BOOKS AND ARTS JUNE 25, 2010
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The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay
By Umberto Eco
Translated by Alastair McEwen
(Rizzoli, 408 pp., $45)
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
By Atul Gawande
(Metropolitan Books, 209 pp., $24.50)
“Please direct your attention to the front of the cabin where the flight attendants are demonstrating safety procedures ... in the event of a water landing ... doors to manual, and cross-check.” And inside the cockpit, away from our benumbed ears, the pilot and copilot go through a series of additional checklists before pushing back from the gate, before starting the engines, before beginning the takeoff roll.
The story of where these aviation checklists came from is something that interested Atul Gawande. As a surgeon interested in his—and his profession’s—ability to heal and to do no harm, Gawande became fascinated with the steps taken by other complex professions to reduce myriad possible dangers via list-making. One of the problems faced by the surgeon is the need to deal with so many possible outcomes, all of which unfold very quickly and with serious long-lasting consequences. Some of the stories he tells of the “saves,” as well as the losses, bear directly on this plotting of complexity against time.
Gawande is too smart to believe that a checklist can reduce that complexity. Instead, in telling example after telling example, he shows how lists can eliminate the stupid errors that are made not because things are complex, but because while focusing on the complex things we fallible humans often screw up the obvious ones: not sterilizing a medical instrument, not knowing a patient’s history, leaving instruments where they do not belong—all the terribly familiar nightmares. What the list does so effectively is to routinize certain processes so as to free up what power of concentration finite humans can muster to deal with the multiplicity of possible unfolding medical realities.
Gawande, the man of action, is all about how the list can reduce the infinitude of possibility to the possibility of finitude. Umberto Eco’s new book is about the way in which the finitude of a list can remind us of the possibility of infinitude. Of the two approaches, the former may save lives, and may be addressed in a concise, accessible format—it’s about finitude, after all—whereas the latter can only make life richer, without ever being possibly encompassed, and certainly not between covers. Gawande’s philosophy of the list already seems to have won over the World Health Organization to global surgical checklists. But a phenomenology of the list? Only Eco would try this. And yet both agree, in their different ways, that the list is a point of contact between the human and the infinite.
Gawande and Eco understand that “there are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But where Gawande’s response to that limit is to call a meeting—he presents this in terms of mandated communications between co-workers—Eco would send us to the museum. (This book was written to accompany an exhibition that he curated at the Louvre last winter.) There are, Eco tells us, two basic ways that artists have tried to make sense of the infinitude of the world. The first is to try and capture its essence; the second is to list as many parts of that whole as possible. Gawande’s checklist almost fits the second category, but not quite.
Eco’s argument is inspired by two passages from Homer’s Iliad. In his description of the shield of Achilles, Homer creates, according to Eco, the perfect form. On this shield, Hephaestus managed to depict the earth and the heavenly bodies, and on the earth two cities full of people going about their all-too-human existence. It is complete in itself. Homer could create such a form because he knew this world. But there are many instances, Eco observes, where “we cannot provide a definition by essence and so, to be able to talk about it, to make it comprehensible or in some way perceivable, we list its properties.”
This, he explains, is what Homer did when wishing to convey the scale of the Greek expeditionary force. Lacking words, he decided instead to list; and finding the list of individuals impossibly large, he instead listed the captains of the army and their ships. This, too, proved an enormous undertaking—Homer devotes 350 verses to this catalogue—and so conveys to readers the size of the Greek force at Troy. And it is the very limitation of the list, compared to the form, which points us toward the infinite. The catalogue is meant to remind us of what cannot be grasped; the checklist, of what can be grasped.
If Homer presented Eco with the aesthetic alternatives, Kant seems to have provided him with his analytical framework. Kant argues that there are two ways of experiencing infinity. The encounter that can so overwhelm our senses and imagination as to leave us with a feeling of the infinite may nevertheless be rendered aesthetically by the description of a single star, person, or flower. But that same feeling of infinity may also be represented by something approximating the felt infinity: the starry sky by many, many, many stars. Even “a partial list of all the stars in the universe in some way wishes to make us think of this objective infinity,” Eco writes. This is the analytical core of his project.
