Amazing things can come your way if you allow yourself to wander, especially through footnotes. Real footnotes, in books. Which is how I was introduced to the celebrated German critic, Walter Benjamin, and his essay, “The Storyteller.”

I was in the Round Reading Room at the British Library in Bloomsbury, reading about fairy tales. I did this for almost two years. It wasn’t the 19th-century. It was 1994. I was reading a book of Angela Carter’s, and I followed her thinking through her footnotes.

It was before most of us were hooked by the Internet. There were cell phones, though, but not many people on e-mail. There was the fax machine. No one twittered.

“The Storyteller” is an elegy for the real storytelling — the oral tale. It is about many other things, but one passage has stayed with me all these years, what Benjamin wrote about boredom. He wrote it in the 1930s. That was the era of the telephone, the overseas cable, and the postage stamp.

Benjamin was very upset about the ravages of the first two decades if the 20th Century. He realized that after the World War (he was writing about the first, of course, the second was yet to come) and the destruction and horror of mechanized warfare, that the helplessness of the “tiny, fragile human body” against killing machines was on this Earth to stay.

I was reminded of Walter Benjamin when I read Sean Kernan’s blog post on the salutary effects of boredom on the human spirit (see www.seankernan.squarespace.com)
in response to a recent piece in the New York Times Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler.

Neuroscientists are praising the effects of boredom. I regret it is too late for Walter Benjamin, who would have wondered why it took them so long. (He took his own life, in 1940, fearing capture by the Nazis.)

But here is the poetry of it, from eight decades ago:

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom — are already extinct in the cities and declining in the country as well. With this the gift of listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.”

(You can find this essay in Illuminations, a collection of his writing.)

Wrap this metaphor around any of the arts that come from the hand, eye, heart and mind of the fragile human being.

I’m teaching a class in the UCLA Extension Landscape Architecture Program called Making Space:  Four Voices, Four Writers, Four Landscapes. We’ve become interested in the anthropology of space, that is, how language, culture, and experience shape our perception of space.

(In the article below, by the way, there is a reference to “Edge” — that is edge.org. )

I ran across this post on the NPR blog, Planet Money.  Our tricky minds! So much is at work and play when we try to think about how we think or see.

3 Ways the Brain Betrays Us by Jacob Goldstein

Over at Edge, they’re asking a bunch of big thinkers a big question:  “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”

They’ve collected more than 150 responses, and it’s fun and interesting to read (or at least skim) through all of them.

Lots of the responses point out systematic cognitive errors that are deeply embedded in all of us. In other words, our brains are wired to prevent us from seeing the world as it is.

Here are three examples that stood out to me.

1. Memory is rigged

…human beings tend almost invariably to be better at remembering evidence that is consistent with their beliefs than evidence that might disconfirm them. When two people disagree, it is often because their prior beliefs lead them to remember (or focus on) different bits of evidence. To consider something well, of course, is to evaluate both sides of an argument, but unless we also go the extra mile of deliberately forcing ourselves to consider alternatives—not something that comes naturally—we are more prone to recalling evidence consistent with a proposition than inconsistent with it.

From “Cognitive Humility,” by Gary Marcus

2. We see patterns where there is only randomness

…when our pattern-detection systems misfire they tend to err in the direction of perceiving patterns where none actually exist.

The German neurologist Klaus Conrad coined the term “Apophenia” to describe this tendency in patients suffering from certain forms of mental illness. But it is increasingly clear from a variety of findings in the behavioral sciences that this tendency is not limited to ill or uneducated minds; healthy, intelligent people make similar errors on a regular basis: a superstitious athlete sees a connection between victory and a pair of socks, a parent refuses to vaccinate her child because of a perceived causal connection between inoculation and disease, a scientist sees hypothesis-confirming results in random noise, and thousands of people believe the random “shuffle” function on their music software is broken because they mistake spurious coincidence for meaningful connection.

In short, the pattern-detection that is responsible for so much of our species’ success can just as easily betray us.

From “Everyday Apophenia,” by David Pizarro

3. We overestimate the importance of whatever we think about

Nothing In Life Is As Important As You Think It Is, While You Are Thinking About It. …

On average, individuals with high income are in a better mood than people with lower income, but the difference is about 1/3 as large as most people expect. When you think of rich and poor people, your thoughts are inevitably focused on circumstances in which their income is important. But happiness depends on other factors more than it depends on income.

From “Focusing Illusion,” by Daniel Kahneman

The day of the Resurrection or the resurrection or just any Sunday, depending. But I thought to comment on my previous post, “Eating Icons,” first published in a longer form in the oldest extant magazine in the country. I love history, so I like that about The North American Review.

My true mentor in essay-writing is Vivian Gornick, a writer’s writer, fierce intellectual, and die-hard New Yorker. She teaches that good writing in the form of the personal essay must be alive on the page, bear the signature of its maker, so to speak, and always, always must implicate the self.

“Eating Icons” fails on all fronts.

In 1994, I was living in London with my family, and daily making the trek from Hampstead on the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Station, then walking over to Bloomsbury, where the British Library was then, and sat under the dome (constructed 1857) and fell in love with the Reading Room as everyone had done before me, including Karl Marx. The seats are numbered and everyone knew where Marx had sat, toiling away on words that would throw a bomb into what had been known as the orderly march of history.

I was studying Slavic fairy tales. Then I was studying fairy tales in general, and then I was studying the origin of fire, and anthropology, and then 17th-century English cookery and history. That’s the way it is there, in the British Library. One thing leads to another.

Eggs show up in great numbers in fairy tales, and the story my friend had told me about her drawing of an egg was still lurking in my heart, and when I researched and wrote the piece I was able to pull in the folklore, and anthropology, and cookery, and everything else. Karl Marx was even in it indirectly, but was edited out for the blog posting. (It had to do with Fabergé eggs turning anyone into a Bolshevik.)

Right before I began writing the piece, my father killed himself. I returned to Phoenix, where we had been living before the move to London, in time to be with him as he died, and then I returned to London and took up eggs.

Eggs real and in the imagination kept me going through those months after. It was the best I could do. I didn’t want to talk about anything else, not on the page or in any other way.

I don’t believe in explaining things. Works of the imagination are, or should be, sufficient unto themselves. But as William Mulholland said when the stolen water from the Eastern Sierra came into Los Angeles: Here it is, take it — and I will add, only if you wish.