Your perfect right is wrong

Rain kept us in, in CoPhi yesterday morning, where the topic of choice was love. Told again my tale of romantic friends who've held out for a perfect match, a singular better half without which they'd be forever incomplete, and in consequence spent the better part of their lifetimes alone. That story ends with a twist, now, since my friends finally found adequate matches in their later innings - or would they say "perfect"ones? Either way, my contention is that we ought not condemn ourselves to searching for needles in haystacks, when we might find what we're looking for right under our noses, out in the open. Might even find a surfeit of possibilities.

Not everyone is willing to renounce the pursuit of perfection, though I do think I notice fewer young people lately who say they're waiting for their perfect prince(ss). Those who do, the Christian Platonists, tend also to say that they're trusting God, the ultimate matchmaker.com, to arrange it. But for most, it seems, love - like happiness - is a choice and not a destiny. I call this progress.

By late afternoon the skies had cleared, and we concluded Happiness by choosing to take our discussions outdoors. The last chapters of Daniel Haybron's Very Short Intro left us with many choices: Will having kids make you happier? Or better? Is acting badly "out of the question," even if it makes you happier? What will they say about you at your funeral? Is it true that no old person every entertains a final regret at not having ended it all much earlier? Are our devices and the social media they plug us into turning us into ironically anti-social drones?

But the topic we finally chose, and (so far as I could tell) did not answer uniformly, was simply to comment on Haybron's plainest statement of principle: "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." It may be your perfect right, but it is still wrong. At least, it's our right to say so.

podcast
5:20/6:28, 65/84

Pretty petty problems, pale by comparison

It started to rain just after I reached my office yesterday, meaning I'd have to deal with a wet bikeride to class or else hoof it under an umbrella. Pretty petty problem, a first-worlder if ever there was one. But I grumbled internally anyway.

Then the phone rang, reporting a stranger's real problem: an unexpected death in the family, deep sadness, a plea for emotional support and guidance.

It seems our everyday default, even those of us fortunate enough to be gainfully employed in the ideas industry - at least that's what academia was supposed to be, before the paper-pushing "Student Success"-mongers gained their ascendency - is set for "petty." We gratuitously, habitually sweat the small stuff until something exceptional wrenches us out of our quotidian sleepwalk.

So I pedaled to class just a little more mindfully, and talked about all that... about how the best traditions in philosophy east and west remind us to rise above all the small stuff, the trivial internal monologue of complaint. They teach us "how to die," or really how to live in the shadow of mortality with courage, integrity, equanimity, and on the best days joy.

It was a good day to polish Socrates' pedestal, and to appreciate the seeming effortlessness of Taoist harmony.  A good day to wonder what kind of  person fears death, and what kind of soul it is that learns how to really live.

5:30/6:27, 72/83

Desire to learn

We're doubling up in CoPhi this afternoon, making up for ground lost to Monday's Labor Day off. That means we'll be introducing not only Buddha, Confucius, and the Taoists, but Socrates and Plato as well. Wouldn't that be an interesting dinner party?

Speaking of the Symposium...

"And what does he gain who possesses the good?" "Happiness," I replied; "there is less difficulty in answering that question." "Yes," she said, "the happy are made happy by the acquisition of good things. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness; the answer is already final." "You are right." I said. "And is this wish and this desire common to all? and do all men always desire their own good, or only some men?-what say you?" "All men," I replied; "the desire is common to all." "Why, then," she rejoined, "are not all men, Socrates, said to love, but only some them? whereas you say that all men are always loving the same things." "I myself wonder," I said,-why this is." "There is nothing to wonder at," she replied; "the reason is that one part of love is separated off and receives the name of the whole, but the other parts have other names."

Diotima is pushing Socrates up her ladder of love, to an appreciation of immortal beauty and truth. Her improbable Platonic theory holds that love is an impulse ultimately to possess abstract universals, not particular persons, places, and other "good things" whose deficiency will become evident to the scrupulous lover of wisdom in his ascent from the cave of phenomenal ignorance to the light of the Forms.

Sure.

I think, to the contrary, that William James shared far more sense on this subject when (we noted yesterday in Happiness) he wrote in The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,

The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all. Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they bring.  But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal demands.

Desires in the human sphere, at this end of the ladder, run the gamut from large to small, grand to petty. But for most of us, most of the time, they're precise and particular. The Platonic philosopher who dreams of Truth and Beauty is really chasing particular true and beautiful persons, places, and things. And the philosopher, no less than anyone else, is liable to error and delusion when imagining what those occasions of fulfillment will be like. Living is the process of learning which of our elusive desires can be met, which can be reasonably aspired to, and which must be sacrificed.

Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition?‑-he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta?‑-both cannot be the choice of his heart. 

Not if he's a virtuous Victorian, anyway.

And, living well is the process of learning (against the grain of our habitual blindness) that others' many and various desires merit consideration too. There's real truth and beauty in seeing this particular light.

Podcast
5:30/6:26, 74/87

A Walk in the Woods

Lovely Labor Day holiday yesterday, plenty of quality time with the family, the grill, the pool, the hammock, Hume, and the Redford/Nolte version of "A Walk in the Woods" at the cineplex. The script didn't take too many liberties with Bill Bryson's smart and witty prose, the film was beautifully shot in Appalachia, and my take-away folds nicely into this afternoon's message in Happiness class: there's more to a life well-lived than being comfortable, the journey of life is unpredictable, and so we go.

