Among those Men Whom I Have Known, the Love of Books and the Love of Outdoors, have Usually Gone Hand in Hand...

"There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible. Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand. It is an affectation for the man who is praising outdoors to sneer at books." - Teddy Roosevelt

We continue further along on our lovely sojourn into the world of autobiographical reads of diverse hues and shades, from off various times and climes! Indeed, autobiographical novels have been such a rage and sensation across time and place for ages! Right from Angelou’s to Baldwin’s, to Charlotte Bronte’s to Dickens’s, to George Eliot’s to Fitzgerald’s, to Greene’s, to Hemingway’s, fictionalizing of events by authors, albeit on autofiction mode, have had their own charm and their sway on the readers.

Samuel Butler’s autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh is a case in point! A well-known English writer and a notorious iconoclast of the first quarters, from the Victorian age, Samuel Butler vehemently attacked the hypocrisy of the Victorian age, and gave a scathing portrayal of family life in Victorian England. For this and for other political considerations, this explosive autobiographical novel, though written as early as 1873, was published only in 1903. Upon its publication, praise and fame came to him from all quarters. George Orwell was especially profuse in his praise of The Way of All Flesh! He called Butler a courageous and truly independent observer! He added to say that, ‘Butler would say things that other people knew but didn't dare to say. And finally there was his clear, simple, straightforward way of writing, never using a long word where a short one will do.’ What’s more! George Bernard Shaw hailed it as ‘one of the summits of human achievement’! Such is the power, such the charm of this endearing read for us all!

Sample this, from Butler –

Butler speaks! Please go ahead and listen to him below –

I will give no more of the details of my hero’s earlier years. Enough that he struggled through them, and at twelve years old knew every page of his Latin and Greek Grammars by heart. He had read the greater part of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and I do not know how many Greek plays: he was proficient in arithmetic, knew the first four books of Euclid thoroughly, and had a fair knowledge of French. It was now time he went to school, and to school he was accordingly to go, under the famous Dr. Skinner of Roughborough.

The walls were covered with book shelves from floor to ceiling, and on every shelf the books stood in double rows.

That’s for a sample from Samuel Butler!

And next we come to the Teddy-Bear-fame Teddy Roosevelt aka Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography titled, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography.

Even while he was still a student at the famed Harvard, Roosevelt felt his flair for writing deep within him, and surrendered to this delightful call! The result is a whopping 35 wonderful reads from off his pen! He went on to become the 26^th President of the United States. Apart from being a writer, he also commanded great respect from all his subjects for his gift of the gab! He was also a naturalist and an explorer of the Amazon basin.

Teddy is known especially for his famed hunting expeditions. It’s no great wonder then that one of his bear hunting trips in 1902, under the invitation of the Mississippi Governor, fetched him the honorific Teddy that would be etched in people’s hearts even more than a century later, today!

His Autobiography published in the year 1913, also contains exciting, thrilling and fascinating descriptions of his hunting skills, whose beauty lies in the dexterous way in which he connects them with life-values and life-skills for everyday life.

Just excerpts for y’all, from one of his shooting adventures, from off his Autobiography, and the life-skills he imparts to the reader, through them all. Every word and every line of Teddy’s in his Autobiography, is so amazing and enthralling. Please please go through these lines to breathe into your very being the essence of good, descriptive writing. Teddy speaks of his hunting skills, the books that he so loves to read, the books-birds combo, acquiring fearlessness amongst a range of absorbing topics! Read on…

Teddy Roosevelt speaks –

Buck fever means a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity. It may affect a man the first time he has to speak to a large audience just as it affects him the first time he sees a buck or goes into battle. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self- mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control. This is largely a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will power. If the man has the right stuff in him, his will grows stronger and stronger with each exercise of it--and if he has not the right stuff in him he had better keep clear of dangerous game hunting, or indeed of any other form of sport or work in which there is bodily peril.

