“It was barely sunrise. Yet even in the faint, rose-fingered light, there could be no doubt: the invention was a marvel. It could mend cracks in the heart and resurrect hope from the dark. It could summon up raptures and impossible days. It could chase away dullness and unlatch the sky. The invention was literature.” Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher goes on to trace the many subsequent developments in this wondrous technology, using modern psychology and neuroscience to support the ancient man’s findings, while offering many modern examples that apply these innovations.
“And indeed, so tight was the jointure that literature and scripture would be fashioned with identical root meanings: 'that which is writ.” There were two ways of writing the very same thing. What prompted this ancient reverence for literature?” The answer to that question was two powers in particular: the first is that, through beginnings and endings, it can answer any question; and the second is the stirring of emotion, which gives comfort in the face of fear and loneliness. “We can achieve unprecedented success–and still feel that life is pointless. We can have a thousand friends — and still be overwhelmed by loneliness. We can walk in daylight’s brightest gold–and see all the world as gray. To truly be human is none of these things; it is to wonder.”
Modern psychiatrists have created a link between side-to-side eye movement and an attenuation in fear, which has led to the process of EMDR. This is one way reading helps reduce mental tension.
Aristotle followed the trail of a production of wonderful surprise and found the plot twist, with Oedipus Rex being his favorite example. He then stated that, buried within the plot twist, is an even more basic literary invention: the literary stretch. Taking a blue lake and making it bluer, taking a star and making it everywhere, taking an object and making it a symbol, taking normal speech and making poetic meter, taking a human and making a hero.
Catharsis, in a medical sense, was the purging of something unhealthy. In the case of literature, one example is Agamemnon, with a passage about the pain of everyday life, which would be heard in a comfy setting removed from the pain referenced. The Greek word Orkestra, which has an English root that refers to sound, is in Greek directly translated as a dancing place. The Orkestra was an area of dancers in front of the stage who viscerally reacted to the words on stage.
A literary narrator that can equal the tone and focus of a real oral presentation seems impossible, yet somehow it can solemnly articulate, fearfully whisper, or dryly remark. This is achieved by choice emotional infusion.
The neural source of courage is particularly interesting. The amygdala triggers our sympathetic nervous system and other parts of the brain in order to release a mix of adrenaline and natural opioid painkillers. This is the flighty feeling of fear, but courage comes from its countering chemical, Oxytocin. Oxytocin is released from our pituitary gland specifically when we are surrounded by other humans who are also in danger, which is essentially a form of bravery. Courage is what arises when these two chemical systems clash, resulting in physical feelings of energy, invincibility, and a willingness to sacrifice. The paean are war chant to the gods used by the Greeks to create a feeling of companionship with both those sharing in the song (Their fellow soldiers) and the audience (The Greek gods). This sonic unity triggers oxytocin, thereby fostering courage. On a deeper level, the entirety of The Iliad is a paean, which was listened to and recited by many Greeks, fostering a sense of pride in their country among all who joined in the oral events. In The Iliad, the narrator is a hybrid of mortal sentiment and cosmic scope. Homer was also one of the first writers to use the “Epic Simile” in order to further entrench a powerful union of thought.
The fourth chapter discusses Plato’s dive into ancient satirical writings after Socrates’ lecture on Aesop on the day of his death. The earliest tool employed by satirists was the parody, an exaggerated imitation, carried to the point of silliness, and thus intended to make the original concept seem silly. The second tool is the insinuation, or incomplete syllogism, that fosters an air of cleverness. The third and most powerful invention in satire is irony. The example that Plato cites is a passage by Hipponax: “There are two times a woman most delights a man: On his wedding night and at her funeral.” This is ironic as it seems to imply that those on their wedding day are ignorant of the troubles that may follow. Then Plato turns to an innovation from his teacher, Socrates: though present in many of the Socratic dialogues, Meno displays it well. Not only does he use two insinuations in the form of incomplete syllogisms, but he also uses irony in his telling Meno to educate him, and parody is characterizing him as a more obvious idiot than the subject of his parody. The new invention, however, is the subject of that parody, which happens to be the reader, as we all grapple with truth often unsuccessfully. This is shown to be the pain-quenching secret that allowed Socrates to unflinchingly accept execution. While laughing at others may produce momentary pleasure, condescension actually increases anxiety and increases blood pressure, increasing our risk of strokes at the same time. Instead, laughing at yourself actually reduces cortisol levels, diminishing stress, and allowing for the mystic nonchalance that Socrates possessed.
