chris garneau的hymn 非常不辜负单曲和专辑的盛名 某些时候大多数人的选择还是可以信赖的 社会期望值回升中..作自欺状奋力打倒内心cynical的小恶魔~
北京竟然在两周内下了两次雨 我很惊叹 湿漉漉的学校居然跟南京有点模糊地相像 变天的晚上在微凉的气氛里~我很合适宜地做了一个和家有关的梦~睁开眼终于没有咄咄逼人的太阳 恍惚中差点以为真的是躺在蓝色墙壁的右边 妈妈随时就要来敲门 而几米开外有妖妖试图扑我的脚 还好我很快地清醒过来 蓝墙妈妈胖妖统统面目不辨光速远去 只有阴雨天气还和我一起
某句话准确地击中我 梦里不知身是客 一晌贪欢
=====这样别扭的半推半就的言不由衷的段落 终于可以使某博避免沦为垃圾桶体质了吧=====
没有用 笑 自己明明是清楚的 不过是始终放不下无畏的抗争
不过是废柴一枚 就没什么必要假装少年心气迟迟不退 头破血流到头来难受的是自己 我并不是对现状满意到发慌的人
可是为什么还是如此不甘 心里分分秒秒在挣扎 看起来还是若无其事融化在人群里 哦 若无其事 也是假装的 逃避人群 逃避责任 头埋在浮尘和泡沫的脏水里 我不挣扎 窒息死去的人们 果然都会有玫瑰红的唇色么
巨大的世界 不过是想平安度日竟也如此艰难
遁世妙方:kydest的部落格.许许多多曾经南外人的部落格.没有表情地打开,浏览,关闭,心里舒服得要爆炸.这是同一个世界的人.虽然彼此不曾相识,不再相识,细微的痕迹渐渐汇成熟悉的气息.我们共同的,不足为外人道的气息.
很多时候,就是没有预兆地红了鼻子肿了眼睛,头保持向右看窗外姿势直到呼吸恢复,没有人发现我.
不再自欺的话.这里仍旧是一个平静着绝望的地方.充斥着感觉遥远的人和苍白无味的幽默感 if any.四年时间,应该足够一个人被同化直至腐烂了吧.但愿是我在虚张.
想些开心的事.
1.眼镜实验非常欢乐.回去表演给小涕玩.要牢记合适的色泽和尺寸.
2.雷光夏.冒着被众多文青捧杀了的危险,还是成为华语碟里巨大的惊喜.台湾是最后的希望.
3.下雨下雨.帝都气象局的最近定然寝食难安.白费了这么好的空气,蓝天指数目标命悬一线.
4.电驴跑的快.
5.逸夫楼周五六点后很安静.可以在平台上不受打扰地看蓬勃的爬山虎和大树.和自己说话.很久.
今天就这样吧.
希望污染了这里之后能静下心看点有营养的东西.缺乏行动力永远是我的致命伤.
2007年5月31日
2007年5月30日
wow
"In the late forties, Huxley started to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline. He also maintained an interest in occult phenomena, such as hypnotism, séances, and other activities occupying the border between science and mysticism. Huxley’s experiments with drugs led him to write several books that had profound influences on the sixties counterculture. The book he wrote about his experiences with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, influenced a young man named Jim Morrison and his friends, and they named the band they formed The Doors. (The phrase, “the doors of perception” comes from a William Blake poem called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) "
hints..clues..linked!
hints..clues..linked!
2007年5月24日
when Wilson.E meets V.Nabokov
Books of The Times
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971Edited, annotated and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky.
When the gods clash, the earth shakes; and few bystanders on the literary scene of the 1960's failed to feel to feel the tremors when Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov collided in the pages of The New York Review of Books and Encounter magazine over Mr. Nabokov's four-volume translation, with commentary, of Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." What made their skirmish particularly startling was that each turned as a weapon against the other their long-standing literary friendship. As Nabokov wrote, responding to Wilson's review: "I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many interesting talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation."
