Same here. When I write, I’m not filing papers in a cabinet labeled Ideas; I’m trying to metabolize experience into something I can understand. Often, I’m not even sure what I think until I start trying to write it down. Philosophy as “how to live” begins in the pressure of actual days and tries to make a life more lucid.
According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud said that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” And yet, here we have it otherwise, straight from the horse-hugger’s mouth. More proof that Nietzsche was ahead of his time: he revealed Freud to be a charlatan even before the old bullshit artist’s career had begun.
“Know thyself” is the foundation stone of Western philosophy. You try to know yourself; you discover an impulse you didn’t authorize; you explain it; then you discover the explanation was also an impulse. At that point you begin to suspect that Delphi wasn’t offering guidance so much as taunting humanity with a red-dot laser pointer and watching us pounce on the wall for three thousand years.
In Midnight Maxims, Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “Intellectuals are the bureaucrats of thought.” Likewise, Camus’ commentators are the bureaucrats of the book world. The bureaucrat’s survival skill is activity that can be documented, not outcomes that can be verified. A text that stays “richly ambiguous” is a renewable resource. A text that gets nailed down is a closed case. It’s safer to write “a reading of” than to say something falsifiable. And if you can turn “understanding a book” into a method (frameworks, lenses, rubrics), you can always claim progress even when nothing clarifies. Clarity reduces the need for the middle-management of meaning.
It requires great firmness, as well as vast intellect, to refuse high posts, and remain contented in obscurity. Very few possess the merit to play this role with dignity, nor enough depth of mind to fill up time without what is commonly called business. The idleness of a wise man should however be called by another name; and his meditation, discourse, reading, and repose ought to be called work.
Every now and then you stumble across a paragraph from an old moralist and realize, with a blush of recognition, that at last someone has understood you — pre-understood you, even. La Bruyère, for example, perfectly captures my own great firmness of character, my vast intellect, and my noble refusal of high office in order to devote myself to the higher calling of sitting around reading books and commenting on them. True, one cannot technically refuse what has never been offered, but I regard that as a mere technicality. The important thing is that, should such offers ever materialize, I am fully prepared to turn them down with the quiet dignity La Bruyère describes.
History, consisting mainly of diabolical cruelty—why do I read it if I have nothing in common with any of its cruelties—torture and killing, killing and torture, and I keep rereading it in myriad ways; always the same. Without the dates that stick in it like pins, you could never tell all these things apart.
As much as I enjoy reading the Durant’s Story of Civilization series, I have to take a break from it occasionally because of exactly that — one instance after another of a nation rising to prosperity on the back of merciless conquest, only to slouch into decadence and get overrun by invading barbarians. Maybe history is best taken as microdoses, not mainlined. Big narratives blur into the same triptych of despair — war, famine, societal collapse — until the cerebral nerves go numb. Small, regular hits work better. Think of the genre known as “microhistory.” Each small-scale event or story is a pinprick of light you can actually look at rather than the atrocity-sun that burns your retinas.
One sees thoughts stretching their hands out of the water, one believes they are calling for help. A mistake: they live below, intimate and very familiar with one another, just try and pull a single one out alone!
Some ideas don’t do well when removed from their habitat and forced to perform in the aquatic parks of Theory. A good aphorism is a glass bowl carried to the surface with a bit of water still inside — the smallest vessel that keeps a micro-habitat intact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most writers write badly because they communicate to us not their thoughts, but the thinking of the thoughts. It is often vanity that makes the sentences so full, it is the accompanying cackle of the hen that wants to make us notice the egg, namely a small thought standing in the middle of a full sentence.
ChatGPT and I have a good cop/bad cop dynamic going on. I’m getting on in years, not as nimble and spry as I used to be. When an idea resists arrest, he’s the one who chases it down and tackles it to the pavement while I enjoy my doughnuts and coffee. When some important contextual details are in the wind and a basic Google search isn’t talking, I put him on the case. When the rough draft is spitting at me and refusing to speak to anyone but its lawyer, I exit the room for a few minutes and leave those two to get better acquainted. I don’t ask how he does it, and frankly, I don’t want to know. All I can say is that within a few minutes, the idea is chastened and sitting right beside my desk, singing like a bird. One more sip of coffee, one more confession on the page. That’s how the neighborhood stays readable.
