. . . there would be no used bookstores: I keep all my books. So it is a good thing for me that not everyone is like me.
Category: Autobiographical
Books and Reality and Books
I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.
All things human are ambiguous and so it is with books and bookishness by which I mean their reading, writing, buying, selling, trading, admiring, collecting, cataloging, treasuring, fingering, storing, and protecting. Verbiage, endless verbiage! Dusty tomes and dry paper from floor to ceiling! Whether written or spoken, words appear at one or more removes from reality, assuming one knows what that is.
But what exactly is it, and where is it to be found? In raw sensation? In thoughtless action? In contemplative inaction? In amoral animal vitality? In the fool's paradise of travel? In the diaspora of entertainment and amusement? In the piling up of consumer goods? In finite competitive selfhood? In the quest for name and fame? Is it to be found at all, or rather made? Is it to be discovered or decided?
It appears that we are back to our 'unreal' questions about reality and the real, questions that are asked and answered at the level of thought and written about in books, books, and more books . . . .
Why Am I So Hard on Liberals?
A reader comments by e-mail:
I sometimes read your website. I'm generally impressed by (and envy) your clear-headedness and detail when it comes to technical questions, but I find myself turned off by some of the more "poetic" stuff and the political analysis (the former because I hate poetry, more on the latter below).
[. . .]
Why are you so harsh with liberals? I can see why you might be annoyed by the mainstream liberal media . . . but I don't think the mainstream conservative media is any better. [. . .]
Silence and Wholeness
Perusing an old file of juvenilia for blog-fodder, I decided that the contents are mostly too juvenile for reproduction here. But then I came across an aphorism penned in December, 1971 when I was living in the shadow of the medieval Festung or fastness in Salzburg, Austria:
Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man.
Reasons to Blog
Different bloggers, different reasons. I see this weblog as
1. An on-line notebook: a place to preserve and organize quotations from and notes on my reading.
2. An on-line journal: a daily record of the twists and turns of my intellectual life, along with some other sides of my life. A celebration of the life of the mind, an exemplification of the philosophical life. A record of one man's quotidian grappling with the world and its riddles.
3. A didactic site: a place where a serious and resolute reader can learn some philosophy for free.
4. A research site: a venue for trying out ideas and refining them in the teeth of critical comments.
5. An exercise in learning how to write better.
6. An experiment in what blogging might be good for.
7. A soapbox from which to deliver my commentary on the passing scene and do my bit to improve the world, one blog post at a time.
8. An open-ended project some of the purposes of which have yet to emerge.
Study Everything, Join Nothing
Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy?
Well, it depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back, I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort of thing. And being a fair and balanced guy, as everybody knows, I recently joined the Conservative Book Club to balance out my long-standing membership in the left-leaning and sex-saturated Quality Paperback Book Club. (It would be interesting to compare these two 'clubs' in respect of their target memberships — but that's another post.)
And what if I join you for lunch, or join in a discussion in a chat room? A good while ago, the anonyblogger who ran The Will to Blog, but then lost the will to blog and deleted his site, opined that my motto ought to preclude my being a conservative. But surely one does not join a set of beliefs. One joins a political party, an organization, a church, and the like. Our anonyblogger might have been making the mistake of thinking that an independent thinker cannot arrive at any conclusions, for, if he did, then he would be joining something, and lose his independence.
Kerouac 5K
Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago. She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74. 35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado: I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman. (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race. Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia. Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.
Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar. Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy:
Antioch College: Death by Political Correctness
I have a sentimental connection to Antioch College. An inamorata from the '70's graduated from there, as did my old friend, the philosopher Quentin Smith. During my tenure at the University of Dayton in the late '70s and '80s I would often make the pleasant drive over country roads to the sleepy little town of Yellow Springs, Ohio to take in an art film at the Little Art theater or buy incense at a '60s style 'head shop' or chase a burger with a couple of beers at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, or hike in Glen Hellen, a nature preserve behind the campus. At home, my FM tuner was set to WYSO, which emanated from the campus of Antioch College and was a rich source of out-of-the-way folk, blues, jazz, country and other music. I may be a conservative, but I am a BoCon, a bohemian conservative, or perhaps a HipCon, or maybe even a Bobo (to adopt the term if not quite the sense of a David Brooks coinage), a bourgeois bohemian.
