“In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan

A well-written, informative and witty commentary on the dangers of the western food culture. A reminder that the health of individual human beings is closely related to the ecological, cultural and agricultural environment (soil, plants and animals).

Pollan argues that reductionist nutrition science takes nutrients out of the context of whole foods and foods out of the context of culture, and advocates instead a holistic approach to food, emphasizing the relationships between foods, people, culture and the ecosystem. He recommends traditional diets and whole foods over industrialized foods, because they have stood the test of time as products of “biocultural evolution”.

“The Kingdom of God Is Within You” by Leo Tolstoy

A Masterpiece

Tolstoy presented to the readers the essence of Christianity, namely, the Law of Love, stripped of all superstitions, relics, hypocrisies, mystifying rituals and theological arguments. He expounded in a most logical, thoughtful, comprehensive and convincing manner how true Christianity is mutually incompatible with violence and all forms of government founded on violence, including monarchies, capitalists and socialists.

In his fictional works, Tolstoy showed a remarkable empathetic understanding of human nature; In his non-fictional works, he demonstrated great intellectual integrity and capacity by presenting in their entirety all the different schools of thoughts on the subject. Before making his own arguments against war and government, he first stated and quoted all the opposing opinions and analyzed their merits and errors. He always aimed to communicate, understand and edify rather than to judge and condemn.

This book was banned in Russia and he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church, which he denounced in the book. But, as he prophesied in the book, governments and institutions are  powerless against a man who has united himself with the truth.

“Hadji Murad” by Leo Tolstoy

During the last years of his life, Tolstoy told the story of a freedom fighter, whose vitality and tenacity he admired, though he denounced violence. He perhaps sensed in himself the strength and growth of an inner life despite the deterioration of his health.

“Resurrection” by Leo Tolstoy

The last major novel by Tolstoy. According to Wikipedia, Vladimir Nabakov heaped superlatives upon “Anna Karenina”, but questioned the reputation of “War and Peace”, and sharply criticized “Resurrection” and “The Kreutzer Sonata”. My opinion is the exact opposite.

To me, this is a more mature and riveting work than “Anna Karenina”, because it contains deeper spiritual and social insights, the upshot of the author’s personal struggles and growth in the intervening years. In “Anna Karenina”, we witness the despair and destruction of the main character, in “Resurrection”, the tender hope and revival of two souls.

As Levin is a self-portrait of Tolstoy in “Anna Karenina”, so is Prince Nekhlyudov, the hero of this book. Called to jury duty in the criminal court, Nekhlyudov recognized the defendant as the innocent Katusha whom he had loved but also seduced many years ago. He recalled his tender first love for Katusha, and his later betrayal and misuse of her. The reality of his subsequent life forced itself upon him, “a stupid, empty, valueless, frivolous life”. He decided to redeem himself and save her or at least try his best to relieve her misery.

Tolstoy painted a condemning portrait of the Russian society, specifically the prison system and the government service, which he blamed for oppressing and depraving the human spirit. It reminded me of the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and even happenings in our daily life. How otherwise normal, kind human beings can commit horrible crimes against others, and how insensitive and cruel we can be when “doing our job”.

In sharp contrast, the relationship and interactions between Nekhlyudov and Katusha become the more lively and riveting, like plants growing in the desert. There is the whole gamut of emotion, joy, devotion, pity, contempt, anger, forgiveness and love. That is what I as a reader can relate to and it’s also why I care about their fate to the very end.

Rationalization of a Sinful Life

“Everybody, in order to be able to act, has to consider his occupation important and good. … People whom fate and their sin-mistakes have placed in a certain position, however false that position may be, form a view of life in general which makes their position seem good and admissible. In order to keep up their view of life, these people instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it. This surprises us, where the persons concerned are thieves, bragging about their dexterity, prostitutes vaunting their depravity, or murderers boasting of their cruelty. This surprises us only because the circle, the atmosphere in which these people live, is limited, and we are outside it. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e., robbery; the commanders in the army pride themselves on victories, i.e., murder; and those in high places vaunt their power, i.e., violence? We do not see the perversion in the views of life held by these people, only because the circle formed by them is more extensive, and we ourselves are moving inside of it.”

Systematic Depravation of Men

“If a psychological problem were set to find means of making men of our time–Christian, humane, simple, kind people–perform the most horrible crimes without feeling guilty, …It is only necessary that … they should be fully convinced that there is a kind of business, called government service, which allows men to treat other men as things without having human brotherly relations with them; and that they should be so linked together by this government service that the responsibility for the results of their deeds should not fall on any one of them individually. Without these conditions, the terrible acts I witnessed today would be impossible in our times. It all lies in the fact that men think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love. But there are no such circumstances.”

Qualities of Men

“One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own special, definite qualities; that a man is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, etc. … And this is untrue. Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”

“Round the Moon” by Jules Verne

A sequel to “From the Earth to the Moon”, a wonderful and exciting imaginary tale of space travel. The three salient features of Verne’s science fictions, namely, scientific vision, industrial knowledge and  humorous imagination, personified in the book by three space travellers, make it a worthy read, though I could do with a little less of the hypothesized selenographic details.

“Memories, Dreams and Reflections” by C. G. Jung

A Fascinating and Unique Autobiography

Jung explores many fields that are both familiar and strange, such as astrology, alchemy, philosophy, psychology and religion. For someone with limited knowledge and experience, Jung is quite understandable, as he conveys his ideas and feelings very well despite the broad scope and  complexities of the subjects. He has a truly synthesizing mind.

It’s a unique autobiography, because, instead of a record of events in Jung’s life, it’s an account mainly of his inner experiences, his dreams, fantasies and reflections. Life is viewed as a process of transformation, namely, transformation of the psyche to achieve “wholeness” or “total consciousness”. Jung also reflects on his relationships and encounters with people who have influenced him, most notably Freud. It’s surprising, however, that he seldom mentions his wife, though he speaks volumes about his parents.

Jung identifies himself strongly with Goethe’s Faust, who gave his soul in exchange for knowledge. He asserts that there are opposites in everything and is particularly obsessed with the dark secrets. The book documents his fascination with corpses and graves, his experiments and experiences with  the unconscious, spirits and multiple personalities. If not for his social support, he would perhaps have gone over the edge like Nietzsche.

Answer Comes From Within

“Inner experiences also set their seal on the outward events that came my way and assumed importance for me in youth or later on. I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. … I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.”

A Diabolical Mixture of the Sublime and the Ridiculous

“From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was conducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. Today I might equally well say that it was an experiment which was being conducted on me. One of the greatest difficulties for me lay in dealing with my negative feelings. I was voluntarily submitting myself to emotions of which I could not really approve, and I was writing down fantasies which often struck me as nonsense, and toward which I had strong resistances. For as long as we do not understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. It cost me a great deal to undergo them, but I had been challenged by fate. Only by extreme effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth.”

“I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. … This idea that I was committing myself to a dangerous enterprise not for myself alone, but also for the sake of my patients helped me over several critical phases.”

The Process of Individuation

“As I worked with my fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious
undergoes or produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these collective transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation.”

“The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells

A speculative, apocalyptic tale in which Martians landed on earth  and almost wiped out the entire local population. According to the nebular hypothesis, Mars was more advanced in the life cycle of the planet than Earth, and therefore the Martians were supposedly evolutionarily more advanced than humans, having a superior intelligence and no sex or digestive organs. Ironically, they were vanquished by the least evolved life form on Earth, the bacteria, due to a lack of immunity.

“Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde” by Oscar Wilde

A compilation of nine fairy tales from “The Happy Prince and Other Tales”

The Happy Prince
The Nightingale and the Rose
The Selfish Giant
The Devoted Friend
The Remarkable Rocket

and “A House of Pomegranates”

The Young King
The Birthday of the Infanta
The Fisherman and His Soul
The Star-Child

I remember reading “The Happy Prince”and “The Selfish Giant” when I was a child. Sad but beautiful stories about miseries in the world and the fragility and beauty of love. “The Remarkable Rocket” reads like a political satire of the idle and pompous; “The Young King” decries the cruelty of wealth and power.

I don’t quite appreciate “The Nightingale and the Rose” and “The Birthday of the Infanta”. One character died giving her heart’s blood to make a beautiful red rose, another died from shame of his own ugliness. IMO, their lives were sacrificed needlessly in the name of love, or rather, on the altar of beauty.

“Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl

“I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. … I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, … At that moment, I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”

Under the dire circumstances of the concentration camps, Frankl became fully convinced that if life is to have meaning, there must be meaning in death and sufferings also, and that every day, every moment, in every situation, no matter how dreadful and seemingly hopeless, a human being still can live with dignity and meaning, he always has the freedom to choose to be responsible for his life, to love, to experience life in its fullness even through sufferings.

“The Youngest Science” by Lewis Thomas

Medicine Watcher

Dr. Thomas gives a fascinating personal account of the development of medicine in the last three-quarters of a century. He grew up watching his parents practice medicine (his father was a physician, and his mother a nurse), became a physician himself, also a professor and dean of the medical school of NYU, served on the New York Board of Health overseeing public health policy and later headed a cancer center. He also experienced being a patient, receiving surgeries and hospital care.

Neurology, Immunology and Olfaction

Thomas intrigues the readers with many interesting problems in immunology and related fields. His sense of wonder and curiosity are very contagious. In particular, I find his notion that “neurology and immunology may be on the verge of converging” fascinating, and will pursue further readings on the subject.

Dogs and mice can track individuals by their smell and separate people with cancer from those who are normal by the smell of their urine samples. These experiments suggest that differences in genetic makeup are expressed in smell (molecular makeup), and each person has a unique smell that can be used as a unique identifier, like fingerprints. These markers of self may have a mechanism similar to those in immune response, where foreign cells are detected presumably by molecular interactions on the cell membrane.

Memory (both immune memory and long-term memory in the brain) involves molecular interactions (at the synapses) and the synthesis of new molecules (proteins, etc). Vaccines work similarly to sensitization, i.e., they facilitate and strengthen existing pathways and even create new ones.