This calendar page was tucked into the introduction to the Sartre book. I don’t know if it was intended as an editorial comment, but assuming so, I couldn’t agree more. What an apt juxtaposition: existentialism promises confrontation with radical freedom, and the reader’s first free act is to leave.
Art — the artist’s action consists in trying to enclose an infinity. A potential infinity within an actual finite.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2
A piece of music is, obviously, finite. It has a duration. Three minutes, nine minutes, forty-two minutes. It begins, moves, repeats, departs, resolves, ends. We can divide it into measures, beats, phrases, motifs. We can time it with a stopwatch and locate any passage precisely. Nothing could be more bounded. And yet certain passages do not feel bounded. They feel larger inside than they appear from outside.
Augustine’s account of time is useful to think about. The past and future, he says, do not exist as independent regions somewhere “behind” and “ahead” of us. They exist in the present as memory and expectation. The present itself is attention. This makes the present less like a mathematical point and more like an act of gathering. What has vanished, what is now before us, and what has not yet arrived can all be present in different ways.
Music makes this structure audible. While listening, we don’t hear the present note by itself, as an isolated acoustic fact. We hear it in the context of what has just sounded and what may be about to sound. The earlier phrase is gone as sound, but still active as memory. The coming resolution does not exist yet, but it already exerts pressure as expectation. A melody is succession, but not mere succession. It is Augustine’s threefold present made sensuous: attention, memory, and expectation bound into one act of listening.
Imagine linear time as a flat grid, every second evenly spaced from the next. Music presses into that grid like a gravity well. A passage may occupy only thirty seconds by the clock, but those seconds are no longer flat. They bend downward into depth. What has just passed and what has not yet arrived are drawn toward the same present pressure. They are not simultaneous, exactly, but they become co-present. The listener does not merely move across the passage. He descends into it.
This is my clumsy attempt to describe how absorption in music can have such a peculiar aftereffect. A passage holds you, and then releases you. You return to yourself with a start: the room, the chair, the clock, the body sitting there after all. The music has not lasted longer than it lasted. Nothing supernatural has happened. But the interval was inhabited differently. It was deeper, not longer.
Sleep also makes time vanish, but by subtraction. You close your eyes, consciousness drops away, and an hour disappears. Music does something closer to the opposite. It saturates the interval rather than erasing it. In sleep, time passes without you. In music, a minute can be inhabited so completely that ordinary measurement becomes irrelevant.
This may be one way art encloses Valéry’s infinity. Music is not infinite in the sense of lasting forever. It is infinite in the sense that, while it lasts, duration acquires depth. The clock measures the surface distance from one edge of the passage to the other. Attention measures the descent.
見逃しているとも知らぬ秋の蠅 久雄
Minogashite iru tomo shiranu aki no haeThe autumn fly
Does not know
I overlooked it.Hisao
Even in the world of flies, ignorance is bliss.
— R.H. Blyth, Japanese Life and Character in Senryu
I was around eight or nine when I saw a spider carrying a swarm of babies on its back. I gave in to the obvious childish impulse and tried to stomp on it. I missed. The spider, reacting with what I can only describe as perfect comic justice, sprang up my leg and vanished under my terry-cloth shorts. I still remember the involuntary whine-yelp of disgust I made as I danced in place, shook my leg, and slapped at myself like a lunatic trying to beat the devil out through his thigh.
By adulthood, I had begun making a grudging effort to capture insects and put them outside, with a standing exception for wasps, hornets, and other airborne aggressors. I won’t pretend this was because of the spider. It wasn’t my road-to-Damascus moment in arachnid ethics. But I do remember it often, and from the safe distance of several decades, I admire the thing. Cornered by the descending god of the sneaker, it did not freeze, plead, or submit to fate. It leapt, and in so doing, lived a while longer.
