"Life is good"

So said the Amazonian Piraha people, according to Daniel Everett, before it became a popular marketing slogan.

Happiness (the class) begins today with Daniel Haybron's Very Short Introduction, which includes that epigramatic reference to the Pirahas and then tells us that Socrates - so often exalted as a paradigmatically happy man, right up until the hemlock kicked in, in his 70th year - "didn't miss out on a thing." Well, he missed out on his 71st. Life might have been better, certainly longer.

Was Socrates happier than the average college student? "You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss," with minimal obligations and maximal opportunities to ruminate, socialize, and party, but apparently that would be wrong. How many of them are living the examined life? Ignorance is perhaps not bliss, after all? But what about enlightened Socratic ignorance? Either way, American students are apparently less happy than we thought.

Panama is most blissful, evidently. Or was. More recent results point elsewhere. Denmark? Iceland? (I think I recall Eric Weiner's Geography of Bliss giving them high marks.)

One way to chart our happiness index is to ask what's on your bucket list. Another: what's not on your deathbed list of things you just have to do one more time. Maybe not "another peck at the mobile phone, or one more trip to the mall." Maybe you won't wish you'd bought more crap.

"What sort of life ultimately benefits a person," wondered Aristotle. What, not shopping or iPhoning? How many of us can even imagine how bizarre those activities would seem to an old Greek philosopher?

A young Intro student yesterday told me it was his impression that philosophy was mostly about pondering and pontificating on our feelings. But Haybron quickly withdraws feeling theories from the field, in favor of "life satisfaction." But don't confuse that with "subjective well-being," a catch-all of psychologism he says we must confuse with our real quarry.

Has there really never been a better time to be alive? I wouldn't have said the first decade of this millennium was the best ever, but it depends on the yardstick. Steven Pinker's Better Angels makes the case for our good luck.

Many indigenous peoples say the only thing they envy about the western industrial lifestyle is healthcare (and we know how fraught that is). William James told his friend Schiller to "keep your health, your splendid health - it's worth all the truths in the firmament." Hard not to agree, especially after a bout with serious illness. If you've not experienced that, by the time you reach "a certain age," you're even luckier than most.

Haybron says "we need a theory - a definition - of happiness." Do we? What do you mean, we? We philosophers? We authors? We moderns? We shoppers and social media fanatics? Why can't we be happily undefined and atheoretical? Presumably because the absence of a good theoretical framework leaves us in the wrong "state of mind." 

Happiness is a state of mind, for sure, but it's even more a state of experience and expectation. No?
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On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous "American Scholar" address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard (books by this author). He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models... 

It's the birthday of Armenian-American writer William Saroyan (books by this author), born in Fresno, California (1908). His parents were recent refugees from the Turkish massacres in Armenia. His father died when William was three. Saroyan's mother, placed her children in the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, California. Saroyan spent five years there before his mother was able to claim him... Towards the end of his life and dying of prostate cancer, he called the Associated Press to give a statement to be released posthumously. The statement was: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

And it's the birthday of Maria Montessori (books by this author), born on this day in Chiaravalle, Italy (1870)... She believed that children were not blank slates, but that they each had inherent, individual gifts. It was a teacher's job to help children find these gifts, rather than dictating what a child should know. She emphasized independence, self-directed learning, and learning from peers. Children were encouraged to make decisions. She was the first educator to use child-sized tables and chairs in the classroom. WA

The dream begins

We begin this semester in CoPhi with Anthony Gottlieb's acclaimed Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. Last year we did Bertrand Russell's History, so a bit of cross-referencing seems in order. Two storytellers are better than one, say we pluralists and CoPhilosophers. "Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it," said the author of A Pluralistic Universe. The way we stay on speaking terms is by speaking with one another, honestly, humbly, and (as Mr. Rosewater knows) kindly. That, again, is our "philosophy of co."

 Gottlieb's approach is avowedly journalistic, in the best sense: go straight to the primary source whenever possible, question everything, and be clear. All of that is easier said than done, especially (when exploring complicated ideas) clarity. But it's to Gottlieb's credit, as it was to Russell's, to make that a priority.  James's "stubborn effort to think clearly," and Russell's "unusually obstinate" description, may seem mere common sense. 

But common sense is itself often stubbornly, obstinately wrong. That's "the joke at the heart of philosophy" as it deliberately spurns conventional wisdom, in search of the real thing. Sometimes the joke's on us philosophers, sometimes on the commoners. But of course we all recur to common sense, and we all need to get better at putting it on the rack of critical scrutiny. We're all philosophers in embryo, but to grow into mature thinkers we need to learn when to trust our common inheritance and when to challenge it. We need to stand up from our respective Thinking Rocks and move, and converse, and think again - like the pair of peripatetics in the School of Athens.

