February 2020

The Fruit of It Is Incomparably Greater

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There we find thorny and unpleasant precepts and empty and fleshless words that you cannot get a hold on, nothing that rouses your mind. Here the mind finds something to bite and feed on. The fruit of it is incomparably greater, and also it will be sooner ripe.

— Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children”

Several years ago, I stopped being dilettantish and got serious about diet and exercise. I remember how my mom made a batch of chocolate chip cookies at Christmas, which I didn’t really want, but decided to eat to honor the spirit of the gift. I hadn’t eaten any kind of sugary snacks since early that year, and I was surprised at how quickly I felt the ill effects. I felt lethargic and weak after the initial sugar rush, as well as ravenously hungry for more, a feeling to which I’d grown unaccustomed on a heavier protein diet.

It’s funny sometimes how small changes ripple outward and become surprising results.  Work has been a lot busier as of late, which has left me with far less time for online reading (and writing). At the same time, it just so happened that I didn’t have any newly-published books that I wanted to read, so I decided to start slowly working my way through the essays of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson, with some supplementary Shakespeare. As a result, when I do have time for extended reading online, the effect is similar to the sickly post-sugar sensation. The frantic churn of current events, the overheated invective of people who take the immediate moment far too seriously — bleah. It rouses the gorge, not the mind. So far, I have much more of an appetite for re-reading this year. John N. Gray, Nietzsche, Alan Watts, Isaiah Berlin, and Eric Hoffer provide a lot more mental protein to chew on.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Apr. 26, 2017.]

Lary Wallace:

Some of us are more susceptible than others, but eventually it happens to us all. You know what I’m talking about: the inability to appreciate new music – or at least, to appreciate new music the way we once did. There’s a lot of disagreement about why exactly this happens, but virtually none about when. Call it a casualty of your 30s, the first sign of a great decline. Recently turned 40, I’ve seen it happen to me – and to a pretty significant extent – but refuse to consider myself defeated until the moment I stop fighting.

Aging is like hiking up a mountain. I speak as someone who has done a fair amount of both. What seems like a unique and fascinating tree down at ground level is just another tiny dot of green in nature’s stippling when seen from above. Only a few striking landmarks stand out from that vantage point. The broader perspectives seem more meaningful than the particular nuances. The further you climb, the more you tire, and the more important it becomes to conserve your breath and energy. The external boundaries of the environment constrain your choices.

As a middle-aged music listener, your ability to luxuriate in new sounds the way you did when you were a teenager is constrained by the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s curious that Wallace never mentions, over the course of three thousand words, the most obvious reasons why most people don’t keep up with the contemporary music scene beyond their young adulthood: they have careers, families, and household chores which consume most of their limited time and energy. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, of course; it just means that you’ll have to sacrifice things, and frankly, a lot of rock and pop music, obsessed as it is with the adolescent themes of horniness, chemically altered consciousness, and emotional melodrama, becomes less compelling for people who have moved on to more mature interests. Plus, when you’ve already loved and lost geniuses like Mark Sandman and Peter Steele, you simply don’t have it in you anymore to give your heart to some derivative band who, if they’re lucky, might write three decent songs. There’s no squirming out from underneath the weight of history.

Moreover, as Shakespeare said, there are more things in heaven and earth than can be contained in the typical baby-boomer experience. (Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing from memory.) That is, what Wallace is bemoaning as some perennial mystery of human nature has only been the norm for the three generations born after World War Two. The world of pop culture and mass media as we understand it only developed in tandem with the famously self-centered boomer generation, notorious for its inability to age gracefully. It’s not a surprise that the people who turned “never trust anybody over thirty” into a slogan would have bequeathed to their children a Peter Pan-like desire to stay in Neverland playing air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror forever. Our early thirties loom in our awareness like the River Styx, with Charon extending his bony claw before us, demanding payment in the form of our golden years, before ferrying us across to the land of responsibilities, opportunity costs, and music containing more than three chords. A living death, in other words. But why should we assume that this pattern will still be the same three generations from now?

Where the Noblest Go Wrong

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Where the noblest go wrong. We give somebody the best that we have until at last love has nothing left to give: but he who receives it has certainly not received in it the best that he has, and consequently fails to evidence that completeness of gratitude which the giver counted upon.

