I just read Chapter 11: What is the meaning of it all?

At the start of each chapter, there is a short vignette that tells a little story from a case study. Chapter 11, tells of an elderly woman, Elizabeth, who has an undiagnosed health condition that is making her sick. Her daughter, an ER nurse, becomes her champion and takes her from doctor to doctor, test after test, treatment after treatment while Elizabeth’s health continues to deteriorate. Eventually, Elizabeth announces that she doesn’t want to do this anymore.

Her daughter was stunned. “I thought you wanted to fight this”, she said.

I find this metaphor – “you have to fight” – terribly unhelpful. I think, instead, you have to try to have a good understanding of the choices available and to make decisions that are likely to lead to the best outcomes, even when your information is incomplete.

For my own cancer, a diffuse low-grade glioma, there is very little evidence that surgery is helpful and yet the standard of care is to have surgery. My neuro recommended surgery at our first meeting. Almost everyone I know with a glioma has chosen surgery and many are on their second or third surgery because gliomas almost always recur. Surgery for a brain tumour is very taxing, the recovery is difficult and the benefits are questionable. It’s like the healthcare business has a directive that says something must be done and this is something.

So what is the meaning of it all?

I’ve been studying existentialism for my philosophy degree. Jean-Paul Sartre says that we humans don’t come with any predefined meaning or purpose. We have to find it for ourselves. I find meaning in relationships — family and friends — and in leaving the world a little better than how I found it. I don’t find meaning in racking up more months or years on the calendar.

Sartre also says that once we have found our meaning in life, we are required to make choices to realise that meaning. Most people go through life without ever questioning its meaning and, rather than making choices of their own, they accept whatever option that society or convention or family obligation puts in front of them. To truly live meaningful lives, we must make choices. We are condemned to be free.

I think it’s a shame that our society puts so little emphasis on finding meaning and making choices. It’s a shame that the chapter on meaning is the second to last chapter in a book about the end of life. I expect that more people would lead fulfilling lives if they knew that there were more options available than the school-university-marriage-mortgage-children treadmill that conventional society presents us with.

Using ritual to find meaning

Another part of chapter 11 talks about using ritual to create meaning at the end of life.

I’ve just read an article in Aeon magazine that contrasts the hide-bound rituals of Confucianism with the relative freedom proposed by another Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi.

This is my first exposure to Chinese philosophy, so forgive me if I am misrepresenting anything.

Confucius recommended a series of rituals to ease the pain of loss when someone dies and to make all kinds of transitions (marriage, business arrangements, political decisions) easier to process. Zhuangzi, by contrast, proposed a more free-wheeling approach to life.

Zhuangzi shares a fable to illustrate the limited worldview of someone who knows only ritual.

There is a well-known story in the Zhuangzi, the ‘Fable of a Frog in the Well’. It is a conversation between a well frog and a sea turtle. The frog brags about its own comfortable abode and way of life in a caved-in well to a visiting sea turtle. When the turtle describes for the frog what the sea is like, the frog is completely dumbfounded, not knowing what to make of the turtle’s description. This is a tale about the limited world of the well for the frog in contrast with the limitless world of the sea for the turtle.

Most of us live our lives like a frog who can’t imagine a world outside his well.

Zhuangzi goes on to talk about a butcher, Cook Ding, who creates a ritual way of carving an ox that respects both timeless tradition and the particular circumstances of the task in front of him.

Every touch and every move of Cook Ding’s is conducted in perfect rhythm, as if he was performing some grand ancient ritual, for a highly scripted occasion. His execution is exquisite and precise, hitting all the right notes, and smoothly cutting open the ox’s body without hacking his way through.

I find comfort in ritual. When I returned to England, a few years ago, I was eager to immerse myself in the ancient rituals of my country. A pint of beer in front of a roaring fire on a wet Sunday afternoon. The glories of Evensong in the soaring space of Bristol Cathedral. I believe the words of the funeral rite in the Book of Common Prayer have brought comfort to untold millions over the centuries.

But there is a conflict between following rituals and making the choice to live one’s life freely. I expect Sartre would say that rituals are good when they are freely chosen.

I appreciated chapter 11’s suggestions to create personal rituals to ease the pain of loss and to remember the person who has died. My daughter and I have created a few mini-rituals, like doing jigsaw puzzles together and drinking cocktails at The Broken Dock.

One day, she will be doing a jigsaw and she will remember me and smile.

I’ve been through a substantial proportion of the Dickens canon in the last thirty years – and loved every one! – but, somehow, something about Bleak House keeps me from making that final commitment. But Colin! Believe me when I say that I am so grateful for your gift and your faith in me and, one day, I will prove myself worthy of your kindness.

I have been a committed reader since I first learned ITA and I formed the habit of keeping 5 or 6 books on the go soon after. I keep my active books in a pile by my nightstand, each waiting for the privilege of being the next to come to bed with me. I’ll sample a little of each until one seduces me, whispering I am the one, and commits me to reading on on on until the finish.

In the early days of my reading adventure, Green Smoke and The Little Wooden Horse and The Magic Faraway Tree were my night-time companions but, these days, Mr Bezos’s magical device sends me sample after sample to tease me and tempt me into making that brief, literary commitment. I do still have a few pre-electronic books on my nightstand, waiting for their turn to join me in bed and one of them is Bleak House, waiting longer than Pip waited for Estella – nearly 30 years now – for a turn under the covers.

Other friends have had more luck giving me books. Matt currently holds the title Most likely to buy me a fantastic book, a title he first earned with On The Road, telling me “I hesitate to give you this, because you might just take off and leave me behind” but, in the end, it was he that took off and I stayed put. Matt has since bought me several books out of the blue and every one was a winner. I have tried repaying his compliment on more than one occasion, but I expect my attempts to settle the debt are still piled on his nightstand.

Another memorable book-shaped gift came from Colin’s brother-in-law Rod. I can’t tell you how many times I re-read Fungus the Bogeyman and I’d be more than a little ashamed to tell you how many times it made me cry.

Perhaps the best-ever surprise book came from an unusual source. When I was 15, my dad who, as far I know, never actually read a book, bought me Principles in Organic Chemistry, a second-year (American) college textbook. I say my dad bought it for me, but what I almost certainly mean is that my stepmother bought it for me. Sue, if you are reading, I don’t know how you ever thought to buy me that book and I have been meaning to ask you since forever. That book was perfect for my fifteen-year-old self as, at the time, I loved chemistry and I read it over and over. I still remember all the methyl-, ethyl-, propyl- prefixes and the difference between an -ene and an -ane and how Americans had different names for everything (and still do!). I’ll forever be grateful. I wish I still possessed that book just as I wish I still possessed the Joy of Frogs (think: Joy of Sex but with frogs) that you bought me the year before.

It’s a little bit sad that I have no one to buy books for these days. Mrs Clown reads occasionally, but not any book that I would ever think to buy for her. I have bought her many a book but our secret agreement is that I buy the book for her, read it myself and then tell her what’s in it. She particularly enjoyed me reading Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Mind.

My biggest little clown couldn’t get enough of books when he was an even littler clown but one too many deadly earnest Great American Novels For Children doused his passion for reading in elementary school. I seem to recall that Little House on the Prairie provided the final bucket of water that killed the flame forever. The other little clown still enjoys reading in theory but, in practice, has too many electronic temptations to sit patiently with something so old-fashioned as a book and certainly wouldn’t let people from another generation recommend books for her.

It’s a great shame because I so desperately want them to love the books that I love. I am still able, across the vast generation gap that separates us, to choose a movie and force them to sit still (put that phone down!) through those crucial first 15 minutes until the plot grabs them and drives the electronic temptations from their minds but it’s a skill I have to use sparingly because, although my success rate is impressively high, I feel that a little of my influence drains away each time I use it.

One small clown still trusts me to recommend TV series for us to watch together despite the attempts at sabotage by the other two but my book-recommending mojo is, I fear, gone forever. I still have full confidence in my ability to choose a book for my little ones, but I have no confidence that they will actually open it and let the words cast their magic spell. One little clown, just last week, even made it all the way through one of my favourite books from my childhood but I have no evidence at all that the Call of the Wild was ever more than mere words on a page for her.

If I had a teenage daughter to recommend books for, I would certainly recommend that she read The Bell Jar. OK, maybe I’d wait until she was a little older so she could appreciate the wit and the delicious cynicism more completely, but I have no doubt that she would love it and that it would change the way she thinks about life. It’s always risky to recommend a book when you are only halfway through but I am sufficiently moved by the first half that I wanted to put down my Kindle for long enough to write how much I’m enjoying it.

Sylvia Plath, for me, had always been a footnote in Ted Hughes’s biography. Mr Banks, my teacher for the last two years of primary school, was a Ted Hughes pusher and if we weren’t reading poems about attent, sleek thrushes on the lawn, we were making enormous collages about The Iron Man. But I didn’t know anything about his wife, Sylvia Plath, except the thing with the oven. I understood that a certain kind of American feminist held Hughes responsible for her death but I never understood why they cared so much about her death in the first place. Now I do. She’s a brilliant writer.

