The Smell of a Good Book

Here's this month's ACRE FourThought blog. My contribution is below, and you can follow this link to see the original page with the contributions of the other fellows undertaking this magnificent literary/bloggerary effort.

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I have a kindle, I like gadgets, and I embrace progressive technology enabling books to be read in a progressive way. As technology improves, books as a medium will evolve. It was noted on Stephen Fry's Planet Word documentary that as handheld e-readers improve we will see books that incorporate video and extensive footnotes, clips of music and similar. There are already books rife with hyperlinks, and it isn't difficult to imagine the benefits of textbooks where the references in the bibliography lead to the actual articles or papers themselves. These improvements would make studying easier and reading more fun.

Already on the kindle it is possible to see sections of text underlined if they have been highlighted by a number of readers. I'm not sure how I feel about that, hopefully it's a feature that can be turned off; I'd like to come to my own conclusions, and how I read a section of text will definitely be affected if I am aware many people felt it noteworthy.

As much as I enjoy e-readers, for me, personally, they are currently missing something. However this is not informed by practicality or sense, rather it is a hipster coolwank pretention. Much like musos who prefer cds to mp3, and the older who prefer cassette to cd, and the older who prefer vinyl to cassette, and the yet older who prefer music boxes to vinyl, I prefer books. I think it's likely a preference which will take longer to shift culturally, for in comparison to these evolving music recording formats which evolved over a comparatively short period the book has existed in a largely unchanged format for a large number of years.

So, in what ways do books differ to e-readers? In every material dimension the variety of books make them artefacts I delight in, and while the all-in-one nature of e-readers is also something that pleases me, books of paper and ink stimulate so many more of my senses. I have a colossal gospel tome of the Lord of the Rings, with tiny print despite its giant size, a long bound bookmark fraying at the edge, bounteous illustrations taking up entire pages. It is a beautiful book. It frustrates me somewhat as its size excludes it from one of my favourite pastimes: reading in the bath, however it makes up for this by sitting unused for months, years, and then upon re-discovery it has amassed a layer of dust, allowing me to blow it off, imagining that this is an ancient text I have discovered in an ancient ruin or storehouse. On the other end of the scale I have books from the Penguin Popular Classics series, which were printed cheaply in order to make them more available. Old plays and novels have in this way been shrunk into tiny, thin volumes that suit my pastime magnificently. In this way old bastions of literature stand pamphlet sized, and are a far more valuable and rewarding than anything committed to a flyer. I'd be more likely to frequent a pizza place or an indian restaurant which posted The Picture of Dorian Gray around the neighbourhood instead of their own tacky lists of food.

As well as their dimensions, the texture of books are also wildly varied. The plastic smoothness of dustsheets, the childish joy of running your hands over raised title text, like finding a shiny Ole Solskjaer in a packet of stickers. The simple pleasure of running your finger down the edge of the body of pages, watching them flick quickly back, enjoying the whirr of the motion and the breeze created. Joy. There is no better way to up the anticipation of a new journey about to begin within the pages.

But of all our senses, the most strangely powerful is smell. The olfactory stimulus can drag us back in time like no other. Perhaps that's slightly exaggerating; a film watched in childhood rewatched much later can warp us as well, and an album or a song repeatedly listened to can warp us back to the time and place when we hear it years later. For example Ghostbusters 2 turns me into a child as I watch it, and Tenacious D's Tribute takes my back to my teenage bedroom, playing Championship Manager 01/02 on an old PC. But from my experience so many more books can achieve this effect.

And regardless of this effect, I fucking love the smell of a good book. Even the smell of a shit one. I was shocked when I smelt a Twilight book, as despite knowing that it was a collection of written parp, I was shocked to discover that it smelt like a real book. Such is the power of smell, it can positively augment a good book, and it can even cover the reek of a poor book and bestow upon it the credibility of paper, glue and ink.

I recently re-read the first R.A. Salvatore book, The Crystal Shard, and as well as being pleased at how well it stood the test of time and very much enjoying it, I was surprised by its smell. 'Oh yes' I thought, 'this is the smell of fantasy'. And I was surprised by how right I was. Perusing the limited stock I have at my disposal, I am right now smelling Weis & Hickman's Dragon Wing (raised golden title text - delicious) and though it is, of course, the smell of paper, ink and glue, it also smells of fantasy. Also at hand I have Raymond E. Feist's Magician, and it smells exactly the same way. Why should this be!? All these books are from different publishers, and yet they smell exactly the same way. It is as though a secret council of fantasy elders convened and decided "this is how we want fantasy to smell", and so it does.