Angus Fletcher begins chapter five by talking about the Oracle of Delphi (Who was a real person who consistently breathed in volcanic vapor and claimed she had prophetic visions), and how the reason why she spoke in riddles was to excite the curiosity of the listener in order that they may make the statement true by their own effort to understand it. Tying a riddle to the future turns that curiosity into anticipation, which is an important part of a compelling narrative. Ironic foresight then became a staple in tragedies like Oedipus Rex and Macbeth. The next part of the chapter discusses how humans are conditioned not to waste time on easy or impossible questions; instead, they become engaged when they have some idea of the answer but are also unconfident about it. The brain encourages us to pursue the true answer by giving us a little dose of dopamine, which spurs us on to find the solution and thus opens the floodgates that complement the sensation of the search.
Flethcer talks about the beginning of one of the first modern thrillers, King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard: “I am going to tell the strangest story that I remember. It may seem a quer thing to say, especially considering that there is no woman in it–except Foulata. Wait, though! There is Gagoola —if she is a woman, not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don’t count her.” This conversationalist style leads us to believe that he is leading up to something important, as in plain speech, when someone is talking about an experience they had, it is almost always interestin,g as otherwise it would not be worth telling to an audience. After this discussion of Thrillers, he goes into confusing passages in non-fiction to make it more magnetic. Dante’s Inferno makes us feel paranoid by showing that humans have the freedom to make the wrong choice, thereby increasing the pressure on every decision, even deciding to turn the page.
The lucky twist or Deus Ex Machina is the opposite of poetic justice, and the two synonymous ideas contain the important factor of hope. Even though luck is not dependable, it does make people more resilient, as they hold out against opposition in order to wait for a change in fortune, while also fostering gratitude ,as you know that bad luck has been avoided in every good event. Knowledge of luck is key to the risk-reward matrix of our brain, so reminders of luck in literature tend to encourage forward thinking that improves positivity. Those reminders can come from literature. Straparola magnified this good from bad concept in his tale Adamantina and the Doll, which was found in his anthology collection The Playful Nights, which is now a common example drawn upon for inspiration of modern fairy tales. Adamantina is an anti-Cinderella. Where Cinderella got her gains from merit, Adamantina gets swindled into buying an ugly doll instead of food for the day. However, it is a magic doll that grants infinite money and a happy marriage with a King. This greater negative situation, combined with the greater upside of being a leader of the wealthiest kingdom in the world.
The lucky twist was sometimes a little too convenient, which is why modern authors have adapted it to be a simple concealment of good circumstances (Like Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where she is revealed to have always had the only tool she needs to return home the entire time), or a more complex method of in the form of Superman arriving on earth and improving the situation but not removing opposition entirely, but rather inspiring an increase in evil’s strength to balance out the equation. In fact, almost every superhero gets their powers by a stroke of luck —from The Flash to Spider-Man —as that luck becomes a burden, as they feel a duty to make the most of the opportunity. Then, those heroes would act as Deus Ex Machina for thousands of humans in grim danger.
