books

You Know, You Know; No, You Don’t, You Don’t

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

Knowing oneself doesn’t mean reforming oneself. Knowing oneself is a roundabout way of finding excuses for oneself.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Clever people are often very good at “accidentally” getting in their own way. The clever person rarely says, “I’m avoiding this.” He produces a respectable obstruction: more nuance is needed, the timing is poor, the plan is insufficiently refined, the alternatives have not been exhausted, the motives remain unclear. Each objection may be individually plausible. Taken together, they form a beautifully engineered barricade. “Lord, grant me discipline and motivation, but not yet.”

Obiter Scripta, no. 163

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, socmed

How many expressions of opinion are products of intestinal flatulence! They relieve the man giving vent to them, but pollute the intellectual air of others. This goes for insults, mockery, and exclamations.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Ordinarily, I would be loath to descend to lowbrow humor, this being a respectable, high-minded, family-friendly blog, but if such an august personage as Valéry is leading the way, it would be rude not to follow. At any rate, it’s probably a good thing he never lived to experience the global Dutch oven known as social media.

A Shrine to My Ego

By in books

The Lady of the House’s sister is visiting for a couple weeks. She had previously floated the idea of driving three and a half hours to Virginia Beach to meet an online friend, Megan, but one look at the interstate traffic around Richmond after leaving the airport cured her of that particular aspiration. Instead, Megan, her husband, and his three kids made a day of coming up here to meet her and travel around the area.

At the end of the day, the ladies caught a Lyft back to our house while the husband and kids were finishing their own excursion. I had not paid close attention to the logistics, so I was startled to hear the front door open and see a stranger enter.

A stranger. In my house. Now I had to become sociable, or at least perform a convincing imitation of a man who didn’t hate the world.

I admit I feared the worst when I saw the magenta-streaked hair, cat’s-eye glasses, forearm tattoos, and septum piercing. Now, I’m not saying I leapt to conclusions. I merely sidled up to provisional assumptions. I have known a lot of social-justice types online, and like all subcultures, they tend to converge on a recognizable uniform. I steeled myself to patiently endure predictable remarks about Drumpf, Gaza genocide, Elon Musk, and AI coming to kill us all.

Instead, the thing she wanted to talk about was my bookcases.

“This is phenomenal!” she said. “I want my house to look like this one day!”

Well. All right then. Continue, intruder.

She actually looked at the shelves, not in the polite way people look at a host’s books while searching for an escape route, but with real interest. She paused especially over the Isaiah Berlin and Nietzsche shelves. She talked about how her husband’s three children had already been introduced to tablets and phones before she met them, and how it had been an uphill battle getting them interested in books. But she felt she had made some progress. Her daughter had even come home excited about a philosophy book she had heard of: Gödel, Escher, Bach.

“Have you heard of it?” the daughter asked. Megan then pointed it out on her own shelf with satisfaction.

We talked a little about being old enough to remember when a phone was merely a communication device, not a portable world you could crawl inside and never leave. We discussed the best strategies for finding used bookcases on Facebook marketplace and pondered the possibility of building recessed shelves into the walls. Then the rest of the family arrived to pick her up, and she went on her way.

So I suffered a home invasion, only to have it turn out better than many planned visits.

No, Exit

By in books, editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies

This calendar page was tucked into the introduction to the Sartre book. I don’t know if it was intended as an editorial comment, but assuming so, I couldn’t agree more. What an apt juxtaposition: existentialism promises confrontation with radical freedom, and the reader’s first free act is to leave.

The Gravity Well of Music

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, music

Art — the artist’s action consists in trying to enclose an infinity. A potential infinity within an actual finite.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2

A piece of music is, obviously, finite. It has a duration. Three minutes, nine minutes, forty-two minutes. It begins, moves, repeats, departs, resolves, ends. We can divide it into measures, beats, phrases, motifs. We can time it with a stopwatch and locate any passage precisely. Nothing could be more bounded. And yet certain passages do not feel bounded. They feel larger inside than they appear from outside.

