Read Date: April 2025
Summary in 3 sentences
Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection delves into disaster, fear, memory, and selfhood. The reflections are philosophical, researched, and honest without centering the writer much at all.
How I discovered it
I read a bit of Any Person is the Only Self and enjoyed her writing but not enough to delve into essays on literature at the time of reading last year. This book was available at BPL and I was intrigued by its focus on memory time and internet
Who should read it?
People fascinated by human nature and behavior, with inclination towards science and philosophy
How it changed me
Behavior, ideas, perspectives, emotional shifts
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Ego depletion: overexerting one’s willpower leads to reduced control
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Similarly, there’s empathy depletion or compassion fatigue. Think about how shocking the first mass school shooting in America must have been, but now society says “thoughts and prayers” and we know there will be another one. We care but our hearts are tired.
- Also thought of bystander effect where strangers don’t help those in need (this might have been mentioned in the book)
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Stopping the flow of news, culling feeds, and turning away might be self-love but it’s also a shade of evil.
- I felt guilty reading this sentence! Privilege is often used by this type of choice but evil is a rich, provocative label here. To ignore is to be complicit in the crime.
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The present is the very recent past.
- In a study of video and audio syncing, audio can lag by 125ms in the past but can only precede the video by 45ms (future). Audio to video synchronization
- time is memory
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Influence is at the root of the word influenza (the flu): a flowing in of unseen, ethereal material
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Memory is alternate reality that we can “see”
- If we lose code to memories (e.g. thru injury or illness) then we lose our memories entirely. Encoding is required to remember even what was already encoded.
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Violence is contagious, spreading from one person through another.
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Are emotions ideas? (Feeling → thinking)
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Are ideas emotions? (Thinking → feeling)
Top 3 quotes
A crowded world, then, has a dangerous opacity providing cover for cruelty and corruption.
You’re always living in the past - David Eagleman, neuroscientist