Most Greek revenge plays contained a vicious plot. A plot about how the characters did not just kill their enemies, but how the main plot was them achieving that revenge in horrific ways. The plot was the efforts the characters had to make to utterly destroy their enemies. In the play Thyestes, the avenger murdered three boys, and then fed them in a casserole to their unsuspecting father. Then, in Hamlet, Shakespeare subverted the theme that the revenge plot is based on excessive viciousness. When the original audience tried to figure out what plot Hamlet would plot, they thought he would concoct a terrible death engine to make Nero proud. But instead, Hamlet wandered the palace with a book, tempting people to ask what he was reading, and he would respond: “Words! Woooords. Words?” The plot then disintegrated further. He lectured a troupe of professional actors to “Hold a mirror up to nature… and let your clowns say no more than is set down!” Later, he jumped into a grave and said, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest.” It was madness, not plot. Shakespeare’s rivals laughed, but then Hamlet outsold Romeo and Juliet and prompted more encores. The source of this inspiration was the book that Shakespeare got to console him after the death of his son, named Hamnet (Which clearly resembles Hamlet). That book was called Cardano’s Comfort. Cardano’s Comfort centered around this advice: Call to memory how many worthy men have suffered; or, in other terms, cover grief with stoicism. Acknowledge the pain, and then search for the courage to let it flow over you, to remember the dwell on the most precious attributes of those lost, and let that courage of gratitude give you propulsion instead of paralyzation. This was why Shakespeare did away with the type of plot employed by the Greek tragedies, in favor of the memorial pause, the profound internal contemplation of life’s purpose and value. But how do you avoid floundering in the sensation of misery? Modern psychologists have coined the term "complicated grief," the kind that is not expressed and deepens over time rather than resolving. This kind of grief forms from a wish to evade guilt or shame. Hamlet believes it is wrong to stop grieving. So how does he absolve himself if he sees it as immoral? Guilt is considered by Psychologists to be a motivating emotion, the root cause of revenge, and the desire to impress guilt on other subjects. Revenge is considered a gift to the deceased by psychologists. Revenge is a memorial—an unforgettable reminder of your dedication to the deceased—one that is supposed to free you from guilt. This gift of eternal memory is actually the reason why the Greeks wanted to create such “creative” plots. As said by Atreus in Thyestes: “O my Imagination! Hatch a deed so far beyond the norm that posterity will never forget.” Hamlet languishes, going mad with a desire to find a suitable course of action. But he struggles, and then, instead of revenge, for a moment, he decides to stage a play of the events. It is nearly an effective salve, but then it instead gives Hamlet more evidence to act upon, as he now is more certain that the King’s brother was the murderer on account of his reaction to the play. And this is actually the message Shakespeare is trying to convey: a play cannot perfectly imitate life, and instead serves to clarify real events by comparison. This inner play helps characterize Shakespeare’s writing hand. Furthermore, upon meeting Laertes, Hamlet tells Horatio that he has moved closer to peace. This is once again a meta-narrative, as while the audience expects to find a moraless revenge plot, they instead find mirror of their grief in Hamlet, just as Hamlet finds that justifying mirror in Laertes, Hamlet’s final request is for his story to be told, which gives words to the desire of real humans to have knowledge of their loved ones shared with many strangers.
