October 2025
Night Was Always Coming
“Well, boys, do you see? It’s all one, yes?”
“Yes—” someone murmured.
“Always the same but different, eh? every age, every time. Day was always over. Night was always coming. And aren’t you always afraid, Apeman there? or you, Mummy, that the sun will never rise again?”
“Yesss,” more of them whispered.
And they looked up through the levels of the great house and saw every age, every story, and all the men in history staring round about as the sun rose and set. Apemen trembled. Egyptians cried laments. Greeks and Romans paraded their dead. Summer fell dead. Winter put it in the grave. A billion voices wept. The wind of time shook the vast house. The windows rattled and broke like men’s eyes, into crystal tears. Then, with cries of delight, ten thousand times a million men welcomed back bright summer suns which rose to burn each window with fire!
“Do you see, lads? Think! People vanished forever. They died, oh Lord, they died! but came back in dreams. Those dreams were called Ghosts, and frightened men in every age—”
“Ah!” cried a billion voices from attics and basements.
Shadows climbed walls like old films rerun in ancient theaters. Puffs of smoke lingered at doors with sad eyes and gibbering mouths.
“Night and day. Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and death. That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up into one. Noon and midnight. Being born, boys. Rolling over, playing dead like dogs, lads. And getting up again, barking, racing through thousands of years of death each day and each night Halloween, boys, every night, every single night dark and fearful until at last you made it and hid in cities and towns and had some rest and could get your breath.
“And you began to live longer and have more time, and space out the deaths, and put away fear and at last have only special days in each year when you thought of night and dawn and spring and autumn and being born and being dead.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree
All Is Overturned
Today, Halloween is a fixture of American culture, a beloved national holiday. But if the soul of Halloween — its connection with the unpredictable and unseen world of the spirit — had not been carefully guarded in our culture form the very beginning, the holiday might well have been lost to us. Although Halloween has never received the official legal status of Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, it is nevertheless a feature of our calendars and a date anticipated with great excitement and preparation. Despite its commercial trappings and other pitfalls of any fully modern holiday, Halloween provides something that is unique: a full-fledged celebration of fantasy. It is the one night of the year when all is overturned, when the natural order reverses itself. The dead walk, the glamorous grow horrific, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Children rebel and adults kick up their heels and holler at the moon. It is a holiday of magic and mystery, and one, through a peculiar blending of culture and custom, that is uniquely American.
— Lesley Bannatyne, Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History
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Call it Samhain, Summer’s End, All Hallows’ Eve, November Eve, or Witches’ Night — Halloween has its essential roots in the terrors of the primitive mind, which made no distinction between the waning of the sun and the potential extinction of the self. Ancient rituals of sacrifice and supplication were employed to guarantee a good harvest and, by extension, continued earthly existence.
In Northern climates, harvest time was, or seemed, the very death of nature. As Robert Chambers, the great Victorian chronicler of holidays, characterized October: “As the fallen leaves career before us — crumbling ruins of summer’s beautiful halls — we cannot help thinking of those who have perished — who have gone before us, blown forward to the grave by the icy blasts of Death.”
Because life itself was literally in the balance at harvest, the close proximity of the visible world and the spirit world was more than metaphor. And so the tradition grew: for one night each year, permission would be granted to mortals to peer into the future, divine their fates, communicate with supernatural entities, and otherwise enjoy a degree of license and liberty unimaginable — or simply unattainable — the rest of the year. The Halloween machine turns the world upside down. One’s identity can be discarded with impunity. Men dress as women, and vice versa. Authority can be mocked and circumvented. And, most important, graves open and the departed return.
— David J. Skal, Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween
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As a holiday without an official patron, Halloween has never been securely anchored in national narratives. It has always operated on the margins of mainstream commemorative practices, retaining some of the topsy-turvy features of early modern festivals — parody, transgression, catharsis, the bodily excesses of the carnivalesque — and recharging them in new social and political contexts. That is part of the secret of its resilience and vibrancy.
— Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
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It was both the first day of the new year and the first day of winter. As a point of transition in the annual calendar, a great many beliefs and rituals were associated with the day. The gates that separated the worlds of the living and the dead, of this world and the world of spirits, were opened, the barriers between this world and the next were down, and the souls of those who had died during the year were allowed entry to the otherworld. Bonfires were lit on Samhain, some say to light the way for the spirits, others say to keep them away from peoples’ homes. With the belief in in the wandering spirits of the dead came the custom of preparing offerings of special foods, and of dressing as these spirits and as wild animals. We can only guess at the connections people made between the harvest of crops, the slaughter of animals, and the death of human beings in the cycle of life; or between lighting fires at the onsent of winter and the increasing darkness, between mimicking the wandering souls and respecting them, and between the ritualized offering of food to spirits and their representatives: real human beings who need food to live.
— Jack Santino, Halloween and other Festivals of Life and Death
Witches
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If, in our imagination, we were to journey backward in time, we might come upon a witch of long ago in some moonlit country lane. With her pointed hat and ragged cloak we see her shuffling along, muttering to herself as she makes her way to a sabbat beyond the churchyard walls. Like a shadow a black cat moves behind her, its eyes glowing in the dark. She does not look towards us, for her crooked form keeps her eyes fixed to the ground. And as we pass by we glance over our shoulders, wondering at her second sight and the secrets she hides in her lonely heart.
Or it might be a girl we come upon — lithe, alluring, her hair shining in moonlight with the lustre of a raven’s wing. Her smile would melt a heart of stone. But who knows what mischief is in her thoughts, and who would not fall under her spell?
Throughout the years there have been countless stories of witchery, told around the fireside at Hallowe’en or the Eve of May. Many are lost and will never be heard again. The following tales, gathered from home and abroad, were found in state and county archives or lay in the memories of those who recall characters and incidents related by their forbears.
— Ken Radford, Fire Burn: Tales of Witchery
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Scarecrows
Thus the first theory of the origin of the scarecrow is that it may have started out as a sacrifice to Nature. We have seen that the jackalent was originally a sort of puppet-like figure at which, during Lent, people hurled sticks; prior to this, it was cocks that were the object of these attacks. So is it not possible to argue that perhaps in pagan days man was done to death in this manner and then set up in the fields as an offering? Might this not be the reason why in Normandy and Brittany — where Druidical rites were once prevalent and where legends about them survive in abundance — a life-size effigy of Christ on the cross is set amidst the corn each year? It could be surmised from this that the Church had sought to turn its people from the barbaric custom of slaughtering a real man by providing an alternative which was an all-sufficient sacrifice.
— Peter Haining, The Scarecrow: Fact and Fable
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Britain’s humble scarecrow may have derived from a Greek god of fertility named ‘Priapus’ (or ‘Priapos’). Priapus was regarded as the protector of farmers, shepherds, fisherman, vine growers, beekeepers and goatherds. His emblems were the cornucopia, pruning knife and a phallus, and he received first fruits with libations of milk and honey. Further, he was adopted as the guardian of orchards, gardens and vineyards where his crude statues, painted bright red, were erected to ward off thieves. Donkeys, asses and pigs were his sacrificial animals, reflecting his animal lust, and there is extant a collection of ‘priapeia,’ anonymous, obscene Latin verses. The Oxford Classical Dictionary underlines this dual role of Priapus: “He was adopted as a god of gardens, where his statue was a sort of combined scarecrow and guardian deity.”
The Romans copied the Greek custom of carving wooden statues of Priapus to ward of birds from their fruit and crops. Columella, a Spanish gardener cum Roman soldier who lived in the first century A.D., cultivated vast acres of land in Central Italy. He recommended that Priapic statues should ideally be hewn out of an old tree stump in his treatise on agriculture, ‘De Re Rustica’ (c.65 A.D.) Roman gardeners daubed figures of this rustic satyr purple and gave him a club in one hand, to make him appear more dangerous, plus a sickle in the other to ensure an abundant harvest.
— Gregory Holyoake, Scarecrows
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The word “kakashi” is supposed to be derived from a meaning of something that smells hideously awful, and is said to have been derived from the Edo period word “kagashi” (although the word etymology inexplicably resembles somewhat the Bengali word for scarecrow Kaktadua (কাকতাডুয়া)) or Kag-darawa (काग-डरावा) from the Hindi, which suggests possible connections with the Indo-Sakas, source: Scarecrow). Many fascinating tales and legends surround the use and character of the kakashi in the rice field in Japan.
In Kojiki, the oldest surviving historical chronicle in Japan (compiled in the year 712), a scarecrow known as Kuebiko appears as a deity who cannot walk, yet knows everything about the world.
Memento Mori (III)
O sons of men,
Lean death perches on your shoulder
Looking down into your cup of wine,
Looking down on the breasts of your lady.
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider Nothing waits behind it.
— The Thousand and One Nights, tr. E. Powys Mathers
Deep Earth Brings Forth Rebirth
99 percent of all “creating” is imitation, in sounds or thoughts. Theft, more or less consciously.
— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)
Fellows, I know I just got done telling you why it’s sacrilegious to produce new “Wodehouse-y” books. Unfortunately, I am human, and that means I’m a hypocrite. You see, I discovered a band called October Noir last year — an eerily pitch-perfect copy of Type O Negative — and I’m delighted. If you told me their tracks were a long-lost Type O album, I’d believe it. It’s as if a tribute band became sentient like Frankenstein’s monster and started writing its own songs. So why do I happily accept the musical doppelgänger while recoiling from ersatz Wodehouse?
For starters, Wodehouse is not merely a collection of turns of phrase; he’s a self-contained climate. The cadence, yes, but also the moral weather: the way fools are rescued, the exact timing of luck, the clockwork of farce that never draws blood, the happy endings. A new Jeeves novel doesn’t just borrow a voice; it asserts authority over a finished world. It’s not homage so much as annexation. Books are kingdoms; putting new chapters in a closed chronicle feels like revising a fresco after the painter is gone.
Wodehouse’s references — Jeeves, Wooster, Blandings, and that specific world of the inter-war idle rich —are non-portable. Borrow them, and you’re body-snatching. But his resemblance-features — light, benevolent comedy; clockwork farce; whimsical sentences that pirouette before landing on the joke — are portable, if only by a talented few. Theoretically, a skillful writer could pay homage to the style with new characters in a new setting, and the influence would be clear without being parasitical. Think Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes: you can see the family likeness (talking animals, language play, sealed imaginative habitats), yet Watterson found a way to reimagine it — childhood’s imagination instead of Kelly’s swamp politics. Hence my lack of interest in new Jeeves-and-Wooster stories. Like a surly adolescent, I don’t want to make nice with my new step-author.
Music can be more forgiving (or perhaps “slutty” is the word I want). The Beatles are the Genghis Khan of pop music: some of their DNA is in almost everyone since. Or consider how many members there are in the “blues-rock” family tree. Imagine the paucity if the musician’s guild refused to let anyone else work with the “three chords and a 4/4 beat” template. Still, though, a band like Type O was sui generis. There are obvious debts to the Beatles, Black Sabbath and the Doors, but there are too many unique signifiers: the deep baritone alternating with anguished howls, the funereal BPM, the cathedral reverb and pipe-organ pads, the bass thickened with chorus, the drums trudging like pallbearers, the morbid, self-depreciating humor mixed with Gothic/Romantic aesthetics. October Noir skillfully mimics all of this, even down to the guitar feedback and the drawn-out sound of the pick sliding down the strings. Why am I thrilled instead of outraged? Is it simply because they’re that good? If they only managed to capture, say, 90% of the Type O sound, wouldn’t the remaining 10% be, again, like the pea to the princess? But if so, does that imply I would be open to a pitch-perfect Wodehouse imitation? I hope not, but…
Rock already blesses imitation: covers, tribute bands, subgenre orthodoxy. The medium’s unit is the song, not the character or canon. If you write a new song inside Type O’s sonic idiom, you add repertoire without altering history. Peter Steele is dead; the supply of that exact vibe ended in 2010. A faithful successor fills a scarcity vacuum. No metaphysics of authorship is violated; no royalties are misdirected. The only “sin” is against “originality,” a contrivance that owes more to legal definitions of copyright than metaphysical essence. I wouldn’t want to hear AI versions of Type O, or see a Peter Steele hologram onstage while the other members play the catalogue, but I can live with this.
There’s also a ritual fans need before they can enjoy any continuation: a symbolic reset. After Mark Sandman died, Morphine’s other members didn’t insist that Morphine march on with a new frontman. They formed Bourbon Princess, Twinemen, and — closest to the original — Vapors of Morphine, each of which was recognizably “low rock,” but with just enough different elements to make them their own thing. The names mattered. They admitted, out loud, that the old band was no more, but they still had more songs to write. We could meet the music as additions to a lineage rather than counterfeit chapters in a finished book. Similarly, Kenny, Johnny and Josh didn’t go out and recruit a Peter Steele look-and-soundalike in order to keep producing new albums as Type O Negative, which would have felt wrong somehow. When I first heard October Noir, I was stunned at the fidelity. Then, I was just happy to hear new songs in that style, which I never thought I would again. Perhaps I had already done my mourning, and was ready to love once more.
