Buying social media friends and followers, wholesale.

This is a dark art. It raises many questions, but (what should have been unsurprising) is how the market has developed. The NY Times has an investigation.

“Manufacturers” create Twitter bots. These come in high-quality from, usually copied from an inactive Twitter account (but sometime an active one), with a copied picture and ID. There are also low-quality bots which do not copy a real-life person and are super easy to spot.

These are wholesalers (eg Peakerr) and some are not available to individuals only “retailers”.

The NY Times exposed one such retailer Devumi, which has a large number of celebrity and political clients.

These bots can then be used to amplify your message or any message (realnews or fakenews), or denigrate other messages.

While, the bots will not likely create “true engagement” so not likely to help sell a product directly. They can be very good at pushing an agenda indirectly.

Eg

-follower count is used to gain influencer contracts with real brands

-a useful promotion (eg Go Out and Vote) is targeted only at a certain segment (eg target only >65s will skew the Brexit vote)

-obscuring realnews with fakenews

There is also evidence that many advertising clicks (eg FB) are going to bots and not real accounts resulting in real advertising money being lost.

While Twitter is more open to bots (less checks), IG, FB and LI can all have bots as well. Or even multiple simply fake accounts maintained by real human agents.

Or, simply those who can use the data more sophisticatedly.  Eg a right wing org can try and discourage young voters from bothering to vote, while a left wing org should be targeting its ad spending on the under 25 group.

Imagine if the UK Remain group had spent £1m on FB adverts to under 25s encouraging them to vote with a good advert. The under 25 turnout was <35% vs the >65s with a >80% turnout.

Is that weaponising democracy? Certainly it seems like savvy agents for various governments and other organisations were more savvy than the platforms themselves, and on the the face of it, continue to do so.

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More thoughts:  My Financial Times opinion article.   How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.      

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

Farewell, Ursula K Le Guin.

One of my favourite authors, Ursula K Le Guin passed away this week. Amongst many things, she showed me that you have good books and you have bad books, the “genre” of the book doesn’t really matter. So Le Guin is famous for Science Fiction and Fantasy, but mostly I simply treasure her wonderful books.  I posted on her writing craft book here, and her on literature as a manual for life.

In her later life, she kept a blog (recent interviews here) which is still a treasure trove and much better than my blog. If only mine could be so rich over time.  If you are a fan of cats, then you should read through her blog as though she didn’t write books in her last years, she wrote extensively about her cat. The Annals of Pard.

“As I see it, writing and the arts (and the sciences, and all learning) don’t play a role in ensuring our freedom; they are our freedom — the heart of it.” — UKL. 30 September 2017.

David Mitchell (of Reasons I Jump fame and father of an ASD child, and more famously a novelist) writes about his encounter with her and her influence.

I leave you with her reply to George Zebrowski, who asked her to blurb an anthology of science fiction that contained precisely no women:

"I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here."

And her “A Few Words to a Young Writer”

Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn't talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Zadie Smith. Questions and Answers.

Zadie Smith’s essays are some of my favourite writings.  She takes an idea and pursues it with thoughtful care.

On social Media:  “My worry is narrower: myself, my family. I can’t stand the phones and don’t want them in my life in any form. They make me feel anxious, depressed, dead inside, unhinged etc. But I fully support anyone who finds them delightful and a profound asset to their existence! Different strokes for different folks.”

She attempts to never self-delude: “I’m not delusional – I don’t envision people casting their devices en masse into burning bins any time soon. (And I’m as addicted to my laptop as any user of an iPhone.) “

And offers no quick fixes:

“Do you have any secret techniques for overcoming self-doubt?
As you know, there isn’t really any solution to self-doubt. In the end, you just have to write and doubt simultaneously”

And gives insights in to how things practically are with no magical techniques or insights: Are creative writing MAs a waste of time for talentless saps, polish for the moderately talented or a way to invigorate the literary tradition?

