The one-handed economist

I just read this 2007 book by Alan Weisman, and it’s encouraging — not because it gives me any hope for humans but for the Earth.

Weisman goes on a tour of human impact (and destruction), looking at one problem (plastics, pollution, biodiversity, etc.) or place (the oceans or cities) at a time. The book is packed with facts and useful context. Here are a few notes (not quotes!) of interest:

• Plastic will take millions of years to disappear, via plate tectonic sublimation. GHGs, OTOH, will be “back to normal” in 100,000 years. Oceanic life, even if all the corals die in the short run, will come back strongly after only a 1,000 years. The same is true for avian life.
• Evolutionary pressures will reverse nearly every intervention we’ve made to “improve” animals and plants. Some of the invasives we’ve introduced (e.g., rats) will persist, but they will be disadvantaged without our constant protection of their (our) habitats.
• If the clathrates melt, then we’re going to a climate of 250 million years ago, which will dramatically challenge anything now alive.
• The species we claim to be protecting (“save the whales”) are only in trouble because of us. The best thing we can do for them is to voluntarily extinct our own species. That would really be “giving back” but — ironically — it’s unlikely as long as humans think that the Nature is only there for our entertainment or subsistence.
• It’s kinda sad that the entire funeral industry promises some sort of “eternal memory” but delivers environmental pollution.
• Weisman more or less proposes the same “one child per woman” policy (or goal) that I had around 15 years ago , i.e., to either give every baby boy and girl a permit for 0.5 kids (cap and trade) or to sterlize half the population, so that kids grow up as either “breeders” or “players.”

I don’t think that we will ever make space for other species, so the ideas in this book will probably only manifest as we collapse ecosystems and force humanity into a future that could vary from interesting to savage. Nature will be fine.* I give this book FIVE STARS.

*”You know what makes me happy? Watching my species destroy itself. I take it as a sport, as a kinda hobby, and I root for the complete destruction of this culture that we live in. I root for the underdogs. I root for Nature because on this planet at this time, Nature is the underdog.” — George Carlin

Here are all my reviews.

Update (23 sep): Listen to this podcast on abandoned places — the halfway houses of a world without people.

I read this 1944 book by W. Somerset Maugham because it was listed as funny. I’m not sure it’s the funniest book I’ve read but it has its charms — mostly in the characters and Maugham’s delightful writing. OTOH, it is dated in the its sexist tropes.

The plot is set in 1930s Europe, as four Americans discover themselves: Elliot the would-be nobleman, Larry the ex-flyer and semi-sadhu, and Isabel and Gray, a couple united by their desire for “the good life.” Maugham himself narrates.

Here are some witty bits:

L: I’ve been reading a good deal. Eight or ten hours a day. I’ve attended lectures at the Sorbonne. I think I’ve read everything that’s important in French literature and I can read Latin, at least Latin prose, almost as easily as I can read French. Of course Greek’s more difficult. But I have a very good teacher. Until you came here I used to go to him three evenings a week.” M: “And what is that going to lead to?” L: “The acquisition of knowledge,’ he smiled. M: “It doesn’t sound very practical.”

I: Of course I want to travel. But not like that. I don’t want to travel second-class on steamships and put up at third-rate hotels, without a bathroom, and eat at cheap restaurants.” L: “I went all through Italy last October like that. I had a wonderful time. We could travel all over the world on three thousand a year.” I: “But I want to have babies, Larry.” L: “That’s all right. We’ll take them along with us.”

M: Sometimes he was obviously so far from well that I asked him why he didn’t take things more easily. E: “My dear fellow, at my age one can’t afford to fall out. You don’t think that I’ve moved in the highest circles for nearly fifty years without realizing that if you’re not seen everywhere you’re forgotten.” M: I wondered if he realized what a lamentable confession he was then making. I had not the heart to laugh at Elliott any more; he seemed to me a profoundly pathetic object Society was what he lived for, a party was the breath of his nostrils, not to be asked to one was an affront, to be alone was a mortification; and, an old man now, he was desperately afraid.

