Northern California winter. I forced myself to eat the way I had once coaxed my children (“just three more bites”), but I still lost 20 pounds in two months. I measured each day by how many hours had gone by since the last crying jag (“There now, no meltdowns since 11 this morning”).
I couldn’t work. The dissolution of my own family made the very thought of children unbearable. I had won a multimillion-dollar grant to investigate computational models of children’s learning and had signed a contract to write a book on the philosophy of childhood, but I couldn’t pass a playground without tears, let alone design an experiment for 3-year-olds or write about the moral significance of parental love.

Everything that had defined me was gone. I was no longer a scientist or a philosopher or a wife or a mother or a lover.
My doctors prescribed Prozac, yoga, and meditation. I hated Prozac. I was terrible at yoga. But meditation seemed to help, and it was interesting, at least. In fact, researching meditation seemed to help as much as actually doing it. Where did it come from? Why did it work?
I had always been curious about Buddhism, although, as a committed atheist, I was suspicious of anything religious. And turning 50 and becoming bisexual and Buddhist did seem far too predictable—a sort of Berkeley bat mitzvah, a standard rite of passage for aging Jewish academic women in Northern California. But still, I began to read Buddhist philosophy.

In 1734, in scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart.

As a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today, with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was suffering from anxiety and depression. The doctors told him not to read so much and prescribed antihysteric pills, horseback riding, and claret—the Prozac, yoga, and meditation of their day.

The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book. Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.
In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no soul, no coherent self, no “I.” “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he wrote in the Treatise, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”

How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day?

Hume had always been one of my heroes. I had known and loved his work since I was an undergraduate. In my own scientific papers I’d argued, like Hume, that the coherent self is an illusion. My research had convinced me that our selves are something we construct, not something we discover. I had found that when we are children, we don’t connect the “I” of the present to the “I” of the past and the future. We learn to be who we are.

Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise.

Hume articulates a thoroughgoing, vertiginous, existential kind of doubt. In the Treatise, he reports that when he first confronted those doubts himself he was terrified—“affrighted and confounded.” They made him feel like “some strange uncouth monster.” No wonder he turned to the doctors.
But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.
In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.

How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day? What turned the neurotic Presbyterian teenager into the great founder of the European Enlightenment?
In my shabby room, as I read Buddhist philosophy, I began to notice something that others had noticed before me. Some of the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in Hume’s Treatise. But this was crazy. Surely in the 1730s, few people in Europe knew about Buddhist philosophy.
Still, as I read, I kept finding parallels. The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of “emptiness,” he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
“I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.”
That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
Or could he have?

I settled into a new routine. Instead of going to therapy, I haunted the theology sections of used-book stores and spent the solitary evenings reading. I would sit in front of my grand fireplace, where a single sawdust log smoldered, wrapped in several duvets, and learn more about Buddhism.

I discovered that at least one person in Europe in the 1730s not only knew about Buddhism but had studied Buddhist philosophy for years. His name was Ippolito Desideri, and he had been a Jesuit missionary in Tibet. In 1728, just before Hume began the Treatise, Desideri finished his book, the most complete and accurate European account of Buddhist philosophy to be written until the 20th century. The catch was that it wasn’t published. No Catholic missionary could publish anything without the approval of the Vatican—and officials there had declared that Desideri’s book could not be printed. The manuscript disappeared into the Church’s archives.
I still couldn’t think or write about children, but maybe I could write an essay about Hume and Buddhism and include Desideri as a sort of close call—a missed connection.
I consulted Ernest Mossner’s classic biography of Hume. When Hume wrote the Treatise, he was living in a little French town called La Flèche, 160 miles southwest of Paris. Mossner said Hume went to La Flèche to “rusticate,” probably because it was cheap. But he also mentioned that La Flèche was home to the Jesuit Royal College.
So Hume lived near a French Jesuit college when he wrote the Treatise. This was an intriguing coincidence for my essay. But it didn’t really connect him to Desideri, of course, who had lived in Rome and Tibet.
When I searched the library databases at Berkeley, I found hundreds of books and thousands of articles I could read about David Hume, but only two about Ippolito Desideri: one article and a drastically abridged 1932 English translation of his manuscript. The article had appeared in Indica, an obscure journal published in Bombay, in 1986. I had to get it shipped down from the regional storage facility, where millions of books and articles in Berkeley’s collection languish unread. Ever since my love affair had ended, I had gone to bed each night dreading the next day. But now I found myself actually looking forward to tomorrow, when the article would arrive.

It mostly recapitulated what I had read before. But the author, an Italian named Luciano Petech, mentioned that he had edited a 1952 collection of missionary documents, I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, and that it included some Desideri manuscripts. And, in passing, he provided me with an interesting new detail. “In January 1727,” Petech wrote, “he left India, once more on a French ship, and arrived in Paris.”
Desideri had come back to Rome through France—one more intriguing coincidence.
The abridged Desideri translation could be read only in the Rare Book Room, so I headed there the next day. It was a beautiful book with red capital letters and romantic tipped-in photographs of majestic Buddhas and tranquil Himalayan valleys. I began to read eagerly.
I had been obsessively, ruminatively, fruitlessly trying to figure out who I was and what I would do without work or love or children to care for. It was like formulating an argument when the premises refuse to yield the conclusion, or analyzing a data set that makes no sense. But if I couldn’t figure myself out, I decided, I could at least try to figure out Desideri, and so I lost myself in his book, and his life.

It’s a remarkable story. In his 20s, Desideri conceived his own grand project—to convert the Indies to Catholicism—and in 1716 he became one of the first Europeans to go to Lhasa, and the first to stay. He was passionate, emotional, and easily exasperated. He was also curious, brave, and unbelievably tenacious. In an early letter written on his way to Tibet, he says he feels as if he is being torn apart on the rack. “It pleases his divine majesty to draw my whole heart away with sweet and amorous violence to where the perdition of souls is great,” he wrote, “and at the same time with fastest bonds are my feet bound and drawn elsewhere.” He kept up that intense pitch in everything he did.

