Maverick Philosopher

Social Distance and Good Relations

Social distance aids in the preservation of good relations with people. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, disrespect. In the famiglia, especially. Conventional usages, phony and formulaic as they often are, have their uses. They allow for civil interaction while preserving distance. "Good morning." "After you, sir." We all want respect even while aware of how little we deserve it and how insincere are those who show it.

A figure from Schopenhauer comes to mind. We are like porcupines on a cold night. They come together to stay warm but then prick one another and move apart. Trial and error leads to the optimal spatial adjustment.

The art of life, with its trials and errors, is learned by living, and learned best by living long. 

Consolations of Late Adulthood

Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us?  In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.

One is first of all physically undeveloped and weak. But grow tall and strong, brisk of stride and stern of visage, and you project a secular analog of Christ's noli me tangere,  don't touch me. (Cf. John 20:17.)
  
The child is also psychologically without defenses, overly impressionable and suggestible, and at the mercy of anyone who cares to launch an attack. But as the years roll by one develops the requisite filters. One learns to hold people and their attitudes at arm's length, psychologically speaking. Reading the Stoics helps, as does blogging. One develops a thick skin given all the bottom-feeders and scum-suckers that patrol its vasty deeps. But mainly it is just living day by day and dealing with the world's tomfoolery that has the requisite desensitizing effect. One becomes self-assured and sufficient unto oneself. Validation by others becomes less and less important.

In third place comes the financial weakness of childhood. Money buys freedom, freedom from the wrong environments and the wrong people. A little thought discloses that money is negatively related to happiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the absence of misery. Or to put the point precisely, it can buy that without which most of us will be miserable. It can put one in a position where the pursuit of happiness is likely to succeed. It doesn't take much by way of money and what it can buy to be happy. But happiness does require a modicum, with the possible exception of a few enlightened sages.

So adulthood has its advantages, and for some of us they outweigh its disadvantages. But your experience may vary, and a fool's errand it would be to argue against another's experience.

A Life Goal

Full self-integration, maximal self-individuation.

Aim high. You won't be able to achieve the goal in this life. So believe beyond the sublunary. Live as if your life does not end at death. What harm could it do? No harm at all, and indeed the opposite. We live better here and now when we believe that life has a meaning that transcends the petty and particular, the vain and the transient; when we believe that we are not just dust in the wind.

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

Read the rest at Substack.

Safety is Overrated

Nisi duae res necessariae

Rely on Conscience

In matters moral, reason is weak, easily suborned by the passions, given to rationalization, and easily entangled in the threads of its own dialectic. Reason is not  to be despised but not quite reliable. In matters moral, it is better to rely on conscience.

This advice rests on two presuppositions. One is that conscience is a source of moral knowledge, which itself presupposes that there is moral knowledge. The other is that one's conscience has been well formed. Both presuppositions need examination. But don't make the reliance on conscience contingent on the completion of their examination.

Truth and Decision

One cannot decide what the truth is. But one can and must decide what one will accept and live by as the truth.

The Truth of Life and the Art of Life

We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding.  They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.

The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that  "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)

The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.

How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

Here is a possible attitude for examination.

Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from the proximate, and unfits one for the only life that is sure. Accept finitude, for we are not made for anything more.

But even this train of thought is dangerous. To ride it is already to forsake short views and to speculate fruitlessly about views and about which is best. That view alone is truly short which is accepted thoughtlessly and thus not as a view. The truly short view is no view. If you so much as ask whether the life lived in sensuous immediacy is the truest or best, the worm of inquiry  -- call him Skepsis -- has already entered your head. Or perhaps he was there all along and now you are feeding him.  

But it is too late. You are on the path of inquiry and there is no turning back. Forward you shall go to points unknown. Will you proceed resolutely or in the desultory way of wishy-washy worldlings?

But is it really too late? Why can't one just stop? The trick is to do so without explanation or justification. The example of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that this is impossible. Philosophical Investigations,  309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all the inconclusiveness and endlessness that that entails. He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It is not clear that it can be done, but you can try.  I'm not saying it should be done.  On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  That would be like copulating your way to chastity.  For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?" 

And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic.  He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?

Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style.  But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode. 

Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk.  There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below.   As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft,  "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

The Long and the Short of it

Long views or short? Substack latest.

Hard and Soft

You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa  must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation.  Self-individuation is a task, not a given. 

Ars vivendi longa, sed vita brevis

Life is too short to master the art of life. That is surely the case for most. A few old souls are exceptions to the rule. 

