The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey

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I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came upon myself, was Russian literature. I've always felt very much enthralled to writers like Dostoevsky, especially, and Chekhov. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevsky [Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский] ( 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as multiple of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship. But here’s the cool part — as a approaches infinity, the ideal S approaches 1/2. That means that you never want to suffer more than half of your life, no matter how much of a multiplier effect you get from suffering – even if an hour of suffering would make your next hour of pleasure insanely wonderful, you still wouldn’t ever want to spend more time suffering than reaping the benefits of that suffering. Or, to put it in more familiar terms: Darker nights may make stars seem brighter, but you still always want your sky to be at least half-filled with stars.

Part I, Book I: A Nice Little Family, Ch. 2: The Old Buffoon; as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 44More than a compilation of case studies, Broks’s book is a digressive journey through the subject of human consciousness… Like the box of old family photographs Broks achingly describes, this metascience narrative is well worth sorting through.”

I’ve thrown in a few fictional pieces, speculative tales through which to explore selfhood and consciousness, life and death. I get to discuss grief with C. S. Lewis; I get to meet some zombies; to my great surprise, I discover I have a long-hidden sub-personality fluent in French and adept in the arts of seduction; I celebrate my 150th birthday. Along with these standalone pieces, there’s an intermittent fictional thread woven with the factual material. It involves a time-twisting drunk named Mike who appears at various points dispensing pearls of wisdom, especially on the nature of time and fate. Strange things happen to the flow of time when Mike’s around. In the final chapter he gives me an opportunity to time travel, and with it a deep dilemma. Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them. It says in part: “All across your organs, cells are being produced and destroyed. They have an expiry date. How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.

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Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading and re-reading?) SK: Dostoevsky and Simon De Beauvoir. Since I was a young teenager, I started reading them and I never stopped. From Dostoevsky, I learned how characters are made or should be. How they move, what they think, their inner secrets, their contradictions and complications, and how strong and helpless they are. I am fascinated by most of his work, especially Brothers Karamazov...Those two writers affected me deeply. I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my superior, Anton Antonich Syetochkin. He was the the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I even wonder at the fact myself now. But I even went to see him only when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed at least one human being at hand who actually existed. I had to call on Anton Antonich, however, on Tuesday — his at-home day; so I always had to adjust my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday. Variant translation: I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever. But that does not make me angry any more. They are all dear to me now even while they laugh at me — yes, even then they are for some reason particularly dear to me. I shouldn't have minded laughing with them — not at myself, of course, but because I love them — had I not felt so sad as I looked at them. I feel sad because they do not know the truth, whereas I know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only man to know the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they will not understand.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is an extended meditation on selfhood, consciousness, life, and death. The book traces a loose arc of loss, acceptance, and renewal through interlinked fragments of autobiography, neurological case stories, and excursions into myth and speculative fiction. Why such diverse modes of storytelling? Well, I say, why not? I am writing about brains and selves. The human brain is a storytelling machine, and the self is a yarn it spins. From the first glimmerings of self-awareness, we enter a nexus of stories, and those stories take many different forms, from the mundane to the magical, from scientific to mythic. My mind is in the habit of shooting off in every direction, and I have honored the old cliché: Write something you yourself would want to read. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. I’m ignoring the fact that it matters when the suffering occurs – e.g., if all your suffering occurs at the end of your life, there’s no way it could retroactively make you enjoy your earlier times of pleasure more. It would probably be more realistic to say that whatever the ideal amount of suffering is in your life, you would want to sprinkle it evenly throughout life because your pleasures will be boosted most strongly if you’ve suffered at least a little bit recently. They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling. I hadn’t intended including any Greek mythology when I started writing the book, but the stories crept in. My explanation is post hoc, but here goes: For the Greeks, the myths were a means of making sense of the world, from the origins of the cosmos to the nature of society, individual identity, and mortality. The Darker the Night is about all of those things. Also, the first century BCE was a period of great cultural and cognitive transition. Logos (reason) was gaining ground on mythos (mythological stories), the gods were gathering doubters, and the shoots of western science and philosophy were starting to push through. According to some scholars, this coincided with a psychological revolution through which the foundations of the modern, introspective mind were laid. People were gaining a clearer sense of the distinction between the inner, individual world of thought and the outer world of objects and events, and thus were sown the seeds of the mind-body problem: the problem of consciousness. If we want to understand the modern mind, we need to know something of its history.

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If there is no immortality, there is no virtue. ... Without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like? I absolutely loved this book. I loved the mix of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. It created the kind of edge in words that we live on every day in our minds. Broks perfectly captures the winding labyrinth of the mind and its thoughts, dreams, fantasies. I really enjoyed being able to return to this book each day to read a little and ponder on the questions Broks posits. I think, too, that it helps that many of these questions are ones that I struggle with too. Maybe that is because there are no answers. Still Broks grapples with grief, loss, philosophy, quantum mechanics, psychology, and so much more. I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers...Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov.