Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink?

By in ai, ohferfucksake

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI has a headline-ready story: in drought-stricken Chile, Google plans a data center that will use more than a thousand times as much water as a nearby city of 88,000 people. That’s the sort of detail that lodges in a reader’s mind. Unfortunately — or amusingly, depending on your temperament — it appears to be nonsense. When you work the numbers backward, her claim implies that the entire city survives on less than a sip of water per person per day. The more likely explanation is a simple unit error — treating cubic meters as liters — magnified into a three-orders-of-magnitude horror story. The same chapter seems to blur the difference between water merely withdrawn (and then returned) and water actually consumed, and to invite readers to see a large global withdrawal estimate as if it were all drinkable water being siphoned off by data centers.

I don’t think this is just a math problem. It looks like a case study in motivated reasoning. The story is too perfect: AI, already despised in many circles as a job thief and art thief, now shows up as a literal water thief, menacing poor communities in the “global South.” It plugs straight into an existing “climate crisis” narrative: Western tech giants strip-mine the planet, this time not for oil but for electricity and water. Once you want that story to be true, a ridiculous number like “one building uses a thousand cities’ worth of water” stops feeling like a red flag and starts feeling like a God-given symbol. The data becomes raw material for the morality play.

What bothers me more is what this says about our so-called expert class. Hao isn’t some random journalist writing a TED-talk of a book for the NPR crowd; she has an MIT engineering degree and a background in energy studies. The book had a fact-checking team. Multiple prestigious outlets blurbed and recommended it. Yet apparently no one along that entire chain stopped to say, “Wait a second; can any single building on Earth really use more water than a city?” The institutions that keep telling us to “trust the science” can’t be bothered to do high-school-level sanity checks on their own favorite cautionary tales. This is how you burn trust capital. And once you’ve burned it, you don’t get it back by scolding people for being “anti-science.”

Meanwhile, the influencer class is delighted. They thrive in exactly this kind of epistemological vacuum. Every time a credentialed journalist or public-health authority face-plants in public, another YouTuber or Substack crank gets to say, “See? They lied to you again. Here’s what they don’t want you to know…” The tragedy is that the average layman, watching all this, is not crazy or wicked for becoming cautious. When people say, “Let’s wait and see before we reorganize the economy around your latest ‘a study has shown’ crusade,” they’re not rejecting reason; they’re saying “look who’s reasoning.”

I don’t know how long it will take to rebuild institutional trust, or if it’s even possible in the old sense. It may be that for the rest of our lives, trust is going to be granular and provisional: this lab, not “science”; this reporter, not “the media.” In the meantime, we’re stuck navigating an information landscape where both the official gatekeepers and their self-appointed rivals are constantly auditioning for our belief. My main hope is simply that reality doesn’t present us with a genuinely Plague-level threat while we’re still busy not believing one another. Microbes and CO₂ don’t care about our culture war, and they don’t wait for our epistemology to recover.

440

By in battling personal entropy, books

Bodily strength, even if it is short-lived, aside from the effects noted elsewhere, makes us still more courageous than usual, and less susceptible to fear, even of extraordinary dangers, etc.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

Squatted 440 last night, another personal record. We finished up with “celebratory” one-leg hack squats, for sets of 15, 12, 10 and 8, with my trainer leaning on the apparatus for the set of 8 for extra resistance. Coincidentally, mere seconds after finishing the last rep, the power went out in the gym and all along the street. I think what happened was that the sheer force of my effort and willpower caused an electromagnetic surge that blew the transformer on the utility pole outside, a phenomenon known as “Hulking out.” I’ll have to learn to harness this awesome power before I inadvertently bring the roof down, or collapse the floor.

Waking the Dead

By in books, foolosophy

Reading. The resurrection of Lazarus. Lifting the slab off the tomb of words.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

What I like is that Perros skips the usual cozy metaphors for reading — conversation, companionship, illumination — and jumps straight to something borderline morbid: tomb, slab, corpse. It takes seriously the fact that books are not “alive” in any ordinary sense. They’re remains. The author is gone, the moment of composition is gone; what’s left is this sealed chamber of words, inert until someone comes along and does the shocking thing: opens it.

It suggests publication as burial, an author laying treasured thoughts to rest. You’ve done what you can with a thought. You raised it from a vague feeling, you shape it, fix it on the page, and then you inter it. You don’t get to keep living inside it. At best, you visit the grave now and then by rereading.

But the reader is something between mourner and graverobber. A mourner, because they come with feeling and reverence; a graverobber, because they’re not necessarily obeying the author’s intentions. They crack the tomb for their own purposes — using the text as “intellectual kindling,” stealing a line or an image, ripping the jewelry off the corpse. Perros’s Lazarus image is both miracle and violation.

And then there’s the specifically Lazarus part. In the gospel story, when Lazarus shuffles out of the tomb, he’s still wrapped in grave clothes. He’s technically alive, but not yet free; someone has to “unbind him, and let him go.” That’s not a bad picture of how reading actually works. The text is “resurrected” when you open it, but it’s still wrapped in its time, its idioms, its private context. Only as you work over it — interpret, misinterpret, argue with it — does it get unbound and start walking around in your own life. Every strong reading is a slightly different Lazarus.

And of course, sometimes the slab stays shut. Whole shelves are just neat little cemeteries: immaculate rows of sealed tombs no one has opened in years. When Perros calls reading “lifting the slab off the tomb of words,” he’s also implying: most of the time, nobody bothers. So when a reader finally does come along, of course it can feel a bit like grave-robbing. You’re the first living person who has touched these remains in decades. No one can predict what sort of revenant you’ll raise when you pry the stone away.

Some books you read once and forget. Others are like ghosts: you disturbed their rest, and now they live in your house. And like actual ghosts, they’re not always benevolent. Some are consoling presences; they keep you company, give you courage, put a hand on your shoulder when you’re tempted to lie to yourself. Others are more like poltergeists. They knock things off shelves. They make it hard to keep believing what you believed before. You read some philosopher or diarist in a fit of curiosity, and the next thing you know you’ve spent three years arguing with their voice in your head.

Maybe that’s the deeper point behind Perros’s image: reading isn’t just raising the dead; it’s also accepting that whatever you wake may decide to follow you home. Some books you close and they stay put. Others you close, and find they’ve moved in.

Conversations Aren’t Contests

By in books, bricolage, calvin and hobbes

We no longer know how to talk because we no longer know how to listen. There’s no point in speaking well: you have to speak quickly, get it out before being interrupted, and there’s never enough time. Say whatever you like, however you like: you will always be cut short. Conversation is a game played with shears, in which everyone clips their neighbor’s words as soon as they start growing.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

****

Calvin: When a person pauses in mid-sentence to choose a word, that’s the best time to jump in and change the subject! It’s like an interception in football! You grab the other guy’s idea and run the opposite way with it! The more sentences you complete, the higher your score! The idea is to block the other guy’s thoughts and express your own! That’s how you win!

Hobbes: Conversations aren’t contests!

Calvin: OK, a point for you, but I’m still ahead.

(8/5/1995)

Assuage Against the Machine

By in fresh hell, gender

Tyler Austin Harper:

Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits. Unlike some other critics of the transgender movement, however, Kingsnorth shows compassion for those struggling with their identity and does not scapegoat them for larger problems in society. “People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue,” he writes. But he rejects assertions that “biology is a problem to be overcome” and that the “body is a form of oppression.” These ideas, first aired on his Substack, have, not surprisingly, alienated some fans of his earlier environmental writing. The writer, green activist, and former Kingsnorth enthusiast John Halstead said that Kingsnorth has become a “transphobic proto-fascist.” Specifically, Halstead argues that Kingsnorth confuses sex with gender, and is mistaken to call binary sex “natural,” given that other species have more sexual variation.

For my part, I don’t find Halstead’s objections especially persuasive. Rather, the principal problem with Kingsnorth’s gender analysis is that it mostly ignores the ways that those of us who live in the aftermaths of the industrial, scientific, sexual, and digital revolutions are all already “cyborgs,” as the science and technology theorist Donna Haraway would put it. Microplastics permeate our bodies, birth control courses through our veins, smartphones rewire our neural pathways, medical devices keep our hearts pumping. If, as Kingsnorth claims, gender-affirming medicine is an assault on human nature and the human body, then so, too, are pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, or Botox and condoms, for that matter.

I’ve never been much interested in Paul Kingsnorth. I’m not a Luddite, and I have no interest in becoming a subsistence farmer in response to the “climate crisis,” which I think is mostly performative hysteria. However, it does seem like his newest book, Against the Machine, might still grapple with some interesting issues. I realize it’s The Atlantic — caveat lector and all that — but I was nonetheless annoyed to encounter this irrelevant tangent. Kingsnorth’s concern is that modern technoculture treats everything — land, animals, even the human body — as raw material for the will, rather than as something given that places claims on us. That’s a theme even I’m interested in. Instead, I’m forcibly reminded that I’m reading a review tailored to the sensibilities of Acela corridor midwits: we get a narrative detour to confirm that, yes, some thoughtcrime may occur here, but there’s no need to panic, it has been safely contained and rebuked, and we remain Good People. It feels less like a serious engagement with Kingsnorth’s argument and more like a pilot’s announcement of mild turbulence. The reader is invited to relax. Whatever Kingsnorth thinks about bodies, limits, and modernity’s Promethean will, it won’t require changing any of the emojis in your social media bio.

