I have recently learned of two great sites which may also be of interest to you: SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE (“Are you in search of the ‘wisdom’ of the ancients, but don’t know where to begin? Are you looking for more than the locus classicus–do you long for the odd and the obscure as well? Then you’ve come to the right place!”), and Haggard Hawks (“Strange words, etymology & language facts”), whose Twitter feed is more frequently updated than the blog itself. Give them both a try.
November 2019
Thursday Throwback
[Originally published Jul. 24, 2012.]
Wilson asks the question: Why does everyone hate Céline Dion? Except, of course, it’s not everyone, is it? She’s sold more albums than just about anyone alive. Everyone loves Céline Dion, if you think about it. So actually, he asks the question: why do I and my friends and all rock critics and everyone likely to be reading this book and magazines like the Believer hate Céline Dion? And the answers he finds are profound, provocative, and leave you wondering who the hell you actually are—especially if, like many of us around these parts, you set great store by cultural consumption as an indicator of both character and, let’s face it, intelligence. We are cool people! We read Jonathan Franzen and we listen to Pavement, but we also love Mozart and Seinfeld! Hurrah for us! In a few short, devastating chapters, Wilson chops himself and all of us off at the knees. “It’s always other people following crowds, whereas my own taste reflects my specialness,” Wilson observes.
…We forgive people who can’t sing or construct a song or play their instruments, as long as they are cool, or subversive, or deviant; we do not dismiss Dion because she’s incompetent. Indeed, her competence may well be a problem, because it means she excludes nobody, apart from us, and those who invest heavily in cultural capital don’t like art that can’t exclude: it’s confusing, and it doesn’t help us to meet attractive people of the opposite sex who think the same way we do.
Do you think I’m smart? Or a good writer? A stand-up fellow, even? Better than average, at least? Well, I’ll assume so, if for no other reason than the fact that you willingly return here to read. Anyway, the reason I ask is because I’ve dutifully taken in critically acclaimed albums and books that made no difference in my life at all. They didn’t open up new ways of experiencing the world. They didn’t inspire me with new artistic possibilities. The qualities that others praised as innovative and mesmerizing struck me as trivial or overblown. Conversely, I’ve been lifted into a buoyant mood by simple ear candy, making my mind feel alert and engaged, facilitating the energy and awareness that sometimes leads to keen observation and penetrating insight. I’ve been inspired by brilliant metaphors and turns of phrase found in otherwise forgettable fantasy fiction. The Muses seem to delight in popping out of the strangest hiding places.
If you like what you see here, you should know that an awful lot of unimpressive pieces helped construct the mosaic, is what I’m saying.
Aesthetic taste just isn’t a reliable indicator of overall character, the best efforts of so many pop culture cliques to try to reassure themselves otherwise notwithstanding. I find that most of the people I would call truly interesting are the ones whose taste is scattershot and contradictory without betraying any shame over “guilty pleasures.” And I’m bored silly by all those poor little insecure magpies, collecting various pop culture objets d’art, hoping for some vicarious transmission of superiority thereby.
Assrascal!
Don’t believe everything you hear about the humanities. There is still some important research being done.
Use Them After Your Own Honor and Dignity
But that is for another post – the point I really want to stress at the moment is that we need the bourgeois virtues, and that their pursuit can and often does play a crucial part in enabling someone to live a happy, purposeful life which serves other people and makes society a good place to be. Being pernickety about litter and not swearing in public and not being loud on public transport are never going to be lauded in the history books, but they do contribute massively to the public good. They help people relax and find contentment and peace; they help people feel at home in the world. They treat the world as if it is genuinely a shared place, where we must take into account the needs of others, rather than belonging to the loudest and strongest and least considerate.
There is a rather glib form of pseudo-radicalism that regards good manners, punctuality, smart dress etc. as affectation and hypocrisy. People shouldn’t care about mere appearances, or mere forms of speech; what matters is substance. But again, being careful to put others at ease, to show them that you take them seriously and that you value their time, is deeply substantial.
When we were driving around town, I remember my mom always turning the stereo down when we would stop at traffic lights (we never had AC in our cars when I was growing up, so the windows were down in warm weather). It wasn’t because the lack of road noise made the music too loud while sitting still; it was because we were now in some sort of shared social space. I intuitively picked up the idea that it was rude to inflict your personal enjoyment on other people who hadn’t asked to be included. Was it a generational thing? Were most adults at the time like that, or was she just a weirdly polite individual? I don’t know, but by the time I was driving on my own a decade or so later, it was already becoming common to encounter people pulling up to gas pumps or convenience stores and leaving their stereos blasting loud enough to be heard a mile away. Is it arrogance, insecurity, or simply self-centered indifference which makes people oblivious to the norms of particular social settings?
