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@@4000241 I think it is safe to say that ours is the only dining room in West Los Angeles on whose table -- an eight-foot-long , two-hundred-pound behemoth on which I have taken my meals for many years -- rest piles of photocopies of articles on suicide , all of which were printed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica over the past 220 years . They represent the convergence of two crucially important strands in my own life . Indeed , as I look at the articles , arrayed before me in fanlike tiers , I get the odd feeling that the old oak ruble on which I have eaten so many thousands of dinners has been set not with its customary china and silver but with my intellectual autobiography . <p> My special relationship with the Britannica is of long standing . It is relevant to report that I was a sickly child and stayed home from school a great deal . The reader can readily imagine the sort of boy I was : frail , bookish , and undersized ( I was small to begin with , and continued to shrink , comparatively speaking , as I was double-promoted four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) . Our house , fifteen miles and seventy years from the one in which my wife and I live today , resembled those of many Eastern European Jewish immigrant families with intellectual aspirations . There were copies of Shakespeare , Tolstoy , Dostoyevsky , Conrad , and Mann , diligently assembled from the local Lincoln Heights Library 's list of " The 100 Best . " There was a windup Victrola and records of operatic arias sung by Caruso and Farrar . And in the center of all this -- the jewel in the Shneidman family 's cultural crown-there was the Ninth Edition of the Britannica , enshrined in a Stickley bookcase with glass doors and its own little key . The suite of Craftsman furniture to which the bookcase belonged also included a sofa , a chair , and a table . All of them are in my home today . <p> Among the happiest hours of my childhood were those spent alone at home , circa 1925 . My parents would be working in their clothing store , my brother and sister would be in school , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , tucked in their 1910 Grand Rapids mahogany bed between two billowy white sheets , listening to Farrar sing Gilda and reading the encyclopedia . I have little doubt that more than half of what I know today I learned from the pages of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . I suspect that this accounts for my essentially nineteenth-century ideas about science . And I muse that my frenetic and nervous way of studying ( or reading or writing ) -- a lifelong habit -- could well be a happy remnant of the fact that my first earnest perusals of " The Geometry " or " Kant " were interrupted every few minutes by the need to leap out of my parents ' bed either to change the 78-rpm record or to wind the Victrola . It seems unlikely that I would so deeply love the intellectual life today had I not initially found my young mind 's independence within such a cozy and easeful setting . <p> Fast-forward to 1949 , the year that , quite by accident , I met my life 's second great strand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the Brentwood Veterans Administration hospital . On that particular morning I was in the subbasement of the old Los Angeles Hall of Records , in the coroner 's vault , looking at file folders containing the records of certified deaths . The director of my hospital had asked me to prepare letters to two young widows whose husbands had recently committed suicide while they were hospital patients . My intention was to look at the two men 's folders , make some notes , and get back to work . <p> The first folder contained something I had not seen before : a genuine suicide note . The second folder did not . Who could stop at this point ? I looked at several dozen folders . It seemed that every so often I would open a folder -- about one out of every fifteen suicide folders-and find a suicide note . I did a quick count of the folders on one shelf and estimated that I was standing in a room that contained approximately two thousand suicide notes . I felt like a cowpoke who , wandering home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of oil and is just sober enough to realize he has found his fortune . <p> Had I indulged my initial urge to read the letters right there in the coroner 's vault , I might have learned a good deal about individual human tragedy , but I would have done nothing to advance the study of suicide , which was then an almost nonexistent field . Instead , in a decision that changed my life , I made photocopies of more than seven hundred genuine suicide notes and put them aside without reading them , so that my colleague Norman Farberow and I could later compare them , in blind controlled studies , with simulated suicide notes that would be elicited from nonsuicidal people . The result was the first work on suicide notes -- and indirectly on suicide itself -- that followed scientific protocols . My subsequent career -- helping to found the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center , developing a program in suicide prevention for the National Institute of Mental Health , thinking about suicide , writing about suicide -- all dates from that morning in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I have been continuously intrigued by the topic of suicide and drawn to people who are on the brink of serf-destruction . I am not a suicidal person myself ; my fascination is , I suppose , partly voyeuristic and partly scientific . I have always been attracted to excitement , and few things could be more exciting than the pursuit of understanding in a virgin field that involved such strong and intimate human emotions . <p> The reader can surmise what it meant to me , a quarter century after I happened upon those suicide notes , to be invited to contribute my own seven pages of printed text , headed " Suicide , " to volume 21 of the 1973 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , the same set of books that once was my Testament , Koran , and Upanishads . <p> I have come close to implying that the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a kind of father figure to me . It is true that I treated those books and the information in them with a respect bordering on awe , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cathedra . At that time , all these sentiments were also true of my unquestioned attitudes toward my father . Writing my own article for the EB was a psychological landmark ; it gave me a voice of my own . I suddenly felt like Ernest Pontifex , in The Way of All Flesh , who was finally able to contravene his father without feeling that he was either destroying or betraying him . <p> Before I wrote my 1973 article , I looked at two or three earlier pieces . It did not occur to me then to view them as documents of intellectual history ; I merely wished to identify my predecessors ' pitfalls -- such as an overreliance on dreary tables of statistics -- so I could avoid stepping into them myself . I wrote the article and proudly added the Fourteenth Edition of the Britannica to the Ninth Edition that still reposed in the glass-fronted Stickley bookcase that I had inherited . Two and a half decades passed . Then , as I approached the age of eighty , I had another thought . It was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unlikely to have in one 's twenties or even fifties , when the habit of looking back is not so fully developed . Why not examine the articles on suicide in all the editions since the first one , in 1768 ? <p> The idea allowed me simultaneously to become , all over again , the unformed child in a soft bed who had learned about the world from his parents ' encyclopedia , and also to read these articles on suicide -- including my own -- and see , from the emancipated vantage point of old age , their flaws , their anachronisms , their generational gaps of knowledge . If the Britannica was the most authoritative popular repository of knowledge during the various eras of its existence , would not its successive treatments of suicide reflect , in a long chronological march , our culture 's changing attitudes toward the subject that had consumed my life ? With the help of the Chicago staff of the EB , the New York Public Library , and Harvard 's Houghton Library , I assembled copies of the encyclopedia 's fourteen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story -- the attempt , over time , to answer such crucial questions as : Is suicide a sin ? Is it a crime ? Is it the responsibility of the individual or of society ? What causes it ? Can human suffering be reduced to statistics ? How can suicide be prevented ? Should it be prevented ? And that story is what is now spread out , with my wife 's indulgence , all over our dining table . <p> The Encyclopaedia Britannica , while not the first encyclopedia -- its forerunners include the remarkable Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des Sciences , des Arts et des Metiers of Diderot and d'Alembert , published in France starting in 1751 -- has remained the most constant and influential . Its first edition was published in Edinburgh in 1768 . There have been fourteen editions since then , of which the Eleventh Edition , of 1910 , is generally considered the greatest . Roughly speaking , a new edition was published every ten or twenty years ( in the interim there were sometimes several printings with minor variations ) until the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a half century , there were only relatively modest alterations : some articles were dropped , some added , some contributors replaced . With the Fifteenth Edition , in 1974 , there was a radical restructuring of the overall format of the EB : the timehonored , strictly alphabetical arrangement was dropped in favor of a thesaurus-like approach , including a one-volume Propaedia ( an overview ) , a Micropaedia ( a comprehensive survey ) , and a Macropaedia ( topics discussed in detail ) . The latest version of the Britannica , " published " in 1994 , is on CD-ROM -- a hundred pounds of books reduced to about an ounce . <p> There was no article on suicide in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . That is understandable ; the word itself was fairly new . ( The words suicide and encyclopedia seem to have a common vintage and perhaps even a common creator . The vintage is the fifth decade of the seventeenth century , 1642 for suicide and 1646 for encyclopedia ; the creator is Sir Thomas Browne , the author of Religio @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Second Edition of the EB was published , it contained a memorable article called " Self-Murder . " <p> " Self-Murder " is one page long . Whatever else can be said about it , it is not dull . It jerks you awake with the first sentence , hectors and shakes you until the finish , and , at the very end , makes an unconvincing attempt to soften its Draconian stance . It has the smell of fire and brimstone , the sound of a wrathful sermon by Cotton Mather . The article begins with a beautifully expressed but horrendously cruel definition : " SELF-MURDER , the pretended heroism , but real cowardice , of the Stoic philosophers , who destroyed themselves to avoid those ills which they had not the fortitude to endure , though the attempting it seems to be countenanced by the civil law , yet was punished by the Athenian law with cutting off the hand which committed the desperate deed . " It continues in a vein that joins the religious and the legal : <p> And also the law of England wisely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to destroy life but by commission from God and the author of it ; and as the suicide is guilty of a double offence ; one spiritual , in invading the prerogative of the Almighty , and rushing into his immediate presence uncalled for ; the other temporal , against the king , who hath an interest in the preservation of all his subjects ; the law has therefore ranked this among the highest crimes , making it a peculiar species of felony ; a felony committed on one 's self . <p> And it concludes with an answer to the obvious question : If the felon is dead , how can human laws punish him ? <p> They can only act upon what he has left behind him , his reputation and fortune ; on the former , by an ignominious burial in the highway , with a stake driven through his body ; or the latter , by a forfeiture of all his goods and chattels to the king , hoping that his care for either his own reputation or the welfare of his family would be some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ act . . . . And tho ' it must be owned that the letter of the law herein borders a little on severity ; yet it is some alleviation , that the power of mitigation is left in the breast of the sovereign , who upon this ( as on all other occasions ) is reminded by the oath of his office , to execute judgment in mercy . <p> The last sentence strikes me as conveying the same dubious comfort as a hangman 's blessing . The anonymous author of this mean-spirited little article -- whose only mention of prevention is its approving note on the custom , prevalent at the time , of besmirching the self-murderer 's reputation and confiscating his worldly goods -- is clearly far more interested in flagellating the suicide than in keeping him alive . <p> By 1788 , when the Third Edition was published , the word suicide had gained sufficient currency to constitute the article 's title . And this time the EB had much more to say : five pages ' worth , starting with a far briefer and more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or the person who commits it . " The first section of the article is a historical survey of suicide among the Jews , the ancient Greeks , the Brahmins , the Hindus , the Japanese , the Scythians , the tribes of Scandinavia , and others . The tone of this report can be gathered from the paragraph on suicide among the Jews : <p> Suicide is one of those crimes which we are led to believe not common among savage nations . The first instances of it recorded in the Jewish history are those of Saul and Ahitophel ; for we do not think the death of Samson a proper example . We have no reason to suppose it became common among the Jews till their wars with the Romans , when multitudes slaughtered themselves that they might not fall alive into the hands of their enemies . But at this period the Jews were a most desperate and abandoned race of men , had corrupted the religion of their fathers , and rejected that pure system which their promised Messiah came to Jerusalem to announce . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until 1852 . <p> As for the causes of suicide in England , they are ascribed to " the variableness of the climate , the great use of animal food , strong spiritous liquors and to tea , and to the sulphurous exhalations of the pit-coal used as fuel . . . . We are rather surprised that coal is mentioned even as a distant cause of suicide , for it is one of the blessings of our island ; and a good coal fire we have always found rather conducive to good spirits rather than injurious to them . " It is rare to find such a cozy passage in the staid pages of the EB . <p> Having disposed of history and causation , the article moves on to the aspects that had constituted the entirety of the 1777 article : the morality and legality of suicide . It reasserts that suicide is a felo-de-se ( a felony against oneself ) , a crime against God and the king . But it ends with a sentence that indicates that the times are changing : " Suicide , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it is a difficult matter to find an effectual remedy . . . . Punishment will not be a preventive , even if it could be always inflicted ; and that it is seldom inflicted , though the laws have decreed it , is well known . " This Concluding emphasis on prevention , complete with a humble acknowledgment of its difficulty , sounds surprisingly modern . <p> The historical portions of this entry appeared essentially unchanged for sixty-four years in the Fourth ( 1801 ) , Fifth ( 1815 ) , Sixth ( 1820 ) , and Seventh ( 1830 ) Editions . <p> But changes were coming . The entry for " Suicide " in the Eighth Edition ( 1852-1860 ) in many ways repeats the contents of the Seventh . However , it is notable for including landmark quotations from two major nineteenth-century intellectual figures . <p> The first quotation is from Henry Thomas Buckle , chess prodigy and scientifically minded historian . Buckle believes that " the progress of every people is regulated by principles . . . as certain as those which govern the physical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suicide rates over years and points to the folly of enacting laws against it . He states that <p> suicide is merely the product of the general condition of society , and that the individual only carries into effect what is a necessary consequence of preceding circumstance . . . thus we are able to predict within a small limit of error the number of voluntary deaths for each ensuing period , assuming , of course , that the social circumstances do not undergo marked change . <p> Buckle 's morally neutral stance , which transfers blame from the individual to his society , neatly moves suicide from the purview of religion to that of social science and presages the key role that demography was soon to play in its study . <p> The second quotation is from the great philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill . In his essay " On Liberty " -- in which he opposed any legislation that would interfere with the sale of poisons on the ground that it would exert unnecessary state control over individual freedom-he wrote ( and is quoted in the 1860 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a necessity , but only a danger of mischief , no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficience of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk of buying poison . In this case therefore ( unless he is a child , or delirious or in some state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of the reflecting faculty ) , he ought , I conceive , be only warned of the danger , not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it . <p> This prescient paragraph contains the core arguments of current controversies and debates : Do people own their own lives ( and deaths ) , or are we as a society responsible for saving our fellows from their own errors ? <p> Mill 's libertarian voice was destined to be outshouted by the subsequent inundation of articles that concentrated on numbers rather than ethics . The Ninth Edition ( 1875-1889 ) contains a six-page article by Wynnard Hooper , a financial journalist who , tellingly , also wrote the pieces on statistics and population . ( This was the edition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , remember reading this article then . ) Hooper includes five tables of European suicide statistics and one table for certain American states , and discusses these figures in terms of race , sex , climate , population density , occupations , seasons , and methods of suicide . He concludes that " it can not be said that any satisfactory result has been obtained from these investigations , owing no doubt to the fact that the phenomenon is too minute to furnish numbers large enough for the proper application of the statistical method . " His article marks a radical swing to the demographic and statistical approach , reflecting and foreshadowing the work of Morselli , Durkheim , Halbwachs , and Dublin . It cut the pattern for the next hundred years . <p> The Tenth Edition ( 1902 ) contains an unmemorable two-page article , essentially a shortened version of the article in the previous edition , by H. H. Littlejohn , a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Edinburgh . Littlejohn also wrote the article on suicide in the great Eleventh Edition of 1910 ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . Like Buckle and Hooper , Littlejohn regards suicide as " a sign of the presence of maladies in the body politic which deserve careful consideration . " He asserts that " suicide as a whole conforms to certain general laws , and is influenced by conditions other than mere individual circumstances or surroundings . " His article , mainly concerned with British suicide statistics for the 1880s and 1890s , was repeated in the Twelfth ( 1921 ) and Thirteenth ( 1926 ) Editions . <p> The article on suicide in the Fourteenth Edition ( 1929-1940 ) went through numerous versions in different printings . The first , in 1929 , was a two-page article by S. de Jastrzebski , the assistant registrar general of Great Britain , that included updated figures for sex and age and for methods of suicide in England and Wales as well as an interesting and highly topical section on the " Influence of the World War " : <p> The following figures for 1911-1914 , 1915-1918 , 1921-1925 , relating as they do to nine of the belligerent countries and two non-belligerents closely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doubt the profound effect produced upon the suicide-rate by the World War . . . . In every case the war period is marked by a notable decline in the suicide-rate . To the theory that nervous strain is one of the prime causes which lead to self-destruction , they give a complete and emphatic contradiction . <p> The 1955-1961 printings of the Fourteenth Edition contained a short piece by Ruth S. Cavan , an American sociologist , which was perhaps the most succinct and most comprehensive to date . Within the compass of a single page , it includes pithy paragraphs on a variety of subtopics : international comparisons ; age , sex , and marital conditions ; urban-rural rates ; methods of suicide ; suicide and other means of violent death ; and interpretations . Cavan concludes : <p> Although suicide rates differ with various social conditions , the explanation does not lie in external forces but in the attitudes and emotions of people . . . . Some people are subjected to greater social pressures than others . Finally , some countries provide more adequate guidance and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may turn for help . <p> This brief bit of wisdom touches both the inner and the outer worlds of suicide with more empathy than any of Cavan 's predecessors had shown . <p> My turn came in 1973 , in an article that deliberately owed little to its forerunners . Its seven pages contained not a single statistical table . ( As I reread them in the company of the other articles on my dining table , I felt that in my urge to rescue the study of suicide from the numbing forces of statistics , I had gone too far and given short shrift to the field 's legitimate demographic aspects . ) The sections included : definition , complexities of definitions , major threads of study , psychological characteristics of suicide , attempted suicide , partial death and substitutes for suicide , suicide and religion , suicide and the law , myths about suicide , romantic suicide and the artist , statistics on suicide , suicide notes , and **35;476;TOOLONG . <p> One example will suffice to convey the article 's general tenor . Under " Main @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the locus of blame for suicide . Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas called suicide a grievous sin and located its source within the deficient person ; Rousseau emphasized the natural and innocent state of man and transferred the locus of blame from man to society ; Hume tried to sanitize suicide entirely by arguing that it was neither a crime nor a sin ; Durkheim focused on society 's inimical effects on the individual ; and Freud , eschewing the notions of sin and crime , gave suicide back to the individual but put the main locus of action in the unconscious mind . In other words , I attempted to present a variety of views on suicide instead of the single opinions that had dominated most of the earlier articles . My own expressed opinion is that each instance of suicide is a multidimensional event ( with biological , physiological , sociocultural , and existential components ) , but that the main trunk of the suicidal tree is the psychological drama that occurs in the individual 's mind : the need to escape from unbearable psychological pain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of death or cessation as the effective exit . Here is the heart of what -- now that I have read all the earlier articles -- I feel the EB had previously omitted : a recognition of suicide as a response to individual human suffering , a tragedy that befalls real people . <p> This article had a noteworthy personal consequence . For many years -- from 1950 , when I met him , until his death in 1988 at the age of ninety-five -- the psychological epicenter of my intellectual life was Henry A. Murray : physician , psychoanalyst , biologist , Melville scholar , director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic , and author of Explorations in Personality . ( There is a marvelous portrait of Henry Murray in the winter 1969 issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR , by then-editor Hiram Haydn . ) Murray 's peerless writings influenced me more than any others , and I tried to spend as much time as possible in his presence . I was at Harvard for two extended stays -- as research associate in the early sixties and as visiting professor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as often as I could arrange it . It was one of life 's high privileges for me to know him and to be made , by him , much more than I otherwise could have been . <p> In 1963 , in a paper about Melville titled " Dead to the World , " Murray had defined suicide as " no more than an urgently felt necessity to stop unbearable anguish , that is , to obtain relief by interrupting the stream of suffering . " He asked : " For what is suicide in most instances but an action to put an end to intolerable affect ? " You can see right away that my main ideas about the central role in suicide of psychological pain and negative emotions all flow from his fountain . In any event , in February 1973 , Harry wrote me : <p> Your encyclopaedia article is masterful . . . handsomely written to a marked extent in your own terminology . I could n't help thinking that this was possibly the timely moment to consider a shift in focus of spirit and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paragraph changed my life . I knew Harry well enough to put aside his hyperbolic praise and to know that the real meat of that paragraph -- his covertly intended message -- lay in the serious criticism implied in the second sentence . He was telling me what I already knew inside : that I was temporarily burned out on the topic of suicide and ought to consider a shift of focus for a while . Harry 's note resonated with my own suspicion , which I had not fully admitted to myself until I read his words , that my EB article had been a mite too discursive and idiosyncratic . Accordingly , I shifted my clinical focus from patients who were suicidal to cancer patients who were coming to death unwillingly . I transformed myself from clinical suicidologist to clinical thanatologist , someone who deals with illness and mourning . When I returned to suicide a few years later , I believe I did so with a refreshed vision of self-destruction as well as a better understanding of the dynamics involved in the wrestling match with death . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ <p> My piece was superseded in the Fifteenth Edition ( 1974-1984 ) by a wise and comprehensive five-page article by the late Erwin Stengel , professor of psychiatry at the University of Sheffield . Its most innovative section is headed " Suicide in the Future , " and Stengel 's predictions are not particularly rosy . He writes : <p> It is difficult to imagine man in the future without this potential , which has sometimes been proclaimed as one of the basic human freedoms . There are no prospects of an antisuicidal substance in the foreseeable future . There are certain aspects of present-day society that make a decline in the incidence of suicidal acts unlikely including the increased number of the aged . . . the young who are more openly aggressive . . . the continued increase in population . The outlook for suicide would be very black indeed if it were not for the strong urge to self-preservation inherent in the individual and in society . The emergence of nonprofessional movements toward self-help in the struggle against suicide can be seen as a manifestation of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he thoroughly understood the value of statistics , also understood that suicide is a philosophical act . This is manifestly an encyclopedia article and not a novel . But Stengel 's empathetic sadness , deepened by his own background as a refugee from the Nazis , clearly shows through his prose and , in my view , makes it finer . Inexplicably , there are printings of the Fifteenth Edition in which Stengel 's indispensable essay on suicide does not appear . In these cases , I strongly advise the reader to seek another printing . <p> In the 1985-1997 printings of the Fifteenth Edition there is a half-page article in the Micropaedia ( Stengel 's piece is in the Macropaedia ) . Its concluding paragraph is especially topical : <p> No single approach can be expected to succeed in substantially reducing the incidence of suicide , but early detection and treatment of mental disorders are important deterrents . Since the 1950s special centres and organizations for the prevention of suicide have been created in many countries . . . . The telephone is commonly used as a means of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and advisers who are available by day and night . There is evidence that this kind of service may help to avert suicidal acts . <p> The Encyclopaedia Britannica -- along with our society -- has obviously traveled several light-years since 1777 , when it excoriated suicide as cowardly , sinful , illegal , and shameful . The emphasis has shifted to the question , " How can we help ? " <p> My march through the centuries is complete , but a few ideas still swirl in the wake of my dual obsessions , suicide and the EB . The first idea is that there might be something to learn from similar Britannica surveys of other socially sensitive tag words . One might look , from 1768 ( or whenever the word first appears ) to the present date , at Addiction , Adultery , Childhood , Homosexuality , Insanity , and so forth . Scholars in different fields could suggest candidates for the word list . Put together , these would yield a lexicographic history of the past two centuries that might give some fresh insights into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ returns to the study of suicide . Why not take a look at the word in dictionaries of the past couple of hundred years ? Authoritative definitions are important . Indeed , dictionaries might provide us with a microcosm of what was happening in the encyclopedias of their times . <p> I believe I have good reason , beyond the fact that it is my own field , to think that our society 's views of suicide are important to all of us . I learned from a study I once did with the coroner of Marin County , California , that more than a quarter of all deaths -- all deaths , not just overt suicides -- are probably interlaced with threads of imprudence , disregard , excess , indifference , or ennui that bring an end to life sooner than is necessary . In other words , some people who have died what I call " subintentioned deaths " from heart attacks or automobile accidents may have a good deal in common with people who are termed " suicides . " In that sense alone , suicide is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risk of moving up the dates on our own tombstones . <p> The definition of any important term such as suicide gives it power-and also gives it honorific , neutral , or pejorative overtones . Denotation influences connotation . The connotative meanings of a word govern society 's responses to it . These community responses can cover a wide range : in the case of suicide , one extreme includes scorn , indifference , and punishment , and the other extreme includes empathy and therapy . And even within the realm of therapy , the very modalities are influenced by definition . Whether the therapeutic response is primarily pharmacological ( pills ) , surgical ( lobotomy ) , electrical ( shock ) , institutional ( hospitalization ) , or psychodynamic ( talk ) -- differences that are not trivial-may depend on the inner , unspoken definition of suicide and its connotative associations that one 's physician happens to hold . <p> Anthropologically speaking , dictionaries and encyclopedias are the two key books in any literate society . Each of us lives within ( or rebels against ) the reigning mores @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ words . Much of our English-American Zeitgeist is reflected in the long history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . As I look at the piles of articles fanned out on my dining table , I feel that the pages , though they all deal with death , are in some sense alive , and that they are spreading their exhalations into many vast and tiny places . <p> By Edwin Shneidman <p> <p> Edwin Shneidman is Professor of Thanatology Emeritus at UCLA . He was the founder , in 1968 , of the American Association of Suicidology , and is the author of Deaths of Man , Voices of Death , Definition of Suicide , and The Suicidal Mind . <p>

@@4000341 The high point of my freshman-year English literature survey course , taught by that sweet man and Emily Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall , came early in the fall . Struggling through the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales , I arrived at the point in the story where the narrator of the poem -- referred to by critics as " Chaucer the pilgrim " -- becomes a character in it . At the conclusion of " The Prioress 's Tale , " the host notices " me " for the first time and asks , " What man artou ? ... Thou lookest as thou woldest find an hare , / For evere upon the ground I see thee stare . " He asks Chaucer to contribute " a tale of mirth . " The narrator replies that he knows only " a rym I lerned longe agoon . " This turns out to be " The Tale of Sir Thopas , " a turgid bit of doggerel about an ineffectual and effeminate knight . It goes on for a couple of dozen stanzas , and then , in the middle of a line , the host breaks in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Goddes dignitee ! ... By God , ' quod he , ' for plainly , at oo one word , / Thy drasty rubbishy rhyming is not worth a tord . ' " <p> I found this thrilling , for reasons that were n't immediately clear . Turning to E. T. Donaldson 's commentary in the back of my Chaucer book , I read , " The relation between the creator and the created that the situation implies is revealed by a mind almost godlike in the breadth and vision of its ironic vision . " That was helpful . It led me to understand , in due time , that I responded powerfully in estimable works of art to moments when the artist ... winks : acknowledges , implicitly or explicitly , that what we are experiencing is after all a piece of human handiwork and he or she is the creator of it . It is a gesture simultaneously of humility and of majesty , in both cases honoring the potency of art . <p> The next year , in a seminar on Romantic poetry , my ears @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Keats 's " Ode to a Nightingale " when he muses that the nightingale 's song has " Charm 'd magic casements , opening on the foam / Of perilous seas , in faery lands forlorn . " The stanza ends , and the new one starts with , " Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self ! " The echoing of the word forlorn , the professor claimed ( arguably but provocatively ) , was the first moment in the history of English verse that a poem took itself as its subject . In the final lecture of a Shakespeare survey , I got goose bumps when Alvin Kernan , another terrific teacher , recited the speech in which Prospero tells the audience that " The cloud-capped towers , the gorgeous palaces , / The solemn temples , the great globe itself , / Yea , all which it inherit , shall dissolve , / And like this insubstantial pageant faded / Leave not a rack behind . " The " great globe , " he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where the play was being performed . Moreover , Prospero 's forsaking his magic was implicitly compared to Shakespeare himself giving up the magic of playwriting , The Tempest being his final work . And moreover ( not to put too fine a point on it ) , this was Kernan 's final lecture , before leaving teaching for administrative work , so we understood that he , too , was implicitly saying he was giving up his magic . Great stuff . <p> All this happened in the 1970s , when postmodernism was barely a concept . Now it 's a frayed cultural clich . The self-reference I responded to in Chaucer and Shakespeare long ago acquired an academic moniker -- " reflexivity . " A related phenomenon , works referring to other works , was dubbed " intertextuality . " Together they are subsumed under the ubiquitous term " meta , " at one time a useful prefix for self-conscious endeavors , now an annoying , nearly all-purpose adjective . ( " The Matrix is very meta . " ) Practice has , if anything , outstripped theory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comedians playing themselves , movies ( like Adaptation ) about the process of making a movie , buildings or paintings or poems or novels that refer to themselves as buildings or paintings or poems or novels : we have all , probably , had enough of them . <p> But I still respond to -- indeed , delight in -- reflexivity and intertextuality in one art form . That would be popular music . Flipping the radio dial , I get chills when I come on James Taylor 's " That 's Why I 'm Here " ( " Fortune and fame 's such a curious game / Perfect strangers can call you by name / Pay good money to hear ' Fire and Rain ' / Again and again and again " ) , or the Beatles ' " Glass Onion " ( " I told you ' bout Strawberry Fields , / You know the place where nothing is real " ) , Pink 's " Do n't Let Me Get Me " ( " Tired of being compared to / Damn Britney Spears / She 's so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or even Eminem 's " White America " ( " Let 's do the math . / If I was black , I would 've sold half " ) . And I actually grin when a country station plays a recent hit by Alan Jackson that 's about , and is , a " Three Minute Positive Not Too Country Uptempo Love Song . " For years -- decades -- I have been collecting these songs , just as bird-watchers do with their sightings , separating my life list into categories and subcategories , and ranking all entries according to originality , profundity , and ultimate value . <p> I will share my system with you in a minute , as soon as I try to rebut the charge that self-reference in pop music does not escape the curses of preciousness , self-regard , clich , and portentousness it is subject to elsewhere . A clue to its avoidance strategy is the word itself : the music -- the melody , the singing , the instrumentation , the beat -- takes attention and a portion of the burden from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about popular music . The words to a song may lie leaden on the page in a CD booklet or an ill-conceived Collected Lyrics , but , through a strange alchemy , reverberate like poetry when they are accompanied by melody . In the same way , the music can remove the self-importance from a level of reflexivity that , drunk neat , would be deadly . <p> American popular song lyrics have always had a wide self-conscious streak . Possibly the most successful popular song of all time was Irving Berlin 's 1911 " Alexander 's Ragtime Band , " a song about music . Ira Gershwin 's first lyrics to be sung in public , in 1918 , were to " The Real American Folk Song Is a Rag " ; a later effort was " What Can You Say in a Love Song ( That Has n't Been Said Before ) ? " from the musical comedy " Life Begins at 8:40 , " beginning " Darling , here 's that song you inspired / In a style I acquired / Living with songs of the past @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alley , the mythical locus of the popular songwriting industry , continually nudged one another in the ribs with reminders of what it was they were doing . The Alley was a closed cosmos , with songs commenting on predecessors and begetting successors : first , " Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland , " then " When I Met You Tonight in Dreamland " and " Dreamland Brings Memories of You . " <p> The great American songwriters , all of whom either started on Tin Pan Alley or were begotten by it , liked to tip their hats to one another . In " They Ca n't Take That Away from Me , " Gershwin name-checks one of Irving Berlin 's classics : " The song is ended , but as the songwriter wrote / ' The Melody Lingers On . ' " Berlin , who normally looked straight ahead in his lyrics , permitted himself , " Tuneful , tasteful , soulful , smart . / Music : Rodgers . Lyrics : Hart . " In " You 're the Top , " Cole Porter paired " Waldorf @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " gifted humans like Vincent Youmans , " surely one of the all-time great rhymes . It was Porter who took this sort of thing beyond intramural bantering to high wit . He wrote the immortal couplet " But how strange / The change from major to minor , " which is sung just as the key of the song ( " Every Time We Say Goodbye " ) changes from major to minor . " It 's De-Lovely , " from the musical " Anything Goes , " begins , " I feel a sudden urge to sing / The kind of ditty that invokes the spring . / So control your desire to curse / While I crucify the verse . / This verse I 've started seems to me / The ' Tin-Pan-tithesis ' of melody . / So to spare you all the pain , / I 'll skip the darn thing and sing the refrain . " Tin-Pan-tithesis : the formulation deserves a moment of silence . <p> Hoagy Carmichael 's " Stardust , " which some authorities consider the greatest American song , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " haunts my reverie ... Now my consolation / Is in the stardust of a song . " Is the song " Stardust " ? It 's a mystery , but a sweet one . <p> Tin Pan Alley was zoned out of existence a long time ago . But today 's generically striated pop universe -- country , hip-hop , rock , and so forth , each with its own further gradations -- is just as self-referential . In fact , it 's more so , and in order to assess the field adequately I 'll need to break it into two groups , the reflexive and the intertextual , each with a meta offshoot . <p> The first category consists of songs that refer to or are about themselves , in the manner of " Ode to a Nightingale " and " It 's De-Lovely . " And so : Elton John 's " Your Song " ; James Taylor 's " Hey Mister , That 's Me Up On the Jukebox " ( " I 'm the one who 's singing this sad song " ) ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Song By Heart " ; George Harrison 's " This Song " ( the two-word phrase occurs in most of these entries ) ; Simon and Garfunkel 's " Song for the Asking " ; Carly Simon 's " You 're So Vain " ( " You probably think this song is about you " ) ; The Doors ' " Hello , I Love You " ( " When she moves , my brain sings out this song " ) ; Jim Croce 's " I 'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song " ; Public Enemy 's " Bring the Noise " ( " Radio stations I question their blackness / They call themselves black , / But we 'll see if they play this " ) ; Three Dog Night 's " Old-Fashioned Love Song " ; Spandau Ballet 's " True " ( " Why do I find it hard to write the next line ? " ) ; Steely Dan 's " Deacon Blues " ( " I cried when I wrote this song / Sue me if I play too long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Broke My Promise " ( " That I would n't write another song about you . / I guess I lied " ) ; the Beatles ' " Only a Northern Song " ( " If you 're listening to this song / You may think the chords are going wrong " ) and " Michelle " ( " These are words that go together well " ) . <p> One thing should be immediately apparent from the list : reflexiveness can be associated with both good and bad songs . You do n't have to be familiar with every title to grasp that , merely with the two biggest chartbusters , by Elton John and Three Dog Night . " Old-Fashioned Love Song " is a bland and genial ditty , saved -- barely -- from complete negligibility by its self-reference . Bernie Taupin 's lyrics to " Your Song , " swept along by John 's potent melody , are , like many lyric poems , convincingly about the challenges of doing justice in words to the loved one 's qualities . Toward the end , they double @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ word is like a bell " fashion , the singer admitting , haltingly , " You see I 've forgotten if they 're green or they 're blue . / Anyway the thing is , what I really mean , / Yours are the sweetest eyes I 've ever seen . " <p> There 's nothing special or mysterious about what makes good self-conscious songs good -- just adequate artistry , originality , wit , and feeling . The last is especially important , but the other qualities can go a long way as well . The rapper Nas does some dazzlingly reflexive sleight of hand , in the braggadocious mode hip-hop has claimed for its own , when he raps , " They shootin ! / Aw , made you look . / You a slave to a page in my rhyme book . " <p> In this subgenre , the song about itself , one trope has inspired some particularly ingenious lyric writing : imagining the effect the song will have on listeners when it comes out of the radio or , especially in country music , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is reminiscent of the Aeolian Harp or Lyre , a common image in Romantic poetry : the winds of the world would blow through it and make haunting melodies . ) The country singer David Allan Coe has a number called " I 'm Going to Hurt Her on the Radio , " and Buck Owens 's 1979 song " Play ' Together Again ' Again " asks a bystander to put in a quarter and punch the numbers of an earlier Owens hit . Bruce Springsteen 's moving " Bobby Jean , " addressed to a friend or lover who 's unexpectedly taken a powder , conjectures : " Maybe you 'll be out there on that road / Somewhere in some bus or train / Traveling along in some motel room / There 'll be a radio playing and you 'll hear me sing this song . / Well , if you do , you 'll know I 'm thinking of you . " <p> Loudon Wainwright III 's mordant " Pretty Good Day " is a catalogue of small victories . The singer wakes up and finds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ streets without hearing any sirens or getting shot or even seeing any snipers , and when he gets home , he says , " Nobody was frightened , wounded , hungry , or cold . " The final stanza is unanticipatedly cathartic : " I slept through the night , got through to the dawn / I flipped the switch and the light went on . / I wrote down my dream , I wrote this song . " Those last four words turn the closing refrain -- " It 's a pretty good day so far " -- from ironic self-protection to a welcome truth . <p> None of the lyrical maneuvers or tropes I 've described above should be unfamiliar to past or present English majors , who would do well to equip their computers with a global key that produces the phrase , " Just as in the poem ... " Indeed , it is accepted wisdom that reflexivity is an , if not the , obsession of modern poetry . You find it explicitly in , for example , Archibald MacLeish 's " Ars Poetica " @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " ) , and implicitly pretty much wherever you look -- in Pound , Eliot , Stevens . But there 's an advanced class of pop-music reflexivity that is little seen in these poets , although , come to think of it , it 's everywhere in Whitman , who even gave it a name : " Song of Myself . " In popular music , this is a post-Beatles phenomenon . In the pre-rock era , a popular singer -- think Frank Sinatra -- was manifestly an actor , convincingly giving voice to the playwright 's ( songwriter 's ) words and music . One of the few figures who combined singing and songwriting ( as well as a capacious ego ) was George M. Cohan , and his work was full of explicitly autobiographical representations , most famously in " The Yankee Doodle Boy . " <p> Now singers and bands are expected to have composed their own material , and the Cohan stance is standard . Most blatantly , there is the song about the singer or singers : sometimes merely saying his , her , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ narrating . For some reason , the one that always comes to mind is the Monkees ' theme song , the one that starts , " Hey , hey , we 're the Monkees . " ( Surely Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were paying homage to those boys in " The Message " when they rapped , " Hey , we 're Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five . " A later rap ensemble kicked it up a notch and were n't paying homage to anybody in a song piquantly titled , " Wu-Tang Clan Ai n't Nuthing to **** Wit " ) . But there are many others . The late-seventies band Devo memorably chanted , " Are we not men ? / We are Devo ! " The Mamas and the Papas ' " Creeque Alley " is a musical memoir in the form of a shaggy-dog story : " John and Mitchy were getting kind of itchy / Just to leave the folk music behind / Zol and Denny workin ' for a penny / Tryin ' to get a fish on the line . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sang " The Ballad of John and Yoko , " just as Mott the Hoople sang " The Ballad of Mott the Hoople . " Grand Funk Railroad protested too much in " We 're an American Band , " and Jennifer Lopez recently used autobiography as spin control when she tried to convince her longtime fans that despite all the magazine covers and bling-bling , she was still " Jenny from the Block . " John Eddie has a painfully funny recent song about a special circle of hell for the singer-songwriter : the bar where a drunk loudly asks , " Who the Hell is John Eddie ? " ( The title of the song is the heckler 's command -- " Play Some Skynyrd . " ) The blustery " I Write the Songs " indulged in enough egotism to taint both the author ( Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys ) and the bellower of the highest-charting version ( Barry Manilow ) . Moving from the ridiculous to the sublime : It is n't surprising that thoughtful singer-songwriters like Neil Young , Joni Mitchell , Merle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about music 's significance to them , in , respectively , " From Hank to Hendrix , " " For Free , " " After I Sing My Songs , " and " Old . " <p> A subtler , off-center kind of introspection can be found in the alter-ego song or group of songs , presented in the voice of a performer who has something but not everything in common with the actual one : the Beatles ' " Sgt. Pepper 's Lonely Hearts Club Band , " Dire Straits ' " Sultans of Swing , " Eminem 's Slim Shady , David Bowie 's Ziggy Stardust , Billy Joel 's " Piano Man . " Glen Campbell has bookended his career with two such songs ( neither of which he wrote ) : the 1975 " Rhinestone Cowboy , " in which an unknown dreams of " getting cards and letters from people I do n't even know , " and the more recent " Mansion in Bronson , " in which the record company tells an aging country star , " You 're too out of shape @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small masterpiece in the subgenre is Randy Newman 's " Lonely at the Top , " whose singer , evidently a show-biz icon , boasts , " I 've been around the world / Had my pick of any girl . " Newman wrote this when he was a struggling songwriter and performer with no albums to his credit . <p> I actually prefer autobiographical moments to autobiographical songs . In " You Got ta Serve Somebody , " Dylan ( n Robert Zimmerman ) , normally unforthcoming to the point of invisibility , shockingly proclaims , " You may call me Bobby , you may call me Zimmy . " In " Tenth Avenue Freezeout , " Springsteen recalls " When they made that change uptown and the Big Man joined the band . " The Big Man : saxophonist and crowd favorite Clarence Clemons ; in concert , the line always gets a roar . James Taylor 's " Fire and Rain " talks about " Sweet dreams and flying machines . " Flying Machine : Taylor 's first band . A great moment in the Supremes ' @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ singer Diana Ross interrupts her romantic lament to wonder , " How can Mary tell me what to do / When she lost her love so true ? / And Flo , she do n't know / Cause the boy she loves is a Romeo . " Mary and Flo : fellow Supremes Mary Wilson and Florence Birdsong . One puzzling but cool thing about the aside is that it ( like the rest of the song ) was n't written by Ross but by Motown staff composers Holland-Dozier-Holland . In " Showbiz Kids , " Steely Dan throws in an unexpected self-reference in the manner of a Hitchcock cameo or a postage-stamp portrait-of-the-artist in a vast landscape : " They got the Steely Dan T-shirts . " <p> When it comes to singing about yourself , the hands-down champions are two musical forms that are rarely , if ever , associated with each other : country and hip-hop . They show up disproportionately in all these categories , in fact ; one reason is that they still prize the Tin Pan Alley values of word-play and wit . In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oral tradition , rap is partial to boasts about the rapper 's prowess in rhyming , loving , fighting , etc . Thus Run-DMC raps , " I 'm the king of rock , there ai n't none higher / Sucker MCs should call me sire . " In another number , Run-DMC gives its deejay , Jam Master Jay ( since deceased ) , his props : " J-A-Y are the letters of his name / Cuttin ' and scratchin ' are the aspects of his game , / So check out the Master as he cuts these jams / And look at us with the mikes in our hands . " <p> Early country performers tended to sing their hymns of love , memory , and heartbreak through generic personae , although Jimmie Rodgers had a song about himself called " Jimmie the Kid " and Ernest Tubb one called " When I First Began to Sing , " which cited Rodgers as an influence . The greatest country singer was Hank Williams . The power of his lyrics lay in their seemingly complete emotional sincerity ; it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1953 , he was on the charts with a song called " I 'll Never Get Out of This World Alive . " But he made few , if any , direct references to himself -- ironic , considering how obsessively he has been invoked by others . Modern country autobiography began in 1971 , when Johnny Cash recorded " The Man in Black , " which explained his wardrobe ( " I wear it for the thousands who have died , / Believin ' that the Lord was on their side , " among other reasons ) , and Loretta Lynn recorded " Coal Miner 's Daughter , " which told the story of Loretta Lynn 's life . Both songs gave their creators indelible nicknames -- and nicknames are very , very big in country . <p> The floodgates opened with the " outlaw country " movement a couple of years later , which took as its text Kitty Wells 's old number " The Life They Live in Songs . " Willie " Red-Headed Stranger " Nelson and Waylon " Hoss " Jennings , in particular , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . Nelson spun picaresque yarns like " On the Road Again , " " Me and Paul , " and " Devil in a Sleeping Bag " and angrily told greedy record-company executives to " Write Your Own Songs " ; Jennings asked rhetorically , " Do n't You Think This Outlaw Bit 's Done Got Out of Hand ? " and " Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way ? " <p> The laureate of country memoir is Hank Williams Jr. , also known as Bocephus , who was just three years old when his father died . As a child , he went on the road singing Hank Williams songs , in an uncanny imitation of Hank Williams 's voice . The experience was unenviable , but it provided young Bocephus with a great theme . In 1966 , when Hank Jr . was seventeen , he wrote and recorded " Standing in the Shadows " : " I know I 'm not great , and some say I imitate .... It 's hard when you 're standing in the shadows of a very famous man . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and in the late 1970s and early ' 80s issued a series of compelling songs -- including " The Conversation , " " Living Proof , " and " Whisky Bent and Hellbound " -- about trying to live up to his father 's musical standards and at the time escape the legacy of a self-destructive life and early death . His masterpiece , I would say , is " Family Tradition , " where the refrain alternates between a lament and a sort of rueful and rollicking celebration : " Lord , I have loved some ladies and I have loved Jim Beam / And they both tried to kill me in 1973. / When that doctor asked me , / ' Son how did you get in this condition ? ' / I said , ' Hey sawbones , I 'm just carrying on / An ole family tradition . ' " <p> The autobiographical expectation in country has become sufficiently entrenched as to spawn ghostwriters . That is , everyone in Nashville knows that George " Possum " Jones does n't write his own songs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he is expected to sing about himself . Therefore , other writers regularly supply him with numbers that allow him to poke fun at his own image , like " I Do n't Need Your Rocking Chair " and " ( They Call Me ) No-Show Jones . " I have no problem with that , but the self-mythologizing of minor figures , like David Allen Coe in " Waylon , Willie , and Me , " can get wearing . <p> " Waylon , Willie , and Me " : The song is also an example of the second broad category , musical intertextuality , where the references are to other compositions and performers . Unavoidable examples are Don McLean 's " American Pie " and Rick Nelson 's " Garden Party , " rather self-satisfied allegories that all but demand crib sheets to parse the references . ( In " American Pie , " " the King " is Elvis and " the Jester " is Dylan -- but who 's " the Queen " ? ) By contrast , a single well-placed musical allusion can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : see Mary Chapin Carpenter 's " there ai n't no cure for my blues today / Except when the paper says Beausoleil is coming to town " ; Springsteen 's " Roy Orbison sang for the lonely " ; Stephen Bishop 's " put on Sinatra and start to cry " ; Nirvana 's " Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally " ; Steely Dan 's " Hey Nineteen " ( " that 's ' Retha Franklin / She do n't remember the Queen of Soul " ) ; Calexico 's song " Not Even Stevie Nicks " ; the Police 's line " An Otis Redding record , it 's all I own , " and Davis Daniel 's " She went to William and Mary , / I went to Haggard and Jones . " <p> Earlier , I mentioned some early Tin Pan Alley " response " songs , and that continuing tradition definitely supplies an intertextual frisson . In 1954 , an R &; B singer named Hank Ballard put out a suggestive record , full of double entendres @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It was so successful that it crossed over to the pop charts , and Ballard and his band , the Midnighters , followed it up with " Annie Had a Baby ( Ca n't Work No More ) , " " Annie 's Aunt Fannie , " and " Henry 's Got Flat Feet ( Ca n't Dance No More ) . " Others got into the act as well , most notably Etta James , in " Roll with Me , Henry . " ( A white singer , Georgia Gibbs , released a sanitized version , " Dance with Me , Henry . " ) That kind of call-and-response is a sign of vitality and attentiveness in the art form . <p> It can be even more invigorating when song number two begs to differ with song number one . Hank Thompson 's reflexive 1951 " The Wild Side of Life " starts with the lament that since the singer 's wife has abandoned him , he must give her his message " in the words of this song . " And the message is , " The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ To the places where the wine and liquor flows . " Kitty Wells 's response came swiftly , and constituted a rousing pre-feminism feminist statement : " As I sit here tonight , the jukebox playing / That old song about the wild , wild side of life . / As I listen to the words you are saying , / It brings memories when I was a trusting wife . / It was n't God who made honky-tonk angels / As you say in the words of your song . " UTFO 's early rap song " Roxanne , Roxanne " inspired some twenty-five responses , including two by singers who adopted the name of the girl in the song and told her side of the story : Roxanne Shante and the Real Roxanne . Merle Haggard 's " Okie from Muskogee " spawned Big Brother and the Holding Company 's " I 'll Fix Your Flat Tire , Merle " and " Up Against the Wall , Redneck Mother , " written by Ray Wylie Hubbard and performed by Jerry Jeff Walker . And who can forget Lynyrd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I hope Neil Young will remember / Southern man do n't need him around anyhow " ? <p> As this suggests , response songs can move beyond disagreement to assault and battery . In a sour mood , John Lennon asked Paul McCartney , " How Do You Sleep ? " ( " The freaks was right when they said you was dead . " ) Richard Thompson 's " I Agree with Pat Metheny " refers to Metheny 's outburst against saxophonist Kenny G 's digitized " duet " with Louis Armstrong : " A meeting of the minds , how nice / Like Einstein and Sporty Spice . " Joan Baez got Dylan -- " the unwashed phenomenon , the original vagabond " -- inmost famously in " Diamonds and Rust , " but stuck the knife in a little deeper in " Oh Brother , " which begins " You 've got eyes like Jesus / But you speak with a viper 's tongue . " They Might Be Giants ' catty " Rhythm Section Want Ad " asks " Do you sing like Olive Oyl on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . " John Hiatt 's " Memphis in the Morning , " a rare anti-country-music song , correctly observes , " I do n't think Ronnie Milsap 's ever going to record this song . " <p> The genre that thrives on insults -- also known as " beefs " -- is , of course , rap , where it 's understood that the more derisively a performer can put down a competitor , the more decisively he can elevate himself . The still-unsolved murders of the feuding Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G . several years ago put a bit of a damper on all-out beefing , but it has returned in a stylized and presumably stage-managed form , reminiscent of show-business rows like the one between Jack Benny and Fred Allen . So , Nelly on KRS-One : " You the first old man should get a rapper 's pension / No hits since the cordless mic invention . " Nas 's " Ether " asked Jay-Z , " How much of Biggie 's rhymes is gon na come out your fat lips ? " ; Jay-Z responded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affair with the mother of Nas 's daughter . Eazy-E took on a major hip-hop figure with " All of a sudden Dr. Dre is a g-thing / But on his old album covers , he was a she-thing . " ( " G " is short for gangsta . ) Not exactly Oscar Wilde , but it works for me . <p> Country music , by contrast , favors an intertextuality of admiration , most visibly in the tribute song . To be sure , country has no monopoly on this sometimes moving , sometimes schmaltzy , sometimes crass genre . Ronnie McDowell recorded " The King Is Gone " the day after Elvis Presley 's death , and it 's been followed by 202 more Elvis tributes , according to New York deejay Peter Bochan , who lists them on his Web site ( http : **32;1014;TOOLONG ) . If there 's a " Rock and Roll Heaven , " the Righteous Brothers memorably noted , " you know they 've got a hell of a band . " George Harrison sang about John Lennon in " All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ memorialized George in " Never Without You . " The Commodores ' " Night Shift " honors the estimable lineup of fallen soul singers , and Tupac Shakur has been mourned in Master P 's " Is There a Heaven 4 a Gangsta ? , " Richie Rich 's " Do G 's Go to Heaven ? , " and Naughty By Nature 's " Mourn Till I Join Ya , " which avers , " Nigga I miss ya this thug gon na miss ya till I 'm witcha . " <p> But this is as nothing compared with country tribute songs . The tradition started in 1933 , with the death of the Singing Brakeman , Jimmie Rodgers , at the age of thirty-five . Just days later , " When Jimmie Rodgers Said Goodbye " was issued , followed by " The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home , " " The Life of Jimmie Rodgers , " " The Passing of Jimmie Rodgers , " and many others . Hank Williams 's death twenty years later , at the age of twenty-nine , was followed by a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Metress , sixteen songs honoring Williams were released in 1953 alone , and there has been no sign of a letup . A German devotee of American country music lists ninety-six Williams tribute songs on his Web site ( http : //www.haukestruebing.com ) , including " Hank Williams Meets Jimmie Rodgers , " " Hank Williams Sings the Blues No More , " " Please Do n't Let the Name ' Hank ' Die , " " Everybody Wants to Be Hank Williams , " Jerry Jeff Walker 's " I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight , " and Johnny Cash 's " The Night Hank Williams Came to Town . " <p> Country songwriters love tribute songs so much that they even write them to singers who are still alive , as in David Allan Coe 's " Hank Williams Jr , " ; Toby Keith 's " I 'll Never Smoke Weed with Willie Again " ; Tim McGraw 's " Give It to Me Strait " ; Chris Wall 's " An Outlaw 's Blues , " about Waylon Jennings ; Becky Hollis 's " Jones on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 's Why I Sing This Way " ( the reason , he explains , is " Mama used to whip me with a George Jones album " ) . Before his death in September 2003 , Johnny Cash was the subject of " ( In the Mood for ) Johnny Cash , " " Hooked on Johnny Cash , " " Walking Talking Johnny Cash Blues , " Billy Joe Shaver 's " That 's Why the Man in Black Sings the Blues , " and his own daughter Roseanne 's lovely " My Old Man . " <p> If you sing a song of a certain kind , if your parents sang that song , and if you expect that your children will sing it as well , then you 're not likely to attempt to characterize , explain , or defend it in a song . But sometimes a musical genre is more contentious . Listeners and performers think about and define themselves by it . That the blues is a highly self-conscious genre can be grasped merely from the fact that roughly half of blues songs contain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rock and roll were lyrically proclaimed seemingly from the moment of its birth , the constant invocation of " rock " and " rock and roll " being only partly explained by the terms ' sexual innuendo . Bill Haley and the Comets asked us to " Rock Around the Clock " ; Chuck Berry wrote a song ( covered by the Beatles ) called , simply , " Rock and Roll Music " and in another commanded , " Hail , hail rock and roll " ; Danny and the Juniors proclaimed " Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay . " Meanwhile , rearguard singers vocally demurred , as Nat King Cole in " Mr. Cole Wo n't Rock and Roll , " which regretfully observed , " When Tin Pan Alley serenades a beauty / Do they sing of Rose Marie or Sweet Lorraine ? / No , they dedicate a hymn to Tutti Frutti , / Who 's as tender as a dame from Mickey Spillane . " The Byrds ' " So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star " was a biographical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1974 " It 's Only Rock and Roll ( But I Like It ) " was appropriate , since the battle had long been won , although heavy-metal anthems of the late ' 70s and early ' 80s , such as AC/DC 's " Let There Be Rock , " protested excessively in invoking rock ( never rock and roll ) as a near-holy pursuit . And , needless to say , there will never be an end to boring songs about life on the road . <p> When it comes to meta-music , yet again , country is king . There is a curious history here . As Richard A. Peterson explains in his 1997 book Creating Country Music , the word country itself was an invention of the early 1950s . The music had been called , variously , " western , " " hillbilly , " and " folk " ; to consolidate the terms and , Peterson shows , to avoid the left-wing associations with the last ( Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson performed folk music , after all ) , the Nashville powers that be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ permanent success , largely , I would say , because it brilliantly combined a declaration of the rural origin of the music with a subliminal patriotic assertion : that the music was of , about , and for this country . <p> Whatever the reasons , the country song about country music has become legion . A partial , alphabetical list , including only ones that put the magic word in the title : <p> " Back When Country Was Ugly " ; " Country Enough " ; " Country In My Genes " ; " Country Music Is Here to Stay " ; " Country My Ass " ; " Country Till I Die " ; " Country Was the Song " ; " A Damn Good Country Song " ; " Do n't Think You 're Too Good for Country Music " ; " Every Kind of Music But Country " ; " A Few Old Country Boys " ; " Gone Country " ; " Heart of a Country Song " ; " Here 's to Country Music " ; " Hit Country Song " ; " @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " If That Ai n't Country " ; " If There Was No Country Music " ; " I 'm Country " ; " I 'm That Country " ; " A Jukebox with a Country Song " ; " Kindly Keep It Country " ; " My Life Would Make a Damn Good Country Song " ; " Now That 's Country " ; " The Perfect Country Song " ; " Put Some Drive In Your Country " ; " A Sad Country Song " ; " Take Me Back to the Country " ; " Too Country " ; " Too Rock for Country " ; " Welcome to the Country Music Hall of Fame " ; and " You 're Looking at Country . " <p> There are three broad historical categories . The first were self-congratulatory : songs about how wonderful Jimmie , Hank , and Lefty were ; how the singer is following in their path ; how there 's nothing like a country song to express joy or heartbreak . The second , more contentious and dating from the 1970s , recognized that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " country music . " Southern rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers had claimed a kinship with country , to the dismay of some venerable Nashville personages , and the outlaws -- Hoss , Willie , Bocephus , the Man in Black , and Kris Kristofferson -- countered with pleas for a more inclusive definition . One of Hank Jr . ' s several entries in this category , " Why Do n't You Leave Them Boys Alone ? " ( cowritten with Tanya Tucker ) , was noteworthy because he was joined on it not only by Waylon Jennings but also by one of the old guard , Ernest Tubb . <p> The third , still-current type is a lament , summed up in the lyrics of the Dixie Chicks ' recent hit " Long Time Gone " : " the music ai n't got no soul / Now they sound tired but they do n't sound Haggard / They 've got money but they do n't have Cash . / They got Junior but they do n't have Hank . " Or , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ n't Country . " The villains of these pieces are n't rock bands but the likes of Billy Ray Cyrus , Garth Brooks , Faith Hill , and Shania Twain : the cowboy-hatted , midriff-baring Barbie and Ken dolls whose bland and innocuous sounds push real country artists off the so-called country stations . Performers like Tritt , Alan Jackson , Vince Gill , and Marty Stuart include at least one such critique on every CD they release . Stuart is the most self-consciously militant of this group . His most recent recording is called Country Music , which is a little like Jonathan Franzen putting out a novel called Contemporary Fiction . <p> Have I justified my obsession ? If not , it 's probably too late to defend it . But I will say that as fatuous , lame , inauthentic , and cheesy as popular music often is , it manages to retain a gravity not often found in other arts , low or high . The way people respond to an action movie , a prime-time soap opera , or a romance novel can be fairly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some other article of bad faith . Music 's logic is at its base emotional and thus not as easily assailed . More elevated works -- say , an off-off-Broadway play in which the actors start commenting on the previous scene , or a contemporary painting that , in its use of color or texture , is " about " painting -- have a contrary problem : they are trees falling in , if not a forest , then a very sparsely populated region . In pop music , good or bad , there is usually the sense that something is at stake . As a result , it demands our attention . Bob Dylan is no Shakespeare , but , like Shakespeare , he appears to be putting a great deal on the line . In the song " Sara , " Dylan sings of " staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel , / Writing ' Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands ' for you . " That puts me , for one , in mind of Prospero . At one point near the end of Neil Young @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all the parts are sung by Young , the character " Grampa " erupts with a complaint : " That guy just keeps singin ' ! / Can somebody shut him up ? / I do n't know for the life of me / where he comes up with that stuff . " For my money , that 's a moment of comic and cosmic humility that ranks up there with " The Tale of Sir Thopas . " <p> By Ben Yagoda <p> <p> Ben Yagoda is Professor of English at the University of Delaware . He is the author of About Town : The New Yorker and the World It Made and The Sound on the Page : Style and Voice in Writing , forthcoming this month from HarperResource . He contributed " The Years with Kolatch " to the SCHOLAR 's Autumn 2002 issue . <p>

