jameswharris

“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder

by James Wallace Harris, 8/9/26

“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder returns to the assertion that reading makes us more empathetic. The 2020s are difficult times for trans people, especially for those who live in the heartland. Emma Binder tells us about Cody Hartbrook, a trans man, whose father kicked him out of their Wisconsin home when he graduated high school. Cody found love, acceptance, purpose, even happiness in Massachusetts. Then his father got cancer, and Cody returned to Wisconsin to help his mother.

Unfortunately, you can’t read this story online. You’ll have to buy a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2025. I understand publishers need to make money, but I wish literary magazines would publish their stories online. Few people read little magazines, and not that many people even buy the annual Best American Short Stories.

Writing short stories is how new writers break in. They need the exposure. According to the Colburn Classroom, the Michigan Quarterly Review had a print run of 1,000 copies in 2020. I doubt most little magazines are for-profit concerns. Leaving their content offline is only hiding their light under a bushel. The world is giving up on reading short stories, and paywalls are only accelerating that decline.

But you should buy The Best American Short Stories every year. It makes you a patron of the arts by supporting budding writers. Most of the contributors will have names you don’t know. A few of them will publish a bestseller in years to come. Who knows, you might even buy their first novel when it comes out because you loved reading their short story.

Emma Binder said this in their contributor notes:

One of my obsessions, both artistically and in life, are the stories of queer and trans people who come from rural places and small towns, who may be omitted from the acknowledged social fabric of these communities but still shape them and are shaped by them. Queer and trans people are everywhere, so if their existence is not visible in a certain place, that erasure has been somehow designed. I also wanted to write a story about the feeling of freedom, and how some environments allow us to feel free while others are designed to constrain us—perhaps we experience that constraint through fear, shame, self-hatred, or an ambient hunch that we need to hush some vital part of ourselves in order to make our lives simpler. And maybe we love and miss those places regardless. So the emotional and thematic context was very clear to me, but the actual events of the story—Cody seeing a man falling through the ice, saving him, meeting him and his friends at the bar—took shape slowly and organically, during a warm winter when I was taking a lot of walks past ice fishermen.

I started this story in 2022, amid what I already thought was a harsh political climate for queer and trans people in the United States. Looking back on this story in the even darker and more oppressive landscape of 2025, I feel compelled to say that the ability to live in environments where we feel free, and where we can experience self-determination and authenticity, is literally lifesaving; it allows us to move past raw survival and access deeper, human, complex modes of living. It allows us, as Cody says in the story, to experience such essential things as “love, family, peace.” That is true for trans people and for every person on this Earth.

“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” really is a test for that common assertion that reading makes people more empathetic. I can’t believe anyone can read this story and not feel for Cody.

Like I’ve said before, literary stories are often like experiencing telepathy. Cody saves an ice fisherman, Greg Parham, when the ice breaks. Greg invites Cody out for a beer to say thanks. Cody doesn’t want to go because he’s afraid the locals will discover he’s trans and beat him up.

Cody does go to the bar, but is unnerved when Greg shows up with Kevin and Nick. Cody drinks and shoots pool with the guys while they ply him with friendly questions.

From that, we experience the anxiety Cody lives with. It becomes even more complicated when the guys discover Cody went to high school with them. The guys are baffled that they can’t place Cody. It makes them pry even more. Cody doesn’t lie, but he doesn’t tell them he was much different back then. He just says he was a loner.

Evidently, Cody wants to be one of the guys, but knows, or fears, being beaten up. I’m not sure I like Emma Binder’s ending. It works realistically, but not dramatically. She shows a gun in the first act, but it’s never used. What if Greg, Kevin, and Nick did learn that Cody was trans? How would Greg, a big, burly, bearded guy, feel about having his life saved by a trans guy?

Greg, Kevin, and Nick are ordinary guys, but they’ve probably never met a trans person. As readers, we feel tension from their masculinity. But aren’t we prejudging them too? Would they beat up Cody?

Other Takes

JWH

“Take Me to Kirkland” by Sarah Anderson

by James Wallace Harris, 8/6/26

At 74, my youngest friend is 60. It’s been years since I’ve socialized with a young person. And when I think of young people, I recall the fellow baby boomers when they were young, or maybe Gen Xers I watched growing up. I’m totally out of touch with recent generations. So when I read a short story like “Take Me to Kirkland” by Sarah Anderson and view modern youth from inside their head, it’s kind of a shock.

Anderson is a young woman from Gainesville, Florida, who is at the beginning of her writing career. Her first novel, Fallow, will be out in September.