What makes it more exasperating is that even the counterpoint offered is rote and weak. Harper blithely suggests that we’re already cyborgs, so who is Kingsnorth to object to gender-affirming surgeries and hormones? But this is just a category mistake. There is an obvious difference between unintended collateral damage (microplastics), restorative medicine (pacemakers), and deliberate, irreversible interventions into healthy sexual development. To pretend they all belong in one moral category called “assaults on nature” is precisely the sort of flattening a serious critic is supposed to resist, not perform.

Which is a shame, because aside from the obligatory culture-war throat-clearing, Kingsnorth’s basic question is unavoidable: are there any non-negotiable limits built into human nature and the world, or is everything from sex to climate to cognition just clay for the will to mold? You don’t have to be a radical environmentalist or a would-be peasant in rural Ireland to see the importance of it. You can reject Kingsnorth’s own answers and still recognize that he’s at least posing the right kind of question. What I want from a review is help in thinking that question through, not another in-flight assurance that the moral instruments are functioning and the crew’s politics are sound. If Kingsnorth is wrong about givenness and limits, show me where. If he’s right in places but goes too far, mark the line. But don’t waste my time with ritual genuflection toward the Rainbow God. I can get that from any algorithmic feed. From critics, I’d prefer something closer to thought.

For a sense of what actual context and perspective looks like, you can put Harper’s piece alongside John Gray’s review of the same book in the New Statesman. Gray takes Kingsnorth’s central claim seriously: that contemporary environmentalism and progressive politics are not a radical alternative to the Machine but one of its more hysterical moods, still committed to remaking the world as raw material for human projects. Gray traces the lineage of this idea through Lewis Mumford’s “megatechnics,” Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain phase, his eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and the eschatological fiction. Then he does the thing a critic is supposed to do: he asks whether a collapse of the Machine would mean anything like Kingsnorth’s “uncivilisation,” or whether, as history suggests, it would more likely mean famine, pogroms, militias, and then a new, harsher form of industrial order.

Reading Gray after Harper clarified what had been bothering me. Gray sees the same faults I see in Kingsnorth: the fantasy that a smallholding in Galway could somehow scale to eight billion people; the muddled eschatology that can’t decide whether it wants Christian apocalypse or pagan world-cycles; the refusal to admit that renouncing technological progress may mean a more denatured planet, not less. Watching him work through those points, you can feel a mind engaging the book’s actual architecture. With Harper, by contrast, I found myself briefly disoriented: what does gender have to do with Kingsnorth’s core outlook? Why is that the element being singled out for extended treatment? It’s like a film where a jarring line or bit of acting breaks the spell: suddenly you’re no longer inside the world of the story, you’re staring at a studio note. Gray makes me want to argue with Kingsnorth; Harper makes me want to argue with The Atlantic.

We See Things They’ll Never See; You and I Are Gonna Live Forever

By in foolosophy, technology, the big sleep

I think he’s overstating it. Even with strong life-extension, you don’t actually get rid of finitude. You get increased odds and longer runs, but there will still be accidents, resource limits, and eventual failure modes. The horizon moves out, but it doesn’t vanish. There will still be a market for philosophies that say, “You have to die sometime; here’s how to make that tolerable.” If anything, the more people fear death and cling to their extended lives, the more counter-arguments in favor of limits will develop: death as relief from exhaustion, as release from stasis, as the only way for new people and new cultures to arise. Not to mention that there’s no reason to suppose the human affinity for murder will fade away; if anything, it might become more widespread as people refuse to take nature’s hint.

How death is valued might change. I can easily imagine a scenario: a hyper-managed majority trying to defer death indefinitely, and a Romantic counter-culture that treats dying “on schedule” or even early as the last authentic gesture in a world obsessed with self-preservation. “Live forever” becomes the bourgeois norm; “die young” becomes the punk move. We already have micro-cultures that romanticize early death: the 27 Club, “live fast, die young,” the Romantic poet dying of consumption, the political martyr. In a world where the responsible default is “continuous optimization and health-span management,” checking out early becomes an even louder counter-signal. Voluntarily refusing life-extension (or just living recklessly in a world built for safety) would start to look like a kind of aristocratic gesture: throwing away what everyone else is desperate to buy.