After he has achieved the ability to exercise wariness and judgment and the control over his nerves /which will make him shoot as well at the game as at a target/, he can begin his essays at dangerous game hunting, and he will then find that it does not demand such abnormal prowess as the outsider is apt to imagine. A man who can hit a soda- water bottle at the distance of a few yards can brain a lion or a bear or an elephant at that distance, and if he cannot brain it when it charges he can at least bring it to a standstill. All he has to do is to shoot as accurately as he would at a soda-water bottle; and to do this requires nerve, at least as much as it does physical address. Having reached this point, the hunter must not imagine that he is warranted in taking desperate chances. There are degrees in proficiency; and what is a warrantable and legitimate risk for a man to take when he has reached a certain grade of efficiency may be a foolish risk for him to take before he has reached that grade.

A man who has reached the degree of proficiency indicated above is quite warranted in walking in at a lion at bay, in an open plain, to, say, within a hundred yards. If the lion has not charged, the man ought at that distance to knock him over and prevent his charging; and if the lion is already charging, the man ought at that distance to be able to stop him. But the amount of prowess which warrants a man in relying on his ability to perform this feat does not by any means justify him in thinking that, for instance, he can crawl after a wounded lion into thick cover.

I have known men of indifferent prowess to perform this latter feat successfully, but at least as often they have been unsuccessful, and in these cases the result has been unpleasant. The man who habitually follows wounded lions into thick cover must be a hunter of the highest skill, or he can count with certainty on an ultimate mauling.

I need hardly say that all the successes I have ever won have been of the second type. I never won anything without hard labor and the exercise of my best judgment and careful planning and working long in advance. Having been a rather sickly and awkward boy, I was as a young man at first both nervous and distrustful of my own prowess. I had to train myself painfully and laboriously not merely as regards my body but as regards my soul and spirit.

Footfalls Echo in the Memory... Into the Rose Garden...

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. - Proust

The role of memory in literary studies is a vibrant thrust area for an intensely passionate research endeavour! Also, memory in literature is conditioned by a host of factors, which include the historical, the political, the social, and the religious events that impact the lives of the characters!

Writers since days of yore, have dabbled with such finesse on the role of memory in their works! One such writer who’s got such a unique way with memory is T. S. Eliot! And this prodigy was influenced in his endeavours by the pathway shown by Marcel Proust and his amazing and astonishing tryst with memory!

Sample this from Eliot's much-renowned Burnt Norton, on time and memory! (the first in his Four Quartets)

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

In fact, Eliot’s breath-taking descriptions here make this delightful read his best work in his entire oeuvre! Moreover, his awesome take on memory here, has a lot of impactful associations with Marcel Proust’s too!

If for Chaucer, memory aided his characters and their idiosyncrasies in the construction of a collective identity, to the Romantics, memory was a tool that helped them fly back into the past, or fly into the ideal world of imagination, or to reflect on their personal conflicts, ‘charioted by Bacchus and his pards, in the viewless wings of poesy’!

Marcel Proust takes this a step forward, through his sense-evoked memory!

Well, in general, to most of us, some of the sensory impulses evoke unique memories all the time!

It could be one cherished song we’d have loved to listen to, since our childhood days, or it could be a phrase that we associate with a particular person, a nickname that we use for a particular friend, or an object that evokes strong recollections and reverberations into the past!

Similarly, on ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’, through the sensory memories, Marcel Proust takes us all down memory lane with his nostalgic reflections that beautifully connect with tasting a little cake dipped in tea! From this little flashback that is stirred up in the writer through the taste of the cake, and the mental connects associated with it, he brings out a vast interconnected array of divergent identities constructed through the realm of memory! This ‘drawing of a network of associations, crafted effectively from a personal sensory memory of a cake,’ was used with finesse by Marcel Proust, and later perfected with such alacrity by a host of twentieth century writers, including namma Eliot!

This component of memory, known as involuntary memory, occurs with such frequency in most of us, when habituated incidents of everyday life help evoke recollections of the past without much ado, and with such spontaneity! Ain’t it? To Proust, dunking the tea biscuits in a cup of piping hot coffee or tea, is one such example that can evoke wondrous nostalgic involuntary memories from the past!

