books

I’m Not Locked In Here With You; You’re Locked In Here With Me

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology

I know I was just complaining about how people don’t write letters anymore. But at the risk of sounding difficult to please, I have to say that when people did write letters they often weren’t very interesting. College students wrote to mom and dad, but just as an excuse to ask for money, and don’t get me started on the literary merits of the average love letter. The letters of Italian humanists are another case in point. Elegant though they are, they tend to follow predictable motifs. There’s the epistle of consolation, sharing in the grief of losing a loved one before saying it’s time to pull oneself together. There’s the letter in which the recipient’s eloquence is extravagantly praised, and the answer to such a letter, where the done thing is to respond with even more extravagant false modesty. Closely related is the plea for patronage, a showpiece of verbal dexterity in which fulsome praise of some rich person is used to entice that rich person to pay for more of the same. Most characteristically, there is the letter that is not about much of anything, apart from the fact that one is writing a letter. It begins by apologizing for not writing sooner and goes on to apologize again for having to be brief, before closing with the admonition that the recipient should reply as soon as possible. Renaissance rhetoric is at its purest when it uses beautiful, well-balanced, Ciceronian sentences to say nothing.

— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

In other words: the human talent for self-evasion doesn’t need modern technology. It never did.

That’s what I want to use as a moral reminder — not “mindfulness” (that word now comes with incense and merch), but something simpler and harsher: there’s no real escape from yourself. Wherever you go, you bring the same appetite for ease, the same ability to drift, the same knack for making excuses sound principled. Every day offers small temptations to take the shortcut and call it “self-care,” to slide into a warm bath of self-centeredness where your obligations dissolve and your ideals become decorative.

Nostalgia is one of the warmest baths. It whispers that authenticity was easy back then. If only we could return to the mid-90s — before algorithms, before smartphones, before social media — then of course we’d all be living in authentic reality: long conversations, meaningful relationships, handwritten letters, depth everywhere. But those of us who were actually there know what that’s worth. People frittered away their time just fine back then. They dodged hard conversations. They postponed letters. They did the minimum and dressed it up. They simply had fewer gadgets to blame.

If you think “people” should take the time to write more personal letters, what’s stopping you? Not the era. Not the medium. Not the loss of some vanished social grace. You can do it today. You can even do it on a laptop — if you’re willing to pay the real cost, which is attention. Renaissance humanists could produce elegance on command. That was the problem. Elegance became an alibi: proof that something had been done, without the discomfort of actually saying something. And that temptation hasn’t changed. We can all “compose” our way out of sincerity, whether with Ciceronian balance or a perfectly-toned text message. But we don’t like to pay attention, because we’d rather spend our time fantasizing, as people have always done.

Obiter Scripta, no. 150

By in books, obiter scripta, the statusphere

Those who write abstractly are rather lucky: they will have commentators. Others only have readers, which, it seems, is to be looked down upon.

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

In Midnight Maxims, Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “Intellectuals are the bureaucrats of thought.” Likewise, Camus’ commentators are the bureaucrats of the book world. The bureaucrat’s survival skill is activity that can be documented, not outcomes that can be verified. A text that stays “richly ambiguous” is a renewable resource. A text that gets nailed down is a closed case. It’s safer to write “a reading of” than to say something falsifiable. And if you can turn “understanding a book” into a method (frameworks, lenses, rubrics), you can always claim progress even when nothing clarifies. Clarity reduces the need for the middle-management of meaning.

Praise You Like I Should

By in books, foolosophy

We always suppose that others possess great powers of acute penetration thanks to which they will discover our worth, whether real or imagined, and that they will then devote considerable attention to these merits of ours, even when we refuse to recognize such qualities in respect of any other object.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

It’s funny, because most of us recognize our own narcissistic tendencies here, especially from our self-involved adolescence (mine, at least). To be recognized by others as being smart, sensitive, and talented, and to be marveled at! Of course, he’s talking about the ways we daydream about other people paying close, positive attention to us, captivated by our awesomeness. The flip side of that is the equally-narcissistic fear that they’re paying close negative attention to us, seeing every flaw and judging us harshly. The deflating truth is, most people are as wrapped up in their own personal soap opera as we are and probably hardly think about us at all. Likewise, we are often guilty of the same self-absorption. How often do we hand out affectionate compliments to people who are, after all, just doing their job?

