Soon after I set out to write a book about psychedelics, it became obvious what I would have to do: Trip, and then write about what it was like. True, I could have relied on the testimony of others, but that seemed less than satisfying. Ever since the 11-year-old me read George Plimpton’s account of playing football in “Paper Lion” (1966), I’ve believed that the most absorbing way to convey an experience is to have it yourself and then try to describe it from the inside. Best of all is to have it yourself for the first time, which is the only time the comprehensive wonder of any experience is available to us.
But while it may have been obvious that I would have to trip in order to write “How to Change Your Mind,” it wasn’t at all obvious how I would write about that experience, one often described as, well, indescribable. William James famously wrote that mystical experience — perhaps the closest analogue we have of a psychedelic trip — is “ineffable”: beyond the reach of language. I couldn’t count on a common frame of reference, since not all of my readers would be familiar with the exotic psychic terrain onto which I wanted to take them. Boring readers was another worry. Perhaps the second closest analogue of a psychedelic journey is the dream, and there is no surer way to drive people off — even your loved ones! — than to tell them your dreams. I’d also read enough “trip reports” online and in books to be acutely aware of the literary risks — what Arthur Koestler, a skeptic after his own psychedelic experiments, described as “pressure-cooker mysticism” and “cosmic schmaltz.”
“Sit down and listen, Donner Kay. I have something to tell you,” she said, sniffing.
“Honey, your mama never went to school a day in her life,” she said. “I don’t know how to read or write. And I don’t want nobody to know but you.” I stared at her in shock. I had seen her sign her name methodically many times. “I want you to start helping me, alright?”
“I will, Mama. I promise,” I pledged, not knowing to what.
But we were a team in a world that wasn’t all that kind to us, and I was about to start writing checks, paying bills, reading her mail, helping her sell Avon beauty products, anything to help enable her to quietly survive in a written world.
Working at a restaurant is a rite of passage for many New Yorkers. For some it’s a way to finance their dance classes or start-ups or screenplays. For countless others, it is simply a way to survive. But the model of working for cash in a restaurant is changing, as several businesses, in an effort to guarantee workers a better hourly rate, are doing away with tipping. There is also a campaign underway to raise the wages of tipped workers across the state and the country. Such changes could raise prices all around, affecting the entire food-service ecosystem in New York.
Increasing wages for food service workers is certainly a noble cause, one that aligned with the ideals of Colors when it first opened, in 2006. But good intentions are one thing; running a restaurant in a city as competitive as New York is quite another.
And yet the idea still persists that those who opposed him were pathetically few in number, and that most were rabid nationalists with whom we could never have done business. That is inaccurate and unjust. Ashdown’s book is suffused with a moral sense, a fellow-feeling for the courageous men and women who made gut-wrenching moral choices in the most appalling circumstances. The story has been written before, but Ashdown contributes riveting new detail, especially about the Europe-wide network of agents through which Admiral Canaris, the wily head of the German foreign intelligence organisation, contrived to pass information to Hitler’s enemies. The book is pacey, fluent, and fascinating. But Ashdown aims above all to give these people the honour that is their due.
“I have set out to write this book for my son in the context of our American story today,” he writes. “To remind him, and perhaps myself, that any hope for the future depends on our ability to reclaim the narrative of a long continuum of resistance that has been the foundation of our country and the bulwark against the very forces that have threatened our democracy since its founding.” This is the book’s real target, as little anger (if any at all) is directed toward the president’s character. But readers can latch onto that intended hope, that sense of goodness that permeates in the souls of humankind for its members of future generations. And that might be the book’s greatest accomplishment.
There’s not much here for anyone looking for a route map to making Britain great again. Those curious about how manufacturing might evolve in years to come, under the threat of automation or the promise of some jobs potentially coming back to Britain if the premium on cheap labour gives way to one on skills, will also be disappointed. This is a book of lost yesterdays, not possible tomorrows. But agree or disagree with Hamilton-Paterson’s definition of lost greatness, at least he doesn’t make the politician’s mistake of promising to bring back something that he privately knows is gone for good.