Every effective metaphor brings with it a more complete perception of the world and its interrelationships. It reveals more truth, it brightens, expands, clarifies—in effect, it helps to create—our understanding of the world. Through metaphor we receive “in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation…a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded.”
A good metaphor is a pry bar on the skull: suddenly more light gets in, more joints show between things we thought were separate. You don’t just admire the phrase; you find yourself able to notice what you couldn’t notice five minutes earlier. That experience — what Barfield called a felt change of consciousness — is the afterglow of meaning being made. For me, the most foudroyant sense of truly understanding a subject happens when I see it captured in a metaphor. Suddenly, an isolated subject clearly fits into the wider world. Do I quote myself? Very well; I quote myself: “an apt metaphor is to language what the invention of the wheel was to labor — a means of carrying heavy concepts with minimal effort. A prescient metaphorical picture is worth a thousand words of academic detail.”
The dialogue between Montaigne and others, like a literary game of mirrors, is one of the most original aspects of the Essays. Montaigne engages in self-reflection through books and comments on these books not to cast himself in a favorable light, but because he recognizes himself in them. As he observes in the chapter, “On the Education of Children,” “neither have I said so much of others, but to get a better opportunity to explain myself” (I, 25).
Someone once remarked to me about my writing: It’s interesting that you rely on an external spark (quotation, anecdote, found phrase). You’re never starting from a vacuum; you’re starting from friction with something that already exists. Yes, I said; as much as I might like to pretend that I’m purposefully following in the humanist commonplace-book tradition, the truth is that I learned it from the old blogosphere, where it was standard. I like to keep that old spirit alive, of pointing to things I’ve found funny or interesting in case someone else might enjoy them too. I always liked the idea of writing as part of an ongoing dialogue, rather than ex cathedra pronouncements from a self-absorbed writer alone in his study. It makes my site a salon, not a pulpit. A good quotation isn’t to end an argument, it’s to start a conversation — with the author, with the reader, with my multitude of selves.
When you see the many and manifold institutions for teaching and learning and the great crowd of pupils and masters which throngs them you might think the human race was much occupied with wisdom and insight. But here too appearance is deceptive. The latter teach to earn money, and strive not for wisdom but for the appearance of it and to be credited with it; the former learn, not to achieve knowledge and insight, but so as to be able to chatter about them and give themselves airs. Every thirty years a new generation appears which knows nothing and then sets about trying to gulp down summarily and as fast as possible all the human knowledge assembled over the millennia, after which it would like to think it knows more than all the past put together. To this end it resorts to universities and reaches out for books, and for the most recent ones too, as being its own contemporaries and fellows of its own age. Everything quick and everything new! as new as it itself is. And then off it goes, loud with its own opinions!
Wait, is this the Eternal Recurrence? Am I reading Schopenhauer or Nietzsche? Dear God! This was written in 1851, and it could have been written yesterday. There’s no hope! It’s always been like this! On the other hand, this was written in 1851. There’s no need to despair; it’s always been like this. That’s the good news and the bad news. The lesson here is: neither hope nor despair, but maintenance — and earplugs.
Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste — a malicious taste, perhaps? — no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is “in a hurry.”
There are two ways to drive the hurried reader to despair. One is the cuttlefish method, a long-time favorite of fatuous frauds: hide your scrawny meaning within a cloud of ink. I prefer the second method — compression, not fog. I’m not trying to be opaque or verbose; I’m trying to be dense. Ideally, I want to set spring-loaded sentences, capable of snapping on careless fingers. I want to produce prose that looks like a harmless puddle and turns out to be two feet deep. I want my posts to be gobstoppers, fitting easily in the mouth, but cracking a tooth if you try to chew and bolt. The internet serves cotton candy “content” by the yard. I’m offering beef jerky—salted, tough, but ultimately more nourishing.
Doctrinaire belief has never stopped people from behaving badly. At best it adds an extra step where they apologize afterward; at worst, it’s just one more incitement to violence. If God is watching, He’s like a night watchman in a cosmic case of “quiet quitting” — scrolling His phone, half-watching the monitors, and telling Himself He’ll file a report later. Like the rest of us, He’s just trying to get through His shift.
The thoughts of someone who is solitary, who has sense, and is also mediocre, will be worth very little if he is not aware of what is said and what occurs in society.