There must be countless bugs going about their microscopic business in complete ignorance of the human eye upon them. Their safety consists partly in not knowing how near judgment has come. We humans can only hope that Disease and Injury sometimes glance at us in the same way and look elsewhere. Until the day they don’t. And when that day comes, may we have the spider’s wit: not dignity, not serenity, not wisdom — just enough nerve to jump up the monster’s leg and make it shriek.
Only in the depth of night are we entirely ourselves: becoming famous surrounds us with humans and their demands upon us. We must cast our fame into the sea.
— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)
I received a kind email from a reader the other day, thanking me for doing what I do here. It was brief, written for no reason other than gratitude. No one was watching him praise me. No public exchange of favors was being made. He was not trying to attach himself to a scene, because there is no scene here. He had simply found my site, kept reading it, and decided to tell me that the habit meant something to him. That, as far as I’m concerned, is the whole reward. Not money, not metrics, not the fever dream of influence, but one distant mind making contact with another through mere words.
A few days later, while I was talking to my massage therapist about my four-part scheme of healthy living — two active duties, diet and exercise; two passive necessities, sleep and recovery — she suddenly asked, “Are you a writer?” Apparently I had outed myself by talking like someone who thinks in paragraphs and outlines. She followed, naturally enough, with the usual questions about professional ambition, publication, money. I disavowed them all.
Many people receive one sincere word of praise and immediately want it multiplied beyond recognition. The error is easy to understand. A man receives fan mail and thinks, naturally enough, “This is wonderful. Wouldn’t it be even better if hundreds, thousands, millions of people were saying this?” But no. He already had the thing he wanted, though he may not have recognized it while it was still small enough to hold. The pleasure was in the contact, not the number of contacts. Multiplication does not preserve that contact and enlarge it; it converts it into a problem of administration. Ten thousand grateful readers do not mean ten thousand versions of the first delight. They mean an overflowing inbox, a reputation, a public identity, a set of expectations, a crowd of strangers each arriving with the full force of his own sincerity and no way for the writer to receive it as such. Scale promises abundance and delivers abstraction.
The first letter is a person; the ten-thousandth is a statistic. That’s the painful asymmetry: for each reader, the encounter may be singular. For the author, it becomes cumulative. Every fan arrives with the freshness of first discovery; the author receives them with the fatigue of repetition. The reader says, “This book changed my life.” The author, hating himself a little, thinks, “Yes, that does seem to happen.” At first, “It’s like you wrote this just for me” means contact. Later, heard too often, it may begin to feel like being trapped inside a public function: the Professional Articulator of Other People’s Feelings. The magician must keep producing the same astonishment for each new spectator, long after he knows where every rabbit is hidden.
This is why obscurity has its uses. It keeps praise small enough to remain human. Fame gives you ten thousand eyes looking up at you, but it also makes it harder to look back into any one pair. The god’s-eye view is very bad at eye contact.
Ah, yes, the legendary European constitution — forged in hardship, tempered by warm lager, sustained by open windows and damp towels. And now, after forty minutes in the great American convection oven, it seems air conditioning is no longer decadent American softness. It turns out it is actually the thin blue line between civilization and involuntary heatstroke. Will you now bend the knee before Willis Carrier, Bringer of the Blessed Refrigerant?
Our fathers took oaths as of old they took wives,
To have and to hold for the term of their lives,
But we take our oaths, as our whores, for our ease,
And a whore and a rogue may part when they please.— Tom Brown, “Oaths”
Alan Jacobs has issued another encyclical on his AI usage. It turns out that the matter is more complicated than his earlier blanket rejections allowed. Claude, regrettably, is useful. Jacobs has bought a year of the Pro plan, though he assures us that renewal is not the default. Renewal will depend on “significant ongoing needs,” the relative corruption of Anthropic among the AI kaiju, and the possibility of reconciling his use with the energy and water demands of the company’s datacenters. No LLM will ever write so much as one word for him. It may, however, clean up dictated transcripts, sort and rename 1,400 PDFs, identify authors, search the web when necessary, and leave the results “very clean” and “extremely satisfying.” (There is one tiny comic grace note in the first paragraph: “(a)… (b)… and (b)…” The doubled “b” is almost too perfect. No LLM will ever collaborate with him, and by God, no LLM will fix his outline lettering either.)
