Obiter Scripta, no. 125

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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.

To Strive With Difficulties and to Conquer Them

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That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem; and what can any man infer in his own favour from a condition to which, however prosperous, he contributed nothing, and which the vilest and weakest of the species would have obtained by the same right, had he happened to be the son of the same father?

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

— Samuel Johnson, “The Pleasures and Advantages of Industry”

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The greatest and most understated benefit of strength training beyond just lifting heavy weights is that you’ve completed a task you couldn’t do previously. Let’s say I’m working with some 50-year-old trainee who has to squat 275 for two sets of five reps. He’s got a task to complete. Based on the outcomes of prior training sessions, he doesn’t know whether he can do that last rep of that second set of 275. This trainee has a choice. He does the first set, completes all five reps, racks it, and sits down. He then realizes he has to do it again. Now he’s on that fourth rep of the second set and it’s hard — he may get stuck at the bottom of this, he may get hurt. Does he continue for a fifth rep or rack it? His spotter is right there.

The decision he makes teaches him something about himself. This decision transforms people. There are few instances in the modern world when we get to make such a decision. I’ve had people who have been training for years tell me that they’ve noticed people treating them differently. Something has changed in them. What was it? Well, now they know that they can complete tasks with uncertain outcomes that depended entirely on their efforts. This is terribly important for people of all ages, something that you owe it to yourself to experience.

Do you have the guts to try the last rep? If you can make yourself do it, you have proven that you have that courage. This is one of the few ways you can still learn that kind of lesson. Learn it under the bar, then watch it carry over into everything you do for the rest of your life. How can this be any harder than that fifth rep of that second set with 275 pounds? Now you welcome the challenges of the world. You don’t cower.

— Mark Rippetoe

Complexity Appeals to Stupid People

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Complexity appeals to stupid people — it makes them feel superior intellectually, even if they’re making no real progress.

— Mark Rippetoe

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The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outré or specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue”

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I like William James because he speaks of his “raids into philosophy.” He considers common life — a day in Saratoga, for instance — his real feeding ground, and only conducts raids into philosophy to find out what he can get out of it. His mind was far too curious for it to be shut up behind the gray plastered walls of philosophy. I believe I can understand what the professors are talking about in their long words, but I like to see occasional sallies of real insight and horse sense.

— Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist

A Hollow Sound Is Heard

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When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Patrick Kurp describes a common experience of mine, the inability to remember anything noteworthy about a book. Well, to be more accurate, it’s not that I remember nothing about them, it’s just that I can’t produce my recollections on demand in the form of a critical summary. In fact, it’s quite interesting to attempt to describe what memory is like when it comes to books I’ve read. I might be reading some random article online, and a phrase or an idea might jump out at me. “That sounds like something Eric Hoffer said,” I might think, even though I couldn’t begin to recite the quotation from memory. However, it feels similar in some non-verbal way, so I go get my copy of Between the Devil and the Dragon off the shelf and skim through it, looking over all the passages I flagged for occasions like these. My brain only has the RAM of a late-90s desktop, so I can only store so much detailed information at once. Mostly, what I remember about books is vague impressions, tied to loose themes, all strung together like a spider’s web, just waiting for some sensory input to send a vibration down the particular thread that leads to, say Eric Hoffer’s book. I don’t know how to explain it any better than the spider would know how to explain its innate knowledge of how to build a web.

Eviction Notice

By in editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies, language 2 Comments

From today’s Daily Scroll:

I graciously ignored this last week, but since standards are falling at an alarming rate, I return to note:

I’m sorry; I’ve tried to be lenient, but since you all can’t be trusted with responsibility, I will hereby be confiscating the Internet license of anyone caught conflating “tenet” with “tenant.” If this trend continues, I will add a whole new wing onto the correctional facility where I currently keep all those who misuse “begs the question.”

Even When They Won They Always Lost Themselves to the Sideways Glances

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So Derek Thompson wants to outsource his research, and, as we saw yesterday, Noah Smith wants to outsource his writing. Is this boredom or frustration with the basic elements of their work universal among journalists these days?

I hope I’m not the only one, but just for the record: I like researching, and I like writing. I like the hard work of making my prose more clear and vivid. I like overcoming my ignorance. I like synthesizing the disparate things I read and then trying to present that synthesis to my readers. I like it all.

— Alan Jacobs

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One of the most brutal and difficult parts of any Zen retreat is that part right in the middle. You’re too far in to just get up and go home. Yet you’ve still got several hours or days of doing the most boring thing in the world — literally staring at a wall — to get through.

That’s the time when your mind really starts pulling out all the stunts it can come up with to escape. The only real escape you have at that point is fantasy. Your mind can spin out endless places you’d rather be and endless things you’d rather do. What’s worse, your mind can come up with lots of places you could be and things you could do if only you weren’t stuck there watching the paint dry. You experience real psychological pain.

And yet, it’s these moments that are the most instructive and valuable. You come to realize that you really have only two choices. You can get up and leave. Or you can settle into this boring moment completely.

