Alas, Destiny!

By in books, nietzsche, so many books, so little time No Comments

Hugo Drochon:

In her wonderfully gripping new biography of Nietzsche – the type you stay in bed all Sunday just to finish – Sue Prideaux casts doubt on this story. Indeed, the horse only makes an appearance in the legend 11 years later – in 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death – when a journalist interviewed Fino, the landlord, about the events of the day. And only in the 1930s – more than 40 years later – do we hear about the horse being beaten and Nietzsche breaking down in tears; this time in an interview with Fino’s son, Ernesto, who would have been about 14 at the time.

…Prideaux casts even more doubt on the cause usually attributed to this insanity: syphilis. Popularised by Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, which has a Nietzsche-like character contract syphilis in a brothel, the evidence simply doesn’t stack up. Although diagnosed as such when admitted to the asylum in Basle, Nietzsche showed none of symptoms now associated with it: no tremor, faceless expression or slurred speech. If he was at an advanced stage of dementia caused by syphilis, Nietzsche should have died within the next two years; five max. He lived for another 11. The two infections he told the doctors about were for gonorrhoea, contracted when he was a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War.

Instead Prideaux puts forward the – correct – view that Nietzsche probably died of a brain tumour, the same “softening of the brain” that had taken away his father, a rural pastor, when Nietzsche was a boy. Indeed both sides of the family showed signs of neurological problems, or of suffering of “nerves”, as one put it at the time.

You know, it’s getting to the point where I murmur a little traveller’s prayer before getting on the web each day: please let me get where I’m going without encountering any more stray books I feel compelled to pick up and bring home. I have a fair amount of Nietzscheana on my shelves, especially for a non-scholarly amateur, but I don’t recall ever reading a debunking of these legends surrounding his mental collapse before. Could it be that there is still more to learn here? A biography so gripping you want to stay in bed all day to finish it? Sigh. Well, as Zarathustra said sorrowfully, I recognize my lot. Thus my destiny wants it. Well, I am ready.

Words Like Violence Break the Silence. Painful to Me. Pierce Right Through Me.

By in fresh hell, language No Comments

I tend to prefer the idiosyncratic in style to survive and flourish, even at the cost of irregularity and even, on occasion, barbarity. Yet in practice, I tended to be an editor of the hands-on sort. I found I couldn’t bear to have certain words, phrases, even syntax in any magazine I edited. I would go prowling around other people’s prose, unsplitting those split infinitives, sweeping prepositions from the ends of sentences, removing certain over-and ignorantly-used words. I have conducted search-and-destroy campaigns against “lifestyle,” “impact,” “process,” the pretentious “intriguing.” Just now I am quite nuts on the matter of “focus,” a word that shows up in journalism more frequently than Jesse Jackson at the funerals of the famous. I also didn’t permit ideas, movements, or anything except people in a car to be “driven,” nor anything other than large physical objects to be “massive.” I have scores of other tics, quirks, and downright prejudices. I can’t help myself; I have to clean it all up. Anality, you may say. “Anality,” I respond, in the words of a character in a Kingsley Amis novel, “my ass.”

— Joseph Epstein, “C’mon Reiny, Let’s Do the Twist,” In a Cardboard Belt

My first reaction to his linguistic enemies list was to think, “How quaint!” Most of those seem harmless and inoffensive to me; it’s like working up anger against oatmeal or the color beige. My second reaction was to realize that yesterday’s atrocities become today’s status quo, that the words and phrases I find intolerable today will likewise become standard tomorrow, and soon enough (if not already) the correct use of “begging the question” will look as outdated as a hyphen in the word “to-day,” or a capitalized noun in 18th-century correspondence.

So, yes, when I checked the Accuweather site this morning, I was greeted by the above banner announcing a “snow event.” Now, I dimly recall noting that department stores no longer seem to have “sales,” they have “sales events.” But when did this euphemistic bubble-wrap start getting applied to weather as well? What does it clarify to add the word “event” in there? By the way, a prediction of one-tenth of an inch doesn’t even qualify as “snow,” let alone an “event,” so this is a double-scoop of useless verbiage.

In general, I have no problem with some rococo flourishes and aesthetic curlicues in language. Telegram-terseness is not the Platonic ideal of prose. I try to have fun with my own writing, and I love reading dictionaries of forgotten words to see if I can bring any of them back from the dead. I’m not one of those dour fundamentalists who quote Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” like scripture, nor do I look to apply a coat of Strunk ‘n’ Whitener to every patch of purple prose. But there are certainly categories of superfluous speech that make me grind my teeth. Business and marketing jargon, for one. Occasionally, I listen to the local alternative radio station while working, and there’s one vapid commercial in particular that stands out for its inane chatter. The tagline goes something like, “Helping streamline the process of finding solutions to your window needs!” Yes, it’s for a window installation company, though you’d be forgiven for getting the impression that it’s for some sort of consultant service in between you and the people who actually install glass panes in your home or office. If this kind of empty, corporate buzzword-babble has infiltrated the trades, how much further will it go?

Therapy-speak, also known as psychobabble, should of course be eradicated — I would like to have voodoo dolls of people who use the word “journey” to mean anything other than the band. George Carlin already said everything necessary about the insidious nature of euphemisms. I assume it’s a law of nature that the slang of any generation other than one’s own will always be annoying. Journalists and their hangers-on, being highly over-represented on Twitter, have made it so that articles, essays and even posts have become “takes” and “pieces,” as if we needed any more incentive to hate social media. But strangely, one thing that I’ve become increasingly irritated by is casual swearing.

I say “strangely” because I am by no means squeamish about salty language. My everyday speech is still peppered with profanities, though I don’t care for using it in writing very much anymore. But I still remember the thrill of being around twelve or thirteen and testing the boundaries to see when I could finally get away with using bad words around my parents without them scolding me. It was a rite of passage, a way of feeling recognized as more than a kid. However, once that boundary had been crossed, there was no need to exult in it. Like many thrills, the pleasure was mostly in the anticipation. Even in high school, a 2 Live Crew cassette was like samizdat acquired through someone’s older brother. It was only shockingly funny to us because there wasn’t any other music so offensively profane at the time. Après nous, le déluge, though. Now it’s just boring, and I find that I despise hearing something good referred to as “the shit.” Again, not because of any, ahem, anality, but because it’s just so lazy and reflexive. “The new Dead Can Dance music is the shit, man!” Oh, is that supposed to be complimentary? Are you barbarians happy now that you’ve sacked the capital of restraint and decency? Now you’re just amusing yourselves by taking the charred corpses of words and arranging them in grotesque parodies of their former meaning? Like Ismo, I’m perplexed by the way the word can mean almost everything and nothing. Apparently literal meaning is too strenuous for us; we’d rather just rely on tone and emotion to make our point. It’s linguistic nihilism, that’s what it is. Anarchy is loosed upon the words.

Asylum Tourism 2.0

By in antisocial networking, fresh hell, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Today, we are all walking around with the means of recording and broadcasting things that would never have been disseminated in the past. The world may have always been this strange, but the constant act of bearing witness to all that craziness is something novel and disruptive indeed.

Earlier this year, I suggested that, by magnifying and amplifying the stories and events most likely to trigger outrage and despair, people were doing the intellectual equivalent of carelessly coughing and sneezing. In a very limited, non-New Age sense, we do create our own reality, and we all know people who have spent far too much time in the funhouse mirror environment of social media to be capable of coherent conversation anymore. More recently, I complained that our omnipresent media was making it impossible to productively forget things, and Williams seems to be getting at a similar point. Formerly, craziness might have asphyxiated in the vacuum of social isolation. Bizarre opinions or obsessions might have been overlooked with a polite cough and a change of subject. Cranks who refused to take the hint would have found themselves increasingly speaking in soliloquies.

Now, through the safe distance of a smartphone screen, craziness is another way to accrue status points, by being the first in your peer group to call attention to another crank with an unhinged opinion. People who would undoubtedly find the old practice of paying a shilling to observe the lunatics in Bedlam problematic seem to have no qualms about reinventing the practice for our age, which only incentivizes more desperate attempts for viral validation. In a culture which increasingly blurs the line between fame and infamy, any attention is good as long as they spell your Twitter handle right. Rather than allowing craziness to dissipate and be deservedly forgotten, our technology gives us the Gorgon-like power to turn it to stone, littering the intellectual landscape with monuments to crassness and stupidity from which we learn nothing, pointing and giggling like simpletons instead.

Scrutonized

By in augean stables, conspicuous crusading, propaganda, the cult of multi, tribalism No Comments

Toby Young:

This is what the left in this country has been reduced to — online metal-detectorists searching the internet for material they can pretend to be shocked by. Sir Roger Scruton is one of the great intellects of our age and these commissars of political correctness aren’t fit to tie his boots.

Scruton’s official statement is correct but unfortunately irrelevant, as the truth usually is in these manufactured dramas. His real crime is to have been appointed to a government commission on housing due to his expertise on architecture. Anodyne enough, you might think, but his opponents consider influential positions within government and media to be their territory by birthright, and are thus outraged by this defilement. The idea that MPs in a party led by Jeremy Corbyn are appalled by anti-Semitism is too brazen to even be funny. As Theodore Dalrymple noted, the entire purpose of such propaganda is to demonstrate their contempt for the audience in a menacing way. Yes, we’re lying to your face. Are you going to do anything about it? We didn’t think so. It’s a bitter irony that a man who did so much at great personal risk to help undermine tyranny by establishing underground academic networks in Eastern Europe in the 1980s should find himself facing a similar dynamic at home.

Obiter Scripta, no. 53

By in environment, obiter scripta No Comments

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

— Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints”

That’s probably the case in New England, but here in the mid-Atlantic region, it tends to be early November when the leaves reach their glorious peak. This week is traditionally very busy for us, and this year we entertained a visiting relative for a few days on top of it, so I feel as if a whole week of my favorite month of the year has zipped by before I could savor it. But today, the sun was bright, the temperature mild, the pine trees were laying down a golden carpet of dead needles, the breeze was nipping at the heels of the fallen leaves and herding them across the yard, and the air itself seemed to glow with a reddish-orange hue from the blazing treetops. A year ago this night, I was about to embark on a three-day hospital stay culminating in gallbladder surgery. Today, I’m just happy to be alive to enjoy this wonderful time of year.

Where the Son Doesn’t Shine

By in atheism, nihilism, religion No Comments

Peter Hitchens:

Gray keeps on saying much the same thing in many different ways, such as his contention that “secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion.” This is all so obviously correct that, like so many other blindingly obvious things that we prefer to ignore, nobody likes to discuss it. Perhaps most definitive of all is his observation that godless searches for a universal law are futile. “Without a law giver, what can a universal moral law mean?” he asks. “If you think of morality as part of the natural behaviour of the human animal, you find that humans do not live according to a single moral code. Unless you think one of them has been mandated by God, you must accept the variety of moralities as part of what it means to be human.” Well, exactly. No God: no law. No law: no morals, just situational, alterable ethics. I am amazed that so few seem to realize the implications of atheism for the rule of law over power, the one thing that really sustains human civilization.

…For if there are justice and law and hope in the universe, they are surely to be found only on the far side of the grave. And if none of these things exists, then there is no unimaginable reality, nor any point in one, nor any point in poetry and music and speech and temporal love—just mud and silence.

By conventional reckoning, Hitchens is a devout believer and I’m an atheist, but I dare say my faith in the good and beautiful things of this world seems stronger than his; in fact, his strikes me as rather presumptuous. I’ve said for years that “either monotheism or nihilism” is the mother of all false dichotomies, but today, I’ll just paraphrase the German poet Ludwig Jacobowski and say, “Don’t cry because these things aren’t divinely guaranteed to last forever; smile because they ever happened at all.” But I suspect that these things mostly come down to an innate difference in temperament, and that a lot of theology reduces to personal psychology.

He calls John Gray the Spinoza of today. Simon Critchley previously described Gray as the “great Schopenhauerian Buddhist” of our age (which I think is more accurate). I have to say, I would be quite self-satisfied with accolades like that.

There’s a Reason We’re Supposed to Be Afraid of This Night

By in bread and circuses, foolosophizing No Comments

Regrettably, the woke left doesn’t have a monopoly on scrutinizing pop culture productions for convenient political messages. Kyle Smith and James Pinkerton recently cheered the new Halloween slasher movie for its supposed “conservative” message. It’s a shame, not just because politics rots hearts and minds and the last thing we need is every corner and crevice of everyday life becoming politicized for ephemeral gain, but because the broader theme of the movie is far more interesting.

I decided on a whim to take a couple hours off today and go see the movie. As I said recently, I hadn’t been to a theater in probably eleven years or so. But I love autumn, and I love Halloween, and it just wouldn’t be the same watching the movie on TV sometime after New Year’s, so off I went to partake of some seasonal spirit.

Fate hangs over the whole film like a funereal shroud. From the temporal significance (set forty years to the day after the events of the first film) to the personal (Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, both essentially frozen in time, waiting for nothing else but to meet again and resume their battle), the question that makes the  film more interesting than just another scary slasher flick is that of fate: Who questions it? Who rebels against it? Who accepts it? And what are the results? Both the podcasters and the psychiatrist are obsessed with getting Myers, who hasn’t uttered a sound in forty years of confinement, to speak, to explain himself. Fate, or evil, if you prefer (sometimes hard to tell the difference), of course remains silent, and goes methodically about its grim business. Whether we approach the inhuman, incomprehensible mystery of fate from a touchy-feely desire to master it and render it harmless, or whether we seek to ingratiate ourselves to it by becoming cold and remorseless ourselves, we inevitably fail. In this particular tragic tale, both types come to a gruesome end. Only those who accept fate and meet it on its own terms stand a chance.

Dark thoughts for a dark time of year. Happy Halloween.

Hello, Deafness, My Old Friend

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

At another time he said that he contracted the illness “by eating a hundred golden pippins at a time, at Richmond,” adding that the first attack of deafness came on several years later after he fell asleep outdoors. For a while the nausea and vertigo seemed to come on independently, but eventually they tended to coincide, and Swift was often tormented by “a hundred oceans roaring in my ears.” He became progressively deaf as well, first in one ear and later in both. The dizziness affected his balance, and he referred to it variously as “tottering” and “vertigo.”

…Due to a disturbance of the labyrinthine canals in the inner ear, Ménière’s syndrome produces four classic symptoms, and Swift had them all: irregular attacks of “rotational vertigo” that can last for weeks; progressive hearing loss, especially in the lower frequencies; tinnitus (the roaring noise); and a feeling of fullness and pressure in the ears. It is common for sufferers to feel deep depression, and as the years went by and the symptoms worsened, that is indeed what Swift felt, lively and energetic though he had been in his prime. Referring to himself in a late poem, he lamented, “That old vertigo in his head/Will never leave him till he’s dead.”

— Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and World

Swift was convinced that eating too much fruit was the cause of his torment, but it turns out that excess salt is the culprit. I know because I was diagnosed with the cochlear version of Ménière’s several years ago after having suffered symptoms since around the year 2000. In my case, the vertigo which is the hallmark of the classic version is apparently rare; I’ve only had a few fleeting episodes of it. Mostly, it consists of the feeling of fullness and pressure in the ear with the accompanying loss of hearing. Episodes could last for weeks or months with varying intensity, and would usually end with vomiting and a need to lie down and sleep it off.

My primary physician didn’t seem to think much of my complaints early on, suggesting that I just blow my nose while pinching my nostrils shut to clear the pressure. The otolaryngologist he referred me to, though, whom you would expect to recognize the symptoms of Ménière’s right away, diagnosed me as being allergic to newspaper dust (I worked in the newspaper business at the time) and put a tympanostomy tube in one ear. Seven years later, it was the Internet which would be my savior where professional medicine had failed me, when a French fellow I knew online described his symptoms along with their name. Armed with this new information, I went to a different specialist and was prescribed a diuretic along with the injunction to keep my sodium intake to 1500 mg or lower per day.