And yet, as stunning as this claim may be, one has a slightly unsettled feeling about all this. First, though ostensibly linked to an art exhibition, Eco’s argument is born from texts and articulated by way of textual examples. His images illustrate but they do not conceptualize, and they certainly do not argue. At a push, Eco’s entire argument could be presented without a single illustration. It did not have to be this way. One suspects, even after plowing through this book, that the “visual list” still has not met its proper theorist.
And since Eco is so invested in the infinity of some lists, he needs to separate them sharply from those others that he calls “practical,” which denote specific objects, such as the shopping list, the top ten restaurants, even the museum catalogue. His chief example of this type of list—it gave the name to his show at the Louvre—is Leporello’s famous catalogue of Don Giovanni’s conquests, with its refrain of “mille e tre,” or 1,003. (In fact, the number of the diabolical Don’s conquests is 2,065: 1,003 refers to the smitten women of Spain only.) Eco presents Leporello as a matter-of-fact empiricist—which is to say, he seems unaware that Mozart’s music tells another story, hinting at mockery and a hyperbole meant to evoke a reality beyond our imaginings, just as the very precision of the enumeration of battlefield casualties induces a sickening feeling of the bottomlessness of human suffering that more general terms such as “slaughter” or “massacre” do not convey.
Eco himself explains just how it is that a practical list can also be an infinite list, noting that “a restaurant menu is a practical list. But in a book on culinary matters, a list of the diverse menus of the most renowned restaurants would already acquire a poetic value.” Book lists, he offers, are equally ambivalent. They both record what is present and, in the hands of the right sort of bibliophile, are an invitation to wander in the wider Elysian fields of acquisitiveness and possession. Gawande’s checklists, whether “read-do” or “do-confirm,” would likely signal to Eco all the many things that could have been, or that had been. Infinity, Eco seems to suggest, is all between the ears.
As now, so too in the seventeenth century there was a serious side to list-making. For making a list requires paying extremely close attention to the world. Going in a direction different from Eco’s, we can see the listing function as a cipher for the direct encounter with the object-world. The Baroque was not only the great age of learned play, but also of the New Science and the self-conscious championing of observation. Lists follow from this. Francis Bacon was the prophet of close examination, and was a great list-maker. Not only did he propose new ways of studying nature, he drew up inventories of natural historical projects to be undertaken by others. The vogue for encyclopedias and research tools—librarians still call them “finding aids”—that also sprouted in the seventeenth century, such as Daniel Morhof’s Polyhistor (1688), transformed European learned culture into a series of lists: books to read, instruments to master, speeches to control, and so on. With this we come closer still to Gawande’s idea of the list as a means of managing uncertainty.
The age of the New Science was also, in Europe, the age of the city. Among the transformations wrought by commerce were the flow of population into cities and the development of cities into physically and psychically huge locales, bursting to the brim with possibilities of all sorts. When Mr. Spectator spent twenty-four hours on the go in London on May 23, 1711, he was announcing to his thousands of readers—his authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, reckoned on sixty thousand per issue—that London was the first city that did not sleep. When Dickens begins Bleak House, a century later, with his primeval catalogue of a London shrouded in fog and drowned in mud, we are already in the idiom to be forged by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Man of the Crowd,” which in turn was so powerfully received and made French by Baudelaire. Paris—“the capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it—was the city of infinite possibility, and infinite despair. Walt Whitman looked at New York, the future capital of the twentieth century, and saw his infinitude mirrored in its. The late modern city—Eco gives us Los Angeles-sprawls in all directions, with only connections, and neither center nor periphery. The image of the neuron is apposite, and suggests again the horizon of what we do not fully understand.
