Notches in time

“‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”

So wrote 20-year-old Henry David Thoreau in 1837, encouraged by his friend Emerson. The result was two million words in 14 volumes, composed in the remaining 24 years of a life foreshortened by tuberculosis. According to Walden.org, Thoreau's journal "was his most prized possession and the only one he kept locked up when he went out for walks while living at Walden Pond." He did not suffer the possession of too much stuff.

Younger Daughter (like Older Daughter) has expressed literary ambitions, and has even proposed a collaboration. I'd be honored. Tomorrow she turns 22. I'm going to ask her the question Emerson asked Henry, and present her with the elegant blank book I've been holding on to for a while now. It seems too pretty to mar with my inelegant script, but I think she's its rightful owner. 

A writer's journal is more than a diary, it's a receptacle for all kinds of miscellany (they actually used to call them Miscellany Books, and Day Books), random quotes, fleeting thoughts, partially-baked ideas, project reminders, recipes, notes-to-self... it's a bin for the seed-corn that may one day grow into something lovely and nourishing. 

And if it doesn't, well, the nectar is in the journey. Or maybe the better metaphor of the writing process is Henry's own. "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."

Remember Henry's hike, Younger Daughter?

Or as Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury intimate Vita Sackville-West wrote to her,

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”

Notch the stick, toe the line, snag the butterfly, enjoy the journey. Writing isn't always easy , but often enough it is its own reward.

Our "forever young" anniversary

 Twenty-eight years, today, of intermittent matrimonial bliss... along with all the other normal feelings in the full human range of response to the difficult but worthy challenge of syncing two lives, and then three, and then four. This was a special year, when we both turned the age Paul McCartney mused about when he was twenty-two, and when we saw Younger Daughter walk the stage to receive her diploma. 

We binged a lot of Parenthood this spring and thus heard Dylan crooning his recurrently earnest homage to eternal youth. And this is also the year when we're finally addressing the debility that's made me feel older than I should. Surgery is dead ahead. Hoping to get the spring back in my stride before the year is out.

So this is our "forever young" anniversary. May we stay just that way.

This is a nice version too.

 

  

Percy's "search" & Foote's happy labor

 Walker Percy is still my favorite southern Catholic Existentialist novelist...

It’s the birthday of novelist Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). He was working as a psychiatrist when he caught tuberculosis and he spent two years recovering from the disease. In bed he started reading existentialist philosophers and decided to become a writer. He later said, “[Tuberculosis was] the best disease I ever had. If I hadn’t had it, I might be a second-rate shrink practicing in Birmingham, at best.” He’s best known for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), about a stockbroker who tries to get over a nervous breakdown by spending all his time at the movies. WA

And he's still my favorite Tea House co-constructionist. His pal Shelby Foote is still my favorite southern semi-reconstructed southern Proustian Civil War historian and Ken Burns talking head. (Mississippi, for such a benighted state, has produced more than its share of terrific writers. Richard Ford's another favorite on the trail.)

Foote and Percy had a marvelous lifelong friendship [g'r] and (as he told CSPAN) a wonderful correspondence. Percy died in 1990, Foote in 2005.

At the beginning of that CSPAN interview Foote told the humorless Brian Lamb that writers are unhappy people, but near the end of it he had a delightfully different message about the connection between meaningful work and happiness. It's also what he told the Paris Review in 1999:

“People say, My God, I can’t believe that you really worked that hard for twenty years. How in God’s name did you do it? Well, obviously I did it because I enjoyed it. I don’t deserve any credit for working hard. I was doing what I wanted to do. Shakespeare said it best: “The labor we delight in physics pain.” There’s no better feeling in the world than to lay your head on the pillow at night looking forward to getting up in the morning and returning to that desk. That’s real happiness.”

I went searching for his Memphis home, and found it down the street from Rhodes College (taking a break from moving Older Daughter into her dorm) in 2013. There is a sadness to "empty rooms" but also an invaluable reminder. Gather ye rosebuds. Carpe diem. Sic transit gloria.

