books

Memento Nescire

By in books, foolosophy, media/propaganda, nietzsche, psychology

Being a member of the species of stories increases this complication of signaling by several orders of magnitude. There was a time, many tens of thousands of years ago, when every individual discovered a great deal of what they knew, perhaps even most of what they knew, directly, using their own senses. But as we evolved into the species of stories, the proportion of knowledge we gained by being told, that came via the hearsay of the senses and perceptions of others, increased and kept increasing with every new storytelling technology, so that today almost everything we know comes indirectly from other people’s stories, and almost nothing we know comes directly from our senses.

— Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

Most of what we call being informed is only knowing which strangers we currently trust. That isn’t shameful; it’s the condition of living in a complex civilization. But it is a poor foundation for the daily manufacture of righteous fury. If pressed hard enough — “How do you know? Did you see it? Did you measure it? Did you read the primary documents? Do you understand the institutional incentives?” — most certainties quickly reduce themselves to a more modest stance: someone I trust said so, and for now I believe him. Perfectly reasonable as a working rule. Thin gruel, however, for a casus belli.

That’s the absurdity of political news as middle-class recreational combat. The average participant is not a statesman, intelligence analyst, economist, epidemiologist, military planner, or local official. He is a person on a couch with a glowing rectangle, absorbing accounts of events he did not witness, in places he will not visit, involving institutions he cannot influence, interpreted by people whose incentives he barely understands. Then he turns around and treats this tissue of hearsay as grounds for moral aggression against neighbors, relatives, strangers, and former friends.

This is probably why so many political arguments become so feral so quickly. It is not because the combatants know so much, but because, somewhere below the performance, they suspect how little they know. The dissenter reminds us that our knowledge is secondhand, provisional, tribal, leased rather than owned. So we answer not with proportion but with force. We beat down the external opponent to quiet the internal skeptic.

One reason we never learn from experience is because most of the things we are wrong about do not kill us, bankrupt us, or even greatly inconvenience us. They merely embarrass us. Luckily, we are talented custodians of our own reputation. We forget our pratfalls, sand down their edges, or build them into a new legend of ourselves: yes, I was wrong, but only because I was too trusting, too generous, too open-minded; and in any case, my willingness to admit error now proves the very integrity that my error seemed to call into question. As Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil, ““I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains implacable. Eventually memory gives in.”

The Refuge of Books

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne

Montaigne has not had another real friend since La Boétie’s death, and in the chapter “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” he laments the decline of his sex drive. These two kinds of contact undoubtedly give rise to more feverish displays of feeling, more intense sensations, because they involve interaction with other people—but they are also more fleeting and unpredictable, and more prone to interruption. Reading, however, offers the twin advantages of patience and permanence.

This parallel between love, friendship, and reading, which compose a sort of gradation, might seem shocking. We might think Montaigne is telling us that reading, which requires solitude, is superior to any relationship involving another person, which are merely diversions that take us away from ourselves. Books, then, would make better friends or lovers than real people. But before we jump to this conclusion, we should remember that Montaigne never sees life as anything but a dialectic between the self and others. Though the rarity of friendship and the fleeting nature of love may drive us to favor the refuge of books, reading will inevitably lead us toward other people.

— Antoine Compagnon, A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well

One of the minor twists of the bookish life is discovering how much of one’s sociability has been outsourced to the dead. Books are, in some ways, surrogate friendships. They allow us to extract the interesting thought, the beautiful image, the memorable turn of phrase, without having to submit to the inconveniences of the human source: moods, obligations, misunderstandings, demands upon time. The author never calls at the wrong hour. The essayist never sulks because you have neglected him. Montaigne, unlike most friends, is always exactly where I left him.

And yet reading does not leave us sealed inside ourselves. The private pleasure almost immediately becomes a social impulse. A line wants to be quoted. A thought wants to be voiced. A discovery wants to be proselytized. The book gives us something friendship once gave more freely: matter for conversation, the feeling of another mind moving in sync with our own. Reading is solitude that keeps trying to become company.

