Homo viator

Frederic Gros is humming my tune in today's Happiness assignment, with his paean to the sacred silence of early morning walks, "dim light slanting through red and gold leaves" in autumn, "muffled footsteps under a white sky" in winter's snow (a rare occasion in these parts), and in every season an invitation to peaceable coexistence in and with the antique world. Silence is the golden muting of deafening nonsensical noisy chatter. People used to say, ironically or moronically, "Thanks, Obama"... I say Thanks, Drumpf... 

Thanks for pushing chatter beyond the tipping-point and breaking my morning addiction to NPR and all the other news-speaky organs of idle talk and breathless speculation driven by our benighted CEO's latest tweet-storm. (That's "idle," said the late Robert Solomon, as in "the engine is idling" or "idle hands are the devil's playground"...) Now the only information I require before leaving the house and hitting the pavement is a brief weather update, so I'll know whether to to lay down the base layer, grab the rain gear, or just go.

Then, I check Keillor's Almanac (oh won't you come back to Saturdays, Mr. K!) for a little historical and literary context and poetry, and a reminder that all things must pass. In a dark time that's actually lighten-ing.

I do think Gros overstates the extent to which walkers lose the use of language, even when "doing nothing but walk" (and even if they emulate their canine companions' version of "nothing"-the aforementioned sniffing, squirreling, circling, meandering etc.)... and the Nietzsche/Rousseau/Wallace Stevens style of peripatetic composition obviously intends the opposite. ("Wallace Stevens composed his poetry on slips of paper while walking — an activity he, like Maira Kalman, saw as a creative stimulant...BP)

But I do get the point of appreciating those moments when words are seen to be mere innocent bystanders to the silence in which "you hear better" because you're finally really seeing, really noticing things and not just issuing a running commentary.

The sight of desk or chair does not suffice to sicken me, as Rousseau said it did him, but too much direct seat-of-the-pants acquaintance definitely can. Some (like Susan Orlean) see standing and treadmill desks as the solution, but unless it's 20 below I'll pass on that. Walking while working sounds great, working while walking even better.

For a while I tried setting an hourly alarm, to make sure those sedentary sessions didn't exceed safe limits. ("People who got up and moved around for at least two minutes every hour had a 33 percent lower risk of dying") Better to just train ourselves to know what sick-desk syndrome feels like. You don't have to set an alarm to let you know your nasal passages need clearing, after all, why should blocked mental and emotional passages be any harder to diagnose?

"The doggish man of the Enlightenment" was through, like his cynical forerunner, with the proprieties and conventions of polite society. That's fine, to a point. But untrained dogs are less than impolite, they're a sanitation and safety hazard. Get up and show a little respect, Diogenes.

The aspiration to identify and personify homo viator, "walking man," is one I certainly relate to. "Sitting man" is normal, sadly, but definitely not natural. We're designed, naturally selected, to move. But the romantic notion of a natural man who loves but does not favor or prefer himself, who does not wage even a cold war against all others, is still strictly aspirational at the species level. The Hobbes-Rousseau debate continues. But I've known healthily-altruistic non-egoists who nonetheless suffered no noticeable self-loathing.

In Rousseau's final walking reveries, recounted in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, he may have experienced "marvelous contentment" - it's hard enough to recognize that state in oneself, never mind an old dead philosopher. And, we may still wonder about the gap between contentment and true happiness. But if in my own future final reveries I can manage to "walk at my ease... without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the end," you can call me happy. If I then also  manage to "rediscover the simple joy of existing... that permeates the whole of childhood," well, I don't guess there's a word for that. Or needs to be.

 '

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all...'

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It’s the birthday of the man that Smithsonian Magazine called “truly irreplaceable”: that’s astronomer Carl Sagan (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1934)... Sagan was involved in the “Golden Record” project associated with the Voyager missions. The record was imprinted with images and recordings from Earth, in case it should be discovered by a form of intelligent life. It was on this project that Sagan met Ann Druyan. She was the creative director of the project, and eventually Sagan’s wife. Druyan later said: “Carl and I knew we were the beneficiaries of chance, that pure chance could be so kind that we could find one another in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. We knew that every moment should be cherished as the precious and unlikely coincidence that it was.”

Most people know him best as the co-creator and host of the hugely popular PBS show Cosmos... [Seth] MacFarlane donated money to the Library of Congress, so that the library could purchase Sagan’s papers from Druyan. And there were a lot of papers: almost 800 boxes.

...Sagan died in 1996, of complications from a rare bone marrow disease. He was 62. He didn’t believe in life after death, and once told his daughter, Sasha, that it was dangerous to believe in something just because you want very badly for it to be true. But he also told her, “We are star stuff,” and made her feel the wonder of being alive.

From Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot (1994), the title of which refers to a photo of Earth taken from billions of miles away: 

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives […] [E]very king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every revered teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” WA