Category: Human Predicament

Choice-Worthy, Achievable Goals: Responses to Vohanka

Vlastimil Vohanka put three questions to me:
1) Would you agree with the claim, suggested in my “Boredom of the Gods” rant  that we live at times when people (esp.  white men)  find it hard to find overarching, dominant life-goals that would seem to them both (a) (viscerally) attractive and (b) realistically achievable?

(Maybe you know Bolitho’s quite famous book Twelve Against the Gods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bolitho_Ryall, which, among other things, comments on the same problem. )

BV: I wasn’t aware of Bolitho, but the following excerpt from the Wikipedia article is relevant, especially inasmuch as I am now an old man who will no longer take the risks he took as an adventurous young man.
He [Bolitho] sees human endeavour as a duality between conformity and non-conformity. “We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quite die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.”[9] He points out that their lives [the lives of adventurers] show the difficulties involved, and the scant reward to be expected from such adventuring.[9]
Before I try to answer your question, one better put to a sociologist, I will ask you why the extensive quotation from that morally obtuse Andrew Tate? Your title suggests that you consider him a god. Do you really want to imply that? He better resembles a demon. He says, “Fucking women sucks cuz women are bad people.” False twice-over.  The second half is on a par with Rosie O’Donnell’s recent claim that “Men suck.” Why quote this defective specimen?
This Tate guys seems to be the very poster boy for toxic masculinity. My line on this, which you may be aware of,  is the only reasonable one. Neither masculinity as such, nor femininity as such are toxic; but there are cases that are well-described as cases of toxic masculinity.  See my Substack article, Masculinity. I give examples of toxic and non-toxic masculinity. There are specifically male virtues and specifically female virtues, a difference based in biology and perhaps also in metaphysics.  Men and women need each other’s virtues.  Related: Decent Man, Manly Man, Otherworldly Man.
As for V’s question #1, I disagree with his presupposition that the problem of finding a life-goal that is both attractive and achievable is a recent one. It’s age-old. It is not just V’s and younger generations that face it.  “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Thoreau in the 19th century.  Ever since Adam was kicked out of the Garden, life for the majority has been drudgery and servitude.  The great affluence we enjoy in the West makes things easier than they used to be. But this affluence has also had the opposite effect by fueling the dissatisfaction of many of the young.  The affluence makes possible the leisure that breeds  dissatisfaction. The self-esteem movement plays a role. People brought up to have an excessively high opinion of themselves despite actual accomplishments will naturally kvetch when they find that it is hard to live large and heroically.
Despite what I said, the problem remains of finding a life-goal that is noble and inspiring but also  achievable.
What’s my advice? First off, you need to make a list of choice-worthy goals. Empty celebrity and the adulation of know-nothings ought not be on the list.  Nor should food and sex. Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. To live is to live in a way befitting a human being.  There is nothing wrong with doing well so long as you do well by doing good.
Once you have your list of choice-worthy goals, you need to determine which are achievable by you . This requires self-knowledge.  Do you have what it takes to be a Navy SEAL, a firefighter, a medical doctor, an astronaut, an engineer?
You then must sacrifice to attain your goals. “You have to pay your dues if you want play the blues.”
2) In https://otherlife.co/every-angel-is-terrifying-by-riva-tez-and-praxis-society, philosopher Riva Tez says:

“Nietzsche’s concept of the last man is a prophetic description of the world as it is today. You are basking in a fake glory. You are entertained and satiated. You are seemingly productive, but you are not great. If you feel this and aren’t bothered by it, look away. If you feel this and it bothers you, listen on.”
BV: Nietzsches Last Man “who has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night” is no role model. But then Nietzsche himself has nothing better to offer.
3) I am an elitist: most people can’t be great. And, relatedly, most people can’t do philosophy well. See https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/the-abyss-and-the-soy-latte

Q: Would you agree with both?
BV: Yes, I would agree to both, as long as you mean by ‘elitism’ the elitism of spirit and not that of social privilege and position.  Life is hierarchical.  Indeed, life is many hierarchies, the hierarchy of the spirit being one of them. Few are great. There are only a few great philosophers. The vast majority of philosophers, even if they are sincere truth-seekers,  have a much more humble role, that of striving upwards to the level of the greats.
We should all aspire to be great, but few will make the cut. And when we
write our more serious writing we should write for the ages even though we know we will be lucky to end up footnotes in forgotten books and journals.

Assorted Observations (1.V.26)

Our eyes on the distant, we become far-sighted; our fingers clutching the petty,  petty.

***

The pain you felt, and still feel, from the insult you received is far in excess of the pleasure felt, and forgotten, by the one who insulted you. You keep it alive; you can let it die. Let go, move on, live now!

***

If you endlessly post pictures of yourself, you take the ‘face’ in Facebook too seriously.

***

My wife of 43 years is easy to live with. Just as important, but rather more surprising, is that she finds me easy to live with.

***

There is a sense in which we inhabit our bodies, and there is a sense in which our bodies are our vehicles.  Habitat or vehicle? Combining the comparisons, I’ll suggest that our bodies are mobile homes.  ‘Mobile’ captures our viatory status. ‘Home’ our rootedness.   But don’t expect either to last long.

***

Henry David Thoreau tells us in Walden that as a youth he “inhabited his body with inexpressible satisfaction.” Perhaps he was lucky to die young as people did in the 19th century.

***

Warring metaphors. Plato has Socrates say that the body is the prison house of the soul.  Here if anywhere is a clear case of a house that is not a home. Thoreauvian satisfaction does not characterize such residency in such a domicile. But as I said, Henry David’s “inexpressible satisfaction” would not have lasted into dotage.  But to conclude on a Platonic note, no home in this world is a true home.

***

My overall life strategy is mainly avoidant, thus neither confrontational nor self-effacing. Independent, quietly self-assertive, conciliatory, pan-optic and syn-optic. More a seer than a doer.

***

It is so easy to love oneself! Why then is it so difficult to love others?  Because I am myself?  No doubt I am. Who else would I be? But I am also not myself in that I observe myself, judge myself, and within limits make myself.  I am object to myself as subject.  I am an object of self-observation and also an object of self-evaluation. Of scrutiny and of approbation and disapprobation. I am also the raw material of my self-improvement projects. My selfhood is a unity of these dualities. Still, my  otherness to myself is more intimately mine and thus more easy to love than my otherness to you — which I also need to be me.   This may be part of the explanation why self-love is easier than other-love.

***

Self-esteem sans phrase is axiologically neutral.  It is  a value only when it is a result of  achievement. Empty self-esteem, grounded in nothing, is a disvalue and ought not be promoted in children or in adults.  Barack Hussein Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come to mind as examples of individuals whose self-esteem is far in excess of accomplishment.  But I rank the community organizer and adjunct professor above the bar tender.

Lack of self-esteem is likewise axiologically neutral; a certain amount of it is valuable if it reflects self-knowledge of real defects and limitations.  It is a disvalue if it debilitates and prevents accomplishment.

Know thyself to esteem thyself in the measure appropriate.

***

Disagreement runs deep. Not only do the philosophers disagree about the world, their disciples and commentators disagree about what each has said about the world.  And the anti-philosophers? They too disagree, but  about what is wrong with philosophy, besides failing to note that they themselves philosophize.

***

If the philosophy room is too smoky, the door is unlocked. You are free to go. But the door is very special: if you proffer a justification of your egress, it will automatically lock you in. Just walk away, Renee.

***

“If you didn’t eat so much, you wouldn’t be so hungry.” In one sense, hunger signals the real need for nutrition. In another, it signals the artificial need to fill a stomach distended by inordinate eating. Do we eat because we are hungry, or are we hungry because we eat?  Primarily the first, secondarily the second.

***

First and foremost, food is fuel.  When you gas up your rig, do you inject the gasoline under pressure so as to distend the tank and increase its capacity?

***

You say philosophy bakes no bread? I say: Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. There’s more to life than food, sleep, and sex.

***

“He pretends to be what he is not.” But how much  of genuine aspiration is contained in this pretension? He who fakes it until he makes it is no mere pretender. On the other hand, much of what passes itself off as aspiration is mere pretension.

***

A modicum of phoniness is fitting in a world phenomenal.  Seeming is not being, but if there were no being in seeming it would be nothing at all. It is unseemly in a world of seeming to take everything at face value or to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve.

***

How generous are you if you can easily afford to be generous? How generous is my ‘generous donation’ if it is but one per cent of my monetary surplus? A donation is a giving, but I don’t give of self, but only of pelf, and of pelf a portion with which I can easily part.

***

Philosophy is as dubious a vocation as is the vocation to the priesthood or indeed the calling to anything ‘higher.’ Aspiration or pretension? Hubris? An Icarian reaching for the unattainable that justifiably elicits the scorn of the earth-bound and the ‘practical’?  I say No, but opinions differ.

***

Some say the Bible is inerrant in every particular. Is this type of  inerrantism a form of presuppositionalism? You would be hard-pressed to make a rational case for the claim, let alone prove it.   But what you cannot prove you can always presuppose. And you are free to do so. What you must not do is to think that to argue in a circle is to proffer a proof.

***

We are all affected by the “climate of opinion” as by the actual weather. People believe what others believe because the others believe it. Conformity in belief and behavior is conducive to social success. We go along to get along. The rebel too is subject to the weather. Tied to what he rejects, reacting against it, he is defined by it. He ineptly and unwittingly defines himself by opposing that which he opposes.  But rebels too seek the like-minded so as to form a comforting conformist cohort.  The beatnik in black has his beret and his bible.  In the late’50s, Kerouac’s On the Road was touted as the “bible of the beat generation.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt”

‘Familiarity’ is from the Latin familia, family. The pith of the well-known saying is purchased in the coin of exaggeration, since familiarity needn’t breed contempt; the exaggeration does however rightly point to the ambiguity of human relations.

Although family ties hold one in bonds of love, it is a holding which is too often a holding in contempt, whether mild, moderate, or murderous.  We know our family members too well  to respect them easily, though we ought to.

To maintain respect where there is no fear is a moral challenge. When love is present, it is easy. But true love is rare. In most situations, however, fear suffices. So that you not violate me, it suffices that you fear what I will do to you if you do violate me; whether you respect me is moot.  Hence the logic of deterrence. “An armed society is a polite society.” “Peace through strength.” Si vis pacem, para bellum. (“If you want peace, prepare for war.”)

Since respect is often fear in disguise, it is often an open question how much the respect one is being shown is really fear.

Respect requires distance.  So in every relation with anyone, inside or outside of the family circle, one ought to maintain a certain amount of distance. How much depends on the circumstances and whether one possesses good judgment (phronesis).

There is social distance and physical distance.  Social distance is maintained by the observance of conventional forms of polite behavior both verbal and non-verbal.   “Excuse me, sir” is an example of the former; knocking before entering, an example of the latter.

‘Family’ narrowly defined implies consanguinity.  Consanguinity, however, is no guarantee of spiritual affinity. Sad, but true. On the other hand,  there is no comity without commonality. One form of commonality is consanguinity.  Although consanguinity contributes to commonality, I am spiritually affine with none of the people to whom I am blood-related.  That is my experience; perhaps it is also yours. And yet it is said with some truth that “blood is thicker than water” a saying that points to our dismal rootage in the animal and the tribal.

This is why it is folly to regard the human race as one big happy family. It is not even potentially so. Social harmony is possible only among those who, at a minimum, share a common language and a common culture. Wide-open immigration is therefore a recipe for disaster. A flourishing multi-racial  society may be possible; a flourishing multi-cultural society is certainly not.    If most of our time is spent tearing each other apart, little time will be left over for ‘flourishing.’ A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The political consequences of the above are obvious.