My personal Platonic ideal of friendship probably existed for only a few months, from April to July of 1991. My friend Erin and I had been classmates since 1989; by then I had graduated, while she was still a sophomore. She could not drive yet. The internet, for us, did not exist. So we talked on the phone every two or three days, often for hours. There were no awkward attempts at romance. We were simply content to talk about everything under the sun, in the way that only kids can do. That was the whole arrangement, and its perfection lay partly in its innocence.

Adulthood rarely grants friendship such open pasture. Spouses, children, and work take the lion’s share of our time, and multiple friends are forced to divvy up whatever crumbs of attention remain. So books become faithful companions not because they are better than people, but because they are more available than people. They wait without grievance. They resume without complaint. They give us, in a diminished but reliable form, the old pleasure of a voice on the line and nowhere else to be.

Fiction Affliction

By in books, writing

Of course, it is not quite fair to use Ms. Oates as the representative figure of the novelist, despite the high regard in which she is held by eminent book-bloggers. Still, I have to admit that novels and I have never been especially intimate. I’ve made a good-faith effort, but I just find most fiction boring. I understand the case for it in theory: life, with all its muddle, can be clarified and heightened through imagined scenes, characters, and dilemmas. Some people are reached most deeply by dramatization. They need to see a conflict embodied in characters, stretched across time. But in practice, others get more out of Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Epstein, journals, letters, and conversation than they ever will from a shelf of novels. They may even get more from paying close attention to actual people over the years than from reading three hundred pages about an invented family in decline.

I guess my mind is drawn less to simulated lives than to clarified perception. I’m not especially interested in the machinery of plot, scene, and character; I want the point, the insight itself. Not abstraction, exactly — I’m not trying to come off as an autistic logical positivist — but thought compressed into memorable form. A good aphorism, fragment, or familiar essay does not ask you to submit to a whole invented apparatus. It says: here, look at this. Have you noticed it too? Give me a mind in direct contact with life, observing and reflecting, over an invented world any day.

Inflamed or Inflaming Others

By in books, bricolage, conspicuous crusading

The fact that a quite considerable number of people do seem to find “social problems” their recreation and their hobby as well as their exacting responsibility is cited by some as the one sign of health in our sick world, but why on earth this should be so I cannot see. A healthy individual does not spend most of his life examining treatments and regimens. When a man does do that we say that he is either a hypochondriac or an invalid—not that he is leading the good life for which man was obviously intended. In fact we usually wonder why he finds it worthwhile to keep alive and, for that matter, so, often, does he. Why should the case of the body politic be so different? Wouldn’t a really healthy citizen in a really healthy country be as unaware of the government as a healthy man is unaware of his physiology? The healthy citizen might get an annual check-up, but he would not consider comparative blood pressures and the latest remedies for constipation the only subjects which a serious man considered worth talking about.  And however sick society may be it seems to me that we ought at least not lose sight of what health would be like. We ought not have as our ideal the state of universal hypochondria.

— Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature

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Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Not a ‘malicious’ person — i.e. suffering from seeing suffering, — yet my heart immediately hardens towards anyone who speculates about my compassion — or who wants to achieve his ends by invoking Justice, Humanity, etc. So much so that, even when his entreaties to the Idols are well-founded, — I take up position on the side of Injustice and entrench myself in my dislike for this playacting, of which I’ve seen many an example. This explains my attitude over the ’cause célèbre.’

For invoking Humanity doesn’t make you a man. — — I knew these men as free from any human or writers’ weaknesses — and in this particular case I saw them inflamed or inflaming others for a cause.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

I Have a Precursor!

By in books, writing

Perhaps what disappeared with the familiar essay was not merely a form, not merely even an attitude, but a whole subject matter. For the familiar essay affords what is probably the bets method of discussing those subjects which are neither obviously momentous nor merely silly. And, since no really good life is composed exclusively of problems and farce, either the reading of most people today does not actually concern itself with some of the most important aspects of their lives or those lives are impoverished to a degree which the members of any really civilized society would find it difficult to understand. Just as genuine conversation—by which I mean something distinguishable from disputation, lamentation, and joke-telling—has tended to disappear from social gatherings, so anything comparable to it has tended to disappear from the printed page.

— Joseph Wood Krutch, If You Don’t Mind My Saying So: Essays on Man and Nature

In a postcard to his friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche excitedly told him of his discovery of Spinoza: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” I feel similarly upon reading the essays of Krutch. It’s as if I took a literary 23andMe test and discovered a surprising ancestor up the family tree: “Ah! So this is where I got the compact-reflective gene, the mild irony, the distrust of windy prose, the urge to extract a general truth from some small domestic scene.”

I already knew the appeal of the familiar essay, but if I ever encountered Krutch’s name in connection with it, I don’t remember it. This excerpt is from “No Essays, Please!” from 1951, decades before my parents had ever contrived to publish the first edition of me. Even then, he saw the form being displaced by prose that wanted to look objective, topical, expert, and journalistically “real,” rather than reflective, personal, and literary — the exact complaint I’ve recently made myself about nonfiction. Robert Atwan, in the introduction to The Best American Essays 2012, levels the same charge, saying that the “memoir, autobiographical essay, and confessional narrative” had become the major compositional models. “The nineteenth-century essayist could ruminate on jealousy by citing Othello and other relevant literary or historical works and sprinkling personal observations on human behavior into the mix. The modern essayist covering the same topic would be obligated to include findings and research from the latest journals of psychology and psychoanalysis, along with interview quotations from mental health professionals.” It’s no different in 2026. That’s why the form is left to lowly bloggers; there’s no money or prestige in it.

It’s rather reassuring to be reminded that the things we love have been “dying” for decades, if not longer. If near-death is itself a kind of stasis, we can just go on doing what we do. Of course, “dying” is often just the ceremonial status announcement made by people who have stopped paying attention.  A form can be socially marginal, commercially unfashionable, institutionally unsupported, and still very much alive in the only sense that matters: people still doing it well, other people still recognizing the spark when they see it. Some poor devil in 2074 will probably be sighing over the lost age when people still wrote real posts on strange little personal websites, with blogrolls and comment sections inhabited by twelve faithful eccentrics. He will lament the disappearance of authentic longform in an age of neural mood-casts or whatever hellish nonsense they have by then. Meanwhile, the thing itself will still be going on somewhere, half-buried, as usual.

King At Last

By in books, solitude

For some reason or other, I’m alone in the office. Although this dawns on me suddenly, I had already vaguely sensed it. In some corner of my consciousness I’d felt a great sigh of relief, a deeper breathing with different lungs.

This is one of the strangest sensations that the fortuity of encounters and absences can bring: that of finding ourselves alone in a place that is normally full of people and noise, or that belongs to someone else. We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and – as I said – of relief and serenity.

How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.

The usual sounds are all strange, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are kings at last. This is what we all truly long to be, and the most plebeian among us perhaps more ardently than those full of false gold. For a moment we are the universe’s pensioners, recipients of a steady income, with no needs and no worries.

Ah, but in those footsteps climbing the stairs I recognize someone who’s coming here, someone who will interrupt my amused solitude. My implicit empire is about to be invaded by barbarians.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

One of the minor pleasures in my life is to be alone in a building before or after hours. It’s not quite what John Koenig named kenopsia, though. That word gets at the eerie afterimage of human activity, the sadness or uncanniness of a place gone empty. What Pessoa describes is something better: the relief of finding oneself alone in a place normally full of other people, noise, and demands. Not abandonment, then, but reprieve.

I know this feeling best in the warehouse before the day begins. I love to get there before the rest of my crew. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be the first one in the entire building. No forklifts zooming past, no trailers beeping their way back to the dock, no deliveries needing signatures, no questions. The whole apparatus of work is present, but dormant. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode where someone has pressed pause on reality, only the pause has not affected me. I alone am left moving through the stillness, thinking my thoughts, enjoying a freedom so slight that it almost sounds silly. Other people complain that the empty building is spooky, or even haunted, but I’ve never felt it. I feel like I’m hovering above the day, just observing.

