The delight drug

 Less than two weeks 'til my James Society Prez Address in DC, where I'm supposed to find "delight in dark times"-a topic more daunting now than I could have imagined back in September when I proposed it. Looking for one last ray to lead us from the cave, I turn again to the always-reliably-illuminating Bob Richardson.

WJ famously decried the inadequacy of words to capture the brilliant immediacy of experience. “What an awful trade that of professor is,” he complained at term’s end in 1892, “paid to talk talk talk!… It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.”

But it's finally his fluently original way with them that consistently delivers delight. The gaslighting authoritarian apologists and bullies who've presently hijacked our institutions can't take that away. Kipling was right, at least about this: words are our most potent drug. Better even than nitrous.

"He was the first to use “hegelism,” “time-line,” and “pluralism.” He had a gift for phrases that stick in the mind: “the bitch-goddess success,” “stream of consciousness,” “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” “the moral equivalent of war,” “healthy-minded,” and “live option.” He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page. And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns to face the reader, reaching outward through his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s."

--William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson

We should not underrate the power of words, the right words in the right measure at the right time, to delight the shadowed soul and lead it back to daylight. WJ might have been the last to say so, but among the best at showing it.

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It was my pleasure to exchange a few good words with Richardson in Chocorua NH in August 2010 (at about the 26-minute mark here), at the best academic gathering I’ve ever been privileged to participate in-“In the Footsteps of William James” (kudos to then-prez Paul Croce for bringing it to fruition). It was split between Chocorua and Harvard, marking the centenary observation of James’s exit from material existence in August 1910. The sufficiency of matter to sustain all life’s purposes happened to be the topic of our brief exchange.