On the wall, up the institution

Josiah Royce is not a household name.

His name recognition was once quite high, comparatively speaking, for an academic philosopher. That was a century ago. Lately, your average working philosopher in America toils in utter obscurity. The initial response to David Brooks's January shout-out for Royce suggests he/she likes it that way. "Josiah Royce deserves better readers than David Brooks," tweeted one scholar. Another called him out for interpreting Royce as saying scholars should "submit themselves to their institution, say to a university. They discover how good it is by serving it..."

Admittedly that last statement could use some trimming and qualifying. But committing (not "submitting," please)  to a university institution may just be, will-to-believe fashion, the best strategy for improving it.

Sometimes you first have to profess the loyalty you want to feel, if you want to really feel it. That's why it's not entirely cynical or ironical of my colleagues and me to proclaim ourselves true blue.  Saying it's easier than feeling it (not that we'd ever actually say it out loud, in public) but you've gotta start somewhere.



 In a 1900 letter to his Harvard colleague G.H. Palmer, William James extolled "the genuine philosophic universe" of his institution's department of philosophy, naming all the views of all his colleagues with whom he disagreed profoundly on points of philosophical commitment: Santayana's "pessimistic platonism," Royce's "voluntaristic-pluralistic monism," Palmer's "ethereal idealism," etc., alongside his own favored "crass pluralism." But they shared an institutional commitment, and their plurality continues to shine as the Platonic ideal of academic pluralism, diversity, openness, and civility across difference.

James and Royce famously sat on that wall in Chocorua in 1903, as James "damned" his friend's venerated Absolute. But his true colors were on display in another letter of 1900. To Royce he wrote, from across the ocean:

When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page, and one on you. When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design exclusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace. I lead a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such, you and I rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather loquacious still) in one last death-grapple of an embrace... Different as our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was being lived importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the Object which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical physico-moral-spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some skinny fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We "aim at him generally"—and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall dwell apart forever, though our formulas may.

That's marvelous! We don't engage our intellectual adversaries with such bonhomie anymore, and such respect. Or such frank (though Victorian) love, it's not too much to say. I can't emulate it myself, and I don't know anyone who can with any credibility. Alas.

But on the eve of another academic season at my university (Fall Faculty Meeting and department staff meeting Thursday, convocation Saturday, classes beginning Monday) I can perhaps muster just a bit more institutional commitment - and a bit more enthusiasm for the increasingly sluggish marketplace of ideas.

We're #385!

Postscript. If I'm being honest, the thing I'm most enthusiastic about at the moment is...

Kipling, James, Woodstock

A line in a review in the Times yesterday caught my attention: "Kipling shaped the thought of William James, with whom he worked out the themes of 'Captains Courageous.'" (“If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, Penguin Press, Christopher Benfey)

Did he? It's not so simple. Charles McGrath:

The other great theme of the Jungle Books is that of personal growth through manly, stressful adventure in the wild. This idea found a ready enthusiast in Theodore Roosevelt, then a civil-service commissioner in Washington. He and Kipling became friends and would visit the zoo together (where Roosevelt liked watching the bears, while Kipling preferred the beavers). Kipling also discussed his philosophy with William James, who visited Naulakha in 1895, and who drew on Kipling’s thinking, Benfey says, to formulate his notion of a “moral equivalent of war”—a proposed regimen of adventure and challenge designed to rid American youth of their growing softness.

James may well have drawn on some lines of Kipling's thought, though it's not immediately obvious how the literature of empire could bolster the repudiation of warfare in favor of constructively channeled alternatives like (say) the Civilian Conservation Corps of FDR's New Deal. In an 1899 letter James made it clear that he did not approve of Kipling's more blustery talk of "white man's burden" etc. "I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a 'burden' to carry."

James, in turn, partly inspired Kipling’s one truly American work, “Captains Courageous,” a 1897 novel about a bratty rich kid who falls off an ocean liner, is picked up by some fishermen sailing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and learns from them the virtues of responsibility and hard work... And Kipling’s idea of the natural world as a testing ground, and of life itself as a sort of Darwinian struggle, greatly influenced later Americans writers such as Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway... Kipling’s jungle, one of those enchanted realms where so many great children’s books take place: a world with no parents and very few rules. NYker

Lots to unpack here, but - speaking of no parents and very few rules, I've been distracted by another New Yorker story. The Woodstock generation, turns out, is not mine after all. Louis Menand:

...it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people... the peak year of the boom was 1957, when 4.3 million people were born, and those folks did not go to Woodstock. They were twelve years old... a lot of the people who went around saying “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” were over thirty... If you were born during the baby boom, you can call yourself a sixties person. You can even be a sixties person. Just don’t pretend that any of it was your idea.

No. I was twelve. But I did already like the Beatles. If you were talkin' about revolution, you could count me in (out)... I did have to register for the draft, just before it ended, but fortunately never actually had to say Hell no, I won't go. Would I have? Would I have lived a Canadian life instead? Guess I'll never know.

Zest

Taking an interest in things, events, ideas, interactions with others... making and sharing observations, perceptions, intuitions... connecting one's own experiences to the larger pageant of life... that's how a capacity for selective and focused attention gets honed and refined, so that we can begin to fashion a voluntary field of experience ("what I agree to attend to") and assemble a coherent pattern of living.

And, it's a requisite condition of a life of commitment, plurality, and intentional relation, or what Royce calls the philosophy of loyalty.

Further, it's a crucial step on the road to what James and Bertrand Russell call a life of "zest," and which most people nowadays just call happiness.

James: “wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness (etc.) there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’…”

Russell: "unhappiness is very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ‘ethics, mistaken habits of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends."

John Kaag also targets zest, in his American Philosophy: A Love Story, as inseparable from a life worth living. He connects it as well, through James and before him Emerson, all the way back to Socrates.

So... my current working hypothesis is that what I'm really tracking, in my inquiry into whatever it was Josiah Royce's Spirit communicated to me all those years ago about those elusive Germans, is the possibility and the necessity of zest, for a life well-lived.

By the way: my reconstructed habit of pounding the Chromebook along with the Seattle's Best first thing, well before sun-up, is proving zestful too. I was just treated to a lovely orange-pink predawn. Zest means not wanting to miss it.

Attention

Attention, in William James's Principles of Psychology, is prominently featured in Jenny Odell's unfortunately-titled How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy 

It's not at all about doing nothing. It is all about reclaiming control over the deployment of our most liberating tool of mental direction and physical agency. That's doing something, against the inertial drift of so much of our media-mediated/-saturated virtual lives now.

Maria Popova has often sounded a similar theme in Brain Pickings. She and Odell understand that our contemporary experience is much diluted and distracted, by the Internet and by our passive feeding and consumption thereof. If we want a better experience, we must attend with greater acuity and sharper intention. We must take a directed interest. James:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

Color us gray, lately.

Odell says her book is a cross between activism and self-help, but that undersells it. Some of her insights:

Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline.” 

“I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out,” 

I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.” 

“In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” 

“Thinking about maintenance and care for one’s kin also brings me back to a favorite book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses with the myth that people become desperate and selfish after disasters. From the 1906 San Franscisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, she gives detailed accounts of the surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances. Several of her interviewees report feeling a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and the connection they felt with their neighbors immediately following a disaster. Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor.” 

“What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.” 

Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding - anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching - does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed. 
We should refuse such dams first and foremost within ourselves.”

...the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.”  (See nyt essay on living in a simulation...)

reviews-nyt...wapo...guardian...nation
...

Relationalism

The aforementioned Brooks column anointing Royce as the philosopher for our moment was back in January, leading me to expect that his new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, published in April, would feature Royce prominently.

It's a good book, but Royce's name pops up just once. He joins a list of "Relationalists" (= non-hyper-individualists and "isolated self-interested monads") that includes Edmund Burke, Martin Buber, Walt Whitman, Martha Nussbaum, Annie Dillard, Gandhi, and MLK.

Relationalists are less motivated than hyper-individualists by ego and the drive for personal self-centered success, more by "connection, fusion, service, and care." They're committed. They understand that "a person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world." Doesn't matter how many luxury hotels, for instance, such a person might brand with his name.

The key points of Brooks's "Relationalist Manifesto" include

• Relationship. Life is not a solitary journey... It is a process of forming attachments... It is a great chain of generations...
• Connection. Society is a web, a person is a node in a network, a personality is a movement toward others.
• Nurture. Unconditional parental love instills a sense of we that precedes me.
• Commitment. Vocation, family, philosophy or faith.
• Selflessness. Surrender to something great creates strength.

This all sounds great. It doesn't sound much like the perspective of a William F. Buckley Jr. protege. Even a reformed one. I wonder what WFB would say about it? Would he, for instance, affirm the point about connection and commitment by pointing to his own crusading conservatism?

Royce's pluralism (AND James's, and Brooks's)

On my definition of the term (which I think is not the one that's been contested in the academic literature by some of my friends), Royce is a pluralist like his friend James. A pluralist by my reckoning is someone who recognizes, celebrates, and tries hard to accommodate all the teeming ways of being human.

Their differences are pronounced, but they're not to do with respect for human variety and diversity. David Brooks singles Royce out as a philosopher for our time, but if that's on account of his repudiation of hyper-individualism and his advocacy of communal loyalties and commitments then James is right there with him. Pretty sure I can document that, if anybody's skeptical of the claim. I might even be willing to go to Chicago in February with documentation in hand.

Brooks's recent column on pluralism names neither Royce nor James, but it reflects them both.

The struggle between pluralism and antipluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time...
We pluralists do not believe that human beings can be reduced to a single racial label. Each person is a symphony of identities. Our lives are rich because each of us contains multitudes.
Pluralists believe in integration, not separation... Pluralists are always expanding the definition of “us,” not constricting it... Pluralists believe that culture mixing has always been and should be the human condition. All cultures define and renew themselves through encounter. A pure culture is a dead culture while an amalgam culture is a creative culture. The very civilization the white separatists seek to preserve was itself a product of earlier immigration waves.
Finally, pluralism is the adventure of life. Pluralism is not just having diverse people coexist in one place. It’s going out and getting into each other’s lives. It’s a constant dialogue that has no end because there is no single answer to how we should live.
Life in a pluralistic society is an ever-moving spiral. There are the enemies of pluralism ripping it apart and the weavers of community binding it together. There is no resting spot. It’s change, fluidity and movement all the way down.
The terrorists dream of a pure, static world. But the only thing that’s static is death, which is why they are so pathologically drawn to death. Pluralism is about movement, interdependence and life. The struggle ahead is about competing values as much as it is about controlling guns and healing damaged psyches. Pluralism thrives when we name what the terrorists hate about us, and live it out.

The sticking point between William James and Josiah Royce and their latter-day defenders is NOT over these tenets of this version of pluralism. It's over the intransigent block-universe metaphysical monolith James detected behind Royce's good words about loyalty and community, and the insinuation that our wills might not be free enough to break the block and make a difference. A pluralistic universe can't be a static thing rooted in anything "Absolute"... so, said James, "Damn the Absolute." Royce's rejoinder: you've got it wrong, James, what you perceive as stasis is really a divine form of order we're free to join or not. So, damn-The Absolute! It's the very condition of our freedom, in a precisely stipulated and circumscribed sense that is itself not absolute.

Who's right? I once would have insisted on James, now I'm rooting for them both. We'll see.

Meanwhile, we can join the Vulcans in saluting the pluralism of Royce, James, and Brooks. Live long and prosper, humans. IDIC forever!

Royce's spirit

Opening Day of the Fall semester is just two weeks away. Everlasting summer, fading fast. Same old August story. What's to grab that's gonna last?

Josiah Royce's answer: a cause, a commitment, an object of affection, devotion, exertion, and steadfast loyalty. Something valorous, noble, and challenging that's larger than your puny self. A stake, in a word, in the life of spirit - spiritus, breath, life, the force than animates the world and moves events forward. “Unless you can find some sort of loyalty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.”

I don't think that's necessarily what Walter and Donald had in mind, in Reelin' in the Years, nor can I picture Josiah Royce grooving to Steely Dan. And nothing's ultimately going to last forever, in the cosmic universe. (Granted, though, a few billion years is a practical eternity.) But still, it puts the shrinking summer in perspective.

In all my years of teaching, when on Opening Day I asked students to name an American philosopher, no one ever named Josiah Royce. For that matter, almost no one ever named his more famous friend, colleague, neighbor, and favorite bete noire William James.

That's not their fault, it's a failing of our culture's educational priorities. But it's a failing comparable to the inconceivable scenario of Greek students entirely ignorant of Plato and Aristotle, French students of Sartre and Descartes, Germans of Kant and Hegel. Those cultures would consider that not just embarrassing and shameful but actually, in a word that meant much to Royce, disloyal. In ours it's just sadly and predictably disappointing. Philosophy's "cash value" (in James's misleading and misunderstood expression) has failed to impress the custodians of capitalist consumerism and commercialism.

Royce has been having a little moment, though. His thought features prominently in the pages of John Kaag's excellent American Philosophy: A Love Story. And David Brooks has endorsed the opinion that Roycean pluralism (or "relationalism," as he calls the cognate view he champions in The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life) may be the philosophy we need today. (He actually says the philosopher we need... but Professor Royce has not been available for direct consultation since 1916. Fortunately he left a voluminous bound body of work.)