The infinite came to a forty-six-year-old woman in Flatbush in the last week of December 1695. She left four little children, and so her possessions were inventoried and evaluated to provide funds for their support. Almost all we know of this woman, who was named Margrieta van Varick, is in this list. A probate inventory is a kind of death mask, and bears the same relation to the living person. It is, in short, the opposite of Gawande’s sort of list. It is a list that is the residue of all possible activities, capturing all the finitude of a person, and almost none of the infinitude. On the other hand, like a death mask, the inventory relates a physiognomy which, even if it is cast at a single moment in time, is the sum total of the many individual moments that preceded it.
Eco does not talk about inventories, but they are the form of list that scholars have relied upon for the longest time. They are fantastically helpful in providing documentation about the way people lived. Art historians have used them to learn about artists—what objects they possessed, what books they owned. Social historians have used them to assess the buying power of consumers and the pricing power of producers. Where room-by-room inventories were the norm, their survival enables us to reconstruct interior spaces, and to deduce relationships between people and their things that generally go unspoken in texts.
Seeking to understand the “social life of goods” or to learn the “biographies of objects” has led scholars to push their questions into new places and to address them to new people. With Margrieta’s inventory one can map out her and her family’s movements across the Dutch diaspora from Amsterdam to Malacca and back, and then on to Flatbush. With it, one can help to establish the genealogy of her family. Since this particular inventory comes with an appendix that lists the debts owed her by seventy-five named residents of the six towns of late seventeenth-century western Long Island (a.k.a. Brooklyn), it also helps to identify particular people and the existence of a social network. And an inventory can serve, of course, as the basic building block for a curator trying to re-assemble the kind of objects that Margrieta possessed, if not the actual ones.
But inventories can also tell us something about how people feel. For unlike a shopping list, or a top-ten list, or even a museum catalogue, a person’s inventory brings us up very close to a person’s identity. Even at an enormous distance, and without any letters, diaries, or pictures, Margrieta’s inventory, with its heavy concentration of children’s clothes and toys, and its gifts specially chosen for each child and then carefully wrapped in a napkin for posterity’s voyage, tells us something about Margrieta as a mother that bridges the vast abyss of time. An inventory, appearances to the contrary, is an affective list. Almost all inventories are twinned with death, but this particular one, with its children’s artifacts, and the circumstances surrounding its existence, wrings one’s heart, all the legalese notwithstanding.
There is still one more fascinating thing about an inventory. The word is derived from the Latin verb invenire, “to come upon.” Inventories are lists of things that one comes upon. Probate inventories are what remain of us when our intentionality is no longer—unlike the lists that Eco treats, which are attempts to find infinity in the measure of man, such as Homer cataloging ships as a way of emphasizing an enormity beyond words; and unlike Gawande’s lists, which try to reduce that enormity to something measurable and manageable. They represent, therefore, a different kind of culture: not the triumphant spectacle of the human intervention in the natural world, but the pathos of the human on the uncertain threshold between the finite and the infinite. In this meeting of the living and the dead, the list is at its most powerful. As the poet Peter Cole wrote, in a poem called “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled”:
thought’s disjecta membra—
a letter forgotten
(a recipe scribbled on its back)
a shopping list,
or bill once due,
living’s marginalia—
the rubble of what we’ve known was true.
Peter N. Miller is dean and chair of academic programs at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. He is the editor, with Deborah L. Krohn, ofDutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (Yale University Press).
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10 comments
For my Cat Jeoffrey (Christpher Smart) For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. For he rolls upon prank to work it in. For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. For this he performs in ten degrees. For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean. For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there. For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore-paws extended. For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. For fifthly he washes himself. For Sixthly he rolls upon wash. For Seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat. For Eighthly he rubs himself against a post. For Ninthly he looks up for his instructions. For Tenthly he goes in quest of food. For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour. For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness. For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance. For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying. For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins. For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger. For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger. For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses. For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation. For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat. For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. For every house is incompleat without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit. For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt. For every family had one cat at least in the bag. For the English Cats are the best in Europe. For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupede. For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly. For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature. For he is tenacious of his point. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he knows that God is his Saviour. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually – Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat. For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better. For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat. For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in musick. For he is docile and can learn certain things. For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation. For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment. For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive. For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command. For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom. For he can catch the cork and toss it again. For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser. For the former is affraid of detection. For the latter refuses the charge. For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business. For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly, For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services. For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land. For his ears are so acute that they sting again. For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention. For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire. For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede. For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick. For he can swim for life. For he can creep.
- basman
June 25, 2010 at 3:35pm
What a lovely piece, thoughtful, eloquent and accessible. It's a keeper!
- basman
June 25, 2010 at 3:46pm
The critic Miller suffers from a common critical disease: the belief that the critique is superior to the object of criticism. He also seems to have forgotten that a review is not the same as a critique. First, Miller misidentifies Eco as a phenomenologist or at least says that uses the phenomenological method. Perhaps he did, I haven’t read this particular Eco book, but I do know that he is not a phenomenologist. “But a phenomenology of the list? Only Eco would try this. And yet both agree, in their different ways, that the list is a point of contact between the human and the infinite.” Eco is a semiotician. Semiotics is a part of linguistics and deals with language a product of semiosis or of signification. I doubt that Eco would have written any book without adverting to the process of semiosis. In any case, the opposition of Eco’s notion of lists as “catalogue” and Gawande’s more empirical one seems to me arbitrary. Miller set it up in order to offer his own conception of the list as “inventory” which is meant to function as a kind of syntheses between the two other modalities of list making. In addition, Miller’s view of the Baroque period as one of list making strikes me as forced: “The Baroque was not only the great age of learned play, but also of the New Science and the self-conscious championing of observation. Lists follow from this. Francis Bacon was the prophet of close examination, and was a great list-maker. Not only did he propose new ways of studying nature, he drew up inventories of natural historical projects to be undertaken by others. The vogue for encyclopedias and research tools—librarians still call them “finding aids”—that also sprouted in the seventeenth century, such as Daniel Morhof’s Polyhistor (1688), transformed European learned culture into a series of lists: books to read, instruments to master, speeches to control, and so on. With this we come closer still to Gawande’s idea of the list as a means of managing uncertainty.” An historical period can have more than one conception of reality. Think of 19c with its Romantics as well as its empiricists and utilitarian’s. (Miller summarizes the whole 19c in half a paragraph). The Baroque is more akin to romanticism than to empiricism. The word baroque is of Portuguese origin (The word in Portuguese was used to designate an imperfect pearl.) and meant is meant to convert notions of open-endedness and asymmetry (infinity, as it were). It was invoked in the architecture as well as in literature (Cervantes, for example). I also had a problem with Miller’s view of Kant’s “sublime” which is in opposition to the concept of “beauty.” I won’t say any more here till I read Eco’s book since I am unclear how much of Miller’s view is taken from Eco how much from Kant. Finally, I was mystified by his introduction of inventories as another kind of list making. He introduces it in order to humanize and personalize the abstract notion of lists. However, it doesn’t work. Miller may have had in mind some pathetic (in the original meaning of the word) list which alludes to personal loss, but in opposition to his late 17th century list one could show the inventories of loss set out in a novel by the great German writer W. G. Sebald: “Austerlitz.” This is an inventory of museums and monuments and above all inventory lists of property stolen from European Jews by their German captors. The lists are endless and don’t offer the kind of pathetic “comfort” one takes from natural loss.
- jdyer
June 25, 2010 at 7:29pm
I am grateful for the review, though, since I hadn't known that another book by Eco had been translated. The name of the book has been placed on my own personal list. I hope I have time to get to it. Thanks, Peter N. Miller.