Tragic Liberalism
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
— Thoreau
There’s an old parable, “The Chinese farmer.” The farmer’s horse runs away; the neighbors say, “What a tragedy!” “Maybe,” replies the farmer. The horse returns with several companions; the neighbors say, “What good luck!” “Maybe.” The farmer’s son breaks his leg while trying to tame the new arrivals. “How terrible!” “Maybe.” War comes; the son is spared from conscription. “How fortunate!” “Maybe.” And so on. We rarely know what our fixes will fix — or break.
That’s the spirit in which I’ve been reading two recent pieces: John Gray’s case for Hobbesian liberalism (a strong state that cools conflicts, protects exits and speech, and stops pretending to supply a moral consensus) and Sebastian Milbank’s rejoinder in favor of postliberalism (a thicker, common-good politics with renewed national/civic culture). They agree that the 80s–00s neoliberal settlement failed and we’re living in the ruins. They split on the remedy. Gray hearkens back to law-and-order minimalism: peace among intractable tribes, equal law, no crusades. Milbank insists a merely managerial state is hollow without shared ends; culture must be rebuilt or politics will keep corroding.
My sympathies lean Gray-ward. I’m an atheist Epicurean whose main political request is modest: leave me alone enough to live as I see fit. Much postliberal rhetoric sounds to me like conscription by prettier names. Thoreau had their number. The implication is “resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.” My inner life is fine, thank you. I don’t need your idea of community or purpose. I don’t suffer from spiritual anomie.
But I don’t believe in clear victories for either camp, because my basic view is tragic: the human animal is chronically dissatisfied. Tight bonds feel stifling; loose bonds feel empty. If you establish rooted communities with guaranteed employment, many will complain of suffocation. If you tear down the walls and let talent and capital flow, many will complain of spiritual desolation. We rotate our miseries like crops. “The discourse” is little more than “How fortunate!” and “How terrible!” back and forth, ad infinitum. That’s not a neoliberal bug or a postliberal bug. It’s the human condition. And because it’s the human condition, salvation politics from any direction should set off alarms. Movements feel intoxicating precisely when they promise to fix intractable problems “once and for all.”
In Genesis, work arrives as a curse: you shall eat by the sweat of your brow. It applies to politics too. There are no guaranteed harvests. It takes hard, unglamorous labor to build prosperity, and even harder, more fragile work to build community arrangements that actually make us happy — and there is no guarantee they’ll take root or endure for long. The lure of movements is that they promise the guarantee. The farmer just says, “Maybe,” and goes back to work.
Weekend at Bertie’s
But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.
…But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetisable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.
The Wodehouse estate appears to be a trifle hard up; it’s digging into our ribs for a tenner, and doesn’t mind if it comes out with the watch-chain too. Wodehouse the man is becoming Wodehouse the brand, this time in the form of a new compilation of Jeeves-and-Wooster stories by various authors, or scabs crossing the cemetery picket line, as I prefer to call them. Graverobbers ply their trade in broad daylight now. Hell, they’re employed by all the major studios and publishing houses.
Some works get a good death. Bill Watterson gave Calvin & Hobbes one: a deliberate ending, no embalming, no weekend-at-Bernie’s corpse-puppetry over the following years. Most of all, he famously refused to allow licensing and merchandising. It’s estimated that he turned down what would have been $300-$400 million had he allowed stuffed tigers and Calvin lunchboxes (to say nothing of the voracious demand for “Calvin pissing” decals) to be produced. He thought that would violate the spirit of the strip, which was about private realities and the magic of imagination, so he let his work die when the time was right. But in a sense, because it could die, it could live on in hand-to-hand gifts, in household phrases, in the private sanctum where a kid meets a book without a marketing plan watching. Friends of mine from adolescence have told me about giving Calvin & Hobbes to their own children, the same way we traded the books among ourselves back in the ’80s. This is the afterlife art deserves; not perpetual motion, but perpetual bequeathing.
Other works get undeath. Many of the old rock-and-rollers of my youth are still shuffling onstage for their third or fourth “retirement” tour, having produced nothing of interest since 1986. Many of the movies and shows I grew up with have been reimagined, rebooted, and refused eternal rest, condemned to reincarnation as sequels, prequels, and perhaps even paraquels and synquels as the money-grubbing occasion demands. Even now, as I glance out on the world through my laptop window, I see the rotting husk of yet another Star Wars zombie lurching by in search of fresh brains to consume. The trademark keeps twitching, so the caretakers practice brand necromancy: sequels-by-committee, “shared universes,” and the algorithmic logic of “If readers love X, they’ll buy X-ish.” We call this “keeping it alive for a new generation,” but it’s really preventing it from resting long enough to be reborn in another’s imagination.
