The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Guilty as charged. I will doggedly charge through four hundred pages of cannon-fodder prose in order to pillage a useful idea, quotation, or reference. The jewels of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Chesterton’s essays, and various works of history and philosophy will be crudely stitched into my bearskin cloak to display my barbarian erudition. Like severed heads on pikes, I like to post quotations from an array of authors around the borders of my territory here. Behold my fearsome literary prowess! Quake, my enemies!
We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
The mouse-ideas of envy and resentment are running wild throughout many institutions these days, shredding valuable sources of wisdom to make their nests and befouling everything else with their waste. Where are the cat-ideas who would cull their numbers? Probably lazing in a sunbeam somewhere. There’s no point even in naming them; they never come when called. I used to have a terrier who would lie still for hours at a stretch, ears perked, completely focused, whenever he heard a mouse scratching around in a cupboard or closet. He would not allow himself to be distracted by anything until he had finally pounced upon it and gobbled it up. We need more terrier-ideas like him.
Plato suggests that how we process and articulate our ideas is inseparable from what we end up thinking and doing, that philosophical excellence is as much a matter of dialectical engagement as it is about arriving at a substantive vision. It is hardly surprising that he mistrusted writing as much as he did, seeing it as more likely to dull the mind than invigorate it. The written word is a medium that is peculiarly susceptible to enabling shallow cleverness rather than nourishing genuinely intelligent thought.
I read around a hundred books a year, yet I increasingly agree with old Plato here. I appreciate the way that podcasting can be a medium for in-depth, invigorating conversation, yet I only listen to podcasts occasionally. To some extent, that’s because if I feel like listening to something, I’d rather it be music. I can’t listen to a podcast while working, because concentrating on a conversation uses the same part of the brain I need to concentrate on my work. Ultimately, though, it’s probably just habit. I know my way around the world of books. Who has time to explore the million-and-one podcast options out there?
One of the diseases of our spectacle-riddled culture is that we forget that the invisible life has all the human splendor of the visible one, and often more. I have had in mind all along, and have appealed to where possible, the humble bookworm, the amateur naturalist, the contemplative taxi driver. If you, like me, are naturally drawn to achievement, collect examples of ordinary thinkers — human beings whose splendor is known only to a few, their family, their neighbors, their coworkers. Settle back in awe from time to time, as I do, in thinking about the vast treasury of thought and experience that will never be available to us.
I like to assume that my audience consists of precisely this type of anonymous foolosopher. You could be thumbing your phones or keeping up with the Kardashians, but instead, you choose to seek out random, uneven thoughts from an ordinary joe about books, current events, and life in general. That makes you pretty special, if a little odd.
The choice was put to them whether they would like to be kings or kings’ couriers. Like children they all wanted to be couriers. So now there are a great many couriers; they post through the world and, as there are no kings left, shout to each other their meaningless and obsolete messages. They would gladly put an end to their wretched lives, but they dare not because of their oath of service.
—Kafka, “Couriers”
There are many interpretations of this parable, but the meaning seems clear and obvious to me: Once upon a time, the blog was the ne plus ultra of social media, or “Web 2.0,” as it was then called. Each blogger ruled hizzorher own kingdom, issuing edicts, jeremiads and stemwinders according to whim. Then came the great enclosure, when we forfeited our kingdoms to move into the gated pens of Facebook and Twitter, where self-expression is limited to primitively reacting to whatever trending “news” is carelessly dumped into the feeding trough. Deleting one’s accounts would seem to be the only logical choice, but doing so would give Zuckerberg and Dorsey the legal right to harvest your organs as a result. (Always read the fine print in the terms of service.) Frankly, I had no idea Kafka was such a prescient visionary. I might have to read him more closely.
I have noticed a hundred times, and do not doubt that many of my readers must have noticed a hundred-and-one or a hundred-and-two times, that books with an arresting, imaginative title are seldom worth much. It is to be presumed that they were invented before the book itself, frequently perhaps by someone else.
A snappy title does not a book make, it’s true. But for us lesser scribblers, the title might be the snowball we need to get the creative process rolling. It’s a writing prompt I’ve used many times: I come across an interesting phrase (often a song lyric—I never claimed to be a highbrow), and think, “If I had a post titled Such-and-Such, what would it be about?” Then I sit down and reverse-engineer it into existence. I’m not ashamed to say that there are many posts in the archives here whose best part is the title. The fact that many writers and authors don’t get to choose the titles of their articles or books is one of the many reasons why I could never write anywhere else. If I can’t amuse myself with obscure references or inside jokes, well, what’s the point in writing at all?
The buried.— We withdraw into concealment: but not out of any kind of personal ill-humor, as though the political and social situation of the present day were not good enough for us, but because through our withdrawal we want to economize and assemble forces of which culture will later have great need, and more so if this present remains this present and as such fulfills its task. We are accumulating capital and seeking to make it secure: but, as in times of great peril, to do that we have to bury it.
It would be flattering to think that my reclusive nature was due to latent genius, but no, I’m pretty sure it’s just personal ill-humor. The political and social situation of the present day just isn’t good enough for me. It’s not me, it’s you.
Most people can’t be reached, of course, because you can’t reason someone out of a belief that he wasn’t reasoned into.
Apparently this venerable saying originates with Jonathan Swift. Is it true, though? How many of us form our bedrock beliefs through reason? None, I’d say. And yet how many of us change our minds later, whether grudgingly or willingly, upon being presented with alternatives? I’ve certainly reasoned myself out of ideas and behaviors that were impressed upon me early in life, and I’m sure I’m not unique in that. I think this is a case of the neatness of the rhetorical technique tricking us into accepting the truth of the assertion.
When affairs get into a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says “All right,” and goes to sleep in his arm-chair.
The Lady of the House will be quite amused to learn that she is the avatar of philosophy, the word of wu wei made flesh. Though I have grown in that direction myself, I still have a competitive spirit which bristles at being forced to alter my plans. I have a tendency to take setbacks as a personal insult, a slap with a glove. I am ready to duel with Reality itself to satisfy my honor, or at least to pummel it into submission. How many times do I emerge victorious? Not the point. What’s important is to fight well.
A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity–and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.
— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I suppose mountain climbing would indeed work, especially in the Swiss Alps, but I can vouch for the fact that unloading nearly a thousand boxes by hand off of two shipping containers also serves in a pinch, especially if you add in a two-hour time limit before the truck driver needs to get moving. By around box 935, one has achieved, if not Zen-like calm detachment, a single-minded focus on endurance. Beyond good and evil lies…exhaustion, it turns out.