petulant, violent and deranged

The "straight line" is actually more than 500 years long, in Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland account.

"How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world's longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man's dementia? That's an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what's more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don't try to sugarcoat and sanewash what's happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America."

Paul Krugman

https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/its-sundowning-in-america?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opening Day '26-first contact

 It's 12 degrees in middle Tennessee on the first day of the Spring semester. No matter. Spring means renewal and a fresh start, just like Opening Day in my favorite sporting pastime. Pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in just a few weeks now.

I think these "first contact" days in academia, meeting bright-eyed eager young learners for the first time (they get younger every year, somehow), hearing who they think they are and why they're here and what they think philosophy is (et al) are what I'll miss most when I stop teaching.  Is this really going to be the penultimate year? We'll see. Meanwhile, I fully intend to enjoy today. 

I see that several more student introductions have surfaced on our course site since last night, before we've entered the classroom for the first time (starting at 9:40 this morning). Pleased to see that so many of the kids have responded to my challenge, when I said in my own intro that I worry about their generation not reading books. They're mentioning titles that are unfamiliar to me, mostly, and that's good. I do learn from them at least as much as they learn from me, when I remember to pay attention and make connection. George Saunders is right: "[W]riting and reading [and teaching and learning] is a way of simply underscoring that human connection is important, that you can know my mind and I can know yours, which is a vastly consoling idea, and we need it."

So here we go. Another fresh start. Tabula rasa time. My mentor John Lachs didnt quit 'til he was 87. I begin to understand why.

On MLK day, 2026

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”— Martin Luther King Jr.

Gifted an inscribed copy to 

Younger Daughter for xmas (two days ago)

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Abraham Lincoln in the 1862 annual address to Congress

"Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject."
John Stuart Mill
1867

Heroes. HCR

I have a dream, in living color

Connect

A good point to note, on the Spring semester's Opening Day tomorrow:

"But to me, it's becoming clear that writing and reading [and teaching and learning] is a way of simply underscoring that human connection is important, that you can know my mind and I can know yours, which is a vastly consoling idea, and we need it."

George Saunders Is No Saint (Despite What You May Have Heard),
NYT Magazine 1/18/2026

Complain!

"...Unless climate change, nuclear war, or both burn us to cinders entirely, humanity will stagger forth from this dreadful era, and once the dizziness has stopped will look back, and will condemn: and condemn us all, unless we did something – even just complain, but the complaint needs to be public and constantly iterated – to refuse to accept this vicious assault on the prospects of a better world." Anthony Grayling

https://open.substack.com/pub/acgrayling/p/pictures-from-an-exhibition?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Or cones

Stitches come out Monday.

"You may not agree, you may not care, but
if you are holding this book you should know
that of all the sights I love in this world —
and there are plenty — very near the top of
the list is this one: dogs without leashes."
— Mary Oliver, Dogsongs

Biblio-patriotism

"So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut

WJS Newsletter – William James Society

Spring 2026 Newsletter

President's Message from Dr. Phil Oliver

LISTEN (audio file on Google Docs)

'Tis the season of William James's birth, in 1842.

By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife's birthday. So it's a date I cannot and dare not ever forget.

The late great biographer Robert Richardson, noting the legendary James "family tradition" according to which Emerson blessed infant William, cautioned against attaching either too much or too little import to that mythic connection. It does seem too right to be true, but also too good not to be...

https://wjsociety.org/news/

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato

Definitely planning, now, to discuss Plato's Symposium in my classes around Valentine's Day. What a moment we're living through! And what a platonic irony, as they're literally killing poets too.

… On Wednesday, as word of disputes like Dr. Peterson's spread, critics of the Texas A&M policies said free-speech clashes became inevitable after the board's moves. The College Station campus's chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the move against Dr. Peterson "raises serious legal concerns."

The group said its misgivings went beyond the Constitution.

"Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world's most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought," the group said. "A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust — and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/tamu-plato-race-gender.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

'Who am I?' (etc.)-time yet again for introductions

It's a real treat, relatively late in an academic career, to teach a new course for the first time. I'll be doing that next semester with Existentialism, and this semester (beginning in less than two weeks now) with Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. I always ask my new students some basic Opening Day questions. Here are my own responses, this time:

*Who are you? - I'm the Prof, probably the oldest guy in the room (though that isn't always the case, in MALA classes). I've been teaching at MTSU for a quarter century, but this is the first time I've offered THIS course. My special interest is in American philosophy, particularly that of pragmatist William James. [And btw: I am current president of the William James Society.]

*Why are you here? - I'm at MTSU because they hired me, not long after the Belmont provost un-hired me when I expressed sympathy for the Unitarian Universalist credo ("guided by reason and inspired by love, we celebrate diversity, confront oppression, and promote environmental and social justice"). And in retrospect, I'm glad he did! I've been happy at MTSU (and teach a course called Philosophy of Happiness). I'm in Middle Tennessee because I came to Vanderbilt (from Mizzou) for grad school and liked it enough to stay.

*What's your definition of philosophy? - "An unusually stubborn attempt to think [and write and speak] clearly" in the pursuit of wisdom. (The quoted/un-bracketed bit is, naturally, from William James.)

*What are the best and the most recent novels you've read? What did you like/dislike about them? Did you find in them anything "philosophical," by your definition? - Most recent, and among the best, are those by the two Richards (Ford and Powers) we'll be reading. We'll get into my thoughts (and yours) concerning their relation to wisdom. Suffice for now to say that Ford's Frank Bascombe is a character I find amusing and occasionally wise, living his life in Periods (The Existence Period, The Permanent Period, etc.); and Powers's Playground touches on themes I find vitally relevant and potentially either an advance or a big setback for humanity: the environment, and Artificial Intelligence. It's too soon to tell about that, but it's pretty clear that we've got to address those issues effectively as individuals AND as a species, if we're to survive and flourish for long.

== 

 Postscript. Frank says things like:

• "For your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined".
• "Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things".
• "If you lose all hope, you can always find it again".
• "Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts."

A day of infamy

 

Jan 6 now signifies surgery, for Nell (and Mom too), as well as insurrection. But this Jan 6 had a better outcome than in '21, even if Nell doesn't quite believe it yet. Substack

A Case for Beauty in a Fleeting World

We turn to art to make sense of a life that is heartbreakingly fragile.

"...Because the rest, as Shakespeare knew, is silence."

Margaret Renkl

New day

But history does matter. Make some more.

Reinstated

Good! I shared the same headline in class, the morning after. Once in a while, school administrators get things right:

Clarksville, TN — the APSU professor who was fired over a post he shared online about the death of Charlie Kirk, has been reinstated. He was fired for resharing a 2023 headline that said, "Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths 'Unfortunately' Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment." Then Sen. Marsha Blackburn shared his post calling for the university to take action.

https://www.threads.com/@allie4tn/post/DS5n_efkU9J?xmt=AQF014Eu4a3E7IgbJRH9K1grF5eYm6lV-mQ2WUT-ibMys6o0yS3y7EznwdMpMbnV6n2NwryL&slof=1

Desiderata

Someone else on the Internet asked about a popular monologue/poem/prayer from the '20s, Desiderata.

It was popular on posters in the '60s and '70s, back when I was into bedroom-wall posters like "If a man does not keep pace with his companions…" (Thoreau) and "Great minds, like parachutes, function only went open" (Einstein-or was it merely coupled with a picture of Einstein on his bicycle?)… 

Desiderata was widely and falsely attributed to some anonymous sage from the 17th century, but no: it was written by a lawyer from Terre Haute in 1927, one Max Ehrmann. It's actually pretty good, and closes with advice. I endorse: "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy." one line, though, offends my meliorism. "No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

Three words too many.

Useful fiction, stubborn facts

Someone on the Internet asked the William James Society if a useful fiction can be true.
WJ's reply:

Literary fiction can be true in the pragmatic sense, definitely. But unlike my shallower younger* brother the novelist, I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. We pragmatists do not deny reality. We do sometimes attempt to defy it.