"One secret of the longevity of our friendship was that each of us knew what would make the other angry, and we were careful not to venture into such areas—except on purpose, which would open the matter to drumfire argument and laughter, time and time again, all down the years.” 

 

Renowned biographer Walter Isaacson was inspired by Percy.

One summer I read Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” and it dawned on me that writing was something you could do for a living, just like being a doctor or a fisherman. The novel’s wry philosophical depth opened my eyes to what Percy called “the search,” poking around for clues about why we are here. At the end of that summer, I tried to get him to expound on the religious themes in the book, but he fended me off. “There are two types of people who come out of Louisiana,” he said. “Preachers and storytellers.” It was better to be a storyteller.

Percy inspired me too, not with his theology– definitely not– but with his wonderful stories, and a style of detached observation that was humane, sympathetic, funny, and indeed searching.

Searchers are implicit optimists, by my definition: they’re on the trail of something, they’re curious and hopeful. They may have met despair but they’ve chosen not to act and live in it. Like Sisyphus.

And maybe like poet May Sarton, whose birthday it also is. “It’s not for me — religion. It seems like a redundancy for a poet.” And some philosophers and storytellers.

An old post:

Walker Percy would have been 100 today  [105 in 2021]

He was a Christian existentialist with a literary sensibility I nonetheless found irresistible when I first read him in the seventies. I’m still amused by his characters’ understated humor and quiet rebellion against what he saw as our lost and fallen condition. He tried to pick a fight with Carl Sagan in Lost in the Cosmos, also more amusing than annoying. His lifelong friendship and correspondence with Shelby Foote is an inspiration. I love the mental picture of young Foote on Faulkner’s porch in Oxford while young Percy waits in the car, too embarrassed to meet his hero. Percy, Foote, & Faulkner

“You can’t make a living writing articles for The Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The thought crossed my mind: Why not do what French philosophers often do and Americans almost never — novelize philosophy, incarnate ideas in a person and a place, which latter is, after all, a noble Southern tradition in fiction.” It’s not as easy as he makes it sound. He didn’t have many rivals, doesn’t have many successors. Richard Ford is kind of a secular Percy. I’m searching for others.

“Search” is Percy’s big theme. His heroes search for God and make fun of people like me, who search for godless happiness, purpose, and meaning. But the search is the thing, whatever its quarry. “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

It was such a surprise and delight to stumble across and rent the “teahouse” Percy and Foote built near “Lost Cove” in Sewanee, Tennessee in the thirties, twenty years ago. When I wrote of it later I heard from Percy’s grandson, who was searching for it. Really.

Walker Percy and Shelby Foote built this "tea house" in Sewanee TN 

on Percy's uncle's property overlooking "Lost Cove," in the '30s... I found it c.'96.

Luxury

LISTEN. What a luxury it is, after last semester when I taught on Tuesdays from my lonely office all day long, to have time on Tuesdays before Enlightenment class begins at 6 pm to respond to all the late student posts. Funny how it makes for better classes, when we've actually thought about what we want to say.

I'm trying gently to encourage us all to post earlier in the week, so we'll have ample time and opportunity to reflect in advance on one another's questions and reflections. But I dashed off a few last-minute thoughts late in the afternoon yesterday that strike me as, well, good enough. Better than nothing, which is what I often had to settle for offering our Democracy class when I was teaching all day before we began at 6. (Had to squeeze in an hour at the Boulevard with Younger Daughter in her final semester, after all.)

What I've noticed is that Garrison Keillor was right (did he write this somewhere, or just say it?), when he said of his habit of writing Lake Wobegon scripts but then going on stage sans notes and winging it, that if you've written down what you intend to say then it'll be in your head, more or less. You'll say something that sounds fresh and spontaneous, because the specific formulation you end up uttering will not be read but roughly recollected.

So, sans questions and context, here's some of what I wrote shortly before class. I'll bet, if I checked the recording, I'd see that I said something like this in class. Or at least something more thoughtful than it would have been, had I written nothing at all.