A small episode at our doctor’s office reminded me of that.

My stepson and I have been going in weekly for testosterone injections for about a year now. Our nurse is a young woman, reliably conscientious and caring, and we always look forward to chatting with her. The appointment is ten minutes long, but repetition turns ten minutes into a kind of ritual. You get familiar. You pick up conversational threads where you left them the week before. It becomes, in miniature, a friendship.

So we decided to get her a little Christmas gift: a gift card to a local coffee shop. Nothing grand, just a thank-you for being consistently cheerful, kind, and competent while doing something for us that’s pure convenience.

We stopped by the clinic’s open-house Christmas party that weekend and gave it to her. Easy. Done. Good deed logged, Christmas cheer spread.

Then we came in several days later for our injections, and my stepson was curious to see if she’d used it yet.

“Did you get any coffee today?”

She said her sister had brought her some that morning. She didn’t seem to pick up on the hint, though.

He tried again. “From [redacted]?” he asked. (The shop’s name withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.)

No, she said. She doesn’t like [redacted]. Apparently they’d pulled some underhanded move against another local coffee place — reneged on an agreement, stole floor plans, something like that. Her sister is a barista, so she’s up on the local bean-water gossip.

Uh-oh.

Then it occurred to me: she might not even have looked at the gift card yet.

So I gently said something like, “Well, if you’d prefer, it’s no trouble to get you a different gift card. We can use that one ourselves…”

Horrified comprehension dawned on her.

“OHMIGOD, you guys!!”

She was profusely apologetic. Flushed and perspiring, she explained she’d gone straight from the party to her other job where she worked all weekend, she’d put the card in her purse and forgotten to look at it, she really was grateful, she didn’t mean to sound rude — on and on. The poor woman was mortified, and my stepson and I started laughing, partly because it was genuinely funny and partly because laughter is the quickest way to say, Please stop punishing yourself. We’re not prosecuting you.

We reassured her: it was just a comedy of errors; we weren’t upset or offended; it was fine; all’s well that ends well.

The next day I went back for a blood draw. She came out to go over last-minute details and joked, “Can’t be too mad, I guess; you came back!” I told her, honestly, that I hoped she hadn’t gone home feeling bad about it.

She admitted she had. Worse, it had become a topic of conversation at dinner. She told her dad and he said, “That’s terrible!”

This is the part where I risk sounding like I’m polishing my halo, but I promise, the point is really about how easily we imagine we’re being judged, and how strangely rare it is to tell someone, plainly, “I see what kind of person you are.”

We know you better than that, I said. We know you’re not the kind of person who’s capable of being rude about a Christmas gift. And I reminded her of something she’d done that she probably thought no one would remember.

In autumn of last year, a hurricane came up from the Gulf and, rather than continuing up the coast, veered inland and tore through parts of the South. We lost power here in central Virginia for about 24 hours, but western North Carolina got severely devastated. Our nurse posted a note online saying she wouldn’t be available the following week because she was going down there to volunteer her nursing services for hurricane victims. I told her that that’s the sort of thing that shows who she really is, not an awkwardly-timed honest opinion.

She smiled and lowered her eyes, and we neatly segued back to talking about blood tests. I like to think that maybe I did my part to disprove the general truth of Leopardi’s observation, and I hope that maybe I gave her a little bit of an inner glow by making her feel unexpectedly recognized and praised for something she would never dream of boasting about.

This comes up in a smaller way every time we visit. If we have to wait, she always apologizes. But this is a tiny private practice; she’s the only nurse on staff; they offer the injections for free; we show up whenever it’s convenient for us and they fit us in as soon as they can, using their own supplies — gloves, syringes, alcohol pads, band-aids. So one day when she apologized, we told her the truth: you guys are doing us a favor; how on earth could we complain about sitting for fifteen minutes? She gave this wistful little smile and said, “I wish everyone felt that way!”

