Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united—What?
— John Wilmot, “Upon Nothing”
****
The naîve idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classical problem of how the world came out of nothing. Now the problem has to be rephrased, “How did something-and-nothing come out of…what?”
— Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman
A positive thing about academic life is that it affords us the possibility of specialization. But this positive is at the same time also a negative, because the specialization of departments and the delimitation of knowledge mean that, when someone tries to understand an issue in an interdisciplinary, global way, it is in the very nature of academia to protest. Though I place this book within political philosophy and the philosophy of history, my analysis walks among many academic disciplines—philosophy, philology, history, sociology, political science. And when someone pays a visit to several departments, but then after a brief time leaves again in order to see the larger whole, it is almost inevitable that he will be accused of not being serious. An interdisciplinary approach will often, therefore, require a certain ruthlessness in tearing down, for at least a little while, the walls that keep neighboring areas apart. Members of the various departments will often resent encroachment on their turfs, since they spent so many years of hard labor to become initiates themselves.
— Benedict Beckeld, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations
****
The grey beards wag, the bald heads nod,
And gather thick as bees,
To talk electrons, gases, God,
Old nebulae, new fleas.
Each specialist, each dry-as-dust
And professorial oaf,
Holds up his little crumb of crust
And cries, “Behold the loaf!”
— Eden Phillpotts, “Miniature”
The invention of printing has done more to change the content of the average man’s mind than anything else. That content is one of the most curious and terrifying phenomena of the modern age. We know too much and too little. We all have a mass of information and opinions on world-wide topics, from Hitler’s schizophrenia to Mussolini’s daughter, from the rise of Kemal Pasha to the proper breeding of turkeys. And yet we really know very little on these subjects. What’s in our minds resembles what’s in the town gossip’s, widened to cover the world. It is as if we were looking at a remote landscape through a field glass that brings just enough details to justify all sorts of exciting speculations. We are all suffering from a surfeit of undigested information, and all floating blissfully on the surface of imaginary, and rather undependable, borrowed opinions. Nobody knows anything any more. The more I read the more ignorant I become. The choice today before any educated man is between unread innocence and well-read ignorance.
— Lin Yutang, “500th Anniversary of Printing,” With Love and Irony
****
Grant me, indulgent heaven, a rural seat,
Rather contemptible than great;
Where, though I taste life’s sweets, still I may be
Athirst for immortality.
I would have business, but exempt from strife;
A private, but an active, life;
A conscience bold, and punctual to his charge,;
My stock of health, or patience, large.
Some books I’d have, and some acquaintance too,
But very good, and very few.
Then (if one mortal two such grants may crave)
From silent life I’d steal into my grave.
— Nahum Tate, “The Choice”
Ed Newman fed some lines of his poems to an A.I. program as part of a collaborative project. What happened next…well, yeah, I’ll admit, I was kind of impressed.
Anyway, November gets the big nix from me. It has the ethos of winter without the manifestations, usually, so you don’t feel as if you’re getting through anything. It’s the waiting room. Thanksgiving? Oh, I do love it, but Daughter’s not coming back this time, and it’s one of those years where the usual elements that assemble have been tossed to the wind. At least we’ll have a new, working stove for the turkey we’re not making.
You know the phrase, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? The journey is winter. The single step is the first of November.
I suppose that’s understandable if you live in Minnesota, as James does. Still, speaking as someone privileged enough to live in the more moderate Mid-Atlantic region rather than the suburbs of the Arctic Circle, November is my favorite month of the year. October is great too — I still retain my childlike love of Halloween, and it obviously stands as the exemplar of autumn, but it also starts off a little warm for my taste, not really cooling down until the middle of the month. December, of course, enough said. But November is overlooked and underrated. In our hyper-political age, it’s become known as the month where we’re expected to break bread with our politically offensive uncles. I find that more often than not, it’s the month where the autumn leaves are at their peak, providing a perfect contemplative backdrop for the month which serves as a calm midpoint between the two commercial monsters, the pumpkin-spiced Scylla and the tinsel-bedecked Charybdis. Savor it, wherever you are, and enjoy this wonderful poem from Linda Pastan:
It is an old drama
this disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape.
In a later scene,
or earlier,
the trees like gnarled magicians
produce handkerchiefs
of leaves
out of empty branches.
And we watch.
We are like children
at this spectacle
of leaves,
as if one day we too
will open the wooden doors
of our coffins
and come out smiling
and bowing
all over again.
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wiresLeads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.— Philip Larkin, “Wires”
And yet, even bovines can find themselves possessed of the Promethean spirit:
cow has learned how to open an electric fence pic.twitter.com/tlzHNyoz7S
— Susan Metcalfe (@susanamet) February 20, 2021
Remove your hats, gentlemen. We’re in the presence of greatness.
So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?
At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade. Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents. It is about shaping the information battlefield, not seeking truth; and its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.
You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness,
and they will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will rise
in his evening flight from the hilltop.
— Wendell Berry, “Do Not Be Ashamed,” Openings
As for On Solitude, applied to our current predicament, I’d roughly translate it thus: stop seeking approval from others. Don’t feel the need to communicate 24-7. Don’t fall into lazy habits. Get to know yourself. Or, more simply: get off Twitter. Get off Houseparty. Stop watching that shit series on Netflix. Go read Montaigne for a bit instead.
Speaking of whom, one passage in his “Of the Education of Children” caught me recently:
History is more my quarry, or poetry, which I love with particular affection. For as Cleanthes said, just as sound, when pent up in the narrow channel of a trumpet, comes out sharper and stronger, so it seems to me that a thought, when compressed into the numbered feet of poetry, springs forth much more violently and strikes me a much stiffer jolt.
I agree, and I’ve resolved to read more poetry henceforth. It’s strange, though, because while I would also claim to love poetry “with particular affection,” I seem to love a Platonic ideal of it more than most actual examples. I don’t just mean formless, navel-gazing contemporary poems. A lot of classic poems likewise fail to move me, even as I can appreciate their technical qualities. As Dom DeLuise’s Julius Caesar said in History of the World, Part. 1, “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling, but nice.” Maybe that’s the problem, though. The truly thrilling examples of poetry have made me insatiably hungry for more. No amount will ever be enough.
Middle age is miserable, according to a new economic study which pinpoints 47.2 years old as the moment of peak unhappiness in the developed world.
Let’s see — point-two…one-fifth of twelve months…starting from X, add Y…hmm, it looks like my life was at its utter nadir…last week? Well, if this is the worst, then the worst is not. In fact, I have to agree with Robert Browning:
Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I’ll complain.
My experience being other,
How should I contribute verse
Worthy of your king and brother?
Balaam-like I bless, not curse.
I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All’s blue.