Self-Deprecation

A modicum of self-deprecation,  judiciously deployed, will enhance your relations with others. Too much will earn contempt, and the opposite hostility.

Let it Go and Move on

Let the past go and move on. Pack as much life as possible into the few years that remain. Squeeze in as much vital thinking and thoughtful vitality as you can. Move up and away from your vices. Consign your hebetude to history. Break useless contacts. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Mill the grist. Press the grapes of experience  for the wine of wisdom. A philosopher's harvest years come late. The clock is running. The format is sudden death. The time control is unknown. The Reaper waits, he is patient, his scythe aglisten in the dying rays of the setting sun. There is work to be done, and it can only be done here. Get on with it, noble soul!

Fake it and Make it

 When we started out, did we know what we were doing? We do now.

A bit of posturing and pretense may be needed to launch a life. Posture and pretense become performance. The untested ideal becomes the verified real. At the start of a life scant is the evidence that you can do what you dream: you must believe beyond the evidence if you are to have a shot.

And so I beg to differ with W. K. Clifford:

For a couple of rather more technical treatments, see here.

The Long and the Short of It

The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it.  This suggests that the old who lose themselves  in the quotidian round  may avoid the view from above and cultivate thereby a life-enhancing illusion.

Not filed under Sage Advice, but under Art of Life.

Practical Types

Practical types look down on speculation, but we are not just animals with stomachs. We have eyes and not just in the head. Mundane grubbing and hassling for property and pelf are  necessary but if not kept within limits will dim spiritual sight. We are not here to pile up loot and land.

Self-Admonitions

Arm yourself with your maxims as you quit your cell. They are as important as your EDC. The vexatious and worse are out and about. Avoid the near occasion of idle talk. Most of what anyone has to say is bushwa. Smile and greet, but pass on. Restrain the social need -- if it is a need. Keep the past at mental arm's length.  Live in the present, relaxed, but situationally aware. Guard the mind. Protect the inner citadel from pointless and harmful invasions.

Good Relations and Deep Relations

Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity.  Reserve has a preservative effect.   Saying less more often accrues to our benefit than saying more. How often have you brought trouble upon your head by simply keeping your mouth shut? 

So much for good relations. Deep relations are another story. In them we court danger. We go deep, we probe, we 'let it all hang out' after midnight of the work-a-day round. You should run the risk from time to time.  Risk rejection and worse. Otherwise, when it comes time to die, you won't be able to say that you really squeezed the fruit of the lemon tree. 

Braggadocio, Self-Deprecation, Contempt

Brag and your peers will hate you. A little self-deprecation may win their hearts. Too much will earn their contempt. We learn these things by living. 

Ingredients of Happiness

What makes for happiness?

Acceptance is a good part of it: acceptance of self, of one's ineluctable  limitations, of others and their limitations, of one's lot in life, of one's place in the natural hierarchy of prowess and intellect and spiritual capacity, acceptance of the inevitable in the world at large. 

Gratitude is another ingredient in happiness: one cultivates gratitude for and appreciation of what one has here and now without comparisons to an idealized past, a feared future, or to the lots of others.  No regret, resentment, worry, or comparison.  Comparison breeds envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Be your incomparable self. If you are not yet incomparable, take up self-individuation as a life project. Realize yourself. Your life is more a task than a given, a task of transmuting givens into accomplishments.  It is the task of becoming actually the unique person you are potentially. But no hankering for what is out of reach. No false ideals. No consorting with the utopian.  No Lennon-esque imagining of the impossible. No dreaming impossible dreams. 

You were born somewhere in the natural hierarchy of physical endowment, moral and affective and aesthetic sensitivity, mental power, spiritual capacity, and strength of will. But your place in the hierarchy allows for development. Know your place but press against its upper limits.

But of course happiness is not just a matter of attitude and exertion but also rests on contingency and luck.  We need, but cannot command, the world's cooperation. Happenstance holds happiness hostage.  You were dealt a bad hand? Suck it up and play it the best you can for as long as you can.

Conservatives emphasize attitude and exertion, leftists happenstance. Both have a point.  "The harder I work, the luckier I become" is a conservative exaggeration, but a life-enhancing one.  It is however the foolish conservative who thinks he is self-made and not the beneficiary of a myriad of forces and factors far beyond his control.  There is truth in Phil Ochs' lament, "There but for fortune go you or I," but not such truth as to trump the conservative's exaggeration.  Weathering "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) he will slog on, per aspera ad astra.

 

Compensations of Old Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

 

What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

 

What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

Happiness Maxims

Just over the transom:

I do want to thank you again for the 'happiness maxims'. I've been reading them to wifey recently, and over time I've benefited hugely from them.

Here they are again, easier to read, and slight emended.  This is a re-post from 26 May 2013.

.........................................

These maxims work for me; they may work for you.  Experiment.  The art of living can only be learned by living and trying and failing.

0. Make it a goal of your life to be as happy as circumstances permit.  Think of it as a moral obligation: a duty to oneself and to others.

1. Avoid unhappy people. Most of them live in hells of their own devising; you cannot help them, but they can harm you.

2. Avoid negativity. Squelch negative and useless thoughts as they arise. Your mind is your domain and you have (limited) control over it. Don't dwell on the limits; push against them and expand them. Refuse entry to all unwanted guests. With practice, the power of the mind to control itself can be developed.  There is no happiness without mind control.  Don't dwell on the evil and sordid sides of life.  Study them unflinchingly to learn the truths of the human predicament, but know how to look away when study time is over.

3. Set aside one hour per morning for formal meditation and the ruminative reading of high-grade self-help literature, e.g., the Stoics, but not just them. Go ahead, read Seligman, but read Seneca first.

4. Cultivate realistic expectations concerning the world and the people in it. This may require adjusting expectations downward. But this must be done without rancor, resentment, cynicism, or misanthropy. If you are shocked at the low level of your fellow human beings, blame yourself for having failed to cultivate reality-grounded expectations. 

Negative people typically feel well-justified in their negative assessments of the world and its denizens. Therein lie a snare and a delusion. Justified or not, they poison themselves with their negativity and dig their hole deeper. Not wise.

Know and accept your own limitations. Curtail ambition, especially as the years roll on. Don't overreach.  Enjoy what you have here and now.  Don't let hankering after a nonexistent future poison the solely existent present.

5. Blame yourself as far as possible for everything bad that happens to you. This is one of the attitudinal differences between a conservative and a liberal. When a conservative gets up in the morning, he looks into the mirror and says, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. What happens to me today is up to me and in my control." He thereby exaggerates, but in a life-enhancing way. The liberal, by contrast, starts his day with the blame game: "I was bullied, people were mean to me, blah, blah, people suck, I'm a victim, I need a government program to stop me from mainlining heroin, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam. A caricature? Of course. But it lays bare some important home truths like all good caricatures do.

Perhaps we could say that the right-thinking person begins with a defeasible presumption in favor of his ability to rely on himself, to cope, to negotiate life's twists and turns, to get his head together, to be happy, to flourish. He thus places the burden of proof on the people and things outside him to defeat the presumption. Sometimes life defeats our presumption of well-being; but if we start with the presumption of ill-being, then we defeat ourselves.

We should presume ourselves to be successful in our pursuit of happiness until proven wrong.

6. Rely on yourself for your well-being as far as possible. Don't look to others.  You have no right to happiness and others have no obligation to provide it for you.  Your right is to the pursuit of happiness.  Learn to cultivate the soil of solitude. Happy solitude is the sole beatitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo.  An exaggeration to be sure, but justified by the truth it contains. In the end, the individual is responsible for his happiness.

7. Practice mental self-control as difficult as it is.  Master desire and aversion. Our thoughts are the seeds of words and deeds.

8. Practice being grateful. Find ten things to be grateful for each morning.  Gratitude drives out resentment. The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.

9. Limit comparisons with others. Comparisons often breed envy. The envious do not achieve well-being. Be yourself.

10. Fight the good fight against ignorance, evil, thoughtlessness, and tyranny, but don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism.  We are not here to improve the world so much as to be improved by it.  It cannot be changed in any truly ameliorative and fundamental ways by our own efforts whether individual or collective.  If you fancy it can be, then go ahead and learn the hard way, assuming you don't make things worse.

11. Hope beyond this life.  One cannot live well in this life without hope.  Life is enhanced if you can bring yourself to believe beyond it as well.  No one knows whether we have a higher destiny.  If you are so inclined, investigate the matter.  But better than inquiry into the immortality of the soul is living in such a way as to deserve it.

Companion post:  Middle-sized Happiness

These maxims work for me; they may work for you.  Experiment.  The art of living can only be learned by living and trying and failing.

0. Make it a goal of your life to be as happy as circumstances permit.  Think of it as a moral obligation: a duty to oneself and to others.

1. Avoid unhappy people. Most of them live in hells of their own devising; you cannot help them, but they can harm you.

2. Avoid negativity. Squelch negative and useless thoughts as they arise. Your mind is your domain and you have (limited) control over it. Don't dwell on the limits; push against them and expand them. Refuse entry to all unwanted guests. With practice, the power of the mind to control itself can be developed.  There is no happiness without mind control.  Don't dwell on the evil and sordid sides of life.  Study them unflinchingly to learn the truths of the human predicament, but know how to look away when study time is over.

3. Set aside one hour per morning for formal meditation and the ruminative reading of high-grade self-help literature, e.g., the Stoics, but not just them. Go ahead, read Seligman, but read Seneca first.

4. Cultivate realistic expectations concerning the world and the people in it. This may require adjusting expectations downward. But this must be done without rancor, resentment, cynicism, or misanthropy. If you are shocked at the low level of your fellow human beings, blame yourself for having failed to cultivate reality-grounded expectations. 

Negative people typically feel well-justified in their negative assessments of the world and its denizens. Therein lie a snare and a delusion. Justified or not, they poison themselves with their negativity and dig their hole deeper. Not wise.

Know and accept your own limitations. Curtail ambition, especially as the years roll on. Don't overreach.  Enjoy what you have here and now.  Don't let hankering after a nonexistent future poison the solely existent present.

5. Blame yourself as far as possible for everything bad that happens to you. This is one of the attitudinal differences between a conservative and a liberal. When a conservative gets up in the morning, he looks into the mirror and says, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. What happens to me today is up to me and in my control." He thereby exaggerates, but in a life-enhancing way. The liberal, by contrast, starts his day with the blame game: "I was bullied, people were mean to me, blah, blah, people suck, I'm a victim, I need a government program to stop me from mainlining heroin, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam. A caricature? Of course. But it lays bare some important home truths like all good caricatures do.

Perhaps we could say that the right-thinking person begins with a defeasible presumption in favor of his ability to rely on himself, to cope, to negotiate life's twists and turns, to get his head together, to be happy, to flourish. He thus places the burden of proof on the people and things outside him to defeat the presumption. Sometimes life defeats our presumption of well-being; but if we start with the presumption of ill-being, then we defeat ourselves.

We should presume ourselves to be successful in our pursuit of happiness until proven wrong.

6. Rely on yourself for your well-being as far as possible. Don't look to others.  You have no right to happiness and others have no obligation to provide it for you.  Your right is to the pursuit of happiness.  Learn to cultivate the soil of solitude. Happy solitude is the sole beatitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo.  An exaggeration to be sure, but justified by the truth it contains. In the end, the individual is responsible for his happiness.

7. Practice mental self-control as difficult as it is.  Master desire and aversion. Our thoughts are the seeds of words and deeds.

8. Practice being grateful. Find ten things to be grateful for each morning.  Gratitude drives out resentment. The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.

9. Limit comparisons with others. Comparisons often breed envy. The envious do not achieve well-being. Be yourself.

10. Fight the good fight against ignorance, evil, thoughtlessness, and tyranny, but don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism.  We are not here to improve the world so much as to be improved by it.  It cannot be changed in any truly ameliorative and fundamental ways by our own efforts whether individual or collective.  If you fancy it can be, then go ahead and learn the hard way, assuming you don't make things worse.

11. Hope beyond this life.  One cannot live well in this life without hope.  Life is enhanced if you can bring yourself to believe beyond it as well.  No one knows whether we have a higher destiny.  If you are so inclined, investigate the matter.  But better than inquiry into the immortality of the soul is living in such a way as to deserve it.

Companion post:  Middle-sized Happiness

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyper-kineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce far niente

Sweet to do nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking.

Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

The Art of Life: Among 'Regular Guys'

Among regular guys it is best to play the regular guy -- as tiring and boring as that can be. Need relief? Strictly limit your time among regular guys. But mix with them a little lest you be hated for being 'aloof,' or 'unfriendly.'

As long as one is in the world, one must be able to pass as being of the world.

Almost all socializing is levelling and dispiriting.  It drains one's spiritual sap. But a little socializing is good, like a little whisky. In both cases, however, more is not better.

In this fallen world, society is the enemy of solitude, and solitude is to be preferred if the good of the soul is a goal.

But I can imagine a form of sociality superior to solitude. This would be a society of spirits who had passed through the school of solitude and had achieved self-individuation.  But such a society is not to be had here below, if anywhere.

A qualification is needed. There are rare occasions in rare friendships in which one gets a glimpse of what that sodality of spirit would be like.

