179. What's wrong with TRTC?

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Zuckerberg

Our local tech superstars are competing to have hospitals named after them. I haven't yet visited Marc Benioff's UCSF Children's Hospitals in SF and Oakland, but last week I walked around the new Zuckerberg SF General Hospital and it is quite the impressive building. And since SFGH is the main trauma center for this area, this is undoubtedly money well spent. Here are a couple shots of the building,

This is a sculpture near the entrance with the new building on the right and one of the (grand) original wings on the left.

This time the new is on the left and the old on the right. The brickwork is intended to tie the buildings together visually. 

First let me say that I wasn't intending to document the building when I was there, so I just shot what interested me visually. You can find info on the hospital HERE and better views of the building HERE. The brickwork that is the most obvious link to the older buildings is at the very top where it it almost invisible from street level. From the rooftop garden you can see that brickwork, but you can't see the older buildings so there is no context. 

In general, the interior of the hospital looks less like a government institution and more like a corporate building with lots of art and high end materials on view.

Heading off to lunch after touring SFGH, we ran into a curious little structure only a block or two away that is seemingly stuck in time. Again, I didn't capture the structure as a whole, only some details that I loved. I think this was originally a filling station and garage and it is still a garage,

I'm such a sucker for outside lighting fixtures here and...

...also here. But, surprisingly, that isn't what first caught my eye.

I'm not sure what these things did, but I'm guessing either air or water that you could pull down to service a car.

So what's wrong with The Road To Character?

If there really was an obvious lesson to learn from studying these lives, it would have been best to just lay them out there and let the reader make the connections. Obviously, you would present the biographies in a way that you would hope would emphasize the similarities. In The Brothers K, Dostoevsky laid out his characters and plot for the reader to make sense of, and then, just to be safe, followed up with the prosecutors speech at the end of the trial where he made sure his interpretation or intention was not overlooked by the reader. 

Here Brooks starts out talking about the points he plans to make (using a confusing variety of different terms and dichotomies), then presents the stories (with constant references to what he hopes to be showing), and than ends with a treatise on his moral topic that his character studies contradict as often as they support.

Becoming Wise was an awkward re-purposing of interview content for other mediums. This is a sophomoric mashup of "things I read this summer." Of course, for my purposes, this makes for a juicy read. It ranks right up there with the delightfully irritating Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler. 

Still, there is a sense in which Brooks's conclusions aren't wrong. The values he's talking about -- and the benefits one derives from accepting them -- are the same as (and were much more convincingly presented) in the account of the illness and death of Zosima's older brother in The Brothers K. (And reprized at least one more time in the novel.) And this is also the conclusion Victoria Sweet arrived at at the end of God's Hotel, with respect to the patient who required AA to get free of his chemical dependence problems (and so Annie Lamott is also a much better spokesperson for Brooks's position.)

Finally, because this is my blog, I have to add that Brooks's value system is also the equivalent of the Berghof in The Magic Mountain, the place Joachim Ziemssen finally agreed to return to when he had burned through his last shot at living in the flat land. It's a refuge, but it isn't really living. I'm overstating the case, but then, so does Brooks.


This brings to an end my coverage of The Road to Character. And I have nothing else ready to go, so there will be another gap of unknown duration.

Postscript

I almost forgot something. So there's this thing called Nextdoor.com that is a sort of community bulletin board and gossip tool. A week or so ago I was invited to join the one for this neighborhood and signed up. It seems to be equal parts informative and annoying. Yesterday I finally got the first weird and wonderful posting of the type I was hoping for. Here's the quote:

Some guy named Danny McCullough posted on here about needing a hammer to borrow a few weeks ago. I met up with him, and let him borrow my nice, heavy duty hammer. After reaching out a few times to try and retrieve it, I'm putting Danny on blast. 

If Danny the tool thief posts about needing to "borrow" anything else, don't do it. I'm certain that he has no intention of returning items. I also think he probably is a collector of borrowed things.

Here we have moral romanticism turning into moral realism. William Godwin turning into Edmund Burke -- at least that's the way I see it. 

Next - 180. Kite Festival 2017