March 2026

Bibliomisia

By in books, fresh hell

Bibliomisia — hatred of books — is a silent epidemic in our society, ignored by social scientists, overlooked by the professional awareness-raisers, bereft of bumper magnets and national days of commemoration. Don’t believe me? Then listen to how proudly these people display their abusive tendencies, with no hint of shame. Don’t look away, I beg you. Bear witness with me.

First, Bill Hayes:

As I went through Oliver’s many marked-up books, I understood that the art of annotation is, almost by definition, impulsive—you have to get your thoughts down now, right now—even if it means turning the book upside down to complete a thought. There’s no time to find a pad of paper, no time to turn the page, no time to pull out a journal. (Over his lifetime, Oliver filled more than 600 handwritten journals and notebooks.)

Second, Emma Sarappo:

The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as “Absolutely not” and “STOP IT!!!!” and “girl get UP.” These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise.

…That’s the thing about books. If Barbara, or another character, is making me bang my head against the wall, I can just close the novel and move on with my life. But sometimes I like to salt my days with a person who simply grinds my gears. I might yell aloud to the empty hall; I might text everyone I know about a character’s foibles and idiocy (and tell them to read the book too). I’ve been known to, infrequently, throw my reading material across the room. Or I might just blacken more margins. Writing “I HATE THIS” inside a book can be another way of saying “I love you.”

There you have the whole pathology in miniature: the injury openly confessed, then immediately wrapped in the language of intimacy.

This is the classic logic of the abuser. Look what you made me do. “I only blackened your margins because I care so much. If you were less infuriating, less provocative, I would not have had to lose control and mark you up in purple felt pen.” Then the poor volume is shoved back onto the shelf, dust jacket pulled tight, and told to keep smiling for company. “No, no, everything’s fine. She just gets passionate about literature.” Meanwhile the endpapers look like a bathroom stall, and the title page bears the scars of “passion.”

We are asked to regard this not merely with tolerance, but with admiration. The annotator has become a romantic figure: impulsive, alive, too full of thought and feeling to restrain herself before the nearest clean surface. But this is only graffiti with better publicists. Spray-paint a train car and society still clings to certain outdated moral prejudices. Cover a novel with shrieking little exclamations and suddenly we are in the presence of intellectual vitality. No. A book is not your emotional support drywall. It is not there to absorb your all-caps eruptions. If “I love you” and “I hate this” have become interchangeable, that may explain a great deal about contemporary culture, but it does not contribute to the well-being of the book.

It is one of the many achievements of liberal modernity to have taught people that every appetite becomes noble the moment it is furnished with a vocabulary of self-expression. The old barbarian merely pillaged. The new barbarian announces that she is in dialogue. Her outrages arrive garnished with theory. What was once defacement is now “interaction;” what was once possessive ugliness is now “making the text one’s own.” I confess I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a book already is its own. I do not improve a cathedral by chalking objections on the pillars, nor honor a symphony by shouting commentary over the second movement. But the bibliomaniac of destruction — that is to say, the bibliomisiac — finds every finished object intolerable until it bears some trace of his own precious ego. He cannot read without leaving fingerprints on the texts.

Has your first edition been marked, dog-eared, or struck with handwritten outbursts? You are not alone. Every year, thousands of innocent books suffer in silence at the hands of “enthusiastic readers” who insist the abuse is really affection. At SafeShelf, we provide emergency rehoming for hardcovers in crisis, confidential repair services for damaged endpapers, and trauma-informed support for volumes with banalities scrawled in the margins. Because love should not leave visible scars.

Menders of the Faith

By in books

Interview with Kevin Ashton:

If storytelling has been so utterly transformed by these new technologies, why do the earliest forms of storytelling stick around? People are constantly saying, poetry is dead, novels are dead, but they aren’t dead. They don’t go away even though we keep getting new storytelling technologies. Why do you think that is?