That stuck with me. To us, it’s obvious she’s a good person who deserves appreciation. But she’s probably dealing with a steady trickle of people who treat “free” as an entitlement and still find something to gripe about. And those are the people who give the loudest feedback. If you’re the one who only speaks up to complain, you end up training the world to expect complaint. Which is one reason it feels worth setting aside a little time and money, to say, formally and out loud: we notice you, and we appreciate you.

Bartleby the Scribbler

By in books, identity, work, writing

There’s nothing like the book section at Goodwill to serve as memento mori for literary ambition. Shelf after shelf of novels and memoirs you’ve never heard of, each one the culmination of somebody’s dream. Years of work, an agent, a contract, launch parties, reviews; and now, a buck and change on a thrift-store shelf, moldering away after the original owner stuck it in a box with unwanted Christmas gifts and old sweatshirts and dropped it off in the donation bin like Rousseau leaving an infant on the orphanage stoop.

And that’s the ordinary outcome. At the more spectacular end, you get something like Olivia Nuzzi’s recent memoir, American Canto. A wall-to-wall media circus, months of scandal coverage, an affair with a cabinet secretary, her ex-fiancé serializing his side of the tawdry story on Substack — and after all that, the book moves a little over a thousand print copies in its first week. Imagine whoring away your privacy and integrity for an audience smaller than a mid-tier YouTube channel’s Tuesday upload.

Rob Henderson has a post about what it takes to be a writer now: not just writing, but running a one-person media operation. Newsletter, social feeds, a constant stream of “content,” and enough personal disclosure that readers feel like they “know” you — so that occasionally you can step in and say, “By the way, here’s where you can buy my book.”

On paper, I look like the sort of person a publisher might get ideas about. I’ve been blogging regularly for years. There’s an archive, a recognizable voice, recurring obsessions, a small audience that keeps wandering back. If you’re a literary marketer, this is the kind of thing you point at and say, “Look, a platform.”

This is not to say I could have a career as an Author if I wanted. If I ever published a book, odds are it would sink without a ripple, like most books do. The only point I’m making is narrower and more boring: the visible behavior the publishers and marketers want — regular posting, a sense of personality, a trickle of readers — is already there. What interests me is how the meaning of that behavior would flip the moment it became someone else’s plan. Right now, when I write a post, I’m just following an itch from inside. Something bothers me, or amuses me, or catches my attention, and I want to see what it looks like in sentences. That’s the whole story. If I don’t post for a few days, no one is waiting with a spreadsheet and a frown. The activity begins and ends with my own curiosity. Now imagine the same surface routine, but add a publisher, a publicist, or a boss.

“Time to produce some topical content; your recent posts haven’t really done numbers.”
“You really need an Instagram account; the marketing data are clear.”
“Could you say something a bit provocative on Twitter to juice interest before the launch?”

Nothing material has changed. I’d still be typing words on a screen. But suddenly the internal itch is secondary. The primary thing is fulfilling an obligation someone else has defined: keep the graph pointing up and to the right. The exact same habit becomes part of a strategy deck.

I don’t think obligations are bad. It’s normal to have them. Civilization more or less depends on people doing things they wouldn’t spontaneously choose at 7 a.m. on a Monday. You can even take pride in meeting your obligations, whether you resent them or cheerfully accept them. But obligations have a way of draining some of the spontaneous joy out of an activity. The more something is tied to money, status, or other people’s expectations, the less it feels like play and the more it feels like work, even if you’re doing precisely what you “love.” Which is why I’ve always preferred to keep writing in the hobby column. I’ve heard it said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” For me, this gets it precisely backwards. The surest way to ruin something you love is to make it responsible for your mortgage and your self-worth at the same time.

I already have a job. I treat it as a task: something I do competently in exchange for a paycheck. It doesn’t need to express my deepest self. It just needs to keep the lights on. Writing is the thing I do for its own sake, the place where a stray thought can turn into an afternoon’s entertainment. No deliverables, no targets, no sense that I’m failing if it doesn’t lead to anything. No one has to care. No one has to pay. If I never earn a cent from it, nothing is “wrong.” In my view, something in your life needs to work like that, something that is allowed to be pointless in the best sense. Hobbies are ideally placed to fill that role. For me, writing is a hobby.

Maybe there’s something quintessentially Gen-X about it after all. I’ve never dreamed of being an author, but I do find it amusing to imagine practicing passive resistance against a publishing house and a publicist. “But you like blogging! You’ve already been doing it for decades! Why can’t you just keep doing it with a link at the bottom of every post to the sales page at Amazon?!”

“I would prefer not to,” I’d say. “That’s all.”

You Say You’re Gonna Leave Me, You Know It’s a Lie

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit

Jay Caspian Kang:

Here’s a thought many of us have these days: if only we weren’t on our damn phones all the time, we would surely unlock a better self—one that went on hikes and talked more with our children and felt less rank jealousy about other people’s successes. It’s a nice idea; once a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare. Would I become a scratch golfer or one of those fathers who does thousand-piece puzzles with his children? Would I direct ambitious films that capture the Zeitgeist? Would I at least read more difficult novels?

For years now, I’ve thought most of the handwringing over “social-media addiction” was just a high-tech version of the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse. People like to tell themselves that their reading habits were like a remote island ecosystem, full of rare and beautiful fauna with no natural predators, until a couple of scrawny cats named Facebook and YouTube came ashore and laid waste to the place. Truth is, the ecosystem had always been fragile; the cats just exposed it. The internet didn’t “rewire their brains” or “hijack their dopamine receptors;” it revealed that the self-image of being a devoted reader full of deep thoughts couldn’t survive contact with weaponized distraction. Faced with that revelation, rather than change their lives to match their professed values, they chose instead to build an alibi: I would read serious books, if only the evil app designers would stop outwitting my noble but helpless cortex.

That’s why I perked up for a moment in Kang’s essay, when he describes quitting social media to finish a book and discovering, to his surprise, that he still didn’t start reading more “difficult novels.” There it was, the obvious conclusion blinking in the sunlight: you deleted the apps, you met your deadline, and the fantasy version of yourself still never showed up. Case closed; now what? But instead of following that line to its end — “this is on me” — he veers off into safer terrain, quibbling over the supposedly-evolving meaning of literacy and constructing thought experiments about Dave, the Midwestern military-history buff who reads fewer books but more efficiently. This is just more procrasturbation. Talk about anything — statistics, definitions, “new forms of reading” — so long as you don’t have to say the unvarnished thing in plain language: if you say you love reading books and you don’t read them, the problem is not your phone, your neurology, or late capitalism. It’s you.

I’m equally unconvinced by the horror stories about perfectly sealed algorithmic filter bubbles. Maybe it’s just a quirk of temperament, but when I see too many people saying the same sort of thing in the same sort of voice, I don’t settle into a curated comfort zone; I get bored and go looking for something else. Curiosity is a natural bubble-buster. And recommendations are famously bad at capturing whatever it is that actually makes one author “like” another: the part that hooks you is usually the “not quite” the algorithm couldn’t quantify. I think the choice in front of us is much simpler than Kang allows. Either you put in the mundane effort to carve out a reading life that matches your self-image — turn things off, say no to the feed, sit with the boredom, and read — or you admit that you don’t really want to. Both are respectable positions. What’s not respectable is insisting that you’re a thwarted bibliophile while blaming the world, its apps, and its recommendation engines for making your real priorities visible.

The Codex Files

By in books, identity, socmed, the geist of the zeit

A man walks into a bar with Infinite Jest.
He orders a drink, opens the book, and starts to read.

For a normal person, that’s where the story ends.

For the Extremely Online, that’s where the investigation begins.

Brady Brickner-Wood has a piece in The New Yorker about “performative reading” — the guy in the bar with Infinite Jest or Moby-Dick, the TikToks mocking him for showing off, the mother hens online clucking over whether people are reading “sincerely” enough. It’s written in the lamentable house style: a little Kant and Rousseau, a little Foucault, some David Foster Wallace, an obligatory swipe at “consumerism and market capitalism,” and it’s not very interesting or informative. What stuck with me, though, wasn’t the analysis of the guy with the book. It was the fact that we’ve reached a point where a stranger quietly reading a book in public has to be treated as a potentially suspicious performance at all.

In the early 2010s, remember, this kind of paranoia was still in remission. Social media was going to democratize everything, topple dictators, spark “color revolutions,” forge connections between lonely people, and usher in a global conversation. A decade later, that fantasy has curdled. We now know what the global conversation actually sounds like, and we’ve seen what happens when you give every crank, fanatic and snake-oil salesman a megaphone. Add AI to the mix — deepfakes, bots, autogenerated sludge that can fill any text box on command — and it’s not irrational to feel that the online environment is fundamentally untrustworthy. You’d be a fool not to doubt a lot of what you see on a screen.

But once that habit sets in, once you’ve trained yourself to read everything online as branding, manipulation, or fakery, the anxiety spills over the edge of its container. If you spend all day marinating in synthetic “content,” it becomes harder to believe in the unremarkable reality happening right in front of you. A stranger reading a book in public no longer registers as “man passing time with a paperback”; he’s “performative reading guy,” a real-world instance of the same insincerity you see everywhere on your feed. Once you’ve spent enough time online, the unofficial slogan becomes “Trust No One” — not even the person reading Middlemarch while sipping her coffee. There must be an angle. There must be a bit. There must be content being harvested!

Ironically, books are one of the last cheap, sturdy, physical symbols of “realness” most people have access to in a world of ephemeral media. You hold them. They don’t ping you. They don’t refresh themselves or run an update overnight. They don’t hypocritically promise “authentic connection” while trying to sell you something. They don’t (yet) hallucinate their citations. If anything in modern life deserves to be exempt from the endless fraud inspection, it’s the quiet, analog act of sitting down and reading a long book for no one’s benefit but your own.

So of course the online-poisoned imagination can’t allow that exemption. It has to colonize this last patch of non-digital ground and declare it suspect. If influencers fake their “candid” photos, if brands fake their wokeness, if AI fakes its expertise, then surely this guy must be faking his absorption in Proust. The environment has trained people to assume there is always a camera, always an audience, always a layer of calculation behind anything that looks sincere. The tragedy is that this stance, which began as a sane response to a polluted information ecosystem, ends by making it impossible to recognize a simple, sane act when we see one.

I don’t know what the motives of the man with the book are, and I don’t care. Mixed motives are the human default. Maybe he likes being seen with a big novel; maybe he’s just tired of staring at his phone; maybe he really is hoping some pretty lady will swoon over his endnotes. I want to believe… he’s just reading. But the point is that reading itself doesn’t need to be put on trial. When the culture gets to the stage where even that has to be defended against charges of fraudulence, the problem is not the reader. The problem is a way of looking at the world that has been so warped by screens that it can’t imagine any act that isn’t performed for one.

Obiter Scripta, no. 149

By in books, obiter scripta

It requires great firmness, as well as vast intellect, to refuse high posts, and remain contented in obscurity. Very few possess the merit to play this role with dignity, nor enough depth of mind to fill up time without what is commonly called business. The idleness of a wise man should however be called by another name; and his meditation, discourse, reading, and repose ought to be called work.

— La Bruyère, The Characters of Jean De La Bruyère (via Isaac Waisberg)

Every now and then you stumble across a paragraph from an old moralist and realize, with a blush of recognition, that at last someone has understood you — pre-understood you, even. La Bruyère, for example, perfectly captures my own great firmness of character, my vast intellect, and my noble refusal of high office in order to devote myself to the higher calling of sitting around reading books and commenting on them. True, one cannot technically refuse what has never been offered, but I regard that as a mere technicality. The important thing is that, should such offers ever materialize, I am fully prepared to turn them down with the quiet dignity La Bruyère describes.

Borrowing and Lending

By in books, montaigne, writing

Montaigne and Burton were both fascinated with the same impulse to collect quotations that had inspired Erasmus. They also developed Erasmus’s insight that one could make a literary work out of quotations, a kind of patchwork interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its own.

…Far from being antithetical to borrowing, personality depends on it. Montaigne could not have disagreed more with those who regard quotation as a failure of originality and a surrender of individuality.

— Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture

When I was a teenager, I used to cover my school notebooks in song lyrics. It was the easiest way I knew to say something about myself: not by coming up with original lines, but by surrounding myself with other people’s words that felt right. Looking back, that habit never really went away. It just migrated from ballpoint scrawl on Trapper Keepers to block quotes and hyperlinks on a blog.

Some of my favorite posts to “write” are still the ones where I mostly arrange quotations — sometimes in agreement, sometimes in argument — and let the sparks fly in the gaps between them. The old blogosphere made an art out of this: you’d pull a passage, react to it, set it alongside something else, and see what new shape appeared. My bricolage posts are just a continuation of that practice, formalized a bit. I don’t feel any embarrassment about “hiding behind” other people’s eloquence. Quite the opposite: if Morson has already said something cleanly, why would I insult both of us by trying to paraphrase it in clumsier prose?

I like to think there’s a bit of humility in starting a post with someone else’s paragraph and a link to their essay or book. It’s an admission that I’m a reader first and a commentator second, and that part of the fun is simply pointing and saying, “Look at this.” But it’s also where whatever “personality” I have on the page actually lives: not in manufacturing original thoughts on command, but in choosing which voices to invite in, which lines to underline, and how to arrange them so they say a little more together than they did alone.

Du Wirst im Shitstorm Untergehen

By in aphorisms, books, jests japes jokes jollies

Happy the man who can take books leisurely, like a soaking rain, and not inquire too curiously into the amount of fertilizer they contain.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Harold J. Laski, letter c. 1929

I like the image here. I try to take it in the generous, gentlemanly spirit intended. Really, I do. I know I’m supposed to nod along: yes, yes, you should read for the pleasure of being soaked, letting the prose wash over you, not with a clipboard in hand, calculating the nutrient content of every paragraph.

But the moment he adds fertilizer, I become literal-minded. A gentle spring shower over the fields is one thing; a brown, ammoniac deluge is another. The more I try not to “inquire too curiously,” the more my imagination insists: “No, look, if the books are the rain, then is the man the soil? Where exactly is the manure in this scenario? How is it contained by the books which are also rain?” Before long I’m not picturing a wise old justice taking his evening’s reading like a country rain; I’m picturing a happy man standing in a full-blown shitstorm, face uplifted, arms wide, murmuring, “Ah, the life of the mind.”

Perhaps that’s my problem, not Holmes’s. A more wholesome soul can let the phrase pass over him like, well, a soaking rain, and never once visualize liquid slurry. I, on the other hand, am now wondering if burying some copies of Zizek’s books in my garden will produce more vegetables next year.

Our Own Prisons

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.  From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what that ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. Now to be able to live two hours out of twelve in a different world and take one’s thoughts off the claims of the immediate present is, of course, a privilege to be envied by people shut up in their bodily prison. Such a change of environment is really similar to travel in its psychological effect.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin’s image of the non-reader as “imprisoned in his immediate world” can sound like the usual literary snobbery, as if people who don’t read are just empty rooms with the lights off. That’s not quite right. I’ve known plenty of people who rarely open a book and yet have an inner life that runs on talk, work, hobbies, family gossip, or just steady contentment. For me, though, the metaphor fits uncomfortably well. When I’m not reading or writing anything that grips me, I don’t become serenely Taoist; I turn into a zombie going through the motions of existence. Conversely, I can chase after new books or ideas with all the undisciplined joy of a dog after squirrels. Other people can happily spend the afternoon dozing in a sunbeam like a cat, or get their novelty from shopping, scrolling, or watching television. I seem to need a different kind of stimulus, the feeling of being led by a voice on the page into another mind, another time. It’s a difference of degree rather than kind. A man content to pass the time in a rocking chair on the front porch might see me as enslaved to my books and laptop, unable to sit quietly and just be.

