Mark Manson imagines how to restore old-fashioned virtues

Humans need hope. Manson appeals to readers to develop "a sustainable, benevolent hope" that unites rather than dividing us, that is "robust and powerful, yet still grounded in reason and reality." Only this can carry us through life "with a sense of gratitude and satisfaction."

In this remarkable work, Manson shows how current social values and expectations weaken us. He speaks of values that are now unfashionable: emotional maturity, character, and virtue. He also encourages us to face up to where we are and how we've got here.

Individual choices, choosing challenging commitments and taking responsibility for them -- these are the actions of mature adults, and the only path to "spiritual happiness." They also make us "anti-fragile," able to stand up to life.

Daily decisions have long-term consequences, and choice is a serious business. This important activity should not be confused with selecting among the overabundance and variety of consumer goods available today. In reality, these are distractions. The plethora of meaningless purchasing options steals our attention from the truly important things.

Human conflict is always with us, both within and without. The author notes that in the paradox of progress, "an irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading across the rich, developed world...The better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel." Yet we all have the power of choice. How we cope with this as individuals will have great influence on the future pf spcoetu. 

I was surprised by the concluding section of the book, which lays out Manson's thoughts on how to pass through human crisis into a "post-hope" world. There is much to recognize here, and whether a reader resonates with the final section or not, this is definitely a worthy read.

American by Day and the paradox of individualism

This novel portrays Sigrid, a female Norwegian police officer who featured in Norwegian by Night. Learning her brother is missing in America, she goes looking and meets Irv, an American sheriff who studied divinity rather than criminology. Wary at first, the two cops develop enough mutual trust to tackle the problem they share, though it has different implications for each of them. Sigrid fears for the safety of her brother Marcus, who has run like a guilty fugitive from the scene where his lover dropped to her death from a high building. In Irv's world, the professor's death raises the American spectre of race relations.

At a tense confrontation in from of a biker bar by a Target parking lot, Sigrid recalls how Norwegian gangs "adopted American tropes about freedom, individuality, and rebellion and demanded complete conformity to them."

According to academic race relations expert Lydia Jones, the paradox of American cultural individualism is "both the problem and the solution." She explains that "'What we're up against now is a conservative movement anchored in a way of seeing Americanness that says that any attention to group problems, or trying to actively support diversity through representation is actually divisive and discriminatory itself...They see the entire world through this individualism prism," which "negates discussions of race and racism...One can't escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.'"

Marcus, also a teacher, makes similar observations about the students who are plugged in to their phones, thinking "the more they strive to express their uniqueness in those machines, the more conformist they become."

Miller's language is smart and funny, which makes it easy to absorb unpalatable truths. We laugh when Irv explains that "nobody has ever overestimated the intellect of a man in cowboy boots," which is why he wears them. We like him better for  having left his job using his "knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew to help name pharmaceutical products," when he realized that "most of the products aren't meant to cure you but make you dependent on the treatment." That felt wrong.

Sigrid's perspective on American policing is fact-based and clear. Citing a recent article, she tells Irv, "While we don't know how many citizens are killed by the police, we do know how many cops have been killed by criminals...the overall number of murdered officers has been dropping in a nice flattening curve since the 1970s." The perceived "war on the police" is illusory; there's been nothing close to that since Prohibition in the 1920s.

This book features variable and shifting perspectives, shown mostly using Sigrid's point of view. "Why," she wonders idly as she flips through the TV channels in a motel room, "is overacting preferred in situation comedies but not in dramas?" In a more serious moment, she decides that "The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable." Shopping in Target provides a salutary reminder of privilege: the low prices make her feel "a momentary pang of guilt for the abducted and enslaved children who surely weaved the clothing with their tiny little fingers." She finds it "unsettling how quickly that feeling fades as she "holds up a pair of ...jeans being sold...for twelve dollars, the price of coffee and a muffin in Oslo." And as Sigrid tells Irv, there are no glass barriers between the front and rear seats of Norwegian cruisers; it's unheard-of for Norwegian criminals to shoot police.

She also feels that American horror movies reflect the culture: the invariably end "with someone being self-reliant and overcoming her own fear or else failing to do that and dying." Unable to think of a single movie "where the horror was overcome through strategy, cooperation, teamwork, or planning," she reflects to Irv that "the terrible machine you've created," explains "why Americans buy guns rather than build institutions," which does not make anyone safer.

