Logan Pearsall Smith was asked shortly before his death whether he had found any meaning in life. “Yes,” he replied, “there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters — to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”
— The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (ed. Clifton Fadiman)
Philosophically, I can agree with that. Semantically, though, I think I’d like my word chimes to resonate more like the Corinthian Bells, or maybe the Quartal Basso Profundo.
It’s enough to make you despair: to read everything and remember nothing! For one forgets everything. Do your damnedest, it all vanishes. Here and there a few scraps remain, fragile as those puffs of smoke which show that a train has passed.
— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910
As the meme says, “I know that feel, bro.” On the other hand, as Alfred North Whitehead said, civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. Our puny cerebral hard drives aren’t meant to store photographic reproductions of the millions of words we’ve read. The best we can do is have a well-organized library with some means of being able to find particular passages on demand. In any event, it’s a misapprehension to think that conscious recollection matters most. I don’t need to be consciously aware of all the individual meals I’ve eaten to enjoy the cumulative effects of all that strengthening protein. Likewise, I don’t need to be able to quote pages verbatim from every book I’ve ever read. Everything important has trickled down into some subconscious reservoir which my entire worldview draws upon.
I confess that I am like an aeolian harp — which gives off some pretty sounds but can play no songs.
— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
I’ve spent the last few weeks going through my archives and collecting my best efforts to present in bespoke book form to my oldest friend for her birthday later this year. It’s fun to take a bird’s-eye view on twenty years of scribbling, to see how my thoughts have developed or changed, but it also confronts me with my own limitations. I have a few favorite themes, and I’ve produced some good jokes and some well-turned phrases, but per the Peter Principle, it’s clear that the blog is the highest level of my writing competence, such as it is. There will be no extended essays forthcoming, let alone novels or monographs. I’m just another unremarkable koi fish in the small WordPress pond, and that’s how I like it.
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.
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.
In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.
—François de La Rochefoucauld
I noticed the warehouse manager limping around the other day. It turns out his sciatica is paining him greatly. I gave him some advice, and the number of a fantastic medical massage therapist, so, you know, I’m a good person, clearly. But this is a guy who doesn’t take much care of himself, never goes to the doctor if he can help it, smokes tobacco and pot, and is definitely carrying too much fat around the midsection for his age. Until now, though, he seemed impervious to the costs of unhealthy living. I have to admit, it’s a little…reassuring to think, Ah, so you’re human after all.
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.
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.
The reward for work and accomplishments is almost always more work. The reward for meeting and exceeding previously-determined expectations is a new and elevated standard. We’ve never really “arrived” until we retire (regarding sport/business) or die (regarding family and any other personal matters).
Fall in love with the process. Get comfortable with adversity. Keep showing up. Do the work.
Just over a month ago, a client, one whom I specifically am responsible for, dumped a huge project on us with no warning, which I finally completed this week after many long days and weekends of extra effort. Not long after that, I pulled a muscle in my lower back while deadlifting, which caused a couple weeks of agonizing pain and limited mobility. (It was mordantly funny to be reading a book about Stoicism while lying in bed with ice packs underneath me, listening to Seneca airily dismiss pain as anything worth fretting about, but then we already knew that Seneca didn’t even lift.) I’m pleased to say that I made it through the whole double ordeal without my equanimity getting ruffled. I didn’t get stressed, I didn’t get discouraged, I just accepted the challenge and set myself to the necessary tasks of working hard and recuperating. Hey, it only took half a century of practice to finally accomplish.
Would that I had words that are unknown, utterances and sayings in a new language, that hath not yet passed away, and without that which hath been said repeatedly — not an utterance that hath grown stale, what the ancestors have already said.
— Khekheperre-Sonbu, quoted in The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians: Poems, Narratives, and Manuals of Instruction from the Third and Second Millenia B.C.
This week marked eighteen years since I first pushed off from shore in my little blog-boat. When I think of how little I know and how little I have to say about it, I’m amazed I’ve kept going so long. I’ve never really felt like I suffer from writer’s block per se, because I’ve never had to write on a schedule, but there have certainly been many times when I’ve felt lacking in inspiration, wondering if I’d ever have an interesting or amusing thought again. And yet, somehow I’ve managed to pile up all these tiny writer’s blocks and assemble them into a miniature pyramid. Something to be said for sheer diligence, I suppose.
Talk as if you were making your will: the fewer words, the less litigation.
— Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
I did it, fellows. I recently went an entire work day without speaking to anyone. Now, like Apocryphal Alexander, I weep, for what is left for me to conquer? In order to extend my silence even longer, I’d probably have to officially join some kind of monastical order. No, I’m afraid I’ve reached the limits of my potential.
I haven’t intended to be silent here, by the way. It’s just the usual thing where the inanity and fatuity of the world reduces the onlooker to mute incomprehension. These things always pass, though.
One of the things which make life on this planet more or less agreeable is the speed with which alarums, excursions, excitement, and rows generally, blow over. A nine-days’ wonder has to be a big business to last out its full time nowadays. As a rule the third day sees the end of it, and the public rushes whooping after some other hare that has been started for its benefit.
— P.G. Wodehouse, The Head of Kay’s
One of the smaller pleasures of this time of year is reading the year-end summaries of notable events and thinking, “Oh, yeah, I forgot all about that.” For three days, the fate of the world seemed to hinge on this thing, and now it’s just an afterthought. I admit I take a tiny satisfaction in seeing how many supposedly-momentous happenings passed into obscurity without managing to solicit any comment from me.
Some people predict that it’s only a matter of time until our ordinary telephones disappear and are replaced by individual devices about the size of a pocket watch—one side will have a TV screen and speaker; the other will entail a set of buttons you can use to activate various functions or dial world information for any given individual. And if that person doesn’t answer, it will mean that they are dead. Under such circumstances, absolutely no one can get lost anymore.
—Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe
I had noticed over the last few weeks that my phone seemed to be slow to receive emails, and I was having problems getting texts to go through to certain people. I didn’t think much of it, because a smartphone is little more than an mp3 player to me. Today, though, I rebooted it and promptly received five voicemails and a couple texts that had apparently been in limbo for who knows how long. I know full well that various corporate and political actors would love to eliminate the possibility of true “private time,” and that the little surveillance devices we all carry around make it easier for them to do so, but it still pleases me to see how, for no particular reason, things just sometimes stop working as expected, introducing just that little bit of unpredictability into events again.
Where moderation is an error, indifference is a crime.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
Dictionary dot com’s Words of the Day for the past week have been: choice, dissent, draconian, autonomy, galvanize, and liberation. Is it really too much to ask to get an interesting, possibly unknown word delivered to my mailbox every morning — you know, just for fun — without it becoming yet another opportunity for political sermonizing? Boy, I really didn’t know what to think previously about complex topics like abortion or federalism, but now that the person in charge of the dictionary email listserv has oh-so-subtly made their point, I’m convinced!
Is there, after all, any solace like the solace and consolation of Language? When I am disconcerted by the unpleasing aspects of existence, when to me, as to Hamlet, this earth seems a sterile promontory, it is not in Metaphysics nor in Religion that I seek for reassurance, but in fine phrases. The thought of gazing on life’s Evening Star makes of ugly old age a pleasing prospect; if I call Death mighty and unpersuaded, it has no terrors for me; I am perfectly content to be cut down as a flower, to flee as a shadow, to be swallowed like a snowflake on the sea. These similes soothe and effectually console me. I am sad only at the thought that Words must perish like all things mortal; that the most perfect Metaphors must be forgotten when the human race is dust.
— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms
I was thrilled to discover the existence of a book called Wodehouse Nuggets, a collection of that genius’s finest phrases. Granted, I love the entire stories, but I admit it feels deliciously decadent to sit down with a big bag of similes, as it were, and stuff handfuls into my greedy mouth, so to speak. Now, if only someone would compile a similar effort called Nietzsche Nuggets. Damn. That’s going to end up being my job, isn’t it?
I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality, into the daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom—in fact into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet unexplained Universe.
Then I, who came out of the Eternal Silence and seem to be on my way thither, got up and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read, I pottered, I complained, and took exercise; and I sat punctually down to eat the cooked meals that appeared at regular intervals.
— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms
I woke this morning, as I often do, with a strange self-consciousness of my own mortality. I’m alive! One day, I won’t be! I briefly thought about how fortunate it is that we don’t simply lose all our memories while we sleep and awaken as total strangers to ourselves. As usual, my mind stalled upon attempting to make the cessation of consciousness an object of conscious reflection. A short while later, I opened Smith’s book and read this aphorism, which gave me an eerie feeling of standing in front of an infinity mirror. After that, I was happy to work, exercise, and punctually partake of my meals. Smith seems to imply that this reversion to the habitual mean is some sort of moral or philosophical failing. I disagree. I concur with Nietzsche: deep problems are best approached like cold baths — quickly in, quickly out.