The other day, we went to the gym late in the evening. One of the other members, a very heavily tattooed guy, was wearing a hoodie that read, in big block letters on the front, “Physically Fit and Tatted as Shit,” as if it weren’t obvious. At one point, I noticed a woman who had been on the cardio machines head toward the back and reappear a couple minutes later with her two young kids, who had been in childcare while she exercised. I don’t know if they noticed him, or vice versa, and I don’t know if either would have cared, but it did occur to me that if I had been wearing that sweatshirt, and if I had somehow been unembarrassed to do so, I would have felt embarrassed at seeing two little kids and their mom walk past close enough to see it. It’s not about whether we have the “right” to wear what we want; it’s just an acknowledgment that a phrase which could be a mildly-amusing inside joke in one context, among friends, can seem gratuitously stupid in another, in public, and we should alter our behavior to reflect the difference. I remember a buddy from work, a devout Christian, ex-military, telling me a story about being on a bus in Arizona and almost getting beaten by a group of guys after he told them to stop cursing in front of children. I admired his courage, but I have to admit I would have only been one of those clucking my tongue in silence.
I realize that this all sounds like a cliché and is typically answered with even worse clichés. “Get off my lawn, you kids.” “Old man yells at cloud.” The usual suspects would additionally insist that “manners” are just one more bourgeois invention designed to distinguish them from their social inferiors, who are already struggling under the unjust burden of racial and class grievances. Until society’s flaws have been remedied by enlightened state policy, it would be unfair and unrealistic to expect individuals to do their own little bit toward making the world more sweet. But contra the unfortunate philosophical legacy of Rousseau, people in their natural, uninhibited state are not very pleasant. Those chains of which he complained are the necessary counterweight to selfishness and self-indulgence. Even Ozzy Osbourne, of all people, born in 1948, spoke of his father, a toolmaker in postwar Birmingham, saying to him, “‘You might not have a good education, but good manners don’t cost you anything.’ And he always practiced what he preached: he’d always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road.” Was Papa Osbourne’s generation the last to see things that way?
The Lady of the House comes from an extremely egalitarian background, one in which earthy, intimate familiarity is taken for granted. Reticence or formal politeness can be interpreted as rudeness, or putting on airs. I’ve tried to suggest to her that by contrast, a lot of typical Southern men, however roughneck they may be, are somewhat taken aback by a young woman who freely curses among casual acquaintances. It’s not about being offended, per se — of course, they all know and use those words themselves. And no one objects to the meat and potatoes of outgoing friendliness; they merely prefer them with less salty language sprinkled on top. It’s just that people expect and practice a bit more official decorum in mixed company. Perhaps it’s a lingering remnant of Southern honor culture. The gesture matters. You wouldn’t want to violate protocol and find yourself challenged to a duel for insulting someone’s honor. Still, she hates the way so many men here, both young and old, reflexively call her “ma’am.” In her culture, that’s like holding oneself aloof, refusing to engage as equals. I’ve tried to explain that this poor twenty-year-old contractor probably got cuffed upside his head countless times as a boy by his parents or grandparents for neglecting to say “ma’am” to a woman, so it would be cruel to insist on him breaking that habit in her case. Likewise, I’ve suggested that her swearing, far from relaxing people and placing them on an equal social footing, actually makes them uneasy. Disregarding little social niceties makes you an unknown quantity in their eyes, a loose cannon. Is this an example of Isaiah Berlin’s incommensurate values? You show respect through straightforwardness, we show respect through discretion. How do we adjudicate between the two? “When in Rome,” I suppose.
And in any case bourgeois morality is not just a matter of the small things. A film that pays magnificent tribute to the self-denying virtues is Brief Encounter. In Brief Encounter, we follow the story of Alec and Laura. Both are married people in early middle age who fall deeply in love after a chance meeting and consider running away together. In the end they decide that they do not have the right to ruin the happiness of others – their spouses and children – to fulfil themselves. At the end of the film they part forever (Alec to take up a post in South Africa). They put duty and morality before desire, privileging the feelings and contentment of others over their own. I once visited a school with the rather splendid motto nemo sibi nascitur: “no-one is born unto himself alone”. Laura and Alec know this. They treat their marriage vows seriously, because vows matter. They understand that they are vital figures in other people’s networks of support and happiness and stability.