On the religious spectrum I'm definitely in the non-theist camp. I believe there probably are no gods, at least not of the omnipotent/omniscient/omni-benevolent variety. I also believe in what they used to call the religion of humanity. So I guess that makes me some variety of humanist and naturalist. But I'm also a defender of William James's approach to "the varieties of religious experience," meaning that I--like he--support the right of individuals to decide for themselves what they believe. I simply urge them to be sure that their beliefs accord with their own experience, and that they not interfere with others' equal right to (dis)believe. Like James, I believe in believing -- but not in coercing others to share any particular belief or dogma.

"Adopt but qualify" is my approach to pretty much everything. I've very bad at responding to questionnaires, I always want to interpret the questions and qualify my replies.
==
That's great: [Enlightenment is a never-ending process, ideally. And it's never too late or too early to begin. Ideally, I think, it begins in childhood under the nurturing care of loving parents who give their children quality time and attention, read to them a lot, encourage their questions, respond honestly to them, etc. Parents who shrug off the Big Questions of childhood, or who insist on instilling very particular beliefs and attitudes in their progeny from the earliest years, are in my opinion doing a tremendous disservice to their kids and to society at large. Emerson said to such parents "you're trying to create another you. One is enough!"

Of course many kids, through no fault of their own, are denied quality nurture. For them, we as a society need to step up and support their education from pre-K forward. I've always loved what John Dewey said: "What the best and wisest parents want for their children, that must society want for all children."

I also think we need to encourage philosophical curiosity from the earliest ages. Philosophy with children is a growing movement, and it's a great idea. I believe we'd do a better job of creating a society of adults if we began by philosophizing with kids. (That's what Rousseau thought too, it's what his book "Emile" was about.)

And that prompted me to share Christopher Phillips's crusade to get everyone, and especially everyone of tender years, to reflect and converse philosophically. I remain convinced that we'd be better and better off (a phrase of John Lachs's) if more of us had been encouraged in childhood to embrace our curiosity and share it.

Writing does trigger shareable associations. I wrote: One reason Deism was so popular during the Enlightenment was that it pre-dated Darwin. Many 18th century Deists (Voltaire for instance) might have considered natural selection a sufficient explanation of life's processes (if not yet of its ultimate origins) to let go of God. Personally, though, I'm fine with the Deist assertion of divine indifference to our fate. Whether you're a Deist or a Darwinian agnostic or an atheist, you believe we have to paddle our own canoes and not count on divine intervention to save us from our own foibles.

And "let go" reminded me of Julia Sweeney. I think a class called Enlightenment Now needs to hear her story, but I'm not sure I'd have remembered to say so if I hadn't written those other things first. So the moral is: write on. 

And listen to Jane Kenyon. “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.”

And as Emerson is said to have 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.”

And

“Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.” Because, as he definitely did say, "it is a luxury to draw the breath of life."

And keep a journal.

Jefferson's Bible, Hume's Guide, Emerson's Address

LISTEN. In our Enlightenment Now course, zooming again this evening, we take up a number of questions prompted by Robertson's Very Short Introduction. Two in particular interest me:

• The "Enlightenment Bible" may not have undermined revelation (30), but what about the Jefferson Bible?
• What do you think of David Hume's view that Christians "supported their elevation of the next world above the present with a morality of self-denial," and that this is antithetical to what is naturally "useful and agreeable"?

Jefferson thought Jesus naturalized was a "sublime" moral teacher: "To the corruptions of christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other."

Bertrand Russell famously rejected the notion of Jesus as among the "best and wisest" moral teachers.

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we shall all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much farther than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said: ‘Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tze and Buddha some five or six hundred years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept... (continues)

Russell's major and most serious indictment is against the teaching of a punitive afterlife for those who've "committed the sin against the Holy Ghost" and must thus anticipate an eternity of torturous hellfire. "I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world."

And then "there is the curious story of the fig-tree" Jesus cursed to death even though "it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree." Buddha and Socrates would not have been so intemperate, nor would they ever have invoked supernatural powers to punish the innocent. And that's why Russell was not a Christian. He did not think Christ was the best and wisest, let alone divine. And, btw, he did not believe in God or immortality. 

Julian Baggini's new book on Hume is out today. We've noted in previous classes (particularly Democracy in America, last semester) that the best defense of Hume against the charge of racism is to be found in his own philosophical skepticism: had he taken it truly to heart, he'd not have penned those odious sentiments in the first place. That's Baggini's line, anyway.

"Hume's philosophy is grounded in an honest assessment of nature--human nature in particular... [The Great Guide] follows Hume on his life's journey, literally walking in the great philosopher's footsteps as Baggini takes readers to the places that inspired Hume the most, from his family estate near the Scottish border to Paris, where, as an older man, he was warmly embraced by French society. Baggini shows how Hume put his philosophy into practice in a life that blended reason and passion, study and leisure, and relaxation and enjoyment. The Great Guide includes 145 Humean maxims for living well, on topics ranging from the meaning of success and the value of travel to friendship, facing death, identity, and the importance of leisure." g'r

We'll see if Hume's assessment of human nature is honest, accurate, and adequately inclusive. What we can be sure of, in advance, is that it's thoroughly naturalistic. It may not be "sublime," but is it enlightened? 

And was our University president's decision, announced yesterday?

"Effective immediately, and in accordance with guidance from federal and state public health officials, I am removing campus mandates for the wearing of masks, maintaining social distancing and observing modified COVID-19 room capacities..."

==

Postscript. Just learned it's Emerson's birthday...

"In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine..." --Divinity School Address https://t.co/WzZJIQGlNy

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 25, 2021

"A morning star"

 Seriously contemplating an indelible iteration of this image, on the canvas of an appendage. 

 

It'd be best to "let it alone," maybe. Henry'd probably say so. 

But sometimes an impulsive act just feels like the life-affirming thing to do. Henry's sun has set anyway.

How long can you contemplate a thing, though, before it loses the quality of impulse? 'Til Tuesday?

 

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. 

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. 

There is more day to dawn. 

The sun is but a morning star.

Postscript, Wednesday May 26. Went to see a tattoo artist yesterday, and talked to another. It's definitely going to happen, I'm going to wear at least a part of my identity just below my sleeve. I shall join the legion of ink-stained wretrches. Or so I feel today. 

Spring cleaning

 It has begun, the big project I've postponed for years. Decades. The clean-up, or clean-out, of my Little House. My wife insists: everything must come out, much must go. She's not wrong. 

 

 

“I’ve been escaping the world here since 1996. It’s accumulated a  

lot of “stuff” (see George Carlin) over the years, some of which

probably needs to go. It all certainly needs a good cleaning. So that’s

about to happen, we’re going to cart everything out into the sunshine

and see what’s worth bringing back. The place will never be the same

again - for better or worse. So here’s a little tour, before the purge.”

Electricians are coming to re-wire it today. Someone else is coming to help empty it next week. My job now is to begin sorting and boxing, getting stuff organized and transportable. The goal is to make the place better than it was before, a cleaner and more efficient workspace/retreat (I refuse to call it a "Man Cave").

The job has its satisfactions. Yesterday I went through the glass cabinet that contains my little shrine to baseball, and uncovered a few delights. 

There were all those old autographed baseballs, including the one I got Joe Torre to sign back in the early '70s when he played for the Cardinals, right before my sister's old Doberman Pinscher "Bo" teethed on it...

and the one I caught in the upper grandstand of Al Lang Stadium (before the "Devil Rays," before the desecration of futbol) during Spring Training of 1992, the only ball I've ever snagged at a major league contest (off the bat of the Phillies' Dale Sveum, later a Brewers and Cubs manager)...

And there was the autographed copy of George Plimpton's wonderful April Fool's saga of Siddhartha Finch, the book that I got him to sign in Cooperstown a couple of years before his death (his hearing must have been a bit off)...

 

And the mugs my dad bought for me, when the Cards won in '67 and lost to KC (and the 1st base ump) in '85. (Dad and I attended game 5 at old Busch Stadium.)

