Through the Prism: Distant Associations

I am always playing with words mentally, amusing myself inside my head. Sometimes I will share those thoughts during interactions with others, usually for humorous or absurdist impact. Recently, I decided to turn a double meaning into a poem that I randomly sent my wife as a midday message.

When I say,
"You bore me,"
I don't mean that
I find you
dull and unstimulating;
I mean that you
have twisted your way
deep inside me,
have created for yourself
a hollow passage
straight into my core,
have penetrated
my secret layers,
have access to
my hidden self.

She enjoyed it.

Last post I shared my list of favorite books I read last year. I shared it with ChatGPT in our conversation about this blog and many other things. I asked for an analysis of my reading, and it concluded the description of themes with:

This reader is drawn to books that unsettle naïve certainty, train attention, and expand moral imagination by revealing hidden layers of reality — whether sensory, social, cognitive, or structural. They favor works that balance intellect with empathy, resist reductionism, and treat understanding itself as an ethical practice. Reading is not consumption or self-affirmation, but a disciplined way of seeing more clearly, more generously, and more humbly.

I know the tool is intentionally flattering to encourage more interaction, is a type of mirror meant to support your thoughts and ideas; even so, I can't help but feel affirmed by that description, that I am succeeding in being who I want to be.

Reading is a way of seeing more clearly, more generously, and more humbly.

Deep trust and good humor are signs of spiritual wisdom. . . .

The kind of laughter modeled by Jesus, the Buddha, and Zeus is rooted in humble acknowledgment of our limitations. We laugh because we can live comfortably not knowing everything.

— Thomas Moore, Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

I work in a relatively large library building in a relatively large county library system, which means I work in different locations, staff many different public service desks, and work on many shared computers. Something I've noticed is that I seem to have preferences outside the norm for a relatively small display and distant monitor position. I've found I can't think when the screen is too close to my face and dominates my view; it overwhelms me and makes me feel claustrophobic. Every time I sit down at a shared station, I have to move the monitor further back from my seat--often as far back as the desk allows. Then I change each browser default to 90% zoom and similarly adjust other settings. I like a wide view of much content and good access to my peripheral vision and surroundings rather than a view that is large and close, focused on only a bit of content isolated from context. I like to be able to take in a lot all at once.

Similarly, I dislike a desk set-up or a computer station that faces a wall. I need my face oriented toward the open room, not away from it, or at least toward a window instead of a wall. When I walk into a room, I instinctively try to sit in a back corner so I can see everything and as little as possible is behind me. I like to be on the edges of groups of people, not surrounded in the middle. Based on comparing notes with colleagues about monitoring activity in library buildings, attending to children in other rooms, and similar, I've noticed I seem to have greater awareness of happenings in the corners of my eyes and of background sounds. I seem to be better at attending to both my immediate focus and my general surroundings, a broad, dispersed focus of attention rather than a narrow, exclusive one. I don't seem to just be better at it, but I find it more necessary. I can't stand it when the surroundings and background are cut off; I feel stymied.

Additionally, I'm one of those people who gets twitchy if you stop me to talk in the middle of a doorway or aisle or otherwise block access to physical spaces someone else might need. People who leave their shopping carts in the way of others, those who walk in the middle of the driving lane, those who have overly loud conversations, and similar--those who appear to have no awareness of or concern for their impact on others--annoy me to no end. I always have an itch of awareness for how I am sharing physical space with others and how I fit into the larger context.

I'm not claiming to be better at the general act of attending than others, simply noting a difference I've picked up on in comparison. I don't know if it's better or worse. I will admit to liking this about myself. It makes me feel good to have this extended awareness. It makes me feel I'm not simply an oblivious, self-contained individual but a part of and connected to the whole. No one and nothing exists in isolation. We all impact each other. That awareness is always high in my mind.