I’m not much of a feminist myself – and I’m even less of one after the PyCon thing last week – but if I were a woman and a feminist, I think I’d want to be the kind who succeeds because she’s great at what she does, not because she’s a feminist and Plath was a great writer and she tells a story that I know well. I hear she’s pretty good at poetry too, and that’s where my reading adventure will take me next.

I quit after three months with no idea of what to do next but I eventually narrowed it down to one of five things.

• Six years in the navy had not cured me of my love of the sea. I applied for a job on a millionaire’s yacht based in Antibes.
• I rather liked tropical islands. I applied for a job fixing satellite tracking equipment on Ascension Island.
• I rather liked “abroad” in general. I applied for a course to learn to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL).
• I had a tiny twinge of regret that I had not been to university. I applied to Cambridge.
• I vaguely remembered that I had been good with computers as a lad. I applied for an adult education class in software engineering.

I didn’t really have a strong preference and decided to accept the first offer that arrived in my letterbox. Software engineering came in first so software engineering it was and I headed up to Whitechapel for a five-month course.

If you have ever been to Whitechapel, you will know that it is one of the poorest, roughest parts of London and home to immigrants, gangsters and outcasts. Imagine a neighbourhood that has not changed one whit since Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror. That should help you picture the environs of my classroom.

If you have ever been unemployed in England, you will know that there is a prevailing threat that your benefits will be stopped unless you attend an endless stream of adult education classes. That should help you picture my fellow students.

Our instructor was a total nutcase. It was not clear that he had ever programmed a computer before but that didn’t stop him from having a sackful of forceful opinions about software engineering. Fortunately, he only showed up for class about one a week.

My fellow students were delighted. There was a pub next door and I got pretty good at pool. Winner Stays On was the prevailing convention and one of the highlights of my life was racking up for the first game at 11 AM and not leaving the table until the pub closed at 11 PM after thrashing all-comers including several shady-looking characters as the evening hours wore on and the bar filled with gangsters.

A few weeks into our course, the four of us who were not receiving unemployment benefits decided to complain about the lack of an instructor. The company that ran the course promised to find us a new instructor and they gave us a copy of The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie to pass the time until they found a new teacher

I opened the book and on the very first page was the program that changed my life.

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{ 
  printf("hello, world\n");
  return 0;
}

Our new instructor eventually showed up and tried to teach us ADA but I wasn’t interested. I had my White Book. I had my passport to a successful career in software.

Two weeks later, I finished my first big C program. It was an editor for sheet music that could play the music you typed in. Two months later, I had my first programming job. Two years later, I was managing a 12-person team building insurance software. Two more years and I was working on Wall Street. Two years after that, I made it to Silicon Valley.

My story is not complete unless I tell you about the Women into Technology class next door or rather, about Rita — a Maltese woman in that class — and how we moved in together and… well… that’s a longer story and I’ll save it for another day…

Epilogue
The very day that I started my class, I received a big fat envelope with tickets to fly down for an interview on a millionaire’s superyacht in Antibes. But I’d already made my choic. I was going to be a software engineer. I wonder how my life would have been different if I had got on that plane.

For years after I returned home from Asia, all I could think about was how to get back to those magical lands. I knew that a life in England was not on the cards for me but America was off limits too. The Quiet American steeled my determination.

One scene from the book stuck in my mind for 30 years. When Phuong prepared Fowler’s opium pipe, Greene’s sensuous depiction of the hiss of the needle sizzling in the opium and the blissful bubbling that gave Fowler peace made me dream of the beaches of Thailand and the jungles of Burma.

When I first arrived in Asia, I made a vow that I would not take advantage of the easy access to drugs. I don’t even remember why I made my vow, but I felt a certain superiority as the only one in my party to decline the bong or to Just Say No to the mushrooms and the hashish and even the heroin that were on offer at every turn.

I kept my vow until Piratefest 2016 when the spinning from a brownie sent me to my bed. It was like I’d skipped over the gentle buzz of my glass of wine and fast-forwarded to that moment when you try to keep the horizon from pitching and the room just won’t stay still. After that nauseating instant, it became even easier to Just Say No.

When we trekked through the Burmese jungle, our Karen porter bubbled up his opium pipe at every cigarette break and politely offered us a hit. We always declined. The trekking group after ours lacked our temperance and their emergency evacuation for an overdose took them on an unscheduled trip to the hospital in Chiang Rai. But, still.

The hiss of Phuong’s hot needle in Fowler’s bubbling bead of opium and the romance of our porter’s pipe always seemed to offer an escape from the cares of the world should I need to escape myself one day.

