Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz (2010, Harper Collins)

To err is human; it’s also distressing, discouraging, and sometimes downright humiliating. None of us is perfect, just as none of us is immortal. Kathryn Schulz’s book is onto this right from the beginning: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us. Accordingly, when mistakes happen anyway, we typically respond as if they hadn’t, or as if they shouldn’t have: we deny them, wax defensive about them, ignore them, downplay them, or blame them on somebody else.” All true, all familiar; we are, personally and as a society, terrible at simply acknowledging error.

So here’s a whole book about what Schulz calls ‘wrongology,’ treating error both as an idea and as an experience. Philosophers have thought about error for pretty much as long as there have been philosophers. Thomas Aquinas adhered to the pessimistic view, that error was a terrible defect, because people had a natural faculty for truth. William James was more accepting, says Schulz: “[I]f you believe that truth is not necessarily fixed or knowable, and that the human mind, while a dazzling entity in its own right (in fact, because it is a dazzling entity in its own right), is not reality’s looking glass–if you believe all of that, as James did, then error is both explicable and acceptable.”

Both of those views have their appeal, and they remain in tension. It seems a worthy pursuit to narrow the distance between ourselves and truth, or perfection. That would seem to entail trying to eliminate errors; but “to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth–a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves could be wrong. Thus the catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.” Or else, inevitably, we’d commit new errors in the process.

Modern science, since the seventeenth century or so, has turned that likelihood into a tool for truth-seeking. “These thinkers [Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes] weren’t nihilists, nor even skeptics. They believed in truth, and they wanted to discover it. But they were chastened by the still-palpable possibility of drastic error, and they understood that, from a sufficiently distant vantage point, even their most cherished convictions might come to look like mistakes.” The scientific method, the practice of devising testable hypotheses and testing them, has brought the search for truth a very long way.

Soon enough, Schulz comes down from these dizzy conceptual heights. She tells stories from all over the map, about people who have made life-changing mistakes; or rather, had their lives changed by understanding themselves to have been mistaken. (‘I was wrong’ is a common enough sentence; ‘I am wrong’ is almost unheard of.) Some cases are rare, like the Klansman who recognized that his perceived adversary had all the same problems he had; others are as ordinary as a divorce lawyer’s waiting room.

This is really my kind of book: abstract, extensive, and wise. How about this: “When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with aporia: with a sense of doubt, perplexity and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt.” Allow me to wish you a life of doubt, perplexity and awe.

 

 

Any Good Books, September 2023

 

The Anthropocene Reviewed

 

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

John Green (Dutton, 2021)

John Green has been a book reviewer and a novelist, and, more recently, a podcaster. This book would probably make a great audio book, since some of it was originally written for the podcast. I think that has influenced the writing toward smoothness and lucidity, and toward a very personal point of view. The fact that podcasts became a common reality only in this century is a pretty good example of what the essays are about: we are surfing on our own history, and it might be well to take a good look around.

 

The Anthropocene, for one thing, is what many geologists are calling the era we’re living in, when human activity is having measurable effects on conditions on earth. We live in a world partly of our making, right down to the temperature of the sky and the sea. Nothing else on earth can escape our influence, either, which is appalling to remember, because we have certainly set forces in motion that we neither understand nor control. 

 

The internet, of course, is one such force. There’d be almost no way to go back and decode the algorithms that know us so well, if we have any kind of presence online, whether we’re reading, shopping, or listening. Google music wants a thumbs up or down, to tune itself to my taste; Google and Amazon want reviews on a scale of five stars. “The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.” 

 

And now it’s everywhere. “The five-star scale was applied not just to books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers. The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8.” Green cheekily stretches the form by applying the system to Diet Dr. Pepper, Teddy bears, and Canada geese, but he does so in a familiar and recognizable way. In his early drafts, he tried to write from a disinterested, ‘neutral’ point of view, as he had when he reviewed books in for Booklist. Fortunately, his wife turned him around, pointing out that “in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.” If you love Diet Dr. Pepper, and hate Canada geese, you might as well say so. 

 

“With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.” Would you believe they had almost been hunted to extinction a hundred year ago? Now they live nearly everywhere we plant Kentucky bluegrass, which is pretty much everywhere, between lawns, parks and golf courses. “Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.” The geese end up with a lowly two stars. 

 

There’s a marvelous range to this book, from the minute (Staphylococcus aureus) to the immense (Halley’s Comet); from the very old (the Ginkgo Tree) to the very new (Super Mario Kart); from the general (Sunsets) to the particular (Jerzy Dudek’s performance [as a soccer goalie] on May 25^th, 2005); from the sublime (Our Capacity for Wonder) to the ridiculous (The World’s Largest Ball of Paint.) And everything, so to speak, in between.

 

And what could be more in between than Indianapolis? Green lives there because his wife has an art museum job there; they live in one of the economically and racially diverse ZIP codes in the United States. It’s a place so average as to be almost a joke: “The city’s nicknames include ‘Naptown,’ because it’s boring, and ‘India-no-place.’” But it’s also a place where people meet up with friends and ride their bikes out to the Speedway to watch the Indy 500, along with a quarter million or so other people. In 2020, when Covid-19 stopped the race, Green and his buddies made the trip anyway, just for the joy of it.