Jacobs wants to take his oath as a wife, to have and to hold, for the term of his life. “No LLM will ever write so much as one word for me” has the ring of covenant. But the surrounding apparatus — the trial period, the reassessment, the acceptable uses, the ecological accounting, the mental image of Cousin Claude from Cullman to keep the machine from becoming an oracle — suggests that he fears he may be a rogue. Somewhere between “never one word” and “extremely satisfying,” the vow begins to feel the pressure of interpretation.
Readers of Jacobs over the years will recognize the shape. I say this with affectionate exasperation. Twitter used to summon the same cycle of attraction, renunciation, return under discipline, renewed disgust, and further renunciation. He would swear it off for excellent reasons, then reappear with a new framework for limited use, then conclude with embarrassment that the framework had failed. The pattern was not at all contemptible. In many ways it was admirable. Plenty of people are mastered by their habits and never write one honest sentence about it. Jacobs’s oddity is that he can’t seem to have a vice without writing its anthropology. If every ordinary technological decision becomes a spiritual crisis, one begins to wonder whether the crisis itself is part of the gratification. There is pleasure in renunciation, pleasure in relapse, pleasure in diagnostic clarity, pleasure in the newly drafted rule. The whole cycle can become a kind of moralized fidgeting.
For ordinary people, “I have a problem” is the beginning of action. For the intellectual, it is the beginning of a research program. Before the app can be deleted, one must consider repair, attention, embodiment, Christian humanism, technological enclosure, common life, convivial tools, perhaps Mumford, certainly Ellul, and, if time permits, the eschatological destiny of the human person under platform capitalism. The professorial reflex is: before I can decide what to do, I must understand the genealogy of my doing. What is the technological imaginary? What is the hidden anthropology of the platform? What does this reveal about late modernity, attention, embodiment, sacramentality, political economy, and the shape of the common good?
In the Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow, the wounded man refuses to let the physician remove the arrow until he knows who shot it, what caste the man belonged to, what kind of bow was used, what sort of feathers were on the shaft, and so on. Of course, by the time the inquiry is complete, he is dead. Jacobs has been shot by Twitter, or Claude, or the internet, and instead of pulling the arrow out, he begins assembling a seminar: Mumford on technique, Ellul on technological society, Illich on tools, Augustine on disordered loves, Doctorow on enshittification, perhaps a short excursus on tikkun olam, followed by a cautiously hopeful note about decentralized protocols and the redemocratization of the internet. At some point, “What should I do about my Twitter/AI habit?” has been smothered under so many layers of diagnosis that the obvious answer — “stop looking at Twitter/AI” — seems almost vulgar.
This is where a grounding in less theoretical forms of work has its uses. In a warehouse or a small business, abstraction has a shorter leash. The pallet either moves or it does not. The order ships or it does not. The customer gets the right item or writes back annoyed. Rent, postage, inventory, fatigue, floor space — these things have a way of disciplining the mind. I do not need to reimagine the warehouse every time a pallet is in the wrong place. Sometimes the answer is not a theory of space, labor, and late capitalism. Sometimes the answer is: move the pallet.
This doesn’t make practical people immune to self-deception. They procrastinate, rationalize, scheme, and backslide like everyone else. But the work itself is less patient with ornamental thought. A theory that does not cash out in action soon starts looking expensive. Academia, by contrast, can reward the elaboration of the problem independent of its solution. In fact, the elaboration often is the product. So the professorial vice is not laziness in the ordinary sense. It’s productive avoidance. You are working, reading, connecting, citing, historicizing, complicating — and yet somehow the arrow remains lodged exactly where it was.
