aphorisms

All Is Number

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

We fall in love once, or twice; have one or two real friends; hate one enemy; feel pity for a few unfortunates — and the rest of mankind leaves us perfectly indifferent.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

The human heart is an exclusive club operating under the name Dunbar’s Number. The bouncer has a clipboard, a bad attitude, and a ruthless sense of capacity. Another way to put it: The heart is generous in theory and protectionist in practice. It cannot afford open borders.

Scarcity does not cease to exist when we leave the marketplace. It follows us into the heart. Attention, patience, the ability to worry without being consumed: all are scarce. We may dislike the intrusion of economic language into love, but the underlying fact remains: to care deeply for someone is to spend oneself, and no creature has infinite reserves. We can demand a world of unlimited sympathy as easily as we can demand a world of unlimited food, land, water, or energy. But scarcity does not vanish because the resource is invisible. Love, patience, pity, attention, forgiveness — these too must be husbanded, cultivated, restored. There is no moral genius in spending them thoughtlessly.

Travel Compresses the Spine

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

A friend recently asked whether we had any trips planned this summer. Hell no, I said. I hate traveling. Driving and flying are uncomfortable for long distances; meals become tactical problems; sleep becomes theoretical; bathroom breaks require logistics. I enjoy my routine. It does not imprison me. It steadies me. I have to have it pried from my fingers, preferably by men with court orders and rifles. If your thoughts are already roaming all day, why would you also want your meals, sleep, bathroom habits, shoes, luggage, and spinal column thrown into disorder? Travel is sold as expansion, but for some of us it feels more like being evicted from our own nervous system.

The Lady’s sister is visiting in a couple weeks and asked whether we could take her to the beach, more than three hours away. “Couldn’t we just rent her a car and send her by herself?” I asked. Apparently this falls short of hospitality, though I maintain it shows initiative.

I realize this sounds like mere crankiness. It is not. It is proof of mental mobility. A dull man must go somewhere to have an experience. I can stand in the kitchen, drink from the same mug, look at the same patch of yard, and still be mildly overwhelmed by the abundance of existence. Why would I need to add traffic?

Travel is an assault on the small republic of habit. Suddenly the whole orderly government of the day collapses. Food depends on strangers. Sleep is negotiated with pillows designed by enemies of the human neck. Bathrooms appear only at the moment when one has given up hope or lost all dignity. Every meal requires a committee, every exit requires shoes, every outing requires some fresh humiliating acquaintance with logistics.

And then someone says, “But don’t you want to see new places?” Not especially. I have books, memory, imagination, and a perfectly serviceable chair. I can be dissatisfied with existence from home. My body stays put because my mind is already running loose.

Obiter Scripta, no. 162

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

The metaphor is far more intelligent than its author, and this is the case with many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees something in everything.

— Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (Penguin Classics)

I love metaphors, and I feel pleased when I come up with what I consider to be a good one, but I also feel a little bit like I’ve cheated — as if I’ve explained something rather than merely artfully compared two things. I feel like Victor Frankenstein, accidentally stitching life together from dead parts: one observation, one image, one half-remembered association, one stolen nerve from some previous book. Then the lightning hits, and suddenly it sits up.

Obiter Scripta, no. 161

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

I no longer want to bark. But I hang onto my prejudices. They are the testicles of my mind.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

A wise man will keep his suspicions muzzled, but he will keep them awake.

—Marquis of Halifax, Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

Keep the prejudice-testicles, by all means; a mind without them may be well-behaved, but it will not sire many thoughts. But keep a muzzle on the suspicion-snout. Let prejudice supply vigor, suspicion supply caution, and judgment hold the leash. That last part is vital: the intact crank, allowed to roam at will, sprays his opinions everywhere. Every book, movie, sentence, political event, and innocent passerby must be claimed by the same stale scent. The mind doesn’t need to be neutered, but it must be housebroken.