I'll end on a mundane note.  In my experience, a little socializing is often physically stimulating.  On an early morning ramble, I am doing alright.  I encounter an acquaintance. We chat for a few minutes. When I start up again I feel energized. There's a spring in my step and  glide to my stride. I exult, "I feel better than any old man should be allowed to feel."

RELATED:  Introverts and Inwardness

Time it took to compose this entry: 35 minutes from 4:00 to 4:35.

Thought, Prayer, Meditation

"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses.  It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate  and wait, like Weil, in silence.  (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)

So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer.  But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.

Thomas Merton on Henry Thoreau

Journals, vol. 4, p. 235, 8 August 1962:

Thoreau's idleness was an incomparable gift and its fruits were blessings that America has unfortunately never learned to appreciate. Yet he made his gift, though it was not asked for. And he went his way. If he had followed the advice of his neighbors in Concord, America would have been much poorer, even though he might have sweated a good deal. He took the fork in the road.

Old Henry David has meant a lot to me too. My mind drifts back to Wayne Monroe, high school history teacher, a grotesquely obese and superficial man who mocked Thoreau as  a hippy who didn't want to work.  "Freight Train Wayne," as we called him, drove a 1964 Pontiac Catalina. When he got in the vehicle it would list pronouncedly to the port side.  We observing wits would typically make a crack about his Monro-matic schock absorbers.

That Merton was drawn to Thoreau has something to do with my being drawn to both of them.  Thank you, gentlemen, for living your lives in your way and writing it all down for men like me to savor.  Hats off, glasses raised, your memory will be preserved by the like-minded and discerning.

Thoreau was a great aphorist. My favorite: "A man sits as many risks as he runs."  In those ten syllables, the sage of Walden Pond achieves aphoristic perfection. Study it if you would learn the art.

America may not have appreciated him, but the greatness of America is that it allows his like to flourish.

Success is living your own life in your own way.

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The Lure of the Trail

It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around. But I can easily understand how many would feel differently about this.

I once proposed to a woman that she and her husband accompany me and my wife on a little hike. She reacted as if I had proposed that she have all her teeth extracted without benefit of anaesthetic. She   seemed shocked that anyone would suggest such a thing. Finally she said, "Well, maybe, if there's a destination."

A destination? Each footfall, each handhold, each bracing breath of cold mountain air is the destination. Did John Muir have a destination when he roamed the Range of Light? Was Henry Thoreau trying to get somewhere during his cross country rambles?

Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live. Surrounded by beauty, he is yet oblivious to it, rushing to his destination. If one does not have the time to meditate on the moon set, celebrate the sunrise, or marvel at a stately Saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridge line, it is a serious question whether one is alive in any human sense at all.

You may end up at your destination all right -- in a box, never having lived.

Slow Down and Accomplish Non-Accomplishment

Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by  flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, Thoreauvian stewardship of the moment, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot -- this too is a sort of accomplishment.  You have to work at it a bit.  Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and the larger society's suggestions.  Eradicating one's suggestibility is actually a life-long task, and none too easy.

The world's a vast project of often useless neg-otiation. It is the enemy of otium, leisure, that basis of culture. (Josef Pieper) There is need of those who will 'otiate' it, enjoying "leisure with a good conscience" to cop a phrase from Nietzsche, that untimely saunterer. 

Slow down! You'll get to your grave soon enough.  Why rush?  Is the universe in a rush to get somewhere?  It already is everywhere. Are you any less cosmic, you microcosm?

The Troubled

The troubled are often trouble. Do you need more? Avoid the troubled and avoid trouble.  But if you can help them while retaining your equanimity, then do so.

Superficial Acquaintances

We need them, but we need to keep them superficial. Two reasons. First, if you try to go deep with the superficial, you will only frustrate yourself. Second, superficial relations hide faults and  allow for idealization.  Ignorance aids admiration.

The Optimist and the Art of Life

The optimist is no cosmologist seeking the final truth about the world but a cosmetologist who puts a pretty face on it. He applies cosmetics to the cosmos. He knows the art of life and  how to make the most of life, and does not shy away from such life-enhancing illusions as are conducive to his making the most of it.  The philosopher, however, seeks the truth of life. Come hell or high water, or both, or neither.

There is the art of life and the truth of life, and there is a tension between them, a tension to be investigated by those of us who seek the truth of life. The investigation of this tension cannot be recommended to the artful livers. They would do well to ignore, and leave unexamined,  the Socratic "The unexamined life is not worth living."