books

Bookshelves

By in books No Comments

We devoted readers love to talk about our books, but let’s take a moment to appreciate the supporting cast — the bookshelves themselves. I’ve only recently graduated from bookshelf-beggar to bookshelf-chooser. That’s not to say I’ve suddenly acquired taste and discernment, of course, just that I’m no longer dependent upon particle-board shelves from big-box stores. The Lady of the House keeps a Facebook alert for bookshelves for sale within the area, and I’ve found a few really nice ones in the last couple years. I just got this one last week for fifty dollars. Over six feet tall, and made of real wood, even! Look at all that empty space. Doesn’t the potential of it just warm your heart? How many books that I have yet to discover will eventually come to roost there?

It was almost exactly two years ago that I got this other one. (It’s long-since filled.) I boasted to a co-worker that it only cost me twenty dollars. Maybe this will become a spring ritual of mine? The air is warming, the earth is coming back to life, people are cleaning out their houses, and library sales are blossoming again. What better way to celebrate than by getting a new bookshelf?

 

The Strongest Oaths Are Straw to the Fire In the Blood

By in books, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Erasmus was weary of the life he had once loved so well. We are shaken profoundly when we read his plaintive prayer, “May God gather me soon unto Himself so that I quit this mad world.” For where had the spirit room to live and to grow, now that fanaticism raged through the land? The sublime realm of humanism which Erasmus had built had been overran by enemy hordes and wellnigh conquered; gone were the days of “eruditio et eloquentia”; men no longer hearkened to the subtle and delicate message of imaginative genius, but turned their ears to listen to the rough and passion-wrought babble of politics. Thought had succumbed to mob-frenzy, it had donned the uniform of Luther or of the Pope; the erudite no longer waged war in elegantly phrased epistles and books, but, like fishwives, hurled gross invectives at each other’s heads; none was willing to understand what his neighbour said, but instead each tried to impose his own pet belief, his particular doctrine, upon all the rest. Woe unto him who stood aside and took no part in the game! Twofold hatred was hurled against those who remained aloof. Those who live for the spirit are lonely indeed at times when passion rages. Who is there left to write for when ears are deafened with political yappings and yelpings?

— Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam

Zweig clearly identified with Erasmus, and it’s even more moving when you consider that he published this book in 1934. Eight years later, he and his wife committed suicide in exile, no longer willing to hope for the return of the cosmopolitan ideal destroyed by the world wars. (Theodore Dalrymple wrote a wonderful essay about him that’s also worth reading.) We are fortunate enough to live in more comfortable and peaceable times, which is why I find it especially hard to forgive those who blow on the embers of ideological conflict out of ignorance, boredom, or both. Today’s political arguments, both professional and amateur, make professional wrestling promos look subtle and subdued. However impractical one might find Zweig’s pacifistic ideal, he was at least willing to die rather than compromise it. The least we can do, in our far more advantageous circumstances, is refuse to dignify today’s clownfights with our participation.

In Groups, Parties, Nations and Ages, It Is the Rule

By in books, foolosophy No Comments

Justin Smith:

I had long supposed that human thought and behavior have been a relatively static thing for the past 200,000 years, that there is a fairly narrow range of species-specific responses to the world around us, and that these are not going to fundamentally change until or unless we become a different sort of animal. The past few years have tested this long-held assumption. I came to feel that the world was going mad, that many people, including many I know and love, were now speaking and reasoning as if they had passed through to the other side of a looking-glass, or had come back from the other side, and were now communicating in a frenetic glossolalia or in pretend robot-voices. And it terrified me. I began to wonder whether this is not a normal process of disillusionment one can expect to go through at a certain stage of life, when the scales fall from our eyes and we realize that human beings have been bonkers all along and that society is just a flimsy tarp that camouflages this madness, or whether, instead, there really is something important about the present moment that is bringing the irrationality out, like methane from below the ice of the melting tundra.

I found his previous book disappointing, but I was browsing through this one last week in Barnes & Noble and it seemed interesting. Personally, I can’t remember a time before I assumed that “normality” was a tenuous achievement for both individuals and groups.

Dream of Better Lives, The Kind Which Never Hate

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, religion No Comments

In fact, for many misotheists, love is precisely the centerpiece of their moral philosophy. One could go so far as to argue that misotheists are more likely to foster love for humanity because they have already channeled and contained whatever capacity of hatred they possessed when they direct their hostility against an intangible antagonist—God. There is nothing (or much less) of the bitterness, destructiveness, and violence in the misotheist that marks the determined racist, misogynist, or religious bigot.

— Bernard Schweizer, Hating God : The Untold Story of Misotheism

I’m not sure how to spell the sound of surprised, muffled laughter, so I’ll just say yes, one could go so far as to argue that point — if one didn’t mind looking ridiculous. Who knew that the human capacity for hatred and violence was a finite resource, subject to hydraulic limitations?

On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love for the human race — that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind — is an unaccountable person with whom it is difficult to deal upon any well-known and recognized principles, and who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

— James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

The Tyranny of the Present

By in books, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit, writing 2 Comments

Adam O’Fallon Price:

But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now.

Oh, no. Surely not. No, please don’t…!

Our current era is marked by cynicism and nihilism—it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that we managed to elect the worst person in the world as president, a con artist and pathological liar who will say anything to stay in the public consciousness and keep the inverted pyramid of his shabby criminal empire from toppling down onto his empty head. Trump is an avatar of everything impermanent, incompetent, and insincere about this era, and I believe there’s a great inchoate hunger for the opposite, for someone who thinks that words and ideas matter.