Western science was created when the first (western) philosophers stopped settling for the "God(s) did it" non-explanation of things and went looking for natural causes. That led to enlightenment, of a sort, and to Gottlieb's next volume, The Dream of Enlightenment.

But today, our topic is bounded by these questions: What's your definition of "philosophy"? Do you have a favorite philosopher? Can you summarize your current, personal philosophy of life?

A glance back, to last August 24:

We're off, with Bertrand Russell's introductory chapter in his History. There we're cautioned against the "impertinent insolence towards the universe" of dogmatic theology, and directed instead to the gray space between certainty and paralysis that good philosophers occupy. Then we're told that the Stoics presaged Christianity, that Montaigne's "fruitful disorder" made him a representative man of his age, that Descartes' subjectivist inflation of ego as philosophic method was insanely contrary to common sense, and that every community must negotiate the extreme opposite dangers of either too stultifying a regard for tradition or too much personal independence.

Those are just a few of the countless sharp opinions Russell will deliver, with audacity and biting wit, in this narrative. Another: that philosophy occupies a No Man's Land between theology and science. So, we'll wonder: are no theologians or scientists philosophers? Is there more than one way to be a philosopher? Here I'll invoke Professor James's observation that we all have some implicit philosophy or other. For a No Man's Land, it's pretty crowded.

Other points to ponder, prompted by this chapter: Is there any higher duty than that to one's fellow humans? What do we owe the state, our contemporaries, our successors? In what specific ways should it matter to us that we're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving, on a distant spiral arm of a relatively nondescript galaxy, one among trillions? Ought we ever to acknowledge the authority of any individual or institution, to settle matters of belief and conscience? (Good question to ask on the anniversary of the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible.)

Some students will become frustrated with all these questions. I'll happily suggest answers, and will not hesitate to advocate for my own. But the key takeaway today is that in philosophy the questions always outpace the answers, and we're okay with that. Love it, in fact.
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To follow up on what I was saying about respecting one another's humanity even when we can't respect one another's beliefs or philosophical conclusions, here's a wonderful npr story I heard on the way home from class: "I saw his humanity..." (listen here)

...What came to me was that he was a human being, and I didn't want to see anybody die. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about the events in Charlottesville, and I remember seeing the pictures of a young man being brutally beaten by these guys with poles, and when I saw that I thought, "why didn't anybody step in?"
And you know, in retrospect, it doesn't matter if he doesn't see my humanity, what matters to me is that I see his. What he thinks about me and all of that, like — my humanity is not dependent upon that...

Mary Shelley would have appreciated that story, she wrote one about a guy whose humanity was unfairly denied. "It's the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (books by this author), born Mary Godwin in London, England (1797). She is famous as the author of Frankenstein (1818), which is considered the first science fiction novel ever written." WA
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What do you think is the biggest misconception about today's college students?
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A base to the first student today who can tell me whose shoes are these?

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A student brings to my attention a YouTube channel called "Crash Course," and specifically its entry on philosophy. I watched two minutes of it, it looks ok. If you find other helpful sites and sources, please share the link (and take your base).

1.19.17 5:30/6:57, 47/64, 4:58
Happy birthday to the creator of the Imagination Library, and the largest employer in Sevier County TN. (A bonus run to the student who today first tells me who that is.)

Happiness returns

My Philosophy of Happiness course only comes around every other year. (Here's how we kicked off, time before last: Happy go lucky, 8.29.13) Who could have predicted, when last we met in 2015, the current state of things? Who could have imagined this eclipse-defying, race-baiting, ally-smacking, self-infatuated POTUS? It's been surreal, mostly not in a happy way. Some of us may be tempted to surrender to this moment, to suspend talk of happiness as self-indulgence of another sort, and to brace ourselves for conflict domestic and foreign as we soldier through a time of troubles.

But not me. Happiness and its pursuit are too important, too central to the meaning and point of being human, to abandon for anything as fleeting as the particular political absurdities of this passing show.

Weren't you happy to experience and share that cosmic diversion last Monday? But that gets it backwards. Politics, impactful though it is on lives and prospects, is the diversion. We need to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving, etc. We need to retain a cosmic perspective. Then, we'll not be so inclined to discount the importance of our happiness.

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Thus spake my philosophical spirit-guide James, a little over a century ago. But if that's too current, you can go back to Aristotle. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."

