What a fine weekend: we've been meeting up at a designated Airbnb location in a minor league baseball town in the southeastern US every August from all directions of the compass, my old '80s grad school cohort and I, since 2017. This year it was Greenville SC. Staying in touch with old friends is truly one of the keys to a happy and meaningful human life.
I wasn't planning to mention Woody Allen or baseball on Opening Day in Happiness class, but I did. It is important to make our personal lists of things ("small stuff") that make life worth living for us ("for me..."), and then to realize that others' lives and lists are as vibrant and compelling to them as ours are to us.
And it's important to care about the small stuff, so we can transpose our care to life's bigger prizes. Like happiness.
"Small stuff""An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about... the universe. Let's... Well, it has to be optimistic. Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile. Like what? OK... for me... Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing. And Willie Mays. And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues. Swedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra. Those incredible apples and pears by C?anne. The crabs at Sam Wo's. Tracy's face..."
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” ― Roger Angell, Game Time: A Baseball Companion
The Fall '25 academic season kicks off for me today. It always feels like a holiday, and like MLB Opening Day: nobody's in last place. Everybody's still a winner, and still will be in December whatever the gradebook says, if they've showed up and made a contribution to our co-philosophizing.
I'm going to mention Douglas Adams's eternally-recurrent whale, and this time I'll bring a centipede into it too.
On Opening Day I never say to myself what that bowl of petunias said about the whale-"Oh no, not again."
[Previous Opening Day posts.]
A slightly different take on WJ's youthful commitment to free will-
"Set in the biographical context of James’s back pain and mental ill health, it would seem that free will, as a philosophy of indeterminism, represented, for him, the chance that his own situation might improve. It was the intellectual foundation on which hope and resilience were made possible; the hope that eventually, perhaps, his future and others’ would be less blighted with the evils of illness and pain.116
A diary entry for April 30, 1870, recorded James’s adoption of this new perspective and how he applied it to his own life. He wrote of how, “hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, . . . suicide seemed the only most manly form to put my daring into.” He then proposed a new way of thinking about his future, however, one that was predicated on a belief in the reality of his own “free will” and “creative power,” a life built on “doing and creating and suffering.”117"
"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" by Emma K. Sutton: https://a.co/hWf2zf8
…Despite the title of his book [Anti-intellectualism in American life] Richard Hofstadter concluded that Americans skeptical of academic life are in the end neither pro-intellectual nor anti-intellectual, but "ambivalent" about what they want from their colleges, professors, experts and scientists. Hence all the back and forth about the state of our universities.
Hofstadter himself was not so sure that his fellow intellectuals always deserved special deference, given their tendency to resist self-critique. The best he could come up with, by way of defense, was to suggest that having a vibrant, free and democratic sphere of intellectual inquiry was a whole lot better than not having one. "I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon," he wrote. But "one does not need to assert this, or to assert that intellectuals should get sweeping indulgence or exercise great power, in order to insist that respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and the health of any society."
Recording at Substack (last three posts)
"The scourge of life is responsibility—always there with its scowling face, and when it ceases to someone else, it begins to yourself, or to your God, if you have one. Consider the lilies, how free they are from it, and yet how beautiful the expression of their face. Especially should those emerging from "nervous prostration" be suffered to be without it—they have trouble enough in any case. I am getting on famously, but for that drawback, on which my temper is liable to break; but I walk somewhat as in old times, and that is the main corner to have turned. The country seems as beautiful as ever—it is good that, when age takes away the zest from so many things, it seems to make no difference at all in one's capacity for enjoying landscape and the aspects of Nature." Letters of William James, Aug 29 1902
Postscript.
To this word about enjoying the aspects of nature may be added a few lines from a letter to his son William, which James wrote from Europe in 1900:—
"Scenery seems to wear in one's consciousness better than any other element in life. In this year of much solemn and idle meditation, I have often been surprised to find what a predominant part in my own spiritual experience it has played, and how it stands out as almost the only thing the memory of which I should like to carry over with me beyond the veil, unamended and unaltered. From the midst of every thing else, almost, surgit amari aliquid; but from the days in the open air, never any bitter whiff, save that they are gone forever."