M: He [Elliot] was dead. I lit the lamp by his bedside and looked at him. His jaw had fallen. His eyes were open and before dosing them I stared into them for a minute. I was moved and I think a few tears trickled down my cheeks. An old, kind friend. It made me sad to think how silly, useless and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes and counts. They had forgotten him already.

M: “And are you under the impression that America is a suitable place to practise the particular virtues you mentioned?” L: “I don’t see why not. You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We care nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it’s merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”

L: “I know. One must adapt oneself to one’s environment and of course I’d work. When I get to America I shall try to get a job in a garage. I’m a pretty good mechanic and I don’t think it ought to be difficult.” M: “Wouldn’t you then be wasting energy that might be more usefully employed in other ways?” L: “I like manual labour. Whenever I’ve got waterlogged with study I’ve taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating. I remember reading a biography of Spinoza and thinking how silly the author was to look upon it as a terrible hardship that in order to earn his scanty living Spinoza had to polish lenses. I’m sure it was a help to his intellectual activity, if only because it diverted his attention for a while from the hard work of speculation. My mind is free when I’m washing a car or tinkering with a carburettor and when the job’s done I have the pleasant sensation of having accomplished something. Naturally I wouldn’t want to stay in a garage indefinitely. It’s many years since I was in America and I must learn it afresh. I shall try to get work as a truck driver. In that way I should be able to travel from end to end of the country.

Suzanne: And then there is my daughter to think of. She is now sixteen and promises to be as beautiful as her father. I have given her a good education. But it is no good denying facts that stare you in the face; she has neither the talent to be an actress nor the temperament to be a whore like her poor mother; I ask you then, what has she to look forward to? A secretaryship or a job in the post office. Monsieur Achille has very generously agreed that she should live with us and has promised to give her a handsome dowry so that she can make a good marriage. Believe me, my dear friend, people can say what they like, but marriage still remains the most satisfactory profession a woman can adopt.

I give this book FOUR stars for its place in the literature of the era (similar to Great Gatsby)

Here are all my reviews.

I read this 2023 book by Richard J. King on the recommendation of LS. It’s all about those sailors who take to the sea alone, with only wind (or muscle power). It’s about the mental and physical challenges, and how technology and society have added or (mostly) subtracted from them.

I thought the book was insightful. It definitely convinced me that sailing alone is for other people!

Here are some excerpts I marked:

1. Davison’s why-go paragraphs present, most importantly, the genuine, unabashedly aspirational belief that a sail across an ocean is a passage of greater significance, a vision quest, a morality tale for how we each should spend our time on Earth. Voyages alone out to sea, taken so intensely and seriously by their sailor-authors, represent one of the nearest and clearest of metaphors of any single human life spent on Earth. A copy-editor for a newspaper in Ohio named Robert Manry, who sailed a 13.5-foot boat across the Atlantic in 1965, wrote that he tried to craft his voyage “into something nearer to a work of art than my life on land had been.” This is perhaps why the single-handed voyage story is so compelling to so many of us—in its madness, pluck, pride, and in its “do not go gentle” journey of solitude before existential unknowns. No one on the planet is more often reminded of one’s meaninglessness in time than the solo sailor in a little boat bobbing about on the eternal indifferent deep.
2. The sea had emerged as a respite from humanity, finding thousands of survivors seeking new lives, a “Ulysses generation” as Rousmaniere put it: people who perceived the ocean as the last place on Earth that remained wild and untouched by war [after WWII, when solo sailing took off], still seemingly clean and free without national borders and government authorities.
3. In Sailing Alone Around the World (my review) Slocum regularly quipped about the satisfaction of his own company, “There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.” Aboard Spray at last, Slocum enjoyed a voyage free from mutiny, domestic life, and living under the roof of another family member. At sea he could avoid any interpersonal conflict at all.
4. Don Quixote lives in his imagination and yearns to serve a world that has long since moved on. Go to nearly any marina today anywhere in the world and you’ll find a Don Quixote, half-mystic and half-fool, applying another coat of varnish to the rail of his old, beloved Rocinante.
5. Jones explained to me that they had stuck the famous sailor out to anchor in the current because he did not dress like the yachtsmen at the club, his boat “looked exactly like she had been doing what she had been doing,” and they wordlessly resented this easy-going solo circumnavigator who threatened their self-esteem and view of themselves as sailors.
6. Maybe, though, there is something deeper here, crudely summarized, in terms of social values in modern Pacific Island cultures: an emphasis on family, serving the community, and decentering the individual? … The social-science researcher Peter Belmi, a Filipino immigrant and professor in the business program at the University of Virginia, has found that people from wealthier backgrounds end up focusing more on themselves, whereas people from communities with fewer resources seek power or success to benefit others, since they have been raised relying on their communities to survive. “We don’t need others as much in order to survive,” said Belmi, referring to the thinking of those in power, “and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you are unique, compared to others.
7. Since the 1960s, even as portions of the general public throughout the world began to really consider anthropogenic threats to the open-ocean environment, this has proven more the exception than the rule among single-handed mariners and the narratives they created: the sailing and adventure came first and then—often, but definitely not always—the environmental advocacy follows.
8. Adams said that despite what the world sees today as a powerful feminist act of being the first woman to sail the Pacific alone, she did not identify as a feminist then or now. Her why-go was not to prove anything about women. Adams feels as she always had, that this trip was simply something she wanted to do—and could. Her friend and fellow single-handed sailor Carol Baker, who herself in her late seventies still sails alone along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, told me that Adams has never had any axe to grind and “never had any patience at all with the feminist movement.”
9. An important point: Do I think that Peter Nichols was reflecting on how metaphorically appropriate this was, how sadly perfect his sinking boat was for his future book, even as he was stepping up the ladder onto the merchant ship that had answered his mayday? I do. I do not think, however, there is anything unethical or false in this. Aren’t we all doing this at some level all the time, always imagining an audience? It is part of that fair, old question: can you be a storyteller and be pure of endeavor at the same time? Is an adventurer, athlete, activist, politician, or even a social worker or teacher to be considered compromised, less “true,” if they know from the start that they are going to create something from it, craft some form of art or research project or any other form of creative or scholarly expression? Solo sailors present an exceptionally compelling case study in this fluidity of experience and art and story, because there is so long a tradition of the ancient mariner’s sea stories. There is no one to confirm the tale. For single-handers the stakes are often life and death, and the remains and the reality of a death are almost always unrecoverable and unknown. We will never know if Slocum’s Spray really did steer itself so well, if he did in fact escape pirates, or even how or when he died.
10. Put another way, it’s often quoted that the novelist Gabriel García Márquez once said: “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”
11. His voice is one of long experience, but also humility. In an appendix, Moitessier makes clear that the ocean’s weather and sea states are too variable and complex for full human knowledge. “The sea will always remain the great unknown,” he says. “It is sometimes enormous without being too vicious; not as high a week or a month later, it can become very dangerous because of either cross-swells, or an unexpected or completely new factor. The person who can write a really good book on the sea is probably not yet born, or else is already senile, because one would have to sail a hundred years to know it well enough.”