"The Nabokov-Wilson Letters," edited, annotated and introduced by Simon Karlinsky, professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the written record of that friendship. It contains 264 letters, the extent remains of a correspondence that begins in the summer of 1940, with Nabokov proposing that he and Wilson meet, and ends, for all intents and purposes, in the spring of 1958, with a perfunctory exchange of summer itineraries.
Background for Rereading
In the meantime, their mutual affection flourishes. Wilson extends a helping hand to the financially hardpressed immigrant, praises his first writings in English, introduces him to editors, publishers and friends. Deeply grateful ("I feel it is you who have given me the great Push"), Nabokov encourages and nurses Wilson's burgeoning interest in Russian literature. Opinions are exchanged, favorite writers recommended, even articles of clothing borrowed. ("Dear Bunny, I am sending you the socks you lent me and a sample of my translation of Yougin One-gin.") Wilson proposes a book collaboration, lines up a publisher and arranges advances.
In short, they weren't being merely facetious when they wrote in the course of the "Onegin" exchange that they had been friends. And this volume creates an extremely rich and interesting background against which to reread that exchange (so much so that one wishes it had been included in these pages).
But why does this book matter so much by itself? Why do we read it as avidly as we do a compelling novel--and a good deal more avidly, by the way, than we did Wilson's "Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972"? Because these letters form a dialogue between two dramatically contrasting characters. Here is Wilson on the one hand, sober, tenacious, and dedicated to the social importance of literature: "Another thing," he admonishes his new friend at he start of their correspondence, "do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here."
And there is Nabokov, a butterfly (equipped with a stinger) to Wilson's bulldog. "You can well imagine how strongly I disapprove of your preface" to Anton Chekhov's "Peasants and Other Stories. . ." Do you really think that Chehov is Chehov because he wrote about 'social phenomena,' 'readjustments of a new industrial middle class,' 'kulaks' and 'rising serfs' (which sounds like the seas)? I thought he wrote of the kind of things that gentle King Lear proposed to discuss in prison with his daughter. I also think that at a time when American readers are taught from high school on to seek in books 'general ideas' a critic's duty should be to draw their attention to the specific detail, to the unique image, without which--as you know as well as I do--there can be no art, no genius, no Chehov, no terror, no tenderness, and no surprise."
An Inevitable Clash
They were bound to clash. If we didn't know that they would from recalling the 1960's, we know it from Professor Karlinsky's introductory essay, in which he carefully probes their contrasting attitudes toward everything from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the differences Russian and English versification. And we know it from the growing fissures in their letters, which show Nabokov falling into jocular repetitions of his disagreements with Wilson, and Wilson grumpily declaring, "I am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new."
Actually, there is barely a hint in the correspondence of the explosion that eventually occurred. They continued to exchange an occasional letter right up to 1971. In Nabokov's last note, he asks Wilson to "please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin." In Wilson's reply, the volume's final letter, he warns that "I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca" in a forthcoming book. "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't)." (It did.)
The rest is silence. A very fraught silence.
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
THE NABOKOV-WILSON LETTERS Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971Edited, annotated and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky.
When the gods clash, the earth shakes; and few bystanders on the literary scene of the 1960's failed to feel to feel the tremors when Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov collided in the pages of The New York Review of Books and Encounter magazine over Mr. Nabokov's four-volume translation, with commentary, of Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." What made their skirmish particularly startling was that each turned as a weapon against the other their long-standing literary friendship. As Nabokov wrote, responding to Wilson's review: "I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many interesting talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation."
"The Nabokov-Wilson Letters," edited, annotated and introduced by Simon Karlinsky, professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the written record of that friendship. It contains 264 letters, the extent remains of a correspondence that begins in the summer of 1940, with Nabokov proposing that he and Wilson meet, and ends, for all intents and purposes, in the spring of 1958, with a perfunctory exchange of summer itineraries.
Background for Rereading
In the meantime, their mutual affection flourishes. Wilson extends a helping hand to the financially hardpressed immigrant, praises his first writings in English, introduces him to editors, publishers and friends. Deeply grateful ("I feel it is you who have given me the great Push"), Nabokov encourages and nurses Wilson's burgeoning interest in Russian literature. Opinions are exchanged, favorite writers recommended, even articles of clothing borrowed. ("Dear Bunny, I am sending you the socks you lent me and a sample of my translation of Yougin One-gin.") Wilson proposes a book collaboration, lines up a publisher and arranges advances.
