How food affects the mind, as well as the body | Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge | Six books that tell the history of money

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How food affects the mind, as well as the body - The Economist

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.

A glistening roast turkey. Rounds of golden, roast potatoes and parsnips. Pigs in blankets (because what meat-based meal is not improved by a side of sausages wrapped in bacon?). Brussels sprouts. Bread sauce. Cranberry sauce. Gravy. And, to finish, brandy-sodden pudding topped with butter.

Countries vary in their Christmas-meal traditions. Poles prefer fish, often carp. A Swedish julbord groans with variety, though herring will never be far off. But the repast served at most British tables on December 25th is iconic, and has been (with goose sometimes standing in for turkey) since the time of the Victorians.

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Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge - The Marginalian

In literature, when a storyline involves victim and a persecutor, we call it a drama. In life, most acts of aggression or complaint (which are two sides of the same coin: the emotional currency of existential malcontentment), most tantrums thrown by otherwise reasonable adults, most blamethirsty fingers pointed at some impartial reality, involve the self-victimization of drama. People prone to drama have not only cast themselves as victims of a perpetrator in a plot, but have tacitly conceded that there is a plot, which presupposes a playwright — some external entity scripting the story in which they feel done unto. The person self-cast into a drama is resigned to being a character, insentient to Joan Didion’s fundamental law of having character: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” Wherever there is drama, there is a deficiency of self-respect and too shallow a well of self-knowledge.

The ways in which we are all susceptible to drowning ourselves into drama, and what it takes to float free, is what Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores in her subtle, splendid 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea (public library) — the story of a talented but complacent playwright approaching the overlook of life, who is ultimately overcome by his tragic flaw: Despite his obsessive self-reflection (or perhaps precisely because of it), his egotism ultimately eclipses his creative spirit — that brightest and most generous part of us, the part rightly called our gift, the part that extends the outstretched hand of sympathy and wonder we call art and invites, in Iris Murdoch’s lovely phrase, “an occasion for unselfing.”

Looking back on his life, the elderly playwright reflects on his own art and its relation to life itself:

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Six books that tell the history of money - The Economist

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.

MONEY PREDATES history. Before the ancient Mesopotamians invented the means of writing they had invented accountancy, using cuneiform symbols to track the flow of goods into and out of temples. The history of money itself is fascinating–and helps to explain how it works today. Some of the six books selected here take on the daunting, perhaps impossible, task of tracking the entire history of money. Others hone in on one particular aspect or episode of it. Each is illuminating and demonstrates that money itself has plenty of stories to tell.

Felix Martin’s pacy biography of money is a polemic told through history, rather than a dry chronology. Written in the shadow of the 2007-08 financial crisis and the euro-zone debt crisis, Mr Martin sets out to show that the commonly held view of money as a “thing”, such as a lump of metal or a coin, is wrong-headed. Starting with the giant stone money of the island of Yap, he demonstrates that it is more like a shared language or social contract. Creating a commonly accepted measure of value relies on collective agreement, including between the sovereign and bankers, who have often tried to change the terms of this bargain to their advantage. Some of the later chapters lose their way slightly but it is hard to find a more entertaining entry point to monetary history.

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