Literary fiction is often a touch autobiographical, but you can never be sure. Is the unnamed narrator in “Take Me to Kirkland” made up, or does Anderson use herself or people she knows to paint her tale? Since I’ve sat through dozens of writing critiques in writing classes, I know some writers make things up, and some writers describe things they know. Generally, writers of genre fiction make things up, and literary writers use details from real life.

That’s why I like reading The Best American Short Story series. Reading each volume’s twenty stories feels like eavesdropping into people’s lives. And generally, they are unlike anyone I’ve known.

Luckily, the anthology includes notes from the contributors, so we get some clues about Anderson.

“Take Me to Kirkland” initially grew out of two main fragments.

The first piece to arrive was the scene of the narrator meeting Chloe and the intensity between them. My own breasts came in late, and one of my clearest memories from teenhood is the obsessive, desperate way I looked at other women’s bodies, like at any moment someone might jump from the bushes and announce a winner. That moment of sizing up by the mailbox was my way into the scene, and then the friendship came in a series of images: the cutting of the lemon, girl underwater, the trampoline.

The second piece was the section about childhood misunderstandings. I was a deeply anxious child, and that anxiety was made so much worse by all the things I didn’t understand about the world. I just had this vague sense of how much I didn’t know, and it terrified me. Perhaps because of this, and having made it to the other side, I take a particular joy in collecting other people’s stories of the misunderstandings they had well into adulthood. Like the narrator, I truly believed for a long, long time that Al Gore was only his last name.

It eventually became clear to me that the two fragments were connected, and I spent another year figuring out how to stitch together a narrative around them. Once it started to take shape, the story became a vehicle for a collection of other strangenesses, things that used to or still unsettle me in ways I struggle to articulate, all the ways the world never does actually make sense even after you grow up, and all the stories we tell each other and ourselves to try to understand it.

In other words, the story fictionalizes Anderson’s own anxieties. This is often true with literary short stories. It’s what I like. Unfortunately, I have a terrible time convincing my bookworm friends to read the annual Best American Short Stories. Most bookworms don’t like slice-of-life stories.

Partly, their dislike is with short stories in general. Most bookworms love novels. Writers like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout write slice-of-life stories, but they are longer, and they have a plot. Genre short stories and 19th-century short stories have plots, but contemporary literary fiction short stories seldom do. Unless you’re a connoisseur of literary short stories, enjoying them is difficult.

The real pleasure of reading these kinds of stories is admiring a kind of pseudo-telepathy. In “Take Me to Kirkland,” readers will assume the unnamed narrator is either Anderson or a simulacrum of someone like her. We’re invited into her head. The best literary fiction is when writers reveal their innermost thoughts. Fans of this type of fiction particularly love when writers reveal things so private that we cringe at their honesty.

By the way, this same appeal is why memoirs are bestsellers.

There is a challenge to writing literary fiction. Book, TV, movie, and social media addicts now encounter the inner lives of thousands of people. It’s very difficult to make your thoughts naked in today’s world without appearing mundane. There’s a similarity between literary writers and OnlyFans hosts: you have to be willing to take it all off and show everything.

The narrator in “Take Me to Kirkland” is somewhat over 18, but spends most of the story remembering her friend Chloe from when they were children. At the beginning of the story, they were reunited after being out of touch.

I was surprised that Chloe was calling. We hadn’t spoken in almost two months, for a few reasons. The first was that she had new friends now, the girls she waitressed with three nights a week at the Longhorn Steakhouse. The one Chloe liked the most, Kayla, had a pierced nipple. Chloe showed me a picture after the first time they hung out. I didn’t know that an areola could be that big. I checked Chloe’s face out of the corner of my eye and could tell I was supposed to not make a big deal about it. “Nice,” I said. “Isn’t it so pretty?” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “I like that it’s silver.”

The second reason was that I had been spending more time with Damian, who Chloe said had too much body hair and a weird sense of humor. When I was honest with myself I kind of understood where she was coming from. Damian could be a real piece of shit sometimes and he was four years older than us which, at our current ages, many people found distasteful.

I’m sure this is all mundane to young people today, but for an old baby boomer, this is not how real people or characters talked fifty years ago.

The next part connects the reader to the story’s title. The narrator explains how, as a little kid, she thought Costco’s Kirkland was a magical place. This is a common MFA writing trick. Unfortunately, such childhood fantasies come off as cute rather than psychologically revealing. In fact, some of Anderson’s childhood stories are on the cute side. Especially the one about baby ducks. Such memoryscapes come off as writerly affectations.

Good writing is the accumulation of details. Great writing is the accumulation of significant details. I don’t think these early childhood details were significant. But then we jump forward in time.