Now she was kneading the little ball of hot paste on the convex margins of the bowl and I could smell the opium. There is no smell like it. Beside the bed my alarm clock showed twelve-twenty, but already my tension was over. Pyle had diminished. The lamp lit her face as she tended the long pipe, with the serious attention she might have given to a child. I was fond of my pipe: more than two feet of straight bamboo, ivory at either end. Two-thirds of the way down was the bowl, like a convolvulus reversed, the convex margin polished and darkened by the frequent kneading of the opium. Now, with a flick of the wrist, she plunged the needle into the tiny cavity, released the opium and reversed the bowl over the flame, holding the pipe steady for me. The bead of opium bubbled gently and smoothly as I inhaled.

The Quiet American (Greene, 1955, p.13)

In my memory, Fowler had cancer and was using opium to dull the pain. I always imagined that if the pain ever got too much for me, a trip to Vietnam and some opium bubbling in a pipe would be more romantic than a morphine drip under the harsh lights of a hospital room. Re-reading the book after a thirty-year interval, I find that my memory has bent the narrative to fit my desire. Fowler did not have cancer but what he endured was much worse. Who knew there were worse things than cancer?

I was intrigued to remember that opium sharpens the mind. I wonder how many of Greene’s wonderful novels bubbled up from the bowl of an opium pipe? How I wish my mind had the peace and sharpness that comes with opium! I have so many decisions to make.

After three pipes I felt my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions easily without losing sight of the main question — what did they want from me?

The Quiet American (Greene, 1955, p.16)

Could I ever go back to those mystical lands? Do they even still exist? I don’t know but Grahame Green took me halfway there and for that, I am grateful.

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

L’invitation au voyage (Charles Baudelaire, 1857)

Four years ago, I drove up to Portland, Oregon to make a new life and I fell entirely in love with every detail of the city. I loved exploring Portland and I found something new each time I looked.

I have a sense that the Puritans never made it as far as Portland. In San Jose, the mayor is proud that they haven’t handed out a new liquor license in years. They just recycle the old ones. In Portland, the mayor is named after a beer. In San Jose, bars are either dingy and shallow or shiny and shallow and when they die, they are replaced by another just the same. In Portland, bars spring up on every corner and reach for the sky as a tree in the rainforest reaches for the canopy and the sunlight beyond.  Undaunted by the diversity of what came before, new bars are excited and eager to become part of the diverse ecosystem where everyone feeds off everyone else’s success.

I loved the little details of the city. I loved finding the kind of place that has 27 beers on a blackboard, ranked by IBU and scribbled out as new beers are put on tap and old ones run dry. I loved that Portland has more strip clubs per resident than anywhere in the United States and I loved finding myself in the middle of a World Naked Bike Ride and seeing co-workers cycle by with a delighted wave. I loved going to the movies and being brought my dinner on a tray. I loved seeing the real-time display above the bar announcing who had just checked in on FourSquare and I loved that every new bar had three new beers that I had never previously tried.

My favourite bit of Portland was the New Old Lompoc on 23rd St. It was the kind of crappy, divey, dingy bar that is always filled with real people. The Lompoc brewed their own beer and I began with the Condor because I had been warned that the hoppier IPAs would shrivel my labia. Condor gave me cramps in my calves just like Courage Sparkling Bitter did all those years ago and like no other beer since. By the time I was done with Portland, I always looked for the hoppiest beer or the strongest beer on the blackboard, genitalia be damned. In Portland, I found barley wines and even, for the first time in 25 years, a prize old ale at Steve’s wonderful Cheese Shop that took me back to that tiny pub in Horndean.

On my first visit to the Lompoc, four long years ago, the waitress brought me my Portland Dip and a pint of Condor and smiled the brightest, widest smile I have ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie. Last Monday, the same waitress smiled the same bright smile as she delivered my labia-shrivelling Kick Axe at my last farewell to Portland before I departed for my new life back in San Jose. The Lompoc is closing down next week to make way for some nice new condominiums. They tell me that it will reopen in a couple of years, but it won’t be the same. It feels oddly fitting that the Lompoc will close down just as my love affair with Portland ends and my new life begins.

This week, I started a new job with a brand-new startup. The kind of startup where everyone looks at each other and decides whether we should use Python or Ruby or, perhaps, Perl because no one has really thought about trivial details like which technology to use yet. The kind of startup where the furniture is scavenged from a previous tenant and where, if you want to talk to the CEO, you swing your chair around and talk to him. WebMD wasn’t an especially big company but, in many ways, it felt like the biggest company I had ever worked for and by the end, it felt very safe and comfortable. It’s time for something a little more dangerous and exciting.

