Let the past go and move on. Pack as much life as possible into the few years that remain. Squeeze in as much vital thinking and thoughtful vitality as you can. Move up and away from your vices. Consign your hebetude to history. Break useless contacts. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Mill the grist. Press the grapes of experience for the wine of wisdom. A philosopher's harvest years come late. The clock is running. The format is sudden death. The time control is unknown. The Reaper waits, he is patient, his scythe aglisten in the dying rays of the setting sun. There is work to be done, and it can only be done here. Get on with it, noble soul!
Category: Sage Advice
Alain on Keeping to the Present
Substack latest.
Hunger and Satiety
You should be hungry before every meal and sated after none.
Tough and Forebearing
It is better to be tough on oneself and forebearing toward others than the other way around.
Are You Hungry?
Don't let the thought of the pleasures of the table persuade you to eat if you are not hungry. Eat only at meal times, but never because it is meal time. An exception is breakfast for those quitting their domiciles for a sally-forth into a mean world. To leave your house without food in your gut is like driving into the desert without gas in your tank. You don't know what awaits you.
The Opinions of Others: Signal and Noise
"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your inner voice." (Steve Jobs)
True as far as it goes. But there is both signal and noise is the opinions of others. Heed the signal, lest your inner voice become a noisy idiolect.
Live Long
There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here.
Food: Medicine, Drug, or Fuel?
In an excess of the ascetic, the author of The Confessions in Book Ten, Chapter 31 recommends taking food as medicine. At the opposite extreme we find those for whom it is a soporific, a sedative, an escape from reality, a drug. The wise tread the middle path: food is fuel.
Eat in quantity and quality precisely that alone which optimally fuels fratre asino so that he may bear up well in this vale where his services are indispensable. Properly fortified, he will carry your load over many a pons asinorum.
Kerouac No Role Model
Lest I lead astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty-bound to point out that my annual October focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated. Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as a child and the Buddhist precepts he assiduously studied in the mid-1950s. Not that he was a hypocrite; he was just a deeply flawed human being.
I just now recall a critique of Kerouac by Douglas Groothuis from some years ago. (Old Memory Babe ain't got nothing on me.) Ah yes, here it is. I am in basic agreement with it.
Fake it and Make it
When we started out, did we know what we were doing? We do now.
A bit of posturing and pretense may be needed to launch a life. Posture and pretense become performance. The untested ideal becomes the verified real. At the start of a life scant is the evidence that you can do what you dream: you must believe beyond the evidence if you are to have a shot.
And so I beg to differ with W. K. Clifford:
For a couple of rather more technical treatments, see here.
Care of Soul and Body
To care properly for the first, live each day as if it will be your last. To care properly for the second, live each day as if your supply of days is infinite. (Adapted from Evagrius Ponticus.)
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The mortalist body-abuser is one puzzling hombre.
Christopher Hitchens loved to drink and he loved to smoke and he knew that the synergistic effects of drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney could lead, as it did in the case of Humphrey Bogart, to an untimely shuffling off of the mortal coil. (Hamlet's soliloquy, Act 3, Scene 1) You would think that someone who was utterly convinced that he was nothing more than an animated body, a clever land mammal, would want to take care of his body. Hitchens was not suicidal. He loved to write and he had writing projects planned out. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age 62 in 2011. Those of us who champion free speech miss him greatly and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world.
People think they have plenty of time. But it's later than you think. The Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we scribblers sharpen our pencils.
Stoic Advice
KNOW IN ADVANCE that people will respond to you in the most diverse ways, favorably, with hostility, indifferently, in every way. Do not be surprised or much affected. Take as much of it as you can with equanimity. Observe their antics with detachment. Observe as well your emotional responses.
Treat feelings and emotions as they arise as interesting objects of study. Holding them at mental arm's length, objectifying them, we lessen their grip on us.
Self-Admonitions
Arm yourself with your maxims as you quit your cell. They are as important as your EDC. The vexatious and worse are out and about. Avoid the near occasion of idle talk. Most of what anyone has to say is bushwa. Smile and greet, but pass on. Restrain the social need — if it is a need. Keep the past at mental arm's length. Live in the present, relaxed, but situationally aware. Guard the mind. Protect the inner citadel from pointless and harmful invasions.
Ingredients of Happiness
What makes for happiness?
Acceptance is a good part of it: acceptance of self, of one's ineluctable limitations, of others and their limitations, of one's lot in life, of one's place in the natural hierarchy of prowess and intellect and spiritual capacity, acceptance of the inevitable in the world at large.
Gratitude is another ingredient in happiness: one cultivates gratitude for and appreciation of what one has here and now without comparisons to an idealized past, a feared future, or to the lots of others. No regret, resentment, worry, or comparison. Comparison breeds envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Be your incomparable self. If you are not yet incomparable, take up self-individuation as a life project. Realize yourself. Your life is more a task than a given, a task of transmuting givens into accomplishments. It is the task of becoming actually the unique person you are potentially. But no hankering for what is out of reach. No false ideals. No consorting with the utopian. No Lennon-esque imagining of the impossible. No dreaming impossible dreams.
You were born somewhere in the natural hierarchy of physical endowment, moral and affective and aesthetic sensitivity, mental power, spiritual capacity, and strength of will. But your place in the hierarchy allows for development. Know your place but press against its upper limits.
But of course happiness is not just a matter of attitude and exertion but also rests on contingency and luck. We need, but cannot command, the world's cooperation. Happenstance holds happiness hostage. You were dealt a bad hand? Suck it up and play it the best you can for as long as you can.
Conservatives emphasize attitude and exertion, leftists happenstance. Both have a point. "The harder I work, the luckier I become" is a conservative exaggeration, but a life-enhancing one. It is however the foolish conservative who thinks he is self-made and not the beneficiary of a myriad of forces and factors far beyond his control. There is truth in Phil Ochs' lament, "There but for fortune go you or I," but not such truth as to trump the conservative's exaggeration. Weathering "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) he will slog on, per aspera ad astra.
Purgation of Memory and Purgatory of Memory
The manuals of mysticism enjoin the purgation of memory. But not all such purgation is good. Vexing memories of folly and excess, of time-wastage and wrong-doing, are an earthly purgatory which the purgation of memory, if it could be achieved, would eliminate.
Prosecute the purgation of memory but not to the detriment of memory's purgatory.