Stonehurst,
Intervale, N. H., Sept. 18, 1902.
Dearest Fanny,—How long it is since we have exchanged salutations and reported progress! Happy the country which is without a history! I have had no history to communicate, and I hope that you have had none either, and that the summer has glided away as happily for you as it has for us. Now it begins to fade towards the horizon over which so many ancient summers have slipped, and our household is on the point of "breaking up" just when the season invites one most imperiously to stay. Dang all schools and colleges, say I...
Still in the process, pre-Fall '25 Opening Day, of screwing my head on straight for the task at hand.
(Still, I say, because most of my old cohort have already hung it up. Retired. Begun to bask in the pleasures of uninterrupted-by-alarms morning sleep not followed by stressful vehicular commutes.)
The task at hand for me on Tuesday, then, is of first asking neophyte students who they are and why they've come to a philosophy course, and then conveying to them why I think they've come to the right place.
I do myself believe, with William James, in philosophy. Devoutly. ("Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers..." - Pragmatism Lec.I))
But I also share James's ambivalence about the whole professional/academic philosophic enterprise.
He liked to say his "religious act" was to defend experience (including the varieties of religious experience) against philosophy, whenever the latter became too imperious and dismissive of the former... and never mind the fact that so many religious creeds and theories are patently absurd. (Letters, April 12 1900)
In another letter he declared, at least a bit facetiously and referencing himself in the third person, his hatred of philosophy... "especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being." (Letters, July 17 1895)
But we're not at the beginning of a vacation, we're at the end of it. This is the time of year when we must all set aside our various ambivalences about the philosophy teaching vocation and get on with it, with as much overt enthusiasm as we can muster. WJ concluded that same letter with the concession that "at present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year."
Next year is here.
All good pragmatist philosophers always want to do it better next year, whether we say so in public or not, because we really do believe devoutly (albeit secretly, sometimes) in what we're doing.
And what is that? It's nothing less than attempting to inspire and empower the next generation to step up and care about "the really vital question for us all-What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"
And in caring, to be impelled to doing.
To Theodore Flournoy.
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26, 1907.
Dear Flournoy,—Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really happy for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves—you write about me. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about himself, when you want to talk about yourself." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, and I am certain that it is your philosophy...
*I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The 1st function is the essential one, officially considered. The 2nd is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only meant to write a line! Love to you all from
W. J.
"Suffrage is the pivotal right." Susan B. Anthony
On this day in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage. Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920. @reboomer
Don is one of the talking heads in the award-winning film documentary “Silent No More: The Story of American Women’s Suffrage".
Don took several of my classes. We'd seen him in the Democracy in America Zoom class just a couple weeks before his passing. He rode with another MALA student and me to the Scopes Trial play in Dayton TN in July 2018.
"Consider the allegory of the centipede. From the beginning of time he had manipulated his countless legs with exquisite precision. Men had regarded him with wonder and amazement. But he was innocent of his own art, being a contrivance of nature, perfectly constructed to do her bidding. One day the centipede discovered life. He discovered himself as one who walks, and the newly awakened intelligence, first observing, then foreseeing, at length began to direct the process. And from that moment the centipede, because he could not remember the proper order of his going, lost all his former skill, and became the poor clumsy victim of his own self-consciousness. This same self-consciousness is the inconvenience and the great glory of human life. We must stumble along as best we can, guided by the feeble light of our own little intelligence. If nature starts us on our way, she soon hands over the torch, and bids us find the trail for ourselves. Most men are brave enough to regard this as the best thing of all; some despair on account of it. In either case it is admittedly the true story of human life. We must live as separate selves, observing, foreseeing, and planning. There are two things that we can do about it. We can repudiate our natures, decline the responsibility, and degenerate to the level of those animals that never had our chance; or we can leap joyously to the helm, and with all the strength and wisdom in us guide our lives to their destination. But if we do the former, we shall be unable to forget what might have been, and shall be haunted by a sense of ignominy; and if we do the second, we shall experience the unique happiness of fulfilment and self-realization." The Approach to Philosophy by Ralph Barton Perry
This is exciting (if you're a Jamesian):
William James Society executive board member and (with his Pragmatism Cybrary) master archivist of American Philosophy John Shook informed us at yesterday's board meeting that he has recovered the earliest society publications, going back to "The Streams of William James" which launched, with the Society itself, back in 1999. And here they are... including my own contributions to the first issue (which I remembered, vaguely) and the third (which I'd entirely forgotten), here:
[Recording at Substack]
Students don't seem to read as much as they used to, or maybe it's just that they've lost the knack and patience for long-form texts in the face of so much distraction from the unceasing fire-hose of short texts and videos, and games, and social media threads, and so on and on.