Early on, Katz (Nolte) asks"Are you happy?" Bryson (Redford) says "What the hell kind of question is that?" He never answers that question, but eventually demonstrates the more important point: ultimate well-being requires some effort, some discomfort along the way, and some doubt. But if you don't quit, you can go home when you're ready.

So now I want to read the book again, of course. I'm a bit worried about that obnoxious and chatty know-it-all girl they ditched.

“I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity.” 

I don't particularly want to walk the AT myself, except in bits and pieces, or imaginatively. But Bryson does reaffirm my commitment to ambulation in general.

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.” 

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous.”  

And what did the experience do for Bryson?

“I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn't know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.”  

Loved this scene.

But I think you can be curious and Big Picture, both. And read books, "TV for smart people." And watch just a little TV.

Podcast
5:30/6:26, 69/91

Success

Yesterday sweltered, but we beat the heat in our 8 am CoPhi class. Had a good walk and several great TIB-inspired talks including one older student's hard-learned lesson, generously shared with her younger peers, about not being afraid in life to take risks and to fail. We all fail. We all make mistakes. We all commit errors. We all fall short of expectations. We all could then pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and reboot. We all don't. But this student's wise counsel is that it's never too late to learn. The message was echoed in Happiness later, when our conversation hit on the subject of "learned helplessness."

We sat in the morning shade of the library courtyard and discussed "success," giving me an excuse to share again one of my favorite hard-edged William James lines. More than a century ago he wrote to H.G. Wells: “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease." That, along with the corollary that if at first you don't squalidly succeed in this society, you're off the island.

We're still seeking a reliable cure for our national disease, but I think the kind of dialogue we've been enjoying this semester shows real promise.

Also showing promise this morning: our long-festering and possibly soon-flowering walkabout Study Abroad proposal. We have an itinerary, a syllabus, and after yesterday's long afternoon session with the spreadsheet we now have a budget too. Watch this space for details.

Oh, and thanks to Colm Toibin's The Master we now also have another promising angle on one of our course's site visit subjects. Henry James, the "younger and shallower" brother of William (by the latter's own admission), "walked the streets of Rye (Sussex) almost every day now..." I knew that had to be true. One day soon we will follow the Master's footsteps.

5:30/6:23, 73/97

Different PsOV on the PBD

Whenever we talk about the Pale Blue Dot in CoPhi, someone invariably says they find it depressing to contemplate our smallness in the vast uncharted cosmos. I used to be surprised by that reaction, now I'm just reminded that all my talk about the endless varieties of PsOV we ought to co-philosophize about, in order to deepen our mutual understanding and tolerance, is more than just talk. So, we talk about it.

The brain that contemplates is, as the poet said, wider than the sky. When we place ourselves in that frame, with the "You are here" arrow to orient by, doesn't it seem as if the universe shrinks to fit? Or that the place we call home expands? Doesn't the cosmic perspective, internalized, shared, and transmitted to as much of the next generation as can be reached, begin to transform us into a more cosmopolitan species with that much greater a chance of living long and prospering? Doesn't something like a global consciousness begin to suggest itself? Can't we begin again to entertain the possibility that humans are in fact capable of greatness?

Depressing? No, for me the vision of our little pixel, our fraction of a dot, our mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, is  uplifiting, inspiring, horizon-stretching, challenging. And beautiful, like the only home we've ever known.



5:30/6:22, 75/93

Why we don't share

We're taking some more time with TIB's testimonials in CoPhi today, in the effort to ingrain a habit of listening critically but respectfully to other points of view while in the perennial process of forging and reevaluating our own. That's what we're supposed to do in Philosophy, and it's what we mostly don't do in public life. More important than what we think of any particular essay is the question What would you say? TIB celebrates multiplicity, of voices and views and friendly exchanges thereof.

One of the questions we went walking with yesterday was:

Have you ever attempted to share your beliefs, convictions, core principles (etc.) in public? (If yes, would you say you did it in a spirit of evangelism and proselytizing, or in a philosophical way? What's the difference? And if no, why not?

Most respondents said they do not even make the attempt, mostly because their past experience of that kind of conversation has been unpleasant, hectoring, divisive, mean-spirited, and, indeed, evangelical. That's disappointing but, given our collective failure to introduce a philosophical alternative to most children, not surprising. If you want a culture of philosophers you have to begin growing it early. But this is a big country, and thousands of us have used TIB's happy medium to initiate the kinds of conversation I still think might be our salvation as a civil society. That's why I keep saying, with William James, that we all have a philosophy. What we don't have is enough practice sharing our philosophies with civility.

It's interesting to note, as TIB II does, that most young people who've participated in the project tend to write about things like money, music, and sports. Also that educators are drawn to this exercise because it gives them an opportunity to "encounter adults thinking hard, not lecturing but soul-searching," empowering young people to follow their example and realize that nobody has all the answers.

We're also looking today at the late great Carl Sagan's philosophical conviction (and Neil Tyson's, and mine) that we'd be a kinder, gentler, more responsible species if we better appreciated our situation as riders on a fragile spaceship earth, a pale blue dot, "the only home we've ever known," that we must cherish and preserve if we want to have a future among the stars. So much blood has been shed, so much misery inflicted, by those deluded kings and emperors who thought they did have the answers and wasted lives to become "momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

I've already shared my partial list of favorite TIBs, here are a few excerpts.

