Coming of age, time's arrow aside

Time keeps on slipping slipping slipping...


http://dlvr.it/T1FTZ2

Coming of age, time's arrow aside

Today, and for the next few weeks, my wife is nominally and calendrically older than me: we were both born in the year of Sputnik, but I not until Valentine's Day. I love pointing that out to her.

She might need to hear what Maria Popova and Simone de Beauvoir say about time's arrow… (And happy birthday to WJ, a spry 182 today.)

Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

…to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing)...

"There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion." Simone de Beauvoir

[John Lachs could have written that.]

Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope and the artist's task to liberate the present from the past. -The Marginalian

“Happy people die whole.”

The great poet Robinson Jeffers, born on this day in 1887, on moral beauty, the interconnectedness of the universe, and the key to peace of mind https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/06/03/robinson-jeffers-sister-mary-james-power/

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/C17Ex-MOjZH/

Morning Person? You Might Have Neanderthal Genes to Thank.

Hundreds of genetic variants carried by Neanderthals and Denisovans are shared by people who like to get up early.

Neanderthals were morning people, a new study suggests. And some humans today who like getting up early might credit genes they inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors.

The new study compared DNA in living humans with genetic material retrieved from Neanderthal fossils. It turns out that Neanderthals carried some of the same clock-related genetic variants as do people who report being early risers...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/science/neanderthal-sleep-morning-people.html?smid=em-share

Pragmatic twist (aka meliorism)

 

 

Honorably peripatetic

The new semester's about to launch, I'm looking forward (as always) to pedagogic motility.


http://dlvr.it/T16XVG

Honorably peripatetic

I'm pleased to see, in our Honors College's recently-posted building tour, a brief spotlight on room 218.

I've never taught in that classroom before, but all three of my CoPhi classes this semester (starting next week) are slated for there. 

What especially pleases me is the open floor arrangement. Lots of room for a peripatetic philosopher to ramble in, and encourage students to want to get up out of their chairs and join him - just as soon as the weather outside is no longer frightful. I'll encourage them to dress appropriately for the season and wear comfortable shoes.

 

Calvin, and every student who's ever told me they suffer "social anxiety," just need to reflect on what Eleanor Roosevelt said: 

“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”

Embodied connection

Taking a Cue From the Squirrels in My Birdhouse

"...To make it through the gathering disquiet, I will need embodied connection. As my wild neighbors did in the uncheery newness of an inhospitable morning, as I did myself in all the lovely places I visited on book tour, and in the company of dear friends on New Year’s Eve, I will need to seek comfort in the warmth of others this year. Whenever the cold creeps in, wherever the dark night pools, I will need to look for others. I will need not pixels but voices. Not distances but reaching hands." --Margaret Renkl 

And see, also in the Times this morning, David French...

“[Brene Brown writes]: Empathy is a choice, and it’s a vulnerable choice. Because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.”

In other words, if you’re really sharing sorrow, you’re feeling it as well, and as you feel what your friend feels, you lighten your friend’s load. Brown continues: “If I share something with you that’s very difficult, I’d rather you say, ‘I don’t even know what to say right now. I’m just so glad you told me.’ Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.”

Those of us who’ve experienced that connection and love should feel an urgent necessity to extend it to others..." 

Stephen Hawking happy

When asked about living with [ALS, Lou Gehrig's ] disease, he told an interviewer that he was "happier now" than before he became ill. "Before, I was very bored with life. I drank a fair bit, I guess; I didn't do any work . . .When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have." GK

 

‘He had an unquenchable zest for life’

Graham Nash

"My feet are always up"-csny's great harmonizer urges persistent pursuit of personal passions…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001v2w0?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

“flash and sparkle”

A week ago my wife and I spent a delightful afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago. Laying eyes on American Gothic was a highlight for me.

They do need to talk, don't they? And wouldn't the museum experience be so much more amusing if all the pictures were captioned like New Yorker cartoons!
 
The clear highlight for her was all that Impressionism, especially Monet (Kieran Setiya flags Julian Barnes's appreciation this morning).

I've never quite grasped the special allure of that artist, but a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art sheds light. I especially like Patrick Bringley's invocation of Emerson's lively language to describe the artist's uncanny way of transcending mere vision, showing us how to see beyond the literal surface. Next time I'm in an art museum, I'm going to talk to a guard or two.

"If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge. I step up to a landscape painting called Vétheuil in Summer, close enough that it swallows my field of vision. I find that my eyes can accept its fictive world as real. I see a village and a river and the village's reflection suspended in river water, only in Monet's world there is no such thing as sunlight really, just color. Monet has spread around the sunlight color like the goodly maker of his little universe. He has spread it, splashed it, and affixed it to the canvas with such mastery that I can't put an end to its ceaseless shimmering. I look at the picture a long time, and it only grows more abundant; it won't conclude.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can't be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the "flash and sparkle" of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than our tidying minds typically let us see. Usually, we are looking around for useful information and dampening or ignoring a riot of irrelevant stimuli that threatens to drown it out. Monet's picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters—the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters—and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment.

