Autobiographical – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Rebel with a Cause

"The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard."

Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards. I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort taught. I had arranged for Robert Sokolowski to come and read a paper on Husserl. Comrade Van attended the talk. By then, however, the political enthusiasms of his youth were a thing of the distant past. He had given up politics for logic and love. My entry tells the tale of his murder by a crazed lover in Mexico City where Lev Davidovich Bronstein met his grisly end.

Moral? Stick to logic if you want to play it safe. But there is more of life (and death) in politics and love.

A comment from Joseph:

I regularly read your blog, but I never comment because I do not know how. Anyway, I wanted to send a note about the Monsignor — what an incredible man. He is one of my personal models for how an academic should be. He is not only brilliant but also patient with students not so gifted (99.99% of them) — and he has quite a knack for teaching to several levels simultaneously. He is also funny (and not just for a priest). I'm glad that you have had the chance to meet him.

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bi-cultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages. My mother was both bilingual and bi-cultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not to me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn't your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.' The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values. Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African? Does he enjoy dual citizenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead. There is no 'institutional racism.' There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals. Man up and move forward. Don't blame others for your problems. That's the mark of a loser. Take responsibility. We honkies want you to do well. The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

It must also be said that the alt-Right identity-political counter to POC tribalism is just as bad, although it may be excusable as a pro tem tactic on some occasions.

The Old Man Wakes Up . . .

. . . from the first nap of the day to the soothing strains of The Who.

Two minutes into it, he's banging on all eight, the iced coffee is working its reliable quotidian magic, and soon after some more of this bloggity-blog ephemera, and a few 3-min Internet chess games, he will be ready to slam his paltry pate once again against the rocks of Time, Existence, and Death.

The Most Boring Philosophers

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed, no subject is boring except to the bored who make it so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is a list of philosophers who bored me, or would have bored me, when I was one and twenty:

   1. G. E. Moore
   2. Elizabeth Anscombe
   3. Paul Ziff
   4. Norman Malcolm
   5. John Wisdom
   6. Roderick Chisholm

Philosophers who excited my 21-year-old self:

   1. Nicholas Berdyaev
   2. Miguel de Unamuno
   3. Karl Jaspers
   4. Friedrich Nietzsche
   5. Martin Heidegger
   6. Jean-Paul Sartre

Now imagine a philosophy department composed of the twelve aforementioned. Do you think it would split into two factions? What, if anything, do they have in common that justifies subsuming them under the rubric, philosophers?

I have become in many ways more analytic and less Continental over the years. I tend to think that this is a lot like becoming less liberal and more conservative, as these terms are popularly understood. One becomes more cautious, careful, precise, piece-meal, rigorous, attentive to details and differences and empirical data, less romantic, more patient, more logical, less impressionistic, less sanguine about big sweeping once-and-for-all solutions. . . .

In sum, and in a manner to elicit howls of protest: In philosophy, the trajectory of maturation is from Continental to analytic. In politics, from liberal to conservative.

Howl on, muchachos.

Cognitive Dissonance on Good Friday

It was Good Friday. I was 11 or 12 years old, possibly 13. I was with the boy next door, also raised Catholic. He wanted to play. It was around two in the afternoon. Christ had been on the cross for two hours according to the account we had been taught. I recall to this day the cognitive dissonance induced by the collision of the worldliness of my playmate and the Catholicism inculcated in me by my pious Italian mother and the priests and nuns in the days before Vatican II.

An acquaintance of mine, a former altar boy with a similar upbringing, told me he never believed a word of it. I would guess that most of those who attended the Catholic schools for 8-12 years mainly just went long to get along and then dropped it all when the world issued its call. The etymology of 'inculcate' suggests that it is not the right word. The teaching wasn't stamped into me, but planted in me, in soil fertile and receptive unlike the stony and weed-choked psychic soil of most of my classmates. In compensation, they were spared the cognitive dissonance.

The Great Blizzard of ’78 and How I Got my Dissertation Done

Reader Josh E. asks for tips on how to get a dissertation done. Here is how I did it.

