Obiter Scripta, no. 75

By in aphorisms, books, montaigne, nietzsche, santutthi, Ω No Comments

Reading too much erodes your capacity for original thinking: “I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, ‘read to ruin’ in their thirties—merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks—’thoughts.’ Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength—to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!” (Ecce Homo,”Why I Am so Clever” §8).

The danger of excessive reading, Nietzsche thinks, is that it leads to an idolatry of the book: we confuse the explication of text for the interpretation of life. The final goal of reading aphorisms is not so much to penetrate their inner meaning (something that Nietzsche seems to deny anyway) but rather to use them as a springboard to other lines of inquiry. “I don’t write treatises,” he continues, “they’re for jackasses and magazine readers.” For this reason readers should, like Roman builders, plunder from older writers in order to build their own edifices: “Error of the philosophers.—The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material” (Human, All Too Human, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” §201). This practice is by no means original to Nietzsche. Montaigne encapsulates the entire Renaissance practice of imitation by admitting that his work is no more than a careful spoliation of previous texts and thinkers.

— Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter

Montaigne also said — paraphrasing Pythagoras — that our lives are like the spectacle of the Olympics. Some are there to compete, some are there to sell merchandise and hot dogs, and some are there to simply observe, to be spectators of other men’s lives in order to better regulate their own. Likewise, I’m a mere spectator of others’ thoughts, a flâneur of the codex. I was never destined for great, original things. I peek in secondhand shop windows to find slightly-used ideas and metaphors to bring home and polish, and I’m not above carting away a wheelbarrow full of bricks from someone else’s building site. I do my reading before bed, at least.

And Who Is Willing to Destroy a Piece of His Own Heart?

By in foolosophy, identity, political philosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Jim Geraghty:

The good news is that when we listen to voices as diverse as Rich, Putnum, Obama, Trump, Carlson, Brooks, the other Brooks, and almost every lawmaker and commentator in American life, they all recognize the same problems in society and all want to figure out some way to make Americans feel more connected to each other; to feel like we have a strong support network around us to help us get through life’s rougher moments. If there’s consensus over the problem, then just maybe someday we could have a consensus over the solutions.

He’s speaking of the fact that increasing numbers of conservative intellectuals and politicians are echoing populist themes recently, complaining of “the market’s” inability to heal us and make us whole. I, being an ornery li’l cuss, would argue that this doesn’t indicate any sort of consensus (let alone the desirability of consensus); it’s not necessarily any more significant than the fluttering of windsocks in a strong breeze. Careerist intellectuals and politicians are capable of recognizing trends and jumping on bandwagons in pursuit of power, influence, and maybe even wealth; even professional conservatives can think of no permanent thing more worthy than getting their hands on the steering wheel of state. When did we feel connected and supportive of each other in society? Pre-1960’s? Pre-20th century? Pre-agriculture? Wherever your time machine lands, there you find professional thinkers and doers lamenting the same perennial themes and flaws in human existence. Pull the blanket up to nestle under your chin and complain about your cold feet. Put on woolly socks and complain that your feet get sweaty.

My personal trainer deplores the trend of people wearing headphones in the gym. She wishes they would make eye contact with each other, and say supportive things like, “Nice set!” She’s old enough (as am I) to remember when parents and mores didn’t allow you the option of placing that audio barrier between yourself and the world; you had to be sociable, or at least be open for conversational business during normal hours. She also has a prickly side to her personality, though, as evidenced by the bitchy little asides she’ll make about other members in particular, or about people in general getting on her nerves, which seems to happen regularly. This person makes small talk about stupid things like the weather. That lady sings too loud while working out. This guy stands around too long flapping his yap in between sets, blocking the way. There’s always something petty to attract her critical notice. (Interestingly, she also seems to be a devout Christian, which raises the obvious question to an ornery li’l cuss like me: would she be even worse about it without religious exhortations to be a better person?)

In Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome illustrates this contradictory aspect of human nature by means of a hilariously ironic scene in a picturesque churchyard, where the narrator finds himself swept up in beatific thoughts about his fellow man:

It was a lovely landscape. It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired me. I felt good and noble. I felt I didn’t want to be sinful and wicked any more. I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver hair when I got old, and all that sort of thing. In that moment I forgave all my friends and relations for their wickedness and cussedness, and I blessed them. They did not know that I blessed them. They went their abandoned way all unconscious of what I, far away in that peaceful village, was doing for them; but I did it, and I wished that I could let them know that I had done it, because I wanted to make them happy.

His reverie is broken, however, by the appearance of the old groundskeeper, who thinks that he wants to be let in to see the tombs. Naturally, he heaps abuse upon the old man for disturbing him, the first individual he’s encountered after embracing humanity in the aggregate. “Go away, and don’t disturb me. I am chock full of beautiful and noble thoughts, and I want to stop like it, because it feels nice and good. Don’t you come fooling about, making me mad, chivying away all my better feelings with this silly tombstone nonsense of yours. Go away, and get somebody to bury you cheap, and I’ll pay half the expense.” Ivan Karamazov, with the bitter self-awareness that J. lacks, noted the same discrepancy. One might love those at a distance, in the abstract, but one’s neighbors? How can we seriously love our neighbor, who has a stupid face, who once stepped on my foot, who voted for Trump, who talks too much and sings too loud and…

Our beautiful and noble thoughts make us feel nice and good. It’s pleasant to fantasize about life in a society without dead-end jobs, or opioid addiction, or declining church attendance, or whatever other trendy signifier the sociology-minded are prattling on about today. Who knows, maybe they will weave a blanket policy to cover our sense of disconnected anomie. But then we’ll start complaining that our desire for novelty is left cold and remember just why it was that we didn’t want to have anything to do with our neighbors and their stupid faces and their suffocating, woolly embrace in the first place. “Only connect,” said E.M. Forster, quoted by countless undergrads online looking to capture the spirit of our time. And yet, Forster didn’t mean the phrase the way it’s commonly interpreted in the age of social media. It turns out that the type of “connection” he had in mind, being in touch with our hidden erotic desires, is the sort of thing we’re actually lamenting these days, a symptom of our atomistic malaise. Even the hyper-individualism being attacked by Catholic integralist culture warriors might have its roots in…guess where? The dividing line is not between parties, or states, or individuals vs. communities, but right through every human heart, indeed.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Feb. 5, 2012.]

Nathan Heller:

The Grey—in which Liam Neeson fights a pack of wolves in some obscure Alaskan locale—is an insult to marquees everywhere and to the lupine species. In this country, the land of freedom and wild dogs, gray is properly spelled with an A. The E version, bearing the pretense and the inhibitions of the Old World, ought to be associated only with those words that hearken to that culture—earl grey, for instance, or grey peas. Grey, in short, signifies sorry cuisine. Now, it is true that Neeson hails from greyer lands. But The Grey is an American film, set in this nation’s northern soil; to force an E on this effort is to deny the blood and toil and orthographic genius of this country’s forebears, who fought, in great peril, to liberate a nation from the unjust spellings of its European colonizer.

Ooh, uh, yeah, I’m gonna have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there. Please, do not allow jingoistic nationalism to cloud your view of what should be an open-and-shut case of linguistic verisimilitude. Speak the word and envision it with an E as you do. Go ahead, out loud, do it right now, I implore you. Do you not picture the tight-lipped mouth and steely gaze of stoic forbearance displayed by someone facing the flat, leveling monotony, the streamlined sameness, of dense fog or existential despair? Would you not concur that the Americanized “ay” (a singular example of the unfortunate American habit of intoning vowel sounds with all the subtlety and grace of a perturbed donkey) softens and nullifies this necessary sense of vague peril, rendering it affable and harmlessly round, much like the American paunch imposing against the faded college athletic logo on an old t-shirt?

“Grey” signifies a dignified nobility, a suit of armor against the vicissitudes of life, the hard-won wisdom of experience as evidenced in one’s hair. “Gray” — I shudder to even type the word in reference to the color — merely conveys the casual, unprepossessing familiarity of a favorite pair of sweatpants dotted with powdered sugar and marinara sauce.

Obiter Scripta, no. 74

By in beards, books, obiter scripta No Comments

A major division in the bearded kingdom exists between those who revel in no longer having to bother with maintenance, letting Nature have its luxuriant bushy way, and those who continue to keep a razor nearby—prudently pruning or shaving the cheeks every few days. A well-clipped beard on a kindly man looks as proper as a well-kept lawn on Sunday.

— Phillip Lopate, “On Shaving a Beard,” Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays

A couple times, I’ve tried to let mine grow wild for a month or more, hoping that after its wiry rumspringa phase, it will settle down and behave like the wise old elder of my facial community. So far, its rebelliousness has outlasted my patience. It doesn’t help that my beard nation has balkanized into the Brown, Blond and Grey tribes each claiming their own territory, resisting unification. I have yet to achieve the philosopher-king style — more like “clinically depressed fur trapper.”A dedicated topiary practice is still necessary to keep anarchy at bay.

Obiter Scripta, no. 73

By in books, obiter scripta, writing No Comments

One might as well “blame” the decline of the conversational style of writing. Familiar essays were fundamentally, even self-consciously, conversational; it is no surprise that Swift wrote one of his best short pieces on “Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation”; that Montaigne tackled “Of the Art of Discussion”; that Addison and Steele extensively analyzed true and false wit; that Hazlitt titled his books Table Talk, Plain Speaker, and The Round Table; or that Oliver Wendell Holmes actually cast his familiar essays in the form of meal time dialogues. Why would a book like Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a celebration of good talk that was so popular in its time, be so unlikely today? I cannot go along with those who say “The art of conversation has died, television killed it,” since conversation grows and changes as inevitably as language. No, what has departed is not conversation but conversation-flavored writing, which implies a speaking relationship between writer and reader. How many readers today would sit still for a direct address by the author? To be called “gentle reader” or “hypocrite lecteur,” to have one’s arm pinched while dozing off, to be called to attention, flattered, kidded like a real person instead of a privileged fly on the wall—wouldn’t most readers today find such devices archaic, intrusive, even impudent? Oh, you wouldn’t? Good, we can go back to the old style, which I much prefer.

— Phillip Lopate, “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays

As I’ve said, one of my favorite things about blogs is the way they facilitate that same conversational familiarity. Perhaps I should phrase that in the past tense — there once was a time when the blogosphere was more like a neighborhood with community spirit. Comment sections could be left unlocked, and other bloggers and their followers could and frequently did drop in while making the rounds like daily wassailers. People made more of an effort to include other bloggers in their written conversations. Google used to have a blogsearch function which I would visit daily and use to search by topic, hoping to find some new site with an interesting voice (I even know of people who met their spouses that way). Does anyone bother keeping an updated blogroll anymore? Do people still occasionally check their site stats for the surprise of seeing who directed a burst of traffic their way? On Twitter, as I understand it, “quote-tweeting,” i.e. using someone else’s tweet as a springboard for your own, i.e. the standard conversational practice in the old blogosphere, is considered bad form, at least a nanoaggression if not an outright assault. Everyone now wants to speak and be heard, but no one wants to communicate.

Obiter Scripta, no. 72

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Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

I have a younger friend who has already had more adventure in his three decades than most of us have in a lifetime. Walt Whitman’s multitudes are homogenous compared to his. He has a very inquisitive mind despite a Hillbilly Elegy-type upbringing. He’s traveled widely and had enough unique experiences to already make for an interesting biography. He has a very dangerous job in the justice system in which he has been hospitalized at least a couple times with gunshot wounds and other “lesser” injuries, one of which required him to fatally shoot a man in self-defense. He’s great to have a conversation with, but it also sure makes me appreciate life in my hobbit-hole, never having adventures or doing anything unexpected. No one would want to read about my life, but I wouldn’t want to live any other.

Like a Fiend for Nicotine, But I Don’t Need a Cigarette, Know What I Mean?

By in battling personal entropy, ohferfucksake No Comments

Jack Butler and Alec Dent:

For his part, Lloyd cites Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as an example of a health nut whose meditation and other health-conscious practices are a replacement for smoking. Once, such a person supposedly “would have smoked 40 or 50 or 60 cigarettes a day instead.” He “would have ended up dying earlier,” Lloyd admits, “but the effects of nicotine — regular hits of dopamine, raised alertness, speedy reaction times and powerful anti-anxiety and antidepressant qualities — would have given him everything he gets from meditation and more.”

Similarly, Walther’s main sentiment when the health-conscious Paul Ryan replaced the cigarette enthusiast John Boehner as speaker of the House was contempt for Ryan’s healthy lifestyle. Writing for the Washington Free Beacon, Walther alleged: “This is a guy who is obsessed with health and exercise, the kind of man who can tell you exactly how many calories he ate last week. He probably owns a $200-plus bicycle helmet.” Walther’s reaction to a description of Ryan’s exercise routine was simply “Ugh.” Smokers cannot honestly claim that their habit is healthy, or that being healthy is only for the wealthy. That they instead devalue health shows their argument’s weakness.

The Lady of the House’s younger brother likes to make quips about how silly it would feel to die healthy. He’s young, though, so I can imagine it still seems witty to him. The aforementioned Will Lloyd, though; I’m not sure what his excuse is. In his response to Butler and Dent, he makes a virtue of spiritual depth out of the necessity of laziness — apparently only those who slowly poison themselves truly appreciate the evanescence of life, you see — before offering up the same juvenile retort to those who exercise: “Do they think it’s possible to be healthy forever?” If he’s going to construct men of straw in the workplace, I hope he’s at least careful not to drop one of his smoldering cigarette butts nearby.

I enjoy the ritualistic discipline of rising early to exercise. I appreciate the patience necessary to improve my physique. I respect the sobering awareness of how much work it takes to be fit, and how easily fitness can fade once laziness and rationalization creep in. I love being able to work with a nutritionist and learn new things rather than pass off stupid dietary habits as the cumulative wisdom of the ages. And on a more practical level, I savor the moment at the end of a long, busy day when I can say with pleasant surprise, “Hey, my back isn’t killing me,” or “Hey, I don’t feel completely exhausted; in fact, I feel pretty good.” I’ve been unhealthy, both by choice and by cruel fate. There’s no ambiguity at all: life is better when you’re healthy. Of course we all have to die of something. Of course some fitness enthusiasts are tedious egomaniacs. But as people like Lloyd and Walther prove each time they peck at their keyboards, shallow, boorish people can be found everywhere, pursuing every type of pastime. And body odor isn’t anywhere near as foul-smelling as tobacco smoke.

Sure to Play a Part, So You Love the Game

By in antisocial networking, identity No Comments

Claire Berlinski:

Here’s how to make journalists stop doing things like “publishing a vaguely offensive thing that a local hero said on Twitter when he was sixteen.” It’s so simple you wouldn’t believe it.

Never, ever click on stories about that kind of thing.

They’re measuring the amount of time you spend looking at stories like that. The amount of time your eyeballs spend on the article or articles about the article is all they care about. By “they” I mean advertisers, and it doesn’t matter if you’re pleased or enraged. If something gets your attention, they’ll show you more of it. They’ll show you more, in particular, of the thing that most enrages you. By reading that story—and—this is key—stories about that story, you’re telling advertisers how to get your attention, and it doesn’t matter if the attention is good or bad. It’s good for them.

I agree. But I’m afraid that this is all a good idea in the same way that veganism is a good idea, and I don’t think the media equivalent of a vegan diet is ever going to catch on any more than the literal one has. The best we can probably hope for is to convince people to invest a bit more of their time, and maybe subscription money, in supporting free-range articles which have been allowed to stretch their argumentative muscles and spread their rhetorical wings, rather than gobbling buckets of deep-fried news nuggets which have spent their short lives on clickbait factory farms, crammed into tiny cages, being pumped full of outrage steroids.