Someone who is genuinely indifferent to a temptation does not usually stage elaborate demonstrations of indifference. He just ignores the thing. The theatrical proof suggests that the thing has already taken up residence in the imagination. The act of mastery becomes another way of keeping the object close. “I shall use the infernal convenience-machine, but only as valet, clerk, indexer, recipe-card, road atlas, and moral eunuch. It shall never become my co-author.” Maybe true. But anyone issuing regular communiqués about the chastity of the arrangement probably knows there is some danger in the room. As the meme-joke has it, his “My Relationship with Claude is Ethical and Chaste” t-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by his shirt.
I’ve had enough. Which is why, from here on out, if I see you passing off an AI output as your own work, I am going to kill you. I will find out where you live and bash your head in with a crowbar, until the brains you decided not to use are dripping down the walls. This is not a literary device. This is not a comic bit. This is a highly credible real-world threat to do physical harm, punishable in America under 18 USC § 875(c) and in the UK under section 16 of the Offences Against the Person Act.
Kriss goes on to argue that beauty and insight have already been lost to the machines. If you attempt to write in that mode now, you are trespassing on their territory. What remains inviolably human is not judgment, taste, memory, craft, or responsibility, but degradation: real writers are “sexual perverts,” “bitter and frustrated little gremlins,” “rapidly obsolescing apes” driven by “dumb lust and jealousy.” The machine may have won beauty; we retain “death threats, racist tirades, and pornographic fantasies.” Well. With friends of the human spirit like this, the robots can afford to take the afternoon off.
This is Romanticism minus the aspiration. The old Romantic complaint was that Enlightenment reason had made the world too neat, too dry, too mechanical. Man had to be rescued through passion, imagination, nature, sublimity, eroticism, madness, rebellion. Fittingly for an age of undead IP franchises, Kriss offers the rebooted and degraded version: if machines can imitate poignancy and insight, then the human writer must prove himself through spite, obscenity, and menace.
The other thread in the essay is less Romantic than professional: the guild-reflex. Kriss is a man with postgraduate training in Critical Theory, a long record of publication, and a livelihood bound up with being recognized as a writer (at least until his wealthy parents die and leave him their “massive house“). Now automation has wandered onto his turf. His fury is territorial. This is the prose equivalent of lifting one’s leg.
It’s true that much AI writing is bad in precisely the way he says it is bad: maudlin, frictionless, padded, eager to please, always reaching for poignancy without earning it. But much human writing has always been bad in the same way. The machine did not invent false profundity, stale metaphor, obscure nonsense, or the thrill people get from mistaking vagueness for depth. Hegel, Heidegger and Zizek did not need ChatGPT. Generations of poets, mystics, academics, commencement speakers, essayists, and newsletter moralists have managed to produce deepities under their own power.
What AI changes is not the existence of bad writing, but access to its surface competence. A person without the usual training, leisure, inborn talent, or literary inheritance can now ask for help organizing an argument, finding a phrase, testing a paragraph, or sanding down a clumsy sentence. If you need that sort of help, the implication runs, perhaps you were never meant to be here. Go back to assembling widgets, sweeping floors, driving Uber, or whatever else the uninitiated do with their days. The title of Writer is not yours to share.
Like it or not, AI is now another active agent in the literary ecology. It is not some alien corruption descending on an otherwise pure republic of letters. It is another producer of verbal atmosphere, though an unusually powerful one because it can generate enormous quantities of plausible prose on demand. The important point is that it imitates the existing discourse, then feeds its own imitation back into the discourse, where humans imitate the imitation, which machines then ingest again. Aesthetic prion disease, basically.
And the funny part is that human beings have always been machine-like in groups. Give any scene enough time and its members converge on the same rhythm, vocabulary, in-jokes, pieties, insults, and other verbal mating calls. Most “original voices” are partly just talented instances of a local dialect. AI makes this more obvious, and maybe more depressing, because it shows how much of our supposedly personal expression was already patterned.
