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"We Are Not Ourselves" By Matthew Thomas

Matthew Thomas’s realist epic, “We Are Not Ourselves,” exceeds the usual boundaries of fiction on the subject. Tracking one family through three generations, it has a “Buddenbrooks”-like quality, offering a vision of a society in flux that is at once expansive and tangibly detailed. While Alzheimer’s disease comes to occupy the agonizing center of the novel, the word “Alzheimer’s” doesn’t appear until halfway through the book’s six hundred and twenty pages. “We Are Not Ourselves” opens with a series of resonant, finely observed vignettes, vital moments in the young life of Eileen Tumulty, a child born to an Irish family in Queens in the years after the Second World War. Burdened with alcoholic, financially struggling parents, Eileen is a shy girl who “would have chosen, of all powers, the power to be invisible.” But she harbors the usual outer-borough dream of social advancement. Standing outside a department store at Christmastime, Eileen longs “to be in one of those scenes in the window, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert.” She thinks she has found that faultlessness in a charming young professor of neuroscience named Ed Leary; she imagines spending her life “tuning into the calming frequency of his thoughts.” As the years pass and the transmission between husband and wife grows increasingly garbled, this novel’s form—its simple chronology and the careful intimacy of Thomas’s prose—proves to be the ideal vehicle for conveying the insidious onset of Alzheimer’s. Ed, who has not missed a day of work “in twenty years,” tries to soothe his “cloudy head” by clamping on heavy headphones and listening to classical music in the living room for days on end. Eileen dismisses his early symptoms as a “midlife crisis,” but they worsen. Ed spends whole nights struggling to tabulate his students’ grades; he is injured when “his hand [is] no longer as fast as his mind”; this deeply “sensitive” man calls his wife a “bitch.” Ed’s strange behavior accumulates across nearly two hundred pages, until, at last, Eileen has the grim epiphany that Ed might be suffering from Alzheimer’s: “The dawning came all at once, though it felt as if it had been heading her way for a while, like a train she’d heard whistle from miles off that was now flying past and kicking up a terrible wind.” The fact that Thomas delays introduction of the book’s primary subject becomes crucial to its depiction. Before Ed’s diagnosis, we encountered him as a full and complex character—“open-minded,” “polite,” someone who “soaked up whatever you gave him” but is also “committed to his own pointless suffering.” By portraying the entire span of Ed’s adult life, Thomas frames Ed’s Alzheimer’s as a life-altering event but not as an occasion for a journey into the past. In this novel’s unswerving linearity, the past remains past, and Ed’s wife and son must reckon with a radically altered future. “Why Ed? Why now?” Eileen asks herself. “It hadn’t happened for a reason,” she decides, “but they would find something to glean from it anyway.” Thomas does not seek comfort in an imagined, wishful notion of a “wholly whole” Ed trapped behind his symptoms. The story is limited to the perspectives of Ed’s witnesses—later chapters alternate between Eileen and their son, Connell—and Thomas leaves it up to them to do that gleaning. The pages that follow offer the truest and most harrowing account of a descent into dementia that I have ever read. These are mostly intimate, domestic scenes, but Thomas understands how the numbing, repetitive minutiae of caretaking are often freighted with unspeakable pain. Eileen’s attempt to persuade Ed to lift a leg becomes a desperate struggle, her worry growing so severe that she implores God to tell her what to do. When Connell tries to help his father shower after an accident, the scene is an affecting display of a son’s love and a father’s remorse: Connell must clean his father but also attempt to spare him “great indignity,” as Ed flails “like a man on fire,” his “chest heav[ing] in deep, mournful sighs.” But for all the daily burdens of caretaking, the deepest horror is in Eileen and Connell’s contemplation of what is left of the Ed they knew. Not long after Ed’s diagnosis, Eileen grasps that “his real self wasn’t hiding in there waiting to be sprung. . . . [T]his was his real self now.” But Ed’s Alzheimer’s, like any, is vexingly erratic. The old Ed still vibrates into view for a few alluring seconds. “Something deep in him was surfacing,” Eileen briefly believes, “some essential fiber in his character. Then he stopped again.” It is that same dimming faith that inspires Connell, late in Ed’s disease, to spring Ed from his nursing home to enjoy one last Christmas at home. Ed’s drooling, babbling presence only reminds Eileen and Connell of how horribly “far” they have come, and Connell is seized with “an agony of regret.” Later, Connell looks at the lights strung up outside their home and thinks of happier Christmases, “trying to derive a simple pleasure from the lights, trying to forget that they and the hundreds more inside had not prevented the encroaching of a fathomless darkness. His father was gone, gone.” But this grim understanding brings Connell a degree of solace. He finds comfort, finally, not in the belief that there is a soul-like self trapped in his father’s addled brain but in the memory of the person Ed was before. “The understanding between us goes beyond words,” an earlier Ed writes, in a letter that Connell later opens, “and it is there that I live most fully, there and in the mental space I inhabit with your mother.” While this marvelous novel resists a glibly humanizing attempt to imagine what lies “beyond words,” the need to imagine remains. For all its insight, Thomas’s novel ends with the old question unanswered. If “we are not ourselves” in the depths of Alzheimer’s, who are we? After experiencing his own “sensation of panicked blankness,” Connell considers the possibility that he might inherit the disease, and he reassures himself with thoughts of the sensual joys that even Alzheimer’s can’t claim, pleasures that lie outside of selfhood: “the mouth-fullness of cannoli cream . . . the comfort of a body squeezed against one’s own.” This might be poor compensation, but it is one that I, too, try to believe in. Who knows? Perhaps, after the horror of memory loss passes, there might really be some relief in relinquishing your self and returning to the endless present in which an infant lives. Perhaps late-stage Alzheimer’s is simply unimaginable to those not afflicted with it. Perhaps it is incompatible with language, a place “beyond words.” The New Yorker

Thank You to my blog fans

Thank You Everyone for the Readership at my blog. I seem to have a fan club. United States, Germany, France, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Great Britain and Malaysia. Way more than I ever anticipated when starting the blog in May. It's work to maintain, though a lot of fun. Glad y'all enjoy the posts. I keep working at it to be a source of info that is somewhat esoteric and uplifting. It's a journey for me to read so many newspapers to extract info for the blog, so that it's educational and entertaining for my fans. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your interest.

U2 -- Pride (In The Name of Love)

U2 -- Heal soon Bono.

Time for a Pause By Thomas L. Friedman

You could easily write a book, or, better yet, make a movie about the drama that engulfed Sony Pictures and “The Interview,” Sony’s own movie about the fictionalized assassination of North Korea’s real-life dictator. The whole saga reflects so many of the changes that are roiling and reshaping today’s world before we’ve learned to adjust to them. Think about this: In November 2013, hackers stole 40 million credit and debit card numbers from Target’s point-of-sale systems. Beginning in late August 2014, nude photos believed to have been stored by celebrities on Apple’s iCloud were spilled onto the sidewalk. Thanksgiving brought us the Sony hack, when, as The Times reported: “Everything and anything had been taken. Contracts. Salary lists. Film budgets. Medical records. Social Security numbers. Personal emails. Five entire movies.” And, on Christmas, gaming networks for both the Sony PlayStation and the Microsoft Xbox were shut down by hackers. But rising cybercrime is only part of the story. Every day a public figure is apologizing for something crazy or foul that he or she muttered, uttered, tweeted or shouted that went viral — including the rantings of an N.B.A. owner in his girlfriend’s living room. What’s going on? We’re in the midst of a Gutenberg-scale change in how information is generated, stored, shared, protected and turned into products and services. We are seeing individuals become superempowered to challenge governments and corporations. And we are seeing the rise of apps that are putting strangers into intimate proximity in each other’s homes (think Airbnb) and into each other’s cars (think Uber) and into each other’s heads (think Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). Thanks to the integration of networks, smartphones, banks and markets, the world has never been more tightly wired. As they say: “Lost there, felt here.” Whispered there, heard here. And it’s now hit a tipping point. “The world is not just rapidly changing; it is being dramatically reshaped,” Dov Seidman, author of the book “How” and C.E.O. of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership, argued to me in a recent conversation. “It operates differently. It’s not just interconnected; it’s interdependent. More than ever before, we rise and fall together. So few can now so easily and so profoundly affect so many so far away.” But, he added, “it’s all happened faster than we’ve reshaped ourselves and developed the necessary norms, behaviors, laws and institutions to adapt.” The implications for leading and operating are enormous. For starters, our privacy walls are proving no match for the new technologies. “Now, we’re not only getting X-ray vision into the behavior of others,” said Seidman. “We’re getting fine-grained M.R.I.’s into the inner workings of palaces, boardrooms and organizations and into the mind-sets of those who lead them.” So how does anyone adapt? Just disconnect? “Trying to disconnect to avoid exposure in a connected world is a misguided strategy,” argued Seidman. “If you do that, how will you create value and get anything done?” The right strategy is “to deepen and strengthen all these connections.” But how? “If we’re in an interdependent world, then the only strategy for countries, companies and individuals