That perception has led me and many of my colleagues to make fewer and shorter reading assignments. I've tried to compensate for the loss by adding more and more RECOMMENDED texts, with a promise of reward in the form of exam bonus questions drawn from those non-required readings. I may be fooling myself, but at least it appeases my conscience to offer a traditional reading buffet to those who might wish to partake.
So here's the list of RECOMMENDED TEXTS I've placed on reserve for check-out at our school library.
Intro to Philosophy ("CoPhilosophy"):
(REQUIRED: Nigel Warburton, LITTLE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ... Susan Neiman, WHY GROW UP... John Kaag, SICK SOULS, HEALTHY MINDS: How William James Can Save Your Life... Eric Weiner, THE SOCRATES EXPRESS: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
Philosophy of Happiness:
(REQUIRED-- Happiness: A Very Short Introduction by Haybron... The Philosophy of Epicurus... The Good Life by Waldinger... Against Happiness by Flanagan et al... Four Thousand Weeks by Burkeman)
It's been disconcerting to be asked by students, in recent years, how to check books out of the library. Many of them have never bellied up to a circulation desk, or randomly roamed the stacks. I'll once again try to rectify that with a class day (Sep 4) devoted to touring the library and meeting librarians.
And I'll again call on Arthur to inspire.
==
UPDATE. I ran my list of recommended texts for our course by chatGPT, and got back some pretty impressive additional thoughts: the italicized sentences, and "Why now...":
How the World Thinks (Baggini) – because Western philosophy is not the whole story.
It’s a passport to the intellectual landscapes of India, China, Africa, and beyond—perspectives that can unsettle our assumptions and widen our mental horizons.
Why now: In a hyperconnected world, knowing only one cultural tradition is like navigating with a map that’s missing half the continents.
Fantasyland (Andersen) – because the contemporary crisis of American democracy is rooted in our history.
Reading it is like pulling back the curtain on a magic trick that’s been running for centuries—you can’t unsee it once you’ve looked.
Why now: Conspiracy theories, misinformation, and political extremism didn’t come from nowhere—understanding the roots helps you resist the rot.
How to Think Like Socrates (Robertson) – because he was, as the Monty Python song says, "a lovely little thinker..."
It’s an invitation to sharpen your mind through dialogue, questions, and a willingness to admit you might be wrong.
Why now: Social media rewards quick takes, not slow thought; Socratic thinking is an antidote to the rush toward certainty.
How to Think Like Marcus Aurelius (Robertson) – because he was a wise Stoic and emperor, as close to a Philosopher-King as we've had or are likely to get.
His meditations offer a steadying hand when the world (or your own mind) feels chaotic.
Why now: Climate anxiety, economic instability, and personal stress demand a mental toolkit for staying grounded.
The Philosopher Queens (Buxton & Whiting) – because women have always philosophized too.
These stories restore missing voices to the conversation and prove that philosophy has never been a boys-only club.
Why now: Representation matters—for who speaks shapes what gets said, and which problems we notice.
