Hilary Mantel Reviews “A Life of One's Own/An Experiment in Leisure” (1986) | Hacker News Reader

Hilary Mantel Reviews “A Life of One's Own/An Experiment in Leisure” (1986)

literaryreview.co.uk

A Life of One's Own is a great book, far ahead of its time (she was using the word 'mindfulness' 90 years ago), and a classic in 'thinking for oneself', something that used to be popular to recommend but has never been easy to do.

Joanna Field was the pen name of Marion Milner. I have a quote from her in my profile. It took me a long time to track down the paper but that quote was the only interesting thing in it.

What a beautiful quote! And it does a great job capturing the thought you've put into building this community

If only a quote like that could be taken to heart and applied to ones own life, I'm pretty sure that would be life changing. If everyone did it, it would be world changing.

I'm thrilled that you (and the other commenters) are really getting it. I feel the same way, and it informs everything I try to do.

It really is a great quote, gives tremendous insight on your moderation philosophy, and I read it frequently when stalking your mod actions ;-)

Related (maybe if you’re pareidoliac like me) principle I need to work on much harder to internalize is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marit_ayin#In_private

;)

I believe I've got a better-than-chance feel for when a HN submission might hit the front page ("public") or will go/stay down in the long tail (giving opportunity for kicking off the shoes in "private" convos) but admit that when I mess it up it's usually spectacularly wrong.

For folks still paying attention (& on similar levels of practice/deliberation or cortex/amygdala :) the quote is from Milner’s

https://www.amazon.com/Suppressed-Madness-Sane-Men-Psychoana...

EDIT: right in the intro, for the especially impatient/deadtreefans.

This is one of those rare times when I'm seeing Dang comment on a post directly!

And thanks for that quote. I've read it earlier, of course. But it's good to read it again and again. For some reason, reading that quote always makes me introspect and think whether I've become better human over the years.

Anything by Hilary Mantel is extraordinary and worth your reading time. Wolf Hall trilogy threw me into a decade-long search into who really was Thomas Cromwell, A Place of Greater Safety finally made me feel like I understand the French Revolution (I enjoyed this as an audio book on a very long drive) . Thanks to her, complex history has made sense, and how today's machinations are not much different.

I read Wolf Hall after I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, which takes place in late 17 century post Cromwell England. You might enjoy it as well! It’s packed with history.

The audiobooks of the Wolf Hall trilogy are fantastic as well. They're read by Ben Miles, who played Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and collaborated directly with Mantel on the stage adaptation of the Mirror & The Light. His take on the character is excellent, far superior to Mark Rylance in the TV version, who I thought was badly miscast.

He wasn't, you just like Ben better (which is obviously fine).

I saw the "Bring Up the Bodies" stage show with Miles in London in 2014. Miles was very good, as was the show. I agree that Rylance was a bad choice for the part on the BBC. He doesn't look the part at all, plus I tend to find him very unexpressive as an actor. Po faced, wooden. The rest of the TV adaptation was excellent but, as the central character, Rylance ruined it for me. I'm finishing the "Mirror and the Light" just now (having re-read the previous two again). Great, great novels. Thank goodness she lived to complete them.

A Life of One's Own is incredible, and is one of two books I credit with changing my life.

I reviewed it partially here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-to-enjoy-things

don't know if additional vocabulary might help you turn up anything more useful, but the "narrow attention"/"wide attention" dichotomy you point out is something I've mostly heard talked about in metaphorical terms: a "hard eyes"/"soft eyes" dichotomy.

Neat! I've never heard that one, will definitely add it to my vocab

If you guys want to go down an unusually interesting rabbit hole, the book Open-Focus Brain by Les Fehmi and (especially) the associated audio exercises, are all about this.

The exercises are something like guided meditations, but unique in my experience, and I never do exercises like that. It's a pity that his work isn't better known*. He died a couple years ago.

* Edit: although HN does not disappoint!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712532 (Oct 2016)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721704 (Dec 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718142 (Dec 2014)

Interesting: it sounds like we do something similar with animals (training them not to close down their focus and fixate on things that might well, in a state of nature, be alarming, but don't really matter when living with people in a 21st century environment) but it's kind of hard to say while the Fehmi exercises are still in copyright...

EDIT: the pain relief part seems completely orthogonal to what I was talking about above, but the perception of attention and especially gaps in attention is something that one finds in japanese martial zen...