It is easy now to mock their “repression”, so-called, or their fear of breaking with social convention. The disgraced columnist Johann Hari once wrote of the film that the central characters appeared to him to be “deeply mentally ill”, and suggested that the climax sees the two characters “return to miserable, wasted lives”. This seems like a view that could only be taken by someone whose mind is entirely addled by the uncritical adulation of the bohemian virtues. Both Alec and Laura are much-loved spouses and parents (and, presumably, fondly-regarded siblings and friends). Alec is a doctor! In what possible sense are their lives “wasted”? If anything, it is giving in to their desires which would be wasteful of all the value and joy they bring in and through their existing relationships.
I had a friend who wrote to me out of the blue several years ago to tell me of her separation from her husband (with whom I’d been friends even longer; in fact, it was through him that I even knew her). She presented her side of the story. I never asked for his; I just offered my sympathy. And truth be told, I did sympathize with him. I have no idea how valid her complaints were, but I also knew full well that she and her two teenagers weren’t always the easiest people to live with, and I thought he made a strong effort at it. “I deserve to have my needs met. I deserve more,” she wrote in conclusion. As far as I’m aware, though, she’s no happier now, especially since she turned her attention and energy toward the social justice/therapeutic morass so endemic to her niche of academia. Of course, I can only say so much from a superficial perspective on something as intricate as a marriage, but I also can’t help but suspect that she made the perfect the enemy of the good and subsequently ended up with neither. “Deserve”? What does “deserve” have to do with anything? As a Danish royal once said, give everyone what they “deserve,” and we’ll all be due for a whipping!
Sometimes I jokingly (or half-jokingly) think that Melody Beattie, the Codependent No More author, “one of the seminal figures in the recovery movement,” is one of the greatest monsters of our time for the epidemic of narcissism she unwittingly helped to unleash. It’s currently trendy for professional thinkers to blame Locke, Hobbes and Mill (if not William of Ockham even further back) for all of our social ills, but personally, I don’t think liberalism turned malignant until notions of responsibility, sacrifice and duty within personal relationships got redefined as codependency. Rousseau’s chains reappeared in the guise of self-help. Somewhere in the upheaval, the baby of courteous obligation to others got thrown out with the bathwater of stifling conformity. I imagine that if and when it comes back, it will be due to the cyclical nature of such things: we may simply get bored of authenticity and vulgarity.
Instructing and Improving
Is there a person on earth who has done more damage to liberal democracy than Mark Zuckerberg?https://t.co/w4K5Me0I1k
— Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn) November 23, 2019
It was hard work, and the pay was poor, what sustained us was the consciousness that we were instructing and improving our fellow men and women. Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally popular is the game of school. You collect six children, and put them on a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. We play it when babies, we play it when boys and girls, we play it when men and women, we play it as, lean and slippered, we totter towards the grave. It never palls upon, it never wearies us. Only one thing mars it: the tendency of one and all of the other six children to clamour for their turn with the book and the cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep. He instructs and improves them.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel
Happy Christmas (Culture War Is Over if You Want It)
We’ve since been doing informal, totally anecdotal surveys among friends, colleagues, and even Advent snobs, and our suspicion is that we’re far from alone. Our change of mood seems to be more general. Lots of people are letting go of their resistance and letting at least a little bit of Christmas come to their homes early.
And honestly, I think it has to do with our politics and social-media culture. We’ve had four years of Donald Trump and hatred of Donald Trump, culminating in this impeachment. Surely if you use Facebook or some other social-media tool, you’ve worried about a friend or family member who seems to be losing their mind, one way or another, over politics. And the commercialism of Christmas seems almost like a relief from the commercialism of social media.
Yes, what a relief to get away from 24/7 Trump obsession and break out the the traditional seasonal arguments about the “War on Christmas” and whether or not “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a rape anthem. (Personally, I’m just sickened by the way we’re so eager to get to those Black Friday deals that we barely take time to lament having to put up with our racist uncles at Thanksgiving anymore). But I guess what I’m saying is, Christmas encroachment doesn’t really need to be explained. Businesses love selling things, consumers love buying things, and most people enjoy the holiday season anyway. Trump isn’t responsible for it any more than he’s responsible for the sales of writing style guides. The fact that so many people want to assign him credit or blame for everything under the sun is itself a symptom of the sickness. Hang your garlands as early as you want, but it won’t make any difference if your mind is still hostage to politics and social media. You’ll still keep poisoning everything you touch.
I Am Just a Poor Boy and My Story’s Seldom Told
Against much historical evidence to the contrary, Wilson asserts that capitalism destroys personal autonomy and prevents people from developing their intellectual capacities. Lost in Wilson’s blunt assertions is how Epicurean thought could offer any insight into the modern complexities of labor markets, gun control, abortion, tax rates, medical research, nuclear energy, and affirmative action. She remains unfazed, sprinkling policy proposals on these issues throughout. By the book’s conclusion, this ancient philosophy’s values seem to coincide perfectly with those of today’s Democratic Party.
Epicurus established his Garden to avoid politics. “Do not get involved in political life,” he warned his followers. Wilson would have done well to heed his warning.
Indeed. I think the essence of Epicureanism, at least as I understand it, would be better expressed in poetry. The joy to be found in particular moments, the wistful heartache of knowing their transitory nature, the feeling of what it is to live a humble life, unconcerned by important people and important events — that’s poetry’s jurisdiction, not philosophy’s. I wonder if there are any poets who specifically think of themselves as Epicureans? I’ll have to make a mental note to ask Stephen Pentz.
Thursday Throwback
[And with that prompt, here’s this week’s Thursday Throwback, originally published Apr. 26, 2013]:
Watching the world around me change its ugly faces
Yes, this is mankind— Diary of Dreams, “Mankind“
To be sure, the power of crowdsourcing has given us gifts both precious (like Wikipedia) and picayune (the cover design of Elizabeth Gilbert’s next book), but it is a legitimate achievement of the digital age, one that proves that the internet is capable of transforming the way we interact collectively. Prior to vilifying Tripathi, for example, Reddit users had been helpfully sifting for leads amid the enormous amount of footage taken at the Boston Marathon. Nevertheless, the reflexivity with which we invoke the “wisdom of crowds” seems to suggest less that we think crowds are truly wise and more that we understand — if only dimly — their undeniable potency. The fact is that the digital age has yet to really countenance the cultural anxieties produced by the new invisible crowd.
In this regard, the jitters of the internet era bear an almost comic resemblance to a central disquietude of the august, and apparently closed, epoch we call modernity. For just as the increasing institutionalization and regulation of the internet seem to be attended by the lurking possibility that everything could crumble from one cyber attack unleashed by a handful of anonymous malcontents, so too did the project of modernity grapple with the contradiction that even as its liberal institutions grew more powerful, its stability became more dependent on the whims of the crowd. The French Revolution and its aftershocks are the textbook examples here, providing the archetypal images of the crowd in all its revolutionary splendor and violence. Now clearly, the works of Anonymous or 4chan don’t quite match the grisly proceedings of the Jacobins, but one can detect definite recursive qualities between them — namely excessive zeal, indiscriminateness, feverishness. And if history insists on recursion, there’s no reason not to learn from its lessons.
There’s little diversity and independence: Twitter and Facebook mostly show you people who are like you and things your social group is into. And social media is becoming ever more centralized: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, Pinterest, etc. instead of a decentralized network of independent blogs. In fact, the nature of social media is to be centralized, peer-dependent, and homogeneous because that’s how people naturally group themselves together. It’s a wonder the social media crowd ever gets anything right.
The dream of a new humanity dies hard. Formerly, the post-Enlightenment project to create one was understood as being political and cultural in nature. In the last couple decades, there’s been some half-hearted gestures in the direction of the old socialist ideals, but the focus mostly seems to have shifted to technology. The Internet and all its gadget offspring have given us one more sugar rush of belief in transformative potential, but it turns out that a bajillion monkeys still don’t produce Shakespearean-quality art even after you replace their typewriters with MacBook Pros. Perhaps we could say that our love affair with all things digital was a rebound relationship after our breakup with socialist utopianism, a torrid, escapist fantasy to avoid coming to terms with the limitations of our nature. Somewhere in the back of our mind, we knew that we weren’t seriously going to reinvent the human animal simply by the use of incredible new tools, but those winking screens and sleek designs were just too tempting, and besides, it was good for our self-esteem as we slowly processed what we’d lost.