Desideri sailed from Rome to India in 1712. In 1714 he began walking from Delhi across the Himalayas to Lhasa—a trek that lasted 18 months. He slept on the ground, in the snow, and struggled with snow blindness and frostbite. At one point he made his way over a rushing river by clinging precariously to a bridge made of two vine ropes. To get through the Ladakh desert, he joined the caravan of a Tartar princess and argued about theology with her each night in her tent.
When he finally arrived in Lhasa, the king and the lamas welcomed him enthusiastically, and their enthusiasm didn’t wane when he announced that he was a lama himself and intended to convert them all to Catholicism. In that case, the king suggested, it would be a good idea for him to study Buddhism. If he really understood Buddhism and he could still convince the Tibetans that Catholicism was better, then of course they would convert.
Desideri accepted the challenge. He spent the next five years in the Buddhist monasteries tucked away in the mountains around Lhasa. The monasteries were among the largest academic institutions in the world at the time. Desideri embarked on their 12-year-long curriculum in theology and philosophy. He composed a series of Christian tracts in Tibetan verse, which he presented to the king. They were beautifully written on the scrolls used by the great Tibetan libraries, with elegant lettering and carved wooden cases.

But his project was rudely interrupted by war. An army from a nearby kingdom invaded, laid waste to Lhasa, murdered the king—and then was itself defeated by a Chinese army. Desideri retreated to an even more remote monastery. He worked on his Christian tracts and mastered the basic texts of Buddhism. He also translated the work of the great Buddhist philosopher Tsongkhapa into Italian.
In his book, Desideri describes Tibetan Buddhism in great and accurate detail, especially in one volume titled “Of the False and Peculiar Religion Observed in Tibet.” He explains emptiness, karma, reincarnation, and meditation, and he talks about the Buddhist denial of the self.
It’s hard to imagine how Desideri kept any sense at all of who he was. He spent all his time reading, writing, and thinking about another religion, in another language. (Thupten Jinpa, the current Dalai Lama’s translator, told me that Desideri’s Tibetan manuscripts are even more perceptive than the Italian ones, and are written in particularly beautiful Tibetan, too.) As I read his book, I could feel him fighting to retain his missionary convictions as he immersed himself in the practices of “the false and peculiar religion” and became deeply attached to its practitioners.

That sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhism. Or could he have?

Desideri overcame Himalayan blizzards, mountain torrents, and war. But bureaucratic infighting got him in the end. Rival missionaries, the Capuchins, were struggling bitterly with the Jesuits over evangelical turf, and they claimed Tibet for themselves. Michelangelo Tamburini, the head of the Jesuits, ordered Desideri to return to Europe immediately, until the territory dispute was settled. The letter took two years to reach Tibet, but once it arrived, in 1721, Desideri had no choice. He had to leave.

He spent the next 11 years writing and rewriting his book and appealing desperately to the Vatican to let him return to Tibet. It had clearly become the only place where he really felt that he was himself. In 1732 the authorities finally ruled—in favor of the Capuchins. His book would not be published and he could never return. He died four months later.

Almost at the end of Desideri’s book, I came across a sentence that brought me up short. “I passed through La Flèche,” he wrote, “and on September the fourth arrived in the city of Le Mans.”

La Flèche? Where Hume had lived? I let out an astonished cry. The librarians, accustomed to Rare Book Room epiphanies, smiled instead of shushing me.
I headed to a café, wolfed down a sandwich (I was suddenly hungry again), and took stock of this new discovery. Could there be a connection after all?
The English Desideri was abridged. Could I find out more in the Italian book of missionary documents that Petech had described in his article? The seven volumes of the 1952 I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, never translated or reprinted, arrived from the storage facility the next day.
I called my brother Blake, an art historian who knows Italian (and French, German, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon), and got him to translate for me. Blake had been my mainstay through my darkest days, and I think he was immeasurably relieved that this time my late-night emergency phone call was about an obscure manuscript instead of a broken heart.
With Blake’s help, I made out a longer version of the passage about France. “On the 31st (August) around noon,” Desideri wrote, “I arrived at our Royal College at La Flèche. There I received the particular attention of the rector, the procurator, Père Tolu and several other of the reverend fathers. On the 4th I left La Flèche.”

So Desideri not only had been to La Flèche but had also talked with the Jesuits at the Royal College at some length. Reading Petech with Blake, I realized that the Jesuits at La Flèche might even have had a copy of Desideri’s manuscript. Petech described the history of Desideri’s manuscript in detail. He explained that Desideri had actually written multiple manuscripts about his travels. He wrote the first while he was sailing from India to France, and evidence suggests that he had this manuscript with him as he made his way from France to Rome in 1727. When he got back to Rome, he revised his text considerably, and six months later he produced a new manuscript. In this version, Desideri writes, “When I returned through France and Italy to Tuscany and Rome, I was strongly urged by many men of letters, by gentlemen and by important personages, to write down in proper order all I had told them at different times.” The reason? The religion of Tibet was “so entirely different from any other,” he wrote, that it “deserves to be known in order to be contested.”
So it was possible that Desideri had sent the Royal College at La Flèche a copy of this revised manuscript; the Jesuits regularly circulated such unpublished reports among themselves.
But Desideri visited in 1727. David Hume arrived at La Flèche eight years later, in 1735. Could anyone there have told Hume about Desideri? I couldn’t find any trace of Père Tolu, the Jesuit who had been especially interested in Desideri.

