This is The Leaky Margin, a repository for book reviews, loosely construed. This newsletter takes its name from a term William James used to describe the very edges of conscious awareness. In his imagery, awareness consists of a series of “mental fields", whose peaky centroids point to information we are attending to at a given time, just as the focused light of a flashlight illuminates its direct targets. Each field decays smoothly away from the primary object of our interest, to cast dimmer light over inputs that we are decreasingly attentive to. Here is how he puts it:
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually.
Chapter “Conversion”, from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, p. 2311 (bolding mine)
Hazy and faint, the stuff that sits at the murky margin “leaks” into our mind, influencing our thoughts and behaviors:
Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention. It lies around us like a ‘magnetic field’, inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle […].
p. 232 (bolding mine)
The inputs that lie at the margin of our awareness exert an influence on our mental states whether we like it or not. The material that makes it to this newsletter will be at the centroid of my attention today. Tomorrow, it will sit at the margin. Writing this newsletter thus serves as an attempt to occupy my margin with new frameworks, ideas, and expressive articulations of “the human heart in conflict with itself”2. Eventually, I hope that some of these bits of insight will drift into the core and become part of the way I understand the structures and gears that drive the world, appreciating all the more deeply the lives and constraints of those around me.
From the 1985 Penguin Classics edition.
A William Faulkner quote, from his 1949 Nobel Banquet speech.