In short, they weren't being merely facetious when they wrote in the course of the "Onegin" exchange that they had been friends. And this volume creates an extremely rich and interesting background against which to reread that exchange (so much so that one wishes it had been included in these pages).
But why does this book matter so much by itself? Why do we read it as avidly as we do a compelling novel--and a good deal more avidly, by the way, than we did Wilson's "Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972"? Because these letters form a dialogue between two dramatically contrasting characters. Here is Wilson on the one hand, sober, tenacious, and dedicated to the social importance of literature: "Another thing," he admonishes his new friend at he start of their correspondence, "do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here."
And there is Nabokov, a butterfly (equipped with a stinger) to Wilson's bulldog. "You can well imagine how strongly I disapprove of your preface" to Anton Chekhov's "Peasants and Other Stories. . ." Do you really think that Chehov is Chehov because he wrote about 'social phenomena,' 'readjustments of a new industrial middle class,' 'kulaks' and 'rising serfs' (which sounds like the seas)? I thought he wrote of the kind of things that gentle King Lear proposed to discuss in prison with his daughter. I also think that at a time when American readers are taught from high school on to seek in books 'general ideas' a critic's duty should be to draw their attention to the specific detail, to the unique image, without which--as you know as well as I do--there can be no art, no genius, no Chehov, no terror, no tenderness, and no surprise."
An Inevitable Clash
They were bound to clash. If we didn't know that they would from recalling the 1960's, we know it from Professor Karlinsky's introductory essay, in which he carefully probes their contrasting attitudes toward everything from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the differences Russian and English versification. And we know it from the growing fissures in their letters, which show Nabokov falling into jocular repetitions of his disagreements with Wilson, and Wilson grumpily declaring, "I am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new."
Actually, there is barely a hint in the correspondence of the explosion that eventually occurred. They continued to exchange an occasional letter right up to 1971. In Nabokov's last note, he asks Wilson to "please believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin's and Nabokov's Onegin." In Wilson's reply, the volume's final letter, he warns that "I have included an account of my visit to you in Ithaca" in a forthcoming book. "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't)." (It did.)
The rest is silence. A very fraught silence.
2007年5月23日
..that i am that i am and why is that..
For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why.
Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.
Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.
YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”
Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older.
During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.
In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.
In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say.
“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.
Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events.
Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy.
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.
They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.
“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.
The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.
Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory. They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene — whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie.
In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person.
“What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story.
Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes.
Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight.
He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.”
After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.”
Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person.
Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.
And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.
The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”
Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person.
The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes.
But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.
“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”
Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.
Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”
Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.
YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”
Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older.
During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.
In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.
In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say.
“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.
Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events.
Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy.
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.
They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.
“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.
The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.
Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory. They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene — whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie.
In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person.
“What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story.
Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes.
Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight.
He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.”
After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.”
Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person.
Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.
And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.
The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”
Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person.
The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes.
But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.
“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”
2007年5月22日
where do they come from...
ON THE JOB
The mystery of the daytime idle: Why aren't you working?
By Chris Colin, Special to SF Gate
Monday, May 21, 2007
Two mysteries have followed me well into adulthood: Does soaping yourself work underwater, and how come there are so many people out on the street all day, seemingly not working? Having pitched a work, and not a soap, column, I recently attempted to answer the latter.
Because look out your window. Who are these people? At any given hour on any given workday, well, it turns out it's not a workday at all. Not for these hordes roaming free, anyway. By rights our parks and movie theaters and stores should be minor ghost towns between 9 and 5 -- chanced upon by the occasional tourist or late-night bartender but otherwise peaceful. Instead, they're inexplicably packed. I didn't doubt that the packers had sound explanations. I just wanted to hear them.
It occurred to me last night that you can learn as much about a city from what its people don't do as you can from what they do do. So I drove to as many parts of San Francisco as I could and interrupted as much leisure as possible to find out.