There is also the Twilight Zone connection. Rod Serling graduated from Antioch, taught there at one point, and featured the statue of Horace Mann on campus in one of his best episodes, The Changing of the Guard.
So it is too bad that Antioch College has suffered Death by Political Correctness. This excellent piece confirms my view of contemporary liberals: they are simply incapable of arresting their slide into the looniest precincts of hard Leftism. Quentin Smith was on campus during the beginning of the end in the early '70s. I recall him telling me about the bringing onto campus of unprepared ghetto blacks who proceeded to terrorize the place with Black Panther type demands and armed thuggery.
UPDATE (21 July 2009): Relevant YouTube clips (HT: Mike V.) Antioch College 1858-2008? Antioch University Decides Womyn's Center Library is Garbage; Water Damage at Old Main
A Difference Between Me and David Lewis
David Lewis is (or rather was) living proof that being a genius is no guarantee of having sound ideas. I am living proof that having sound ideas does not require being a genius!
My Preferred Modes of Locomotion
Ambulatory and cursory, primarily, and then in distant second and third places respectively, natatory and saltatory.
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 hyperkineticism, 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.
Not a Joiner
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. II, p. 117:
He is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from his own. Another reason is that too frequently there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search.
On the other hand, going it alone does not guarantee safe or speedy arrival in the harbor of truth. It can just as easily leave one rudderless in the samsaric storm.
Life's a predicament.
Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities? Part II
On February 9th I linked to Thomas H. Benton's Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go. Today I discovered his Just Don't Go Part II. Prospective graduate students should digest it thoroughly albeit cum grano salis. I don't recommend Benton's piece in order to discourage anyone but to apprise them of what they are up against should they embark upon graduate study. But if ideas are your passion, and you have talent, and you are willing to live like a monk, take risks and perhaps later on retool for the modern-day equivalent of lens-grinding, then go for it!
Here is the question you should ask yourself. Will I consider it to have been a waste of time and money to have devoted 4-10 years of my precious youth to graduate study if I find that I cannot secure a tenure-track appointment in a reasonably good department in which the chances of tenure are reasonably good and find that I either have to re-tool or become an academic gypsy moving from one one-year appointment to another, or end up as an adjunct teaching five courses per semester for slave wages?
If you answer in the affirmative, then you almost certainly should avoid graduate school given a very bad job market that gives every indication of getting worse. But if you love your discipline, have some talent, and your very identity is bound up with being a philosopher, say, then you should take the risk. I did, and I don't regret my decision for a second. Of course, I was one of those who secured a tenure-track position right out of grad school and went on to get tenure. But had I failed to get a job, I would not have considered my time in grad school wasted. They were wonderful years in a wonderful place: Boston on the Charles, the Athens of America. I lived on next-to-nothing but avoided debt by tailoring my lifestyle to the modest emolument of my teaching fellowship. But that's just me. Philosophy for me is the unum necessarium. I cannot imagine who I would be were I not a philosopher. For me, no way of life is higher. I am going to do it one way or another, whether or not I can turn a buck from it.
Now if you think like I do, but allow yourself to be cowed by parents and friends and the manifold suggestions emanating from a money-grubbing society in which 'success' is spelled '$ucce$$' and pronounced 'suck-cess' into thinking that you must be 'practical' and put economic and career considerations above all others, then you may wake up one morning a rich shyster or medico but with deep regrets that you didn't have the courage to pursue your dream.
Politics: Would That I Could Avoid It
Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me some of the time), but it is necessary as a means only. Its whole purpose is to subserve the vita contemplativa. To make of action an end in itself is absurd, and demonstrably so, though I will spare you the demonstration. If you are assiduous you can dig it out of Aristotle, Aquinas and Josef Pieper.
In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct
The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow). I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy." I also took a course in logic from him. The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books. And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I taught.
I don't believe Morris ever published anything. The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question. But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.
The moral of the story? Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy. So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.
I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when. The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend. I've done it a number of times. I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher. I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no. What ingrates we are.
So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath. Heute rot, morgen tot.