A Hopeful ["surprisingly upbeat"] Reminder: You’re Going to Die. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Fifty years on, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" remains an essential, surprisingly upbeat guide to our final act on Earth.

...Only by confronting our own mortality, Becker argued, could we live more fully. To hold that terror is to see more clearly what matters and what does not — and how important it is to grasp the difference. Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified. "To talk about hope is to give the right focus to the problem," Becker wrote... nyt

HUMANIST VOICES

"It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. Whether or not true, humanist lyrics often go unnoticed. Maybe that is because they are sensible, reasonable and usually sung somewhat quietly, not ranted from mountaintops, preached from pulpits. Many distinguished voices are humanist even though with no ‘humanist’ label.

Humanist voices, with or without the label, deserve to be heard – such as:

Charles Darwin: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: You take the way from man, not to man.

Mark Twain: God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

Albert Einstein: A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Richard Rorty: The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.

Philip Pullman: The true end of human life … is not redemption by a non-existent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom.

We could add today, for example, the voices of Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Miller, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins. From earlier times, we would hear Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Manabendra Nath Roy. Earlier, we find David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Verdi – to mention a few.

From Midwest America’s Christian fundamentalisms to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Muslims, many believers understand that their duty is to convert, or deal in some way with, non-believers – with ‘devils in disguise’. This affects their ethics, politics and daily living, leading some determined to bring non-believers to see the religious light or, at least, to live according to religious law. When humanists become vocal about the dangers of religion, they therefore are not making a big fuss about kindly and tolerant Church of England vicars who share tea and cucumber sandwiches with parishioners. They are rightly making a big fuss about those whose godly belief leads to the repression of many here on earth, be it through death threats to questioners of religious belief, or punishment to women who dare to remove the veil in public..."

--"Humanism: A Beginner's Guide (updated edition) (Beginner's Guides)" by Peter Cave: https://a.co/1cKWQjT

Resolute

The most delightful projects aim at much more than self-improvement. Roger that, Rosenblatt.


http://dlvr.it/T0fTkC

Resolute meliorists

This Year, Make a Resolution About Something Bigger Than Yourself

…In "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman writes: "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy." He continues, "Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.''

So there. If you're looking for a worthwhile resolution, Whitman is not a bad place to start.

The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn't... Roger Rosenblatt

No, not impossible. But it's harder to visualize if you're conflicted like E.B. White: 

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

I get it. I too have a dog compulsion that distracts me from my keyboard.

So I'm looking for concrete steps that will make me a better meliorist and a better savor-er. I've been granted a bit of release time to work on a book, which I'm telling myself has some small potential to improve (not save) the world. Concrete step: close the office door when working, hang a DO NOT DISTURB SIGN, turn off the phone. 

And savor the  delight of advancing the cause of meliorism in this age of anxiety, this time so desperately deficient of confident commitment and resolve. And reliable delight.

It's a start.

What Christmas is all about

This life already bears tidings of great joy, if we'll just take the time to appreciate them


http://dlvr.it/T0cV71

What Christmas is all about

Last Christmas Eve we somehow neglected to screen IAWL, and so were determined to make time for it this year. 

 

But time, as it will as time goes by, got away from us again. It was late, we were tired, and so we settled for Charlie Brown.

Fear not: for, behold

I bring you good tidings of great joy

They're both classic and cliche for good reason, they're both worthy accompaniment to the season of peace and good will and generosity of spirit. But if I had to choose, I'd choose George over Linus. For me, Christmas is not about a babe in swaddling clothes, a supernatural savior and a virgin birth, glory to god in the highest etc. 

It's about family, love, re-connection, forgiveness, gratitude, healing, hope... It's about appreciating all the good things we've got, and resolving to do what we can going forward to keep and expand and strengthen them. 

And it's about the gift of presence, of time together now, the happy recollection of time together then, the hopeful anticipation of time together until our tomorrows end. It's about celebrations of life past and future, bracketing a wondrous present. (Next year, besides George and Chuck we should also make time for Dickens.)