Albert Einstein, An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man ...The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a god who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with the awareness of—and glimpse into—the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basis of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive...

Oscar Hammerstein II, Happy Talk ...I believe that it is important for a man to announce that he is happy even though such an announcement is less dramatic and less entertaining than the cries of his pessimistic opposite. Why do I believe I am happy? Death has deprived me of many whom I loved. Dismal failure has followed many of my most earnest efforts. People have disappointed me. I have disappointed them. I have disappointed myself.  ...I don’t believe anyone can enjoy living in this world unless he can accept its imperfection. He must know and admit that he is imperfect, that all other mortals are imperfect, that it is childish to allow these imperfections to destroy all his hope and all his desire to live... It would be folly for an individual to seek to do better—to do better than to go on in his own imperfect way, making his mistakes, riding out the rough and bewildering, exciting and beautiful, storm of life until the day he dies.

Victor Hanson, Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being ...I believe all of us are natural links in a long chain of being, and that I need to know what time of day it is, what season is coming, whether the wind is blowing north or from the east, and if the moon is still full tomorrow night, just as the farmers who came before me did. The physical world around us constantly changes, but human nature does not. We must struggle in our brief existence to find some transcendent meaning during reoccurring heartbreak and disappointment and so find solace in the knowledge that our ancestors have all gone through this before...

Penn Jillette, There is No God ...I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy... anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy. But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God...”

Erroll Morris, There Is Such a Thing as Truth ...There is such a thing as truth, but we often have a vested interest in ignoring it or outright denying it. Also, it’s not just thinking something that makes it true. Truth is not relative. It’s not subjective. It may be elusive or hidden. People may wish to disregard it. But there is such a thing as truth and the pursuit of truth: trying to figure out what has really happened, trying to figure out how things really are... It’s not that we find truth with a big “T.” We investigate and sometimes we find things out and sometimes we don’t. There’s no way to know in advance. It’s just that we have to proceed as though there are answers to questions. We must proceed as though, in principle, we can find things out — even if we can’t. The alternative is unacceptable.

Azar Nafisi, Mysterious Connections That Link Us Together ...I believe in empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships. I am a writer and a teacher, so much of my time is spent interpreting stories and connecting to other individuals. It is the urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and alternative lens... 

Eboo Patel, We Are Each Other's Business ...I attended high school in the western suburbs of Chicago. The group I ate lunch with included a Jew, a Mormon, a Hindu, a Catholic and a Lutheran. We were all devout to a degree, but we almost never talked about religion. Somebody would announce at the table that they couldn’t eat a certain kind of food, or any food at all, for a period of time. We all knew religion hovered behind this, but nobody ever offered any explanation deeper than “my mom said,” and nobody ever asked for one... A group of thugs in our high school had taken to scrawling anti-Semitic slurs on classroom desks and shouting them in the hallway. I did not confront them. I did not comfort my Jewish friend. Instead I averted my eyes from their bigotry, and I avoided my friend because I couldn’t stand to face him. My friend told me he feared coming to school those days, and he felt abandoned as he watched his close friends do nothing. Hearing him tell me of his suffering and my complicity is the single most humiliating experience of my life.My friend needed more than my silent presence at the lunch table. I realize now that to believe in pluralism means I need the courage to act on it. Action is what separates a belief from an opinion. Beliefs are imprinted through actions. In the words of the great American poet Gwendolyn Brooks: “We are each other’s business; we are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Jackie Robinson, Free Minds and Hearts at Work ...I believe in the human race. I believe in the warm heart. I believe in man’s integrity. I believe in the goodness of a free society. And I believe that the society can remain good only as long as we are willing to fight for it—and to fight against whatever imperfections may exist.  My fight was against the barriers that kept Negroes out of baseball. This was the area where I found imperfection, and where I was best able to fight. And I fought because I knew it was not doomed to be a losing fight. It couldn’t be a losing fight—not when it took place in a free society...

Wallace Stegner, Everything Potent is Dangerous ...what I believe is neither inspirational nor evangelical. Passionate faith I am suspicious of because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal, Christian, Muslim, Communist, or whatever, because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise reconciliation of human differences, and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand. I cannot say that I am even a sound Christian, though the code of conduct to which I subscribe was preached more eloquently by Jesus Christ than by any other. About God I simply do not know; I don’t think I can know...

Arnold Toynbee, I Agree With a Pagan ...I believe we have no certain knowledge of what is right and wrong and even if we had, I believe we should find it just as hard as ever to do something that we knew for certain to be right in the teeth of our personal interests and inclinations. Actually, we have to make the best judgment we can about what is right and then we have to bet on it by trying to make ourselves act on it, without being sure about it... Since we can never be sure, we have to try to be charitable and open to persuasion that we may, after all, have been in the wrong, and at the same time we have to be resolute and energetic in what we do in order to be effective. It is difficult enough to combine effectiveness with humility and charity in trying to do what is right, but it is still more difficult to try to do right at all, because this means fighting oneself...

John Updike, Testing the Limits of What I Know and Feel ... I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. The special value of these indirect methods of communication — as opposed to the value of factual reporting and analysis — is one of precision. Oddly enough, the story or poem brings us closer to the actual texture and intricacy of experience... Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds. The power of materialist science to explain everything — from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms and their sub-microscopic components — seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind. On the other hand, the reality of subjective sensations, desires and — may we even say — illusions, composes the basic substance of our existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address, organize and placate these. I believe, then, that religious faith will continue to be an essential part of being human, as it has been for me.

podcast
5:45/6:21, 71/93

More core conviction

A student caught me off-guard when I walked into section 12 yesterday afternoon, asserting: "that word peripatetic is overused." It is? Really? Is this an intervention, I asked?

 I 'd thought precisely the opposite, which is why I've been using it so much; and why I'd planned the day's class session and built our course around it. It's not a familiar concept to most of our students, who'd almost always rather hop the bus or skateboard or anything mechanically locomotive, to make the short transit across our campus.

I tried to be accommodating, spending the balance of our period searching for pluggable synonyms. But "mobile philosophy" (for instance) just isn't as much fun to say. You can't get a good Calvin and Hobbes cartoon out of it to match "pair of pathetic peripatetics". I'm standing by my word, but after today should have less occasion to say it. We'll just be doing it.

Come to think of it, I've also been saying This I Believe a lot too. I'll look for substitutes. (Personal philosophy, core conviction... or maybe just TIB will do.) I've asked CoPhi students to find moreTIB essays that resonate with them, and briefly to say a bit more about why. I'll do the same for some of mine, which include

• Albert Einstein, An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man... The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a god who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with the awareness of—and glimpse into—the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basis of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive...
• Oscar Hammerstein II, Happy Talk
• Victor Hanson, Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being
• Penn Jillette, There is No God... I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy. But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God...”
• Erroll Morris, There Is Such a Thing as Truth
• Azar Nafisi, Mysterious Connections That Link Us Together... I believe in empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships. I am a writer and a teacher, so much of my time is spent interpreting stories and connecting to other individuals. It is the urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and alternative lens... 
• Eboo Patel, We Are Each Other's Business
• Jackie Robinson, Free Minds and Hearts at Work... I believe in the human race. I believe in the warm heart. I believe in man’s integrity. I believe in the goodness of a free society. And I believe that the society can remain good only as long as we are willing to fight for it—and to fight against whatever imperfections may exist.
  My fight was against the barriers that kept Negroes out of baseball. This was the area where I found imperfection, and where I was best able to fight. And I fought because I knew it was not doomed to be a losing fight. It couldn’t be a losing fight—not when it took place in a free society...
• Wallace Stegner, Everything Potent is Dangerous
• Arnold Toynbee, I Agree With a Pagan
• John Updike, Testing the Limits of What I Know and Feel

That last phrase from Updike is particularly apt and timely. "Testing the limits" does happen in class occasionally, between students and teacher, but we all need to expand our horizons and become less limited. We're all here to learn.

Podcast
5:30/6:20, 68/90

I believe in walking and talking

And pedaling. My wife and I went for a bikeride yesterday on the old converted rails-to-trails greenspace that runs along the Cumberland River near Ashland City, enjoying the mild breezy weather and even the light rain that accompanied the last leg of our trip. Good conversation and good times just seem to flow better when you're moving but in no hurry to get somewhere.

In CoPhi today we revisit "This I Believe," in book form the freshman summer read (again) and in format the model I'm suggesting students follow for their final reports this semester. They can post their short essays of core conviction on our site and on TIB's, along with accompanying podcast recordings if they choose.

Some philosophy teachers encourage their Intro students to focus more on what others have believed, but I believe a philosophy course is all about finding words and voice for the inarticulate philosophy William James says we all have whether we know it or not.

So I've asked students to find TIB essays they like, share them, talk about them, listen to their classsmates' views, and begin thinking about how to frame their own TIB essays. Some of their early nominations: Warren Christopher on trust, Jackie Robinson on free minds & hearts, M. Gandhi on peace, moving beyond stereotypes, being cool to the pizza dude, the power of hello...

And because we're still getting accustomed to the walk-and-talk approach to philosophy and learning, today we're looking at what peripatetics believe too.

Time is not money; time is a an opportunity to live before you die. So a man who walks, and lives and sees and thinks as he walks, has lengthened his life. Donald Culross Peattie, Joy of Walking

Walking means seeing the unseen, understanding, friendship, privacy, emotional perspective, physical capacity... an image of life itself. John Man, Walk!

This book could not have been written by sitting still. The relationship between paths, walking and the imagination is its subject, and much of its thinking was therefore done -- was only possible -- while on foot... walking [is] a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways

I believe they're right.

And I believe Calvin shouldn't worry so much about what other people think.

 

podcast
5:50/6:19, 66/86

A happy start

This has been just about as perfect a first week of class as I've ever enjoyed, with enthusiastic students, mild weather, and a convivial revival of the post-Happiness Happy Hour tradition at the Boulevard last night. We were all peripatetic, no one was pathetic, all is copacetic. Everyone in Happy Class seems already to get the crucial point of presence, of being fully awake and alive to the moment at hand. We all seem happy to be here this week, and happy to keep on walking. Happy but not sappy, with nuanced views of the backdrop of cruelty and suffering that honest happiness cannot ignore or explain away. When I asked students to react to old Schopenhauer's repudiation of our subject, the responses were thoughtful, balanced, and wise.

Athletes speak of "staying within themselves," which I interpret to mean something like presence in motion and a disciplined commitment to training.  For a peripatetic philosopher that translates into a series of measured steps, establishing a reliable rhythm of corporeal movement that the mind naturally falls in with, making thought and forthright conversation flow. Endorphins too. Maybe that's how you "dissolve" (as Maria Popova says Willa Cather said) into happiness. And health. And a sense of meaning and purpose, if that's what you're looking for too.