But the issue of our existence is never settled by the citing of authorities, no matter how lustrous. We have to work it out for ourselves, find a way to flourish in personal terms while also remaining responsibly committed to the welfare of our peers and the survival of our species. No simple task, but there's none more urgent.

That sounds almost grim, in an existentialist sort of way. "You will never be happy," said Camus, "if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Well, I disagree. That's too pessimistic, too Schopenhaurian.

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”

If that's the course you signed on for, this one will disappoint. The world does have a great deal to offer. It has a world. We get to live here. We're the lucky ones who got to live at all, who'll get to be happy if we apply ourselves just a bit to the question of how to do it.

 That, anyhow, is our working hypothesis. It makes me happy to begin working it out again. We'll see if we can verify the SoL's 60-second secrets, and its preference for eudaimonia.

There's nothing more fun, and often funny, that the pursuit of happiness.

It's the birthday of the man who said, "Love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness... That's 19th-century poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1809)... the father of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) he wrote, "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible."

And it's the birthday of the man who said, "The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts": British philosopher John Locke, born in Wrington, Somerset, England (1632). He believed all of our knowledge is derived from the senses. He also believed that we can know about morality with the same precision we know about math, because we create our ideas. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1688) was an instant success and sparked debate all across Europe.

Locke said, "Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

Opening Day!

It's Opening Day of the Fall 2017 semester at our school.  I'll meet two sections of CoPhilosophy this afternoon, commencing once again to try and explain what philosophy is for: it's for getting better at asking questions and entertaining alternative possible answers, for coexisting with those who answer differently, for learning to love thinking for ourselves, for learning how to be happy, for learning how to live and die.... among other things.

 Alain de Botton's School of Life has its critics, but it sure performs a valuable service when it comes to opening a philosophical conversation. That's what our classes are, extended conversations with one another but also with philosophers long past and, we may hope, into a far future.

Our quest is for clarity, in William James's sense when he defined philosophy as an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly, and for sweep:

"...explanation of the universe at large, not description of its details, is what philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with other views... any very sweeping view of the world is a philosphy in this sense." Some Problems of Philosophy

We're also in search of mutual understanding and respect, in Spinoza's sense when he said "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."

And we're also after kindness, in Kurt Vonnegut's sense when he welcomed babies to planet Earth and informed them of its one indispensable rule:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Ultimately of course, in philosophy we're searching for wisdom. We like it, we love it, we need a lot more of it,  philo-sophia...

It’s one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty, it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be – unlike say, being cultured, or kind. Others could perhaps compliment you on being it, but it wouldn’t be something you could yourself ever announce you had become... SoL

And so we begin. Put on your philosophy goggles, everyone. You don't want to look directly at the Form of the Good (aka the sun) without 'em. No one's exempt from the laws of nature.

Opening Day this year is also Freedom Day.

On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington. The march was the brainchild of civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who once said, "We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers." They worked diligently for nearly two years, convincing members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put aside their differences and participate...There was no violence. There was not one single arrest. Marchers linked hands, they sang, and they chanted all the way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where the 16th speaker of the day, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., began what would become one of the greatest speeches in history with, "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." WA

And it's the poet Goethe's birthday (1749). He said "A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days." Not so. I can stand ordinary days just fine, so long as the occasional exception is peppered in from time to time. Days like today.

Totality!

It's eclipse day at last. Never has cosmic perspective been more needed or welcome.

"The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it's more than just what you know. It's also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:

The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it's not solely the province of the scientist. The cosmic perspective belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote, but a precious mote and, for the moment, the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and sex.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.

Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.

During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices. And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective." Neil deGrasse Tyson

And, the cosmic perspective dismisses all narrow parochialism. The Tennessee eclipse? Really?

In Nashville's sky, a ring of fire (nyt)...

Georgia

Georgia Ruth Turnbow Roth (1931-2017)

They dismissed school early, the day Georgia was born. That teacher knew something about teachable moments and the school of life.

It was a long, rich life, in all the ways that really matter. She touched so many of us, and leaves so generous a legacy of spirit and kindness and perseverance.

Georgia was born November 17, 1931 in Perry County on Sinking Creek, in the same house her mother was born in. The first child of James Turnbow and Clyde Graves Turnbow, she grew up on Swan Creek and later moved to Hohenwald, where she graduated from Lewis County High School. She married Freddie Roth on November 2, 1950. They were married almost 60 years.  

Georgia often recalled the thrill and wonder of first seeing humans take to the sky, though firmly and proudly planted in the soil of her native grounds.