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I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. I got off and hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78 every single day holidays included.

That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up at 2 AM. I've become a slacker.

One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.

Addendum. An excerpt from Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday:

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.

Are You an Introvert? Take this Test!

This is a re-post from April 2012 with minor edits and additions.

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The bolded material below is taken verbatim from Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (Crown 2012), p. 13. I then give my responses. The more affirmative responses, the more of an introvert you are.

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. Absolutely! Especially in philosophical discussions. As Roderick Chisholm once said, "In philosophy, three's a crowd."

2. I often prefer to express myself in writing. Yes.

3. I enjoy solitude. Is the Pope Catholic? Beata solitudo, sola beatitudo. Happy solitude, the sole beatitude.

4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. Seem? Do!

Money is a mere means. To pursue it as an end in itself is perverse. And once you have enough, you stop acquiring more and turn to higher pursuits.

As for fame, it is a fool's cynosure. Obscurity is delicious. To be able to walk down the street and pass as an ordinary schmuck is wonderful. The value of fame and celebrity is directly proportional to the value of the fools and know-nothings who confer it. And doesn't Aristotle say that to be famous you need other people, which fact renders you dependent on them? He does indeed, in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Similarly with social status. Who confers it? And what is their judgment worth?

5. I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. More than once in these pages have I ranted about the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.

6. People tell me I'm a good listener. Yes. My mind drifts back to a girl I knew when I was fifteen. She called me her 'analyst' when she wasn't calling me 'Dr. Freud.'

7. I'm not a big risk-taker. That's right. I recently took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license. I had been eyeing the Harley-Davidson 883 Iron. But then I asked myself how riding a motorcycle would further my life tasks and whether it makes sense, having come this far, to risk my life and physical integrity in pursuit of cheap thrills.

8. I enjoy work that allows me to "dive in" with few interruptions. Right. No instant messaging. Only recently acquired a cell phone. I keep it turned off. Call me the uncalled caller. Still don't have a smart phone. My wife is presently in a faraway land on a Fulbright. That allows me to unplug the land-line. I love e-mail; fast but unintrusive. I'll answer when I feel like it and get around to it. I don't allow myself to be rushed or interrupted.

9. I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. I don't see the point of celebrating birthdays at all. What's to celebrate? First, birth is not unequivocally good. Second, it is not something you brought about. It befell you. Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen.

10. People describe me as "soft-spoken" or "mellow." I'm too intense to be called 'mellow,' but sotto voce applies.

11. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it is finished. Pretty much, with the exception of these blog scribblings.

12. I dislike conflict. Can't stand it. I hate onesidedness. I look at a problem from all angles and try to mediate oppositions when possible. I thoroughly hate, reject, and abjure the blood sport approach to philosophy. Polemic has no place in philosophy. This is not to say that it does not have a place elsewhere, in politics for example. Don't confuse politics with political philosophy.

13. I do my best work on my own. Yes. A former colleague, a superficial extrovert, once described me as 'lone wolf.' 'Superficial extrovert' smacks of pleonasm. An extrovert is like a mirror: nothing in himself, he is only what reflects. Is that fair? Fair enough for a blog post. Or an extrovert is like an onion: peel away the last skin and arrive at — precisely nothing. The extrovert manages to be surface all the way down. Or you could say that he is merely a node in a social network. He is constituted by his social relations, and nothing apart from them; hence no substance that enters into social relations.

14. I tend to think before I speak. Yes.

15. I feel drained after being out and about, even if I've enjoyed myself. Yes. This is a common complaint of introverts. They can take only so much social interaction. It depletes their energy and they need to go off by themselves to 'recharge their batteries.' In my case, it is not just an energy depletion but a draining away of my 'spiritual substance.' It is as if one's interiority has been compromised and one has entered into inauthenticity, Heidegger's Uneigentlichkeit. The best expression of this sense of spiritual depletion is probably Kierkegaard's remark in one of his early journal entries about a party he attended:

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me — but I came away, indeed that dash should be as along as the radii of the earth's orbit ———————————————————- wanting to shoot myself. (1836)

16. I often let calls go through to e-mail. Yes. See comment to #8 above.

17. If I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. I love huge blocks of time, days at a stretch, with no commitments whatsoever. Dolce far niente. Sweet to do nothing.