Augustine’s account of time is useful to think about. The past and future, he says, do not exist as independent regions somewhere “behind” and “ahead” of us. They exist in the present as memory and expectation. The present itself is attention. This makes the present less like a mathematical point and more like an act of gathering. What has vanished, what is now before us, and what has not yet arrived can all be present in different ways.

Music makes this structure audible. While listening, we don’t hear the present note by itself, as an isolated acoustic fact. We hear it in the context of what has just sounded and what may be about to sound. The earlier phrase is gone as sound, but still active as memory. The coming resolution does not exist yet, but it already exerts pressure as expectation. A melody is succession, but not mere succession. It is Augustine’s threefold present made sensuous: attention, memory, and expectation bound into one act of listening.

Imagine linear time as a flat grid, every second evenly spaced from the next. Music presses into that grid like a gravity well. A passage may occupy only thirty seconds by the clock, but those seconds are no longer flat. They bend downward into depth. What has just passed and what has not yet arrived are drawn toward the same present pressure. They are not simultaneous, exactly, but they become co-present. The listener does not merely move across the passage. He descends into it.

This is my clumsy attempt to describe how absorption in music can have such a peculiar aftereffect. A passage holds you, and then releases you. You return to yourself with a start: the room, the chair, the clock, the body sitting there after all. The music has not lasted longer than it lasted. Nothing supernatural has happened. But the interval was inhabited differently. It was deeper, not longer.

Sleep also makes time vanish, but by subtraction. You close your eyes, consciousness drops away, and an hour disappears. Music does something closer to the opposite. It saturates the interval rather than erasing it. In sleep, time passes without you. In music, a minute can be inhabited so completely that ordinary measurement becomes irrelevant.

This may be one way art encloses Valéry’s infinity. Music is not infinite in the sense of lasting forever. It is infinite in the sense that, while it lasts, duration acquires depth. The clock measures the surface distance from one edge of the passage to the other. Attention measures the descent.

Up the Leg of Judgment

By in animals, books, foolosophy, poetry

 

見逃しているとも知らぬ秋の蠅　　久雄
Minogashite iru tomo shiranu aki no hae

The autumn fly
Does not know
I overlooked it.

Hisao

Even in the world of flies, ignorance is bliss.

— R.H. Blyth, Japanese Life and Character in Senryu

I was around eight or nine when I saw a spider carrying a swarm of babies on its back. I gave in to the obvious childish impulse and tried to stomp on it. I missed. The spider, reacting with what I can only describe as perfect comic justice, sprang up my leg and vanished under my terry-cloth shorts. I still remember the involuntary whine-yelp of disgust I made as I danced in place, shook my leg, and slapped at myself like a lunatic trying to beat the devil out through his thigh.

By adulthood, I had begun making a grudging effort to capture insects and put them outside, with a standing exception for wasps, hornets, and other airborne aggressors. I won’t pretend this was because of the spider. It wasn’t my road-to-Damascus moment in arachnid ethics. But I do remember it often, and from the safe distance of several decades, I admire the thing. Cornered by the descending god of the sneaker, it did not freeze, plead, or submit to fate. It leapt, and in so doing, lived a while longer.

There must be countless bugs going about their microscopic business in complete ignorance of the human eye upon them. Their safety consists partly in not knowing how near judgment has come. We humans can only hope that Disease and Injury sometimes glance at us in the same way and look elsewhere. Until the day they don’t. And when that day comes, may we have the spider’s wit: not dignity, not serenity, not wisdom — just enough nerve to jump up the monster’s leg and make it shriek.