"Jeffrey" (some names changed at owner's request), writing a poem in a notebook on Church Street, had quit his California Pizza Kitchen job that morning; he was down to a barista gig now. The poem was about knots. With extreme reluctance he conceded to hailing from Fresno. There was "no love" at his pizza job.
John Spencer, 57, was sipping a large soda near some flowers outside the shopping center on Market Street.
"What do I do? I don't do anything. I'm in hospice. And now I'm having a luxury Coke at Safeway," he said.
Spencer was on his way to a writing class at the AIDS Health Project; he writes poetry. The class will end soon. He also goes to respiratory therapy three times a week, and a support group, and he does genealogical work.
I didn't approach school-age kids or obvious tourists. I didn't approach grown-ups wearing lab coats or swinging hammers. These people are either not meant to be working, or they clearly are working. My methodology was to canvass at different hours of the day and to discount those merely on lunch breaks. Science? No. But revealing all the same.
Just visiting, said the blonde with the cappuccino outside a Starbucks; she passes for native but comes from Belgium. And she's been saddened by the weather. (A believer in temporary solutions, I lied that tomorrow was supposed to be lovely.)
"I get Wednesdays off," said Kim Anderson, 29, an administrative assistant at an architectural firm. She spends them at physical therapy or catching up on errands or doing what she was doing here: sitting and watching the dogs at Duboce Park.
"Alan" sat 20 yards away, but his nose was in a short-story manuscript. Once he was a writer in the multimedia industry, but then he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. That was 14 years ago and he's been on disability ever since. There are days when typing is exhausting and walking across the room impossible. Today, however, he was out in the sun.
"If there's been anything good in this, it's that I started writing fiction. Which is actually kind of what I always wanted to do."
There are helpful statistics to shed light on the out-and-about. In 2005, 14 percent of San Franciscans 5 and older reported a disability -- nearly 100,000 people. Over 40,000 people were self-employed. Almost 70,000 were in college or grad school. Stereotypes about the contemporary human condition aside, a great many people don't inhabit cubicles.
John, 41, wasn't in a cubicle when I spoke to him. He runs large servers for a living but is between jobs now. He sees lots of movies at the Metreon and concedes he doesn't work out enough.
Many people I encountered reported variations on the "in-between jobs" line, and it's not just a euphemism. Among the employed are those who will soon be without work, thanks to frictional unemployment, the inevitable periods of joblessness structured into even perfect economies. As of March, about 4 percent of San Francisco's labor force was unemployed altogether -- 17,300 people. On top of those are the self-employed, the partially employed and so on.
Going over my own findings, a surprising number of people had had something job-related happen that very day. A surprising number had called in sick. Claire, who works in quality control at a biotech company, used a vacation day to get a tattoo of a bird. Another woman took the day off to be with her dogs. ("And catch up on errands," she added responsibly.)
"John," who is 18 and was strolling through Yerba Buena Gardens one Thursday morning, laid out his typical itinerary: "Watch the grass grow, get high, hit on the ladies."
How does he pay rent? "If you ask 100 girls for $10, that's $1,000, that's rent," he explained logically.
How does he get them to part with their $10?
"I tell them I can't live without them," he answered, with some disappointment at the caliber of question, as though he'd been asked how many moons our planet has.
Also downtown, there was a pastry cook getting on a bicycle who works weekends. Then a couple of teachers chatting at a bus stop in the Sunset, done with their workdays by 3. Two college students, Jeremiah and Tiera, with no classes that day. Another young man who did his security guard work on weekends. Steve, on Divisadero, carrying a neatly wrapped bag of comic books to his son and extolling the pleasures of running one's own company.
A funny thing about these swarms of daytime layabouts: They are quietly self-reflective swarms. Almost all of them admitted to me that they often wonder about their fellow malingerers. The funny thing is, everyone has an answer for themselves but is baffled by everyone else. Possibly this is like life itself.
"They can't all be writing the Great American Novel," said Joshua, 45, nodding in the direction of everyone else. Joshua recently left a large law firm to work on his own, hence his mid-afternoon workout downtown. "I used to wonder who all these people were. Now I'm one of them."