And then, inevitably, the spell is broken by some expected sound: the metal door rolling up, an engine coughing to life, footsteps, a voice. The republic resumes. My brief monarchy is over. But this, too, is part of the pleasure. If it lasted, it would become just another condition of life. What makes it sweet is that it is only an intermission, a little pocket of unclaimed time and space, gone too soon, but soon to return.

Obiter Scripta, no. 157

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta

The conquerors enslave the conquered, who in turn begin to shape and color the secret dreams and the culture of their masters. The diabolical prisoners’ cage is occupied first by the sadist who designed it. The Duke of Alva ends a career of legendary terror by being breast-fed. English colonels would stamp round India for years, snorting with contempt, and return home to join the Theosophical Society. In large American cities so many people are in a hurry and drive automobiles that traffic in the congested streets goes into slow motion. In England so many people want to live on the edge of the countryside that miles and miles of it disappear into the city. Both whole communities and individuals turn their back on some pitfall and hurry off to land in another, rather deeper. Just when Man thinks he can do everything, he finds himself helpless in the clutch of some unknown force. And in this ironic principle, which appears to govern so much of our lives, I find delight. Even when it comes close and hurts, the delight is still there. “The Old So-and-So!” I mutter admiringly, from that part of me which must be immortal and invulnerable.

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

Priestley calls it the ironic principle, but I prefer to think of it as the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused. Just when man is most convinced he has mastered events, secured his dignity, and arranged the world to his liking, he sits on a whoopee cushion or slips on a patch of black ice. One trap escaped, another entered; one boast uttered, one humiliation prepared. Reality will not let us remain pompous for long. Priestley’s genius is to greet this with delight instead of resentment. That may be as good a definition of wisdom as any: to feel the pain, but also to get the joke.

Reader’s Digestion

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy

I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

There is something reassuring about this comparison. No one keeps a journal of every sandwich he has ever eaten, nor feels like a fraud because he cannot produce, on demand, a vivid summary of his lunch from seventeen Tuesdays ago. The proof of those meals is not in recollection but in result: in one’s frame, one’s energy, one’s general ability to keep moving through the world without keeling over. Books, however, flatter our vanity in a different way. Since they are made of words, and words seem as though they ought to remain neatly available for quotation, we feel a vague shame when they sink below the level of conscious recall. We imagine that a properly educated man should carry thousands of volumes around in his head like a sort of ambulatory Library of Congress.

But that would be less a cultivated mind than a case of intellectual constipation. One does not want one’s books sitting there undigested, bloating the system. Better that they be broken down and metabolized into taste, judgment, instinct, a sharpened nose for the profound and the fraudulent. And for the minority of books whose exact contents one really does want at hand, there are always sticky tabs and the useful dim memory that “Lichtenberg had something good on this; I should go pull that down again.” Alfred North Whitehead said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” The protein you consume doesn’t need to be monitored; its effects appear once you’re under a heavy squat bar. I have around 2,000 books on my shelves, and for at least 1,950 of them, I probably couldn’t tell you anything more informative than what you could read on the back cover. But I’ve metabolized them in some form or another; their effects appear once I sit down to write on a particular topic. Suddenly, it turns out that I remember more than I knew.

A Small Lighted Space

By in books, writing

Discovering once again how small the world is. Clever young monkeys can jeer their heads off, but the rest of us, who know that the world is full of howling dark wildernesses and so want to feel cozy for a while, rightly persist in being delighted by this discovery. The man in the smoke room visited the same specialist that we did. The widow we met in Egypt is the cousin of the woman at the next table. Our boys must have gone to the same school. We must have been in San Francisco about the same time. What—do you know him? Why, of course, they used to live next door to us. Not old Billy Smith? How disgusted the young are at this kind of talk, and how delighted we old codgers are! And quite right too. For we know that just beyond the curtains, shaking a little no doubt with all our triumphant cries, are night, black as the grave, and the east wind and Siberia and the Okhotsk Sea and the endless wastes of the North Pacific; that in East Asia alone are a thousand million strangers and idols with three eyes and eight arms; that half a mile from the banks of the Amazon is the jungle nobody knows, probably with spiders the size of kittens; that any small lighted space, loud with friendly talk, is almost a miracle; and that we grow old and our wounds ache and too often when we cannot sleep we remember the dead… Why then, your brother must have been there when my uncle was there. How extraordinary! It just shows one, doesn’t it, what a small place….