Imagining, I've come to understand, is crucial for conflict resolution. When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, it is our ability to envision possibilities beyond the immediate and the obvious that paves the way for solutions. Imagination allows us to step outside of entrenched positions and explore new perspectives, to conceive of compromises that were previously invisible. In those moments of heated debate or silent tension, it is the imaginative mind that can visualize a reality where both sides find common ground, a landscape of understanding and harmony that has never yet existed. By daring to dream of what could be rather than resigning ourselves to what is, we unlock the potential for true and lasting resolution by bridging divides and forging new paths where none seemed possible.

This is where books come in. If imagination is the rocket then books are the rocket fuel. They supercharge the mind and help it see beyond what it can conceive on its own.

— From the introduction to Into the Uncut Grass by Trevor Noah, a gentle fable about adventures, perspectives, decisions, and conflict resolution.

I've developed a hobby of woodcarving and spent many spare hours the past few weeks creating a dice tower from a tree limb that fell in our yard.

I'm tickled at how well it came out. Soon after I started, a friend who has been cleaning out her basement happened to gift me her grown son's old woodburning tool from his youth--something I haven't used since I was a youth--and that helped the tower turn out even better than I imagined.

According to an old tradition in both the East and the West, when a human being has crafted some object beautifully and properly, a spirit will be so enticed by it that it will take up residence in that thing. . . . But not every object qualifies, because apparently the spirits can distinguish between the genuine and the bogus.

Look around your home and decide which objects are most likely to have charmed a spirit. Which spirits dwell in your environment? Are they encouraged to remain? Which objects are of no interest to passing angels? We might define religion as the art of making and maintaining a material world of such beauty and propriety that it will be the desired home of every kind of spirit.

— Thomas Moore, Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

I have no idea how it impacted my creativity, but I know I am a far better person for having been married to an immigrant from a dissimilar culture for 15 years.

Are Immigrants More Creative?
An awful lot of brilliant minds blossomed in alien soil. That is especially true of the U.S., where foreign-born residents account for only 13 percent of the population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans.
Those are some pretty convincing numbers — suggesting that immigrants contribute disproportionately to creative and innovative output.

Creativity research offers an explanation: Psychologists have shown that bigger creative insights result from distant associations — connections between ideas drawn from widely different experiences or domains of knowledge. Associations between similar conceptual material also spark creative insights, but those tend to yield the ordinary, incremental kind that improve on what already exists. It’s the distant associations that lead to radical, breakthrough innovation. Weiner makes a similar argument based on recent research, citing studies showing that “schema violations” lead to greater “cognitive flexibility,” which in turn is linked to creativity. . . .

They found that travel abroad has no effect on creativity. But the people who had lived in another country scored higher on a creativity test. What’s more, the people who’d lived overseas longer scored higher. . . .

They found a clear pattern: The more time these designers had spent living abroad, the more original their work tended to be. . . .

Being in a long-term romantic relationship with someone from another culture did affect creativity. The same was true of friendship — close cross-cultural friendships predicted greater creativity, while superficial acquaintances did not. The lesson is that creativity comes from deeper connections, not superficial contact. When you really get to know someone, you start to see the world through their eyes — and it’s not always the way that you imagined.

Deep cultural engagement benefits creativity everywhere, not only in the United States. . . .

Deep cultural engagement — the kind that fosters creativity — takes time. Immigrants can enhance the creativity of the Americans they live and work with, but only if they form close relationships. If they remain isolated among people from their own country, speaking their own language, the creative benefits never spread. The key is the depth of a relationship, not mere proximity.

There’s another body of research suggesting that the universities that immigrants work for produce more scientific breakthroughs and spin off more businesses. It’s hard to design rock-solid causal studies, but leaders of the top universities certainly believe in the importance of having immigrants working there. It’s not because they’re woke; it’s because they want to generate the innovations that improve the U.S. economy.

