obiter scripta

Obiter Scripta, no. 77

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Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books, like you and me, have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas. Some of us may occasionally change our beliefs and our lives as a result of a chain of conscious reasoning, but not very often or very honestly. Our own age has forcibly reminded us that intellectual elites often struggle to bring their societies with them. Their default role is to tag along, explaining with perfect hindsight why things inevitably turned out as they did.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

It’s been said many times that humanity has suffered a series of shocks to its self-image thanks to Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, who demoted us from our position at the center of the universe, the pinnacle of the animal kingdom, and the command center of our own consciousness, respectively. Those of us who still read books for pleasure are constantly reminded that we’re like Amish who insist on riding our horses and buggies down the information superhighway as all the kids zip by us in their text messages at the speed of 5G, laughing at our quaint old habits. One could take this particular excerpt as another diminishment of the bibliophile self-image, but I prefer to think of the ideas and concepts I encounter in my reading as akin to melodies, not blueprints. Music doesn’t make me a “better” person; reading doesn’t make me smarter. Neither one is leading to anything in a progressive, cumulative sense; they’re just here to make the present moment a little bit brighter or tastier. Humming a sweet snippet of Tchaikovsky at Christmastime; reading an elegant expression of a feeling or an idea — these need no external justification.

Obiter Scripta, no. 76

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It is true enough that in Russia writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows where all that is arrested is their development. This is an important difference, but it does nothing to change the fact that grievance is the source of all interesting prose. Without grievance, a writer tends to become a celebrant, which is an agreeable but repetitious state. After you have sung two choruses of “God Bless America,” what else is there to say?

— Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble about Language, Technology and Education 

If this is so, and I think it often is, why should it be? Are we naturally belligerent and inclined to argument? Or does our lust for novelty prod us to differentiate ourselves from others, thus leading to contrast and conflict? Why is it so difficult to be interesting without being provocative?

Obiter Scripta, no. 74

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A major division in the bearded kingdom exists between those who revel in no longer having to bother with maintenance, letting Nature have its luxuriant bushy way, and those who continue to keep a razor nearby—prudently pruning or shaving the cheeks every few days. A well-clipped beard on a kindly man looks as proper as a well-kept lawn on Sunday.

— Phillip Lopate, “On Shaving a Beard,” Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays

A couple times, I’ve tried to let mine grow wild for a month or more, hoping that after its wiry rumspringa phase, it will settle down and behave like the wise old elder of my facial community. So far, its rebelliousness has outlasted my patience. It doesn’t help that my beard nation has balkanized into the Brown, Blond and Grey tribes each claiming their own territory, resisting unification. I have yet to achieve the philosopher-king style — more like “clinically depressed fur trapper.”A dedicated topiary practice is still necessary to keep anarchy at bay.

Obiter Scripta, no. 73

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One might as well “blame” the decline of the conversational style of writing. Familiar essays were fundamentally, even self-consciously, conversational; it is no surprise that Swift wrote one of his best short pieces on “Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation”; that Montaigne tackled “Of the Art of Discussion”; that Addison and Steele extensively analyzed true and false wit; that Hazlitt titled his books Table Talk, Plain Speaker, and The Round Table; or that Oliver Wendell Holmes actually cast his familiar essays in the form of meal time dialogues. Why would a book like Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a celebration of good talk that was so popular in its time, be so unlikely today? I cannot go along with those who say “The art of conversation has died, television killed it,” since conversation grows and changes as inevitably as language. No, what has departed is not conversation but conversation-flavored writing, which implies a speaking relationship between writer and reader. How many readers today would sit still for a direct address by the author? To be called “gentle reader” or “hypocrite lecteur,” to have one’s arm pinched while dozing off, to be called to attention, flattered, kidded like a real person instead of a privileged fly on the wall—wouldn’t most readers today find such devices archaic, intrusive, even impudent? Oh, you wouldn’t? Good, we can go back to the old style, which I much prefer.

— Phillip Lopate, “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays

As I’ve said, one of my favorite things about blogs is the way they facilitate that same conversational familiarity. Perhaps I should phrase that in the past tense — there once was a time when the blogosphere was more like a neighborhood with community spirit. Comment sections could be left unlocked, and other bloggers and their followers could and frequently did drop in while making the rounds like daily wassailers. People made more of an effort to include other bloggers in their written conversations. Google used to have a blogsearch function which I would visit daily and use to search by topic, hoping to find some new site with an interesting voice (I even know of people who met their spouses that way). Does anyone bother keeping an updated blogroll anymore? Do people still occasionally check their site stats for the surprise of seeing who directed a burst of traffic their way? On Twitter, as I understand it, “quote-tweeting,” i.e. using someone else’s tweet as a springboard for your own, i.e. the standard conversational practice in the old blogosphere, is considered bad form, at least a nanoaggression if not an outright assault. Everyone now wants to speak and be heard, but no one wants to communicate.