Those fleeting hours of togetherness are truly sweet.

And yes, besides presence there are the presents. Gratitude should always abound, but in this season it's a bit more tangible and nearer the surface. 

🙏

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The Essential Henry James

You don't expect to find Henry James featured on the front page of the digital edition of the New York Times on Christmas Eve. That's fine, but now I'd like equal time for his less "compulsively sub-claused" and less shallow older brother--here given only cursory notice. I won't hold my breath.

"A patron saint of exquisite verbosity, James made a career examining the clash of American innocence with European cunning. Here are his best works."

An American expatriate who spent his adulthood in England, James (1843-1916) was the patron saint of exquisite verbosity; of circuitous, compulsively sub-claused sentences that contain all the twists and adventures his story lines lack. Reading the prodigious body of fiction he produced over four decades, between 1871 and 1911, you get the sense he lost himself so deeply in his recurrent themes — the innocence of America versus the experience and depravity of Europe, the psychological richness of everyday life — that he couldn’t help carrying on... nyt

When Philosophers Become Therapists

Coincidentally, I've been invited to deliver an Honors lecture on mental health in the spring. Maybe I'll hang out a shingle one of these days.

"…Amir is one of a small but growing number of philosophers who provide some form of individual counselling. In the United States, two professional associations for philosophical counsellors, the National Philosophical Counseling Association (N.P.C.A.) and the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (A.P.P.A.), list dozens of philosophers who can help you with your problems. Italy has multiple professional organizations for different forms of philosophical counselling, and similar organizations exist in Germany, India, Spain, Norway, and several other countries. In Austria, Italy, and Romania, universities offer master's degrees in the field. Everyone should study philosophy, Amir told me; since few people do, she argues that philosophical counselling fills an important need. "If he changed, it's because he got educated," she said of David's transformation. "And he got educated because he wanted a philosophical education. If something good happened to him, it happened because of philosophy, not me. I just enabled the encounter."

…

--Nick Romeo, NYer

Obama's list

Sarah Bakewell's Humanly Possible made POTUS 44's list this year. 

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A humanist celebration

I'll have to miss it, but not "in spirit"


http://dlvr.it/T0Wm9R

A Humanist Funeral Service and Celebration

A week after JL's memorial service I'm still pondering the last party I'll have to miss, though I'd love to be able to say I'll be there "in spirit"… and I do say it, naturally.

Since I've been instructed by my would-be survivors to write all this down, I refer them to JL's own remarks in Stoic Pragmatism about not counting on winning the supernatural afterlife lottery ("I am prepared to be surprised to learn that we have a supernatural destiny, just as I am prepared to be surprised at seeing my neighbor win the lottery. But I don't consider buying tickets an investment"); to Wallace Stegner's Spectator Bird (“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.…"), to Andrew Copson's books on humanism and possible humanist farewell ceremonial rituals, and to Corliss Lamont's pioneering work on the subject (below*).

I'm still working on the music, but at some point in the proceedings I hope they'll play John Fogerty's Put Me in Coach, Dire Straits' Walk of Life, maybe even Steve Goodman's last request. Go Cubs go! They should fly the W at my party too, even though I'll never shake my early-life birds-on-the-bat indoctrination.

I may seem to be taking all of this much too un-solemnly. Well, 'tis still the season for "It's a Wonderful Life," isn't it?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good life. 🎄 

* "… She felt that this life is enough, without a promise of a reward elsewhere, and without some kind of supernatural intervention. 

She didn't feel the need to reach out to make a connection with traditional promises of a paradise in another world. She was aware, as each of us is, that life is all too short, this brief time in the sunshine between the two mysterious darknesses, those shadowed areas of our coming-into-being and of going-out-of-being. She knew, as most of us know, that the very fragility of life, even the precariousness of living, makes each human life even that much more precious. Humanists are so acutely aware of our mortality. 