12. Since the 1990s, the technologies of GPS and satellite communications have enabled far more single-handers to go to sea and do so more safely, but the technologies have also encouraged a larger portion of mariners to avoid learning or practicing celestial navigation and wayfinding, which surely reduces their spiritual connections and their deeper awareness of the sea, the clouds, and the movement of the solar system. I used a paper chart, kept track of my dead reckoning, but I relied on that little electronic box far more than I would have liked. Bernard Moitessier would have been disappointed in me.
13. The satellite phone and now the internet, both still exceptionally expensive out at sea, provide emotional comfort, safety, weather, anchorage information, and gear assistance. But they also reduce the sailor’s focus on the sea and their self-reliant endeavor, which was supposedly why so many went out there in the first place.
14. I like having this ocean crossing in my pocket. [King sailed solo across the Atlantic.] It’s like when you touch your wallet or phone now and again just to make sure it’s there. I did not plan for this to be the impact of the passage, but it has remained an ego crutch for me, even though I almost never bring it out. I just put my fingers on it when I’m speaking with someone who I think is a condescending jerk. My “pocket reminder” is my five years of (kinda solo) travel.
15. Many single-handed writers use “we” when talking in their narratives about their progress, referring to themselves and their boat. This makes sense, because it shows humility and the recognition that this couldn’t be done without a good boat. It was certainly true for me that Fox tolerated its new owner, caring for me far more patiently than I deserved.
16. Slocum, Pidgeon, and other well-known single-handers were relatively poor. They did nearly all the work themselves on shoe-string budgets. In the countries they lived in and the ports they visited, though, as white men, even without much money, they had a path to achieve what they wanted if they had the talent and gumption. Any individual and cultural discouragement they felt before departing was but a scratch on the barricades that had been constructed in front of, say, an African American man trying to build a boat and sail around the world in the 1890s, or 1920s, or 1950s—and still today.
17. The footage from the news cameras at the time Laura Dekker looks calm, partly confused, very young, but also maturely, mildly amused by the absurdity of the attention. She wrote in her personal notes at the time that she felt terribly depressed and exhausted by the trials, writing “It’s a good thing I’m a fine actress.” The Dutch Council for Child Protection saw Dekker’s idea primarily in terms of child neglect and seemingly a fear that this might break the compulsory education system in the country. (So apt!)
18. I took solace from wisdom more useful than the texts of the weather service: the words of the lobster captain that I had worked for part-time just before I left on the trip. While we were out hauling pots one morning, I asked him if it was going to stop raining. He said, “Always does.”
19. Conrad wrote vivid, accurate, and extravagant descriptions of waves and storms—perhaps more passionately than any other writer before or since writing in English (his third language after Polish and French). Here are a few sentences from Typhoon: It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were—without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
20. It is foremost the storm that is the proving ground for the individual, not the doldrums or the sharks or the logistics or the ship avoidance or even the loneliness. The solo sailor might interpret their safe emergence out of a storm as a success born of experience, toughness, personal philosophy, technological expertise, the good boat, the aid of one’s ancestors, the mercy of their god, or just merely dumb luck. Or a mixture of all these things.
21. Looking ahead toward the future of solo sailing, cruising or racing, regardless of what type of boat people choose to go on and at whatever speed and however connected to shore, the single-hander will always return home with a deeper appreciation for a single human’s smallness in time and on Earth. Sailing a small boat at sea is, especially for the cruisers, a commitment to a low-impact lifestyle that teaches one to adapt and pay careful attention to the natural world. Robin Lee Graham put it well after his five years on Dove in the late 1960s: “One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much.
22. During one of Ellen MacArthur’s first ocean passages across the North Sea as a teenager, she tried to bottle up some bioluminescence to bring home. “I began to realize that the beauty of the water can’t be taken away or captured,” she wrote, “It can only properly be appreciated first hand.
23. I too was almost killed by not only a steamship, but more significantly by a containership, arguably the twenty-first century’s greatest symbol of capitalism, over-consumption, and the linear economy. Could we extrapolate, as literary types are wont to do, that I was a wee symbol of Western culture and so far it has been a near miss, to be killed by our own products, our own emissions, but we have been granted a bit more time to do something with the life we’ve been left?
24. Then what is courage?” she wrote. “An understanding and acceptance; but an acceptance without resignation, mark you, for courage is a fighting quality. It is the ability to make mistakes and profit by them, to fail and start again, to take heartaches, setbacks and disappointments in your stride, to face every day of your life and every humdrum, trivial little detail of it and realize you don’t amount to much, and accept the fact with equanimity, and not let it deter your efforts.