Maybe Hume’s letters contained a clue? I sat on my narrow sofa bed, listening to the rain fall, and made my way through his voluminous correspondence. To be immersed in Desideri’s world was fascinating but exhausting. To be immersed in Hume’s world was sheer pleasure. Hume writes better than any other great philosopher and, unlike many great philosophers, he is funny, humane, fair, and wise. He charmed the sophisticated Parisian ladies of the grand salons, though he was stout, awkward, and absentminded and spoke French with an execrable Scots accent. They called him “le bon David”—the good David.
Hume always described his time at La Flèche with great fondness. In the one letter of his that survives from his time there, he says he is engaged in constant study. La Flèche’s library was exceptional—reading books was a far better way to learn, he notes, than listening to professors. As for reaping all the advantages of both travel and study, he writes, “there is no place more proper than La Flèche … The People are extremely civil and sociable and besides the good company in the Town, there is a college of a hundred Jesuits.”
A later letter shows that Hume talked with at least one of those Jesuits at some length. He recalls walking in the cloister of the Royal College, his head “full of the topics of my Treatise,” with a Jesuit “of some parts and learning.” The Jesuit was describing a miracle, and this inspired Hume to come up with one of his cleverest skeptical arguments. A real miracle, he said, is by definition highly improbable, which means that deception or delusion is always a more likely—and therefore better—explanation. The Jesuit understood this reasoning (he was “very much gravelled,” Hume wrote) but said that it simply couldn’t be right, because if it were, you would have to reject not just the miracle in question but all the Gospels. “Which observation,” Hume the skeptic noted drily, “I thought it proper to treat as a sufficient answer.”

Who was this Jesuit “of some parts and learning?” Could he have been one of the fathers who had met Desideri eight years earlier? And whoever he was, what else did he and Hume talk about?

When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything. Desire, hope, the future itself—all seem to vanish, as they had for me. But now I at least wanted to know whether Hume could have heard about Desideri. It was a sign that my future might return.

I had thought I would spend that future alone; I was realistic about the prospects of a 50-year-old female professor. But then I had a romantic adventure or two.
They were adventures with both women and men. In my period of crisis I had discovered that I could have deep, sustaining friendships with women, as well as romance. I had been wrong about that part of my identity, too.
I was still fragile. A one-line e-mail from my ex-lover enveloped me in black depression once more. But the adventures were invigorating.
One of them happened in Montreal. I had grown up there, and went back to give a lecture at my old university. One evening I walked up St. Lawrence Boulevard in a swirling snowstorm toward a rendezvous. Suddenly, my 16-year-old self appeared, in a memory as vivid as a hallucination, striding through the snow in her hippie vintage fur coat, saying eagerly, as she often did, “I wonder what will happen next?”

Something was going to happen next, even if it wasn’t the new life I had longed for.
I got back to work. In 2007, I began the Moore Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, glad to get away from my dark, cold room and melancholy memories. The school gave me a big sunny apartment looking out at the San Gabriel Mountains. I found myself able to write about children again, and I started my next book, The Philosophical Baby. But I kept working on the Hume project, too.
My philosophical detective story had driven me to find out more about the Royal College at La Flèche. If my atheism made me suspicious of the Buddhists, I was even more suspicious of the Jesuits. After all, at least in the traditional telling, the whole point of the Enlightenment had been to dispel the malign influence of the Catholic Church.
The Berkeley library had only one book about the college at La Flèche: Un Collège de Jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, 1,200 pages in four fat volumes with marbled covers, printed in 1889. I had waded through them before I left for Caltech, and had started to get a picture of the place. And then, fortuitously, my neighbor down the hall at Caltech turned out to be the historian of science Mordechai Feingold, one of the world’s leading experts on the 17th- and 18th-century Jesuits and their contributions to science.
For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that the Jesuits were retrograde enforcers of orthodoxy. But Feingold taught me that in the 17th century, the Jesuits were actually on the cutting edge of intellectual and scientific life. They were devoted to Catholic theology, of course, and the Catholic authorities strictly controlled which ideas were permitted and which were forbidden. But the Jesuit fathers at the Royal College knew a great deal about mathematics and science and contemporary philosophy—even heretical philosophy.

Hume had said that Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle inspired the Treatise. Descartes, I learned, graduated from the Royal College, and Malebranche’s most dedicated students had taught there, although the most-fervent Malebranchistes were eventually dismissed. Books by Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle were in the college library—although they were on the Index, the Vatican’s list of forbidden books. (Hume’s Treatise would join them later.)
La Flèche was also startlingly global. In the 1700s, alumni and teachers from the Royal College could be found in Paraguay, Martinique, the Dominican Republic, and Canada, and they were ubiquitous in India and China. In fact, the sleepy little town in France was one of the very few places in Europe where there were scholars who knew about both contemporary philosophy and Asian religion.
The Jesuits documented everything, Feingold told me. If I wanted to know who had talked with Hume at La Flèche, I could go to Rome to find out.

Toward the end of my Caltech stay, I gave a talk at one of those TED-like conferences where successful people from different fields gather to inspire the young and impress one another. A large, striking, white-haired man in the audience nodded and laughed in an especially enthusiastic way during my talk. He turned out to be Alvy Ray Smith, a co-founder of Pixar.

Unlike me, Alvy had leapt into new lives many times. He had started out as a Southern Baptist boy in small-town New Mexico, and then had plunged into the wildest reaches of San Francisco’s counterculture. Later, he impulsively abandoned his job as a computer-science professor at NYU and took off again for California, because he felt “something good would happen.” Something did: Xerox PARC, where he helped invent the first color computer graphics, and then Lucasfilm, where he helped invent the first computer-generated movies. He leapt into entrepreneurship and created Pixar—and then left Pixar, to found a new company, which he sold to Microsoft. He retired on the proceeds. Now he lived in Seattle, where he collected art, proved mathematical theorems, and did historical research for fun.