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

Patrick Kurp should have put a trigger warning on this post:

It has happened again. I loaned a book and it came back not destroyed but damaged. An old-fashioned word comes to mind: sullied. In this case, soiled, scuffed and with a page dog-eared.

I…just…I…ugh, God! What kind of barbarian dog-ears a page in someone else’s book? Dueling should be allowed under these circumstances. I would hire a gypsy woman to place a curse on the miscreant causing him to incur a paper cut on the webbing between his fingers every time he turns a page for the rest of his life. Hey, since superhero movies are all the rage, I’d also like to see a movie about a vigilante who lurks in coffee shops, meting out justice to the over-caffeinated freaks who seem to think, “Gee, I need a coaster, but I don’t have one. What can I—ah, perfect! A pristine hardcover book! Let me just use my jittery hand to set this overfull mug—” At which point our hero would intervene, and I would stand up in the theater and loudly cheer.

My philosophy teacher told us once how she never lent anything. If I can afford to give it to you, I will, she would tell people, but lending too often creates tension and hard feelings. I had a friend (note the past tense) who would borrow books and not only fail to read them in a timely manner, she would forget she even had them, or even worse, forget they weren’t hers to begin with. First, I’d feel annoyed by her failure to grasp the significance of the loan — books are very important to me! we could have built a conversation around this if you had read it! — and then I’d feel embarrassed on her behalf as I considered whether to remind her. Then I’d feel irritated with myself for feeling awkward about asking for my own damned book to be returned sometime within, oh, the next year or so, and finally, I’d feel grumpy with her for causing the whole mess through her scatterbrained thoughtlessness. Ms. McCarty was correct: only loan things you can live with never seeing again.

Obiter Scripta, no. 79

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A frequent and attentive prospect of that moment, which must put a period to all our schemes, and deprive us of all our acquisitions, is indeed of the utmost efficacy to the just and rational regulation of our lives; nor would ever any thing wicked, or often any thing absurd, be undertaken or prosecuted by him who should begin every day with a serious reflection that he is born to die.

— Samuel Johnson

Just over ten years ago, I reported that I had indeed been waking up each morning with a strong awareness of my own mortality. Those kinds of reflections tend to appear at more random intervals these days, though still regularly. (Thoughts of his own death/Like the distant roll/Of thunder at a picnic — Auden.) But I’m afraid I must stand as the living (for now) disproof of Johnson’s conjecture, for while I may have avoided outright wickedness, I have undertaken and prosecuted much absurdity since then. Like rock smashing scissors, folly easily beats memento mori.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Sep. 3, 2016.]

Alan Jacobs:

Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided to resume my tumblr, on which I was very active for around eight years or so — I’ll have my 10-year Tumblrversary next March — because I wasn’t getting a ton of traffic here and I thought “Why bother to post stuff that almost no one reads?”

I resemble that remark, so allow me to offer some answers.

  • For the sheer joy of expression which requires no external validation
  • To avoid pestering individual friends with long-winded emails
  • For posterity
  • To nurture a self-pitying fantasy of yourself as a misunderstood genius surrounded by unappreciative philistines
  • Montaigne wrote his Essays without an audience for ten years before publishing them (if it was good enough for him…)
  • To give solid form, structure, and clarity to your thoughts
  • Because when you read a lot of books, your head gets filled with words, and if you don’t empty them out periodically, they’ll start talking amongst themselves, and the din will be unbearable
  • To look busy at work
  • For its own sake, as with other spiritual disciplines and practices
  • To be surprised by how often a piece of your writing looks better when rediscovered
  • Because even the latent possibility of an audience keeps you from lapsing into “Dear Diary” self-indulgence
  • For the same reason we do almost anything beyond eating, sleeping, and reproducing: to distract ourselves from thinking about our inevitable deaths
  • Because the older generations walked miles every day to work tirelessly on the website factory assembly lines so that you kids could one day have the luxury of playing with preassembled, smoothly-functioning text editing platforms in any color or design you could want, so I really don’t think it’s asking too much that you take a few minutes to sit down and use the thing without crying about the fact that it doesn’t come with an audience included.