I recommend this book to sailor. For everyone else, maybe not? FOUR STARS.

Here are all my reviews.

I read this collection of short stories by Nescio (“I don’t know”) after hearing it mentioned as “maybe one of the few pre-WWII books written in Dutch that people can still read.” Now, I read it in English, but that comment addresses an interesting issue of (a) reforms to the language making it harder for younger Dutch to read older texts and (b) competition from imported (English!) books for Dutch readers’ time. These issues do not affect native English speakers, but they are probably relevant in many other languages.

Anyways, the short stories were fun to me for their portrayal of Amsterdam and some of its people in the 1904-1944 period. I am not sure that the dropped place names (the equivalent of “going to North Beach for a coffee” in San Francisco) are as interesting to non-Mokkumers, so this book’s appeal will be more historical than geographical to most of you. That said, the book (in translation) has many delightful passages, such as these:

1. He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain. Those were the great enemies. You always had to eat and sleep, over and over again, you had to get out of the cold, you got wet and tired or miserable. Now look at that water. It has it good: it just ripples and reflects the clouds, it’s always changing and yet always stays the same too. Has no problems at all.
2. Japi was good at getting even with those well-disposed cultured Dutchmen who have no patience for anyone who doesn’t look at least as stupid and tasteless as they do, and who scoff at you and say things about you to your face, in public, as though pastors and priests in even the tiniest villages hadn’t been trying to raise people properly for centuries. Japi was a workhorse and he could lay into people, if needed, with such skill and force that even the most brutish lout had to knuckle under.
3. For the earth everything was simple enough. It just turned on its axis and followed its course around the sun and had nothing to worry about. But the people on it fretted out their days with troubles and cares and endless worries, as though without these troubles, these cares, and these worries, the day wouldn’t turn into night.
4. Someone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so “goddamn delicious,” who sniffed his hands at night to smell the sea. Someone who thought it was enough to be alive and in good health, who went on his joyful way between God’s heaven and God’s earth and thought it was idiotic that people caused themselves so much trouble, and laughed out loud at them, and sat there eternally with his beatific smile, quietly enjoying the water and the sky and the clouds and the fields, and let the rain soak him through without noticing it and then said “I think I’m wet” and laughed. Someone who could eat an expensive meal and drink expensive jenever better than anyone in Holland and then, at other times, on his long walks (because he didn’t always sit around, every so often he spent days at a time on his feet), he’d eat dry rolls day in and day out and be moved to tears because out in the open “a piece of bread like this can taste so good.”
5. It was eight o’clock. I put my watch down on the table next to my money, the watch that was no longer on its way to the pawnshop, and I said, “For now you’ll stay right here with Old Man Koekebakker, little watch,” and I put my hand back in my pocket. I was used to having conversations with my things since there’s so little that’s worth saying to most people. I was out of the woods for now… I had finally transmuted it to gold at my writing desk and now I could sit and look at it in the form of my own money, money you can count on and that never lets you down and never leaves you in the lurch.
6. You know what you should do, go get a half dram of old jen-ever, it’s on me. I’ll pay you back when I get the chance. — Japi, the freeloader (uitvreter).
7. You don’t know what an office job is like, Koekebakker, or you wouldn’t laugh. First you go to school till you’re eighteen. Do you know how many sheep there are in Australia or how deep the Suez Canal is? My point exactly. But I knew all that. Do you know what polarization is? Me neither, but I used to. I had to learn the strangest things: ‘Credited to the inventory account,’ translate that into French. Have a go at that. You have no idea, Koekebakker. And it goes on for years. Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realize that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush. And it’s always the same old routine, be there nine o’clock sharp, sit there quietly for hours and hours. I realized I couldn’t do it. I was always late, I really tried to get there on time but it never happened, it had been going on too long. And so boring. They said I did everything wrong and I’m sure they were right about that. I wanted to but I couldn’t do it, I’m not the kind of person who is cut out for work. Then they said I was distracting the others
