jameswharris

The Addiction to Fiction

Have you ever wondered about the nature of fiction?

Reality is what we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, feel with our hands, taste with our mouth and smell with our nose. Fiction is the way we fool our senses into thinking we’re perceiving another reality, one that isn’t there, but one we want to temporarily inhabit. Fiction is our effort to create virtual realities without computers, using just the power of our minds, or the illusion of television/movie screens.

From amoebas to chimpanzees, we’re probably the only creature on Earth that spend so much time rejecting reality. Why? Have we evolve more brain power than we need to live, so we use the excess to imagine? Or is sitting around in trees eating grubs just not enough to keep our brains busy? We created civilization after civilization trying to find the right alternative to nature, but we’re never happy. We always want more.

Or did our addiction to fiction start with “Once upon a time” when were were so very little?

I have met people who lived their lives without fiction, but they were usually graduate students from Asian countries whose ambitions didn’t allow for them to waste time on books, movies, television, comics and video games. Busy people, especially those who go on to make billions, usually don’t waste time with fiction. Which makes me wonder if I hadn’t had my lifelong addiction to fiction if I would have been busier, more creative and productive? Or is it, if we don’t find exciting lives to live, we read about them instead?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not regretting my addiction. I am not trying to talk myself into going cold turkey. I am too far gone to ever contemplate giving up my addiction.

I want to understand the nature of fiction so I can seek more powerful fictional highs.

Most bookworms are beer drinkers and marijuana tokers, merely satisfied with using one genre their entire life. I’m not sure any mystery or science fiction novel ever gets beyond the buzz of beer or the high of grass – for the real opium and heroin level highs you have to move on to literary writers. And that’s so hilarious, because the most addictive fiction, the hardest of the hard stuff, are those books that get the closest to writing about reality.

Television and movies are more like crack highs that become all consuming. Which makes video games the crystal meth of fiction.

I like to rationalize that fiction represents the greatest form of communication. In real life we can listen to each other chatter on for minutes at a time at most, but when we read a book, some of those communiqués last for thirty or forty hours. How many people would listen to their friends if they talked as long as Tolstoy, Proust or even Stephen King? And is Anna Karenina or War and Peace escapism, or capsule summaries of 19th century life?

JWH – 11/18/13

The Flavors of Science Fiction

Science fiction is not a good term for pointing to the things I like about science fiction books. I know too many people who claim to love science fiction, but we don’t share the same favorite movies and books. Why is that? Well, because the term science fiction is not a very good term for pointing at a specific type of stories. It’s a collective term for a whole spectrum of fantastic tales. I’m now thinking we need a new way of describing the stories we love that go beyond genre labels.

I’m not even sure the standard genres labels, mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, westerns, historical, thriller, etc. are all that useful for readers. They’re a rough categorization for book publishers and bookstores, but not very precise for reading moods. I think readers like particular flavors featured in fiction, rather than their genre classification.

Take witty romantic comedies. Does it really matter where the witty romance takes place, in the old west, in Regency England, in outer space, as part of a murder mystery in 1939 New York City, if that’s the kind of story you’re in the mood to read? If you’re in the mood to shoot a lot of bad guys, does it matter if it’s Al Qaeda terrorists you blow away, or aliens from Betelgeuse or Nazis in WWII?

I believe readers who love Military SF would probably enjoy just as much, high-tech, squad level combat stories set in other times and places. Combat stories with band of brothers camaraderie is the flavor readers crave. Or a grunt working up the ranks is another flavor people love. Honor Harrington stories are appealing in the same way many people love stories about Horatio Hornblower or Aubrey-Maturin stories. I think they reflect a flavor of fiction rather than a genre. Although some readers might find they love stories about very tall women, and thus the connection to other sea stories wouldn’t matter.

Growing up I loved “sense of wonder” stories. I thought the label meant specific kinds of science fiction, but I don’t now. Now I know there are several buttons to push to turn on my sense of wonder. When I was a kid and read books like After Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, it pushed my sense of wonder button in a big way. When the humans were exploring the ancient city of Bronson Beta, that pegged my sense of wonder meter. Any science fiction book that has explorers walking around in long dead civilizations pushes my sense of wonder button. But when I read regular fiction and nonfiction books about explorers poking around in long dead human civilizations of Earth, it pushes the same button.