Of course, that was nothing - speaking of legacy - compared to the thrill and wonder of the birth of a son, Frederick David, and then a daughter, Sharon Clydine; and later a pair of granddaughters, Emma Rebekah and Elisabeth Kathleen (Katie).

Georgia, like her parents before her, worked for many years at Genesco. She provided for her children not only materially but especially in the richness of an endless and daily nurturing love.  She loved keeping her home and cooking beautiful meals.  She is survived by her son F. David Roth, her daughter Sharon C. Roth (Phil Oliver), her brother Jimmy C. Turnbow (Ruth), and granddaughters Emma Rebekah Oliver and Elisabeth Kathleen (Katie) Oliver, and many beloved nieces and nephews.

When her daughter Sharon and I married, Georgia was about my age now. She struck me then, as she deserves to be remembered now, as youthful, kind, funny, curious, nurturing, and nourishing: she was a wonderful cook, in the traditional southern country style, and that - her cooking, my delight in her cooking - was maybe the first strong connection we made (beyond agreeing, of course, that her daughter was a pretty terrific person). Recalling that I bonded with Georgia’s mother, Granny Bo, over homemade GooGoo clusters, you might suspect a pattern here.

I gave her a copy of the Andy Griffith Cookbook, knowing she’d know just what to do with it. Every time we gathered over one of her and Freddie’s wonderful meals I’d have cause to effuse, in my best Andy of Mayberry accent, “Aunt Bea…!” And I tried not to be too much like Goober, when he briefly fancied himself a philosopher.

Georgia was funny, usually in a droll and understated way. She loved to laugh, and to make others laugh. She loved to repeat the inadvertently-funny things her granddaughters would say, like the time we were driving through the aromatically-bovine Vermont countryside when 3-year old Emma complained about something nasty “on her nose.” (That was a euphemism, I really didn’t want to talk about cow manure here.) Oh, and ask Emma about the Granny/leopard print lingerie story, I really can’t do it justice.

She also struck me, back then, as an auto-didactic, a self-educator and lifelong learner, a curious and eager reader, still working on her education. That was another strong and warm connection. I’m an auto-didact too, albeit an overeducated one. But Georgia was the sort of person who knew instinctively what Mark Twain meant when he said you should never let schooling interfere with your education.

So I didn’t just give her cookbooks. I gave her my book on William James, which she found a prominent place for on the coffee table, and a collection of some of his correspondence. He wrote delightful letters, back when people still knew how to write letters and treated them as a form of art as well as communication. I directed her attention to a couple of them in particular, that I thought she’d especially appreciate.

One was about the futility of trying to say everything, to put everything into words, because so much of life is too large to fit into words and sentences. There’s always something that “glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught.” She was one of the more perceptive people who seemed to me, somehow, to get that.

Another James letter was about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which he experienced at firsthand. Georgia back then seemed to me someone who’d also respond to unanticipated upheaval with more excitement and curiosity than fear, with “glee at the vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as ‘earthquake’ could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely.” (That was certainly the spirit in which she thrilled to her first bumpy ride in an ATV “mule” last Fall with Jimmy Fite at the wheel, a ride too bumpy for her daughter and me.) The philosopher described a feeling like a terrier shaking a rat, followed in the days ahead by the socially uplifting spectacle of strangers pitching in together to clean up and rebuild. There are people in the world who meet disappointment and distress with perseverance and resolve. She was one of those.

I also shared with Georgia an appreciation of the great chronicler of the American west Wallace Stegner, and a copy of his Angle of Repose. In geology the angle of repose is “the steepest angle of descent or dip relative to the horizontal plane to which a material can be piled without slumping.” In human terms, it’s “the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down.” The narrator of Angle of Repose is a stoical wheelchair-bound historian who must come to terms with his own present incapacity as he tries to understand the past. “Wisdom,” he realizes, “is knowing what you have to accept.” Georgia was wise in that way too.

Another Stegner character said, in  Crossing to Safety,

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.”

There’s more than a bit of wisdom in those broadly geological and biological perspectives, reminding us that the sting of death is due mostly to excessive fixation with our linear individual destinies. Life’s a much bigger picture, a more epic adventure, than even the sum of all our individual stories. The adventure really begins when children and grandchildren enter the picture. If we can grasp that, then we can accept our mortality and be grateful for our “little life rounded by a sleep.”

Georgia did grasp and accept the bigger picture, and also knew that some individuals--the ones we call grandkids, for sure--definitely do warrant attention. Lavish, tireless, delighted attention.  How she loved and doted on her granddaughters Emma and Katie, loved to tell their stories, loved to dream of the lives they’d live and the love they’d pass along in their turn. It’s a long and often-dazzling (if finally wearying) parade, this human journey. We’re the lucky ones, we’re in the procession, we get to wonder what life may yet become, and to try and nudge it forward. Think of all the merely-possible people who’ll never get the chance.

