How to survive miseries and pandemics, wars, worldly addictions, social media, media and taboos? Start by compiling a comforting catalog of positive things and then face today’s risks. The role that politics, religion, culture can play. What can be the levees to shelter you from future threats. Choose books, a Library. Choose the sea of life.Give yourself a hygiene of life and look at yourself from the outside, without feeling at the center of the universe. Beyond happiness, it points to bliss, it is possible and it disappoints less. Good Library to all!

How to Survive

Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed. — BACON, _Advancement of Learning_.We visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of the inspiration, and cannot easily breathe in other air less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits. — HAZLITT’S _Plain Speaker_.

Bacon & Hazlitt

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in some dormitory or middle state. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew around the happy orchard. — CHARLES LAMB, _Oxford in the Long Vacation_.

Charles Lamb

My neighbours think me often alone, and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes, each of whom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite as intelligibly as any person living can do by uttering of words; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near to me as I please; I handle them as I like; they never complain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence, though ever so abruptly, take no offence. — STERNE, _Letters_.

Lawrence Sterne

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes, — EMERSON, _Books, Society, and Solitude_.Nothing is pleasanter than exploring in a library. — LANDOR,_Pericles and Aspasia_.

Emerson & Landor

I never come into a library (saith Heinsius) but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not their happiness. — BURTON, _Anatomy of Melancholy_.

Robert Burton

I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I am never long even in the society of her I love without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library. — BYRON, _Moore’s Life_.Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book. — JOHN MORLEY, _On Popular Culture_.There is no truer word than that of Solomon: ‘There is no end of making books’; the sight of a great library verifies it; there is no end — indeed, it were pity there should be. — BISHOP HALL.

Byron, Morley & Bishop Hall

You that are genuine Athenians, devour with a golden Epicurism the arts and sciences, the spirits and extractions of authors. — CULVERWELL, _Light of Nature_.He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts. — SHAKESPEARE, _Love’s Labour’s Lost_.I have wondered at the patience of the antediluvians; their libraries were insufficiently furnished; how then could seven years of life be supportable? — COWPER, _Life and Letters by Southey_.

Culverwel, Shakespeare & Cowper

Unconfused Babel of all tongues! which e’er The mighty linguist Fame or Time the mighty traveller,That could speak or this could hear!Majestic monument and pyramid!Where still the shapes of parted souls abideEmbalmed in verse; exalted souls which nowEnjoy those arts they wooed so well below,Which now all wonders plainly seeThat have been, are, or are to beIn the mysterious Library,The beatific Bodley of the Deity!COWLEY, _Ode on the Bodleian_. Higgons, Thomas, Sir,

Sir Thomas Higgon

This to a structure led well known to fame,And called, ‘The Monument of Vanished Minds,’Where when they thought they saw in well-sought booksThe assembled souls of all that men thought wise,It bred such awful reverence in their looks,As if they saw the buried writers rise.Such heaps of written thought; gold of the dead,Which Time does still disperse but not devour,Made them presume all was from deluge freedWhich long-lived authors writ ere Noah’s shower.DAVENANT, _Gondibert_.

William Davenant

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. — MILTON, _Areopagitica_.

John Milton

Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end. — FIELDING, _Tom Jones_.

Henry Fielding

We whom the world is pleased to honour with the title of modern authors should never have been able to compass our great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the general good of mankind. — SWIFT, _Tale of a Tub_.A good library always makes me melancholy, where the best author is as much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coronation. — SWIFT.

Jonathan Swift

In my youth I never entered a great library but my predominant feeling was one of disturbance of mind — not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes on viewing his army, and reflecting that not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some instruction and pleasure; and before I can have had time to extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive in all likelihood I shall be summoned away. — DE QUINCEY, _Letter to a young man_.

Thomas De Quincey

A man may be judged by his library. — BENTHAM. I ever look upon a library with the reverence of a temple. — EVELYN, _to Wotton_.‘Father, I should like to learn to make gold.’ ‘And what would’st thou do if thou could’st make it?’ ‘Why, I would build a great house and fill it with books.’ — SOUTHEY,_Doctor_.What would you have more? A wife? That is none of the indispensable requisites of life. Books? That is one of them, and I have more than I can use. — DAVID HUME, _Burton’s ‘Life_.’

Evelyn, Southey and Hume

Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery! What is that to opening a box of books? The joy upon lifting up the cover must be something like that which we shall feel when Peter the porter opens the door upstairs, and says, ‘Please to walk in, Sir.’ — SOUTHEY, _Life_.I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading. — MACAULAY.Our books … do not our hearts hug them, and quiet themselves in them even more than in God? — BAXTER’S _Saint’s Rest_.

Southey, Macauly and Baxter

It is our duty to live among books. — NEWMAN, _Tracts for the Times, №2_.What lovely things books are! — BUCKLE, _Life by Huth_.(Query) Whether the collected wisdom of all ages and nations be not found in books? — BERKELEY, _Querist_.Read we must, be writers ever so indifferent. — SHAFTESBURY, _Characteristics_.It’s mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow. — O. W. HOLMES, _Poet at the Breakfast Table_.

Newman, Buckle, Berkeley, Shaftesbury and Holmes

I adopted the tolerating measure of the elder Pliny — ‘nullum esse librum tam malum ut non in aliqua parte prodesset.’ — GIBBON, _Autobiography_.A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t. — BYRON, _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. While you converse with lords and dukes,I have their betters here, my books;Fixed in an elbow chair at easeI choose companions as I please.I’d rather have one single shelfThan all my friends, except yourself.For, after all that can be said,Our best companions are the dead.SHERIDAN _to Swift_.

Gibbon, Byron and Sheridan

We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can beadmitted for the asking? — LOWELL, _Speech at Chelsea_.

Gretchen Lowell

On all sides are we not driven to the conclusion that of all things which men can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books? For, indeed, is it not verily the highest act of man’s faculty that produces a book? It is the thought of man. The true thaumaturgic virtue by which man marks all things whatever. All that he does and brings to pass is the vesture of a book. — CARLYLE, _Hero Worship_.

Thomas Carlyle

Yet it is justThat here in memory of all books which layTheir sure foundations in the heart of man, …That I should here assert their rights, assertTheir honours, and should, once for all, pronounceTheir benediction, speak of them as powersFor ever to be hallowed; only lessFor what we are and what we may becomeThan Nature’s self, which is the breath of God,Or His pure word by miracle revealed.WORDSWORTH, _Prelude_.

William Wordsworth

Take me to some lofty room,Lighted from the western sky,Where no glare dispels the gloom,Till the golden eve is nigh;Where the works of searching thought,Chosen books, may still impartWhat the wise of old have taught,What has tried the meek of heart;Books in long dead tongues that stirredLoving hearts in other climes;Telling to my eyes, unheard,Glorious deeds of olden times:Books that purify the thought,Spirits of the learned dead,Teachers of the little taught,Comforters when friends are fled.BARNES, _Poems of Rural Life_.

William Barnes

A library is like a butcher’s shop; it contains plenty of meat, but it is all raw; no person living can find a meal in it till some good cook comes along and says, ‘Sir, I see by your looks that you are hungry; I know your taste; be patient for a moment and you shall be satisfied that you have an excellent appetite!’ — G. ELLIS, Lockhart’s ‘_Scott_.’A library is itself a cheap university. — H. SIDGWICK,_Political Economy_.O such a life as he resolved to live Once he had mastered all that books can give!BROWNING.

G. Ellis, H. Sidwick and Robert Browning

I will bury myself in my books and the devil may pipe to his own. — TENNYSON.Words! words! words! — SHAKESPEARE. HOURS IN A LIBRARYHours In A Library by Leslie StephenA splendid Folio Edition of writings by the eminent critic, father of Virginia Woolf. Includes critical essays on: Defoe’s Novels, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, Godwin and Shelley, Gray and His School, Sterne, George Elliot, Carlyle, Coleridge among others.

Tennyson & Shakespeare

Come sopravvivere …. Come sopravvivere alle miserie e alle dipendenze mondane, ai social, ai media e ai tabù? Parti compilando un catalogo consolatorio delle….

Books

How to survive in a Library ...

Is being a woman a matter of biology, a product of an inner identity—or something in-between? A range of women, including a former Supreme Court judge, a biologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and a feminist campaigner give us their verdicts.

What is a woman?

I am a lawyer, and in law there are two sorts of woman: a person who was born a woman and has not transitioned to become a man under the Gender Recognition Act 2004; and a person who was born a man and has transitioned to become a woman under the same Act. But in practice there are people who were born either a woman or a man and experience gender dysphoria but have not yet completed the legal transition to the other gender. The current law requires them to live in the other gender for two years before their transition can be recognised in law.

Brenda Hale, former president of the Supreme Court

There are other people who are driven to live in the other gender, even if they do not intend to complete a legal transition. For practical purposes, people who live as women in this way are women.Genuinely trans people are among the most vulnerable and marginalised of groups in our society and deserve our understanding and support. They are not to be confused with men who like dressing up as women, any more than people who live as men are to be confused with women who like dressing up as men.

Nor are they to be confused with men who are not genuinely trans but who pretend to live as women in order to gain access to women’s spaces for ulterior reasons. I do not know how common this is and I understand how deeply concerned some women, especially those who have suffered abuse at the hands of men, are about that risk. It is, quite simply, bad behaviour and should not be tolerated. The difficulty lies in knowing which is which.

First, get the science right. Most born women have XX chromosomes, men XY. Intersex individuals can have other combinations. In the US, it is estimated that 1.4m people—or around 0.6 per cent of the population—want to change in social role from male to female or from female to male, though all the political excitement is about males to females. A little girl who says “I’m a boy” from age three onwards, refusing to wear dresses, is probably going to be happier as a boy. If he changes his mind, he can transition back.

Deirdre McCloskey, professor of economics, history, English and communication at the University of Illinois

Practically no one I know has regretted the decision. “Ecstatic” would be a better description of their state of mind. On the other hand, prevent it and you get deeply unhappy people.Second, get the politics right. Take the high road. In a free society, people get to make harmless choices. We are not classified permanently at birth as barristers or ploughmen, barmaids or accountants. The freedom of which most of us approve requires equality of permission. No castes, please: we’re British.

People raise objections. The bathroom issue. Come, come, I go to the loo to pee. What do you do? The sports debate. ­Alright, let’s be reasonable and ­polite, and not have XY people with massive male muscles compete against XX people. I don’t know: maybe a test of muscle mass? Yet some of the XX people have a lot of that.Whether Ukraine is essentially Russian is a big issue. Whether people are essentially free adults is still bigger. Whether I am essentially a woman is not.

I believe that what defines a woman is her biological sex. The binary biological categories of male and female are a material reality even if there are variations of sexual development in-between. Throughout the world and throughout history, women have been and are subject to systematic subjugation on the basis of their sex; a subjugation that is legitimised through patriarchal power embedded in the institutions of the state, community and family. In many cultures, a woman’s destiny is mapped out the day she is born and, in some cases, while still in the womb.

Pragna Patel, former director of Southall Black Sisters

To those who argue that sex is not a biological but a cultural and social construct, I would say that this cannot wholly explain why women and girls are the targets of many forms of harm throughout their lives: female foeticide (sex-selective abortion), female infanticide, FGM and reproductive coercion are just some of the harms that are perpetrated against women and girls on the basis of their biological sex. Feminists across the world have challenged these and many other abuses in the struggle for the right to female autonomy, including bodily autonomy.

Women need single-sex spaces to make sense of their shared biological and social experiences and to stay safe from the harms that they face.To those who say that this view can make feminism a natural ally of the religious right, I say that fighting for sex-based rights must lead us into necessary contestations with the religious or far right. Today, these forces represent one of the greatest threats to women and girls as well as to people who are same-sex attracted, other sexual minorities and those deemed to be non-conforming.

The Iranian fundamentalist regime, for example, is willing to pay for sexual reassignment surgery because it sees the existence of gay men and lesbians as the greater threat to the patriarchal contract. Everyone has the right to live as they wish in security and dignity and without fear of discrimination and stigma, but this cannot be achieved by hitching feminism or indeed other social justice movements to regressive ideological projects.

A woman is someone who identifies as an adult female human being. The word is in flux so no wonder politicians, who want to be all things to all people, find it so tricky to define. Usually language evolves gradually. But “woman” is changing fast, helped by social media, meaning we can watch its morphing definitions in real time.

Sarah Ogilvie, linguist, University of Oxford

We know it means something different for Caitlyn Jenner, Kimberlé Crenshaw, JK Rowling, Cara Delevingne, James Charles, Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Lia Thomas, the Queen, Malala Yousafzai, an incel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Miriam Margolyes, or a man who buys a “non-bio woman” (an AI-enhanced sex doll which may cost up to $25,000 depending on which distinguishing features you choose).New senses of the word “ have appeared over time: woman as wife or a form of address (13th cent.), woman as a sexual partner or in contrast to a “lady” (15th cent.), woman as the embodiment of femininity (17th cent).

Some terms for woman have been positive and heroic (virago, Zamazim, Amazon); ­others decidedly pejorative (strumpet, wench, malkin); some have died out (unchaghe, mot, kittock); others die hard (hussy, minx, skirt).Slang terms for a woman outnumber slang terms for anything else, more even than crime, alcohol, sex or race, and certainly men. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has 10,000 terms for a woman and thousands more referring to female body parts (1,500 words alone for vagina but only 27 for ­clitoris—clearly a woman’s pleasure is not a priority in slang).

New spellings of woman have also emerged, some of them naturally occurring (Old English wifmann, Middle English wuman); others, especially in the 1970s, constructed to reflect a political stance (wimmin, womyn, womxn).Our definition of woman is not fixed. Language reflects culture, and culture changes over time. What is derogatory and offensive now won’t be to future generations. Some artists and activists try to force that change.

In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler repeats the word cunt over and over until it (nearly) loses its shock value. The designer Suzi Warren makes t-shirts reclaiming negative words for woman: Sandi Toksvig chose crone, Mary Beard chose witch, I chose blue-stocking. If only it were that easy.

It is uncontroversial to name an adult female sheep a “ewe” or to know that our scrambled eggs come from “hens.” Humans have long used nouns that denote individual animals by their species and sex (and often stage of maturity), including in relation to our own species: a “woman” is an adult female ­human.The least controversial of this triplet is “human.” Nobody disputes that the word “woman” applies uniquely to humans. And (almost) equally uncontroversially, “adult” denotes an individual who is fully developed and no longer dependent on others.

Emma Hilton, developmental biologist, University of Manchester

Much of society has deemed that a human becomes an “adult” during late adolescence.So it is “female” that is the source of controversy. Yet in biology and medicine, in the hundreds of thousands of textbook references and papers, it is no more controversial than “human” or “adult.” Almost all animals reproduce sexually, via the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, and 95 per cent of animal species—including all mammals and birds—are divided into two reproductive classes of individual who, in the absence of illness, injury or disease, produce either eggs (females) or sperm (males).

Like other animals that give birth to live young, female humans also provide their developing baby a safe space in which to grow during gestation.To describe as “female” a ewe that (just like a woman) has ovaries, a uterus and a vagina, who (just like a woman) produces eggs and gives birth does not attract handwringing analysis of what “ewe” means and whether some rams might be counted as one. It is a peculiarly human and almost religious practice to distinguish our own species from the rest of the animal kingdom, in this case with regards to sex.

But the answer to the question “what is a woman?” is—like the answer to “what is a ewe?”—an almost mundane description of age, sex and species, albeit one with human significance in life and law, sport and data, and single-sex spaces and services. Just as a “ewe” is an adult female sheep, a “woman” is an adult female human.

What is a woman? What makes someone a woman? I should know. Shouldn’t I? I’m a cisgender, straight woman.My birth certificate says “female.” Is that what makes me a woman? No, it’s not that simple. A six-letter word—female—on a birth certificate or any other official document does not always determine womanhood.My reproductive organs played a large part in gifting me two children, and my breasts serviced them for months on end. But reproductive organs, menstruation, pregnancy, menopause, breasts and breast-feeding don’t always define womanhood or make one a woman.

Dawn Starin, anthropologist

For the most part, social and political institutions divide their populations into females and males. I easily fall into the female category in this gender binary system. Yet this system is not universal. There are many other ways we humans have organised genders; both in the past and present, three or more genders have been seen as a very natural way of being and being identified. Historically, people have often transcended binary ideas of gender. In India, the history of the Hijras, a third gender community, stretches back to ancient times.

Since pre-Hispanic times in southern Mexico, there have been three ­recognised genders: muxes, females and males. Today, muxes are accepted and celebrated within their indigenous Zapotec community.Official documents, officialdom, sexual and reproductive organs, biology, external rules, laws, society and body parts (except for the one big one, the brain) cannot always automatically define one’s personal gender. Gender and therefore womanhood are probably determined by the self. And, just as there are no two identical women, there are no two usable identical definitions of womanhood.

Maybe asking “what is a woman” is an impossible question because there are any number of ways of being a woman.Perhaps all I can say is what makes someone a woman is simply a piece of unique, amorphous self-identity floating around in one’s brain, saying: “you are a woman.” Or, to put it more succinctly, paraphrasing an established principle from the trans rights movement: womanhood is what’s inside your head, between your ears.

In most cases, the question that troubles people is not what is a woman, but what is a “real” woman. "Real” women are defined very differently in different periods and places. It is one of the paradoxes of gender that we are so often told it is in our nature to be women, as if biology is indeed destiny, and yet an enormous amount of effort is put into getting us to conform to whatever is the current paradigm.Others find the labels so incompatible with their sense of themselves that they choose to live in a different gender, undergo surgical or hormonal interventions, or redefine themselves.

Anne Phillips, professor of political theory, London School of Economics

Babies are identified as male or female on the basis of their genitals—though in a small number of cases the observations are inconclusive—and are then set off on the long process of acculturation into their assigned categories, learning the appropriate ways of holding their bodies, engaging in the world and envisaging their futures. Some of us accept the label, but resist the baggage attached to it, and try to practise a different version of what it is to be a woman.

These all strike me as different ways of responding to the coerciveness of our current gender order. While the ones that involve changing one’s gender or transforming one’s body throw up sometimes taxing problems regarding access to women-only services or how much prior counselling is appropriate before embarking on possibly irreversible change, I cannot see any one of them as more legitimate than any other. The body matters, shaping how others see us and how we see ourselves. Most of us will change something about our bodies in the process of changing ourselves—but the body is not destiny.

Women are made to be loved not to be undestood

Who What When Where Why

What is a Woman?

The positives and negatives of geographic unity and disunity for nation states:"China's frequent unity and Europe's perpetual disunity both have a long history. The most productive areas of modern China were politically joined for the first time in 221 B.C. and have remained so for most of the time since then. China has had only a single writing system from the beginnings of literacy, a single dominant language for a long time, and substantial cultural unity for two thousand years.

Unity & Disunity

In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification: it was still splintered into 1,000 independent statelets in the 14th century, into 500 statelets in A.D. 1500, got down to a minimum of 25 states in the 1980s, and is now up again to nearly 40 at the moment that I write this sentence. Europe still has 45 languages, each with its own modified alphabet, and even greater cultural diversity. The disagreements that continue today to frustrate even modest attempts at European unification through the EEC are symptomatic of Europe's ingrained commitment to disunity.