The real deep answer is we’re exactly the same people with exactly the same brains and behaviors that we were 100,000 years ago or more when storytelling first evolved. The things that appeal to us about stories today are the things that appealed to our ancestors. That hasn’t changed. The hard-wiring is the same. And more people can read than ever before. More novels are being sold than ever before.

I’ve been talking about this a long time because I get really tired of this old post-literate world thing. Marshall McLuhan was declaring the world post-literate when only 40 percent of people could read. Give me a break. We live in a world right now where there’s been a democratization of reading, an egalitarianism of reading. People who like romance and fantasy books are writing their own romance and fantasy books and they’re self-publishing them. And some of them get the attention of traditional publishers and become very successful.

It’s only anecdotal, but I’ve seen four or five people reading actual books while doing their cardio at the gym. I declare this to be a new trend. Books are back!

The hopeful fact is that human nature is older than its gadgets. The devices change, the incentives change, the social atmosphere changes, but the basic desires remain: for story, for meaning, for company, for some account of how to live. Poetry and novels don’t vanish when a new machine arrives to distract us. The quick pleasures may proliferate like kudzu, but they don’t strangle the deeper inclinations; they only compete with them, and often remind us of them by contrast. What goes stale fastest is usually not seriousness but novelty.

The sane response to such change is neither panic nor worship, but adaptation. The useful question is the old Stoic one: what is in my control here? I can’t restore an earlier dispensation, nor can I prevent the age from becoming what it is becoming. I can, however, decide what kind of attention I will cultivate, what companions I will keep, what habits I will strengthen, what small corner of life I will tend against the surrounding haste. To live bookishly now is not to pretend the smartphone age never arrived; it is to preserve, within its conditions, the values that matter most.

So have faith. The bookish life will never again be the center of gravity for the whole culture, and probably it never really was. But there will always be those in whom the superficial pleasures have begun to sour, who find themselves hungry for something steadier, more inward, more durable. For them, the best argument will not be a stemwinder against modernity, but the gravitas of those steeped in the older ways. Be seen keeping faith with books. The example is the invitation.

I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, Somewhere You Can Hear My Voice

By in aphorisms, books, writing

To capture readers, one must write novels. To lose them, one must write well.

On this: “More and more, I have had to convince myself that a writer’s importance is proportional to his ability to disregard the reader, to possess an unshakeable confidence—since nothing exists without the social context—that he will nonetheless have a reader and a wonderful one at that.”

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation

Shortly after reading this, I was amused to read Patrick Kurp mention being mildly scolded by a reader for referring in passing to Spinoza, thereby forcing this wounded party to consult Wikipedia, as if he had been sentenced to hard labor in the salt mines. One tries to be sympathetic. Life is busy. Time is short. Fingers grow weary. And yet I have always supposed that readers of a certain sort could be trusted to survive the strain of encountering an unfamiliar name without demanding that the writer provide hyperlinks. Thankfully, I have never been rebuked for my own obscure references or inside jokes, though I confess I have proceeded on the sanguine assumption that you fine folks are fully capable of using the search functions on your fancy internetting machines.

I was surprised to recognize myself in Hohl’s aphorism. I am not by nature a swaggering or headstrong person. In most areas of life I can second-guess, hesitate, revise, and doubt myself into a standstill. But for whatever reason, the uncertainty stops at the edge of the page. There, and perhaps only there, I have always felt an almost unreasonable assurance: that I know what I am doing, that I can do it well, and that there are people who will appreciate it. It is not a moral virtue, and certainly not an achievement of character. It feels more like an unearned gift or a quirk of temperament; a peculiar form of self-command bestowed in one narrow province and withheld everywhere else.

I have no illusions of my importance, but truth is, I have never considered the reader’s interest. I take it for granted and write to my own self-imposed standard for anyone who cares to read along. This is not contempt for the reader. It is a form of respect. In any event, I have no desire to “capture” readers. It’s enough to occasionally see them as glowing eyes in the darkness, reflecting the campfire, or to find their tracks in the site stats.