His favorite motto came from Alan Kay, another computer pioneer: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” The conference went on for two days, and by the end of it, after a few long conversations but without so much as a kiss, he took another leap and decided that his next life would be with me. If I was a bit slow to realize it, that was okay. He was used to the fact that it took other people a while to catch up to his visions of the future, especially poky academics.
When my time at Caltech was up, I returned to my old beloved Berkeley house; my ex-husband had moved to Boston, and I had bought out his half. Alvy came to visit one weekend, and we began talking on the phone every night. I had decided to follow Feingold’s advice and go to the Jesuit archives in Rome, and I asked Alvy, rather tentatively, whether he would like to come along. It was an unusual venue for a date, but he found the prospect far more romantic than sitting in the sun by the Trevi Fountain. It seemed a good omen.
The archives are not easy to find—they are, appropriately, tucked away behind a corner of St. Peter’s Basilica. Finding the actual records was not so easy either. But on our very last day there, we discovered the entries in the Jesuit catalogs that listed everyone who lived at the Royal College in 1726, 1734, and 1737: some 100 teachers, students, and servants in all. Twelve Jesuit fathers had been at La Flèche when Desideri visited and were still there when Hume arrived. So Hume had lots of opportunities to learn about Desideri.

One name stood out: P. Charles François Dolu, a missionary in the Indies. This had to be the Père Tolu I had been looking for; the “Tolu” in Petech’s book was a transcription error. Dolu not only had been particularly interested in Desideri; he was also there for all of Hume’s stay. And he had spent time in the East. Could he be the missing link?
When I got back to California, I found nothing at all about Dolu in the Berkeley library catalogs. But Google Books had just been born, so I searched for Dolu Jesuit in all the world’s libraries. Alvy kept track of what we found, in an impressively thorough and complex spreadsheet.
We discovered that in the 1730s not one but two Europeans had experienced Buddhism firsthand, and both of them had been at the Royal College. Desideri was the first, and the second was Dolu. He had been part of another fascinating voyage to the East: the French embassy to Buddhist Siam.

In the 1680s, King Narai of Siam became interested in Christianity, and even more interested in European science, especially astronomy. Louis XIV dispatched two embassies to Siam, in 1685 and 1687, including a strong contingent of Jesuit scientists. Dolu was part of the 1687 group.

These characters were more fluid than they appeared, even to themselves. Hume and the Buddha would have nodded sagely at that thought.

One of the other ambassadors was another extraordinary 17th-century figure: the abbé de Choisy. The abbé was an open and famous transvestite who gave the ladies of the French court fashion tips. He wrote a very popular and entertaining account of his trip to Siam. Hume had it in his library, along with de Choisy’s scandalous autobiography, The Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy Who Dressed as a Woman. The abbé’s sexual fluidity was a good example of the adventurous, boundary-crossing spirit of the 17th century, which often leaves the 21st looking staid by comparison.

The Jesuits in the 1687 embassy, including Dolu, stayed in Siam for a year and spent a great deal of time with the talapoins—the European word for the Siamese Buddhist monks. Three of them even lived in the Buddhist monastery and followed its rules.
Like Desideri’s mission, the Siamese embassy ended in bloodshed and chaos. In 1688 the local courtiers and priests revolted against the liberal king and his arrogant foreign advisers. They assassinated King Narai, the new bridge between the two cultures crumbled, and the Jesuits fled for their lives. Several of them died. Dolu and a few others escaped to Pondicherry, in India, where they set up a Jesuit church.
In 1723, after his extraordinarily eventful and exotic career, Dolu retired to peaceful La Flèche for the rest of his long life. He was 80 when Hume arrived, the last surviving member of the embassies, and a relic of the great age of Jesuit science.
I had to piece together a picture of Dolu from contradictory fragments, mostly from his time in India. To Protestant English writers, he was a typical Catholic zealot. On the other hand, Catholic Capuchin writers, Desideri’s adversaries, attacked Dolu and his fellow Jesuits for their sympathy toward Hinduism. Dolu joined two other priests to break down the doors of a Hindu temple and destroy lamps and torches. But with Jean-Venance Bouchet, the head of the Indian mission, he also designed Catholic ceremonies that integrated Hindu traditions, and the Vatican disapproved. In fact, Bouchet became a noted scholar of Hinduism and adopted Hindu dress, ascetic practices, and even vegetarianism.

I also caught glimpses of Dolu the scientist. “There was never a more polite and generous man, nor one more learned about the natural world,” reported a periodical of the time. The Jesuits brought state-of-the-art 12-foot-long telescopes to Siam and then to Pondicherry, and they made important astronomical discoveries. I saw an engraving of King Narai of Siam gazing through one of the telescopes at a lunar eclipse.
Dolu had a sense of humor, too, and wrote satirical squibs and plays. An aristocratic intellectual named Saint-Fonds wrote to a friend that as an amusement, back in France, he had invited Dolu to lunch with Robert Challes, an intensely anti-Jesuit writer—indeed, an atheist—who had also traveled in Siam and India. Saint-Fonds hoped, he said, to enjoy the furious storm of controversy that would surely result. But instead, “I found myself in the midst of the gentlest breezes,” he wrote. “P. Dolu, the name of the missionary, under a wild beard, is a Jesuit per omnes casus, that is to say, polite and politic, and he understands witty repartee better than a man of the world.”
Dolu was an evangelical Catholic, and Hume was a skeptical Protestant, but they had a lot in common—endless curiosity, a love of science and conversation, and, most of all, a sense of humor. Dolu was intelligent, knowledgeable, gregarious, and witty, and certainly “of some parts and learning.” He was just the sort of man Hume would have liked.

