The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity | Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment | Six books that tell the history of money | Poland gives pro-European liberals a big win

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The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity - The Marginalian

“Give me solitude,” Whitman demanded in his ode to the eternal tension between city and soul, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” In those primal sanities, we come to discover that “there is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” as May Sarton wrote in her stunning 1938 ode to solitude — her hard-earned testimony to solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery, for it is in that intimate place that we see most clearly what our animating spirit is made of. Solitude, Kahlil Gibran knew, summons of us the courage to know ourselves. Elizabeth Bishop believed — a belief I can attest to with my own life — that everyone must experience at least one long period of solitude in life in order to know what we are made of and what we can make of our gifts. “There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear,” Rilke wrote in contemplating the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity, “but… we must hold ourselves to the difficult.”

The visionary poets knew — as do the visionaries of scientist, as do all persons engaged in lives of creativity or contemplation, which are often one life — how this solitary self-discovery becomes the wellspring of all the meaning-making that makes life worth living, whether we call it art or love. From solitude’s promontory, we peer out into the expanse of existence and train our eyes to look with wide-eyed wonder at the improbable fact of it all. Solitude, so conceived, is not merely the state of being alone but the art of becoming fully ourselves — an art acquired, like every art, by apprenticeship and painstaking devotion to dwelling in the often lonesome inner light of our singular and sovereign being.

Its mastery, delicate and difficult, is what the Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor explores in The Art of Solitude (public library). Celebrating solitude — not the escapist privilege of it but the practice of it against the real world’s pressures — as “a site of autonomy, wonder, contemplation, imagination, inspiration, and care,” he writes:

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Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment - The Atlantic

When self-checkout kiosks began to pop up in American grocery stores, the sales pitch to shoppers was impressive: Scan your stuff, plunk it in a bag, and you’re done. Long checkout lines would disappear. Waits would dwindle. Small talk with cashiers would be a thing of the past. Need help? Store associates, freed from the drudgery of scanning barcodes, would be close at hand to answer your questions.

You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction—not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine—well, maybe don’t do that.

All is not rosy in the world of self-checkout, and some companies seem to realize it. Walmart has removed the kiosks entirely from a handful of stores, and is redesigning others to involve more employee help. Costco is stationing more staffers in its self-checkout areas. ShopRite is adding cashiers back into stores where it had trialed a self-checkout-only model, citing customer backlash. None of this is an indication that self-checkout is over, exactly. But several decades in, the kiosks as Americans have long known them are beginning to look like a failure.

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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.

Money Changes Everything. By William Goetzmann. Princeton University Press; 600 pages; $35 and £30

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Poland gives pro-European liberals a big win - The Economist

THE POLLS closed at 9pm on October 15th, but those still queueing were allowed to cast their votes, so at one polling station near Wroclaw balloting continued until almost 3am. A pizzeria delivered 300 free pies to those standing outside. “Better to wait four hours than four years,” a voter there told Gazeta Wyborcza, a newspaper. Many had worried that the vicious campaign would discourage voters from showing up. Instead turnout reached 74%, Poland’s highest rate ever—higher even than in the election in 1989 that brought an end to communism.

Indeed, this election may have been Poland’s most important since 1989. Rule-of-law advocates said it was the last chance to stop the country’s right-wing populist government from seizing control of the courts, filling the state with apparatchiks and wrecking Poland’s standing in the EU. The voters gave the opposition a surprisingly decisive victory. That augurs a change of direction for Poland and a big setback for Europe’s hard right.

The Law and Justice (PiS) party, in power since 2015, came first. But it took just 35.4% of the vote, down from 43.6% in 2019. The main opposition alliance, the centrist Civic Coalition (KO), got 30.7%. Another centrist outfit, Third Way, drew 14.4%, well above expectations. Lewica (The Left), an alliance of leftists and social democrats, managed 8.6%. The hard-right Confederation party won 7.2%. That gave KO, Third Way and Lewica, which promised to govern together, a majority of 248 out of the 460 seats in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament. PiS has just 194, and no other party so far wants to join them.

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