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mb7gbzit2c22

*Re: WJ's shallower younger (and "vainer") brother, a recent Paris Review essay characterizes the sibling rivalry that I take to have been mostly affectionate as more sinister than I hope it was: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/04/01/william-and-henry-james/

JCO

James Clay Oliver, 1928–2008. He'd be 97 today.

Tested + for Covid on Xmas eve

 So we've still got this to look forward to:

Men at Work: The Japanese Way of "Wa" Meets the American Way of Play

My proposal for the 29th Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in 2026, in Ottawa KS:

When former Cub/Met/Card George Altman died recently, the New York Times reported of his post-MLB career in Japan: "During seven seasons... he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases." [emphasis added] *

Altman worked at fitting in culturally, as teammate and guest.

Professionals in every endeavor, not just athletes, must of course work at their craft as well as their collegiality; but in the western world we're often implored to do what we love, so that we'll "never really have to work a day in our lives."

Freddie Freeman, asked why he banters and jokes with opposing players at first base (and takes abuse from young Blue Jays fans in video ads), says he tries to remember that he's playing a kid's game and should be having fun.

Robert Whiting, in You Gotta Have Wa, observes that "Americans played ball. Japanese worked at it." The Japanese game is more like a martial art, a game of "control" (kanri yakyu) mostly devoid of fun (or at least not primarily aiming at fun).

With so many Japanese stars now shining in MLB, and more on the way, we have an opportunity and an incentive to study and try to understand this contrast in cultural styles. They seem to have meshed effectively for the Dodgers these past couple of years, with Ohtani, Yamamoto, et al.

 (And, having now read Altman's memoir, I can report that he seems to have had at least as much fun playing in Japan as in the U.S.)

Will east meet west between the lines, and ultimately sync up? Will the Freeman style of fun endure, for fans and players alike? Here's an invitation to philosophy, which I'll take up in my presentation in March as players resume working and playing ball.

* And there are some great Japanese phrases... my favorite is Ikigai. There needs to be a word for what gets you out of bed (besides "dogs").

William James Society Prez's message, winter '25-6

 AUDIO version: LISTEN

‘Tis the season of William James’s birth, in 1842.

By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife’s birthday. So it’s a date I cannot and dare not ever forget.

The late great biographer Robert Richardson, noting the legendary James “family tradition” according to which Emerson blessed infant William, cautioned against attaching either too much or too little import to that mythic connection. It does seem too right to be true, but also too good not to be.

   

But isn’t it also a nice (and documented) twist, whether coincidental or fated, that WJ ended up delivering the keynote commemorative address at Emerson’s centenary in 1903? “Emerson's revelation,” suitably naturalized, was also his: “the point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity.” That is to say: Emerson and James both defended the actual experience of everyday people (as against the esoteric metaphysical daydreams of system-building philosophers, themselves not excluded) as reality’s surest sign.

It’s no coincidence that a devout philosopher of experience would take particular delight in sharing his own and others’ experience via the now-sadly-disappearing art of literary correspondence. WJ definitely did. His letters, like so much of his colloquially rendered and public-facing philosophy, shine and sparkle with wit, wordplay, and (above all) a profound humanity. So much of the message he meant to give the world in published form was even better conveyed in intimate missives to friends and family. 

And so it was a particular delight for me personally when a perceptive student in my Philosophy of Happiness course gifted me, at semester’s end this past December, with the two-volume 1925 edition of James’s letters (edited in 1911 by his son Henry). 

What a delicious trove! (And just a tip of the iceberg, compared to the unabridged edition that runs to over a dozen thick volumes and three feet on the shelf.) I often find myself consulting, for quick convenience, Project Gutenberg’s online version (II). But the books–the book books–are very special. (Rhys had already nailed down his A, by the way, but this gift sealed his happy Happiness legacy.)