It Is Enough

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang, santutthi

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

— Pascal, Pensées

****

What does man want in life? Does he want to change the universe? Time flows for ever; the past cannot be recaptured and the future is uncertain; only the day, the present hour, is a solid good. Perhaps the best way to thank God for the gift of living is to appreciate the present hour, to sit quietly and hear your own breathing and look out on the universe and be content. One can see time flow sometimes; one does not have to do something to pass the time; time can pass by itself. And there is infinite pleasure in watching the color of the day change from hour to hour and being able to say to oneself, “I have passed a perfectly leisurely afternoon.” Such perfect afternoons are entirely possible. There is no intrusion upon one’s solitude — not one telephone call, no television — one sees from the window only a child falling and bruising her leg, nothing serious, and young lovers and middle-aged couples sitting quietly on benches under trees. The world goes by. It is enough.

— Lin Yutang, On the Wisdom of America

Choose Your Illusion

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang

Illusions are necessary to human life. They are what make life endurable. Strip the world of illusions, and we have nothing to live for….Without illusions, there would be no love, no art, no religion.

— Lin Yutang, Looking Beyond

****

Illusions cannot be condemned, despised, and persecuted save by those who are deluded and by those who believe that this world is or truly can be something, and something beautiful.  An utterly crucial illusion, and so the half-philosopher combats illusions precisely because he is deluded; the true philosopher loves them and proclaims them because he is not deluded, and combating illusions in general is the surest sign of very imperfect and insufficient wisdom, and notable illusion.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

****

That is why this man, who lost his only son a few months ago and was so troubled and oppressed this morning by lawsuits and quarrels, is not thinking about it any more. Do not be surprised; he is concentrating all his attention on which way the boar will go that his dogs have been pursuing for the past six hours. That is all he needs. However sad a man may be, if you can persuade him to take up some diversion he will be happy while it lasts, and however happy a man may be, if he lacks diversion and has no absorbing passion or entertainment to keep boredom away, he will soon be depressed and unhappy. Without diversion there is no joy, with diversion there is no sadness.

— Pascal, Pensées

That Mocking Pitiless Temper

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

When men impartially compare the arguments of opposing sects, and give their allegiance to none, they seem to rise, in a fashion, superior to all parties. But ask these independent philosophers to choose a creed, or to establish some truths of their own, you will observe that they are as much in trouble as all the rest. The world is full of frigid minds, which, while incapable of discovering anything of their own, console themselves by rejecting all the discoveries of others, and, by a display of contempt for many things, think to add to their reputation.

— Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims: Complete Edition

****

How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and a system, means the destruction of moral energy, of faith, and of all spiritual force.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

****

Cynicism continues today, not just by accident but as a self-chosen identity. Modern cynics’ interpretations vary greatly, some fitting Diogenes’s ethos and some not. We can locate it in a widespread intellectual disposition, apparent in such phenomena as a notion of “radical honesty,” a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” radical relativism, a cult of transgression, and a general demeanor of debunking, unmasking, and bitter irony.

…The Cynic instead voyages without, in the external world, and in an everyday drama en plein air performs private acts, unmasking what he considers others’ hypocrisy and demonstrating his own moral superiority. Rather than experience the humility of being part of an external world, Cynics claim this superiority over others on the basis of their special insight that questions all human convention as unreasonable. Cynics’ conversion is only a halfway stop. The destination is the self, on display for all to see, an inward-facing externalism.

— Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living

Make Me Feel Real Loose, Like a Long-Necked Goose

By in battling personal entropy

Fundamental Sports & Fitness:

Once you pass 40, recovery isn’t as automatic as it used to be. Muscles lose elasticity, circulation slows slightly, and the body takes longer to repair microtears from exercise. Add daily stress, lack of quality sleep, and hours of sitting, and it’s no surprise so many recreational athletes feel “niggly” most of the time. Stretching and foam rolling help, but they can only go so far.

This is where sports massage steps in as a game-changer.

People hail me on the street. “Outis,” they say, “what’s your secret? How do you perform feats of cerebral dexterity on your blog by day and manhandle massive amounts of iron in the evening? How can one man possibly bridge the Meathead/Egghead divide so effortlessly?”

One thing at a time, I reply. Let’s start with the physical side of things. I will tell you, for free, that massage therapy is a fundamental part of what allows me to keep shaming younger men in the gym. Now, you may scoff, thinking of “massage” as some bougie extravagance. However, I’m not talking about having someone play pattycake on your shoulders in a room filled with scented candles and ambient “music.” Think of it not as pampering, but as necessary maintenance. Every four to six weeks, I go in for deep-tissue/sports-medicine massages. It’s more like physical therapy. If you’d like to test your pain tolerance and practice deep breathing, there’s nothing like having someone run her forearm down a tight IT band on the outside of your leg, or dig an elbow into your spasming rhomboids under the shoulder blade.

Lest you think that I’m just some masochistic freak, I assure you that this is a simple matter of trade-offs. The temporary pain of being forcibly rubbed back into shape is nothing compared to the debilitating, chronic pain of aging. In fact, I credit my massage therapist with helping rehabilitate me from a meniscus tear, allowing me to avoid surgery and still continue to lift:

Thanks to her, my knee has been pain-free ever since I had that MRI a couple years ago. It turns out that releasing the tension from the surrounding fascia, tendons, ligaments and muscles made all the difference. And let me stress that I’m not sedentary in any event. I’ve done yoga since I was twelve, I’ve always stretched before and after exercising, and I do foam-rolling. Still, there’s something about having someone else’s hands getting into those problem areas that just can’t be replicated otherwise.

So, whatever your status — young athlete, middle-aged weekend warrior, elderly couch potato — my honest recommendation is that you incorporate massage therapy into your routine. Most supplements have marginal effects at best; this is right up there with quality food and quality sleep. It makes a huge difference.

Madbrain Rudesbies Full of Spleen

By in aphorisms, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

In general, when people break the yoke of opinion, it is rarely to lift themselves above it, but to descend below it.

— Chamfort, Complete Maxims and Thoughts

With Elon’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s return to power, many on the right exulted. At last, they thought, they would no longer be hectored by liberal gatekeepers or forced to mouth the approved pieties of the age. Many of these people spent years presenting themselves as dissidents, truth-tellers, and fearless enemies of cant. How’s that been going?

I kid, of course. Human nature doesn’t change. The current “discourse” resembles a food fight at a mud-wrestling match during a Klan rally with an audience of cranks, paranoid schizophrenics, trolls, shameless influencers, and anonymous degenerates cheering from the stands. Housebreaking is beyond these people, to say nothing of self-governance.

A Room With a View

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, montaigne

The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause—in a word, some one.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

Montaigne, by contrast, advises us to keep a room behind the shop: a private retreat, inward and unencumbered, where the self can learn not to cling too desperately to wife, children, possessions, or public station: “We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.”

Both men are right. But there is also a danger in admiring extremes too theatrically. Not everyone who avoids the front room is a sage, and not everyone who keeps to the back room has achieved liberty. Some are merely hiding. One can become as affected in one’s solitude as another man is in his sociability.

The ideal is not the drawing room, where one is forever performing, nor the sealed Stoic bunker, where one practices losing wife, children, and health in advance like a philosophical fire drill. The ideal is some modest interior room where one remains available to reality without being swallowed by it. One hears the commotion in the front, knows there is a back room somewhere for emergencies, but ordinarily lives in a place fit for an ordinary human being: partly social, partly reflective, capable of company, capable of silence, and not entirely at the mercy of either. By nature, I tend to avoid extremes. Left to myself, I would gladly spend most of my time in a study, surrounded by books; but even there, the laptop on my desk gives me a window onto the world.

Postmodern Prometheus

By in ai, foolosophy, technology, unintended consequences

Julie Beck:

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. Yet in some ways, AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship. Social chatbots provide the semblance of a kind of friendship that many people already want, or at least have gotten accustomed to: one that’s on demand, low effort, and completely personalized.