 

Another reminder: I don't know what time is, but I do know it's the most precious thing we have in shortest supply. So, time spent revisiting treasured artifacts of times gone by is anything but wasted. I almost look forward to getting back out there and rummaging some more.

==

Postscript. More interesting objects pulled out of the clutter...

  

This photo w/Older Daughter c.'96

 

 

 

And most ironically...

This all calls for a musical interlude. In '98 this was Older Daughter's favorite song:

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." Henry nailed it, once again.

==

Postscript, May 29. Let a lot of things alone, once the dust settled, but hauled a lot away too. Gonna miss that chair...

    

Time and singularity

 The latest Vandy alumni magazine reports what I already knew, but seeing it in print makes it emphatic and real. My old mentor, and my old classmate, are both stepping down. 

 

I shared this in a text to several far-flung pals. One quoted his recently-late father's late lament: "I don't know what time is."

John Lachs, I learned in this notice, supervised 72 Ph.D dissertations in his decades of service to Vanderbilt. I'm proud  and humbled to have been one of them.

One of my early Nashville memories is a scene from my first summer here, the summer before the election of Ronald Reagan. Bandas and some others of our young cohort were gathered on a porch on Belcourt Avenue near campus, as he held forth and proclaimed the impending decline and fall of American civilization as we knew it. He projected a cynical, imposing edge. "Badass," we'd later call that attitude and mien. (Now, if you met him on the street, you might discern a different resemblance. Ned?) Someone else on that porch, if memory serves, said things weren't as bad as he said. Time will tell. Or has it already?

So what is time? I just know that it keeps on slipping slipping slipping... And flattening, and shrinking. In retrospect, if we're lucky, it will represent us in others' memory as a single clarifying note. William James in 1903 remembered his godfather Emerson that way: "...when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory [is] so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us... happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement."

I hope my friends are happy. It certainly makes me happy to recall them, as they were and as they are. Happy retirement, gentlemen.

Flying into the light

Enjoyed our first Enlightenment class last night, we mostly just introduced ourselves and shared our respective notions of what "enlightenment" might mean. I wanted to emphasize the point that enlightenment in the western philosophical sense is decidedly not about finding a singular sage or guru with privileged insight into reality, truth, and meaning. It is about the collaborative conversation that attempts to corral as many points of view and fields of experience as can be gathered, so to yield a wider comprehension of (in James's phrase) "our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means."

And, I wanted to highlight the distinction between The Enlightenment, as a particular historical era, and enlightenment per se as an attitude and approach to reason and feeling, head and heart, science and humanism and progress etc. that transcends any particular time and place. 

We're trying in our course, in other words, to identify core enlightenment values that we may now share with that earlier moment and build upon, to better meet the challenges of our own day.

And that aspiration prompted one of us to wonder about the limits of historical interpretation. Can we be sure that their Enlightenment values may translate constructively into enlightenment in the 21st century and beyond?

Good question. I mentioned Wittgenstein's notion of a family resemblance between concepts, and averred that that's all we need: not perfect translation, just a sense that we're playing in the same ballpark. I think we are. We'll see.

The student who raised the historiographic concern also shared a metaphor I like. "As I walk down the hallway into the darkness I know there is a door that might be halfway opened..." It reminded me of James's pragmatic corridor, the idea of negotiating various philosophies and ideas via a central passageway that is the pragmatic method. (He generously, characteristically credited an obscure other, Papini, but it's a fundamentally Jamesian vision.) 

As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS.

So much for the pragmatic method!

And then the darkened hallway also reminded me of the Wallace Stegner quote my wife and I shared in our wedding scroll, nearly 28 years ago...

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But... It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle." (--from The Spectator Bird)

And it reminded me of Dumbledore, who said happiness is always possible if we just remember to turn on the light. I think that's right.