It is something fun to wonder about, in my vague, uninformed way. Are we starting to bump up against the edge of our petri dish in more ways than one? If political, cultural and technological attempts to progressively alter human nature toward some nebulous betterment all fail, what then? Will we retreat into some kind of mystical inwardness, experiencing life on a level plateau instead of a sharp incline, realizing that wherever we went, there we were?
What? You Wanna See If I Got the Minerals?
Do-dee-do, looking at some exercise gear on Under Armour’s website. Wait, what?
“Mineral-infused fabric”? You mean…actual minerals are, what, woven into the fabric? For what purpose? Do they rinse out in the wash? If it’s 87% polyester and 13% elastane, where are the minerals? I’m sorry, this just seems like an utterly absurd marketing gimm—
Oh! The minerals absorb and reflect “energy” and your muscles recycle it through…photosynthesis? So I basically become a perpetual motion machine? Well, I’m convinced!
In the Morning ‘Bout Three or So, Can’t Stop Thinking of the Universe
There are men I know who can wake themselves at any time to the minute. They say to themselves literally, as they lay their heads upon the pillow, “Four-thirty,” “Four-forty-five,” or “Five-fifteen,” as the case may be; and as the clock strikes they open their eyes. It is very wonderful this; the more one dwells upon it, the greater the mystery grows. Some Ego within us, acting quite independently of our conscious self, must be capable of counting the hours while we sleep. Unaided by clock or sun, or any other medium known to our five senses, it keeps watch through the darkness. At the exact moment it whispers “Time!” and we awake.
…In my own case my inward watchman is, perhaps, somewhat out of practice. He does his best; but he is over-anxious; he worries himself, and loses count. I say to him, maybe, “Five-thirty, please;” and he wakes me with a start at half-past two. I look at my watch. He suggests that, perhaps, I forgot to wind it up. I put it to my ear; it is still going. He thinks, maybe, something has happened to it; he is confident himself it is half-past five, if not a little later. To satisfy him, I put on a pair of slippers and go downstairs to inspect the dining-room clock. What happens to a man when he wanders about the house in the middle of the night, clad in a dressing-gown and a pair of slippers, there is no need to recount; most men know by experience. Everything—especially everything with a sharp corner—takes a cowardly delight in hitting him. When you are wearing a pair of stout boots, things get out of your way; when you venture among furniture in woolwork slippers and no socks, it comes at you and kicks you. I return to bed bad tempered, and refusing to listen to his further absurd suggestion that all the clocks in the house have entered into a conspiracy against me, take half an hour to get to sleep again. From four to five he wakes me every ten minutes. I wish I had never said a word to him about the thing. At five o’clock he goes to sleep himself, worn out, and leaves it to the girl, who does it half an hour later than usual.
— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel
On Saturday morning, I woke up at around 3:30 with intellectual labor pains. A few loose ideas that had been quickening in my brain earlier decided they were fully formed and ready to go, so I had to get up and give birth to that morning’s post. I was a little tired later on, but it was worth the sacrifice.
This morning, I was again awake around 3:30. Yesterday we had been down in North Carolina, and at one point, getting back in the car, I dropped my wallet and it bounced just underneath. I had to get down on my knees to reach under and get it, but it was fine. Nothing fell out. Still, apparently there was some lingering trauma, because twelve hours later, my brain was absolutely convinced that I had either left my wallet or at least some important contents from it in a parking lot in Greensboro. I managed to subdue the fear without having to get up and check on my wallet’s well-being, but of course, my brain was like, “Hey, since you’re up, here’s all these other vitally important matters I’d like to bring to your attention!” Needless to say, none of them were even slightly important. I refused to negotiate and eventually fell back asleep.
If my Garmin wrist device is to be believed, I only get about forty-five minutes of “deep” sleep per night, with another two to three hours of REM, and the remaining four-plus classified as “light.” That seems accurate to me. I do seem to have the ability to set an internal alarm clock, and it doesn’t take much to wake me up. Most of the time, I fall back asleep just as easily, but the problem is that it only takes a couple instances of my inward watchman’s anxiousness to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think to myself, “Man, I sure hope I don’t wake up with my brain on fire at 3:30 again.” He incompletely overhears that and thinks, “What’s that? A request for another 3:30 wake-up call? Great! Let me just gather up all these vitally important notes I’ve been taking for the last month for tomorrow morning’s meeting…”
Obiter Scripta, no. 75
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?
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
[Originally published Feb. 5, 2012.]
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
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
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
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.
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