Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 5 June 2021

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

FDR’s first inaugural address was a bold assertion of public authority over the banking sector and a nakedly populist attack on the titans of high finance. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply,” Roosevelt said. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men….They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Rudolf Steiner

Gary Lachman

“Truth, for Goethe, is “a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality.... It is a synthesis of world and mind, yielding the happiest assurance of the eternal harmony of existence.”

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

39. 2. I will now conclude this theoretical account of civilization with some remarks gathered up under two heads: the first ‘Law and Order’, the second ‘Peace and Plenty’. 39. 21. Both are familiar phrases. Each is a name for civilization in one of its main aspects. The first is a name for civilization as a task: it is a name for what you have to do to be civilized. The second is a name for civilization as a product: it is a name for what you get by being civilized, the fruits of the civilized life.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

There is a considerable conceptual affinity, indeed, between reason of state and Pascal’s wager in that both involve action on opinions whose low probability is compensated for by a high payoff; deceit for reason of state is justified in terms of the allegedly overriding consideration of the safety of the realm, while acting as if one believed in God is recommended by the wager on account of the infinite gain to be expected, and loss to be avoided, if religion is true.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 11 December 2020

 

What is political imagination? If we say the other fellow’s point of view, the emphasis is first on point, on something spatial. Difference between understanding and imagination: I understand something or somebody directly, if I understand something, I always understand it within a wider horizon of things which I take for granted. I isolate the thing I understand and put myself into a direct relationship to it.

If I understand somebody, I understand him in a direct relationship, within the framework of the world, but still him directly isolated from all others. If I want to understand him, I first must know from which point of view he sees things, and that means where he is located in the world. I must imagine the world from his point of location. Example: the table between us.

Imagination is the prerequisite of understanding: You should imagine how the world looks from the different point of view where these people are located. The assumption is: It is the common world of us all and that what is between you and this other location like the table separates you and bind you to him at the same time. That is the meaning of ONE world.

--Hannah Arendt (lecture notes from a 1955 class she taught courtesy of Samantha Rose Hill @ her Illuminations site here (a must for any student of Arendt's work).

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel put it magnificently: “Hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism.”

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The American Republic is the only political body based on the great eighteenth-century revolutions that has survived 150 years of industrialization and capitalist development, that has been able to cope with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and that has withstood all temptations, despite strong and ugly racial prejudices in its society, to play the game of nationalist and imperialist politics.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Listened to it. Great for walks & other forms of travel

An audio version has once again (e.g., Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby) helped me to complete a classic that I’d stalled upon in previous attempts. Audible reader Anne Flosnick provided a fine reading of the text. After all, the novel is about nothing in particular and everything.

Mrs. Dalloway is a London matron giving a party one fine June day not long after the end of the Great War (WWI). Starting with this premise, Woolf acts as an eavesdropper on the thoughts—often mundane and full of envy and remorse—of those who encounter or surround Clarissa Dalloway. Despite serving as the title character, Clarrisa Dalloway, does nothing of significance, nor do any of the other characters with one significant exception. And that was the act of a man gone out of his right mind (if I may use that old-fashioned turn of phrase). Thus, the novel is full of activity and lacking in action. It has characters but no actors. I suppose that this is, in part, why it serves as an example of modern fiction. (N.B. Woolf was not on my Modern Fiction (David Morrell) reading list, but this seems like it would have fit.) 

By the end of the novel, we have a sense of the characters, at least of their inner chatter. We live by our own internal monologues (don’t you?), and Woolf captures the monologues of this set of Londoners—at least as far as I could imagine them—brilliantly. If we laid out our thoughts to examine them, I suspect we’d be appalled at what we see. Our daily thoughts and mental images usually won’t have the sex obsession that Freud imagined or the mythic grandeur suggested by Jung. Most are rather like small fish that we reel in thinking we’ve made a great catch when in fact they’re all small-fry, rarely worth examining and embarrassing to discuss.

Woolf captures multiple streams of consciousness without creating the prose challenges laid down by the likes of Joyce or Faulkner. Her prose is clean and efficient, written as a sympathetic reporter. Woolf does not comment upon her characters. She does not impose judgment upon them. She captures them and puts them on display for us. She reveals the streams of consciousness of these individuals who collide and coalesce around this one London lady who’s throwing a party, Mrs. Dalloway.