18. I don't enjoy multitasking. Right. One thing at a time.

19. I can concentrate easily. Obviously, and for long stretches of time.

20. In classroom situations, I prefer lecture to seminars. Especially if I'm doing the lecturing.

Here is a description of the Myers-Briggs INTP. And here is another.

Life’s Fugacity

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on? Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world. In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor. But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

A Cure for Infatuation?

One of the very best is marriage.

Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*

But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.

The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.

It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore.

Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation. Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.

But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry? And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide. That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols. What we want is an infinite and eternal love. This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.

But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.

_____________________________

*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.

Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold

(A re-post, with corrections and additions, from 13 January 2010)

Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to meeting was Richard Peck, but by the time I found out about his passion from his wife, Joan, he had passed away. Sadly enough, Joan unexpectedly died recently.

Joan had me and my wife over for dinner on Easter Sunday a few years ago, and my journal (vol. XXI, pp. 34-35, 28 March 2005) reports the following:

Joan's dead husband Rick was a true believer in the Dutchman mine, and thought he knew where it was: in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle, and accessible via the Terrapin trail. A few days before he died he wanted Joan to accompany his pal Bruce, an unbeliever, to a digging operation which Bruce, a man who knows something about mining, did not perform. Rick to Joan, "I want you to be there when he digs up the gold."

Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."

I Introduce Two New Friends to the Superstition Mountains

One of the great boons of blogging is that the blogger attracts the like-minded. Below are two medical doctors I had the great pleasure of spending the day with in a satisfying break from my Bradleyan reclusivity. Dave K. found me via this weblog and initiated correspondence, so I knew he would be simpatico. I didn't know about his wife, Barbara C. , but she turned out also to be a member of the Coalition of the Sane, a Trump supporter, and one charming lady of Italian extraction.

Halcyon October in the Western Superstitions

Photo credit: Barbara Caffaratti

A Couple of Venice Characters I Met While Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify. It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool. But working Manpower grunt jobs was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

One cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.' A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D. He lived in Venice, California, with a couple of other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath. He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree. Booze and dope didn't help either. I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates. A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel." When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety. He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating. In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there. Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it. So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs. And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible. Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me. We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon. On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie. John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels. (For more on Montgomery see here.) Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home. I've regretted that non-meeting ever since. Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Last Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM. Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse. While passing Saratoga, CA decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats. We couldn't get in touch with him. So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso. By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse. The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.]

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA. [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971] Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case. Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before. Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared. Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon. Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's. Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM. Thursday spent in Eugene. I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests. Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM. Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel. Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger, Jim Huntsman. Arranged to start working Monday morning. So far, so good.

Old and Jaded

The trick is to get old without becoming jaded.

My valued colleague H. N. couldn't pull it off. He had a certain depth and a certain wisdom, and we were on good terms. He knew how to take my intensity and he wasn't threatened by my intelligence: his was a healthy self-confidence. But he had become lazy and complacent among unstimulating colleagues. I couldn't engage him. An idea of mine might be dismissed with "That's already in Spinoza." Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. "But what do you think of the idea?" No answer. Didn't care. Tired, jaded.

He was dead wood on the path to petrification. Jaded, he was turning to stone.

What I didn't say to him out of affection and because it would have done no good: What are you doing here? You have the wherewithal to retire. Why do you continue to draw a salary?

Of Apples and Sparkplugs

All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, and so on.

Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference. Or, 'You are comparing prime numbers and prime ministers.' Or, 'You are comparing anorexic girls and over-inflated basketballs.'

This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper. A man once ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites. He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed through the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently chopped up or watered down.

So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my fourth grade teacher Sr Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

A good piece of folk wisdom that has served me well.