In Search of Lost Time in Six Volumes

In his monumental autobiographical novel of epic proportions, titled, In Search of Lost Time, [originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past] that runs to a whopping 4,215 pages, in seven volumes, Proust  recollects with such intense detailed descriptions on his childhood experiences up till his adulthood in early 20th century aristocratic France! He simultaneously reflects on the loss of time and lack of meaning in the world!

The role of memory assumes significance throughout the novel, through involuntary memory, wherein sensory experiences of smells, touch, sights and sounds, bring up a plethora of important memories right in front of him!

Let’s start rightaway on our ‘snippety’ hitch-hikey journey through Proust’s wondrous autobiographical novel!

Just a few delightful excerpts for us all, from this awesome read!

There was Another Bookish Lad in the Town, with whom I was Intimately Acquainted...

On Benjamin Franklin | For that High-Octane Inspiration 

Autobiographies have such a charm and delight of their own! 

And so do life writings! And so do memoirs! And so do confessions, and so do diaries, and so do personal journal entries!

Indeed, their quaint charm and their ‘awesome wonder’ give them their peculiar ‘thisness’ or ‘aboutness’, coming as it does with their innate cultural baggage and lived experiences galore!!!

In this respect, we human beings have always been amazing narrative beings! 

In other words, we are the sum total of our life's narratives! So yes! our 'Self' is in reality the product of all our life-narratives woven together into a rich tapestry of sorts! 

Narratives that integrate memories, weave nostalgia, and plait past pictures into a myriad, culturally grounded discourse. 

As such, our life stories act as highly effective cultural texts too! Autobiographies are a delightful case in point! 

They not only help us delve into the minds and the hearts, the lives and times of the great minds of yore, from their own points of view, but also help us get an insightful glimpse into their lived realities that would act real ensamples to us - readers of all hues - from yonder-yonder times and yonder-yonder places as well! 

This wondrous autobiographical read by Benjamin Franklin, a voracious reader, and one of the founding fathers of the United States, is the bestest bet for an autobiographical reading! 

It’s titled, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and is regarded till date, as one of the bestest examples of how an autobiography should be!

Benjamin Franklin - printer, politician, postmaster, author, scientist, inventor...

It’s no wonder then that his editor quipped on his Autobiography, as 'the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men’!

The youngest son of seventeen children, Benjamin Franklin had to cut short on his schooling when he was just ten years old, and by dint of sheer hard work rose up to become a printer, from which he published The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Well, The Pennsylvania Gazette was one of the most prominent newspapers to have come from America. 

It ruled the minds and hearts of the Americans for more than seven decades until the Revolution happened. 

Benji also did his might to enliven this famed periodical with his numerous essays, most of which he wrote under aliases, with the avowed aim of transforming society and agitating for a variety of local reforms! 

His literary fame today rests much-o-much on his Poor Richards, his Richard Saunders, and his Father Abraham – which were his ingenious, witty pseudonyms for himself!

Poor Richard’s Almanac was a yearly almanac that he published all by himself. The Almanac had ample information on the calendar, witty sayings, wordplays, weather reports, poems, along with astronomical and astrological information too!

Interestingly, Franklin had admitted to having created the Poor Richard persona based on Jonathan Swift’s pseudonymous character, ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’.

Moreover, Franklin was able to cleverly pass off his Poor Richards persona as the name of his printer!

This Poor Richards Almanac has yet another glorious name to fame too!

It was in this Almanac that Franklin introduced one of his most amazing personas ever and it was his ‘Father Abraham’ persona!

Incidentally, these high-renowned ‘Father Abraham persona’ speeches, later became the delightful essay, titled, The Way to Wealth!

Today, as we all know, the impact of The Way to Wealth is beyond compare! In fact, it was this essay, that’s been touted as the work that introduced American capitalism to the entire world!

[On an aside, well, the one-hundred-dollar bill in the US is called Benjamin, for the simple reason that, his face adorns the Bill!]

Comes as it does, with an impactful collection of adages, wise thoughts and advice, gleaned from the Father Abraham series of speeches, The Way to Wealth is a treat to the diligent mind!

Akin to the Academy founded by Plato in Athens, Franklin founded an Academy, which later took shape as the University of Pennsylvania! 

Wait! That’s not all! He also founded the American Philosophical Society to help the scientific-minded to communicate their inventions and discoveries amongst themselves.

And as the saying goes, when the boss wasn’t into writing, he was busy inventing something. Most of his high-renowned inventions include the bifocal lenses, the lightning rod, etc are meet for a different feature!

This apart, Franklin also pioneered the public library system in America along with giving shape to the idea of the fire department and the hospital. Added, he also pioneered the process of harnessing the immense ‘power’ of electricity for public consumption.

Coming back to his autobiography, which is a class of its own –

The very opening paragraph to the autobiography reminds one of Charles Lamb and the myriad cryptic clues to names he splashes across through his entire ‘Elia’ persona’d essays!

The rhythmic, alliterative and invigorating style to his autobiographical masterpiece in prose, lends a cadenced feel to the reading that comes albeit almost spontaneously to any reader who’s reading him even for the very first time!

I would so love to take you on a whirlwind tour into this wonderful autobiographical read! With some astounding snippets that speak volumes to the mettle and the drive, the vibrancy and the joi de vivre that has so possessed his entire being.

Now over to some interesting snippets from his Autobiography! [The captions to each paragraph alone, are this blogger’s! The rest, in italics, are Benji's!]

Benjamin Franklin speaks –

My fondness for Reading!

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes. I afterward sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections; they were small chapmen’s books, and cheap, 40 or 50 in all.

On 'Pictorial Semiotics' by Goran @ UoM today! An Overview

English literature today, has become as inter-disciplinary as could be!

Sonesson on song!

Having forayed into vistas and avenues hitherto considered tabooed by the defenders and glorifiers of the canon - the tabooed philistines, the tabooed schools of resentment, and the tabooed –isms, that have for long been anathema to the canon (thanks much to Harold Bloom!) have now become the cynosure and the centrestage of all literary eyes!

Thanks much to the twentieth century, which advocated a vigorous scientific approach to literature! Something akin to a literary mathematics or a literary science per se, shaping our experience and understanding of our ‘lived realities’ in a much more comprehensive way than it was hitherto possible!

This brings us to Semiotics, [dubbed by Terence Hawkes as the ‘science’ of signs,] and considered to be the very foundation on which the entire gamut of literary theory hinges upon!

Almost all the major literary theories of the twentieth century have been very much influenced by this science of the study of signs, thanks much to Saussure and his ilk!

Well, how do signs give us meaning? Or in other words, how is meaning created? and how is it communicated?

As cultural beings, all our actions and thoughts are always already automatically affected and influenced by a set of cultural signs, cultural codes and cultural messages, which help us to interpret them instantly, impulsively and instinctively!

Don’t we always do that?

Why do we stop at the colour red at a traffic signal?

Well, the colour red at a traffic signal, is a cultural code, governed by a convention, which has, by default, given us a ‘cultural conditioning’ to stop our vehicles impulsively, the moment we see the colour red! In short, we are ‘culturally conditioned’ beings who are governed and dictated by signs and codes every moment and every day of our lives!

Language is one such code!

In that respect, everyone of us is by default, a semiotician because we always tend to interpret, albeit unconsciously, the meanings of signs that we see all around us!

So we are all practicing semioticians by default! Ain’t we?

And the signs that we interpret, the signs that we decode, need not be visual signs alone! They could be aural also! The moment we hear the hoot of a police vehicle, or the siren of an ambulance, we could always recognize its unique aural note even from far away, without necessarily seeing it!

Such is the power of semiotics in our everyday lives!

That's endowed us all with the power to interpret signs, the power to make meaning out of signs and the power to make sense of our lives as the ‘Heideggerian’ dwellers on this planet!

Semiotics then, is a prospective tool that helps in delivering the real intention of a message, with the utmost clarity, without even a bit of confusion, (ambiguity) to the intended recipient!

Cognitive Semiotics, is a branch of semiotics, that studies how meaning is created!

Have we ever thought about how we create meaning in our thoughts, in our actions, in our perceptions, etc?

Curious, ain’t it?

How do we make meaning of something in our thoughts? [Aaaahh! it’s like Derrida’s lines on thinking about the structurality of structure!]

But then, it’s relatively much simpler over here!

As ultra-sophisticated animals, [we human beings,] how do we experience things as meaningful? How do we produce meaning? What are the criteria for constructing or producing meaning?

These are some of the questions that Cognitive Semiotics seeks to address!

In short, Cognitive Semiotics studies –

How language impacts or influences a reader!

How a picture impacts or influences a spectator!

How a sound impacts or influences a listener!

To put it in another way,

When I look at a beautiful Picasso painting, how do I say it is beautiful? How does it make meaning to me, for me to say it is beautiful?

Be it a natural everyday phenomenon, like a sunrise or a sunset! How do I ascribe meaning to it, and say that it is so lovelyyyy to me?

Or take for example, a piece of literature! A humorous read from P G Wodehouse! How do I say that I enjoyed reading it, and how does it make sense/give meaning to me?

Or when I watch a movie, how do I say it makes sense or meaning to me?

Cognitive Semiotics gives us a possible, [or a possibly effective] answer at that, by helping us study the nuances of sign formation and its connect with language that assist in the creation of images, symbols, metaphors, and even narratives!

In short, Cognitive Semiotics helps analyse the human production of meaning in our various cultural expressions, artworks, texts, etc!

Cognitive Semiotics has been much popularized in recent times by Professor Goran Sonesson!

Well, Dr. Goran heads the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) at Lund University, Sweden. Through his research, he seeks to apply semiotic theory to the study of pictures! It’s a wonderful conceptual area, which goes by various names like pictorial semiotics or the semiotics of pictures! Something akin to visual semiotics!

So here, at the University of Madras, today, 19 February 2019, Professor Goran Sonesson spoke to a packed audience of ardent minds, on some of the features of Cognitive Semiotics!

Lecture on Cultural Semiotics @ University of Madras

Department of English

University of Madras, Chennai

Cordially invites you for a

Special Lecture

by

Dr. Goran Sonesson

Expert Speaker on Semiotics

Lund University, Sweden

on

Tuesday, 19 February 2019

from 10 am to 1 pm

at

F-50, First Floor, Centenary Building

University of Madras, Chepauk, Chennai

Lecture on Digital Humanities @ Kannur

'Ideas for a New India' @ ITC Grand Chola, Chennai

Welcome to the two-day symposium on, ‘Ideas for a New India’, to be held on February 13 and 14 at ITC Grand Chola, Chennai!

This two-day conclave will feature Bharat Ratna recipient Pranab Mukherjee along with 46 other speakers.

Other noteworthy speakers include Subramanian Swamy, Smriti Irani, Shashi Tharoor, and Farooq Abdullah.

Bestselling authors Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghi will also be speaking at the event, on the topic, Lessons from the Epics: Should we have them in our textbooks?

and

Modern lessons from ancient India: Have we learnt the right ones?

The event will be inaugurated by Governor of Tamil Nadu, Banwarilal Purohit, on February 13. The governor will also give an address that will be chaired by Prabhu Chawla, editorial director, The New Indian Express.

The conclave, which is in its seventh year, will cover a range of issues affecting the educational sector, including infrastructure, access, finance and policy. Experts in these fields have been invited to share their thoughts and experiences in an enriching debate.

There will also be talks on cinema and technology, hosting speakers such as actor and politician Prakash Raj. A lec-dem by musician and educator Anil Srinivasan on the topic ‘Education and the music within’ will also be held.

Entry is Free!

Do not miss - 

● Pranab Mukherjee will speak on ‘View From The Hill: Education and Beyond’ on February 13 at noon.