Raul, 34, works security at Cafe Du Nord when he's not cooking on a line. He used to work construction and "would always wonder how the 9-to-5 people got their errands done." He's concluded that many of them work nights, like he does now.
I thought Pacific Heights would be crawling with the daytime idle. If it is, the crawling happens indoors. And away from the windows. Possibly those mansions require long hours at offices? I drove to the Richmond. "Zhang," leaning against a building, said he works in several restaurants and shops. "Not always," he noted, acknowledging his presence on the side of the building.
Ken, in the Castro, is in his 50s and is a published author ("Emphasis on the 'published,'" he requested. "There are lots of scribblers sitting in coffee houses"). When he's not writing, he lectures, makes calls and so on. At the Main Library, a very tall woman gave a be-quiet face, then said she was out of grad school for the summer. Two young actors chatting at Yerba Buena noted the importance of leaving time for auditions.
Aren't we the country that other countries make fun of for working too much? Even the most assiduous Europeans, the British, work more than three hours less than us per week. Almost half of us get less than seven hours of sleep a night, and it's gotten worse in recent years. Our workaholism has spawned entire walls of self-help books. And yet this parallel universe exists right alongside the work-obsessed one. It looks nice, too, as parallel universes go.
The shameless weekday daytime moviegoer lives in another dimension entirely. Richard Inlander, 63, has been retired three years and loves it. In addition to watching movies, he travels, spends time with his grandchildren and does part-time work for Weight Watchers.
"I don't know how I ever had time for a job," he laughed in front of the Metreon's ticket line.
The cafe crowd is another special subset of the don't-seem-to-be-working population. Ritual Coffee Roasters, in the Mission, is a special subset of that subset. All day it's full and, with the music and the laptop acreage, a particularly San Franciscan mellow industriousness fills the place. I set about grilling the laptoppers.
Ben Long, 40, is a freelance writer and photographer. Sometimes he works out of the house, sometimes out of Ritual.
"People aren't just working here -- they're doing more and more of their non-work, too," he observed. "People play massively multiplayer games, they work on their MySpace pages. It isn't just an extension of the office here, it's an extension of the living room."
Keith Kessler, 38, assumes the other laptoppers are mostly Web designers or students. He himself is a lawyer at a downtown firm. He's been there long enough that he can do legal research or work on a memo from here.
Brandan, 41, was working on an e-mail. But he could've been working. He does technical editing and writing. Margaret Mason, seated nearby, makes a living from her blogs, MightyGirl.com and MightyGoods.com. Her book "No One Cares What You Had for Lunch" was written from this same cafe.
"Face time isn't such a thing anymore," she said. "What people care about now is whether you get the work done."
Sitting next to her was her husband Bryan. He has an actual office -- just didn't feel like going to it today.
Closer to the door sat Shauna, 24.
"I don't work. I'm a trust-fund baby," she said, with a nice mix of self-deprecation and not-too-much self-deprecation. What did she do today? "Got up at noon. Farted around. Made corn on the cob. Went to buy a shirt. Came to Ritual."
Her laptop was open; she was reading about careers in psychology. Why pick a career? I asked. It's a question that asserts itself after several days among those with daytime freedom. If you have a trust fund, I asked, why not keep farting around and making corn on the cob?
"I'm bored."
Chris Colin was a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He's the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93," about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of The Blue Pages, a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.
The mystery of the daytime idle: Why aren't you working?
By Chris Colin, Special to SF Gate
Monday, May 21, 2007
Two mysteries have followed me well into adulthood: Does soaping yourself work underwater, and how come there are so many people out on the street all day, seemingly not working? Having pitched a work, and not a soap, column, I recently attempted to answer the latter.
Because look out your window. Who are these people? At any given hour on any given workday, well, it turns out it's not a workday at all. Not for these hordes roaming free, anyway. By rights our parks and movie theaters and stores should be minor ghost towns between 9 and 5 -- chanced upon by the occasional tourist or late-night bartender but otherwise peaceful. Instead, they're inexplicably packed. I didn't doubt that the packers had sound explanations. I just wanted to hear them.
It occurred to me last night that you can learn as much about a city from what its people don't do as you can from what they do do. So I drove to as many parts of San Francisco as I could and interrupted as much leisure as possible to find out.
"Jeffrey" (some names changed at owner's request), writing a poem in a notebook on Church Street, had quit his California Pizza Kitchen job that morning; he was down to a barista gig now. The poem was about knots. With extreme reluctance he conceded to hailing from Fresno. There was "no love" at his pizza job.
John Spencer, 57, was sipping a large soda near some flowers outside the shopping center on Market Street.
"What do I do? I don't do anything. I'm in hospice. And now I'm having a luxury Coke at Safeway," he said.
Spencer was on his way to a writing class at the AIDS Health Project; he writes poetry. The class will end soon. He also goes to respiratory therapy three times a week, and a support group, and he does genealogical work.
I didn't approach school-age kids or obvious tourists. I didn't approach grown-ups wearing lab coats or swinging hammers. These people are either not meant to be working, or they clearly are working. My methodology was to canvass at different hours of the day and to discount those merely on lunch breaks. Science? No. But revealing all the same.
Just visiting, said the blonde with the cappuccino outside a Starbucks; she passes for native but comes from Belgium. And she's been saddened by the weather. (A believer in temporary solutions, I lied that tomorrow was supposed to be lovely.)
"I get Wednesdays off," said Kim Anderson, 29, an administrative assistant at an architectural firm. She spends them at physical therapy or catching up on errands or doing what she was doing here: sitting and watching the dogs at Duboce Park.
"Alan" sat 20 yards away, but his nose was in a short-story manuscript. Once he was a writer in the multimedia industry, but then he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. That was 14 years ago and he's been on disability ever since. There are days when typing is exhausting and walking across the room impossible. Today, however, he was out in the sun.
"If there's been anything good in this, it's that I started writing fiction. Which is actually kind of what I always wanted to do."
There are helpful statistics to shed light on the out-and-about. In 2005, 14 percent of San Franciscans 5 and older reported a disability -- nearly 100,000 people. Over 40,000 people were self-employed. Almost 70,000 were in college or grad school. Stereotypes about the contemporary human condition aside, a great many people don't inhabit cubicles.
John, 41, wasn't in a cubicle when I spoke to him. He runs large servers for a living but is between jobs now. He sees lots of movies at the Metreon and concedes he doesn't work out enough.
Many people I encountered reported variations on the "in-between jobs" line, and it's not just a euphemism. Among the employed are those who will soon be without work, thanks to frictional unemployment, the inevitable periods of joblessness structured into even perfect economies. As of March, about 4 percent of San Francisco's labor force was unemployed altogether -- 17,300 people. On top of those are the self-employed, the partially employed and so on.
Going over my own findings, a surprising number of people had had something job-related happen that very day. A surprising number had called in sick. Claire, who works in quality control at a biotech company, used a vacation day to get a tattoo of a bird. Another woman took the day off to be with her dogs. ("And catch up on errands," she added responsibly.)
"John," who is 18 and was strolling through Yerba Buena Gardens one Thursday morning, laid out his typical itinerary: "Watch the grass grow, get high, hit on the ladies."
How does he pay rent? "If you ask 100 girls for $10, that's $1,000, that's rent," he explained logically.
How does he get them to part with their $10?
"I tell them I can't live without them," he answered, with some disappointment at the caliber of question, as though he'd been asked how many moons our planet has.
Also downtown, there was a pastry cook getting on a bicycle who works weekends. Then a couple of teachers chatting at a bus stop in the Sunset, done with their workdays by 3. Two college students, Jeremiah and Tiera, with no classes that day. Another young man who did his security guard work on weekends. Steve, on Divisadero, carrying a neatly wrapped bag of comic books to his son and extolling the pleasures of running one's own company.
A funny thing about these swarms of daytime layabouts: They are quietly self-reflective swarms. Almost all of them admitted to me that they often wonder about their fellow malingerers. The funny thing is, everyone has an answer for themselves but is baffled by everyone else. Possibly this is like life itself.