Oh! Raise Us Up, Return to Us Again

By in books, eric hoffer

That a substantial part of this generation may be lost, at least in the sense that they will accomplish little, seems to Hoffer a real possibility. “If you raise a generation,” he says, “that is used to having their appetites instantly satisfied, you are going to have a south sea island civilization. And you can’t have a south sea island civilization on this sized continent. You won’t last five minutes.” He wonders whether a generation that has grown accustomed to having its desires immediately fulfilled can produce anything of lasting value. “Instantness,” he says, ” is a characteristic of animals. If the young adopt it they will submit to the tutelage of medicine men and they will not achieve anything of importance.”

Hoffer considers it at least a possibility that an anti-Semite movement could emerge from the present racial tensions in the United States. “It would be very easy,” he says, “to make out the case that all the major problems of the country were started by Jews. All you have to do is say what people like Chomsky say. America might find itself solving its domestic problems by blaming Jews. Lili and I will be inside the barricades with them fighting for survival.”

— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America

Hoffer! thou shouldst be living at this hour. America hath need of thee.

When Two Freedoms Meet

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, eric hoffer

It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power — power to oppress others.

— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

****

Without being very sharp, you can imagine all human beings want to be free, and not unhappy. This is false. They want their own freedom, not their neighbor’s. They want their happiness, or unhappiness, not their neighbor’s. When two freedoms meet, it’s war.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

The Written Word Is a Lie

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, writing

“You steal ideas, you steal sentences,” he says, “if you are a creative person. If you don’t know how to steal, you don’t know how to create.” It is like a cow eating grass, to use one of Hoffer’s favorite metaphors. “The cow does not become grass,” says Hoffer, “the grass turns into cow.” Quotations, thoughts, a turn of phrase, and ideas in general taken from other writers are alfalfa to the creative person.

— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America

Let no one say I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts by being arranged differently!

— Pascal, Pensées

Originality is often treated as if it had to be immaculate conception. A thought must arrive unsullied by influence, untouched by other minds, bearing no fingerprints from the books one has read or the sentences one has admired. But writers are not virgins visited by angels. They are ruminants, tennis players, pickpockets, ventriloquists, and bad listeners. They steal, fail to steal properly, misunderstand what they have stolen, and sometimes discover that the thing they meant to steal was never there in the first place.

Attempted theft is rarely clean. A young writer tries to copy a cadence, a tone, a gesture on the page. But he can’t do it exactly. His own lack of skill interferes. His own preoccupations intrude. The borrowed coat hangs badly on his shoulders. So he cuts it, patches it, shortens the sleeves, replaces the buttons, and by the time he can wear it in public, it is no longer the master’s coat. Imitation fails in the direction of personality.

There is a comic version of this in the mondegreen. You hear Hendrix sing “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but your ear, composing behind your back, hears “kiss this guy.” For a moment you think: what a line. Then you learn it was never the line at all. Good news: now it is salvage. The original has no claim on what he never said. A mondegreen is plagiarism without a victim.

Books do something similar to the mind. You read an ambiguous passage and believe the author has opened one door, only to learn later that he was probably pointing toward another. Well, the room you entered by mistake still exists. Sometimes a book gives you an idea by failing to say it. The writer says one thing; the reader hears another; the error becomes a footpath. Misreading is often an unauthorized sequel to the original sentence.

In the fourth century, Aelis Donatus wrote a line that frequently appears in today’s quotation analogies, “Confound those who have said our remarks before us.” But with reverse quotation, our predecessors are quoting us! Instead of a “burden of the past,” in which the achievements of earlier generations rob us of opportunities for creativity, there could be a burden of the future, in which what we say merely echoes words to come. Imagine objecting: That man was quoting what I am going to say. He plagiarized what I am destined to write. However odd, it is a feeling we sometimes have. We know we created a certain thought or set of words, and so, when we discover them already expressed long ago, it feels as if they had been stolen from us in advance.

Gary Saul Morson adds the metaphysical absurdity. We all know the burden of the past: the suspicion that the dead have used up all the good sentences. But I like this idea of the burden of the future, too. Perhaps our predecessors are not merely people from whom we steal, but people who have stolen from us in advance. You labor over a thought, feel the private triumph of invention, then discover some dead man in a toga, wig, cassock, or frock coat said it more stylishly centuries ago. The outrage is absurd but real. He plagiarized what you were destined to write.

Worse still, the line of theft runs forward too. Perhaps every original sentence I write is being stolen from some unborn writer who would have arrived at it honestly in 2087. I am not merely robbing graves. I am looting cradles. The burden of the future is the suspicion that I am plagiarizing my literary grandchildren.

Burke thought civilization was a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. Literature may be the same arrangement, but conducted under cover of darkness. The dead steal from us by saying our sentences before we are born. We steal from the unborn by spending their inheritance early. We steal from our contemporaries, siblings, cousins, rivals, and friends by misreading, mishearing, misremembering, digesting, rearranging, and improving whatever they leave unattended. To write is to enter a marketplace where everyone is stealing from everyone else, including the dead, who had the low cunning to rob us in advance. Call it tradition if you like. I prefer “honor among thieves.”

All Is Number

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy

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

— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

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

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

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

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

545-545+495×2

By in battling personal entropy, books

It is indisputable that civilization weakens the human body, which by nature (like every other thing, in due proportion) requires strength and without it, or with less strength that is due to it by nature, cannot help but be most imperfect; and that civilization makes the subsequent physical delicacy a quality proper to civilized man, when in nature it is neither proper to man nor to any other type of thing, nor indeed should it be. It is indisputable that the human race, insofar as the body is concerned, is declining from generation to generation, each generation being worse than the last one, both in its own right and also because, having thus declined, it cannot fail to produce a generation which is worse than itself, etc. etc.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

It’s not all glory, fellows. One must accept failure as a regular companion on the lifting journey to keep us humble. Last night, for example, I missed two attempts at deadlifting 545 off of a two-inch block. My arms twitched. My legs trembled. A bead of sweat plunged from the tip of my nose to the floor. The plates shifted. A hush descended. E pur, an onlooking Galileo might have muttered watching the bar, non si muove.

I did get two reps at 495 as a consolation, though.

Faceless Men

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

To conform is to submit, and to conquer is to conform, to be conquered. Thus every victory is a debasement. The conqueror inevitably loses all the virtues born of frustration with the status quo that led him to the fight that brought victory. He becomes satisfied, and only those who conform — who lack the conqueror’s mentality — are satisfied. Only the man who never achieves his goal conquers. Only the man who is forever discouraged is strong. The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

****

I do not speak to the weak: these want to obey and everywhere race toward slavery. In face of relentless nature, we still feel ourselves to be relentless nature! — But I have found strength where it is not sought, in simple, mild, and accommodating humans without the least inclination to rule — and conversely to me the inclination to rule has often appeared as an inner sign of weakness: they fear their slave’s soul and cloak it in a king’s robe (in the end they become the slaves of their followers, their reputation, etc.). Powerful natures rule, it is a necessity, they will not lift a finger. Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house!

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

****

But if there were such secret brotherhoods, then most of us have occasionally met the kind of men who ought to be members of them. They are men who give us the impression that they have deliberately turned aside from power and fame. They are content to be comparatively obscure, to be known only to a small circle of friends and acquaintances, who do not hesitate to turn to them for guidance and help at times of crisis. They are not failures, except in the eyes of the vulgar and stupid. They may not be mystics, though I doubt if any of them are ever found with a materialist philosophy, but, like the mystics, their lives appear to be rooted in some other world.

They earn a living but never join in the general grab for prizes, possessions, fat jobs and bouquets. Except when their help is urgently demanded, they are never quite with us. They are friendly but never babblingly intimate. From the standpoint of Who’s Who and Fleet Street, they are nonentities; but in the circles where they are known, they are deeply respected and have much influence. We feel they could have been rich, powerful, famous, if they had wanted to be; but preferred another way of life. They are leaders who do not choose to lead. On the other hand, they are never missionaries, fanatical propagandists, martyrs. They are extraordinary men pretending, fairly successfully, to be ordinary men. They appear to be having a rest in this life, or to be waiting for some signal that the bulk of us will never recognize. There are never many of them, and perhaps we meet a true specimen of the type about once every ten years. And just as I do not delight in the powerful and famous, who have been mostly ruined on the way up, so I do delight in these Members of the Secret Brotherhood, the men who have never started to climb and who seem to have looked in on us from some other and better planet.

— J.B. Priestley, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life

A Bone For the Mind

By in books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, writing

“My writing is done in railroad yards, while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch,” he explained in a 1941 letter to Miss Anderson. “Towns are too distracting. Now and then I take a day off to ‘put myself in order.’ I go through the notes, pick and discard. The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have something to chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentious as it sounds.” His usual method was simply to take a single idea and work it out in his mind, put down the result in fifty words or less, and then go on to something else.

— Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I was a distracted driver for many years. Oh, I don’t mean that I was watching YouTube videos behind the wheel or anything. But I used to drive hundreds of miles a day for work, and most of my writing was done in my head, sometimes with a song on repeat, putting me in something of a focused trance. Hours went by on autopilot. I navigated highways and traffic without remembering any of it, concentrating on chewing sentences into shape. I tended toward brevity because a new idea for a post had to be brief enough to remember all the moving parts. By the time I got home in front of the computer, the work was already done; the rest was just stenography. (I never had an accident while driving, by the way.)

The keyboard is often where the sentence appears, but not where it was made. The sentence was made somewhere between mile markers, or while stacking boxes, or while mowing the same quadrant of grass for the third time, the mind gnawing away like an animal with a bone. Like Hoffer, I tend to ruminate on big-picture thoughts. Everyone and his mother wants to create “content” these days. I’m driven to give myself context and perspective. I like “sensemaking” as an aspirational goal, but much of it will never be used for anything practical. It won’t make me richer, fitter, wiser in any visible way, or more efficient at any task. I only want to know where I am, what sort of thing I have seen, what company it keeps. I want to put myself in order, like returning a book to the right shelf in the inner library.

Travel Compresses the Spine

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

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

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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

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

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

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

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

So the People With the Books, They Went and Stood Up On the Mountain to Get Away From the People With No Books

By in books, the geist of the zeit

Joel Miller:

Smartphones deliver near infinite options that appeal to unliterary people more than books. They have music, podcasts, streaming, short videos, long videos, social feeds, and AI to generate whatever else they want. I’ve spent the last two weeks in a hospital caring for my mom. I’ve seen a hundred people waiting for one thing or another—all of them with their phones, not one with a book. (I’ve been looking.) But can you blame an unliterary person if they prefer TikTok to Cormac McCarthy and YouTube to Toni Morrison? That’s like blaming someone for liking tacos more than pho.

All of this points us to an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable reality: The mass of unliterary readers has been padding the reading statistics for a century. After all, “it’s no big deal. It’s just a book.” The unliterary are now abandoning reading because, for them, they’ve got better alternatives for passing time.

It’s an interesting essay, and I tend to be more sanguine about the issue myself, but I will qualify my own optimism a bit. Serious readers don’t emerge from nowhere. They are often produced in a surrounding ecology of half-serious readers: parents with shelves, teachers who still read, newspapers worth reading, magazines with essays, used bookstores, paperback racks, libraries, middlebrow critics, hobbyist bloggers, people who may not read Proust but still think books are normal things to have around. If the middle layer collapses, the “reading class” may survive, but it becomes smaller, more hereditary, more credentialed, more weirdly monastic, perhaps even a little inbred.

Obiter Scripta, no. 162

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

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

— Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (Penguin Classics)

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

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