The title quote, by the way, is stolen from the book I am reading.

Here we go out of the sleep of mild people, into the wild rippling water.

I have seen the movie, Deliverance, three or four times already but no one ever told me I should read the book too until now. The writing sears my senses.

In many ways, it reminds me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  There too, I had seen the movie so many times that I could almost recite the lines but the quality of the writing in the book just took my breath away. I was totally unprepared for how it would move me. I remember reading a paragraph of Cuckoo’s Nest and putting the book down gasping for breath at the audacity of the words and then rereading the paragraph to check that it was as good a second time. It almost didn’t matter whether the plot was good. He could’ve been writing about turnip farming and I’d still read it with joy for every root vegetable and planting.

Deliverance has that same quality. The movie catches a little of the delight of creating a scene where nothing happens but the nothingness burns into your consciousness as when the hillbilly kid joins Drew in Duelling Banjos. Who has ever seen the movie and forgotten that scene? It has nothing to do with the plot. The plot almost does not matter and those scenes keep coming and coming.

I am just at the point in the book where they put their canoes in the river, a little afraid of what’s around the next bend. For now, they know nothing of squealing like a pig or of what they will have to do to survive as their adventure turns dangerous but they have a sense that something important is going to happen.

I like to think that even if they knew all the things that might happen downstream, they’d still get in those canoes and paddle down that river and enjoy the thrill of the whitewater along with the calm certainty of future success. Anyone who has ever joined a startup knows the feeling of pregnant possibility and the quickening as the ideas swell and kick the new company into life.

It feels great to dip my paddle in new waters and to bend my bow knowing that the shot I fire will change the world. The rednecks hardly scare me at all.

Photo Credit: Naked Bike Ride by Stefan

Then the layoffs started.

After the second round of layoffs, my boss challenged me to come up with something to help with the sagging morale of the engineering organization and encouraged me to put together a team to build a skunkworks project that I’d been working on. We’d have carte blanche to work however we wanted to work. As long as what we came up with was scalable to the whole team eventually, we wouldn’t have to follow our normal software development lifecycle which was something like this:

1. Spend a week writing a functional spec without talking to anyone.
2. Take another week to copy-paste the functional spec and change a few words so we could call it a technical spec.
3. Give the specs to the QA folks then code like hell for a month. The QA folks didn’t read anything yet because they were still finding bugs in the previous release that would never be fixed.
4. Feature complete! Stop coding!
5. Declare that you are 90% done with just a few edge cases left to fix until…
6. Code Freeze!
7. Carry on coding until the last possible moment and answer questions from the QA folks and the writers about why the finished product looked nothing like the specs.
8. Fix the bugs in a maintenance release.

We’d been doing this three times a year for five years and that odd mixture of High Ceremony and Minimal Discipline was wearing on the soul.

We called our experiment Project X and commandeered a conference room for our kick-off meeting. Julio suggested we try Extreme Programming. “What’s that?” we all asked blankly.

We bought ten copies of Kent’s new book and all agreed to read it over the weekend. I had never been so excited about a book on software methodology. We were all excited.

Extreme Programming (XP) puts an emphasis on collaboration so we all moved out of our cubicles and commandeered a meeting room so we could work together. In XP, programmers work in pairs with a single keyboard that gets passed backwards and forwards between them. We switched pairs every couple of hours. With everyone talking to each other all the time, there was no need to write everything down in specs that no one would read anyway.

Programmers were notorious for hating testing and, in those days, nobody wrote automated tests. XP introduced a new style of testing. You write the test before the code which guarantees that your code has 100% test coverage.

We did a demo of test-first programming to the whole engineering team and invited someone in the audience to introduce a random bug in the code. There were audible gasps from the audience when the tests found the bug immediately (*).

(*) At that time, our main codebase had 1000s of bugs in our bug database.

Planning was different too. Instead of the product managers going off into a room for two months and producing a massive requirements document, the programmers would sit down with the product managers for a couple of hours and write everything that needed to be done on a bunch of index cards. We called them story cards because they told a story about how the user would experience the feature rather than making a list of tasks for the programmer to complete. Put the cards in order of priority and decide whether each story is big, medium or small and you have a plan. If you change your mind later, you can always tear a card up or change the order.

This was another big change from the before-times. Back then, we’d have a detailed plan saying it would take 7.5 hours to code the buttons for the chart options and if someone wanted to move the buttons to a dialog, they’d have to submit a change request and then the project would be replanned and someone would negotiate whether a chart dialog was more important than printed reports. With XP planning, you just start at the first card and work your way down the list. When it feels like you’ve done enough, you call it finished and ship it. There’s no big testing phase at the end because everything gets tested as you go along.

