Gravity, repetition, and fantasyland

We'll finish our stroll with Gros's Philosophy of Walking today. He says the distance walker experiences "an immense renunciation," or resignation to being earthbound, that issues ultimately and paradoxically in "the joy of being" and an "utter bliss." He's probably exaggerating at both ends of that statement, hikers typically begin not in a spirit of resignation but rather of eager anticipation, and end at the bliss end of the scale for sure, but possibly not utterly  - but I haven't hiked the AT yet, so I'll suspend judgment. Bryson ended his hike all aglow, sure enough, but didn't soft-pedal the challenges and indignities of the abortive journey either.

Daily walkers, or this one anyway, do not set out in the expectation of slipping the surly bonds of earth, nor do the typically mild and reassuring rewards of transit for its own sake generally rise to transcendent levels of ecstasy. We keep our feet on the ground and our heads out of the clouds, or short at least of Cloud Nine. Slow and steady is our mantra, we're not racing anyone or renouncing anything. But we do indeed understand and accept that our place is here, on this earth and in this skin, as every step reinforces the point. We're down to earth.

And yet, we also feel a pleasant lightness of being as we realize and celebrate the ease of traveling without encumbrance. Gros had to ditch his rucksack at the foot of a mountain to feel that. I ditch my figurative rucksack every morning as I step out the door and also find "nothing between me and the sky, me and the ground" but a leash and a friend.

Reflecting on Gandhi's disciplined, principled marches for justice, Gros says you can better "hold yourself to account" through "meticulous self-examination" measured a step at a time. You can, but you can also - as he's already told us - slip away from hyper-self-examination. A walk is a canvas, and each can be different.

Does walking cure apathy ("acedia")? Some monks have said so, owing somehow to the rhythm and regularity of a steady gait. I know I find it harder not to care about things, during and after a walk. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure I need to know why. Some gift horses just must be ridden and not riddled out.

I don't know if Wordsworth was really the first poet of walking, but he was surely its poet laureate. "I calculate," said De Quincy, "that... Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles—a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and other stimulants whatsoever to animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings."

Wordsworth achieved in his wanderings what the Tibetan masters devised breathing and gymnastic exercises (lung-gom) to attain, the ability "of walking very fast over enormous distances without fatigue." He and they may be our peripatetic role models, if we need them. For me, it's enough simply to echo Montaigne's observation:  "My thoughts sleep if I sit still." I don't necessarily have to go long and far, to shake off somnolence. I just have to go. And go. And go. It's not for nothing that our last chapter is Repetition. Once more into the breach. Let's go.
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And once again, tonight, I get to repeat the happy experience of teaching the first of a two-class block in our school's Master of Liberal Arts (MALA) program. Last semester it was Human Migration (and cosmopolitanism), this time it's Cheating. My contribution: Cheating Truth (which, to be clear, I'm against). We'll begin with a look at Princeton Professsor Harry Frankfurt's classic "On Bullshit," originally a mid-'80s essay in Raritan, revived in teeny pocket-book format in the mid-'00s, and on target now more than ever. As the author told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, it just keeps "piling."

I've been instructed not to require introductions from our students, since they've already had a half-dozen opening nights with different teachers all semester long and should know one another well enough by now. I get that, but it's still hard for me not to begin my opening night, as I begin all my opening days each semester, with two questions: Who are you? and Why are you here? So, folks, I won't ask. If any of you would care to volunteer that information, however...

And if anyone would care to volunteer a synopsis of what's gone on in the cheating class so far, I'd love to be caught up. (So far the class has heard from my colleagues in Theater and Dance, Global Studies and Human Geography, Music, Political Science, and Sociology and Anthropology.)

Why "bullshit"? Isn't it obvious? As Kurt Andersen says in his timely, troubling, yet vastly entertaining new alt-history of our land, it's not a new phenomenon but lately it's really coming to a head.

When John Adams said in the 1700s that “facts are stubborn things," the overriding American principle of personal freedom was not yet enshrined in the Declaration or the Constitution, and the United States of America was itself still a dream. Two and a half centuries later the nation Adams cofounded has become a majority-rule de facto refutation of his truism: "our wishes, our inclinations" and 'the dictates of our passions' now apparently do 'alter the state of facts and evidence,' because extrteme cognitive liberty and the pursuit of happiness rule...

...mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire - a 500-Year History

We've fostered "a promiscuous devotion to the untrue," one nation under Twitter with liberty for disinterest in truth and facts for all.

Well, fortunately not all. Wits like Andersen and Frankfurt, and before them sages like Carl Sagan with his euphemistic baloney-detection kit, have done their best to call out and rein in our promiscuous magical thinking. May the force be with them, and with us all.
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It was on this day in 1913 that the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was published. He’d begun work on it in 1909, after taking a nibble of a French pastry cookie dipped in tea...WA

LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) is first synthesized by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland on this day in 1938... in 1835 Charles Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" published in Cambridge Philosophical Society... in 1965 Walt Disney launches Epcot Center: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow... in 1974 John Lennon's only solo #1 "Whatever Gets You Through the Night"... in 1982 Space Shuttle Columbia completes its 1st operational flight