As John McWhorter and Glenn Loury discuss in their most recent conversation, it’s hard to be an individual. It’s not pleasant to constantly set yourself at odds with your peers. People are hardwired to prefer the “warmth of the crowd,” the consoling “group hug” of shared identity. And few people are willing to voluntarily isolate themselves through a principled refusal to participate. “I don’t eat that kind of food. I don’t read those sorts of articles. I don’t enjoy that type of entertainment. I’m not interested in gossip.” Do that enough times, and you might start to feel lonely. And one way that people compensate for that feeling of loneliness is by developing a sense of smug superiority, which isolates them even more.

I’m a fairly taciturn, solitary person. Always have been. I’ve never had a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. account. For me, the Web 2.0 train stopped at Blogspot station, and I’ve never felt the need to get back on. And yet even I find myself aware of far more cultural effluvia than I care to admit. Why? Because even I, fairly disciplined as well as solitary, can’t devote my free time with monastic rigor to reading cerebral books and thinking elevated thoughts. I love the amateur writing I do here; I love building with words the way other hobbyists like to build with power tools or craft materials. But I’m also an ordinary, boring fellow, and I don’t have enough depth of inner resources to draw on in order to write original, interesting material. So I depend on the conversational prompt of other websites to stimulate my own thoughts. Thus am I compromised. You dance with them what brung you. There’s also the fact that my curiosity is somewhat Whitmanesque — I’m easily interested in subjects both high and low, refined and vulgar; I feel ambidextrous enough to approach topics either critically or reverentially, to attempt either commonsense philosophy or cheap puns.“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” If that occasionally leads me to flirt with popular culture and sample the low-hanging fruits of social-justice stupidity, I console myself with the thought that at least I avoid whoring around with syphilitic Buzzfeed listicles and “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS liberal snowflake!!!” videos on YouTube. I might even balance it out by occasionally, accidentally, writing something moderately profound.

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles,” said Winston Smith. For me, hope lies in the podcasts. If there is a dependable audience for calm, in-depth, three-hour discussions of weighty issues, maybe there’s a quiet revolution taking place underneath all the cacophony of social media and network news.

Obiter Scripta, no. 71

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta 2 Comments

I have never been much of a teacher, but I can see how teaching can act as a feather duster of the mind.

— Theodore Dalrymple, False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine

I would like to think of my mind as a tidy bookshelf which just needs an occasional dusting. But when I consider how much of my learning mainly involves unlearning things I mistakenly thought were true or forgetting things which are no longer useful, I think what I really need is a gardener to trim the shrubbery, pull the weeds, and most of all, take a leaf blower to all the debris cluttering up my synapses.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Mar. 12, 2015.]

Saladin Ahmed:

Now certainly, one could spend one’s life reading only books by straight white men, and never run out of wonderful material. But this is akin to spending a lifetime’s worth of vacations visiting only Disneyland. Whether or not one agrees with ‘the SJWs’ that it’s ethically contemptible, it is, in a word, boring.

Because, naturally, all straight white men think and write exactly alike, which is no surprise, given that they were all mass-produced on the same suburban assembly line before being assigned to their identical upbringings. Their vocabularies, their prose styles, and their imaginations all follow the same well-worn paths as dictated by their biology. Their race and sexuality, needless to say, thematically informs everything they write. The Exotic Others, of course, do everything differently, from sex to grocery shopping to forming friendships, which is why they’ve evolved completely new languages to convey those nuances, languages which are nearly incomprehensible to straight white readers.

I swear, this fetishization of superficial differences reminds me of Pliny the Elder describing the inhabitants of the All-Ears Islands, or Marco Polo (and later, Columbus) telling tales of dog-headed cannibals. Now let me tell you of a race of equatorial homosexuals well worth describing in this book. You may take it for a fact that all the men of this island have massive, permanently engorged members, which they use alternately as pogo sticks, oars, jousting lances, or parasols; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their lives is that of a phallic nature… 

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