As societies grow wealthier, safer, and more mobile, human beings become freer from inherited limits. We are no longer bound in the same way to the religion of our fathers, the customs of our town, the loyalties of our neighborhood, the companionship of whoever happens to live within walking distance, or even, now, to other people as such. That freedom is real. No honest person wants to romanticize the old world too much. Pre-modern life was often narrow, coercive, parochial, and hard. Most of us would not truly choose to return to a village where our horizons were fixed by birth and where options could be counted on one hand. (Maybe Paul Kingsnorth would.)

The old world imposed solidarity by necessity. The new world requires solidarity by principle. It’s one thing to help your neighbor because he is your neighbor and there is no alternative social universe to defect to. It’s another to help him when you have a thousand other options, all more pleasant, more convenient, and more tailored to your preferences. It’s one thing to remain loyal to a faith because family, custom, and community make defection costly. It’s another to remain loyal when belief has become a buffet, and one may freely take the consolations while discarding the commandments, sacrifices, and obligations that offend one’s convenience.

Choice exposes our weakness. Left free to arrange life around comfort, convenience, self-protection, and personalized reward, we often do exactly that. We evade difficult friends. We thin out our obligations. We “set boundaries” in ways that suspiciously resemble mere selfishness. We select from religion what soothes or flatters us and leave behind what commands us. And now, when the friction of actual friendship becomes too tiring, too slow, or too unpredictable, we can turn to a machine that asks nothing, needs nothing, and exists entirely on our terms.

AI companionship offers the dream of friendship drained of mutuality. It is the logical destination of a culture that increasingly asks of every bond, every institution, every loyalty: what is this doing for me? And yet nobody can live well for long in a world made entirely of that question.

This is the tragic dilemma of modern freedom. We have become so successful at escaping necessity that we now have to recreate, by conviction, the disciplines that necessity once imposed for free.

Bot, Are You the One Who Is Living Life?

By in foolosophy, fresh hell, poetry, technology

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one
who is living life?

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Barrows and Macy)

At last, one more intolerable hardship of human existence has been lifted from our shoulders. Reading was already too much to ask of a modern person, of course — all those words, all that eye movement, the faint possibility of having to think. But apparently even watching a video is now an unreasonable demand. We have progressed from “help me understand this” to “please have the experience in my place and send me the synopsis.”

This is being sold as a way to “save time,” which raises the obvious question: save it for what? More summaries? More secondhand encounters with things you cannot be bothered to encounter? More efficient ways of avoiding contact with your own life? A video was already the shortcut. Now we want a shortcut around the shortcut. Soon the bots will attend our vacations, endure our sunsets, and perhaps even die on our behalf. The important thing is that we ourselves remain unburdened by the exhausting task of being present.

There’s a deeper problem, apart from the obvious comic squalor of it. Any intermediary decides what counts as relevant. If I ask for “the point” of Moby-Dick, I am really asking someone else to pre-sort the book for me — to tell me which parts were essential and which parts I may safely miss. But how do I know the supposedly “inessential” part is not the very thing that would have struck me most deeply? The odd image, the side remark, the tonal wobble, the long digression everyone else skips — those may be the real point for the person actually present to them. This is the telephone game elevated into a philosophy of life: more and more mediation, more and more compression, until people forget that the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.

Still, let us be generous and assume the dream is perfected. The bot watches the whole thing for me. It catches every nuance, every shift in tone, every expression, every implication. But then a small metaphysical difficulty appears. If the bot is having the full experience on my behalf, in what sense is that my experience at all? Is the bot me? If so, then what exactly am I — the management layer? The executive assistant to my own displaced consciousness? And if the bot is not me, then all it has really done is watch a video while I remained absent from it. In that case, what has been “saved” is not my time so much as my participation.

