The Best of 1899

 

Although a new year is upon us let us not forget some noteworthy titles from 1899. Consider these two non-fiction titles: The first is from, a relatively unknown Norwegian-Ameircan Minnesotan, Thorstein Veblen. He published a radically new theory drawing upon sociology as well as economics. He calls it, “The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions ”.

A new historical account about the Boer War of 1881 was published by popular fiction writer, H. Rider Haggard. Additionally, his popular novel written several years ago, “She: A History of Adventure” has been captured for the new visual media, cinema, thanks to the illusionist, Georges Méliès.

In addition to non-fiction, the final year of the century had its notable fiction. “To Have and to Hold” by Mary Johnston will be a best seller in the first year of the twentieth century. Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” promises to be well received in the future as well.

Those who like Haggard’s adventurous fantasies are probably also familiar with the name H. G. Wells. He, too, published a new title in 1899, “When the Sleeper Wakes”. The novel tells of a sleepless man who finally finds slumber only to waken more than two hundred years later. Thanks to an investment on his behalf, the sleeper is now the wealthiest man in world. Without revealing any spoilers, I’d like to mention that the Wells will issue a revision in 1910. By that time Wells, will have published another 11 novels. That may matter now, but it won’t by the year 2000. In that future, Wells will largely be known for only three novels, “The Time Machine”, “The Invisible Man”, and “War of the Worlds”. All three were published prior to 1899.

Kerouac's days in Denver

 

Jack Kerouac’s writing doesn’t mention Boulder as a place he visited in Colorado, yet there’s a school named after him there. Founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman it’s Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Kerouac became disembodied in 1969 at the age of 47. Neal Cassady, who inspired Kerouac’s best known novel, "On the Road" did so a year earlier. Unlike his two friends who lived faster and died younger, Ginsberg almost made it into the new millennium. He died in 1997.

The movie, “Howl,” stars James Franco as Allen Ginsberg and, takes place during the Beat era — an era that owes its name to Kerouac. Who were the Beats? Where does Colorado fit in?

William S. Burroughs was mentor to the group of writers who would later be called the Beats. Burroughs, who was fascinated by life’s seamy side, learned the word “beat” from Herbert Huncke, a Chicago junkie. Hunke used the word as a synonym for poor. It was Jack Kerouac who modified its meaning, making “beat” a combination of poor and beatific, “like sleeping in the subways … and yet being illuminated and having illuminated ideas about apocalypse and all that.”

Ginsberg and Kerouac met Cassady in 1946 when brought his wife to New York from Denver to look up his friend, Hal Chase, who also knew Ginsberg and Kerouac. Handsome, exuberant and amoral, Cassady mesmerized Ginsberg and Kerouac.

Cassady’s wife, LuAnne left her negligent husband in January 1947 and returned to Denver. Some months later, Cassady returned as well. The hitchhiking Kerouac was dropped off on Larimer Street in July. Respectable today Larimer Street was Denver’s skid row in 1947. Cassady had spent much of his childhood there.

While staying in Denver, Kerouac visited Central City, where he attended a performance of Fidelio at its opera house. He bathed in the hotel room of one of its performers before repairing to a miner’s shack for an evening of revelry. Today people go to Central City to attend performances at its old opera house and gamble in its newer casinos.

Kerouac’s desire to ranch or farm in Colorado is recorded in his journal. He returned to Denver in May of 1949 after selling his first novel, “The Town and the City.”

He rented a house several days after arriving, and wrote its Westwood, Colorado address in his journal. Today that address is in Lakewood, which incorporated as a city in 1969. The house is west of Sheridan, which forms the border between Lakewood and Denver.

In his journal, Kerouac talks of walking to Morrison Road to buy a notebook. He stopped for beer at a roadhouse. That roadhouse may well have been Hart’s Corner at the intersection of Mississippi and Sheridan. Hart’s Corner began as a root beer stand in 1929 and kept its name well into this century.

