We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbors, and make the best and not the worst of them. But they are parvenu people as compared with thought and action. What we should read is not the words but the man whom we feel to be behind the words.
My words have always been taciturn neighbors. We’ll exchange greetings over the fence if we’re both out in the yard at the same time, but we tend to mind our respective business. Lately, I haven’t seen them around much. I don’t see any lights on in the windows, and I haven’t heard them coming and going for a while. Maybe I should request a wellness check. Of course, if nothing’s wrong, I’m afraid I’ll cause an irreparable breach in our relations by having the authorities come knock on their door. What to do, what to do…
In the preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton explained that he wrote the book to rid himself of his own melancholia. This it failed to do; Bishop Kennet wrote that Burton’s only relief from despondency was to lean over the foot-bridge at Oxford and listen to the bargemen swearing at each other.
I’m not melancholy or despondent, but I’m also not easily provoked to more than a smirk and a chuckle. Very few things cause me to literally LOL. One thing that does reduce me to uncontrollable giggling like a drunken fool is listening to prank calls using soundboards. They tickle my absurdist/surrealist funny bone. One of the staples of the genre is when a poor victim is called with a soundboard of their own voice, using insults recorded during previous prank calls. It’s amazing how long it takes people to recognize their own voice, or even their own choice phrases. It’s like watching a bird trying to fight with its own reflection in a window. If only Burton could be here now to spend a silly evening on YouTube!
After years of patient work around the globe, volcanologists and climate modelers are now sure: in the years 536 and 539/40, there occurred at least two volcanic eruptions of almost unprecedented magnitude. The first of them may have been somewhere in the tropics, although the location has not yet been pinned down conclusively. The second was at Lake Ilopango in El Salvador, an explosion so vast that the entire volcano collapsed and left only the flooded caldera that can be seen today, large enough to contain the capital city. It is estimated that Ilopango alone produced up to eighty-seven cubic kilometers of ejecta, a figure big enough to induce double-takes in even the most skeptical authorities.The sulphate emissions may have measured up to two hundred megatonnes, significantly higher than those from Tambora (1815), which was the second-greatest eruption in history. The Ilopango eruption was among the ten largest on earth in the last seven thousand years, and remember, this was preceded by the 536 volcano, so far unlocated. New research suggests these may have been followed by a third major eruption, in 547.
Price goes on to describe the resulting effects upon the people who would become known to history as the Vikings. Global temperatures fell anywhere from two to four degrees Celsius. The catastrophic effects upon Scandinavian agriculture caused up to a fifty percent population loss, and the consequent collapse of social institutions. Various Norse myths can be plausibly read as referring to those terrible times when the sun disappeared for years. I was talking with a geologist friend the other day, and we idly wondered how much of human culture and self-conception has been shaped by natural disasters, from whichever Middle Eastern flood inspired the myth of Noah’s Ark, to Pompeii, to the Lisbon earthquake. If the Big One hit the West Coast tomorrow and sent California to the bottom of the Pacific, how much would that reshape the American identity? If another Ilopango erupted next week, how would the narrative around climate change be altered? It’s kind of funny to think about how much human pride depends upon the benign neglect of volcanoes, earthquakes, and asteroids.
I got vaccinated back in the spring. I have not experienced any “lasting effects,” other than steadily improving my lifts at the gym, which I suppose I can live with. I know of several people who are unvaccinated, for various reasons. I understand that we’re all supposed to be angry with them now, for reasons that have yet to be explained clearly to me. I don’t want to see any of these people get sick and die, but I also recognize that the freedom to decide how and why to risk your life is an important one. So, I’m indifferent. Mainly, I’m more concerned about a more perennial threat to societal well-being: the burning desire to hate some outgroup who “deserve” it. I imagine this is an especially heady thrill for progressives, who spend most of their time denying themselves any opportunity for harboring inequitable thoughts. To finally have the chance to let go of all that resentment and self-righteousness without guilt must be an ecstatic release.
Despite our image of medieval people living in a world of superstition, abject terror, and haunting Gregorian chants, there was also a surprising amount of nonbelief. Peter of Cornwall, prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, complained in 1200: ‘There are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than providence.’