Upon Galileo's discovery of sunspots and his detailed mapping of the moon's chaotic craters, the poet John Donne began an effort to quantify the implications of cosmic imperfections. This was a physical representation of something that men had been forming for years: A paradox. Blemishes on the sun clashed with the idea that the heavens were God’s perfect creation compared with that of the sinful Earth. Many authors rejected these paradoxes. Why willingly give up truth for the sake of lies, obscuring something that they know is beautifully consistent in practice? The first paradox of Donne was this: Humans can extinguish the sun. How? By closing our eyes. This led the cosmic view to become more dynamic. Where once talking about the sun was as boring as calling water water and the Earth Earth. The illogical made manifest was truly an engaging topic to discuss which made all revel in the feeling of cleverness. Donne's next experiment was equally stirring. At the last moment of life and the first moment of death, what is the difference between them? The answer is: nothing. And the answer is also: everything. Double sight, double perception; this is a biologically possible phenomenon that our eyes can achieve. Humans can look at two-dimensional paper and see something that is not only three-dimensional, but also impossible: Take, for example, the classic triangle that seems to fold back on itself infinitely, simultaneously leaning in three directions. When humans see a normal object for the first time, the visual memory releases a neurochemical burst that signals to the rest of the brain: "This is something novel; look at it for a second so you can remember it properly next time." But when we see something impossible, the visual memory jams open. It sends this message instead: Keep pausing! Keep looking! We need more time to record this correctly! This stretches the experience of visual wonder. Psychologists call these sights psychedelics, which is a mash-up of the two Greek words Psyche (Soul) and Delos (Visible), which, when combined (In noun form) means soul sight. This sensation is also achieved through literary paradoxes. Dr. Russel Brain stated that even when the “cold eye” of science had exposed every secret of the brain, the mind (separate from the brain) would remain explicable only by poetry. The most extensive research into tangible psychedelics was conducted by Roger Walt Sperry, who easily won a Nobel prize in 1981. He cut out a salamander's eyes, rotated them 180 degrees, and reinstalled them. Even though its body saw things as upside down, its mind still tried to see things as right side up, and so was put into a permanent semi-drugged state, where it clearly saw the world as insane and crawled around weirdly and flipped on its back. Then, Roger Walt Sperry carefully cut a cat’s brain down the middle, making the discovery that both sides were separately conscious, but not conscious of each other. That cat split into two minds and lost the ability to have both sides of its body move in unison, instead trying to move in opposite directions at once. Knowing this was possible, Sperry found individuals with naturally occurring split-brain syndrome. He postulated that we all have parallel experiences. That each waking instant is an instant twinned, baking a paradox into our brain. Modern poet William Carlos Williams wrote a poem, “This is Just to Say.” In it, a man recalls that when he ate a plum in the past, thinking of its sweetness and refreshing coldness at the same time—a paradox of focus that enriches every experience —further showing how the unexplainable is important for vivid description. “The miracle of the impossible you. The one that glimpses two.”
Cao Xueqin is heralded as the greatest Chinese novelist. But he exemplified why the imperial exams were not conclusive, because his genius did not prevail. The only main teaching of Confucius that he could remember was chi, the doctrine of shame, which was fitting to the situation. The main line of Confucius regarding chi was this: “Shame is the root of Duty. It is a friend to be embraced, without which we are not human.” Confucius also stated that chi was an essential aspect that guided people towards achieving Tao, spiritual mastery. Cao was a true practitioner of chi. Then, he found the Bark-Paper Codex in a dark corner of the imperial school. “In the middle of the world lived Wonton. Wonton had two neighbors: the emperor of the North and the emperor of the South. And he was always very kind to them. So, one day, the emperors decided to repay Wonton. They said: ‘We have seven holes in our heads. Two for hearing, two for seeing, two for smelling, and one for tasting. But poor Wonton has no holes like us. We should give some holes to him.’ Pleased by their plan, the two emperors got a drill. Each day, they drilled a new hole in Wonton’s head. And on the seventh day, Wonton died.” This passage in the Bark-Paper Codex confused Cao. He felt that he should experience a surge of chi after reading the text banished to such a dusty corner by those wiser than him. But instead, his tension lessened. Wonton was developed by the sage Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi lived during the generation that saw the crowning of the first “celestial emperor.” The celestial emperor’s iron discipline contrasted with the teachings of Confucius, especially those of chi, which held that discipline halted the purifying process of chi. But Zhuangzi saw both as extreme ends of a concept that was ultimately too hyper-focused on one aspect of humanity. Then, he had a breakthrough: He saw that both sparrows and koi fish had their own kinds of Tao, that each needed different actions and tools to be what they are meant to be. Each human follows a different path to enlightenment. But he was stymied in spreading that idea. How to empower people to teach themselves without imparting to them that they should follow in his personal journey? How to teach without imparting? It was quite obvious: Unteaching. To pull off this reverse, he looked back to before Confucius, to the pyromancers of the Shang dynasty: the teaching of yin and yang, light and darkness, which suggested a duality that applies to other fundamentals of existence, one that applies to every aspect of nature having a complementary element. Confucius stated that this balance was unstable and that one always triumphed in the end, but Zhuangzi disagreed. He decided that Confucius was overthinking, and that one may become physically dominant, on a metaphysical level, they remain equal. To explain this, he relaxed his consciousness and let the metaphysical flow through before recording those metaphorical details with the brush. He wrote The Tale of Wonton, which intonated that there was no imperial rule that all must follow. But he did not stop writing, for the flow of the metaphysical never stops. So he continued to write the rest of the Bark-Paper Codex. He set out to create balancing stories that did not include such a brutal end, with no “villains” to carry it out. The Dream of the Butterfly is one such poem that displays a more positive concept. Cao found this and accepted that his path was different than those around them. He became self-content, merely because of inked words. Pride has the potential for good, and shame has the capability to be crushing. This idea is so novel that the word Cao used to describe it is the root of the word for the literary novel. Not true. At least not for everyone. Then, when Cao’s thirsts for more of these, “not truths,” He discovered Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, the only two Chinese novels that can culturally compete with Cao’s magnum opus, which built on their success. The character you truly care about, who has an impact on the reader's heart. That kind of character is what Cao borrowed from the Three Kingdoms and the Water Margin. But Cao was annoyed that the two novels elevated yang over yin, order over chaos. So he wrote Dream of the Red Chamber. How to achieve a perfect blend of yin and yang? The conflicted hero, a panoply of human experience. Inception, with its layered dreams, was based on Dream of the Red Chamber, but Red Chamber also gave us the first Equilateral love triangle, where one of the members is yin, the other yang, and the final one balances. The main character of the love triangle —the one of balance —is an allegorical representation of Cao, reflecting his life story and personality. One final note: There are four separate schools of thought regarding Dream of the Red Chamber, and thus even the study of this novel forces us to follow in Zhuangzi’s footsteps and find which perspective is our own.
Chapter thirteen lays out the beginning of the modern mystery genre in the form of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The sleuth of the novel follows what is essentially the scientific method, but he makes it his own. He gathers data, makes a hypothesis, tests that hypothesis, analyzes the results, and shares his findings. Mind blown. That is how humans learn. Making predictions based on evidence that inevitably fail in some way, and after many attempts, narrow down the effective truth. Magical thinking (That of the abstract), intellectual insecurity, and confirmation bias obscured generations of philosophers before Copernicus. The way to break this fear of disrupting facts is an easy solution that makes mystery novels compelling: going to an environment outside our minds or habitual living spaces, allowing our comfort zone to not be directly touched by the turbulent idea. In the beginning of Murders of the Rue Morgue, E. A. Poe talks about checkers, and how it pertains to the solving of mysteries and the generating of pattern recognition, before stating that reading a novel like the one that follows delights our pattern recognition. When your pure logic capabilities fail, gather and guess more rigorously, enjoying the infinitely developing pursuit more than the fixed and limited destination.