Familiarity is a species of propinquity (social proximity) but not all propinquity is familiarity.   Spiritual affinity requires neither consanguinity nor propinquity.  There is spiritual affinity. This is a fact that, to my mind, points to our higher spiritual nature.

We humans are a hybrid ‘species’ drawn upward toward the aethereal but held fast by  blood and soil, the tribal and the animalic.  Or is that too Platonic a way of putting it?

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 on the far side of middle age 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 womb to world, and from helpless infant to 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 ages 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 age 50 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won’t be long before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Tempus? Fugit!

Random Jottings on the Day before Thanksgiving

Sehnsucht.  The far-off in time or space can arouse our longing for the  metaphysical Elsewhere. A lonely saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridge . . . .

When I met him, I was young and he was younger. Now I am old and he is dead.  This life is too dream-like to be real, and too real to be a dream.

He died in a hospital bed, not with his boots on. “This is funny,” are said to have been Doc Holliday’s last words.

A race is not run all at once, but step by step. So too in life: it is lived day by day, hour by hour. This is a comforting truth.  Can you get through the next hour?

For my kind of life, she’s been the right kind of wife: tamquam alter idem.

It takes a spiritual being to affirm that spirit is nothing but an efflux of brain chemistry and that what is ultimately real is matter alone.

Can there be moral seriousness without some doctrine of immortality?  Yes? Are you serious?

Given that we are ineluctably both truth-seekers and moral strivers, could the world in itself be ultimately unintelligible and purposeless? If it is then man is no microcosm but a cosmic joke.

The ultimate joke would a joke without a teller.

If might makes right, then there is no right. To say that might makes right is to say that the notion of right is illusory.

If it won’t matter tomorrow, how much does it matter today? If it won’t exist tomorrow, how much does it exist today? Does existence come in degrees?

Is salvation of individuality or from individuality?  Christian versus Hindu views. If the former, it ought to  involve a transformation into a higher individuality and not a mere perpetuation of the petty earthly self.

Some friendships ought to be left in the boneyard of memory where they belong. “Let sleeping dogs lie.” But if the friendship was rooted in something deep, fruitful re-awakening may be possible.

Two Types of Humanity: The Mystic and the Profligate

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, entry of 30 December 1940, p. 104:

Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? [. . .] There are only two types of humanity . . . the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes , searching, each is his own way, for the absolute;  but, of the two, the profligate is to my mind the most [more] mysterious, for he never tires of the only dish served up to him by his appetite and on which he banquets each times as though he had never tasted it before. Probably because of this, I have always had a tendency to consider an immoderate craving for pleasure as an accepted form of madness.

Only two types of humanity? No, but two types. Man is made for the Absolute, and some of us seek it.  Mysticism and profligacy are two ways of seeking it. Eschewing the phony and conventional, some of us strive after the really real, τὸ ὄντως ὄν.   Some by world-flight, others by immersion in sensual indulgence.  An enlightened upward and a deluded downward seeking.  The solid and stolid bourgeois type will consider both types of seekers mad. But only those who seek the really real in the pleasures of the flesh are truly mad.  They are bound for a hell of their own devising as I suggest in A Theory of Hell. Excerpt:

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell would then be not as a state of pain but one of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise —  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. On fire with the fire of desire, endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists but will never experience.

Homo Faber, Homo Mendax

Man the maker is a damned liar. He is a fabricator in both senses of the term. A little god and a little devil.  Neither the Father of all nor the Father of lies, he is a chip off the old blocks.

This observation has a Manichean flavor. But if there are not two co-eternal and co-equal principles butting heads, then we get the problem of how the Good Itself can sire evil which is rather lamely viewed as a mere privatio boni.

That it is a dubious doctrine I will argue later, but for now I will simply note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent.

Thus in one clear sense good and evil are polar opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance, for example, is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

Or so it seems. Until we think harder. More later. Old Sol is threatening to rise once again. The heat is back. The mountain bike beckons. The sun also rises, and so do I from the bench of blog to greet the day.

