The Importance of Living

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I am not original. The ideas expressed here have been thought and expressed by many thinkers of the East and West over and over again; those I borrow from the East are hackneyed truths there. They are nevertheless my ideas; they have become a part of my being. If they have taken root in my being, it is because they express something original in me, and when I first encountered them, my heart gave an instinctive assent. I like them as ideas and not because the person who expressed them is of any account. In fact, I have traveled the bypaths in my reading as well as in my writing. Many of the authors quoted are names obscure and may baffle a Chinese professor of literature. If some happen to be well-known, I accept their ideas only as they compel my intuitive approval and not because the authors are well-known. It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler’s window.

I am not deep and not well-read. If one is too well-read, then one does not know right is right and wrong is wrong. I have not read Locke or Hume or Berkeley, and have not taken a college course in philosophy. Technically speaking, my method and my training are all wrong, because I do not read philosophy, but only read life at first hand. That is an unconventional way of studying philosophy—the incorrect way. Some of my sources are: Mrs. Huang, an amah in my family who has all the ideas that go into the breeding of a good woman in China; a Soochow boat-woman with her profuse use of expletives; a Shanghai street car conductor; my cook’s wife; a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York; a deck steward who made one good remark; that writer of a column on astronomy (dead for some ten years now); all news in boxes; and any writer who does not kill our sense of curiosity in life or who has not killed it in himself…how can I enumerate them all?

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

If Montaigne had been a Chinese man writing in 1937, he might have been Lin Yutang. If nothing else, a time-traveling Montaigne would have surely found many enjoyable conversations to be had with Lin. Like his French predecessor, Lin presents his humble credentials without embarrassment and proceeds to consider, examine, and pontificate on any topic that catches his wondering eyes.

Immediately following this preface, by page five he’s already musing over the possibility of classifying national types according to an admittedly pseudo-scientific, quasi-chemical formula “by which the mechanism of human progress and historical change can be expressed.” R stands for a sense of reality (realism); D for dreams (idealism); H for humor; and S for sensitivity, with 4 being the highest quantity and 1 being the lowest. Therefore, “we may put it thus: 3 grains of realism, 2 grains of dreams, 2 grains of humor and 1 grain of sensitivity make an Englishman.” After averring that this is, of course, all provocative rather than authoritative and open to revisions, he proceeds to apply the same chemical classification to writers and poets, from Shakespeare to Li Po. (Shakespeare only needs one more grain of humor to be all fours.) Already, I suspect his claims of unoriginality are a bit overstated.

Again, like his spiritual kinsman, he unabashedly writes from a first-person perspective; the idea of hiding behind some pretense of objectivity would never occur to him. These are his thoughts, stated plainly and firmly, and if you find one or another unappealing, don’t worry, there will be many others arriving presently. “I have no doubt that lyrical poetry would not have developed if our hairy human ancestors had had no lice on their bodies.” Or: “Germany lost the war because Wilhelm Hohenzollern did not know when to laugh, or what to laugh at. His dreams were not restrained by laughter.” Then there are the sections on the proper way to lie in bed (“upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one’s head”), or to sit in a chair (“I want to write about the philosophy of sitting in chairs because I have a reputation for lolling…I contend that I am not the only loller in this modern world and that my reputation has been greatly exaggerated.” Apparently the Communists especially hated him for his “most leisurely of all leisurely writers” reputation.) No subject is too prosaic for reflection and discussion, and it’s wonderful to see quotidian details being attended to in earnest, with no cynicism or irony.

Looking up the book on Goodreads before re-reading it, I saw a review from a woman complaining that she was going to have to bail on it before finishing because of his retrograde opinions on women. I was surprised, then, to first encounter numerous sympathetic references to the “subjection” of women (he blames bipedalism as the original sexist sin). Eventually, he does proclaim his view that women who don’t have children are incomplete and probably unhappy, that careers are no substitute for the engrossing work of motherhood. He also qualifies this by saying that he’s speaking of the average woman, and that if he asks her to raise the children and wash the dishes, he also asks the average man to forget about the arts and concentrate on being a breadwinner. All in all, it’s a pretty mild view for a Chinese man writing more than eighty years ago. I can’t imagine being upset over the discovery that Chinese men of 1937 weren’t intersectional feminists, or not being robust enough to be able to dismiss such an unimportant perspective in a spirit of charity. Imagine Lin (or Montaigne) being offended at encountering something in an old book contrary to their modern sensibilities. If anything, they would have been interested, if not delighted, by the surprising reminder of the true diversity to be found throughout world history.