An Illusion of Unity

By in books, foolosophy, identity

Nostalgia for others’ lives. It’s because, seen from the outside, those lives appear whole, whereas our own, seen from the inside, seem fragmented. We’re still chasing after an illusion of unity.

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

What we like about the past is that sense of complete perspective, a story with a beginning, middle and end. We can never have that relationship to our own life without ceasing to be alive. We envy other people’s lives because we only ever see their stories with the jump cuts and edits already done; we’re stuck watching the raw footage of our own. A complete story of you is something other people will tell, if anyone does, when you’re safely out of the picture. So the longing for a sense of unity and completion isn’t just a quirk; it’s structurally impossible to satisfy from the inside. That’s why we get this “nostalgia for others’ lives” and for finished epochs: we’re really yearning for a point of view we can’t inhabit — a narrator who already knows how things turn out, a final edited cut of your own life while you’re still in mid-scene. In that sense, our chronic dissatisfaction with our fragmentary present is just the storytelling brain banging against the bars of time, demanding an ending it can fold everything into. And life’s reply is basically: you can have wholeness, or you can have immediacy, but not both.

Cogitare Aude

By in books, foolosophy, philosophy

The ancient philosophers (and for good reason) reflected a lot more than they read. That’s why they stuck so close to the concrete. Printing changed this. We read more than we reflect. We don’t have philosophies, only commentaries. That’s what Gilson is getting at when he says that the age of philosophers who busied themselves with philosophy has been succeeded by the age of professors of philosophy who busy themselves with philosophers. There’s both modesty and impotence in this approach. And a thinker who would begin his book with the words: “Let’s start from the beginning” would face a few smiles. We’ve reached the point where a philosophy book published today that doesn’t lean on any experts, quotations, commentaries, etc., wouldn’t be taken seriously. And yet…

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

The old philosophies were born from the pressure of experience; ours tend to be born from the pressure to publish. We inherit not so much Plato and Aristotle as the secondary literature about Plato and Aristotle, a great compost heap of commentary from which no new tree seems able to grow. Philosophy has become, in large part, the professional management of its own archives.

The culprit isn’t simply “too much reading,” though. It’s the research model of the modern university, where every discipline is expected to resemble science or technology: measurable “progress,” constant novelty, specialization, and peer-reviewed output. That works reasonably well in a laboratory, where yesterday’s result really can be superseded by today’s. It is absurd in the humanities, where the “data” are finite and centuries old, and where all the real questions about justice, death, love, and meaning keep coming around again, as the philosopher Carly Simon sang. To stay employable, humanists pretend they’re doing something like lab work: tiny, incremental “interventions” and “contributions to the literature.” The classics are not read as live challenges; they’re strip-mined for another paper on race, gender, or whatever the current thing is. Some innocent naif who fell in love with thinking in Philosophy 101 finds himself twenty years later in an academic career producing dreck about Aristotle and Queer Futurity, Kierkegaard and Neoliberal Austerity, Dante and Decoloniality. What a tragedy.

Meanwhile, the sort of person Camus has in mind who would dare to “start from the beginning” is increasingly unlikely to be found on a faculty roster. Interesting thinkers don’t need laboratories of thought; they need time, a modest income, and freedom from committee work. They use the past as a quarry for perspective. In practice, that kind of philosophy is already leaking back into its older habitats: notebooks, letters, pamphlets, essays, now blogs and newsletters. The university, having professionalized itself into sclerosis, may end up as a museum of philosophy rather than a seedbed for it. And yet, as Camus says. The materials haven’t changed: the world, a mind, and the question of what to make of both. The only real requirement is someone willing to think first and read second, and to risk writing a book that does not bow to the experts before it dares to say what it sees.

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