The Project X team loved XP and most of us still love it twenty years later but everyone else hated it.

“How can we plan anything unless we lock ourselves in a room for a month without talking to anyone?”
“No wonder you enjoy it when you only have to do half the work!”
“We have to test our own code? Don’t we pay other people to test our code?”

Eventually, Project X came to an end and we went back to our bad old ways. We could take responsibility for how we wrote and tested our code but everything else stayed more or less the same. We hired new dudes to do more planning and eventually, we found ourselves trapped in The Planning Cycle That Would Never End. Finally, the Layoff Monster came back and I asked if he would take me with him.

I got my next two jobs on the back of my knowledge of test-first programming and iterative planning but no one was interested in Extreme Programming. Most managers thought of it as a kind of cult.

Maybe we were a kind of cult. Kent had shown us the best way to write code and no one was interested. For a long time, I got terribly depressed that we had discovered this brilliant way of building software and no one cared but, in hindsight, I think XP had an incredible impact on the world of software even if everyone thought that XP was nuts.

The way we build software now is very different from the way we built it back in the old days. The projects I work on now have two or three bugs instead of two or three thousand. Developers write automated tests. Instead of tracking bugs, we fix them and we write a test to make sure they stay fixed. QA people are no longer in a different part of the building, forbidden to talk to developers. We have conversations instead of writing specs and if the requirements change, we change the code instead of filing a Change Request Form. No one thinks of these things as XP anymore but there is a straight line from the first XP project at Chrysler to the Agile Manifesto and modern software practives.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Agile Manifesto, 2001

I shudder when I think back to how we used to build software. Although Extreme Programming did not stick, Kent Beck changed the way we write code forever and his book, Extreme Programming Explained changed my life.

What else changed my life?

Way back in the day, when everyone had a blog, someone started a meme where you had to list ten books that changed your life. Rather than just list them, I thought I’d tell a story about each one. It’s going more slowly than I thought.

Here are the previous four. I’ve lost my list of the remaining five but I remember it included Cialdini’s Influence, Russell’s History of Western Civilisation, The Collected Works of Byron and a book about playing the harmonica. Maybe I’ll finish it one day.

By the time I got back, I was enchanted by both.

Being untutored in the arts, I was free to decide for myself what I liked and what I didn’t — even if what I liked wasn’t the right thing or it was unfashionable or whatever. That sentiment applied equally to my music playing and to poetry.

One night, in Darwin, during a bone-shaking thunderstorm, I heard someone playing blues harp in the other room. It was the most amazing sound I had ever heard come out of a harmonica and I went to investigate. There was an Australian dude a little older than me and we got talking.

He invited me to play a little too and he said words to the effect of “Wow! I have never heard anyone play the harmonica like that!”. I am still not sure if he meant Wow! That was great! or Wow! You suck!

Since I had no idea how I was meant to play it, I just played what sounded good to me. Same deal with poetry.

I jumped around all over the poetry book and each poem launched me into a quest for more poetry like this one. I had been force-fed Wilfred Owen at school but reading him of my own accord felt reckless, revolutionary. After six years in the Royal Navy, I had to read poetry to find out what war was about.

I have, again, no recollection of why I decided that I should learn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart but I gave up after about 75 verses. I was heartbroken when my new team at work decided that Team Albatross was too gloomy for a team name. They must not have read Coleridge (or heard the song).

My tastes were eclectic (sorry, Dylan, that I made you learn For Whom the Bell Tolls for a recital) and after mini-expeditions with Kipling (Kim, The Man Who Would be King), DH Lawrence (The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love) and a day trip or two with Tennyson and Betjeman, I settled on George Gordon Byron as my travelling companion and soulmate.

I read everything that Byron had ever written and, for a short, mad while, I wanted to be him. I wanted to be the second mortal to swim the Hellespont; I wanted to so scandalize my wife on my wedding night that she would file for divorce the very next day (must’ve been a pretty successful night as it produced Lady Ada who also discovered the joys of programming); I wanted to seduce the wives, sisters, sons and mothers of prominent politicians, including the prime minister’s; I wanted to raise a private army and go liberate the Greeks from the Turks or to die trying – like Byron did.

Shelley and Keats travelled with us for a while, but neither thrilled me the way Byron thrilled me.

I haven’t read poetry for a long, long time – except to read old favourites to my daughter. My passion, like Byron’s life, was brief but intense.