Well, You Can Call Me Crazy, But I Know Where I Belong

By in foolosophy, fresh hell No Comments

It seems the Eye of Social-Science Sauron has turned toward generalists. Forget intensive specialization; being a Renaissance man is what it’s all about now. Reading the interview transcript, I felt the same unease and annoyance as I did several years ago when Susan Cain’s book Quiet was trendy, and introversion became something of an inverted status symbol. My impression of Cain’s message was, “Introverts can be productive, contributing members of corporate and academic environments too!” Well, that’s nice, but I was perfectly fine with being ignored and overlooked, thanks. Likewise, I’m a generalist because I have a genuine interest in many things and I’m not particularly ambitious. Hearing an author cite a bunch of studies to prove that dabbling in a variety of activities and disciplines can be a more efficient way of increasing one’s chance of success sounds like using the methods and idiom of specialization to justify the existence of generalization, i.e. a Pyrrhic victory. With any luck, within the next few years, this data will be considered fatally flawed and outdated, the social-science geeks will become fixated on a new shiny object, and I can go back to enjoying the benign neglect of the wider world.

An Ideological Fur Coat

By in nietzsche, the statusphere No Comments

Rob Henderson:

She was raised by a traditional family. She planned on having a traditional family. But she maintained that traditional families are old-fashioned and society should “evolve” beyond them.

What could explain this?

In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.

In Daybreak, Nietzsche wrote: “The Greeks, in a way of life in which great perils and upheavals were always present, sought in knowledge and reflection a kind of security and ultimate refuge. We, in an incomparably more secure condition, have transferred this perilousness into knowledge and reflection, and calm ourselves down with our way of life.” In the parlance of our times, he might say that shallow people, bored with their own comfort and affluence, enjoy theoretically deconstructing civilization without being willing to risk or sacrifice any of their actual privileges. Personally, I blame Foucault. (I’ve always loved Nietzsche’s writing, but his numerous epigones are a virulent plague.)

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Jun. 14, 2016.]

Ben Sixsmith:

The immediacy and excitement of social media and online journalism have encouraged people to ignore this and hold forth on everything. Mouthing off with insufficient knowledge of one’s subject can entail devising and promoting arrant nonsense. What it also does, however, which is far less acknowledged, is make it more difficult to stop promoting nonsense as having publically endorsed a particular opinion one has made a personal investment in its success, integrating the idea into one’s identity and gambling one’s social status on it being impressive.

In the depths of an old-growth forest, a tree falls. In a study, a blogger glances over the headlines and trending topics in his feed reader and rolls his eyes in disdain before closing the laptop and picking up a book. Do either of them make a sound? It depends, of course, on how you define the term. Are the soundwaves that ripple out from the tree’s crash into the undergrowth significant if they’re only registered by the ears of forest creatures incapable of recursively reflecting on them? Is the blogger’s weariness with the fatuity of social media meaningful if it isn’t publicly performed in that same venue in return for validation by clicks, likes and retweets?

It’s no fun ignoring people if they don’t know they’re being ignored, is it? How are people to know that the weeklong lapse between posts is due to my principled rejection of the popular topics and viral essays on offer, rather than my being occupied with work or other hobbies, if I don’t say so? However, conspicuous disdain, the kind that wants to make sure the audience knows just how unworthy of your attention you find the current object of your attention, should be beneath us. It’s akin to the fraudulent spectacle of a football player peeking through his fingers to see if the referee has taken note of his simulation of mortal injury. In the social media marketplace, sense and nonsense are not polar opposites, however invested consumers might be in believing otherwise; they’re competing products, like Coke and Pepsi. Performance, signaling, and seeking validation — these are the currency, the bills and coins which dirty the hands of the enlightened and benighted alike.

Words You Say Never Seem to Live Up to the Ones Inside Your Head

By in books, language, ohferfucksake No Comments

Joe Moran:

This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.

One is tempted to say, well, it’s the Guardian, what else do you expect? The house style pretty much calls for some vestigial gestures in the direction of power to the people! revolution! and the progressive arc of history, even in a linguistics book review. When efforts to remold stubborn reality through politics, cultural diktats and technology have all fallen short, I suppose the incantatory power of language is an obvious alternative, one which just so happens to promise a starring role for bookish intellectuals, imagine that.

