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I often think of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore, the old one, an oneiric subterranean space with mysterious corners and hissing pipes overhead, with books you wouldn't find anywhere else crammed onto shelves and wedged into hidden alcoves. Right at the entrance to this labyrinth was the front table, where bookstore staff presented without explanation a curated selection, stacked neatly in rows—philosophy, literature, political science, and anthropology existing in unspoken conversation with one another and with the reader. These books offered different perspectives on the human experience, there for the reader to integrate or not, and, in so doing, to add her own mental voice.
My book selection these days aspires to be as chaotic and colorful as the Co-op's front table. Different authors on different topics hawk their wares in my mind, letting me do the work of placing diverse perspectives in dialogue. Recently, I have found myself reading books that, in their own ways, attempt to answer the fundamentally ethical and deeply psychoanalytic question of how to define the good. What are humans like, and what should they aspire to be? What metaphors have shaped our understanding of the human mind over different points in human history, and how have these metaphors influenced our ideas of what is good and what we are able to become? I want to focus here on two books that I'm reading now that examine this question.
Elizabeth Williams’ Appetite and Its Discontents is a fascinating book in which the author explores the evolution of the concept of humans’ appetite for food. Williams shines a light on a surprisingly nebulous
concept, showing us how dramatically the concept of appetite has changed over time and how it has persistently defied attempts at localization within the body, existing in shadowy opposition to biologically based hunger. When we discuss appetite, Williams argues, we rely on metaphor, an argument supported by the ease with which we switch from discussi