Bookshelves

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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.

Taking Heartache With Hard Work

By in nietzsche, philosophy, work No Comments

In a marvellous short portrait of Conrad, Bertrand Russell said of him, “I felt… that he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.” Because he saw life in such terms, Conrad emphasized the place and importance of work in life. There was, he believed, a particular kind of dignity in the sober exercise of one’s duty in the service of one’s work, precisely because life is such a perilous affair. Conrad had spent the first part of his life as a merchant seaman, and the kind of work he had in mind was largely active, physical work. In some respects he resembled Wittgenstein, who felt that there was something profoundly unhealthy about life as an academic philosopher and who himself gave up philosophy at various points in his life to work as a gardener. There was for Wittgenstein something honest about the kind of labour characteristic of work in a garden. This honesty derived from the sense that the external rhythm of nature, to which the gardener has to be responsive, helps to provide a kind of order to the inner world of the mind. It was also a matter of the fact that gardening provides a focus for the mind’s energy, helping it to avoid consuming itself in its own anxious self-questionings.

— Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

I don’t like being pressed for time, but I have to admit I do love being absorbed in work, whether paid labor, routine chores, or even exercise. I remember a busy day recently that extended well into the evening, and rather than feeling exhausted or grumpy afterward from the amount of work that had to be done, I felt a rather meditative calm, in addition to the pride of accomplishment. By contrast, I often feel restless on days with no pressing duties. It’s like being spoiled for choice. I can only read for a couple hours before I want to get up and do something else, which is why I prefer to save it for the time before bed. I suppose Aristotle would shake his head and dismiss me as a born beast of burden unsuited for the philosophical life. Well, at least Wittgenstein would have my back.

Interestingly, Nietzsche had also wanted to be a professional gardener after resigning his professorship, telling his mother in a letter, “There is no other cure for my health. I need real work, which takes time and induces tiredness without mental strain.” His physical limitations forced him to abandon the fantasy after three weeks, but he retained a fondness for horticultural metaphors in his writing. I recall that Phil Oliver was working on a book about philosophers and writers who loved walking; I wonder if anyone has ever done the same for those who favored gardening?

Football Is Not a Matter of Life and Death. It’s Much More Important Than That.

By in foolosophy, world football No Comments

M.M. Owen:

This writer – this intense thinker who perceived that everything was Sisyphean, who proclaimed that the only way to live was to revolt relentlessly against meaninglessness – loved a mere game. Loved it with as much intensity and consistency as he loved anything. Why?

Consider this: what could be more absurd than 22 people chasing a sphere of inflated leather around a rectangle of grass for 90 minutes, and believing that the amount of times said sphere crosses a couple of painted lines is a matter of the most profound importance? In any sort of rational analysis, football is fundamentally ridiculous. A flurry of imaginary meaning.

But in the absurdist analysis, human striving of any sort is fundamentally ridiculous, and all meaning is at bottom imaginary. Zoom out until yours is the long view of the cosmos, and there is no essential difference between chasing a football and chasing a career, or a first home, or the eradication of racial injustice, or your soulmate. All of our huffing and puffing will exhaust itself and be forgotten, in time. To find meaning anywhere, Camus thought, required approaching life with more than cold reason. It required filtering reality through different states of being.

This seems unnecessarily cerebral to me. Owen makes many interesting points about why “a mere game” can have such a hold on our attention and energy, but he never mentions the simplest one: it’s fun. Fun is too banal a concept for analysis, I suppose. Even our pets intuitively understand fun. If my cat could talk, I’m sure he’d say that it’s just plain fun for him to jump up, skitter across the garage floor, and start batting a pebble around for a few seconds. Writers and thinkers tend to be dreadfully serious, which means they dare not risk looking frivolous by suggesting that some things simply are as they appear; they stand on their own merit without any need for theoretical scaffolding. Games are meaningful in a different way than careers and relationships; they’re not all competing in a zero-sum fashion for the same goal.

Obiter Scripta, no. 66

By in bonsai minimalism, obiter scripta, santutthi No Comments

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.

Fixed, If Not Ordained

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

My generation has seen the West undone by consumerism, lax divorce laws, the Sexual Revolution, outsourcing, urbanization, and centralization. All are defended (even if only half-heartedly) by modern conservatives as “the price we must pay” to live in a free and prosperous country. They’re wrong. Liberty without morality is mere license; prosperity without charity is mere decadence. The traditionalist rejects both perversions while upholding the essential Good that they distort.

To quote Burke: “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” And what is it that Millennial traditionalists want? Friendship, family, community, an honest day’s work, real music, good books, and above all God. Kirk summed it up very nicely when he said that “conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship, and Christians call love of neighbor.”

— Michael Warren Davis, “The Radicalism of Russell Kirk”

What we call “globalization” is a sudden radical expansion in the worldwide division of labor—a miracle of human cooperation that, as such miracles so often are, goes mostly unappreciated and unloved, and often hated. Our globalization is hated for the same reason that Renaissance globalization was hated: It disrupts existing status arrangements and introduces new elements of insecurity and anxiety into communities whose members had believed their situations to be fixed, if not ordained—and who believe that they have a natural right to the fixity of those situations, and that the duty of the state is to secure them.

— Kevin D. Williamson, “The Division of Labor Is the Meaning of Life“

Something Else

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Samuel Loncar:

I am outraged at some injustice. The injustice is real, maybe even written on the face of a person mocking another culture or ethnic group. My blood rises, and I reach for my judgment, my condemnation, then pause. I reflect. Have I ever wanted anything that would make another person feel the same way about me? Yes, okay, sure, I admit to myself. But that’s not the point, I tell myself. Is it not? What would have helped me to see my own error? What would have spread more goodness: someone enraged, shouting at me because of how bad I was? Or something else?

Just that movement of the mind, of the soul, of the frail human heart, softens our impulse to spread anger and rage in the name of justice. It might lead to a different judgment, or none at all. I can’t say how it will or should play out for other people. I can say its very practice will reduce the regret we’ll have every time we undertake the harrowing exercise induced in the beginning of this essay. It will make us kinder, more understanding, and, crucially, more just in our dealings with injustice.

I read this admirable essay earlier this week, and I returned to it several times after. I had been far too busy to organize my thoughts about it, but then, as if on cue, the Roger Scruton hit piece in the New Statesman appeared, resulting in his dismissal from his unpaid position as the chairman of a British architectural commission.

It’s very easy to be outraged by the whole sordid affair. Scruton is an exemplary man, writer, and philosopher. A journalistic nonentity named George Eaton blatantly misrepresented Scruton’s statements for the purpose of getting him fired and was crass enough to gloat about it on social media afterward. The sheer vindictive pettiness of it all, the refusal of the left to tolerate a prominent conservative’s presence even in a largely symbolic capacity and the cowardly capitulation of a Tory government, is nauseating.

But I have to admit there was a time when I would have unthinkingly considered someone like Scruton a bigot for opposing conventional left-wing pieties. I could have easily been part of the group of people cheering Eaton on, competing to impress my peers with my witty put-downs. If I had been aware of the underhanded tactics involved, I’m sure I could have easily rationalized those as necessary for the greater good, but it’s even more likely that I would have been securely ensconced in what we now call a filter bubble, where I would have never encountered anyone pointing them out to begin with. If my every stupid remark and callow judgment had been frozen in social media amber for public display, I too would look like an awful person. Blogger, critique thyself.

“Yes, okay, sure, I admit to myself. But that’s not the point, I tell myself. Is it not?” Here, too, it’s easy to blow past the acknowledgement of the obvious in order to return to the serious business of being angry at injustice. It’s easy to rationalize once again why this injustice is serious and deserves an appropriate response, rather than a lot of vapid relativism on how none of us are perfect. A practical response might be to acknowledge one’s own powerlessness in such matters and focus on the quotidian details of one’s own garden instead. It’s certainly healthier than fuming impotently. But even that might only be a way of avoiding the point. I might be just mature enough to recognize that there’s no use in being enraged about things I can’t do anything about, but if I believed for a moment that I could do something…well, I’d probably be just as angry and self-righteously vindictive as the next guy.

So, then — do I want to take the time to contact just one of the many people I saw on social media exulting over Scruton’s firing and attempt to explain, patiently and kindly, why he or she is mistaken to feel that way? Of course not. Like I said, I’m busy and tired and barely have enough time to read and write for pleasure as it is. Why would I want to devote any of my limited free time to a likely-fruitless conversation? And yet, I do find that even the idle thought of doing so seems like a better use of my imagination than indulging in fantasies of seeing the wicked receiving their comeuppance. Maybe that’s something.

What helped me to see my own errors? It was, and is, a cumulative process. There are rarely any thunderbolts of enlightenment, just a gradual, barely-perceptible dawning. I think that a significant factor was that I can’t recall ever being humiliated for being wrong. I was either fortunate enough to never say anything stupid in front of someone who could have made a brutal example of me, or fortunate enough that they chose to pass over my stupidity in graceful silence. I was allowed to outgrow errors at my own pace, I suppose, maybe even allowed to forget having made them and thus preserve a fragile sense of confidence and dignity. Perhaps one of the worst things about social media is the way it forecloses on the possibility of that productive forgetting. Your errors are forever as loud and fresh as the moment you made them, with vengeful enemies devoted to rubbing your face in them. Perhaps it’s better if errors are simply allowed to outlive their usefulness and then slink off to the woods to die alone and forgotten. That’s offensive to the progressive notion of history as a cumulative elimination of error and injustice, of course, but funny enough, that’s one of my own errors which died of natural causes.

Too Much Nothing

By in fresh hell, nietzsche No Comments

In favor of the idle. An indication that esteem for the meditative life has decreased is that scholars today compete with active men in a kind of hasty enjoyment, so that they seem to value this kind of enjoying more than the kind that actually befits them and, in fact, offers much more enjoyment. Scholars are ashamed of otium. But leisure and idleness are a noble thing.
If idleness is really the beginning of all vices, it is at least located in the closest vicinity to all the virtues: the idle man is still a better man than the active man.
You don’t think that by leisure and idling I’m talking about you, do you, you lazybones?

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Leave it to academics and intellectuals to make the concept of “doing nothing” seem both exhausting and incomprehensible.

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.

All That Remains Is to Be Brave, Whatever May Result

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

Traditional bonds to families, communities, and churches are subjected to rationalist criticism and, eventually, demolition, without much consideration for the personal and societal crises that might be produced, and without any presentation of alternate forms of social and cultural order to put in the place of the destroyed forms of life. Totalizing individualism burns away supportive webs of mutual dependence. This erosion is modernity’s baseline force. It works against the collective symbols, norms, and rites that have been the glue of human society from time immemorial. The shared body of symbolic and ritual material was what Durkheim described as the object of religion: the sacred.

— Alexander Riley, “A Religion of Activism”

Consolation of a desperate progress. Our age gives the impression of being an interim; the old views on life, the old cultures are still evident in part, the new ones not yet sure and habitual, and therefore lacking in unity and consistency. It looks as if everything were becoming chaotic, the old dying out, the new not worth much and growing ever weaker. But this is what happens to the soldier who learns to march; for a time he is more uncertain and clumsy than ever because his muscles move, now to the old system, now to the new, and neither has yet decisively claimed the victory. We waver, but we must not become anxious about it, or surrender what has been newly won. Besides, we cannot go back to the old system; we have burned our bridges behind us. All that remains is to be brave, whatever may result.
Let us step forward, let’s get going! Perhaps our behavior will indeed look like progress; but if it does not, may we take consolation in the words of Frederick the Great: “Ah, mon cher Sulzer, vous ne connaissez pas assez cette race maudite, à laquelle nous appartenons.” (“My dear Sulzer, you know too little this accursed race to which we belong.”)

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

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