We accept the responsibility, as———did, while we can enjoy being alive, of trying, in whatever way we can, to give joy to others, and to make this earthly existence tolerable, or at least as close as we can get it to the idealized concept of a mythical heaven; that is, living in peace and harmony with our fellow humans, finding an earthly reward in all of our endeavors, in our communities, in our homes, and in the sharing of compassionate, positive, productive, and loving relationships with our friends and family. 

Each of us confronts death in our own way. Each of us grieves in our own time. Each of us faces the reality of this irrevocable loss differently. No one set of words or rituals will speak to us as we journey through our personal grief. Yet, words and rituals are all we have. Limited, perhaps, words afford us the opportunity to give voice to the tangle of feelings that dwell deep within us. Sometimes collected readings, reflecting these diverse thoughts that deal with the wide range of questions and emotions that we experience in our grief, can bring some comfort by bringing into focus new dimensions that may have eluded us. That's what words of poetry and inspiration are all about. 

All of us here have been touched by death. What are we to do? How is it possible to comfort one another when all of us are overwhelmed by pain and sorrow? Where do we turn? Who will hold us and give us strength? This is when it is most important to turn to each other. It is almost like we are groping in the darkness, unsure of our path. In the darkness of this night, in the depth of our dispair, we reach out to each other. Though weakened, joining together gives us strength and courage and hope and knowledge that together, friend supporting friend, we will journey through the darkness to find the light of another day. 

When we come to grieve at the loss of a friend or family member, we face also, thoughts of our own demise. It is almost impossible to imaging NOT being. We can identify with sleeping, immersed in an unconscious world, and then, of course, waking! But to NOT waken seems so frightening. In dealing with this thought as a teen, when the reality of the finality of death was giving me panic attacks, I began to comfort myself with a little made-up verse that went like this: Before I was, I knew no pain; not being will take me there again. 

It is easy to understand why the primitives expected that the breath that made life possible was one and the same with the concept of spirit. And when the lifebreath escaped the body for the last time, it would go to another place where spirits dwelled. This has been a comfort in traditional beliefs. But———recognized the capriciousness of that mythical being in a spirit world that promises everlasting life. This is the same mythical being that belief in which can pit human beings against each other in wars of vengeance, and in its myriad incarnations, has wreaked havoc with the people of this beautiful Planet Earth.

———' s wish to have a Humanist remembrance ceremony shows her faith in something more tangible: that humans can manage their own lives in a rational and ethical manner. This is consistent with the Humanist philosophy that believes we humans have evolved and are still evolving..." —Corliss Lamont

Thank goodness

I'm reading Daniel Dennett's memoir I've Been Thinking, which begins with the near-death experience that inspired my favorite written testimonial of natural gratitude.

"ON OCTOBER 24, 2006, I WAS RUSHED BY AMBULANCE from my office at Tufts University to the emergency room at Lahey Clinic, where doctors discovered the problem: the inner and outer layers of my aorta had come apart—an aortic dissection—and I could die at any moment if the blood from my heart burst out into my chest cavity. The day before I had been in Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island in Maine on my sailboat, Xanthippe. This was the last cruise of the season, joined by my Swedish friend Bo Dahlbom and his son Fredrik, and as I slowly pulled on the heavy anchor line I felt a slight pain in my chest, reminding me of the pain I had felt seven years earlier when I’d had a “silent heart attack” that had led to a triple-bypass operation. We sailed back to Blue Hill in a stiff headwind, moored the boat, took off the heavy sails, put the inflatable dinghy on the roof of my car, and went back to the farm, before I made a quick trip to the local hospital, where I was told I had not had a heart attack but should see my cardiologist as soon as I could. The next day we drove to Tufts, where I asked the department secretary if she had any Tylenol, and she wisely called the ambulance instead.