Enlightenment Now

LISTEN. The Master of Liberal Arts summer course inspired by Steve Pinker's book begins tonight. "Enlightenment Now" zooms Tuesdays at 6, all summer except for my date in mid-June with a couple of surgeons who offer a major improvement in my ambulation, and another a month later in Kansas for that conference I try never to miss (and missed last time only because COVID postponed it).

Opening Days (and Nights) are always about introductions, to one another and to our course, prompted by some basic questions. Who are you? and Why are you here? And, this time, What does enlightenment mean to you? 

Who am I? A long-time student and teacher of philosophy, a pragmatic pluralist fond of the thought of William James (wrote William James's "Springs of Delight") and John Dewey, a peripatetic in the Lyceum tradition (Solvitur ambulando), a lover of dogs and baseball and beer, midwestern by birth but cosmopolitan by temperament, an Anglophile (I'd rather listen to the BBC than NPR), a proud father of two young adult women (the younger of whom just graduated from our institution, the older an LA creative who's going to make world-changing films)...

Why am I here? To learn, to teach, to lend a hand, to do no harm if I can help it, to cultivate our garden (not just mine), to transmit some sort of heritage to Dewey's " continuous human community" to come (see below#)... I'm here in Tennessee because that's where Vanderbilt is, I'm at MTSU in part because Belmont's provost two decades ago decided their philosophy department should not employ someone with overt Unitarian sympathies ("Our beliefs are diverse and inclusive. We have no shared creed...Our shared covenant (seven Principles) supports 'the free and responsible search for truth and meaning'...We think for ourselves...”)

What does enlightenment mean to me? A lot. It'll take all summer to say. But for starters...

Pinker's subtitle begins to answer that, proposing to make a case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Reason, the ability and the will to apply experience-based intelligence in meeting the practical challenges of living and ameliorating the human condition... Science, the best testable tool we've got for understanding the world and our place in it... Humanism, which Kurt Vonnegut* said means in part "trying to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishment" in some imagined post-human, post-mortem limbo... Progress, the commitment to doing all we can to make things better for all of our kind, now and in the future... Or as John Dewey put it in the concluding lines of A Common Faith (1934) that became his epitaph, 

The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the #continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant.

Susan Neiman's Kantian answer to the question her title poses, Why Grow Up, is also mine: growing up means repudiating our increasingly self-inflicted immaturity and embracing the responsibilities of thinking for ourselves. “A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” g'r

In other words, Sapere aude... But don't just have the courage to think for yourself, act from that courage as well. Mr. Jefferson acted plenty, but dodged the biggest act of courage available to him. Still, he's a pretty good exemplar of American enlightenment... to a point well short of liberty and justice for all. He was right, though, to identify happiness as our great individual and social aspiration.

Some of the additional texts I've recommended help fill out my answer: enlightenment means the intelligent pursuit of happiness.

From The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 by Ritchie Robertson--

"Recently, the case for the Enlightenment has been put with particular eloquence by the psychologist Steven Pinker and the philosopher Susan Neiman...

Whether by freeing people from false beliefs or by increasing their material well-being, the pursuit of happiness, long before Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in drafting the American Declaration of Independence, was the overriding purpose of enlightened thought and activity." 

From The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret Jacob-- 

"[Hume] left religion largely out of the story of progress, but noted that superstition holds back all who seek to be 'in the pursuit of their interest and happiness'..."

From The Enlightenment and why it still matters by Anthony Pagden-- 

“'In a century as enlightened as ours,' he declared emphatically, 'it has finally been demonstrated ...that there is ...only one life and only one happiness,' and that is here on Earth..."

He was wrong about the cosmos, I hope; other life surely must have evolved out there somewhere, in all that infinite space-time. But for us, the earth--as Carl Sagan said--is where we make our stand.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. Pale Blue Dot (1994)

Enlightenment about the fragility of our abode and humility in the face of human conceits also means to me, as it did to William James, "a certain lightness of heart"... 

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. Will to Believe

And *Vonnegut said something else I consider enlightened, in the voice of one of his fictional alter egos: 

“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.”

We're not there yet. Let's keep going.