 

Read this book, or listen to it, just for the joy of it.

Furious Hours

 

Any Good Books, May 2023

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Casey Cep (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours is a story about a story, a book about a book that didn’t happen. It’s a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book about loose ends, ambiguous heroes, and lost drafts. This befits its subject, Nelle Harper Lee, who achieved literary success beyond her wildest dreams, only to find the fame deeply burdensome, and the wealth expensive.(The top tax rate was still 90% in 1960, when the royalties for To Kill a Mockingbird began flooding in. The book has been in print ever since.)

Cep’s book opens in Alexander City, Alabama, in 1977, at the trial of a man, Robert Louis Burns, who shot another man in front of three hundred people. The shooter and the victim, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, were black, as were most of the witnesses; the jury, the judge, and all of the lawyers were white men. Harper Lee sat among the press. She was there at the invitation of the defense lawyer, Tom Radney, whom she’d met in New York at a party connected to the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

The man who was shot, the Reverend Willie Junior Maxwell, lived a lavish life for a part-time preacher living in the wide spot in the road that was Nixburg, Alabama. In addition to preaching, he worked in a rock quarry, reducing rock to gravel and dust, and ran a pulpwood crew, delivering soft Alabama pine to paper mills, possibly the only man ever to do so in dapper three-piece suits.

In 1970, Maxwell’s wife, Mary Lou, was found beaten to death in her car, a short way from home. Her life was unusually well insured, and her husband was the prime suspect. The Reverend had policies with companies all over the country, not only on his wife, but on “...his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews, and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated.” The initial charges were dismissed for lack of evidence; the following summer, new evidence and a new indictment led to a not guilty verdict. Meanwhile, Tom Radney was helping the Reverend sue for Mary Lou’s death benefits, and taking a hefty cut when he won.

His first wife’s was not the only unresolved death. In the next two years, his older brother and his second wife also met suspicious ends. Some insurance companies had begun to refuse his business, but others paid some $80,000 on Mrs. Maxwell’s death. Then a nephew who worked on the pulpwood crew was found dead in a car; and then a teenage girl his third wife had taken in. It was at her funeral that Robert Burns drew a gun and shot Willie Maxwell three times at close range.

The trial chapters are riveting. “Two hundred people had come to watch the trial of Robert Burns, and the Alexander City Courthouse was packed tight as a box of crayons. The onlookers gasped at the coroners, laughed at witnesses, and whispered among themselves during any new testimony, their benches squeaking every time they leaned over to talk with their neighbors.”

Here was a story, after all those years, that called out to Harper Lee. She had grown up watching her father in courtrooms. She had gone to Kansas with Truman Capote to dig into the murders of the Clutter family for In Cold Blood. Her interview notes, and the way people opened up to her who found Truman Capote too exotic to deal with, contributed immeasurably to the success of that book. In Alex City, she spent time with Tom Radney, and became friendly with a young local journalist named Jim Earnhardt. She interviewed everyone who remembered Reverend Maxwell, including his killer. Burns had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity, but passed through the state mental hospital in short order, and was already home. She went home to New York to start writing with a hefty valise full of Radney’s files, and Earnhardt’s reporting scrapbook.

And then… what? “Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most starts out blank.” The tale was, in the first place, exceedingly tangled; where she needed facts, she had rumors, conjectures, and lies. She was lacking the help her first agent and editor had given her on Mockingbird. Those people were dead, and no one could replace them. And was the public ready for the story of a black serial killer, from the author of such a beloved book?

Casey Cep has done an exceptional job reconstructing all of this, especially the social and economic fabric of Alexander City. If we can’t have Lee’s book, I’ll gladly take this one.

The Art of the Wasted Day

 

Any Good Books, July 2023

The Art of the Wasted Day

Patricia Hampl (Penguin, 2019)

The never-ending to-do list seems to be a fundamental problem of modern life; I’m never averse to reading about how to manage it better. That said, what Patricia Hampl is after here is harder than that: what is the actual alternative? What did Michel Montaigne know that we have forgotten? Come to that, what did she know as an eight-year-old girl, lying in the shade of a backyard beechwood tree, that we have forgotten? “There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of existence.” That girl will grow up to be a daydream believer, though she has already been told by the nuns that daydreaming is ‘an occasion of sin.’ It just may be delicious enough to be worth going to hell for.

Of course, she also grew up to be an ordinary adult with a to-do list, which is pleasant enough in its academic and household details. “Whole decades can go this way–and have–not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward.” Assuming that the end of toil does not coincide with the end of life, there’s still the problem of what makes life worth living. Yoga and meditation, offered as solutions, seem like a peculiarly American approach, inasmuch as they seem to be material for an ever more highly evolved to-do list.