One of the little-known side effects of open-heart surgery is ministrokes caused by debris from the operation clogging up the capillaries in the brain, and my cardiologist explicitly warned the surgical team that since my mind was my life, they should strive to avoid turning me into a “pumphead”—the ugly term heart surgeons use in private for those whose brains are damaged by the heart-lung machine. After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally. Did it work? As soon as I could sit up in my hospital bed after the operation I got out my trusty laptop and wrote a short piece to see if I still had my marbles. It was put on Edge.org, where it attracted a lot of attention. What do you think?

Thank Goodness! (November 2, 2006)

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder..."

(continues...)

 

“My Year of Being Very Online About Dogs”

My friend Daryl's friend and former colleague at W.Carolina, on dogs and the culture wars. What a strange world, dogs' AND ours…

Dogs are where we project our "fantasies about what we want — either who we want to be or what we want the world to look like," said Katharine Mershon, a professor of religion and philosophy at Western Carolina University who studies the role of dogs in American society.

Dr. Mershon told me how dogs had become a focal point for tensions in her rural Appalachian town: Her local NextDoor was filled with arguments about whether leaving hunting dogs to roam about freely, slightly underfed and living mostly outside, constituted abuse. This was an argument, ostensibly about dogs, that was actually about gentrification and the place of newcomers to impose their values on local life.

At points in my conversations with Dr. Gabrielsen and Dr. Mershon, we discussed the poet, philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne. "Dogs are domesticated to, and into, us," Ms. Hearne wrote in her 1986 book "Adam's Task." "And we are domesticated to, and into, them."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/opinion/dogs-culture-wars.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
My Year of Being Very Online About Dogs

Why not?

It's list season. 

Maria Popova offers her reading list of  favorites from 2023, beginning with Pico Iyer's The Half Known Life: in search of paradise (which I'm currently enjoying) and continuing with many excellent choices, concluding with Laurel Braitman's encouraging rhetorical question in What Looks Like Bravery:

… In a passage that calls to mind that immortal Mary Oliver line — "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" — Braitman writes:

I am extraordinarily privileged in nearly every way, but what I'm most grateful for now is my parents' belief, passed down like any other inheritance, that there's more beauty in the world than horror.

[…]

This optimism gives you license. It's a kind of audacity and it can work like an all-purpose key to the locked doors of your dreams. "Why not you?" it whispers.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/12/19/favorite-books-of-2023/

One eye on the page

More solid writing advice from Emerson, via Robert Richardson


http://dlvr.it/T0LhXn

Ageless

 My (old) new Substack avatar...

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RWE's writing advice, continued

Continuing my slow-read of Richardson's First We Read, Then We Write in the pre-dawn, symbolically in much the same way an athlete preparing to take the field listens to a personally-motivating playlist...

My highlights from the  "Sentences" chapter:

• "My debt to Plato is a certain number of sentences: the like to Aristotle [and] Milton and Shakespeare... save out the good sentences, and destroy the rest." Same here, though my debt to Plato is mostly a counter-debt: he shows me a philosophy to resist, not embrace. I always tell students I'd side with Team Aristotle, forced to choose. I don't owe much to Milton but I do agree (figuratively) that, while the right form of service to humanity is admirable, I'd generally rather reign in hell than merely serve in paradise. Well, maybe not the hell. And some of Shakespeare's sentences increasingly speak to me, especially (since I've been pondering my inevitable memorial service) Sonnet 73-“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” I'm just finishing Shapiro's excellent Shakespeare in a Divided America. Funny how some Brits consider Yankee affection for the Bard cultural appropriation. 

• "He only is a good writer who keeps one eye on his page and with the other sweeps over things." Don't get swallowed by the text, make it a reflection of unfolding experience and revise as you sweep.
• "Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can." Good teachers, friends, models. And unrelenting spouses.