If you can learn to do that on a Zen retreat, you can learn to do that anywhere.

Then you’ll stop missing out on 75% of your life. You’ll stop wishing to get your time on Earth over with quicker. You’ll actually live longer, no matter how long you end up living, because you’re really all there.

— Brad Warner

My Fake Plastic Love

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Oliver Bateman:

It should come as little surprise, then, that emails written by Johnson himself, asking for advice about the steroids he was using, were eventually forwarded to the YouTube fitness channel More Plates, More Dates. Written prior to the launch of his assorted online accounts and fitness brands — at a time when he had almost no social media following whatsoever — the Liver King outlined his $11,000-a-month steroid regimen, explaining that he needed to lose his love handles and back fat in advance of launching the “ancestral lifestyle” content that would make him famous.

Far from being the caveman-like “primal” who spent hours a day in the sun and ice-cold water before sleeping eight uninterrupted hours each night, the email correspondence depicted an individual who pinched his tummy in the mirror, watched Marvel movies, and struggled to sleep more than a handful of uninterrupted hours before waking up in a state of discomfort. He was, in other words, another middle-aged man desperately trying to turn back the clock — one of many such cases.
I had never heard of this Liver King guy before, but suddenly everybody’s talking about him. I guess I’m just surprised at the wounded tone of betrayed innocence in so many of these write-ups. Yes, Virginia, your favorite celebrities, from Hollywood to YouTube, are relying on steroids, plastic surgery, professional photography, and who knows how many other tricks of the trade to look the way they do. I remember seeing this image a while back:

I would add that even this is quite optimistic, as it assumes that most of the relevant factors are within your control, but I suppose McElhenney didn’t want to flaunt his privilege too much even as he decries it (giving him the best of both worlds — coincidentally, I’m sure). It would also help if you could remain twenty years old indefinitely and have the right genes. Thankfully, mature adults realize that the middle ground of “good enough” is still attainable and worth striving for, yes? Just because you can’t look like ripped Thor doesn’t mean you’re doomed to look like fat Thor. Diet and exercise will still take you a long way.

I don’t know; as a kid, I watched countless hours of the Saturday morning philosophy roundtables, and yet never believed that I could survive a shotgun blast to the face, or stand suspended in thin air above a cliffside drop. In the tween years, I graduated to the slightly-less-cartoonish world of professional wrestling, and even though the musclebound grapplers who entertained me were all on steroids, I was still inspired to start a lifelong habit of working out because of them. In my later teens, I was rocking out with my heroes on MTV, and the fact that they were often dissolute morons who owed their svelte figures to eight-balls of cocaine wasn’t enough to diminish their mystique in my eyes. I guess what I’m saying is, I thought it was just generally understood that everything you see on TV is a lie, but that’s no reason to get all angsty about it. The source may be corrupted, but what you make of it? That’s still up to you.

In a Word

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From Foyle’s Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words, some choice selections coming soon to a post near you:

captious: inclined to find fault or raise trivial objections

claque: 1. a group of people hired to applaud a performer in a theater etc. or a speaker at a meeting; 2. a circle of admirers and flatterers

contumacy: stubborn refusal to obey or comply; resistance to authority

crepuscular: 1. relating to twilight; dim; 2. denoting animals that are active or appear at morning or evening twilight

enantiodromia: a process by which a strong force produces its opposite, and the interaction between the two

facinorous: extremely wicked

feculent: 1. polluted; fetid, filthy; 2. containing sediment or faeces

flagitious: 1. deeply criminal; utterly wicked; 2. infamous; scandalous; shamefully disgraceful

lethologica: the inability to remember a word or call to mind the right word

Colors of the Future

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It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.

— Jean Rostand, Carnet d’un biologiste

Christian Schneider:

The desire for segregation on campus has spread far beyond mere meetings and performances. According to a study of 173 public and private colleges and universities conducted by the National Association of Scholars, 43 percent had programs to segregate student housing by race or sexual orientation, and 46 percent of schools had racially segregated orientation programs. Often, unaware of the inherent irony, schools conduct racially exclusive anti-racism training.

Further, 76 percent of the schools studied by NAS had segregated graduation ceremonies. Columbia University, for example, announced it would be holding six separate graduation ceremonies for students based on characteristics such as race, sexuality, and income level. After word of the graduation ceremonies hit the internet, Columbia backtracked and rebranded the graduation “ceremonies” as graduation “celebrations.”

That furious scribbling sound you hear is Steven Pinker trying to make this data fit into his conceptual scheme of a progressively improving world.

Moth Thoughts

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To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

It frequently happens, that a design which, when considered at a distance, gave flattering hopes of facility, mocks us in the execution with unexpected difficulties; the mind which, while it considered it in the gross, imagined itself amply furnished with materials, finds sometimes an unexpected barrenness and vacuity, and wonders whither all those ideas are vanished, which a little before seemed struggling for emission.

— Samuel Johnson, “The Happiness and Infelicity of Writers”

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What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest, those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

The ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems, for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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