The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey

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For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Notes from Underground (1864) [ edit ] The characteristics of our romantics are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it... Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I've thought a lot about this. It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can't endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. But a man always talks of his own ache.

Yes — you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who're no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse — that's my fate. What do I care that you do not understand any of this? And since we’ve worked out that f(S) = aS + 1, we know that f'(S) = a, and we can plug both of those expressions into the equation above:

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Brok skilfully twines together strands from myth, legend, personal anecdote, philosophy, neurobiology, developmental biology and psychology to give us an answer which is much greater than the sum of the parts.

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt. Dostoevsky once wrote, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted, if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism-man is free, man is freedom. Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea. And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other "higher" ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. In this gorgeous kaleidoscope of a book, the neuroscientist Paul Broks takes us image by image, story by story, into an exploration of life with all its brilliant hues of grief and despair, joy and resilience, biology and society. There’s science here, and curiosity, and humanity, all forming a remarkable portrait of who we are—and who we hope to be.” Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading and re-reading?) SK: Dostoevsky and Simon De Beauvoir. Since I was a young teenager, I started reading them and I never stopped. From Dostoevsky, I learned how characters are made or should be. How they move, what they think, their inner secrets, their contradictions and complications, and how strong and helpless they are. I am fascinated by most of his work, especially Brothers Karamazov...Those two writers affected me deeply.

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Once it's been proved to you that you're descended from an ape, it's no use pulling a face; just accept it. Once they've proved to you that a single droplet of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow human beings and consequently that all so-called virtues and duties are nothing but ravings and prejudices, then accept that too, because there's nothing to be done. In her dying days, my wife said to me, matter-of-factly, You don’t know how precious life is. You think you do, but you don’t. We were sitting out on the patio in the late summer sunshine, drinking tea. A week later, I was sitting there alone, but her words were with me. They still are. The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is, in part, an effort to make sense of them. As the subtitle signals, it’s an odyssey of sorts, a journey through the strange territories of the brain-injured and psychotic, down into the underworld of dreams and imagination, through the porticoes of ancient philosophy. Along the way, there are encounters with gods and monsters and tussles with Fate, and we catch glimpses of what the superhuman future might hold, but ultimately we are contending with the stark realities of life and death in the here and now. We are born; stuff happens; we die. So, how best to live? How best to come to terms with the end of life, our own and others’? More than a compilation of case studies, Broks’s book is a digressive journey through the subject of human consciousness… Like the box of old family photographs Broks achingly describes, this metascience narrative is well worth sorting through.”

Jorge Luis Borges, in his Preface to Dostoevsky's Demons as translated by Eliot Weinberger, in Borges's "A Personal Library" series; included in Jorge Luis Borges – Selected Non-Fictions (1999) The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) [ edit ] Using primarily the translation of Constance Garnett (1900) - Full text at Wikisource I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since. Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all... They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were! They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. The actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language... How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God have pity upon you. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and cleanse not only your own sins but the sins of others. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

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Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.