santutthi

Can’t Think Big, Can’t Think Past One or Two

By in books, foolosophy, santutthi, work, Ω 7 Comments

I had a friend, an intelligent and very learned man, who gave no hint of having been in the least troubled by time. He was a university teacher, who taught well but scarcely bothered to publish. After his retirement from teaching, the one mild pressure in his life, meeting with his classes, was removed. He rose, read the daily press with a mordant eye, watched one of the morning television talk shows with his second cup of coffee, drew a bit, read some, taught himself (slowly) the rudiments of Chinese, wrote comic letters, looked up French words, considered etymologies of English ones, gave delight to his friends, took pleasure in his food and drink, and thus lived out his days until a benevolent (or so it seems in retrospect) heart attack took him out of what seemed a not very taxing game. It seems rather pointless to say of him “May he rest in peace,” since, as near as I can determine, he pretty much lived in peace. I’m not sure he owned a watch. Not a man, clearly, on a schedule.

Did he, I have often wondered, have any doubts? Had he got the most out of himself? In suppressing ambition, did he not also kill a certain kind of joy—that very genuine joy connected with achievement? He left no children. His friends, those who have not already died, grow old. His memory will fairly soon be extinguished. He was too clever a man not to have thought about all this. He lived, if not all that intensely, still almost entirely in the now. He met all his obligations, not least among them giving pleasure to his friends, though apparently he never felt that he owed any obligations to the future. Was he more or less intelligent than I in eschewing the notion of a schedule?

— Joseph Epstein, “Time on My Hands, Me in My Arms,” With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays 

My gym is looking to hire a new overnight cleaning service. They already have a few interviews set up, but they posted a notice at the front just in case any of the clientele might know a guy, etc. I’ve been pestering the Lady of the House ever since. This is my dream! Working a night shift by myself? Cleaning? In the gym, where I assume my membership might even be comped? Come on, I said, let’s sell the business and get back to the simple life!

I’m kidding, but on the square. If I were financially set for life, that is precisely the sort of work I’d do. The Lady is fascinated with business qua business; I’m not. I’m just a draft horse. (Thankfully, she keeps her Napoleonesque urges under control, so I don’t fear becoming another Boxer.) I can work as hard as anyone, but I have absolutely no interest in CEO-level stuff. Just give me my menial task and let me get to work, preferably while listening to music, ideally without any personal interaction at all.

Me and my friends sell ourselves
Short but feel very well
We feel fine, ah, we feel fine
Small stakes ensure you the minimum blues
But you don’t feel taken and you don’t feel abused
Small stakes tell you that there’s nothing can do
Can’t think big, can’t think past one or two

— Spoon, “Small Stakes”

Sounds to me like Epstein’s Epicurean friend had it all figured out.

I Don’t Wanna Play With Them Other Kids In the Sun

By in foolosophy, santutthi, work, Ω 2 Comments

Douglas Dalrymple:

Perhaps that’s something to differentiate human beings from other animals: the need for a calling. Have you noticed that almost no one – especially no one with any pretensions to being educated or enlightened – is satisfied with a simple “job” anymore? It’s not enough to have a job, a career, or even a profession; everyone wants a vocation. Even in business and industry, where metaphysical considerations used to nap from 9 to 5, people want a sense of calling, the conviction that the work they’re doing serves a higher purpose, a transcendent goal. The preacher-teachers of today are really no different from others in this respect.

It’s the “educated and enlightened” part that’s the key. I’ve walked widdershins around the idea of work as a calling for my entire adult life, and it seems to me that a pococurante attitude here puts one on the wrong side of a class divide, even more than income. “Jobs” are for people who, well, can’t do any better, poor things. For the educated and enlightened, work is both personal expression and public service. My goal regarding work has always been to find something at which I’m reasonably competent and that pays me well enough to get by. Self-expression? That’s for my free time; that’s why I have a blog.

Oh, you have a blog? Why don’t you join the exodus to Substack like all the cool kids and maybe get paid for your efforts, or pitch some essays to some digital journals? Because I don’t want to feel indebted to subscribers, or pressured to produce “content.” I want to have a hobby that’s about nothing but enjoyment. Turning my hobby into a job would bring with it all the things everyone hates about their job. When work is done, I get to read books and think and sometimes write down my thoughts about those books. Why would I need to see how far that could be pushed? Why mess with perfection?

