You’re not the first person to ruin or lose a book and you definitely won’t be the last. What I’m saying is accidents happen and none of us are immune from the pitfalls of treating books worse than we should. We’re all guilty!
But what happens next when the book isn’t yours? What happens when it comes to making library restitution?
Sometimes, stood down the garden with the washing waiting to be pegged, knowing where I will be at each hour of the day, I feel myself rise. The church bell rings across the road. The baby cries. Twenty miles south of here, and thirteen centuries ago, Eadfrith of Lindsfarne illuminated a text of the gospels. I imagine, sometimes, the labor involved, and how it must have been fitted to a routine of prayer and daylight. I think of each pigment made from scratch, each page prepared, pricked out, and how slowly the letters must have grown across the 516 sheets of vellum. For the ten years or so it took to make, he would have risen each morning the same and set about his day, his work a consecrated act and its product given value by the time it took, his routine and his productivity entwined.
With graduation less than a week away, the President Emeritus of Lake Forest College was trying not to panic. He’d had an especially difficult time organizing the ceremony that year, and he’d just received word that the scheduled commencement speaker for the class of 1977 was refusing to give a speech.
“I talk with people, not to people,” insisted Theodor Geisel, better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss. The renowned author and illustrator had misunderstood Lake Forest’s invitation, believing the college intended to award him an honorary doctorate—which it did, but with the polite understanding that honorary degrees are the usual currency for graduation speeches. Seuss told President Hotchkiss that he was completely unwilling to address the eager students with anything more than a few words of thanks. He did not, he felt, have any useful advice to offer them.
But as ubiquitous as the phenomenon is, and as plentiful the studies that demonstrate it, the placebo effect has yet to become part of the doctor’s standard armamentarium — and not only because it has a reputation as “fake medicine” doled out by the unscrupulous to the credulous. It also has, so far, resisted a full understanding, its mechanisms shrouded in mystery. Without a clear knowledge of how it works, doctors can’t know when to deploy it, or how.
Not that the researchers are without explanations. But most of these have traditionally been psychological in nature, focusing on mechanisms like expectancy — the set of beliefs that a person brings into treatment — and the kind of conditioning that Ivan Pavlov first described more than a century ago. These theories, which posit that the mind acts upon the body to bring about physical responses, tend to strike doctors and researchers steeped in the scientific tradition as insufficiently scientific to lend credibility to the placebo effect. “What makes our research believable to doctors?” asks Ted Kaptchuk, head of Harvard Medical School’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. “It’s the molecules. They love that stuff.” As of now, there are no molecules for conditioning or expectancy — or, indeed, for Kaptchuk’s own pet theory, which holds that the placebo effect is a result of the complex conscious and nonconscious processes embedded in the practitioner-patient relationship — and without them, placebo researchers are hard-pressed to gain purchase in mainstream medicine.
Last year, I walked into an upscale independent clothing store in Berlin and greeted the conservatively dressed, bespectacled woman hovering in the back. I’d seen a stylish male mannequin in the window, but it wasn’t clear that they sold men’s clothing, so I asked. “It’s all for everyone,” she said. “I mean, technically that rack and this rack are men’s, but I believe it’s outdated to think like that.”
“You know what?” I replied. “You’re right. Most people don’t get that.” She seemed pleased — until I pulled out a long women’s white underwear top and asked to try it on. Clearly, there were limits, and she tried to talk me out of it. The top was revealing, and normally would have been worn with a bra. This was Berlin, though, and I needed something daring.
We Begin in Gladness is well worth reading for its celebration of the art, and for placing poetry as a necessity in today's frenzied society — where dystopian fiction sells well, and too few people take time to read. Teicher's examination of poets' artistic maturation is an engaging topic. If his conclusions are informed by his own taste, we can appreciate him as a generous guide through his chosen profession. Similarly, Zapruder and Wiman offer up valuable lessons from their poetic journeys.