So Hampl, following the death of the man she lived with and loved for more than three decades, sets out to visit some settings of legendary leisure. First, she went to Llangollen, Wales, the retreat of a couple of ladies from Ireland. They moved in together in 1778, when Lady Eleanor Butler was about forty, and her companion, Sarah Ponsonby, was twenty-four. In their day, they were famous for their seclusion, which is an inconvenient thing to be famous for. “...[B]oth Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and ‘stare,’ apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron–and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott.”

What did the famous and fashionable find at the secluded cottage? A sort of secular cloister, ordered by a System of daily times for walks, correspondence, reading, and study. “They seemed to experience liberation precisely because of the limititation of the System. This insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life together. The tournaquet of the System was a saving ligature.” Within it, for fifty years, they had all the time in the world. Similarly, the Ladies chose to wear black riding habits and men’s top hats, and never had to think about clothing again. They’d prefer to think about books, and gardening. This is obviously a way of life also made possible by a live-in servant and scrounged funding from the families back home in Ireland; still, it shows the possibilities.

As she travels, Hampl is reading Montaigne, whose tower is the later object of her pilgrimage. He lived and worked in a tower on the grounds of the family château, thoughtfully furnished with a private chapel on the ground floor, which he could listen in on from his upper room. He thought of his essays as ‘meddling with writing,’ though surely he labored over that informality, rewriting and polishing his one book. But Montaigne was right: all he had to do was describe what he was thinking. “Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world.”

If the thirst for narrative drives your reading, this book is not for you, but I’m glad to read an argument for the rest of what impels my reading, since I wouldn’t have known just what to call it. “What characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the opposite condition–not a gripping ‘narrative arc,’ but the quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.” Those voice and their descriptions bring me to places I haven’t seen just as surely as tales of climbing Everest would. Actually, there is a thread of narrative, not only in the journeys to stand in the places her subjects stood, but the filament of her relationship, remembering the things her beloved said and did, and the warmly humorous regard he held for her. Even in flashes, it’s a lovely thing to witness.

Left on Tenth

Left on Tenth – A Second Chance at Life: a Memoir

Delia Ephron (Back Bay Books, 2022)

In 2015, Delia Ephron’s husband died of cancer. She was seventy-one, and they’d been married for more than thirty years, supporting each other in diverse and successful writing careers. He died at home, thanks to hospice, but it was exhausting and disorienting. With the help of sisters and friends, she planned a memorial, and reoriented her life toward taking care of herself. Her sister Nora had died of leukemia in 2012; Delia had been seeing Nora’s hematologist regularly, and she had seven years of ‘all clear’s.

“People always asked ‘How are you?’ Emphasis on the are so I knew it was a serious question. But I never had a clue how to answer it...I couldn’t articulate my grief. And to try seemed to cheapen Jerry’s memory.”

A year and a couple of days after his death, Delia got a message from a man in California who wanted to reopen an old acquaintance; old, as in, they went on a few dates when she was in college. But in the present, they had a number of interests in common besides their recent widowhood. The e-mails that ensued are reproduced in the book – they read like the first drops of a monsoon. She liked him, he liked her, they talked on the phone like teenagers used to do. Peter flew to New York a couple of weeks later. “Looking back, we were already in love and possibly set up for catastrophe. The phone calls and e-mails were almost dreams, perfect versions of ourselves.”

But at the next blood test, things are not so good. “I should say that I am someone who keeps myself nearly completely medically ignorant. In spite of all the googling I do, I have never googled myelodysplastic syndrome or AML...Everything else is about to change on this day, but my attitude toward illness will not.” Like her late sister, she has leukemia. Dr. Roboz says, not for the first time, that she is not her sister, and her illness is not her sister’s. Possibly more to the point, treatments have advanced continuously, and there are new drugs and procedures to try. It’s good news that her new boyfriend is a doctor; a Jungian analyst, actually, but a trained scientist, who’s happy to handle what the doctors need to tell them.

Delia and Peter get married in the hospital where she goes for the first treatment with CPX-351, a drug so new it doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a optimistic move for two seventy-two-year-olds, but it bespeaks a hope that could only help, over the coming months. This first time is not so bad; five weeks to kill the bone marrow white cells and hope that only healthy ones grow back. But no – her disease comes back, and the doctors want her to have a bone marrow transplant.

We know, because she survived to write this book, that it worked, but, wow, what a harrowing ride it would be. Delia doesn’t know this, because she doesn’t want to know it. “If I do research I will panic, I will become hysterical, I will misunderstand, I will obsess.” Instead, she marshals friends and friendships, right down to a neighbor she knows from dog-walking.

The marrow graft means another six weeks in the leukemia wing, so many pills, so little appetite, so much weakness. Worst of all, after the graft is in and starting to work, she’s visited with a crushing depression. She hates it all, and wants to die–but then she doesn’t, and lives to tell about it. Credit the doctors and the inventors of CPX-351; credit Peter’s love, wisdom, and constancy; credit all those devoted friends. “And luck. Is luck another word for miracle?” Maybe not, but does it matter? She’s grateful, and so am I.

 

 

Any Good Books, June 2023 by email 6/1/23