Another type of story that sets off my sense of wonder button are those that remember humans after they became extinct, like the connecting pieces to City by Clifford Simak, or the later chapters of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. But watching documentaries about life after people sets off the same flavor. Theoretically I should be able to seek out all the stories, whether science fiction, or nonfiction, and find the flavor I desire to experience. The same powerful sense of wonder flavor came in the 1920 poem “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The World Without Us is evoked by a very specific idea. It shows up every now and then in science fiction, but elsewhere too.

Another flavor I realized I loved as a kid that I completely associated with Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels, is the young adult science fiction novel. I found the same flavor in many Winston Science Fiction novels and books by Andre Norton. But over the years I realized that any story about a teen without parents struggling to make it in a new environment does the trick. Part of the enticing flavor is the kid must be on their own, or their parents must be mostly tuned out. National Velvet by Enid Bagnold works because Velvet Brown is learning to do something behind her parent’s back, and something girls, especially young girls in the 1920s, didn’t do, which was jockey a horse in a national race.

What I point to when I use the term science fiction, are those books which extrapolate on current trends to speculate about possible futures. Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stand on Zanzibar, and The Windup Girl are examples of what I mean. But there are many kinds of science fiction that I read that don’t fit that flavor. Space opera is one. PKD type stories are another. In fact, Philip K. Dick wrote a flavor of story I really crave that’s not science fiction at all, and those where his stories about the 1950s. I really love Confessions of a Crap Artist, and would read more like it if I could find them.

I often meet people who love Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga series. That’s the flavor they think of when they crave science fiction, but most science fiction stories are not like her books about Miles and Cordelia. Her books are a mixture of romance, military, thriller and mystery set in an aristocratic galactic empire. Her books have so many other flavors that I don’t think of them as science fiction at all, at least by my definition. But that’s my point. Fans of Bujold seek a certain flavor or flavors in their fiction that can’t be described by the generic term science fiction. I find her books very pleasant, but none of their flavors actually make me think of science fiction.

To me, when a group of people all claim to love science fiction, I no longer think they love the same thing, even though they are all using the same phrase, science fiction. In reality, they could all hate each other’s favorite books and movies. We have to accept the term science fiction because it’s so widely used, but I think impossible to universally define. Now when I talk to friends about books, or read reviews, I’m going to see if I can find out the flavors of the stories, because I know I love certain flavors of fiction and crave them.

JWH – 11/15/13

Has Humanity Given Up on the Three Major Promises of Science Fiction?

Science fiction has been around a very long time, but it wasn’t always called that. The essential core of science fiction has always been three promises: space travel, intelligent alien beings and intelligent robots. We know as far back as the classical Greece, that there has been speculation about travel to other worlds and finding intelligent beings on them. The idea of building an artificial human is as old as memory too.

There’s always been a few outliers in society that think up far out ideas and a larger group of fans who favor them. Currently we call these two groups science fiction writers and science fiction fans. During the second half of the 20th century I believe certain science fiction ideas peaked in popularity, and that we’re now detecting a possible diminishment of their popularity.

I strongly felt the public turning against the major promises of science fiction when I read the new issue of The Atlantic, and the essay “The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think” by James Somers that profiles Douglas Hofstadter, author of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter hit a home run with his first book, but has been mostly missing in action all these years since, even though he continues to write brilliant books about artificial intelligence (AI). The trouble, as The Atlantic article points out, is Hofstadter’s idea of artificial intelligence is different from what the academic world has come to accept for the term. Douglas Hofstadter wants to teach machines to think, just like us, while the industry is happy enough to program computers to accomplish fantastic data processing feats that give the illusion of thinking.

If we want robots like C-3PO, then we need Douglas Hofstadter. If you’re happy with IBM’s Watson, then we don’t. And I’m worried that most people on Earth don’t have the sense of wonder that it takes to want a C-3PO. And that’s a fucking crying shame. I want Star Trek, but the public is only grudgingly willing to pay for NASA. I want humanity to become friends with all the aliens in the galaxy, but all the vast run of people on Earth want is to thrill to the xenophobia of alien invasion movies and to shoot ETs in video games.

I have pretty much given up on seeing the public support space travel, and figure our only hope of meeting aliens would be through SETI projects, but I figured we had a real chance of seeing intelligent machines in my lifetime. I might have to give up on that dream too.

For most people artificial intelligence is not an issue they will ever concern themselves with, but if you’re a philosopher, computer scientist, or science fiction fan, then it is. The crux of the matter is whether or not machines will ever be able to think like us. Here’s my logic. Humans are self-aware thinkers and we’re the accidental creation of evolution. If nature can randomly rub molecules together until it produces a self-aware biological being why shouldn’t we create thinking machines intentionally? Sure, it took 13.78 billion years for reality to create us, but that doesn’t mean it will take as long for us to engineer intelligent machines if we put our minds to the task – we have 13.73 billion years of experience to consciously study.

Up to now, we’ve mostly tried to program machines to do specific jobs, some of these jobs used to be tasks we thought required thinking, like playing chess, being a contestant on Jeopardy or translating foreign languages. We can program machines to do these tasks, but they don’t think, not in the way we think. That’s not a failure of AI, it’s a lesson in what makes us conscious beings.

To do what Hofstadter wants will require building machines that can learn and evolve. This is completely different from the direction that AI is taking now. We can’t program machines to be self-aware, but we should be able to program machines to learn and evolve, and eventually that will lead to self-aware AI.

Think about the evolution of life on Earth. It reflects the growth of simplicity into complexity. It shows how simple creatures learn to interact with its environment and evolve better senses. Over time those senses could interpret more and more complex patterns in the environment. Look around you. Everything you see is recognize as a distinct object. In a cluttered room you might be seeing hundreds of different things. Think how, and how long it took you to learn what all those things are. Computer scientists for the longest time have tried to just tell machines what to see. That won’t work for a thinking machine. Like a human child, a thinking machine will have to grow up and learn everything on its own.

It does no good to create code that tells a computer what a banana is. Can you remember learning what a banana was, and how to tell it from all the other kinds of fruits, or even distinguish it from vegetables? I bet you can remember learning what an iPhone is, and maybe you can even tell the difference between an iPhone 3S and a 5S. You’d think it would be easy to tell a computer to do the same thing, but it’s not. Modern AI can be programmed to spot an iPhone, but not out of context of knowing what everything else is around it. Not seeing and understanding the complete context of the visual field shows why the machine isn’t thinking. It’s how we learn about new things that’s thinking, not knowing what they are.

The same problem we face building thinking machines are the ones we face for creating true space travel and finding alien life forms in the galaxy. Most people just don’t see the point. They don’t want to waste the money. And they’re xenophobic. But what it comes down to is most people really don’t care. It’s not on their radar. Space travel, aliens and robots have no value to them at all. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

So why the immense popularity of science fiction at the movies, on television and in video games? Well, that’s another essay.

When I was a kid back in the 1950s and 1960s I embraced science fiction because I wanted to see space travel in my lifetime. I wanted first contact in my lifetime, even if it was just SETI contact. And I expected intelligent machines to be created in my lifetime. Hell, I thought all of these things would have happened by the beginning of the 21st century. Boy, was I wrong.

I thought we took a bad turn when the Apollo program was cancelled, but felt things were back on schedule with the emerging popularity of Star Wars and the return of Stat Trek. I felt millions and millions of Earthlings were embracing the three great promises of science fiction as science fiction at the movies became huge box office successes. But I was wrong. All those people weren’t dreaming the same dreams as I had. They are getting something else out of science fiction.

Orphans of the Sky is a powerful story by Robert A. Heinlein about a generation ship traveling the vast distances between the stars for so long that the passengers have forgotten that they live in a spaceship. Their self-contained world becomes their entire universe and they forget the larger universe exists at all. When I read Orphans of the Sky back in the 1960s I felt that humanity was waking up and realizing that they were living on spaceship Earth. Hell, again I was so goddamn wrong.

In most people’s minds, people on Earth live in a small place where God rules over them and cruelly holds out promise of everlasting life if they only confess belief. Earth is a ball of dust God created as a classroom for us to live on while we decide. Earth has no purpose other than a staging area for heaven and hell. All the rest of the vast universe is a big distracting illusion.

The future used to be a vision of mankind spreading out to the stars making endless discoveries, but now I have a different vision. Humans will continue to live on the Earth forgetting it’s a spaceship traveling through a vast universe, and the inhabitants will continue to follow their illusions century after century until they destroy their ship. I could be wrong – I’ve shown that to often be true. Let’s hope. Maybe The Enlightenment is just taking longer than we thought.

Now it might sound like I’m depressed over this reevaluation of my beliefs, but I’m not. I consider it far more healthy to be realistic than try to keep my own cherished fantasies. The truth is always discovering the true mission of the spaceship where you become self-aware. Which brings me back to robots. If we ever create truly self-aware robots, what will they make of old spaceship Earth?

JWH – 11/6/13

Models for Writing the Great American Science Fiction Novel

Decades ago ambitious young writers hoping to take the literary world by storm would attempt to write The Great American Novel. The phrase “writing the great American novel” has fallen out of fashion. Well, I’ve retired and want to write a novel, but I want to write a science fiction novel. Science fiction has fallen out of fashion too. Oh sure, there’s a healthy little genre for hardcore science fiction readers, but they aren’t many compared to the legions of bookworms at large. Science fiction might be an extremely popular movie genre, but for some strange reason its success does not translate into frequently seeing science fiction books on the New York Times best sellers lists.

If I’m going to delude myself into thinking I can be a late bloomer in the novel writing business, I might as well be ambitious about it, so I’ve gotten the idea of trying to write the great American science fiction novel. I picture my would-be novel being a literary novel set 40-50 years in the future, thus making it science fiction. The goal for writing the great American novel was to capture an essential defining moment in America life. Examples are such books as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, On the Road, To Kill a Mockingbird – novels that defined an era and place.

Because science fiction is generally about the future and is often set in space or other exotic locales, it almost never attempts to be The Great American Novel. There are a damn few exceptions, most notably Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. Some people think of it as the counter-culture novel of the 1960s because when they think of the 1960s they think of all the weirdness and Stranger in a Strange Land is one weird-ass novel. The trouble is Stranger captures a late 1940s to somewhat mid-1950s weirdo mentality about America, and not the hippie weirdness of the 1960s. If I wrote a SF novel set in the 2050s it’s going to be damn hard for it not to feel like the 2010s. That would be like F. Scott Fitzgerald imagining the 1960s. I’m not sure if that will work, but it won’t keep me from trying.

For my novel writing ambition I feel the need to find models to study, from both American literature and science fiction. Now I don’t want to start a flame war about what are the absolute best science fiction novels, but I’ve decided to pick those that are most remembered and read by non-SF fans. I wrote a whole essay on this topic: The Greatest Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century. It’s been the most popular essay I’ve written – at least in terms of hits, but not with what it says. Few science fiction books are well known with the literary world at large, and most of them were written by writers not from the genre.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
Ender’s Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card
The Windup Girl (2009) by Paolo Bacigalupi

Now I know that regular science fiction readers are going to be outraged by this list, but the huge world outside of their little genre seldom thinks about science fiction, and the books that do pop into their collective memory are the ones they were made to read in school. I wanted to include Stranger in a Strange Land, not because I admire it, but because it was once a cult classic, however I think it’s mostly forgotten now. If a book isn’t taught in school or gets the movie treatment every generation, they are usually forgotten by the following generations.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? wasn’t PKD’s best novel, not by a long shot, but because of Blade Runner, it’s remembered, but even Blade Runner is fading from collective memory. I keep Androids on the list because there’s talk of making a new version of it. The controversial Ender’s Game is on the list because it is often taught in schools, often loved by teachers, and was recently made into a movie.

There are many science fiction books that have legions of fans that love them, but most never have enough fans to make them well known in pop culture at large. Notice that I didn’t include Jules Verne, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, authors who are known for writing great classic novels within the SF genre. Their books are very big fish in a very little pond. The twelve above titles aren’t even the biggest fish in the big literary ocean, but they are big enough.

In terms of memorable novels, science fiction seldom gets remembered. So why have an ambition to write science fiction? Well, it’s what I like to read. However, if an ambitious science fiction writer wanted to get remembered, studying the above novels for clues is a start. But also studying mainstream popular novels for why they are remembered is another lesson of study.

I watch a lot of old movies and I’m always surprised to see films based on hit novels of their day that are now completely forgotten. Dune has attracted a lot of cinematic attention, but so far I don’t think moviemakers have captured the novel. However, their attempts have made the novel very famous. There is a weird symbiotic relationship between books and movies. So far, none of the model SF books I’ve listed has been created into a cinematic masterpiece except Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? None of them have achieved that immense status of being routinely made into new film versions every generation like A Christmas Carol, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, or Great Expectations.

Evidently, the real key to writing a great science fiction book is having something startling or profound to say. Now regular science fiction fans will claim all their favorite SF books have something startling or profound to say. I think that’s the general appeal of science fiction – the ideas. However, the public at large seems to embrace some science fictional ideas as iconic pop culture concepts, and ignores the rest. The public at large seems to care little for reading about space travel, time travel, robots, galactic civilizations, and so on. In fact, the most popular science fictional concepts that appeal to the public appear to be on the morbid side of things – they love a good dystopian tale. Evidently, if you can imagine a scary future that will scare the bejesus out of them then you’ve struck gold.

If I’m going to write the great American science fiction novel it will need to capture an era and place in America where dystopian feelings are strongest. You’d think bookworms would embrace upbeat views of the future, ones that promise scientific successes and thrilling times. But I’ve got to admit, that these books listed here, with all their bleakness, were powerful stories, with impressive memorable concepts. When you read them they feel heavy-duty.

I don’t think any of these books are particularly well-written, not in the literary sense. Their narrative style gets the job done, but I’m not sure how often their writing is quoted for being beautiful. Today I started collecting copies of these novels to study. I’m using my retirement to be like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, to contemplate life carefully. However, I have no interest in going outside to study plants and animals. Instead I’m observing my reactions to fiction. Thoreau really wanted to get to know his deepest self, his most real self, and he felt getting away from it all and observing nature would reveal his true self to is contemplative mind. I’m hoping my true self will be revealed by studying fiction.

I’m selecting ambitious novels, in particularly, science fiction, to see what they reveal about me, and how I tick. Why do we respond to their ideas, characters, plots and settings? Many people claim to love science fiction, but they are generally referring to science fiction in the movies and on television – fluff Sci-Fi. That kind of science fiction is very different from book science fiction. And a lot of modern science fiction book fans love particular authors because of their series – they love the setting and characters because they’re fun and even within the SF book genre, serious SF is avoided. I’m not sure many SF readers have a deep understanding of what draws them into science fiction, and the type of stories their minds resonate with.

Other than winning awards and being selected by Time Magazine as being one of the best novels of 2009, The Windup Girl doesn’t have much validation as the kind of SF classic that the rest of these novels represent. But The Windup Girl feels like them, and I responded to it in the same way. I admired its sheer intellectual speculation about the future. It’s also a novel that I’ve recommend to my bookworm friends who don’t read science fiction and they’ve liked it very well.

Ender’s Game seems like an oddball on this list because on the surface it seems like just another alien invasion adventure story, but down deep it has a disturbing core. In fact, to some people it’s as disturbing as A Clockwork Orange. Strangely, many readers see it as a fun romp, like it was a video game. But like video games, we need to question our thirst for violence, and our constant justification of violence.

None of these science fiction books represent my sentimental favorites, books hardcore science fiction fans would pick as their favorites. There’s no need to list such books, we all know have our own classics of science fiction lists. The twelve books I list here are the science fiction titles that go up against literary classics read by people who normally never read science fiction. They’re the books taught in school, the ones teachers torture kids with test questions because they supposedly deal with important themes.

It’s sad that the literary world chooses to ignore fun science fiction. Evidently they feel sense-of-wonder is for adolescents. Sometimes there’s a crossover, like The Hunger Games series, that fans love for the adventure, but still have the dystopian seriousness to evaluate. Another good example is The Giver by Lois Lowry. If I included YA novels, my list would be much longer. Science fiction is taken seriously at the YA level by teachers. And that might be why so many ambitious young writers are working the YA field. Winning the Newberry Award will keep your book around a lot longer than the Hugo Award. Take for instance 50 years ago, 1963, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle has had far more success with the public at large than The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, even though I much prefer PKD’s novel.

I guess another way to express what I’m saying is to talk about your targeted audience. To create a hit of the year in the science fiction sub-culture of books, you need to make just a few thousand people happy. To create a hit in the YA world, you’ll need to make tens of thousands of readers happy. To write a standout best seller of the year, you’ll need to write a book that maybe a hundred thousand or more people will choose to love. But to get into Nineteen Eighty-Four’s territory, you’ll need to impress millions of people, even tens of millions. That’s not easy!

Now it’s extremely presumptuous of me to even think of trying to write such a novel. At this stage, I’m just trying to understand how such novels work. Now that I have the contemplative time to explore such issues I think I need to do it. If you move to Walden Pond and just goof off, isn’t that just tragic? Or pathetic? Like the philosopher said, an unexamined life is not worth living. Well, I want to examine my fictional life. And then I want to play the game by writing my own novel from what I’ve learned.

JWH – 11/5/13

How To Write a Sermon to Inspire Thousands

Most people are used to getting jokes, cute pictures and funny videos forwarded to them in emails, tweets or posted on Facebook by their friends. But there’s another type of forwarded message that’s not as popular, the inspirational message. These internet homilies usually involve a moving story and sometimes a bonus list of lessons, just like a sermon you’d hear in church. Sometimes they mean to be religious, or at least worshipful of God, but usually they are just heartwarming anecdotes that intend to inspire goodwill and positive thinking.

I’ve sometimes fantasized about writing a joke and sending it to all my friends and hoping that one day years later it would come back to me in some anonymous way after being spread all over the internet. But since I’m terrible at telling jokes I doubt I would write a popular one. I assume internet inspirational messages are from people who would love to write a good sermon themselves, or at least enjoy inspiring others. It’s an interesting writing challenge to think about.

I got this message overnight and I’ve decided to analyze it as a model for writing internet sermons.

BANK ACCOUNT!!!

This is AWESOME … something we should all remember.

A 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud man, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with his hair fashionably combed and shaved perfectly, even though he is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.

His wife of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, he smiled sweetly when told his room was ready.

As he maneuvered his walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of his tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on his window.

‘I love it,’ he stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.

‘Mr. Jones, you haven’t seen the room; just wait..’

‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ he replied.

Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time.

Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged .. it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it.

‘It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice;

I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do.

Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away.. Just for this time in my life..

Old age is like a bank account. You withdraw from what you’ve put in.

So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in the bank account of memories!

Thank you for your part in filling my Memory Bank.

I am still depositing.

Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

Free your heart from hatred.

Free your mind from worries.

Live simply.

Give Thanks to God for your Blessings.

Expect less.

Pass this message to 7 people except me. You will receive a miracle tomorrow.

Now, STOP! Did you hear what I just said. You WILL receive a miracle

Tomorrow.. So send it right now!

Have a nice day, unless you already have other plans.

I believe my friend Linda sent this message because I wrote about whether or not I should get up early or sleep late in my retirement. This is a story about a 92 year-old legally blind man who gets up, shaves, dresses and is ready to start his day by 8 am.

Now I’m fascinated by the story process here. How did it come about? Is it true? Or is it made up? Do people sit around thinking up inspirational stories like other people sit around thinking up jokes to tell? I’m going to guess that this story has a kernel of truth, and the rest is added by a writer or writers, maybe a blogger like me. There’s even a chance that as it’s been passed around, the story could have been altered or added to.

Most of the inspirational stories I get by email are about old people, or people overcoming adversity. I suppose that’s because of my age and the age of the people sending me messages. I suppose if I was younger and had children, I’d receive a lot of children inspired stories. Or if I was a young divorced woman I’d see a lot of stories about meeting guys who weren’t dickheads. So the first lesson of writing an internet sermon is to target your audience carefully. The message above is aimed at people getting older, especially those fearing nursing homes and living with less in life.

However, I’m afraid I’m going to be cynical here and deconstruct this message. This mini-sermon makes several philosophical statements. I think the story can be divided into three sections. First, the green, is an incident with an old man, probably inspired by a real event. The second, blue, is another lesson, about memories, maybe inspired by the first story, or maybe just an additional lesson. Third, in red, additional commentary and advice. All three could have been from one person, but it feels to me like they were from three different people. I don’t think the old man and writers 1 and 2 are expressing the same philosophical points.

The old man who has just lost his wife of 70 years, needs a walker, and is nearly blind, is assigned to a nursing home. The old man is very positive, well groomed, and agreeable. The story as written has the old man imparting two pieces of wisdom, first about deciding to be positive and second, banking good memories for bad times. Those are two totally different solutions for finding happiness in old age. That’s why I think it’s from two different writers.

The first lesson is about mental attitude. Decide to stay positive – be in control. Like the British who dress for dinner in the middle of a jungle, this old man dresses up for each day of old age.

The second lesson is actually wimpier, but still a great coping mechanism. It advices us to have a great life so we can live off those memories when we get old. Many people do this. It’s not a lesson I like. I prefer number one.

The third lesson is really just an addendum of extra advice that doesn’t really relate to the first two lessons. They break down to love, don’t hate. Don’t worry. Live simply, be thankful and don’t want to much. “Expect less” is a very odd piece of advice unless you think about it carefully. All five are very Buddhist, especially number five, which is the heart of Buddhism, desire is the cause of all unhappiness. This is why I think three different people wrote this message, or one person used three different philosophies in their sermon. They are: keep a stiff upper lip, hide in good fantasies, and third, accept what you get, be thankful and don’t want too much.

It would have been a much better sermon if it had one consistent message. The best of the messages, the green one from the old man, inspires the most, because it appears to be based on a real person. In other words, find real life people and events for the heart of sermons.

Whole libraries could be written about these lessons. Thousands of books have been written about the concept of happiness. Unfortunately, it appears happiness is a condition that most people have or don’t have. I’ve been lucky, and have always been a happy person. I don’t think its due to any belief I’ve learned or acquired. Some people go through years of analysis trying to be shown how to be happy, but I’m not sure its something that can be revealed. I think some people become happier with drugs, either legal or illegal. And I think some people become happier through behavioral conditioning, either gained intentionally, or unintentionally. Sometimes happiness comes with age and wisdom.

I really doubt people can find permanent happiness in a sermon, but we love to try. Don’t we?

Decades ago I met this guy who had a lesson about happiness that I found wise. He said there were three goals in life that we had to accomplished before we could relax and be happy with our lives. First, we had to finish our education. By this he meant, we had to get to a place in our life where we no longer felt the need to go back to school. Second, we had to find the job that we were going to keep and one we didn’t consider a shit job. Third, we had to find our mate for life. I thought this a wise story because much of what makes people unhappy is caused by the normal stresses of life – frustrations over incompleteness. And these three factors are what causes most people a lot of unhappiness.

Like the old man, some people naturally learn from an early age that happiness is knowing how to make lemonade from lemons. Not everyone can do that. But can we teach others that lesson? How many people getting this email today will change from unhappy to happy by doing what the old man does, just deciding to be happy?

Now for the second part of the old man’s wisdom – bank good times when you’re young and withdraw them when you’re old. I’m not sure this philosophy would have come from that old man. It’s a totally different philosophy to live by, a different psychological coping mechanism. Instead of deciding ahead of time to always make the best with whatever is given to you, this advice tells us to make great memories now to live off of when we get old. A lot of old people do this of course, spend their days dwelling on the past. Of course there’s lots unhappy guys in their thirties living off their high school glory days. As a coping mechanism it’s not a particularly good one.

As a whole inspirational story, the last part, the tacked on five point lesson detracts from the original real life story because it sounds too abstract. And the first two lessons contradict each other. One is an example by doing, and the second is a made up solution. Like the golden rule of writing advice, show don’t tell, this story works best when it’s showing and least when it’s telling.

My guess is someone actually met this old man and wrote his story up. Then the same person or another person, thought it wasn’t enough, and created the idea of a memory bank to fill it out, even though it’s a contradictory message. Then another person decided the story needed some explicit lessons to take away and added their five bits of wisdom. This happens in The Bible all the time. Sermonizers love to add their own bits. Read Misquoting Jesus or Forged by Bart D. Ehrman.

My conclusion for sermon writers is to only tell the parable and let the reader generate their own lessons. Make sure nothing in the story contradicts itself. Make sure the voice stays consistent. Make sure the philosophy stays consistent.

JWH – 11/1/13