Europe's Chronic Disunity

Hence the real problem in understanding China's loss of political and technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China's chronic unity and Europe's chronic disunity. The answer is again suggested by maps. Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece, Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway/ Sweden. China's coastline is much smoother, and only the nearby Korean Peninsula attained separate impor­tance.

China's Chronic Unity

Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert their political independence and to maintain their own languages and eth­nicities, and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major independent European power. But even China's two largest islands, Tai­wan and Hainan, have each less than half the area of Ireland; neither was a major independent power until Taiwan's emergence in recent decades; and Japan's geographic isolation kept it until recently much more isolated politically from the Asian mainland than Britain has been from mainland Europe.

Britain & Ireland - Taiwan & Hainan

Europe is carved up into' independent linguistic, ethnic, and politi­cal units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwe­gian border mountains), while China's mountains east of the Tibetan plateau are much less formidable barriers. China's heartland is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems (eventually linked by canals).

Languages & Rivers

As a result, China very early became domi­nated by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single core. Europe's two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and connect much less of Europe. Unlike China, Europe has many scattered small core areas, none big enough to dominate the others for long, and each the center of chronically independent states.

Core Areas

Once China was finally unified, in 221 B.C., no other independent state ever had a chance of arising and persisting for long in China. Although periods of disunity returned several times after 221 B.C., they always ended in reunification. But the unification of Europe has resisted the efforts of such determined conquerors as Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler; even the Roman Empire at its peak never controlled more than half of Europe's area.

Unity vs Disunity

Thus, geographic connectedness and only modest internal barriers gave China an initial advantage. North China, South China, the coast, and the interior contributed different crops, livestock, technologies, and cultural features to the eventually unified China. For example, millet cultivation, bronze technology, and writing arose in North China, while rice cultiva­tion and cast-iron technology emerged in South China. For much of this book I have emphasized the diffusion of technology that takes place in the absence of formidable barriers.

The Diffusion of Technology

But China's connectedness eventually became a disadvantage, because a decision by one despot could and repeat­edly did halt innovation. In contrast, Europe's geographic balkanization resulted in dozens or hundreds of independent, competing statelets and centers of innovation. If one state did not pursue some particular innova­tion, another did, forcing neighboring states to do likewise or else be con­quered or left economically behind. Europe's barriers were sufficient to prevent political unification, but insufficient to halt the spread of technol­ogy and ideas.

Contrasts

There has never been one despot who could turn off the tap for all of Europe, as of China.These comparisons suggest that geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on the evolution of technology. As a result, in the very long run, technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness, neither too high nor too low. Technology's course over the last 1,000 years in China, Europe, and possi­bly the Indian subcontinent exemplifies those net effects of high, moderate, and low connectedness, respectively."

Comparisons

An intriguing study of the rise of civilization argues that human development is not based on race or ethnic differences but rather is linked to biological diversity, discussing the evolution of agriculture, technology, writing, political systems, and religious belief. Tour.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Her Majesty has more to offer in terms of life advice than any self-appointed wellbeing guru on social media.When I was in rehab, way back when, I heard a piece of advice that has stayed with me ever since. It came from a counsellor, during a session about staying sober in the real world.It focused on dealing with stressful events or people that would usually be a trigger to drink or take drugs. His advice? “Just smile and wave,” he said, himself smiling and waving.

Her Majesty

Smiling and waving has got me through all sorts of situations since – tantrumming children, broken boilers, dead guinea pigs, plummeting oestrogen, et cetera, et cetera. It is the piece of mental-health advice I go to above all others, the thing that keeps me sane when all else is failing. But it is only recently that I have realised who is really responsible for this priceless piece of guidance. Not that counsellor, as dear as he is to me. Not a self-help guru or psychological expert. No. It’s the Queen.

It's the Queen

The Queen is… well, the queen of smiling and waving, isn’t she? I realised this as I watched her at her Platinum Jubilee, standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, despite the obvious discomfort of her 96 years. There is a tendency among younger generations – and I include myself in this – to see the Royal family as symbols of the repressed stiff upper lip that has been such a barrier to good mental health in this country.

Platinum Jubilee

But my mind changed as I watched The Unseen Queen, the incredible BBC documentary narrated by the monarch herself, featuring previously private home footage of Her Majesty as a child and young mother. As I watched her skip through the fields of Balmoral and gulp back a cup of tea almost as big as her 10-year-old head, I realised that the Queen isn’t buttoned up. She’s just – in the parlance of Instagram influencers everywhere – boundaried.

The Unseen Queen

I’ve watched it several times now and, on each occasion, I am struck by a sort of lightning bolt of spiritual enlightenment: the Queen has more to offer us in terms of life advice than any of the self-appointed wellbeing gurus who now litter social media and popular culture. It’s all there in this 76-minute documentary, a veritable treasure trove of guidance for those feeling slightly adrift.

A Spiritual Enlightment

Here she is on raising children: “As with any team, there is strength in combination”; and here she is on the importance of inclusivity, way back in 1947 during her first visit to South Africa, long before any of us understood the concept of “woke”: “We share the same world, but we do not share the same opportunities. A tolerant society actively develops the people that belong to it, and enriches their lives because it values their diversity.”

We Share The Same World

Here is a woman who could have got lost in glitz and glamour, but who instead shares the qualities of all great spiritual leaders, from the Dalai Lama to the Pope: she knows that no one person is better than any other and that she is but a vessel for something far bigger than herself. “We are all visitors to this time, this place,” she says at one point during the film. “We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love. And then we return home.”

Our Purpose Here

The Queen talks of faith in the future and the need to remove fear and in just a few simple words she passes on a message that spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra have dedicated their entire lives to spreading. “I have lived long enough to know that things never remain quite the same for very long.” Queen-speak, that is, for the most Instagrammable quote of all: This too shall pass. I was touched by her sentiments on doing service for others – another concept that is crucial in the treatment of addicts.

Faith In The Future

“We sometimes think the world’s problems are so big that we can do little to help,” she said. "On our own, we cannot end wars or wipe out injustice. The cumulative impact of thousands of small acts of goodness can be bigger than we imagine.”And when she talks of her late husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, she may as well be summing up the key to life: “His sense of service, intellectual curiosity and capacity to squeeze the fun out of any situation were all irrepressible.” I had not thought of the Queen as a mental-health icon before, but now I cannot stop. Long may she smile and wave over us.

A Mental Health Icon

Her Majesty has more to offer in terms of life advice than any self-appointed wellbeing guru on social media

Day by Day

The Queen is my mental health icon

As the most celebrated version of the masterpiece goes on display, we examine its many meanings.We all know The Scream – or we think we do. Boiling sea beneath blood-red sky. A figure – genderless, featureless, alone on a precipice – confronts us with an anguished face as it covers its ears with formless hands.It is a skull, or perhaps a foetus. Its body is contorted, as if without bone and muscle, and it appears to be undulating into the sky. Two figures walk away, oblivious as the world dissolves into chaos.

The Scream

Edvard Munch’s timeless representation of human terror, created at the birth of modernism in Europe, makes its long-awaited return tomorrow at the opening of Norway’s new £500 million National Museum, after more than three years in storage. This is the oldest of several Screams, painted in 1893. Norway’s most revered painter reworked it many times (one is in the nearby Munch Museum; another sold at auction for nearly $120 million in 2012 –(then a record) and in numerous lithographs. In earlier versions, the figure is a well-dressed man gazing to sea. But this is The Scream you probably know.

Norway’s Most Revered Painter 

It is the one on which Munch dripped candle wax, possibly left out in the garden and on which he scribbled: “Could only have been painted by a madman.” It was stolen then returned in a gallery raid in 1994, and is reproduced on endless Munch merchandise, from women’s dresses to babies’ bibs to desktop inflatables – and, of course, emojis.The Scream has seeped into pop culture and sits deep in our collective psyche. Even if you have never heard of Munch or seen the artwork in the flesh, you will know and understand its tortured figure.

A Tortured Figure

We use it ironically, as visual shorthand for exasperation, perhaps anxiety. Why does it resonate so deeply? Thierry Ford, a conservator at the National Museum, says we project whatever we want on to Munch’s figure. “There is no right or wrong way to interpret it – it’s so versatile.”And, according to curator Vibeke Waallann Hansen: “It’s so radical and communicative – everyone of any culture, even a child, can understand it, even if people interpret it differently.”

Versatile

Munch’s masterpiece is different from reproductions – the brushstrokes are more dynamic, the colours of its tempera and pastel are more luminous than on the umbrellas and tote bags in the gift shop. The figure’s expression seems to be in shock, not anxious; its eyes are blank crosses that lock into my gaze. Something unseen appears to be clutching its shoulder; the perspective is dizzying. I notice gouges on the surface. It is as if The Scream is forever shifting, familiar yet unknowable. I must be peering too closely because a guard rushes over to ask me to stand back.

Forever Shifting

Unlike <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9126366/Mona-Lisa-copy-may-have-been-painted-by-Leonardo-da-Vincis-lover-art-historians-suggest.html">Mona Lisa</a>, which last month in Paris had cake thrown at its protective glass in a bizarre climate protest, the returning Scream is not alone in a room. It is hung with other Munch pieces (intentional on the part of the curators: the artist conceived it as part of a series depicting stages of love). There are no ropes, glass sheets or electronic alarms. Only a few visitors can enter at one time. Hansen describes it as “a non-selfie experience”.

A Non-Selfie Experience

The circumstances in which Munch worked on it give more clues to its resonance. He was nearly 30, and he knew The Scream was special. His life before had been ravaged by madness, sickness and death. His mother and sister died of tuberculosis; his father was dogged by depression. Another sister became schizophrenic. Munch turned to drawing to keep himself occupied, but his pious father gave him no support and considered an artist’s profession unholy.

The Scream Is Special

In 1889, he escaped to Paris, where he encountered the post-impressionists: Van Gogh’s expressive and emotional brushwork; Gaugin’s heavy, simplified outlines and contours. He took them, and injected his own sense of northern European melancholy, developing a new style of painting that reflected interior life rather than the physical world.Four years later, in 1893, he painted The Scream that’s in Oslo’s National Museum, while living in Berlin, where an exhibition of his work a year earlier had caused a great commotion and established him as a pioneering artist.

A Northern Melancholy

Hansen points out that The Scream is not screaming; that was not Munch’s intention. He left several poems, notes and diary entries in which he described the circumstances behind the image, including this diary entry written in 1892: “I was walking along the road with two friends – then the sun went (I went) down. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red and I felt a breath of melancholy and an exhausting pain under my heart – I paused, leaning against a fence, tired to death. Above the blue-black fjord and city there was blood in tongues of fire.

The Sream Is Not Screaming

My friends went on and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and felt that a great, infinite scream went through nature.”The scream is emitted by an outside force; the figure covers his ears because he cannot bear the intensity. Hansen suggests a second interpretation: “The scream is the world surrounding you. You are afraid that you cannot cope with social relations, with love. Munch first showed it in a series called the Paintings of Love – and it was about love and desire.”

An Outside Force

Across Oslo harbour, Munch superfan <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/thanks-tracey-emin-people-finally-talking-disease-killed-mother/">Tracey Emin</a> is in town to unveil her bronze sculpture, The Mother, outside the Munch Museum. Later, she talks about her fascination with The Scream. “It’s like some kind of sperm-like, unborn presence that is just within the ether,” she says. “It’s not a ghost, not a spirit. It’s something half there, and half in another world.”She points out its timelessness: “I went to Egypt, to the Valley of the Kings, where there’s a foetus that would have become a king. And I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s just like The Scream!’”

Some Kind of Sperm-Like

From foetuses to emojis. The “Face Screaming in Fear” was added to platforms in 2010 – inspired by both Munch’s image and characters in Japanese anime – and has been used in millions of digital messages ever since, whether to add feeling to a photograph of a positive lateral flow test, or to punctuate a picture of a toddler’s chocolate-smeared face. It’s a joke, to convey despair at mundane inconveniences.Has this new digital life reduced Munch’s existential cry to glibness? Alisa Freedman, professor of cultural studies at the University of Oregon, doesn’t think so.

From Foetuses to Emojis

“People still respect and know its culture, they know the work,” she says. But now, like other emojis, it has a new role helping humans to communicate. “The Scream has become social glue,” she says.In any case, we are using it less. According to Unicode, the official body in charge of emojis, the screaming face is the 55th most-used icon, and fell in global rankings between 2019 and 2021. Freedman says others are taking its place: the skull is increasingly used to convey dying of shock or laughter.

A Social Glue

Nevertheless, Emin fears The Scream has lost some of its power. “I went to the museum shop and there were nail files with The Scream, so when you file your nails it goes, ‘Wheeee!’ I thought, ‘That’s so bad. What would Munch have said?’”I think about Emin’s encounter with a Scream-like mummified foetus, and she’s right. Once you start looking, you see The Scream everywhere. I see it in 5,000-year-old carved mace heads at the British Museum, screaming silently for millennia, and again at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Somerset, where a selection of Henry Moore’s found objects is on show.

The Scream Everywhere

They include a piece of beach detritus – a wooden disc with three holes, some kind of winding mechanism.Moore cast it in bronze in the mid-20th century. It looks like The Scream. He must have known.And I see it in the mask worn by the villain in Scream, Wes Craven’s 1990s classic shlock-horror film. I realise why Munch’s masterpiece resonates.It is just an iteration. The Scream has always existed, and it always will.-----Why Munch’s The Scream isn’t actually screaming. As the most celebrated version of the masterpiece goes on display, we examine its many meanings Helen Barrett, 10 June 2022 •

Munch's Masterpiece Resonates

As the most celebrated version of the masterpiece goes on display, we examine its many meanings

Why Munch’s The Scream isn’t actually screaming

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.

An Astonishing Thing

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. This room [in the New York Public Library] is full of magic… More recently, books, especially paperbacks, have been printed in massive and inexpensive editions. For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”

Books Are Like Seeds

Books: Time Capsules of Life

﻿"In birth certificates it is written where and when a man comes into the world, but the reason and purpose are not specified." This phrase by Anton Pavlovič Chekhov gives us a sense of how scary and, at the same time, wonderful it can be to come into the world. Not knowing what purpose we are set for scares us, but it is also a range of possibilities that we can put into action with our strength and our will.