Obiter Scripta, no. 159

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, obiter scripta

I love ideas as much as I love women. I derive a sensuous pleasure from playing with ideas. Genuine ideas dance and sing. They sparkle and twinkle with mirth and mischief. They titillate the mind, kindle the imagination, and warm the heart. They have grace and promise.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Hoffer saw the flirtatious side of ideas. But ideas are not always coquettes at a party. Sometimes they are cold hands pressed against your back just as you were drifting off to sleep. They give you the silent treatment all morning, then want to talk when you are driving, showering, or carrying groceries. They flirt outrageously in the margins of a book, then become prim and distant when you sit down at the keyboard. Sometimes they ask “Does this paragraph make me look fat?” and you must gently suggest that perhaps the second sentence is retaining water, or that possibly it wouldn’t hurt to lose a couple adjectives. Sometimes they keep you in the friendzone for years: intimate enough to haunt you, evasive enough to resist becoming an essay. Others move in after one conversation and begin rearranging the furniture.

Find a Penny, Pick It Up

By in ai, aphorisms, books, technology, writing

Waste-book method highly recommended. A note made of every phrase, every expression. Wealth can also be acquired through saving up truths in pennyworths.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I save phrases in Simplenote. Usually song lyrics, a poetic phrase, or an irresistible pun — little verbal coins dropped into the drawer. Sometimes a particularly striking phrase will make me ask, “If this were the title of a post, what would the post be about?” and I reverse-engineer it from there. But phrases are not yet thoughts. A title is only a hook until some poor fish of an idea gets dragged up behind it.

The real value, for me, is discussing ideas with AI. How have I managed to write something daily since last summer after increasingly long hiatuses in recent years? It’s not that I have more ideas than before. It’s just that none of them die of neglect any longer. In the past, a half-formed notion would appear, hover for an hour, and vanish before I could give it any time. Now I can drop it into a thread as it occurs to me and go back to work. The next time I get a break, there it is again, with questions attached, objections raised, possible shapes suggested. I can send my bot-bloodhound on research errands while I do the things I get paid for. By the end of the day, what would once have evaporated has usually become at least a rough draft.

You can fairly say that this is just basic writing discipline: outlines, rough drafts, research. True enough. But discipline is partly a matter of finding the form in which you will actually practice it. I never had the patience to do this with pen and paper, and I wouldn’t have time to do it now if I had to do all the brainstorming, organizing, and preliminary digging alone. Conversation is the format in which my creativity and lateral thinking are best stimulated, but real people are often lacking in interest and availability. This lets me take all those pennyworth ideas and compound them.

Obiter Scripta, no. 158

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

This seems…optimistic. My experience is that once we know our weaknesses, they simply force us to buy them new clothes. The old disguise has been compromised. Vanity can no longer appear decked out as independence; cowardice has been seen strolling around in prudence’s hat; laziness has overplayed its hand as philosophical detachment. Very well, then. Back to the wardrobe. A man must go on deceiving himself somehow, and self-knowledge, far from ending the deception, merely raises the cost of production.

Cooties On the Porch

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit

Stoics and Epicureans.— The Epicurean selects the situation, the persons, and even the events that suit his extremely irritable, intellectual constitution; he gives up all others, which means almost everything, because they would be too strong and heavy for him to digest. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to become ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it: he reminds one of that Arabian sect of the Assaua whom one encounters in Algiers: like these insensitive people, he, too, enjoys having an audience when he shows off his insensitivity, while the Epicurean would rather dispense with that, having his “garden!”

For those with whom fate attempts improvisations—those who live in violent ages and depend on sudden and mercurial people—Stoicism may indeed be advisable. But anyone who foresees more or less that fate permits him to spin a long thread does well to make Epicurean arrangements. That is what all those have always done whose work is of the spirit. For this type it would be the loss of losses to be deprived of their subtle irritability and be awarded in its place a hard Stoic hedgehog skin.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The distinction feels obvious once he makes it. The Epicurean picks, chooses and arranges; the Stoic sits and endures. The Epicurean asks what sort of life can best preserve his powers; the Stoic trains himself to thrive on whatever scraps fate pours into his dish. I can admire the latter in extremis. If fate “attempts improvisations” one may need the hedgehog skin. But squaring up to the universe and daring it to do its worst is a young man’s game. Middle age has made the question less theatrical. What am I trying to be strong for? Not for the young man’s sport of proving I can digest whatever gravel the universe serves up. The universe will always win that contest. I want strength enough to be a good spouse, a good friend, and a tolerably healthy animal; strength enough to read, work, and enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life.

As it happens, while I was thinking about Nietzsche’s Stoic who enjoys having an audience before whom to display his insensitivity, Ryan Holiday, the avatar of modern Stoic life-coaching, released a video objecting to Ivanka Trump’s praise of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The irony is almost too neat. The ancient Stoic showed off his hardness. The modern Stoic influencer shows off his sensitivity with eye-rolls and irritated grimaces. He does not say, “I have trained myself to endure fools, vulgarity, vanity, dynastic politics, and bad readers without nausea.” He says, in effect: please be assured that I do not accept this woman as an authorized appreciator of my Marcus Aurelius. “Stoicism is not a brand; it’s a practice,” he huffs, which is funny, because it very much is something of a brand for him, and he’s protecting it exactly like you would expect: by hurrying to distance it from being contaminated by association with a low-rent, gauche name like Trump. He talks like an evangelist but reacts like a brand manager. Stoicism is for everyone, yes — provided “everyone” means CEOs, Navy SEALs, quarterbacks, founders, and the sort of striver who buys leather-bound wisdom for the office shelf. But let the wrong sort of name praise Meditations, and suddenly the porch has a velvet rope and a guest list.

This is the perennial danger with philosophical/religious/spiritual outlooks once they become personal brands or lifestyle accessories. They stop being windows and become mirrors. Catherine Wilson’s Epicurus, when I read her How to Be an Epicurean, sounded coincidentally like a modern liberal academic Democrat. Holiday’s Marcus Aurelius coincidentally motivates Holiday to be inclusive, ethical, and to “do better.” In both cases, the ancient philosopher is not allowed to interrupt. He is invited in, dressed for the occasion, and made to ratify whatever the host already believed.

Holiday, of all people, ought to understand the possibility of transformation. His first book was not Lives of the Saints but Trust Me, I’m Lying, a manual-memoir of media manipulation. Yet that success helped make possible his later reinvention as America’s most visible Stoic popularizer. Very well. Let us grant the premise. People can change. A man may begin as a clever little vandal of the attention economy and end by preaching Marcus Aurelius to executives and athletes. But if that grace is available to Ryan Holiday, why is it not available to anyone else? Why may the former amoral media manipulator become a genuine Stoic, while Ivanka Trump, upon praising Meditations, must be treated as if she had smeared chewing gum on a relic? “The only similarity you have with the Aurelius family is that you’re a Commodus! And so are your shitty brothers!” Ah, yes, the ironies of history: if a great man like Marcus Aurelius could produce a degenerate son like Commodus, why couldn’t it work in reverse? Who’s to say that Ivanka’s understanding of Stoicism, even if we assume it to be shallow right now, couldn’t deepen? Stranger things have happened. But Holiday dismisses her appreciation as “cringe,” and “not real.” Stoicism demands “doing the right thing even when it costs you something,” a slogan so revolutionary it was adopted by a (cringe?) brand like Nike in an award-winning bid for market share in the attention economy.  Stoicism demands doing the right thing even when it’s painful, “even when it would mean, I don’t know, confronting your horrible family members?” And what would that accomplish, other than another brief spectacle in the news cycle, another serving of gossip and pro-wrestling drama for people who pretend they’re above such tawdry entertainment?

Part of the disappointment is watching yet another mind make the ritual genuflection. Even Stoicism, whose whole value should lie in helping us step back from the day’s petty tyrannies, must now shape itself around the great bedrock question of the age: Donald Trump, for or against? No one seems willing to say: this is larger than one politician. History has seen emperors, warlords, demagogues, buffoons, assassins, saints, frauds, and madmen. The point of reading Marcus Aurelius is not to acquire the correct contemporary voting reflex, but to ground oneself in a perspective capacious enough to survive them all. Yet somehow the former reality-TV host and real-estate tycoon has acquired the most precious property in the world: other people’s minds. And they handed him the deed for free.

Between Two Noises

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit

Better deaf than deafened.— Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those who want to sell and without hoarseness there no longer is any genius.

This is surely an evil age for a thinker. He has to learn how to find his silence between two noises and to pretend to be deaf until he really becomes deaf. Until he has learned this, to be sure, he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Poor Nietzsche thought David Strauss was a symptom of cultural decay. He thought the public intellectual arena was a fraudulent carnival in the early 1880s. Luckily for him, he never had to see Strauss presented as a thumbnail image: mouth agape, eyebrow raised, with three red arrows pointed at his face, under a caption screaming, “Scholar’s new book DESTROYS divinity of Jesus!” He had hucksters, yes — barkers, pamphleteers, academic charlatans, literary careerists: the usual fleas on the hide of civilization. But he didn’t have the algorithm: that tireless pimp of the nervous system, forever urging even decent minds to hitch up their skirts and show a little more leg for engagement.

In one of his unpublished notes, he says, “Becoming famous surrounds us with humans and their demands upon us. We must cast our fame into the sea.” Sour grapes in his case or not, he was right. Live unnoticed, said Epicurus. Scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs, said Montaigne. Worshiping the bitch-goddess SUCCESS breeds moral flabbiness, said William James. Our age always has a bargain ready: your face for a little reach, your anger for a little traffic, your shame for a little recurring revenue. Refuse it. Do not become a window prostitute in the red-light district of opinion. Bite the hand that offers the platform. Leave the bell unrung. Keep something unsold, for the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the algorithm, sponsored hysterical branded, dragging themselves through the monetized depths of content creation, looking for angry subscribers to smash that like button and subscribe…

Meep Meep!

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, writing

Sigh— I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them—and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Words are the seducers of philosophers; they struggle in the nets of language.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

My own case is less flattering. Words may be nets, but I am as likely to be found hanging upside down in one of them as to have captured anything. If I am a hunter of insights, I am closer to Elmer Fudd or Wile E. Coyote: forever creeping after the same prey with some new weapon of language, only to have the trap close on my own foot, or the shotgun blast rearrange the quarry’s beak for three seconds before it snaps back into place. Perhaps I have never been chasing separate insights at all. Perhaps there is only one insight, endlessly escaping over the horizon, tongue out, legs spinning, leaving me behind in a small puff of dust with another notebook full of arid words.

Reader’s Digestion

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

There is something reassuring about this comparison. No one keeps a journal of every sandwich he has ever eaten, nor feels like a fraud because he cannot produce, on demand, a vivid summary of his lunch from seventeen Tuesdays ago. The proof of those meals is not in recollection but in result: in one’s frame, one’s energy, one’s general ability to keep moving through the world without keeling over. Books, however, flatter our vanity in a different way. Since they are made of words, and words seem as though they ought to remain neatly available for quotation, we feel a vague shame when they sink below the level of conscious recall. We imagine that a properly educated man should carry thousands of volumes around in his head like a sort of ambulatory Library of Congress.

But that would be less a cultivated mind than a case of intellectual constipation. One does not want one’s books sitting there undigested, bloating the system. Better that they be broken down and metabolized into taste, judgment, instinct, a sharpened nose for the profound and the fraudulent. And for the minority of books whose exact contents one really does want at hand, there are always sticky tabs and the useful dim memory that “Lichtenberg had something good on this; I should go pull that down again.” Alfred North Whitehead said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” The protein you consume doesn’t need to be monitored; its effects appear once you’re under a heavy squat bar. I have around 2,000 books on my shelves, and for at least 1,950 of them, I probably couldn’t tell you anything more informative than what you could read on the back cover. But I’ve metabolized them in some form or another; their effects appear once I sit down to write on a particular topic. Suddenly, it turns out that I remember more than I knew.

I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, Somewhere You Can Hear My Voice

By in aphorisms, books, writing

To capture readers, one must write novels. To lose them, one must write well.

On this: “More and more, I have had to convince myself that a writer’s importance is proportional to his ability to disregard the reader, to possess an unshakeable confidence—since nothing exists without the social context—that he will nonetheless have a reader and a wonderful one at that.”

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation

Shortly after reading this, I was amused to read Patrick Kurp mention being mildly scolded by a reader for referring in passing to Spinoza, thereby forcing this wounded party to consult Wikipedia, as if he had been sentenced to hard labor in the salt mines. One tries to be sympathetic. Life is busy. Time is short. Fingers grow weary. And yet I have always supposed that readers of a certain sort could be trusted to survive the strain of encountering an unfamiliar name without demanding that the writer provide hyperlinks. Thankfully, I have never been rebuked for my own obscure references or inside jokes, though I confess I have proceeded on the sanguine assumption that you fine folks are fully capable of using the search functions on your fancy internetting machines.

I was surprised to recognize myself in Hohl’s aphorism. I am not by nature a swaggering or headstrong person. In most areas of life I can second-guess, hesitate, revise, and doubt myself into a standstill. But for whatever reason, the uncertainty stops at the edge of the page. There, and perhaps only there, I have always felt an almost unreasonable assurance: that I know what I am doing, that I can do it well, and that there are people who will appreciate it. It is not a moral virtue, and certainly not an achievement of character. It feels more like an unearned gift or a quirk of temperament; a peculiar form of self-command bestowed in one narrow province and withheld everywhere else.

I have no illusions of my importance, but truth is, I have never considered the reader’s interest. I take it for granted and write to my own self-imposed standard for anyone who cares to read along. This is not contempt for the reader. It is a form of respect. In any event, I have no desire to “capture” readers. It’s enough to occasionally see them as glowing eyes in the darkness, reflecting the campfire, or to find their tracks in the site stats.

Madbrain Rudesbies Full of Spleen

By in aphorisms, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

In general, when people break the yoke of opinion, it is rarely to lift themselves above it, but to descend below it.

— Chamfort, Complete Maxims and Thoughts

With Elon’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s return to power, many on the right exulted. At last, they thought, they would no longer be hectored by liberal gatekeepers or forced to mouth the approved pieties of the age. Many of these people spent years presenting themselves as dissidents, truth-tellers, and fearless enemies of cant. How’s that been going?

I kid, of course. Human nature doesn’t change. The current “discourse” resembles a food fight at a mud-wrestling match during a Klan rally with an audience of cranks, paranoid schizophrenics, trolls, shameless influencers, and anonymous degenerates cheering from the stands. Housebreaking is beyond these people, to say nothing of self-governance.

A Room With a View

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, montaigne

The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause—in a word, some one.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

Montaigne, by contrast, advises us to keep a room behind the shop: a private retreat, inward and unencumbered, where the self can learn not to cling too desperately to wife, children, possessions, or public station: “We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.”

Both men are right. But there is also a danger in admiring extremes too theatrically. Not everyone who avoids the front room is a sage, and not everyone who keeps to the back room has achieved liberty. Some are merely hiding. One can become as affected in one’s solitude as another man is in his sociability.

The ideal is not the drawing room, where one is forever performing, nor the sealed Stoic bunker, where one practices losing wife, children, and health in advance like a philosophical fire drill. The ideal is some modest interior room where one remains available to reality without being swallowed by it. One hears the commotion in the front, knows there is a back room somewhere for emergencies, but ordinarily lives in a place fit for an ordinary human being: partly social, partly reflective, capable of company, capable of silence, and not entirely at the mercy of either. By nature, I tend to avoid extremes. Left to myself, I would gladly spend most of my time in a study, surrounded by books; but even there, the laptop on my desk gives me a window onto the world.

Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book

By in aphorisms, books, jests japes jokes jollies

I have thought a great deal, I know, much more than I have read; as a consequence I am ignorant of a great deal that the rest of the world knows, so that when I mix with the rest of the world I often err and blunder, and this makes me shy and retiring. If I could express all that I have accumulated in thought, not in a fragmentary and often unattractive way, but as it exists within me, it would certainly receive the world’s applause.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I have long suspected that I am a misunderstood genius, possibly touched by hyperthymesia, but in one of those regrettably impractical forms in which nature bestows her favors. As a boy, I could remember the details of my team’s soccer games from seasons past with a fidelity that should have qualified me for intelligence work. Dates, final scores, who scored (for each team), how they scored (header, right foot, left foot) incidental details of the match, and, on occasion, even the type of cleats worn by particular players: all of it remained in my head without effort. Meanwhile, mathematical knowledge passed through my consciousness like angel-hair pasta through a big-hole colander. My father, who was stubbornly attached to conventional standards of usefulness, found this less impressive than I did.

As a young man, my gifts matured. I became a living storage unit for song lyrics, especially by obscure bands no sane employer has ever asked about. If called upon, I could supply whole verses from songs last heard years before, as though some officious clerk in my mind had carefully filed them away for future retrieval. I could not, however, be trusted to remember ordinary obligations with equal zeal. The world, philistine that it is, failed to recognize the grandeur of this arrangement. It did not say, “Behold, a human archive.” It said, “Did you return that phone call?”

Now in adulthood the pattern persists, only in more dignified forms. I can often tell you which Nietzsche book contains a passage, which bookshelf it sits on, and roughly where the passage lies: two-thirds through, left-hand page, near the bottom, penultimate paragraph. I have a similar talent for recalling conversations nearly word for word, sometimes years later, which is a gift of dubious social value but undeniable accuracy. One would think such powers might command respect, if not a sinecure. One would think the world might applaud.

Instead, the world pesters me with trifles. It wants to know whether I finally signed the tax forms for the accountant, whether the inventory count for client Smith is finished, and why there is a set of keys in the refrigerator. These are the things on which one’s reputation apparently hangs. Not one’s ability to retrieve a forgotten aphorism, reconstruct a conversation verbatim, or explain in loving detail the differences between Patrick Mustangs or Patrick Stabils. No: civilization is evidently upheld by people who can solve for X, return emails, and complete forms on time.

This has always struck me as a little coarse. The world is forever complaining that genius is unrecognized, but when genius does appear in its proper form — lopsided, specialized, faintly ridiculous, superbly equipped for the wrong tasks — the world shows no gratitude whatever. It merely clears its throat and asks again about the paperwork.

There Is Something You Must Know

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

It is a fault common to all people of little talent and more reading than understanding that they hit upon ingenious rather than natural explanations.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

My friend Donny is what I think of as a prairie intellectual. I don’t mean that unkindly. He is intelligent, soft-spoken, and genuinely bookish, with the sort of autodidactic curiosity that sends a man ranging far beyond the approved shelves: religion, conspiracies, prophecy, obscure paperbacks, all the byways and oddments that accumulate around a mind that likes to wander. Lichtenberg’s insult is too harsh for him, but the underlying tendency is accurate enough. Donny does not lack intelligence; if anything, he takes too much pleasure in using it. The plain explanation rarely satisfies him when a more elaborate one can be devised. He is drawn less to the merely probable than to the intriguingly possible.

In a denser intellectual environment, some of those habits might have been worn down by constant friction. Certain speculative impulses do not survive long when every loose connection is challenged at once and every baroque theory is forced to answer for itself. But out on the prairie, both literally and mentally, stranger growths can persist. One finds there a kind of intellectual island species: widely read, highly curious, genuinely thoughtful, yet still retaining certain old speculative traits that harsher conditions might have selected against. The result is a mind I find both admirable and faintly wild: thoughtful, curious, and always in some danger of preferring the ingenious to the natural.

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