People talk as if AI prose will simply flatten everything forever, but annoyance is one of the great engines of aesthetic change. The more dominant the median machine cadence becomes, the more valuable it becomes to sound unlike it. Some people will overcorrect into conspicuous difficulty: God help us if more people try to write Finnegans Wake. More jagged syntax, more private references, more deliberate ugliness, more broken forms, more “you can’t autocomplete this, you bastard.” That may produce some interesting work but will certainly produce a lot of unreadable peacocking.
Evolution proceeds. A new predator appears; the prey get faster, spikier, more camouflaged, or better at tasting like poison. The bot-species enters the ecosystem, and writers who care about style develop new defenses. Some responses will be hysterical. Some will be snobbish. Some will be productive. The worst writers will imitate the machine. The vainest writers will perform anti-machine authenticity. The better ones will absorb the lesson and keep moving.
How can we combat misology and reclaim our logos? First, understand that the very core of our humanity is at stake. That’s worth fighting for, so we must screw up our courage for grassroots personal effort, without which we cannot count on institutional or other help. We’ll need courage to stand up to totalitarian impulses wherever they assert themselves, from campus bullies to governmental speech controls, and to relearn how to say what we think in public. We must also try to put down our phones, read good books, reclaim the meanings of high-jacked words, and seek out face-to-face conversations with family, friends, and fellow citizens. Above all, we must purge education of petty politics, and once again make the cultivation of logos a central focus of everything from grammar school through university.
UnHerd may be the ugliest website on the internet. It’s the graphic design equivalent of a vomitorium, every editorial impulse horked up unto the page and left to congeal. Content is violently expelled at the reader. I’ve seen Angelfire and Geocities websites that were more attractive. Nevertheless, we’re here, wading through the incoherent jumble of grids, sidebars, podcast tiles, and repeated modules, because, as the man says “the very core of our humanity is at stake.”
The argument begins at maximum altitude: logos is humanity itself, and misology is “perhaps the definitive characteristic of 21st-century life.” Once you say that, everything else has to become evidence of the same mega-disease. Campus identitarianism, degraded political speech, activist euphemism, Trumpian hyperbole, social media, smartphones, AI summaries, institutional cowardice, bad pedagogy — all are folded into “misology.” If humanity’s innermost being is being extinguished, if Homo sapiens is “an endangered species,” then the closing advice can’t help sounding like pamphlet boilerplate. “Put down our phones, read good books, reclaim meanings, seek face-to-face conversations” — okay, great, but after the preceding escalation, it feels like telling people to fight Ragnarok by journaling, flossing, and supporting local independent radio. “Logos” becomes another noble word floating above the mess, which is ironically close to the very linguistic inflation he is criticizing.
These civilizational-alarm essays often miss a simple point: decadence usually arrives as a series of reasonable-seeming accommodations. Each one has a justification. Each one can be defended in isolation. The damage appears only in aggregate, after enough people have made enough locally defensible choices that the original standard becomes unrecoverable. “We stopped reading books.” Well, why? Because of phones? Credential inflation? Exhausted parents? Schools that turned reading into test-prep? The collapse of leisure? The rise of streaming? The decline of religious and civic cultures? The fact that plenty of people never read much in the first place? Those are different phenomena requiring different explanations. But under the master-word “misology,” they blur into one condition: hatred of reason.
The villain story is emotionally satisfying: bad people did bad things because they hate truth, courage, books, and civilization. But that is never how institutional rot happens. A more accurate account is less theatrical: people made local decisions under pressure. They avoided a lawsuit. They placated a loud faction. They softened a standard because enforcement was exhausting. They adopted a euphemism because the old word had become socially radioactive. They let a policy slide because no single case seemed worth the fight. They accepted a little managerial language because it seemed harmless. They used AI “just this once” because the semester was overloaded. They let students read less because everyone else had already lowered expectations. No one needed to hate logos. They only needed to prefer peace, convenience, plausible deniability, career safety, or efficiency in the immediate case.