Alt-Amazon

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Joan Verdon:

He believes publications and writers will welcome the opportunity to link to an online site that supports independent bookstores. “Even if they like Amazon, they don’t necessarily want Amazon to put all of the bookstores out of business,” he said.

“And I think that’s true of the major publishers, too,” he said. “There are publishers who feel that Amazon is a good partner. But everybody understands that if the only partner is Amazon, if Amazon completely dominates the market, that it’s not going to be healthy for anyone.”

Hunter said he’s been warned that American consumers care about one thing—price—and that Bookshop.org can never beat Amazon on price. He doesn’t buy that. He believes there is a growing population of consumers who care more about supporting local businesses than price. “From buying organic to choosing clean energy, it’s all part of a general consumer enlightenment that is occurring now and Bookshop is part of that,” he said.

I don’t know; I remember in the early days of blogging that linking to Powell’s instead of Amazon was the way you signaled your status as a socially-conscious reader, and I don’t think that revolutionized anything. I fear that “buying from Bookshop.org” will just become yet another progressive merit badge, like listening to a Vox podcast while driving an electric vehicle to the farmer’s market to think global while supporting local organic screen-free clean-energy shelter-rescued recycled genderfluid blahblahblah. We’ll see, of course. I wish them well. I have no problem with alternatives to Amazon, but I wish there were more alternatives to the increasing dominance of the online literary sphere by progressive assumptions.

What a Strange Game. The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play.

By in notorious jbp, socmed, the madness of crowds, tribalism No Comments

On that note, two recent articles I noticed but refused to click on:

From a video that his daughter posted, I already knew that Peterson’s wife had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that the medications he was taking for his depression had caused him to suffer through physical dependence and withdrawal. What point is there in an article that adds nothing to this sad story but disgust at the spectacle of people behaving horribly on social media in reaction to it? If a writer simply wanted to express sympathy for Peterson, it would have been fairly easy to do. But that would lack spice. It wouldn’t have the necessary frisson of righteous anger. For that, we need to add, “And look at all these horrible people gloating over his suffering. Look at this tasteless comment in particular. Remember, these people are on the Other Side. That’s the sort of degenerate character they have over there.” That’s what gets the clicks, and that’s what guarantees a steady supply of more of the same. Rush Limbaugh’s recent lung cancer diagnosis brought more of the same gloating, which was amplified and magnified even more by people who were appalled by it. It’s ironic to see people on social media worrying about the slim possibility of contracting coronavirus while not thinking twice before passing along intellectual bacteria like this. Another, even better, irony is that if social media were to be “saved,” it would have to find a way to incentivize not antisocial but asocial behavior — people who couldn’t care less about site stats, follower counts, clicks, likes, and retweets. Writing for money, performing for attention — these are the livestock chutes which funnel the content-providing cattle toward the inevitable lowest common denominator.

Kudos to Those Who See Through Sickness

By in gender, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Tom Slater:

Glasser sees the leadership’s shift as a response to generational change within the organisation: ‘What my successor is doing is demagogic, he’s pandering to what he thinks his new constituency wants to hear. The staff by now must be in their twenties and thirties… They’ve been socialised into a different ACLU.’

Romero may well be pandering to the ACLU’s new supporters, as well. In the wake of Trump’s election, the ACLU began to position itself as part of the anti-Trump Resistance, and it has paid off. Membership quadrupled in a year and donations hit $120million, 25 times what it raised the previous year.

Maybe I was just naïve back then, or maybe I’m just old now, but I seem to remember the ACLU being primarily devoted to protecting the right to unpopular speech in opposition to censorious partisans, not enforcing politically correct fads in opposition to biology and common sense. I don’t know about you, my fellow frogs, but when I see a tweet from them in defense of the “right” for boys to compete in girls’ sports, I’m fine with declaring that the water we’re sitting in is most definitely getting warmer, and I’m getting out.

The Gods of Flame

By in animals, foolosophy No Comments

So, last spring, we decided to bring Kitteh inside and let her live out her dotage as a house cat. Her arthritis and generally non-combative nature left her at a disadvantage against Trump, the outside cat, so we intervened. She quickly adapted, and is generally low-maintenance. Until she discovered the wood stove, that is.