One of her favorite poems, and mine, is William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (his “consideration of death,” which Georgia committed to memory in youth and retained for a lifetime)-allegedly written when Bryant was just a teenage college dropout and inspired by one of my favorite poets William Wordsworth. He aptly said the best portion of a good person’s life is her little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love. We should remember. Wordsworth also said

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind…

Life remains behind, here and now on this planet and, let us hope, for many tomorrows and many generations to come, newly invigorated by her memory. Bryant’s “consideration” lends strength to that hope.

Thanatopsis

To him who in the love of Nature holds   

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks   

A various language; for his gayer hours   

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile   

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides   

Into his darker musings, with a mild   

And healing sympathy, that steals away   

Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts   

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight   

Over thy spirit, and sad images   

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,   

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,   

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—   

Go forth, under the open sky, and list   

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—

Comes a still voice…

So live, that when thy summons comes to join   

The innumerable caravan, which moves   

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take   

His chamber in the silent halls of death,   

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,   

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed   

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,   

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch   

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Pleasant dreams, Georgia. The example of your unfaltering trust sustains and soothes us, in our grief for your passing. Grief will give way to gladness and gratitude for the privilege of sharing our too-brief time here with you. And, as I learned from the experience of losing my own parents several years ago, you won’t ever really leave us. Exemplary lives shine on, with an unshakable inspiring presence.

The great essayist Montaigne said he wanted death to find him planting his cabbages, not fretting about death or his garden. Georgia’s literal gardening days were behind her, but she still met death in the metaphorical cabbage patch. Now it’s up to us to harvest that crop and be nourished by it, and to cultivate our gardens in turn. Thank you, Georgia, for your nurturing example. We love you. We’ll never forget you.
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obit, Lewis County Herald

"What gets me out of bed in the morning"

Emerson had a resolutely resilient thought when he counseled himself to "finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.” Emerson in His Journals, Jan 26, 1844

But did he in fact ever say what the Internet claims he said?

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Doesn't matter, it's a darned good statement about what gets resilient people out of bed in the morning.

Taking the whole discussion down a notch in solemnity, while taking it up in levity, is Senator Al Franken in his new book. "What gets me out of bed in the morning is having to pee. Sometimes that's also what gets me out of bed in the middle of the night. In either case, I always go right back to bed."

I can relate. Walls of sleep aren't as solid as they used to be. But tomorrow is a new day. Exciting new blunders and absurdities await.

"Resilience"

I've volunteered to try and come up with something philosophical and different to say about one of the buzzier words in current circulation, "resilience." It's a splendid concept, and one I've treasured since long before it became a pop culture buzzword and cliche.

During my walk this morning, leaning into the rising sun while the morning air was still fragrant and cool, it occurred to me that it's really just another word for what "dawn" means to me: a new day, a fresh start, another chance to do something good, another round of experience to notch on my stick. For me, and I suspect for most dawn risers addicted to morning air, "resilient" means nothing if it doesn't mean awake, rested, and ready. It means a daily return to life.

Great, but here - on a loop William James endlessly repeats to me -  is every honest philosopher's challenge:  "the return to life can't come about by talking. It is an act..."

And so, in order to say something worthy about resilience I'm going to have to do something resilient. Why don't I do this? Why don't I resume regular reporting to this journal of no very wide circulation, this repository of dawn reflections, and see if something more than mere talk materializes?

I'm betting it will. But if it doesn't, I'm sure I'll be resilient.

I wonder if the School of Life is onto something, with its take on the subject?

“One of the characteristic flaws of our minds is to exaggerate how fragile we might be; to assume that life would be impossible far earlier than it, in fact, would be. We imagine that we could not live without a certain kind of income or status or health; that it would be a disaster not to have a certain kind of relationship, house or job. This natural tendency of the mind is constantly stoked by life in commercial society, which adds to our sense of the number of things that should be considered Necessities rather than Luxuries. This kind of society goes to extraordinary lengths to get us to feel that we really do need to go skiing once a year, to have heated car seats, to fly in Business, to own the same kind of watch as a famous conductor and a jumbo-sized fridge, and to lay claim to lots of friends, perfectly muscular health and a loving, kind, sex-filled relationship…”

A materially-simpler life is a more resilient one, is the message here. Not just any old act will do. The return to life can't come about by shopping. I'll buy that.