But okay, let’s pretend: I’ve read this essay, and now I’m all fired up to go out there and join the campaign for the restoration of man. I begin by reading Plato in a spirit of civilizational renewal and discover that my friends are discussing a show I haven’t watched, a meme I haven’t seen, and a group chat I muted for the sake of my humanity. I try to revive face-to-face conversation, only to find that everyone is tired, scheduled, avoidant, or vaguely suspicious of my new intensity. I put down the phone and immediately fall out of the informal commons. I object to euphemism, ideological language, or institutional cowardice, and instead of restoring logos, I become “that guy,” then “possibly problematic,” then the subject of a short, serious conversation with someone from HR who keeps using the word “impact.” Help, Howland, what do I do now? He won’t have any answers. At that point, “read books and be courageous” has reached the end of its usefulness.
Amusingly, the existence of this decline-thinkpiece genre weakens its own premise. If the West is truly drowning in boredom, hatred of logos, mass stupidity, spiritual exhaustion, or civilizational amnesia, it is curious how many magazines can still support a professional class of people elegantly announcing the fact every Tuesday. Decline may be real in some respects, but “decline” is also a content category. It has house styles, reliable emotional beats, and an audience who read, nod, share, and feel morally awake, without facing any of the hard choices. No one is asked to give up a friendship, lose a promotion, homeschool a child, confront a principal, abandon a platform, take a financial hit, or accept social awkwardness as the price of principle. The essay gestures toward sacrifice while remaining safely within the realm of approved seriousness. The prophet of decline has become one of decline’s stable professions.
That a substantial part of this generation may be lost, at least in the sense that they will accomplish little, seems to Hoffer a real possibility. “If you raise a generation,” he says, “that is used to having their appetites instantly satisfied, you are going to have a south sea island civilization. And you can’t have a south sea island civilization on this sized continent. You won’t last five minutes.” He wonders whether a generation that has grown accustomed to having its desires immediately fulfilled can produce anything of lasting value. “Instantness,” he says, ” is a characteristic of animals. If the young adopt it they will submit to the tutelage of medicine men and they will not achieve anything of importance.”
Hoffer considers it at least a possibility that an anti-Semite movement could emerge from the present racial tensions in the United States. “It would be very easy,” he says, “to make out the case that all the major problems of the country were started by Jews. All you have to do is say what people like Chomsky say. America might find itself solving its domestic problems by blaming Jews. Lili and I will be inside the barricades with them fighting for survival.”
— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America
Hoffer! thou shouldst be living at this hour. America hath need of thee.
A dubious study says handwriting improves “brain connectivity” more than typing. I believe it. When I write by hand, my brain is extremely connected — mostly to questions like, “What does this chickenscratch say?” “Damn, my hand hurts!” and “Christ, this is slower than molasses in January.” When I type, by contrast, using my patented index-fingers-plus-right-thumb system, my brain is mainly occupied with correcting typos and noticing that the last two lines have been produced with the caps-lock key still on. So I’m not sure either method makes me think better. Handwriting gives me more time to suffer; typing gives me more chances to correct myself. In the end, the brain connectivity probably evens out.
While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.
…Pangram, to be clear, is not useless. But this is exactly the problem: It’s too easy to twist and contest Pangram’s conclusions, especially when nobody really agrees on which uses of AI are or aren’t ethical. Just like chatbots, AI-detection tools have become effective enough for widespread use, but not reliable enough to fully trust. In this way, Pangram and other detectors are mirror images of the AI products they are hunting for.
I admire Wong’s attempt to bring facts and perspective to a moral panic, but I fear it’s largely beside the point. The mob does not primarily want accuracy. It wants authorization. I’ve already seen several articles and posts which indicate to me that the narrative has congealed around Pangram being the authority that can tell AI from non-AI. It has become one of those things that “everyone” knows.
“Is Pangram good at detecting AI?”
“That’s what ‘they’ say!”