Atheism got a big boost when the so-called Four Horsemen mounted their steeds and wrote the four books – God is Not Great, The God Delusion, The End of Faith and Breaking the Spell – that defined The New Atheism. It’s hard to recommend any of those books to someone who is not already pretty secure in their disbelief though and, of the four, only Richard Dawkins is neither shouty nor weird. They are all polemics of one kind or another.

A polemic is a variety of argument or controversy made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. […] The word is derived from the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike, hostile”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemic

The most interesting writings about atheism are personal stories – like Russell’s – that answer the question, “Why Don’t you believe in God?” Here are three of my favourite stories.

Ricky Gervais has a masterpiece in the genre in the Wall Street Journal today. Ricky has his eight-year-old self figuring out the answer.

But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked,”Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh, hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution – a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us – with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

Julia Sweeney turned her story into a monologue – Letting Go of God – that she performs on stage. Here’s the first act, performed at Ted.

You can watch a full performance of Letting Go of God on YouTube but be forewarned: in between the laughter, there will be tears. Keep a box of tissues handy.

The last story that I like to recommend is Bart Ehrman’s essay that forms the introduction of his book Misquoting Jesus.

When I was in seminary, I was taking a class devoted to the interpretation of the Gospel of Mark. At that time, I would have called myself a strong evangelical Christian. I thought the Bible had no mistakes. The first time I realized it did was Mark, Chapter Two. The disciples are walking through a grain field with Jesus, and the pharisees object to them eating grain because it’s the Sabbath. Jesus asks them if they haven’t read the passage in scripture when David went into the temple of God and ate show bread that wasn’t supposed to eaten. He says it happened when Abiathar was the high priest.

For the term paper, I decided to write on this passage; it contains a famous historical problem. The Book of Samuel says that Abiathar was not the high priest at that time; it was his father, Ahimelech. I wrote a 35-page paper explaining why this can’t be a mistake. It was based on the interpretation of the Greek words. The grammar is tricky in the passage. My professor was a very devout Christian, who I respected very much. He gave me an A on the paper but at the end he wrote “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”

Even though it was a tiny little detail, it exploded the whole thing for me. Once I realized there could be a mistake in the Bible, I started finding them all over the place. The first thing it did was made me realize the Bible is not an inerrant revelation from God. It’s a human book with errors. I stopped being evangelical and became a liberal Christian. I eventually became an agnostic. There’s no way I would have leaped from fundamentalist to agnostic. It required a lot of transition. And the first thing to go was the inerrancy of the Bible.

Professor Ehrman is a little more scholarly than Ricky Gervais and his book is not a light read by any means. It’s a good read though, and examines the history of some famous bible passages – like the story of the woman accused of adultery – and when they were added to the bible.

One of the many books I am reading at the moment is The Peregrine by J.A. Baker.

It’s a bird-watching diary written by a man who (according to the intro) is in the last year of his life and decides to devote it to watching falcons.

The book is just day after day after day of falcons killing birds.

October 21st

Falcon killed a bird.

October 22nd

Falcon killed a bird.

October 23rd

Falcon killed a bird.

Every now and again, the falcon will fail to kill a bird or eat a mouse instead, but that’s pretty much the whole plot right there. Why read such a book? You might wonder.

The answer is language.

I read somewhere that Nabokov wrote Lolita to demonstrate that it’s possible to write beautifully even about a disgusting topic like child abuse. I think Mr. J.A.Baker had the same kind of idea in mind. Like a jazz quartet that plays the same phrase over and over for hours on end to see how many different ways they can say the same thing the author says “falcon kills bird” like The Grateful Dead improvise a solo.

Here’s a sample.

February 10th. This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure. Slate roofs and crows’ wings burned white like magnesium. The shining mauve and silver woods, snow-rooted, bit sharply black into the solid blueness of the sky. The air was cold. The wind rose from the north, like cold fire. All was revealed, the moment of creation, a rainbow poured upon rock and shaped into woods and rivers.