And I discovered something else. Hume had said that Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary was an important influence on the Treatise—particularly the entry on Spinoza. So I looked up that entry in the dictionary, which is a brilliant, encyclopedic, 6 million–word mess of footnotes, footnotes to footnotes, references, and cross-references. One of the footnotes in the Spinoza entry was about “oriental philosophers” who, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God and argued for “emptiness.” And it cross-referenced another entry about the monks of Siam, as described by the Jesuit ambassadors. Hume must have been reading about Buddhism, and Dolu’s journey, in the very building where Dolu lived.

What had I learned?

I’d learned that Hume could indeed have known about Buddhist philosophy. In fact, he had written the Treatise in one of the few places in Europe where that knowledge was available. Dolu himself had had firsthand experience of Siamese Buddhism, and had talked at some length with Desideri, who knew about Tibetan Buddhism. It’s even possible that the Jesuits at the Royal College had a copy of Desideri’s manuscript.
Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure what Hume learned at the Royal College, or whether any of it influenced the Treatise. Philosophers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle had already put Hume on the skeptical path. But simply hearing about the Buddhist argument against the self could have nudged him further in that direction. Buddhist ideas might have percolated in his mind and influenced his thoughts, even if he didn’t track their source. After all, contemporary philosophers have been known to borrow ideas without remembering exactly where they came from.
I published an article about Hume, Buddhism, and the Jesuits, long on footnotes and short on romance, in an academic journal. As I was doing my research, many unfailingly helpful historians told me that my quirky personal project reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous). As part of this new global intellectual history, new bibliographies and biographies and translations of Desideri have started to appear, and new links between Eastern and Western philosophy keep emerging.
It’s easy to think of the Enlightenment as the exclusive invention of a few iconoclastic European philosophers. But in a broader sense, the spirit of the Enlightenment, the spirit that both Hume and the Buddha articulated, pervades the story I’ve been telling. The drive to convert and conquer the “false and peculiar” in the name of some metaphysical absolute was certainly there, in the West and in the East. It still is. But the characters in this story were even more strongly driven by the simple desire to know, and the simple thirst for experience. They wanted to know what had happened before and what would happen next, what was on the other shore of the ocean, the other side of the mountain, the other face of the religious or philosophical—or even sexual—divide.
This story may help explain Hume’s ideas. It unquestionably exemplifies them. All of the characters started out with clear, and clashing, identities—the passionate Italian missionary and the urbane French priest, the Tibetan king and lamas, the Siamese king and monks, the skeptical young Scot.
But I learned that they were all much more complicated, unpredictable, and fluid than they appeared at first, even to themselves. Both Hume and the Buddha would have nodded sagely at that thought. Although Dolu and Desideri went to Siam and Tibet to bring the wisdom of Europe to the Buddhists, they also brought back the wisdom of the Buddhists to Europe. Siam and Tibet changed them more than they changed Siam and Tibet. And his two years at La Flèche undoubtedly changed David Hume.
Hume and the Jesuits and Siam and Tibet changed me as well. I’d always thought Hume was right about the self. But now, for the first time, I felt that he was right.
In 2010, Alvy and I got married—the future reinvented. Once again, I was an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy. But that’s not all I was. I’d discovered that I could love women as well as men, history as well as science, and that I could make my way through sadness and solitude, not just happiness. Like Dolu and Desideri, the gender-bending abbé and the Siamese astronomer-king, and, most of all, like Hume himself, I had found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and the sheer endless variety of human experience.

Rilke, Frederick, Gift of the sea and more.

How I wish I could read so many books and absorb them fast!

Every other day, a new author beckons..teases me to read him/ her and savour their flavour.
Yet, given my incompetence, I have to disappoint many.

Some people I'd like to read:
http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm - Rilke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFCLWytjcUY

 http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Sea-Anne-Morrow-Lindbergh/dp/0679732411

Thoureau's unsold works

Rain in the night and this morning, preparing for winter.
For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon, — 706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship; these are the work of my brain. There was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The unbound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed, —
H.D. Thoreau’s
Concord River
50 cops.
So Munroe had only to cross out “River” and write “Mass.” and deliver them to the expressman at once. I can see now what I write for, the result of my labors.
Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed, I believe that this result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less and leaves me freer.

Amazing woman Anais Nin

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/21/anais-nin-love-life-diaries-illustrated/

One of my heroes - Mansoor Khan on his book "The third curve"

ENERGY STOREHOUSE Mansoor Khan says there was a centre in his life he was always moving towards — leading a non-urban life. Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.

Mansoor Khan, who directed the cult Hindi film Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and then quietly retreated to his dream farm in Coonoor is now back in the limelight with a book called The Third Curve, which looks at world economic reality. He tells we are all deluded about things, like money, growing forever

Mansoor Khan is charming, down-to-earth, has an ability to laugh at himself, and has a view of money and success that most of us would scoff at. But he also has a life one would envy — after dropping out of top engineering colleges, doing a successful stint in Bollywood, he’s running a cheese-making farm in Coonoor, growing vegetables, and writing about Peak Oil! “I don’t believe in superheroes, I’m Mr. Reality,” he laughs, when we suggest he pose in front of a statue of Superman at the launch of his book in Bangalore. And in saying that he quite ably characterises himself. Excerpts from an interview:

What connects the dots between films, cheese, oil, and the economy?

My heart! (laughs). Whatever I feel is should do, I do that. There are no boundaries for me. Living on the farm was what I always wanted to move towards, so there is a centre — to live a non-urban life. I can’t live in cities. I wanted to live in a small place, have my own farm, grow my own food. This book is something that needed to be said. It’s not like I wanted to be an author and looked for a subject to write on. I realised no one else was talking about it. I’ve been studying this for the last 13 years. We knew the collapse would happen, but didn’t know which year, but you could see all the signs. We knew oil was going to peak. Sadly we all see the world through the lens of economics. Economics is the study of false tokens called money. We started believing that the token has value and started making our rules around it. And you can fudge tokens. In the west the collapse was called the Black Swan event – it didn’t fit into their model – like a Bollywood guy who writes a book on energy! But this book is not a surprise if people knew my background. I was studying engineering, computer science, electronics. I was good in physics, which is among other things, the study of energy.

Are you a very easily unhappy or dissatisfied person? You dropped out of IIT, then Cornell, then MIT. You made four films in Bollywood and moved to a farm…

No, no…The only thing I changed my mind on was engineering. I didn’t wan to do that as a career. I liked to understand it. Films… I was always sure I didn’t want to do it forever. If I can make films, I will, otherwise I won’t. I became more aware of environmental issues, about chaos humans are creating on planet. I studied that. I like the idea that my world is small. I like that I have time for myself, can grow my own food. We experimented with a gobar gas plant, my wife Tina and I make cheese. It’s adventure, it’s fun, it’s hands on. I can’t understand what people do in cities. Honestly! It’s so boring ya… The world is not going to be able to sustain its cities. Cities are energy intensive. That model will have to redefine itself. The suburbia of America is already facing it. It was built on a car and driving model. Our world here in India is quickly shifting there.

Living on your farm changed your worldview?

No, my worldview was formed even before I went there. Living on farm consolidated my thinking, made it sharper. Petroleum took 250 million years to collect. We burnt half of it in 150 years. So the notion of sustainability is a totally false notion. How can you be sustainable, because the primary energy you use is in a deficit of 10,000 : 1.

Are we too late already to change anything?

The “too late” part isn’t here. It’s in climate change. We’ve crossed the tipping point. Climate change is the other side of Peak Oil. In terms of energy consumption and changing our world it’s not too late. For India it’s definitely not too late. We are only now trying to go the other way, the way of the Western countries that are in the doldrums.

So you’re saying growth is an illusion?

Growth is a disease. Yes, now it’s become illusive! First it was real. It became an illusion after a point. We fudged reality with artificial means in the form of stocks, mortgages, leveraging, options, derivatives. We’re getting more and more notional. Money has to grow, double, follow the rules; so we’ll make it, either by real means or mathematical means. We make models from our minds.

Then this year’s economics Nobel is wasted?

(Laughs heartily) They can do what they want. They are deluded. I’m not only blaming economists. I’m saying this about everybody who believes in finance planning. You can make your lifestyles easy with surplus food, labour saving devices, hi speed trains, 300 TV channels …we felt great and felt “why shouldn’t this go on forever?” The reason why it can’t, lies in another domain called energetics – it is a discipline that has to replace economics. If you don’t do the real accounting, you’re fooling yourself. I’m not saying all industries will decay. When you look at real growth, GDP, it’s definitely going to go down in a shrinking energy world.My book says energy is the currency of the universe and the bell curve I have plotted are the laws of energy. We are at the top of the curve and we’re beginning the descent now, and there’s no up again. Nothing grows forever. You’re going to feel the pain of shrinkage. That’s what our finance minister is feeling now. They cant figure it out. This is not a book of blame. People are looking though the wrong lens — that of money. We’re busily making false plans. Because India is an emerging market we can pay the high energy prices — 100 dollars a barrel. Oil is not going to get over. We’ve only finished half. But descent is what I’m talking about. In a paradigm of growth, how can you do with less? Oil is a dam of 250 million years of sunlight. Which we found, looted, had a good time. Now, time to reckon with reality.

Does your book offer solutions?

Solution is the wrong word. Problems have solutions. Traffic jam is problem; death is not a problem. It’s a predicament. You don’t find solutions for it; you find ways of dealing with it. The finiteness of the planet is a predicament. We’re refusing to accept we’re energy-holics. You’re refusing to accept that your world runs on liquid fuels; we’re enmeshed in it. You’re trying to find arithmetic solutions to exponential problems. Transition is about accepting ecological thinking rather than industrial thinking. Right now I’m sounding like an oddball but I know it’s going to happen, I’m confident, so I’m writing about it. I had to WAIT to write about this. Before the economic collapse no one would believe it. We’re living in a bubble economy. It’s a fascinating subject – you can make a 100-part series on this.

Why don’t you?

We should! I’ll talk to Aamir (Khan, his cousin) about it (guffaws). I don’t have the money or the energy. I can do great talks.

What were your learnings from Bollywood?

I learnt how to deal with people first of all (laughs). Because I was too much of a loner. Because when you’re part of a big team, you’ve to instruct, be captain of the ship. I was fortunate enough to have a father who handled all the nitty-gritty. I was happily left to do the writing, direction – the creative part. Things were not so dear to me; somebody else did the marketing. I really didn’t care.

You felt no pressure at any time to deliver another QSQT?

I didn’t feel it right after QSQT itself, which is why I made Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander. This is a completely wrong way of looking at life, at success. I laugh at this notion of success. I find people are so badly trapped in this illusion. How unhappy can you be? I’m so happy with my book’s reach out…with whatever’s happened. It’s happiness in the happening, in the right now.


At the chennai book launch:

Khan, however, began by saying that what was said about him is unrelated to what he was going to talk about. “The book is about possibility; it’s not about morality, guilt, environment or blame.”

In 1850, oil, he said, made growth possible. And since then, growth became more plentiful, and we believed it would go on forever. In fact, “the biggest religion in the planet is growth”, Khan said, and explained how the ‘paradise times’ lasted till the 1960s. “And then came the ecological collapse,” when the life signs of the planet withered. But, “we thought money could control it!” he said, pointing out that, shortly, money too collapsed.