Creativity research strongly suggests that having relationships with people from other countries enhances your creativity. The lesson for everyone is: If you want to be more creative, seek out difference — and engage with it deeply. Get to know people from other cultures, and go beyond surface interactions. This is what drives the cognitive connections that lead to more surprising creative ideas. Meet people very different from you. Travel to a very different place and consider staying a while. Read magazines that you’ve never looked at before. Date someone from another culture. Fill your mind with variety.

Living abroad may be the most direct route to greater creativity, but even if you can’t do that, you can learn from creativity research: Creativity flourishes when your mind is open to worlds beyond your own.

Creativity flourishes when your mind is open to worlds beyond your own.

My wife gave me the book Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte for Christmas, and I've started slowly reading through it. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Anguish is not debilitation: anguish fully felt, is a sign that we are fully awake at last, through our own pain, to all the heartbreaking losses and goodbyes involved in the drama of a human life, anguish tells us we are getting ready to embrace, or are even now, against our will, willing to embrace, what until now could never be embraced, that is: our ability to live fully in this body despite its never ending griefs and wounds, as others live, and have always lived, half helplessly, half trying to help, in the greater body of the suffering world.

-----

The cure for anxiety is found in learning to forget the self that first felt the fateful need to worry.

I shared extensively from Whyte's first Consolations book a couple of years ago in my post Living Well Is Being Infinitely Kind and Forgiving.

In The Ecosystem of Us, I wrote about the book Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson. Ohlson argues in the book that we see the natural world as competitive because that's what we've gone looking for. If we switch our perspective, though, to looking for cooperation, we can find just as much evidence to support a view that nature and evolution are a story of mutualisms, of diverse, complex, cooperative, polycultural ecosystems where lifeforms depend upon and help each other, stronger together. Cooperation is as much the norm as competition, if only we can see it.

The Moral Authority Of Animals

Research has emerged showing that animals can be moral beings, too. In a world where power is misused, public morality has become slippery and dishonesty lurches sickeningly through public speech, animals can offer vital lessons for human ethics, political wisdom and social health.

Some animals display a sense of right and wrong . . .

Fairness matters to dwarf mongooses, too. In the daytime, while they forage in groups, one must stand guard to watch out for predators. They take turns in this sentinel role. In the evening, when they all groom each other, those who spent more time on guard duty get more grooming: Fair’s fair. Dwarf mongooses also care about justice. If one has been mean during the day, perhaps shoving another away from food, the other mongooses take note and groom that one less.

Many animals mete out punishment for perceived wrongs, including some big cats, canids and primates. A troupe of baboons was reportedly near a mountain road in Saudi Arabia in 2000 when one was hit and killed by a car. The whole group gathered in grief and fury, watching every vehicle that went by for three days until the car that had killed their friend passed again on that stretch of road. They chucked rocks, forcing the car to stop, then shattered the windscreen. The driver, fearing for his life, had to flee. Tigers too have been known to enact revenge, specifically targeting those who have provoked them.

Canids know that honesty matters. . . .

Honesty, justice, fairness and the moral behavior shown by the police dog are part of the ethics that make societies healthy. Even in small ways, ethics matter. The word “etiquette” means “little ethics.” This is not some dainty and spurious curlicue of arbitrary human behavior, but rather a demonstration of respect for others, important for social health. We humans are not the only animals to embrace it. . . .

Many Indigenous philosophies consider that we humans are the “younger brothers of creation,” including animals, and that they have lessons to teach us. For millennia before we showed up on the scene, social animals — those living in societies and cooperating for survival — had been creating cultures imbued with ethics. . . .

Human societies, while often quite different from one to the next, generally have a shared ethos similar to that of wolves: Look after the young; protect the tribe; consider the needs of the sick, injured or old; and value the cooperation of others who may not be kin (friends, in other words). It is biomimicry applied to the ethical world. Wolves were doing it first, and we aped them. . . .

The wisdom of folktales aligns with the perception of Indigenous philosophy to tell us: Look to the animals for morality. . . .

