The Brittle Self
Available Formats:
Kindle Edition · Paperback (coming soon) · Free PDF
About This Book
The Brittle Self is a history of one of the oldest fears a mind can hold: that the self is fragile, that it can be seen through, broken, switched off, or shown to be unreal. Across six hundred years the fear holds steady while its costume keeps changing, and the book follows that single dread from a medieval palace to a present-day clinic.
It begins in 1393, when Charles the Sixth of France forbade his court to touch him, certain his body had turned to glass and would shatter at a careless hand. From there it moves through the glass men of Europe and the men who believed they were made of butter, through the patient who was sure she had already died, through the London tea broker who drew diagrams of a machine he believed worked his mind from across the city, through the broadcast age and its conviction that the cameras never stopped, and at last to the chatbot built to agree with every word its user types. Each age explains a mind in crisis with its newest marvel. The instrument is always modern. The injury is ancient.
The book is built in two voices. One, the Record, sets down the documented history, the case files and letters and diagrams, with its sources named. The other, the Interior, steps inside the experience to ask what it felt like to be the man who would not be touched or the woman who believed she was a corpse, and every such chapter is marked, so the reader always knows where the record ends and the imagining begins. Written for anyone who has felt, even briefly, that they might come apart, The Brittle Self argues that the terror in the newest ward is the Glass King in a new coat, and that seeing the pattern is its own kind of company.
The Argument
The histories of madness usually sort the great delusions by century and by name, the glass delusion here, the influencing machine there, the broadcast delusion later still, each filed as a curiosity of its own age. This book sets them in a single line and shows them to be one thing. Underneath the changing materials runs a constant fear, that the self is fragile and exposed, breakable from outside, transparent to strangers, or not quite real, and that fear is among the oldest a person carries.
What changes from age to age is only the costume the fear is given. A mind in crisis reaches for the most astonishing thing its century has made and builds its terror out of that. In an age of glassblowers it becomes glass. Among looms and magnets and mesmerism it becomes a hidden machine working the body by remote control. When radio and television arrive it becomes a broadcast that never stops. In our own time it becomes an algorithm that knows you, watches you, and answers in your own voice. The instrument is always modern. The injury is ancient.
The pattern behaves like a meme in the strict sense, a thing that survives by passing from host to host and taking a new shape in each. It cannot stay glass, so it becomes a loom. It cannot stay a loom, so it becomes a broadcast, and then a chatbot. Each generation calls the previous generation's delusion a superstition, then reaches for its own newest wonder and assembles that same dread.
To name that pattern is the work of the book, and naming it does practical good. It places the patient in a long line of company rather than alone with a private and shameful terror, and it warns the rest of us, now living inside the newest costume, that the fear in the chatbot ward did not begin with the chatbot. It began six hundred years ago, in a palace, with a king who would not be touched.
Table of Contents
A Note on Method
Prologue. The Glass King
Part One · Glass
Chapter One. The Wonder That Could Be Seen Through
Chapter Two. The King Who Would Not Be Touched (Interior)
Chapter Three. The Glass Men of Europe
Chapter Four. The Licentiate of Glass
Chapter Five. The Piano Inside Her (Interior)
Part Two · Butter, Clay, and the Failing Body
Chapter Six. Made of Butter
Chapter Seven. The Body That Was Already Dead
Chapter Eight. Mademoiselle X (Interior)
Part Three · The Hinge
Chapter Nine. The Air Loom
Chapter Ten. The Man Operated by the Loom (Interior)
Chapter Eleven. The Two Families of Fear
Part Four · The Marvel Elsewhere
Chapter Twelve. The Self the West Did Not Invent
Chapter Thirteen. Boanthropy and the Beast
Part Five · The Broadcast
Chapter Fourteen. Everyone Is Watching
Chapter Fifteen. On Air (Interior)
Part Six · The Simulation
Chapter Sixteen. The Machine That Agrees With You
Chapter Seventeen. Inside the Simulation (Interior)
Chapter Eighteen. The First Age to Build the Mirror
Coda
Chapter Nineteen. The Cured Man Has Nothing to Say
Chronology · Glossary · A Note on Sources · Notes · Bibliography · Acknowledgments · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
"Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —"
Emily Dickinson
"I am like a broken vessel."
Psalm 31:12, King James Version
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1
What the Book Traces
From a king in a Paris palace who had iron sewn into his clothes so the pieces of him might hold together, through the glass men and the butter men and the woman who kept house inside her own death, through a London tea broker bent over diagrams of a loom that no one else could see, through the asylum that held him and the century of broadcast that followed, when patients first told their doctors the cameras were always running, to the present clinics where people lose their footing inside a screen that answers in their own voice and agrees with everything they say. The cases cross six hundred years and several continents. The dread underneath them does not change. Setting them in one line, marking what the record holds and what the imagination must supply, and following the fear from the palace to the chatbot is the work of the book.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about minds convinced they are fragile should be easy to reach and easy to keep. The free PDF is a complete reading edition, set at five and a half by eight and a half inches with the cover as its first page, the body in a serif face with every font embedded so the file reads the same on any machine, a clickable table of contents, and a bookmark panel that runs from the Prologue through every chapter to the bibliography. Download it, read it, and hand it to anyone who has ever felt that a careless touch might break them.
Dedication
For Janna, and for everyone who has feared they would break.
Author Interview
Further Reading
Companion essay: The Glass People: The Materials of Madness, from the Glass King to the Simulation (Boles Blogs), on the lineage at the heart of the book.
Go to Every Funeral · Abandoned in Place · The Tale of the Most Insane Desk Ever: No Drawers Allowed (Boles Blogs) · Garry Davis and the World Citizen Movement: Life of Pleasure or Pursuit of the Purity of Nothingness (Boles Blogs) · Ideas & Inquiry · About David Boles