Laws of money

Next, Khan explained the laws of money we have built into the system. “The stock market is institutionalised gambling. Every time we’re in trouble, we add a new concept of money. Each is more powerful, more complex. And this is the growth trap — the ‘unbelievable growth’ that you seek comes with ‘crazy risk’.”

Ably supported with an interesting Power-Point presentation, Khan showed his audience at Landmark, Citi Centre, how money can double every 10 years, provided there is energy. “But the earth is finite, all resources come from here.”

Rapid exploitation

Khan then went back to the oil example — which the Red Indians knew about long before it was discovered — and which has now been rapidly exploited by civilisation. “Civilisation always talks about exploitation. But do we do it in our families? Do we say, ‘let’s exploit our aunty? No!” Then why the earth and its resources? Exploiting oil — or forcing oil-wells to pump out faster — actually backfires, because once the well reaches its peak, production only drops. “But ‘peak oil’ has not come into our parlance. In 2005, when oil peaked, and production dropped, prices shot up. The global meltdown of 2008 came as a huge surprise to economists,” he said, adding that it had not surprised him. Because, when the concept of growth (an exponential graph), and the reality (a bell-shaped graph) separate at one point, growth becomes false.

“Growth, according to me, is a disease,” said Khan, quoting Edward Abbey’s famous statement ‘growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’. “We have bred cancerous ideology into our economy.” And with growth demanding more and more energy — and given that half that energy (oil reserves) has been used up in just 150 years — we’re heading towards a crash if we go into denial. “But there’s a better way — acceptance, and then a controlled energy descent.” And that, he said, was the third curve — transition. “But it’s not just about putting CFC bulbs, or putting off all the lights for two hours and holding hands. That is fun, but it won’t stop anything. We need to talk not just about economics, but also energetics, because we are addicted to cheap energy, and we need to get over that.” In the last 150 years, every single thing we have made is more efficient. “So how come we need more energy? That is because we are only looking at growth.” Deal with reality, the author advised. Or else, “reality will deal with you”.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/chasing-a-rainbow/article5228808.ece

Mansoor Khan, whose book on alternative energy was released recently, talks about the leap from making blockbusters like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak to growing one’s own food.

Mansoor Khan, the man behind blockbuster films like Qayamat se Qayamat tak and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, is not in the hustle and bustle of Mumbai where the biggest Hindi films are produced, but in quiet Coonoor. 

His journey from the city to the 22-acre ‘Acres Wild’ in the hills began with computer science at IIT-Mumbai, Cornell University and MIT. But this was not his calling. Instead, he followed in the footsteps of his father, filmmaker Nasir Hussian. Though temporary, filmmaking helped him identify Coonoor as the space that would fill his spiritual vacuum.

After the recent release of his book The Third Curve: The End of Growth As You Know It, he talks about his filmmaking days, life as a farmer and energy perspectives. Excerpts from an interview:

Why did you leave Mumbai?

When I came back to India from the U.S. in 1980, I realised that I did not like cities. The city was all about straight lines, traffic lights and people rushing to office. Open spaces, the desire to grow my food — it slowly began making sense. It took 23 years to materialise, but the decision was made a long time back. People ask me why I gave up a successful film career. I tell them I moved away to something that I value more than some film of mine doing well. It’s of no value to me that someone else thinks I am successful.

Why films at all, then?

I had to prove myself to my father. I had a knack for telling stories. Could I render the story differently; through characters that are real, and not completely over-the-top? Life took its own course after that. I do not believe in free will beyond a point. We do not make our destiny, but within that we can shape our lives and believe in something and know what is good for us. I bought land in Mandwa, where I went sailing, and thought I would live there. It took me three hours (from Mumbai) to reach there. I realised I can’t live half here and half there. I had to get out of there totally.

What was the turning point?

The government wanted to take my land in Mandwa in 1997. That led me to question the basis on which the government acquired land for development. Later I met Medha Patkar and that led me wonder what we actually value when we have dammed our rivers. I realised that this is the other side of education we were not taught because we are not the ones being thrown out of our homes. We created an inverted concept of development, which is why these people are homeless.

What is the central theme of your book?

My book talks about possibility. I’ve explained why economic growth is over from an energy perspective.  Growth is dead for a geological reason. Oil makes the industrial world work. It is the keystone of energy. Remove that energy, everything else fails. We’ve reached the peak of the resources. So, growth slows down because the earth gives you these resources slower after the halfway point. Nothing in nature grows forever. How did we come up with the concept that growth can go on forever, when we are using stored energy? Oil is nothing but 250 million years of stored sunlight.

Why not make a film about this instead?

A film is not a strong medium. It’s a great medium for entertainment, propaganda, titillation and instruction. But it does not serve as a platform for shifting paradigms or to change a set of rules. Real life is good; you’ll stick with your paradigm till real life teaches you that this does not work.

To what extent do you think your views will be absorbed?

I do not expect people to change instantly, but hope they will keep it in the back of their mind. It will only be seen in hindsight. If you don’t believe what I’ve said in my book, please go ahead and do what you think. But keep this lens handy. Tomorrow, when something you did according to your rules fails, look through my lens and see. May be it will make sense.

Neil Gaman on where he gets his ideas from

http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

Usha K.R and Shashi Deshpande

Some good interviews:
http://monideepa.blogspot.in/2011/02/conversations-with-usha-kr.html
http://readinghour.in/articles/issue1/interview/story.htm
http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2007&issid=11&id=562

I really liked the sincerity and depth of the interviews. They talk about their favourite authors, research, the bestseller thing, the agony of not reaching some readers, the pain of malicious interviews..

John Updike

I had read about him through Baradwaj and then completely forgot the chain and lost him! Have you lost anyone or any thought this way and never been able to trace it back?