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

This book was, well, a delight. It is personal without being confessional, thoughtful without being academic, and elevated without becoming windy. This essay, one of my favorites, has a complete internal architecture. Here, he starts with something utterly ordinary — small talk about what a small world it is. Then, without strain, we drift into the grand and faintly ominous: night, distance, wilderness, the dead, the unknowable vastness outside the lamplit room. Just as quickly, we’re back again: friendly talk in a small lit space becomes a fragile human achievement against forbidding immensity.

It is compressed without feeling compressed. A lot of short prose feels pinched, as if the writer has been aggressively pruning. This does not. It feels like something that grew to exactly the right size. He gives you social observation, generational comedy, metaphysical backdrop, and a humane conclusion in barely more space than many people now waste clearing their throats. Nothing is labored. Nothing is announced. The thought unfolds as though it were simply the most natural thing in the world, and still includes some poetic flourishes.

I often wonder why such a seemingly-perfect genre ever fell out of fashion, leaving aside the nature of fashion itself being the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. My guess is that a few things worked against it. First, the professionalization of nonfiction. More and more prose came to justify itself either as scholarship, journalism, or expertise. That pushes writing toward citations, studies, frameworks, credentials, methodology, documented exhaustiveness. That’s hostile to the familiar essay, which depends on a cultivated person being allowed to say, in effect, “Here is a human observation; see whether it rings true.” Second, the collapse of the old generalist middlebrow audience. A writer like Priestley could assume a fairly broad common world: educated but non-specialist readers, patient enough for reflection, not yet broken into a thousand subcultures and algorithmic niches. Once that world fades, the prose either migrates upward into academia or downward into more marketable forms.

The modern cult of identity has also hurt it. The older familiar essay often says, “Here is something one notices about life”; the newer mode often says, “Here is what it is like to be me, specifically, under my conditions.” It is clear, for example, just from context, that Priestley is a white Englishman of a certain generation, but he is not really the star of his own show. If he mentions his own characteristics, it’s often in a self-deprecating manner. His personal details are only like a finger pointing to the moon of his larger theme. The older essayist says, “Come look at this with me.” The newer one too often says, “Come look at me looking at this.”

The older style depends on tact. It leaves things implicit. It trusts the reader to make the second and third inference. Our culture increasingly distrusts implication. Writers are prodded to explain, label, position, caveat, and signal their framework, lest anyone miss the point or misread the moral valence. Of course, I’m sure there was plenty of windy, pompous, dead mid-century prose too. What survives is the good stuff. But the good stuff really does represent a lost norm: the belief that a civilized person, writing clearly out of ordinary experience, could illuminate something general without turning the piece into either a dissertation or a confession.

All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XXIV)

By in books, so many books, so little time

Inspired by my enjoyment of Irwin Edman’s Under Whatever Sky (thanks again to Isaac Waisberg), I set about with my faithful chatbot/bloodhound to track down more practitioners of the “mid-century middlebrow” genre of essay-writing that I love so much. I found an E.B. White collection at the library sale, and found Joseph Wood Krutch, Christopher Morley, J.B. Priestley, and the Fadiman father-daughter duo online. I had not read any of Clifton’s books before, other than a compilation of anecdotes he edited, but I was already a fan of Anne’s previous two books of familiar essays, so I was delighted to find that she had just released a new one in February.

Pedicabo Ego Vos

By in books, bricolage

I find reading savage reviews like reading pornography; though I often enjoy them, I feel a bit ashamed of myself for doing so.

— W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

****

Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets a tremendous erection.

— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

****

In the previous post, we considered David Bell’s lament for the supposed death of the book review. He saw the practice as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, one of the great civilizing mechanisms of modern intellectual life. Auden is more candid, and Lichtenberg more candid still. Beneath aspirational paeans to “the exploration of new knowledge and new forms of artistic expression” and “open, passionate, critical debate” lies a baser pleasure, decorously concealed like so many apocryphal piano legs under miniature Victorian trousers. Catullus, Juvenal, and even that old quack Freud would have understood: underneath the facade of propriety, what the critic really wants is to irrumate his rival in print. Apocryphal Oscar Wilde says that everything is about sex except sex, which is about power. Savage reviews appear to be that happy middle territory where sex and power stop pretending to be different things. What is best in life, Conan the Book Reviewer? “To eviscerate your enemy’s bestseller, to sodomize his prose in the Quarterly, and to hear the lamentations of his blurbers.”

Fever In the Swamps of Reason

By in books, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit

David A. Bell:

The modern book review was born with the Enlightenment and it expressed key Enlightenment values: a commitment to the exploration of new knowledge and new forms of artistic expression, free of censorship; a belief in open, passionate, critical debate; and, above all, a dedication to making the results of this exploration and debate accessible to a broad general public. It is no coincidence that the book review, as a cultural phenomenon, is in steep decline, at the moment when the last gleams of the Enlightenment itself increasingly recall the unsteady flickers of a guttering candle.

This reminded me of something from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books:

I regard reviews as a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree. There are instances of the soundest dying of them, while the feeble often come through. Many don’t catch them at all. Attempts have often been made to ward them off with the aid of amulets of prefaces and dedications, or even to inoculate them with self-criticisms, but this doesn’t always work.

Bell writes about the book review as though it were one of the Enlightenment’s noblest offspring: a vehicle of free inquiry, rational criticism, and public instruction, now fading along with the civilization that produced it. There is something appealing in that picture, but also something a little too tidy. Lichtenberg, after all, was not a belated cynic looking back on the Enlightenment from the ruins. He was there, and he saw something more comic than the serene operation of public reason.

Bell gives us the Enlightenment’s self-image, or rather our nostalgic reconstruction of its self-image: criticism as a noble institution in the service of truth and the educated public. Lichtenberg gives us the Enlightenment’s self-knowledge: the recognition that even in an age devoted to reason, literary life remained vulnerable to fashion, chance, vanity, overreaction, and all the other crooked timber of human judgment. Bell sees the review as an instrument of civilization; Lichtenberg sees it as one more reminder that civilization never abolishes human folly, but merely refines its forms.

The imagery makes the contrast even better. For Bell, the book review is born with the Enlightenment. For Lichtenberg, books are the newborns, and reviews are the random illnesses they catch. Bell sees a candle of reason guttering in our barbarous age. Lichtenberg seems to say the candle always flickered, because the draft was human nature itself. He punctures, in four lines, the sentimental habit of imagining that there was once a golden age when criticism was mostly rational, public-spirited, and sane. There was no such age. There were only the usual humans following the same mixed motives. Bell, like many today, is lamenting the loss of a media ecosystem that offered more status to writers and intellectuals — in hindsight, at least.

He is not merely lamenting that books are no longer discussed in public. They plainly are. People on YouTube, podcasts, Substack, Goodreads, Reddit, and niche blogs talk about books constantly. What he is really lamenting is the weakening of a particular kind of public discussion: centralized, salaried, institutionally validated, and conducted by people whose judgments carried inherited prestige. Under the older model, a fairly small class of critics and editors stood at the chokepoints of literary attention. They did not just discuss books; they conferred seriousness. Their judgments arrived with the aura of metropolitan authority, cultivated taste, and cultural office. When Bell writes in that elegiac register, part of what he misses is not only a forum, but a world in which certain people got to speak from on high and be recognized as doing so.

