It was so good to see Dr. Fauci publicly lauded as Humanist of the Year yesterday, just before Younger Daughter returned from a days-long visit with the extended Show-me State family that must at times have felt to her, progressive chip-off-the block that she is, like weeks. She reports having had to endure (in the name of family) dispiriting Fox-incited Fauci-bashing there, and other benighted beyond-the-fringe fantasyland-style provocations. The Missouri Mule's a stubborn, blinkered animal. She's a braver soul than I, to enter its stall and stick around for such nonsense. She's probably a better Humanist, too. "Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns... [and] strive toward a world of mutual care and concern..." --Humanist Manifesto III
There are so many good new books and essays I should be reading for the first time, to stoke my humanist sensibilities and fuel my own writing. But nothing charges the creative batteries more reliably than re-reading an old favorite like Lay of the Land. Pick just about any random page or two, as when Frank discusses his practice of neighborly "Sponsorship" and lends a sympathetic ear to lonely and distraught peers. "Other people, in fact--if you keep the numbers small--are not always hell." (Wrong again, J-P S.)
I have to say I find more humane wisdom here, paragraph-by-paragraph, and certainly more literary style word-by-word, than in just about any work of academic philosophy I've encountered outside of Willy James. I generally find the best fiction a far better vehicle for reflective profundity than the general run of what passes for professional philosophy.
I do love what Eddie Glaude Jr. said in the Times:
“Henry James defeats me every time I crack open his work. I prefer his brother, William. His sentences dance. Henry’s, not so much.” The novelist wrote like a psychologist, the psychologist/philosopher like a novelist. A really good novelist.
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