@@4000441 There seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery : bigness . It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation . Wherever something is wrong , something is too big . -- Leopold Kohr , The Breakdown of Nations <p> <p> To undergraduates universities are landlords , to scholars they are multidisciplinary think tanks , to entrepreneurs they are applied research parks , to economic development officials they are economic growth centers , and to gung-ho alumni they are sponsors of professional football and basketball teams disguised as college teams . Is it any wonder that the cost of higher education is out of control and that the mission of most universities appears to be garbled and inconsistent ? American universities have tried unsuccessfully to be all things to all people . In so doing they find themselves in too many unrelated and disconnected businesses . They have become academic behemoths . <p> During higher education 's " roaring eighties " we said no to almost no one . By the nineties , we had become virtually unmanageable . This is a far cry from the fifties and sixties when universities were viewed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ liberals as agents of social change , and by taxpayers as avenues of social mobility . <p> Overspecialization and functional isolation are two reasons college costs consistently outpace inflation . Each department or professional school is an island unto itself , cooperating with no one . Promotions and faculty salaries are closely linked to publications within one 's narrowly defined discipline . Departments compete for students and resources . Research and writing are rewarded ; teaching is not . <p> It is not uncommon for a university 's business school , divinity school , law school , engineering school , and medical school each to have its own separate library . The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University has its own dining hall , computer center , audiovisual center , placement service , alumni office , and luxury hotel for executive education programs . <p> The cost of high-tech research equipment soared in the 1970s and 1980s -- particularly in engineering , physical science , and medicine . The cost of research in such fields as particle physics and molecular biology is prohibitively expensive . But is all of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ undergraduates with a well-rounded liberal arts education ? We think not . <p> Undergraduate education and state-of-the-art research are two quite different businesses . Does it make sense to try to combine them under one umbrella called a university ? Middlebury College is an excellent undergraduate educational institution . MIT , Caltech , and the Stanford Research Institute are world-class research institutes . Should not Amherst , Middlebury , Mount Holyoke , Vassar , and Williams specialize in undergraduate teaching , and MIT , Caltech , and Carnegie Mellon in basic and applied research ? The necessary skills for successful research grantsmanship are not the same skills required to be a good undergraduate teacher . Why do so many academics pretend otherwise ? <p> The prevailing attitude among most state universities , caught in the competition for tax dollars since World War II , has been " bigger makes better . " Now we find ourselves burdened with huge institutions . There is a serious need for downsizing . There are also , we believe , far too many universities in the United States . Some are so tiny that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . Others are so large that they are fundamentally unmanageable . The state of North Carolina , for example -- a relatively poor state with a population of 6.8 million -- has no fewer than fifteen state universities plus another seven private universities . The state also has four medical schools -- two public and two private . On the other hand , tiny Vermont sensibly has only one state university . <p> The proliferation of universities with the inherent duplication of programs and infrastructure has contributed significantly to the skyrocketing cost of higher education . America needs not more universities but more small undergraduate colleges . But we have acted as if sheer size makes no difference when it comes to achieving the mission of higher education . <p> Countering the trend toward giantism in universities is well-managed Oklahoma City University with only 4,660 students , of which 2,400 are undergraduates . Although OCU 's strong international programs attract students from 71 different countries , 75 percent of OCU 's undergraduates -- including many American Indians -- are from Oklahoma . OCU produces a high-quality product , at a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ university campuses . The administrators of OCU seem to know what business they are in and have created an environment with a strong sense of community between faculty and students . <p> Just as there are too many small universities whose quest for university status has distracted them from the task of undergraduate education , there are also too many universities that have become inefficient , dehumanized , bureaucratic agglomerations of unrelated businesses . Undergraduate , professional , graduate , and adult education ; housing ; food service ; dental and health care services ; book publishing ; agricultural extension services ; management consulting ; public service ; and semiprofessional athletics are among the plethora of unrelated businesses in which large universities find themselves . <p> With 52,183 students , 38,958 of whom are undergraduates , the Columbus campus of Ohio State University , the largest university in the United States , more closely resembles a small city than an academic community . It is not alone : Mega-Universities PREFORMATTED TABLE <p> Throughout the 1960s , many universities grew haphazardly , without any well-defined sense of direction . New programs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and new sources of government funding . Not unlike the programs of the federal government , obsolete academic programs are seldom allowed to die . Instead , they continue indefinitely , long after their original rationale has faded . Restructuring Higher Education <p> We believe that what is called for in higher education is nothing less than a complete restructuring of universities , including the way they are organized , the way undergraduates are taught , and the substance of the curriculum . The ultimate aim of restructuring is to improve the quality of undergraduate education , increase its value , and reduce its costs -- to create a community of scholars and teachers that will enhance students ' critical thinking skills and their search for meaning . <p> While we know that smallness alone is no guarantee of a school 's educational effectiveness , we do believe that a large size is a mostly negative factor in achieving the goals of higher education . Universities are not immune to the law of decreasing returns with regard to increased size . We would estimate the optimum-size undergraduate learning environment to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thousand students subdivided into English-style residential colleges of around three hundred students each . Large state universities , with their dehumanizing high-rise dormitories , legions of graduate teaching assistants , and tens of thousands of undergraduates are antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge , meaning , and community . There are those who respond , " But do n't many students at larger schools do quite well on standardized tests like the GRE or the LSAT ? " Such arguments fail to move us . The quantification and standardization of education , represented in such tests , is precisely what we are arguing against . Even relatively small universities like Duke , with 6,130 undergraduates , and the University of Vermont , with 7,925 , are difficult to control . Viable undergraduate learning communities at the mega-universities described previously are an almost impossible dream . <p> What we are proposing is downsizing colleges and universities to a more reasonable scale and eventually decoupling undergraduate education from the largest of them . Growth at universities with more than five thousand undergraduates should be brought to a halt . Proposals for new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , large universities should either completely spin off their undergraduate programs or significantly decentralize them in a manner consistent with the residential college mode . Too many of our universities resemble General Motors of the fifties . While American business has radically transformed the World War II-induced behemoths churning out haphazardly built products , American higher education is still saddled with huge institutional relics that produce assembly-line graduates . American higher education must show some of the same creativity and courage that we have seen recently in much of American business . Downsizing is the order of the day . <p> The three best-known American examples of the residential college systems are Harvard , Princeton , and Yale . Yale 's twelve residential colleges are self-sufficient communities within Yale College , each with its own dining hall , library , courtyard , seminar rooms , practice rooms , and numerous other facilities , from darkrooms to printing presses , from game rooms to saunas . At the end of their first year , Harvard students are assigned to a house in which they will live for the remainder of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ senior tutor or dean , a tutorial staff , a library , and dining facilities . All houses are coeducational , and much of the social , athletic , extracurricular , and academic life at Harvard centers on the house . At Princeton all freshmen and sophomores live and dine in one of five residential colleges . A small number of juniors and seniors live and eat in the residential colleges , but most live in the upperclass dorms , and more than half dine in Princeton 's well-known independent eating clubs . <p> We are not suggesting that the residential college system , as practiced by the aforementioned universities , is a panacea . We know that the residential college experiments at the University of Virginia and at Princeton have had their critics . Yet we do defend the notion that size is an important issue . Even with the residential college system , size mitigates against the benefits of residential colleges when , as is the case at Harvard , there are 6,672 undergraduates dominated by 11,601 graduate students and professional students . <p> In 1994 , tiny @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to education and its high tuition , sent shock waves through the American higher education establishment when it announced its plans to implement one of the most radical college restructuring schemes ever conceived . The reconfiguration called for faculty and staff reductions , the abolition of tenure , the elimination of traditional academic departments , a 10 percent cut in tuition and fees , the adoption of an alternative contractual system for faculty , and the establishment of a revolving venture-capital fund to support innovative new faculty ideas . <p> All of this was in response to declining enrollments , a $1 million deficit , serious erosion of academic standards , poor faculty morale , and organizational chaos . Bennington was not only out of control , it was in a death spiral . But to its credit , Bennington was small enough and flexible enough to reinvent itself . Most large colleges and universities are not . <p> Over the long term , during the next decade , we are proposing that large universities withdraw from the undergraduate teaching business . The university of the future would consist of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ research institutions , adult education , and professional outreach services . State universities would provide support services to a network of colleges not located on the central university campus , including administrative and financial services , library services , and central computing facilities , as well as specialized courses for advanced undergraduates . Seniors in satellite colleges affiliated with the university might be allowed to take a limited number of graduate courses at the university . <p> Moreover , we encourage those who charge that these proposals would be extravagantly expensive to be honest about the extravagance , the waste , and the redundancy present in the large educational institutions . There are functions of the university , particularly those that thrive on communication , interaction , and cooperation , where costs increase and efficiency declines as the bureaucracy grows . Downsizing is not a call to withdraw from the commitment to educate the largest possible number of qualified students , but rather an attempt to give all of our students the best possible education by the most efficient means . <p> To finance the shift toward decentralized liberal arts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and graduate programs . For many states -- not including California , New York , and Texas -- there is little need for multiple , state-supported medical schools , law schools , and engineering schools . Many underfinanced , undersubscribed universities should be downsized back to colleges . Having experienced a couple of decades during which numerous colleges and two-year institutions frantically moved toward pinning the name " university " upon themselves , we must now help these schools recover the dignity , the focus , and the efficiency that comes from reclaiming their identity as colleges dedicated to undergraduate education . <p> Not every state needs a dental school , a veterinary school , or state-of-the-art research institutions in nuclear physics and microbiology . The cold war is over and we do not need nearly so many nuclear physicists , mathematicians , chemists , and defense-related engineers . As taxpayers demand cutbacks in the defense budget , research universities are going to discover painfully how much of their intellectual activity has been dictated by the Pentagon . A preoccupation with short-run profitability and stock prices has prompted American companies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only is there less demand for Ph.D.s in basic science and engineering , but there is also less private and government funding available to support expensive high-tech research in these fields . Be well assured that if our faculties and administrators do not take this opportunity , they shall then be led through the humiliating process of having legislators and mere market pressures hack their schools to pieces , bit by bit . <p> Graduate education has always cost more than undergraduate education because of small class sizes and laboratory equipment requirements . Universities should become much more selective in choosing departments and fields in which to offer Ph.D . degrees . The manner in which some graduate departments continue to produce Ph.D.s in fields already oversupplied borders on the immoral . Those who would defend the mega-universities on the basis of their altruistic desire to provide the largest possible number of students with access to higher education ought honestly to examine how much potential undergraduate funding is siphoned off at these institutions by expensive , glamorous , but relatively unproductive graduate and professional programs . For too long undergraduate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the university for graduate and professional work . We want to reverse that process , inviting universities to see themselves as existing for and supportive of the task of undergraduate education . <p> Since professors in newly emerging liberal arts colleges will not be under the university publish-or-perish mandate , they can be expected to teach more -- perhaps as many as four or five courses per semester . <p> As universities begin downsizing and cutting back on their undergraduate programs , former undergraduate dormitories can either be transformed to graduate and professional dormitories or converted to apartment buildings or much-needed housing for the elderly . We see much educational value in colleges attempting to foster more interaction between the generations . <p> With modern telecommunications networks , universities may offer their satellite colleges televised courses on topics too specialized to be included in the curricula of most small colleges , such as Chinese , Japanese , advanced physics , and molecular biology . Universities might be seen as resource centers that offer support for strong undergraduate colleges , the strong undergraduate colleges being the basic units of American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather than as their norm to emulate . <p> Why should universities continue to support big-time football and basketball programs ? University stadiums and basketball field houses could be sold or rented to nearby professional teams . In downsizing , intercollegiate athletics would return to the scale on which it existed before World War II . Small colleges would compete among themselves for the pleasure of it , not to train professional athletes and hype alumni and state legislators . If athletic scholarships were continued , their educational usefulness , not simply their athletic value , would need to be demonstrated . <p> For decades , on many campuses , fraternities and sororities have provided a second-best alternative to the residential college system in America . In their fraternity or sorority , students found the sense of community they craved , but which the college or university failed to provide . Indeed , the very existence of the Greek system may at least partially explain why so few colleges and universities have adopted the English residential college plan . <p> Obviously , restructuring higher education will be a long and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just as multimillion-dollar industrial conglomerates have outlived their usefulness and have given way to more creative adaptations , so too will large mega-university degree factories . It is not by chance alone that small colleges such as Amherst , Dartmouth , Middlebury , Mount Holyoke , Smith , Vassar , Wellesley , and Williams command premium prices in the marketplace . They charge high tuition because they provide a high value-added product . <p> By attempting to be all things to all people , large-scale universities have allowed their most important business -- undergraduate education -- to be seriously eroded . For too long university trustees and state legislators have been biased toward professional schools and graduate education . It 's time to turn the situation around , to recover the centrality of undergraduate education . <p> By Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon <p> <p> Thomas H. Naylor is professor emeritus of economics , and William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel at Duke University . This piece is based on their recent book The Abandoned Generation : Rethinking Higher Education ( Eerdmans , 1995 ) . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Princeton , NJ 085402741 . <p>

@@4000541 The papers that comprise this symposium are adapted from remarks delivered on 31 May 2002 in Washington , D.C. , at the NAS 's tenth national conference titled " Higher Education and Democracy in Peace and War . " They reflect the intention of the conference organizers to approach the role of patriotism in higher education from differing perspectives . Introduction Gertrude Himmelfarb <p> " Is higher education compatible with patriotism ? " That question suggests a prior one : Is higher education , as we now know it , compatible with education-education , that is , as we once knew it , liberal education ? <p> About higher education as we now know it , I think the members of the National Association of Scholars have no illusions . Much has changed since 9/11 , for the good . But higher education , I regret to say , is not among them . It is no accident , as Marxists used to say , that some of our most eminent professors in our most prestigious institutions of higher education should have immediately , instinctively , responded to the Twin Towers attack by blaming and disparaging America . <p> @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ May 2002 at a university in this city , the capital of our nation-a university bearing the proud name of American University , should have counseled the graduating class : " Find out who you are , what you think , " Goldie Hawn told them . " Learn to listen to the sounds of your own heart .. Now is the time for you to go to the College of You " -by which she meant , the College of Me . I do n't know which is more absurd-that Goldie Hawn should have been chosen as the commencement speaker ( and , I presume the recipient of an honorary degree ) , or that she should have taken this occasion , and this time , to deliver that narcissistic message . <p> It was in 1965 that Lionel Trilling coined the phrase " adversary culture " to describe the attitude of the early modernist writers and artists toward the dominant bourgeois culture of their time . By the 1960s , that adversarial attitude had been democratized , so to speak , adopted by a large body of people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) who had no pretensions as writers or artists , but who assumed the attitudes associated with those callings . Since then , modernism has been succeeded by post-modernism , and the adversarial culture has become ever more pervasive and aggressive . The postmodernists have an " adversarial intention , " as Trilling would have said , not only toward bourgeois culture , but also toward those very ideas of mind and art , of truth and beauty , which had inspired the modernists and had been the warrant for their animus against the bourgeoisie . <p> Mind and art , truth and beauty-have they ever been entirely at home with such bourgeois values ( once classical " virtues , " perhaps , but now bourgeois " values " ) as family , community , country ? Does n't education , even higher education at its best-liberal education at its best-always tend to have a corrosive effect upon traditional beliefs and practices , loyalties and affections ? Are n't the Socrateses of all times always , in a sense , corrupting the youth ? <p> These are the perennial anxieties @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only brought them to the fore , made them more urgent than ever . Terror and war concentrate the mind wonderfully . Now is a good time to address these most elemental and critical issues . The Perennial Trashing of Bourgeois Democracy Walter Berns <p> I recall a faculty party at Cornell , the day after the annual Fourth of July celebration at the University football stadium . A wife of an economics professor , when asked if she had enjoyed the fireworks , replied , " Yes , but I could have done without all the flag-waving . " This reminded me of that familiar old song-familiar in some circles , at least- " If you do n't like my peaches , why do you shake my tree ? " <p> As in Ithaca , New York , so , apparently , in Ann Arbor , the home of the University of Michigan . The following statement comes from an article by a professor of English titled , " Dissing the Middle Class " : PREFORMATTED TABLE <p> This phenomenon is not peculiar to America , or to this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Orwell remarked much the same thing in England . " It is a strange fact , " he said , " but it is unquestionably true , that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King " than of stealing from a poor box . " 2 What accounts for this ? <p> Orwell attributed it to what he said was the fact that English intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality . As to that , he would of course know better than I , but it seems to me that shame alone does not explain it , certainly not shame as Hobbes defined it-as grief caused by " the discovery of some defect of ability . " It was surely not because they grieved for England that four of them-Guy Burgess , Donald MacLean , Kim Philby , and Anthony Blunt-spied for the Soviet Union . Orwell was probably closer to the truth when he said English intellectuals were Europeanized , taking " their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow . " Of course , a Paris @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why Moscow 's Marxism rather than Britain 's liberal democracy ? The answer has something to do with the fact that , especially after Adam Smith , liberal democracy became bourgeois democracy . <p> Just as it was in England that the idea of liberal democracy was born-I refer , of course , to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke-so it was in England that opposition to , or dissatisfaction with , liberal democracy was first manifested . By this , I do not mean the champions of the old or traditional political idea-monarchy or divine right ; Locke presumed to have disposed of that in the first of his Two Treatises of Government . I have in mind certain poets who defended what they called culture , and foresaw that John Locke 's , and after him , Adam Smith 's principles would lead to a commercial society , a society with no secure place for culture as they defined it , in a word , a " bourgeois " society . <p> Although not the first to use the term as it is now employed , the Scotsman Thomas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " as the body of arts and learning separate from the " work " or " business " of society . This definition has the merit of reflecting ( and that very clearly ) the problem that gave rise to the " culture " movement in the early nineteenth century . Carlyle was preceded by the poets Coleridge , Keats , and especially Wordsworth ( who , in his role as poet , saw himself as an " upholder of culture " in a world that had come to disdain it ) ; and by Shelley ( who said that " society could do without Locke , but not without Dante , Petrarch , Chaucer , Shakespeare " ) ; and by John Stuart Mill , for whom " culture " meant the qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity , or those aspects of our humanity that he foresaw might be absent in a liberal democracy . His famous essay , On Liberty , was written with this in mind . <p> But it was the great English historian and man of letters , Thomas Babington Macaulay , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem . I quote from his essay on Francis Bacon , where he compares the old philosophy with the new : PREFORMATTED TABLE <p> It was left to America to demonstrate the extent to which Macaulay and Bacon were right . <p> In 1776 , we laid the foundation of a regime that would secure our unalienable rights to life , liberty , and the pursuit of happiness . What we did with these rights was up to us ; more to the point , it was left to each of us to define the happiness he has the right to pursue . He might-we might-seek eternal salvation in another world , or , on the other hand , find happiness by acquiring the goods of this world . The government was to have nothing to do with this , other than to provide the conditions making it possible . This was to be done , in the one case , by guaranteeing liberty of conscience , and , in the other , by securing the property right-or as James Madison put it in the celebrated Tenth Federalist , by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . " He went so far as to say that this was " the first object " of government . <p> To repeat : guided by the new political philosophy , we established a commercial republic , peaceful and prosperous , and peaceful , in part , because it is prosperous . The Constitution secures our rights , including the right to be-or not to be-cultured . The choice is ours . We can spend our leisure time reading the Bible , Petrarch , Dante , Shakespere , and listening to the music of Bach , Mozart , Beethoven , or , on the other hand , by going to the movies , watching MTV or , thanks to modern science ( which is protected by the Constitution-see art . 1 , sec. 8 , cl. 8 ) gaping at internet porn . We enjoy the right to do the one or the other . As someone once said , the Constitution gives rights to vulgarity as well as to culture . <p> What began in nineteenth-century Britain as a serious critique of the new liberal democracy became , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost a way of life for some of our campus radicals . But if not American liberal democracy , with all its vulgarity , then what ? What 's the alternative ? Our intellectuals might , with reason , prefer Parisian crme caramel to American apple pie , but they can not , with reason , prefer Moscow 's Marxism to America 's liberal democracy , if only because Marxism suffered an un-Marxist-i.e. , unhistorical-death in Moscow . <p> Orwell , to get back to him , accused the intellectuals of his time of being unpolitical , of living in the world of ideas and having " little contact with physical reality . " The same might be said of some of ours : Martha Nussbaum , for example , a Harvard classicist but now a professor of law , as well as of ethics , philosophy , and divinity ( a veritable polymath ) , at the University of Chicago , and author of the lead essay in a book entitled , For Love of Country . It ought to be titled For Love of Nowhere . <p> Nussbaum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ calls cosmopolitan education , according to which students should be taught that " they are , above all , " citizens not of the United States , but , instead , " of a world of human beings . " Patriotism , as we ordinarily understand it , is a problem , she thinks , because it leads to parochialism , or " partisan loyalties . " " Only by making our fundamental allegiance to the world community of justice and reason do we avoid these dangers . " 4 But where is this world community to which we can pledge our allegiance ? The United Nations ? <p> In fact , of course , this country , however numerous its imperfections , is now , as Abraham Lincoln said it was in 1862 , " the last , best hope of earth . " It is this because the cause of justice , equality , tolerance , human rights , all the values Nussbaum favors , depends not on the so-called World Community-Iran , Iraq , Saudi Arabia , North Korea , China ? -but absolutely on this country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its enemies . She fails to appreciate this country and the fact that there is nothing narrowly partisan about its patriotism . <p> Lincoln made this clear in his eulogy on Henry Clay . Clay , he said , " loved his country partly because it was his own country , but mostly because it was a free country ; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement , prosperity and glory , because he saw in such , the advancement , prosperity and glory , of human liberty , human right and human nature . " ( Emphasis added . ) <p> In closing , I refer to an article by John Judis in The New Republic some time last year.5 He had attended a conference in New York City on " globalization and independent politics , " sponsored by the Nation Institute , George Soros 's Open Society Institute , the Carnegie Institute , Barnard College , Columbia University , and the City University of New York-in a word , a conference of academics . As one might expect in such a gathering , the speakers accused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , generally , a place where no decent person would choose to live . Among the speakers was a professor of politics at one or another branch of the University of California , who said the " two-party system is a sanctuary for middle-class , white-skin that is , bourgeois privilege . " Not to be outdone , a female member of the audience repeatedly complained of " brown tap water . " <p> Judis said he had intended to stay for Ralph Nader 's luncheon address , but , instead , packed his suitcase , headed for Penn Station , and caught the first train back to his quiet home in the Washington suburbs where , he said , people think " white-skin privilege " is a kind of hand cream , and , when faced with " brown tap water , " call the plumber . And also , I would add , where they love this country and , when necessary , are prepared to take up arms in its defense . <p>

@@4000641 Quaesivit arcana poli videt dei . ( " He sought the secret of the Pole but found the hidden face of God . " ) -- inscription , Scott Polar Institute , Cambridge <p> <p> Everyone has an Antarctic . -- Thomas Pynchon , V. <p> <p> As a child I was home-schooled on an old schooner in various anchorages along the Gulf Coast of Florida . In a corner of our paneled dark mahogany main cabin sat a globe that turned reluctantly on a rusty metal stand . Rubbing my fingers along the buckled seams of the pasted-on sections of world map , I brooded over the shapes of the continents and the way they seemed to match each other like pieces of a giant puzzle . Florida 's jagged , concave inner curve , if you swept assorted West Indies island bits and pieces along with it , locked boldly onto the north rim of South America , whose eastern edge , like any good jigsaw piece , snapped into place under the jutting bulge of West Africa . Joining the land masses in my head produced in me a pleasure too intense to put into words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continents had united in a single Gondwanaland . <p> I was precociously anticipating , in the early 1950s , the rehabilitation of a then-discredited theory . Continental drift is one of those curious instances where the techniques of empirical science converge with a long-standing human tendency to project inner psychological contents -- images of wholeness , and ultimately of the self -- onto the physical contours of our planet . That this identification is an ancient one in Western culture , and that it continues to flourish long past its allotted historical moment , is the subject of this essay . <p> Representations of planet Earth as a topos of the human psyche derive from the pre-Enlightenment cosmological framework of sympathetic correspondences in which hierarchies of beings in an animate cosmos were believed to function equivalently : the heavens are mirrored , great to small , in the human body and ( especially once its roundness was established ) in Earth itself . Microcosm and macrocosm converge in the rotundum , the spherical container -- cosmos , globe , and human soul . Renaissance natural philosophers drew their notions directly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said Plato in the Timaeus , is a perfect living animal , feeding on its own waste , with no need of eyes or ears since there is nothing outside to see or hear , that also happens to possess the perfect form : " a sphere , without organs or limbs , rotating on its axis . " The Republic presents the cosmos as eight hollow concentric spheres set inside each other like " nested bowls " with Earth at the center . The celestial axis holds the Earth still while the three Fates at the North Pole -- apex of the Earth and its interface with the celestial axis and heaven -- wheel the spheres and their attached fixed stars around it . Here Plato also describes " openings in the sky " where souls depart after death and " openings in the earth " where they return to be reborn , later identified by the Neoplatonist Porphyry as the northernmost and southernmost points of the zodiac , or the apex and nadir of the heavens . <p> Though the idea of a round Earth would be abandoned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ retained the concept of concentric circles to describe the relationship between our terrestrial regions and the heavens . Meanwhile the Platonic rotundum endured in Western consciousness in other forms . The Hellenistic sciences of the animate cosmos , alchemy and astrology , were preserved by Arab alchemists and widely disseminated in Europe after the twelfth century C.E. Through their experiments in transmuting " living " metals , the Christian and Muslim alchemists of Europe and the Middle East undertook the investigation of their own souls as well as their outer-world materials ; the steps of the Great Work that changed lead to gold , or the prima materia to the lapis or Philosopher 's Stone , were thought to work a similar effect on the experimenter 's psyche by creating a mystic unio between spirit and matter , a conjunction of the macrocosmic and microcosmic on a single plane of existence . This dual transformation occurred , not coincidentally , within yet another perfect sphere -- the alchemist 's crucible , that oval Vase of Hermes , the egg or vessel that was , by sympathetic connection , the heavenly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Copernican revolution and the new empirical sciences converted cosmic forces to telluric ones , the focus of attention shifted downward from the celestial and ethereal spheres to the newly valorized elemental sphere , and Earth became the important level in the geocosmic hierarchy . The physical features and sacral nature of the celestial spheres were increasingly downloaded , as it were , onto the orbis Terrarum ( Fig. 1 ) . As all the classical attributes of the cosmic spheres -- equator , tropics , and poles -- were transferred directly to the Earth , ontology became , in a very , literal way , geology . Ironically , even as the new sciences put the notion of an animate universe under active attack , the old guard found it no strain at all to fit a spherical Earth into the resonating symbolic framework of Pythagoras , Plato , and Ptolemy . For seventeenth-century alchemists -- unregenerate Neoplatonists still " comprehending , " in Boberr Flood 's words of a previous century , " the true core of natural bodies , " not just the puny " quantitative shadows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet another level of correspondence in the hierarchy of Hermetic vessels ( Fig. 2 ) . <p> Nonalchemists proved equally adept in pouring the old wine into new glasses . Just as the pole star was thought by the ancients to mark a hole in the heavens , the earthly poles were now believed to mark holes in the planet . In his Mundus subterraneus ( 1664 ) , the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher described ocean currents as subterranean waters rushing out of an enormous vortex at the South Pole to converge in a giant whirlpool that sucked them back under in a second hole at the North Pole ( Fig. 3 ) . In 1692 , the astronomer Edmund Halley advanced the theory that the Earth is composed of a series of inner concentric spheres capable of sustaining life . The most fascinating document of the rapidly expiring Platonic natural philosophy of this era , however , is Thomas Burnet 's Telluris sacra theoria ( 1689 ) , revised and expanded in an English version , The Sacred Theory of the Earth ( 1690/91 ) . Burnet , master of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and John Tillotson , presented his explanation of the divine plan as manifested in the natural laws of Earth 's physical development . Regarded by its author as a devout work of " Christian geology " but by others as highly heretical , The Sacred Theory represents a last-ditch effort to bridge the widening gap between the old and new sciences . <p> Carrying through a tradition of medieval Christian Neoplatonism out of Pythagoreanism , Burner describes Earth as a " Mundane Egg , " with the shell the Earth 's ernst and its interior the yolk . He posits an historical sequence of three Earths : first , out of Chaos , an original Edenic orb that was a fixed star , a Platonic rotundum of unblemished smoothness and regularity ; then the present " broken Globe " whose continents , crevices , mountains and other irregularities are a consequence of its humanlike Fall ( a sixteen-hundred-year process of geological " moral degeneration " in which a flood erupted from waters already lying within the hollow Earth ) ; and finally a third millennial Earth , restored to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the resurrected righteous will rule for a thousand years until , after a final epic fire , the planet will metamorphose once again into a fixed star . <p> It is alchemy as implicit subtext , however , that rules the metaphorical structure of The Sacred Theory . In the story of Burnet 's planet , whose rivers flow like arterial blood and whose fissures embody moral decay , we see geological , cultural , and spiritual transmutations nostalgically coincide . The cyclic births and deaths of Burnet 's first and second Earth are virtually identical with the transmutation process , and the Earth itself makes an ideal crucible . The perfection of this Edenic Earth is ruptured by a Kircherian " Great Abysse " near the Pole that unleashes subterranean waters onto the Earth 's surface in an alchemical dissolutio or Flood to produce the split-apart land masses of its present fallen state ( Fig. 4 ) . After purging in a " Refiner 's fire , " Earth will be transmuted by a coniunctio of earthly and divine into its ultimate lapis status as a fixed star . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vision of planet Earth also functions as a kind of sacred theory of the psyche . Within the individual human , the apocalyptic sequence occurs as a profound interior transformation of the personality . Much like the tree-cum-Cross protagonist of the Old English Dream of the Rood , Earth is a character whose progress we follow in a bildungsroman narrative of high adventure . Its fall from rotundum to " mighty Ruine " mirrors the human misfortune , its continental drift the emergence of the specific personal topography of character that spoils the perfect regularity of the undifferentiated prelapsarian soul . Both self and globe will regain their perfection after the Resurrection . Winding up his story , Burnet bids an affectionate goodbye , as to a familiar figure : " There we leave Earth ; Having conducted it for the space of Seven Thousand Years , through various changes from a dark Chaos to a bright Star . " <p> The intertwined apocalyptic destiny of self and globe , as we will see , is a theme Burnet 's literary heirs in the twentieth century will often return to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Burnet as a redactor of the old science was already a marginal figure . From the next century 's perspective , Erasmus Darwin 's syncretic conceits in The Botanic Garden ( 1791 ) -- his millennial vision , for example , of " Nymphs " towing icebergs to the equator to equalize the climates , thereby allowing Earth to return to its Edenic state -- would seem even quainter . For eighteenth-century Westerners , alchemy and the sympathetic identifications had been increasingly exiled to the realm of ornamental metaphor and -- for wits like Pope -- outright satire . Though Neoplatonic metaphors continued to exert a strong influence on the new empiricists and vestiges of the old Naturphilosophie would be revived by Goethe , Humboldt , and others well into the nineteenth century , after the Renaissance " the means of internalizing the cosmos , " as Ernest Tuveson has said , would be " by the aesthetic " rather than natural science . We must look to literary , not scientific , descendants of Fluddian natural philosophy for the continuing identification of self with globe and cosmos . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ literary genre of mystical geography out of the same mixture of Christian and classical sources drawn on by the old sciences . From Dante to John Bunyan , the quest literature of Christianity had always boasted authors who , much like the classical and medieval mnemonists , created their own special kind of inner topography . In the concrete allegory of these narratives , outer and inner worlds describe each other ; the spiritual journey enacts itself in the physical journey , and vice versa . Unlike the discourse of natural philosophy , however , the underlying terms of this literary genre were not immediately -- and in some eases , never -- erased by the rapidly changing philosophical , religious , and scientific worldview of the Enlightenment and later . From the Romantic era on , this Neoplatonic tradition would be carried on in a distinct group of literary sea and adventure narratives that , while ostensibly imitating the real feats of Western explorers circumnavigating the globe , became the vehicle for a new kind of soul quest through the geocosm . <p> " O vast Rondure , " @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to identity himself as " a Kosmos " ) , PREFORMATTED TABLE <p> The new secularized quest narratives embodied considerably more than " passage to India , " however . Now as earlier , this spiritualizing of physical geography would require that the journey be undertaken by real people and start at a quantifiable point in time and space in the physical world precisely in order to end up in an internalized soul region outside time and space . Using the topographical allegorizing of the religious narratives , they would also oblige their readers to employ , within their own interpretative process , the analogic principles of the old discarded science . For the Romantics and their literary heirs , the artist became Robert Fludd 's Pan who fashions a world that is the perfect mirror of his own insides . Coleridge and Poe would imagine their journeys in a Hermetic mode , creating visionary landscapes in which elements are first hypothesized , then appear ; possibilities are entertained , then materialize . What M. H. Abrams called the Romantics ' " habitual reading of passion , life and physiognomy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ notions of the Imago Mundi as a mirror of the human soul , contributes the same Demiurgic framing to what I have called elsewhere " psychotopographic literature " of the twentieth century , expressionist fiction in which , naively or deliberately , inner psychic processes are projected sympathetically onto an exterior landscape . <p> Nowhere is this complicated Renaissance heritage more strikingly apparent than in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western fictional narratives of journeys to the Poles , and particularly ( because of its greater remoteness ) to the South Pole . The historical path of this identification follows the same development as that for the Earth generally . Pole began as an astronomical term ( Greek polos , axis or sky , Latin polus ) , first as the entire axis of the celestial sphere , then as the two fixed points in the celestial sphere around which the stars seemed to revolve . By the sixteenth century , pole signified the two points at which the earth 's axis met the celestial sphere . ( Similarly , Arktos the Bear , the northern constellation , and anti-Arktos , its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Earth their names . ) <p> The term pole was also extended to each of the two opposite points on the surface of a magnet , which aligns itself north-south . The magnetic poles of the earth are these two points in the North and South Poles , respectively , where the compass needle takes a vertical position . The magnet , of course , was a crucial tool for mariners in finding their way ( lodestone , the old word for magnet , means literally " way-stone " ) . Thus the Poles , in both their " true " and " magnetic " manifestations , are orienting points . In microcosmic terms , this means they are the orienting loci of the psyche , but by the same token they are also the least known , the farthest from consciousness , the points ( inherent in the notion of polarity ) where the transcendent and celestial spheres have special access to the human sphere . <p> This association is reinforced in Western fantastic representations across the centuries that present the outer , geographic Poles as either Hells @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the inhabited part of the Earth , in a northern temperate zone that had a southern counterpart , the " Antipodes , " on the lower side of the sphere -- a region the Pythagoreans had earlier dubbed the " Antiehthones " because they believed it to be a separate celestial body , an alter orbis completely distinct from our planet . Lucretius and other ancient commentators , however , derided the idea of an inhabited southern area because their position on the sphere ( literally " antipodes " ) would oblige these people to hang upside down by their feet . Nonetheless , the belief in a large southern land region led Ptolemy in the second century C.E. to posit the " Terra Australis Incognita , " a southern continent completely enclosing the Indian Ocean -- an hypothesis that would be accepted as geographical fad for the next fifteen hundred years . <p> The tradition of the Antichthones and Antipodes as a region of reversals contra naturam was similarly transferred into medieval Christian geography : Higden 's fourteenth-century Polychronicon , for example , contains a mappemonde detailing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fariei , Virgogiei , Troglodytes " ) ' , in Paradise Lost Milton located a " frozen continent " in Hell . Even as late as the eighteenth century , Shaftesbury could comment , about his map of nature : " In the places most remote from man 's works and occupations we encounter the manifestation of the divine Mind pure and undefiled . " Out of this tradition comes the implicit identification of the Poles with the furthest unknown reaches of the self/world and , for that very reason , with its transcendent center as well . For what is farthest away and most hidden is , paradoxically , always what is most important : the journey to the pole is a journey to the center of the soul . <p> A mystic or occult notion of both Poles also figures strongly in alchemists ' speculations about the resonating inner and outer worlds . C. G. Jung -- the twentieth century 's only notable Hermetic philosopher disguised as a psychologist , and not coincidentally a fervent student of alchemical literature -- uncovered numerous references to the Poles in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , " Philalethes " asserts that since the magnet has a hidden center which turns toward the Pole , thus <p> in the Pole is found the heart of Mercurius , which is the true fire wherein its Lord has his rest . He who journeys through this great and wide sea may touch at both Indies , may guide his course by the sight of the North Star , which our Magnet will cause to appear to you . <p> Jung interprets this passage as a description of the psyche 's irresistible journey or impetus toward wholeness , that is , <p> the Deus absconditus ( hidden God ) who dwells at the North Pole and reveals himself through magnetism . His other synonym is mercurius , whose heart is to be found at the Pole , and who guides men on the perilous voyage over the sea of the world . The idea is that the whole machinery of the world is driven by the infernal life at the North Pole , that this is hell , and that hell is a system of upper powers reflected in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Pole " was " a cross from which the four directions radiate " ; that the quest to reach the Pole is symbolic of striving for " wholeness as the goal to which the ' archaic appetite ' points , the magnetic north which gives the traveller his bearings on the ' sea of the world . ' " <p> In the sharply diverging post-Enlightenment histories of natural philosophy and nautical exploration , however , we may safely identify a single shared moment of harmonic convergence : Sunday , 30 December 1774 , when Captain James Cook on his journey to the Southern Ocean in the Adventure reached latitude 71 10 's . In place of Ptolemy 's Terra Australis Incognita and a mystic circulus australis there was now a real Antarctic Circle , and a real ship had just penetrated it . Deciding because of the " immense Icefields " that he " could not proceed one Inch farther South , " however , Cook concluded there was no southern land mass enclosing the Indian Ocean from the south . <p> Samuel Taylor Coleridge had read Cook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ volume of his Neoplatonic muses " Iamblichus , Proclus , Psellus , and Hermes Trismegistus " that he purchased in x796 and carried everywhere in his pocket . Whereas Mary Shelley would have her Frankenstein 's Creature disappear into the " darkness and distance " of the Arctic , the South Pole 's greater remoteness seduced Coleridge sufficiently to transpose his extensive readings in Arctic literature to the Southern Ocean when he composed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , first published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads and revised in 1800 . <p> Universally recognized as " the travelogue of a spiritual journey , " the Ancient Mariner is a profoundly alchemical and elemental poem that most closely resembles the medieval dream vision whose landscape provides fixed points for meditation and self-reflection . Coleridge 's unique amalgam of physical and soul journey was to set the pattern of the southern journey for his many imitators in Western literature : an archetypal sea-trip from a bustling port ( consciousness ) to Terra Australis Ineognita ( unconsciousness ) , where a transcendental encounter occurs that initiates either integration of the self or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ <p> In a not surprising convergence of influences , the poem begins with a quote from Burnet 's Archaeologiae Philosophicae attesting to the reality of Neoplatonic spirits in the air around us . In Burnetian ( or even Miltonian ) terms , if humans lost their inner vision at the Fall , a journey to the Pole must involve an initial failure to recognize that the journey has an esoteric as well as an exoteric meaning ; this failure must produce catastrophe followed by suffering and eventual redemption . And this is exactly what happens in the Ancient Mariner : a man blind to his inner spirit ( the albatross ) kills it , but is redeemed when he experiences love for God 's creatures ( the sea-snakes ) as his ship or body journeys on the larger Body of the globe , pushed by angelic forces in a harrowing voyage of self-discovery . Ultimately , the " lonesome Spirit from the south pole " guides the mariner 's boat back to civilization , where it sinks in a maelstrom , leaving him the sole survivor . ( This is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ encounter with an ill-omened white creature . ) The journey to the furthest unknown recesses of the psyche discovers a positive force there that supports the ego 's act of self-redemption . We take it as a good psychotopographic sign that the sinking occurs dose to the Ekemene , home base in Europe , because that suggests the experience inflicted on the mariner is more accessible to his ( and the reader 's ) consciousness than any action taking place at the Pole itself . <p> In the two voices of the Ancient Mariner -- one a pre-Shakespearean sixteenth-century balladeer and the other his Percylike antiquarian commentator , from roughly Burnet 's time -- Coleridge 's obvious strategy , as Jerome McGann and others have shown , is to reproduce not just the flavor of an archaic ballad , but a sense , as in the Old and New Testaments , of multiple textual layers . In fact , the poem amounts to a kind of self-contained Burnetian geological process of its own , a little evolving world of complex textual strata . As in The Sacred Theory , cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . The contrasting layers reinforce our sense of the poem and its craggy fissures as no perfect rotundum but a self-conscious and all-too-human Burnetian " mighty Ruine . " <p> When Edgar Allan Poe 's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published in 1838 , the same year that the U.S.-sponsored Wilkes expedition departed for the Southern Ocean , the Antarctic continent had still not been reached , and its very existence was uncertain . Poe , like Coleridge , drew heavily on explorers ' accounts , but even more heavily on the old notions of the animate universe : in the warm waters he bestows on the Antarctic Ocean we see the classical legends of the warm waters of Hyperborea , the land behind the North Wind . More specifically , he uses the then-popular theories of John Cleves Symmes , an army captain turned natural philosopher who postulated a hollow earth composed of five concentric spheres ( projecting the structure of the Ptolemaic cosmos , as the Renaissance natural philosophers did , directly onto Earth ) accessible through holes near the North and South Poles . <p> @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Symzonia : A Voyage of Discovery ( 1820 ) , by " Captain Adam Seaborn , " probably Symmes himself . Considered the first piece of American utopian fiction , Symzonia describes Captain Seaborn 's most American determination to discover a " new and untried world " because " the resources of the known world have been exhausted by research , its wealth monopolized , its wonders of curiosity explored , its every thing investigated and understood ! " He navigates his custom-built steamboat to a temperate southern land mass and follows a wide river pouring into a hole at the South Pole to the first of the five layered concentric spheres ( Fig. 5 ) . In this land ( which " out of gratitude to Capt . Symmes for his sublime theory " he names Symzonia ) Seaborn finds a perfect democracy of albino humans governed by a council of Worthies and a Best Man . <p> Symmes 's theory of the hollow earth was enthusiastically propagated by his follower J. N. Reynolds , whose treatises on the South Pole were both reviewed by Poe and inserted verbatim @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bailey once suggested , might just as easily have been titled Pymzonia ) . Widely disseminated in the early nineteenth century , Symmes 's notions passed into popular folklore as the polar " Symmes Hole , " a belief that kept its currency among hollow earth cultists in America and Europe well into the twentieth century . In 1906 a sixteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft wrote a letter to the Providence Daily Journal to refute the theory advanced in a new book , The Phantom of the Poles , " that the earth is a hollow sphere , with openings at the poles . " ( It is typical of his contradictory conscious and unconscious agendas that this writer , who prided himself on the rigor of his " scientific materialist " views , went on to create , with enormous gusto , just such a Kircherian globe in his own fictions . ) Even after World War II -- as Joseelyn Godwin details in his fascinating study Arktos -- a popular myth arose that Hitler had survived the war in a subterranean Antarctic labyrinth with a legion of flying saucers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his own predilections toward the vortex that made the Symmes Hole a perfect fit with the inner structure of his psyche . For even more than the Ancient Manner , Pym is an imagined story in the full sense of the world . In Poe 's only novel , action must be imaginatively anticipated before it can be made manifest , events seem only to proceed while the first-person narrator lies in a swoon , and Pym awakens each time to find himself regressed into ever more outrageously claustrophobic and life-threatening predicaments . This repetitive retreat into lowered or obliterated consciousness is a microcosmic journey to his own self 's Terra Incognita , an ongoing dress rehearsal of the outer journey that will end so obscurely . In the macrocosmic terms of the larger narrative , the apocalypse that Pyre and his comrades rush toward in their small boat ( a structurally equivalent act to that chronicled in his stories " MS Found in a Bottle " and " Descent into the Maelstrom " ) is also the vortex in the unconscious toward which the conscious ego feels both attraction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , are congruent and resonate sympathetically . In the symbolic terms of Poe 's magic cosmos throughout his literary works , falling into a hole or pit is the transforming moment of death , and this recurring private and personal Symmes Hole becomes the inevitable destination in both the smaller and larger predicaments of Pym . It is the reason that Poe can provide no depiction of the South Pole itself , or of Pym 's reaching it . <p> Pym presents its own complicated pastiche of textual fragments recounted by at least three narrators , two of whom are unidentified . " Tekeli'li ! " one anonymous commentator obligingly recaps for us after Pym 's own account abruptly breaks off , " was the cry of the affrighted natives of Tsalal upon discovering the carcass of the white animal picked up at sea . " It was also , he continues , <p> the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym . This also was the shriek of the swift-flying , white , and gigantic birds which issued from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ giant white birds Poe is echoing Coleridge 's albatross , but he engages a " polarity " as well : the black island of Tslalal that intrudes itself before the whiteness . <p> The commentator , however , fails to mention the most striking manifestation of whiteness , namely , the giant " shrouded human figure " with snow-white skin who rises before Pym and his companion Dirk Peters out of the ashy cataract filling the southern polar sky . In Poe , as in Coleridge before him , these mysterious white figures embody the transcendental and unearthly dimension of the southern polar region . In Pym , however , does this figure represent the Anthropos , the macrocosmic Original Man of Gnostic and Jewish belief , as Richard Howard has proposed ? Or is perhaps the globe itself the true Anthropos here and the giant figure merely its microcosmic equivalent ? The enigmatic , open-ended narrative leaves readers looking over the edge of the Great Abyss with no clear view of what lies below . <p> We may note in passing that when Herman Melville drew on Pym for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only very briefly ) , and so his descriptions of the landscape of the Southern Ocean are considerably less shadowy and mythic than those of the armchair sailors Poe and Coleridge . Melville 's greater involvement in the world of the senses makes his characters ' pursuit of the whiteness an outer world journey first and an inner world journey by extension rather than the other way around . It is no coincidence , consequently , that Melville 's Anthropos turns out to be a marine mammal , a creature of the elemental world rather than a daemon of the next sphere up . <p> As the nineteenth century wore on , the Romantic world view suffered its own continental drift into the Victorian sentimentality of Arthur Conan Doyle on one hand -- whose supernatural story " The Captain of the ' Pole-star ' " ( 1883 ) , in which a tormented ship 's captain meets his end on an Arctic ice floe , pursuing a white insubstantial female form ( presumably the ghost of his dead fiancee back in Comwall ) , contains more than an echo of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the techno-literalism of Jules verne in works like The Sphinx of the Ice Fields ( 1897 ) , which Verne composed , according to William Butcher , not only to " completely superimpose itself on Poe 's novel but also to cover it so completely as to virtually block it out . " The mysterious Sphinx that Verne 's explorers are seeking at the South Pole turns out to be a giant magnet that strips their vessel of all its iron ; pinned to the lodestone by a stray musket is none other than the frozen corpse of the explorer Arthur Gordon Pym . This decidedly nonoccult echo of Robert Fludd is typical of Verne 's framing consciousness of nineteenth-century scientific materialism . <p> Much closer in spirit to Poe 's mythic journey is Verne 's Journey to the Center of the Earth ( 1864 ) , in which scientists retrace the route of a sixteenth-century Icelandic alchemist reminiscent of Athanasius Kircher ( who , though no alchemist , once had himself lowered by ropes into Vesuvius to observe an eruption firsthand ) . Entering the mundus subterraneus through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lands and oceans and are ultimately ejected in an eruption onto the island of Stromboli ( earnestly asking a local boy , " Is this the North Pole ? " because their compass has been magnetically reversed ) . Although Verne , like his closest twentieth-century equivalent , the English writer J. G. Ballard , flirts with the sympathetic connections in his primal topographies , the deeper possibility of the " journey to the center of the self , " simply because the narrative stays literalized on the level of physical geography , remains unconscious . Verne 's sensibility proved the enduring trend as it helped initiate the popular genre of science fiction , which rationalized the supernatural into " marvelous machines " capable of accomplishing feats formerly performed by angels , nymphs , and Neoplatonic daemons . <p> A century after Poe , a proponent of the new popular fantastic fiction , H. P. Lovecraft , wrote as both a child of this materialist movement and a rebel against it . Yet another explicit homage to Pym , Lovecraft 's South Pole horror novella At the Mountains of Madness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ architectural , depicting inner psychic processes macrocosmically in the globe itself and in the city under the globe 's South Pole . The narrator of Lovecraft 's tale is a geologist who has brought to the Antarctic a remarkable new drill that can go to unplumbed depths . ( In the symbolic terms of polar romance this means he is an explorer of unconscious strata of the psyche , or , put another way , what Lovecraft most loathed in conscious life : a psychoanalyst . ) The expedition uncovers evidence of a lost civilization beneath the Pole whose extraterrestrial builders -- the Great Old Ones , star-headed beings from another galaxy -- entered the planet via the Antarctic Ocean and built marine cities shortly after the moon was separated from the South Pacific . <p> The heart of the story is the narrator 's exploration of the Old Ones ' colossal abandoned underground city below the South Pole . Penetrating the multileveled labyrinth of this mundus subterraneus becomes the story 's true journey within a journey -- its novelty lying in the suggestion that even as we imagine we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet lies beyond and under , something hostile and deeply threatening to human reason . Like Burnet 's fallen Earth , Lovecraft 's Pole is a decayed realm . " If we could open the Earth , " Burnet said , <p> and go down into the bosom of it , see all the dark Chambers and Apartments there , how ill contriv 'd , and how ill kept , so many holes and corners , some fill 'd with smoak and fire , some with water , and some with vapours and mouldy Air ; how like a ruine it lies gaping and torn in the parts of it . <p> For Lovecraft this region is likewise " a haunted , accursed realm where life and death , space and time , have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet 's scarce-cooled crust . " The cities of the Old Ones , we learn , were gradually destroyed geologically , by seismic upheavals , the wearing effect of rivers , and similar telluric events . <p> This Burnetian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Terra Incognita regions of the human head , which we penetrate at our peril : the assistant goes mad and the narrator barely escapes with his sanity . Microcosmically , Lovecraft in the person of his narrator is telling us not to push the interior journey too far ; there is a fatal structural flaw built into the composition of the psyche/planet . At the very least , only the inaccessibility of certain regions holds in check the sinister transcendent principle that , unleashed , would overwhelm it . Here , finally , the hole at the Pole definitively converges with the proverbial " hole in the head " signifying madness . Lovecraft would find much to identify with in the French asylum inmate 's diagram from the famous Art brut collection in which the globe is overlaid with a sympathetically connected " interior world " that strikingly resembles a medieval mappemonde ( Fig. 6 ) . <p> After Lovecraft the fantastic polar journey continues to flourish in any number of twentieth-century literary and science fiction works . In the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem 's Solaris ( 1961 ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planet entirely covered by a living ocean , a regularized surface of animate matter much like Plato 's sphere and Burnet 's flooded Earth ( though its name suggests our own planet 's sun and an opposing element , fire ) . After a century 's futile attempts to establish contact with this creature , the story opens as Earth scientists have beamed X-rays onto the surface of the ocean from the space station hovering above its surface , to surprising effect : the three resident scientists have been visited by simulacra or " Phicreatures , " materialized projections that are the ocean 's living representations of their secret desires . When Kelvin , a psychologist , arrives from Earth , he is immediately sent the simulacrum of his dead wife-a woman who , it is suggested , killed herself because of his emotional neglect . <p> But the true landscape of Solaris , as Gaston Bachelard has correctly observed of Pym , is an inner one : the interface of consciousness and unconsciousness . In Kelvin 's helpless love for his Phi-creature wife and growing contact with his own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( as the name " Kelvin " suggests ) hovering above an inaccessible unconsciousness that resists control and , sending back as it does inconvenient messages about their innermost psychic contents , shows far greater knowledge of those who study it than vice versa . The scientists are self-deceiving , narrow Cartesian rationalists detached from their own animal and emotional natures , vainly attempting to control and subjugate their split-off desires under the guise of " communication . " As one disillusioned scientist / explorer puts it , <p> We are searching for an ideal image of our own world : we go in quest of a planet , of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of our primeval past . At the same time , there is something inside us which we do n't want to face up to , from which we try , to protect ourselves .... We arrive here as we are in reality , and when that reality is revealed to us -- that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence -- then we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ indeed , is the classic postcolonialist argument : if the Western imagination does no more than project its own psychic Terra Incognita onto the rest of Earth , then we correctly regard such accounts of these regions as portraits of an alter ego , not an alter orbis . The colonialist 's psychotopographic presumption is to seek the Other and find only his own reflection . Solaris presents the exquisite joke that , for once , rejected contents of the psyche are projected onto an Other who is having none of it and -- to the total psychological undoing of the projectors -- reflects these contents right back to them . <p> Inevitably , the planet Solaris is discovered to contain , Chinese box style , its own alter orbis . As Kelvin and the other scientists move the station toward the planet 's southern polar region , they try beaming Kelvin 's own brain waves into the ocean . Of this same region an earlier scientist , whose suppressed testimony is preserved only in lost notebooks ( significantly nicknamed the " Little Apocrypha " ) , testifies that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ocean after an astronaut falls in it . Is this , as some hypothesize , the ocean 's representation of an artifact of the drowned man 's memory ? Possibly so , but Robert Fludd had this to say on the subject of " polarity " in alchemy : <p> The two polar fundamental principles of the universe are form as the light principle , coming from above , and matter as the dark principle , dwelling in the earth .... In the middle , the sphere of the sun , where these opposing principles just counterbalance each other , there is engendered in the mystery of the chymic wedding the infans Solaris , which is at the same time the liberated world-soul . <p> The ocean , our highly erudite author Lem may be suggesting , could be producing the possibilities of an alchemical coniunctio , or mystic union of spirit and matter , a philosopher 's stone of its own . But what , exactly , does the baby , this " child of the sun , " consist of ? Is it materialized spirit or spiritualized matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ notion of material imagination as he comes to see the ocean as an " imperfect " or " evolving " god " whose passion is not a redemption , who saves nothing , fulfills no purpose -- a god who simply is . " In his highly alchemical definition , " this God has no existence outside of matter . He would like to free himself from matter , but he can not . " Hoping to maintain his tenuous connection to transcendence through the strait gate of his now fully accepted love , pain , and loss , Kelvin decides to remain on Solaris . <p> The mystic geography of Thomas Pynchon 's V. ( 1963 ) also owes a great deal to Renaissance natural philosophy . In one of the novel 's intricately interwoven subplots , the English explorer Hugh Godolphin , sent on a routine mapping expedition into the heart of Asia , stumbles upon the land of Vheissu , the first letter of whose name , in this novel 's terms , signals its membership in a macrocosmic hidden pattern that shapes human events all over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ region whose physical features have the magical ability to change color constantly , like a " tattooed skin " ; its emblematic indigenous species is an