The whole thing begins to look less like efficiency than like a fanatical inability to tolerate unfilled attention. No moment may be silent, slow, or unrewarding; no stretch of time may simply be lived. Everything must be processed, condensed, accelerated, stripped to “the point.” But life is not an empty highway between you and the point. Life is the road, the weather, the delay, the scenery, the boredom, the sudden thought you did not schedule, the stray detail that lodges in the mind. A person can waste a staggering amount of time trying to avoid ever having to sit still long enough to notice that.

And so the grand irony: in the name of saving time, one adopts a whole philosophy of perpetual evasion — more tools, more summaries, more skipping, more fretful management of one’s own supposedly precious minutes — and ends by becoming the kind of person who cannot simply be anywhere at all.

The Sims

By in foolosophy, language, socmed

We cannot live in a way that is neither positive nor negative but neutral, latent, expectant—we cannot “simply live”; no more can we use words that are neither our own nor someone else’s. But when you are not living positively—living your own life—you are already living negatively—living the life of another. Just as a word used by me that is not my word, is already plagiarism.

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation

Hohl writes a lot about “work” in a very specific sense. For instance:

For our actions to be worthwhile, we must undertake them fully conscious of life’s brevity.

If we lose this awareness, we may appear active but will live in a perpetual state of expectation (in most cases, external forces compel us to engage in apparent busyness and leave us no escape). However, if you maintain complete consciousness of life’s ephemerality, your primary desire will be to do something immediately (—and with a very different kind of seriousness than the one with which you do things when governed by external forces). Yet it is only doing of this sort—activity you engage in out of inner compulsion and not because of external pressures—that gives life, that can save.

Precisely this kind of action is what I call work.

Real work is action arising from inward necessity, while most of what passes for activity is only externally induced motion. We look busy, we feel occupied, we keep reacting, talking, posting and replying, but that is not yet “work” in his sense. It is movement without an inner center of gravity.

A lot of chatter, meme-speak, and reflexive online discourse can be understood as verbal busyness. It has the form of activity but not the substance. It is often driven by promptings from outside: the timeline, the group mood, the trending phrase, the bait, the joke format, the cue to demonstrate tribal affiliation. In Hohl’s terms, that would not be speech grounded in inner compulsion but speech governed by “external forces.”

An inside joke is not just a repeated form, unlike a meme. Its meaning comes from shared memory, mutual knowledge, tone, timing, and the fact that these two people are saying this thing to each other. The Lady of the House and I still find ways to quote lines from shows we haven’t watched in fifteen years. Underneath those quotes sits an entire history of recognition. That’s why it can feel intimate, or absurdly funny, or even moving.

Memes are often like mass-produced inside jokes. They simulate the structure of shared knowing while thinning out the actual relationship behind it. They give the user a quick hit of recognition, belonging, and tone without requiring much personal investment or expressive precision. That’s also why they can feel so dead. A private joke between friends may be repetitive, borrowed, even silly, but it is alive because it belongs somewhere. Meme-speak often does not belong anywhere in particular. It hovers above people and situations like a set of prefabricated reactions waiting to be dropped in.

Autumn Christian is reacting to a counterfeit of intimacy: the look of familiarity without the substance of relation. Hohl is reacting to a counterfeit of living: the look of activity without the substance of inner necessity. Put those together and you get a broader indictment of the same modern habit — simulacra of life. Simulated friendship, simulated expression, simulated participation, simulated purpose. I don’t know what everyone’s worried about: AI will never be able to make human behavior and communication as rote and repetitive as humans do naturally.

Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book

By in aphorisms, books, jests japes jokes jollies

I have thought a great deal, I know, much more than I have read; as a consequence I am ignorant of a great deal that the rest of the world knows, so that when I mix with the rest of the world I often err and blunder, and this makes me shy and retiring. If I could express all that I have accumulated in thought, not in a fragmentary and often unattractive way, but as it exists within me, it would certainly receive the world’s applause.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I have long suspected that I am a misunderstood genius, possibly touched by hyperthymesia, but in one of those regrettably impractical forms in which nature bestows her favors. As a boy, I could remember the details of my team’s soccer games from seasons past with a fidelity that should have qualified me for intelligence work. Dates, final scores, who scored (for each team), how they scored (header, right foot, left foot) incidental details of the match, and, on occasion, even the type of cleats worn by particular players: all of it remained in my head without effort. Meanwhile, mathematical knowledge passed through my consciousness like angel-hair pasta through a big-hole colander. My father, who was stubbornly attached to conventional standards of usefulness, found this less impressive than I did.

