Book # 28 of 2020: How to Meditate by Pema Chodron

We are entering month five of lock-down in Panama. The first 3 months were spent teaching online. Then, we started summer break from school and have been in the apartment for 3 weeks on "vacation." It looks like we will remain on lock-down for the next month and then resume teaching online from home in August. Travel is barred domestically and internationally. I can only leave the apartment for short shopping windows 3 times a week, and we are supposed to shop within 1km of our residence.

The only way I maintain my sanity under these conditions is to regard this all as a mindfulness retreat. Every morning: yoga, Tai Chi, mindfulness, and then an online class followed by Rosetta Stone practice. Then, it's reading in the bed for a while, reading on the chair for a while, and reading in the hammock for a while.

Pema's book helped me with some simple self-discipline techniques as I try to maintain daily practice. She gives really strong advice about dealing with the emotions during mindful practice. Clear, elegant, charming, and often funny. Recommended!

Book #17 of 2020: All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell

Historical fiction does not get better than this. An enormous cast of characters and a dense web of events with global repercussions, all unspooling outward from Haiti at the end of the 18th century. I was flabbergasted by this novel. Each character is painted with master strokes, and each point of view is captured believably and situated within the complex political, economic, racial, religious, intellectual, and revolutionary realities of the era.

There are two more in the trilogy--but I shan't dive right in. This book was far too harrowing. Its literary merits are obvious and the scholarship and research in its formulation daunting. But there are extended passages of the most DeSadean brutality--nothing ahistorical, mind you--but this was a time of casual and elegantly contrived brutality. And Bell's prose scintillates when bringing the most exquisitely awful scenarios to vivid life. I need a break before part 2!

Noam if You Want To

One of the chapters in Chomsky's latest slim volume of ponderings is called "What can we understand?" My response is: MOST of this book.

It's deep.

Chomsky, with elegance, marshals his profound knowledge of science, philosophy, and history and distills all of this down to about 120 pages on problems and interesting avenues for exploration in the cognitive sciences. Hold onto your hat because the first chapter with its scientific linguistic jargon might have you squirming!

I have read dozens of works by Chomsky, but with one exception they were all books about politics. Politics only makes a brief appearance here as a slim chapter called "What is the common good?" This was the most accessible chapter, but the most interesting IMO was "The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?" Chomsky spends a lot of time explaining the concept of mysterianism and how some attempts to understand the origins of language and consciousness might indeed be doomed as scientific enterprises, with mere speculative "storytelling" taking the place of actual proof.

So if you are up to finding out what one of history's most interesting and sophisticated minds is thinking about--Noam if you want to!