But that Romantic status will be very selective, the way it always has been. When Keats dies young, it’s a legend; when some anonymous factory worker dies at 42, it’s a statistic. Any future cult of “beautiful early deaths” would probably attach itself to glamorous artists, influencers, or ideological die-hards, while the vast majority of premature deaths from poverty or addiction stay as unromantic and invisible as they are now. Life-extension tech would sharpen a class line: the long-lived, medically managed overclass; the involuntarily short-lived underclass; and a small self-conscious minority that chooses not to cash in the extra decades and makes a whole aesthetic out of that refusal.

Nietzsche worried that one immortal man would make the rest of us long for death out of sheer boredom with him. He didn’t live to see the prototype: tech billionaires livestreaming their biomarker readouts into eternity. The problem with immortality isn’t just that it’s arrogant to inflict yourself on the universe forever. It’s that most people already don’t know what to do with seventy years. Isaac Brock asks, “You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?” and he’s right. If you’ve spent half your current allocation staring at your phone, why assume the next hundred years will be different? At that point, “life extension” risks becoming the metaphysical version of a gym membership: not something you seriously intend to use, just a comforting receipt you can wave around to prove you’re not really frivolous, you’re just getting ready. But time doesn’t care about your intentions. If you need an extra century before you can suck the marrow out of life, the odds are you’re going to spend the bonus years the same way you spent the base model: thinking you’ll start tomorrow. Many people don’t want more life; they want more wiggle room to avoid living.

Distinct Observations

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that, while a good many of the numbered sections in which most of his books consist have the compactness and epigrammatic quality supposedly characteristic of aphorisms, a good many others do not. They instead are paragraph-length or even page-length reflections of a frequently related but also relatively self-contained nature. Yet even these longer reflections share with genuine aphorisms the characteristic of being distinct observations, rather than clearly connected sequential paragraphs in a sustained line of thought. They typically make (and sometimes elaborate) a point of some sort on some topic, but need (and are intended) to be thought about in conjunction with other points on the topic, both in the same book parts and elsewhere. This makes reading most of Nietzsche’s books a very different experience — and challenge — from reading chapters in a typical philosophical monograph. And what makes understanding both his kind of philosophy and his philosophical thinking even more challenging is that he wrote no definitive treatises, and instead gives us almost nothing more than these bits and pieces, leaving it to us to try to figure out what to make of them collectively.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

Nietzsche was my first experience of “aphorisms,” so I’m afraid I’ve imprinted on him to the extent that it’s hard to read other, more traditional versions without seeing them as lacking. The ones that are brief often seem too shallow to me, little more than quips. Others rely on rhetorical symmetry, like a tweet I saw at random this morning: “The left wing view of human nature is rosy and idealized while left wing art is grim and ugly. The right wing view of human nature is grim and ugly while right wing art is rosy and idealized.” The effect relies on the neat inversion of chiasmus, which can lull the reader into accepting the premise without thinking, “Wait a minute; is that really accurate in most cases?” It seems to me that many of Nietzsche’s best aphorisms are too long to be rhetorically tidy like that (while still displaying genuine rhetorical skill), but not so long as to outgrow the “aphorism” designation.

In his book The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, Gary Saul Morson — who pleasingly agrees with me that Oscar Wilde’s witticisms are formulaic and shallow, a charge I might extend to La Rochefoucauld — classifies and examines several varieties of short-form writing, from aphorisms and maxims to apothegms and dicta. He categorizes “thoughts,” which he names in honor of Pascal’s Pensées, as belonging to “the family of short genres while more closely resembling an unfinished longer one.” He adds, “It is hard to say just where the thought as a genre ends and the essay begins. Many resemble the germ, or else the residue, of an essay.” He names Lichtenberg and Nietzsche as the other two masters of the form. I like the cut of his jib here, but I fear that “thoughts” is too generic of a term to describe a specific style of short-form writing. Same goes for “reflections.” If I were forced to choose a term, I might go with “reflective fragments.” Maybe even “assays,” just so I could say, “Outis Niemand: putting the ‘ass’ in ‘assay’ since 2005.”

I Am All That Is Man

By in battling personal entropy

Deadlifted 510 last night. My trainer and I had been talking about people who ask for a spot while deadlifting for fear of passing out, so we decided that it would make a better picture if I collapsed after the lift.

Livin’ La Vida Contemplativa

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, nietzsche, who's žižoomin' who?

In the end, however, the Nietzsche of Human rather surprisingly accords the highest rank—among levels of Cultur of humanity and sensibility in both a society and a human being—to a quite different kind of spirituality he envisions. He introduces it by way of the classical expression vita contemplativa — the “contemplative life,” which rises above involvement in all things human, reflects upon them, and endeavors to comprehend them.

— Richard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way

The phrase vita contemplativa may suggest incense and monk’s cells. I take it more pragmatically: the practice of standing far enough back from the day’s noise to see the pattern in it. Not otherworldly “spirituality,” just disciplined perspective — history when it helps, psychology when it helps, a scrap of everyday conversation when it helps, all woven into a view of how to live. And the contemplative life is my summum bonum. I’m one of those “whose only aim is to observe how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of other men’s lives, in order to judge and regulate their own,” as Montaigne put it. A life spent reflecting and endeavoring to comprehend is a life well-lived.

I Googled “vita contemplativa” to remind myself what Aristotle originally said about it. The first page of results were mostly for a recent book of that title by Byung Chul-Han, “the Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher,” as he was dubbed by the New Yorker. Knowing that “the Internet” has previously been infatuated with that flatulent, fraudulent pufferfish of a self-promoting provocateur posing as a philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, I went to the “read sample” page on Amazon with low hopes. They were not subsequently raised. Within the first four pages, we’ve already been treated to mentions of Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno, and “capitalist relations of production.” Well, thank goodness I didn’t waste any money on more grad-student seminar bullshit, at least.

The Fool Hath Said In His Tweet

By in atheism, nihilism, ohferfucksake, religion

It is untrue that religion should have provided morality — the converse! We prove religion true or untrue with morality.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

1. “The universe is cold and uncaring” — True, but melodramatic and self-pitying. Warmth and caring are social traits, so, as the cosmologist Johnny Lee noted, expecting “the universe” to relate to you in that manner is looking for love in all the wrong places.

2. “Just animals like all the others” — Again, true in a banal sense, in that we are biological beings, products of evolution, sharers of DNA with other animals, but still melodramatically dismissive. There are clearly relative differences between species, and even between individual members of species. The phrase implies it’s some kind of demotion or degradation to be “merely” an animal. The whining tone is undignified.

3. “And therefore” — I wince whenever I see a moron preparing to draw sweeping conclusions from dubious premises.

4. “There can’t possibly be anything like Right and Wrong” — Well, true in the sense that morality is not a gift from God, but egregiously stupid insofar as moral instincts are present even in “mere” animals; as Nietzsche wryly noted above, they predate religious concepts. Right and Wrong” with capital letters is just a demand for moral bullion from the Cosmic Treasury; alas, all we’ve got is the fiat-morality standard, backed by the full faith and community credit of our neighbors. Luckily, that functions well enough for our purposes.

5. “You genuinely are permitted to do whatever you want” — “Permitted” by whom? “Everything is permitted” equivocates between metaphysical permission (no cosmic judge) and institutional permission (what people, laws, and norms will tolerate). Technically, you’ve always been free to “do whatever you want,” but it has never been the case that you are therefore free from earthly consequences.

6. “There will be no final accounting.” Yes, that at least does follow from disbelief in monotheism.

7. “And yet almost no atheists admit to it.” Strange; I can’t imagine why anyone would object to being caricatured.

And this is the “tamest, most obviously true thing” he’s ever posted.

Here the Ways of Men Divide

By in atheism, nihilism, religion

Leaving aside the ridiculous absurdity of trying to force the ancient debate over the God of monotheism’s existence onto the Procrustean bed of post-1789 politics, both Ash and Heiens are trying to wring a should out of metaphysics. Ash: if there’s no Creator, evolution is the only engine of value, therefore you should accept Social-Darwinist hierarchy. Heiens: if you oppose a world of Socialists and National Socialists exterminating entire populations of racial or class enemies, you should accept Christian metaphysics. In each case, a contested premise about atheism is smuggled across the is/ought bridge and cashed out as duty.

Underneath is the same motivation: the submission impulse. If Christian dogma won’t do, we’ll substitute Nature, History, or any other proper noun of our own invention. What’s being sought isn’t truth so much as guarantee: a rule outside the self that absolves the self of agency. “Tell me what binds me — God, Cosmos, the Law of the Jungle — so I can stop weighing, considering, judging and choosing, and simply obey.”

This is why so much self-described “nihilism” is only inverted universalism. When “God’s word” can no longer legislate everywhere for everyone, some people simply replace the regent: now Nothing legislates everywhere for everyone. They reify the void and enthrone it. The middle ground — meaning as contingent, plural, revisable — is skipped because it offers no total guarantee, only the work of fallible judgment. Adult life is precisely that: living without a cosmic permission slip, accepting that our “shoulds” are stitched from experience, memory, and bargaining, and that responsibility can’t be outsourced to a grand axiom. “Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 148

By in books, history, obiter scripta

History, consisting mainly of diabolical cruelty—why do I read it if I have nothing in common with any of its cruelties—torture and killing, killing and torture, and I keep rereading it in myriad ways; always the same. Without the dates that stick in it like pins, you could never tell all these things apart.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

As much as I enjoy reading the Durant’s Story of Civilization series, I have to take a break from it occasionally because of exactly that — one instance after another of a nation rising to prosperity on the back of merciless conquest, only to slouch into decadence and get overrun by invading barbarians. Maybe history is best taken as microdoses, not mainlined. Big narratives blur into the same triptych of despair — war, famine, societal collapse — until the cerebral nerves go numb. Small, regular hits work better. Think of the genre known as “microhistory.” Each small-scale event or story is a pinprick of light you can actually look at rather than the atrocity-sun that burns your retinas.

Autotelic

By in books, foolosophy, writing

His notion of happiness: to read and write quietly for a lifetime without ever showing anyone a word of it, without ever publishing a word of it. To leave in pencil everything one has written down, changing nothing, as though it existed for nothing; like the natural course of a life that serves no confining purposes, but is fully itself, and records itself, just as it proceeds and breathes, by itself.

—Elias Canetti, The Human Province

A monastic ideal: writing as a near-religious practice, refusing the market’s demands, even the demand to “matter.” “Pencil” signals provisionality and humility; “changing nothing” rejects the sculptor’s pride in revision. The paradox: he prints this in a published book. So I read it as a corrective rather than a commandment — a way of disciplining the eyes to not wander toward an audience. The point isn’t literally never to publish; it’s to write as if no audience were owed anything. It remains true, however: sharing things we love is rewarding.

 

Intellectual Kindling

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

Which of the sentences in an aphorism collection does one write down? For one thing, the sentences that confirm one: things that one feels are right, that one has often thought, that go against conventional opinion, that justify one. There is much dogmatism in this urge to be confirmed by great or wise men. But it can also be more: a pure joy in meeting a truly congenial mind. For if many sentences by a single man accord with one, then mere dogmatism turns into astonishment: in a totally different time, among totally different people, a man sought to grasp himself in exactly the same way as oneself; the same form, the same definiteness and definition came to him. One would be happy if one’s best were equal to his best. Only timidity keeps one from falling into the arms of the older brother: the feeling that many things in one could frighten him.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

When I look through books that I read decades ago, I see that I used to mark the mirror-lines — the ones that provoked an exclamation of “Yes, this!” and made me feel intelligently vindicated. These days I hunt tinder-lines. They don’t just agree; they ignite. A good line carries a spark — an odd metaphor, a skewed angle, a question with teeth — that sets my own cerebral scrap-heap ablaze. Kinship is still important, but the point isn’t to fall into the arms of the “older brother.” A line has to resonate as being true or useful in some way, but it doesn’t have to simply affirm what I already think; in fact, it can be productively wrong, that is, wrong in such a way as to inspire a spirited response. I want to be stimulated to new and interesting thoughts. My simple rubric now: if a passage doesn’t sharpen my wits or start a fire, it stays in the book.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Timelines

By in books, foolosophy

The difference today is that everything gets photographed. There is no misery left that can be kept secret. All misery has gone public. But this merely signifies that everyone can more easily grow used to it. In the past, a man could pretend to know nothing. Today, he can pretend to be helpless, because he knows too much.

—Elias Canetti, The Human Province

That was from 1969. He thought people were living in the Panopticon then. Imagine him stumbling through a portal into our time and being greeted by Pinhead’s croak: “We have such sights to show you.”

“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks,” said Randall Jarrell. Every era believes it’s the dull shadow of a golden age, and the next age will feel the same in relation to us. In 2075 they’ll call our period the “good old days” because you could still technically opt out — no cranial pingstorms, no brainwaving. I guess that’s good news, of a sort: however rotten you think things are now, people in the future will look back at us in envy. We may as well try to seek out the cracks and be grateful.

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