October 2020

Obiter Scripta, no. 96

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Undeterred, Vaughan dismissed More as an “Elf” and a “scurvie, slabbie, snotty-snowted thing,” whose “Excrements run the wrong way, for his mouth stooles.”

— Jonathan Rée, Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English

Neil Postman marveled at the fact that audiences for the Lincoln-Douglas debates willingly, cheerfully, sat still to listen to seven hours of oratory. He went on to paint a grim picture of shrinking vocabularies and attention spans in the age of digital media. He was a gentleman and a scholar, though, so he didn’t include an analysis of how shallow and unimaginative our oaths and invective have become. I am neither a gentleman nor a scholar, so it falls to me to lament the fact. We say that someone is “full of shit”, or “talking shit.” With just that little bit of extra effort, we could have said that someone’s excrements ran the wrong way and called him a stool-mouth. And look at that alliteration! Do you think that was an accident? No. That’s skill, and dedication to the craft. Why can’t we revive the old ways?

To See Like Your Eyes Do

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Sam Leith:

Where Gray makes a bit of a leap, of course, is in his confident assertion that cats think, or rather don’t, in the way he supposes. In truth, we have no idea what goes on in a cat’s furry little head, and that alterity is what makes them so attractive. When my cat sat on the end of the bed, perfectly still, staring at nothing, how am I to know that she wasn’t wondering intently about whether existence precedes essence? Indeed, in insisting that it’s vain of philosophers to see humans as different from the rest of the animal world, and at the same time insisting that we are uniquely cursed with self-consciousness, Gray seems to me slightly to be having his Whiskas and eating it.

I’ll read the book, of course, but maybe I should also read Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to even temporarily inhabit the perspective of other creatures? What does go on in their heads? It’s true, Gray sometimes seems too invested in proving that humanity is nothing special after all. Wallace Kaufman, on the contrary, suggested that maybe our desire to share the company of other animals, to understand them on their own terms for the sake of knowledge, should be a small point in our favor. I tend to agree.

The Chill Suns of October

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If one can depend on any season, it is on the chill suns of October, which, like an elderly beauty, are less capricious than spring or summer.

— Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole

If you ask residents of the Northern Hemisphere their favorite time of year, I wonder how often it would correlate with their birthdays. Do people born in early February have a sentimental attachment to cold, short days? Do people born in mid-August love the blazing sun and suffocating humidity? Or is it simply an objective, scientifically-proven fact that late October is the most beautiful time of year, and anyone of sound mind would choose to be born now if they could?

Fritter and Waste the Hours In an Offhand Way

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We inevitably waste most of each day in eating and drinking, defecating, sleeping, talking and walking about. For the tiny remainder of our time, we do worthless things, speak worthless words, think worthless thoughts. And not only do we pass the moments in this way, but whole days, whole months pass thus — a lifetime. This is supreme folly.

— Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness

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The same observation may be transferred to the time allotted us in our present state. When we have deducted all that is absorbed in sleep, all that is inevitably appropriated to the demands of nature, or irresistibly engrossed by the tyranny of custom; all that passes in regulating the superficial decorations of life, or is given up in the reciprocations of civility to the disposal of others; all that is torn from us by the violence of disease, or stolen imperceptibly away by lassitude and languor; we shall find that part of our duration very small of which we can truly call ourselves masters, or which we can spend wholly at our own choice. Many of our hours are lost in a rotation of petty cares, in a constant recurrence of the same employments; many of our provisions for ease or happiness are always exhausted by the present day; and a great part of our existence serves no other purpose, than that of enabling us to enjoy the rest.

— Samuel Johnson, Rambler no. 108

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Our greatness and efficiency crumbles away not all at once but continually; the little plants which grow up in and around everything and know how to cling everywhere, it is these which ruin that which is great in us — the everyday, hourly, pitiableness of our environment which we constantly overlook, the thousand tendrils of this or that little, fainthearted sensation which grows out of our neighborhood, out of our job, our social life, out of the way we divide up the day. If we neglect to notice this little weed, we shall ourselves perish of it unnoticed! And if you absolutely must perish, do so all at once and suddenly, then perhaps there may remain of you some sublime ruin! And not, as there is now some reason to fear, a molehill! And grass and weeds upon it, little victors, modest as ever and too pitiable even to celebrate their triumph!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

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Kenko almost sounds like an extraterrestrial entomologist, watching us scurry around under his magnifying glass, describing a life in scientistic terms purged of all subjectivity. Johnson almost seems to be saying that one’s “true” self is what’s left when every single attachment and obligation is severed, leaving nothing but uncaused individual choice; if he’s not careful, some traditionalists are going to hold him up as a cautionary example of unfettered modern liberalism, which would no doubt bemuse him. Nietzsche, well, he’s been drinking some 180-proof Romanticism again, I think. Lord knows we all feel encumbered by chores and responsibilities, with no time left over for fun. “Born to rock, forced to work,” as a musician friend’s Gmail avatar says. But fantasies of significance and omnipotence don’t do anything for me. I find it more awe-inspiring to notice how beauty and meaning can spontaneously germinate from the manure of everyday routine, how infinite space can exist within a humble nutshell.

I Spit Me of Zem All

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Alexander Larman:

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

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

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

Obiter Scripta, no. 95

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

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Noteworthies (48)

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• Greg Ross, “Turnabout”

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

• Alan Bellows, “Let Us Be Joyful”

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

• Samuel Kronen, “The Prescience of Shelby Steele”

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

• Blake Smith, “The White Scare”

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

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

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

• Spotted Toad, “Shadows on the Grass”

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

Strive After Clarity

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

— Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

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

— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

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

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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Those who write obscurely have great luck: they will have commentators. The others will have only readers, and this, it seems, is worthy of scorn.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951

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The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outrée or specialist, it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

— G.K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue,” A Miscellany of Men

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

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

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