(for instance, the "3 pwns": the lowest level is to "pwn the sword", where you physically react quickly enough to counter an opponent's action; the intermediate level is to "pwn the technique", where by recognising the start of a technique one can predict where it will end, thus gaining time to counter; the advanced level is to "pwn the spirit", where by recognising where an opponent's attention lies one can predict what techniques they will attempt, thus gaining even more time...)

Belated reply here - I don't fully understand what you're saying but I did hear that Les Fehmi was an accomplished Zen practitioner and used to hang out with Leonard Cohen at Mount Baldy.

Are you still practicing them?

Yes—they're quite remarkable and I've never encountered anything like them. But I wouldn't use the word "practice"—I'm more of a dilettante.

I listen to them whenever I have trouble sleeping. Inevitably one of two things happens: either I fall asleep, or I end up in an expanded state—and either option is fine with me.

I have the impression that Fehmi was disappointed that he didn't win more people over to becoming serious practitioners. People would resort to his stuff when they were stressed or in pain, but wouldn't necessarily practice it every day.

> ...listen to one of them (the 'head and hands' one) whenever I have trouble sleeping

My father taught me an "instasleep" system that may(?) be related: basically you start distally and work proximally, becoming aware of any tension in body parts and allowing them to relax. When I do it I feel "myself" kind of "diffusing" to meet my environment, like fresh and salt water meeting to form a brackish zone, sometimes with a rocking sensation, and I usually fall asleep well before getting to core muscles. (when I was younger, people used to ask "how can you fall asleep on rocks?" to which I replied "you have to choose the comfortable ones", but it was likely more this technique)

The oddest thing about this technique is the source: although it sounds very Baba Cool, he'd been taught it in Uncle Sam's service.

I hadn’t heard of this particular duality, and it seems to throw up some very instructive blogposts in sportscoaching.

Expertise through peripheral vision is a pet obsession of mine, this is an almost academic article from that rabbit-hole (pdf; maybe they could have expanded on the dichotomy, though :)

Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005 Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts https://www.wellesu.com/10.1177/0170840605053102

Also would like to point out (maybe tangentially I’m afraid,) that in another HN thread, user mjburgess has a dichotomy of his own, the narcissistic/borderline[0]. It seems to be a refinement of Field’s masculine/feminine dichotomy in TFA! (as a bonus, “rhymes” with Aristotelian vice, “geometrically”) That whole thread imho relevant— psychiatry is finally moving on from psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, eye-opening to see ideas as they birth, in the basement of the (also, now “collective”) mind!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41246273

on a tangent to the tangent, the NPD-leader BPD-follower model reminded me (even in one or two details) of Bob Altemeyer's studies of "authoritarian followers".

EDIT: regarding Dreyfus & Dreyfus, it's interesting to think of expertise in terms of Minsky's Society of Mind: what if there's just as much deliberative choice going on for the expert, but it's no longer perceived at a conscious level? [go far enough along these lines of course, and you arrive at Jayne's ... Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), which is probably a bit too far]

By deliberative, do you mean something more sophisticated than “deterministic” ( to mean, e.g., that regarding a process that integrates internal & external inputs in a way that cannot be Kolmogorov-decompressed :)?

More concretely, can a coach note the differences — why world champions need coaches, not necessarily coaches who were themselves world champions.

>[haha]

mjburgess thread commenter came back with anxiety-depression axis, which seems personally more salient, as I seem to wander into latent conflicts with depressives who seem depressed at the same level that i am anxious (in a particular situation).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674

Tangent to the tangent to the tangent [maybe this is the right moment to call it “peripheral”, if not “bounding”]:

Meditating on this rare moment of anger (because of the vitious still in myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388

That said, any pointers from Altemeyer I should watch out for before I go into a deepdive mapping the NB axis to the DA axis?

(Tangential edit:

inherent vice is imho the most autobiographical (as Sortilège?) of Pynchon, you might enjoy the soundtrack from the adaptation as well, esp. the rewilding of Can

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe)

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_in...

)

Yes, by deliberative I was taking seriously the notion (from Society of Mind and Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) that our qualia of consciousness may be a quasifictional single-threaded experience which we tell ourselves to explain actions which we've actually arrived at in a far less totally-ordered manner.

On coaching and anxiety as overthinking the future: a big part of dealing with horses is to notice when they're overthinking [the danger in] a situation, and focus their concentration upon activity in the here-and-now, one after the other*, but staying with what needs to be done and not leaving space for anxiety about what might happen. This is difficult for them at first, but gets easier and easier with practice. (one of the aims of both european and "western" training is to get a horse to a point where it can go into the equine equivalent of an on guard position, ready for any movement, not because it is excited but because it is relaxed)

[I certainly couldn't arrange all the muscle firings for four legs and a neck to carry both myself and a rider through even a halfway complicated movement, but acting as coach I can help a horse to improve how they do so.]

I've also used this focus on myself: one of the better moments of my fencing career was a bout in which I was down 0-9, and said to myself "I'm obviously choking here; time to change something", and so by concentrating solely on winning precisely each current point ("no past no future") eventually won 15-12.

* compare https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... which argues that if you have a small mind coping with a wide world, a next-state automaton is both necessary and (insofar as it's the best you can do given the size mismatch) sufficient.

What’s the other one?

Glad you asked! _Facing the Dragon_ by Robert Moore

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-drag...

Thank you! This does look like it could provide a much needed perspective to some Nietzsche-adjacent issues (relating to his own “cosmodicy”) that I have been wrestling with others about.. especially as I recently, off-handedly, in anger, in grandiosity even, accused somebodies of being well-intentioned bullies.. Also relevant to organizational/selves herding, of course ;)

EDIT: if i may, your review makes me imagine that one socially virtuous mantra (or vitious countermand?) to meditate upon in mitigation of narcissism could be “loyalty to the Other”

Tangential EDIT: it could also be worth meditating on the wide spread opinions that Ayn Rand (mentioned above) and Nietzsche are both young people’s (mostly young men’s) writers

In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more... the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger... in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical...

"The I That Is God" as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber

> DEUS FACTUS SUM

as opposed to Vespasian, who on his deathbed, is said to have said:

> Vae, puto deus fio.

Dude apparently didnt get to consult, e.g. his personal astrolger Seleucus (pro Weirdo? Oriental? Wojack? AOTA?)

Or he’d have said instead

< Deus, vae, felix fio

(Did i get that right?)

Most felicitous, for tomorrow he could be sure of being free from meeting with people (for surely if there were such a century later, they'd already been there in Vespasian's time) who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial.

I hope this isnt directed at me but i was glad to see some HN comments getting unflagged yesterday. Cant expect curmudgeons to become real estate salesmen* overnight..

* et tu, Livy? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curmudgeon

Not directed at you; it was recalling how MAA noted that the reward for being at the very top of a hierarchy is getting to spend your waking hours in the company of the sorts of people who get near the top of hierarchies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930334

Very off-topic, but has anyone ever read a book that someone else credited with changing their life and felt like their own life was changed?

Anecdotally I haven't despite having read at least a dozen such books. Assuming I'm not an outlier, I think it's a bit like the "monad tutorial fallacy[1]" where the book crystalizes things that have already been bouncing around in one's head, rather than being the original source of the change.

1: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...

The Alchemist came recommend that way to me, and it's certainly shaped how I think about certain things.

Good example, because I thought it was a terrible book, utterly pedestrian and pseudo-deep.

One man's pedestrian book is another man's lifechanging literature. Everything depends on whether the words that one is reading are what, when, and how they need to read.

That's why reading a ton of books, and re-reading old ones, are both decent ideas. Something is gonna stick, even if purely via application of statistics.

I had this experience with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I am sure I read it at the wrong time in my life.

For me The Fountainhead was life changing precisely because I was an insecure and overly-mothered boy that needed to read about pursuing one’s own ends to the exclusion of all expectations otherwise. Today I’m a father and would find it uselessly myopic.

I was guessing that would come up. If it's not the most recommended book to me as a "will change your life" book, it's near the top.

My experience has been that a book gets recommended, but I’ve already read it (and I read a fair bit, but I’m not a bookworm). It is rare that I’ve had a recommendation that wasn’t already on the “usual suspects” list. On those rare occasions, yeah, it wasn’t all that (usually some pop self-help book).

"Might is Right" (https://ia803202.us.archive.org/0/items/might-is-right-by-ra...). Not as a way to form a personal philosophy, it's obviously not a book to build but to tear down. And in that regard it does it better and simpler than Nietzsche and with much less stupidity than Stirner, in my opinion.

I also find the writing style pretty attractive, same way that Magma's music can be "attractive".

I guess that Kaczynski's short manifesto could also change some lives, as it is pretty good (not without faults, though).

Highly recommend:

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-...

Also relevant;

In Praise of Idleness and The Conquest of Happiness both by Bertrand Russell.

On Doing Nothing by J.B.Priestly

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