Royce had an impact on my own early philosophical education, back in the late '70s when my mentors at the University of Missouri unexpectedly awarded me their undergraduate essay prize for my Royce-infused attempt to understand the abstruse idealistic metaphysical morass of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854). Royce had written The Spirit of Modern Philosophy back in the 1890s, and I'd randomly whisked it from its dusty perch in the stacks of the Ellis Library at Mizzou all those years later.

My winning essay is no longer in my possession, or probably anyone's, so I can't go back to it, precisely, for clues as to what real insight I may actually have gleaned from JR.

So, it's going to take some digging and extrapolating to begin to understand what it was about Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy that so captivated callow undergraduate me, circa 1978-9. What in that book emboldened me to write more confidently and knowingly about a metaphysically mystifying, abstruse, obscure set of variations on the philosophy I'd just learned to call Absolute Idealism than I can really have felt? Why did my capsule Roycean riff on the pre-Hegelian systematizers ("How's the system coming?" was apparently their common salutation) Schelling and Fichte persuade my teachers to think I deserved to win the undergraduate essay contest? I didn't know anything about Royce, or James yet either), or about their important mutual misalignment. Still don't know much about Royce, certainly compared to the Royce Society scholars I'll be addressing in a couple of months...

http://royce-edition.iupui.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Philosophy-of-Loyalty.pdf

My habitual reformation

"William James offers three maxims to aid the successful formation of new habits," or the re-formation of old habits gone slack. [LISTEN]

• The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible... take a public pledge...
• The second Maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up... abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way... whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one’s hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.
• A third maxim... Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new ‘set’ to the brain.

And that's why I'm posting herewith my renewed resolve to get back to rising and writing before dawn, rather than waiting for dawn's early light in the window to prompt the start of my day. 

Sleep is good, and not rising (as Thoreau said in Walden) to the prompting of a mere "mechanical servitor" is an old summer habit. But it's a bad habit for me, experience shows. 

Besides James and Thoreau, I'd like to thank some others for nudging me back to what worked.

Thanks, Anthony Trollope. "Trollope achieved his incredible productivity by writing in 15-minute intervals for three hours per day..."

Thanks, Garrison Keillor. "My reason for living is simply this: I am still working and my best work may be yet ahead of me."

Thanks, Margaret Renkl. "I gave myself permission to spend 15 minutes a day, in the midst of working and raising a family and tending to failing elders, to remember who I am."

Thanks, Maria Popova (and Aristotle). “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit...”

And...

Thanks, Obama!

You need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. ‘You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,’ he said.'I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. 'You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.’ Michael Lewis, Obama's Way

Don't even think about it. Just do it. Habits are habit-forming.

Identity & Truth, & Asheville

The curtain came down Wednesday night on "Identity and Truth," the summer course I offered students in my school's Master of Liberal Arts program this year. I miss it already. (But what are our goals?)

[LISTEN]

We were a small but devoted group of lifelong learners, including among others a teacher, an artist, a pilot, an accountant (retired). We tackled serious and sensitive subjects, including how it is that so many of our peers choose to identify themselves by such increasingly-constricted labels that invite mutual hostility, disrespect, and dishonesty. But we did it with civility and good humor, and a lot of fun. Wednesday nights were a sheer delight, as was our Thursday afternoon field trip to the Tennessee State Museum in July.

There were a few students younger than I, but most were of my generation. That's very different from the Fall and Spring, when I must constantly remind myself that my young charges don't have a clue what my jokes and pop culture references are about. I now have two children older than most of my students.

I'm really reelin' in the years. Some days, just reelin'... but I take heart in realizing that the view from here, from this pinnacle of years, affords a deep appreciation for life. "When you get older you realize how precious time is," says one of my student savants who quotes Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living or get busy dying."

Garrison Keillor, who's had his inglorious moments and his #MeToo moment, keeps cranking out good thoughts. "My life is good enough. Every day is incredibly precious. When you reach 77, you’ll feel the same way. It’s a shame that a con man is in the White House as the Arctic is melting and white nationalists are shooting up our cities, but we’ll be okay, we just need a Trexit vote next year..."

But we'll have to wait 'til next year to see if that's in the cards. Meanwhile, precious days await. I find they go better when I deliberately don't expose myself to the latest deplorable Drumpf updates early in the day.