Reviews of "To Show and To Tell" by Phillip Lopate, "The Made-Up Self" by Carl Klaus, and "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf

As challenging as it often is, being a writer (not a Writer) is a rewarding calling. Professionally, much of a lawyer’s work consists of writing. This sometimes creates mountains of god-awful legal prose, but it can be done better—much better. Demand letters and briefs are especially fun challenges, and I enjoyed refining my skills as a legal writer. In addition, from my days as a Young Republican essayist (we’re talking junior high-- gimme a break!) writing about the value of the two-party system (good for second place among three contenders), I've felt compelled to say things on paper. After years of journals (C: “Why do you keep these? What are you going to do with them?” A: “Don’t know, except keep them”) and letters to congressional representatives and newspaper editors, I came upon blogging. 

I wish that I could say something profound and insightful about why I blog, but the plain truth is I sincerely believe that everyone should experience the value and pleasure of knowing my opinions about this or that. It’s just another form of narcissism, I fear, but to keep my head from getting too big, I occasionally look at the number of persons who read my posts and then rest my worry that the circle of those who know of my ranting hasn’t much expanded beyond those on whom I would have inflicted it anyway. 

So why did I just read two books on the essay and Virginia Woolf’s classic essay “A Room of One’s Own”? Well, with more time on my hands than in the past, with a new position that involves teaching how to write well, and with thoughts of future ventures, refining my writing seems the thing to do as a practical matter. Then, too, there is this pretension that maybe some blog post might prove worthy of the shadow of those who made the essay an intriguing and vital part of our literature. 

Phillip Lopate and Carl Klaus are two of the best-known scholars of the essay, and both practice the art that they teach, which makes reading their works a double-treat. Lopate’s book, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, which I read first, had me with the title. Well, I love to tell people things: how else will they receive the benefit of my knowledge and wisdom? Further, just “showing” can hide the forest for the trees. But the book does more than puncture a hole in the current wisdom. Instead, Lopate reviews the art of the essay from the time of its founding Aeneas, Montaigne, to the best of those writing today, including himself and this very book. In writing about various issues that essayists have addressed from the time of Montaigne to the present, Lopate—in essay chapters—discusses the many variations and challenges that have been raised and addressed by the essay and “literary nonfiction” in general. 

Klaus’s book, The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay addresses one of the ongoing challenges presented by the essay from Montaigne down to his own efforts. Quoting Virginia Woolf’s aphorism: “Never to be yourself, and yet always”, Klaus, starting from the fountainhead (Montaigne, of course), explores the different ways that the self is presented and sometimes hidden by the essayist. By concentrating on the personal essay, one that drags you in because it’s written in the first-person and because you have a sense of the someone who’s written this—of someone  having lived this—you have the challenges of wondering what has been left in and what left out. It’s an opportunity to look into the life and experiences and observations of another, and when well written, it proves delightful, or at least intriguing. 

In fact, while I greatly appreciated Klaus’s knowledgeable and insightful consideration of Montaigne, Lamb, Woolf, E.B. White, and Orwell, among others, it’s his own personal reflections in the final chapter that provided me with the most pleasure and insight. Klaus reports that in the mid-1990s he decided to write an entry each day for the weather, about 500 words. And a very important fact: he lives in Iowa City, where he taught at the University since the 1960s. * Now, such an idea might fall flat here in Rajasthan (typical entries: hot and dry, very hot and dry, extremely hot and dry), but in Iowa, he has subject-matter that changes, sometimes violently. He set out to describe “what it looked like and felt like each day on my hillside lot in Iowa City—a place where I'd spent twenty-five years witnessing the flow (and sometimes the clash) of arctic- and gulf-born weather systems.” This seemingly mundane task (discouraged by some colleagues)  becomes a larger meditation on change and life, as concerns for the health of his wife and his pets, among other things, impinge upon a simple weather report. He finds himself, like Iowa weather, changing at times unexpectedly and uncertainly. So with the self and its concerns. 

Finally, between these two works, I read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, and I greatly enjoyed my time with it. In addressing women and fiction as a given theme, Wolf meanders through the centuries to address the topic, weaving her way through history as if providing a leisurely pointed tour of the past, and in particular, the burdens and challenges endured by women who wanted to write . Careful phrasing, an authoritative but friendly voice, and a careful choice of topics made this a very enjoyable read. A tract of feminism, and a fine one, yes; but its pleasure proves much greater than that of a political tract or polemic. It’s a tour, and one to savor, as if in the company of a gifted docent.

* I don’t believe that I’ve ever met Mr. Klaus. I know that I didn’t take a class from him (if only I knew), but he gives a shout out to Jackie Blank, our friend and realtor at the beginning of the book, so that provided some extra fun in reading this.