Songs from my spirit

27 Sep 2007, ST

Singer Kenny Loggins shares how he learnt to listen to his soul while performing on stage

By Loh Keng Fatt

YOU have probably hummed along to the pop songs of American singer Kenny Loggins, such as Footloose and Danger Zone.

But success, it seems, doesn't mean that the now 59-year-old lived a life of sunshine and roses.

His tale of spiritual loneliness is one of 55 stories collected from successful folks, from Stephen Covey to Dave Barry, in a compendium called You've Got To Read This Book!.

The two people behind this book are Jack Canfield, who co-created the famous Chicken Soup For The Soul series, and Gay Hendricks, who has also written inspirational books. Here's an excerpt from Loggins' account.

'I READ it twice through. Siddhartha was the only time I felt calm - actually, the only time my hands stopped shaking - so I just sat there in bed and read and read. That's mostly what I remember from that period of my life; just devouring the book.

When I finished Siddhartha the second time, I reached for another book. Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography Of A Yogi was next on the stack: another story of someone in search of a higher truth. I don't remember if I'd purchased these books or someone had loaned them to me but there they were by my bed, waiting to ignite my spiritual path.

The combined impact of the two books was compelling. I realised that although I'd had success on a level that I thought would make me happy and complete, when I was left with just myself, I'd come unglued.

Reading those books made it clear to me that I needed a stronger spiritual dimension. They described a peace that I was searching for and inspired me to take action to find it. I called a friend who taught meditation, and not long after, I got out of bed and learnt to meditate.

It immediately affected my writing. The meditation, the books and the breakdown itself all made me much more empathetic; there was a new level of compassion in my music.

I knew what a rough time was and I knew what peace was, and this new awareness imbued many of the songs I wrote after that - from Celebrate Me Home all the way through Conviction Of The Heart, from the Leap Of Faith album.

If you look at the songs from that period, you can trace the evolution of someone feeling more and more connected to other people and to life.

Reading Siddhartha and Autobiography Of A Yogi helped me see everything in my life - performing, writing songs, relationships - in a more spiritual light.

In the beginning of Siddhartha, the main character leaves home, seeking enlightenment. After a long search, trying every conceivable avenue, he becomes disillusioned, bitter and finally gives up.

At one point, he actually runs from the traditional sources of enlightenment. He ends up living by a stream, and it's the sound of the stream that triggers a spiritual transformation and opens his heart.

Every morning and every night Siddhartha hears the stream, and it speaks to him. The stream becomes both his path and his enlightenment.

Now I see that my stream is my music which has become my primary spiritual practice. I still meditate today as a way to calm down, to catch my breath.

It has kept me grounded through all the ups and downs I've experienced in the last 30-plus years. Yet the main thing I've leaned on in times of trouble has been my music.

My songs have become messages to myself from my spirit. Every time I perform, I get onstage and sing them not only to the audience but also to myself.

I go into my centre - and into the moment. Going into each moment, which singing and performing forces me to do, is like a meditation.

I have to be clear about the note I'm singing, the word I'm singing, right now. Whenever my mind starts to wander, I have to bring it back to the note, to the feeling within the note, and the word.

Through this practice, the stage has become the place where I best communicate with my higher self and with others. I've become aware of an internal voice that speaks to me when I am out there.

It constantly focuses me back on 'this moment, this moment, this moment, this note, this note, this note'.

The pivotal element of performing has become how present I can be, and from that place, how much I can allow my heart and my spirit to be available each night I go on stage.

I remember the night I first realised the power of this experience. I was about two songs into the show and I couldn't seem to make the connection.

The audience response was okay but bland. All of a sudden, to my right, I saw two eyes lit up like lights. I looked over... and saw a young girl, about 10 years old, whose face was radiant. She was just pouring love at me. I looked in her eyes, and my heart opened.'

# You've Got To Read This Book! will soon be sold at $25 in bookstores.

A city of true civility

20 Sep 2007, ST

Writer Jan Morris finds Trieste in Italy to be populated by people of a special breed

By Hong Xinyi

WRITER Jan Morris was born James Morris in England in 1926 to Welsh parents, and worked as an intelligence officer and a journalist before becoming a travel writer.

It is for this last designation that she will most likely be remembered, despite an arguably dramatic personal life.

Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949 and the couple had five children before he had sex reassignment surgery in 1972. The couple continued living together.

Morris adopted the name Jan, and documented this journey in the book Conundrum in 1974.

As a travel writer, she combines meticulous historical research with a lyrical style that paints vivid, often melancholic portraits of cities all over the world, from Hong Kong to Venice.

Below is an extract from Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere, published in 2001, a meditation on one of her favourite cities, Trieste in north-eastern Italy.

'THERE are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours.

They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.

They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding.

When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.

They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness.

They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

The elusive flavour that I enjoy here is really only the flavour of true civility, evolved through long trial and error.

I have tried to get the hang of many cities, during a lifetime writing about them, and I have reached the conclusion that a peculiar history and a precarious geographical situation have made Trieste as near to a decent city as you can find, at the start of the twenty-first century.

Honesty is still the norm here, manners are generally courteous, bigotries are usually held in check, people are generally good to each other, at least on the surface. Joyce (writer James Joyce) said he had never met such kindness as he did in Trieste. Mahler (composer Gustav Mahler) just thought its people 'terribly nice'.

So do I. I am only an outsider here, and my responses may be naive, but I am constantly struck by the public empathy of this city, expressed in small, everyday matters - a comradely wiggle of the fingers from one driver to the other, when the funicular engine is hitched on to the Opicina tram, or the smiles women offer to perfect strangers when they join the queue for postage stamps.

Time and again in Trieste I have made some casual contact, told somebody the time, asked the way to somewhere, to find the encounter develop into a conversation full of delight.

A man once noticed I had an antique Baedeker in my hand (The Mediterranean, 1911), and stopping dead in his tracks, there in the street, he engaged me in warm dialogue about the particular pleasures of old guidebooks.

I much admired the reception Triestini gave to a couple of Romany musicians from Slovakia, who turned up one day to play sultry music in Via San Lazzaro: as the citizens walked up to place their lire in the open violin cases they laughed, sang, jiggled their heads to the music or warmly thanked the players, and some looked as though they would like to break into gypsy dance themselves, if they were not a little afraid of making fools of themselves.'

# Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere ($23.54) is available from Books Kinokuniya.

Keeping the mean streets safe

13 Sep 2007, ST

A New York police officer pens a rare insight into the oft-misunderstood world of the men in blue

By June Cheong

POLICE work runs in American writer Edward Conlon's blood.

The 42-year-old Bronx native is a fourth-generation New York City Police Department (NYPD) cop and currently serves as a detective.

He joined the NYPD in 1995 and started by patrolling the public housing estates in five South Bronx precincts, documenting and picking up all manner of criminals and victims from two-bit drug dealers to 10-year-old rape victims.

A Harvard graduate, his career choice was met with vehement disapproval from his father, himself a World War II officer who left the NYPD to become an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In his memoir of police life Blue Blood, Conlon delves into the noble, oft-misunderstood occupation and the sacrifices of blood, sweat and tears needed to keep the gritty streets safe.

In the excerpt below, he speaks of his childhood friend Mike Kelly, also an NYPD police officer, and the latter's unwavering belief in the value of his work:

'Mike's belief in the white knighthood of the Job never abated.

That belief was what Mike was most afraid of losing, I think - I never heard him talk about his personal safety, as a real concern that lasted beyond a few moments of danger, fighting an EDP (police shorthand for an emotionally disturbed person), facing a volatile domestic dispute, and so on.

The threat was to his faith in the Job - what the Job meant, as a whole; what it would do to him, and with him, in the event of some crisis. And the crises we read about usually came in the form of racism or corruption.

In a sense, he expected to encounter them in the NYPD not because it was an especially crooked or racist institution, but because these evils were part of the human condition, and to be a cop meant you would experience humanity at a level of skinned-alive intensity.

The fact that a Brooklyn neighbour was one of the cops involved in the 'Buddy Boys' scandal, which involved a ring of drug-dealing thieves and became a book by journalist Mike McAlary, didn't make him rest any easier. But the fact remains that he never saw any corruption, never saw a cop take a nickel or even heard of any who did.

Racism was another matter, not nearly as simple, and if what he saw wasn't enough to shake his faith, there was much to challenge his reason.

Mike was from a part of Brooklyn that had reconvened from other parts that had 'turned' - turned bad, or turned black, which to the shame of the liberals and the bitter delight of bigots often meant the same thing.

But in the aftermath of racially charged killings in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, the attitude of simply being fair in how you dealt with people, and figuring it out as you went along, didn't seem to be quite enough, either.

After Mike went to the Two-Three (a patrol area which covered 96th to 116th Street and Fifth Avenue east to the river), he was sometimes partnered with an old-timer who used racial slurs almost as if they were punctuation marks. Mike didn't like it, and tried to explain why as best he could - which, in a rookie-veteran partnership, is somewhat like an altar boy preaching to the Pope.

In most ways, the old-timer was a plainly decent guy, and his treatment of people was respectful, no matter if it masked an abstract contempt. On the street, or responding to a job, he handled matters with the amiable pragmatism of the veteran city cop, and face to face, he was an effective public servant.

But once they retreated to the car, it was all colour commentary, so to speak: 'Would you believe how these niggers...' and 'It reminds me of the time this spic...'

Suffice it to say that they agreed to disagree, Mike being a fair guy who figured it out as he went along. And then came a day that made it all the more confusing.

Mike was at court or on vacation - not on patrol, in any case - when his partner went into a burning building, alone, and saved an elderly black woman.

Mike was never able to reconcile his partner's constant and audible prejudice with his act of colour-blind heroism.

In the old-timer's case, the divorce between word and deed was wide enough that there's at least one black person who is grateful he worked as a cop.'

# Blue Blood by Edward Conlon is available for US$12 (S$15) from www.amazon.com or on loan from library@orchard. The book's call number is English 363.2092 CON.

Blow a kiss and look younger

09 Sep 2007, ST

NEW YORK - Botox and plastic surgery may promise to reduce wrinkles and worry lines, but some New Yorkers are turning to facial yoga to achieve a youthful appearance.

At a recent class in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, yoga instructor Annelise Hagen teaches several facial exercises designed to stretch and tone facial muscles.

A group of women practise moves including The Lion, showing the tongue hanging out and eyes rolled up.

Ms Hagen encourages class members to hold the position for 60 seconds, joking: 'You can do this any time. It really helps you get a seat on the train.'

She recently released a book titled The Yoga Face: Eliminate Wrinkles With The Ultimate Natural Facelift.

She said she developed a workshop using facial yoga because women wanted to look their best, 'but they weren't really thinking about how to exercise their facial muscles'.

She said facial muscles become weak and flabby and need regular workouts and circulation to reduce wrinkles.

Besides The Lion, other exercises include Satchmo, in which the cheeks are blown out Louis Armstrong-style, and Marilyn, in which glamorous kisses are blown to strengthen mouth muscles for full and firm lips.

'It uses the same principles of exercise you would use for any other part of your body,' she said. 'Facial muscles also become more toned, so it is a natural way of getting a lift.'

She recommends facial yoga for those wanting to find outer and inner beauty, saying 'the emotional aspect is just as important as the physiological'. But she does not rule out plastic surgery or Botox.

'I don't rule it out for myself. One day I may feel like I need that. But regardless, maintaining elasticity and tone is really crucial, especially if you have had Botox and plastic surgery,' she said.

While making faces in front of strangers might intimidate some, those who attended the class thought it the perfect way to combat busy New York lifestyles.

'Working in New York is very stressful,' Ms Kathy Healey said. 'It's a perfect way to end the week.'

Reuters

Sounds nuts, but it makes perfect sense

09 Sep 2007, ST

By Janadas Devan, ON WORDS

WHY do bars give away peanuts for free, but charge for bottled water? After all, peanuts are more expensive than water.

Well, because 'nuts and alcoholic beverages are complements. Someone who eats more nuts will demand more beer or mixed drinks... In contrast, water and alcoholic beverages are substitutes. The more water bar patrons drink, the fewer alcoholic beverages they will order'.

Another question: 'Why do female models earn so much more than male models?'

It is not because female models are intrinsically lovelier than male models. It is 'because women's fashion is a vastly bigger business than men's fashion. Women in the United States, for example, spend more than twice as much on clothing each year as men do, and the difference is even more pronounced in other countries'. Thus, beautiful women, modelling beautiful clothes, who can catch the eyes of consumers are highly prized.

Yet another puzzle: Why do women wear high heels, despite the discomfort, even harm, they cause?

That seems like a no-brainer. Tall women seem more striking. Also, 'in addition, to making women taller, high heels force the back to arch, pushing the bosom forward and the buttocks rearward, thus accentuating the female form. 'Men like an exaggerated female figure,' writes fashion historian Caroline Cox'.

So far so good. But the problem is if all women wore high heels, such advantages would cancel out. Surely, it would make more sense for all women to collectively agree not to wear high heels. 'But because any individual can gain advantage by wearing them, such an agreement would be hard to maintain.'

All of the above questions-and-answers derive almost verbatim from a wonderful new book by Cornell University economics professor Robert H. Frank, titled The Economic Naturalist: In Search Of Explanations For Everyday Enigmas. Prof Frank is the co-author with the current Federal Reserve Chairman, Mr Ben Bernanke, of a well-regarded economics textbook. Quite apart from its diverting content, The Economic Naturalist is interesting for another reason: Most of its questions as well as answers were provided by Prof Frank's students at Cornell.

Standard economics courses, the professor believes, are too theoretical. 'When students are given tests designed to probe their knowledge of basic economics six months after taking the course,' he found, 'they do not perform significantly better than others who never took an introductory course.' He hit upon a more effective method of teaching economics through - wait for this - a writing course!

Cornell has a writing programme 'inspired by research showing that one of the best ways to learn about something is to write about it'. Informed by 'the narrative theory of learning' - which holds that human beings have a universal predisposition... to impose a narrative interpretation on information and experience', as two educationists Walter Doyle and Kathy Carter put it - Prof Frank had his students write narratives explaining everyday economic phenomena.

They were asked to pose themselves the most interesting questions they could think of - 'Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?', for instance, or 'Why do 'almost new' used cars sell for so much less than brand-new ones?' The very act of thinking up these questions was useful, for the students had to consider many preliminary questions before arriving at the final one.

More importantly, precisely because the questions were their own - and were prompted by everyday puzzles in the real world that had struck them personally - they were motivated to take ownership of their questions. That motivation extended to their answers as well, for students with especially interesting questions felt a need to communicate their answers to others.

'Hey, do you know why A occurs? Well, it is because of B, C and D, you see. Let me tell you how it is' - and they formulated their own narrativised answers to their own questions.

They wrote because they had something to write about; they communicated because they had something which they wished to communicate. Learning how to write effectively and well became a function of wanting to communicate something specific - a thought, an answer to a precisely formulated question - effectively and well. Writing is a tool; one cannot learn to wield it without finding nails to hit.

In the process, Prof Frank's students learnt, too, how economic principles worked in the real world. His course opened his eyes 'to the remarkable effectiveness of the less-is-more approach to learning', as he put it - or, as Singapore's educationists have taken to saying, the 'teach less, learn more' approach.

I don't suppose that means Prof Frank's students won't have to, at some point in their educational careers, mug up on the more formal aspects of economic theory. But as an introductory course, his approach seems to have worked wonders.

The Economic Naturalist is one of the most delightful books in the dismal science that one can find in the market today - and it is almost wholly the product, not of a distinguished professor's ideas, but of his students'.

This is a technique of teaching writing that can be applied widely. Lecturing students endlessly on the principles of good writing does almost no good. Nobody in the history of the universe has ever produced a fine piece of writing without wanting to communicate something specific.

It would be far more productive to train students to formulate interesting questions for themselves and to write so as to communicate their findings to others. Prof Frank's approach can work in literature classes as well as GP, in history as well as economics.

'Why are whales in danger of extinction, but not chickens?' That, believe it or not, is an economics question that elicited a neat piece of writing. So, too, did the following: 'If attractive people are more intelligent than others, and if blondes are considered more attractive, why are there so many jokes about dumb blondes?'

My favourite in Prof Frank's book was this: 'Why do humanities professors, who should be more adept than most in their use of language, often write so unclearly?'

Clearing away the cobwebs

6 Sep 2007, ST

Andrew Keen's The Cult Of The Amateur is a refreshingly brusque critique of how culture is being cannibalised in the brave new Internet world

By Ong Sor Fern, culturevulture

I HAVE never, nor will I ever, read blogs.

Yes, I am an information snob. I prefer my writing to come in published formats: newspapers, magazines and books. As someone who grew up on a hearty diet of old media, I trust these established systems of delivering information simply because there is quality control.

When I read a newspaper, I can be assured that the journalist is subject to a code of ethics, his work has been audited by editors and his sources verified. Ditto a magazine and a book.

Blogs, however, are a Wild West frontier, a welter of undifferentiated information that blends fact with opinion with merry disregard for consequences.

No doubt there are intelligent bloggers out there. But trying to find them is akin to looking for a single brainy needle in an exceedingly large and, mostly dumb, haystack.

I am no Luddite. But I do regard the current enthusiasm for Web 2.0, the so-called second generation of Web-based communities, with a jaundiced eye.

This is partly because I have seen the Web mushroom from its early days, when there was a much better signal to noise ratio, to its current state of mostly deafening white noise.

And it is also partly because as someone in the media business, I have been taught to assess information with an eagle eye, so I value the quality, not just the quantity, of information.

So it was with relish that I devoured Andrew Keen's book The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture And Assaulting Our Economy.

The book is a much-needed wake-up call for all those who think that Web 2.0, where Google, YouTube and Facebook are worth billions of dollars even though they produce no content, promises a new utopia.

Keen, an Englishman based in the United States, is a self-declared apostate. He was a technopreneur during Silicon Valley's first Internet boom. So his perspective is not that of some lofty old media Cassandra perched on the outside, but a clear-eyed insider who has thought long and hard about the industry.

The book is not perfect by any means. Some parts are a bit repetitive and his tone occasionally totters dangerously close to hysteria, especially when he rails on about morality and the Web.

He is also focused solely on the US, so his book does not deal with the impact of the Web on other countries around the globe.

But the most intriguing central tenet of his argument is that Web 2.0 is killing culture creation through its celebration of the 'noble amateur'.

The idea that anyone can be a writer/artist/critic is a seductive one, as Keen concedes. But the grim reality, he points out, is closer to 19th-century evolutionary biologist T.H. Huxley's infinite monkey theorem.

The theory states that if you provide an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters, one will eventually produce a masterpiece to rival William Shakespeare.

The problem is, of course, trying to find that one talented monkey amidst the cacophony.

While Web 2.0 businesses are busy building more typewriters for more monkeys, it is also tearing down the infrastructure that used to support the William Shakespeares.

The idea of intellectual property, which Keen points out has sustained culture creation in Western civilisation for 200 years by paying people for their creative output, has been pulverised in the new information age.

Students plagiarise chunks of writing for their essays. People steal music and movies online. So-called citizen journalists do armchair reporting by cobbling together tidbits from legitimate websites.

Such disregard for intellectual property has already resulted in the collapse of the American music industry and a drastic nose-dive in circulation for American newspapers, whose readership are deserting old sources of information for the illusory 'variety' offered free online.

While Keen lambasts new media for indiscriminate destruction of old media structures, his book, in focusing so tightly on the negative aspects of new media, also seems in danger of committing the same sin of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But it is rescued by a last chapter, in which he lists the Web ventures which manage to find an economically sustainable middle road between the technological promise of the new Web and old-fashioned products.

Of course, my love of old media could be seen as springing from vested interest. After all, I work in the print media, about as old school as you can get.

But I am not simply a producer of content. I am also a consumer of content. As such, I also have a vested interest in finding trustworthy sources of content, produced with integrity and accountability, because such content contributes to the cultural discourse of society.

I think the world will be a very much poorer place if newspapers, magazines and books were to be replaced by Web 2.0's drastically shorter and much more populist forms of writing.

Old media has to find ways of adapting to the new platform before the new media completely cannibalises the old to the detriment of everyone in the culture industry. That much everybody agrees on.

But I think that just as old media businesses need to adapt, consumers of culture need to draw a line in the sand. They have to commit to paying for legitimate content, because if there is anything Web 2.0 has proven, it is that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

In that, the brave new world of Web 2.0 looks pretty much like the old world. The new divide, it seems, will be between those who can afford to pay for the correct sort of information, and those who cannot.

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# Andrew Keen's The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture And Assaulting Our Economy (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 228 pages, $29.40 w/o GST) is available at Kinokuniya Book Stores.

Living in hope

6 Sep 2007, ST

A young mother infected with Aids finds the courage to aim for a better life for her daughter

By Loh Keng Fatt

HER name is Ana. Infected with HIV at birth, she learns early to hide her ailment from others. But she gets to know a boy and, at 17, becomes a mother.

Her life story of standing up to tough times is recounted by Jenna Bush, daughter of United States President George W. Bush, in Ana's Story: A Journey Of Hope.

The two met when Bush, 25, was on an internship with Unicef in Latin America and the Caribbean, and came into contact with young people infected with Aids.

Here is an excerpt from the book, which zooms in on Ana's desire to do better for herself and her daughter, and the difficult decision she has to make regarding the father of her child, the Aids-infected Berto.

'Things became more and more difficult between Ana and Berto. He had left the hospital and returned to the hogar (home) but they hadn't spent much time together.

She always had to visit him because it was difficult for him to get around. She felt bad for him, sad he was in pain but she also felt lonely watching other couples walk hand in hand with their children.

She was surrounded by families but although Berto was the father of her baby, she did not feel they were a family of their own.

Ana's feelings for him were unpredictable. When she thought of the love they shared in the beginning of their relationship, she wanted to be with him forever.

When she thought of Beatriz, she wasn't sure that he could be the type of father that she wanted for her daughter.

When they were together, he seemed more interested in Ana than Beatriz; it seemed as if he wanted to be a boyfriend, not a father. Ana wanted a family for her daughter. She wanted to give her everything she hadn't had.

In many ways, he was still her best friend but she didn't have the same feelings for him that she used to. The passion, the attraction, the butterflies had flown away.

Instead, she found herself thinking of Guillermo. Berto was and would always be Beatriz's papa but Ana knew what she had to do. She didn't want to hurt Berto but she had to tell him how she felt. Her palms sweating, she dialled the number of the hogar.

'Hola, Berto,' she said nervously. 'Hola, Ana. What's up? How is Beatriz?' he asked.

'Beatriz is good; I am good too,' she said as she cleared her throat. 'Berto, there is something I need to talk with you about. I know I've been acting weird.'

'Ana, it's fine,' he said. 'I understand.'

'No, Berto, it's not okay.' Ana paused, unsure of how to say it. Then she blurted out. 'You will always be Beatriz's papa but I don't think we are working as a couple.'

There was silence on the phone line.

'I wasn't expecting this at all,' he said. 'I don't want this. I don't want Beatriz to live the life that I have lived, without a mama and a papa. I am her father.

'I would do anything to make this work, to be a family, a real one,' he said.

'Berto, you can't. You don't have a job. You still live in the hogar. You need to be there and Beatriz and I can't live there with you. How can we be a family when we can't live together?' she said. 'I'm sorry but my feelings have changed too.'

'Okay,' was all he said, then he hung up. She felt a combination of grief and relief. She didn't regret what she had done but she did regret that Berto would not be able to be the kind of father Beatriz needed.

Ana and Berto still wanted the same future - one with a loving and supportive family - but she no longer saw the two of them living that dream together.'

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# Ana's Story: A Journey Of Hope is available in major bookshops at $28.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

The wind as my wings

30 Aug 2007, ST

The Alchemist, a tale of a travelling boy, takes the reader on a journey of the mind and heart

By Loh Keng Fatt

THE Alchemist by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, 60, is among the recommended books in this year's Read! Singapore campaign, organised by the National Library Board.

First published in 1988, the book has since sold over 35 million copies.

While the story, on the surface, is about a boy who travels to seek the most prized treasures ever known, the perceptive reader will understand that the journey also detours inside one's heart and mind.

And the truth is that, often, the answers and dreams you seek reside close to you.

Here's an excerpt:

'You can't be the wind,' the wind said. 'We're two very different things.'

'That's not true,' the boy said. 'I learnt the alchemist's secrets in my travels. I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars and everything created in the universe.

'We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul. I want to be like you, able to reach every corner of the world, cross the seas, blow away the sands that cover my treasure and carry the voice of the woman I love.'

'I heard what you were talking about the other day with the alchemist,' the wind said. 'He said that everything has its own destiny. But people can't turn themselves into the wind.'

'Just teach me to be the wind for a few moments,' the boy said. 'So you and I can talk about the limitless possibilities of people and the winds.'

The wind's curiosity was aroused, something that had never happened before. It wanted to talk about those things, but it didn't know how to turn a man into the wind. And look how many things the wind already knew how to do.

It created deserts, sank ships, felled entire forests and blew through cities filled with music and strange noises.

It felt that it had no limits, yet here was a boy saying that there were other things the wind should be able to do.

'This is what we call love,' the boy said, seeing that the wind was close to granting what he requested.

'When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you, and even men can turn themselves into the wind. As long as the wind helps, of course.'

The wind was a proud being, and it was becoming irritated with what the boy was saying. It commenced to blow harder, raising the desert sands. But finally it had to recognise that, even making its way around the world, it didn't know how to turn a man into the wind. And it knew nothing about love.

'In my travels around the world, I've often seen people speaking of love and looking towards the heavens,' the wind said, furious at having to acknowledge its own limitations. 'Maybe it's better to ask heaven.'

'Well then, help me do that,' the boy said. 'Fill this place with a sandstorm so strong that it blots out the sun. Then I can look to heaven without blinding myself.'

So the wind blew with all its strength and the sky was filled with sand. The sun was turned into a golden disk.


# The Alchemist is available for loan from The National Library Board under the call number English COE.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

Private battle with demons

30 Aug 2007, ST

By James Martin

THE stunning revelations contained in a new book, which show that Mother Teresa had doubted God's existence, will delight her detractors and confuse her admirers. Or is it the other way around?

The private journals and letters of the woman now known as Blessed Teresa of Kolkata will be released next month as Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, and some excerpts have been published in Time magazine.

The pious title of the book, however, is misleading. Most of its pages reveal not the serene meditations of a Catholic sister confident in her belief, but the agonised words of a person confronting a terrifying period of darkness that lasted for decades.

'In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,' she wrote in 1959, 'of God not wanting me - of God not being God - of God not existing.' According to the book, this inner turmoil, known to only a handful of her closest colleagues, lasted until her death in 1997.

Gleeful detractors may point to this as yet another example of the hypocrisy of organised religion. The woman widely known in her lifetime as a 'living saint' apparently did not even believe in God.

But it was not always so. In 1946, Mother Teresa, then 36, was hard at work in a girls' school in Kolkata when she fell ill. On a train ride en route to some rest in Darjeeling, she had heard what she would later call a 'voice' asking her to work with the poorest of the poor, and experienced a profound sense of God's presence.

A few years later, however, after founding the Missionaries of Charity and beginning her work with the poor, darkness descended on her inner life. In 1957, she wrote to the archbishop of Kolkata about her struggles, saying: 'I find no words to express the depths of the darkness.'

But to conclude that Mother Teresa was a crypto-atheist is to misread both the woman and the experience that she was forced to undergo.

Even the most sophisticated believers sometimes believe that the saints enjoyed a stress-free spiritual life - suffering little personal doubt. For many saints this is accurate: St Francis de Sales, the 17th-century author of An Introduction To The Devout Life, said that he never went more than 15 minutes without being aware of God's presence.

Yet the opposite experience is so common it even has a name. St John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic, labelled it the 'dark night', the time when a person feels completely abandoned by God, and which can lead even the most ardent of believers to doubt God's existence.

During her final illness, St Therese of Lisieux, the 19th-century French Carmelite nun who is now widely revered as 'The Little Flower', faced a similar trial, which seemed to centre on doubts about whether anything awaited her after death.

'If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into,' she said to the sisters in her convent. But Mother Teresa's 'dark night' was of a different magnitude, lasting for decades. It is almost unparalleled in the lives of the saints.

In time, with the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual director, Mother Teresa concluded that these painful experiences could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus Christ felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment that the poor faced daily.

In this way she hoped to enter, in her words, the 'dark holes' of the lives of the people with whom she worked. Paradoxically, then, Mother Teresa's doubt may have contributed to the efficacy of one of the more notable faith-based initiatives of the past century.

Few of us, even the most devout believers, are willing to leave everything behind to serve the poor. Consequently, Mother Teresa's work can seem far removed from our daily lives. Yet in its relentless and even obsessive questioning, her life intersects with that of the modern atheist and agnostic.

'If I ever become a saint,' she wrote, 'I will surely be one of 'darkness'.'

Mother Teresa's ministry with the poor won her the Nobel Peace Prize and the admiration of a believing world. Her ministry to a doubting modern world may have only just begun.

The writer is a Jesuit priest and the author of My Life With The Saints.

Mother Teresa's letters reveal crises of faith

27 Aug 2007, ST

MOTHER Teresa, who is one step short of being made a Catholic saint, suffered crises of faith for most of her life and even doubted God's existence, according to a set of letters.

'Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,' the missionary wrote to one confidant, Reverend Michael Van Der Peet, in 1979.

The letters, some of which she wanted destroyed, appear in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, due to be published next week, 10 years after her death.

Extracts of the book appear in the latest edition of Time magazine.

In more than 40 letters spanning some 66 years, the ethnic Albanian nun who devoted her life to working with the poor in the slums of Kolkata in India, writes of the 'darkness', 'loneliness' and 'torture' she is undergoing.

'Where is my faith - even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness and darkness - My God - how painful is this unknown pain - I have no faith,' she wrote in an undated letter addressed to Jesus.

'If there be God - please forgive me - When I try to raise my thoughts to heaven - there is such convicting emptiness.'

In her early life, Mother Teresa, also known as 'the saint of the gutters', had visions. In one, she talked to a crucified Jesus on the cross.

But the letters reveal that apart from a brief respite in 1959, she spent most of the last 50 years of her life doubting God's presence - much at odds with her public face.

In one letter, written in 1959, she wrote: 'If there be no God - there can be no soul - if there is no soul then Jesus - You also are not true.'

The book's compiler and editor Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk is a member of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity and was responsible for petitioning for her sainthood. She was beatified - one step short of sainthood - in 2003.

'I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,' said Rev Kolodiejchuk.

Mother Teresa's successor said yesterday that the revelations would not hamper her path to sainthood.

'I don't think it will have any effect on the process of sainthood for Mother Teresa,' said Sister Nirmala, who succeeded Mother Teresa as the head of the Missionaries of Charity.

Cardinal Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, said the letters showed Mother Teresa was 'one of us, that she did all her work as we do, no more no less'.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stay cool to defeat bullies

23 Aug 2007, ST

The scariest bullies aren't always found in school. Psychologist Albert Bernstein explains how you can handle enemies in a mature manner

By Loh Keng Fatt

IF YOU thought you had escaped bullies when you left school, you probably know better now that you haven't seen the last of them yet.

The fact is that bullies could be your colleagues at work, your bosses and even your friends.

That's why American psychologist Albert Bernstein has written books that arm people with self-defence tips on how to handle these pesky enemies.

In his 2001 book Emotional Vampires he tackles the problem of people who try to destroy the emotional and psychological well-being of others. Here's an excerpt:

TO DEFEAT bullies, you have to do what they don't. Namely, stay cool and keep your wits about you. Here's some advice that may help.

Ask for time to think: Only in the primitive jungle do you have to respond to attacks immediately. That's where the vampire wants to send you but there's no law saying that you have to go.

Normal people don't get angrier at you if you ask for a minute to think things over. By your actions you are communicating that you take the situation seriously and want to handle it well.

Vampires may try some other device to get you to respond in an immediate, emotional manner. They want a fight, not a rational discussion. They may mistake your silence for freezing up with terror, which you may be, but you don't have to let them know it.

Whatever you're feeling, just asking for a couple of minutes to think things over is usually so unexpected that you may be able to end the confrontation right there.

No matter what, take your time and think before you respond.

Think about what you want to happen: While you're taking your minute to think, consider the possible outcomes. Immediately discard any that involve making the bully back down and admit that you're right.

You cannot be right and effective at the same time. Don't even try.

Get the bully to stop yelling: Actually, this is easier than you might think. Just keeping your own voice soft may do the trick. Bullies expect you to yell back; don't oblige them.

If either of you is yelling, nothing reasonable will be said.

Another unexpected way to get a bully to stop yelling is by saying: 'Please speak more slowly; I'd like to understand.'

Often, people will comply with this request without thinking about it. Reducing the speed will also reduce the volume.

Have you ever tried to yell slowly? This strategy works particularly well on the phone.

On the phone, also remember the 'uh-huh' rule. We usually respond with uh-huh when the other person takes a breath. If you go three breaths without saying uh-huh, the other person will stop and ask: Are you there?

Following this technique will allow you to interrupt without saying a word.

Whatever you do, don't explain: If you are ever attacked by a vampire bully, you may feel a powerful urge to explain the whys and wherefores of your own actions.

Don't do it. Explanations are the way that primitive responses sneak down from your reptile brain and out your mouth.

Explanations are usually a disguised form of fighting back or running away. The typical explanation boils down to: If you know all the facts, you will see that I am right and you are wrong, or it wasn't my fault, you should be mad at somebody else. Never mind that your explanations seem true and reasonable to you.

Bullies always recognise the primitive patterns for dealing with aggression. They will see your explanation as an invitation to go for the jugular.

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# Emotional Vampires is available for loan from The National Library Board under the call number 158.2 BER.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

Order too much food - it's good economics

19 Aug 2007, ST

In his new book, Professor Tyler Cowen explains how to use economic thinking to better your life in small ways

NEW YORK - Economics Professor Tyler Cowen delights in using his expertise to get the best out of life. In his new book, he says anyone can.

From choosing a restaurant to persuading a child to wash the dishes, Discover Your Inner Economist follows in the footsteps of the best-selling Freakonomics, by showing how to put economic thinking to work in almost every area of life.

'Small improvements in understanding can bring a much better use of incentives, leading to much better decisions and much better lives,' writes Cowen, who teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

In a restaurant, he will order the most elaborate dishes rather than plainer fare on the assumption that, having invested in going out, there's no point eating food that you can cook at home.

By the same token, he will order several dishes - more than he can eat - to sample as much as possible and maximize his return on the cost of the outing. What he doesn't finish, he takes home.

For good value, he will seek restaurants in less-expensive parts of town because, he says, those in high-rent areas are either for the masses or very expensive.

'There are better food buys in East Hollywood than West Hollywood, where the movie stars live,' he writes.

He sees dating as a good place to apply the economic principle of signalling - the idea that, for example, people study for an MBA degree at Harvard more for what it says about them than for what they learn.

Playing hard to get fails to separate the winners from the losers, he concludes. In economic-speak, it doesn't satisfy a separating equilibrium - because it's too easy for losers to mimic the behaviour of winners.

Not surprisingly, he says that in marriage and family life, financial incentives are either too hard to get right or counterproductive, as he found when he tried paying his stepdaughter to wash the dishes.

Similarly, he cites a day-care centre that started fining parents for picking up their children late and found this made the problem worse. The fines allowed parents to make a financial calculation about what they had previously seen as a question of courtesy or parental responsibility.

Cowen, who discusses many of these issues on his blog (www.marginalrevolution.com), also finds that museums are run for their donors, not for the public.

He also contends that the book market is not about reading or enjoyment - a big proportion of books are bought but unread.

His own strategy when reading a book is to dip in, sample a few chapters, read from back to front, or simply discard the book if there is a better one to be read. If he starts 10 books, he says, he may finish just one.

'Why not be brutal about this?' he writes.

'Is this the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world? For me at least, the answer is usually (but not always) no.'

Reuters

Discover Your Inner Economist (US$17.13 or S$26) is available on www.amazon.com

Thinking aloud about self-pity

16 Aug 2007, ST

By Hong Xinyi

BY HER own admission, when American writer Joan Didion sat down to pen The Year Of Magical Thinking in 2003, she had nothing else in mind besides the urgent need to make sense of her grief.

On Christmas night that year, her only child, Quintana, was hospitalised for pneumonia and septic shock. Five days later, her husband, writer John Dunne, died of a heart attack during dinner. Her daughter would die less than two years later.

Didion, an iconic journalist, essayist and novelist, made her mark with her sparely detached and steadfastly lucid prose.

In seminal books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), she captured the texture of American culture and politics with a distinct, melancholy elegance.

The Year Of Magical Thinking, an account of how she coped in the days following the death of her husband, won the National Book Award in 2005. Earlier this year, it was adapted into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Below is an excerpt from the book:

YOU sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it'.

We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it'. Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

'A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,' Philippe Aries wrote to the point of the aversion in Western Attitudes Towards Death. 'But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.'

We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn't I see that, why am I so selfish.)

The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: Self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow.

Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.

'Our worst enemy,' Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing/sorry for itself, D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough/without ever having felt sorry for itself.

This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.

In fact, the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life - both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections - have all vanished.

# The Year Of Magical Thinking ($19.26 with GST) is available at Books Kinokuniya.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

Online fake Steve Jobs found

07 Aug 2007, ST

Mystery blogger who parodied Apple's CEO on the Net is a technology writer at Forbes.

SAN FRANCISCO - For the last 14 months, high-tech insiders have been eating up the work of an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steven P. Jobs, Apple's CEO.

The mysterious writer has used his blog, the Secret Diary Of Steve Jobs, to lampoon the CEO and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical leader, as well as skewer other high-tech companies, tech journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and Silicon Valley's overall aura of excess.

The acerbic postings of Fake Steve, as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership - both the real Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog ( fakesteve.blogspot.com ).

At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley's gossips to discover his real identity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention.

'I'm stunned that it's taken this long,' said Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. 'I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I've been sort of waiting for this call for months.'


'Fake Steve' Daniel Lyons (above) responding to a reporter asking him about his blog

Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction, including a 1998 novel, Dog Days.

In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, Options: The Secret Life Of Steve Jobs, A Parody.

Unlike the off-the-cuff ramblings on his blog, Options is a well-plotted satire that imagines Apple's CEO grappling with his real-life stock option backdating troubles and getting help, and bad advice, from friends like Larry Ellison, Bono and Al Gore.

Blogger unmasked

THE book, in part, led to Lyons' unmasking.

Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine.

The New York Times found Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of Fake Steve to a blog Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point (floatingpoint.wordpress.com).

Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year when a group of CEOs- turned-bloggers drew some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. 'I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a CEO kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.'

He said he recalled trying out the voices of several CEOs before settling on the colourful Apple co-founder. He twice tried to relinquish the blog, but started again after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had disappeared.

Though many speculators have guessed Fake Steve was an Apple insider, Lyons said he has never interviewed Jobs or written a story about the company. 'I have zero sources inside Apple,' he said. 'I had to go out and get books and biographies to learn about a lot of the back story.'

He said writing as Fake Steve became addictive. He developed a unique lexicon and catalogue of insults for the character. Bill Gates is Beastmaster, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google's CEO, is Squirrel Boy.

When a reader asked Fake Steve about Apple's succession plan, he replied: 'My plan at this time is to live forever and to remain in charge here, though perhaps with fewer restrictions on my power. The truth is, I am not human - I am a man-god, son of Zeus, born to mortal woman but fathered by the ruler of the gods, lord of thunder.'

Lyons receives around 50 e-mail messages a day through the blog, many with ideas for posts, and says the site had 700,000 visitors last month.

Recently someone claiming to be Jobs' daughter, Lisa, wrote to tell him: 'You don't sound at all like my father, but your blog is hilarious.'

The guessing game around his identity saw speculation centering on a variety of plugged-in journalists, former Apple employees and even Jobs himself.

Over the last year, Forbes publisher Richard Karlgaard even got into the act, speculating about Fake Steve's identity on Forbes.com. At one point he wrote: 'The guessing game has begun. Who is writing it? Send me your guesses. I'll gladly buy the most expensive iPod for the first to identify Fake Steve Jobs.'

Lyons said he felt bad and later revealed himself to his bosses and colleagues. Since yesterday, Secret Diary has been published on Forbes.com.

The Fake Steve saga calls to mind the guessing game behind Primary Colors, the political roman a clef written in 1992 by Joe Klein, then a Newsweek writer.

Newsweek, however, fired Klein when he allowed other writers at the magazine to speculate on the book's author without tipping them off.

Lyons used the Fake Steve persona to further some of his own interests and positions. For example, articles in other business publications and their journalists were a frequent target of criticism from Fake Steve, while Forbes got off comparatively easy.

Asked whether he was worried that he would be called to account for some of Fake Steve's stinging, personal posts, Lyons chuckled and said: 'Yes.'

As for Jobs himself - the real one - he did not seem interested when told about Daniel Lyons. He said in a phone interview that he had no interest in reading Lyons' novel.

---------------------------------

'I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I've been sort of waiting for this call for months'
'Fake Steve' Daniel Lyons responding to a reporter asking him about his blog

'The truth is, I am not human - I am a man-god, son of Zeus, born to mortal woman but fathered by the ruler of the gods, lord of thunder'
Daniel Lyons, impersonating Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs on his blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Being old, then and now

04 Aug 2007, ST

By David Brooks

WASHINGTON - LAST week, while driving from a campaign event in Keene, New Hampshire, I stumbled upon a used bookstore that I hadn't seen since I was a teenager. I stepped in - even though I was rushing to catch a plane - and came upon a sad book published anonymously in 1911.

The book is called Autobiography Of An Elderly Woman, and it is a description of what it was like to be old a century ago. The woman begins by recalling the stages of her life: the misty days of girlhood; the precious years when she was raising her young; the rewarding times when she and her children were adults together and companions.

But then something changed.

'I do not know when the change came, nor do they, if indeed they realise it at all,' she writes. 'There was a time when I was of their generation; now I am not. I cannot put my finger on the time when old age finally claimed me. But there came a moment when my boys were more thoughtful of me, when they didn't come to me anymore with their perplexities, not because I had what is called 'failed', but because they felt that the time had come when I ought to be 'spared' every possible worry. So there is a conspiracy of silence against me in my household.'

She describes how her children baby her. They offer to give her rides in the carriage to run errands when she could just as well walk.

They try to prevent her from doing normal housework on the grounds that it's too taxing. 'You count the number of your years by the way your daughter watches your steps; and you see your infirmities in your son's anxious eyes.'

She describes living in a different dimension. She sees and understands, but her counsel is never sought and she has no ground upon which to act. 'We have learnt then that we can't help our children to lead their lives one bit better. There is not one single little stone we can clear before their feet.'

Though writing in the age of the gas lamp, she understands what the latest scientific research is now concluding. 'Very soon your children slip from between your fingers. They develop new traits that you don't understand and others that you understand only too well, for, like weeds, your faults come up and refuse to be rooted out.'

'There came a time when I realised that every child on the street my child stopped to talk with had its share in bringing up my sons and daughters. One week in school was enough to upset all the training of years.'

The book is a lament from a person put on a shelf, bound by convention and by the smothering concern of others not to exert any power on the world, even while seeing more clearly than ever the way power can and cannot be exerted.

It's a remarkable little book, and when I did some research, I was surprised to learn it wasn't written by an old woman. It was written by 37-year-old Mary Heaton Vorse, using the voice of her own mother.

Vorse was a bohemian and a radical journalist who wrote for The Masses, hung around Eugene O'Neill, John Reed and Louise Bryant, and she helped found the Provincetown Players.

Using her mother's perspective, Vorse wrote a sort of The Second Sex for the elderly of 1911. It is about a class of people unable to exercise their capacities.

And what she described was real. In Growing Old In America, the historian David Hackett Fischer writes that age was venerated in early America. But starting in the first half of the 19th century, youth was venerated and age was diminished.

Thoreau wrote that the young have little to learn from the old. The word 'fogy', which had once meant a wounded veteran, acquired its current meaning. Dinner table seating was no longer determined by age but by accomplishment. Scientific knowledge gained prestige over experience.

Women, who had once rarely lived much past their youngest child's marriage, now lived on with no clear role. The character in Autobiography Of An Elderly Woman is a victim of all this.

I don't know how many of her opinions will ring true to today's oldsters. Now, elderly are richer, more active and more engaged than their cohorts of a century ago - but are they still living in a different dimension? Is it now a dimension of their own choosing?

NEW YORK TIMES

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'I cannot put my finger on the time when old age finally claimed me. But there came a moment when my boys were more thoughtful of me, when they didn't come to me anymore with their perplexities...because they felt that the time had come when I ought to be 'spared' every possible worry.'
MARY HEATON VORSE, writing in Autobiography Of An Elderly Woman, using the voice of her mother

Talk is cheap

26 Jul 2007, ST Life

An American psychiatrist says we pay too much attention to what we say, not enough to how we act

By Loh Keng Fatt

D R GORDON Livingston has provided a listening ear for 30 years. The American is a psychiatrist and people come to him to unburden their fears, fantasies and problems.

He himself is not immune to life's trials and tribulations. In one tragic 13-month period, he lost his eldest son to suicide and his youngest to leukaemia. He also has four grown children.

His life experiences spurred him to write Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, which nails down the truth that life is too short and unpredictable to idle away. Here's an excerpt.

'I tend to confront patients who talk about changing their lives but do not take concrete steps to do so.

I often ask them whether their latest plan to do something different is a real expression of intent, or simply a wish.

The latter can be entertaining and distracting but should not be confused with reality.

Religious transformation aside, alteration of our attitudes and behaviour is a slow process. Change is incremental.

Look at any successful prison break and you will see plenty of imagination, hours of planning, often months, even years, of slow progress towards freedom.

We may not admire the people who do this but their ingenuity and determination are lessons for us all.

One of the most difficult things to ascertain when confronted with a person seeking therapy is their readiness to change, their willingness to exercise the fortitude that is necessary to do so.

Some people seek help for reasons other than actually changing their lives. We live in a society that has elevated complaint to a primary form of public discourse.

The airwaves and courts are full of victims of this and that: childhood abuse, mistakes of others, random misfortune.

Voluntary behaviours have been reclassified as illness so that sufferers can be pitied and, where possible, compensated.

Not surprisingly, many of these people appear in psychiatrists' offices expecting a sympathetic ear and medication that will relieve their feelings of distress.

Often, they want testimony to support lawsuits or letters to excuse them from work. They are not there to engage in the difficult process of examining their lives, taking responsibility for their feelings, deciding what they need to do to be happy - and doing it.

People mistake thoughts, wishes and intentions for actual change. This confusion between words and actions clouds the therapeutic process.

Confusion may indeed be good for the soul but unless it is accompanied by altered behaviour, it remains only words in the air.

We are a verbal species, fond of conveying our minutest thoughts. We attach excessive importance to promises.

Whenever, as happens frequently, I point out to people the discrepancy between what they say they want and what they actually do, the response is surprise and sometimes outrage that I will not take their expressions of intent at face value but prefer to focus on the only communication that can be trusted: behaviour.

The disconnect between what we say and what we do is not merely a measure of hypocrisy, since we usually believe our statements of good intent.

We simply pay too much attention to words - ours and others' - and not enough to the actions that really define us.

The walls of our self-constructed prisons are made up in equal parts of our fear of risk and our dream that the world and the people in it will conform to our fondest wishes.'

# Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart is available for loan from The National Library Board under the call number 158 LIV.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

What if there is no God? Only Satan?

I recently finished reading a book, "The Lucifer Code" by Michael Cody. The book is a fictional sci fic thriller, that is nothing similar to the "Da Vinci Code".

The storyline is about a terrifying religious conspiracy to stage a most ambitious experiment the world has ever seen - to prove beyond doubt the existence of a heaven or a hell.

The following is an excerpt from the book which i find interesting. Page 291. The speech is from a character in the book, Accosta, the Red Pope, who has gone to the other side.

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"I am a servant of the Lord. I have seen His power and i know His will. He has ordered me to return and reveal the Soul Truth."

"I have always believed in God, my God, who created mankind in His own image to worship Him. An all-powerful, all-knowing, compassionate God."

"When i was younger, I was troubled by what the philophers call the Problem of Evil. Given all the evil in the world, how can an all-powerful, all knowing, merciful God exist? Either God knows about evil, cares for it, but can't do anything about it - in which case He is not all-powerful, or He cares about it, can do something about it, but doesn't know about it - in which case he is not all-knowing, or he knows about it, can do something about it, but doesn't care about it - in which case he is neither merciful or compassionate."

"I have always squared this inconsistency by believing that my powerful, omniscient, benign God allowed evil in the world to give us, his greatest creation, the gift of free will. To trust us with the ability to choose between good and evil, even in face of our harshest trials ad tribulations. I now know the truth about good and evil. And now I know this truth it seems so obvious to me. After all, what God would create man simply to worship Him? What Supreme Being could be so vain, so petty?"

"There is no Problem of Evil because our Lord did not create us to worship Him. I always assumed God created a perfect ordered world - an Eden - then introduced the serpent of evil to test us. But this isn't true. Our Lord created an evil world then introduced good. The natural state in the world and the next is chaos - entropy. Evil is the normal way of the world, and good was only introduced as a capricious whim. The Lord only created us to enhance his amusement. That is the sole reason for our existence.

"As a child builds a stack of bricks only to knock it down again, our Lord allows us to climb higher and higher, believing in virtue and goodness and honour, only to dash us down with random acts of evil."

"There is no heaven, only arbitrary suffering. Life beyond death is as cruel and random as life on earth - except that it is eternal. There is no escape. There is no karma. No justice. No elysian fields where the good may find peace after a hard life. There is no divine order, just chaos. The Soul Truth, which i can reveal to you no is, that God, the God to whom, i dedicated my life on earth - doesn't exist."

"I am a soul in torment. The Lord I have willingly served all my life, and the Lord I am now condemned to serve for all eternity, is not God. There is only one Lord and he is the Lord of chaos and darkness. He is the Devil. Satan himself."

"Forgive me, I took my journey full of hope but I have returned with non. There is no hope. There is no God. I cannot even pray for you."

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The next following text passage is from another character in the book., Soames Bradley. Page 425.

"Two thousand years ago, God sent down his first son. He was a good man who preached compassion and forgiveness - he even died on the cross for humanity to teach you the true way of God. But it didn't work. Religions fought with each other over their interpretations of Christ's teachings. They got in the way of faith. It no longer became an issue of free will but of power and guilt. Where's the free will in a priest saying, "Do what i tell you to do or you'll go to Hell"? That isn't free will, that's obeying orders because you fear punishment.

"Priests are only men anyway. They don't care about understanding God - they care about building power in this world. But God doesn't want vast churches and adoration. He's not that kind of father. He wants you, His most ambitious creation, to come of age and no longer need him. That's what his first son tried to explain. Living a good life is its own reward - at death each individual will experience his own soul truth. But no one listened.

"So He sent down a second son, a darker son. Not to preach good and kindess this time, but to prove once and for all that God doesn't exist. That only the Devil hold sway. Only then could mankind outgrow the shackles of religion and develope its own sense of right and wrong - true free will. After all, one can only make a truly virtuous choice then there's no promise of reward. So this is God's gift to you, to erase Himself from your consciousness.

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Before any one dismissed the book as blasphemous and deluded, let's keep an open mind and enjoy the book as it truly is. A book of fiction.

Frankly, this book is quite a relative good read. Not the best though. The story is a bit slow at times. But the above concepts are quite refreshing.

Normally it takes me about 3-5 days to complete a book. But I was busy and not in the mood for reading and so this book took me more than 2 weeks.

The King shows how

12 Jul 2007, ST Life!

By Loh Keng Fatt

MANY people have jobs that may not be that fulfilling. But they are afraid to try something new or explore a skill that is marketable.

Perhaps the person is just too lazy to change tack or is plain ignorant of how to do it.

In this excerpt from American horror writer Stephen King's how-to book called On Writing, he lays down a blueprint on getting started.

'So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone.

You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water.

Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all... as long as you tell the truth.

The dictum in writing classes used to be 'write what you know'. Which sounds good but what if you want to write about starships exploring other planets or a man who murders his wife and then tries to dispose of her body with a wood-chipper?

How does the writer square either of these, or a thousand other fanciful ideas, with the 'write-what-you-know' directive?

I think you begin by interpreting 'write what you know' as broadly and inclusively as possible. If you're a plumber, you know plumbing, but that is far from the extent of your knowledge; the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination.

Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

In terms of genre, it's probably fair to assume that you will begin by writing what you love to read - certainly I have recounted my early love affair with the EC horror comics until the tale has grown stale.

But I did love them, ditto horror movies like I Married A Monster From Outer Space, and the result was stories like I Was A Teenage Graverobber.

Even today I'm not above writing slightly more sophisticated versions of that tale; I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin, that's all. If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It's what I have.

If you happen to be a science fiction fan, it's natural that you should want to write science fiction (and the more of what you've read, the less likely it is that you'll simply revisit the field's well-mined conventions such as space opera and dystopian satire).

If you're a mystery fan, you'll want to write mysteries, and if you enjoy romances, it's natural for you to want to write romances of your own.

There's nothing wrong with writing any of these things. What would be very wrong, I think, is to turn away from what you know and live in favour of things you believe will impress your friends, relatives and writing-circle colleagues.

What's equally wrong is the deliberate turning towards some genre or type of fiction in order to make money.

It's morally wonky, for one thing - the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lives, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck.

Also, brothers and sisters, it doesn't work.

When I'm asked why I decided to write the sort of thing I do write, I always think the question is more revealing than any answer I could possibly give.

Wrapped within it, like the chewy stuff in the centre of a Tootsie Pop, is the assumption that the writer controls the material instead of the other way around.

The writer who is serious and committed is incapable of sizing up story material the way an investor might size up various stock offerings, picking out the ones which seem likely to provide a good return.

If it could indeed be done that way, every novel published would be a bestseller and the huge advances paid to a dozen or so 'big-name writers' would not exist.'

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# On Writing is available for loan from The National Library Board under the call number 808.02 KIN.

# Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

Farewell my friend

28 June 2007, ST

A collection of famous eulogies makes for moving and inspirational reading

By Loh Keng Fatt, booksforthesoul

THEY say the true test of a life well lived is what others say about you when you are dead.

Which is why author and magazine columnist Phyllis Theroux has compiled the eulogies made by the friends of famous people like Abraham Lincoln and Robert Kennedy in The Book Of Eulogies.

Her point is that life goes on and those who come after can draw inspiration and courage from the departed.

Here's an excerpt of a eulogy to author Mark Twain (real name Sam Clemens, 1835-1910) by Helen Keller (1880-1968), a deaf-blind author, activist and lecturer.

'He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me and how it felt to be blind and not to keep up with the swift ones - things that others learnt slowly or not at all.

He never embarrassed me by saying how terrible it is not to see, or how dull life must be, lived always in the dark.

Once when someone exclaimed, 'God, how dull it must be for her, every day the same and every night the same as the day,' he said, 'You're damned wrong there, blindness is an exciting business, I tell you; if you don't believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door'.

He thought he was a cynic but his cynicism did not make him indifferent to the sight of cruelty, unkindness, meanness or pretentiousness. He would often say, 'Helen, the world is full of unseeing eyes, vacant, staring, soulless eyes'.

He would work himself into a frenzy over dull acquiescence to any evil that could be remedied. True, sometimes it seemed as if he let loose all the artillery of heaven against an intruding mouse, but even then, his resplendent vocabulary was a delight.

He often spoke tenderly of his wife and regretted that I had not known her. 'I am very lonely sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my guests have departed,' he used to say.

To one hampered and circumscribed as I am, it was a wonderful experience to have a friend like Mr Clemens. I recall many talks with him about human affairs. He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless, as so many people do.

He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses.

He kept me always in mind while he talked, and he treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him.

Perhaps my strongest impression of him was that of sorrow. There was about him the air of one who had suffered greatly.

Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story. He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind - a gesture of the soul rather than of the face.

His voice was truly wonderful. To my touch, it was deep, resonant. He held the power of modulating it so as to suggest the most delicate shades of meaning, and he spoke so deliberately that I could get almost every word with my fingers on his lips.

Ah, how sweet and poignant the memory of his soft, slow speech playing over my listening fingers. His words seemed to take strange, lovely shapes on my hands.

His own hands were wonderfully mobile and changeable under the influence of emotion. It has been said that my life has treated me harshly and sometimes I have complained in my heart because so many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me, but when I recollect the treasure of friendship that has been bestowed upon me, I withdraw all charges against life.

If much has been denied me, much, very much has been given me. So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

The Book Of Eulogies is available for loan from The National Library Board under the call number 920.02 BOO.

Books For The Soul is a weekly column that highlights books which move, comfort or inspire.

Heaven and Hell

Where there is Heaven, there is Hell.

Where there is Good, there is Evil.

I came across this paragraph from a book, "The Thieves of Heaven" by Richard Doetsch, page 301.

Do u believe in Heaven?

Then why is it so hard to believe in Hell? They are just opposite sides of the same coin.

Hell is real and it is eternal. Hell is not some picture on the wall., some actor in a movie. (Satan) is not just a cloven-footed beast with horns.

Man has envisioned Satan and created Hell with his own thoughts: Dante's inferno, the nine circles of Hell, fire, and brimstone - they are all bullshit. That is all man's imagination.

As we cannot hope to comprehend the beauty and salvation of Heaven, we cannot hope to comprehend the torment and agony of Hell. It is dark, unrelenting, and viciously evil.

Hell is is undeserving if any name. You have no concept of pure evil but you will........Before we are through, you will know better than any man who walks this Earth what true evil is.