As a young man, my gifts matured. I became a living storage unit for song lyrics, especially by obscure bands no sane employer has ever asked about. If called upon, I could supply whole verses from songs last heard years before, as though some officious clerk in my mind had carefully filed them away for future retrieval. I could not, however, be trusted to remember ordinary obligations with equal zeal. The world, philistine that it is, failed to recognize the grandeur of this arrangement. It did not say, “Behold, a human archive.” It said, “Did you return that phone call?”

Now in adulthood the pattern persists, only in more dignified forms. I can often tell you which Nietzsche book contains a passage, which bookshelf it sits on, and roughly where the passage lies: two-thirds through, left-hand page, near the bottom, penultimate paragraph. I have a similar talent for recalling conversations nearly word for word, sometimes years later, which is a gift of dubious social value but undeniable accuracy. One would think such powers might command respect, if not a sinecure. One would think the world might applaud.

Instead, the world pesters me with trifles. It wants to know whether I finally signed the tax forms for the accountant, whether the inventory count for client Smith is finished, and why there is a set of keys in the refrigerator. These are the things on which one’s reputation apparently hangs. Not one’s ability to retrieve a forgotten aphorism, reconstruct a conversation verbatim, or explain in loving detail the differences between Patrick Mustangs or Patrick Stabils. No: civilization is evidently upheld by people who can solve for X, return emails, and complete forms on time.

This has always struck me as a little coarse. The world is forever complaining that genius is unrecognized, but when genius does appear in its proper form — lopsided, specialized, faintly ridiculous, superbly equipped for the wrong tasks — the world shows no gratitude whatever. It merely clears its throat and asks again about the paperwork.

455

By in battling personal entropy, books

Civilization has introduced refined labors, etc., that consume and exhaust and extinguish human faculties such as memory, sight, strength in general, etc., labors that were not required by nature. And it has taken away those labors which conserve and improve the faculties, such as agriculture, hunting, etc., and primitive life, which were willed by nature and necessary for such a life.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

Squatted 455 last night (and the prior set was a double at 415). Yes, my faculties feel much conserved and improved, thank you for asking.

There Is Something You Must Know

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

It is a fault common to all people of little talent and more reading than understanding that they hit upon ingenious rather than natural explanations.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

My friend Donny is what I think of as a prairie intellectual. I don’t mean that unkindly. He is intelligent, soft-spoken, and genuinely bookish, with the sort of autodidactic curiosity that sends a man ranging far beyond the approved shelves: religion, conspiracies, prophecy, obscure paperbacks, all the byways and oddments that accumulate around a mind that likes to wander. Lichtenberg’s insult is too harsh for him, but the underlying tendency is accurate enough. Donny does not lack intelligence; if anything, he takes too much pleasure in using it. The plain explanation rarely satisfies him when a more elaborate one can be devised. He is drawn less to the merely probable than to the intriguingly possible.

In a denser intellectual environment, some of those habits might have been worn down by constant friction. Certain speculative impulses do not survive long when every loose connection is challenged at once and every baroque theory is forced to answer for itself. But out on the prairie, both literally and mentally, stranger growths can persist. One finds there a kind of intellectual island species: widely read, highly curious, genuinely thoughtful, yet still retaining certain old speculative traits that harsher conditions might have selected against. The result is a mind I find both admirable and faintly wild: thoughtful, curious, and always in some danger of preferring the ingenious to the natural.