Asides like this make me smile. Not because, to use the empty-headed cant term, I’m looking for “representation” of my Epicurean perspective in historical works. I just like it when the abstraction of historical narrative gives way enough for us to catch a glimpse of the singular people who populated the past, unaware and unconcerned with how difficult they might be making things for future historians.
Machines may make people superfluous, but they cannot make them harmless. No matter how many and how ingenious the machines, there will always be people around to mess things up.
Today at work, I watched a 30-foot steel support column get repaired. I marveled at the technical skill required for a job of that size and importance — ground radar, pouring a new foundation, using a six-foot wrench to maneuver the column, all while it continued to support a section of the roof. The simple fact that there is a tried-and-true process for something like that impresses a layman like me. The thing is, the reason this repair needed to be done was because someone had driven a forklift into the column at high speed while being distracted by his phone screen, shifting it four feet across the floor, dropping the I-beam one foot, and causing a section of the roof to sag. Heavy machinery, dangerous working environment, ooh, shiny object…
But even Nietzsche’s antidemocratic moments are not all they are often cracked up to be. His philosophy, he wrote in 1887, will be best suited to those he calls “the most moderate”: “Those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account.” These are the humans he considers “the strongest” — not those who can destroy the most, or the towering egotists of Ayn Rand’s imagination, but those pessimists who can withstand the most destruction without giving way to pity and resignation. “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.” Like Don Quixote, the best pessimists have a strength of character and a sense of humor — for this world, both are needed.
It amuses me to think that for all the competing radical claims on Nietzsche’s philosophy, for all the academics who have claimed the power to see into his heart of hearts and divine the true essence of his thought, it could be liberal individualism that proves most accommodating to his thought experiments after all. There’s certainly some surprising hints in that direction — his lifelong love of Epicurus and Montaigne, his paeans to humility and his disavowals of vindictiveness — could it be? Was Nietzsche a liberal individualist at heart whose enchanting rhetoric, like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, simply got away from him and unleashed forces he couldn’t control? (I don’t think so, but like I said, it’s fun to imagine.)
We must accept the possibility that the habit of reading is a fad, long in duration, but now in its final stages — destined to be carried on in the future only by a few devotees. Horsemanship was, for over twenty centuries, an indispensable adult skill for the middle and upper classes in Europe and Asia, much more so than reading. And yet, within the space of a century, it has become merely an elite hobby. So may it be with reading. Computers will soon become so adept at spoken language and displaying information with icons that it is possible to imagine a generation arising that does not perceive written language to be necessary for the general public for day-to-day life — as a generation has already arisen that hardly knows how to read clocks, since time is everywhere displayed digitally. Our only hope is that the pleasures of reading, meager as they are in comparison to visual entertainment, will continue to seduce a regular few and prevent reading from becoming the technical skill of scientists and history professors. But that is a gamble with perilous odds, given the inconstancy of the human libido. Did not man and horse, after all, once seem as inseparable as…well, as man and woman once seemed?
Question: can a philosopher really undertake with a good conscience to have something to teach every day? And to teach it to anyone who cares to listen? Will he not be obliged to give the impression of knowing more than he does know? Will he not be obliged to speak before an audience of strangers of things which he can safely speak of only among his nearest friends? And speaking generally: is he not robbing himself of his freedom to follow his genius whenever and wherever it calls him? — through being obligated to think in public about predetermined subjects at predetermined hours? And to do so before youths! Is such thinking not as it were emasculated from the first! Supposing one day he said to himself: I can’t think of anything today, at least not of anything worthwhile — he would still have to present himself and pretend to think!
We recently got accepted into a mentorship program, where small, plucky businesses like ours get paired with similar, more established, businesses to reap the benefits of their experience. In addition, we’re moving to a bigger space later this summer. That doesn’t sound artsy enough, though, so if you check in here and see that I haven’t posted anything new in several days, do me a courtesy and just say to yourselves, “Ah, I see Damian is once again following his genius wherever it calls him.”
There is a great deal to be said for rapidity; but it is not especially a good way of grasping reality. People merely going the pace, in any age, have generally missed everything except the most artificial and external costume and custom of that age. Men need to walk a little slower to look at the earth and to face the facts of nature.
— G. K. Chesterton, “On the Prudery of Slang,” All is Grist
My gym lifted its minimal mask requirements a couple weeks ago, right after the CDC announcement. Within a week, the same was true of the Aldi where we get most of our staples, as well as the Walmart grocery. As Walmart goes, so goes America, one would hope. So, as we approach normality again, what have we learned? If we spent our time being “connected” and “informed” through social media, we probably were kept apprised of all the latest rumor-mongering, doomsaying and chin-stroking, but didn’t learn much of enduring value. What in our day-to-day lives would have been different had we just ignored it all?
51 The art of letting things alone:to be practiced the more so the wilder the waves of public or of private life. There are hurricanes in human affairs, tempests of passion, when it is wise to retire to harbor and ride at anchor. Remedies often make diseases worse: in such cases one has to leave them to their natural course and the moral suasion of time. It takes a wise doctor to know when not to prescribe, and at times the greater skill consists in not applying remedies. The proper way to still the storms of the vulgar is to hold your hand and let them calm down of themselves. To give way now is to conquer by and by. A fountain gets muddy with but little stirring up, and does not get clear by our meddling with it but by our leaving it alone. The best remedy for disturbances is to let them run their course, for so they quiet down.
— Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
The online world seems to exist in a tropical climate. Storms of the vulgar, hell; it’s a years-long rainy season out there. I’d love to believe things will quiet down on their own, but I suspect we’ll just have to move to a temperate internet zone, if there are any.
People between the ages of twenty and thirty read a good deal, after thirty their reading drops off and by forty is confined to each person’s special subject, newspapers and magazines; so that the most important part of one’s audience, and that which should be mainly written for, consists of specialists and people between twenty and thirty.
I haven’t taken a census, but I’d be willing to bet that my own audience consists of amateurs and people between forty and seventy. I suspect that holds true for much of the remains of the blogosphere. Jonah Goldberg claims that blogging, at least the political/current events type, was a precursor to Twitter and its numerous pathologies. While there’s something to that, I like to think that the blog has evolved into the abode of an older, more reflective audience.
The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people whom he knows? If this is his position he can do no wrong, the spirit in which he works will ensure that his defects will be only as bad spelling or bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. If, on the other hand, he is playing for social success and to get a reputation for being clever, then no matter how dextrous his work may be, it is but another mode of the speaking with the tongues of men and angels without charity; it is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
Guilty as charged. I will doggedly charge through four hundred pages of cannon-fodder prose in order to pillage a useful idea, quotation, or reference. The jewels of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Chesterton’s essays, and various works of history and philosophy will be crudely stitched into my bearskin cloak to display my barbarian erudition. Like severed heads on pikes, I like to post quotations from an array of authors around the borders of my territory here. Behold my fearsome literary prowess! Quake, my enemies!
We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
The mouse-ideas of envy and resentment are running wild throughout many institutions these days, shredding valuable sources of wisdom to make their nests and befouling everything else with their waste. Where are the cat-ideas who would cull their numbers? Probably lazing in a sunbeam somewhere. There’s no point even in naming them; they never come when called. I used to have a terrier who would lie still for hours at a stretch, ears perked, completely focused, whenever he heard a mouse scratching around in a cupboard or closet. He would not allow himself to be distracted by anything until he had finally pounced upon it and gobbled it up. We need more terrier-ideas like him.
Plato suggests that how we process and articulate our ideas is inseparable from what we end up thinking and doing, that philosophical excellence is as much a matter of dialectical engagement as it is about arriving at a substantive vision. It is hardly surprising that he mistrusted writing as much as he did, seeing it as more likely to dull the mind than invigorate it. The written word is a medium that is peculiarly susceptible to enabling shallow cleverness rather than nourishing genuinely intelligent thought.
I read around a hundred books a year, yet I increasingly agree with old Plato here. I appreciate the way that podcasting can be a medium for in-depth, invigorating conversation, yet I only listen to podcasts occasionally. To some extent, that’s because if I feel like listening to something, I’d rather it be music. I can’t listen to a podcast while working, because concentrating on a conversation uses the same part of the brain I need to concentrate on my work. Ultimately, though, it’s probably just habit. I know my way around the world of books. Who has time to explore the million-and-one podcast options out there?