That does not mean his complaint is wholly fake. Something real has been lost: editorial discipline, a common venue, the expectation that a serious review might be read by a general educated public rather than by a micro-tribe. But the sepia filter kicks in when that loss gets translated into a broader civilizational lament, as though ordinary readers discussing books online do not count because they lack the old voice, costume, and prestige markers. A woman on YouTube giving a shrewd ten-minute discussion of a novel, or hundreds of readers hashing out reactions on Goodreads, may produce less “gravitas,” but that doesn’t warrant portentous proclamations of “the death of reviews.”

535*

By in battling personal entropy, books

We can therefore imagine what enthusiasm the ancients must have felt, who without any question found themselves in a habitual state of physical vigor, much superior to our normal state.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

A 535 block pull last night. I had to use my figure-8 straps for the first time in a long while; my grip started to slip on the previous rep at 525. The blocks give you a 5-6 inch head start from the floor. Similar to last week’s chain squats, these allow you to move heavier weights through a shorter range of motion. It doesn’t count as a PR, of course, because it’s not a full deadlift. But that’s coming soon.

Petit Bonheur

By in books, foolosophy

Well, the way things are going in the world — the way, one might say, that they have always gone — it might be well to settle for the small happiness, the little joy. I think Montaigne would have been on my side, and Epicurus and Ecclesiastes — the last-named because he was quite despairing of any long or large felicity. The French have always specialized in the petit bonheur: the small omelette, the little wine, the intimate foyer of enjoyment. The English have celebrated it, too. Austin Dobson was one of the prophets of this moderate aspiration:

Here in this sequestered close
Bloom the hyacinth and rose.

Rupert Brooke, homesick for Grantchester, the tranquil village near Cambridge, asked:

Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

And the small pleasures that make a tempered happiness persisted in an older Germany, long after that unhappy land had gone in for bigness and empire.

Is it sour grapes to settle for the little happiness: to aim to make happiness out of the most modest ingredients: little things lovingly collected, simple meals in modest surroundings with unpretentious friends, discoursing, perhaps, on not too grand ideas? Is the little happiness cherishable only because, as one grows older, neither private ecstasy nor public utopias seem any longer feasible? Do we tell ourselves the unspectacular moments satisfy only because all moments are threatened, because even gentle goods — like honey for tea in England — cannot be taken for granted any longer? How many millions in the world would now compound for the petit bonheur! Included among those millions, no doubt, the readers of this meditation — and its author.

— Irwin Edman, Under Whatever Sky

Via Isaac Waisberg, I’ve been enjoying Edman’s book recently. It’s a perfect example of a beloved genre I think of as “mid-century middlebrow.” Intelligent, reflective writing, free of academic longueurs or social-science frameworks. There is something deeply civilized in the old middlebrow manner at its best: the easy traffic with books, the unforced assumption that Montaigne or Ecclesiastes or Rupert Brooke might simply turn up in the course of reflection, as naturally as a remembered conversation. Not scholarship as display, but reading as seasoning. One feels that these writers had lived with their books long enough for them to become part of the furniture of the mind. The effect is not pedantry but a kind of cultivated naturalness — the sense that thought has been enriched by literature without becoming clogged by it.

Chains Chains Chains

By in battling personal entropy, books

When lifting a heavy weight: if you give it your all, the result will depend on external circumstances. But if you don’t, then it will depend on you.

(When you give your utmost, you do not need to make a superhuman effort; if you don’t, you will reach exactly your level. “He put in a superhuman effort.” I certainly believe it—from the negligible results I concluded that he wanted to force things above and outside himself instead of engaging, investing himself completely.)

— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation

Heavy chain squats this week. This is 315 in plates, and the chains add another 130 at the top of the movement. These are a good way to practice handling maximal weight, because the chains let you feel the full load at the top while reducing some of it in the bottom position as they settle on the floor. That makes them useful for walkout practice, balance, bracing, and exploding upward with force, while also helping you get neurologically accustomed to heavier weights. I did one regular squat a couple weeks ago at 455, which pushed me to my limit; these allowed me to do two sets of three reps, with 445 on my back at the top of each rep. Plus, chain squats have the aesthetic advantage that they sound magnificent — clanking and rattling the whole way, like the lift is taking place in a dungeon rather than a gym.

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