is to build healthy interdependencies so we rise, and not fall, together,” Seidman added. “This comes down to behavior. It means being guided by sustainable values like humility, integrity and respect in how we work with others: values that build healthy interdependencies.” It means shunning “situational ‘values,’ just doing whatever the situation allows.” The American-Canadian relationship is a healthy interdependency. The relationship between police forces and black youths today is an unhealthy interdependency. The relationship between Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and his police force is an unhealthy interdependency. But there is another critical part. It’s how we learn to respond to all the secrets being revealed: the C.E.O.’s email that makes him or her look foolish, but also reveals that women are being paid less than men in the same jobs; the video of a suspect being killed by police; the elevator footage of a football player knocking out his fiancée; and private photos of movie stars. They all have different moral and societal significance. We need to deal with them differently. “We need to pause more to make sense of all the M.R.I.’s we’re being exposed to,” argued Seidman. In the pause, “we reflect and imagine a better way.” In some cases, that could mean showing empathy for the fact that humans are imperfect. In others, it could mean “taking principled stands” toward those whose behaviors “make this interdependent world unsafe, unstable or unfree.” In short, there’s never been a time when we need more people living by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because, in today’s world, more people can see into you and do unto you than ever before. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a “gotcha” society, lurching from outrage to outrage, where in order to survive you’ll either have to disconnect or constantly censor yourself because every careless act or utterance could ruin your life. Who wants to live that way? (For 2015, I will just be writing on Wednesdays while I work on a book.) The New York Times

Net us pray: churches should install Wi-Fi, says Andrew Lloyd Webber

Cats composer and Tory peer says government is looking at ways to help churches become centre of community again. The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has urged churches across the country to be fitted with Wi-Fi in a bid to make them a more integral part of the community. The musical theatre writer also gushed about the star of his recently revived West End show Cats, the singer and former X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger, in a magazine interview. Lloyd Webber, who sits as a Conservative member in the House of Lords, indicated that discussions over installing internet for the general public at churches have already taken place with the government. He told the Mail on Sunday magazine Event: “I want to get every church in the country on Wi-Fi.  “Once you do that, the church becomes the centre of the community again. They should go back to the medieval traditions, which is that the nave of the church is always used for local businesses. Asked who would fund the project, he said: “Well, I am going to get involved, but the government have indicated that they would pay for the idea of putting the Wi-Fi in.” Lloyd Webber has given his record-breaking musical Cats a new lease of life after more than 10 years away from the West End. The London Palladium show reunites Lloyd Webber with the original team behind Cats, including director Trevor Nunn. Speaking of Scherzinger, who plays Grizabella, he said: “She is what you might call an American theatre babe. I do believe she is the most exciting musical theatre artist I have found – well, that I have worked with – in very, very many years. I really do. He added that Cats will also return to Broadway and that he “greatly hopes” Scherzinger would star in it. The Guardian Yahoo!

Chancellor Angela Merkel

Neujahrs-Ansprache "Freedom in Europe?" Bild