The next chapter on "Emblem, Symbol, Metaphor" is about the ubiquity and inescapability of signs. RWE's big claim about that is

• "The visible world and the relation of its parts is the dial plate of the invisible... the Universe is the externalization of the Soul." There's a lot to ponder there, and to resist: "Sacramentalism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Hegelianism, and Christianity are all forms of idealism..." And I'm fine with the lower-case version of idealism, but the Platonic Form is trouble. RWE also said “Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.” Agreed. That's Emersonian transcendentalism naturalized (and lower-cased), and that's the version I prefer. But I must remember what he said in Self-reliance about foolish consistency and hobgoblins, and assert my preference with circumspect humility.
• "The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics." Just look at the crowd at any NFL or SEC game. Or at the viewing audience at home.

• "We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air." What does he mean, we? But I do like Plato's allegory, so long as I can naturalize it too.
• "the world of things stands for the world of ideas"... WJ said "the earth of things must resume its rights," (Pragmatism III) which I take to be the exact reverse of RWE's formulation.
• "The creation of a work of literature [or philosophy, or autobiography] mimics the creation of the world...'Good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories... it is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind." Right. Keep just one eye on the page, again, and sweep with the other.
• "...as William Gass has insisted, 'The forms of fiction and the aims of art support Idealism..." There's that problematic upper-case I, again. I met William Gass, the old Wash U prof, when he visited Mizzou back in my student days. Nice man. I think he's wrong about this.
• "The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it." The poet can try, for verb and noun. But does it follow that in the beginning of everything (not just the beginning of a poem or a book) there was only the word? It does not.
• From Paul Scott's Raj Quartet: "There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time." Yes, it's the relation of scale and the relation of grasping our personal finitude in stark contrast to history, especially natural history. 
• "...each life, any life, is emblematic of the whole." I take that as the daunting creative challenge: to write something that both reflects and transcends one's own personal experience. "This is no abstraction." Not if you do it right. And keep sweeping.

Magnanimous meliorist

He told a colleague, very different in style and substance, that every department needed someone like her "and someone like me." Every department of life should be so lucky.. http://dlvr.it/T0HsX1

==

 

Above: from "Pragmatism and Death" (in Freedom and Limits)

Below: from In Love With Life

Magnanimous meliorist

Saturday afternoon's traditional Episcopal memorial for John Lachs at Vanderbilt's Benton Chapel was a beautiful sacramental service, a beautiful religio-ritualistic affirmation of life eternal. John reportedly was deeply involved in its design, selecting the music (Bach, Brahms, Mozart), the bible readings (Romans, Psalms, Corinthians), and two selections of his own work from In Love With Life and "Pragmatism and Death."

I admit I was surprised by the conventionality of it, expecting something more akin to Andrew Copson's humanistic celebration of life... something more affirming of life ephemeral. I thought we might have heard something like John's coda in the epilogue of Stoic Pragmatism:

“Believing in what our fervent hopes promise has, in any case, never much appealed to me. I think, on the contrary, that the dignity due our intelligence requires seeing the world and our prospects in it with unclouded eyes. Religion gets undue support from our desire to escape the pain of loss and the dread of death. Although they do not bring out the best in religion, I have no quarrel with such consolations. But philosophers should not need them. They ought to have the courage to look into the abyss alone and to face sudden tragedy and inevitable decline with equanimity born of joy or at least of understanding. I am prepared to be surprised to learn that we have a supernatural destiny, just as I am prepared to be surprised at seeing my neighbor win the lottery. But I don't consider buying tickets an investment.”

That would be a joyous surprise indeed, but John never held the a value of life hostage to surprise. He was in love with it, whatever its ultimate unknown denouement. The Apostle's Creed (which I and a few others did not stand for on Saturday) was not something he insisted on, as life's condition of validation.

I told my wife I'd like John's coda of equanimity and joy to be read at my own service, someday. She surprised me with her matter-of-fact response: print it and put it in a file folder... I wasn't expecting her to be so on top of planning my last party already. But we are, already, growing old together. We're counting on the best being yet to be, and on its being here if anywhere. 