Walk on!

5:30/6:17, 64/87

Peripatetics in Tennessee

The great peripatetic experiment seems to be working. Took both of my afternoon CoPhi classes out and across campus yesterday, 30+ students in each, ambling at a leisurely pace in discussion groups of 3, chewing on the questions What's philosophy, what's yours, & who's your favorite philosopher? We all met up at the Naked Eye Observatory, the Uranidrome, to compare notes, in the mid-to-late afternoon shade of Pluto and the Trans-Neptunian Objects, and after a bit resumed our trek. Complaints about bugs and heat and weary feet were few, appreciation of the open sky (which of course the brain is wider than, as Emily Dickinson the philosopher said) and fresh air was evident on many faces.

Next stop, the steps of the oldest and most classical-looking structure on our campus, the Old Main (KOM). Many interesting things were reported and later posted on our site. Some named usual suspects as their faves - Aristotle, Hume, Thoreau - while others surprised us - D.H Lawrence (or T.E., they weren't certain), T.S. Eliot, the author of  Kite Runner. 

And then, the fire engine and campus police suddenly swarmed our location with sirens blaring. We decided it might be best to move along. But we'll be back.

And back as well, at least in one small corner of middle Tennessee, is the proud, unduly-neglected, and now no-longer-dormant old Lyceum tradition of walking-and-talking philosophy.

5:30/6:16, 60/84

Small stuff

Had two more Opening Day classes yesterday, beginning with my first-ever 8 am class and concluding with the Philosophy of Happiness. Both went well, dwarfing the trivial annoyances, interruptions, and worries - a malfunctioning machine, a pair of looming deadlines, a nonconforming online form - that crowded in to fill the day's midsection. The early class gave me just the timely distraction I needed, from a rude school crossing-guard's gratuitous shout and whistle. (There must be magic in those whistles, the way they seem to empower some of their blowers with a sense of arrogant authority.) The later class compensated for the computer "help" that was no help at all.

The great thing about my job, and I suppose any job that regularly offers the possibility of absorption and constructive interaction with interested/interesting humans, is that when it goes well it makes all that other stuff and nonsense feel as small as it really is. A time-out from turbulence and trouble, a reminder of the shopworn wisdom in the old cliche about not sweating the small stuff.

In Happiness class I solicited a class Grump, someone who would admit to being unimpressed by our culture's manic pursuit of happiness and disinterested in its attainment. One or two confessed to a streak of pessimism but most seemed amenable to my Jamesian starting-point:

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. William James

So, we'll let Schopenhauer's ghost be our class Grump this time:

What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”

Well, I said, he's wrong. Oh, the world offers us plenty of small-potatoes unhappiness every day (see paragraph 1 above), the small stuff we all tend to sweat. But as yesterday reminded me, it offers other stuff too. Good stuff.

And I'm going to push my line on Schopenhauer: his ghost will never admit it, but his profession of pessimism made him happy.

5:30/6:16, 59/81

Ignatius

New Orleans was founded on this date in 1718. Some of my new students are from there (met two of my new classes yesterday, two more today), as is one of my favorite old ones. The scene in the courtyard yesterday just outside my classroom on Opening Day was perfectly mild and evocative of summer's transition to school days. The soundtrack would have to be something sweet and jazzy.





Quick free association: first thing you think of, when you think of the crescent city? Louis Armstrong, Mardi Gras, letting the good times roll? Katrina? For me it's one Ignatius J. Reilly, philosopher-slob, critic of modernity, Boethius and Batman enthusiast who said “leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.” I love it that New Orleans has a statue of him, not that many fictional antiheroes earn such a distinction.

"You must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age," Ignatius said solemnly. "Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books... I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.” ― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces 

5:30/6:15, 58/80

Staying awake

It's Fall Faculty Meeting day already, that annual kickoff event just  before classes begin when we all are supposed to crowd into the stuffy dramatic arts auditorium for a pep talk - last year more a scolding - from the top, a roll-call of new colleagues, and a sentimental farewell from one of our retiring number. We don't all go, there are boycotters among us, but I wouldn't miss it. Or the free lunch to follow. It's good to begin the year with a sense of the campus zeitgeist and the policy imperatives our administrative controllers intend to execute. As William Stafford's poem says, "it is important that awake people be awake... the darkness around us is deep." WA

It's the birthday of late novelist Robert Stone (1937), who said "Writing is lonely... most of the time you are in a room by yourself. Writers spend more time in rooms, staying awake in quiet rooms, than they do hunting lions in Africa." Staying awake is today's theme, it seems. Not everybody manages that well, at the fall faculty meeting.

I've given myself one last summer read, or re-read, just finishing again the masterful Wallace Stegner's All the Little Live Things. What a depth of insight into the crotchety and complicated relations between the generations, and into the contradictory ways nature and life are both beautiful and cruel. From beginning (“How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”)  to end (“I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow”) Stegner kept me both awake and dreaming in the surrounding darkness, the way only really great literature can. What a magnificent writer. He's one I'll mention the next time a student tells me she doesn't read fiction because it's not "true." Wake up, kids, and dream.

And now my summer's dream ends. It's back onto the highway for the long commute to school. I have an event-appropriate audiobook cued up for the ride: William Deresewiecz's Excellent Sheep. His recent postscript in Harper's is worth every educator's time, and it'll be much on my mind in Tucker Auditorium this morning. "How college sold its soul," indeed. Thank goodness for the honest refuge of fiction.

podcast
5:25 am/6:12, 61/83

Music of the spheres

Voyager 2 was launched 38 years ago today, towing a golden (actually copper) record featuring the sites, sounds, voices, and music of earth.

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras...

Would an alien intelligence listen to music, or even have ears? Mathematics is supposed to be the universal language, but this is way more fun to imagine. ET be goode!

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

And about musical sophistication in the cosmos.

Gene Roddenberry imagined our first warp drive ride into space accompanied by Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride." Wouldn't it be nice!

6 am/6:11, 67/82

We built that

Gene Roddenberry, the "Great Bird of the Galaxy," would have celebrated his 94th birthday today. His optimism spoke to a basic need I too seem to have had already at age 9 (and still have), when he introduced the Enterprise, Vulcan philosophy, the Prime Directive, and intergalactic and inter-species (never mind interracial) comity. His version of the human trek insisted that "there is a tomorrow — it's not all going to be over in a big flash and a bomb, the human race is improving, we have things to be proud of as humans. No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids — human beings built them because they're clever and they work hard." WA

I saw Roddenberry speak at my school when I was an undergrad in the 70s, at a time of American "malaise" when we all seemed to need a  re-infusion of that kind of humanistic, pluralistic, naturalistic, melioristic thinking. We could use a booster. Who else is going to build the better future?

In an episode from Trek's next generation, a young space cadet informs his captain that "William James won't be on my Starfleet exams" and is instructed, in a line Roddenberry didn't write but did inspire, "Nothing really important will be. Open yourself to the past, history, art, philosophy, and all of this might mean something."
gr
5:45/6:10, 74/82

‘The Philosopher’

I think I've found this academic season's poetic anthem and keynote, just in time for the first day of the Fall term in what I'm dubbing the Year of the Peripatetic. We'll be leaving our "chamber drear" at every opportunity, especially while the summer's sun is still with us. 

Enough of Thought, Philosopher;
Too long hast thou been dreaming
Unlightened, in this chamber drear –
While summer’s sun is beaming –
Space-sweeping soul, what sad refrain
Concludes thy musings once again?
– Emily Brontë (1818-1848), ‘The Philosopher’

Emily Brontë - Philosopher
6 am/6:09, 73/81

We forget

Late in his lovely memoir of growing up in Memphis, Screening Room, Alan Lightman steps briefly away from the intimate family narrative to recall one of the ineluctable realities revealed by his subsequent scientific vocation.

Caught up in the inches and minutes of our lives, we forget that we are specks on the surface of a sphere 12,000 miles across, which hurls us through six hundred million miles of empty space every year--as it orbits about a bigger sphere of gas and fire. And that larger sphere, our sun, makes its own circuit about the center of the galaxy every two hundred and fifty million years.

I try not to forget all that. Every time I gaze at the sky, day or night, I prod myself to keep things on the ground in perspective. I think about the cosmic scale of time and space, wonder what's out there, and regret the absence of perspective so widely suffered by those who never look up from the gritty details of daily living.

Lightman surprises me when he continues,

If we thought about such enormities, we would be unable to speak. We would be unable to write our few feeble words, build our flimsy cities. We would just wait for our minute of life and awareness to pass.

I suppose that's true of some of us. But I hope it's rather the case that if most humans ever really learn to keep it all in perspective, we'll become better people: more reflective and wonder-struck, less belligerent and cruel and stupid. More sustainably committed to living well together during our brief opportunity to circle the sun, and to passing along a solid legacy as the spotlight of time shifts ahead.

And I'd like to think we'd be better writers. Like Lightman.

I wonder if he ever read today's WA poem, Louise Gluck's "Telescope"? It shares his sense of incommensurability between the human and cosmic scales, and insinuates a delusional human tendency to see things as closer and more manageable than they really are. Moving away from the telescope's image of distant bodies, she says, "You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing."

Maybe. But I think it's also possible to see that we're connected with even the most remote realities, and that bearing them in mind prevents a kind of obtuse forgetfulness that we simply must overcome if we're ever to shrink the distances between ourselves and the stars. Or between one another.

5:30/6:08, 72/77
podcast

Steve Martin

Steve Martin is 70?! The wild and crazy philosophy major turned stand-up comedian turned actor turned bluegrass musician doesn't act his age in public. But he's studiously pondered  the philosophy of humor, and was deeply influenced by an early reading of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (whose protagonist was in turn deeply influenced by William James). His re-enactment of the death of Socrates rivals Woody Allen's version, if not Plato's.

[College] "changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me... If you’re studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life."

But in a good way.

5:30/6:06, 65/90

Healthy and wise

Dawn-rising doesn't work for everyone, and can in fact (says Charles Bukowski's WA poem this morning) be an impediment to awareness and wisdom. But even when I throw away the alarm clock in summer, my body clock hauls me up and out. If that doesn't make me healthy, wealthy, or wise, at least it makes me routinely reliable and (by summer standards) productive. Days when I've overslept 'til 7 tend to go off the rails - like Bukowski's life, as he cultivated the style and sensibility of "the defeated, the demented and the damned." That's one way to win a cult following, I suppose. Takes all kinds. The dissipated life's not for me.

It's Alfred Hitchcock's birthday. Note to Older Daughter:  he said “a good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission, and the babysitter were worth it." He also said happiness is "a clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive..." That's healthy and wise, at any hour. And if you're healthy and wise, you're wealthy in the most valuable currency there is.

6 am/6:05, 62/86

Nothing important to communicate

 "Echo 1, NASA’s first communications satellite, was launched on this date in 1960." WA 

What a different world we live in now, constantly chattering and listening to chatter that's been beamed into space and back. But Thoreau's point about the telegraph still applies, doesn't it?

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

 Much of what leaks into our broad, flapping ears lately seems to be gossipy infotainment (including most political discourse and other "reality" programming). I don't want to ditch the satellites - Commander Kelly's satellite transmissions have been transcendent - but down here on the ground there's definitely room for real "improvements."

==

6 am/6:04, 71/87
podcast (including previous posts)

Moving in

Back from moving Older Daughter to school, this time ahead of the throng since she's signed on as a Resident Assistant this year and had to report early for training. It's a different vicarious experience, moving your kid into an utterly empty college dorm. Same feeling of clean-slate anticipation and excitement, curiosity and mild concern, eagerness and trepidation, worry and hope.

But walking those empty corridors, peering into those identically scrubbed and denuded rooms, I was also struck by a feeling of the contingent, constructed nature of the collegiate experience we've inherited. Our traditional ways of educating and transitioning our young, preparing them for independence, happiness, and success, might be otherwise.

The appalling expense of higher education in this country (and non-public secondary education), the emphasis on preparing students for careers and and competitive participation in a "global economy," the false assumption (as Frank Bruni put it) that where you go wholly determines who you can be... these "givens" are mythic, and largely unquestioned. We just do it this way because we've done it this way. We could change.

5:35/6:04, 76/90

Truth and youth

Birthday of poet Sara Teasdale (1884), who understood life's bargain opportunity: “When I can look life in the eyes, / grown calm and very coldly wise, / life will have given me the truth, / and taken in exchange — my youth.” WA

Beware young people who think they already know it all, and old people who don't accept the bargain.

On this day in my youth, in 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. TD I was sure that would change our politics in a big way, for the better, and usher in generations of wise, honest leadership in America. I wasn't quite looking life in the eyes then. Now, I no longer expect politics to deliver transformational change.

That's one of the unfortunate truths the poet may have had in mind. It's not "the truth," the only truth - that would not be wise. She was trying to rhyme.

Jon Stewart was telling a truth when he signed off the other night: "bullshit is everywhere." (Remember when he hosted Harry Frankfurt?) Paul Krugman was too, in yesterday's Times: "the Republicans can't be serious." Still, after all these years.

 



7 am/6:01, 67/90

At sea

Beautiful night at the ballpark last night, a rare doubleheader and a sweep for the home team against Memphis. Amused myself between innings monitoring tweeted updates from the so-called GOP debate. What a ludicrous spectacle. What a letdown for all who still entertain the fantasy of responsible dialogue between serious and worthy applicants for the nation's most important position of leadership. As the Donald said, it was not "nice." Don't go, Jon Stewart, we need you!

Meanwhile, in our local election, none of the at-large candidates for five spots on our bloated city council could manage to garner even 10% of the vote. Rather than a run-off, since the amendment to shrink the council failed, how about a lop-off? The voters have spoken.

But there's good news: the right mayoral contender came up just a little short.

Today's the birthday of anthropologist Louis Leakey (1903), who showed that our earliest ancestors were "out of Africa," and the anniversary of ethnologist Thor Heyerdal's Kon-Tiki expedition (1947) showing that some of our later ancestors were a lot more resourceful and nautically intrepid than previously thought. WA

How would the current crop of political pretenders fare on Heyerdal's raft? They're already adrift and at sea. How far can they go? I'd like to find out. Shove off, guys.

5:50/6:00, 72/86

Vote

Fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (1965). We're still overcoming.

Appropriately it's voting day here in Nashville, near ground zero for events that precipitated that historic legislation. Our mayoral race does not excite me, though I do want to see the defeat of the candidate who was stupidly quick to declare the Charleston atrocity non-racially motivated.

I am eager to vote for the elimination of several city council seats. That body is ridiculously overstaffed and underwhelming. Like the Tennessee state House and U.S. Congress.

How many of us would have voted to drop "Little Boy" on Hiroshima seventy years ago this morning? And how many would have voter's remorse?

Would we have voted for penicillin in 1881? Or would there have been an anti-antibacterial movement?

We the people aren't as informed or as reflective as we ought to be, as participants in popular democracy, nor are our public educational institutions adequately supported and funded to that end. Was it H.L. Mencken who said the public is an ass? It is, often enough. But the plutocracy's a bigger one. Anyway, he was speaking publicly too.

Anti-intellectualism has always been a problem here, as Douglas Hofstadter documented. It's his birthday too. And as Isaac Asimov said,

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

Vox populi clearly does not always reflect the public interest, as old Rousseau rightly said, but it's always in the public interest to solicit the voices of the people and start a conversation. To the polls.

Postscript, 8:15 am. Getting antsy, waiting for the heavy rainfall to subside so I can get on with my habitual 8 am walk. Thoreau said he always went, "in any weather," but I'll bet there were mornings when he waited it out in his pondside shack too. Good time to invoke Stoic patience, consult the radar, admit will's natural limitations, and ponder this:

“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obli­gation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote."  On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Polls don't close 'til nightfall, there is more day to dawn.

6:30/5:59, 72/82
Podcast

Wendell Berry

Birthday of poet/novelist/farmer/environmentalist Wendell Berry (1934), whose poem about a man who diligently archives his vacation but still misses it could be an allegory of life in our socially mediated, digitally translated time. WA

...preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Aren't we rarely "in it" these days, many of us, though constantly online, in touch, in REC mode? Framing, documenting, liking, sharing, but not fully experiencing the moments of our lives?

Or is that just Chicken Little the Luddite squeaking?

Either way, Wendell Berry is an admirable defender of authentic existence and living at first hand, in touch with the earth that sustains us. Like his friend Gary Snyder he reminds us that nature isn't just something external to our lives but is life itself. We need to be there for it. In it.

I went to Berry years ago for help assembling my thoughts on the place of hope in our affairs, in Springs of Delight.

Writer and poet Wendell Berry tautly summarizes the call to hope I find so prominent in James and Dewey: "A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study life and our conditions, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope." But, he elaborates significantly, the search must center on ourselves, in our own time:

"We can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use . . . [T]he man who works and behaves well today need take no thought for the morrow; he has discharged today's only obligation to the morrow."

Berry goes on to illustrate but also to strain this correct emphasis on the present as preparing (and possibly sabotaging) but not simply waiting on the future. He says that disciplined attention to present needs aligns us "with natural processes, [with] no explicit or deliberate concern for the future. We do not eat, for instance, because we want to live until tomorrow, but because we are hungry today and it satisfies us to eat." In fact, both kinds of reasons—present satisfaction and continued existence—are coordinate in human action.

Maybe the best thing the eminently-quotable Berry ever said: "Be joyful because it is humanly possible." At least be present.

5:50/5:59, 75/90
Podcast

Happy existentialists

Birthday of Louis Armstrong (1901), who really did think it's a wonderful world; and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), kicked out of Oxford for writing risque poetry and disbelieving in God, who said "Do it now — write nothing but what your conviction of its truth inspires you to write.” He died before he was 30. WA

Yesterday's Godot post left me thinking about Existentialism and its popular but false reputation for bleakness. The proto-existentialist pioneers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche weren't philosophers of bleakness, though both depicted a stark world of lonely choice, personal isolation, and irreversible responsibility. When I think of them, though, the starkness recedes and a joyful, affirming, peripatetic mood steps up. Nietzsche's "formula" for happiness was "a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal." He said

“all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Rising at dawn, Nietzsche would stalk through the countryside till 11 a.m. Then, after a short break, he would set out on a two-hour hike through the forest to Lake Sils. After lunch he was off again, parasol in hand, returning home at four or five o’clock, to commence the day’s writing. Gymnasiums of the Mind

 Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane, cheerfully advised:

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” K's Journals and Papers

In contrast to Samuel Beckett's waiters, no peripatetic existentialist ever despaired to take the next step.

 6:50/5:58, 72/97
Podcast

Tired of waiting

It's been sixty years since Samuel Beckett affronted English theater convention with Godot. WA

VLADIMIR: There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet... We can still part, if you think it would be better. ESTRAGON: It's not worthwhile now.Silence.VLADIMIR: No, it's not worthwhile now.Silence. ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go? VLADIMIR: Yes, let's go.They do not move.

And the first curtain fell. Would you have stayed for the second act? Or would you have moved?

Peripatetics, or this one anyway, find that play's inertial heaviness unnerving. Those guys, like most angsty existentialists, just needed to go.

As do I, on this lovely autumnal August morning. Just a few lines of dialogue more, for the road, but then I'm not waiting another moment.

VLADIMIR: Try and walk. (Estragon walks.) Well? ESTRAGON: It fits. VLADIMIR: (taking string from his pocket). We'll try and lace it. ESTRAGON: (vehemently). No no, no laces, no laces! VLADIMIR: You'll be sorry. Let's try the other. (As before.) Well? ESTRAGON:(grudgingly). It fits too. VLADIMIR: They don't hurt you? ESTRAGON: Not yet. VLADIMIR: Then you can keep them. ESTRAGON: They're too big. VLADIMIR: Perhaps you'll have socks some day. ESTRAGON: True.VLADIMIR: Then you'll keep them?ESTRAGON: That's enough about these boots...VLADIMIR: Yes, but—ESTRAGON:(violently). Enough! (Silence.) I suppose I might as well sit down.He looks for a place to sit down, then goes and sits down on the mound.VLADIMIR: That's where you were sitting yesterday evening.  I could only sleep. VLADIMIR: Yesterday you slept. ESTRAGON: I'll try.He resumes his foetal posture, his head between his knees.VLADIMIR: Wait. (He goes over and sits down beside Estragon and begins to sing in a loud voice.) Bye bye bye bye
Bye bye– ESTRAGON: (looking up angrily). Not so loud! VLADIMIR: (softly).
Bye bye bye bye
Bye bye bye bye
Bye bye bye bye
Bye bye . . .

And there they go again, blaming the boot for the foot's ambivalence. What Beckett said of uncomprehending critics, I say of his characters and all who identify with them: "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple, I can’t make out.” Just pick a direction and go, guys!

Set some goals, make a plan, do something... like my young friend who, following the example of his hero Penn Jillette, has reclaimed health and happiness and set himself on the path of the philosopher."The most basic things we owe each other as humans are love, respect, and telling the truth as we see it."

In fairness to the real substance beneath his innovative and surprising style, I'm sure Beckett would agree

6 am/5:57, 66/97
Podcast