- jdyer
June 25, 2010 at 7:34pm
Just to counter Jack’s critique of this essay, I’d like to take a crack at its defence (and support my enthusiasm for it) in light of his comments. (As a lawyer, working with checklists, and thinking about them, Miller’s essay is of particular interest to me.) First, I don’t see Miller overwhelming the object of his criticism with his own comments. He pretty faithfully, it seems to me, without having read the books he discusses, lets his observations and arguments emerge from what he reviews, save for his latter themes, which Jack objects to, and, on which, I’ll latterly comment. That seeming faithfulness, I suggest, shines through when close attention is paid to Miller’s actual content. More, respectfully, it is inaptly prescriptive to hold Miller strictly what he reviews as though he breaches some etched-in-stone critical canon. And that prescription betokens a misreading of Miller’s essay. For while Miller deals with the books he mentions, and is faithful to them in doing so, he also uses them as a conceptual dock from which to depart on a short, entirely related voyage of his own. And there is no reason why he ought not to. Miller begins by rehearsing briefly Gawande’s (a surgeon) interest in checklists: how, for Gawande, they, in complex situations, during surgery, mitigate against things going wrong and help guide, and release, necessary instant decision making. (Implicit, I am presuming, in Gawande’s use of checklists is their partial functionality as flow charts, or logic trees, where certain known relations between cause and effect are systematized and reduced to their cores.) Miller makes the point that for Gawande the check list is not the answer to complexity, nor does it really deal with complexity as such. Rather, by making clear the basic and the obvious—sterilizing instruments, accounting for them and so on—it helps to minimize dumb mistakes, and establishes procedural routines so that the decision making surgeon is freer to deal with the unexpected pressing upon him. I’d quarrel here that Gawande, with Miller’s assent, paints too clear bright a line between complexity and the list, and asserts too singular a notion of complexity. One mode of complexity is a body of a great amount of interacting detail constantly generating unencountered problems. But another is simply the integrated presence of those many, many details in the sense of saying, for example, the body or perhaps a statute, is a complex system. Checklists, or perhaps, here, just lists, contra, Gawande and Miller, can reduce that letter sense of complexity by isolating and making plain the body’s parts. And, even in the former sense of complexity, I’d think that checklists—for, what, finally, are the known relations between, say, symptoms, and particular ills, or testing to eliminate possibilities, but checklists?—reduce complexity too. I think, in fact, the relation between complexity and checklists I’ve just argued for is nicely captured by Miller’s incisive and telling encapsulation of Gawande’s intent: “Gawande, the man of action, is all about how the list can reduce the infinitude of possibility to the possibility of finitude.” Miller excellently contrasts that encapsulation with his description of Eco’s project: the list as an arrow to the infinite: the former wants to contract; the latter wants to expand; the former aims at functionality; the latter aims at a “phenomenology of the list”. (On this point I think, respectfully again, Jack goes quite astray. What Miller means, I think, is Eco’s intent to account for the idea of the lists by studying the structure of lists though “his experience of them ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity.” The issue is not whether Eco is a phenomenologist.) But what knits Gawande and Eco a bit together, for Miller, is the idea “…that the list is a point of contact between the human and the infinite.” I don’t know, arguing further against Jack, how this can be thought to be the critic overwhelming his material. It’s the opposite: the critic adhering to his material both (Gawande) to distill it and represent it and (Eco) to distill it and put it into illuminating contexts. At that point of contact, a “limit” in the sense of that which surpasses our understanding, Miller observes, Gawande, wanting functional contraction, would call a meeting, Eco “…would send us to a museum”. For, as Eco says, artists reckon with the infinitude of the world either by trying to get its essence or by cataloguing it to illuminate the vastness beyond the catalogue, the latter bearing some relation to Gawande’s checklist. That relation is only partial because Gawande’s checklist drives toward what can be grasped while Eco’s catalogue drives to what can’t be. Eco’s two ways of the artist reckoning with infinitude derives, says Miller, from Kant’s two ways of apprehending it: experiencing it as microcosm: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. and beholding in many things—stars in the sky, or more grandly, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread”—its irreducible plentitude and vastness, which for Eco finds aesthetic form in the catalogue, however, and necessarily, partial. Again, as against Jack, I say Miller, fulfilling his role as reviewer and