Life in Time

A life in time is a paltry substitute for eternal life, but at least we know we are alive, and in time, whereas we don't know much if anything about eternal life.  On rare occasions, however, some of us catch a glimpse of something that seems to fits the description.  These occasional glimpses fuel a faith that makes life in time a game worth the candle.

Those who claim to know what they can only believe do a disservice to both knowledge and faith. 

Life is Hierarchical

An old lie of leftists is compressed into one of their more recent abuses of language: 'equity.' So-called 'equity' is wokespeak for equality of outcome or result. 'Equity'  in this obfuscatory sense cannot occur and ought not be pursued.

It cannot occur because people are not equal either as individuals or as groups. That is a plain fact. Leftists won't face it, however, because they confuse the world as they would like it to be with the world as it is. 

'Equity' ought not be pursued because its implementation is possible only by the violation of the liberty of the individual by a totalitarian state apparatus precisely unequal in power to those it would equalize.

Life is a ladder.  It is many ladders, as many as there are directions of achievement. On any ladder, some are above, some below. Look up without envy; look down without contempt. Climb as high as you can on as many ladders as you are on.  Lend a hand to those below; if any you help should surpass you, take satisfaction at your mentorship and pride in their accomplishment. 

Look on the Bright Side!

The world is rife with pathologies of all sorts: spiritual, psychological, moral, and medical. But it's all grist for the thinker's mill. That is the bright side. One can allow oneself to become depressed at how pathetic we all are — in different ways and to different degrees — or one can cultivate wonder at our strange predicament and get to work understanding it, thereby squeezing the joys of theory from practical misery.

List and Precision Obsession

You are list-obsessive if you write down an already completed task just so you can cross it off your list. You are precision-obsessive if you point out that a task, completed or not, is not the sort of thing that can be crossed off a list.

An admirable concern for precision can veer off into pedantry, punctiliousness, preciosity.

On the Death of a Neighbor

My neighbor Ted across the street, 85 years old, died the other day. Last I spoke with him, two weeks ago, he seemed as hale and hearty as ever. Ted and I enjoyed 26 trouble-free years of neighborly, if superficial, acquaintanceship.  In this world of surfaces, relationships kept conventional and superficial are often best. Not one harsh word passed between us.  Nothing was ever said in seriousness or in jest to sully the serenity that made the living easy. I will remember him fondly, with nary a negative thought.

There is a lot to be said for mere acquaintanceship and for cleaving to the conventional.  Go deep with people and you may see things you would like to forget. In a world of seemings, surfaces are safe.  You say conventional usages are phony? They mainly are, but what did you expect in a world fleeting and phenomenal? Grow up, Holden!

Don't look for depth where it cannot be found. But look for depth. Where? First within, and then in a kindred spirit or two.

Birthdays

People celebrate birthdays.  But 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.

"It befell you."

Riders on the storm . . .
Into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown.

Thus Jim Morrison recycling Heidegger's Geworfenheit. (Sein und Zeit, 1927, sec. 38)

For all we can legitimately claim to know, however, we may have pre-natally, or rather 'pre-conceptually' chose to enter this crap storm and go for a ride. Can you rule that out with objective certainty? No more than you can rule it in with the same certainty.

As for anti-natalism, see my Anti-Natalism and Benatar categories. Here too no objective certainty either way.

Family Life with the Cheever’s

I'm sure family life has its compensations. But it is not for everybody. I live with an angelic wife and two black cats.  All four of us will die without issue. My contact with relatives is minimal. Blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and in some cases the former seems to exclude the latter. * I can relate to Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation, somewhere in his Journal, “I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone.”