 

 

Carrying the Fire

LISTEN (includes More Light +)

Prompted by the recent passing of Apollo legend Michael Collins, I've just finished re-reading his Carrying the Fire and am reminded how exceptional an explorer he was.

His last tweet:

I am certain, if everyone could see the Earth floating just outside their windows, every day would be #EarthDay.

There are few things more fragile or more beautiful than Earth, let’s work together today and everyday to protect our home. pic.twitter.com/XJO3RSJczw

— Michael Collins (@AstroMCollins) April 22, 2021

What an exit line.

And what thoughtful reflections, in the closing chapter. First of all the T.S. Eliot epigraph from Four Quartets that's always meant so much to me. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Why explore? "Exploration produces a mood in people, a widening of interest, a stimulation of the thought process..." Of what use is that? Ben Franklin's rhetorical riposte, defending the hydrogen balloon, still zings: "Of what use is a newborn babe?" Only time will tell, but nothing in the cosmos is more pregnant with possibility. "Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities..."

I'm struck by Collins' ability to shift his inner gaze, in an instant, from the earth to the moon. "I can now lift my mind out into space... When things are not going well here on earth... I can gain a bit of solace and perspective by making this mental trip." Like William James recalling the gulls he'd encountered in youth "down at the mouth of the Amazon,"* this is a life-altering bit of mental therapeutics they ought to teach children in elementary school. So many "adults" don't know how easy it can be to transport oneself from what James called one's "evil moods."

"Any death seems premature," Collins wrote at age 43, not quite halfway through, "but I really believe my own will seem less premature, because of what I have been able to do." And, because of the written legacy he was able to leave us. "I am condemned to the use of words," as we all are, to communicate our experience and try to inspire our peers and progeny. 

"What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." William James wasn't wrong. 

But it would be even more barren than the moon, without them. I'm grateful for Mike Collins's good words, and the bold deeds they recount.

* 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. Letters I, 1868 

 

The custom of creativity

Thinking some more, this morning, about creativity and its roots in custom and habit. Younger Daughter just texted me the image of some jewelry she's designed (and sold!), now that she's a college grad she's got time to be creative. 

I was already thinking about creativity in writing and thinking, after talking yesterday with another new grad. He's much further down the path, decades further than her, and with a decade even on me; but with more decades still ahead, I'm quite sure. He thinks I'm going to deliver his eulogy. We'll see. (Well, one of us will.)

My friend mentioned that my colleague, another of his recent teachers, had instilled in him the habit of journaling. That reminded me of Emerson's seminal question to Thoreau: "Do you keep a journal?"

And that reminded me of Emerson's eulogy for his friend.

Mr. Thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect,—his face covered in the late years with a becoming beard. His senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. He could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably out-walk most countrymen in a day’s journey. And the relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. He said he wanted every stride his legs made. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.

I totally get that. The best time to write in your journal is after a walk. Or maybe before. Either way, it needs to be a daily habit. 

More light!

 Looking forward to our "Enlightenment Now" course beginning next week.

We'll be reading

• The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction
• Why Grow Up: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age 
•  Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress 

And maybe also one or more of these recommended texts:

• The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790
• The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters
• The Secular Enlightenment
• The Dream of Enlightenment: the rise of modern philosophy
• Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil 

That's a lot, but summer always looks long from the vantage of mid-May. We'll do what we can. Best to err on the side of ambition and more light.

Mehr Licht! "More light!"  would have been terrific haiku-poetic dying words for the great polymath Goethe, more stirring than what he actually said. "Do open the shutter of the bedroom so that more light may enter." 

Oh well. They can't all be gems. But literally parting the curtains to let the light in is exactly how I begin each dawn's quest for enlightenment these days. We don't bound out of the house first thing anymore, my dogs and I, since my discovery that they're not the morning persons I'd mistaken them for... and since we installed all those lovely pellucid new windows.

Prosaic custom and habit, that is to say, do have a vital role to play in the process of enlightenment.

==

Postscript, 8 a.m.-They're still snoozing...