We Take For Granted We Know the Whole Story. We Judge a Book By Its Cover and Read What We Want Between Selected Lines

By in books, foolosophy 4 Comments

Himadri Chatterjee:

So why is he so dissatisfied? Holden himself cannot explain this, for, firstly, he does not analyse himself, and is possibly incapable of doing so; and secondly, neither is he very articulate. His general sense of dissatisfaction is something he feels, but which he cannot understand, or express in words even if he could. So it is up to us, as readers, to try to look beyond his natural inarticulacy. One word he uses frequently is “phoney”. He doesn’t explain what he mans by this, but we can see that he tends to apply this word to describe what he regards (although he would possibly be unable to articulate it thus) as emotional shallowness, or insincerity. And this he sees all around him. People say things, do things, not because they feel it, but simply because that is the form, as it were, simply because this is what everyone does. What appears to dissatisfy him is a lack of feeling, a lack of emotional depth in peoples’ day-to-day lives. But why seems it so particular with him? However, as with Prince Hamlet (in this if little else), he knows not “seems”: for Holden, it is. It is the seeming in others that he deplores.

And the reason for this, though not immediately apparent, emerges slowly over the course of the novel, and takes centre stage in the climactic passage towards the end, where he meets with his sister Phoebe: Holden is still in grieving for the death of his brother Allie, and he cannot understand why the rest of the world isn’t also in grieving with him. How can people – even his own parents – carry on with their lives as before after something so momentous as this? How can they all go inside to take shelter from the rain immediately after his funeral?

This, I think, is at the heart of the matter. The novel is not about teenage angst, or rebellion, or about the difficulties of coming to age: it’s about a sensitive young lad who cannot articulate his grief, nor understand how the rest of the world, his own parents included, could fail to grieve as he does, could carry on living when his own life seems to have come to a halt. And considered as such, it strikes me as a very poignant novel, and not deserving the opprobrium so frequently heaped upon it these days.

I read The Catcher in the Rye in eleventh-grade English class. It didn’t make a deep impression on me, and I’ve rarely thought about it since. In fact, I don’t even remember Holden having a dead brother named Allie, but my faith in Himradi’s honesty is such that I’m willing to accept that he did, and that this isn’t just some prank to see how many people have actually read the book before offering opinions on it.

For as long as I can remember, though, conversation about the book has resided on some meta-level of significance, in which people pronounce on its cultural importance rather than its merits as a story. I have an isolated memory of the actress Christina Ricci in a magazine interview back in the mid-to-late ’90s expressing the “contrary” opinion that despite her teacher’s best efforts to convince her of the novel’s “voice of a generation” significance, she found it overrated and thought Holden was whiny and boring. I put “contrary” in scare quotes because, as is so often the case with rebels who refuse to accept that they are the new establishment, I’ve rarely if ever heard a different opinion since. I doubt if any teacher in the last thirty years has tried to present the book as the ne plus ultra of teen angst, but for some reason, people are still invested in rebelling against it as such (when they’re not seeing it as coded Marxist propaganda, that is).

It’s another humbling reminder that sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is to quietly pay attention to avoid missing what’s right in front of us. Too much conversation is simply about changing the subject to something else, to everything else, to nothing at all.

Sisyphus’s Push Mower

By in environment, foolosophy No Comments

Graham Hillard:

From a purely financial perspective, doing one’s own yardwork ignores well-established theories about opportunity cost and comparative advantage. Just as the United States should focus on soybean production and import its avocados, such thinking goes, so its citizens should leave the lawn-mowing to the professional landscapers lest they misappropriate a billable hour.

Indeed, the answer is obvious if the question is going to be discussed in economic terms alone. I save $200 a month by caring for my own lawn but could easily earn more than that figure were I to use my yardwork hours to teach an extra class or write a bit more second-rate political commentary. What I would lose in the bargain, however, is the moral satisfaction of creating order out of chaos, bringing the land up to my own standards, and performing a task that remains — how else to put this? — proper to a man.

A friend of my stepson’s came over at the beginning of June to watch the Champions League final with us. “Man, I really like what you’ve done out there,” he said, gesturing out the window. “You’ve got a miniature Versailles going on.” I demurred that if anything, we were more inspired by the English garden ideal than the overly-geometric French version, but of course I took the compliment in the spirit in which it was intended. “Thanks, but it’s all her vision,” I said, referring to the Lady of the House. “I’m just the groundskeeper.” That’s not entirely true — I just do the brute labor, like mowing the lawn and picking up branches and offering an opinion while shopping at the greenhouse. She’s the artiste who builds, sculpts, cultivates, plants and harvests. I don’t always appreciate having to stoop under the branches of the redbud trees which nevertheless manage to slap my face and knock my hat off, and it certainly is challenging to maneuver around some of the intricate arrangements she’s constructed, but I know my place.