He also wrote that he, “looked out on the fields of golden green and the great mountains,” from his back door. That view is gone now, but the view from Lakewood’s Belmar Park is a good approximation.

While waiting for his family to join him in Colorado, Kerouac’s money and self-esteem diminished, while his impatience and depression increased. He took a boy he befriended to Lakeside Amusement Park where they “rode around a sad little lake in a toy railroad.” The train was pulled by one of two engines which had been used during the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair. Lakeside acquired them prior to its opening in 1908. Those engines were still running recently.

Kerouac’s family joined him in Colorado, but none of them stayed long. Kerouac, accompanied by his sister and brother-in-law, dropped his mother off at the train station on July 4. Afterward, they attempted to lessen Kerouac’s sadness with a picnic at Berkeley Lake. This lake is to the east of Sheridan Boulevard; Lakeside Amusement Park is west of Sheridan. Both border I-70.

Kerouac traveled to Colorado a final time in 1950 using airfare money provided by his publisher. He took a bus because it was cheaper than flying.

Before Kerouac’s arrival, Cassady broke one of his thumbs jabbing his wife’s forehead. Kerouac and Cassady visited the rundown Windsor Hotel on Larimer and 18th Street where Cassady had lived with his alcoholic father. During the visit, Cassady injured his other thumb by striking the men’s room door repeatedly.

Galileo's Error

Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
Philip Goff
Non-fiction, 256 pages

Galileo determined that the natural world can be measured with math. Certain qualities, however, are unmeasurable because they are derived from the soul rather than from nature. Sensory qualities like “yellow” can’t be measured like size, weight, or movement. Aside from unmeasurable sensory qualities and similar information, Galileo’s method describes nature quite well. But the method creates an error: “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious. In other words, Galileo created the problem of consciousness.”

It took a while to notice the problem. It didn’t trouble René Descartes at all that Galileo’s method couldn’t address unmeasurable qualities. For Descartes, matter was one thing while mind was another. While a bodily action might follow a mental intention, both body and mind, being distinct, can exist without the other.

Today Descartes’ dualism has fallen out of fashion. Materialists argue that it’s the brain that generates consciousness, nothing more. Some, such as Daniel Dennett, argue that consciousness is a brain-generated illusion.

Goff describes several arguments that refute the materialist view of consciousness. Of these, I’m most convinced by David Chalmers’s argument that materialism fails to address the “Hard Question of Consciousness.” Connecting the brain with its outward actions answers easy questions. Such examination can never explain why we experience life as we do. Nobody questions their own experience, but materialists encounter Galileo’s soul derived qualities when they attempt to explain it.

Goff explores one possibility that might save dualism. It involves quantum physics. “By far the strangest aspect of quantum mechanics is that observation seems to make a difference to how the universe behaves.” If an observation is necessary, what else but a mind could perform that function?

 The argument is complicated and involves Schrödinger’s imaginary cat. The cat does just fine when nobody is looking. It’s both alive and dead. But once an observation is made the cat becomes either living or dead. Weird as it sounds, physics has yet to solve this contradiction.

 Goff does not defend dualism for long. Instead he moves on to panpsychism, a view that holds that consciousness is somehow an inherent quality of nature. The problem with panpsychism however is that it fails to provide a mechanism for how the simple consciousness of, say, atomic particles, combine to create the complex consciousness of a human being.

 Every approach to philosophy of mind has problems, Goff explains. However he believes that panpsychism offers the best explanatory approach. While his arguments are inconclusive his explanations are clear and readable. That’s good. Philosophical arguments can be tough for non-philosophers to digest. I have only one criticism. In explaining how the observation problem in physics might save dualism, Goff misses an opportunity to investigate how the observation problem might strengthen the argument for panpsychism.

 Goff’s book is a good introduction to philosophy of mind. Annaka Harris provides another good introduction in her book “Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.” Despite its shorter length, her book covers the same territory and throws in meditation as well. I won’t say more now about her book now but hope to provide a more complete review later.