‘Frankenstein’: The Futility of Thoughtless Ambition
Vanity masquerades as individuality. Selfishness masquerades as acheivement. Pointless pursuits masquerade as progress.
Victor Frankenstein embodied these ideas when he devoted years of his life to merciless toil in the name of science. He was vain, selfish, and pursued great accomplishments, not for the sake of improving the world or helping people, but for his own ego and legacy. The cruel twist of irony in Frankenstein is that exactly this arrogance that doomed him to a life of vicious misery.
Mary Shelley’s wrote Frankenstein, the 1818 classic of gothic horror and science fiction, in the age of—and largely in response to—the Industrial Revolution, a time of great human “progress” and “achievement”. It is a harrowing tale of a scientist that goes too far and creates a monster in his desire to learn “the secrets of heaven and earth”. And although he occasionally frames this thirst for knowledge as a driver, the much greater desires, by his own admition, are glory and power. Frankenstein says, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”
The Word for Human is Violence
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) examines whether violence is human nature or not.
Humans and killing go together like Subarus and Colorado. We kill one another with such frequency that we’ve developed cute little names for all the different kinds—genocide, xenocide, fratricide, regicide, etc. And of course there’s war—for resources, conquest, religion, independence, glory—which is so synonymous with human history that it seems no fantasy or sci-fi story can exist without it.
Every Book I Read in 2023, Ranked
2023 was the year of reading, and—to a lesser extent—writing. I am on pace for 41 books read this year, after 22 in 2022, and 10 in 2021. I’ve also more than doubled my page count from last year. So, what was the key to unlocking my reading potential? Well, it boils down to two main factors: habits, motivation, and knowing what I like. I have a lot of free time in my new-ish WFH life, yes, but I was unemployed in 2022 and read almost 20 books less, so it can’t only be time.
The key, for me, was building strong habits around reading. I read nearly every night before I go to bed, usually 30-90 minutes. I used to listen to podcasts, but reading calms me and helps me sleep better. That probably made up the bulk of my reading, but I also would make a habit of taking a book outside during a nice day and reading in nature.