Category: Human Predicament
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The Diplomat
Not an original aphorism, but a good one nonetheless: A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip. This illustrates the principle that in human affairs it is less what one says than how one says it that matters. Perverse as…
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Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
When I asked Harry if he uses the Internet to look up old friends, "Let sleeping dogs lie" was his reply. His attitude, qualified, recommends itself. The friendships of old were many of them friendships of propinquity. They were born of time and place and circumstance, and they died the death of distance, whether temporal or…
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Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook…
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Pushing Sixty?
If three-score are at the door, the Laudator Temporis Acti has some Emerson and some Martial for you. Whether or not they help you over the transom, they will provide matter for salutary reflection.
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My Favorite Pascal Quotation
Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55): How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a…
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Our Exigent Predicament
What do we lack? Not much — just knowledge, resolve, goodness, and reality. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul, and we are soon to vanish from the scene entirely.
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Competition
You won the race, the tournament, the jackpot, the promotion, the presidency. So now you won't have to die? You beat another miserable mortal for some lousy bauble? Such is all it takes to give your paltry life meaning?
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Work, Money, Living and Livelihood
Prevalent attitudes toward work and money are curious. People tend to value work in terms of money: an occupation has value if and only if it makes money, and the measure of its value is how much money it makes. If what you do makes money, then it has value regardless of what it is…
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The Worst Thing About Poverty
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 38, written in 1940: 155. The worst of poverty — today at any rate — the most galling and the most difficult thing to bear, is that it makes it almost impossible to be alone. Neither at work, nor at rest, neither abroad nor…
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Advice on Publishing From the 17th Century
Suppose you are working on an article that you plan on sending to some good journal with a high rejection rate. You know that what you have written still needs some work, but you submit it anyway in the hope of a conditional acceptance and comments with the help of which you will perfect your…
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Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine
Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962: . . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity. He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves…
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The Punctum Pruriens of Metaphysics
Man is a metaphysical animal. He does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone, and he does not scratch only where it physically itches. He also scratches where he feels the metaphysical itch, the tormenting lust to know the ultimate why and wherefore. And where is that punctum pruriens located? What is it…
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Idle Talk
From Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199: In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this…
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We Annoy Ourselves
There are not a few situations in life in which we are tempted to say or think, 'Your behavior is annoying!' Thinking this, we only make ourselves more annoyed. Saying it is even worse. For then two are annoyed. Instead of saying or thinking of something external to oneself that he, she, or it is…
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Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic
Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii: My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution. The suggestion is that the…