My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson I

I've started on this long 2002 biography by Alfred Habegger. Normally I might have saved it for winter, but I don't have any other suitable books at the moment. Natural Magic, which I read in March and April, doesn't focus much on the details of Dickinson's life. As far as I've read, this book is extremely thorough regarding Dickinson's family background and the social atmosphere in Amherst at the time. I am hoping that I will gain some insight into Dickinson's thinking process and, ideally, a better understanding of some of her poems. Even if it turns out that aspects of Dickinson's poems will remain inscrutable, biographies can be an art in themselves if they fully explain the social dynamics in a place and time. I was a little disappointed by the biography that I read of Thoreau, who was thirteen years older than Dickinson and also lived in Massachusetts, because the discussion of his family background and the precise context of his intellectual development seemed somewhat limited. While this book seems better-written, some of that may have to do with the fact that Dickinson's family was firmly in the middle class and Thoreau's was not; if Thoreau hadn't happened to live near Ralph Waldo Emerson, he may never have become a prominent writer, whereas Dickinson's poems probably emanated organically from her background in conjunction with her personality. Furthermore, since Dickinson's family was more involved with civic affairs than Thoreau's, more information is available for her than Thoreau. And the Dickinsons produced vast correspondences.

On the Dickinson side of the family, Emily's grandfather was Samuel Fowler Dickinson (1775-1838). He was a Dartmouth graduate and a lawyer who was instrumental in the founding of Amherst College. However, as noted in Natural Magic, his civic zeal led to his financial ruin, and he moved to Ohio permanently, apparently with some bitterness regarding events in Amherst. Emily's mother was a Norcross, from Monson, Massachusetts. Her father, Joel Norcross (1777-1829), was a civically active businessman and seems to have been better-off than Samuel Fowler Dickinson. Habegger, I think, does a good job describing how life in these families was quite different than it is in most families today. The Norcrosses had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. The Dickinsons had nine children, all of whom survived to adulthood. In those days, I think that the stresses were quite high in non-farming families where it was presumed that the sons would attend college. Emily's father, Edward, had to transfer to Amherst from Yale once, apparently because his father couldn't afford the Yale tuition. And housekeeping must have been a nightmare, with no electricity, no modern appliances, no public water and no public sewage systems. Furthermore, even for wealthy families, there was a shortage of qualified domestic servants. It sounds as if Emily's mother, also named Emily, was rather anxious, and it is easy to see why, even though in her case she had only three children.

I'm up to the year 1836, when Emily was just five. Her older brother was Austin and her younger sister was Lavinia. Her mother's sister, also named Lavinia, took a liking to Emily. Not much has happened yet in Emily's life, and her father, Edward, is still under some financial duress due to his father's bankruptcy. He has moved once, between marriage and Emily's birth, and will move again twice during Emily's life. It is already apparent that Austin might become a lawyer, but the fates of Emily and Lavinia seem unclear. It is possible that the stress evident in their mother discouraged them from wanting children, and they don't seem to be under any pressure to follow that path.

Video of the Day

 A walk with Sabine Hossenfelder.

Diary

I've sort of been waiting for the Trump administration to implode, but, although it does seem to be occurring, it's still a slow process. Obviously, the Republicans are already panicking about losing the House in the midterm elections next year, and in true Republican form they are launching a massive gerrymandering campaign. Since they have specifically tied their destiny to Donald Trump, I don't think that they are going to get the results that they wanted. One thing that has caught my eye is that Trump is currently losing the support of male voters. I think that, from this position, the only way that he can increase his popularity is by reviving the economy and reducing inflation. However, economic growth has been jostled about by his tariff "plan," which is still in an unstable state, and, even if it is finalized soon, the economy may take several years to stabilize. If there were a resurgence in manufacturing jobs, which I think is unlikely, it would probably be after 2028. And, since the initial effect of tariffs is usually higher inflation, there may be higher inflation for some time. Because Trump is an idiot, he seems to think that if the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, he will get both an economic surge and lower inflation. In fact, there may not be an economic surge, and this might lock in higher inflation. As I said earlier, inflation is usually reduced by raising interest rates, not by lowering them. 

On a broader scale, I have been thinking about recent American political developments in terms of "liberal" and "conservative," and how this relates to my readings on evolution, particularly the evolution of cooperative behavior in humans. In many respects, the MAGA movement is a continuation of the Tea Party movement, in which selfish behavior overshadows selfless behavior in politics. The rough pattern of this change is that conservatives gradually decided that it wasn't worth it to them to help minorities, immigrants or women, and that liberals dug further into the idea of social equality as a democratic principle. From an evolutionary standpoint, either view might be correct. While cooperation is probably the main reason why we exist today as a species, as I've said, that was primarily an evolutionary fluke, and all of the other primate species are less cooperative than we are: if they could vote, they would probably be Republicans. This may be why progressive politicians currently seem to be fumbling around to come up with an effective message. My overview of this situation is still that the human population is too high, we have seriously damaged the environment, and that we should cooperate at least in addressing these two issues and reducing warfare. As I have also noted, H. sapiens is not an intrinsically rational animal, and I would welcome some help from AGI.

My personal life is currently a lot less dramatic. My tomatoes are doing even better this year than last year, and this is the first time since I moved to Vermont that I've had large, ripe tomatoes in the first week of August. I'm hoping that, since this is a longer ripening season, I may be able to eat all of them this year and not have to give any away. As far as my investments go, I haven't held any stocks since July 22. So far, this has had little effect on the value of my holdings, and I would rather be safe than sorry, with huge market drops possible in the next few weeks. My new telescope mount finally seems to be working properly. At times I was getting fed up with it but was unenthusiastic about repacking it into four boxes and returning all 116 pounds to California. The main problem turned out to be that, in the course of making screen and software modifications, they never changed their setup instructions, so that the instructions didn't match the equipment. I eventually figured this out on my own and experimented a little to figure out what the correct steps were for star alignment. Losmandy is a little different from most astronomy equipment-making companies, which tend to be engineering-oriented. I don't think that Scott Losmandy went to college, and he attended Hollywood High School. He started the company because he was a machinist and stargazing hobbyist. The company is located in the same town from which The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was broadcast. Johnny also became interested in astronomy and used to have the astronomer, Carl Sagan, as a guest. Even so, although there was this glitch, the people at Losmandy were friendly, and I sort of enjoyed seeing how they operate. They make more videos and podcasts than other suppliers, probably because of their Hollywood orientation. I usually appreciate quirky companies like this that don't follow standard corporate models.

Brain Death by Technological Innovation

Today I came across this short article on reading versus listening on 3 Quarks Daily, which I usually peruse once a week on Sundays, and thought I'd comment on it. As I've said, I don't think that I was a natural reader when I was growing up, and, because no one encouraged me to read, I don't think that I became particularly proficient at it until I was in my thirties. I probably wasn't that great of a listener either, but I was always able to pay attention. My appreciation of reading developed very gradually, when I found out that you could learn new and interesting things that you might never know otherwise. The end result, I think, is this blog, which probably covers more topics in a small space than most blogs.

What made me think of this topic is that I know a highly intelligent person who was able to read by about the age of four and graduated from Cambridge. I had long noticed that she liked to multitask and, before I even met her, she became accustomed to listening to recorded books and rarely actually read physical books. In the more than twenty years that I knew her, I don't recall her ever reading a demanding book. She usually listened to light fiction. Although this is only one example, it came to represent for me how new technology may actually induce cognitive decline. According to the Dworak study, there was a cognitive decline in the U.S. from 2006 to 2018 in all areas except spatial reasoning. On a broad scale, since about 2004, I have noticed a general decline in American intellectual life, a general increase in the number of social influencers, a general decline in news quality, and, especially now, an increase in the number of completely incompetent political operatives. Arguably, a major source of these changes has been social media, which has also created some of the wealth imbalances that we are currently experiencing.

As a personal matter, as I've written, I have found that by weaning myself from a daily consumption of internet material and switching to serious nonfiction and fiction in printed form, my psychological state has improved considerable since 2015. I've taken down that noose. An unfortunate side effect of this improvement is that many people are unable to relate to me, because they are still in that internet trance. For example, thousands of people from all over the world (currently about 20,000 per month) click onto this blog and never express their opinion.

Of course, I see this as a subtopic of the broader subject of the corrosive effects of capitalism. Essentially, the U.S. is up for sale. Maybe, in a few years, we'll luck out, and Xi Jinping will buy the U.S. and fire Donald Trump!