Chloe and I met again when we were eleven, in July, when her family moved into the split-level one street over from mine. We had been in different classes every year since second grade and I hadn’t really thought about her. But that summer there she was, sitting on the curb across from our mailbox when I went outside to check if my mom’s Cosmopolitan magazine had been delivered so that I could read it first and then put it back in with the next day’s mail. “No mail on Sundays,” she said from behind me. I had forgotten what day it was.

I couldn’t decide if the girl in front of me, this new Chloe, was hotter than me or not. Her legs were shorter but her tits were bigger, and I had a bad feeling that her face was better than mine. I wanted her to whisper something in my ear. I wanted to cut her hair off. I wanted to watch her suck a slice of lemon and spit the little seeds into my hand one by one.

Chloe considered me too, pausing on my legs. “I live over there now,” she said finally, pointing. “Do you like trampolines?”

“Cool,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Come with me,” she said. Her ass cheeks peeked out from her jean shorts, two pimply little half moons. She took me to the pharmacy down the street to shoplift laxatives, and cough syrup as an afterthought. We passed the bottle back and forth the whole way home and then lay down on the trampoline in her backyard. The trampoline was covered in gravel and twigs and dead leaf fragments, so once we were high we took turns pulling out the pieces that were tangled up in each other’s hair. The syrup left gritty little particles of something on our tongues and made our breath thick and sweet, our thoughts scattering like fistfuls of pennies in a fountain.

These details seem more real and significant. But are they real? This is unknown territory to an old man like me, but is it mundane to someone Anderson’s age? Mundane isn’t always boring. Sometimes, it’s how people connect.

For the next several pages, the story takes a surreal detour for someone like me, but I worry: is this the average world of being a young woman today?

Then we reach the true shocking point of the story, when Chloe disappears. Was she killed or kidnapped? Did she run away? The narrator thinks she sees Chloe in a porn video, one about rough sex and teens. The narrator reveals she watches porn to combat insomnia. This is the narrator getting naked. Are there other things she can tell about herself that are even more disturbing?

To an old person, this is too private. One reason we old folks retreat from the world is that it gets too weird for us. Reading “Take Me to Kirkland” tells me how much the world has changed.

The narrator of this story tells us how she copes.

To try to make myself stop loving Chloe, I sifted through our moments, looking for a handful of them that could bend our narrative arc, or at least end it. The only thing I could come up with was the sight of that ugly black outline on her skin, glistening under the Saran Wrap, and the way she looked when I passed her silently in the hallway at school that last week, bony and distant. But other moments kept creeping in instead, things that made me love her more. Grape breath and her fingers working through my hair, the v of her legs and the o of her mouth when she jumped too high on the trampoline and scared herself, then did it again. The gasp when her hurricane body knocked me flat onto the nylon. “Sorry,” she said, when I pointed at the slick red rug burn on my elbow, and then she licked it.

For the first two weeks after we realized she was gone, people kept asking me if I was ok, and I didn’t really know but I thought I was, except that I was having a very hard time falling asleep. By the end of that first month, more and more I found myself on PornHub, which Damian introduced me to. I would start out watching really basic stuff but as the night wore on, things would escalate and eventually I would find myself watching a gangbang.

Our narrator has finally reached a state of Holden Caulfield-like mental illness. Does she recognize that? Is the world of 2026 that different from 1951 for young people? Or what about Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar in 1963?

In my nonfiction book club group, we recently asked if fiction or nonfiction was the best way to convey what a moment in time and place is like.

If readers in the 2120s read “Take Me to Kirkland,” will they assume it’s how life was generally like in America in the 2020s? This story resonates with the nonfiction book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein that I read about a decade ago.

The problem with short stories is they are too short. Readers don’t spend the time to think about what they imply. Short stories are going the way of poetry. And if current pundits are correct, the novel will soon follow.

For many readers, reading an anthology like this one is like being pistol-whipped by reality.

JWH

“Dominion” by Lauren Acampora

by James Wallace Harris, 8/5/26

There has been much discussion lately about how people are no longer reading for pleasure. Advocates for reading often claim that reading is important because it promotes empathy. Is that really true? I’ve decided to test that.

I read the short story “Dominion” by Lauren Acampora in The Best American Short Stories 2025, but it was originally published in New England Review. “Dominion” is reprinted in Acampora’s new collection The Animal Room. You can read more about Lauren Acampora here.

Roy Fox is a retired CEO of an oil company. “Dominion” is his story, and we follow Roy’s thoughts. Roy spends his retirement collecting exotic animals. He claims he runs a rescue preserve, but in reality, he owns a large private zoo and employs many people as caretakers.