Starry Messenger (Tyson) – because we are cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos.
It can give you the mental equivalent of looking up on a clear night—suddenly your problems and your possibilities are both reframed.
Why now: Space exploration, climate change, and AI are reshaping what it means to be human; perspective is a survival skill.
Question Everything (Catapano & Critchley, eds.) – short popular essays by contemporary philosophers, because philosophy is relevant to contemporary issues.
It’s proof that philosophy is not locked in dusty tomes; it’s alive in our headlines and our daily dilemmas.
Why now: Hot-button issues—from ethics of AI to climate policy—need slow, careful thought, not just hot takes.
Three Roads Back (Richardson) – because we'll all eventually lose someone close.
This is philosophy with skin in the game—how great minds navigated grief without losing their compass.
Why now: Pandemic losses, mental health struggles, and a culture allergic to mourning make wisdom on grief urgent.
Be Not Afraid of Life (Kaag, ed.) – because William James can save your life, or at least ameliorate it.
James’s words remind you that despair is not the final word, and that meaning can be remade.
Why now: Rising rates of anxiety and depression demand voices that offer both hope and hard realism.
Life is Hard (Setiya) – because we'll all eventually be challenged by something hard.
Setiya shows that facing limits and losses is not an interruption of the good life, but part of what makes it possible.
Why now: Resilience isn’t something you’re born with—it’s something you learn, and we’re all being tested.
Night Vision (Allesandri) – because all is not sunshine and light.
This is a philosophical flashlight for moving through the shadows without pretending they aren’t there.
Why now: Instagram happiness culture can make real struggle feel shameful; this book insists it’s part of the human condition.
The Word of Dog (Rowlands) – because dogs, who can teach us much about attention and the present, make me happy.
They model a kind of uncomplicated joy and loyalty that philosophers sometimes forget to take seriously.
Why now: In an age of distraction, dogs remind us to notice—and savor—the moment we’re actually in.
Wanderlust (Solnit) – because the peripatetic life makes me happy.
Walking turns thought into a moving, breathing thing; Solnit’s history will make you want to lace up and go.
Why now: Walking is a low-tech, high-return antidote to sedentary, screen-heavy lives.
Moral Ambition (Bregman) – because there's more to life than happiness, and more to happiness than pleasure and complacency.
Bregman asks what happens when we aim our energy at making the world better, and how that quest can give life depth.
Why now: The biggest problems—climate change, inequality, injustice—won’t solve themselves; a meaningful life requires more than self-care.
==
My policy on using AI for learning is simple: be transparently honest. Never claim the AI's "thoughts" as your own, but do share them --suitably flagged, as with italics or some other obvious marker-- if you find them interesting, helpful, or provocative. And always corroborate any factual statements. Sapere aude, think for yourself... but not by yourself. Sometimes the machine can be a useful interlocutor. But it should never be a substitute for your own thinking."I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health." —Voltaire g'r
Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs |
August 11, 2025
Phil Oliver
Philosophy and Religious Studies
Congratulations!
Each semester my office contacts graduating students to invite them to identify individuals from MTSU's faculty, staff or administration who significantly contributed to their success while at the University. The students are told that letters of appreciation will be sent to those that they identify to recognize their service to students and the University community.
You were cited as a person at MTSU who makes a real difference to our students. The students' responses are their way of recognizing you for your influence on and commitment to their development. Since the students are not required to sign their nominations, this anonymous gesture should be considered as the sincerest form of compliment.
You should feel a true sense of accomplishment in the knowledge that your efforts at MTSU have not gone unnoticed by this semester's graduates. It is commitment such as yours that enhances our students' academic and personal development.
On behalf of the students at MTSU, thank you for meeting their needs with such dedication. And from the Division of Student Affairs, thank you for all you do to make MTSU an outstanding university.
Danny R. Kelley, Ph.D.
"A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it's all over."
That's one way to look at it..
