I Am a Strange Loop

“In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad — and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority — to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards — scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being — his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions — and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”

Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange.

What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?

I slice up and devour tomatoes without the slightest sense of guilt. I do not go to bed uneasily after having consumed a fresh tomato. It does not occur to me to ask myself which tomato I ate, or whether by eating it I have snuffed an inner light, nor do I believe it is meaningful to try to imagine how the tomato felt as it was sitting on my plate being sliced apart. To me, a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity, and I have no qualms about doing with its “body” as I like. Indeed, a tomato is nothing but its body. There is no “mind–body problem” for tomatoes. (I hope, dear reader, that we agree on this much!)

I also swat mosquitoes without a qualm, though I try to avoid stepping on ants, and when there is an insect other than a mosquito in the house, I usually try to capture it and carry it outside, where I let it go unharmed. I eat chicken and fish sometimes [Note: This is no longer the case — see the Post Scriptum to this chapter], but many years ago I stopped eating the flesh of mammals. No beef, no ham, no bacon, no spam, no pork, no lamb — no thank you, ma’am! Mind you, I would still enjoy the taste of a BLT or well-done burger, but for moral reasons, I simply don’t partake of them. I don’t want to go on a crusade here, but I do need to talk a little bit about my vegetarian leanings, because they have everything to do with souls.

Guinea Pig

When I was fifteen, I had a summer job punching buttons on a Friden mechanical calculator in a physiology lab at Stanford University. (This was back in those days when there was but one computer on the whole Stanford campus and few scientists even knew of its existence, let alone thought about using it for their calculations.) It was pretty grueling work to do such “number-punching” for hours on end, and one day, Nancy, the graduate student for whose research project I was doing all this, asked me if, for relief, I’d like to try my hand at other kinds of tasks around the lab. I said “Sure!”, and so that afternoon she escorted me up to the fourth floor of the physiology building and showed me the cages where they kept the animals — literally guinea pigs — that they used in their experiments. I still remember the pungent smell and the scurrying-about of all those little orange-furred rodents.