books

Sardonicus Maximus

By in books, writing

Wise sayings (and dicta) know, sardonic maxims ask why we think we know. The former presume, and the latter doubt, both the possibility and the value of wisdom or knowledge. Sardonic maxims concern vanity in both senses of the word: futility and excessive self-regard. Their sense of the former makes them suspicious of effort and their sense of the latter of judgment.

…For the sardonic maximist, zeal — of religious fanatics, or political parties, of adherents of a theory or proponents of an ideology — constitutes the greatest, and most dangerous, folly.

…The maximist speaks from experience, which counts more than reasoning or theory, and has evidently had plenty. We sense him as old, though not very old. He has lived through what surprises younger people and has reflected upon it. Having moved among the urbane and sophisticated, he knows his conclusions have been tested by demanding judges. In this sense, the maximist is aristocratic, as well as world-weary. He speaks out of what one commentator has called “cool disdain.” The maximist expects his readers to be as old and sophisticated as himself, and to recognize from experience, rather than proof or argument, the truth of what he says. If they don’t, no argument will substitute.

…It takes self-control, as deft as the maximist’s control over language, to remain alone as a mere observer. “In France,” writes La Bruyère, “it takes much firmness of spirit and a great breadth of understanding to do without offices and positions, and be willing to stay alone and do nothing.”

— Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel

Obiter Scripta, no. 133

By in books, obiter scripta

To lie in wait for one’s mind, pen raised, ready to spear the slightest thought as it surfaces.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

Childhood visits to my grandparents usually meant a day at Limestone Springs to fish for rainbow trout. It’s a preserve, so it was about as close to fish jumping into the net as it gets. No sitting in a boat for hours on a lake with nothing to show for it. I’ve spent years ranging far across the internet, stalking skittish herds of thoughts for days if need be. But with intellectual climate change in the past decade or so, the habitat has become desiccated and barren, and the thoughts are sickly, inbred mutants unworthy of an arrow. Hence my idea to build myself a thought preserve and stock it with more short-form writing. I don’t care if it’s unsporting. Sometimes a fellow just wants to cast his line over to the bookshelf and reel in a few plump aphorisms.

Obiter Scripta, no. 132

By in books, obiter scripta

Being alive means recording. What’s called inspiration only consists of special moments in which human wax finds an appropriate needle.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

Much of my reading had started to feel weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. It was as if someone injected Ozepmic into my brain — I’d lose my appetite halfway through a book and only finish it with effort. But without the nutrition of reading, there’s no energy for writing. So, I’ve decided to seek out more short-form writing — aphorisms, maxims, epigrams, journals, and notebooks. As with poetry, so too with prose — I’ve always preferred brevity and concision; the quick, sharp insight as opposed to the logorrheic essay. I feel better already.

Sages

By in books, the geist of the zeit

Oliver Bateman:

John Burn-Murdoch laments that the digital environment is sapping our sustained concentration, but we might recall that early modern and even our boomer relatives rarely read for hours at a stretch either. Even the modest expansions in literacy did not produce libraries in every home. In fact, the average person’s reading might have been quick, sporadic, or done communally: a local official reading a letter aloud to a crowd, a parson sharing the news from a printed pamphlet, or an older sibling reading a chapbook to younger ones. The rest of life went on in speech. Our modern version is scrolling bullet-point updates on social media, or listening to a 30-second audio summary or reaction on TikTok. The difference is that elites maintain illusions about some sort of golden era that preceded it. The truth is that the dense, contemplative reading we associate with the age of the novel was always a minority pursuit. Many people from roughly the mid-1700s onward were taught to read sentences from the Bible or sign a ledger, but they still gleaned most of their knowledge from conversation, from newspapers read or retold to them, from the radio or the television in the centuries that followed.

…As for the claims that “reading is dying,” we might ask if it was ever truly universal or unassailable. A vast majority of the population has always found extended reading burdensome, even in periods, like ours, that are widely regarded as “more literate.” Pre-modern society taught many its knowledge exclusively through spoken means, and if there were some “golden age” of universal literacy, historians have not pinned it down. Indeed, the historical record suggests that, by 1700, only around half the population could read more than just a few words. Even if the younger generation in the 21st century read fewer printed pages and prefer brief TikTok videos, that might not represent a cataclysm so much as a rebalancing. This rebalancing might be questionable in certain arenas — research has shown, for example, that consistent reading helps shape attention and fosters complex thinking — but it also might revive more social ways of learning, reminiscent of how neighbors once passed around songs, proverbs, and stories.

Obviously — I assume — I love reading. I’m also a little bit of a weirdo in general, though. I’m not under the illusion that many people share my weird interests, and I’ve never indulged in the masturbatory fantasy of moral progress beloved of the typical NPR/Atlantic/NYT midwit that reading makes one a “better person,” more empathic, more humane. It may possibly make one more interesting, which is not at all the same thing. But even that’s debatable. Many non-readers are far better company than me and easier to get along with. Thus I’m sanguine about the future of books and reading. For the remaining (possible) few decades of my life, I expect that studious literacy will retain a certain gravitas among the population at large, much like shamanism, and that’s good enough for me. “Don’t bother him. He’s a strange one, sitting in that study all the time, communing with imaginary and long-dead spirits.”

Personal Thoughts That Are Obvious Truths

By in books, foolosophy

I concur. I’m also greatly enjoying Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization series for the same reason. For example, here’s one passage I read last night in The Life of Greece:

Other cities huddled along the hills along the Corinthian Gulf—Aegium, Helice, Aegira, Pellene—now almost forgotten, but once alive with men, women, and children, every one of whom was the center of the world.

He does that often. It’s that little pinch of poetry at the end that keeps it from being a dry recitation of ancient names and events, a dash of memento mori that would have no place in a more objective scholarly book. I feel like the social science idiom has dominated non-fiction for as long as I’ve been alive. I wonder how long ago this more humanistic approach went out of style?

Reading, the Aristocratic Pastime

By in books

The picture is not much better for books. In 2022, for instance, the best-selling nonfiction title (a self-help book called Atomic Habits) sold 1.2 million copies. The number two bestseller, The Body Keeps Score, sold roughly half as many units (637,000). For context, there are roughly 258 million adults (eighteen years and older) in the United States. This means the absolute best-selling nonfiction title in the U.S. reached less than 0.5 percent of American adults, and the runner-up reached roughly 0.25 percent. Even the number one fiction book, It Ends with Us, only sold enough units to reach roughly 1 percent of American adults. For university presses, the numbers tend to be much lower. The typical monograph sells less than 500 copies. More trade-oriented academic press books tend to move around 5,000 units at the high end. At the pinnacle of the academic publishing world, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century has sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide since 2013. As impressive as that sounds, it amounts to only 1 percent of the current U.S. population—and this statistic counts all units sold over the last decade, many in international markets.

And of course, as it relates to impact, many who buy books never read them (there’s even a Japanese word for this practice, tsundoku). Even those who start to read titles regularly fail to finish them. E-reader based estimates by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg suggest that the overall book completion rate for American readers may be as low as 3 percent— with Piketty’s bestselling Capital being among the least likely to be finished once started. With only around 1 percent of the population buying even the best-selling titles in a given year, and only a small fraction of purchases actually reading those texts to completion (if at all), even the most successful titles typically reach a miniscule share of the public and have a negligible effect on the social world.

— Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

Some may find this disheartening. I think they suffer from a democratic romanticism. A world full of obsessive readers would be like a university English department writ large. Besides, how often do you get a chance to be in the top one percent of anything? Enjoy your aristocratic status, fellows.

The Head of Some Old God

By in atheism, books, religion

I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new: superficial they all seem to me, and shallow seas…Alas, I cast my net into their seas and wanted to catch good fish; but I always pulled up the head of some old god.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tyler Hummel:

Enter Spencer Klavan, the Oxford-educated classicist, editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and previous author of How To Save The West. His newest work Light Of The Mind, Light Of The World: Illuminating Science Through Faith directly dives into the bizarre transitionary moment we are living through, asking the same questions McGrath asked prematurely two decades ago with the added benefit of hindsight. Klavan is digging into the tidal movements of this moment and asking if the forces of secularism and materialism have become a spent force.

When a book review titled “Materialism on the Ropes” appeared in my inbox, I clicked on it with interest. Frankly, I’ve been feeling quite jaded and bored, intellectually speaking. I find it hard to escape the conviction that everything of interest has been thought and said already. So, did I miss some new developments in religious thought over the last lost decade of political idiocy? Did someone come up with a way to breathe new life into the old arguments over religion?

On this evidence, no. It was kind of fun to see some of my old opponents again, but they’re showing their age. The “God of the gaps” argument makes an appearance (quantum physics can’t be satisfactorily explained yet, therefore…monotheism must be true). There’s the old argument from consequences (materialism logically leads straight to totalitarianism and death camps). There’s even the appeal to (if not authority) fame that we saw a few weeks ago: several high-profile names have recently embraced Christianity (so therefore you should, too). Assuming the review is comprehensive and fair, Klavan’s book isn’t saying anything we haven’t heard before. There may well be some sort of religious revival as the center of cultural and political gravity swings back toward the right in the near future, but human beings are never content anywhere for very long. Faith or no faith, the human condition remains.

When Accountants Attack

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies

Thank goodness this book exists. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been attacked at a suburban backyard barbecue by some crazed IT guy with a wrench and thought, “Damn, if only I had studied techniques for severing his femoral artery with my drop point knife!” It’s like a heart-pounding form of l’esprit de l’escalier. Well, next time I’ll be ready.

When to Read

By in books, lin yutang

One should read the classics in winter, because then one’s mind is more concentrated; read history in summer, because one has more time; read the ancient philosophers in autumn, because they have such charming ideas; and read the collected works of later authors in spring, because then Nature is coming back to life.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

This year, my big reading project is going to be The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant. I’ve encountered single volumes many times over the years, and I’ve always been impressed by the scope of the undertaking, as well as the prose style, which I like to call “mid-century middlebrow.” It’s from a time when it was naturally assumed to make sense to write an eleven-volume summary of Western civilization aimed at a general audience who would of course be interested to read such a thing for the sake of general knowledge. O tempora, o mores! Anyway, eleven volumes — one a month, to finish the whole thing this year? We’ll see.

The Hidden

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

I suppose the question boils down to whether you think that everything in life should be out in the open or whether some things should be concealed. I favour the second view, but I think I am now in the minority. It is not merely that, like everyone else (I assume) there are things about me that I would wish no one else to know: I think there are things about everyone I care for that I would not wish to know. The art is in knowing where to draw the line.

The hidden is, in part, what makes life interesting. To say that someone is an open book is also to imply that they are shallow. There are many things that should be skirted over or even brushed under the carpet.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Nothing But Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture

• While talking to a college kid we have working for us during his winter break, I offhandedly mentioned my wish for a widespread ethos of “digital modesty,” in which people refrain from oversharing. I thought this was a banal remark, but he seemed quite struck by it. Has no one else ever offered him that perspective before? It just serves as a reminder of the quotation misattributed to André Gide: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

• While listening to Christmas music, I was reminded of a coworker from my days in the newspaper business, a guy from the island of Truk, in Micronesia. I worked with this guy almost every day from 1993-2011; in particular, this song called to mind one Christmas morning when we were two of the few people who still had to come in to work rather than take a day off. He was everyone’s ideal employee: hardworking and always cheerful, but he was somewhat quiet, owing partially to his basic command of English. We only had a few real conversations over those couple of decades. The last time I talked to him was in the summer of 2013, when we discussed him doing some side-work for me. Upon Googling him last weekend, I found that he died of cancer almost a decade ago, in February 2015. He was only 46. Did I ever really know him? Did I need to?

• At present we regard it as a matter of propriety not to be anxious either to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that the good God is everywhere present? ” asked a little girl of her mother: “I think that is indecent”: a hint to philosophers! One should have more reverence for the shame-facedness with which nature has concealed herself behind enigmas and motley uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not showing her reasons? Perhaps her name is Baubo, to speak in Greek?… Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: for that purpose it is necessary to keep bravely to the surface, the fold and the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in forms, tones, and words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – from profundity!

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Obiter Scripta, no. 130

By in books, obiter scripta

From an early age he sunbathed naked on Welsh hillsides (when there was sun), which did not endear him to the preachers of the local chapels. He believed himself to be a druid, wrote in an archaic Welsh all his own, and wore red trousers, a green tunic, and a complete fox skin on his head. He grew a long white beard and refused to wear socks. He was a vegetarian, claiming that to eat the flesh of animals was to take on their characteristics (exactly what a vegetarian cousin of mine claimed a century later), and was an anti-vaccinationist. He was in favour of free love and fathered a child at the age of 87.

He was the father of British cremation, believing burial to be unhygenic and wasteful. In 1884 he tried to cremate his 5 month old son (called Jesus Christ Price) but was arrested in the attempt. A howling mob attacked his home for his blasphemy, but at his trial—Dr. Price always defended himself—he was acquitted by the judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, author of the classic riposte to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and uncle of Virginia Woolf. Henceforth cremation was permissible under UK law. The howling mob changed its mind too. Around 20,000 people attended Dr. Price’s own cremation, nine years later.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Nothing But Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture

This potent little capsule biography reminds me of a similar one by Bill Bryson. Again, it seems to me that a full biography would be disappointing in comparison. On the one hand, it’s sobering to imagine one’s own life summarized, however deftly, in a couple short paragraphs. On the other hand, we can only hope for a Dalrymple or Bryson to memorialize us in such a charming way. Nudity seems to be a common theme with these eccentrics. I guess I need to start going around naked more often if I’m going to be worthy of an amusing eulogy.

Obiter Scripta, no. 129

By in books, obiter scripta

Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I have never gone trouserless in order to buy a book, but I have known the pleasure of using credit card points to that purpose. Groceries, business supplies, and other mundane necessities, through some abstract alchemy, become a new hardcover on my nightstand.

Better Late Than Never

By in books

Fellow fans of Theodore Dalrymple’s essays, rejoice; for I have made a serendipitous discovery. Nothing but Wickedness: Idleness, Madness, and the Culture of Decline, his out-of-print? never-printed? long-delayed? book, is finally being released this week. I pre-ordered my copy from Blackwell’s. Hurry up and get one before it disappears into limbo again.

To Laugh Is Really to Love

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, religion

Humour, however, belongs very much to the world. Life is suffering. As Shakamuni pointed out long ago, we cannot have what we want, and we must have what we don’t want, but humour is not escapist. It overcomes the world, not by ascending to heaven, but by laughing at the paradoxes of life. We overcome the world by laughing at it; we overcome it in so far as we laugh at it. Humour is thus a religion. It is religion itself. It belongs to the will, to the subconscious will, and sets its will against communism and democracy and Buddhism and Christianity, and every other will, that is, every other religion.

Buddhism, like Christianity, hates this world. The world, the flesh, and the devil are lumped together in the New Testament. In Buddhism the world is, as said before, suffering, something we hate. Perversely, Christianity and Buddhism both tell us to love what we hate, to love our enemies, to be compassionate to the things or creatures or human beings that annoy and destroy us. Humour, on the other hand, makes us laugh at our enemies, and at our friends still more, laugh at God and the Devil, laugh at ourselves. To laugh is really to love. This we see in Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello and Desdemona, whose humourless love causes their tragedy.

If we take humour to be the nature of the universe, the origin of life and its object, the antagonism of Christianity and Buddhism to humour shows their irreligiousness. Of course, when we assert the importance of humour in this serious way, humour itself is absent, and we get only one more humourless -ism or -ology. What I really want to say is that it does not really matter whether a theory of life is good or bad, right or wrong, so long as it is humourously so.

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

I’m reminded of Mary Beard’s comments on Democritus in Confronting the Classics:

The most revealing ancient discussion of Democritus’ laughing habit is found in an epistolary novel of Roman date, included among the so-called Letters of Hippocrates – a collection ascribed to the legendary founding father of Greek medicine, but in fact written centuries after his death. The fictional exchanges in this novel tell the story of Hippocrates’ encounter with Democritus. In the philosopher’s home city, his compatriots had become concerned at the way he laughed at everything he came across (from funerals to political success) and concluded that he must be mad. So they summoned the most famous doctor in the world to cure him. When Hippocrates arrived, however, he soon discovered that Democritus was saner than his fellow citizens. For he alone had recognised the absurdity of human existence, and was therefore entirely justified in laughing at it.

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