None. In my class, we spend 14 weeks reading works of literature and philosophy, mostly by long-dead people, and then my students write essays about what they have read and then we discuss these books, trying to understand how each one works. In between times, a smaller group of students will show me the novel or stories they’re writing and in a series of meetings we discuss their work, try to edit it and improve it, just as my best editors do with me. I never imagine that I am, by doing this, either saving literature or destroying it. It’s just a group of people appreciating and analysing literature – and also hoping to write it.

This echoes with my experience of creative classes.

To me, she is rightly concerned about the local and narrow.  Her family.  Her friends.  Her students.

But she is a writer.  She engages with the world (she comes to writing through writing and reading).

On the one hand, she’s like to be known as herself in the way Don selling can.   Rather than a voice of a black female writer.

But as I have often thought we hold multi personalities all at the same time:

“I’m a black person, also a woman, also a wife and mother, a Brit, a European – for the moment – a Londoner, a New Yorker, a writer, a feminist, a second-generation Jamaican, a member of the African diaspora, a Game of Thrones-er, an academic, a comedy-nerd, a theory-dork, a hip-hop-head and so on.

I am delighted to be all these things and everyone, no matter where they are from – if they really think about it – will find themselves with a similar plurality of communities. At different moments, you’ll feel the pull of certain commitments more strongly, especially if an aspect of your identity is particularly embattled.

But the whole debate can fall into a kind of trap. I know the argument: no one calls Don DeLillo the “white American author Don DeLillo”, so why should I put up with being called “the black British author Zadie Smith”? But by that logic, the rhetorical pressure falls on this idea of neutrality, as if to be white is not to possess a race or an identity – is simply to be “the author” – whereas to be black is precisely to have an identity. And then from there you are forced into the corner where you find yourself arguing that to be truly great, truly “the author”, you must have your blackness forgotten, you must aspire to people seeing “beyond” it, “past” it.

It’s a version of that backhanded compliment I sometimes heard as a child: “Honestly, you’re just my mate, I don’t even think about your colour. I’m colour blind!” I think you have to reverse the concept to see how strange it is: “Oh, Don, I don’t even think about you being white any more, I just love your books!” No, I don’t desire this supposed neutrality. I am all the things I am – and also an author. It’s all inseparable, as Don and his whiteness are inseparable.”

What song lyric best describes you?

“And I just blame everything on you/ At least you know that’s what I’m good at” – Kanye West

Read more in the Guardian article here. I found the answers sometimes illuminating and pretty entertaining.

Read my earlier post on Zadie’s writing tips here plus some video of her in conversation.

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Read more tips here - top writing style tips - some thoughts from Ursula K Le Guin - and some tips from  Philip Pullman.

Or Ta -Nehisi Coates on the Black American experience.

Rufus Norris. Teach creativity in UK state schools.

 "The myth goes that the true artist is born, mysteriously fully formed in their own exceptional talent. A second myth holds that creativity thrives in adversity; a third that creative sorts are somehow morally wayward, something to be tolerated as long as the results are diverting, but not a model for citizenship. These three combine gloriously in the icon of a lascivious and poverty-stricken Mozart, writing sonatas while still in the womb."

Writes Rufus Norris in the Guardian  

"But whatever the reason, the result is that another myth, deeply embedded in our peculiarly British psyche, is being reinforced: that culture and creativity belong naturally to the elite, that they are not for everyone.

And this problem affects us all, because the whole economy needs creative skills. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2020 creativity will be in the top three most important skills for future jobs, alongside complex problem solving and critical thinking. Which are skills innate to and honed by a creative education." 

More here in Guardian  

I recall hearing Rufus Norris speak to a group of young theatre practitioners starting out, about 20 years ago.  

We were at the Young Vic and he was leading a workshop.   

He was inspiring and offered much practical advice.  Echoed in this quote 

"Almost all have got there by two means: elbow grease and support for their creativity. This is what we have learned: just like maths, “creativity should not be perceived as an exceptional talent; it is a basic skill that can be mastered with the right teaching and approach”."

Oprah Winfrey Golden Globes Speech on the voices who are not heard

"For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men, but their time is up.    Their time is up. Their time is up."

Oprah Winfrey’s speech as she accepted the Cecil B DeMille Award at Sunday Jan 7, US Golden Globe Awards.  Full text below and youtube.

In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for Best Actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope, and said five words that literally made history: “The winner is Sidney Poitier.” Up to the stage came the most elegant man I had ever seen. I remember his tie was white and, of course, his skin was black. And I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. And I have tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door, bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney’s performance in Lilies of the Field, “Amen, amen. Amen, amen.”

In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B DeMille Award right here at the Golden Globes, and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award.

It is an honor – it is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women who inspire me, who challenge me, who sustain me and made my journey to this stage possible. Dennis Swanson, who took a chance on me for AM Chicago. Quincy Jones, who saw me on that show and said to Steven Spielberg, “Yes, she is Sofia in The Color Purple.” Gayle, who has been the definition of what a friend is. And Stedman, who has been my rock. Just a few to name.

I’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association because we all know that the press is under siege these days, but we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice – to tyrants and victims and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: what I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell. And this year we became the story. But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue.

They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories, and they work in restaurants, and they’re in academia and engineering and medicine and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They are athletes in the Olympics, and they are soldiers in the military.

And there’s someone else: Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother. She was just walking home from the church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP, where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case. And together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men, but their time is up.

Their time is up. Their time is up. And I just hope – I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks’ heart almost 11 years later when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery. And it’s here with every woman who chooses to say, “Me too” and every man, every man who chooses to listen.

In my career what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave, to say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere and how we overcome. I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who have withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon.

And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say, “Me too” again. Thank you.

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Read   Oprah on gratitude and service.    Sheryl Sandberg on death, gratitude and resilience. 

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The speech is artful. I like the thread of story she carries through using Rosa Parks. The tricolon triple repeat of "their  time is up" is well pitched emphasis, and she is even handed to the "men who listen" while never letting up on the championing of the women speaking up.

How to live a life, well lived. Bernie De Koven.

Bernie (Blue) De Koven is a fun theorist. A shaman of fun and play (Wired Interview). He is also terminally ill. Through supporting a game of legacy, I asked him these questions:

“How do you live, a life well lived?

If you would do life differently - what would you do?

What would you tell your 40-year-old self?

If these are the better days of an early nation, what should I do?”

To understand Bernie’s life’s work, read the start of the introduction to his book: A Playful Path (free ebook available here) his website on his life work and collection of games.

"When you are playful, when you are feeling, being playful, you are walking a playful path. When you are having fun, when you are graceful, when you are in harmony with your self in the world, when you feel alive, when you are delighted and delightful, surprised and surprising, loving, caring; you are dancing on a playful path. When you are playing, when you are at play, in play, when you are fully playing, when you are playing playfully, you are creating a playful path.

When you stop playing, stop being playful, when you become inflexible, unresponsive, insensitive, humorless, fearful, frenzied, you are on some other path entirely.

For adults, following a playful path is a practice, something you put into practice, and then practice some more. When you were a kid, it wasn’t a practice. It was what you did, always. You had to be reminded not to be playful.  And you were. O, yes, you were. But now that you have become what you, as a kid, called “an adult,” you find that play is something you have to remind your self to do, playful something you have to allow your self to be.

And once you again take up that playful path you knew so well, you discover that it’s different, you’re different. You can play much more deeply than you could before. You are stronger, you understand more, you have more power, better toys. You discover that you, as a playful being, can choose a different way of being.  A way of being as large as life.  A way of being you, infinitely.”

You can listen to Tassos Stevens and Bernie discuss my questions here.

You can read more about the Game of Legacy (kickstarter here).  And see a piece of it here:  http://www.alegacyofplay.net/

You can see the questions on the site here.

The very short answers would be:

A life well lived...

It’s a life that brings joy to the person who is living it and to those who are living it with her

 

Believe in the truth as you discover it - let go of the truth that no longer serves you

 

Celebrate while you can - prepare while you can’t

 

Be inspired at what lands at you - follow that as far as it goes…

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If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

Never a wrong time to do the right thing. Free Speech.

There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.  If you think you’ve made the wrong decision, but you are very much in the public eye then reversing it can be a hard thing to do.  The Royal Court led by Vicky Featherstone have reversed such a decision.  Regardless of one's own opinion, listening and responding is a mark of a considered leadership and should be congratulated.

“Written when Andrea Dunbar was just eighteen, Rita, Sue and Bob Too was presented as part of the Young Writers Festival 1982, in a double bill with Bows and Arrows by Lenka Janiurek. The play caused a sensation with its frank look at teenage sexuality and became notorious for its opening scene where two schoolgirl babysitters take it in turns to have sex with their employer in the back of his car. In 1986, the play was adapted into a film of the same name, and attracted a cult following.”

The RC at first thought it was too difficult to stage the play at the RC putting more weight on keeping the RC a safe space and the conflictual overtones of having  a director (accused of multiple harassment incidents) previously involved with the production.  

Yet the RC puts the writer’s voice at the heart of its work. Not directors not actors.  So, as writers might say, silencing a working class female voice because of who the original director was, would be untrue to the RC mission.

A wider ranging examination of the difficulties of separating art from artist is looked at here by  Claire Dederer in The Paris Review.   Can we look at Ezra Pound’s work as separate from his poetry or even harder can we take out what we know of Woody Allen from his masterwork that is Manhattan as discussed in the article.

“....They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them….Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop….”

Those of a libertarian angle or fierce defenders of speech freedom will mostly conclude that primacy of voice and freedom of speech comes first and anything else would be censorship and censorship is mostly or even always unwelcome.

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If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio on  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

Testimony. Charles Reznikoff.

Charles Reznikoff created two unique works of poetic art of the 20th century. To my mind, these works are amongst the greatest by an American poet, yet he is hardly known.

Perhaps, this should be unsurprising.  Most are unable to name  the greatest living British (female) playwright, and very few can name an artistic director of a theatre, who is a also a person of colour.

Increasing this awareness of Reznikoff’s work by a drop, I highlight this biographical essay from the Poetry Foundation by Milton Hindus.

Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creely were admirers, as were George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky.

Perhaps like JH Prynne in England, he is a poet’s poet.

I’ve read  Testimony: The United States, 1885-1890: Recitative.

And Holocaust, both once and have dipped in and out since. I can not say they are easy works. Both are unique in American literature.

“Drawing on actual US legal records between the years 1885 and 1915 (Reznikoff read “thousands” of such cases), the poem dispassionately, in a minimum of words, generally with all names and hence personality and individuality removed, records accident, injustice, disaster: Reznikoff’s great concern for man’s inhumanity to man, and for sheer ill-fortune, makes Testimony both a painful book to read and at the same time a profoundly moving assertion of human worth, dignity, nobility, and promise.” (Hindus)

This editing to its essential bones, the closing and the finding of the gaps between hits a deep and true level of poetry.

This has cousin work in what I have been writing on found art (see Tony Matelli post), found sound and verbatim theatre.

*

The extract is notable that there is a poetic thread on the lives of black Americans running throughout the work.  This makes the work the most significant on the black American experience by a white (modernist) poet – I do not know of another white poet to portray black America of that time in this un-adorned poetic fashion.

*

With the exception of Holocaust, it has no parallel in American writing.

Reznikoff distils, concentrates and crafts the essence of holocaust survivor testimonies into Holocaust.  He used the Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann Trial as source material.

There is no opinion. There is no observed outcry. The voices speak for themselves.

He self-published much of his work or had small print runs. Unassuming, self-deprecating - it seems - his is a poetry which has passed us by. Eliot Weinberger writes:

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If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or  JK Rowling on the benefits of failure. 

Interested in some more found art, I have some thoughts on watching Dickie Beau and his found sound. The found sound of drag fabulist Dickie Beau.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. 

MeToo Business stories

One learning from theatre and #MeToo is that telling your story, anon or publically, can be important part of the healing process for some. Vicky Featherstone lead that work for theatre, from the London based Royal Court Theatre.

You can see the code arising here:

https://royalcourttheatre.com/vicky-featherstone-releases-industry-code-behaviour-prevent-sexual-harassment-abuses-power/

““You must take responsibility for the power you have. Do not use it abusive over others more vulnerable than you. Think about what you want, why you want it, what you are doing to get and what impact it will have.”

There are concerns specific to a theatre rehearsal room and artistic process, yet many items are universal.  The 11 accounts of rape is brutally shocking.

In financial services, there has not (as far as I have seen) been the same process, although the NYT had a process months ago.

The FT has a process on going now. For women, men, trans. See image. If you think it would help you, I encourage you to speak out. I know people who have been helped by that process.

https://www.ft.com/content/06c43094-cad0-11e7-ab18-7a9fb7d6163e

#MeToo #SpeakOut #NoGreyArea

Annie Proulx acceptance speech

Annie Proulx (wiki here, Brokeback Mountain author) 2017 acceptance speech for lifetime achievement (Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters). I like this from it

"The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on."  Full speech below.  The video below is her take on the publishing industry from a 2014 speech.

This 2016 Telegraph article is also insightful reading:

"Proulx doesn’t like to talk about her personal life, and sharply deflects enquiries about her three marriages and four children. When I ask how long she has lived by herself, however,  she responds enthusiastically. ‘Like many  older women, I have discovered the absolute luxury of living alone, and being master of one’s time – important if you are a writer.

'Freed  from the tyranny of table and closet, there  is time to observe and think. If one longs for company, there are friends and relatives. Nothing and no one could persuade me to give up voluntary solitude.’"

....

"‘Curiosity is what drives me,’ she says. ‘I am interested in everything, and all the people I know and like have fierce passions for places and things. I never thought it was peculiar or abnormal to be this way when I was younger, but I’ve learnt differently. Most people are remarkably incurious.’"

...

I agree.  I wish this for my children. S. has an idiosyncratic curiosity - sometimes narrow, but often quizzical, and I'd love for him to keep it as a strength not a weakness.   Same for O. I wsh they could teach curiosity, empathy and creativity more at school; and rote learning, less or even not at all.

...

Although this award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t start writing until I was 58, so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…

[ ]

We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response “likes” or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.

To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil. The ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna, of drowning the land in pesticides again may have brought us to a place where no technology can save us. I personally have found an amelioration in becoming involved in citizen science projects. This is something everyone can do. Every state has marvelous projects of all kinds, from working with fish, with plants, with landscapes, with shore erosions, with water situations.

Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth—an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors that we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.

The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on. The poet Wisława Szymborska caught the writer’s dilemma of choosing between hard realities and the longing for the happy ending. She called it “consolation.” Darwin: They say he read novels to relax, but only certain kinds—nothing that ended unhappily. If he happened on something like that, enraged, he flung the book into the fire. True or not, I’m ready to believe it. Scanning in his mind so many times and places, he’s had enough with dying species, the triumphs of the strong over the weak, the endless struggle to survive, all doomed sooner or later. He’d earned the right to happy ending, at least in fiction, with its micro-scales.

Hence the indispensable silver lining, the lovers reunited, the families reconciled, the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded, fortunes regained, treasures uncovered, stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways, good names restored, greed daunted, old maids married off to worthy parsons, troublemakers banished to other hemispheres, forgers of documents tossed down the stairs, seducers scurried to the altar, orphans sheltered, widows comforted, pride humbled, wounds healed, prodigal sons summoned home, cups of sorrow tossed into the ocean, hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation, general merriment and celebration, and the dog Fido, gone astray in the first chapter, turns up barking gladly in the last. Thank you.

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Check out Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude and JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here.