There’s also the problem of the uncanny valley of voice. Influence is honest; imitation that aims to be indistinguishable feels like trespass. Style isn’t a bag of tricks, but a soul’s gait — you can borrow the shoes, but not the walk. If someone writes as Wodehouse in 2025, every tiny divergence — word choice, cadence, modernized plot and setting — irritates like the pea beneath the princess’s mattresses. It’s neither fish nor fowl: too similar to be itself, too different to be the thing it mimics. Reverence becomes body-snatching.
This is where limitation becomes a spiritual discipline. In The Walrus, Mark Migotti jokes that he has to ration Wodehouse — “three pages at a go, once per day” — so as not to disappear into the book at the expense of other obligations. His rule isn’t for everyone, but the spirit is right: you preserve what you love by placing limits around it. In my case, the limit is refusing the false hope of resurrection — saying no to the revenant so the work I love can rest in peace.
Obiter Scripta, no. 147
One sees thoughts stretching their hands out of the water, one believes they are calling for help. A mistake: they live below, intimate and very familiar with one another, just try and pull a single one out alone!
— Elias Canetti, The Human Province
Some ideas don’t do well when removed from their habitat and forced to perform in the aquatic parks of Theory. A good aphorism is a glass bowl carried to the surface with a bit of water still inside — the smallest vessel that keeps a micro-habitat intact.
Newsless and Nameless
We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more frequent in a Roman’s life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popular today. History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and ourselves: they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.
— Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325
Everyday Romans might have worried about plague, barbarians, unstable government, inflation, and we…well, we worry about much the same things to greater or lesser degrees. It’s true that we don’t crucify petty criminals along the highways, or feed prisoners to wild animals on pay-per-view, but much of our violence is technologically mediated and far away, like drone strikes, or covertly-funded wars. I guess we have better plumbing, at least, and while we don’t fear famine anymore, we do have to deal with obesity and its side-effects at the other extreme. Still, I raise my glass in salute to my fellow insignificant nobodies of times past, living their quiet lives, getting by as best as they could.
Gentlemen, This Is Democracy Manifest
The Lady of the House informs me that some people are purposely leaving typos in written communication to signal human presence. Well, isn’t this a fine kettle of fish. It appears we’re heading into an era in which polish, style, and correct spelling will place one under suspicion of artificial intelligence enhancement. I assume we’ll soon have to submit to the digital equivalent of piss tests.
I trace my letter-arranging prowess back to third grade, when I handily won my first spelling bee by getting “mansion” correct (the last swineherd’s son in competition with me had offered up “manshun;” I mean, come on). Though I’m not severely educated, I do enjoy reading popular books on the art and craft of rhetoric by authors like Mark Forsyth and Ward Farnsworth; thus my passing familiarity with official rhetorical devices. I know how to place dashes like silverware in accordance with the relevant house style. I know how to wield a semicolon like a smallsword in a duel. I know how to keep my dependent clauses at heel like a pack of hounds, loosed only when the field is ready.
And for what? So that in our degraded, demotic age, every half-literate halfwit incapable of forming a sentence without the assistance of predictive text can prod my sentences like livestock, pronouncing them too good to be true? “Writing too smart! Make head hurt! Machine! Machine!” cry the plebs, mistaking skill for sorcery. Very well; what is the charge? Crafting a tricolon? A tasteful, succulent tricolon? I assure you, I wrote it myself; in fact, the LLMs come to study under me. Now kindly step away from my prose. And you — get your hand off my chatbot!
The Laughter of Silenus
But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad.
— G. K. Chesterton, “What Is Right With the World“
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Man can live only by religion or by illusions. This is a clear and incontestable fact. If you drastically curtail his religion or his illusions, anyone, even a child at the first stage of reasoning (since children live mostly only off their illusions) would definitely kill himself, and our species would of inborn and material necessity be doomed at birth.
— Leopardi, Zibaldone
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Very well! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of his efforts, when he says to himself, “You are incapable of realizing your ideal; happiness is a chimera, progress is an illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare; and supposing all your ambitions were gratified, everything would still be vanity,” then he comes to see that a little blindness is necessary if life is to be carried on, and that illusion is the universal spring of movement. Complete disillusion would mean absolute immobility. He who has deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite life escapes from the great wheel of existence; he has left the world of the living—he is already dead.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime
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There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.”
— Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
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It might be something flagged on your latest bloodwork. It might be the business cycle grinding down to belt-tightening and hard choices. It might just be a stray headline about someone else’s catastrophe. Either way, it reminds you that most of our life is in a small boat on a vast ocean; now and then a shark passes close, or bumps the hull, and you’d trade anything to believe, just for a moment, that you’re on dry land.
Which a Feeble Body Cannot Sustain
In ancient times, exercises to promote physical strength were not only useful in wartime or for encouraging a love of glory, but also contributed, in fact were essential, to maintaining strength of mind, courage, aspiration, and enthusiasm, which a feeble body cannot sustain, in other words those qualities on which the greatness and heroism of a nation depends.
— Leopardi, Zibaldone
Age is just a number. A number like, say, 505. Which, coincidentally, was the number of pounds on the bar that I deadlifted this week.
Beyond the Dust
That’s why the images of the Buddha always present him as looking blissful. Cats look like this, too, because they can sit for ages and simply watch. You might say it’s because they have nothing better to do because we think we’re supposed to be constantly improving somehow or doing something beneficial for the world. But hermits who live solitary lives and meditate all of the time are doing an enormous amount for the world, and just the suspicion that people such as that still exist today is marvelous for everybody. The contrast of their presence reveals how the rest of us are so busy raising so much dust. We think we’re going somewhere, but we’re already there. Meanwhile, all the dust we kick up rushing about everywhere is getting in everybody’s nostrils and polluting everything. So to know that there are hermits deep in the forest is like knowing there’s a world beyond the dust — a world of streams and flowers that few of us ever see.
— Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe
Every day I heroically refrain from founding a movement. Please, no applause. I’m merely performing my civic duty by staying out of your hair and out of your feeds. I’m practicing radical inaction so you don’t have to. While lesser spirits churn the great particulate cloud of Progress, I nobly remain indoors, filtering the noösphere with my quiet studiousness. History will not thank me, because I will stay beneath its notice.
Long Distance
The telephone upheld a certain formality, it contained within it a permanent distance, and since this was owing to its shape, which even frequent use was powerless to overcome, the shape had to be changed, since the times were trending towards greater informality. The same thing happened to the letter. Old people, into whose lives the stationary telephone had sunk deep roots, treat the mobile phone just as formally and with the same respect, which gives them an air both ridiculous and touching. Distance, which was formerly a means to control reality, so as not to appear awkward and inept, has now itself become awkward, and while the two are hardly comparable, I find myself thinking of the figure of the dictator, one day all-powerful and controlling every aspect of life, the next, when the people revolt, naked and exposed.
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn
When the phone rang in the era of “long distance,” the house changed temperature. Your mom hushed the room, because money and miles were suddenly in the wire. The TV would be turned down or off. You were aware the call was an event. The cord kept you within a couple-foot radius. Once the receiver was in your hand, you’d entered something you couldn’t casually leave.
As I type, I’m in the middle of an ongoing email chain with my oldest friend from high school, making plans to get together soon. She and I have exchanged many phone calls, letters, and postcards over the years, but no text messages as yet. When we were teenagers, a phone call was a small performance. Even the risk felt ceremonial: a father’s voice might answer first, and you’d have to present yourself before you reached the person you meant to speak to. You chose your moment (not during dinner, not too late), rehearsed a topic so the silences wouldn’t stretch too long, hoped your voice wouldn’t pick that moment to crack, and braced for the disappointment of a parent telling you to call back some other time. Letters shared much of the same gravitas. You shaped paragraphs because the blank page asked for form. You arranged your thoughts and presented them in an order that wouldn’t waste the reader’s time. We weren’t writing literature, but we were writing to someone, and that made all the difference.
Nowadays, a conversation mediated through technology is more like food stuffed with preservatives. It never truly goes stale; it waits in the pantry of the messaging app until someone remembers to take another bite. The etiquette has inverted: it’s not interrupting that’s rude anymore, it’s leaving someone “on read.” Where the call demanded readiness and risk, the thread promises availability and delay. We used to drop what we were doing and rush to answer the ringing phone; now we casually glance at our screen as messages arrive, and vaguely resolve to get back to them at our convenience.
Knausgaard is right about distance as a kind of dignity. The old distance let us compose ourselves; the new nearness lets us postpone ourselves. Less ceremony, less gravitas, and far more ways to fail each other slowly. Now the old distance has vanished. We can reach anyone, anywhere, at any hour — no miles to pay for, no gatekeepers to pass. But a second distance has opened: indifference. Availability replaces readiness; presence gives way to drift. We keep each other at arm’s length by refusing to make an occasion of our speech and attention.
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