Two final reports capped our last class, one on Alan Watts (naturally reminding me of Her) and the other on the Locke-Reid debate about personal identity. That odd but oddly-fitting juxtaposition spurred the thought that living in the present is a fine thing, but so is the recovery of dormant memories and the renewal of life they can sponsor. And, so is our commitment to the future. "The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" There's no reason to deprive our present of precious memory and hopeful anticipation. Wendell Berry:

"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." Discipline and Hope

Albert Camus: "Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." The Rebel

Our course was all about the distortions and depredations both identity and truth are bound to suffer, when we allow our present to be swamped by special pleading on behalf of this or that shrunken constituency, this or that shriveled conception of self and humanity. Our true identity is large and inclusive. We are the world, nay (say Alan Watts and, in very different ways, Carl Sagan, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and many others whose views we encountered this summer) the universe. Wrapping ourselves too tightly in our own skin is a big mistake.

Speaking of dormant memories delightfully stirred back to life, and of the renewal of life: last weekend I traveled to Asheville N.C., the designated meetup location for me and several of my old pals from grad school back in the '80s. The pretext is always a minor league baseball game. Do we really need a pretext? Does it really need to be a sporting event? Well no, but so far as I'm concerned it does need to include beer and enough measured time to loosen all our conversational reticences and restraints. Baseball's deliberate pace is perfect for that.

We've done this annual Friends Weekend three times now, at three different venues, and there seems to be a strong consensus for continuing it indefinitely. It's pretty much the only time we all see one another anymore, being scattered across several states and several hundred miles. I've had a similar experience re-connecting with professional colleagues at academic conferences, but it's different when genuine friendships dating to a time of personal and professional insecurity are involved. It's like the continuation of a comfortable conversation that feels fresh, not forty years old and stale. I recommend it.

I went up early, on Thursday, to spend a little extra time with our Best Man up in the mountains outside Asheville. We squeezed in an early game, we old throwbacks, on Throwback Thursday. The Royals' affiliate from Lexington was in town. I didn't keep score and can't instantly recall who won... but who cares? When the last great scorer comes to mark against our names etc., as Mr. Rice so rightly put it, and the game we were really playing was more about renewing old ties than about cheering for Tourists in pinstripes.

We'd been thinking of a hike in the Blue Ridge on Friday, but afternoon rain scotched those plans. It was just as well, we ended up spending precious quality time walking Penney (the last surviving old Golden Retriever of a trio, age 16) down that mostly-untraveled "primative" road in front of his place, and just rocking on the porch, listening to the birds, conversing, and enjoying the lesser summer warmth of 3,000+ feet.  Then to dinner by the river (creek? pond?)  in the charming little mountain town of Sylva, and to the lovely independent bookstore where the young student bookseller spoke excitedly in anticipation of taking one of my pal's classes this Fall.

Then late Friday night our old friend who now works and lives in northern Alabama ("Rocket City") rolled in. I observed that the exuberant cursing quotient in the house rocketed skyward, with his arrival. Life as a university administrator does that to some people.

Saturday afternoon we made our way back into Asheville where we were joined by the rest of our cohort, first at the Green Man craft brewery and then over to McCormick Field (dubbed a "delightful place" by no less luminous a past visitor than The Bambino himself, according to the image on one of the restroom doors... Bull Durham's Crash Davis, an old Tourist himself, anointed another) for these Tourists' game against the Phillies' affiliate from Lakewood NJ.

(Did you see they're going to play a game at the Field of Dreams in Iowa next year? It's not Crash's Carolina League, nor in fact is it heaven, but it too is a place where dreams are said to come true.)

 

Again, I forget and don't care who won. We won, we band of old brothers reunited and reinvigorated. A postgame repast of excellent Carolina barbeque capped the social evening, and then it was time for some of us to make our way back to the Country Inn. Google said it was just over a mile away, and we all fancy ourselves peripatetics of a sort (not to mention cheapskates), so we decided to hoof it.

Google lied, or else we were all really dragging. It took the better part of 45 minutes to make it back, the first portion of which presented Asheville after hours as a hopping, festive place that feels much bigger and bolder than the census figures would indicate. The middle passage was less delightful, but now at least I can say that I've walked through and seen light at the end of a tunnel. (So that's why it's called Tunnel Road.) A green light. We are borne ceaselessly into the past, straining to see the future. Sometimes, though, now is just right.

Conversation over breakfast Sunday morning again felt like stepping into a time machine. Old thoughts and memories rushed to the surface, new again. Old times rolled back the years, for a bit.

Wait 'til next year is a common refrain in baseball, and suggests one more reason to resist the call of some spiritual sages (like Alan Watts, in either analog or digital format) to live strictly in the present. I can't wait. But of course we must, with lots of specious presence to enjoy now and in the near future. Those days will carry us back ("God willin' and the creek don't rise," as some in these parts are reputed sometime to have said), and forward let us hope, to many happy returns of the day.

==

On this day in 1854, Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) published Walden; or, Life in the Woods... WA

15 Minutes

My favorite Nashville-based New York Times contributor reflects on the power of writing something rather than nothing, even if you only have (say) fifteen minutes at your immediate disposal. Nothing I didn't already know, but there's knowing and there's doing. She did it, with her new book Late Migrations and a steady stream of terrific opinion and nature-reflection pieces in the Times. Thanks for the timely reminder, Margaret Renkl.

Crossing the Finish Line in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Powell's ...So I started out with a paltry goal of 15 minutes a day. Some days I didn’t manage even that much... But most days I kept writing anyway: 15 minutes when I could manage it, a single sentence when I couldn’t. In only a few weeks, that little jump-start had gotten under my skin. After five years of surrendering to work and eldercare responsibilities, those few minutes with a notebook every morning had given me permission to write again...

A single essay is not much to show for a month of writing, but it was also not nothing, and that was the truth I found myself clinging to. It was an actual essay, and it would not exist if I had continued to wait for my life to get easier, for some magical expanse of writing time to open up. A month later, I made that 15-minute writing goal my New Year’s resolution, and I stuck with it, more or less, for the next two years.

I didn’t write every day, but I wrote many more days than not. I opened my notebook first thing in the morning, and I kept it open all day. Some days I came back to the essay again later, whenever I had a few minutes to spare. That was the unexpected advantage of writing every day, if only for a tiny stretch of time: even when I wasn’t sitting at my writing table with a pen in my hand, I was keeping the essay in my thoughts. When the time did come to sit down again, I didn’t need to re-read what I’d written; I didn’t waste time trying to remember where I’d left off. It was always right there, ready when I was, because I was never far away from it.

Even more surprising was the discovery that I didn’t need to be consciously thinking about what I was writing to be thinking about what I was writing. The act of writing seemed to prime my unconscious mind for more writing. I could be standing in the shower or carrying groceries in from the car or waiting for the dog to do her business, and a word that had eluded me earlier in the day suddenly handed itself over on a tufted pillow. Sometimes a dead-end from the morning’s 15-minute session turned into an epiphany later that night...

I did the best I could in the time I had, and the time I had was 15 minutes a day.

But 15 minutes a day, it turns out, is enough time to write a book. It’s also enough time to knit a sweater, to learn a musical instrument, to establish an exercise routine. Mastery won’t come overnight, but that doesn’t matter. Life is not a race, and this is not the story of the tortoise and the hare. It’s the story of the tortoise and herself. Whenever anyone asks me how I finally came to publish a book at the age of 57, I tell them that I gave myself permission to spend 15 minutes a day, in the midst of working and raising a family and tending to failing elders, to remember who I am. 

And thanks for those last five words, making this explicitly relevant to Identity and Truth.

Zest

We wrap up our semester today, pending next week's exams and final posts.

Kurt Andersen says the right has now effectively raised two generations of "fair and balanced" Fox-watchers who discount all facts that contradict their opinions. That was a joke, back in grad school: "Discard all facts that dispute your theory," was the parody principle with which we mocked our own earnest seriousness. Now it's evidently the new "norm"... how SAD.

It's evident that the incumbent POTUS understands very little of the machinery and purpose of shared governanace. And yet he seems to have understood  "better than almost everybody" that "the breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts" is a golden opportunity for his variety of huckster hustler politics, under cover of the "Don't even think about it..." mantra.

UCONN's Michael Lynch is one of the most astute observers of these truth-discounted times, and of the crucially enabling role played the Internet has played in diluting our commitment to a "shared public reality." In The Internet of Us he writes.

My hypothesis is that information technology, while expanding our ability to know in one way, is actually impeding our ability to know in other, more complex ways; ways that require 1) taking responsibility for our own beliefs and 2) working creatively to grasp and reason how information fits together... greater knowledge doesn't always bring with it greater understanding.

We're glutted with information, much of it false or irrelevant, while starving for wisdom and integrity. The "gods of silicon valley" will have much to answer for, if they don't step back from their unexamined support of authoritarianism in the public sphere (gathering and disseminating user data for the benefit of self-interested politicians, providing a ready and eagerly-neutral platform for all kinds of misinformation and outright lies, etc.)

But there's good news: it can't get much worse, we're surely at Peak Fantasy now. Aren't we? 

The final installment of American Philosophy: A Love Story reveals William Ernest Hocking's possibly illicit fantasy love interest, the Nobel novelist Pearl S. Buck. She declared herself "weary unto death" of proselytizing hypocritical American fundamentalist missionaries in China. Much like Barbara Kingsolver's later tale of missionaries in the Congo, she thought the do-gooders did far more harm than good when condescending to their "lost sheep." We'd all do better to listen and learn what we can from one another, rather than trying so hard to win converts to our own POV.

Gabriel Marcel was the French Existentialist (and fan of Hocking) who, contrary to the more prominent rockstars Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, did believe in God. He said “life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived." Can't it be both? But he and his atheist counterparts did agree was that philosophy must begin in actual human experience and "the concrete stuff of life," not in airy theoretical abstractions. 

The dead are gone, in body, and many of us also doubt their presence in any form of supernatural spirit. But their memories, legacies, and (for those who committed their thought to print) words may persist. Is it some sort of ancestor cult that engages those thoughts and continues the conversation with the old dead philosophers? 

No. We mustn't worship them, but why wouldn't we want to conduct a virtual dialogue with the wisest of the dead? Human finitude may be tragic but it needn't be a total loss. The dead and the living may continue to commune together. What else is a library but a gathering place for secular (though in its bibliophilic/philosophic way sacred) communion? Kaag's response to Royce's last written words is quite poignant on this point.

John Kaag ends his book where he began it, retutrning to the question of whether life is truly worth living. How do you "live a creative, meaningful life in the face of our inevitable demise"? His answer may strike some as disappointingly equivocal. It's been suggested that "maybe" is not so good an answer to that question as "possibly," with the latter's emphasis more hopeful and encouraging. 

That's as may be, but the publication of Kaag's latest book Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are gives strong indication that his "maybe" is as positive an affirmation as can be. As Nietzsche expressed it: "The formula of my happiness: A Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." And as Viktor Frankl quoted Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning, "He who has a why to live can endure almost any how."  The peripatetic life is the how of choice, for Kaag as it was for Nietzsche (who said all great thoughts are conceived while walking). "Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is the way we organize space and  orient ourselves to the world at large. It is the living proof that repetition--placing one foot in front of the other--can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress." Emerson, who was one of Nietzsche's heroes, agreed. "Each soul, walking in its own path, walks firmly..." So: walk your path.

And finally, as Kaag puts it in the last paragraph of his Acknowledgements, the project at West Wind, the recovery of love and purpose, and especially the birth of his daughter have all converged to restore for him the "zest" the makes life so very worth living. Zest awaits us all. Even in Fantasyland.

Wishing upon stars

In CoPhi, Fantasyland comes to Disney. And Disneyland only makes sense, of course, in a world of fantasy capable of Disney-fying itself and deliberately adopting a theme-park identity. That's not all bad, Kurt Andersen thinks; otherwise we'd have nothing resembling historic preservation at all.

Celebration, FL ("ruined by mold and shoddy construction")

On the other hand, when a third of park patrons are nominal grown-ups we have to ponder the implications of an infantilized America. Psychologist Alison Gopnik says we're most childlike when consuming, or really consumed by, our fictions. The fantasy-industrial complex of our time now practically guarantees our perpetual prepubescence. Kids R Us, in the world of make-a-wish.

(Peter Singer, btw, has thoughts about the foundation of that name. Is it better to spend $7,500 on making a sick kid's wish to hang out with Batman or Scott Kelly come true, or to save several other from immanent starvation? Is that really such a hard call? Only in a Disneyfied land.)

And speaking of magical/wishful thinking, Rhonda Byrne's Secret counsel is to "be like a child, and make-believe... and watch the magic begin!" That's the faith of our "dominant religion" in the church of Get Yours Now (a spin-off of Flip Wilson's Church of What's Happenin' Now), the confident belief that wishing will make it so. Our popular music tells the tale: When you wish upon a star, I'm a believer, Oh oh oh it's magic, y'know... etc.

Children frequently do imbibe the faith and hit the jackpot here. America's Facebook fantasy made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire at twenty-three, quicker than he could grasp the meaning or importance of privacy. Lots of Wall Streeters were (and are) Wunderkinds too, right up until they weren't. Too big to fail? Or too young to know the meaning of the word? Have social media and online life generally contributed to making it much too "easy to track people without their knowledge"? Or is the concept of privacy now just a quaint holdover from primitive yesteryear?

In American Philosophy: A Love Story, John Kaag and his close colleague made an unsettling discovery: the women were all in the attic, at the West Wind library. Even Lydia Maria Child, "first woman of the Republic," "grande dame of American transcendentalism," observed with barely concealed contempt for the blithely unaware sexism of her time that women had no choice but to be "self-reliant" in a world of benighted male chauvinists.

Hull House founder Jane Addams defeated Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison in 1913, and won a Nobel Prize in 1931. I'll bet half of you never heard of her, or the Settlement House movement of which she is the most salient example. How is that possible? Well, she was in the attic.

The humane ideals of philosophers in the American tradition have stood  too much in the shadow of over-intellectualizers who value the abstract ideas over concrete experience. Addams, inspired and supported by John Dewey, pushed back hard. "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be the device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes the method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men." And women, John.

Agnes Hocking's Shady Hill School (pics) looks and sounds like fun, with its supra-rational exuberance and all. An old 60s protest poster complaining about "no poetry in your lectures."

Not a problem at Shady Hill, as poet/alum May Sarton corroborated. "The school was born of the marriage of poetry and philosophy, and though philosophy was worshipped, poetry ruled." (And here's a poem for today... The other day there was an even better one, by Billy Collins: I sometimes wonder about the thoughtful Roman/who came up with the notion/that any problem can be solved by walking... But it was a thoughtful Greek named Diogenes, Billy, who came up with it first.)

Ms. Sarton said, "We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be." It's much easier to muster the courage of self-possession in a supportive educational environment committed to that very endeavor.

Henry James in broad daylight

It's Henry James's birthday. He wrote long meandering self-interrupting elegant sentences that drove his older brother William right up the wall. In a 1905 letter William complained to his sibling of the latter's "method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don't know what to call it, but you know what I mean)..."

And then he asked Henry: "But why won't you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?"

Henry, always gracious in his praise of Older Brother's books and ideas, declined. In literary circles he's managed well enough without William's enthusiastic approval, at least according to those who consider him The Master.

“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Why so dark? And in fact, Henry was peripatetic enough for us to suppose that at least some of his best work was due to the time he spent ambling and cycling in daylight. 

In the foyer at Lamb House stood a round table upon which were piled hats, gloves, scarfs, and walking sticks for every possible scenario: golf, walks, rides... In Rye, James struck the right balance between work and leisure. At 3 p.m., he walked its streets. As one guest recalled, James had ''the air of a curate making the rounds of his village.'' On first-name terms with the butcher boy and the postman, he also indulged in gossip with Rye society, who welcomed his presence. One dowager objected to his not playing bridge. ''For he really has a very clear mind,'' she lamented. He was saving it for the late afternoons, when he returned home to read and revise the morning's work.

Like an earlier Henry, he too walked to work. And rode.

The weave of time

Carlo Rovelli permits himself a lovely digression, in The Order of Time, to acknowledge the enduring presence of two past colleagues whom he calls "spiritual fathers":

Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing seas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread. This book is also part of that weave...

"This, too, is time: a strange shifting of perspective." 

Indeed. The great conversation that is the history of the life of the mind overspills, gloriously, the banks of the river of time.

"We inhabit time as fish live in water..." Guardian extract

“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. 
For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.” 

“I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.” 

g'r

Dawn: A Serenade to the World Becoming Conscious of Itself

In praise of the natural optimism of daybreak.

BY MARIA POPOVA

“In the name of daybreak / and the eyelids of morning / and the wayfaring moon / and the night when it departs,” Diane Ackerman wrote in her wondrous poem-prayer for presence. There is a singular and deeply assuring beauty to the prayerful optimism that daybreak brings. On the darkest of days, the knowledge that the sun will rise is the sole certainty we can hold on to. And when it does rise, it ignites the splendor of a world becoming conscious of itself — the first birdsong, the first breath, the first catlike stretch, the first cup of tea.

That splendor is what the great Polish-American children’s book author and illustrator Uri Shulevitz (b. February 27, 1935) celebrates with uncommon tenderness of heart and brush in his 1974 masterpiece Dawn (public library) — a watercolor serenade to the world as it becomes conscious of itself.

The book opens with a splash of quiet stillness in the final stretch of night... (continues)