My otolaryngologist is overweight, 260 pounds and probably 5’9” or so. I appreciate that insouciance about him somehow. I mention it because he joked to me that if he got Ménière’s, he’d probably lose a lot of weight because of all the foods he would no longer be able to eat. Well, there are salt-free versions of many dishes to be found, but you will definitely end up making a lot more food from scratch than you would otherwise. Most prepackaged grocery items and restaurant dishes are ridiculously salty, and the less accustomed you become to it, the less you can tolerate it. A couple years ago, we ate at a diner during a trip to Maryland. The soup that came with the meal was a tiny cup of chicken noodle. I figured I could handle it, since I routinely come in under-budget on my sodium consumption, thus allowing me to cheat a bit on occasion. Well, my ears were fine afterward, but my god, my lips were on fire the rest of the day! I must have guzzled four bottles of water afterward in a vain attempt to quell the burning. It makes me shudder to think of how many people eat probably around three to four thousand milligrams of salt a day and then try to quench their thirst with soft drinks, which are, of course, useless for anything but delivering sugar and caffeine (which is another contributor to Ménière’s).

Over the past few months, I had started eating omelettes more often, though I’d never really been fond of eggs as a rule. The high-protein/low-sodium combination, though, made them ideal for me. At first, I used mostly Swiss cheese (the lowest in sodium) with some cheddar for flavor, but complacency snuck in, and I started using a spicier variety of cheese for extra tanginess without checking the sodium levels. After a few weeks, I started to notice my symptoms coming back, and it was only then that I checked and realized, to my horror, that I’d been getting almost my entire 1500 mg daily allowance from my omelettes. I immediately put myself under a strict sodium embargo, hoping to avoid a full-blown attack, and mostly succeeded. But yesterday, as my inner ear finally started to recalibrate, I got one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had in my life. It felt like someone had stuck their thumb up inside my right eyesocket with their fingers drilling down into the top of my skull. I was completely useless for the rest of the day, just lying in bed with an ice pack on my head, mewling and whimpering and longing for Death’s sweet embrace.

Earlier this year, I had to see my otolaryngologist to renew my diuretic prescription, and he complimented me on my discipline in living within my sodium means, having gone a few years without any flare-ups. I was shocked to hear that most of his patients, having been given clear instructions on how to relieve their misery, would ignore it or practice it halfheartedly. The Lady of the House laughs and calls me naïve, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go through that routinely if they could do anything at all to avoid it. As for me, this latest brush with my old enemy has scared me straight and renewed my determination to rout the saline menace from my diet. My family can rant about politics all they want at Thanksgiving next month, as long as the stuffing is made from scratch.

Noteworthies (43)

By in noteworthies No Comments

• Fred Bauer, “On Culture War and the Moral Limits of Anger”

• Joseph Epstein, “The Bookish Life”

• Sophie Ratcliffe, “The Five Best Books on P.G. Wodehouse”

• Bradley Birzer, “The Autumnal Imagination of Ray Bradbury”

• Stephen Marche, “The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity”

• Conor Friedersdorf, “The Idioms of Non-Argument”

• James Poulos, “Life Finds A Way: Jurassic Park‘s Warning at 25”

• Theodore Dalrymple, “In Search of Moral Authority“

Living Life Golden

By in battling personal entropy No Comments

In 2008 economists David Blanchflower at Dartmouth College and Andrew Warwick published an article, “Is Well-Being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle?” They relied on surveys that asked adults of various ages, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?” Adjusting for income, marital status and employment, they found that the level of reported happiness by age had the shape of a gently curving U, starting high in young adulthood and ending higher in old age, with an average nadir at forty-six.

…If average life satisfaction is lowest at forty-six and there is a variation around the norm — a certain proportion of people being above average, a certain proportion below — we would expect emotional trauma to peak at roughly that age. That is what Blanchflower and Oswald saw. Looking at the incidence of depression and anxiety in a U.K. Labor Force survey, they found that the likelihood topped out around forty-five, with a rate roughly four times that of teenagers and three times that of older adults. The chances of falling apart are significantly higher in midlife, even if the majority get by.

— Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

Should there be any eavesdropping Greek deities around (or any Old Testament ones with a taste for placing squalid bets), I certainly hope it won’t be taken for hubris if I report to you, live from this apparently-desolate temporal junction, that I have no serious complaints. I can’t even truthfully say I’ve dodged a bullet, because in a blithe state of Mr. Magoo-like unawareness, I didn’t even realize anyone was shooting at me. Long may it continue? (Please don’t smite me.)

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