"They can't all be writing the Great American Novel," said Joshua, 45, nodding in the direction of everyone else. Joshua recently left a large law firm to work on his own, hence his mid-afternoon workout downtown. "I used to wonder who all these people were. Now I'm one of them."
Raul, 34, works security at Cafe Du Nord when he's not cooking on a line. He used to work construction and "would always wonder how the 9-to-5 people got their errands done." He's concluded that many of them work nights, like he does now.
I thought Pacific Heights would be crawling with the daytime idle. If it is, the crawling happens indoors. And away from the windows. Possibly those mansions require long hours at offices? I drove to the Richmond. "Zhang," leaning against a building, said he works in several restaurants and shops. "Not always," he noted, acknowledging his presence on the side of the building.
Ken, in the Castro, is in his 50s and is a published author ("Emphasis on the 'published,'" he requested. "There are lots of scribblers sitting in coffee houses"). When he's not writing, he lectures, makes calls and so on. At the Main Library, a very tall woman gave a be-quiet face, then said she was out of grad school for the summer. Two young actors chatting at Yerba Buena noted the importance of leaving time for auditions.
Aren't we the country that other countries make fun of for working too much? Even the most assiduous Europeans, the British, work more than three hours less than us per week. Almost half of us get less than seven hours of sleep a night, and it's gotten worse in recent years. Our workaholism has spawned entire walls of self-help books. And yet this parallel universe exists right alongside the work-obsessed one. It looks nice, too, as parallel universes go.
The shameless weekday daytime moviegoer lives in another dimension entirely. Richard Inlander, 63, has been retired three years and loves it. In addition to watching movies, he travels, spends time with his grandchildren and does part-time work for Weight Watchers.
"I don't know how I ever had time for a job," he laughed in front of the Metreon's ticket line.
The cafe crowd is another special subset of the don't-seem-to-be-working population. Ritual Coffee Roasters, in the Mission, is a special subset of that subset. All day it's full and, with the music and the laptop acreage, a particularly San Franciscan mellow industriousness fills the place. I set about grilling the laptoppers.
Ben Long, 40, is a freelance writer and photographer. Sometimes he works out of the house, sometimes out of Ritual.
"People aren't just working here -- they're doing more and more of their non-work, too," he observed. "People play massively multiplayer games, they work on their MySpace pages. It isn't just an extension of the office here, it's an extension of the living room."
Keith Kessler, 38, assumes the other laptoppers are mostly Web designers or students. He himself is a lawyer at a downtown firm. He's been there long enough that he can do legal research or work on a memo from here.
Brandan, 41, was working on an e-mail. But he could've been working. He does technical editing and writing. Margaret Mason, seated nearby, makes a living from her blogs, MightyGirl.com and MightyGoods.com. Her book "No One Cares What You Had for Lunch" was written from this same cafe.
"Face time isn't such a thing anymore," she said. "What people care about now is whether you get the work done."
Sitting next to her was her husband Bryan. He has an actual office -- just didn't feel like going to it today.
Closer to the door sat Shauna, 24.
"I don't work. I'm a trust-fund baby," she said, with a nice mix of self-deprecation and not-too-much self-deprecation. What did she do today? "Got up at noon. Farted around. Made corn on the cob. Went to buy a shirt. Came to Ritual."
Her laptop was open; she was reading about careers in psychology. Why pick a career? I asked. It's a question that asserts itself after several days among those with daytime freedom. If you have a trust fund, I asked, why not keep farting around and making corn on the cob?
"I'm bored."
Chris Colin was a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He's the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93," about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of The Blue Pages, a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.
2007年5月21日
ultramarathoner
they run a over-100-miles course for over 24 hours,literally,on end. after the match, vomiting and hallucinating are normal. they forget who they are and what they are doing. but after a while, there comes a rapture that makes them feel out of the world.
i wanna write you a story. i desparately wish to be one of you to live life to its fullest, at any cost.
i wanna write you a story. i desparately wish to be one of you to live life to its fullest, at any cost.
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