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-august-12-2025/
My wife is hosting a health-oriented retreat this weekend, so the dogs and I are decamping to a remote retreat of our own: a cabin to the east aptly dubbed The Doghouse. (I've been in the proverbial doghouse before, but never this one... and never in the literal company of dogs.)
I've been a bourbon-and-a beer-a-day drinker for decades, though never to an extent I'd consider incapacitating or debilitating; and I've enjoyed the aesthetic experience (see Walker Percy's essay "Bourbon").
But lately I've had sleep issues and a curiosity about what drinking might have to do with that, and with my overall health and vitality. I just came across "The Alcohol Experiment" and "This Naked Mind," and Annie Grace seems to be speaking to me.
So I've been bourbon-free for a week, and today I'm letting go of beer. Looking forward to seeing where this takes me in the next month.
Two years ago I went 60+ days without alcohol, but only because my back surgeon ordered it. This time I'm hoping a shift of intention will make the total experience feel less like a deprivation and more like an experiment.
I have friends who swear by AA and its talk of submission to a "higher power"... but they also say "higher power" is open to interpretation. I'm choosing to interpret it as meaning a present and supportive community of peers eager to help one another face the challenge of living alcohol-free.
Good luck to us all!
Well, two years on I can report that my initial month's experiment in suspending that long, too-comfortable old habit has been a lasting success. I've replaced the old desire for what Percy called "the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime" with the far better desire for optimal health, clarity, and self-possession. The habitual, un-reflective ingestion of a toxic substance does not conduce to those ends. I'm happier and better for the change.
Retreating from a bad habit is forward movement. That's something to reflect on.
[On Substack]
TR meant something positive by "Bully!" Wouldn't it be nice to reclaim that sense of it? But we'll have to dispatch the other kind first.
I've participated as a faculty member on many MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) capstone project defenses at my school over the years, none so gratifying as yesterday's by the 70-something grad who collaborated with her son (illustrator) and grandson (trial audience) in producing a children's book about bullying. She'd experienced it her entire life, she said, from siblings to classmates (she was one of the first to integrate Murfreesboro's high school in the '60s) to coworkers and acquaintances.
She showed us a video clip of her reading the manuscript to her four-year-old grandson. He got the message. How sad, that so many parents fail to take the time with their children to have that conversation and awaken that capacity for empathy. How disappointing, that so many adults lately (not to mention Elon) speak of empathy as a thing to shun.*
The other elephant in the room, of course, was the Bully-in-Chief in Washington. Nobody had to mention him, his presence pervades this moment like a plague.
The good news, I think, is that kindness and fellow-feeling exists in posse in most young human hearts. Just as the South Pacific song said, you have to be carefully taught to hate... and to bully and demean others. Thus can it be un-taught, and replaced by the better lesson-the one reflecting our better angels, the one we learned of yesterday.
Way to go, Shirley, I hope your book finds many receptive readers and listeners. Let's all be done with bullies.
It's the birthday of Wendell Berry, born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. All his great-grandparents and grandparents had lived and farmed in the area. As a boy, he was taught by his grandfather how to work a farm with nothing but a plow and a team of mules, no mechanized sprinkler systems or tractors.
Berry had an uncle he described as "an inspired tinkerer with broken gadgetry and furniture … and a teller of wonderful bedtime stories." His uncle kept a ramshackle cabin up in the woods, and Berry often went up there as a kid to get away from everything. It was in that cabin that he first read the work of Henry David Thoreau, and where he first fell in love with poetry.
He went to a military academy for high school and then on to college and to graduate school. He lived in California and Italy and New York City. But through all those years, he never stopped thinking about the place where he grew up, and he often went back to his uncle's old cabin. He finally decided to move back to the area permanently. Most of his city friends thought he was crazy, but he bought a small farm in his hometown, which still had a population of only a hundred or so people, and he began farming it the way his grandfather had taught him, without any machines.
He grew squash, corn, and tomatoes, and he got a flock of sheep, a milk cow, and some horses. And he wrote about his experiences as a farmer in more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His collections of poetry include The Farm (1995) and A Timbered Choir (1998). But he's best known for his essays in books such as The Gift of Good Land (1981), What Are People For? (1990), and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000).
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-august-5-2025/A historian sees the dangerous parallels between artificial intelligence and the Enlightenment.
...It is here, with this question of engagement, that the comparison between the Enlightenment and A.I.’s supposed “second Enlightenment” breaks down and reveals something important about the latter’s limits and dangers. When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.
When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery, “That’s a great question.” It has never responded, “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.
And why should it? It is, after all, a commercial internet product. And such products generate profit by giving users more of what they have already shown an appetite for, whether it is funny cat videos, instructions on how to fix small appliances or lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. If I wanted ChatGPT to challenge my convictions, I could of course ask it to do so — but I would have to ask. It follows my lead, not the reverse.
By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested. For most ordinary uses, this clarity is entirely welcome. But Enlightenment authors understood the importance of having readers grapple with a text. Many of their greatest works came in the form of enigmatic novels, dialogues presenting opposing points of view or philosophical parables abounding in puzzles and paradoxes. Unlike the velvety smooth syntheses provided by A.I., these works forced readers to develop their judgment and come to their own conclusions.
In short, A.I. can bring us useful information, instruction, assistance, entertainment and even comfort. What it cannot bring us is Enlightenment. In fact, it may help drive us further away from Enlightenment than ever.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/opinion/artificial-intelligence-enlightenment.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bk8.XmNh.Witef6iO7cfb∣=em-share
May we be so lucky.
"When someone asked [Lincoln] if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.”"
Grant, by Ron Chernow: https://a.co/g5zhfnV
Time to draft a presidential summer missive for the William James Society newsletter.
When I think of William James in summer, I think naturally of his annual escape at term's end to his Chocorua summer home in New Hampshire, with (he told his sister Alice) its "fourteen doors, all opening out"...
and where he had what he called a Walpurgis Nacht pseudo-mystical experience...
And then I think of the terrific split-venue Chocorua/Cambridge centenary celebration of his life and work the James Society sponsored in August 2010, "in the footsteps of William James," coinciding with Harvard's Houghton Library exhibition Life is in the Transitions.
I think of the time he got horribly lost on a hike and probably propelled the heart-strain that expedited his exit from this earth at age 68 in August 1910.
And of course I think of the nobility of that exit. It was in his dying summer a hundred and fifteen year ago, when he penned a marvelous riposte to Henry Adams's morose pessimism over the universe's own mortality. The entire letter (dated June 17, 1910) is a tour de force of indomitably life-affirming human spirit, even in the shadow of looming personal extinction. It concludes with a crescendo of defiantly insistent hopefulness: "Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be... a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness... In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, 'I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.'"
Isn't that an exit!
It was in his terminal summer that James declared, a bit disingenuously, that there were "no fortunes to be told and no advice to be given," in the conclusion of his final publication, "A Pluralistic Mystic"-a paean to his eccentric friend Benjamin Blood, but from our vantage more a brave "Farewell!" at the conclusion of a remarkably inspiring, perceptive, and humane life devoted to the unyielding defense of experience in all its irreducible variety.
The disingenuity in question has less to do with fortune-telling (though he was more than sufficiently receptive to the experience of unscrupulous seers and non-creditable prognosticators) than with advice. He was full of that. "Be not afraid of life" was one of his better lines, in this regard.
And it's probably the line we need most to heed ourselves, in this summer of our own (and America's) unsettled fortune. He'd tell us, I'm sure: you can stand it.
As he told us just before that final farewell: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?"
We're still here, to enjoy experience and to shape it; to enjoy the world and to change it.
So say we at the William James Society, in the spirit of our namesake: enjoy your summer, and help ameliorate our world.
Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment.* The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like Darrow and scientists like Winterton Curtis found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:
The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.
That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.
Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.
... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?
Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.
His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.
...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace.
Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will. When I do, I’ll channel the spirits of Winterton Curtis and Clarence Darrow and thus won’t be at risk of losing what Meghan O’Rourke calls “the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work… the imprint of attention.”
My wife and I enjoyed the play and dinner last Saturday. It was her first trip to Dayton. I visited for the re-enactment in 2018 and 2023.I do want to reiterate a suggestion I've made before: it would be great if a future performance could expand the story a bit. If you look in John A. Farrell's biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011), p. 381, there's a remarkable anecdote about Darrow's budding friendship with one of the scientists who came to Dayton, Winterton Curtis. The latter confided in Darrow, one night after dinner in Dayton, that he'd received a terminal cancer diagnosis. He found great solace in what Darrow said to him in reply, and "thanked Darrow for sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.'"Well, he did live righteously and to a ripe old age... long enough for me to remember encountering him in my childhood, when my parents rented rooms in his home in Columbia Missouri while my dad finished his veterinary degree (1960). Curtis truly embodied the best of "the humanistic philosophy of life" he espoused in his bookCurtis published his impressions of the trial years later. Those reflections are reproduced in D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. Tompkins. He does not condescend to the fundamentalists in Dayton, and in fact seems to prefer them to H.L. Mencken's variety of cynicism.If there were some way to get the Curtis-Darrow connection into the play, it would add depth and texture and humanity to the story, and would counter a certain inaccurate caricature of humanists like Curtis and Darrow as being morally deficient.I wrote a little blog post about this...
It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He went to Harvard, but he didn't like it very much, nor did he enjoy his later job as a schoolteacher. He seemed destined for a career in his father's pencil factory, and in fact, he came up with a better way to bind graphite and clay, which saved his father money. But in 1844, Thoreau's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond, a 61-acre pond, surrounded by woods, and Thoreau decided to build a cabin there. It was only two miles from the village of Concord, and he had frequent visitors. During the two years he lived there, Thoreau kept a journal that he later published as Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau wrote, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
It's the birthday of the essayist and children's writer E.B. White (books by this author), born Elwin Brooks White in Mount Vernon, New York (1899)…
E.B. White said: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F07%252F11.htmlRon Chernow's new Mark Twain bio led me back to Justin Kaplan's 1966 bio, which has now led me to this evocation of New York in the decade of my birth. A different world. I wouldn't call it "great"... (After he retired From baseball Jackie Robinson went to work For chock full O. nuts, giving the company an undeserved "progressive" reputation).
"The owner of Chock full o’ Nuts, a white man named William Black, advertised in the tabloids for “light colored counter help,” an example of nth-degree job discrimination. The separation of whites and blacks was an embedded fact of American life, “civil rights” an unfamiliar phrase, Harlem another world. In 1956 the city’s nearly eight million population was 83 percent white, only 11 percent black. Except downtown in the Village and in other artistic and intellectual enclaves, white people and black people did not mingle. We were accustomed to seeing only white faces as patrons in theaters, restaurants, hotels, and sports arenas. It was only in 1947, when Jackie Robinson, wearing a Brooklyn Dodger uniform, trotted out to second base at Ebbets Field, that the color line in major league baseball was finally breached."
"Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950s New York" by Anne Bernays, Justin Kaplan: https://a.co/0BpjOPs
"The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago..." —“A Damned Yankee Professor in Little Dixie: from the autobiographical notes of Winterton C. Curtis”
“The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times.” [p.9]Curtis concluded his “Damned Yankee” autobiographical notes (published in the year of my birth, 1957):
"It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield, to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia."Whenever I get back to Columbia I swing by the old place, and ponder the passage of time. What a marvel, that a man of the 19th century remains so vividly alive in the imagination of one still ticking so far into the 21st. And what good fortune for me, that I can still go home again. And back to Dayton.
Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment. The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like Darrow and scientists like Winterton Curtis found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:
The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.
That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.
Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.
... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?
Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.
His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.
...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace.
Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will.
