January 2011

Consider the Sillies

By in foolosophy, philosophy

I found that Jacoby essay via Jenny White:
I propose instead that we do what we can to prepare for that long life, and then we annihilate time.
I’m not the first to think of this, although I’d gladly snatch credit from the Zen masters. Live in the moment: A sentiment overripe from use, but how many of us have actually tried it when wagging fingers insist that as responsible people we should worry about the future as well as prepare for it. The timeline is unforgiving, as we are expected to atone for our pasts as well. Adulthood is an extended act of penance (thrice-weekly gym and no cookies), and old age is your comeuppance for all those unrepented acts of wantonness. Time is society’s dream of your life. It doesn’t have to be your life.
I agree. I think. I guess I just want to make sure that when we invoke Zen wisdom and say “Live in the moment”, we understand that this means grasping that our ideas of the future and the past are both projections of this moment as well. We never actually exist in either the future or the past. When the future gets here, however you define it, it will be experienced as “now”, just as the past was. So “living in the moment” doesn’t mean, pace the Grass Roots, to just live on impulse and refuse to think about anything but satisfying immediate desires, nor does it mean, as certain deranged cult leaders would have you believe, that God will provide if you just have faith; unless, of course, you share said cult leader’s belief that the world is due to end in a fiery apocalypse any minute now, in which case, all right, then.
We can’t help but live in this moment. The hard part is simply realizing that.

Getting High On My Mortality

By in foolosophy, the big sleep

I would rather share the fate of my maternal forebears — old old age with an intact mind in a ravaged body — than the fate of my other grandmother.

Like Susan Jacoby, I actually hope I don’t live to such an old age. And I share her conviction that diseases like Alzheimer’s can allow one to live too long to live well. But as I’ve mentioned before, I developed rheumatoid arthritis when I was in my late twenties. And even though I’m fine now thanks to medication (which could, of course, destroy my liver or cause cancer, but I’ll cross that bridge if or when I get there), I spent three and a half years in unrelenting physical pain as doctors puzzled over what was wrong with me if my blood tests kept coming back showing a negative rheumatoid factor. Thus, I can report with confidence that even with the overall good health of a twenty-something to alleviate at least some of the decrepitude, it’s not easy to live that way either. The intact mind tends to be a bit too preoccupied with the ravaged body to spend much time enjoying the fruits of contemplation. So it’s more like “six of one, half-dozen of another” if you ask me; a life as a physical or mental ruin with no reasonable hope of improvement is a life worth ending on its own terms.
I don’t say it to be morbid. In fact, I think contemplating one’s own mortality, while initially terrifying, of course, leads one to an appreciation of life that doesn’t require the sorts of fantasies Jacoby mentions, of people determined to live longer than a century, a century and a half. Those people, to me, don’t understand that life’s finite limits are actually what give it meaning in the first place. As Steve Hagen said, we want it because it dies. And let’s be real; if people thought they could solidly expect another fifty or so years of life, what would they do with that time? Travel, learn new languages, create art? Or spend that much more time eating junk food on the sofa while watching TV? The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough time, it’s that we take the time we do have for granted. That’s not going to change by adding on another few decades.

Humble Pie

By in books, language, socmed, writing

I can’t begin to tell you (or at least I prefer not to tell you) how many times while reviewing the original text I found myself thinking, “I didn’t know that. Why, I’ve been making that mistake for years.”…In an alarmingly real sense, the alternative title now could be Even More Things in English Usage That the Author Wasn’t Entirely Clear About Until Quite Recently.

That’s Bill Bryson, in the foreword to his Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. I’ve been reading that and June Casagrande’s Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies over the last few days. It’s fun to read stuff like this, but it’s a bit mortifying to realize how many mistakes I’ve been making for years. At least I can use the excuse that I’m only writing on an insignificant little blog. It’s supposed to be written in a loose, conversational style!

I’ve scoffed before at those who see harbingers of cultural doom in everything those damned kids today are saying and doing, and I accept that a language is often going to be driven by popular usage, no matter how much it causes the grammar scolds to gnash their teeth. But I do feel a little more sympathetic to them now, because so many of the mistakes I’m now aware of in my own writing are due to the fact that I’ve always heard people talk like that. And sometimes the differences are so subtle, you don’t notice them until someone takes the time to point them out. If, as I’ve argued before, texting, Twittering and Facebook posts (oh my!) are creating a sort of sea-level when it comes to the forms of writing that most of us use, one that reinforces mediocrity and minimal effort, where are people going to be exposed to anything that teaches them differently?

Open-Minded Is Not the Same as Empty-Headed

By in spiritual-not-religious

Frank Furedi:

Outwardly, Ramadan upholds the ideal of open-mindedness. But it’s an open-mindedness that avoids critical thinking and making judgments. His call for embracing multiplicity and diversity is about avoiding the challenge of intellectual clarification and moral judgment. Yet his celebration of diversity is deceptive, too, because his cheering of difference is actually oriented only towards those whose views echo his own. His acceptance of ‘all outlooks’ certainly does not extend to classical liberal thought; indeed, it’s worth noting that the only strong argument consistently pursued through his book is a critique of the liberal virtue of tolerance.
…In line with the values transmitted by the therapy culture that is currently widespread in the Western world, Ramadan wants, not toleration, but respect, validation and uncritical acceptance. That is why he, like numerous other multiculturalists, rejects tolerance on the ground that it is patronising or is ‘not enough’.
Ramadan’s claim that people do not want to be tolerated is another way of saying that they don’t want to be judged – but they do want to be affirmed. In his own way, Ramadan gives voice to the Western therapeutic imagination’s estrangement from making value judgments. Contemporary Western culture’s refusal to judge goes hand-in-hand with its celebration of the therapeutic value of affirmation and boosting self-esteem. This sensibility inexorably leads to the affirmation of individual and group identities, an act which has become something of a sacred duty in recent years. It is this gesture of granting respect-on-demand which constitutes the real insult these days, since it does not actually take people seriously. It is about making people feel good about themselves rather than seriously engaging with them – and that is the real form that patronising ‘intellectual charity’ takes today.
This grabbed me because it can also be read as a succinct summary of everything I’ve been trying to say with regards to the whole “spiritual-not-religious” phenomenon. I see too much of a tendency to gravitate toward pat answers, to value echoes over dissonance, to seek out those who can be counted on to tell you what you want to hear. Criticism and confrontation don’t have to be seen as disrespectful; indeed, as he says here, it seems more condescending to avoid them for the sake of a superficial peace.

Where Everything Yet Can Happen

By in poetry

Having enjoyed my usual year-end ritual of reading a Rilke poem, it occurs to me that starting off a new year with one would be pretty cool as well. So here’s one from his Book of Hours, as translated by Barrows and Macy. The last line especially gives me chills, despite (or perhaps because of) the sense of ominous foreboding:

A great leaf, that God and you and I
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.
We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.
Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.
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