The plot pivots on a girl who is clawed by a serval when Roy invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class for a field trip.

Now I can’t say that Lauren Acampora’s goal in writing “Dominion” was to have readers empathize with Roy Fox, but if the virtue of reading is to understand people who are unlike us, then Roy is our subject. We live in politically polarized times where politics and wealth make us vilify our opposites.

Acampora doesn’t side with Roy. I believe she works hard to paint Roy Fox realistically and without judgment. However, many readers will see Fox as a narcissistic rich man who constantly rationalizes his wants while sneering down on the poor. But Acampora’s presentation is more nuanced than that.

The story begins when Roy reads through a couple dozen letters that mostly thank him for bringing Molly, the tiger, to Piper’s school. Piper is Roy’s granddaughter. However, one letter, written by a parent, riles Roy:

While we appreciate your good intention in visiting our child’s school with an animal ambassador as impressive as Molly, we’re concerned by the practice of keeping wild creatures captive—

Roy immediately wanted to defend himself by contacting the parent and telling them that Molly was rescued from a circus cage in Peru and now had three acres to herself. Then Roy thinks about how Shannon, his daughter, insisted on sending Piper to a public school when there was a “… panoply of private and Christian academies at her disposal.” He then thinks, “It was doubtful that his granddaughter would gain any special benefit from ‘diversity’ in this rawest sense of the word, this bestiary of scrappily dressed, minimally groomed children.”

Now, is Acampora using these details to criticize Roy? Or faithfully paint her character? Are liberal readers supposed to empathize with Roy? He is spending a great deal of money to “save” animals?

Roy’s favorite lines from The Book of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” He had it engraved on a stone plaque and put it on the gate to his property.

Roy also recalls a time when his company spilled 10 million gallons of oil into the sea. He rationalized that it wasn’t the largest of spills. And that TV images of oil-covered birds were a PR nightmare for his company. Roy worked to minimize his company’s exposure to the affair, but that led to a fiasco. Marilyn, his wife, had tried to get him to immediately take responsibility because that would be the right thing to do. He refused, but in his mind he admitted she was right.

Are readers to assume that Roy is now spending a fortune on a personal zoo as atonement for the oil spill? Do we forgive him? Are we supposed to forgive him? Or is Acampora only asking us to walk a mile in Roy’s shoes?

The readers are next shown Roy’s love of his animals. Is it genuine love, or do caring for the animals only support Roy’s narcissism? Isn’t he getting off on playing God to them? That Bible quote is a clue. This long paragraph is quite telling.

Roy found himself laughing, too. The truth was that he enjoyed his property staff more than his peers in black tie. The people he hired to maintain the property and care for the animals were fine people, steered by other desires. The concept of ambition—of success for success’s sake—was foreign to them. Satisfied by the simple things the natural world provided, they were unaware of or indifferent to the higher calibers of human pleasures. Roy might have envied this plain contentment, but he understood he was designed differently. His enjoyment of these animals, this life, was necessarily contingent on all that had come before, the challenges he’d met with his own brain power. He enjoyed the animals because he’d worked to obtain them. But unequal as they were, he and his staff were happy together in this Eden. Roy was pleased to share the humor of watching a capybara waddle into the lagoon. Marilyn took delight in the animals, too—especially the camels, whose faces she loved, full of comedy and tragedy. She divined profound feeling in their soft, long-lashed eyes. She was, ironically, the keeper of the household ledger. In a funny swap, she was the manager now, and Roy the irresponsible one in need of reining in. When he’d wanted to build a dolphinarium, Marilyn had unequivocally told him no.

Roy wants to control his image. He decides to invite Piper’s class to the estate as a field trip. He’s sure they will see his side of things. Marilyn agrees with Roy and thinks it’s a good gesture. And the school agrees to come, but under conditions that irk Roy and spoil some of his plans.

Unfortunately, the field trip turns into another oil spill for Roy when a serval leaps at the fence, sending one of its very long legs through the links, clawing Layla, a young girl, on her chest.

After the ambulance and school bus leave, Roy goes inside and lies down. When Marilyn comes home, he tells her what happened; she’s horrified he didn’t follow the ambulance to the hospital and meet the parents.

Marilyn rushes them to the hospital. Marilyn goes right in and physically comforts the parents, while Roy holds back. Readers don’t know if Marilyn is a naturally good person or just good at appearing to do the right thing.

Roy is confronted by Layla’s teenage brother, Jordan. Jordan’s righteousness reminds Roy of his daughter, Shannon, when she was young. Roy feels Jordan spits on him, but the others don’t see it. Roy leaves the hospital room quickly to hide in the bathroom, where he starts getting hives that he scratches until they bleed.