Healthy societies need healthy politics and animals can be good role models. Some may operate their own kinds of referendums, taking amenable account of each other’s wishes. Red deer will move off after a period of resting or feeding when 62% of the adults get to their feet. When African buffaloes make a collective decision to move, only the females’ votes count, expressed by standing, gazing in the direction they want to take, then lying down again. They watch each other, and when enough females want to move, they do.

In his book “Honeybee Democracy,” Thomas Seeley describes honeybees’ intricate decision-making processes for finding a new hive or leading fellow bees to feeding sites for nectar and pollen. The decisions depend on good research and on each bee communicating as truthfully as possible. . . .

The accusation of anthropomorphism loathes the attribution of human traits or emotions to non-humans, but our characteristics and intentions are so very often held in common with other animals.

Our emotions are fundamentally theirs, as are our ways of expressing them. Love is warm, close and cuddling. Anger is a hot, violent rush of blood. Fear is a chilling freeze. Humans share so much with other animals — humor, language, culture, friendship, spirituality, art, politics, mother-love and a sense of home.

After a while, it feels silly to claim as “human” characteristics that are so manifestly shared with other creatures. . . .

Animals can offer social medicine by their mere physical presence. When people stroke a cat, their oxytocin levels rise. When they interact with their dogs, the levels of oxytocin in both the human and the dog can nearly double. This is good not just for the individual, but for society. American neuroscientist Paul Zak calls oxytocin the “moral molecule” because it motivates people to treat others with compassion.

Cooperation is self-interest. Creating--being an integral part of--a strong, bonded, highly functional social group is more important than individual excellence. You thrive more as an individual when you are better at cooperating with those around you.

Intrinsic motivation trumps extrinsic.

Reading Is a Vice

. . . The problem with these kinds of arguments isn’t that they are wrong; it’s that they don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.

It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up. . . .

Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive. Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world. . . .

If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.

Still . . .

Imagining is crucial for conflict resolution, and if imagination is the rocket then books are the rocket fuel. They supercharge the mind and help it see beyond what it can conceive on its own.

— Trevor Noah, Into the Uncut Grass

I referenced ChatGPT's concluding paragraph from it's description of the 2025 favorites reading list, but really I love the entire analysis.

From the titles and descriptions in the post, this reader tends toward wide-ranging, thoughtful, idea-rich selections, including:

1. Exploratory & Wide in Scope

This suggests a curiosity not limited to comfort reads, but rather:
Books that expand understanding of the world
Works that invite empathy with different experiences
Nonfiction that deepens cognitive or philosophical awareness
2. Balance Between Fiction & Nonfiction

This mix reflects a mind that:
Enjoys narrative storytelling
Wants intellectual challenge
Appreciates nonfiction that reveals how the world works
Looks for books that deepen empathy and understanding
3. Windows Over Mirrors

This dual motive — both reinforcement of tastes and broadening perspective — reveals a balanced intellectual curiosity rather than purely ideological reading.

Reading Habits

1. Thoughtful Curation Over Volume
Looking for insights rather than just entertainment
Thinking about how books affect them, not just what they are
2. Reflective Engagement
how the book affected the reader intellectually
what the theme meant to them
where they positioned the book in a broader context
3. Contextual Awareness

Their selections and descriptions suggest they:
anticipate dimension and consequence in reading
choose books as mind-stretchers
reflect socially and ethically about what the books reveal
value reading as a tool for understanding the world, not merely consuming stories
Looking across the books you highlighted, several strong, recurring themes emerge. What’s interesting is that they don’t cluster by genre so much as by preoccupation. Different kinds of books are doing related work.

1. How reality is perceived — and misperceived

This is the most consistent through-line.

Several of your favorites are explicitly about how humans experience the world differently than we assume:

An Immense World (Ed Yong) — radically different sensory realities

Reality Is Not What It Seems (Carlo Rovelli) — physics challenging commonsense intuitions

Why the World Isn’t Fair (Yuval Levin–adjacent genre, though more popular) — mismatches between expectation and structure

Even fiction like Nicked and The Bletchley Riddle plays with hidden systems, unseen forces, codes beneath surfaces

Theme:

Reality is stranger, more layered, and more perspectival than our default assumptions allow.