In my days of renting houses, I always had yards small enough to cut with a push mower. I bought this house twelve years ago, with just under two acres of land, but I didn’t upgrade to a riding mower. At the time, there just always seemed to be better things to do with a thousand dollars, but soon enough, I decided I didn’t need one anyway. It only takes about three hours to do the entire yard, and the mower is self-propelled anyway, even though sometimes I refrain from using it just to make it more challenging. I look at it as three hours of enforced walking, mild exercise, and music listening. And I do love the temporary satisfaction of a job well done, as I look over the uniformly-trimmed grass late on a summer evening after mowing. It will only be about three days until I start to see all my work come undone, but that’s plenty of time to enjoy it. While it remains neat and tidy, it reminds me of the professionally-manicured soccer pitches I spend so much time gazing upon. This is worthwhile labor. It is its own reward. As Camus said about Sisyphus, the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. I, too, conclude that all is well.

What Musician Holds Us In His Hand? Oh Sweetest Song

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Just a little over seventy-two hours ago, I only had a vague awareness of Devin Townsend’s existence. I still pay some attention to goings-on in the world of heavy music, even though, truth be told, I don’t find a lot of it appealing anymore. What can I say? I’m not a young man filled with excess testosterone, and my emotional palette contains more than aggression and depression, so a lot of today’s metal music just strikes me as too limited and boring. Somehow, over the years, I had gotten the impression that Townsend was an avant-garde, abrasive, noise-metal musician. You know, buzzsaw guitars, Cookie Monster vocals, etc. Well, I was very wrong, and I curse whoever misled me. He does have a lot of heavy songs, with galloping-herds-of-Brontosaurus kick-drums, 32nd-note riffs, and detuned guitars (he apparently tunes down to C and even B, which is also what Type O Negative used to get their massive, moaning-glaciers, tectonic-plates-shifting, footsteps-of-God sound), and he’s perfectly capable of shrieking and growling when he wants. But he also has some ethereal acoustic music, and he names Enya’s Watermark album as one of his Top 5 all-time biggest influences. This dude is seriously diverse.

The Lady of the House has had classical training as a singer, and so we’ve been enjoying the YouTube channel of a Scottish vocal coach, Beth Roars, and that’s where I first heard him, performing his song “Kingdom.” The way his spectacular voice climbs and soars from about 6:45 to 6:50 in that video gives me full-body chills every time. From there, well, he’s been recording since the early ’90s, and he’s quite prolific, so there’s a huge back catalog for me to dive into. I’m still only about half-done. Some of his songs, like “Namaste” or “Addicted,” sound like a slightly more melodic Ministry or Godflesh, with an aggro, industrial feel to them. Other songs, like the acoustic “Little Pig,” are more reminiscent of Pink Floyd. (And that song comes from a gorgeous collection of B-sides! Most bands should be so lucky to put out a proper album as good as that, and these are just the songs he had left over!) Some albums are more of a mix of heavy and gentle. His latest release, Empath, which came out this spring, is one where he says he tried, for the first time, to put all of himself into it, rather than compartmentalizing his different tastes into different projects (he’s recorded under Devin Townsend, The Devin Townsend Project, The Devin Townsend Band, and Strapping Young Lad, and probably others I haven’t uncovered yet). The closest comparison I can make is to Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, who is similarly capable of writing blistering metal riffs as well as feather-light, wispy melodies, similarly prolific, and who also physically resembles a giant thumb. But Corgan’s voice is much more limited (and definitely an acquired taste), and I personally have found much of his post-Smashing Pumpkins output to be forgettable and uninspired. No, Townsend appears to me to be sui generis. I wouldn’t have believed it possible to discover someone like him.