Koushun Takami's Battle Royale has pages which are unusually white. It has a cold smell, slightly sanitise and lacking in personality. Like a hospital ward or a government building. The cover is a deep red, glossy with a dimpled title. It fits the story magnificently. I have a number of Haruki Murakami books, mostly through the Vintage label, and to me the smell of them is the ultimate smell of comfort. It is the nasal equivalent of putting on the comfiest of pyjamas and hibernating deep in bed. Final Fantasy VII is my gaming equivalent of this. Thanks to the portableness of books, and FF7s release on the PSP I can have this sensation whilst actually in comfy pyjamas and in bed, but I daren't risk it lest I slip into an eternal coma of comfort. Or die as it is also known.

The book which has most moved me nasally recently is Richard Dawkins' The Magic of Reality. Ostensibly a book for older children it is, frankly, utterly majestic. Each page is glossy and rich with colour, and smells of recent redecoration. If you like reading and sniffing paint, I would suggest firstly that you stop sniffing paint, but while you're going cold turkey you can work your way intellectually and olfactorily through this tome. With it's dustsheet off it is a pleasing pale yellow, and at the risk of looking like a lunatic I could very easily simply touch it for an entire hour and be pleased. I would argue that e-readers simply aren't a substitute for that.

E-readers are cool and functional, but they simply don't (yet) have the capacity for exciting me fully in the material world. My kindle doesn't smell of anything. Of course, being human beings we are problem solving animals and we, as we have always done, have thought our way around the problem. We have covers for these e-readers. I have three, for reasons which parallel the Goldilocks tale. One came with the device, a cheap black leather case, and was functional but a little loose and it did not please me. The second, which I bought, was a purple latex sheath which attracted dust like a bugger and was therefore unpleasant to the touch. My final purchase, which so far has pleased me, is a brown hemp cover which is delightful to the touch, and also to the nose.

I am sometimes moving with the times, but I hope that it will be awhile yet until the smell of fantasy is eradicated.

The Reason of Reason

I recently watched the documentary 'Collision' which charted correspondence between and a subsequent debating tour by Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson. I am very interested in the work of Christopher Hitchens, who is a highly-regarded journalist that is also well-known for his participation in public debates. It is my interest in Christopher Hitchens which led me to find this film. The topic of debate was 'Is Christianity Good for the World?', with Hitchens, an atheist/anti-theist, arguing the negative and Wilson, a Christian theologian, arguing the positive.

It was a very interesting piece, with fascinating footage of the debaters off-stage which provided some insights into their characters, and helped to humanise them both, which I felt was valuable in an arena where it's easy to demonise the individual who is proposing the world-view counter to your own. Also, seeing the two men treating each other with grace and politeness was very heartening, proving, to me at least, that the effort was to actually engage in a logical process of understanding, and not shout each other down or out emote each other, although bits and pieces of these behaviours do crop up in the piece, though that is human nature I suppose.

If you have the variety of nerditry that I possess, namely the enjoyment of debates, and you have viewed a fair amount of these, you will quickly find that a number of the arguments and refutations become repetitive very quickly. This is largely, I would speculate, due to one side thinking that a point is valid, with the opposing side considering it as solidly debunked and vice versa. This ensures that a vast amount of debates, specifically on the topic of religion/atheism (i.e. the existence / non-existence of god) I should perhaps specify, often cover the same ground. Therefore it is a joy to discover an argument that you've never come across before, it is like finding a free toy in a box of cereal which isn't even promising a free toy (I used to like the holographic pictures). Such was the case in this debate.

In actuality I just clicked through the film again to find an exact quotation of what was said, and I was unable to find the question I was thinking of. I have watched a large amount of such debates recently, which leads to the possibility that I heard this argument elsewhere, so I won't attribute it to Douglas Wilson in any concrete way, but I will present it nevertheless.

