We have to stop loving our horror stories. Joyce’s Ulysses was rejected fourteen times. I don’t like that story; I hate it. Fitzgerald burned out and could not work. Hemingway despaired and could not work. A went mad, B died in penury, C drank herself to death, D was blacklisted, E committed suicide. I hate those stories. Great works are written in prisons and holding camps. So are stupid books. The misery does not validate the work. It outrages the sensibilities and violates the work.
But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.
In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.
When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.
Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.
…I take notes on four-by-six index cards, reminding myself about once an hour of a rule I read long ago in a research manual, “Never write on the back of anything.” Since copying is a chore and a bore, use of the cards, the smaller the better, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one’s own mind, so to speak. Eventually, as the cards fall into groups according to subject or person or chronological sequence, the pattern of my story will emerge. Besides, they are convenient, as they can be filed in a shoe box and carried around in a pocketbook. When ready to write I need only to take along a packet of them, representing a chapter, and I am equipped to work anywhere; whereas if one writes surrounded by a pile of books, one is tied to a single place, and furthermore likely to be too much influenced by other authors.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil, the terrible boredom of pain.
Lewis Thomas, “The Long Habit,” in The Lives of a Cell:
In a recent study of the reaction to dying in patients with obstructive disease of the lungs, it was concluded that the process was considerably more shattering for the professional observers than the observed. Most of the patients appeared to be preparing themselves with equanimity for death, as though intuitively familiar with the business. One elderly woman reported that the only painful and distressing part of the process was in being interrupted; on several occasions she was provided with conventional therapeutic measures to maintain oxygenation or restore fluids and electrolytes, and each time she found the experience of coming back harrowing; she deeply resented the interference with her dying.
With tools, we crave intimacy. This appetite for emotional resonance explains why users – when given a choice – prefer deep rapport over endless options.
If there were no imperfections, no primordial defect in the ground of creation, why should there be any urge to create, any longing for what must yet be fulfilled?
Science is the best idea humanity has ever had. It’s a systematic way of exploring the nature of reality, of testing and proving or disproving ideas. But it’s important to remember that science is ultimately a specialized way of being wrong. That is, every scientist tries to be (a) slightly less wrong than the scientists who came before them, by proving that something we thought was true actually isn’t, and (b) wrong in a way that can be tested and proven, which results in the next scientist being slightly less wrong. Research is the ongoing process of learning new things that show us a little more of what’s true, which inevitably reveals how wrong we used to be, and it is never “finished.” So when you read a headline like “New Study Shows…” or “Latest Research Finds…,” read it with skepticism. One study does not equal proof of anything. In [this book], we’ve aimed to use ideas that have been established over multiple decades and reinforced by multiple approaches. Still, science doesn’t offer perfect truth, only the best available truth. Science, in a sense, is not an exact science.
disappointed impoverished scholars
know the limits of hunger and cold
unemployed they like to write poems
scribbling away with the strength of their hearts
but who collects a nobody’s words
may as well save your sighs
write them down on rice-flour cakes
even mongrels won’t touch them
🎙️ I’m this week’s guest on Micro Monday podcast series.
I know, I know: fifty-four minutes isn’t exactly “micro.” Well, after the main interview, we talked for almost forty extra minutes about Until the End of the World, which we’re both very big fans of.
And “cinephile”? Oh I don’t know. I think of myself more as a song & dance man.
I returned the Netgear router I bought last week. Half the speed of the thing it replaced, dead zones where there had been strong signals before. Not worth it.
Maybe I’d have been a little more patient if they hadn’t told me my own name wasn’t valid.
To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness…. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.
Even “having no meaning” is a way of meaning. The absurd is one of the extremes that meaning reaches when it examines its conscience and asks itself, What is the meaning of meaning? Ambivalence of meaning: it is the fissure through which we enter things and the fissure through which being escapes from them.
Meaning ceaselessly undermines the poem; it seeks to reduce its reality as an object of the senses and as a unique thing to an idea, a definition, or a “message.” To protect the poem from the ravages of meaning, poets stress the material aspect of language.
I’ve been thinking that the most difficult thing to do is convince someone that two things — any two things — are not connected. We can argue endlessly about whether a connection is meaningful or not, but we never doubt that the connection is there, somewhere; if we haven’t found it, that’s only because we haven’t looked hard enough for it yet. We define something as meaningful if we are able to place it in the matrix of our worldview. When we associate a specific thing in the context of other things, then we feel we understand it. Context is everything, precisely because that’s how we understand our world. If we can’t contextualize something, we simply can’t grasp it. Connections are the core of meaning and it is literally unthinkable – not to mention deeply offensive – that there might not be a “because” to any “why” we might ask.
With age one loses all sense of the supposed inevitability of art and life. Vivid moments are no longer strung together by imagined fate. The sense of proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal. Bad is bad and you let it go. Good you cherish as it whizzes by. Mental struggles become lucid and muted with particular visual images attached to them, somewhat irrationally or beyond ordinary logic. Money shrinks to money. Fear is always recognizable rather than generalized. It is sharp and its aim is very good indeed. If there is wisdom as such, it is boiled down by fatigue. On the very rare occasion that I check out an old notebook as I am doing now, the sweat rises in my hair roots and I wonder, What is this fool going to do next?
Some authors flog consumerist society with the aid of irony; others continue to wage war against religion; still others do battle with the bourgeoisie. At times irony expresses something different – our flounderings in a pluralistic society. And sometimes it simply conceals intellectual poverty. Since of course irony always comes in handy when we don’t know what to do. We’ll figure it out later.
There is no beginning, this side of the classics, to a history of mediaeval Latin; its roots take hold too firmly on the kingdoms of the dead. The scholar’s lyric of the twelfth century seems as new a miracle as the first crocus; but its earth is the leafdrift of centuries of forgotten scholarship. His emotional background is of his own time; his literary background is pagan, and such furniture as his mind contains is classical or pseudo-classical.
The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.
A man sets himself the task of drawing the world. As the years pass, he fills the empty space with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, houses, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
I was just remembering a funny dream I had some time ago.
I was in a room in my house (both house and room were not known to me in waking life, but it was clearly where I lived). The room was full of beautiful acoustic guitars, and they belonged to me. They were all fabulously expensive. Some were unique and custom-built, others simply rare or antique. Some were opulent, with exquisite inlays and carvings, others elegantly plain and clean. I wandered through this room, hushed and awestruck, thinking, “I can’t believe these are all mine!”
I picked one up, and tenderly began to play. I formed an open G chord, and then moved that chord form up and down the neck. It was the only chord I knew.
I was strumming a creditable 4/4 rhythm, but I couldn’t think of even one other single chord. “Hmm, I really thought I knew a few chords besides this one. Let’s see…uh…” I would contort my hand into what seemed like a “typical” chord configuration. Nope, I just kept making that same chord.
“Maybe if I try a different guitar?…” No luck. Still G.
The funny thing about the dream was that instead of finding it nightmarish, I was, even as I dreamed, amused at my sudden and nearly complete amnesia.
Many years ago, an acquaintance of mine, C., died of brain cancer. Leading up to his death, they performed a number of surgeries to try to remove the tumor. Because it was malignant there was, of course, no way to remove only the tumor. After awakening from one operation, he discovered quickly that he was no longer fluent in Mandarin. Gone, completely. This wasn’t like your high-school locker combination, or the procedure for transferring a call at a job you haven’t worked at for a decade. This was a language he’d studied for years; he’d travelled extensively in China, and had even lived there for a time. He laughed about it, eventually spinning a whole Pythonesque routine around it.
An entire, complex skill-set quite literally cut out of you. Can you imagine? I couldn’t either, until I had this dream. I only hope that if such a fate awaits me, I will face it as C. did (and as I apparently did in the dreamtime): with equanimity and humor.