Richardson notes that “by his mid-twenties William James already had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight, and accepting trouble was the first step in overcoming it.” What a useful skill for us to emulate, in these times of trouble! 

“In January 1868, as his twenty-sixth birthday rolled past and he did his annual stocktaking, he wrote [his friend Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Jr.] that he was in the dismalest of dumps, unable to understand ‘how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter.’ He could not have known that it would be a little over two years before he really hit bottom” (as he would confide in the famous diary entry of February 1, 1870: “I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard . . . or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?”

The  “moral business” for WJ was the active and proactive will he’d not quite believed in before. But now, as RIchardson aptly summarizes, he began to reject any fate as a fait accompli. “It is not what fate does to us that matters; what matters is what we do with what fate does to us.”

In a charming letter decades later in 1896, to his salvific hero Renouvier, he complained (as we academics are perennially wont to do) about his extra-academic workload: “Our University inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month.”

Yes indeed, we can relate. What was on your holiday reading list?

But then he said: “During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels…”

‘Nothing serious’!! Was he joking? He went on to say of Tolstoy:“I don’t like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but…”

In any event, here we are on the cusp of a new year and a fresh semester, as light expands and “light reading” gives way to something supposedly more continuously serious. I think WJ would enjoy the course I get to teach for the first time, Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. We’re reading Richard Ford, Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, and more. He’d like their anti-fatalism and semi-optimistic meliorism, as I know you Jamesians do too.

One more thing: many thanks to Professor Kevin Decker for his stellar service as secretary to WJS; and a hearty welcome to his incoming successor, Professor Alexis Dianda! Their transition has been smooth, and the state of our society is strong.  

Happy 2026, everyone. Let’s see if we can make it better. 

Phil Oliver

President@wjsociety.org

Nashville, TN

December 2025

Nothing serious

I can relate.

"Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month. During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels, which, strange to say, I had never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children."

"The Letters of William James, Vol. II": https://a.co/7orKwS6

Artificial learning

Cautionary warning for my upcoming Philosophy in Recent American Fiction course:

"All I want for Christmas is to have my brain scrubbed of the memory of teaching a university-level literature course where most students used AI to tell them what the books were about and then also used AI to tell me what they thought about the books."

https://www.threads.com/@annasandyelrod/post/DSfpbY_iSuF?xmt=AQF0tMZ1NskaVYuYlU8maJd3ef_ngVHjxLuJ9bGQUAaJ2UyhV1ab79qOALAYfukA4ftq8Xa5&slof=1

Resentment vs. Happiness

"...In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don't think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life. I have not myself very often experienced people complaining about this sort of thing, but I don't like it when they do. If I'm teaching a course on race and racism, it's a bit weird that I'm not allowed to mention the N-word.

At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn't mean to. Let's start with that. Evidence can mount up that that's not what's going on. But that should be our presumption in a college classroom..."

Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity in an Age of Essentialism
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professor-of-pluralism?bc_nonce=hpau1vwvsvdpy3tcevyy7a&cid=reg_wall_signup

Schopenhauer

"Nietzsche considered him one of his most important teachers, and Freud, astonishingly, thought him one of the half-dozen greatest individuals who had ever lived. One of the few professional philosophers to treat him as more than a crank was Wittgenstein, who perhaps saw in his work an anti-philosophy akin to his own."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n22/terry-eagleton/pregnant-with-monsters

"Staying Informed and Not Overwhelmed in 2026"

NYTimes: We are asking readers to share their tips for coping with the news.

I avoid it on waking (I wake early, before dawn). I do pick up my phone or tablet, but I go straight to the Bluesky app's "beach sunrises" tab and take in a few beautiful images... then maybe read an inspiring Maria Popova "Marginalian" post, or the like... then pick up a book and read for 30 minutes... then write in my journal... then walk the dogs. THEN I'm almost ready to confront the NYT, BBC, New Yorker, Harper's, et al. When I get to school (I teach Philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University) I open class with a glance at onthisday.com (because students don't know much about history) and only then at the NYT website. I do not face the news alone and by myself. We discuss it.