Now I should say in advance that this argument is perplexing to me, because my instinct tells me that there is some fundamental fallacy taking place, but after playing with it in my mind all I have managed to achieve is a headache. In questioning the mandate of morality in a world where there is no ultimate moral creator, we must suggest another way of justifying the importance of morality. In my memory of this argument, 'reason' was suggested to justify morality. Using reason we can come to the agreement that murder, perjury and stealing (three things that are often considered as being immoral in every human community that has ever been observed) are immoral because were they practised widely, the community in which they were practised would fall apart under it's own lack of solidarity. If there was a community who did not consider these things immoral, that community would not survive. Taking the argument a level further, and this is the point which perplexed me, is that on what terms are we judging the efficacy / mandate / importance of 'reason'. The proposition was that if we are judging the process of reason using the standards of reason that this is a circular argument and therefore null. My own personal reaction would be to suggest that the effort and the process of reason has been proved time and again to work, the only concrete and clear understanding and achievements we have achieved as a species have come from the application of reason. The process of faith has never once enabled a human to fly, though some would claim, ludicrously, otherwise. It is only reason, specifically scientific endeavor with reason at its core, that can claim that accolade. The counterargument to this claim is that the process of judging the merit of a process by its achievements is itself the use of reason, and so it is, again, circular reasoning. It was at this point that I fell prey to a frustrating headache.

Of course the argument also applies the other way around, I would argue, as if you say "you can only see the merits of reason by using a process of reason" then similarly "you can only see the merits of faith through having faith". The only way to avoid this that I can see would be to claim that the value of reason must be self-evident, which I would be wary of stating, as clearly there are a large number of people who seem to abstain from reason, and if not in every aspect of life then they seem alarmingly able to partition their lives into a) problems that can be solved with reason, usually in the material/scientific realm, and b) problems that can not be solved by reason, which usually land in the supernatural realm and sometimes the moral. I am skeptical of the existence of a supernatural realm because it, by its very nature, cannot be verified or observed using scientific means, which, as techniques and tools improve, has been able to verify and observe more and more. Of all the things we previously believed to be supernatural in origin and now understand, the supernatural claims were proven correct 0% of the time. Zeus threw the lightning until we figured out what was really going on, the world was flat until we figured out that it was actually a sphere, and while we may not yet understand precisely how the Universe came into being, precisely how life arose from non-life and precisely how morality emerged I am confident, because of our reason-based problem solving past record that we will eventually come to know the answers. Even if this is not the case, and we cannot know as a species how these fundamental processes began, then that is still no reason to hypothesize a solution that would be contrary to everything we understand about the nature of existence, which is what a supernatural creator would entail.

Some would also feel that a morality that exists simply as a survival mechanism because of evolution would be devalued, but I would argue that that is simply not the case. Though we arrived at our current state due to evolution, our possession of sentience means that we can evaluate, using reason, what is of value and what is not, what is good and what is not, so while morality evolved for survival reasons, we can understand that it is of more fundamental value. Simply because we have discovered that morality has it's origin in natural selection does not devalue its importance, just as understanding that love developed in because it helped propagate genes doesn't devalue or lessen the impact of love.

I fear I have drifted slightly askew of topic there. The core point of this entry was to discuss the idea that justifying the importance of reason using reason was a circular argument. In the brief discussion I had regarding this it was pointed out to me that this is perhaps an epistemological issue, which is an area I have not read into, so I will be endeavoring in that direction soon.

Headache.

Comments are for Commenting

In a bid to get involved with my local community, I started reading the websites of a number of my local churches. They all seem to be doing some very good word, and providing very valuable services to the community, such as mother toddler groups, fundraisers and other events.


I found a blogspot account for one of the churches local to me, the St David's Uniting Church, which provides an account of the events that they put on in the church. In one post, here, seems to have been a talk which focused on 'sin'. I would say that this is largely understood as a religious concept, and as is so often the case though we have a general understanding of what 'sin' is, I realised I was unable to actually form a coherent definition that I feel people would agree to. After looking at a few dictionary definitions I found that at it's most basic it is an action which breaks a moral law.


If you click the link you can see the entire post, which isn't particularly controversial, but as I read it I felt that there were two conflicting accounts of what constituted 'sin'. I tried to comment on the post, since that is what the option is there for, but discovered that only the authors of the blog are allowed to comment there, so, having written out my comment, I felt slightly annoyed, and thought I'd post it here instead. Here it is:


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I'm not sure whether I'm misinterpreting what's been written here, but I think some of the thoughts on sin here are inconsistent.


