Protagonists who have something to live for?

War, challenges, quests, dying relatives, damsels, dames, treasures, love, magic, power, wonder, answers, truth, hope, curiosity.

What is it about protagonists who have something to live for that makes them compelling characters?

What is it about characters that don’t?

Which is more realistic?

Is it best to justify actions by their outcomes alone?

One day you’ll be sitting around some afternoon, the taste of lunch on your breath, trees rustling on the blue sky; and suddenly you’ll know for sure that nothing special is in store for you.

Is it best to justify actions by their outcomes alone?

Is it ever appropriate to behold people to prove their worth? Worthiness?

A world where all basic needs are met?

Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age is set in the near future when nanotechnology, like information technology before it, has changed what it means to be human. At one point in the book, two of the characters are forced to live on the street. Soon they head to a public matter-compiler, which assembles, atom by atom, a set of sushi for the homeless.

With all the talk about welfare, and handouts, and how much of a responsibility the government should have to make sure peoples’ basic needs are met, this scene brings up a question. Imagine a world where some technology has made it more than affordable, trivial in fact, for the government to provide people with what they need to stay alive. Could this, would this, be a better world? How would this affect the structure of society, the meaning of poverty, the meaning of life?

Countering the forces of capitalism to keep culture alive?

The other day I heard someone say, the forces of capitalism are essentially at odds with study of the humanities. This was a humanities professor, giving a lecture, and so I didn’t have a chance to ask him to elaborate.

At the same time that he said this, he kind of insinuated that the “the forces of capitalism” favor the study of science, of economics, of psychology. In effect, areas of study that can produce capital directly. What use, after all, is an anthropologist to someone trying to turn a profit? What use is literature? In a pure profit-seeking society, everything gets parred down to what sells to most people, from nail-clippers, to culture, to food. Things that have value beyond money have essentially no value in a world that doesn’t have a way to counter “the forces of capitalism.”

First of all, how solid is this assumption that the forces of capitalism are ultimately at odds with culture?

If you think “pretty damn solid”, then my next question is:

How does a society counter, or perhaps even channel, the forces of capitalism in order to sustain the integrity of knowledge for knowledges’ sake, truth for truths’ sake, and beauty for beautys’ sake?

What, then, would be left?

Those who carry around beliefs

Like so many membership cards,

Others who wrap themselves in opinion

Swathed in ideas like regalia

Seem to miss the point of truth;

If we could

Dodge opine conscription

Doff ideological pride;

What, then, would be left?

Dance so it all keeps spinning?

Haruki Murakami is a contemporary Japanese author known for his whimsical novels that put a lightness on life’s heaviness. Often Murakami’s books don’t seem to make obvious sense, but yet they manage to leave an impression on the senses. His words flow out of the pages like breeze out of a far distant land that in its very dust contains a story drenched in the past but new as the breath that touches. A reader comes out at the end dizzy and elated, less with a heart-pounding exuberance than a soft recognition, like a simple memory of something that happened long ago. Or like a long beautiful song has just ended.

Last year the author published an essay entitled “Jazz Messenger” in which he explains:

…I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.

This essay partly answers a question I had about a year ago. It was a couple months after I’d finished my first Murakami book, Kafka On The Shore. There was a local author visiting my high school and I asked her, What do you think is more important in writing, the sound of your prose or the clarity of your words? She answered that though she sought after a musical quality in her writing, coherency was absolutely necessary and most important.

This didn’t help answer how I could have read a book that consciously made little sense, but left such an impression on my senses. I was baffled.

Should a poet sacrifice the wonder of a phrase for its lack of clear meaning? Or should one dance so it all keeps spinning?

Shakespeare’s prose was so powerful that his invented words and meanings found their way into English proper; that is, they became meaningful by their sounds. I think Ray Bradbury once said if he caught himself thinking about what he was writing, he knew that the piece wouldn’t work out. Now Murakami says that he learned how to write by listening to music. What does lead to?

Is it good to feel good?

“Do you like music?” Dr. Robert asked.

“More than most things.”

“And what, may I ask, does Mozart’s G-Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Arman-Brahman?”

Will laughed. “Let’s hope not.”

“But that doesn’t make the experience of the G-Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it’s the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-medicine…”

- Aldous Huxley, Island (1962)

One thing a hippie I know says sometimes is, “It’s good to feel good.”

Is it good to feel good?

What percent of the time should life seem difficult?

What percent of the time should life seem difficult?