Commencement address

I've heard some unimpressive ones over the years at my school, and anticipate another this afternoon. To compensate:

Tim Minchin - 9 Life Lessons

https://youtu.be/FJ__a4qVE_g?si=5Wz6_4xEJ0OtiE4M

Read the whole thing here. Sure beats the "eat more fiber" debacle of '21.

Exit line

What a lovely end-of-semester gift from a student in Philosophy of Happiness. Volume II includes the transcendent 1910 letter to Henry Adams I sent them off with: " I am so happy...I can stand it no longer!"

 https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m7rz2pr6ok2c

If I retire in May '27 and this was the last time I will have taught PHIL of Happiness, it'll leave a warm and lasting impression. Good times, happy memories.

Passing the torch

A good coda for a semester, a generation, and a career, from a former teacher and true patriot committed to what he calls the long game. 

The great responsibility of adulthood, as Hannah Arendt said, is to love the world enough to want to try and save it... or at least not contribute to its ruin.

"It is far too easy to attribute failure to a generation, way too simplistic to blame those with the power to change society for the better who did not exercise such power. Most of the people I have worked with did the best they could under circumstances over which they felt little control. But the stark reality—as I have traced it in these pages and lived it over the past seventy-eight years—is that the richest and most powerful nation in modern history, the America that emerged victorious from World War II and whose democracy was a beacon for much of the rest of the world, is now coming up short. Trump and Trumpism are consequences, not causes. As I hope I've made clear, the causes have been growing for more than forty years. We could have addressed them. We did not. The responsibility to remedy this—to restore genuine opportunity, strengthen democracy, and contain the bullies—now falls to those who come after us. They include my wonderful, brilliant students."— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich

Making of hell a heaven

Late in my professorial career, I keep discovering philosophers I'd never heard of. Is this guy any relation to Fred?

"…[John] Macmurray devotes as much space to spelling out an alternative to the egocentric bias of Western philosophy as he does to arguing against its theoretical bias. Regarding the theoretical bias, he concludes that 'I do' is more foundational than 'I think'. Regarding the egocentric bias, he argues that the fundamental unit of personal reality is not 'I', but 'you-and-I'. We can note a connection by observing that 'I do' implies a 'you' interacting with an 'I', but Macmurray's two criticisms remain distinct. Macmurray didn't argue for the importance of positive personal relationships, he started from it, observing that the most valued thing in our lives is the relationships central to them, giving our lives meaning. Sartre said "Hell is other people": Macmurray could equally have said "Heaven is other people." Both are true, but Macmurray is more inclined to dwell on the positive…"

Jeanne Warren
Philosophy Now
Oct/Nov '25

Standing tall in the ER

Thanks, Bob Reich, for being such good company in the ER last night, and delivering such timely thoughts on teaching, learning, retiring, aging, living…

"…Teaching is not about conveying facts or thoughts or even theories. It's about conveying energy and excitement. If my students wanted to know what I think about something, they could read my books. What I could give them in the classroom was my enthusiasm, curiosity, and enjoyment about the subject we were learning about. Rather than use our classroom time together to lecture, I wanted to grab their interest, stir their own excitement. I had to figuratively grab them by the shoulders and shake them, laugh with them, run up and down the aisles of the classroom, asking them questions, keeping them surprised and engaged. 

If I couldn't touch their emotions, I couldn't get them to think hard. Touching their emotions meant connecting with them. Telling stories that illustrated the points I wanted them to understand. Having them tell their own stories. Using humor—not telling jokes but punctuating our lessons with self-deprecating stories drawn from my life (some of which I've shared with you in these pages) and with gentle digs at conventional wisdom. 

When they laughed, they opened themselves up to being receptive to the more serious things we talked about. Laughter made even the largest classes intimate. We were all sharing in the joy of being together. Every class was different. Each had its own personality. Every semester was like meeting a new person, gradually getting to know them, coming to understand what made them tick, how they thought, what they considered interesting or alarming or amazing or funny…"

— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich

Animal planet

 I love it when students share photos of their pets, gives me an excuse to share mine.