In the third paragraph it says:


"Sin is not so much about moral misbehaviour as about lazy thinking - opting out of thinking for ourselves."


Which, it seems to me, would be advocating critical thinking, however in the next paragraph you say:


"It cannot be sinful to think as we have been taught, rather the sin is to refuse insights which are given to us, which would keep us honest."


Unless I am misunderstanding, you seem to be saying that you should both 'think for yourself' and also 'think as you were taught', which would seem to be contradictory.


I'm unclear if your sentence "think as we have been taught" refers to a method / way of thinking or whether it just means 'believe what you are told (presumably by someone in religious authority).


Apologies if I've simply misunderstood.


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I personally do believe it is very important to think for yourself, and to think critically. If the second point raised does imply that it is good to simply believe what you are told, I would vehemently disagree. They have phrased it very misleadingly if that is what they are suggesting, travelling an interesting linguistic route to justify simply believing as the church says. Unfortunately I was unable to ask them directly, so I may never know what they actually intended.

Skepticism

Recently I have become preoccupied by skepticism, rationalism, critical thinking and science, and I have been watching and reading widely on these subjects. My research efforts have been a little formless and scattergun, so I decided to start blogging about it in order to give more form to my efforts. I am intending it to be somewhere I can write as I learn, to serve as a tool to help me keep track of what I am learning about, and also, hopefully, serve in some small way as a link to a community which is growing ever larger in the world, and especially online.


Who am I and where am I coming from?


My name is Adam and geographically I am from the South Wales Valleys. I am an atheist, and while I've never considered, nor experienced anything that suggested, that position to be socially controversial, it seems that it is widely considered as a minority position, and so in the effort of upping awareness I have no reservations about broadcasting my position. I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of a god/gods.


I would like to be able to say that all of my beliefs boil down to:


I believe in x because there is sufficient evidence to support it
or
I do not believe in y because there is insufficient evidence to support it.


Unfortunately that isn't the way life works, and I, as everyone else is, am subject to presumptions and trust in arguments from authority. I believe it is only a rational approach that can help filter out presumptions and falsehoods from actual truth. At this point in human history our knowledge is so vast that it is impossible for any individual to have tested and to conclusively know everything we have discovered or worked out as a species. No one person knows everything, and every individual has been wrong or mistaken at some point in their lives. I believe it is through a process of rational thinking, skepticism and critical analysis (and self-analysis) that we can discover what is actually true or correct.


I don't believe this aim is easy to achieve. This is why I subtitled this blog 'A Skeptical Effort', because being skeptical is a constant effort, it is not something you achieve and then have built into you and suddenly you can think critically about everything. It is something you have to work at, and it involves the willingness to alter your position if you discover you are wrong.


I have a degree in English Language and Communication which, of course, is of minimal use when it comes to scientific matters, but I would say it has made me very capable where it comes to picking apart illogical or inconsistent statements, and also gives me a grounding in research and analysis. Perhaps stating it in such a way is slightly hubristic, time and my efforts will show whether I am mistaken in my self-assurance.


I am eager to improve my scientific knowledge and understanding, which I have left wither somewhat since school, but I am actively taking steps to improve. While I have an interest in all things skeptical, the specific area of interest where I have an acute fascination is religion, as it has such clear and tangible positions on morality, where it's pronouncements, by their very nature, are not open to discussion or alteration, which I believe is a stubbornly ignorant position, and ultimately negative.


My aim is to always be learning and thinking, and using what I learn to be better in interacting with other people. I believe in the importance and value of discussion, and am seldom happier than when pointedly philosophising with good people. I hope that I am always trying to become a better writer. I write fairly often, though broadcast the writing less and less lately, and I also record vlogs, up until now on the topic of the Welsh language, and I also write, perform and record sketches, podcasts and videos with my friends, in a comedy group called The ACRE. I, increasingly infrequently, perform stand-up comedy. I enjoy reading (favourite author Haruki Murakami), playing games (favourite game Final Fantasy 7), watching good films, good comedy and anime regardless of how good it is. I have recently discovered the abundance of long debates and talks on youtube and I have become obsessed with them. Above everything else I value thinking and talking, by myself and with other people. I can't do very good impressions and I know very few jokes. I almost always have a beard of some kind, but I distrust moustaches.


That's some of me and Why.