Did you know that on the fourth of July, 1854, abolitionist William Lord Garrison stood beneath an inverted American flag and burned a copy of the US Constitution, while saying, “So perish covenant with death, agreement with death! And let all the people say, ‘Amen!’” Frederick Douglass watched and was horrified. He utterly detested his experience as a slave and the cruelty of his masters. But the constitution was at its core, at least an attempt to make all men equal. That attempt had value in the slave’s eyes. He said that if America continued to strive, then it would change, as he had in perseverance. This was documented in his book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. It was a chronicle of horror and the driving corruption behind it, one that challenged the North to target that previously obscured corruption if they believed that horror must be extinguished. A call to growth, fertilizer for the soul. Before writing a second autobiography, he set out to learn about the autobiographies of the past, locating Augustine’s Confessions. Normal irony is the idea that we are conscious of a truth that other people do not know, but Augustine used self-irony, the consciousness of a truth that we do not know. Then, Douglass stumbled upon Confessions. By Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Instead of self-irony, he focused on the poignancy of intimate disclosure of self-love and self-justification, focusing on how facing your inner truth renews inner purity. The inherent good within humans allows for admission of failure or success to be plentiful and naturally occurring, so that man unconsciously grows morals, whether bad or good. Douglas was the first to set self-irony and self-love/justification on equal footing within an autobiography. These two concepts combined form many recognizable aspects of Logos and Pathos (The arguments and emotion within Rhetoric), namely a basic incomplete syllogism in the form of a historical example and a charged metaphor. Douglas first learned this from The Columbian Orator as a boy, but as a man, he separated it into these two elements of honesty. This led to the distinct style of My Bondage and My Freedom, a radical change in the form of recognizing that, as Rhetoric is a hybrid of concepts, so too all of life and the development of life’s characteristics are not straightforward, but only occur as a result of a balance of understanding.
In 1848, a temporary surge of democratic idealists emerged. But it was quickly quashed by force, in such a way that the proponents were humiliated, discouraging further attempts at change. It was a significant change that wasn’t a turning point in history, one that failed to truly turn. But it did plant a seed in the mind of novelist Mary Ann Evans, whose pen name is George Eliot. Though it took many second tries to find a better way of failing, Eliot would succeed at last. The first novel she released after the revolution was Felix Holt, the Radical. Within it, one of the many plotlines was of a fake English revolution is a preacher who preaches against wealth inequality (As Isaiah does in the Bible). But after learning that his adopted daughter is going to inherit a massive fortune, he begins praying first Thessalonians. With gratitude for God’s grace and sufficient power, he manages to survive the setback to the foundation of his ministry. Psychologists have discovered that the fastest cure for rumination is looking away, and the most gratifying way to do so is through gratitude. In addition, wonder, especially theological, amplifies the therapeutic nature of gratitude, as it further makes us less conscious of ourselves and thus dissolves the gnaw of rumination. The combo of wonder and gratitude has shown significant and life-changing effects. Back in the time of George Eliot, she saw love as a distinct kind of love, a profound affection rather than a simple acknowledgment of obvious facts. Eliot goes on to write Middlemarch. The book follows the life of a woman who is “a foundress of nothing.” But the thing that turns the novel from pessimism is the narrator's shift from loftily removed to saying “You and Me” instead of us, with the unnecessary words emphasizing the significance. This bonding of the narrator and the protagonist means that the narrator (whose perspective is the influencing window the reader looks through) forces us to feel an increasing gratitude for the characteristic of the main character that the narrator emphasizes. This phrase of you and me comes from Paul’s mouth in the first Corinthians, the same passage that had inspired parts of Eliot’s earlier work. When an omniscient being acts as if it were human, it dissolves our disappointments and makes us feel the gifts God gave us in the form of reason.
The simple brains of animals have no filter, accepting all the primary perceptions of the eye, and gullibly trusting that the food is floating alone in the water, and that a fish should eat it right now without delay. But this is a gullibility that leads the fisherman to catch dinner. In the rest of chapter sixteen of Wonder Works, the author shows that readers are gullible in a similar way: They believe in the foundations set by the author at the beginning of the story, however odd, only questioning those literary foundations when there is a contradiction that cannot be ignored. That contradiction is engaging because not believing takes more effort than acceptance, and the willful creation of that contradiction is a literary invention similar to that of the paradox. An illogical bias towards first impressions. The earliest iterations of this self-contradiction were certain forms of rhetoric, including what today is known as the fallacy of the strawman. This is an idea employed by Caesar’s friend Mark Antony in his speech during Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the famous one in which he simultaneously states reasons why Brutus is suspicious, before seemingly “discounting” them by stating that Brutus is an honorable man. By saying that Brutus was honorable so many times, it made the audience think he was trying too hard to obscure something, planting the opposite idea: This Brutus guy must have some great moral weakness hidden within. Verbal repetition, and repetition of any kind (Think of the Hebrew phrase, Shalom Shalom, or peace of peace), is powerful. In 1915, a Japanese student named Akutagawa published the short story “Rashomon.” Within it, he first states that the main character is standing outside the Rahomon gate, waiting for the rain to pass, before amending that statement to say that his master had dismissed him and he had nowhere to go even if it stopped raining, so in fact writing that he was waiting was a mistake, and he should have instead said standing destitute. Then, a woman justifies herself by admitting to doing something immoral, but then says that she needs to do it in order to be fed, just as the woman whose corpse she is burgling had to lie in the market to survive, so in fac,t you can’t really blame me on account of circumstance. Then the dismissed servant from before comically turns the argument back on itself as he says, “You argue well. You’ll understand then, why I need to rob you. I have to feed myself somehow.”
Chapter Seventeen covers what is called the “riverbank of consciousness”. It is about the journey of Virginia Woolf, who struggles with manic depression post-war. The suffering was further exacerbated by George Savage’s philosophy of inactivity, which led to a healthy reset of the mind. Instead, it merely purified rumination and led to Woolf’s further descent. Ultimately, she came upon Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Joyce’s Ulysses. She finds Proust’s work in line with the newer psychological beliefs of William James, whose process of innovation is unpacked in the passage. We learn about his distinction between a train and a stream of thought. However, Woolf believes herself capable of surpassing Proust in that she believes that many minuscule waterfalls would improve the river cruise of the mind. She wrote Mrs. Dalloway, a more accessible stream-of-consciousness piece that strives to lift the reader onto the riverbank. The conclusion of Mrs. Dalloway, which is an abrupt shift from is to was, carries a note of finality, allowing the reader to step away from the fictitious stream of consciousness before them and back into their own mental rivulet, which has widened as a result of the excursion.
Chapter Eighteen covers the Anarchy Rhymer. It begins with the cataclysm of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He believed that man is capable of infinite imagination when conditioned at a young age, and warned against it. He sparked the rational program of education, which stated that children should be drilled only in the association of ideas that possessed natural correspondence. From cradle to the school-house, they would be told that ice was cold and fire hot; that money bought things and dreams did not. Then, in the mid-1990s, the PET scan was developed, and the researchers discovered that, during relaxation, a particular network was activated more than during intense thought. This state is so healthy that the most solemnly somber scientists recommend a designated “mind wandering” time. To broaden the wander and escape “mental furrows,” musical improvisation is recommended. Nursery rhymes are a way to bring musical improvisation to non-musicians. It is a verbal process of “Yes-anding.” Hey Diddle Diddle, The Cat and the Fiddle, The Cow jump’d over the Moon. This sentence just forces us to imagine what comes next, leading us to wander. Edward Lear’s The Book of Nonsense is an early anthology of such work. Alice in Wonderland created an extended Yes-anding experience, using the consistent character of Alice to more easily insert us into the mindset by donning her perspective. The original Winnie the Pooh is then mentioned as a counterexample, as it is not the character but the world that serves as the anchor. The two texts each other: one makes us wonder about the world around us, and the other takes that and makes us start to wonder what we should do in it.