Anyway... the resonant keynote of John's memorial was lovely. The reception afterwards, not livestreamed, featured stories illustrative of his boundless energy and service to the various communities touched by his generous and active spirit--especially the community of former students who, one after another, declared that he'd changed their lives for the better. He was the quintessential meliorist.

His colleague Dr. Dobbs-Weinstein gave the most succinct testimonial, in a word: "magnanimous"... He and she were very different in style and substance, philosophically, but he told her every department needed someone like her "and someone like me."

Every department of life should be so lucky. But there just aren't that many others like him, large-hearted, great-souled, in love with this life, happily embracing its finitude, working joyously to prepare the way for those behind him in the great moving caravan of humanity.

John Lachs on tone-deaf philosophers

"some philosophers go so far as to deny the existence of feelings and private minds altogether. In the quiet of their minds, they clearly feel good about holding such positions…"


http://dlvr.it/T0DBSb

Quiet minds

The John Lachs memorial service is this afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/live/DEAmsoFOe2w?si=nsaePPSHobRoWJ3b

Here's a typical, delightfully droll Lachsian takedown of philosophers who are out of touch with subjectivity and feeling, particularly their own:

"…immediacy continues to receive little attention in the world of thought. In philosophy, in semiotics, in law and the other professions, thirds occupy pride of place. Our interest is focused on rules and laws, on the intelligible structure of what we do. We seem to think that understanding is possible on the basis of description alone and that living, direct experience, what we might call direct acquaintance, is an impediment to thought. In our urgency to know the outcome of our acts, we overlook how they feel. We appear not to realize that some of the most important consequences we help cause are feelings and emotions. Instead, we relegate private experience to the realm of the "merely subjective" and thereby rob it of dignity and significance. Even worse, some philosophers go so far as to deny the existence of feelings and private minds altogether. In the quiet of their minds, they clearly feel good about holding such positions."

— The Cost of Comfort (American Philosophy) by John Lachs
https://a.co/28bDfsy

You should start... a splendid conversation

Continuing a slow-re-read of Robert Richardson's inspiring "First We Read..."


http://dlvr.it/T0BsRr

“splendid conversation”

This is true of neither Emerson or Carlyle, nor even of most fictional dialogue. But it's a good target to aim at. Richard Ford says he listens to every sentence aloud before publishing. That's a good approach. If it doesn't sound good, don't write it. (But if it didn't sound good in original speech, write it better.)

"…his paragraphs are all a sort of splendid conversation." Emerson's long correspondence with Carlyle was one such conversation, and Emerson set its value high. 'Strict conversation with a friend is the magazine out of which all good writing is drawn.' "

— First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson
https://a.co/9g3qV3T

“conversation transferred to a book”

Good novels accomplish that, and good dialogues.

Montaigne conversed with himself mostly, but also accessed multiple points of view, pluralizing, connecting, and (when possible) harmonizing varieties of his own experience. Such writing is natural and lively, not forced or pedantic. Fun to read. A challenge to write. Worth essaying.

…it is Montaigne's writing as much as his knowing that interests Emerson. "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive." — First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson

 "More practical hints" from Richardson/Emerson:

...he was sure that process mattered more than product, that the act of writing was more important than the written and finished piece.

[What's  best] is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams... this dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the chorus of his future, is his possibility.

..."whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it." Samuel Johnson

When he had nothing to say, he wrote about having nothing to say.

It's not the setback that matters, its what happens next.

...every morrow is a new day... we should be willing to die when our time came, having had our swing and our gratification.

Emerson casts these concerns as practical matters for the working writer... talismans for the pragmatist who evaluates things by their fruits, not their roots... "I value men as they can complete their creation."

But Waldo, you said "process matters more than product." Right? 

Or is that a foolish consistency?

“Be more funny!”