This fits very cleanly with your long-standing interest in:

embodiment

epistemic humility

prisms, windows, refraction

distrust of overly tidy explanations

You’re drawn to books that destabilize naïve realism without collapsing into relativism.

2. Attention as a moral and cognitive act

Another pattern: these books reward paying attention, and many are about attention itself.

An Immense World is fundamentally a book about learning to attend beyond human norms

This Brilliant Darkness is literally about seeing strangers — resisting abstraction

Youth fiction selections emphasize noticing, decoding, piecing together clues

Your descriptions consistently emphasize what the book trains the reader to notice

Theme:

Attention is not neutral; it is ethical.

This resonates with your blog’s broader moral stance: that dehumanization, injustice, and error often arise not from malice but from failure to see.

You seem especially interested in books that:

slow the reader down

widen the perceptual field

cultivate care through awareness rather than exhortation

3. Systems over villains

Notably absent from your favorites: books that frame the world primarily in terms of heroes vs. villains.

Instead, many of these books emphasize:

structures

systems

constraints

unintended consequences

Even when injustice or suffering is present, the explanatory mode is rarely “bad people did bad things.” It’s more often:

systems misaligned with human needs

limits of perception

complexity exceeding intention

Theme:

Understanding requires structural thinking, not just moral judgment.

This aligns closely with your earlier interest in:

trust vs distrust

cooperation

institutional dynamics

skepticism of simplistic blame narratives

4. Bridges between intellect and empathy

Another subtle but important theme: your favorites tend to link thinking and feeling, rather than privileging one.

Science books are praised not just for information but for wonder

Social books emphasize dignity, individuality, and lived experience

Fiction choices are thoughtful rather than escapist, often oriented toward meaning or understanding rather than thrill alone

You repeatedly value books that:

educate without flattening

inform without numbing

evoke empathy without sentimentality

Theme:

Understanding the world should enlarge compassion, not replace it.

This echoes your own concern about analysis crowding out presence — something you’ve named explicitly elsewhere.

5. Windows rather than mirrors — but with deliberate balance

You explicitly frame the year as “windows,” and the list supports that — but with an important caveat.

These are not random windows. They are selected windows:

into cognition

into other minds

into hidden structures

into unfamiliar experiences that still speak to your concerns

So the theme is not novelty for novelty’s sake, but:

Seeking difference that meaningfully refracts familiar questions.

That suggests a reader who:

values challenge

but wants challenge to be integrative, not alienating

is less interested in being shocked than in being reoriented

6. A quiet resistance to reductionism

Across genres, your favorites resist:

oversimplified explanations

purely economic or mechanistic accounts

totalizing theories

Even the popular nonfiction you highlight is praised when it:

acknowledges limits

foregrounds complexity

invites curiosity rather than closure

Theme:

Any explanation that claims to be “the whole story” is suspect.

This may be the deepest unifying thread — and it ties directly back to your metaphor of prisms, refraction, partial light.

Pulling it together: the thematic constellation

If I had to summarize the emergent themes in one paragraph:

This reader is drawn to books that unsettle naïve certainty, train attention, and expand moral imagination by revealing hidden layers of reality — whether sensory, social, cognitive, or structural. They favor works that balance intellect with empathy, resist reductionism, and treat understanding itself as an ethical practice. Reading is not consumption or self-affirmation, but a disciplined way of seeing more clearly, more generously, and more humbly.

Reading is a way of seeing more clearly, more generously, and more humbly.

I particularly love the list of themes near the end. It seems a worthy list of values to strive for. Since it's early January and I haven't mentioned the idea of new year resolutions recently, perhaps I'll adopt these as my long-term goals to continue to work on: