August 11th, 2024 — reading
Fundamentals to Misunderstanding Politics
Chapter 0.1 What Do You Mean By “Maxims?”
(see Chapter 0.0 here)
Newt Monk: Thus, do not listen to what I say or seem to say, but try to get a glimpse of what I say I saw in some book written by either Boethius or Machiavelli from long ago, particularly in regard to contemporary politics.[1] In those books I once found what used to be called “maxims” or “rules of thumb,” though better metaphors might now be needed. I therefore sometimes think of them as seeds, as pods, as starting points, as springboards, as tent stakes, as prefabricated political truths, as carbon-composite cookie-cutter constants, as givens, as groundings, as grounds keeping, hence the term “tent stakes” I keep returning to.
Oak Boat: Right, the important thing is that these things-once-called-maxims are not ends in themselves but means (methods, applications) to help scoot one along toward some distant end that will likely never actually be reached but, nonetheless, as an end personified, stares down and scowls at the stooped traveler across her whole journey.
Newt Monk: And as I can’t prove that any of my findings from Boethius and Machiavelli are in common use (particularly in central Texas), I must follow R. B. Y. Scott’s introduction to his 1965 translation of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII to say that what I found were not maxims but artifacts, like finding arrowheads in a field:
Strictly speaking, an epigram, an aphorism, or a maxim does not [p. 4] qualify as proverbial unless it has passed into common use. An epigram like Lord John Russell’s is a perceptive observation wittily expressed, but no one would quote it unless he were discussing the present subject. An aphorism like “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is philosophical in tone and lacks the common touch. A maxim is an axiom or rule of conduct which may or may not gain widespread acceptance, such as “Knowledge is power.” The homeliness of the truth expressed and the simplicity, conciseness, and picturesqueness of its expression characterize the anonymous familiar popular saying. “Dead men tell no tales.” [“]A new broom sweeps clean.” “Chickens come home to roost.”[2]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims, these words, observations by dead authors. Rhetorically, one could say what you want is somewhat equal to eidolopoeia: presenting a dead person as speaking, or assigning words to the dead. Yet what you want is also somewhat equal to ethopoeia: putting oneself in the place of another to then understand, express that person’s feelings better.[3]
Newt Monk: Yes, this whittling down of terms, of finding which one is the sharpest, does help. I think what I found in Boethius and Machiavelli sometimes involves the usage of a kind of catena, which Old Oxford has defined as “a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine.” Plus, the idea of a literary catena was once envisioned by the great bookman Andrew Lang as being “a golden chain of bibliophiles,” that is, as in a chain of quotations from the best books on the best topics found by the best readers, the best lovers of books, etcetera.[4]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims––these words, observations by dead authors––but you might call them catenas…. Hmm. Rhetorically, one would say that what you ask for sometimes involves epicrisis: the quoting of a passage followed by commenting on it. Still, what you ask for appears to be more than mere antithesis: the attempt to conjoin contrasting ideas.[5]
Newt Monk: Indeed, I think at the end of the day I can only call this thing an adynata—a term that in medieval rhetoric meant something akin to stringing together impossibilities, as an attempted confession that all words eventually fail us. And so calling them “tent stakes” is as good a vivid metaphor for the abstract term adynata as any other I suppose.[6]
NOTES
[1] From Jung:
A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation….
To the philosopher as well this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share.
(Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewessten,(Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1928), trans. by R. F. C. Hull as “Relations between ego and unconscious,” (1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 105)
And let me add from Walter Kaufmann:
Another question remains which in some cases may be most important of all: What did the author see? The answers to such questions as, for example, what concrete instances he had in mind and against what view he aimed his proposition, do not necessarily solve this central problem, though they are relevant and important. Nor is the difference between what an author saw and said necessarily reducible to the difference between what he meant and what his proposition means. What he meant to say may well have been as wrong as his proposition, and nevertheless he may have seen something important.
(Critique of Religion and Philosophy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1958), pp. 72–73)
[2] R. B. Y. Scott, “General Introduction,” The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 3–4.
[3] See Richard A. Lanham (ed.), A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991).
[4] Andrew Lang, “Bibliomania in France,” Books and Bookmen, (London: Longman, Green, and Co; Second Edition, 1887), p. 105.
[5] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
[6] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
December 11th, 2017 — Books
Two Brief Thoughts on Reading Books
A ghost––either of Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848), or Andrew Lang (1844–1912), or Jorge Borges (1899–1986)––asks how differently I read a book (or author) when:
(1) I’ve bought the book,
(2) I’ve been lent the book from a friend or library,
(3) I’ve been given the book (and cannot re-gift it), or
(4) I’ve stolen the book?[1]
For scenarios (1) and (4), the answer involves me as an individual recognizing my own need to read. But in scenarios (2) and (3), it is someone else who recognizes the need for me to read something I have yet to get around to or perhaps deserve to reread. For I read differently when I want to read compared to the times when someone else wants me to read, either silently to myself or aloud to anyone around.
*****
When I was a child there were two kinds of trees: those you could climb, and those you couldn’t. Funny, I don’t remember thinking of buildings this way, even though the same principle would apply. But architecture is frozen music,[2] while books are trees. My childish eyes looked only for attainable branches to grab, sturdy knots to claw, and convenient toeholds to brace.
And these days I think I still think of books like that: books and trees that can be read or climbed versus those that can’t, or, at least on initial inspection, look too challenging to attempt. For example Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) is a towering redwood whose canopy I slowly approach. ’Tis a big book, one I began reading in June of this year, and, after taking about 60 pages worth of notes, am only about a third of the way through. I scoot up its trunk with some fear and much trembling, not knowing what I’ll find when I reach the top, or how I’ll safely get back down.
NOTES
[1] Andrew Lang, The Library, (New York, NY: Macmillan & Co, 1881). Reprinted under Dodo Press. 2004:
The Book-Ghoul is he who combines the larceny of the biblioklept with the abominable wickedness of breaking up and mutilating the volumes from which he steals … He prepares books for the American market. (p. 28)
See also D’Israeli’s essay “A Bibliognoste†in Curiosities of Literature – Vol. III, (Sixth edition, London: John Murray, 1817.)
[2] Goethe, Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, (1811–1830) in Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, (trans. R. O. Moon, Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1949) II, 43.
August 4th, 2017 — Books, reading
July 27th, 2017 — Criticism
Joan d’Arc and the Scottish Bookman Andrew Lang
Anything by the Scottish bookman Andrew Lang (1844–1912) is usually a rewarding read. This is because he was so well-read.
Now the other day I was curious to read up on Joan, or rather Jeanne d’Arc (1412–1431), and I had no hesitation picking up Lang’s biography of her entitled The Maid of France (1908). I didn’t flinch because I knew him to be well qualified to write a sound account. I know he knew all about history, languages, rare books, blue China, medieval poetry, most of the world’s mythologies, European fairy lore and even conducted (with sound skepticism) researches into the paranormal.
Andy Lang wrote modern poems parodying Ronsard and translated Homer. He was the kind of person who could tell the difference between a first and second edition of the extremely rare Histoires ou contes du temps passé or Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times with Morals or Mother Goose Tales) by Charles Perrault, published in 1697.
But he always considered himself a journalist rather than a scholar, as he admitted in a note to the widow of his sometime rival, the philologist Max Müller:
My own relations with Mr. Max Müller were those of an amateur, or casual inquirer, who ventured, on a single point, to oppose the conclusions of a man eminently learned. We approached the subject, that of the origins of myths, from different quarters, and saw different sides of the shield as in the old apologue….
I am anxious to say is, that Mr. Max Müller always met my criticisms, often petulant in manner, and perhaps often unjust, with a good humour and kindness perhaps unexampled in the controversies of the learned and the half-learned. I shall always remember with pleasure certain occasions when Mr. Max Müller turned my own laugh against myself, with victorious humour and good humour. Our little systems have their day, or their hour: as knowledge advances they pass into the history of the efforts of pioneers. [1]
But as I read through Lang’s book on Miss d’Arc, I kept getting slightly irritated how Lang keeps crowbarring in anecdotal, information concerning Scotland, information often parallel to Joan and events going on in France. On the other hand, I’m new to Joan and her world. I don’t know squat about the Hundred Years War, except that Wikipedia tells me, yes, Scotland and France were often allied against England during the war.
So it does make some sense for a Scotsman like Lang to retell Joan’s tale in the manner that he does. And I haven’t forgotten that Lang often wrote for “the seriously self-educated.â€[2] That means Lang wasn’t writing for Oxbridge dons, though many respected his expertise and were his friends, but for the seriously self-educated reading public in late Victorian–early Edwardian Britain. That kind of reading public would probably have known a thing or two about the war beforehand, and might well have appreciated Lang’s anecdotal gestures.
Yet I really don’t feel I learned very much, except about Lang’s adoration for Joan as well as most things Scottish. The book did have some jewels:
The mournful truth is that the historian has a much better chance of being read if he gives free play to his fancy than if he is strictly accurate. But to add the figments of fancy to the facts on record, to cite documents as if they were warrants for the statements which they do not support, is to wander from history into the enchanted forest of romance.[3]
Lang never plays with the facts as he warns here, but his fancy for Joan (and Scotland) sometimes distracts him from telling a plain story with the facts clearly presented, even if the fancy is interesting in itself to some readers:
How did Jeanne overcome the scepticism of Baudricourt so far that he ended by allowing her to have an escort? To answer this question entails what Sir Walter Scott calls “a boring attempt to see further into a millstone than the nature of the millstone permits,” —a process which Sir Walter, as an historian, thought highly undesirable…. [4]
Jeanne endured the irons, the chains, the hideous company of the merry men, because she refused to be on parole not to attempt an escape. This is one more example of her matchless courage and resolution. For five months she bore things intolerable rather than give her faith to any man, rather than abandon the chance of resuming her task. Great in everything as she was, we here see her at her greatest. [5]
I’m glad I read Lang’s The Maid of France, but nonetheless remain surprisingly underwhelmed.
NOTES
[1] Müller, Max. The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller. Edited by his wife. Vol. II. London: Longmans. 1902. pp. 428–29.
[2] As Elanor de Selms Langstaff writes in her biography: “Lang did not write for the newly literate, but, good Scotsman that he was, speak he did to the most serious of the self-educated,†(Andrew Lang. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co. 1978. p. 14).
The distinction between scholars and journalists was emphasized by Walter Kaufmann in his The Future of the Humanities (1977):
The journalistic orientation poses an immense threat to the future of the humanities. Some old-fashioned humanists felt that whatever was not worth reading ten times was not worth reading at all. They concentrated on books that had survived for centuries, and they ignored what seemed ephemeral—often even science, because it kept changing. The predilection of journalistic teachers for what is “news†and their concern with the latest fads endangers the conservation of the greatest works of the human spirit. (NY: Reader’s Digest Press. p. 21)
Kaufmann suggests studying George B. Shaw’s distinction:
The Newspaper Man, a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism (for a newspaper, not having to act on its description and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity), he has perforce become a journalist, and has to keep up an air of high spirits through a daily struggle with his own illiteracy and the precariousness of his employment. He has a note-book, and occasionally attempts to make a note; but as he cannot write shorthand, and does not write with ease in any hand, he generally gives it up as a bad job before he succeeds in finishing a sentence. (The Doctor’s Dilemma. 1906. NY: Brentano’s. 1909. IV, p. 92)
[3] Lang, Andrew. The Maid of France. London: Longman’s. 1908. pp. 14–15.
[4] Lang 73.
[5] Lang 252–53.
July 17th, 2017 — Criticism
Working With Wilder: Reflections on Mark Athitakis and “The New Midwest”
It is evident after reading The New Midwest: a Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt (2017) that Mark Athitakis has read a lot more books on the Midwest than I think I’ll ever be able to get around to, so I am somewhat hesitant to comment or critique his book too much. But when it comes to the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder I think I can offer some constructive reflection linking both authors.
The Little House books are some of the earliest books I remember my mother reading to me and my siblings in the mid-1980s. So I found it a little strange to encounter Athitakis’ confession that he was “conditioned to think” of the books as “written for girls,” (p. 37).
Yes, the characters of Laura, Ma, Mary, Carrie and Nellie are all girls, but I never felt the books were “girly” or “sissy” or what have you. But on the other hand, I get what Athitakis is getting at. I wasn’t quoting passages from the books and the television show in the locker-room after football practice.
I’m pretty sure that, even in “the late 1970s and early 1980s,” when he was growing up, Mr. Athitakis doesn’t mean he was conformed to believe all fiction written by women was therefore written for women. I don’t think he was taught that in school, nor do I interpret him as saying that he did. But, what is an interesting question, is whether he (and I and others of our generation) grew up assuming that when fiction prior to the 21st century contains females as its principle characters, did (and do) we initially assume such fiction was written more for women than for men?
Upon some reflection, the question doesn’t pan out. Think about it. I’ve never heard of a male reader characterize Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) as a “girly” book, nor have I ever heard of girls complaining that Rowling’s Harry Potter series were too “manly” to be read. My mother’s favorite book by Wilder is Farmer Boy (1933), which is a retelling of the boyhood of Wilder’s husband Almonzo Wilder. Perhaps gender is pretty arbitrary.
But what about when the author, particularly for a children’s book, is a woman and the principle character happens to be a girl? Are there examples in this context that have traditionally not been considered too feminine for male readers from the last 300 years?
On this issue I must confess I’ve never been impulsively tempted to read Little Women (1868) (or Little Men for that matter). Super-reader Andrew Lang once confessed in Adventures Among Books (1910) of his childhood love for Brönte’s Jane Eyre (p.10). And, if we accept the experts general agreement that fairy-tales were originally and principally told by women to children, then one can say Charles Dickens’ confession of his desire to marry Red Riding Hood counts as an answer in the affirmative to the proposed question above (see “A Christmas Tree” (1859)).
https://www.instagram.com/p/BWoCoGulYya/?taken-by=bookbread2&hl=en
Athitakis’ comments (pp. 37-38) on the plotlessness of Wilder’s first book Little House in the Big Woods (1932) is an important observation. As Laura Wilder said later in life:
For years I had thought that the stories my father once told me should be passed on to other children. I felt they were much too good to be lost.
And so I wrote Little House in the Big Woods.
That book was a labor of love and is really a memorial to my father. A line drawing of an old tin type of father and mother is the first illustration.
“My Work.†A Little House Sampler. By Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. Edited by William Anderson. Lincoln, NE. 1988. NY: Harper Collins. 1995.  176–77.
But one should compare and contrast the sixth book in the Little House series The Long Winter (1940), whose narrative is strongly plot-driven–yet also full of psychological stress and spiritual strength to endure a fierce series of blizzards in the winter of 1880-81, strangely not unlike Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), although it takes place not in the Midwest but in Colorado, and Michael Punke’s The Revenant (2002), a novel of the Northwest but one that starts out in Midwest Missouri.
November 4th, 2016 — Criticism
Bookbread: International Voting Edition
With only four days left before this election ends, I’ve noticed some readers of this blog come all the way from places such as Yerevan, Armenia and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as Bad Kissingen, Bavaria and even Bengaluru, Karnataka.
I wonder, what would those readers and their friends and families ask of a voter in the United States? Would they be curious for whom I voted? Do they understand the typical American’s deep ambivalence toward both candidates?
- I will say I’ve already voted.
- I will say never have I joined a political party nor voted a “straight ticket†for a single faction.
- I will say I come from a modest family involved in agriculture, healthcare, and education. I grew up on a farm outside of a town with a population of less than 7,000 but now live about 60 miles away from that farm in Austin, Texas with a metro populous of over a million.
- I will say the city traffic proposition that I voted on will affect my day-to-day life much more than any President of the United States ever can on any issue.
I cannot deny being tempted to pen, as Ovid did to his enemies in the Ibis, an elaborate curse upon these hucksters who herd us like cattle. Or should I follow Paul’s advice and shake my sandals at these clownish candidates and their supporters and declare “your blood be on your own hands,� [1]
On the other hand, perhaps all this anxiety and confusion will revive the aesthetic significance of literature. After all, in both good times and bad, one nearly always wants better books. Yet I would be willing to face a famine that made worthwhile works scarce should that famine render an abundance of readers seriously interested in self-education. This was Andrew Lang’s audience,[2] and it is the audience this Bookbread blog continues to seek, no matter which ape be the acting President.
NOTES
[1] Matthew 10:14; Acts 18:6.
[2] As Elanor De Selms Langstaff put it: “Lang did not write for the newly literate, but, good Scotsman that he was, speak he did to the most serious of the self-educated,†(Andrew Lang. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co. 1978. p. 14.)
October 27th, 2016 — Criticism
Throwing Heidegger for a Loop (by Not Reading Him)
The Younger Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) writes that, “the fall of anything great generally takes time,†for this is the nature of Fortune.[1] Fortune juggles us from her felly—because she is a jester performing before the Court of Zeus—Seneca, therefore, advised his fellow ancients to accept Fortune; for they cannot resent her.[2] They must adopt a noble spirit (wherever she throws them).[3]
I have yet to read Being and Time (1927). But I’ve heard things about it. I’ve heard it discusses a concept called “thrown-ness†(Geworfenheit) that seems to be basically the same as the ancient idea of the goddess Fortune. And moderns, even before Heidegger (1889–1976), have tossed around this same idea––that the condition of being is analogous to the sense of being thrown by Fate/Fortune. Emerson (1803–1882), writing 80+ years before Heidegger, believed that while we are thrown into our immediate conditions without whim or warning, we must choose not to passively fall like Milton’s Satan, but instead soar like a Hellenic Icarus:
The man who bates no jot of courage when oppressed by fate[,] who miss ed ing of his design lays hold with ready hand on the unexpected event & turns it to his own account & in the cruelest suffering has that generosity of perception that he is sensible of a secret joy in the addition this event makes to his knowledge––that man is truly independent,––“he takes his revenge on fortuneâ€* is independent of time & chance; fortune may rule his circumstances but he overrules fortune. The stars cannot thwart with evil influences the progress of such a soul to grandeur….[4]
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.[5]
This thrown feeling was not limited to American transcendentalists. Take the Scottish bookman Andrew Lang (1844–1912):
So he brings us no news
From the stars we peruse,
Or in hope, or in terror survey;
He is only a stone
From the world that was thrown
When the Earth was an infant at play.[6]
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of anthroposophy, once defined free will as being “conscious†of our “desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.†For Steiner, the fact that we prioritize our desires gives the illusion of free will. Being human, we cannot free ourselves from our free will. We cannot help that we’ve been thrown. For Steiner:
[A thrown] stone, for example, receives from an external cause acting upon it a certain quantity of motion, by reason of which it necessarily continues to move, after the impact of the external cause has ceased. The continued motion of the stone is due to compulsion, not to the necessity of its own nature, because it requires to be defined by the impact of an external cause. What is true here for the stone is true also for every other particular thing, however complicated and many-sided it may be, namely, that everything is necessarily determined by external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and definite manner.
Now, pray, assume that this stone during its motion thinks and knows that it is striving to the best of its power to continue in motion. This stone which is conscious only of its striving and is by no means indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and that it continues in motion for no other reason than its own will to continue. Now this is that human freedom which everybody claims to possess and which consists in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Thus the child believes that he desires milk of his own free will, the angry boy regards his desire for vengeance as free, and the coward his desire for flight. Again, the drunken man believes that he says of his own free will what, sober again, he would fain have left unsaid, and as this prejudice is innate in all men, it is difficult to free oneself from it. For, although experience teaches us often enough that man least of all can temper his desires, and that, moved by conflicting passions, he perceives the better and pursues the worse, yet he considers himself free because there are some things which he desires less strongly, and some desires which he can easily inhibit through the recollection of something else which it is often possible to recall.[7]
C. S. Lewis (1899–1963) warned that even if an individual is competent enough to realize their condition of being thrown into the world arbitrarily, that realization often further throws that individual into the habit of mistaking the map for the territory it marks:
The truth is that [the medieval] language about inanimate bodies was the same kind of language that the modern man uses—I mean, the modern “plain†man, not the modern scientist or philosopher. When a modern says that the stone fell “in obedience to the law of gravitation,†he does not really think there is literally a law or literal obedience; that the stone, on being released, whips out a little book of statutes, finds the chapter and paragraph relevant to its predicament, and decides it had better be a law-abiding stone and “come quiet.†Nor did the medieval man believe that the stone really felt homesick, or felt at all. Both ways of putting it are analogical; neither speaker would usually know any way of expressing the facts except by an analogy.[8]
For Lewis, the analogy of the stone (or thrownness for that matter) is only a tool used to finish the product the job calls for, nothing more.