In fairness, most of what we “know” is like this. We do not personally verify food safety standards, bridge engineering, drug trials, crime statistics, economic data, historical dates, or medical advice. We live by delegated trust. The problem is that delegated trust and herd belief feel similar from the inside.
Who is “they”? What do “they” know, and how do we know that they know it? The next person you see repeating the claims of Pangram’s accuracy doesn’t know how it works, or how reliable it is. They just know that an article or spokesperson told them what they wanted to hear. They just know that “studies have shown.” They just know the sweet relief of doubt and insecurity being assuaged. Pirate Wires published an excellent debunking of the panic around data centers and water usage last year, and I still hear friends repeating the conventional wisdom that “AI is using up all the water.” (Strangely, the “misinformation” sniffers are nowhere to be seen on this issue.)
Studies and corrections have limited power for now. A study can answer, “How much water does this consume?” or “How accurate is this detector?” But the panic is asking different questions: “Are we being replaced?” “Are people cheating at being human?” “Is civilization being hollowed out?” “Can I still trust any text I read?” “Are my own skills suddenly worth less?” Those are existential anxieties, not spreadsheet questions. Once anxiety has moralized itself, the facts become subordinate. People do not say, “I am afraid and disoriented.” They say, “This is theft.” “This is fraud.” “This is environmental destruction.” “This is soulless slop.” “This is the end of human creativity.” Some of those claims may contain truth in particular cases, but their social function is often emotional laundering. Fear enters the machine and comes out as righteousness.
In a panic, people do not merely want facts. They want reassurance that the walls still hold. They want an authority to step forward, raise his hands, gesture for calm, and say that the malefactors have been identified and the contamination contained. In earlier ages, that authority might have been priest, magistrate, censor, expert, committee, or cop. In ours, with perfect comic symmetry, it may be software. The crowd terrified that judgment has been outsourced to machines now asks a machine to tell it whom to punish.
The harsh truth is that this probably has to burn itself out socially before facts matter much. People will need to see enough absurd accusations, enough friendly fire, enough ruined trust, enough obviously human prose dragged before the tribunal. Until then, skepticism will sound to the panicked like apologetics for the devil.
I’ve only had a couple of nicknames in my life.
As an infant, my grandmother called me “Puttser,” because of the way I apparently “puttsed” around in my crib. My parents used it affectionately through my childhood. My younger brother, less affectionately.
Then came high school. In tenth grade, I played varsity soccer. I was 5’2″ and 105 pounds. One of the juniors looked at me and decided that “Toddler” would do nicely. There was no appeal process. Once a nickname enters circulation, it belongs to the crowd. I carried that one for the rest of the season.
The years passed.
Last night at the gym, I was finishing a 450-pound squat when one of the employees happened to walk by. He stopped, raised his eyebrows, and exclaimed, “That’s big weight!”
There it was: another sobriquet. “Big Weight.”
Not officially, of course. He didn’t mean it as a nickname. He was simply reacting to what was on the bar. But nicknames often begin that way. Someone says something offhand, everyone immediately recognizes its fitness, and a new identity enters the world. And I have to admit, of all the names I’ve worn, this one has a certain dignity.
The funny thing is that the progression almost tells a story by itself. Puttser to Toddler to Big Weight. There are worse ways to chart a life. As a infant, I was nicknamed for fidgeting like an inchworm. As a teenager, I was nicknamed for being physically small. Decades later, after thousands of hours under barbells, after all the accumulated meals, sets, repetitions, and aches, I finally acquired a nickname that refers not to my size but to the size of the thing I’m moving.
Not “Big Guy.” Not “Tank.” Not “Ox.” Big Weight. The emphasis remains where any lifter would want it: on the iron.
So if you happen to see me shuffling around today, moving with all the grace and agility of a man who recently had 450 pounds on his back, please show the proper respect. Step aside. Big Weight’s coming through.
It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power — power to oppress others.
— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
****
Without being very sharp, you can imagine all human beings want to be free, and not unhappy. This is false. They want their own freedom, not their neighbor’s. They want their happiness, or unhappiness, not their neighbor’s. When two freedoms meet, it’s war.
— Georges Perros, Paper Collage
“You steal ideas, you steal sentences,” he says, “if you are a creative person. If you don’t know how to steal, you don’t know how to create.” It is like a cow eating grass, to use one of Hoffer’s favorite metaphors. “The cow does not become grass,” says Hoffer, “the grass turns into cow.” Quotations, thoughts, a turn of phrase, and ideas in general taken from other writers are alfalfa to the creative person.
— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America
Let no one say I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts by being arranged differently!
— Pascal, Pensées
Originality is often treated as if it had to be immaculate conception. A thought must arrive unsullied by influence, untouched by other minds, bearing no fingerprints from the books one has read or the sentences one has admired. But writers are not virgins visited by angels. They are ruminants, tennis players, pickpockets, ventriloquists, and bad listeners. They steal, fail to steal properly, misunderstand what they have stolen, and sometimes discover that the thing they meant to steal was never there in the first place.
Attempted theft is rarely clean. A young writer tries to copy a cadence, a tone, a gesture on the page. But he can’t do it exactly. His own lack of skill interferes. His own preoccupations intrude. The borrowed coat hangs badly on his shoulders. So he cuts it, patches it, shortens the sleeves, replaces the buttons, and by the time he can wear it in public, it is no longer the master’s coat. Imitation fails in the direction of personality.
There is a comic version of this in the mondegreen. You hear Hendrix sing “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but your ear, composing behind your back, hears “kiss this guy.” For a moment you think: what a line. Then you learn it was never the line at all. Good news: now it is salvage. The original has no claim on what he never said. A mondegreen is plagiarism without a victim.
Books do something similar to the mind. You read an ambiguous passage and believe the author has opened one door, only to learn later that he was probably pointing toward another. Well, the room you entered by mistake still exists. Sometimes a book gives you an idea by failing to say it. The writer says one thing; the reader hears another; the error becomes a footpath. Misreading is often an unauthorized sequel to the original sentence.
In the fourth century, Aelis Donatus wrote a line that frequently appears in today’s quotation analogies, “Confound those who have said our remarks before us.” But with reverse quotation, our predecessors are quoting us! Instead of a “burden of the past,” in which the achievements of earlier generations rob us of opportunities for creativity, there could be a burden of the future, in which what we say merely echoes words to come. Imagine objecting: That man was quoting what I am going to say. He plagiarized what I am destined to write. However odd, it is a feeling we sometimes have. We know we created a certain thought or set of words, and so, when we discover them already expressed long ago, it feels as if they had been stolen from us in advance.
Gary Saul Morson adds the metaphysical absurdity. We all know the burden of the past: the suspicion that the dead have used up all the good sentences. But I like this idea of the burden of the future, too. Perhaps our predecessors are not merely people from whom we steal, but people who have stolen from us in advance. You labor over a thought, feel the private triumph of invention, then discover some dead man in a toga, wig, cassock, or frock coat said it more stylishly centuries ago. The outrage is absurd but real. He plagiarized what you were destined to write.
Worse still, the line of theft runs forward too. Perhaps every original sentence I write is being stolen from some unborn writer who would have arrived at it honestly in 2087. I am not merely robbing graves. I am looting cradles. The burden of the future is the suspicion that I am plagiarizing my literary grandchildren.
Burke thought civilization was a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. Literature may be the same arrangement, but conducted under cover of darkness. The dead steal from us by saying our sentences before we are born. We steal from the unborn by spending their inheritance early. We steal from our contemporaries, siblings, cousins, rivals, and friends by misreading, mishearing, misremembering, digesting, rearranging, and improving whatever they leave unattended. To write is to enter a marketplace where everyone is stealing from everyone else, including the dead, who had the low cunning to rob us in advance. Call it tradition if you like. I prefer “honor among thieves.”