Friday, August 04, 2006

Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I'm a bit behind on writing book reviews, so I'd better write one quickly. On the other hand, some of you are slow readers, so I'd better type at a slightly more leisurely pace...

What a great book this is! It's a first person narrative from the point of view of a child with Asperger's, who spends a good fraction of the book trying to investigate how the neighbour's dog died and ends up discovering all kinds of stuff.

It's done very well of course and you really end up understanding and sympathising with the kid in a lot of ways. Well, I did anyway. It's also quite amusing which details he picks to explain in any given situation, or the random maths puzzles that he just puts into chapters. They're fun.

One of the things that was interesting to my twisted and self-obsessed mind was the ways that how he thought resonated a lot with how I think (or in some cases used to think). For example, I remember stopping trusting people completely on the basis of one lie. I do the whole noticing ridiculous amounts of detail thing, but I've learnt to filter and forget most of what isn't useful. But I still find it really tiring being a passenger in a car partly because of the detail thing - it's much easier if I close my eyes. Oh yeah, and he's good at maths and stuff like that too...

When I was little, people used to say that looking at the Sun could make you go blind. I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, and didn't go blind. So I assumed it didn't apply to me. I used to stare at the Sun a fair bit, and damaged my eyesight as a result. I still think it's the fault of the people who told me that it could make me go blind - they should have said that looking at the Sun damages your eyes, then I'd have paid attention.

18 comments:

Daniel Hill said...

Your friends were surely quite right to say that looking at the Sun could make you go blind; indeed, haven't events basically proved them right? And why did you disregard them merely because what they said could have happened didn't (at first)?

If, on the other hand, they had said that looking at the Sun does damage your eyes then they would have been wrong; your glimpse of the sun would have refuted them and you couldn't have been blamed for disregarding them (since you would have proved them wrong.)

John said...

The distinction I understood in them saying it could make me go blind wasn't that of probability, but of a blind/not blind distinction. I inferred from the statement that blindness caused by looking at the Sun was an on/off condition rather than a gradual one.

And looking at the Sun does damage sight - it's not just probablistic. The first look did damage my eyes (imperceptibly).

Daniel Hill said...

Thanks for this, Custard. No, I wasn't understanding what your friends said probabilistically either, and I also understood blindness as being an all-or-nothing affair (though I stand corrected in this by your second paragraph). I interpreted your friends as saying, however, that it was possible (but not certain) that looking at the sun should make one blind. It still seems to me that this is correct, and the fact that the possibility didn't become actual on the first time didn't license repeated goes.

But, to turn to your second paragraph, if even the first glimpse did damage your eyes, then surely you agree that these friends were right and you were unjustified in disregarding their advice, merely because you couldn't perceive the damage that had been caused?

John said...

What happened to me was eye damage. I hadn't been warned about that - I'd been warned about blindness.

What I'd do now, of course, is try to work out what they actually meant.

John said...

And yes, blindness is a subset of eye damage, but it is that subset where all sight is lost. I doubt there's anyone who has gone blind by looking at the Sun.

Daniel Hill said...

Thanks for the corrections, Custard. Yes, you're right that there is a difference between blindness and mere eye damage, and I'd not recognized that in my previous posts.

I'm still puzzled, however: your friends said merely that looking at the sun could make you go blind (i.e. that it is possible that it should make you go blind), not that it would. So the fact that it didn't make you go blind doesn't prove them wrong; in fact, their words still seem to me literally correct.

John said...

Right, but irrelevant.

Daniel Hill said...

Eh? Who's right but irrelevant? I or your friends? The relevance of their comments was that they were warning of a real danger; the relevance of my comments was that you were wrong to assume that their warning didn't apply to you merely because (cf. your 'so') it didn't get fulfilled the first time. (Compare the person that falls into the zoo's bear pit and luckily gets away with it and so assumes that the warnings don't apply to him and he can climb in and out with impunity.)

John said...

My issue is that they would have been better warning me of the danger of eye damage.