As any middle-aged or older person knows, it’s increasingly difficult to be surprised. History’s weight bears down hard on us; memory stifles imagination. Newer music tends to sound like things we’ve already heard done before (and done better). Older artists tend to be inconsistent quality-wise over a long career. So you can imagine what a total joy it is for me to stumble across a treasure like this. Dozens and dozens of songs to listen to! Genuinely fresh sounds, unlike any other artist I can think of! It’s disorienting, but in a good way. For a couple weeks or so, the whole world will feel almost new again. Every morning, I’ll eagerly look forward to listening again. There will be that delicious unfamiliarity with the songs for a while, where I remember enough of the melody to crave it without being able to remember exactly what’s coming next in the song. I’ll run some songs into the ground, listening on repeat day after day, until several days later, when I move to the next one in the playlist and joyfully realize that I’d already forgotten I bought this one, and I’ll get to fall in love with it again! I’ve been listening to music all day long throughout this weekend, and when I’m not, my head is heavy with melodies, some of which, being only half-remembered, morph into something unique, making me want to grab my own guitar and try to capture them before they drift away. Ah, but it’s so blissful to just stay put and let them ebb and flow over me…

And as it happens, this coincides with the new fitness routines I’m building. We joined a gym at the beginning of summer, where we started working with a personal trainer and a nutritionist. Like always when you change old habits, there’s a novelty to the new way of doing things that focuses your attention and makes a lot of details of everyday life stand out. Plus, we’re at that point in August where it’s still hot out, of course, but there’s a hint of fall coming soon. I’ve come to appreciate August, funny enough. I feel almost magnanimous toward it, as you can afford to feel toward a defeated opponent. “Well, summer, you did your best to kill me, but you’re getting weaker, and you’ll be gone soon. Thanks for putting up a challenging fight. See you next year.”

So, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced many times, there’s this fortuitous constellation of events and feelings that make certain time periods preserve especially well in the memory. I’m old enough now that I can somewhat recognize them as they’re forming, and it’s wonderful to think ahead to next year, when all of these particular details will look as if they’ve been caught in amber. Especially the songs. There’s not much sweeter than a song that calls to mind a specific time and place. Some melodies will go with you anywhere, like carry-on luggage, and will adapt to new circumstances. Some stay rooted to the place where they were born for you. Music that evokes the borderland between summer and fall might be my favorite of all.

A small part of me wonders anxiously how many more serendipitous discoveries like this there are for me to make, or how infrequent they’re likely to be. The wiser part of me just laughs at how quickly we become greedy for more! more! before we’ve even finished what’s in front of us. Who could be so ungrateful to demand to know if and when it will be repeated? It’s wonderful enough that it happened at all. This is exactly where I was always trying to get to. Let time continue on without me for just a little while.

Obiter Scripta, no. 70

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta, writing No Comments

To my mind, the maximum length of an aphorism is whatever can be written in one sitting. Written, not read—for many aphorisms may be taken in at once. An aphorism can be revised, of course, before it is released into the world. It may be improved, simplified polished; but if it is complicated, if another train of thought is added, even one fully consequential to the first… then it is an essay, no matter how short. The reason is, so to speak, phenomenological. Deriving from one glance to the horizon, an aphorism can only contain as much as the eye can take in in a moment. This is more for some than for others, but not very much more. If its essence is not set down in one sitting, usually immediately, then it is lost.

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

That’s how I’ve approached most of my writing here. I’d always thought of my posts as a species of dwarf essay, but maybe I’ve actually been producing plump aphorisms instead.

The Question to Everyone’s Answer

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Alan Jacobs and Anthony Daniels independently encounter and consider a strange species of academic/intellectual conceit: the ideal of open-ended inquiry, which in practice seems more like a pathological fear of commitment. Daniels finds an architect who thinks that being “rigorous in the questions that I ask” is more important than the answers he comes up with, as if buildings are just abstract experiments in self-expression rather than physical structures for people to inhabit. Jacobs notes a Harvard history professor claiming that philosophy “at its best” is about encouraging a critical posture rather than anything as trite as providing answers to pressing questions of how to live (I would hardly consider Theodor Adorno an example of philosophy at even its second-best, but I’m not a professional thinker and no one asked me). The juxtaposition of these two examples makes me realize how accustomed I’ve been to this conceit without ever accepting it; seeing it exposed, naked and shriveled under the light, makes me realize what a scrawny, contemptible thing it is.

Giacomo Leopardi wrote that suicide motivated by existential despair was reason’s one final attempt to assert itself at any price. Self-destruction in protest against a cruel, unjust world is an example of a contradictory, inconsistent human being sacrificed on the altar of logic. The ideal of a “critical posture,” of existing indefinitely in suspended judgment without ever being forced to choose one imperfect stance over another, seems like an intellectual’s attempt to seat himself upon the vacant throne of the God he banished — observing, contemplating, and occasionally prodding lesser mortals from his cerebral redoubt beyond space and time.

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