Reason & Purpose

Who I am. I always wonder. My self answers and tells me everything is written in the identity card that I went to renew this morning. The paper card is about to expire, they will give me the electronic one. Advantages of progress. Those big book-registers of the past no longer exist, with the alphabet in the margins. Letter after letter, the registry clerk scrolled down your surname followed by the list of all your most important data.

A Matter of Identity

Today we are transformed into "bits & bytes".Tax code, driving license, credit card, passport chip complete identity on the additional brain that is the indispensable mobile phone. If you don't have it, you can't say you exist. It all happened in a handful of a few years.

Bits & Bytes

I am writing this text not in pen, not on a sheet of paper, not on a typewriter and not even on a PC. I am typing it on my cell phone, using my little finger, meekly pressing on the display of my additional brain, my samsung. I use my little finger in order not to miss the keystrokes, due to the limited space on the small keyboard.

My Little Finger

I am obviously connected, or perhaps better to say "trapped" by the Net and I send this memory of mine to the cloud, the Google Cloud that connects us all with the whole world. They call it Internet, Net, Web, I don't really know what it is, nobody knows, but everyone is there and must be there. Me too with my identity which I mentioned at the beginning. That's who I am.

We're All Trapped

Today, twenty-first century. Certainly not what I was or was. I've never been the same, of course. I was constantly in the making and was what I didn't know I was going to become. I only know today that I am no longer what I was. Space and time have continually conditioned me without realizing it.

Constantly in the Making

I should be able to know the reason and purpose of what I have been. I do not think it is possible to answer these questions especially because no one ever asked me the question or asked me why I would have to face a test of this kind. I was forced to accept without escape. It was the result of chance, they call it love, but also survival or evolution. The meaning I should have acquired over time, but I always have the doubt.

No Escape

Here is the word, the doubt. Not to be or not to be. That was Hamlet, but it was a literary deception written by someone who has proven himself to be a genius of such deceptions. Still, Shakespeare knew nothing of DNA, but he knew himself well, or rather, his human nature. His art was able to give birth to his characters without being born as people.

The Word is the Doubt

For this reason he knew how to give them a sense and a meaning. They came into the world knowing what to answer for their identity. Can you say the same thing about yourself, dear reader you read? And you who write this post, can you give me your reasons and reasons? Just another exercise in Creative in birth

Creative in Birth

Life

To Be Born: An Exercise in Creative Writing

The business of staying alive. Jan Lucassen and James Suzman both think that there is, at this moment, a particular interest in work. They point to recent and possible future changes in work as reasons why this might be the case: the rise of the gig economy and the spectre of robotics and artificial intelligence.

Work To Live Or Live To Work?

Lucassen aims to produce a comprehensive history of work. This might seem an unexceptional undertaking, but what makes it at once important and demanding is how fully he embraces the still radical idea that all humans are historical, and not just a fraction of them.Put another way, Lucassen’s signal accomplishment is his rejection of the received convention identifying history with the past several thousand years of human existence, almost solely in Eurasia and especially in Europe.

History Of Work

A view in which most of human time is prehistory and most areas of the world are outside or without history (at least until recent centuries).Thus, in place of a narrative that begins with “the Greeks” and ends with “us” – or that takes this codified narrative and tacks on hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic Revolution as prefaces to it – Lucassen attempts what properly can be called not just a world history of work, but a human history of work. On this important point, we can hope that Lucassen’s text is in the vanguard of comprehensive histories of any topic.

A Human History Of Work

Such a thorough-going revisioning of the temporal depth and geographic scope of history – this recognition of history as co-extensive with human existence – gives history as a field of inquiry both anthropological ambitions and anthropological troubles. Thus, in taking “work” as the focus of his ambitious history, Lucassen faces the same conceptual problem that anthropology has long struggled with in regard to topics of cross-cultural study, notably “kinship”, “religion” and “economics”.

A Conceptual Problem

The great difficulty here is that such terms refer at once to something that is present wherever and whenever humans are present and, very differently, to something – also fully real – that is present in only a small subset of human social orders, and even in these not identically. Similarly, “work” can usefully be taken to refer to whatever humans, in every time and place, do to keep themselves alive – to obtain food and shelter, for instance.

The Term "Work"

Yet “work” in our world is also a cultural category or slot within which we, in our social world, place human activities on the basis of how fully (or, perhaps, how blatantly) they are located in a cash or monetary nexus. Sex is an obvious example of an activity that is work when it is paid for, but not in other cases. Work in this cultural sense exists as an attribution given to activities according to a particular set of social norms and values.

A Cultural Category

Jan Lucassen and James Suzman both think that there is, at this moment, a particular interest in work. They point to recent and possible future changes in

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Antonio Gallo
@antoniogallo

How to survive in a Library ...

What is a Woman?

Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Queen is my mental health icon

Why Munch’s The Scream isn’t actually screaming

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Antonio Gallo@antoniogallo

How to survive in a Library ...

What is a Woman?

Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Queen is my mental health icon

Why Munch’s The Scream isn’t actually screaming

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Antonio Gallo
@antoniogallo