Sigh. He did it. Yes, of course, if a literary style guide becomes a surprise bestseller, it must have something to do with Donald Trump, the star at the center of the bien-pensant solar system. A moment’s reflection would remind us that Steven Pinker, to name one example, also wrote a bestselling style guide in 2014, suggesting that there may just be a sizable audience with a perennial interest in the craft of writing regardless of political trends, an audience that, shockingly, might not spend every conscious moment obsessing over Donald Trump. Frankly, this kind of “praise” is a philistine insult. It reduces a thoughtful consideration of language and writing to just another emoticon in the frivolous chatter of the news cycle. A book on stylish writing, grown women wearing ridiculous pussy hats — they’re just interchangeable symbols of self-indulgent #resistance. I’m afraid the barbarians are already inside the gates of the literary imagination.

As the Heathen Do

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Leah Price:

The subject of this book is marginalia – what readers write in the margin and how readers underline and annotate books. Sherman describes a big historical shift. We tend to see writing in books as an act of defacement. For example, if you return your library copy of Sherman’s book with passages that have been highlighted you will receive a hefty fine. But readers in the Renaissance thought that if you didn’t leave notes in the margin of a book then you were being lazy and passive, because you weren’t doing the job of engaging with the text and answering back to it.

Sherman showed that until two or three hundred years ago, children were taught how to write in books. There were very conventional systems of how you were supposed to take notes in the margins. At the same time, until wood pulp was used in paper making in the 19th century, paper was a very expensive commodity, and because people didn’t have scrap paper lying about, books became a useful source of raw material. So you find books with shopping lists written in the front, or spaces where people practised their handwriting.

More evidence that the Gordian knots of moral conflict, rather than being unraveled, are simply severed by the sword of technology. New knots reappear in new circumstances, though. For instance, now that there are convenient alternatives to defacing one’s reading material, what is to be done with those who persist in their deviance? Are they to be offered therapy, the hemlock cup, or lifetime banishment to the land of audiobooks?

Obiter Scripta, no. 63

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, obiter scripta No Comments

I would think it obvious that it is essential to human equilibrium and a true engagement with reality to acknowledge that tragedy is the defining part of human life and to accept the limits (and opportunities) this imposes, both individual and political. The effort to deny tragedy was among the fundamental factors responsible for what happened in the twentieth century. Utopianism defies tragedy—and fails.

Two of the individuals most important to my discussion, T. E. Lawrence and Vladimir Peniakoff, found a kind of serenity in resolute acceptance of and engagement with the violence in our nature, deriving from it what I would call the only true solution, the classical one, identified by Aristotle as the pursuit of virtue, the only proper pursuit for a human being.

Such is an uncomfortable route toward a solution since it demands individual self-examination and renounces the consoling ideologies and utopian illusions of a collective resolution of the human problem. Virtue is an all but totally ignored conception today, when narcissism and the (futile) pursuit of self-esteem are the prevailing counterfeits of individual worth and achievement, with death denied in the search for the therapy of immortality.

— William Pfaff, The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

Pfaff identifies the First World War as the cataclysmic event in which the old certainties were shattered. Since then, we’ve been frantically pawing through the shards, trying to piece them back together, creating various grotesqueries in the process. He also notes the role simple boredom, a frivolous longing for “something interesting,” played in the destruction. A century later, in the midst of unprecedented affluence, other bored people, needing something stronger than video games, prefer to live-action-role-play as Nazis and Communists to make their lives seem significant. As George Santayana said, that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to: strutting and roaring. The alternative, humility, is more painful than battle.

…The Point Is to Change It

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

That feeling when you click through to read a review of a book about Greek philosophy, only to be jarringly reminded that you’re reading the Nation:

As Adam Smith noted, perhaps with a hint of melancholy, we seem to help each other best when we act selfishly. He may be wrong, but is Stoicism really going to help us overthrow capitalism?

Sparkling Armada of Promises

By in battling personal entropy, books, foolosophy No Comments

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and that will stave off hunger for as long as possible, like protein, fiber, and fats. I exercise—not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care: I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.

— Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

In her recent article for Harper’s, Lionel Shriver raised a point that I hadn’t precisely considered before. Comparing it to the current enthusiasm for demanding “total social and professional exile” for thought-criminals, she noted that during the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-’90s, for the infinitely more serious crime of double murder, there was no equivalent demand to give his previous sporting and acting careers the collective silent treatment, to erase them from cultural memory. Were we more mature and sagacious then, capable of handling ambiguity, or did our vindictiveness simply lack the laserlike intensity that social media would later provide?

Anthony Kronman, in his magnum opus Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, explored the theme at length: having posited that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and completely free to act according to his own uncaused will, envious Westerners set out to usurp his throne and claim these qualities for themselves through scientific mastery. But what would we do if we had a God-like power to control and optimize existence? What vision of the Good motivates us, exactly? A life of unrestricted choice, free of suffering? What if our desire to eradicate all the “bad” parts of life, from the personal to the political, is just the immaturity of the perpetual adolescent who only wants to affirm a comfortable life of video games and junk food while wearing earbuds to ignore the sound of the responsibilities and tragedies of adulthood pounding on the locked bedroom door?

Ehrenreich has come to the conclusion that freedom paradoxically comes from relinquishing the obsessive desire for control, from accepting that ultimately “only one ship is seeking us.” A life spent in paranoid anxiety over optimizing one’s health is not worth extra decades or centuries of existence, no matter how many tools we develop to make it possible. Likewise, a life spent enraged by the idea that our fellow citizens are thinking the wrong thoughts or pressing the wrong button in the voting booth is a waste of time. The body politic can’t be purified and indefinitely preserved any more than ours can, and the efforts to do so will be rife with unintended consequences.

< 1 2 3 4 5 >»