The goods of family life I am missing, in a second sense I am not missing: one cannot miss what one never had.  But the bad things I am missing in the first sense I am happy to miss in that same sense.  The following from The Journals of John Cheever:

My daughter says that our dinner table is like a shark tank. I go into a spin. I am not a shark. I am a dolphin. Mary [Cheever's wife] is the shark. Etc. But what we stumble into is the banality of family situations. As for Susie [Cheever's daughter] she makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong times and of speaking lines I have not written. Does this prove I am incapable of love, or can love only myself? (282)

Well, John, it doesn't prove it, but it is pretty good evidence of it. You would prefer your daughter to be your own creation, a creature of fiction, who does not laugh at the wrong times and speaks only the right lines, a fictional object rather than the subject she is, an ipseity resistant to, and  in adolescent rebellion against, the will of pater familias.  You sired her; you did not create her.**

"Every craft makes crooked" as German folk-wisdom has it,*** and so it is with the novelist. He invents and gets carried away.   Here is an entry on family life illustrating the manipulation of memory by invention:

I think of my father, but nothing is accomplished. The image of him is an invention, not a memory, and an overly gentle invention. There was his full lower lip, wet with spit; his spit-wet cigarette, his hacking cough; the ash on his vest; and the shabby clothes he wore, left to him by dead friends. "Let's give Fred's suits to poor Mr. Cheever." I find in some old notes that my mother reported that he had, just before his death, written a long indictment of her — as a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and a woman. I never saw the indictment. I suppose, uncharitably, that the effect on her would have been to fortify her self-righteousness. She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation.  Sigh — how deep were her sighs. I have no idea what their marriage was like, although I suspect that he worshipped her as my brother worshipped his choice and as perhaps I have worshipped mine. In my brother's case there was, I think, that rich blend of uxoriousness in which praise has a distinct aftertaste of bitterness, not to say loathing. I think that Mary was wounded years before I entered her life, and who is this ghost whose clothes I wear, whose voice I speak  with, what were the cruelties of which I am accused? (275)

From Blake Bailey's biography of Cheever, I take it that the ghost who wears Cheever's clothes and speaks through him, and haunts Mary, is the ghost of Mary's father, the formidable Dr. Milton Winternitz, "the legendary dean of the Yale School of Medicine" (as Bailey puts it in Cheever: A Life, Vintage, 2010, p. 102).  Winternitz was an oppressive and domineering presence who beat Mary as a child with a belt. One moral to extract from this is that one ought not marry a woman until one understands the relation she had with her father, lest you suffer through a marriage as bad as Cheever's. A girl's attitude toward men is formed in large part by her relationship with her father.  A recurrent theme of Cheever's journal is his rotten marriage to the woman he often refers to as Mary maldisposta. The Italian adjective is in the semantic vicinity of unwell, hostile, unfriendly, ill-disposed, and disinclined.

The topic of uxoriousness and the related one of putting women on pedestals beg to be ruminated upon. Romantics are prone to these related errors. Italians are well-represented among romantics, not that Cheever was of Italian extraction, but he had a thing for Italy and swotted up a lot of the lingo. According to G. M. Hopkins' biographer Robert Bernard Martin, Coventry Patmore was ". . . one of the most flagrantly uxorious men of the [19th] century, one who quite seriously worshipped women and all they stood for." (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1991, p. 355.)

Finally, you can see that Cheever is a good writer. How do I know that? It takes one to know one. Like alone knows like. (I recall this principle's being referred as the homoion theorem. But Google turns up nothing. Paging Dave Lull!) 

_____________

* This is evidence of a sort for our dual status. If we were animals merely, why would some of us find the spiritually affine only among the non-blood-related?  And why would be feel spiritually alienated from the blood-related?

** Can we understand divine creation in analogy to the creation of fictional characters by a novelist?  Hugh McCann makes a brave attempt in this direction in his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. I bring up some weighty objections in my review article Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty, published in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2014, 88 (1):149-161.

*** Jeder Handwerk zieht krumm. I picked up this folk phrase from Nietzsche, The Gay Science [Die fröhliche Wissenschaft], 1882:

Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, [you get] the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.

No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the “men of letters” and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus—to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training.

Could old Fritz write or could he write? He puts us all to shame. He and his century-mate Kierkegaard, a prodigious engine of literary productivity if ever there was one. He lived for a scant 42 years (1813-1855); Nietzsche a mere 56 years (1844-1900).