Category: Sage Advice

A Test for Marital Compatibility: Travelling Together

DinerI just heard Dennis Prager say on his nationally syndicated radio show that travelling  together is a good test for marital compatibility. Sage advice.

Long before I had heard of Prager I subjected my bride-to-be to such a test.  I got the idea from the delightful 1982 movie The Diner.  One of the guys who hung out at the diner tested for marital suitability by administering a football quiz to his fiance.  That gave me the idea of taking my future wife on a cross-country trip from Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California in my Volkswagen bus.  This was not a camper bus, but a stripped-down model, so the amenities were meager-to-nonexistent.  I threw a mattress in the back, made some curtains, and hit the road.  That was in the summer of '82. The soundtrack from The Diner was one of the tapes we listened to on the way. I recall reading the Stephen King novel Cujo about the dog from hell when my inamorata drove.

We slept mainly at rest stops.  I had an old .38 Special with me for protection, which fortunately proved unnecessary.  What did we do for showers?  I don't think we took any.  We cleaned up at the rest stop facilities like true vagabundos and moved on.

One dark and starry night I pulled off Interstate 10 in  some desolate stretch of the Mojave desert. Wifey-to-be was scared but it was a memorable moonless star-studded night.  We made it to L. A., saw family and friends, then headed up old U. S. 395 along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada to Bishop, Cal,  where we visited some more of my people, then north to Reno, Nevada where we hooked up with I-80 and  pointed the old bus East.

Dear one took the rigors of that  trip 30 years ago like a trouper, and passed the test with flying colors.  We got married the following summer and remain happily married 29 summers later.

When I told the story to a feminazi some years back she gave me a hard and disapproving look.  She didn't like that I imposed a marital compatibility test upon my lady love.  Bitch!  So here's another bit of free and friendly advice. Marry an angel, never a bitch.  Life's enough of a bitch. You don't need to marry one.  Does your belllicosity need an outlet?  Fight outside the home.  Home should be an oasis of peace and tranquillity.

So once again I agree with Prager.  Check her or him out on the road before heading for the altar. 

A Letter to Young Voters

I would quibble with parts of this piece  by Dennis Prager, but it is worth reading.   Excerpt:

Young people believe that when the government gives more money and benefits to more people it helps them. This is naïve. As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy. Every study shows that people who earn money are far happier than people who win many millions of dollars in a lottery. Happiness is earned, not given.

Here’s another: Young people are far more likely to believe that world peace is achieved when nations lay down their arms and talk through their differences. But this has never been the case. Of course, good nations stay peaceful when they talk to other good nations. Bad nations — that is, nations ruled by evil men — are never dissuaded from making war by talk. They are dissuaded only by good nations having more arms than they do. That is why the Marine Corps has done so much more for world peace than the Peace Corps.

If you want to vote Democrat, don’t do so because that is the party that cares more for the poor and the hungry. We older conservatives (and young ones, too) care just as much for the poor. But after living a life of seeing the naïve only make things worse for the poor, we are no longer seduced by caring rhetoric. We are seduced by policies based on the awesome American value of individual initiative combined with liberty to create and retain wealth. It’s now called “conservatism.”

And, finally, you should know this: The “idealists” that many of you find appealing are the ones leaving you with a national debt that will render it very difficult for you to attain the material quality of life that these people have had.

Will millenials be persuaded?  Not likely.

Widely-Read or Well-Read?

This from a reader:

Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book, pointed out that being widely-read does not mean one is well-read. I've enjoyed reading some of your old posts about reading and studying, so I wanted to know your opinion on this matter.

Should I aim to read a lot of books? Or is it better to read and reread a few good books? I know some people say one should read widely but read good books deeply. But I've found that a hard balance to maintain. For example, deeply reading an 800-page selection of Aquinas's writings several times would consume almost all of my reading for the next 1-2 months. Also, it's hard for me to switch gears, you might say. If I'm accustomed to reading most of my books through quickly without pausing much to think, then I easily fall into that mode of reading when I'm trying to read deeply.

I imagine you would have some interesting thoughts on this topic, since you have a few decades of reading behind you. Which type of reading benefited you the most? If you could go back and change what you read and how you read during your decades of scholarship, what would you change?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

I will begin by reproducing a couple of the paragraphs from A Method of Study:

Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan.  Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them.  I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading.  Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a fine cigar . . . .

 If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought
to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.  This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.  The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it.  Here is where blogging can be useful.  Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.                          

To the foregoing, I would add, first of all, the magnificent observation of Schopenhauer: "Forever reading, never read."  If you want to be read, then you must write.  And even if you don't want to be read, you must write — for the reason supplied in the preceding paragraph.

Now on to your questions.  

Widely-read or well-read?  You can be both. And you should be both.  Switching gears can be difficult, but it can be done.

As for time that could have been better spent, I do not regret reading vast quantities of Continental philosophy, but some of the time spent on the more extreme representatives of that tradition, such as Derrida, was time wasted. 

Re-reading these remarks, I realize they are rather trite.  But they may be of some use nonetheless.

On Praise

We do not like to be praised if (a) the praiser is beneath us; (b) what is praised is something insignificant or common; (c) the praise is insincere, perhaps by having an ulterior motive; (d) the praise is mistaken in that we lack the excellence attributed to us.

Particularly annoying is to be praised for something insignificant while one's actual virtues go unappreciated. So be careful in your bestowal of praise: take care that you do not offend the one you hope to flatter.

Seize the Day

Horace advises that we seize the day. "Life ebbs as I speak: so seize each day, and grant the next no credit."  The trouble with this advice is that what we are told to grab is so deficient in entity as to be barely seizable.  The admonition comes almost to this: seize the unseizable, fix the flux, stay the surge, catch the wind. 

I do indeed try to seize the day, and its offerings, day by day, moment by moment.  Walking along the trail I stab my staff into the ground saying "This is it, this is your life, right here, right now, and it is good." Living in tune with this mantram, without wanting to be elsewhere or elsewhen, is obviously better than standing on tiptoes trying to make out the future or looking through memory's rear-view mirror. 

There is no full living  without presence to the present, without mindfulness to the moment.  But mindfulness is ultimately no solution since what one is minding is ultimately empty.

The passing moment is more real than the past and the future, but it is precisely passing and so, ultimately, unreal.  The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time at all.  The alternative, however, is present to us only as this blank sense of time's deficiency.

So, with unseeing eyes, we stand on tiptoes after all.

An Ideal Spouse

My opinion of Maureen Dodd went up a notch when I read this NYT column in which she quotes a Catholic priest.  He proffers good advice about marriage one piece of which is:

     Don't marry a problem character thinking you will change him.
 
Excellent advice, Schopenhauerian advice. You will remember his riff on the unalterability of character. It is true as a general rule: people do not change. What you are characterologically at twenty you are for life. If you catch your inamorata lying to you or engaging in any sort of duplicity, know that you have been vouchsafed an insight into an underlying mendacity that will manifest itself time and time again. If one time she racks up a credit card bill that she cannot pay in full at the end of the month, she will do it a thousand times. And so on down the line. Enter into matrimony with such a person if you must, but do it with eyes open and thoughts clear.

My wife has a wide range of virtues and no vices to speak of. But in point of punctuality, she falls down. I am by contrast punctual to a fault. So 29 years ago I tried to change her, to make her punctual like me, but soon realized my folly and changed myself instead. I simply gave up making precise dates with her, rather than courting vexation at her nonshowing at appointed exact times. Instead of: Meet me at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth at the stroke of high noon, this: I'll be at the Sufficient Grounds coffee house from 2 PM on writing and playing chess; fall by when you get a chance.

I also realized that part of her being such a sweet and agreeable person is her not being hung up on precision.  And I furthermore bore in mind Plato's point in the Symposium, namely, and to put it in my own way, that a partner should be a complement, not a copy.

As a rule of thumb: You can't change others, but you can change yourself. And you should. A bit more precisely: character is largely invariant but attitude admits of adjustment.  

Lavelle on Living in the Present

Louis Lavelle (1883-1951), The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. W. T.  Gairdner (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 153:

Life breaks the surface of reality and emerges at the present moment; we must not hold our gaze fixed on a future which, when it comes, will be merely another present. The unhappy man is he who is  forever thinking back into the past or forward into the future; the happy man does not try to escape from the present, but rather to penetrate within it and take possession of it. Almost always we ask of the future to bring us a happiness which, if it came, we would have to enjoy in another present; but this is to see the problem the wrong way round. For it is out of the present which we have already, and from the way we make use of it, without turning our eyes to right or to left, that will emerge the only happy future we will ever have.

Good, Better, Best

From the mail bag:

Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good".
 
Good, better, best.  Positive, comparative, superlative.  "The best/better is the enemy of the good" means that oftentimes, not always, the pursuit of the best/better will prevent one from attaining the good.  The point is that if one is not, oftentimes, willing to settle for what is merely good, one won't get anything of value.  So I suggest that my reader has not understood Monsieur Voltaire's aperçu.
 
Example.  It will come down to Romney versus Obama.  If libertarians and conservatives fail to vote for Romney, on account of his manifold defects, then they run the risk of four more years of the worthless Obama.  Those libertarians and conservatives will have let the better/best become the enemy of the good.  They will have shown a failure to understand the human predicament and the politics pertaining to it.  He who holds out for perfection in  an imperfect world may end up with nothing.
 
You give the example of a spouse: try to hold out for a perfect wife, and you'll never marry at all. An example that would fit my reading would be, if one settles for a wife who's merely better than most of the available options, then one's apt to settle for a wife who isn't good. Sometimes it's better to refuse all the available options.
 
I agree that it is sometimes better to refuse all the available options.  If the choice is between Hitler and Stalin, then one ought to abstain! 
 
Maybe a better example would be, imagine I need to install plumbing in my house. Crappy plumbing is almost always going to be better than no plumbing. But should I (say, out of laziness) really settle for that, on the grounds that 'well, it's better than the nothing I had'?
 
Of course not.  Voltaire's point is not that one should settle for what is inferior when something better is available.  The point is that one should not allow the pursuit of unattainable perfection to prevent the attainment of something good but within reach.  Suppose someone were to say: I won't have any faucets or fixtures in my house unless they are all made of solid gold!  You will agree that such an attitude would be eminently unreasonable.
 
The Voltairean principle as I read it is exceedingly important in both personal life and in politics.
 
Perhaps you know some perfectionists.  These types never accomplish anything because they are stymied by the conceit that anything less than perfection is worthless.  I knew a guy in graduate school who thought that a dissertation had to be a magnum opus.  He never finished and dropped out of sight.
 
In politics there are 'all or nothing' types who demand the whole enchilada or none.  Some years back, when it looked as if it would be Giuliani versus Hillary, some conservative extremists said they would withhold their support from the former on the ground that he is soft on abortion.  But that makes no bloody sense given that under Hillary things would have been worse.
 
The 'all or nothing' mentality is typical of adolescents of all ages.  "We want the world and we want it . .  NOW!"

A New Year’s Resolution

I make it every year and I break it every year: Handle each piece of paper only once!

Let's say you have just come in with the mail. Without pausing to pour coffee or stroke the cat, fire up the shredder and open the trash barrel. Shred the credit card applications, pay the bills, file the financial statements. Deal with each piece of paper on the spot. When in doubt, discard.

Socializing as Self-Denial

You don't really want to go to that Christmas party where you will eat what you don't need to eat, drink what you don't need to drink, and dissipate your inwardness in pointless chit-chat.  But you were invited and your nonattendance may be taken amiss.  So you remind yourself that self-denial is good and that it is useful from time to time to practice the art of donning and wearing the mask of a 'regular guy.'

For the step into the social is by dissimulation. Necessary to the art of life is knowing how to negotiate the social world and pass yourself off under various guises and disguises.

Negative Thoughts

Squelching them is good in two ways.  It is good to be rid of them since their presence keeps the positive from streaming in.  And the very act of squelching them is a form of self-denial, something without which there can be no moral or spiritual progress.  Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens.