Frank Bruni, Stoic Pragmatist

LISTEN. With our first beach vacation since well before COVID looming, I'm giving serious thought to my leisure-reading list. Currently on it: The 1619 Project, because it so annoys the right; Walking to Listen, because it's our freshman summer read; James Patterson’s eponymous memoir, because I've never read him --everyone else has, apparently-- and want to see if I should; and Ben Shattuck’s Six Walks in the Footsteps of Thoreau, because of course.

Frank Bruni's books were on my list. I didn't wait for the beach. 

Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater is about obsession, excess, and delight, and his lifelong struggles to enjoy life responsibly and in appropriate moderation. It's not just about food, though it was an interesting and challenging career twist for him when he became the Times's food critic. 

I share Bruni's concern about the decline of reading for pleasure, especially among younger people who've grown up with so many electronic distractions and don't have a personal memory of ever falling into a printed story and being transformed by the experience. “Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.”

Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania ought to be our freshman read one of these years. “College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to give your brain a vigorous workout and your soul a thorough investigation, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it.” Right. For too many students college is just another hurdle on the road to "the real world" and a job. That's largely true of the Ivy-obsessed, Bruni says, but it's also true of too many in public institutions like mine. Who you'll be, if you do it right, is only negligibly determined by where you go or what work you end up doing. Will you be curious, engaged, open to possibility, eager to learn, excited to discover new things? Or will you settle for less, far less, and then die?

The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found also confronts the choices we make in the shadow of mortality and loss. Bruni recounts the harrowing experience of waking one morning with badly-compromised vision that turned out not to be merely the residue of too much wine the night before. He had "non-arteritic anterior optic neuropathy," effectively blind in one eye and at serious risk of total blindness. There's no cure except ownership of one's agency.

“Of course, some people, confronting hardship, don’t have that agency: The circumstances are so overwhelming or their internal coping mechanisms so compromised that their lots hinge on the interventions or generosity of those around them. But…more people have sway over the direction they turn in… there’s a crucial period, a discrete phase, when they summon the will to steer toward a sunny horizon or they don’t.”

But “People who flourish make a decision to flourish. They point themselves toward joy... While we have minimal control over the events that befall us, we have the final say over how we regard and react to them.”

Flourishing, joy, and stoicism belong together, Bruni is saying. I agree. We can't know we have "the final say," but isn't it better to believe so? The Beauty of Dusk makes that case pretty effectively, and that makes Frank a pragmatist too. A Stoic Pragmatist.