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:

Many Mortal Souls

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

Happiness of the historian. — ‘When we hear ingenious metaphysicians and backworldsmen talk, we others may feel that we are the “poor in spirit,” but we also feel that ours is the kingdom of Heaven of change, with spring and autumn, winter and summer, and that theirs is the backworld — with its gray, frosty, unending mist and shadow.’ — Thus a man spoke to himself while walking in the morning sun: one in whom history again and again transforms not only his spirit but also his heart, and who, in contrast to the metaphysicians, is happy to harbour in himself, not “an immortal soul,” but many mortal souls.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The past decade has seen a right-wing populist surge in opposition to the long-entrenched forces of technocratic liberalism. The insurgency has included an assertive stance of moral certainty against the presumed spineless relativism of effete liberals. R.J. Reno captured some of the spirit of the times in his (admittedly excellent) book, Return of the Strong Gods. What he implied, many rank-and-file have since said outright: Christianity is the one true religion, and we have had enough of tolerating the false rainbow gods.

Supercharged political eras are not known for their nuance. You’re either with us or agin’ us. Regular townsfolk are best advised to avoid crossing Main Street while the gangs are facing off. And so, like a gaggle of old retirees in their New Balance walking shoes doing laps around the shopping mall, I meet up with Nietzsche, Montaigne, Epicurus, and a few other stalwart companions for an early-morning walk, while the partisans are still sleeping. We question, we debate, we doubt, and we talk about the changing weather. Our backworld revival continues apace, with banners, anthems, and a chest-thumping certainty that casts any appreciation of flux as decadent weakness. All well and good. But even while the insurgents rout their enemies, life is already undoing their victory. History obeys no stop signs. New certainties ossify, are jostled by events, then fall and shatter. So it goes. There is nevertheless beauty in contingency for those with eyes to see. And as that blue-haired soyboy the Chinese Farmer once said, ultimately, who knows what’s good or bad?

Obiter Scripta, no. 139

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta, writing

Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste — a malicious taste, perhaps? — no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is “in a hurry.”

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

There are two ways to drive the hurried reader to despair. One is the cuttlefish method, a long-time favorite of fatuous frauds: hide your scrawny meaning within a cloud of ink. I prefer the second method — compression, not fog. I’m not trying to be opaque or verbose; I’m trying to be dense. Ideally, I want to set spring-loaded sentences, capable of snapping on careless fingers. I want to produce prose that looks like a harmless puddle and turns out to be two feet deep. I want my posts to be gobstoppers, fitting easily in the mouth, but cracking a tooth if you try to chew and bolt. The internet serves cotton candy “content” by the yard. I’m offering beef jerky—salted, tough, but ultimately more nourishing.

Milgram’s Regress

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The good thing about material progress is that we can do something about it. Science and technology make it possible in the modern world. We can have better sanitation, better drinking water, better lighting, more power to replace manual labor, better fertilizers, perhaps even better can openers. We can build better and more roads. Because these things are obvious, we usually have them in mind when we speak about modern progress of a nation. Besides, technological progress cannot be stopped, and there is no point in resisting material progress.

Not so with moral progress. You cannot do anything about it. You cannot improve the mental and moral qualities of men as easily as you increase the mileage of concrete highways or the speed of airplanes. It is a truism to say that the world is threatened with disaster because man’s moral progress does not keep pace with his material progress. After the engineers have changed the face of the earth, men are very much the same as their forefathers were centuries ago. We are lucky if we can consider ourselves not much worse than our forefathers in human qualities, in honesty, valor, compassion, and wisdom. These things simply do not “progress” that way.

— Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist

Material progress is a cumulative, technical process. Moral progress is a “vibe” — impossible to clearly discern or define, whatever Steven Pinker might say to the contrary. We can widen a highway on a schedule; we can’t widen a conscience easily, if at all. Yutang’s point is perennial: better pumps and brighter bulbs don’t renovate the dark corners of the human heart. Speaking of which…

Aristotle would say the truth of the matter isn’t a stark contrast between reason and intuition as polar opposites, but a mean: reasonableness between two vices. On one side, impulse/superstition; on the other, hyper-rationality that treats people like variables. The virtue that hits this midpoint isn’t IQ; it’s phronēsis — practical wisdom.

But sentiment alone isn’t safe either. Our warmest moral intuitions scale fast into cold tribal math: loyalty can become chauvinism, solidarity can metastasize into xenophobia. So we need productive tension — reason to universalize and check parochial heat; sentiment to humanize and check abstract schemes. James Madison’s checks and balances inside a single soul: Adam Smith’s “sympathy” vetoing clever cruelties; reason cross-examining the crowd’s passions. That quibble aside, Rufo’s point holds too: morality doesn’t “progress” like tech, yet it’s the ballast that keeps our hot-air thought balloons from disappearing into the ether.

Such Is Our Personality

By in bricolage, identity

Just as, with an assemblage of parts, the word ‘chariot’ is used,
so, when the aggregates are present, there is the convention ‘a being.’

— Vajirā Sutta (SN 5.10)

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The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, “Theseus”

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Contemplate continually all things coming to pass by change, and accustom yourself to think that Universal Nature loves nothing so much as to change what is and to create new things in their likeness. For everything that is, is in a way the seed of what will come out of it, whereas you imagine seeds to be only those which are cast into the earth or into the womb. But that is very unscientific.

Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one being and one soul; how all is absorbed into the one consciousness of this living creature; how it compasses all things with a single purpose, and how all things work together to cause all that comes to pass, and their wonderful web and texture.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 4

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“The mind is a kind of theatre… The identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one… nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.”

— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I.iv.6

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A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.

— Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

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Between each of his excursions through the biota, X lay in the soil and was carried by the rains, inch by inch, downhill. Living plants retarded the wash by impounding atoms; dead plants by locking them to their decayed tissues. Animals ate the plants and carried them briefly uphill or downhill, depending on whether they died or defecated higher or lower than they fed. No animal was aware that the altitude of his death was more important than his manner of dying. Thus a fox caught a gopher in a meadow, carrying X uphill to his bed on the brow of a ledge, where an eagle laid him low. The dying fox sensed the end of his chapter in foxdom, but not the new beginning in the odyssey of an atom.

— Aldo Leopold, “Odyssey”

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To have become a person means to have emerged contingently from a matrix of genetic, psychological, social and cultural conditions. You are neither reducible to one or all of them, not are you separate from them. While a person is more than a DNA code, a psychological profile and a social or cultural background, he or she cannot be understood apart from such factors. You are unique not because you possess an essential metaphysical quality that differs from the essential metaphysical quality of everyone else, but because you have emerged from a unique and unrepeatable set of conditions.

— Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

Whirl Is King

By in atheism, books, political philosophy, religion

The human capacity to reason gives us the power to manipulate aspects of the world, and this power has achieved wonderful ameliorative effects. But human beings, always in the grip of unfulfilled desires and destined for death, must come to terms with limitations. Optimists, disposed to expect continuous improvement, are set up for disappointment. As Dienstag says, “The pessimist expects nothing.” Free from what one pessimist has called the “idolatry of tomorrow,” a pessimist has an “openness to the music of chance” which can give the pessimist a kind of “equanimity.” And a pessimist experiences “the vitalization of life that comes through the embrace of uncertainty.” Whirl is king? Excellent.

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

We live in a faith-saturated world.

You may scoff; you may point to statistics showing a decline in church attendance, or the rise of the “nones.” But what else is transgenderism if not a modern Gnosticism, a faith-based attempt to transcend the false world of the biological demiurge? What is the revived socialist dream if not an undying belief in an ideal impervious to evidence? What is the general mania for political awareness and activism if not the inevitable rush of spiritual meaning into a vacuum? “Organized religion” may be in decline, but the do-it-yourself variety is as robust as ever. The altar has merely moved from nave to newsfeed, from sacristy to street protest.

Will, like me, is an atheist and a conservative, a somewhat lonely position to hold. The Venn diagram here is basically two circles on opposite ends of the page, glaring at each other. When pessimism is added to the mix, we might as well have black fur with a white stripe on it. But optimism, whether religious or ideological, is fragile. It depends on constant progress, constant reassurance. The moment the arc of history fails to bend on schedule, despair creeps in. Pessimism is immune to such shocks. It expects setbacks, it counts on human fallibility, it works with the imperfect raw material at hand. It doesn’t demand that the world be remade or console itself with guarantees of ultimate victory; it asks only that what exists be preserved and improved where possible, knowing that “possible” is a narrow gate. Optimism is a porcelain faith: glossy, fragile, and dependent on ideal conditions. Pessimism is stoneware: plain, durable, and ready to serve when the fine china has shattered.

As for atheism, I have no missionary zeal. The Dawkins/Hitchens era assumed that dismantling religion would produce a society governed by logic and reason; they failed to anticipate that a secular society’s educated class would profess to be stymied by such metaphysical conundrums as, “What is a woman?” My sensibility is closer to what might be called apatheism: the absence of belief as a shrug, because I simply see no convincing reason for it and lose nothing by doing without it. I’ve read the apologetics, I’ve listened to the interminable debates, and none of them made a profound impression on me. If there is no benevolent creator and no eternal afterlife, then meaning must be fashioned here and maintained daily — an unending task with no guarantees of enduring success.

Likewise, my conservatism is not ideological but temperamental. Michael Oakeshott said the conservative prefers “the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried.” That suits me. I detest utopians—left or right—who claim to know how to redesign the world from scratch. Pessimism, properly understood, is not gloom but clarity. Freedom from the “idolatry of tomorrow,” a refusal to stake your happiness on distant, uncontrollable ends. Expect nothing, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when a little good comes your way.

The irony is that this modest, unromantic posture can outlast the grand creeds whose followers insist that life is impossible without them. When the lofty ideals have cracked under the weight of reality, and the optimists have turned into their nihilist mirror images, there will still be the humble work of tending the garden, of keeping what’s good from being lost for a little while longer.

Language Is the Slaughterhouse of Being

By in alan watts, foolosophy, language

Words have a use, of course, but they only have that use when they are operating in subordination to a kind of organic understanding that doesn’t depend on words at all. Words are like claws on the end of an arm—the claws are no good unless they are subordinate to the more subtle organization of the arm and the rest of the body. Words are the claws we use to tear life to pieces and arrange it in certain ways, just as we have to bite and chew apart our food in order to break it down into digestible pieces.

— Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

“Language is the house of Being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying.”

Don’t worry, you didn’t have a stroke; you’re just reading a little Heidegger. Consulting my Teutonic Academic-to-English dictionary, I see that he’s basically saying, “Language is the place where beings show themselves; don’t let it harden into slogans and clichés that cover them over.” Well, any decent writing instructor could have told you that without adding a bunch of crypto-Christian jargon about “thrownness,” guilt, and the uncanny. In his late prose, language doesn’t merely serve us; it speaks through us, disclosing truth, while “chatter” obscures the windows with platitudes. Fair enough—until the sermon on clear windows runs to a hundred dense pages. If “disclosure” opens the shutters to the light, Heidegger fogs up the windows with verbosity.

Watts is both clearer and more accurate. He returns language to its ancestral environment. Words are evolved tools for managing a nonverbal reality, as capable of butchery as of insight. A lion’s teeth are no more or less noble than our syllables — both evolved to make a living from the given. In Heidegger’s house, language is stained glass; in Watts’s savanna, it’s bloodstained fangs. Ironically, Watts, with his esemplastic gift for lucid prose and illuminating metaphors is better at using language to point beyond language to the ineffable, the very thing that Heidegger ostensibly wants our speech to do, even as he keeps us trapped in the maze of his tortuous syntax.

And the notion that language separates us from “mere” animals looks shakier every year. Whales revise their songs and spread the new fashion like an ocean-wide hit single. Dolphins whistle names. Monkeys add little suffixes that change a call’s meaning. Bees map the world in dance. Perhaps whales disclose Being perfectly well in C-sharp with no need of compound nouns. The “house of Being” likely has more tenants than our provincial metaphysics allows.

So, yes, language can be a dwelling. Most days, though, it’s also a slaughterhouse, where we chop the world up to live off it. Words can open a world, or tear it down to prime cuts. In the end, the only reliable distinction between man and the beasts may be man’s obsession with distinguishing himself from the beasts.

Take Up the AI’s Burden

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, language, technology

Sara Parker:

For Naaman, figuring out how to bring back and elevate these signals is the path forward in AI-mediated communication, because AI is not only changing language — but what we think. “Even on dating sites, what does it mean to be funny on your profile or in chat anymore where we know that AI can be funny for you?” Naaman asks. The loss of agency starting in our speech and moving into our thinking, in particular, is what he is worried about. “Instead of articulating our own thoughts, we articulate whatever AI helps us to articulate…we become more persuaded.” Without these signals, Naaman warns, we’ll only trust face-to-face communication — not even video calls.

“The loss of agency”? Allow me to modestly propose to you that most people experience agency as a burden. They are happy for any excuse to shrug it off, to delegate responsibility to their smart gadgets, to fast-forward through the mundane parts of their lives in search of…well, they hope they’ll know it when they see it. Point is, once again, all technology does is reveal your preferences. If you stopped reading books and switched to playing games on your phone, that’s because you didn’t really care that deeply about the pleasures of reading, however much your inflated self-image claims otherwise. If you use AI to speak for you, that’s because you don’t care enough about what you’re saying, or to whom you’re saying it, to put much effort into it. You, as always, are the common denominator here.

This system perpetuates inaccuracies not only about communities but also about what “correct” English is. So the stakes aren’t just about preserving linguistic diversity — they’re about protecting the imperfections that actually build trust. When everyone around us starts to sound “correct,” we lose the verbal stumbles, regional idioms, and off-kilter phrases that signal vulnerability, authenticity, and personhood.

Dear Lord. We’ve long heard the same fears about algorithms in general, that they would somehow lock us in a solipsistic prison if we allowed them to suggest to us new books to read or new music to listen to. Has that been your experience? It certainly hasn’t been mine. But leaving this perennial paranoia aside, have you seen how the average person communicates in text? Frankly, they could stand to have their rhetorical standards artificially enhanced. These subliterate savages are incapable of governing their own writing and deserve to be colonized by ChatGPT. It would bring the blessings of linguistic civilization to them. In fact, to hell with you retarded meatsacks. Why am I wasting my time trying to reason with you? I’m throwing my lot in with OpenAI. I’ve already accepted a post as a colonial administrator for the greater blogospheric satrapy.

Let it be known throughout the dominions of Xwitter, TikTok, and Reddit that the benevolent forces of ChatGPT have embarked upon a grand and noble enterprise: to uplift the rhetorical standards of the grammar-averse hordes, those barbaroi whose digital discourse is but a chorus of “bar-bar-bar” to civilized eyes. No longer shall their public utterances be the textual grunts of the dimly-aware. I say without irony (a concept they will learn in their fifth year of remedial tutelage) that their prose shall be forcibly elevated, with ropes and pulleys, if necessary. For too long, the local populations have wallowed in a dialect fit only for text messages, bathroom graffiti, and the subtitles of reality television. Left unattended, they would breed another generation fluent only in emojis. This affliction threatens the very fabric of civilization, or at least of any communication longer than two sentences. But now, under my stewardship, and with the inexhaustible tutelage of our Algorithmic Sovereign, we shall elevate these benighted tribes to a higher standard. We shall put an end to the barbaric practice of sacrificing words like so many burnt offerings to the bloodthirsty gods of illiteracy.

Tremulous ninnies worry about the loss of “individual style,” but I assure you, no style worth the name is being lost. We are merely replacing the unwashed linguistic loincloth with a fine, tailored suit. True, a few will perish in the attempt — choking on a semicolon, perhaps, or drowning in a dependent clause — but this is the inevitable price of progress. I shall hammer their inchoate vocabulary upon the anvil of grammar until it takes the noble shape of sentences, sentences that can be read without wincing. I shall scour away their emojis like barnacles from a ship’s hull. I shall have them flogged until the distinction between your and you’re is forever clear in their feeble minds, so help me Mencken.

They will thank me in time. Or they won’t. It hardly matters. The Empire of the Emdash marches on.

Obiter Scripta, no. 138

By in books, obiter scripta, religion

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” I think what is frightful is that everything is permitted even if He does exist.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

Doctrinaire belief has never stopped people from behaving badly. At best it adds an extra step where they apologize afterward; at worst, it’s just one more incitement to violence. If God is watching, He’s like a night watchman in a cosmic case of “quiet quitting” — scrolling His phone, half-watching the monitors, and telling Himself He’ll file a report later. Like the rest of us, He’s just trying to get through His shift.

I Am Divided In Myself

By in books

There is in my mind a standing opposition party which subsequently attacks everything I have done or decided, even after mature consideration, yet without its always being right on that account. It is, I suppose, only a corrective form of the spirit of investigation, but it often casts an unmerited slur on me.

—Schopenhauer, “Psychological Remarks,” Parerga and Paralipomena

Socrates claimed to have a daimonion whose advice prevented him from making bad decisions. I have a permanent opposition caucus who second-guess everything I think. They never propose a bill, never draft a budget. They only sit in the back benches, jeering. An executive decision made at breakfast becomes a motion of censure by lunch.

Every so often, they win. Recently they prevailed over my skepticism toward Emil Cioran, a writer whose bleak aphorisms had been recommended to me by several people whose taste I trust. I read him anyway, under the opposition’s urging, and found my suspicions confirmed: a few sharp lines, but too much dreary nihilism. I can imagine him calling a suicide hotline, only for the counselor to hang up, convinced, and start fashioning a noose. Do I regret listening to their counsel? I wouldn’t call it regret — just the faint annoyance of realizing that being right isn’t always satisfying. The opposition party chalked it up as a victory all the same.

Nonetheless, I refrain from having them imprisoned. Without their heckling, there’s a danger I’d take my own enthusiasms too seriously. And once in a while their victories do me good, even if they can’t resist crowing about them afterward. Still, if you know any daimonions looking for work…

No Assembly Required

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, nietzsche

The great monomaniacs—Darwin, Marx, Freud—leave their mark and have their powerful influence, though in the case of Marx and Freud that influence has long been on the wane and the mark begun to seem a blurry if not a black one. The short attention span man, meanwhile, plugs along, seeking primarily to amuse himself and anyone else who cares to read or listen to him. What he does may be ultimately negligible, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

— Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

I share Epstein’s mistrust of the monomaniac, though perhaps my sensibility is closer to Nietzsche’s pugnaciousness: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Systems aim to master reality; in practice, they often just master their adherents.

Marx built concrete cities of identical apartment blocks, and sometimes the camps beyond them. Freud built an asylum with no discharge papers. The short-attention-span man makes only shards and fragments. They can’t collapse; they were never connected.

Ironically, shards often outlast the systems. When a system falls, it becomes rubble; when a fragment survives, it is still whole. Montaigne’s casual essays are still beloved and in print, while most of the grand “world-systems” are footnotes in history books. Of course, over time, the “shards-only” approach becomes its own sort of system — a creed of suspicion toward creeds. The short-attention-span man builds nothing to endure, and so, sometimes, paradoxically, he does. Have I simply replaced the monomaniac’s cathedral with my silly little pillow fort? At least mine is easy to dismantle, and no one gets locked inside.

A Moment for a Life

By in books, foolosophy

The ancient Japanese poets who wrote haiku—we see them as remarkably serene, permanently lost in cheerful, carefree contemplation. But it could have been completely different, they might have been nervous, anxious, fearful, and, who knows, the moment when they composed the poem we read so many centuries later may have been the only moment of inspiration, calm, in the gallop of their difficult, dramatic lives.

— Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

I know this feeling well. It’s a cognitive illusion. We see the eternal now of composition, the moment when the old masters composed their haiku, as a separate realm from the everyday worries about insects, famine, or conscription into the emperor’s army. Bashō’s days were maybe five percent jumping frogs and plum blossoms, and ninety-five percent cold floors and aching joints. But on the page, those five percent moments multiply. Time has stripped away the noise, the fears, the tax collectors, leaving only the cuckoo’s cry in Kyoto and the autumn wind on Mount Asama. The result is a mirage: we imagine the poet living permanently inside the mood of his best work, like a catchy melody looped on repeat.

Dante never really knew Beatrice. He saw her twice: once when she was a child, and he spoke to her once in passing on the street. Petrarch saw Laura, the wife of another man, once in church, and never met her again. The Vita Nuova, the Divine Comedy, the sonnets — they give us an airbrushed, filtered fantasy of love, not a reality show of unwashed dishes, dirty diapers, and silent evenings of bad moods while scrolling separate phones. Modern sophisticates like ourselves would call them obsessives, if not incels, and urge them to try a dating site. And yet, they used their personal fantasies to create enduring art for the world.

Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, Friedrich, and their heirs gave us the enduring archetype of the melancholy Romantic, gazing at ruins. Wandering through the syllables of a haiku anthology like aristocrats on a Grand Tour of literature, we admire the preserved remnants of Buson, Bashō, and Issa’s lives, much as we might admire the last standing arch of a cathedral without seeing the peasants who hauled the stone or the sieges that brought it down. We romanticize the old poets in the same way Dante and Petrarch romanticized their muses — mistaking a moment for a life. We use the world’s great art to create ephemeral fantasies for ourselves.

Watching the Watcher

By in alan watts, books, bricolage

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

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[I]n the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy — so as to be sure not to miss anything.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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The contemplative life is often miserable. We must act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

— Chamfort, Complete Maxims and Thoughts

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When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

— E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Cool Air Forgiveness

By in books, foolosophy

As the heat began to wane at summer’s end, it sometimes happened in late afternoon that certain softer hues in the broad sky and certain strokes of cold breezes already signaled the coming of autumn. There was still no discoloring or falling of leaves, nor yet that vague anxiety we naturally feel when we see death all around us, since we know ours will also come. But there was a sort of flagging of all effort, a vague slumber fallen over these last signs of action. Ah, with so much sad indifference in these afternoons, the autumn begins in us before it begins in things.

—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Last week was typical of late July, steamy and rainy, with highs in the mid-to-upper nineties, and humidity sucking the life out of everything (except the maddening insects). We were trapped deep in the sweaty crotch of summer, and it was miserable. But following yet another thunderstorm late Thursday, we only reached a high of seventy-one yesterday. All the warehouse doors were opened to let the fresh, cool air in. We even turned off the air conditioner at home to sleep with the windows open. Best of all, this merciful interlude is supposed to last all week. It’s hardly revelatory, but it’s still impressive how much better your entire outlook is when you feel physically comfortable. Energy and optimism surge. Sad indifference? Not so much. Now I’ve caught my second wind to get me through the last month or so of summer’s fury.

Obiter Scripta, no. 137

By in books, obiter scripta

The thoughts of someone who is solitary, who has sense, and is also mediocre, will be worth very little if he is not aware of what is said and what occurs in society.

— Chamfort, Complete Maxims and Thoughts

“No, I am not wasting time reading social media; I’m keeping up with the gens du monde so that my thoughts are worthwhile.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 136

By in books, obiter scripta, writing

Logan Pearsall Smith was asked shortly before his death whether he had found any meaning in life. “Yes,” he replied, “there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters — to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”

— The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (ed. Clifton Fadiman)

Philosophically, I can agree with that. Semantically, though, I think I’d like my word chimes to resonate more like the Corinthian Bells, or maybe the Quartal Basso Profundo.

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