As he and Marilyn near home, Roy calms down. He says he forgives Jordan because he is young. Marilyn informs him the parents aren’t going to sue. Roy tells her they should open up their zoo to the public so they can learn about animals.

The last paragraph is quite revealing.

At last, they pulled up to their gate, and Roy pressed the button that instructed the iron doors to swing inward. The row of elephant heads receded in orderly welcome. The car drove through, its tires purring over gravel, down the row of tamarind trees. The gnarled branches laced overhead, wrinkled pods dangling—and like that they left behind the barbaric world with all its howling demands. This was home, a sanctuary in the truest sense of the word. Roy’s heart eased back to a steady rhythm. All around them, miraculous creations. The flamingos in the distance like so many fresh brushstrokes. The camels, his grave dignitaries. The monkeys chirping merrily, scrambling through the branches, swinging down in bright numbers to greet him.

Has God returned to Eden after visiting Adam and Eve on the outside?

Like all stories, we could interpret this one in a zillion ways. But I wonder if Acampora is asking us to empathize with Roy Fox? If the value of reading fiction is to help us see inside other people, what should we do with this insight?

I believe one reason why Trump won the 2016 election is that conservative folks were tired of being bullied by liberals. For decades, comedians, late-night hosts, comedy news shows, and sarcastic intellectuals felt it was ethical to belittle the right. It’s rather ironic that we liberals have always defended the downtrodden and demanded that political correctness protect the weak from verbal persecution. Yet, the rich and strong were fair game to any kind of bullying. If kindness means protecting the mentally ill from verbal abuse, why don’t we extend such empathy to narcissists? It’s just another condition in the DSM.

I just wonder if Acampora was trying to make us feel bad for Roy. She paints him with all his sins, yet doesn’t her story ask us to forgive him? Am I taking my bleeding-heart liberalism too far? Am I expecting the woke to wake up even more?

Acampora also portrays Roy Fox in her novel The Hundred Waters. A blurb at Amazon quotes the Boston Globe calling Acampora “a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs.” I’m tempted to read it.

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense has a much different take than mine. But that’s to be expected. Everyone reads a story in their own unique way. Peter Kirwan at Come to the Pedlar is somewhat like Carlson in analyzing Roy. I agree with them that Roy is a goldmine for psychoanalyzing. I’m more curious what Acampora was aiming at in her storytelling.

The writer at Workshop Heretic feels Acampora is contemptuous of Roy. They certainly provide plenty of evidence to make their case. They also found the story dull. I didn’t at all. They called it a “bog-standard lit fic story.”

Since I have many hours of MFA writing courses (but without the degree), I know what they mean. Modern writers are so well trained in MFA programs that their work has a sameness to it. However, I consider that sameness to be high-quality writing.

And I’ll admit that reading The Best American Short Stories won’t appeal to many readers. But is that because its stories feel intellectual, often by elite writers from the literary establishment?

I have a different take. I refer to it as my “message in a bottle” theory of writing. We all live alone inside our heads, isolated from each other, like living on a deserted island. The best literary stories are distilled insights placed in a bottle and thrown into the ocean. The writers hope that bottle might be found and someone else might see what they see.

If you read this story, let me know what you think. I’ve told a good portion of the plot, but that leaves out the heart of the story. It’s a shame that it’s not online to read for free.

I highly recommend The Best American Short Stories series.

JWH

Studying Euclid’s Elements in Retirement

by James Wallace Harris, 8/2/26

Euclid is sometimes called the Father of Geometry because of his book The Elements. A literal translation of the word geometry could be “earth measurement.” Even Aristotle knew that the Egyptians and Babylonians used geometry to survey land and construct buildings. Euclid doesn’t use numbers or make measurements in The Elements, and his geometry does not match what is taught in Geometry classes today.

What Euclid teaches is an abstract construction, yet it drives a pylon into reality. What Euclid really teaches is how to think clearly and precisely, something humans seldom do. There is a story about Abraham Lincoln that claims he didn’t become a good lawyer until he mastered the first six books of The Elements. (If you understand the foundation of what Euclid teaches, you will follow that link. If you don’t follow the link, you will after you have studied Euclid.)

The reason I’m studying Euclid’s Elements in retirement is that it’s exercise for my aging brain. Crossword puzzles, Wordle, and Sudoku are decent stretching exercises for my flabby neurons, but The Elements is Nautilus machines. I’m only as far as Proposition 12 in Book 1, which has left my brain in a puddle on the floor.

It’s not that the problems in The Elements are hard; they mostly require persistence. Numbers and measurements aren’t involved. Just logic, reason, a straightedge, compass, and pencil. Even a tiny amount of exercise can make you feel weak and lightheaded if you’re out of shape.

At 74, the challenge is whether I can learn anything new at all. Especially since I can’t seem to retain new words and concepts. I can still recall old stuff, but keeping new stuff is difficult. Maybe studying Euclid will help with that.

Before I retired in 2013, I thought I’d work on a degree in computer science as a hobby once I retired. I’ve taken many computer courses at the undergraduate level while earning an English degree. Since I spent my working life with computers, I always wanted a computer degree to validate myself. However, when I investigated the requirements for a B.S. or M.S. in computer science, I learned that I needed 24 hours of math as a prerequisite.

I only had College Algebra, Calculus I, and Statistics from the 1970s. When I looked at textbooks in those courses, I realized I had forgotten everything. I’d need to start over from scratch. Not only that, but when I tried Khan Academy as a refresher, I learned I had forgotten the fundamentals of math from elementary school. I had to start over in the 2nd grade. I eventually worked my way up to 5th grade in Khan Academy, but my brain ran out of gas. I dropped the idea of going back to college as a retirement hobby.

Twelve years later, my mind is even more mushy. I do Wordle and the Mini Crossword at The New York Times every day. Even though I often have trouble remembering words, I’m pretty good at those puzzles. I gave up on learning math over a dozen years ago. I regret that. I should have stuck it out.

Recently, I read about the history of Euclid’s Elements. Supposedly, it’s only second to The Bible in the number of editions over the last two thousand years. Its main claim to fame is that it teaches more than basic geometry – it pushes its students to think logically.

The geometry in Elements is very basic, not like the geometry they teach in school today. All 13 books of the Elements use the same 5 Postulates and 5 Common Notions. From that foundation, 48 propositions (problems) are set up in Book 1. Each proposition is proved step by step with diagrams based on the 23 definitions. 131 total definitions cover 465 propositions in all 13 books. Most students only do the first 6 books.

For centuries, an educated person in the Western world would study Latin, Greek, and Euclid’s Elements. Before the scientific method, most knowledge was opinion. Euclid’s Elements set up the idea that knowledge should be built on a foundation. A foundation that is consistent across cultures. Every proposition has to be proved with definitions, postulates, and common notions. Look at this video; the visual demonstration will probably say more than I can in words.

The simplicity and limited domain of the Elements appealed to me. I may not be able to pass a university math course, but hopefully, I can work my way through the first book of the Elements.

I started with the free web version, and then bought a 99-cent Kindle edition of The Elements of Euclid for the Use of Schools and Colleges (Illustrated) so I could read on my phone. I also bought Delphi Collected Works of Euclid (Illustrated) because it had a long history of this famous book. It was only $2.99 for the Kindle edition, and I liked the scholarly history of how Euclid wrote the Elements and how people used it over the centuries.

I’ve been able to work through the early Propositions. I even bought a compass to draw them out myself. I’m not sure I’d even call this mathematics. It’s really just logic. The work is tedious, though. With each step, you’re supposed to cite the Definition, Postulate, or Common Notion you used to justify that step. You have to think hard as you follow along.

Here’s my work for Proposition 1. Most books describe the steps in words, and then show the final diagram. I find that confusing.

Proposition 1: To construct an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line.

Look at how David E. Joyce works the problem at Clark University. It’s very wordy, but it also explains some of Euclid’s faults. But even Euclid’s description is very confusing, at least to me. It’s only clear when you follow the problem logically, step by step.

We start with a line segment with the endpoints being A and B. Ignore point C for now. Many teachers start by drawing line segment AB and immediately put a point C above it. I think that’s wrong.

Draw:

Then draw a circle with A at the center, with AB as the radius.

Then create a circle with B as the center, using AB as the radius.

Now, it’s time for point C. Where the circles intersect, designate points. Remember the definitions. They are abstractions, but we have to always build on them.

Definition 1: A point is that which has no part.

Definition 2: A line is a breadthless length.

Definition 3: The ends of a line are points.

Definition 15: A circle is a plane figure contained by one line such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying within the figure equal one another.

Definition 16: And the point is called the center of the circle.

Postulate 3: To describe a circle with any center and radius.

Euclid doesn’t state that when a line crosses another line, the intersection is a point, but we assume it. He should have included it as a definition.

Because the two circles intersect, we have defined two additional points, which we can label C and D; however, D is not needed for this proof.

Now we can draw lines AC and BC.

Definition 20: Of trilateral figures, an equilateral triangle is that which has its three sides equal, an isosceles triangle that which has two of its sides alone equal, and a scalene triangle that which has its three sides unequal.

Postulate 1: To draw a straight line from any point to any point.

Common Notion 1: Things which equal the same thing also equal one another.

Common Notion 4: Things which coincide with one another equal one another.

Because AB is the radius of both circles, and AC and BC are also radii of those same circles, all sides of the triangle are equal.

Thus we have proved:

Proposition 1: To construct an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line.

In modern geometry, we would have just drawn an equilateral triangle knowing that all three angles equal 60 degrees. And we could have measured the length of each side with a ruler. The point of Euclid is to create geometric objects with basic geometric building blocks. No numbers are involved.

The rest of The Elements involve creating ever-evolving complicated 2D and 3D geometric shapes. Some of which prove other mathematical problems, like Proposition 47. It’s an alternate method of proving the Pythagorean theorem.

But even after watching a video multiple times, it’s still hard to do it myself. Without practicing with drawing lines and circles, it’s hard to see how the proofs really work, even when they are shown to you.

JWH

You Can’t Go Home Again – But Do I Really Want To?

by James Wallace Harris, 7/28/26

What is nostalgia? Most people think of it as a mental perception, an outlook, but what if it’s just another emotion caused by a chemical reaction in the brain? What if it’s like fear or sexual desire, caused by triggers in our environment? When we were still hunters and gatherers, wouldn’t you think that all emotions evolved from traits that supported survival? Fear of tigers and snakes made fear a very good thing. Horniness promoted reproduction.

However, other emotions, like anxiety, sadness, and depression, don’t feel positive, nor would I think they’d promote survival. Have we always had such emotions? Did cavemen sit around the fire complaining they were depressed and didn’t feel like hunting mammoths today? Did they long for old campgrounds or prey they hadn’t seen in a long time?

If nostalgia is an emotion like anxiety, what triggers it? Nostalgia used to be considered an ailment, but today we think of it as an indulgence. Nostalgia has been in the news lately because Gen Z has become nostalgic for the 1990s, and especially for a time before smartphones and social media. Lots of writers and pundits are trying to read the tea leaves of current nostalgia trends.

I have always suffered from nostalgia, even when I was a kid. Nostalgia has always been both painful and euphoric to me. Often specific thoughts and sights trigger it. Does that mean nostalgia is an emotion similar to sexual desire? Then does it have a useful purpose?

Early this morning, my sister sent me a link to Google Maps showing the house her son is buying for her. She said it reminded her of the house we lived in back in the late 1950s, in the Lake Forest subdivision, near Hollywood, Florida. She asked me if I could find the address of our old home. I got on Google Maps and found that house.

That Lake Forest house is a powerful trigger of nostalgia for me. It has haunted my dreams since 1963. It’s the El Dorado of my childhood that I keep searching for in my subconscious.

I never felt nostalgia before I lived there. I’ve never analyzed why before. I have looked it up on Google Maps several times over the years, and it’s always triggered a tremendous rush of nostalgia.

My family first moved to that house in 1958 when I was in the 2nd grade. We’d just moved back to Florida after living in South Carolina for a few months. This might have been the first house my parents owned.

This was an interesting stage in my life. At 7, I evidently was old enough to remember more, so this period is an archaeological strata near the lowest part of my mind. I had memories of places before this, but they are vague and rare.

We only lived at the Lake Forest house for about a year, and then moved to New Jersey and Mississippi for my 3rd grade, and then returned to Lake Forest for my 4th grade. During the 5th grade, we moved to Homestead AFB in 1961, and then returned to Lake Forest in early November, 1963. We moved away from that house the day after John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. That was 11/23/63, and I was in the 7th grade.

I spent less than 3 years total at the Lake Forest house, probably closer to 2 years. Yet, it’s burned into my memory. From 1963 until sometime in the 1980s, I often dreamed about the Lake Forest house. The dreams were always about desperately trying to find my way home. In the 1980s, I actually got to see the Lake Forest house again with my sister and her husband. That was an intense experience. It felt so tiny that I thought I could walk like a giant up and down the block in five steps.

Those searching for my way home dreams stopped. Visiting Lake Forest cured them. At least until I got into my sixties, when I started having a generalized version of those dreams, which I wrote about as “Can’t Find My Way Home Dreams.”

When I looked up the house on Google Maps this morning, that old intense feeling returned. I get this specific, overwhelming ache whenever I think about the places I used to live. And it depresses me in a unique way when I discover that any house I once lived in has been torn down, such as the one on West Trade Avenue in Coconut Grove.

There have been times in my life when I fantasized about returning to one of my favorite houses, buying it, and retreating there to live like a monk until I died. What’s that about? What would a psychiatrist make of that?

My father was in the Air Force, and we moved many times when I was young. I think I went to 3 first-grade schools, 3 seventh-grade schools, 1 school for 6th, 9th, and 12th, and 2 for the rest. Maybe all that moving around as a kid did a number on my psyche. Why do I want to go back to those places? I don’t mean now, but in time. Is nostalgia about finishing unfinished business?

I’ve known people who are seldom, if ever, nostalgic. My friend Laurie will call me sexist for saying this, but I feel women are less nostalgic than men. I know a lot of men who are nostalgic for the things they owned, wanted to own, in adolescence, or for the people and activities they pursued in their teenage years. Is nostalgia simply a longing for happier times? Just look at the old guys who buy old toys. I’d like a 1967 GTO.

Then how come I’m nostalgic for all the less-than-great times? For example, what was so great about the Lake Forest house? Do I want to be a kid again? Do I miss my little friends Michael Kevin Ralph, and Patty Paqquete?

I don’t know what happened to them.

They say when you die you are reunited with everyone you once knew. That’s probably a trick of the mind during the dying process. If it is, does that mean it’s the most powerful desire we have in life? To meet everyone again?

I have moved around so much that there are hordes of people I once knew. And I have run into a few of them over the years. What’s weird is such reunions are often disappointing. We discover we have so little to say to each other. We really can’t go home again. Then why do we try?

If I could travel back in time to visit earlier versions of me, I’m not sure if we would have much fun together. Is the Jimmy that was blown away by hearing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” on a clock radio in 1965 anything like the Jim that thrilled to listen to “Like a Rolling Stone” on SACD in 2010? Or the old Jim listening to it now?

I must admit that Spotify is a goddman humongous nostalgia machine. Six feet to my right are bookcases with old science fiction magazines. They aren’t the same magazines I owned as a kid, but they are the same issues.

Sometimes I think nostalgia is feeling loss for parts of ourselves that have disappeared along the way.

What’s funny is I don’t think I’m as nostalgic in my 70s as I was in my 60s. Maybe, after decades of trying to return home, I’ve accepted I can’t.

I know I hate to travel in my old age, but that might be normal. Before I was 40, 18 months was the longest I lived anywhere. Then as I got older, that period began to lengthen. I’ve lived in this house for 20 years, and the previous house for 7 years.

I want to die in this house.

I still get deep emotional pangs when I think about certain houses, especially the Lake Forest house. Do I grieve for past versions of myself? Did Thomas Wolfe write You Can’t Go Home Again because many people feel that way? Maybe I need to reread that novel. It might be more meaningful now that I’m older. When I first read it, it was assigned in college.

It’s rather ironic that I’ve spent so much time reading science fiction, thinking about the future, and now I spend most of my time living in the past by reading old books, listening to old music, and watching old TV shows and old movies. At night, I dream about people I used to know and places where I used to work. And if I have insomnia, I lie awake thinking about the past. But is that nostalgia? I’m not so sure. I’m probably just consuming pop culture that I’m conditioned to enjoy most.

When I was younger, I’d lie awake thinking about the future, making plans. I used to worry about the future, but I don’t worry much about it anymore.

This morning I listened to an article from The Atlantic about how young people are nostalgic for the years before smartphones and social media, even if they never lived in those times. They hunger for a simpler time.

I wonder if my nostalgia for old homes is something like what they are feeling?

During my younger days, I used to love fantasizing about where I’d go if I had a time machine. Would I return to 1958 if I could? Notice the windows on the right in the picture at the top. They’re open. We had no air conditioning back then. The high today is expected to be 100F. I know this makes me a pussy, but I’d never travel further back in time before central air.

And unlike the current generation, I don’t think I’d like to travel to a time before smartphones. My memory is going, and I depend on them to recall words that won’t come to mind. As my mind becomes more crippled, smartphones are proven to be excellent crutches.

Besides, the old music I love sounds better on modern stereos. And the old movies and TV shows look way better on my 65-inch high-definition TV than they did on the old 19″ CRT. And I doubt the two heart procedures I’ve had were available in 1958.

If I’m realistic, I know any wanting-to-go-home-again nostalgia I feel is just chemical processes in my brain I can’t control. It’s about as useful as feeling horny when you’re an old fat bald guy with ED at 74. That’s just damn annoying. I guess when we’re old, we want to return to many places we used to go, and for some, it just takes a long time to realize we can’t.

JWH