8. Alone. I’m going to Friesland.” “In the middle of winter?” Japi nodded. “To do what?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Do? Nothing. All you people are so pathetically sensible: everything needs a reason and a purpose. I’m going to Friesland, not to do anything, not for anything. No reason. Because I feel like it.”
9. And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn’t make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer, or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn’t do this because of that and couldn’t possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid. Smoke a couple cigars, chat a little, look around a bit, enjoy the sunshine when it was there and the rain when it wasn’t, and not think about tomorrow, not want to become anybody, not want a thing except a little nice weather now and then.
10. You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces, the important gentlemen they as a rule liked a whole lot more than us. They were so much more respectable and spoke so well. And we were bums.
11. So we didn’t do anything. No, actually, that was when Bekker wrote his first poem. I still remember it perfectly, it was on a Sunday, of course, because whenever anything happened it was on a Sunday. The other six days a week we spent dragging our chains around from nine to six.
12. Outside, the spring sun shone down on the cheerless street. My God, how could a street like this exist. I was absolutely not allowed to kiss the girl in the tram but a street like this was allowed to exist. That was allowed.
13. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: “That’s good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I’m sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I’m only God.” And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?
14. Who was that gentleman?” asked the little poet. “God,” said the devil, and the knobby bumps on his forehead grew bigger… The God of all those people who say ‘I never expected that from you’ when you try to live a little, and who say ‘I thought so, that was bound to end badly’ when you end up in the poorhouse later. The God who resents that you have Saturday afternoons off, the God of Professor Volmer, lecturer in accounting and business, who thinks you spend too much time looking up at the sky. The God of everyone who has no other option besides work or boredom. The God of the Netherlands.
15. These were truly strange times. It couldn’t end well. And now he’d gone and said that a new age had dawned. The age of Ironic Dilettantism was over, a new age of Trailblazing Optimism and Dynamic Vigor had begun. That’s what he’d gone and said. And then, with a sigh, God turned back to the manuscript of a thick book about Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management and started reading
16. And when she tilted her head forward—she wore her hair up now—the God of heaven and earth himself looked up for a moment from his eternal contemplation of the eternal lands and seas and propped his right elbow on his thigh and rested his head on his right hand, thumb under his chin and index finger along the length of his cheek, and he beheld the tan little bumps above the hollow that was a poem, and the fine hairs that glinted in the sunlight, and he smiled. Then he looked gravely back down past his feet at his Rhine winding back and forth between his mountains, and he mused: “What’s going on here? How did I let the Germans found another empire? Those Prussians….”
17. Why was she here? Why must she die unkissed? Not just kissed, really kissed. She glowed, her whole body glowed, her heart swelled. She unbuttoned her clothes in front of the mirror and looked at her breasts, so white in her black dress, and held them in her hands. She was pure and untouched. What a joke. And in her great confusion she begged God to defile her. “Am I going crazy?”
18. Last night came the report that the Triple Alliance had accepted Wilson’s proposal. This morning I went into the city to see if people were drunk. It was a soft gray October Sunday morning and the little trees on the Damrak had only a few leaves left. The IJ was so quiet, so bluish gray, and behind a few long furrows it quietly thought back over the year that was coming to an end. But it was quiet on the streets, no drunk people celebrating, no flags. I wonder when shoes will get cheaper
19. October is especially beautiful this year, we live in a golden city, and not for any amount of money, not for a hundred thousand rijksdollar bills would I want to be respectable. I’d rather just stay who I am, a piece of humanity like this walking right at the edge of the embankment, beyond the trees, stopping and turning around every time, like someone a little confused. And it has stopped raining, it hasn’t rained for days and I’m no longer dreaming about wet feet, I’m wide awake. And definitely confused.

I give this book FOUR STARS.

Here are all my reviews.