Said Homer Simpson to his TV…

"Two days ago, a profound experience. I found a set of transcripts someone had made of monologues I did years ago on the radio and I read one. Someone had written down word for word what I said and when the audience laughed, they put in the word LAUGHTER. And guess what? I read through it and it wasn't funny. LAUGHTER. Not even slightly. LAUGHTER. I had said it and back in 1982 a theaterful of people had loved it and in 2023 it was about as funny as a pile of bricks. LAUGHTER. Have you, dear reader, ever gone back to your distinguished past and been depantsed the way I was? LAUGHTER. No, you have not. I wanted to jump out a window. LAUGHTER. Fortunately, the windows in our apartment are childproofed and I can't open them. LAUGHTER. And also it's New York and I could hear children's voices from the street and I don't want my suicide to accidentally wipe out a bunch of eight-year-olds leashed together on their way to the Museum of Natural History. LAUGHTER. That's not funny, by the way. LAUGHTER..." —Garrison Keillor.

But GK (almost) always has a delivery that invites LAUGHTER, even if the mirth doesn't translate textually. That's what Matt Groening didn't get, in that Simpsons spoof... 

You should start

RWE's high-wire writing advice.

But I don't think the universities or most academic writers are good models or the best target audience. They don't generally encourage throwing your whole body into the work or saying something truly new, advice the Sage also offers.

"You should start… with no skeleton or plan. The natural one will grow as you work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have exordium or peroration. What is it you are writing for anyway? Because you have something new to say? It is the test of the universities and I am glad you have made it yours.""

— First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson

Using A.I. to Talk to the Dead

Some people are using artificial intelligence chatbots to create avatars of departed loved ones. It's a source of comfort for some, but it makes others a little squeamish.

The thought of eternal conversation has its appeal, but I'd prefer to be there for it.

nyt

A quiet life

"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live."

I've discovered a happy Substack community called The Quiet Life. I asked its leader if she knew this quote from Bertrand Russell. She did not, and was delighted to hear it.

Here's her affectionate recollection of her nonagenarian grandfather:

https://open.substack.com/pub/susancain/p/when-youre-94-questions-to-ask-yourself?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety

"…It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time…"

The Marginalian

First things first

On beginning a project in the right spirit


http://dlvr.it/Szzyfm

First things first

Countless sentences of Robert Richardson's have reached and jolted me, in his probing bios of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, and in his little survey of their respective early encounters with deep grief Three Roads Back and in First We Read's opening paragraph below.

It is a strong reminder that authorship, though audacious, is also only human. I'll bear it in mind as my friend and I finally burrow into our eagerly-anticipated collaborative book project.

I'd amend Richardson's title, though: first we read, then we talk, then we write. And then we repeat. Repeatedly.

But first I grade.

"The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson's that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. "Meek young men;" he wrote in "The American Scholar," "grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books."" — First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson

Not many young men hang out in libraries anymore, but ours will not be a collaboration of young men. Except in spirit. 

Keep a little note-book

Butler is right about this, though these days my little note-book tends to be the voice recorder on my phone.

"He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little note-book kept always in the waistcoat pocket. Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities." --The Way of All Flesh

Really bad parental advice from Samuel Butler

And kids these days, in my observation, think they know they're unhappy. And while they may be quick to fault themselves AND their parents, they're not so likely to invoke "their own sinfulness"... But Butler is funny, and was more less on target a generation or so ago. This book was his response to Darwin.

"Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself."

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“Brand You”

In the age of online self-promotion and commodification, says Naomi Klein (NOT "Other Naomi"), we create our own doubles and lose or never find our "selves"… and risk losing sight of human possibility beyond mere short-term and short-sighted self-aggrandizement… whatever we can still mean by "self"…

"Branding is a process that requires what the author and psychotherapist Nancy Colier describes as an imperative to "relate to our self in the third person." A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless numbers of us are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted. Which of our opinions are genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? What collaborations don't happen that should because individuals' brands are pitted against one another? What doesn't ever get said, or shared, because it's off-brand?"

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World