Every so often, real-world people discover that I like to read a lot. Some of them suggest I should write a book. I don’t think they really mean it; it’s just a knee-jerk thing to say. Some of them ask if I’m reading for a class. Some of them even ask why I live where I do, in a small, unexciting town, rather than in, I don’t know, some literary hotspot, I guess. The guiding assumption is that any sort of interest or talent should be maximized, monetized, and merchandised, or else it’s just going to waste. Why would you read and write just for the fun of it?

I’m an ordinary guy with no great ambition who likes to read and write. Why should that be an oddity? Whatever happened to the golden age of middlebrow culture, which Susan Jacoby paid tribute to so affectionately? I remember being at a book sale a few years ago and being surprised at the weighty subjects that comprised some of the mid-century Book of the Month Club offerings. When did it stop being widely enjoyable to read biographies and works of history for fun? Off the top of my head, I’d name two potential causes. One, the explosion of entertainment options. There are countless ways to stupefy and titillate oneself, all of them easier and cheaper than a reading habit. And two, perhaps the idea of familiarizing oneself with “the great works” as a means of self-improvement came to seem naïve. Maybe that kind of striving only appealed to a mid-century belief in progress, before disillusionment and cynicism set in. Society isn’t getting any better. You’re not going to have a higher standard of living than your parents did. Everything is crass and insincere, and all that matters is finding an angle to get paid. Why are you giving away your writing for free, like an idiot?

It’s very fashionable to reclaim slurs these days. A while back, I announced my intention to reclaim the term “idiot” as an identity. Today, let me rededicate myself to that effort. Like my idiot forefathers, I will continue to hide my light under a bushel basket, too insignificant to even earn contempt, while sophisticated people go about their important business.

I Wanted Hope From a Grave, I Wanted Strength From a Slave

By in foolosophy, santutthi, work 2 Comments

A.S.H. Smyth:

Most of the time, I was just moving “stock” about, taking maddening credit card orders over the phone, or walking people literally to alphabetised mass-market fiction. All of which required no interest in, let alone knowledge of, literature. To a middle-class nerd such as myself, discovering that working in a bookshop [cue poetic images of James Frain, or similar] was fundamentally no different from working in a Sports Direct or Tesco was about the most depressing thing imaginable. That, and waiting for the Sunday trains in winter.

It’s like the man warned us many centuries ago — render unto Commerce the things that are Commerce’s, and unto Hobby the things that are Hobby’s. No alchemist has discovered a means of combining the two. People who work in bookstores in order to live a literary life 24/7  come away traumatized after gazing long into the rictus grin of the bestseller list. People who keep blogs with visions of becoming Serious Writers, faced with loneliness and dwindling site-stat provisions, typically leave the Blogspot tent like Lawrence Oates, saying “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Lower your expectations to the ground, and suddenly the sky is within reach.

And I Ain’t Got No Worries, ‘Cuz I Ain’t In No Hurry At All

By in books, foolosophy, santutthi 1 Comment

The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It’s an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal.

But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints. Hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this, then that; and then something else. When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.

— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

Somewhere along the way, I became a voracious reader. I mean, I’d always been a dedicated reader since childhood. But sometime in the last decade or so, I started devouring books like they were hot dogs on Coney Island on the Fourth of July. Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s about when I started going to library sales many times a year. Many times, I’d walk into a sale with an Augustinian prayer in mind: “Lord, grant me restraint—but oooh, this book looks interesting…”

But I haven’t been to any sales since December, and there likely won’t be any for the foreseeable future, so I’ve rediscovered the joy of re-reading this spring. I actually started doing that before the pandemic made a necessity out of a virtue, but I appreciate the enforced constraints. I look at some of these titles and realize with a start that it’s been years since I first read them and found them engrossing; how absurd is it that I haven’t picked them up again since? How many other forgettable books did I waste my time on between now and then? Gros’s book was one of the best ones I read last year, so it’s a pleasure to have it return to my attention, like the spring perennials. He’s right; the days seem longer, and activities have more room to breathe. I can read a bit during the day, and spend an hour strolling around the yard in the gloaming, casually thinking, silently observing; going nowhere, doing nothing in particular, but somehow never feeling left behind.