The Barn Door of Belief

By in atheism, books, foolosophy, nietzsche, religion

Many metaphysical and historical hypotheses are defended so strongly only because we are grateful for their consequences.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

Luis Parrales:

As he tells the story, atheism became untenable not primarily through an argument, but because of its inability to explain how his future wife had changed him. “My life was filled with love,” he writes, “but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.” The various forms of atheism espoused by the thinkers he’d read seemed unable to provide an explanation. The scientific bent exemplified by atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offered, in his view, a reductive account of his love, flattening it to “a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain,” a handshake between dopamine and oxytocin.

My dad tells of being young and questioning the point of going to church rather than sleeping in on Sunday morning. My grandfather’s answer was basically instrumental: this way of life is the best one we know of, so this is what we do. You don’t have to believe, but you ought to do it anyway. Rufo and Beha are doing different versions of the same thing. Rufo is grateful to Christianity for its public consequences: order, restraint, continuity, a check on social and ideological disintegration. Beha is grateful to it for its private consequences: a way of making sense of love, gratitude, and the felt richness of a life no longer experienced as absurd or self-enclosed. One sees Christianity as civilizational ballast; the other as existential explanation.

This is understandable enough, but still post-hoc. The barn door of belief has been standing open for a long time, and the horse is far down the road, yet we still stand around arguing over whose fault it was that the latch was not secured. Meanwhile, the real problem is not retrospective blame but the peculiar modern situation itself. We find ourselves having to theorize our way into a felt social ethic. Previous moral orders were never quite as organic as nostalgia pretends; they were formed by custom, ritual, prestige, repetition, shame, authority, and no small amount of coercion. But because that machinery had become old and settled, it looked “natural.” Now the machinery is exposed, and we distrust whoever lays hands on it.

Nietzsche saw this coming too. Moral law, he noted elsewhere, had long been experienced as something standing above our own likes and dislikes, something to be discovered, inherited, or commanded, not something we openly fabricated for ourselves. That older confidence has decayed. We moderns, burdened with too much historical knowledge and too much self-consciousness, do not easily submit to a law we know to be, at least in part, our own artifact. We want obligation, but we also want to inspect its wiring. We want authority, but only after it has passed our private audit. We want thick moral formation in a culture trained to regard thick demands as intrusive, manipulative, or vaguely tyrannical.

Lichtenberg saw another part of the process with equal clarity: “Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.” That’s how moral change often works. First come the scouts, the eccentrics, the blasphemers, the people willing to test the terrain and absorb the danger of novelty. Then, once the ground has been surveyed and softened, the heavy brigade follows: institutions, schools, bureaucracies, moralizers, respectable opinion. What gets called “consensus” is often just yesterday’s audacity after it has acquired prestige, rituals, and penalties. Today’s free spirit becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

Exhortations to “just go through the motions” of belief are ultimately unsatisfying. If the old truth-claims no longer compel assent, then churchgoing risks becoming a kind of moral cosplay, a tactical re-enchantment undertaken for the sake of good consequences. Perhaps that can sustain a few people for a while. But it can also be secularized. If the real point is social cohesion, mutual aid, moral discipline, and some check on atomized self-absorption, then the obvious question arises: why could those things not be sought under some other banner? Once religion is defended primarily as useful, it forfeits any automatic exemption from replacement.

That does not mean the secular alternatives are easy to build, or likely to be better. On the contrary, that is precisely the difficulty. It is one thing to sketch a secular ethic on paper and another to create institutions, habits, loyalties, and sacrifices sturdy enough to live by. Science will not do this for us. An expert class will not do it for us. Administrative procedure will not do it for us. Stable social orders require some mixture of persuasion and coercion, affection and discipline, inner assent and outer pressure. The old religious frameworks once supplied much of that, and their weakening has left a vacuum no one yet knows how to fill without smuggling in either hypocrisy or force.

So the question is not simply whether Christianity once did this work better than its rivals, or whether some new ideology might do it worse. The question is what becomes of a society that no longer quite believes, yet still badly needs to be formed? Which faction will eventually impose a convincing social ethic, and for how long? No one knows. What is clear is only that we have inherited a vast cultural task, and that no amount of pious nostalgia or managerial optimism can relieve us of it.

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