Obiter Scripta, no. 72

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Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

I have a younger friend who has already had more adventure in his three decades than most of us have in a lifetime. Walt Whitman’s multitudes are homogenous compared to his. He has a very inquisitive mind despite a Hillbilly Elegy-type upbringing. He’s traveled widely and had enough unique experiences to already make for an interesting biography. He has a very dangerous job in the justice system in which he has been hospitalized at least a couple times with gunshot wounds and other “lesser” injuries, one of which required him to fatally shoot a man in self-defense. He’s great to have a conversation with, but it also sure makes me appreciate life in my hobbit-hole, never having adventures or doing anything unexpected. No one would want to read about my life, but I wouldn’t want to live any other.

Obiter Scripta, no. 71

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I have never been much of a teacher, but I can see how teaching can act as a feather duster of the mind.

— Theodore Dalrymple, False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine

I would like to think of my mind as a tidy bookshelf which just needs an occasional dusting. But when I consider how much of my learning mainly involves unlearning things I mistakenly thought were true or forgetting things which are no longer useful, I think what I really need is a gardener to trim the shrubbery, pull the weeds, and most of all, take a leaf blower to all the debris cluttering up my synapses.

Obiter Scripta, no. 70

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To my mind, the maximum length of an aphorism is whatever can be written in one sitting. Written, not read—for many aphorisms may be taken in at once. An aphorism can be revised, of course, before it is released into the world. It may be improved, simplified polished; but if it is complicated, if another train of thought is added, even one fully consequential to the first… then it is an essay, no matter how short. The reason is, so to speak, phenomenological. Deriving from one glance to the horizon, an aphorism can only contain as much as the eye can take in in a moment. This is more for some than for others, but not very much more. If its essence is not set down in one sitting, usually immediately, then it is lost.

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

That’s how I’ve approached most of my writing here. I’d always thought of my posts as a species of dwarf essay, but maybe I’ve actually been producing plump aphorisms instead.

Obiter Scripta, no. 69

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There is such a thing as a religious temperament. It involves the will to believe in order to assuage an ache. It rejects, it recoils from, the sense that contingency is everywhere and everything, that there is nothing beyond it. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things.” There is, however, a conservative sensibility that finds flux exhilarating, that is delighted rather than depressed by the idea that there is no beyond and that everything is contingent. A secular conservative sensibility, even a secular conservative aesthetic, finds beauty in the Darwinian view of the world, a beauty that is a close analogue to the conservative vision of a just society respectful of, and dependent on, spontaneous order.

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

I was pleasantly surprised to come across Will’s description of himself as an “amiable atheist” in this section of the book; I hadn’t known that about him. The world of online atheism was, ironically enough, one of the first places where the Great Awokening took hold. They, and almost all other progressive blogs and websites, quickly became unreadable as the fanaticism grew, and as a result, most of the pop culture/current events sites I visit these days are conservative. I had just resigned myself to the background hum of axiomatic assumptions that without a belief in monotheism, life is meaningless and Western civilization is doomed. Most of all, I like the emphasis of that last sentence: if the fragile miracles of society and commerce can emerge spontaneously and organically, and be all the more beautiful and worthy of grateful devotion for that reason, I don’t see why the miracle of life itself should be any different.

Obiter Scripta, no. 68

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Doctor Johnson, being rowed down the Thames by a sculler, was assailed from the shore (as custom then was) by a foulmouthed fellow with a very generous flow of invective. Having endured as much as a man decently could, he turned on the scurrilist and said loudly and deliberately, “Sir, your mother, under pretext of keeping a bawdy house, was a receiver of stolen goods.” The subordinate clause provides at once the balance and the dynamic of this insult. “Under pretext of” gives evidence of judicious discrimination between appearance and reality; yet it implies that the man’s mother, casting about for the most decent front she could find for her fencing operations, could imagine nothing better than running a bawdy house. There is no way to make pretext or pretense of running a bawdy house except by running one, so that implication stands too. It is an extraordinarily opulent sentence; yet balanced, objective, and perfectly simple. One would like to think the recipient took it home and thought about it for several weeks.

— Robert Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side

In the course of my two minutes of Googling rigorous research, I learned that it was apparently considered good sport for boaters on the Thames to insult each other as they passed, but Adams suggests here that bystanders on the bank also took part. I find it much more amusing to imagine that some random weirdo just decided to verbally assault Johnson, whether he recognized him or not, just like I find it amusing to imagine a time-travelling Johnson taking part in a modern “Yo mama” fight. “Sir, it is a fact that your mother is so corpulent…”

Obiter Scripta, no. 67

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What he needed was to work in the shadows while another wielded power, he himself holding aloof from responsibility, reading noteworthy books within the four walls of a quiet room, writing works of his own invention, to no man subservient, beholden to none—and such was Erasmus’s notion of an ideal existence.

— Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam

There should be a particular word for that unexpected and poignant sense of kinship across centuries, where despite all the temporal, linguistic, and cultural differences, you feel like you’ve shared a knowing glance and a smile.

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