books

Witches

By in books, seasonal

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If, in our imagination, we were to journey backward in time, we might come upon a witch of long ago in some moonlit country lane. With her pointed hat and ragged cloak we see her shuffling along, muttering to herself as she makes her way to a sabbat beyond the churchyard walls. Like a shadow a black cat moves behind her, its eyes glowing in the dark. She does not look towards us, for her crooked form keeps her eyes fixed to the ground. And as we pass by we glance over our shoulders, wondering at her second sight and the secrets she hides in her lonely heart.

Or it might be a girl we come upon — lithe, alluring, her hair shining in moonlight with the lustre of a raven’s wing. Her smile would melt a heart of stone. But who knows what mischief is in her thoughts, and who would not fall under her spell?

Throughout the years there have been countless stories of witchery, told around the fireside at Hallowe’en or the Eve of May. Many are lost and will never be heard again. The following tales, gathered from home and abroad, were found in state and county archives or lay in the memories of those who recall characters and incidents related by their forbears.

— Ken Radford, Fire Burn: Tales of Witchery

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Scarecrows

By in books, seasonal

Thus the first theory of the origin of the scarecrow is that it may have started out as a sacrifice to Nature.  We have seen that the jackalent was originally a sort of puppet-like figure at which, during Lent, people hurled sticks; prior to this, it was cocks that were the object of these attacks. So is it not possible to argue that perhaps in pagan days man was done to death in this manner and then set up in the fields as an offering? Might this not be the reason why in Normandy and Brittany — where Druidical rites were once prevalent and where legends about them survive in abundance — a life-size effigy of Christ on the cross is set amidst the corn each year? It could be surmised from this that the Church had sought to turn its people from the barbaric custom of slaughtering a real man by providing an alternative which was an all-sufficient sacrifice.

— Peter Haining, The Scarecrow: Fact and Fable

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Britain’s humble scarecrow may have derived from a Greek god of fertility named ‘Priapus’ (or ‘Priapos’). Priapus was regarded as the protector of farmers, shepherds, fisherman, vine growers, beekeepers and goatherds. His emblems were the cornucopia, pruning knife and a phallus, and he received first fruits with libations of milk and honey. Further, he was adopted as the guardian of orchards, gardens and vineyards where his crude statues, painted bright red, were erected to ward off thieves. Donkeys, asses and pigs were his sacrificial animals, reflecting his animal lust, and there is extant a collection of ‘priapeia,’ anonymous, obscene Latin verses. The Oxford Classical Dictionary underlines this dual role of Priapus: “He was adopted as a god of gardens, where his statue was a sort of combined scarecrow and guardian deity.”

The Romans copied the Greek custom of carving wooden statues of Priapus to ward of birds from their fruit and crops. Columella, a Spanish gardener cum Roman soldier who lived in the first century A.D., cultivated vast acres of land in Central Italy. He recommended that Priapic statues should ideally be hewn out of an old tree stump in his treatise on agriculture, ‘De Re Rustica’ (c.65 A.D.) Roman gardeners daubed figures of this rustic satyr purple and gave him a club in one hand, to make him appear more dangerous, plus a sickle in the other to ensure an abundant harvest.

— Gregory Holyoake, Scarecrows

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The word “kakashi” is supposed to be derived from a meaning of something that smells hideously awful, and is said to have been  derived from the Edo period word “kagashi” (although the word etymology inexplicably resembles somewhat the Bengali word for scarecrow Kaktadua (কাকতাডুয়া)) or Kag-darawa (काग-डरावा) from the Hindi, which suggests possible connections with the Indo-Sakas, source: Scarecrow). Many fascinating tales and legends surround the use and character of the kakashi in the rice field in Japan.

In Kojiki, the oldest surviving historical chronicle in Japan (compiled in the year 712), a scarecrow known as Kuebiko appears as a deity who cannot walk, yet knows everything about the world.

— Japanese Folklore & Mythology

Deep Earth Brings Forth Rebirth

By in books, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, music

99 percent of all “creating” is imitation, in sounds or thoughts. Theft, more or less consciously.

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

Fellows, I know I just got done telling you why it’s sacrilegious to produce new “Wodehouse-y” books. Unfortunately, I am human, and that means I’m a hypocrite. You see, I discovered a band called October Noir last year — an eerily pitch-perfect copy of Type O Negative — and I’m delighted. If you told me their tracks were a long-lost Type O album, I’d believe it. It’s as if a tribute band became sentient like Frankenstein’s monster and started writing its own songs. So why do I happily accept the musical doppelgänger while recoiling from ersatz Wodehouse?

For starters, Wodehouse is not merely a collection of turns of phrase; he’s a self-contained climate. The cadence, yes, but also the moral weather: the way fools are rescued, the exact timing of luck, the clockwork of farce that never draws blood, the happy endings. A new Jeeves novel doesn’t just borrow a voice; it asserts authority over a finished world. It’s not homage so much as annexation. Books are kingdoms; putting new chapters in a closed chronicle feels like revising a fresco after the painter is gone.

Wodehouse’s references — Jeeves, Wooster, Blandings, and that specific world of the inter-war idle rich —are non-portable. Borrow them, and you’re body-snatching. But his resemblance-features — light, benevolent comedy; clockwork farce; whimsical sentences that pirouette before landing on the joke — are portable, if only by a talented few. Theoretically, a skillful writer could pay homage to the style with new characters in a new setting, and the influence would be clear without being parasitical. Think Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes: you can see the family likeness (talking animals, language play, sealed imaginative habitats), yet Watterson found a way to reimagine it — childhood’s imagination instead of Kelly’s swamp politics. Hence my lack of interest in new Jeeves-and-Wooster stories. Like a surly adolescent, I don’t want to make nice with my new step-author.

Music can be more forgiving (or perhaps “slutty” is the word I want). The Beatles are the Genghis Khan of pop music: some of their DNA is in almost everyone since. Or consider how many members there are in the “blues-rock” family tree. Imagine the paucity if the musician’s guild refused to let anyone else work with the “three chords and a 4/4 beat” template. Still, though, a band like Type O was sui generis. There are obvious debts to the Beatles, Black Sabbath and the Doors, but there are too many unique signifiers: the deep baritone alternating with anguished howls, the funereal BPM, the cathedral reverb and pipe-organ pads, the bass thickened with chorus, the drums trudging like pallbearers, the morbid, self-depreciating humor mixed with Gothic/Romantic aesthetics. October Noir skillfully mimics all of this, even down to the guitar feedback and the drawn-out sound of the pick sliding down the strings. Why am I thrilled instead of outraged? Is it simply because they’re that good? If they only managed to capture, say, 90% of the Type O sound, wouldn’t the remaining 10% be, again, like the pea to the princess? But if so, does that imply I would be open to a pitch-perfect Wodehouse imitation? I hope not, but…

Rock already blesses imitation: covers, tribute bands, subgenre orthodoxy. The medium’s unit is the song, not the character or canon. If you write a new song inside Type O’s sonic idiom, you add repertoire without altering history. Peter Steele is dead; the supply of that exact vibe ended in 2010. A faithful successor fills a scarcity vacuum. No metaphysics of authorship is violated; no royalties are misdirected. The only “sin” is against “originality,” a contrivance that owes more to legal definitions of copyright than metaphysical essence. I wouldn’t want to hear AI versions of Type O, or see a Peter Steele hologram onstage while the other members play the catalogue, but I can live with this.

There’s also a ritual fans need before they can enjoy any continuation: a symbolic reset. After Mark Sandman died, Morphine’s other members didn’t insist that Morphine march on with a new frontman. They formed Bourbon Princess, Twinemen, and — closest to the original — Vapors of Morphine, each of which was recognizably “low rock,” but with just enough different elements to make them their own thing. The names mattered. They admitted, out loud, that the old band was no more, but they still had more songs to write. We could meet the music as additions to a lineage rather than counterfeit chapters in a finished book. Similarly, Kenny, Johnny and Josh didn’t go out and recruit a Peter Steele look-and-soundalike in order to keep producing new albums as Type O Negative, which would have felt wrong somehow. When I first heard October Noir, I was stunned at the fidelity. Then, I was just happy to hear new songs in that style, which I never thought I would again. Perhaps I had already done my mourning, and was ready to love once more.

Weekend at Bertie’s

By in books, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy

Sam Leith:

But it’s the principle underlying the whole project with which I take issue. It is very much of our time, and it is deeply misbegotten. It betrays the sort of thinking that sees the works of great authors — specifically, their characters and worlds — as intellectual property, aka what the suits call “eye-pee” (that stings!) to be infinitely exploited. That, as Bertie would put it, is where they make their bloomer. It isn’t the presence of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie and Jeeves that makes Wodehouse Wodehouse: it’s the fact that sentence by sentence P.G. Wodehouse was among the finest half-dozen writers of comic prose in the 20th century. Nobody else could do what he did.

…But to see all art in this way is corrosively reductive. It is to miss that special quality that differentiates art from IP. It is to see artists as “content creators” and art itself as fungible property, all the more monetisable when a franchise is taken over by celebrities with existing fanbases. It is to say, a couple of steps down the line, for that matter: “AI can do that for us.” It’s the school of thought that says “perfect for fans of…” Well. I’ll tell you what’s perfect for fans of P.G. Wodehouse: P.G. fucking Wodehouse.

The Wodehouse estate appears to be a trifle hard up; it’s digging into our ribs for a tenner, and doesn’t mind if it comes out with the watch-chain too. Wodehouse the man is becoming Wodehouse the brand, this time in the form of a new compilation of Jeeves-and-Wooster stories by various authors, or scabs crossing the cemetery picket line, as I prefer to call them. Graverobbers ply their trade in broad daylight now. Hell, they’re employed by all the major studios and publishing houses.

Some works get a good death. Bill Watterson gave Calvin & Hobbes one: a deliberate ending, no embalming, no weekend-at-Bernie’s corpse-puppetry over the following years. Most of all, he famously refused to allow licensing and merchandising. It’s estimated that he turned down what would have been $300-$400 million had he allowed stuffed tigers and Calvin lunchboxes (to say nothing of the voracious demand for “Calvin pissing” decals) to be produced. He thought that would violate the spirit of the strip, which was about private realities and the magic of imagination, so he let his work die when the time was right. But in a sense, because it could die, it could live on in hand-to-hand gifts, in household phrases, in the private sanctum where a kid meets a book without a marketing plan watching. Friends of mine from adolescence have told me about giving Calvin & Hobbes to their own children, the same way we traded the books among ourselves back in the ’80s. This is the afterlife art deserves; not perpetual motion, but perpetual bequeathing.

Other works get undeath. Many of the old rock-and-rollers of my youth are still shuffling onstage for their third or fourth “retirement” tour, having produced nothing of interest since 1986. Many of the movies and shows I grew up with have been reimagined, rebooted, and refused eternal rest, condemned to reincarnation as sequels, prequels, and perhaps even paraquels and synquels as the money-grubbing occasion demands. Even now, as I glance out on the world through my laptop window, I see the rotting husk of yet another Star Wars zombie lurching by in search of fresh brains to consume. The trademark keeps twitching, so the caretakers practice brand necromancy: sequels-by-committee, “shared universes,” and the algorithmic logic of “If readers love X, they’ll buy X-ish.” We call this “keeping it alive for a new generation,” but it’s really preventing it from resting long enough to be reborn in another’s imagination.

There’s also the problem of the uncanny valley of voice. Influence is honest; imitation that aims to be indistinguishable feels like trespass. Style isn’t a bag of tricks, but a soul’s gait — you can borrow the shoes, but not the walk. If someone writes as Wodehouse in 2025, every tiny divergence — word choice, cadence, modernized plot and setting — irritates like the pea beneath the princess’s mattresses. It’s neither fish nor fowl: too similar to be itself, too different to be the thing it mimics. Reverence becomes body-snatching.

This is where limitation becomes a spiritual discipline. In The Walrus, Mark Migotti jokes that he has to ration Wodehouse — “three pages at a go, once per day” — so as not to disappear into the book at the expense of other obligations. His rule isn’t for everyone, but the spirit is right: you preserve what you love by placing limits around it. In my case, the limit is refusing the false hope of resurrection — saying no to the revenant so the work I love can rest in peace.

Obiter Scripta, no. 147

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

One sees thoughts stretching their hands out of the water, one believes they are calling for help. A mistake: they live below, intimate and very familiar with one another, just try and pull a single one out alone!

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

Some ideas don’t do well when removed from their habitat and forced to perform in the aquatic parks of Theory. A good aphorism is a glass bowl carried to the surface with a bit of water still inside — the smallest vessel that keeps a micro-habitat intact.

Newsless and Nameless

By in books, foolosophy, history

We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more frequent in a Roman’s life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popular today. History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and ourselves: they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.

— Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325

Everyday Romans might have worried about plague, barbarians, unstable government, inflation, and we…well, we worry about much the same things to greater or lesser degrees. It’s true that we don’t crucify petty criminals along the highways, or feed prisoners to wild animals on pay-per-view, but much of our violence is technologically mediated and far away, like drone strikes, or covertly-funded wars. I guess we have better plumbing, at least, and while we don’t fear famine anymore, we do have to deal with obesity and its side-effects at the other extreme. Still, I raise my glass in salute to my fellow insignificant nobodies of times past, living their quiet lives, getting by as best as they could.

The Laughter of Silenus

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad.

— G. K. Chesterton, “What Is Right With the World“

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Man can live only by religion or by illusions. This is a clear and incontestable fact. If you drastically curtail his religion or his illusions, anyone, even a child at the first stage of reasoning (since children live mostly only off their illusions) would definitely kill himself, and our species would of inborn and material necessity be doomed at birth.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

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Very well! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of his efforts, when he says to himself, “You are incapable of realizing your ideal; happiness is a chimera, progress is an illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare; and supposing all your ambitions were gratified, everything would still be vanity,” then he comes to see that a little blindness is necessary if life is to be carried on, and that illusion is the universal spring of movement. Complete disillusion would mean absolute immobility. He who has deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite life escapes from the great wheel of existence; he has left the world of the living—he is already dead.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

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There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.”

— Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

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It might be something flagged on your latest bloodwork. It might be the business cycle grinding down to belt-tightening and hard choices. It might just be a stray headline about someone else’s catastrophe. Either way, it reminds you that most of our life is in a small boat on a vast ocean; now and then a shark passes close, or bumps the hull, and you’d trade anything to believe, just for a moment, that you’re on dry land.

Which a Feeble Body Cannot Sustain

By in battling personal entropy, books

In ancient times, exercises to promote physical strength were not only useful in wartime or for encouraging a love of glory, but also contributed, in fact were essential, to maintaining strength of mind, courage, aspiration, and enthusiasm, which a feeble body cannot sustain, in other words those qualities on which the greatness and heroism of a nation depends.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

Age is just a number. A number like, say, 505. Which, coincidentally, was the number of pounds on the bar that I deadlifted this week.

Beyond the Dust

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy

That’s why the images of the Buddha always present him as looking blissful. Cats look like this, too, because they can sit for ages and simply watch. You might say it’s because they have nothing better to do because we think we’re supposed to be constantly improving somehow or doing something beneficial for the world. But hermits who live solitary lives and meditate all of the time are doing an enormous amount for the world, and just the suspicion that people such as that still exist today is marvelous for everybody. The contrast of their presence reveals how the rest of us are so busy raising so much dust. We think we’re going somewhere, but we’re already there. Meanwhile, all the dust we kick up rushing about everywhere is getting in everybody’s nostrils and polluting everything. So to know that there are hermits deep in the forest is like knowing there’s a world beyond the dust — a world of streams and flowers that few of us ever see.

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

Every day I heroically refrain from founding a movement. Please, no applause. I’m merely performing my civic duty by staying out of your hair and out of your feeds. I’m practicing radical inaction so you don’t have to. While lesser spirits churn the great particulate cloud of Progress, I nobly remain indoors, filtering the noösphere with my quiet studiousness. History will not thank me, because I will stay beneath its notice.

Long Distance

By in books, foolosophy, technology, the geist of the zeit

The telephone upheld a certain formality, it contained within it a permanent distance, and since this was owing to its shape, which even frequent use was powerless to overcome, the shape had to be changed, since the times were trending towards greater informality. The same thing happened to the letter. Old people, into whose lives the stationary telephone had sunk deep roots, treat the mobile phone just as formally and with the same respect, which gives them an air both ridiculous and touching. Distance, which was formerly a means to control reality, so as not to appear awkward and inept, has now itself become awkward, and while the two are hardly comparable, I find myself thinking of the figure of the dictator, one day all-powerful and controlling every aspect of life, the next, when the people revolt, naked and exposed.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

When the phone rang in the era of “long distance,” the house changed temperature. Your mom hushed the room, because money and miles were suddenly in the wire. The TV would be turned down or off. You were aware the call was an event. The cord kept you within a couple-foot radius. Once the receiver was in your hand, you’d entered something you couldn’t casually leave.

As I type, I’m in the middle of an ongoing email chain with my oldest friend from high school, making plans to get together soon. She and I have exchanged many phone calls, letters, and postcards over the years, but no text messages as yet. When we were teenagers, a phone call was a small performance. Even the risk felt ceremonial: a father’s voice might answer first, and you’d have to present yourself before you reached the person you meant to speak to. You chose your moment (not during dinner, not too late), rehearsed a topic so the silences wouldn’t stretch too long, hoped your voice wouldn’t pick that moment to crack, and braced for the disappointment of a parent telling you to call back some other time. Letters shared much of the same gravitas. You shaped paragraphs because the blank page asked for form. You arranged your thoughts and presented them in an order that wouldn’t waste the reader’s time. We weren’t writing literature, but we were writing to someone, and that made all the difference.

Nowadays, a conversation mediated through technology is more like food stuffed with preservatives. It never truly goes stale; it waits in the pantry of the messaging app until someone remembers to take another bite. The etiquette has inverted: it’s not interrupting that’s rude anymore, it’s leaving someone “on read.” Where the call demanded readiness and risk, the thread promises availability and delay. We used to drop what we were doing and rush to answer the ringing phone; now we casually glance at our screen as messages arrive, and vaguely resolve to get back to them at our convenience.

Knausgaard is right about distance as a kind of dignity. The old distance let us compose ourselves; the new nearness lets us postpone ourselves. Less ceremony, less gravitas, and far more ways to fail each other slowly. Now the old distance has vanished. We can reach anyone, anywhere, at any hour — no miles to pay for, no gatekeepers to pass. But a second distance has opened: indifference. Availability replaces readiness; presence gives way to drift. We keep each other at arm’s length by refusing to make an occasion of our speech and attention.

An Eighteenth-Century Traveler Logs On

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies

All this was helped by the enormous development of print culture, which itself benefitted from the huge population growth in the last half of the 1700s, and in turn books and pamphlets and newspapers, together with coffee houses and clubs, helped broadcast a campaigning emphasis on improvement throughout all walks of life, and in all territories of empire. With the opening up of so many public spaces, and so many publications of so many different kinds, there was a lively concern with politeness, polite letters and polite behaviour in particular – the convenient belief that in commercial society we ‘polish’ one another, in a collective attempt at harmony – and with sensibility, an aspect of politeness in which the proper appreciation of complex behavioural and aesthetic matters became of first importance for many people for the first time, given that, to begin with, eighteenth-century Britain was somewhat backward in the visual arts (unlike theatre, which was stronger than ever). Sensibility was widely explored in the continuing development of the novel.

— Peter Watson, The British Imagination: A History of Ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II

The time-traveler arrived with a pocket copy of The Spectator and the serene conviction that posterity would have perfected Addison’s dream: a great coffee-house of mankind. The innkeeper pointed him to a glowing slate and said all conversation now took place “online.” He imagined mahogany tables without dust, quills without blot, a universal Tatler humming with agreeable raillery.

At the door he met a bouncer named CAPTCHA who bade him, “Select all squares that contain oil street lamps (no mere shop-lanterns).” Past this doorman sprawled countless rooms without walls. “Where is the proprietor?” he asked. “The algorithm,” said a passing boy, “keeps order.” It appeared to be an invisible master of ceremonies who pressed the most agitated speakers onto the central dais.

He opened a pamphlet called a “thread.” The first sentence was a trumpet for reform; the second blew it to pieces; the third accused the trumpeter of bigotry; the fourth insisted trumpets were violence. Everyone spoke in the tone reserved, in his time, for duels. “Sir,” he ventured in the comment box, “might we distinguish the thing itself from its abuses?” Twenty notifications arrived to inform him he was history’s villain.

He sought the Letters to the Editor and found instead a bazaar where every stall sold indignation by the yard. In the coffee-houses of his day, a witticism earned a bow and perhaps a corrected fact; here, a witticism was repeated through ten thousand parlors, each adding a crudely-drawn symbol of mirth. He watched a lady compose what looked like a sermon in the language of a street brawl and earn medals called “likes.” A gentleman who published a mild emendation was pelted with turnips conjured from nowhere and everywhere at once.

He asked after moderation. “We have it,” they said, and showed him a scaffold erected in the square. “Do you punish libel?” he said. “No, just ‘cringe’.” Off to one side a thoughtful essayist spoke softly; the algorithm hid him behind a tapestry of shrieks for insufficient performance.

In Bath they had once hired Beau Nash to teach men how to bow; here the instructors, represented by miniature heraldic crests of a sort, advised citizens to “ratio” or “dunk on” their enemies. He remembered the old promise that commerce would polish manners, that repeated dealings would tame the temper. But there was no polishing here; only masks, a million first meetings, and profits wherever tempers frayed, which was often.

He closed the slate and stared at his own pale reflection in it. “Progress,” he murmured, “has abolished the coffee-house by building an infinite Bedlam, where the crowd pays a penny to prod the afflicted and call it conversation.” Before taking his leave, he wrote a short apology to the age for the disturbance his visit had caused. The algorithm locked it in Possible Spam alongside the handbills and crypto-bots.

Mihi Ipsi Scripsi (In the Age of ‘Doing Numbers’)

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

On the other hand, just as many pronouncements may be found that attested to his disinterest in potential readers. “Mihi ipsi scripsi” — “I wrote it for myself” — was the motto he had selected for himself, perhaps also to prevent disappointments, while working on Zarathustra. The same ambivalence emerged from the fact that he had addressed the book to “everyone and to no one.” “How could I write for readers?…Rather, I make notations for myself,” can be read in a notebook from the late 1880s. The question of Nietzsche’s audience was further complicated by the fact that he was convinced he was ahead of his age by a generation, if not by several.

— Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: A Tale of a Redemption

In 2005, a couple friends and I started a short-lived blog to join the general conversation. I didn’t have a voice yet, so my efforts were mostly derivative. By the time I finally started to write things that didn’t suck, the crowd had drifted to newer platforms and shorter attention spans. It didn’t matter; writing turned out to be intrinsically rewarding. The bargain I made with myself was simple: keep the work addressed to one exacting reader —me— and let others overhear it if they like.

Then came the metricized web. In 2006 I was uploading obscure musical tracks to YouTube and getting DMs like, “love this!! hey subscribe to my channel!!” I’d check their page: a few shaky cam clips and nothing I’d ever want to see again. I kept wondering, like an overly-rational Vulcan, why would I volunteer to be notified every time this dork posts? Eventually I learned that this was just the new etiquette: don’t offer value, collect it. The request wasn’t transactional (“here’s something you’ll love in return”); it was numerical (“help me inflate this meaningless metric so that I can pretend my inner self is something other than a howling wasteland”). Today’s creator programs formalize it: payouts and promotion tied to “engagement,” with replies and outrage acting like adrenaline. If ten thousand people rage-reply and thirty thousand boost it, the algorithm pays out, and discourse tilts toward provocation. It’s not about conversation; it’s a slot machine that rings louder the more you debase yourself to pull the lever. Now, I feel an irrational rage every time I see an ostensible adult boast about achieving a particular round-number follower count, or about a viral post “doing numbers.” How many of these “followers” are real people who actually read each post carefully and comprehend it? How many of these “content creators” even care, though? Numbers are all that matter, like insecure teenagers in a perpetual dick-measuring contest. I want to charge into the Temple of Elon and overturn all the payout tables. “My blogosphere was to be called a house of conversation, but you have turned it into a den of shitposters.”

I’m Gen-X, and the old ethos still feels right: strive for status if you must, but don’t pant for it in public. Obsession over “selling out” could get precious, and of course it was largely hypocritical, but it kept dignity within reach, at least. Even a “too cool for school” stance like ours was still a tribute to an established norm: it would be pathetic and undignified for an adult to chase after mere popularity for its own sake. By the early ’00s, I was belatedly realizing that no such restraint existed anymore. Empty affirmation was all anyone seemed to care about. I’d rather stick with the Nietzschean attitude — a book for all and none — and use outdated measures of value instead: posts reread, saved, passed along from one person to another. If the age needs me later, it will find me; until then, I’ll keep making notations for myself — several generations ahead, naturally.

On the Urology of Style

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche

There are trickling thinkers and flowing ones, just as springs differ from one another. Lichtenberg holds his glass diligently beneath and eventually fills it full; but he did not have the time to pass the full glass to us; his relatives have measured out the drops to us.

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

I make time on weekends to read a little more of Leopardi’s Zibaldone. Now there’s a flowing thinker. I’m one of the trickling thinkers. Nietzsche practically diagnoses a condition I call benign prostatic hermeneutics: frequent urges to compose, minimal output per attempt, and the sense that something crucial remains lodged behind the sphincter of style.

My muse is enlarged and pressing on the urethra of expression. There’s pressure, there’s intent, there’s even dignity if you squint — yet what arrives is a dribbling paragraph, two if I’m lucky. Mine is not a river of thought; it’s a late-night bathroom visit: urgent, meager, repeat. Still, the cup fills…eventually.

 

An Emptying

By in alan watts, books, bricolage

To understand emptiness does not mean that “emptiness” becomes a discrete “object” of a “consciousness.” Emptiness is experienced as the letting go of fixed ideas about oneself and the world.

The very word “I,” which so poignantly hints at that elusive sense of what is most irreducibly peculiar to a person, only makes sense as part of a language that includes “you,” “him,” “her,” “us,” and “them.” There never has been and never can be an “I” existing in isolation. Emptiness is counterintuitive because it contradicts the deepest sense a person has of being “me.” Yet, as Shantideva makes clear, emptiness does not eliminate this “me,” but transforms it. Contrary to expectation, an empty self turns out to be a relational self.

One might intuitively believe “consciousness,” the most private and enduring feature of one’s self, to be more “real” than the passing phenomena of which it is aware. Consciousness feels like a solitary witness, already there within us, lying in wait for things to appear. For Nagarjuna, this is but a convenient illusion. Consciousness is meaningless unless it is conscious of something; it is inextricable from the sense organs and objects that enable it to take place; it is as contingent and ephemeral as the flickering displays of colors and shapes it beholds.