● Subramanian Swamy will speak on ‘Are we producing hyper-nationalists or pseudo-secularists?’ on February 13 at 12:45 pm.

● Shashi Tharoor will speak on ‘Is India’s education ecosystem stifling the

underprivileged and rural masses?’

on February 14 at 4 pm.

● Smriti Irani and Farooq Abdullah will speak on ‘Is India’s education system divisive?’ on February 14 at 5 pm.

Image & Information Courtesy: The New Indian Express, Chennai

'Most of our Decisions and Choices are Impacted by our Memories...'

The concept of decision-making by characters in literary works, from across the entire gamut of literatures from around the world, has always been fraught with a double bind or a sort of dilemma that goes on and on within the character’s mind!

Take for instance, the character of Huck in Twain’s novel, Huckleberry Finn, where Jim is finally caught by the slave-masters, and Huck has to take a call! Yes! he’s now caught in the horns of a dilemma! Or the hooks of a precarious double bind! The dilemma within him is: Should he really go ahead and inform Jim’s owner about his whereabouts, or rather, obey his own conscience and liberate Jim from his slavish existence! By doing the former, he would be obliging the social dictates that the society has conditioned him into, whereas by doing the latter, (freeing Jim,) he would be loyal to his own conscience! 

Finally, he comes out of his dilemma, takes a bold resolve all by himself, and follows his conscience per se! Interestingly, this happens to be the first ever decision that he has taken in his life, entirely of his own volition! This decision-making thus serves to inform his transition from his childhood to adulthood!

Othello’s is yet another case in point! Othello’s decision-making abilities have always already been heavily manipulated and coloured by the wily fella Iago, to such an extent that he is not in a position to think clearly or make any sane or wise decisions all by himself! In short, Othello becomes an unwise victim of Iago’s craftiness!

from a staging of Hamlet

Hamlet - the infamous tragic hero of Shakespeare’s longest play - is also an apt sample to this bad decision-making, and hence his downfall! The play then goes on to highlight this aspect to his tragic flaw – the tragic flaw of his “indecision.”

Yet another example for us would be from Great Expectations by Boz! Pip is a character who is constantly on ‘regret-mode,’ regretting for the most part for some of his ‘unwise’ decision-makings! He hates himself for his decision to abandon Joe and Biddy! But his wrong decision-makings have given him ammo and courage, to make better decisions in future, and so he emerges a stronger person in the end!

Achebe’s famed creation Okonkwo too becomes a victim to his rash decision-makings! Incidentally, his downfall begins the moment he starts getting impulsive in his decision-making! Especially in the 'place-incident' where he impulsively takes upon himself the task of killing Ikemefuna, a boy whom he dearly loved! A pile-up of such rash decisions, finally culminate in his most rashest decision-making: to take his own life!

Well, have we, as students of literature, ever gone into the psychological factors, the pulls and the drives, the impulses and the pressures that make people behave the way they behave, or in other words, do the decisions they do? Or take the decisions they take?

These above illustrations are tuned samples to help give out possible clues for answers, by taking y’all to Daniel Kahneman’s wonderful read on the intriguing process of decision-making! The book syncs so very well with most of our perspectives on decision-makings and risk-takings connected to our lived realities!

So here we go!

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow has been and remains one of the most influential books ever on the process of decision-making, next only to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink!

Coming from one of the most popular and most impactful psychologist of our times, Daniel Kahneman who also doubles up as the Nobel laureate of Economics, the book touches upon a slew of aspects that connect with our own decision-making processes!

Daniel begins by highlighting the two basic ‘Systems’ that govern our ‘decision-makings’!

System 1, which is fast, intuitive, effortless and confident, and System 2, which is its opposite, slow, deliberative, effortful, and indolent!

So, System 1 is quite instinctive, impulsive and emotional, whereas System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

Like the difference there’s between Emotional thought and Logical thought!

Daniel also highlights the contrasting ‘selves’ within every individual, namely the remembering self and the experiencing self.