critic, notes his own qualms with Eco: Eco’s curated art exhibition is arbitrary and not serviceable for his argument, an argument essentially born of texts. In Miller’s incisive words, “…the “visual list” still has not met its proper theorist”. As well, Eco, for Miller, has not sharply enough distinguished between the list as prelude to infinitude and merely practical lists, even while for Eco the latter may, in some instances, be a species of the former, especially when they have a dimension of the aesthetic. The point that this second concern goes to is, for Miller, a certain failure in Eco's phenomenological project, his analytical failure to rescue the variety of lists from his own irreducible subjectivity: “Infinity, Eco seems to suggest, is all between the ears.” Then, Miller, having dealt, in his fashion, with Eco, goes abroad as I say, travels intellectually, from the conceptual dock of his critical treatment. Miller deals with the list in relation to the seventeenth century’s New Science and as the age of the city. Thus, he relates the list to New Science’s privileging of disinterested observation, pace Francis Bacon, and he remarks the list as the starting point for taxonomies, texts and encyclopedias, and also for research tools and the itemization, inventorying of, the artifacts of culture and the techniques of personal development (precursor to the infomercial?). Heading back to the contrast informing his essay, Miller notes that with these developments in the seventeenth century, we are firmly on Gawande’s side--lassoing uncertainty-- of the contrasting divide. Miller is wonderfully synoptic is his treatment of the city itself, now pace Eco, as a living catalogue pointing to the infinite, and as a source for the artistic treatment of it as that. As Miller concludes his own synoptic catalogue here: “Walt Whitman looked at New York, the future capital of the twentieth century, and saw his infinitude mirrored in its. The late modern city—Eco gives us Los Angeles-sprawls in all directions, with only connections, and neither center nor periphery. The image of the neuron is apposite, and suggests again the horizon of what we do not fully understand.” In the final section of his essay, Miller, still traveling abroad but without veering from the course of his theme, pursues a sea lane he has sailed before as co-editor of Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varic. He treats, somewhat contra Ganade, probate inventories as a mode of list both contracting and expanding reality, particularly as related to the infinitude of death. Contracting it, a dead Flatbush woman’s seventeenth century inventory of worldly goods, her probate inventory, seems the quintessence of a Ganadian purpose-driven list, the means of implementing all the prosaic, worldly consequences of her death, a listing of all that her life as things comes to. But, as against that account of her life’s inventory, the list also points to the infinitude that makes up a life, all that has gone before, and points to a living, irreducibly complex social history and, the point is made, a living, irreducibly complex psychological history. Finally, as a variation of the theme that “…the list is a point of contact between the human and the infinite…”, the personal inventory, as a mode of list, is something different from an arrow to infinitude as the list is for Eco, and is something different from a means of roping reality as it is for Gawande. Different from these two, the personal inventory as probate list is a pathos--an occasion for feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness—and some confoundedness too: an axis, or, in Miller’s apt word, a “threshold” between life and death, a meeting point between them, sadly and bewilderingly different from Ganade’s meeting as a functional response to the infinite that life wants to manage and sadly and bewilderingly smaller and different from Eco’s meaning of trying to take living man to the periphery of the infinite as human expansiveness.
- basman
June 26, 2010 at 3:59pm
Itzik, thanks for your comments. However since I didn't post my article in opposition to your "enthusiasm for it" I don't feel a need to counter your views. My views were in response to Miller's review and only to his review. My wife liked the article also but for different reasons. Needless to say this is a rich topic and many views of it are possible.
- jdyer
June 26, 2010 at 7:54pm
There was no need to "counter" my views in any event Jack. I haven't posted anything considered in a long time due essentially to busyness. I feel like I got something out of my system and I enjoyed doing it. Cheers.
- basman
June 26, 2010 at 10:35pm
p.s., If I may, from what angle did your wife like this essay?
- basman
June 26, 2010 at 11:14pm
Itzik, she told me she mostly likes the latter part of the review, the part dealing with "inventories."
- jdyer
June 27, 2010 at 5:33pm
Gower in his Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction makes the case that infinity can be understood as how close can you get to something for your purposes. For example: pi is 3 or 3.14 or 3.1415 or .... If my reading was correct, a mathematical interpretation unites Eco's and Gawande's work, but it's not too poetic.
- dashendorf
July 2, 2010 at 12:14am