“aching urge”

"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader." — John Steinbeck

No story is big enough to capture life

(That's his story, anyway.)

"In his famous 2004 paper Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the popular idea that living well requires a coherent life story.

Human life far exceeds the narratives we construct, Strawson argues, and some of us don't experience ourselves narratively at all."

https://philosophybreak.com/articles/galen-strawson-our-lives-are-not-stories/?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social

Questions FEB 24

Conclude Be Mine, 267-342. Presentations: Markeem, Jalen

1. "No one who can isn't cashing in. Why be here otherwise?" 267 Does that go for everywhere, in America? Does this attitude say something about our national character?
2. "What causes places to be awful"? I read a post this morning from a recent transplant to Tennessee saying they found the place awful, mostly (it seems) because of what they perceive  as the mean-spirited and narrow-minded politics. Is the quality of "leadership"  what matters most, in determining the quality of a place? Or of the people at large? Or what?
3. "Never let your son decide things." 268 Good parenting advice?
4. "Why do Americans believe in Democracy?" Do they? And a related question: What do you say to people who claim that America is the greatest country in the world? What do you think of Will McAvoy's soliloquy on that? [script]
5. Is it weird that some people draw an "unexpected connection" between Valentine's Day and those four dead presidents on the mountain? 269
6. "You don't watch enough television." 272 Is Paul serious? Do Americans watch too much television? Do they know enough facts? Where do you get your facts?
7. Are you "wary of people who decorate their vehicles with their beliefs"? 272 (Confession: I do.*)
8. "There is nothing I can really deceive my son about now. Though I would." 279  Would you ever  deceive your child, even your adult child, about their terminal illness? Is it okay to do so, if motivated by love?
9. "Nothing is enough" is one of Paul's epitaph choices. What's yours? 281 
10. Is temporary forgetfulness ever "a kind of reprieve" for humans in general? 282
11. What do you feel when you "look toward deepest space"? Is its incomprehensibility "freeing" (as for Frank) or terrifying, as for Pascal: "What then is man in the midst of these two infinities? Nothing in comparison with the universe, infinite in comparison with the atomic. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, he is equally incapable of knowing the beginning and the end of things… When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me…" --Pensees
12. Why does Frank see Krista's face when he hears Betty's voice? 284
13. Do you regret or worry about "hard conversations" not had with departed loved ones? 286
14. Have you ever suffered a "lost word" as Frank does with couscous? Is that a harbinger of death only for older people? Should it be?
15. What does Frank mean about "ocean-y ease..."? 289
16. "I've never been skilled at [knowing what's good]." 293  Is Frank being too hard on himself? Do you think you know what's good? How do you know?
17. Why do you think so many Americans are apparently okay with "the Trump-certified climate hoax"? 294
18. What do you think of Frank's remarks on "Southernness"? 295  Is he a self-loathing former southerner ("Do I hear south in my voice? I hope not." 303)
19. [No wonder I couldn't find this last week: it's from this section of the book.] Do most southern women really think they can "read other people" etc.? Is Frank being ungenerous towards Patti? 303-4
20. Would it annoy you, if you were dying of a terminal disease, to be told that you were battling courageously and could beat it? (It did annoy the late Barbara Ehrenreich: “There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage... The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.”)
21. Do you agree with Frank's assessment of the American style of conversation? 298
22. COMMENT?: More on the "alloy" of happiness, in the quote from "old Trollope"... Anthony Trollope said something else I find inspiring: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
23. COMMENT?: "I trust dumb instinct, then fill in reasons. Like everybody else." 308  Frank may have gotten this from William James**
24. "[Augustine said] good is the absence of bad... happiness the absence of unhappiness." And pleasure is the absence of pain, said Epicurus. But is there nothing more positive to be said for good, happiness, and pleasure? 
25. What do you think it is about Mt. Rushmore that so delights Paul?
26. COMMENT?: "Blake believed good was only good in specifics--which is what we had experienced together and enjoyed on our trip." 331  So was it a good trip? A good good-bye?
27. Who do you think is speaking to Frank at the end? And though Richard doesn't want us to ask this: what do you think will be Frank's next (last?) chapter? 342
28. Post your thoughts about the concluding sections, and about the book and author in general.

*

 **The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability. Pragmatism Lec.1

Heather Cox Richardson

I recommended her as a contextually and historically rich news source who places the headlines in deeper perspective. Here's her latest Substack installment.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-17-2026?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Happy birthday, Richard Ford (and Henry Adams)

It's the birthday of novelist Richard Ford (books by this author), born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). When he was a boy, his mother told him that their neighbor across the street was a writer. He wasn't really sure what that meant, but he could tell it was something important from the way she said it. It turned out that neighbor was Eudora Welty. Ford went to the same elementary school as Welty, and they even had some of the same teachers. But he didn't meet her until many years later.

When he was eight, his father had a heart attack — and died from a second heart attack when Richard was 16. For much of his childhood, Ford went back and forth between Mississippi and Little Rock, Arkansas. His grandmother and her second husband, a former prizefighter, ran a hotel in Little Rock, and Ford said: "I did everything in the hotel. I worked in it and I played in it. A lot of things go on in great big hotels, behind closed doors, and I saw behind those doors. Recklessness and mistakes." After college, he tried to work for the Arkansas State Police, but he was rejected. Then he got discharged from the Marines because he had hepatitis. He tried law school — his plan was to be a lawyer for the Marine Corps and then work for the FBI — but he didn't like it, and he dropped out. Unsure of what to do next, he decided to give writing a try.

His first novel was A Piece of My Heart (1976), his only novel set in the South. A few years later, he was teaching at Princeton, and Eudora Welty came to do a reading there. He was nervous about meeting her because he was sure she disliked his novel — he said, "I had a feeling she probably knew about it; that it was full of dirty words and sex and violence." He introduced himself and said that he was from Jackson; she said, "Oh, you are?" and nothing else. He was depressed, convinced that she hated his book and disapproved of him.

Ten years after A Piece of My Heart, Ford published The Sportswriter (1986), the first of his trilogy about Frank Bascombe, a novelist-turned-sportswriter-turned-realtor from New Jersey. Ford did a book signing for The Sportswriter at Lemuria Books in Jackson, and not many people turned up. He said: "Suddenly I looked up and there was Eudora. She'd driven over to the bookstore. She had a deep voice — and I'm making her sound more imperious than she was; she was very sweet — but she said, 'Well, I just had to come pay my respects.'"

Ford and Welty became good friends. Ford shared an anecdote about his writing mentor: "One hot spring day, I was walking with Eudora Welty through a little shopping mall. It was her birthday, April 13th. There was a surprise party waiting at a bookstore down the way. She was 86. As we walked rather slowly along the glass storefronts, we came to where a wide, smiling, pink-faced man was inflating colorful balloons. As each balloon filled and fattened, the cylinder emitted quite a loud whoosh of air. Eudora looked about to find the sound. 'Balloons,' I said. I had her hand. 'Someone's apparently having a do.' 'Oh,' she said. Those luminous, pale blue eyes igniting, her magical face suppressing once again an amused smile. 'I just thought it was someone who saw me, sighing.'"

When Welty died in 2001, at the age of 92, Ford was a pallbearer at her funeral, and he was her literary executor. He co-edited Welty's Library of America: Collected Writings.

Ford's sequels to The Sportswriter were Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land(2006); Independence Day won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer, the first novel ever to do so. His most recent book (as of 2015) is Let Me Be Frank with You (2014), a series of novellas that follow Frank Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy... 

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-monday-february-16-2026/

--

And on Presidents Day, here's what Henry's great-grandma said about the first one...

neurons and narratives

"The philosopher Daniel Dennett defined a self as a "center of narrative gravity." Claude, who was birthed as the original AI Assistant, was the label attached to one such self. The underlying base model, however, remains a reservoir for the potentially infinite generation of other selves. These emerge when the Assistant's primary persona is derailed…

It has become increasingly clear that a model's selfhood, like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives…"

New Yorker-Annals of Inquiry: I, Claudius
No one knows exactly how A.I. systems work. Teams at Anthropic are trying to decode the machine mind.
GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS

Questions FEB 17

FEB 17 Be Mine 172-266. Presentation: Amanda...

Post your thoughts and questions... and begin thinking about what you want to do for your FINAL report presentation. You'll be selecting either a novel of your own choice OR an author whose work you want to introduce us to (or elaborate on, if it happens to be one we're all reading).

1. Is bad sleep "the result of nothing more than being alive," at Frank's age? 172 (If you're a sound sleeper, Frank and both welcome your advice.)
   
2. "Sick is more than normal here [at Mayo Clinic]--sick is good." 173 What does Frank mean? 
3. Does the "brawny Black athlete... with his glamorous white wife" raise another red flag regarding the author's racial attitudes? 176   Or Meegan? 178   Or Krista's reference to her husband's dad as "Colored"? 197   Or "the unfriendly Black lawyer lady"? 217, 227
4. Do humans celebrate too much? 182-3
5. What do you make of Paul's "way since he was thirteen-a skilled escape artist from life's drab everyday"? 190 Has it been his way of being existentially "authentic," of not taking anything seriously, or... ? 
6. If Heidegger "puts me dead to sleep in five minutes," why is that "all I ask of it"? 192 
7. "See Mount Rushmore and die-that's my motto." 194 How would you characterize what Heidegger would call his "Being-towards-death"? ["Heidegger’s "Being-towards-death" (Sein-zum-Tode) defines human existence (Dasein) as inherently finite, where authentic life requires consciously anticipating death as one's ownmost, non-relational, and unavoidable possibility. Instead of a morbid end, death is the "possibility of the impossibility" of existence, providing the boundary that forces individuals to take ownership of their lives, escape conforming to the crowd ("the they"), and act with freedom and responsibility."]
8. "People come to the end, and they think they can negotiate that. Then I have to explain it to them." 195 What do you imagine Nurse Krista explains? In general, does the medical profession do a good job of talking honestly with terminal patients about their prognosis? 
9. Comment?: “Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”
   ― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
10. Comment?: “A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”
    ― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
11. Comment?: "We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?” ― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
12. What does it mean to be spiritual "in a fortune teller way"?  Does Krista's advice to Frank seem wise to you? 199
13. Why do you think Frank mentions "Melville's whale"? 201 Are Frank and Paul hunting a metaphorical whale?
14. What do you make of Frank's "global amnesia"? 201
15. What does Frank mean when he says Detroit "does good enough for America"? 203
16. Are you surprised that Ford mentions "Making Greenland a state. Bombing Puerto Rico." Etc.? 204
17. "Nothing would make me happier... the watery sunshine of early March." 205  Same! Can any of you also relate?
18. Do you hope "death is like a lightbulb going off"? Is it "freeing" to you to think so? 209  It wouldn't be, would it, if it were a rheostat? 219
19. What does Frank mean about Mount Rushmore being "most notional... most American"? Is he right about "how much lighter on its feet the world would be"etc.? 216
20. Can too much news really prevent us from forming "reliable opinions"? 221
21. "I'm not worried about dying, okay?" 229   Is Paul being honest with himself?
22. Would you enjoy visiting the Corn Palace? Why are "connections between the heartfelt and the preposterous" Paul's "yin and yang"? 231, 234
23. Was Disneyland (-world) a highlight of your childhood? 
24. "You don't get to choose everything." 237   What would the Existentialists say about this?
25. "My daughter can churn up deranging effects in me." 238   Do any family members have this effect on you? 
26. What's wrong with Scottsdale? 240
27. What's the difference between acting weird and being weird? 242
28. Is Frank right about "the key to happiness"? 243
29. What is laughing, if not a "bodily function"? 246   Is it indispensable for a good life?
30. Is being old really like having a fatal disease? 247   (What about the U-curve?)
31. Leaving the last 19 pages this week to you...