When during an election year a journalist asks, “Where are we headed in this country?â€Â what they mean, as John Searle (1932–) points out, is that, amid the flux of consciousness, the thrown-ness of being, Searle realizes we are thrown both collectively as well as individually. In other words, while the individual kamikaze pilot found himself thrown into the immediate situation of the cockpit, the many individuals on the ground who were attacked at Pearl Harbor suddenly found themselves collectively “thrown†into a world war:
To illustrate the relationships between higher-level or system features, on the one hand, and micro level phenomena, on the other, I want to borrow an example from Roger Sperry. Consider a wheel rolling down hill. The wheel is entirely made of molecules. The behavior of the molecules causes the higher-level, or system feature of solidity. Notice that the solidity affects the behavior of the individual molecules. The trajectory of each molecule is affected by the behavior of the entire solid wheel. But of course there is nothing there but molecules. The wheel consists entirely of molecules. So when we say the solidity functions causally in the behavior of the wheel and in the behavior of the individual molecules that compose the wheel, we are not saying that the solidity is something in addition to the molecules; rather, it is just the condition that the molecules are in. But the feature of solidity is nonetheless a real feature, and it has real causal effects.[9]
Finally, let us not forget Walter Kaufmann’s (1921–1980) critique in Discovering the Mind Vol. II: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber (1980) that all the ideas in Heidegger’s great Book of the Blackforest can already be found in Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) where passages like––
“It is as if I [Ivan] had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death….â€
Suddenly some force struck [Ivan] in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.[10]
––do seem to be echoed by Heidegger 40 years after Tolstoy penned them. But Tolstoy had been writing about being and time and death for a while. He had realized very early on that, “When we don’t think we don’t feel. When a man thinks, it is the worse for him.â€[11] Moreover:
It happened with me as it happens with everyone who contracts a fatal internal disease. At first there were the insignificant symptoms of an ailment, which the patient ignores; then these symptoms recur more and more frequently, until they merge into one continuous duration of suffering. The suffering increases, and before he can turn around the patient discovers what he already knew: the thing he had taken for a mere indisposition is in fact the most important thing on earth to him, is in fact death…. We cannot cease to know what we know.[12]
So we know we’ve been thrown. And we know it without ever having read Heidegger. Let us end with Emerson:
Be a football to time & chance [,] the more kicks the better so that you inspect the whole game & know its uttermost law. As true is this ethics for trivial as for calamitous days.[13]
NOTES
[1] Seneca, Epistle XCI.
[2] Seneca, Epistle XCI.
[3] Seneca, Epistle CVII.
[4] Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks [JMN], Vol. III, June 29, 1827, pp. 92–93. *“[Editor’s note:] See Taylor’s Holy Living p. 128 Phil. Ed…. The edition to which Emerson refers is uncertain. The earliest listed Philadelphia edition of Holy Living is 1835.â€
[5] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,†(1841) last paragraph. See also from Emerson’s journals:
What is the matter with the world that men do not rule themselves but let circumstances rule them. They lay no plan of life but are guided by the gale that haps to blow. Should we not think it strange that an architect should begin to build a house without having determined upon any measurement for the front or the height or the disposal for the room within but left himself to be governed by the shape or the quantity of the materials he might chance to collect? Would you not call the mariner mad who left the port with the first wind that blew & as the wind changed loosened his sheets & still stood before it the wind let it blow from what quarter it would. What does he do? He With an anxious face he pulls sits down to his charts, he consults his chronometer, he takes the altitude of the sun, he heaves the log into the deep & so painfully determines from hour to hour the steadfast course he would keep through the sea. (JMN, Vol. III, June 25, 1828, pp. 132–33.)
[6] Lang, “Disillusions from Astronomy.†Grass of Parnassus: First and Last Rhymes. London: Longman’s, Green, and Co. 1892. p. 146.
[7] Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Revised edition of The Philosophy of Freedom. Translated by Mrs. R. F. Alfred Hoernle. 1922. Putnam: NY. p. 4.
[8] Lewis, “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages.†Chapter 3 from The Discarded Image: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge UP. 1966. Originally delivered in 1956 as a pair of lectures to an audience of scientists in Cambridge. Reprinted in Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Essays on Medieval Literature and Thought. Edited and Introduced by Helaine Newstead. NY: Fawcet. 1968. 46–66 at 54.
[9] Searle, “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology.†Freedom and Neurobiology. pp. 48–49.
[10] Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, IX, XII.
[11] Tolstoy, Sebastopol (1855), I.
[12] Tolstoy, A Confession (1880), III, VI.
[13] Emerson, JMN, Vol. V, October 8, 1837, Journal C, p. 391.
June 10th, 2010 — Books
Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to “recommend a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course. Let this be a reply. No other answer shall they get from me the inquiring young men. [original emphasis]
—Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books (1905), Longmans, Green, & Co. p. 23.
