winter

"Winter – Fifth Avenue" (1893), Alfred Stieglitz

Por sugestão de Not in the Heavens

Dan Gilbert on hapiness

joyful, playful and optimistic

"Lori and Reba Schappell may be twins, but they are very different people. Reba is a somewhat shy teetotaler who has recorder an award-winning album of country music. Lori, who is outgoing, wisecracking anda rather fond of strawberry daiquiris, works in a hospital anda wants someday to marry and have children. They occasionally argue, as sisters do, but most of the time they get on well, complimenting each other, teasing each other and finishing each other's sentences. In fact, there are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. One side of Lori's forehead is attached to one side of Reba's, and they have spend every moment of their lives locked together, face-to-face. The second unusual thing about Lori and Reba is that they are happy - not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful and optimistic. Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often not who doesn't? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation Reba speaks for both of them: 'Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You'd be ruining two lives in the process'.

So here's the question: if this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, 'Joyful, playful and optimistic,' then you are not playing the game and I am going to give you another chance. Try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is 'Despodent, desperate and depressed'. Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circunstances, which is why the conventional medical wisdom has it that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at the risk of killing one or both. (...) And yet, standing against the backdrop of our certainty about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about  the situation, they tell us that they  wouldn't have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, [a proeminent] medical historian found 'the desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal'. Something is terribly wrong here. But what?

There seem to be just to possibilities. Someone - either Lori and reba, or everyone else in the world - is making a dreadful mistake when they talk about hapiness. Because we are the everyone else in question, it is only natural that we should be attracted to the former conclusion, dismissing the twins' claim to hapiness with offhand rejoinders such as 'Oh, they're just sayoing that' or 'They may think they're happy, but they're not' or the even popular 'They don't know what hapiness really is' (ussually spoken as if we do).

( Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Hapiness, Harper Perennial, 2006, pp.29-30. Há tradução portuguesa)

daqui

natural-born cyborgs

Bach-y-Rita (1934-2006)

"But Bach-y-Rita, by showing that our brains are more flexible than localizationism admits, has helped to invent a more accurate view of the brain that allows for such changes. Before he did this work, it was acceptable to say, as most neuroscientists do, that we have a "visual cortex" in our occipital lobe that processes vision, and an "auditory cortex" in our temporal lobe that processes hearing. From Bach-y-Rita we have learned that the matter is more complicated and that these areas of the brain are plastic processors, connected to each other and capable of processing an unexpected variety of input. Cheryl has not been the only one to benefit from Bach-y-Rita's strange hat. The team has since used the device to train fifty more patients to improve their balance and walking. Some had the same damage Cheryl had; others have had brain trauma, stroke, or Parkinson's disease. Paul Bach-y-Rita's importance lies in his being the first of his generation of neuroscientists both to understand that the brain is plastic and to apply this knowledge in a practical way to ease human suffering. Implicit in all his work is the idea that we are all born with a far more adaptable, all-purpose, opportunistic brain than we have understood. When Cheryl's brain developed a renewed vestibular sense—or blind subjects' brains developed new paths as they learned to recognize objects, perspective, or movement—these changes were not the mysterious exception to the rule but the rule: the sensory cortex is plastic and adaptable, When Cheryl's brain learned to respond to the artificial receptor that replaced her damaged one, it was not doing anything out of the ordinary. Recently Bach-y-Rita's work has inspired cognitive scientist Andy Clark to wittily argue that we are "natural-born cyborgs," meaning that brain plasticity allows us to attach ourselves to machines, such as computers and electronic tools, quite naturally. But our brains also restructure themselves in response to input from the simplest tools too, such as a blind man's cane. Plasticity has been, after all, a property inherent in the brain since prehistoric times. The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself."

Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Penguin Books, 2007, p.25.

Felicidade

 (222)

"Um estudo acompanhou crianças com sete anos cujos pais ainda viviam juntos. Se depois os pais se separavam, a criança tinha o dobro das hipóteses, quando comparada com crianças cujos pais permaneceram juntos, de se tornar uma adulto com depressão. A idade da criança aquando da separação não era relevante. Mas o principal problema é o conflito entre os pais - se o conflito é mau o suficiente, a separação poderá ser o melhor (61).

Richard Layard, Happiness, penguin books.

Louis Armstrong and the All Stars - St James Infirmary

Via Um pouco mais de terra

Glenn Gould's Toronto - (1979)

Orphée - Jean Cocteau (1950)

BRUEGHEL, Jan the Elder, Orpheus in the Underworld (1594)

Por sugestão de Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin, 2007) onde se pode ler: "Seria a felicidade como a Euridice do mito grego, que se escapa dos nossos braços quando nos viramos para abraçá-la, desaparecendo mal a vislumbramos? (xi) 