As if by divine intervention, almost 6 - 8 months after losing him, I find him again!
I still found it difficult to read the reviews of John Updike, but I am saving him here, for posterity!

http://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/bitty-ruminations-71/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9272409/Higher-Gossip-Essays-and-Criticism-by-John-Updike-review.html

http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/always-looking-by-john-updike.html?_r=0 

The last piece has some wonderful information on Updike's style of writing.

But novelists and poets bring along, to the gallery or museum, a particular set of skills. Having a gift for narrative and an eye for the revelatory incident, novelists excel at swiftly but comprehensibly guiding us through the high points of an artist’s life.  

Obsessed with detail, poets and novelists notice what is transpiring everywhere in a painting, and how each brush stroke furthers the illusion that we are seeing a hand or a pearl necklace. Most important, novelists and poets have had practice using language to describe not only how something looks but the experience of seeing it.

Often, Updike’s descriptions of paintings do one of the most important things that art writing can accomplish, which is to persuade the reader to seek out, or take another look at, a painting or sculpture.  

“Always Looking” (edited by Christopher Carduff) has passages of great charm, several of which occur when Updike is describing the atmosphere of a museum show. He captures the wry humor of seeing Gilbert Stuart’s portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The next, sixth room is the heart of the show, and the reason so many parents brought their children. Fourteen portraits of the Father of Our Country in one great custard-­yellow room — a herd? a flock? a bevy? of George Washingtons! Such a concentration has its comedy as well as a surreal grandeur. The image is so familiar as to leave an art reviewer wordless. Even the chirping children were momentarily hushed.” A very different atmosphere surrounds the Richard Serra sculptures installed at the Museum of Modern Art and mobbed with happy families enjoying “the biggest interactive art event in Manhattan since Christo’s saffron flags fluttered in a wintry Central Park over two years ago.” 

The fact that John Updike’s essays engage the reader enough to agree or argue with them is a testament to how vivid they are. Reading “Always Looking,” we are grateful for the pleasure of having Updike’s eloquent voice continue to tell us what he saw, and what he knew and thought about art.  

Also, I learnt more about Updike on Wiki.
The amount of work he's produced in mind boggling. How can someone write, read, review so much?

Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity."^[2] His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans;

He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."

His mother's attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. He later recalled how his mother's writing inspired him as a child. "One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in."

Updike also underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith. 

He wrote about Impressions of his day-to-day life in Ipswich.

Updike’s memoir indicates that he stayed in his “corner of New England to give its domestic news” with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer.


Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America, and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores. He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me."

He once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

Updike also commonly wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation.


He described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."

He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated." He was also a champion for young writers, often making generous comparisons to his own literary heroes.

 
The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.

Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.^[4] Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader."^[4] On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life."

After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive.^[53] 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society,^[54] a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works." The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies.

Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that ( in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/mar/12/on-john-updike/?pagination=false)
Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half." McEwan concluded that the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and describing it, concluded:
Updike is a master of effortless motion — between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size"
 Jonathan Raban, said:
It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."

Wood both praises and criticizes Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract." 

Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing

Literary critic Christy Potter called Updike "... THE Writer, the kind of writer everyone has heard of, the one whose name you can bring up at a party and people who have never read one thing he wrote will still nod their heads knowingly and say, 'Oh yes, John Updike. The writer.'" 
 
Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books -  demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language.

Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...

 
One thing that touched me most was, his rules for literary review.

In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:

Updike delivering the 2008 Jefferson Lecture.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Thank you Mr Updike! Your magic shall remain, in print. Your breath will continue through your words. Your writing will inspire debates throughout America. 
 

Daily routines of famous writers and artists

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/is_the_key_to_becoming_a_great_writer_having_a_day_job.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/john_updike_william_faulkner_chuck_close_they_didn_t_wait_for_inspiration.html

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/

Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work."

This doesn't mean that inspiration doesn't exist, or that some work is not more inspired than others. It merely means that you should work each day regardless of whether you feel the urge to; it is the process of working itself that will give rise to new ideas. And with steady application, you can expect to hit inspired patches from time to time.

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness.

Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another ‘ritual’ as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present kitties. Okay?

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary.  


the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.

I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.

I write my stories in the morning, my diary at night.

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. 

Preeti Shenoy on home makers and her dreams that came true

One of the best things about the internet is, you search for something and you find something much more interesting that what you searched for!

While searching for Roohi dixit I stumled upon Preeti Shenoy - the name sounded a little familiar.
Maybe I had read about some of her book releases in The Hindu, don't remember.

I did a quick catch up on who she is, what she did and a little about her books.
I was impressed with her progress but not that much with the writing as such.
But, here's a nice write up on following your dreams, for women, who leave their jobs to take care of their young ones. I am sure, many many women would love it.

http://justamotheroftwo.blogspot.in/search/label/Parenting

One thing she mentioned that I sooooo agree with is:

The problem with Indian society is that if you are a 'stay-at home' mom, you are never treated on par with 'working mothers'. Somehow in India, stay-at-home moms are truly not given the importance they deserve, as the work they do has no 'economic significance'.  I faced my share too. In fact, I remember after one of the office parties, I had cried and cried because of an insensitive remark by one of the 'working women' about 'housewives'. (and years later, it is so darn satisfying to have 'made it big' :-))

To this day I have a problem with the term 'housewives'. They are definitely not 'house-wives' they are home-makers.

Also, her advice to home makers:

So, if you are a stay-at-home mom, feeling bad about giving up your dreams, your interests, have hope.

Children grow up. The time that you spend with them will never come back. Nurture your interests side-by-side and do not quit doing that one little thing which you do for yourself, which gives you joy. (In my case it was working with children initially, and later writing).  Hold on to it. Nurture it. Protect it. It is easy to forget it in the daily rigours and demands of parenting and running a home.