Obiter Scripta, no. 78

By in bonsai minimalism, calvin and hobbes, nietzsche, obiter scripta, santutthi, socmed No Comments

Learning solitude. O you poor devils in the great cities of world politics, you gifted young men tormented by ambition who consider it your duty to pass some comment on everything that happens — and there is always something happening! Who when they raise the dust in this way think they are the chariot of history! Who, because they are always on the alert, always on the lookout for the moment when they can put their word in, lose all genuine productivity! However much they may desire to do great work, the profound speechlessness of pregnancy never comes to them! The event of the day drives them before it like chaff, while they think they are driving the event, poor devils! If one wants to represent a hero on the stage one must not think of making one of the chorus, indeed one must not even know how to make one of the chorus.

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

I think the high priests of commerce, culture, media and athletics have converged for their annual extravaganza as I write this, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Likewise, I think there’s some drama happening up in our nation’s capital which I haven’t paid any attention to. Also, I hear the new bubonic plague is coming to kill us all soon? Oh, and are we still fighting World War Three? Or was that finished last month? Well, anyway, in important news, I spent my day organizing my work space and enjoying this brief burst of springlike weather while looking forward to reading before bed. As Calvin said, the days are just packed.

You Are Too Shallow, Much Too Shallow to Sound the Bottom

By in books, foolosophy, santutthi No Comments

I haven’t read Clive James (yet), but I have read Patrick Kurp quoting from Clive James, and so far, it has proved profitable:

“It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.”

This theme could serve as my own personal manifesto. Over the years, I’ve found quite a few expressions of the first half of it — the lack of professional ambition, contentment found within humble limits. But the second half completes it — the gratitude for living in a time when great books and music are so plentiful as to be inexhaustible. Lack of professional ambition does not equal lack of interest or passion; a life of unadorned modesty does not preclude an inner vitality. Wifi alone allows many of us to be bounded comfortably in the nutshell of our simple lives while enjoying the benefits of infinite space.

Growing up in Charlottesville, when the town had a population of 40,000 not including students, I was always quietly puzzled when my peers would complain about the boredom of living in a “small town.” To me, a small town was the sparse collection of buildings we’d see scattered along rural Route 29 South between Charlottesville and North Carolina. We had B. Dalton’s, Waldenbooks, and, eventually, Barnes & Noble, in addition to all the fascinating independent bookstores on the downtown mall. What possible excuse was there for someone to be bored? How much stimulation from the outside world would be required to fill the bottomless lacuna in your head?

As a member of the last generation to reach adulthood without the omnipresence of the Internet, I certainly appreciate how many questions and ideas were stillborn, or simply failed to conceive. When no practical means for satisfying curiosity were available, we settled for idly wondering. Now, in our hyper-fertile interactive media environment, there’s no such thing as a question with a sperm count too low to produce an abundant litter of direct answers and tangential asides. Even for those with the discipline to avoid disappearing down rabbit holes of ephemeral trivia, there are countless lectures, explainers, and free classes available to occupy every moment of spare time. If anything, it feels a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. I’m never bored. The closest I get to it is feeling a vague sense of guilt for not using my time well, for not making enough effort to fully appreciate this cornucopia of culture.

Obiter Scripta, no. 75

By in aphorisms, books, montaigne, nietzsche, santutthi, Ω No Comments

Reading too much erodes your capacity for original thinking: “I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, ‘read to ruin’ in their thirties—merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks—’thoughts.’ Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength—to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!” (Ecce Homo,”Why I Am so Clever” §8).

The danger of excessive reading, Nietzsche thinks, is that it leads to an idolatry of the book: we confuse the explication of text for the interpretation of life. The final goal of reading aphorisms is not so much to penetrate their inner meaning (something that Nietzsche seems to deny anyway) but rather to use them as a springboard to other lines of inquiry. “I don’t write treatises,” he continues, “they’re for jackasses and magazine readers.” For this reason readers should, like Roman builders, plunder from older writers in order to build their own edifices: “Error of the philosophers.—The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material” (Human, All Too Human, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” §201). This practice is by no means original to Nietzsche. Montaigne encapsulates the entire Renaissance practice of imitation by admitting that his work is no more than a careful spoliation of previous texts and thinkers.

— Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter

Montaigne also said — paraphrasing Pythagoras — that our lives are like the spectacle of the Olympics. Some are there to compete, some are there to sell merchandise and hot dogs, and some are there to simply observe, to be spectators of other men’s lives in order to better regulate their own. Likewise, I’m a mere spectator of others’ thoughts, a flâneur of the codex. I was never destined for great, original things. I peek in secondhand shop windows to find slightly-used ideas and metaphors to bring home and polish, and I’m not above carting away a wheelbarrow full of bricks from someone else’s building site. I do my reading before bed, at least.

That Old Scratch, He Tried to Purchase This Soul. But That Don’t Confront Me, ‘Cause I’m Never In Need of a Payroll

By in foolosophy, santutthi, socmed, writing No Comments

Starting out with the simple intention to proclaim the “good news,” I ended up driven to preach the worst sort of everyday news: the ease with which even those of us bearing the best of intentions can be driven, in an instant, to utter distraction by an insecure frenzy for coin.

— James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves

Justin E.H. Smith:

The truth is I have understood all of this for a long time, and I go on making editorial compromises with media interested only in their bottom line simply because I am interested in mine too: I need the supplementary income. If this were not a concern, I would just post everything I feel the need to express right here at www.jehsmith.com. Perhaps that day will come. Perhaps I will force it to come through this public airing of my grievances. At the same time, I note that there are a few publications, closer to the boutique end of the media world, whose editors have had the grace and decency to edit me with a very light hand (I mention here in particular The Point and TANK). My sincere thanks to them. There is of course a direct correlation between exposure and compromise, and the higher one climbs in the ladder of visibility, the more one can expect to be forced to express oneself through clichés and dumb punchy position-taking. My hope is to stay in the shade-covered side streets of the boutique district as much as possible in the future.

Attention and money: when it comes to writing on a blog, I’m not interested in the former and I’m not in need of the latter. I admire people like Bill Watterson who had the integrity to turn down hundreds of millions of dollars (literally) in order to maintain the purity of his art, but for ordinary mortals like me, the easier option is to render unto Caesar in the first place. Here is my job, and here is my hobby, and never the twain shall meet.

Obiter Scripta, no. 67

By in bonsai minimalism, obiter scripta, santutthi No Comments

What he needed was to work in the shadows while another wielded power, he himself holding aloof from responsibility, reading noteworthy books within the four walls of a quiet room, writing works of his own invention, to no man subservient, beholden to none—and such was Erasmus’s notion of an ideal existence.

— Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam

There should be a particular word for that unexpected and poignant sense of kinship across centuries, where despite all the temporal, linguistic, and cultural differences, you feel like you’ve shared a knowing glance and a smile.

Me and My Friends Sell Ourselves Short but Feel Very Well

By in eric hoffer, santutthi, the statusphere, work, Ω No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

The kind of person we seek, said the personnel manager, is the one who is perfectly content with his living wage and to do the same thing over and over again. If an applicant showed the faintest sign of ambition, he was immediately rejected.

We are inclined to look down on or even despise people without ambition, but unless we want a world in which everyone is frustrated and resentful, we need them, these unambitious types without special talent. We do not want frustrated geniuses shining our shoes or stacking shelves in supermarkets.

There is nothing wrong, then, with mediocrity and lack of talent. It is an essential ingredient of the human mix. Where it becomes dangerous is where it is combined with ambition, as it seems to be nowadays. The world pullulates as never before—or so it seems to me—with the mediocre who are avid for power.

In his diary, Eric Hoffer noted that the education explosion and advanced technology had produced “hordes of educated nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up being mischief-making busybodies.” He obviously hadn’t seen anything yet. Now, there are millions of educated nobodies who think of themselves as pundits, policy advisers and budding celebrities. It’s only my subjective recollection, of course, but when I was coming of age, it seemed like the widely-shared understanding of the good life was to have a rich inner life — if necessary, in stark contrast to an unremarkable outer appearance. Maybe these things move in predictable cycles, and the early ’90s was just the valley in between the hyper-political peaks of the ’60s and our current decade. It may have been somewhat romantic to scorn wealth, fame and power in favor of personal meaning and modest contentment, but I’ll always prefer it to the contemporary “engagé and enragé” ideal.

1 2 3 4›»