51 The art of letting things alone:to be practiced the more so the wilder the waves of public or of private life. There are hurricanes in human affairs, tempests of passion, when it is wise to retire to harbor and ride at anchor. Remedies often make diseases worse: in such cases one has to leave them to their natural course and the moral suasion of time. It takes a wise doctor to know when not to prescribe, and at times the greater skill consists in not applying remedies. The proper way to still the storms of the vulgar is to hold your hand and let them calm down of themselves. To give way now is to conquer by and by. A fountain gets muddy with but little stirring up, and does not get clear by our meddling with it but by our leaving it alone. The best remedy for disturbances is to let them run their course, for so they quiet down.
— Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
The online world seems to exist in a tropical climate. Storms of the vulgar, hell; it’s a years-long rainy season out there. I’d love to believe things will quiet down on their own, but I suspect we’ll just have to move to a temperate internet zone, if there are any.
People between the ages of twenty and thirty read a good deal, after thirty their reading drops off and by forty is confined to each person’s special subject, newspapers and magazines; so that the most important part of one’s audience, and that which should be mainly written for, consists of specialists and people between twenty and thirty.
I haven’t taken a census, but I’d be willing to bet that my own audience consists of amateurs and people between forty and seventy. I suspect that holds true for much of the remains of the blogosphere. Jonah Goldberg claims that blogging, at least the political/current events type, was a precursor to Twitter and its numerous pathologies. While there’s something to that, I like to think that the blog has evolved into the abode of an older, more reflective audience.
The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people whom he knows? If this is his position he can do no wrong, the spirit in which he works will ensure that his defects will be only as bad spelling or bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. If, on the other hand, he is playing for social success and to get a reputation for being clever, then no matter how dextrous his work may be, it is but another mode of the speaking with the tongues of men and angels without charity; it is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
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.