He hovered, and stayed still, striding on the crumbling columns of air, curved wings jerking and flexing. Five minutes he stayed there, fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of the sky. His body was still and rigid, his head turned from side to side, his tail fanned open and shut, his wings whipped and shuddered like canvas in the lash of the wind. He side-slipped to his left, paused, then glided round and down into what could only be the beginning of a tremendous stoop. There is no mistaking the menace of that first easy drifting fall. Smoothly, at an angle of fifty degrees, he descended; not slowly, but controlling his speed; gracefully, beautifully balanced. There was no abrupt change. The angle of his fall became gradually steeper till there was no angle left, but only a perfect arc. He curved over and slowly revolved, as though for delight, glorying in anticipation of the dive to come. His feet opened and gleamed golden, clutching up towards the sun. He rolled over, and they dulled, and turned towards the ground beneath, and closed again. For a thousand feet he fell, and curved, and slowly turned, and tilted upright. Then his speed increased, and he dropped vertically down. He had another thousand feet to fall, but now he fell sheer, shimmering down through dazzling sunlight, heart-shaped, like a heart in flames. He became smaller and darker, diving down from the sun. The partridge in the snow beneath looked up at the black heart dilating down upon him, and heard a hiss of wings rising to a roar. In ten seconds the hawk was down, and the whole splendid fabric, the arched reredos and immense fan-vaulting of his flight, was consumed and lost in the fiery maelstrom of the sky.

And for the partridge there was the sun suddenly shut out, the foul flailing blackness spreading wings above, the roar ceasing, the blazing knives driving in, the terrible white face descending, hooked and masked and horned and staring-eyed. And then the back-breaking agony beginning, and snow scattering from scuffling feet, and show filling the bill’s wide silent scream, till the merciful needle of the hawk’s beak notched in the straining neck and jerked the shuddering life away.

And for the hawk, resting now on the soft flaccid bulk of his prey, there was the rip and tear of choking feathers, and hot blood dripping from the hook of his beak, and rage dying slowly to a small hard core within.

And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky, and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter who kills only through his familiar, and wills him to be fed.

Tom lent me the Game of Thrones to read recently. I enjoyed it thoroughly but I couldn’t help but think that – if you take away the thin veneer of magic and fantasy – it reads a lot like the history of my country. And how much more fantastic to read a true story?

So that’s what I am doing now.

I’ve had Hume’s History of England in three volumes on my iPad for a while (it’s free in iBooks) and I ploughed through Volume I in no time flat.

Every English schoolboy knows that history began in 1066 but my knowledge of what came before was very shaky. I knew some names -Ældward the Confessor, Ælthelred the Unready, Ælfred the Great and a whole bunch of other kings beginning with Æ – but I was a bit shaky on the dates and the sequence of events. In my memory, the shame of the Danelaw went on for centuries and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was only for one king and one generation. I was also surprised that Alfred was much later (and greater) than I remembered.

Really, after reading the history of the Saxon times, I wonder why there is any need to make up fantasy stories. There are at least 10 kings of that era that could have an epic movie of their own. Why are we all so fixated on Robin Hood and King Arthur when the true stories are so much more dramatic? Where are the movies about those forgotten heroes?

I’m loving Hume too. I have read Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples (twice) and Hume shares with Churchill the endearing habit of making little pretence of objectivity. There are good guys and bad guys and Hume makes sure you know which is which. He even pulls off the neat trick of turning the Saxons from “them” – when the likes of Arthur are valiantly but tragically failing to keep them out – into “us” when we cheer on King Alfred’s miraculous victories.

I’ve often wondered about the them-versus-us thing in the context of Australia and the US. They talk of the first Australian explorers who made it to the red centre but those same Australians quickly became British when Tasmanians were hunted down and massacred. It’s odd when Australians and Americans do it and it was odd to witness the same phenomenon in myself.

Clearly, I identify with the Britons trying so desperately to fight off the Saxon horde but just a couple of hundred years later, we (the Saxons) are fighting off a new set of invaders. Funny how the Normans never became “us”.

Late last night I reached the Norman invasion and put my iPad down so that I could read it fresh today. The story was exactly as I remembered from Mrs Harris’s history class in 1977. The same charges. The same feints. The same tragic ending. It was a close-run thing in Hume’s telling of the story. Odd too that I rooted for neither side. Harold got to where he was through treachery but he was, after all, one of us. William brought civilization to my country but it was a foreign civilization. I guess it’s best that he won but his victory feels like a defeat to me.

I leave you with Hume’s recounting of the end of the Saxon era while I move on to Volume II and the Normans and Plantagenets that I remember so well from school.

Thus was gained by William, duke of Normandy, the great and decisive victory of Hastings, after a battle which was fought from morning till sunset, and which seemed worthy, by the heroic valor displayed by both armies and by both commanders, to decide the fate of a mighty kingdom. William had three horses killed under him; and there fell near fifteen thousand men on the side of the Normans: the loss was still more considerable on that of the vanquished, besides the death of the king and his two brothers. The dead body of Harold was brought to William, and was generously restored without ransom to his mother.

Epilogue

Now that I have read about the brutality of William’s reign, I regret my former ambivalence and place myself firmly in Harold’s camp. Civilization, be damned.