The differing perspectives of the sexes comes up for some gentle ribbing too. The SWAT team scenes feature hilariously clownish portrayals of trigger-happy macho males, whose hasty and ill-considered actions incite in Sigrid a flash of anger against men, for "their stupidity, their lies, their egotism, their irrelevant words, their aggressive personalities and their hairy backs...the ease by which they open jars and their inexplicable incapacity to return even the smallest object" to its rightful location. However, knowing that she cares deeply about her brother and respects her male colleague, the reader can smile at her snit as she slogs through the forest ruining her good Italian shoes.

Strangely, just after reading this novel, I learned another piece of the American cultural puzzle from a recently published essay. For American citizens, no matter where they live, work and earn, that there is no escape from filing taxes in the US, and failure to comply can carry heavy financial penalties. Paradoxically, I was gobsmacked to learn that it costs $2350 to relinquish one's US citizenship - a costly sanction against no longer wanting to be American.

In a recent essay, Mark Manson takes the concept of paradox beyond culture into the realm of human biology. We need to maintain homeostasis, a salubrious balance between opposites. This concept, he says, also has applications in psychology, for instance, as we are obliged to seek company, then retreat into ourselves, or cycle between seeking novelty and maintaining a reassuring routine.

Humans are contradictory and paradoxical, and our behaviour is often unaccountable. Reading fiction is a good way to face the irrationality of our views and actions. The work of Derek B. Miller is enlightening and thought-provoking as well as entertaining. While he admits that as a novelist, he takes "some liberties with reality," he deserves kudos for showing us realities we all face, thus expanding our perspective on the human condition.

Josephine Tey returns as a character drawn by Nicola Upson

Born in Inverness in 1896, Josephine Tey entered the world as Elizabeth Mackintosh. After a brief career as a physical education teacher, she turned to writing. As Gordon Daviot, she wrote plays for the London theatre, most notably, Richard of Bordeaux. Staged in 1933, this drama put her in the spotlight and catapulted John Gielgud to stardom.

Josephine Tey was the name under which "Bess" penned her mystery novels. These featured an entirely new sort of detective, Alan Grant. Tey's work broadened the mystery genre "opening doors," as Val McDermid puts it, "for others to walk through." Tey died in 1952, but Nicola Upson revived her, publishing the first of her Josephine Tey Mystery series in 2008. Set in the theatre world of thirties London, it features the novelist as a character.

The Josephine Tey character admits to writing her first mystery novel on a bet and dedicating it to her typewriter. She also uses some qualities of her policeman friend Inspector Penrose as a model for her dapper fictional detective, Alan Grant. Novelist Upson works in a cameo of the redoubtable and very real forensic pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury. The Guardian has dubbed him "the highly controversial founder of crime scene investigation (CSI) in Britain."

Intricately plotted and written in a similar style to Tey's well-known contemporary mystery writers of the time, Upson's first Josephine Tey Mystery also delves deep into its characters and expresses universal themes, portraying in particular, the damage done by war -- not only to those who fight it, but to the generations that follow.

The practice of blogging: a decade of evolution

Ten years ago today, I started blogging. With only the haziest understanding of the medium, I posted Not the Naughties, an essay I'd already written and polished. Unsure how to proceed, I sought advice and found plenty of it. Be the expert on a single topic! Monetize your blog! Establish it as part of your platform! When none of that resonated, I continued to go my own way, writing for the joy of it, and editing past posts that came up in my stats.

Soon I was using the blog to schedule posts and meet deadlines. I'd sketch them in roughly, then finish and and edit them before and after they went live. Soon I began to schedule posts in series, on a single topic. Meanwhile, having decided pictures were essential for this kind of short entry, I'd begun taking photos with future blog posts in mind. My new iphone had a great camera, and I used it to illustrate my posts.

Back then, I worked exclusively on a desktop computer -- writing about anything that inspired words. I kept a notebook in the car, one in my purse, and one by my bed. When an idea struck, I'd scribble a note, then develop a post later.

The first entry I posted while away from my home computer was inspired by my reaction to a novel by Khaled Hosseini. As soon I finished the book (in a very long queue at Heathrow Airport), I felt compelled to write down the thoughts that were tumbling around in my head. Settled in at the Penn Club, I lined up to use the single shared computer the hostelry had recently installed beside the clunky old pay phone. The next time I checked in to my London Club, I had my laptop.

Since that early post about Hosseini's book, I've posted 548 other commentaries on books. I follow no rules, but use my current reading obsessions to comment on books that spark a special resonance. Some of these have been published decades before, and some express the voices of wonderful new writers who keep me on the reading edge.

Looking back at my stats, I note the posts that got the most hits. In 2013, following a visit to Lethbridge, my post about Ammolite garnered 4500 views. A post on Chauvet cave in France (2011) was seen over 3500 times, and one on the late and wonderful writer Richard Wagamese (2013) got 2000 views, and continues to get hits today. The next most popular was one about a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. What am I to make of this? I used to wonder, but now I just use my energy to write and edit, keeping in tune with a practice that hones my skills and soothes me.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson is both chilling and hilarious

London, 1940. Juliet Armstrong has a boring clerical job in "the Registry" at Wormwood Scrubs, hq of a burgeoning MI5. One day she's approached by Perry Gibbons, who introduces himself, saying "I need a girl, I'm afraid."

"Well...I am a girl, I suppose." This response reflects the author's trademark sheen of humour; Juliet's  thoughts sharpen the comic tone. Impressed by his "firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority in a man," she agrees to work for him. Not that she has much choice -- as her friend Clarissa puts it, after a desultory interview, "I think you've been plucked." And so Juliet becomes joins a special operation and becomes a kind of clerical spy, transcribing the words of a group of fifth columnists who meet in the next door apartment to the operation's "office" in Dolphin Square.

Kate Atkinson conveys both characters and setting with devastating wit and power. Readers acquire insight into Juliet from her idle thoughts about word meanings and rhymes, and laugh when she learns that someone's husband is an actuary and wonders what that is, then decides it sounds "as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary." Learning that "Juliet and Hartley had long since abandoned manners with each other," and find it "refreshing to behave without respect towards someone," the reader absorbs a wealth of information about the social rules of the time. Then there is Juliet's touching but innocent hope that her boss might kiss her -- before she eventually clues in to the fact that he is gay.

Sometimes the comedy takes on a darker hue, as with the sketch of the pilot Juliet had "briefly dated" during the war. When he lost a leg in a crash landing returning from a raid, "He made light of it, joked about it endlessly from his hospital bed (Not a leg to stand on, Pull the other one, and so on)." In the same sentence, we learn that "it ruined him and he gassed himself in his mother's kitchen after he was released from hospital," making Juliet "furious." Convinced that she would have stood by the one-legged pilot, she thinks of her other past lovers as "mistakes."

Long after the war Juliet is working for the BBC when she receives a threatening note saying she will pay for what she did. "Must I?" she wonders, sensing the "clumsily stitched wound" of her war service opening up again, and thinking the war "had thrown up plenty of unpaid debts -- why should she be the one being presented with the bill?" She also wonders who "is going to be next to pop out of the box" that is supposed to keep her past contained.

Astutely, she senses "some kind of osmotic membrane between the Corporation and the Service, employees moving from one world to the other without hindrance...Sometimes you had to wonder if MI5 was using the BBC for its own purposes. Or indeed, if it was the other way round." She also feels there is a "quasi-religious tone to the Corporation. Broadcasting House itself was dedicated to 'Almighty God,' as if [he] was looking down benevolently on the transmitters from the clouds," and wonders if that too is a front.

The reader gets a clear sense of Juliet's character through her conversations with other as well as herself. When she and a doleful Prendergast discuss "isms," Juliet considers these: fascism, communism, and capitalism, and comments "We lose sight of the ideal that propelled them and yet millions die in defence of -- or attack on -- those beliefs." As well as being a clear thinker, Juliet has a high level of self-awareness, as when she observes herself feeling "slighted yet relieved," and thinks it "curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord."

The plot of the story hinges on this: who is using whom for what? Who is one of them and who one of us? In a moment that combines horror and hilarity, Juliet finds herself in the Brompton Oratory with the dog of an absent spy, trying to keep out of sight of someone she thinks is "one of us." Yet he has just mysteriously handed something over to "the man in the astrakhan-collared coat," whom she has seen on a few occasions, and suspects may be "one of them." Obliged to hold the dog firmly and duck down twice to avoid being seen, she begins to feel "almost religious."

It's all very complicated. As Juliet concludes, people disappear from history, not by being erased, but by being "explained away."

Geraldton War Memorial in Western Australia

This war memorial comemmorates the 745 sailors lost when the HMAS Sydney was sunk off Shark Bay during WWII.

The dome is comprised of gulls, and rests on seven pillars that represent the seven states of Australia. In the memorial garden, a bronze statue of a woman keeps watch over the pool below, symbolizing the women who watch and wait in wartime. Here visitors can visit and contemplate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Remembering our shared past: a ride through the jungle on an Army Duck

The amphibious Army Duck gave a group of tourists a ride through the jungle at Kuranda in Australia's tropical Northern Territory. We bumped along a rutted track, looking at basket ferns, blueberry ginger, and some of the many poisonous plants that grow in the world's oldest rainforest. The vehicle became a boat and we travelled through muddy brown waters before emerging onto a rough track.

Like many other human inventions that we use daily and with less awareness of their history, this vehicle was devised for use in war.