books

A Correspondence Course

By in books, montaigne, writing

In “A Consideration upon Cicero” — which is, in effect, the second part of his essay “On solitude” — he says that he would have preferred letters to essays as the “form to publish my sallies,” if only he had “had someone to talk to.” The sense of the man that comes across in his writing is of someone genial and talkative who relishes company. Despite his retirement from the affairs of the world, it would be a mistake to see him as a recluse recording his thoughts in lonely isolation. Terence Cave is right to stress the conversational mode of the essays. “Although Montaigne often depicts himself thinking and writing in solitude,” says Cave, “he always imagines his writing directed towards others.” The essays aren’t soliloquies. Rather, they’re attempts to reach out and engage others in his ruminations. The sense of conversation, rather than monologue, is enhanced by the frequency with which Montaigne refers to, and quotes from, other writers.

— Chris Arthur, “On Solitude,” After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays

That rings true to me. I didn’t learn to write by communing with the Muse; I learned by trying to keep up with a friend who outclassed me — Yale and Hopkins-educated, Harold Bloom for a mentor — the sort of mind that forced you to bring better sentences or go home.

I had never written anything but schoolwork and adolescent poetry/lyrics before, but it turned out that I had a latent aptitude for it. Email was my apprenticeship. Each missive had a face associated with it, a standard to meet, a voice to answer. I chased his references, matched allusions, and tried to craft turns of phrase that wouldn’t sound thin when they hit his inbox. Writing, for me, was never a soliloquy. It was sparring with someone generous enough to make me reach further.

Blogging was only a widening of the circle. I’ve never had the temperament for podium-talk. A topic addressed to someone sharpens judgment, trims digressions, and gives each sentence a target. Even an imagined addressee is still an addressee. Without that pressure of an expectant audience, prose gets gaseous; with it, the point comes into focus. Instead of sending an article with comments appended to one person, I posted them for whoever happened to pass by. But the posture never changed: I still write to someone — an educated, skeptical, good-humored reader who won’t let me bluff. Solitude, yes; but it’s a populated solitude, with a seat kept open across the table.

Generals Fighting the Last War

By in books, conspicuous crusading, the great awokening, tribalism

Another email from Hachette Book Group this morning: “Read Banned Books.” The old standards show up — Catcher in the Rye; The Great Gatsby — along with trendy identitarian propaganda: Stamped From the Beginning; The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish; So You Want to Talk About Race. Funny what never shows up: Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, which Amazon actually removed from sale for years and only reinstated in February 2025. That wasn’t a “challenge” in a school library; that was the dominant bookseller in America erasing a title from the market for ideological reasons. If publishers want credibility, they should admit the difference and include examples across the spectrum.

Meanwhile, the real crisis isn’t 1958’s fight to keep Catcher on a shelf; it’s that Americans just don’t read for pleasure anymore. Federal time-use data show leisure reading has cratered — down roughly 40% since the early 2000s; only about 16% of Americans read for fun on a given day in 2023. Among nine-year-olds, “almost every day” reading fell from 53% (2012) to 39% (2022). That’s the house fire; the “banned books” spectacle is a smoke machine.

Which is why “Banned Books Week” feels like Civil War reenactment: a safe, performative replay of yesterday’s battles. Even sympathetic histories admit most headline cases are “challenges,” not outright bans, yet the marketing rolls on because the ritual is familiar and fun, and it flatters our tribal prejudices. If publishers want to help, stop signaling to more than half the country that libraries and bookstores are part of the Blue Tribe’s territory. Otherwise, it’s just more useless partisan pageantry.

A Man of Lower-Case Letters

By in aphorisms, books, philosophy

The pensée-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things in detail, but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him. He handles his instrument agreeably, but he does not possess it, still less does he create it. He is a gardener and not a geologist; he cultivates the earth only so much as is necessary to make it produce for him flowers and fruits; he does not dig deep enough into it to understand it. In a word, the pensée-writer deals with what is superficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, the oratorical, the talking or writing philosopher; whereas the philosopher is the scientific pensée-writer. The pensée-writers serve to stimulate or to popularize the philosophers. They have thus a double use, besides their charm. They are the pioneers of the army of readers, the doctors of the crowd, the money-changers of thought, which they convert into current coin. The writer of pensée is a man of letters, though of a serious type, and therefore he is popular.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

Quite the backhanded compliment. He assumes depth lives only in systems. But systems age like monuments; they weather into curiosities.
Think of the grand designs: Freud’s psychic Rome, Marx’s scientific history. Their constructions still loom, but most of us visit them like ruins — impressive, and no longer habitable. Now they’re ideological heritage sites with tour guides and gift shops. Systems aspire to total custody of experience, which is exactly why they date so fast: the world keeps sprouting annexes they never planned for. Call the aphorist a gardener if you must; gardens outlast architecture because they’re tended, seasonal, and endlessly replanted.

Fragments are built for weather. A strong pensée is a pocket instrument — caliper, compass, flint. You test it against experience; if it works, you keep it. That’s why La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Nietzsche, Joubert, Lichtenberg linger: not because they explained everything once and for all, but because they left us tools we can use again and again in unfriendly climates. When the intellectual environment changes, the first to go are the enormous lizards of Theory. They lie where they fell, ribcages exposed like the staves of shipwrecks. The small, warm sentences scurry between the bones, quick-breathing, adaptable, living off whatever truth is in season.

Obiter Scripta, no. 146

By in books, montaigne, obiter scripta

Montaigne, a sage, has had no posterity. Rousseau, an hysteric, still stirs nations. I like only the thinkers who have inspired no tribune of the people.

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Montaigne, no posterity? Only the quiet kind: a private republic of readers who grow up a little. How many authors would kill to be in both print and discussion 400 years later? That’s not failure; it’s proof that wisdom can outlive fashion without ever staging a parade. Rousseau, by contrast, scales. His pages are Molotov cocktails — ideas that combust best in crowds. He makes movements; Montaigne makes adults. One feeds the appetite for righteousness; the other tames it. Best to judge a thinker by whether his descendants are regiments or readers. I’ll take the writer whose influence is measured in diaries rather than slogans.

The Trouble With Being Supercilious

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

I’ve sometimes fancied myself a courageous lone freethinker — but then again, who doesn’t? Everyone’s a hero in his own story. No one considers himself part of the bovine, slack-jawed masses. Cioran’s supercilious stance flatters that vanity a little too neatly. It’s rebellion as mood lighting. I too say many bold things, provided they scandalize only people I don’t know. If the pose requires only attitude and no losses, it’s just adolescence with better prose.

By contrast, there’s Nietzsche the considerate: in Sils he asked his friend, the devout Emily Fynn — reportedly with tears in his eyes — not to read his books because he feared the anti-Christian parts would hurt her feelings (Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin, 134–35; corroborated in Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 195). And years earlier he told Peter Gast that being “right” is a poor trade if it costs love: “It seems to me so foolish to insist on being in the right at the expense of love…”. That is not the voice of a man preening in opposition; that’s someone counting the cost of speaking forthrightly.

The point isn’t to be “out of step with one’s times,” much less to chase the cheap high of looking down on the herd. The point is to keep truth and tenderness in the same orbit, and to accept that real independence sometimes loses you applause from your own “side.” If your nonconformity never risks friendship, it’s just fashion; if it never revises itself after “one hour’s sympathetic intercourse,” it’s just pride. Better, then, to be occasionally right, frequently kind, and suspicious of any heroism that comes with universal approval.

A Valid Tribute to Thought Such as Nietzsche’s

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

All this talk about fasting from information presumes two things. First, that we want to be alone with our thoughts. For many of us, constant information has become mental junk food that we consume precisely to avoid our own mind and its anxieties. Second, that we have the mental resources to make solitude productive rather than boring.

— Nate Anderson, In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

I blame the publisher and that cloying title. I’m pretty sure the Lady of the House sent me something about this book some time back, but I assumed it would be simplistic and self-helpy, so ignored it. But I found it at the library the other day and decided it was worth reading for free. To my surprise, it turned out to be very good.

The only worthwhile thing Foucault ever said, in my opinion, was that “the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it.” That’s exactly what Anderson does — uses Nietzsche to address the fundamental philosophical question of “How should we live?” He’s not offering yet another academic hair-splitting analysis, nor even a general summary of Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre. He read him intelligently and noticed that much of what he had to say was useful to us in a, well, tech-saturated world. Best of all, he keeps dragging the discussion back to ends, not means. The temptation is to fiddle with “hacks” — screen-time meters, no blue light before bed, whatever — and thereby mistake technique for substance. Anderson asks several times, echoing Nietzsche: What are all these optimizations for? Do the means ever lead to an end, or is “incremental improvement” just a way to stay in motion so we don’t have to ask where we’re going and why?

Our natural state is to be divided against ourselves, a battlefield of conflicting motives and desires, not sure what we want and often not enjoying it when we get it. The missing foundation is self-knowledge. Start with an hour alone — no inputs — long enough to hear what you actually want. Perhaps you must change your life; that begins by refusing the bad-faith alibi that “the internet rewired my brain.” Maybe your supposed goals don’t survive contact with quiet contemplation. That’s fine. Render a verdict, then change what must be changed to serve it.

Pasture On Little Joys

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

Anyway, give me the Past, give me solitude, give me a dog. The past smells of eternity, in solitude only I have dignity, from a dog alone I get unadulterated love.

— R.H. Blyth, Poetry and Zen: Letters and Uncollected Writings of R. H. Blyth

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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. Give me a bed and a book and I’m happy.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms 

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I derive a subtle pleasure from the conviction that the world does not owe me anything. I need little to be contented: two good meals, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing every day. This to me is a full life.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

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Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet when the pain of want has been removed, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

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He who can pasture on little joys, and gather in his heart the little pleasures he has experienced during the day, and give importance within himself to his little strokes of good fortune passes easily through life, and if he is not happy he can believe he is, and be unaware that he is not.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

The Motion Is the Meaning

By in books, foolosophy

The birds and I both needed the berries for the same reason—because winter strips the woods. Their need was the need of all animals, hunger. My need for the berries and the attempts to preserve the “rural character” of Chatham were the special needs of the human animal. John Keats caught it in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ the poem that contemplates the painted figures of happy Greeks about to eat grapes and make love, and of a musician playing a tune that can only be imagined:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare….

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Preserve this moment forever. That sentiment brought out the supporters of the new land-use plan. The vision fills environmental books and films and turns citizens into lobbyists. Keep this species or that species. Maintain these forests as they are for us. Forget that this forest has been this way for only an instant of geological time. It is our time that counts. Keep the red berries, at least through the winter until we desert them for the carnival of spring. I will not stop reading the brilliantly expressed lines of Keats, but I am glad I stopped believing his conclusion: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. No. Beauty is pleasure, not truth.

If we are going to extend our survival on this planet, we must be sure not to equate truth and beauty. If the robins are going to survive, I must let them have the berries. If I am going to get through the winters of life that surely will be colder and darker than any at Morgan Branch or on the arctic shores, I will have to let go of the red berries and understand that my life will continue to change. I will continue moving on through success and failure, not like the people frozen in their beautiful lives on the Greek urn, but like the birds moving through my woods to avoid freezing in winter.

— Wallace Kaufman, Coming Out Of The Woods: The Solitary Life Of A Maverick Naturalist

If Plato braided the True, the Good, and the Beautiful into a single rope, lived reality tends to fray it. In one sense, Beauty lies — it edits, frames, and pleases even when it misleads. In another, Goodness curdles into zealotry when severed from facts. And Truth, absolutized, can turn cruel or sterile — “nothing but the facts,” even where the facts alone don’t tell us how to live with one another. Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism gives us the vocabulary for this: there are genuine, objective human values that are often incommensurable — they cannot be ranked by a common metric or harmonized without loss. Tragic choice is not a bug in the system; it is the system.

How, then, to act without a master value? Aristotle is helpful here. In Nicomachean Ethics II.6 he defines virtue as a mean relative to us — too much courage is rashness; too little is cowardice. Translate this into Kaufman’s terrain: too much Beauty (as preservationist fixation) becomes a vice when it freezes a living forest to satisfy our taste; too little Beauty becomes a grey utilitarianism that leaves nothing worth loving. Too much Truth (as disenchanted bravado) becomes cruelty; too little Truth becomes fan-fiction. Too much Goodness (as purity politics) becomes inquisitorial; too little Goodness devolves into cynicism. The point is not to split the difference mathematically, but to tune three dials in light of the concrete case: what is true here, what harms or helps whom, and what forms of order/fitness/proportion (i.e., beauty in a broad sense) are we protecting or destroying?

That tuning presupposes a further lesson from Kaufman’s winter: movement. The desire to conserve a scene “forever” is aesthetically understandable; in practice it often means starving birds. In morality, a pure rule held too long becomes cruelty to exceptions. Keats’s urn immortalizes a moment by arresting it; the woods live by change. The moral is not “beauty is bad,” any more than “truth is bad.” It is that life keeps moving, and values must be re-balanced as the situation changes. What was fitting at noon may be unfit at dusk. To demand that the trees “never be bare” is to miss what winter is for — and what berries are for. The wiser stance is Aristotelian and Berlinian at once: acknowledge the plural ends we pursue, accept their occasional collisions, and cultivate the judgment to steer among them. Let truth correct us; let goodness constrain us; let beauty inspire us — but never allow one to conscript the others.

Obiter Scripta, no. 145

By in books, obiter scripta

In autumn, the sun and objects appear to have a different color, the clouds a different shape, the air a different savor. It seems as if the whole of nature had a tone, a countenance that belongs to this season alone, which is more distinct and sharper than in the others, even regarding objects that hardly change in their substance.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

I come not to praise summer, but to bury it deep, deep under a carpet of leaves. Leopardi’s right: edges harden, flavors bite, the world seems newly legible. Some evenings the air itself takes on a pink-red glow — as if light had been steeped in crabapples — something I swear I see but can never catch on a camera, a color that exists only at the corner of attention.

The Far Near

By in books, bricolage

You don’t have to go out the door
to know what goes on in the world.
You don’t have to look out the window
to see the way of heaven.
The farther you go,
the less you know.
So the wise soul
doesn’t go, but knows;
doesn’t look, but sees;
doesn’t do, but gets it done.

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 47, tr. Ursula K. LeGuin

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To go down into the depths you don’t need to travel far; you can do it in your own backgarden.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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A man of true wisdom, with nothing but his senses and a soul that’s never sad, can enjoy the entire spectacle of the world from a chair, without knowing how to read and without talking to anyone.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Most of our perceptions depend on our own minds and not on material objects. Fools perceive almost nothing because they are empty-headed, and their hearts are cramped. But great minds discover within themselves a great number of external matters; they have neither to read, travel, listen, nor labor, to discover the loftiest truths; they have but to fall back on themselves, and, so to speak, turn over their own thoughts.

— Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims: Complete Edition

And Yet Two and Two Are Four

By in books

The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.

“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on.”

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities!

— Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

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‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.

‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.

Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’

— Orwell, 1984

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The Underground Man raged against the objective fact of 2+2=4 in the name of unlimited freedom. O’Brien set out to annihilate the independent fact of 2+2=4 in the name of unlimited tyranny. Returning to Dostoevsky, Shigalyov, in Demons, closed the circle: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.” As Apocryphal Galileo might mutter, Et tamen duo et duo quattuor sunt.

Little Things

By in books, bricolage, nietzsche

But we want to be the poets of our life — first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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One should be able to compose a symphony of ordinary existence out of “little things!” Instead of waiting for big ones to happen! The very smallest thing is big! …Little things take the place in life of the “big events”! That is their value, if one can grasp it!

— Peter Altenberg, “Little Things,” The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits

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That’s all there is, just particular people, particular things, poplars and beeches, black lilac bushes, and the mind that watches them, and the sorrow that everything ends.

— Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

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It should not surprise us then when he acknowledges the limited character of his philosophizing in the middle writings. The task of painting what is casually called the picture of life as one set by both poets and philosophers is nonsensical. Philosophers need to show more modesty by showing that what they are doing is providing pictures and miniatures from a single life, from their own lives, “and nothing else is possible.”

— Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Earthbound Wisdom

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After the “Great” War, the very concept of “greatness” — great projects, great motives, great ideas — was under deep suspicion, if not dead in the water. This is perhaps why poetry was the dominant artistic wartime form: life — the good life, bad life, trench life, home life (when you are separated from your family — is made up of the small things poets observe, the all-important details which, as often as not, are made to seem meaningful. As the poets said, and as the phenomenologists and pragmatists had said before them, all the use in life is in the small things.

— Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists

Song In the Tooth

By in books, music

When I imagine a piece of music, something I do every day and often, I — always I think — rhythmically grind my upper and lower front teeth together. I have noticed it before but usually it takes place quite unconsciously. Moreover, it’s as if the notes in my imagination were produced by this movement. I think this way of hearing music in the imagination may be very common. I can of course also imagine music without moving my teeth, but then the notes are much more blurred, much less clear, less pronounced.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

This surprised me, because while I don’t grind my teeth, I do lightly tap or click them together along to music in my head. I don’t do it while listening to music; only when imagining it. I’ve been aware of it, but I never thought of it as significant enough to focus on, let alone wonder if anyone else did a similar thing. I asked ChatGPT about it, and it seems that current research calls it covert articulation: tiny, often unconscious activations of the speech-/singing-related muscles when we imagine sounds. “Imagining music recruits not just auditory cortex but motor regions (SMA/premotor, basal ganglia). Disrupting or down-regulating parts of this motor network can impair rhythm/beat perception; conversely, engaging it tends to help timing. So light, rhythmic jaw clicks would be one more way your motor system ‘locks in’ the beat of inner music.” The things you learn by accident…

Maybe Just Happy

By in books, bricolage

Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.

— Pascal, Pensées

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At peace with itself and the world, the mind atrophies. It flourishes at the slightest contrariety.

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

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The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. We may go further, and say that in the degree in which we are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two.

— Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life

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What a terribly dull affair, too, life must be for contented people! How heavy the time must hang upon their hands, and what on earth do they occupy their thoughts with, supposing that they have any?

— Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

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Happiness writes in white ink on blank pages.

— Henry de Montherlant, Don Juan, Act III

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And in this sense Dostoevsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence. Or again we could say that the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.

— Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916

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I think I’m dumb, maybe just happy.

— Kurt Cobain

A Beast In the Lair of the Human Heart

By in books, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit

The demonstrators were not anti-Semitic — at least, not at that precise moment — but they were driven by the same type and degree of hatred. This hatred is a kind of beast in the lair of the human heart, waiting its occasion to be unleashed and frolic in the ruins it that it produces.

— Anthony Daniels, Buried But Not Quite Dead: Forgotten Writers of Père Lachaise

Nothing stokes the embers of my misanthropy more than the sheer derivativeness of whatever passes for today’s left. I don’t mean to sound like a nihilistic aesthete, demanding originality in political violence, as if it’s just another form of entertainment. I just mean that there’s something extra galling about watching this pathetic rehash of the Baby Boomer narrative arc, right down to the current Weatherman phase. Obviously, this deranged species doesn’t need much excuse to indulge in its worst impulses, but there’s something so rote and reflexive about this version — like CAP said, the utopian early stages, the violent race riots, the third-world revolutionary posturing, and now the Days of Rage. They might as well be sleepwalking for as little as their minds are engaged. So fucking stupid. No one ever learns a goddamned thing.

The Still, Small No

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

Those thoroughly informed about North Americans say that “the ruling opinion in the United States declares itself against everyone who refrains from striving for the highest that is attainable for him. To stay behind from free will is actually considered a disgrace, as a sort of crime against society.”

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

I’ve been told several times that I coulda/shoulda been a writer. I don’t take it seriously; I think it’s just one of those rote things people say to anyone who can string sentences together. In any event, my response has always been that, one, that’s about as realistic as saying that I should’ve tried to be a rock star since I love music so much, and two, that I’m already happy writing as a hobby, and I’m self-aware enough to know that turning it into a job would kill a lot of what makes it enjoyable. Like Bartleby, I simply would prefer not to.

Christopher Knight vanished into the Maine woods for three decades just because he felt like it. Ivan Karamazov stands at the ticket window of paradise and pushes the stub back: even if the ledger balances, one tortured child’s tears are not acceptable to him as the price of admission. Milton’s Satan, tragic and resplendent, would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. I’m fascinated by these acts of refusal, this resistance of something — will, soul, sheer cussedness — against the inhuman harmony of logical or moral necessity. I would rather keep shouldering my burden of agency than accept the undignified relief of handing it over.

Still, pride left to ferment turns caustic. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shows how a life organized purely around “no” corrodes from within. He sacrifices health and love to his perverse notion of freedom, until refusal is his new slavemaster. The lesson, as always, is the golden mean. Say no judiciously, so your yes can mean something.

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