What I'm Reading Now #1
Curated Liminal Conundrums
I Hadn’t Expected to Cry at the Queen’s Death, but I Never Really Expected Her to Die
Reading the news yesterday morning, I was surprised to hear that Queen Elizabeth was “under medical supervision.” It seemed an odd turn of phrase. I didn’t realize that it was code for the monarch’s impending death. And then she was dead, and I, along with millions, cried.
We’re in liminal territory, now, in between the death of a queen and the crowning of a king. Is that part of why I’m moved to tears—liminal spaces are so often disconcerting? But there is more. Those of us born in the 1950s remember the Queen as one of life’s few constants, whether we were fans or not. She was always there, the way the sun always rises in the morning, at least until it doesn’t.
As it happens, I am a fan of the late Queen. It’s a tough gig, being queen, sort of like living in a gilded cage, watching between the bars as the foibles of her relatives play out on the world stage. She did it with unfailing grace. I saw her once, when I happened to be in the U.K. in 1977 during her Silver Jubilee. She was a tiny but brilliantly-colored, pea-green figure in a huge crowd on the opposite bank of the River Thames, dressed as she often did in a bright color, so that she could be recognized at a distance.
I’ve read some of her obituaries, such as this one, Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96; Was World’s Longest-Reigning Monarch. In it the New York Times quotes part of her 2020 address about the COVID outbreak in which she referred to a wartime song by Vera Lynn, “We’ll Meet Again”:
We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.
Her death ends an era, and the world will not be the same without her presence.
Obscurantism—Yes, It’s a Word—Describes What Salman Rushdie Fought Against
As a retired English professor, I rarely run across a word—in English anyway—that totally stumps me. I had to look up this one—obscurantism—that appeared toward the end of The New Yorker article, “Salman Rushdie and the Power of Words.” (Obscurantism, according to Oxford Dictionaries, means “the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known.”) The erudite President Macron had used the word in his praise of Salman Rushdie after the author was stabbed during a visit to upstate New York in August:
For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight against obscurantism. He has just been the victim of a cowardly attack by the forces of hatred and barbarism. His fight is our fight; it is universal.
From the article’s title about the power of words, I expected Adam Gopnik’s piece to be about how the eloquence and meaning of Rushdie’s writing had changed society in some way, but that wasn’t it at all. Rather, Gopnik is disturbed about the spreading tendency of some elements in the media to insist that the stabbing should be viewed from the perspective of Muslims who felt insulted by Rushdie. In response, Gopnik goes to some pains to illustrate that Rushdie’s writing is in no way “an anti-Muslim invective.”
Then Gopnik uses a quote from Soviet dissident author Andrei Sinyavsky to make the central point of his article—that literature uses the hypothetical and the imaginary, not the real, to enlighten the minds of readers:
The most rudimentary thing about literature—it is here that one’s study of it begins—is that words are not deeds.
For me, what Gopnik is getting at in his article, is that fiction such as Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which inspired such lasting controversy, creates liminal worlds in readers’ minds. Such imaginary worlds may affect an individual deeds, though the created worlds are not themselves real. And liminal spaces always have the potential for inspiring discomfort.
Yes, Rushdie’s words are powerful in their creation of liminal worlds, but his words are not deeds and should never be equated with deeds.
How to Keep Your Kids Safe? Hint: It’s Not Obvious
The logic may seem obvious: if you want to keep your children safe, teach them about life’s dangers, about all the ways that the world can hurt them. But what seems intuitive may not always lead to the best outcomes. In his Atlantic article Don’t Teach Your Kids to Fear the World, Arthur C. Brooks cites the evidence that this common wisdom does hold not hold up. Indeed, the opposite is true.
A research study by psychologists Jeremy D. W. Clifton and Peter Meindl showed that teaching your children to fear the world (what they called fostering a negative primal belief) also teaches them to be suspicious of others’ motives and to take fewer risks. These, in turn, creates further negative outcomes, researchers say, such as the tendency to be depressed and less healthy.
People holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts.
Brooks’s suggests a counter-intuitive technique, “cultivate a culture of safety.” For suggestions on how to do that, read the article, Don’t Teach Your Kids to Fear the World.