In response to Sophie's pooch pics, and Amanda's cartoon

 That's Angel (no longer with us, except in spirit) next to a sign at Brook Hollow Baptist Church that says: "Regular walking can strengthen your heart and improve your general health. Walk and enjoy yourself as you enhance the quality of your life." And so we have, my pooch pals and me, in this neighborhood since '96.

Nell and Pita, members of our family since '18

Queenie & me, c.1959

Zeus (not immortal, but enduring in memory)

The true joy in life

I keep encountering this wonderful George Bernard Shaw monologue on the internet, actually a hybrid of his 1903 play Man and Superman and one of his speeches. Its repeated meming evidently is due to Jeff Goldblum's impressive recitation from memory. Definitely worth remembering and repeating.

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live…

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Life is no "brief candle" for me.

It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

Remember, in December

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.
—William James, age 26, to his S.A.D. friend Tom.

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-183010341?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

https://gemini.google.com/share/4591a5943906

Shielded

I watched the final installment of Ken Burns' American Revolution last night.

So it's uncannily coincident (isn't it?) that I chanced upon this clip from Ken Burns' Country Music this morning, about my old friend's ancestor starting the Grand Ole Opry. The story's told by the founder's daughter. "WSM= We Shield Millions. The whole idea was to sell insurance."

The Opry is 100 this year. And my old friend is 80 today.

—100 years ago today, Uncle Jimmy Thompson walked into WSM's downtown studio and played his fiddle for an hour. The reaction was overwhelming.
Within weeks, WSM launched a Saturday night "Barn Dance," soon renamed the Grand Ole Opry.

Here's a clip from our film COUNTRY MUSIC. 

https://www.threads.com/@kenburnspbs/post/DRmzC2NiKy1?xmt=AQF0UcXmWsyaYNtQADE7jus7C_MsttnobaEPlIL0Rj6fJw

Grateful for the chance

I just encountered someone on the internet bad-mouthing E.B. White, of all people. 

But as I wanted to tell my brother-in-law last night, when he intemperately bashed a musical artist his sister had just praised, that if you don't like her, you don't have to listen: If you don't like him, don't read him. To each their own, no?

EBW loved dogs, wrote beautifully,* and was torn between the competing impulses (for finite beings like us) to save the world or savor and enjoy it. Multi-tasking is often futile, but like him I think we must do both. 

On Thanksgiving, though, it's mostly about enjoying... and being grateful for the chance.

*He wrote beautiful letters, too. "Dear Mr. Nadeau..."

Letter to the editor, NYT

re: Difficult Books Club

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/magazine/long-difficult-books-clubs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Good for Sebastian Castillo, for tackling difficult books— particularly Spinoza's  Ethics— with a little help from his book club friends (Magazine, Nov.23). But I resist the insinuation that philosophy must be difficult, If it is to offer "genuine consolation" or "salvation"… 

May I suggest that Mr. Castillo's club consider picking up William James; or at least his excellent expositor John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life. James knew that "the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos." (Pragmatism, Lecture 1).

And then, of course, in the spirit of James's point, they should put the books down and have an honest, deep discussion of how they've each experienced that cosmic pressure and what it's taught them.

The Loved Ones

I read this in a secular spirit, whatever Wendell's intentions: the permanent world is this one, but inverted.  There are other ways to take it than supernaturally. As Emerson said: "there is no other world." As Annie Dillard said: "we spend eternity here, most of it tucked under." Yet my dear departed are indeed a living presence, ever more-so as time goes by. I hope to be one myself, when the time comes.  In the meantime, I will strive to be ever less absent, as  I begin to inhabit what Richard Ford calls the Permanent Period...

Get up

"You can get up. William James reminds us of the real difficulty of that first step…But… your mind will follow your body…" —Megan Craig & Ed Casey, Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion (Columbia University Press, 2025)

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3m5tdpwj6o22t

 

Percy Warner Park

11.16.25