Dying now a second time

"ORPHEUS WAS THE SON of Apollo and the Muse Calliope. He was presented by his father with a lyre and taught to play upon it, which he did to such perfection that nothing could withstand the charm of his music. Not only his fellow-mortals, but wild beasts were softened by his strains, and gathering round him laid by their fierceness, and stood entranced with his lay. Nay, the very trees and rocks were sensible to the charm. The former crowded round him and the latter relaxed somewhat of their hardness, softened by his notes. Hymen had been called to bless with his presence the nuptials of Orpheus with Eurydice; but though he attended, he brought no happy omens with him. His very torch smoked and brought tears into their eyes. In coincidence with such prognostics, Eurydice, shortly after her marriage, while wandering with the nymphs, her companions, was seen by the shepherd Aristaeus, who was struck by her beauty and made advances to her. She fled, and in flying trod upon a snake in the grass, was bitten in the foot, and died. Orpheus sang his grief to all who breathed the upper air, both gods and men, and finding it all unavailing resolved to seek his wife in the regions of the dead. He descended by a cave situated on the side of the promontory of Taenarus and arrived at the Stygian realm. He passed through crowds of ghosts and presented himself before the throne of Pluto and Proserpine. Accompanying the words with the lyre, he sung, “O deities of the under-world, to whom all we who live must come, hear my words, for they are true. I come not to spy out the secrets of Tartarus, nor to try my strength against the three-headed dog with snaky hair who guards the entrance. I come to seek my wife, whose opening years the poisonous viper’s fang has brought to an untimely end. Love has led me here, Love, a god all powerful with us who dwell on the earth, and, if old traditions say true, not less so here. I implore you by these abodes full of terror, these realms of silence and uncreated things, unite again the thread of Eurydice’s life. We all are destined to you, and sooner or later must pass to your domain. She too, when she shall have filled her term of life, will rightly be yours. But till then grant her to me, I beseech you. If you deny one, I cannot return alone; you shall triumph in the death of us both.” As he sang these tender strains, the very ghosts shed tears. Tantalus, in spite of his thirst, stopped for a moment his efforts for water, Ixion’s wheel stood still, the vulture ceased to tear the giant’s liver, the daughters of Danaus rested from their task of drawing water in a sieve, and Sisyphus sat on his rock to listen. Then for the first time, it is said, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears. Proserpine could not resist, and Pluto himself gave way. Eurydice was called. She came from among the new-arrived ghosts, limping with her wounded foot. Orpheus was permitted to take her away with him on one condition, that he should not turn around to look at her till they should have reached the upper air. Under this condition they proceeded on their way, he leading, she following, through passages dark and steep, in total silence, till they had nearly reached the outlet into the cheerful upper world, when Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, when instantly she was borne away. Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air! Dying now a second time, she yet cannot reproach her husband, for how can she blame his impatience to behold her? “Farewell,” she said, “a last farewell,”—and was hurried away, so fast that the sound hardly reached his ears."

Bulfinch's Mythology (Barnes & Noble Classics), Highlight Loc. 2951-76 

Bauhaus, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

Richard Layard, Happiness: New Lessons

Felicidade

Samuel fuller, I Shot Jesse James (1949)

Walker Evans

Walker Evans

Antoine Watteau, The Lesson of Love (1716)

Por sugestão de Philip Sandblom, Creativity and Disease (Marion Boyars, 1996), onde se pode ler:

"In the history of creative work, there are many who, like Molière and Watteau, had their efforts influenced and their lives shortened by tuberculosis. One has the impression that this disease often exerted a singular effect on their talent. The slight fever livened the associations and filled the thoughts with fantastic, dreamlike pictures." (p.168)

our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger

“The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis—“beyond stillness” in Latin—an unmoored, partially unstable state that captures the peculiar instability of modernity. If consumption once killed its victims by pathological evisceration (the tuberculosis bacillus gradually hollows out the lung), then cancer asphyxiates us by filling bodies with too many cells; it is consumption in its alternate meaning—the pathology of excess. Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking “sanctuary” in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively — at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.
This image — of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger — is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.
Like the normal cell, the cancer cell relies on growth in the most basic, elemental sense: the division of one cell to form two. In normal tissues, this process is exquisitely regulated, such that growth is stimulated by specific signals and arrested by other signals. In cancer, unbridled growth gives rise to generation upon generation of cells. Biologists use the term clone to describe cells that share a common genetic ancestor. Cancer, we now know, is a clonal disease. (...)
But cancer is not simply a clonal disease; it is a clonally evolving disease. If growth occurred without evolution, cancer cells would not be imbued with their potent capacity to invade, survive, and metastasize. Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents. When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out. The fittest cancer cell survives. This mirthless, relentless cycle of mutation, selection, and overgrowth generates cells that are more and more adapted to survival and growth. In some cases, the mutations speed up the acquisition of other mutations. The genetic instability, like a perfect madness, only provides more impetus to generate mutant clones. Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.
Such metaphorical seductions can carry us away, but they are unavoidable with a subject like cancer. In writing this book, I started off by imagining my project as a “history” of cancer. But it felt, inescapably, as if I were writing not about something but about someone. My subject daily morphed into something that resembled an individual—an enigmatic, if somewhat deranged, image in a mirror. This was not so much a medical history of an illness, but something more personal, more visceral: its biography.”

Excerto de: Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies,  Scribner, 2010, p.38- 39.

Atenção selectiva

Via Daniel Kahneman,Thinking, fast and slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.23