When I experience such a thing, I feel faint but definite tremors in my chest. I imagine that a similar sensation inspired Monet to pick up a paintbrush. And with this picture, he has trembled his feelings over to me." — All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

The faith of a suffering poet

Christian Wiman's story of faith, suffering, and love is fit for James's Varieties


http://dlvr.it/T10f2g

Christian Wiman

A poet whose religiosity (which "begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end") is complicated, possibly incoherent-- he acknowledges "no solution to the problem of suffering"-- but still fascinating from a humanist perspective. His conversion and faith-through-suffering story would have made the cut for James's Gifford Lectures. A friend calls him a bridge between religion and philosophy. If I were a Yale student I'd take his class. If he ever relocates to Fairfield I may have to drive over and pay my respects. I'll certainly read Zero at the Bone.

...During his years at Poetry [as editor], Wiman came to feel alienated from contemporary poetry and what he regarded as its self-obsessed confessionalism. Before he learned he had cancer, he'd been planning to resign from the magazine—he and [wife Danielle] Chapman, in thrall to the mythology of another pair of poet partners, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, living and writing in pastoral bliss in New Hampshire, hoped to leave Chicago for Tennessee and make Fairfield into their own Eagle Pond Farm. But Wiman's cancer treatments can cost more than a million dollars a year; handcuffed by health care, they stayed put. Then, in 2010, Wiman was invited to give a lecture at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, on the campus of the Yale Divinity School. He was so taken by his conversations with the students, the way they talked so straightforwardly about their faith and their fears and what he considers life's ultimate concerns, that when he got home he wrote a letter to Yale angling for a job.

Wiman became a senior lecturer in religion and literature, and Chapman became a lecturer in English. He is now the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts. One Friday morning this fall, at nine-thirty on the nose, he arrived in a seminar room on the Sterling Quadrangle for his course "Poetry and Faith" holding up a stack of handouts like Perseus holding the head of Medusa. He'd woken that morning full of fever and pain and nausea—something that still happens to him every few weeks, most often from colds and viruses his weakened immune system can't fight off—and had considered cancelling the class, but he wanted to clear up something he'd said the previous week, about Philip Larkin's "Aubade." Wiman had told his students that the poem spoke the truth to him as a Christian, which shocked some of them, since it famously describes religion as "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die."

For Wiman, the poem's theological power comes from its confrontation with "a kind of absolute nothingness." His handout contained a few quotations clarifying the point. The first was from the German theologian H. J. Iwand: "Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists!" The second was from a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer not long before he was murdered by the Nazis: "We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur" (as if there were no God). Before Wiman could finish with the handout, a student tried to slip in late. Wiman reminded his class of the punishment for tardiness—memorizing a sonnet—then turned to that week's readings, which were about love..." --Casey Cep, NYer

To love god, he thinks, one must love life, the world, and all that's in it. Pragmatic meliorists differ on that point, loving only what's lovable and fighting what isn't. 

But for a man racked with debilitating cancer, having survived a brutal Texas childhood, to have made such a gracious accommodation to his own suffering is impressive. Maria Popova is impressed, and characteristically insightful about Wiman and his relevance to those of us who cannot share his particular variety of faith. He, she writes,

considers how any large and luminous love transcends the personal — the realm of the self — and unselves us into the sacred…

At its core, love is the quality of attention we confer upon another; and as Simone Weil observed in her timeless meditation on the nature of grace, “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” All of love’s gravity and all of its grace are found in our acts of attention.

Like WJ I cannot pray ("I cannot possibly pray-I feel foolish and artificial"). But that line would have grabbed WJ's attention, as it has mine.  Especially that word love.

If you build it...

Assembling a team of inspiration, motivation, and moral support. The lineup includes Emerson, Richardson, McPhee, Wilder, Jones, Brock...


http://dlvr.it/T0ylwD

If you build it...

I'd like to think Emerson would have approved the James Earl Jones speech in Field of Dreams (though a speaker in Ottawa at the Baseball Conference in '21, Keir Hichens, did not).

"Toward the end of Nature, for example, Emerson turns directly to his reader and says unblushingly:

Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world." --Robert Richardson, First We Read...

Writing a book, no less than plowing a field and laying out a diamond, is building a world too.

I've also been looking to nonagenerian John McPhee for inspiration and motivation. His wonderfully/optimistically-titled Tabula Rasa: Volume 1  begins with the author's recollection of his own youthful encounter with old Thornton Wilder, who admonished the younger man never to question the value of "scholarship"--Wilder's term for a late-life authorial project that struck young McPhee as pointless. Older McPhee realized that what Wilder was really pursuing was an "Old Man Project," a reason to continue keeping daily accounts with the world and his own experience therein.

McPhee offers this practical advice, which may not be the generally-approved method of academic scholarship but which resonates with my own experience and makes good authorial sense to me.

"I would go so far as to suggest that you should always write your lead (redoing it and polishing it until you are satisfied that it will serve) before you go at the big pile of raw material and sort it into a structure.

O.K. then, what is a lead? For one thing, the lead is the hardest part of a story to write. And it is not impossible to write a very bad one. Here is an egregiously bad one from an article on chronic sleeplessness. It began: “Insomnia is the triumph of mind over mattress.” Why is that bad? It’s not bad at all if you want to be a slapstick comedian—if humor, at that stratum, is your purpose. If you are serious about the subject, you might seem to be indicating at the outset that you don’t have confidence in your material so you are trying to make up for it by waxing cute. I have often heard writers say that if you have written your lead you have in a sense written half of your story.

Finding a good lead can require that much time, anyway—through trial and error. You can start almost anywhere. Several possibilities will occur to you. Which one are you going to choose? It is easier to say what not to choose. A lead should not be cheap, flashy, meretricious, blaring. After a tremendous fanfare of verbal trumpets, a mouse comes out of a hole blinking." --Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process 

So the takeaway is: take the time and trouble to do and re-do a good lead, which--like a good lead-off hitter--sets the table and the tone for what follows. So who's the inspiration here? Shoeless Joe? Rickey Henderson? Ichiro?

No. I'm sticking with Lou, my boyhood hero, c.1967.

Compos mentis

Healthy minds and flourishing lives go together like contented cruisers... and dog-walkers.


http://dlvr.it/T0w6R3

Compos mentis

Here it is, the new year getting older by the moment. I find myself wanting to work, this morning, on the Honors Lecture I've just agreed to deliver in April. But there are other and more pressing deadlines to meet. So I'll just nod at this now, and then try to re-direct my attention. 

The lecture series is called Mental Health and the Good Life: Strategies for Happiness, Wholeness, Wellbeing. My contribution will be "Healthy Minds, Flourishing Lives: A Philosophical Approach to Mental Health and Happiness"... 

I do wish to disassociate myself from the series' avatar, whose name adorns the program's most coveted scholarship. His approach to economics and to governance do not, in my opinion, conduce to mental health or to general human flourishing. 

But never mind. He was a local boy who made a name for himself in the world of scholarship and was awarded a Nobel Prize. I hope our students are inspired by his precedent, but not his benighted and constricted libertarian worldview. Fortunately I'm not tasked to talk about him. (Nancy MacLean did that, expertly.) My topic, mental health and happiness, is far more compelling.

So how to begin?

Garrison Keillor's opening lines in his New Year's dispatch from a cruise ship might work.

These elderly folks [on his cruise] were carelessly frittering away their children’s inheritance, money that might’ve put a young person through Malarkey State for a degree in communications and a career as an influencer, but it was sweet to see the affection between the lengthily married, the exchange of glances, holding hands, the impulsive kiss. To stay in love, that’s a good way to maintain compos mentis…

Many kids these days, I observe, are avowedly angst-ridden and seemingly not much in love with life. But that's the bedrock of every other form of vital human connection. I made that point the last time I spoke to the Honors College in August '22, talking about Aristotle on friendship. 

It was the main message in last semester's Philosophy of Happiness course too, especially from The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. 

And it's central in John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

Health and happiness are inseparable. Mental health depends on love, connection, personal investment in a world, community, relationships, friendships, social support, ...

That's what I'll plan to say in April.

Never despair

https://www.threads.net/@revejs/post/C1nyLKTOe9E/

Humanism is a meliorism

"… Humanism is a philosophy, not a religion, so it has no dogma—but it does have a creed: Humanism believes in the equality of all humans and celebrates the rich diversity of experiences between us. Humanism believes our actions are best informed by reason and critical thinking. And above all, Humanism believes in meliorism—that the world can be made better by human effort. That we can alleviate the suffering of our fellow man, and work toward human flourishing for all.

Thomas Paine penned his own Humanist creed in his work Age of Reason: "I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."

And Humanism comes with thousands of years of philosophical texts: Ideas first espoused by the Greek philosophers Cicero and Epicurus, as well as the Chinese philosophies of Taoism and Confucianism, were later resuscitated by Renaissance Humanists like Petrarch, Desiderius Erasmus, and Michel de Montaigne. During the Enlightenment, Humanist writers like Voltaire and the Marquis de Condorcet brought those ideals into our states and governments, and modern writers like Steven Pinker continue the work, all gospel that humans have some agency against the ails of the world.

 
Throughout history, we took those ideals and made them manifest. As Sarah Bakewell points out in her book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope: "It was thanks to humanistic beliefs in reason and meliorism that Voltaire argued for tolerance of different religions, Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges argued for including women and non-European races in the French Revolutionary idea of human liberation, and their fellow Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham argued for what would now be called LGBTQ+ rights."

It was Humanism's insistence on equality that demanded an end to slavery. It created orphanages, hospitals, social work, and women's suffrage. It implored us to devise spaces for disabled persons. It was Humanism's belief in meliorism that inspired human rights movements and liberal democracies. The progress we have made comes from Humanism's central belief that all human beings are equals and that we have an equal right to human flourishing.

 
Whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to this goal. "I am a humanist," the philosopher Kurt Vonnegut once said, "which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead."
…

-Elle Griffin

Marcus Aurelius on How to Begin Each Day: The Stoic Recipe for Unassailable Sanity and Inner Peace – The Marginalian

And: recall daily how preciously privileged we are, in the first place, to be breathing at all.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/13/marcus-aurelius-meditations-begin-each-day/