Chapter nineteen covers the neuroscience of the soliloquy-this neuroscience is correlated with the assumption that your subconscious thinks that you just thought that thought. The other primary element of subconscious self-awareness is the salience network, which monitors internal conflicts, such as those between the amygdala and ventral tegmental area, or between the immersion of the middle temporal gyrus and the conscious self-awareness. Whichever the trigger, the salient system reminds us that we are not part of the undivided flow of time. Within the most famous soliloquy of Hamlet, he begins the internal conflict stage of the salient system with the famous phrase “to be or not to be.” This particular inflection is off the primeval justice network. This fray is deepened by other neural entities, guilt, interrogatives, and the murder conscience. We are getting to gaze into a character's self-awareness, sparking a beautiful flicker of intuitive experience. The difference is felt for and felt with. The Cid’s version of the famous soliloquy actually perturbed civic authorities, leading to censure because the number of people returning nightly seemed to be inciting a revolution. Compared to the theatrical, literary soliloquy, the salient system is triggered more effectively by the absence of a physical vessel in a distinctly separate space. In To Kill A Mockingbird, the main character Scout is struggling with untangling the verbal soliloquy of Atticus and the primal, nonverbal soliloquy of Boo Radley, as she stands on Radley’s porch in order to understand both him and Atticus. We, the reader, are experiencing the minds of Scout, Atticus, and Radley simultaneously, a functional expansion of the soul.
Chapter Twenty is about rediscovery. It asks: Why does our brain maintain a library of books with half-vanished pages? On the same page, an answer is given. If we’d never learned in the first place, we’d have nothing more than our current perspective to guide us. If we had never forgotten, we’d repeat in an endless loop. Poetic phrasing (“A flower blue” instead of “A blue flower) forces a rediscovery of the related idea, which enriches the neural connection. This questioning and explanation intercut a discussion on One Hundred Years of Solitude. It begins with many hallucinatory ideas, which makes rediscovering the normal interesting. The other most potent element of rediscovery in One Hundred Years is the boat sitting on dry land. When discovered by the colonel’s father, we merely see it as another hallucination following all the rest. But then, many years later, his son comes upon it once more, and we must rethink.
Chapter twenty-one’s main idea: Travel stimulates the anterior cingulate cortex in a way that makes us pause mid-action, forcing our senses to scan separately from the obfuscation of familiar movement. This chapter goes through multiple attempts by authors to activate the anterior cingulate cortex, each culminating in the final recipe of a knowledgeable narrator who goes from lucid to crazy to lucid again, with the shifts correlated to trips between Earth and an otherworldly place.
Chapter twenty-two states that self-affirmation is impossible if you do not have a hole to place your new stability into. The primary example in the passage is a memoir that begins with humiliation, contrasted with the author’s current wisdom—not played out or proved wisdom, but explicit ethos. This combines modern existentialism with the ancient principles of The Wisdom of Ptahhotep, the first self-help book and the original fountain of self-affirmation. This passage also speaks about what existentialism is and why it is appealing to people despite its overarching pessimism.
Chapter twenty-three unpacks the process of how modern authors came to understand Euripides’ tragicomedies (Alcestis being the most famous example). Waiting for Godot and The Cocktail Party, by Beckett and T. S. Eliot, respectively, both include half of Euripides’ style. The stasis of suffering is in Godot, whereas The Cocktail Party emphasizes a more positive shift to a much higher degree, without the same numbness as in Godot. The neuroscience tie-in has to do with type two PTSD, the kind where exposure therapy does not help. In essence, the tragecomedy is like a psychological bending down before a leap.
Chapter twenty-four focuses on how the line between reality and fiction is manipulated in writing, demonstrating two distinct techniques to either bypass or shift that line. Ultimately, the process of acclimating to those shifts is shown in a study to increase the likelihood that you can solve a particular puzzle involving a candle. Don Quixote is the most famous example, focusing on the beginning of Part Two, how the Don discovers that his adventures have been published, but then realizes that someone else has published a fake version of Part Two, of events that have not yet taken place. This fake sequel was actually in the real world, and yet, within the true Part Two, the Don intentionally avoids the plotline offered in the fake book for the pure reason of not playing into the “deception.” This warping of the supreme line is one of the many unique elements that led to Don Quixote’s enduring success.
The Chase Verdict is that Wonderworks is an intellectual's playground, and is a delightful read for those who do more than simply tolerate academic study.
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