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

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For Nagarjuna’s method is simply to show that all things are without “self-nature” (svabhava) or independent reality since they exist only in relation to other things. Nothing in the universe can stand by itself — no thing, no fact, no being, no event — and for this reason it is absurd to single anything out as the ideal to be grasped. For what is singled out exists only in relation to its own opposite, since what is is defined by what is not, pleasure is defined by pain, life is defined by death, and motion is defined by stillness. Obviously, the mind can form no idea of what “to be” means without the contrast of “not to be,” since the ideas of being and non-being are abstractions from such simple experiences as that there is a penny in the right hand and no penny in the left.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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If we do this, we might notice that there seem to be only four possible ways to explain (i.e., conceptualize) our objects of consciousness (i.e., our experience). This is so whether our objects are exotic ones, such as photons, or pure mental objects such as the idea of simplicity, or common physical objects such as cups. These four ways form the four horns of Nagarjuna’s tetralemma, which can be simply stated as follows: either (1) objects are themselves, or (2) they are not themselves, or (3) they are both themselves and not themselves, or (4) they are neither themselves nor are they not themselves.

It would seem to common sense that at least the first statement ought to hold true, and thus offer some explanation of experience. But, as we shall see, none of the four options does. None does — yet experience remains.

— Steve Hagen, How the World Can Be the Way It Is: An Inquiry for the New Millennium into Science, Philosophy, and Perception

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Nagarjuna imagines his opponent saying that the doctrine of emptiness is like someone who shouts the command “silence!” In so doing, he only succeeds in making a noise, thus defeating his own purpose. But Nagarjuna turns the analogy to his own advantage. If there is indeed silence, we cannot announce that there is. The fact that there is silence cannot be said out loud. In the same way, if all the concepts we habitually use to make the world around us intelligible are devoid of meaning and significance, then this is something that cannot be announced using those same empty concepts. But although it cannot be announced, this does not mean it isn’t true, just as there can be silence even though no one can observe that there is silence without falsifying this very observation.

A second analogy invokes the idea of an “artificial person.” The Middle Way philosophy is like the action of one artificial person preventing the actions of another, or of a magician doing magic to counter another magician’s spell. The point of this analogy is perhaps just that, even though the statement that all theses are empty is itself empty and so cannot state anything, it can still show or reveal that this is the true state of affairs… Nagarjuna’s Middle Way is not, then, self-refuting. His words imply something that cannot be stated: that the very words he is using are without foundation. This is not just another move in the game of language, but an ironic intervention within it.

— Peter Adamson, Classical Indian Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 5

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Nagarjuna recognized how emptiness is not a sacred or mystical state to be realized by the diligent meditator. For Nagarjuna emptiness is simply a “letting go of views.” As an emptying rather than an emptiness, it has to do with releasing the hold of habitual patterns of belief that keep one stuck and hinder one’s flourishing. Such emptying requires the courage and audacity to drop cherished opinions and be awed again by the mystery of being alive each moment. To turn away from the world to imagine emptiness as a transcendent source of salvation is to miss the point entirely. “Believers in emptiness,” Nagarjuna wryly remarks, “are incurable.”

— Stephen Batchelor, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times

The Philosopher of Sensual Pleasure

By in books, bricolage, nietzsche, philosophy

The philosopher of sensual pleasure. — A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends — these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

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So we have anger with God, hatred for priests, rejection of transubstantiation, scepticism about life after death. What does it all add up to? Medieval inquisitors, who liked their heresies neatly classified, had a ready label to hand: Epicureanism. The ancient philosopher Epicurus, whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking, was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortalism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the universe. If the gods existed in this worldview, they were little more than a curiosity. Dante put heretics in the sixth circle of hell, but he named only one actual sect: the Epicureans, ‘who with the body make the spirit die’, and who are therefore condemned to lie for ever in opened tombs, unwillingly immortal.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

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From the beginning, detractors misconstrued Epicureanism as unlimited license or philosophical permission to pursue pleasure to any degree and of all kinds. Yet Epicurus clarifies that a pursuit of pleasure is not the same as licentiousness. He advocates “plain fare” in eating,  for example, and offers a clear definition of pleasure as he sees it: “By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul.”

— Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living

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The modern use of the word “epicureanism,” though, is not a good guide to the philosophy of Epicurus. Epicurus would have been nonplussed — though not upset, since he let nothing upset him — to discover his name being associated with the life of a gourmet. In fact he encourages us to be ready to enjoy the simple delights of plain bread and water, and his philosophy certainly did not center around the search for refined pleasure.

Yet it’s true enough that he was a hedonist. This is another word that might confuse us. It comes from the ancient Greek word for pleasure, hedone. Nowadays, we use “hedonist” to refer to someone who is unrestrained in their pursuit of pleasure. Although Epicurus was a hedonist, he certainly did not recommend the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Rather, he was a hedonist in the sense of someone who believes that pleasure is the good, the sole criterion we should use in determining the right way to live, the right choices to make, the right actions to perform. As we navigate our way through life, pleasure is the only star we need to steer by. But this doe snot imply lack of restraint, or a thoughtless embrace of every pleasure that comes our way. On the contrary, Epicurus teaches that the most pleasant life is a life of moderation, discipline, and careful planning. In this, Epicureanism makes a contrast with the Cyrenaic teaching of Aristippus the Younger.

— Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 2

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It might help to put Epicurus in the context of his time, focusing primarily on his chief competitors, the Stoics. Epicurus distinguishes himself from the Stoics by recognizing that we can suffer misfortunes that are harmful, worthy of grief, and non-providential. When a friend dies, we lose something of genuine value that has contributed to our happiness. Epicurus denies a cosmic justification or purpose for suffering such that it could be reconstrued as good. For Epicurus, misfortune is not a divine will at work, a point we will revisit in the chapter on religion. Nor is it a welcome opportunity to gain strength. Instead, misfortunes are harms that happen without design or intention. While we might in some cases gain personal insight from misfortunes, misfortunes never occur for the sake of insight because they do not happen for the sake of anything.

Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, suggests strategies for coping with and counteracting grief rather than encouraging its elimination. The Stoics seek to eliminate grief because they think it arises from a false judgment that something bad has happened. Epicureans, by contrast, manage grief, and they recommend distracting ourselves by replaying pleasant memories, expressing gratitude for past and present pleasures, and engaging with close and caring friends.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

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For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas — “live unobtrusively.” He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world.

This is a likably honest creed. It is encouraging to find a philosopher who is not afraid of pleasure, and a logician who has a good word to say for the senses. There is no subtlety here, and no warm passion for understanding; on the contrary Epicureanism, despite its transmission of the atomic theory, marks a reaction from the brave curiosity that had created Greek science and philosophy. The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity: it thinks of pleasure as freedom from pain, and of wisdom as an escape from the hazards and fullness of life; it provides an excellent design for bachelorhood, but hardly for a society. Epicurus respected the state as a necessary evil, under whose protection he might live unmolested in his garden, but he appears to have cared little about national independence; indeed, his school seems to have preferred monarchy to democracy, as less inclined to persecute heresy — an arresting inversion of modern beliefs.

— Will Durant, The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II

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Praise of Epicurus. — Wisdom has not gotten a single step beyond Epicurus — and often many thousands of steps behind him.

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

Engagé and Enragé

By in books, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions

Sartre entered the fray in the aftermath of World War II, arguing that human beings could escape the contingency of existence by seizing control of their destiny, and that the writer had a duty to speak for those who had no voice. He brought these two notions together in the figure of the intellectuel engagé, of which he became the archetype. Engagement was a vocation that gave the author a responsibility to ‘compose for the whole collectivity’—a function that made him a critical social intermediary: ‘He is writing for everybody and with everybody because the problem which he is trying to solve by means of his own talents is everybody’s problem.’ The Sartrian intellectual’s duties were defined in extensive terms: ‘to interfere in matters that do not directly concern him, to question established truths, and to champion the cause of the oppressed.’ Engagement was thus inseparable from Marxian revolutionary practice: its purpose was ‘to get to know the world in order to change it.’

— Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People

Sartre’s intellectuel engagé was a Trojan Horse filled with student radicals. Declare that “every problem is everybody’s problem,” and abracadabra, every passing mood becomes a public duty. The job description (“interfere in matters that do not directly concern him”) reads like a mission statement for every half-baked, self-righteous, would-be intellectual with a social media account. Out went the hard disciplines of silence, apprenticeship, and proportion; in came “awareness raising,” the strident activist, and the moral selfie. Sartre didn’t just liberate the writer — he deputized him, then handed him a bullhorn. The result is our era’s most exhausting spectacle: professional activists like Greta Thunberg and her epigones, traipsing from one trendy cause to another like pampered students on a Grand Tour of celebrity protesting, chanting slogans with the bottomless confidence of derivative minds who mistake memes for insight and audience for authority. What Hazareesingh describes as a “vocation” became a performance art: the underemployed creative as town crier, forever “composing for the whole collectivity” because the mirror won’t clap.

The repulsive little toad-man only belatedly hopped away from doctrinaire Stalinism after tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956; a couple years earlier, like many other useful idiots, he had visited the USSR and proclaimed that he had found “complete freedom of criticism” there — an assessment that aged with unusual speed. His later championing of Frantz Fanon’s “revolutionary violence,” his anti-colonial support for the Algerian FLN, his early enthusiasm for Castro, his advocacy on behalf of the literary convict Jean Genet, even his open relationship with Simone de Beauvior — all of this demonstrates how little leftism has changed since. Today’s Zohran Mamdani voters are just going through the Sartrean motions. And while his toadies (pun somewhat intended) in the influential circle around Les Temps modernes spun his feud with Camus as a rhetorical victory for Sartre and revolutionary “history-making,” posterity has had the last word.

His concept of “bad faith” was useful, at least.

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