The issue is more akin to that of someone who is warned that the sides of the bear pit look slippery, and if they jump in they might fall and hurt themselves on the way out. They jump in and climb out a few times, then get mauled by bears. The warning might have been right, but it was irrelevant to the damage suffered.

Remember - I saw the two as seperate.

Anonymous said...

Hello 'Custard' :) A quick (or perhaps, not so) question - that of faith. With all the different mutually self-contradicting faiths in the World (I know that there is an argument that this isn't so, but assume that I have read said arguments and that I still find the above statement to be valid), and that accepting any particular person's words at face value (i.e. why one should become a Christian because of the testimony of Christ says) when in the majority of cases, believing such 'extraordinary claims', to inroduce an echo of Occam's Razor, would be unwise. Why does God/Jesus not just speak to each of us individually at a certain point in our lives, or maybe at a number of points, and explain the 'rules of the game'? I have never had a satisfactory answer to this, and it is important to me, as I can't understand why God would not do this, as surely it is not fair to expect people to understand His Law otherwise. It's not enough to say that the Bible contains the Law or Rules, as there are many sets of such 'Divine Rules' to choose from. I anticipate an answer relating to the common-points of each of these different sets of rules :) AC

P.S. I would love to stay in touch, but I tried to find an email from this site and I failed! This either says something about my brainpower, or that I really can't email you from this site :)

John said...

AC, you're right - you can't e-mail from this site, though all comments get e-mailed to me.

Sending stuff might be easier from this blog, where comments are e-mailed to me but not published on-line unless I want them to be. It still doesn't give me an easy way to reply, except when you're on, as it were. Roll on 18/9 I guess.

Your comment will take a fair bit of replying to - I'll try to address it in a post or comment or something when the wording stuff well bit of my brain is working a little better.

Anonymous said...

Ok Custardy, I appreciate the above represents 'a tricky question' :) If any one has the brains to answer it in a satisfactory manner, it is you. I should lay my cards on the table now though, and say that I think it can't be done, and then we will come back to the essential question of 'faith' in its most literal sense: we just have to take the message of the Bible as evidence in itself and that's that. I hope I am wrong. I am most certainly often so, so I live in hope! In any case I shall leave you a 'neutral' email via which you can contact me: kyotocon@hotmail.co.uk (too politically revealing? you will appreciate the irony that it is an anagram of my name).

AC

John said...

I can safely say first up though that I agree that all religions are not compatible.

I'd also quickly add (though it's irrelevant) that Occam's Razor suffers from the problem of subjectivity in simple cases. Which is simpler, to say that God exists and made the universe, or to say that the universe somehow came into existence without him.

But neither of those answer the main question.

Anonymous said...

You saved me the trouble of making that last statement, Custardy!
Anyways, time for bed for me. Take care, and I shall look forward to reading your next reply(s). AC

Daniel Hill said...

Thanks, Custard, for the further comments. My point about the illogicality of your deduction (i.e. that the word `so' is wrong) still stands, but I take your point concerning the bear analogy and blindness vs damage of sight.

Frequently, however, the convention is that one warn only of the severest danger (to save time): many cigarette packets just say `smoking kills'. So the best analogy would be with somebody that reads the warning on the packet, smokes a cigarette, doesn't die, smokes lots, and then complains when he or she gets a non-fatal lung disease. I still don't think it'd be fair for this person to blame those warning for not also saying 'smoking can severely damage your health'.

John said...

Ah, but what if it was "so" in the sense of αρα rather than ουν?

I agree with your smoking analogy, and I agree that I was being silly as a child - hence the telling of the story in a slightly self-deprecatory fashion. Have you read the book?

Daniel Hill said...

Thanks for this, Custard. I have consulted LSJ's lexicon, but I'm still not entirely sure what the point is that you're making by contrasting αρα with ουν. Is it the use of αρα as `expressing succession' (`and so they lived happily ever after'), as opposed to the use of ουν to mean `therefore'?

I heard the Haddon book on the radio, and liked it, though one of the maths puzzles was spoiled by the fact that the reader read it out incorrectly.

John said...

Yeah - that's pretty much what I understood Wenham to say about it. αρα as weaker than ουν, to the point where it could just be succession.