iridescent spider monkey . Haunted by visions of Vheissu , Godolphin journeys to its direct opposite , the South Pole . There , " at one of the only two motionless places on this gyratic world " ( " a country , " he adds simply , " the demiurge had forgotten " ) , he discovers , shimmering through several feet of transparent ice , the body of one of Vheissu 's spider monkeys . <p> Besides representing the now-familiar millennial convergence of tropics and pole , this image recalls the display of colors associated with the albedo or whitening , the first major transformation in the alchemical process . Yet we learn that this impossible juxtaposition , " the rainbow-colored spider monkey buried beneath the zero point of absolute stasis , " is only a cruel parody of the mystic unio . An unnamed " They , " says Godolphin , deliberately planted it for him to find , as a " @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was simply an amusing fabrication of theirs . If this is the ease , then whose fabricated world do Godolphin and all the rest of us live in ? Another character speculates on the identity of these mysterious demiurges . " A barbaric and unknown race , " he says , <p> employed by God knows whom , are even now blasting the Antarctic ice with dynamite , preparing to enter a subterranean network of natural tunnels , a network whose existence is known only to the inhabitants of Vheissu , the Royal Geographic Society in London , Herr Godolphin , and the spies of Florence . <p> In the elaborate tapestry of V. , the rulers of the sublunary sphere are able to elude identification by hiding behind the visible pattern of the natural world . ( Or , conversely , in a familiar modernist twist , they may represent no more than the speaker 's own paranoid fantasies . ) <p> Warning humans off visiting their Antipodean regions , as Lovecraft and Pynchon both do , may seem a sensible strategy -- Coleridge , after all , once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the Centre to live in the Circumference " -- but what of the psyche/globe whose fate is to have its poles invade its central regions ? Here we see the polar quest diverging into two distinct types of journeys cure inner experience : going to the Pole and falling into the mundus subterraneus on one hand or , on the other , having the Poles invade the Ekumene , the center of consciousness , in such a way that the ego experiences either demonic conversion ( death or psychosis ) or a blissful mystical experience . <p> Using the macro-micro polar topos for very different purposes , two British writers , Leonora Carrington and Anna Kavan , employ this second type of mystic journey by sending the ice to their protagonists instead of the other way around . This inversion of the polar ice caps amounts to a translation of the psyche/globe into a transcendent Platonic form that delivers Eden or death , and in both works the globe paradoxically reaches its Burnetian regularized perfection by virtue of the solid sheath of ice encasing it . ( The reverse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and unbearable heat -- informs J. G. Ballard 's 1963 novel The Drowned World . ) <p> In Ice ( 1967 ) , by Anna Kayan ( a name its bearer adopted in homage to Kafka ) , massive glaciers relentlessly encroach on Earth 's temperate zones , possibly as an unexpected result of nuclear testing . Kavan 's main character is an embodied Coleridgean Life-in-Death -- a nameless albino young woman with snowy white hair and skin transparent as glass who moves from one landscape of sadism to another in a world that is dying of frost . The " girl 's " mute passivity , we are told , is the result of being bullied by a sadistic mother ( as Kayan herself claimed to have been ) . The male narrator , symbiotic alter ego of the brutal men to whom this woman is in thrall , pursues her through one vaguely totalitarian state after another in a phantasmagoric narrative in which points of view and lines of narrative are constantly shifting . In simultaneous parallel stories , the brutalized girl is resurrected from death and then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a rollercoaster ride to death . <p> Kavan 's bleak millennial vision communicates powerful excitement about the coming Armageddon . The destruction of life is represented as an enthralling , highly dynamic process : <p> Dazzling ice stars bombarded the earth with rays , which splintered and penetrated the earth , filling earth 's core with their deadly coolness , reinforcing the cold of the advancing ice . And always , on the surface , the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward , implacably destroying all life . <p> The Earth Kavan is describing is a Burnetian sphere , of course ; even allowing such an event as " ice stars " pelting the planet with their freezing rays , it would be impossible , in real world terms , for ice to penetrate the Earth 's core and freeze it from the inside out . Rather , Kavan is giving us a pathetic fallacy description of a seductive , welcomed , apocalyptic death taking place at the center of one person 's soul and physical body as well as in the outside world : <p> Frozen by the deathly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of crystalline ice-light , she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision , her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow . As her fate , she accepted the world of ice , shining , shimmering , dead ; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world . Addicted to heroin , Kavan died of its effects in 1968 , age sixty-seven . One may draw the obvious parallels between the street name for heroin , the novel 's title , and the destruction of the world represented within it . The world and the woman are the same entity ; the body of the planet is her body ; man 's sadistic misuse of both has resulted in their deaths . Perversely , this is also an erotic fulfillment . <p> Leonora Carrington 's shifting polar caps in The Hearing Trumpet ( 1977 ) provide a millennial vision as playful and life expanding as Anna Kavan 's are death dealing . Carrington , an English painter whose fiction and art have not received the recognition owed them in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which an elderly expatriate in Mexico , Marion Leatherby , is consigned by her son to a peculiar old folks ' home ( whose quirky buildings serve as an expressionistic extension of the inhabitants ' own psyches ) run by a Gurdjieffian tyrant . In the course of the entirely unsummarizable plot , Marion and the other old ladies , organized by their secret leader the black servant Christabel , stage a personal revolt , with the macrocosmic result of their invocation of a three-headed Goddess being nothing less than the exchange of the poles with the equator and the release of a winged hermaphrodite called the Sephira ( a syncretic version of Isaiah 's six-winged seraph , here the result of the union of the Devil with a priestess of the old religion disguised as a nun ) from the tower of our heroine 's own psyche . In such a cataclysmic manner -- as wolves and glaciers joyously invade the tropics -- is Marion 's initial forlorn wish to visit Lapland triumphantly fulfilled . <p> Very much in the spirit of Erasmus Darwin 's eccentric vision of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ allows the protagonist of this psychic navigation to avoid the perils of both the overwhelmed consciousness ( as represented by Poe , Lovecraft , and Kavan ) and the colonizing consciousness ( as represented by Lem ) . Here the invasion of consciousness by the remote and rejected regions of the psyche creates an icy Eden instead of Lovecraft 's and Kavan 's icy Hell . Marion Leatherby stands still while the Poles ( herself , or her Self , the innermost core of her being , representing the true Pole ) rise to meet consciousness in an ultimately benevolent encounter . At the climax Marion descends into a mundus subterraneus below the old folks ' home where she dies and -- after an alchemical cooking in a bubbling cauldron/rotundum stirred by her alter ego -- is reborn a greatly enlarged human . This death and rebirth represent the correct outcome of the alchemical work : the mystic unio which results in the shrinking of the Terra Incognita and corresponding enlargement of the " inhabited areas " of the psyche . Self , globe , and cosmos are realigned to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , consciousness and unconsciousness . <p> After Carrington and Kavan , do any more polar literary icicles remain to be harvested ? Quite a few , in fact , though with one exception they can not be covered here . Though its narrative framework is one of more straightforward realism , the same strands of thinking are visible in a short vignette in William Golding 's trilogy about a converted British warship on its perilous voyage through the South Ocean . In Fire Down Below ( 1989 ) , the concluding volume of this underrated masterpiece -- misread by reviewers as , among other things , a " great sentimental journey of the naval kind " -- the motley flock of passengers are Gnostic scintillae Dei whose microcosmically flickering souls resonate with the smoldering keelson in the bowels of the ship that threatens to rend apart at any moment . At one point before the ship reaches safe harbor in Australia , a calving , spinning iceberg ( whose " dull and fitful gleam " the narrator first mistakes for the dawn ) manifests as an enormous " cliff " @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impossibly , rotates around it . As , in another optical illusion , the berg seems to rush past the ship instead of the other way around , the narrator tells us he " saw a melange of visions in the ice which swept past me -- figures trapped in the ice , my father among them . " Golding 's ship of self has had a quick brush with the capricious Polar Spirit , who obligingly offers the ego/narrator a tantalizingly quick glimpse into the Narcissus pool orbis own unconscious . <p> The notion of psychological projection , our secularized humancentered construction of the old trope of sympathetic correspondences , now insists that the macrocosm reflects the microcosm instead of the other way around -- a development some of the old Renaissance heretics might well have applauded , since it locates the divine squarely within the human . In these terms , then , the inner wastes of Antarctica have provided a beautifully blank projective screen for post-Enlightenment writers and poets . Out of the Symmes Hole of their imaginations have crawled -- among other creatures -- the Polar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a huge magnet , snail-like monsters and their star-headed masters , an enormous baby , a winged hermaphrodite , a victimized albino woman , and a multicolored monkey . <p> In Ice , his admirable study of the Antarctic , Stephen J. Pyne claims that now , at the close of the twentieth century , the era of the polar Gothic has also ended : " Once Antarctica and the ocean basins had been generally explored , there were no unvisited geographies within which to set a lost civilization ; fantasy writing had to resurrect old problems , tour other planets , or plunge into the depths of the human soul . " But even as we see this projective mechanism working in a novel like Solaris , it seems likely that our mapped , explored , satellite circumnavigated and much photographed Whole Earth will continue to exert its macrocosmic seductions on the human psyche . Robert Fludd would not find much to quarrel with in the present-day construct of the ecological food chain , a telluric-projected revival of the old cosmogony 's catena aurea , nor in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Antarctica , widely believed in our age to leave humans nakedly exposed to malign ultraviolet radii from the heavens , is another perfect replication of Ptolemaic cosmology ( Fig. 7 ) . Empirically verifiable it may certainly be , but the polar hole is also a venerable construct of Western culture . <p> Popular storytelling continues to feed this symbolically rendered need . The two Hollywood film versions of The Thing , set in the Arctic and Antarctic respectively , belong to the category of the Other who emerges from the Pole , the desert , under the sea , and all other regions of inner wilderness outside the realm of consciousness . The 1956 Mole People , in which albino descendants of the Sumerians are discovered under a volcano , features a " scientific " introduction by Hollywood 's favorite professor Frank Baxter , who cheerfully cites Symmes and other worthies in defense of a hollow earth . In Peter Weir 's The Last Wave ( 1978 ) , Australian aborigines foretell in their dreams the next great Flood , a cataclysm produced by " giant low pressure from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Langoliers ( 1994 ) features a planeload of people who leave sublunary space and time when they fly through a polar aurora borealis that mysteriously appears in the Midwestern skies ; Kevin Reynolds 's Waterworld ( 1995 ) depicts an Earth in which the ice caps melt and the poles reverse to produce a lawless anti-Edenic oceanic planet . And this year will see the publication of a new blockbuster adventure novel , Subterranean , by James Clemens , " about a group of adventurers who travel to the underground center of Antarctica . " <p> In these formulaic narratives , the level of the inner psychological journey remains submerged and unconscious , though we sense intuitively that it is there , just as when as a child I felt the click of the uniting continents . A catharsis of this sort stays locked in reflexive instinct , lacking the fullness of discovery that a completely realized work of art allows . Yet humans never cease in their efforts to bring about the impossible union . The pull we feel the Polar Spirit exerting on us to go to it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us , of course . Although Antarctica continues to be earnestly depicted in documentaries and news reports as " a continent devoted to science , " its less allowable representations flourish in a different territory of the human psyche , a region where we have never stopped trying to tow the Poles into our temperate zones . <p> Because if the old woman ca n't go to Lapland it means that Lapland must come to the old woman . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Tenniel 's illustration of the anti-Beetonian household . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 1 . The Ptolemaic universe as rendered in the seventeenth century . The celestial north and south polar circles , tropics , and equator now have geographical counterparts on Earth . Andreas Cellarius , Star Atlas ( 1661 ) . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 2 . The alchemical globe , nourisher and vessel of transformation . Michael Maier , Atalantafugiens ( 1618 ) . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 3 . The holes at the North and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the subterranean world . Athanasius Kircher , Mundus subterraneus ( 1664 ) . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 4 . Thomas Burnet 's polar hole , out of which the Flood emerges . Sacred Theory of the Earth ( 1690/91 ) . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 5 . The " Symmes Holes . " Frontispiece of Symzonia ( 1820 ) . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 6 . " The Earth and its internal ramifications , " by Florent , a French asylum inmate ( 1944-49 ) . Courtesy Collection de l'Art Brut , Lausanne . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Fig. 7 . Late twentieth-century Symmes Hole caused by ozone depletion ( NASA photo ) . <p> By Victoria Nelson <p>

@@4000941 The expression " sent up the river " finds its roots in New York penal history . From the early 1800s on , convicted felons from New York City were literally " sent up the river " to Sing Sing , the gloomy penitentiary perched above the banks of the Hudson River at Ossining . <p> My arrival there was July 17 , 1985 , after receiving a fifteen years to life sentence under New York state 's Rockefeller drug laws . To my eyes , when the transport bus stopped in front of the gates , the view of the river was awesome , spreading out from the prison like a smooth , still carpet . The contrast of the natural beauty of the surroundings and the daunting facade of Sing Sing was mind-boggling . Then , once inside , as the bus inched past the giant concrete wall , I looked up and saw gun towers with armed guards . Seagulls circled high above , giving the prison the look of a medieval castle . <p> In the heart of the prison complex was the state shop , where new jacks ( prison speak for new inmates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with me on the bus , were taken off and steered like cattle into a holding pen . Our cuffs and chains were removed and , one by one , we were called to another room where we were reunited with our property and given our cell assignments . <p> I was assigned to B Block . With some 660 prisoners , this is reputed to be the world 's largest cellblock . To get there we had to travel past other parts of the prison . Long , concrete corridors and tunnels connected Sing Sing 's many buildings , most of which were in horrendous condition . Slabs of peeling paint hung from the ceilings . A thin film of moisture , residue from the nearby river , covered the battleship-gray walls . The smell of mildew , disinfectant , and body odor from the 2,300 men who filled the prison made me nauseated . <p> At several checkpoints along the way we stopped while guards known as turnkeys opened the steel gates that were strategically placed throughout the facility . Prisoners could n't travel beyond these checkpoints without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 300 yards and countless steel gates later a door swung open and I took my first steps into B Block . <p> The noise hit me like a freight train . Rap music from radios hanging on cell bars blasted throughout the tiers . Prisoners shouted at one another from across the rows of cages stacked one on top of another , four stories high . The voices of hundreds of convicts ricocheted off the steel bars , creating a thunderous din . The block resembled a giant airplane hangar full of human cargo . <p> While I stood there , stunned , another set of gates opened . A guard led us to a cell that had been converted into an office for the officer in charge . This OIC ran the daffy activities of the block and attended to the custodial upkeep of the prisoners who lived there . I was astonished by the enormity of his task . As I gazed out over the tiers , I saw prisoners running buck wild up and down the corridors , hanging out in each other 's cells , shouting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ filthy , raucous , and crowded . <p> The cell I was assigned was a windowless , fifty-four square foot solid metal cube , number W-429 . It contained a small bed with steel springs and a torn , piss-stained mattress . A toilet with an old , porcelain bowl squatted in the corner next to a small metal locker . A portable lamp with a built-in electrical outlet was clamped over the bed . Graffiti covered the walls . I threw my property sack on the floor , sat on the bed , which was more like a cot , and held my head in my hands to drown out the noise . <p> Shortly after , a guard cracked the cell gates , signaling it was time for lunch . I followed a group of prisoners to the mess hall and took my position in line . This place was as loud and confusing as the cellblock . Hundreds of prisoners , some eating , some leaving , some standing in line , filled the massive , high-ceilinged room . At one point I made the mistake of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " Hey , motherfucker ! " he screamed in my face . " What 's wrong with you ? Do n't ever reach over my food again or I 'll kill you . " <p> I backed away and apologized . I learned quickly that this gesture , like so many others in prison , was a sign of disrespect . The subculture there carried its own set of rules , known as the " convict code , " which prisoners lived and died by . The best that a new jack could do was to learn the code as quickly as possible and pray that in the meantime his rookie mistakes would n't get him murdered . <p> One of the worst parts about life as a new jack was being checked out by all the other prisoners . Not having a crew was dangerous . The prison was infested with predators and scam artists searching for men who had n't hooked up with a gang for protection . B Block was more dangerous than the other blocks because it was a transit-housing unit . Prisoners were constantly coming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would be moving out so they lived for the moment , not caring about anything or anyone . <p> The way for a new jack to protect himself was to join a crew and find safety in numbers . Some inmates joined racial gangs for protection , but you could find just about any kind of group to hang with to show that you were n't doing time solo . You 'd start by playing basketball or handball with someone , then meeting his friends . If they liked you , you became " one of the crew . " <p> I found a crew by pumping iron with two older Puerto Ricans . After we 'd worked out together a couple of times , Roberto , who was doing twenty-five years for murder , took me under his wing and showed me the ropes . He told me that it was important to always have a weapon handy in case something went down . I said I was n't looking for trouble . " It does n't matter , " he said . " Trouble has a way of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Later that day , we were hanging out in my cell when Roberto opened his green army jacket . From the inside pocket he removed a shank -- a six-inch sharpened piece of metal with the end wrapped in black electrical tape . He offered it to me . <p> " No , Roberto , I do n't want that . " <p> " Do n't be stupid , Tony . You got ta have something . " He looked at my locker and reached for a small box full of batteries . He snatched my laundry bag and pulled out a sweat sock . " Perfect , " he said , loading the sock with a handful of batteries and knotting the end . It became an instant blackjack . " You can use socks for a lot of different things , " he said , " from brewing coffee to smashing someone 's skull . " He placed a boot on my bed and demonstrated , raising the lethal sock over his shoulder and smashing it down on the boot . " One good crack and that motherfucker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many heads like this , and cracked many nuts , too , " he laughed . <p> " Nuts ? " <p> " Not the kind you eat . The kind you get when you 're backed up . " <p> " Backed up ? " His explanations were starting to confuse me . <p> " Yeah , backed up because you got no pussy . " He reached for the jar of Vaseline in my locker . Instinctively my fists clenched and I looked around for a guard . Roberto grabbed another sock from my bag and filled the inside with a scoop of Vaseline . " Here , " he said , handing me the sock . " When you get lonely , all you got to do is stick your dick inside and you 'll be all right . " <p> I looked at the sock and tried to imagine fucking it . " I do n't think so , " I said shaking my head in disbelief . <p> " Look , " he said angrily . " You 'll do a lot of things you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a decade and have fifteen more to go ! " He was yelling now ; the veins in his neck bulged . " I did shit even I could n't believe but I had to in order to survive . Doing time will change you -- face it . " He calmed down when he saw the look on my face . He could tell his sermon rattled me . " Just keep an open mind , Tony . It 's the only way to beat all this time you got ta do . " <p> I 'd never thought about time and its consequences . In the street , " time " was a relative concept , flowing in and out like the tide . Sometimes you had more , sometimes less . Here , it controlled you , grabbed you by the throat and made you hyperaware of your existence . Roberto spent many hours educating me about doing time . His lessons probably saved my life . <p> One day , he asked me if I 'd do his laundry for him . " Sure ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He waved a finger in my face . " You never do nobody 's laundry . " Doing someone 's laundry was the first step toward becoming his punk , he said . <p> I remained on good terms with Roberto and his Latino crew but , despite having a crew , danger still existed . Much of the danger was brought on by drugs . Sing Sing was awash in them . And where there are drugs , there 's violence . Different crews would fight each other over distribution turf . I tried to keep a low profile but learned that what Roberto had said was true : trouble has a way of finding you in prison , whether you 're looking for it or not . To survive in this environment I had to become comfortable with violence . I was n't a violent person on the outside , but I learned that violence was deeply imbedded in the prison culture , where the strong preyed on the weak . Either you defended yourself or you were victimized , plain and simple . It could start innocently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a young blond-headed guy complimented me on my sunglasses . I made the mistake of letting him try them on . A week later I was walking through the block when I ran into the same guy . He was leaning against the steam pipes with two other prisoners . <p> Casually , he walked over and stepped in front of me , blocking my path . He took a broken , rusty razor blade out of his pocket and waved it in front of my face . " I want those sunglasses , motherfucker , " he said . Because I 'd let him try on my sunglasses , he figured I was easy prey and now he was testing me . <p> My friend Roberto had taught me to look at the size of the weapon before reacting . As a rule of thumb , if the weapon was n't deadly , you should fight back at all costs . If you did n't , word spread that you were a coward , which meant that your ass would be on the line with others . If the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to run but always return with an equal-sized weapon . <p> I looked at the razor blade . It was less than an inch long . It could n't kill me , I figured . I made my choice and looked square into the guy 's face . I was ready to fight because I knew that my survival at Sing Sing depended on it . If I let him take my glasses , I 'd be pegged a pussy . The predators would find out and make my life more hellish than it already was . " Use that , " I growled , " and I 'll kill you . " I stared him down with pure hatred in my eyes , thinking about how I 'd fucked up my entire life , lost my family , and now I 'd be spending my best fifteen years in this rat hole . The piece-of-crap con must have seen the fire in my eyes and everything that was behind it . He quickly put away the blade and tried to make a joke out of it . I walked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to learn that I could get out of most situations simply by feigning toughness , or " fronting , " as prisoners say , putting on a certain face or using certain words and speaking with absolute conviction . There were times , however , when violence was unavoidable . Often it boiled down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time . <p> One day I was walking the flats , the ground-level area of the block , when I saw this guy Nicky whom I knew from the weight room . At 6 ' 2 ? and 240 pounds of solid muscle , Nicky was a monster . The week before , he 'd noticed my sneakers and asked me what size they were . " Ten , " I said . Funny , he wore the same size , too . Since I 'd once seen Nicky whack a guy over the head with a forty-pound dumbbell just for looking at him the wrong way , I figured it 'd be a good idea to get on his good side . I told him I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pair . He 'd nodded and thanked me . <p> The next day , Nicky spotted me at the rear of the cellblock and motioned me over to him . As I got closer I noticed that his face wore a strange expression and his eyes were bloodshot . From his breath I could tell he was drunk on jailhouse wine . " Give me your sneakers , " he demanded . <p> " I did n't get my new ones yet , " I said . <p> " You think I give a shift ? " Before I could answer , he unleashed a powerful upper cut that caught me square under my chin . I sailed backwards to the floor -- and my sneakers came off ! He hit me so hard I literally flew out of my sneakers . To this day , I do n't know whether they 'd been untied and flew off from the impact or if he 'd knocked me unconscious long enough to yank them off my feet . Whatever the case , shortly after hitting the floor , I popped back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me to forget about it . No one wanted to start trouble with a guy like Nicky . Besides , people said he went crazy every so often , usually when he was high or drunk . If I left it alone , Nicky would be fine with me , they said . It was good prison politics . <p> Sure enough , the advice was sound . The next day in the weight room Nicky acted like nothing had happened . " Hey Tony , what 's going on ? " he said , slapping me on the back and flashing a smile . " Thanks for the sneakers , " he said . I noticed that he was wearing them . <p> " Hey , all right , " I replied . " They fit okay ? " <p> " Sure do , man , thanks again . " <p> It was good to have guys like Nicky on your side . <p> About six months into my stay I tried to get a job as an electrician in the prison . Getting assigned to certain jobs could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the facility needed . And this would get me transferred to A Block , the main housing area . After that , I would n't have to worry about being shipped out to a possibly worse facility elsewhere in the state . <p> I went to the chapel where the administration had set up a committee to assign qualified prisoners to work assignments . I approached a counselor and said I 'd like to work as an electrician . I said I had skills to offer Sing Sing and that I wanted to spend my time doing something constructive , something that could get me a job in the real world once I got out . <p> " Look everyone , " the counselor called out . " This man wants to be rehabilitated ! " He doubled over in laughter . <p> I looked at his pudgy face , red with glee , and I thought of everything I 'd gone through to get to this sorry place , how I was standing there like a fool , begging for a job that paid pennies . This time I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And what about it ? " I shot back , not bothering to disguise the hostility in my voice . " I know lots of guys in here who want to improve themselves . " A few heads turned . The room grew quiet . <p> " Rehabilitation does not exist , " the counselor said flatly , glowering at me . <p> " Really , " I continued . " You mean to tell me that your job amounts to nothing more than locking people up ? You do n't believe in giving prisoners a chance to do something constructive with their time ? " <p> He did n't respond . I knew I should 've kept my mouth shut , but I was sick of the crap . All the prison was good for was warehousing men , infantilizing them , and then churning them out like so many widgets on the day of their release . I stepped closer to read his nametag . " Mr. Cody , " it said . He was a civilian employee , not a cop . Fuck it , I thought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ " You know , Mr. Cody , " I said , enunciating both syllables in his name . " With that kind of attitude maybe you should n't be a counselor . " <p> He stared at me hard and tapped his pen nervously on the desk . I decided to back down . " Look , man , I 'm sorry . I got a family to support . I could really use a job . " <p> " I do n't have a job for you , " he said , his voice rising . " Now get out ! " <p> As I left , a counselor sitting in the rear of the chapel got up and walked out with me . He introduced himself as Dennis Manwaring , the Special Subjects Supervisor . " I heard what you said about your family , " he said . " Why do n't you come by my office tomorrow morning and we 'll see what we can do . " I looked in his eyes and I trusted him . <p> The next day , after a brief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ general population status . Just like that , I was staying at Sing Sing . <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Metamorphosis , 1991 <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : Nightmare of Justice , 1988 <p> PHOTO ( BLACK &; WHITE ) : After the Whitney , 1994 <p> By Anthony Papa and Jennifer Wynn <p> <p> While in prison , Anthony Papa became an award-winning artist and received clemency in 1996 from Governor George Pataki . Today he is an artist and a drug law reform activist who can be reached at papa@15yearstolife.com . This article is excerpted and adapted from his recent book , 15 to Life : How I Painted My Way to Freedom , published by Feral House of Los Angeles , California . The article illustrations and cover art are by Anthony Papa . <p> Jennifer Wynn is author of the critically acclaimed Inside Rikers : Stories from the World 's Largest Penal Colony . <p>

@@4001041 ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT causal factors of the seemingly rebounding addiction to supernaturalism as an explanation of the world and justification for action is surely the dramatic rate of social and technological change , which often forces people to abandon tradition in order to adapt to entirely new situations . In our grandparents ' day -- or even our parents ' -- what we learned in school was reasonably expected to provide us with useful information for a lifetime . No more . It has been said that information is doubling every five years . With such an exponential curve , how can anyone expect to learn it all and cope with its ramifications ? <p> This incredible rate of change quite naturally drives many people to cling to traditional approaches as they struggle to slow the process to a more comfortable pace . As a result , fundamentalism often becomes the order of the day . Not merely Islamic fundamentalism or Jewish or Christian fundamentalism but , rather , the basic fundamentalism of " I have the answers . Do n't bother me with more questions " -- a fundamentalism of " stay the course " rigidity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and new data become available . <p> Fundamentalism , in turn , leads to a need for an authority figure -- be it a political leader , a teacher , a parent , or a cleric -- to interpret life 's mysteries and to give direction . As a result , people become even more dependent on powers outside of themselves instead of learning the processes and skills necessary for critical thinking and problem solving . <p> New York Times columnist Tom Friedman , quoting an Iranian woman , tells a story about the education of young boys in Middle Eastern countries . The boys are taught by clerics completely through indoctrination . They are fed information to remember but are n't allowed to think about it . No discussion , no involvement , no interaction is tolerated . Later , if they go on to university study abroad and are suddenly expected to think and offer their own ideas , they are completely at a loss . Frustrated and confused , they may seek refuge in an even deeper fundamentalism . <p> So behind the turmoil in the world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , fundamentalism rather than thoughtfulness , and as a result , the conflict of ideologies . TRADITIONAL VERSUS HUMANISTIC RESPONSES <p> To keep apace with social and technological changes , we must obviously abandon many of our traditions . But the resultant dilemma is : replace them with what ? Do we substitute our traditions with adherence to a different set of principles , do we retreat to the safety of fundamentalism , or do we seek new responses more appropriate to the process of change ? We all admit that knowledge learned in school is merely the beginning , the stepping stones . Education evolves over the entire course of life through experience . And the degree and depth of the knowledge attained is directly related to the development and application of the skills of learning . <p> Unfortunately , too often we both teach our children and use the same processes that have been practiced for centuries , essentially transmitting the technical and cultural wisdom of the past -- known information . We have indeed updated the content : we now teach about computers and debate whether to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most part , we utilize modern equipment , provide extensive financial support for schools , and employ technically competent and generally caring teachers . But we are still locked into the conservative approach of teaching already known information . <p> In the United States the political move toward conservatism in recent years has resulted in less separation between church and state and the growth of fundamentalism and rigidity . George W. Bush 's " No Child Left Behind " legislation is a classic example . While certainly well intended , it essentially promotes rote teaching and learning and emphasizes the accumulation of facts and the simple transmission of already known information by rewarding schools whose students score well on tests that measure accumulated information and punishing those whose students do n't . The importance of learning the facts is n't to be denied , but it 's a long way from the whole story . <p> There is , however , an appropriate humanistic alternative . Rather than merely teaching the what of learning , we can also teach the how . We can emphasize , much more than we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ teach children not only to be learned but learners . And the processes of learning are eminently teachable and learnable . <p> Picture the entire concept of learning and teaching as a spectrum : on one end we have the traditional style of learning the content ; on the other end the emphasis is on learning the processes of learning -- learning how to learn . This table illustrates the idea . <p> This spectrum or dichotomy is obviously artificial and heuristic ; there is no such thing as learning the processes of learning free of content , nor of learning the content without some kind of use of the processes . But nevertheless , schools , teachers , parents , and learners have many options for the position they choose on the spectrum . And there are obvious reasons why the emphasis on learning to learn should be increased . The incredible rate of ongoing social and technological change means that no longer can an individual function by relying only on the information disseminated in school . Suppose a physician used only the knowledge gained in medical school and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ? But even more important , a society of competent learners would be less inclined to be duped by charlatans or corrupt leaders , less susceptible to the claims of the supernatural , less inclined to be fundamentalist . A society of learners would be more able -- and likely -- to think independently from each other , to apply reason and skepticism . THE TEACHING-LEARNING PATTERN <p> In my own teaching , I employ the easy-to-remember acronym EAT . The letters stand for experience , analysis , and theory . In the traditional model -- " I know . You do n't . I 'm going to tell you . " -- the pattern begins with the T or theory . In college teaching , the theory is almost always presented in a lecture . An elementary school teacher might start by presenting a vocabulary list . Next , the big idea , or theory , is A -- analyzed . The instructor explains what the big idea means , what its components are . Then comes E -- the experience or application . This might consist of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nursing . Sometimes it is a further presentation by the teacher , explaining the application . <p> With experiential education , or in the learning-to-learn mode , the order is reversed . The parent or teacher or professor starts with an experience , or a discussion of a prior experience , and then asks the learner to analyze the experience : " What are the parts of it ? How does this connect with things you have done before or know about from another source ? What do you think about this ? How did doing this make you feel ? " The third step is the most difficult and the most neglected : the development of a theory or generalization . It 's an attempt to have the student generalize from the experience and the analysis of it . " What does it all mean ? How would you describe the whole thing ? What principles can you figure out from all of it ? What will you know the next time you work with this issue ? " <p> I teach a Master of Business Administration program course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the personal-interpersonal aspects of the working world , including such themes as leadership , motivation , interpersonal communication , supervision , and teamwork . With respect to teamwork , the traditional transfer teaching approach would have students read the chapter in the text about teamwork , view and discuss a film about teamwork , listen to a lecture about teamwork , with an emphasis on recent research , and write a paper about teamwork , perhaps emphasizing the applications of teamwork in the student 's own work setting . The sequence is T-A-E . <p> I reverse this and use an inductive , process approach . I start with an exercise in which groups of five students are asked to complete a puzzle using puzzle pieces I supply . The sets of pieces are arranged such that teamwork among the five is required . Student observers are asked to watch each group carefully , noting particularly how the group members work together and their behaviors that contribute to assembling the puzzles . Issues that are crucial to teamwork -- such as leadership , communication , sharing , possessiveness , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they work . After all the groups complete their puzzles , each observer provides feedback to the team members , and a vigorous discussion follows , analyzing the puzzle experience in detail . The puzzle experience , followed by analysis , is then taken one step further . Each student is led to ask : " What is my own theory of teamwork ? How can I apply my theory when I go to work tomorrow morning ? How can I be a better team member or leader ? " <p> My role as a teacher has become less the role of " expert " and instead the more difficult one of " facilitator " : I plan the experience , encourage the thorough analysis of it , and share the skills so that students can come to their own legitimate conclusions . The teacher as expert provides the facts and knowledge whereas the facilitative teacher provides or reviews an experience and helps the student analyze it and build a theory . This latter approach leads to deeper understanding and wisdom . And as you might expect , the exercise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discussion , and leads to personal growth for everyone involved . <p> The most successful faculty development workshop I ever conducted was on the EAT model . I distributed copies of the several-sentence course descriptions from our college catalog to the participants but made sure they did n't get one from their own discipline . A nursing instructor , a math professor , and a history professor each got a social psychology course description . A physics teacher , a marketing professor , and a music teacher each got one about anthropology . Then they met in small groups and were instructed to plan the course . Outside the realm of their expertise , the workshop forced them to utilize their facilitative skills in order to ground the course in student experiences . After a bit of good-natured grumbling , these people worked hard to plan an interesting and exciting course that would utilize experiences like simulations and role play , case studies , field trips , instruments , and assignments such as student research projects . They would conclude by helping students analyze the experiences and generate theoretical constructs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others , more ideas surfaced . By the end of the exercise some of the participants said they wanted to take a course presented that way rather than totally by experts . And several made the point that the student learning that would have been engendered by such a course would transcend the course content itself and result in the development of learning skills applicable in other settings and for other content . TIPS FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS <p> Here are a few ideas for teachers and parents interested in the process learning model . ( You will undoubtedly be able to think of more ideas and plan activities specifically suited to the learner in your life , including yourself . ) <p> * When your child comes home from school , you should certainly ask , as you hopefully do now , " What did you learn in school today ? " But you can develop it further by asking " How did you learn that ? " While an initial response may be " The teacher told us , " with careful attention he or she can be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own learning processes . <p> * Do n't forget about the emotional aspects of learning . Because of their focus on reason , Humanists are often mistakenly thought of as unemotional . But emotions are an important aspect of learning . When your child is happy about learning something at school , be sure to reinforce that feeling . When your child tells you about a school experience , ask for details and express your feelings . For example , in discussing a book read in class , ask how the protagonists must have felt in the situation your child describes . Share your own feelings with your child or memories of similar experiences in your life . <p> * Help your child learn to figure things out . Do n't be too quick with the easy answer , too quick to be an expert . Good teachers are worth their weight in gold ; experts are a dime a dozen . Problem solving is a learnable set of steps using logic , rationalism , organizational skills , and decision-making patterns . Help your child think through these processes . @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quick answer can quash curiosity . While we should n't deliberately withhold information , a measured response can help a child to think critically and develop an answer on his or her own . <p> * Children gain self-esteem by learning and sharing knowledge . Being able to contribute as part of a team rather than as a mere recipient of information builds a child 's sense of self-worth . <p> * Many become excessively dependent on a psychoanalyst , a cleric , a political leader , a parent , or a physician to provide them with their beliefs . Fundamentalism is n't limited the fringes of some religions . The importance of an authority figure to many people is growing , not diminishing as we might hope as time goes on and society matures . We all need to be careful to avoid creating powerful dependency needs in our children . Ask yourself if it 's more important that your children be just like you or that they each be independent , self-reliant individuals , even if it means you might disagree on some issues . Process learning , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ side of self-reliance . The most functional parents guide their children to independence . Be a guide on the side , not a sage on a stage . <p> * As a parent , you can help your children enormously to become self-learners by supporting their skills in making choices . Learning the processes of making choices -- weighing the alternatives , remembering earlier experiences , seeing what others have done in similar situations -- can be of enormous help to them , especially as they face issues like the temptations of drug use , choice of friends , career goals , and the like . How your children make these choices is a learning to learn issue and one that most of us neglect in our own lives . Careful decision making can mean the difference between success and failure in many of life 's arenas . If we believe we can determine our own future , that our activities determine the quality of our lives , then it behooves us to plan those activities carefully . <p> As Humanists , we need to respond to a dramatically changing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We need to respond to the rigidity of fundamentalism with more openness and flexibility . The concept of process learning , or learning-to-learn -- as distinct from learning by the transmission of already known information -- is a vital step in the right direction . TRADITIONAL PREFORMATTED TABLE HUMANISTIC PREFORMATTED TABLE <p> By Philip E. Johnson <p> <p> Philip E. Johnson is a retired teacher and administrator with a Ph.D . in education from the University of Arizona . This article is adapted from a handbook he wrote for parents and he is currently writing a book on process learning . His website is at www.LearningToLearn.org . <p>

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"@@4001441 Our purpose in this study is to view theories of psychotherapy from a general social-poli(...TRUNCATED)