We have a wood stove in the center of the great room, surrounded by a brick hearth. I had joked during the summer, “Wait until she learns that these bricks get warm in the winter,” but I don’t think I’d expected her to be quite this enthusiastic. This cat has become a tyrant. From the moment our feet hit the floor in the morning, she’s hobbling around after us, “meeping” her little head off, until one of us builds a fire for her. As I type this, it’s 5:28 a.m., and she’s circling around the table where I sit, like a fuzzy, arthritic shark, waiting for me to get up and do my duty. When I build the fire, she’ll put herself right in the middle of the proceedings, like the most obnoxious supervisor, as if she doesn’t trust me to do it correctly. “I can’t put these logs in here if you’re going to stand in front of the stove door.” “Excuse me, I need those newspapers you’re standing on so I can use them for kindling.” Meep, meep, meep. What’s taking so long, human? Finally, once things are arranged to her satisfaction, she’ll lie on the bricks, inches from the stove (and sometimes partially underneath it), where she will happily sleep for the rest of the day (unless we’re foolish enough to let the fire go out). It’s been a fairly mild winter so far, too — temperatures have been mostly in the forties and fifties, with no real snowfall worth the name. No matter. Until the return of the summer sunbeams, Her Majesty wants fires all day, every day. Wittgenstein claimed that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand him, but I find it fairly easy to understand what this little domesticated lion wants. Warmth, food and maybe some skritching, in that order.

Do cats have religion, do you think? Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, argued that the numerous dying-god myths throughout Europe and the Middle East were rooted in agricultural societies’ need to understand and adapt to unpredictable weather and the changing of the seasons. I feel like I can see a similar rudimentary impulse motivating Kitteh — why do the bricks turn cold again? What must I do to propitiate the fire-bringers? Is God dead? Sometimes, if we fail to respond promptly to her meepings, she’ll return to her spot next to the stove to endure in silence, feet tucked and head bowed almost as if in prayer (once she’s warm, she takes on a more typical sprawling pose to sleep). Is she perhaps reflecting on whether she might have angered the gods by doing her business outside of the litterbox? Is she marking time until the return of the blessed warmth, looking for comprehensible patterns? Yesterday, she apparently re-discovered that the furnace vents also blow warm air. It was near sixty degrees, so we didn’t build a fire; we just left the furnace on to kick in as needed. We noticed her investigating underneath one of the bookcases while it was running, and she perched herself close to the vent for about ten minutes, until it cycled off again, and she was forced to wander in search of the Promised Land once more. Truly, her world is a vale of tears.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Oct. 1, 2016.]

Phil Torres:

Thus, a world without religion would be a significantly improved world than the one in which we now inhabit.

Lord, these people make me embarrassed to be unchurched. The rest of the article is the usual collection of New Atheist tropes that will likely be enshrined in the Constitution of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s utopian nation of Rationalia, and you almost have to admire the unblemished, uh, faith in the salvific potential of evangelical atheism, given the prominent and entirely predictable implosion of one of its most prominent online hubs. Bertrand Russell, favorably quoted, as always, in the article regarding the intrinsic obstacle religion presents to moral progress, could have warned them about the danger of trusting pure logic to trump animal nature — in fact, in his autobiography, he did. Reflecting on the messy damage caused by his progressive experiments with free love, he admitted that, “Anyone else could have told me this in advance, but I was blinded by theory.”

All that aside, I’m just impressed by the blithe confidence with which our hero asserts the above sentence. We’ve been here before, and the point still stands: for people who prattle on and on about the value of evidence and experiment, they seem remarkably indifferent to the fact that “a world without religion” is something that has quite literally never existed, making summary pronouncements on its shape and character quite literally meaningless. Faith-based, you might even say. “Religion” is not a mere integer to be easily subtracted, or a simple proposition to be assented to or denied, but rather a tangled knot of threads comprising everything from culture and history to personal identity and psychology. But presumably new developments in “enhancement technologies” will succeed where previous political attempts to rationally remake the world failed horribly. I’m afraid I’m incapable of making such a leap of faith.

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