I Spit Me of Zem All

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Alexander Larman:

This was, of course, the point from the beginning. As Evelyn Waugh, a great admirer, famously said, “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Nobody has ever sat down to read about the adventures of Jeeves, Bertie, Bingo Little, Gussie Fink-Nottle, the terrifying Aunt Agatha and Roderick Spode (to say nothing of his black short-wearing followers) and expected gritty social realism.

I’ve also leaned heavily on Wodehouse to make the weight of this year more bearable. Not so much because of the pandemic, which, truthfully, hasn’t changed my life much at all, but because, as Joseph Epstein says in the introduction to his newest essay collection, Gallimaufry, “In the current day, what might be called ‘the general interest’ is being swamped by politics.” Indeed, General Interest has somehow found himself outranked by Major Upheaval. All around the “general interest” side of the web, where you would have formerly seen interesting articles and blog posts, you now see the equivalent of Havel’s greengrocers hanging out their perfunctory signs with all the corporate-approved “revolutionary” slogans, lest they be accused of insufficient fealty to the cause. Thank goodness for the time machine of Wodehouse’s novels, which transport us to a world where sheer, playful delight in language and storytelling is all that matters.

I still have no desire to read the homages by Sebastian Faulks and Ben Schott, though, despite the praise they’ve attracted.

Obiter Scripta, no. 95

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It would be a good idea if at the end of each year a tribunal was held on the conduct of the newspapers: perhaps it would make the people who write in them more circumspect…Two or more opposing papers would be compared with one another, and all of them with the actual course of events. Thus some assessment of political journals in general would in the end be arrived at…

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Noteworthies (48)

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• Greg Ross, “Turnabout”

In the early 20th century, medical students often posed for photographs with the cadavers they were learning to dissect — in some cases even trading places with them for a tableau called “The Student’s Dream.”

• Alan Bellows, “Let Us Be Joyful”

Evidently Mozart composed Leck mich im Arsch as a humorous canon intended to play with friends at gatherings. The lyrics were later rewritten by Mozart’s publisher for public consumption.

• Samuel Kronen, “The Prescience of Shelby Steele”

A great writer shows us how to think rather than telling us what to think. By taking us on a journey through their own thoughts, experiences, and revelations, we come to see, step by step, how they arrived at their own conclusions. There’s nothing mystical about it. It’s a matter of clarification, of revealing reality rather than coercing or intimidating the reader into accepting certain premises, of bringing to our conscious mind that which we already knew in our depths but hadn’t yet recognized. Shelby Steele is such a writer. His ability to state obvious but politically unfashionable truths resonates in an era when moral courage is a scarce resource. “This is not rocket science,” he has said of his work, “it is just common sense, applied in a social way. Anyone can see these things.” And yet common sense is not so common at the moment. At a time of intense political and racial division, Steele’s work is invaluable. If only his warnings had been heeded 30 years ago.

• Blake Smith, “The White Scare”

We might therefore call our contemporary moment “woke McCarthyism” or the “White Scare”—a moment defined by a paranoid search for, and hysterical denunciation of, traces of white supremacy in a society where actual white supremacists are no more powerful than actual communists were in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s America. In its alliance of political, corporate, and cultural power, directed toward revealing the secret sympathies of relatively powerless individuals who were then publicly denounced, humiliated and made unemployable in a theater of persecution that could be alternately terrifying and absurd, the Red Scare is a more obvious model for White Scare than the communism it opposed.

• Meng-Hu, “Favorite Hermits: 3. Paul of Thebes”

And here is the essential question of history and human affairs, whether asked by an observer east or west, ancient or modern. That which the average person finds permanent, enduring, important, are for deeper souls reflective of impermanence, temporality, even poignant in its short-lived presence on earth. This wide contemplation of a trajectory that transcends the concerns of average people is what the hermit catches on to. The hermit pays heed to and takes to heart, the lesson of life and death, watching as the world passes.

• Spotted Toad, “Shadows on the Grass”

As we approach the election, each day will offer more disruption, more confusion, more noise, more incoherence, an iterative intensification that may not end anytime soon. If you believe that the set of social arrangements being promulgated is unstable over even the shortest time horizon, the wisest course may yet be not to argue against their spread but to get far away, to make for the territory, intellectually or socially or physically. An endless game of Calvinball- in which rules are continuously rewritten ad hoc, and the game is not to play but to make up the rules- will be interesting for some, forever, and will pay some for its continuance- but for most it is better to walk away. If that cannot be done- if you are obligated by vocation or location or the expanse of the all-seeing, all-telling internet into every corner of your life- to keep playing forever a game you will never influence or understand, the risks will be great not just to the quality of daily existence but to your sense of self as continuous and integral over time. The task to come will be to find ways to see in yourself, your tasks, your immediate circle of human beings who are your life, as your own, that which is persistent, turn away from the dueling shadows to the endless grasses that wave in the timeless wind.

Strive After Clarity

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Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

— Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

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Obscurity and vagueness of expression is always and everywhere a very bad sign: for in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it derives from vagueness of thought, which in turn comes from an original incongruity and inconsistency in the thought itself, and thus from its falsity. If a true thought arises in a head it will immediately strive after clarity and will soon achieve it: what is clearly thought, however, easily finds the expression appropriate to it. The thoughts a man is capable of always express themselves in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those who put together difficult, obscure, involved, ambiguous discourses do not really know what they want to say: they have no more than a vague consciousness of it which is only struggling towards a thought: often, however, they also want to conceal from themselves and others that they actually have nothing to say.

— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

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Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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[M]y ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book…

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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You would think that when a man had something worthwhile to say his chief concern would be to make himself understood and he would write as simply as he could. But it is not so. There are not above a score of scholars in this country at present who express themselves in lucid prose.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Obiter Scripta, no. 94

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If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called “Damn It”.

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Truly, it was a more genteel time back then. Nowadays, thanks to the ambassadorial efforts of English football fans in particular, residents of that noble island are known by a different term, at least among the French. From Geoffrey Hughes’s An Encyclopedia of Swearing:

Only the Lonely

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Louise Perry:

A new book, The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz, poses an interesting challenge to the ‘biological taint’ theory by suggesting that loneliness is both responsible for a huge amount of the emotional suffering that attracts psychiatric diagnoses, and that its prevalence is a consequence of recent historical trends: family breakdown, the rise in both domestic and international migration, the disintegration of civil society, and our increasing dependence on the internet, particularly social media. We are social animals, and loneliness makes us very, very sick. While the elderly are particularly vulnerable to it, the young are also suffering terribly. Those ‘snowflake’ young people on Twitter are telling the truth when they write about their profound unhappiness. It’s just that they’re using these feelings as evidence of their special, oppressed status, rather than seeing themselves as part of a lonely generation in need of better company.

Perhaps the reluctance to face up to this peculiar sadness induced by 21st-century living is because the most reliable remedies to loneliness are disturbingly traditionalist: get married, have kids, live near your extended family, go to a weekly religious service.

In the archives of my mind, there is a steel door, flanked by guard dogs and behemoth security guards, under 24/7 video surveillance, requiring a retinal scan for entry. Inside, there is a heavy-duty safe. Inside that safe, there is a folder stamped, “Confidential: Not for Public Release.” Inside that folder, there is a heavily-redacted report stating my opinion that much of the “discourse” surrounding depression, anxiety and mental health in our time is performative, status-oriented, and socially contagious. A trend, in other words, one likely to appear as outdated several decades hence as Freudian claptrap does now. A trend that tell us more about our time in general than about any of its individual practitioners. As she says, that doesn’t mean the suffering is fake. It’s just an inarticulate way of describing the phenomenon. We dropped our keys a few blocks away in our former social arrangements, but we’re looking for them under the streetlamp of neuroscience and pharmacotherapy because the light’s better there.

For Us, These Are the Days

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Indeed, indeed, there is charm in every period, and only fools and flutterpates do not seek reverently for what is charming in their own day.

— Max Beerbohm, “The Pervasion of Rouge“

I’ve tried, on occasion, to cultivate an antiquarian mindset, to socially-distance from my own time and seclude myself among the great minds of yore, but I’m either too shallow or too curious to stick with it. (I’ll be generous and go with curious.) Everything contains Buddha-nature, no matter how ordinary or ephemeral. A mental landscape populated solely by coniferous stalwarts has its charms and consolations, but the transient beauty of individual deciduous leaves is undeniably fascinating. Why should I be in a hurry to escape the world? A true foolosopher should be able to turn any material, from current events to pop culture, into grist for contemplation.

Obiter Scripta, no. 93

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It is a folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

— Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies

I wish that were so, but Kristian Niemietz has been making the counterargument for some time that “Twitter is the real world,” and I’m afraid he may well be right. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of monomaniacal fanatics can change the world.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 92

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Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance, are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose publick conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend. To the quick circulation of such productions all the motives of interest and vanity concur; the disputant enlarges his knowledge, the zealot animates his passion, and every man is desirous to inform himself concerning affairs so vehemently agitated and variously represented.

— Samuel Johnson, Rambler no. 106

From this, I deduce that the secret to a lasting reputation is to write about old books, personal anecdotes, and inside jokes for one’s own amusement.

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