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Tag Archives: Autobiography

Teddy on How Private Secrets Cripple Leaders

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on Teddy on How Private Secrets Cripple Leaders

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Autobiography, ethics, Josh Billings, leadership, Morals, politics, Theodore Roosevelt

“Traps were set for more than one of us, and if we had walked into these traps our public careers would have ended… A man can of course hold public office, and many a man does hold public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if there are other men who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford to have divulged. But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character. Nor will clean conduct by itself enable a man to render good service. I have always been fond of Josh Billings’s remark that ‘it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.’ There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.”

__________

From Part III (“Practical Politics”) of Theodore Roosevelt’s Autobiography.

More like this:

  • Teddy talks about how to criticize the president
  • How TR responded to the worst day of his life
  • His thoughts on sports, competition, and manhood

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Thankful for the Waves

30 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Autobiography, Bible, Christianity, Faith, fate, Laird Hamilton, Life, memoir, Philosophy, Predestination, religion, Spirituality, Surfing, Water

Laird Hamilton 3

“Water always finds the path of least resistance. It flows. You never see square turns on a river. There’s always a curvature. I think life’s like that, too… So you could say that I believe in things being predestined. How could I not? When I think of my life, I feel as though I’ve always been given the absolute right circumstances to help create who I am. If I hadn’t grown up in Hawaii… surrounded by the era’s greatest surfers throughout my childhood, I don’t know where I would have ended up. And I don’t want to know. I’m grateful for all of the twists and turns of fate that have brought me here.

My spiritual beliefs have helped me walk the path that I knew I needed to be on. I’ve been reading the Bible since I was 16, when I first discovered it (through a girl I was dating — how else?). I’ve always found something golden and truthful in its pages. […]

I believe that our imagination is our connection to higher knowledge. It’s the most formidable tool that we have, an amazing source of inspiration. And then, of course, there’s the world we live in, which is no slouch in that area, either. What we’ve been given here is precious: majestic in its smallest details and its grandest spectacles. Anytime you feel like you’re in danger of forgetting that, I recommend taking a good look at a 50-foot wave. Anyone who can be around something that powerful and not feel humbled has some serious analyzing to do. You can’t deny the spritual world when you’re staring into its eyes.”

__________

From part three of Laird Hamilton’s Force of Nature: Body, Body, Soul, and of Course, Surfing.

Photo credit: lairdhamilton.com

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What John Updike Thought about the Afterlife

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on What John Updike Thought about the Afterlife

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Afterlife, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, comedy, Faith, John Updike, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, On Being a Self Forever, Philosophy, reason, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, tragedy, William Shakespeare

John Updike

“Karl Barth, another Reformed clergyman, responding in an interview late in his life to a question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance…

In church this morning, as I half-listened to the Christmas hymns and the reading of the very unlikely, much-illustrated passage from Luke telling how Gabriel came to Mary and told her that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and the power of the Highest would ‘overshadow’ her and make her pregnant with the Son of God, it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.”

__________

Excerpted from the impeccable final chapter “On Being a Self Forever” in John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this multifaceted, beautifully written book. Among modern American writers, Updike is perhaps the best known for his prolific output: in looking at his CV, it seems he published a book every month — and a poem every morning along with two essays and a review each afternoon. This unsurpassable fluency and energy come through in the superb writing and versatility of Self-Consciousness. It’s a memoir that covers a lot of ground, effortlessly.

Though I like the biographical narrative of Self-Consciousness, it’s these ruminative asides — profound and deeply personal — that make the book so special. You can read more below.

  • JU eloquently touches on how to make peace with your past self
  • My favorite of Updike’s many good poems: “Petty Lutz, Fred Muth”
  • In two paragraphs, Updike outlines his political and personal philosophy

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Debauchery and Its Discontents

18 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on Debauchery and Its Discontents

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Alphonse Daudet, Autobiographical and Social Essays, Autobiography, Biography, Diary, Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, French History, Gustave Flaubert, Journal, Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, Robert Baldick

Edmond du Goncourt“I have drunk my fill, I have had my mistress. I am in that condition in which the monstrosities one has committed seem like children’s games. I am left with a craving which, in drunkenness outlasts love and copulation, a craving which shows all over a man’s face, in his mouth and in his flaring nostrils. How utterly futile debauchery seems once it has been accomplished, and what ashes of disgust it leaves in the soul! The pity of it is that the soul outlives the body, or in other words that impression judges sensation and that one thinks about and finds fault with the pleasure one has taken.

And these are the thoughts which occur to me.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth… Bonald’s maxim needs to be reversed: man is mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men. Chateaubriand died of it, long before his death. Byron was stillborn with it. The essence of bourgeois talent is to be gay. Voltaire spent his life taking an interest in something: himself.

There are moments of discouragement when glory seems as insignificant as the office of mayor of a little market-town.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.”

__________

Pulled from Pages from the Goncourt Journals, in an entry from July 30th, 1861.

While I’m a fan of the Goncourt brothers’ journals — with their lush descriptions of Parisian haut monde, their cameos from Zola, Flaubert, and Daudet — I’m never quite hooked enough to read more than a year’s long log in one sitting. Though usually sharp, their musings often stoop to ground level gossip. Two speakers capable of bold and intricate philosophizing about the everyday turn into whisperers about the Parisian upperclass.

The Goncourt brothers were a bit of a case: they wrote all their books together and never spent more than a day apart in their entire adult lives. Despite this apparent eccentricity, they seem to’ve met everyone, maintained many friendships, and been generally free of insecurities about their sibling issues. Their voices are entirely self-confident, even self-flagellating at times, and clear. It’s just that I don’t care about what went down at the spring 1889 revival of Henriette Marechal at the Théâtre-Français.

(By the way: I Googled “Chateaubriand bored” and found his truly heart-lifting remark, offered to friends while on the way to a popular theater production in Paris, “I am boring myself so as to relieve my boredom.” This reflects Schopenhaur: that boredom is the reflexive condition of mankind, that existence is a process of oscillating between discomfort and boredom. Flaubert wasn’t much better. He’s on the record as saying, at the ripened age of twenty-five, “I was born bored; it is my leprosy, which eats away at me. I tire of life, of people, of myself, of everything.”)

More from the great journals:

  • My favorite journal (and one of my favorite books) of all time: the brilliant, unread journals of Jules Renard
  • 29-year-old Charles Darwin’s diary entry about whether he should get married
  • From Kierkegaard’s journals: life’s two paths to disappointment
  • German theologian Rudolph Otto offers an arresting take on how age shapes how we see God in nature
  • 23-year-old George Kennan uses his journal to lament that, even in the 1920s, the world is moving too fast
  • The most devastating reflection in all the Goncourt journals: Edmond reflects on the afterlife in the wake of Jules’s death

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John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Archimedes, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, Church Going, Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, Experience, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Hitch-22, John Updike, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, Miguel de Unamuno, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Larkin, Proof of God, religion, Rudyard Kipling, Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Speak Memory, T.S. Eliot, The Secret History

John Updike

“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:

1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.

During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…

My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.

Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).

At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.

There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:

From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).

But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]

There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.

Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.

Read on:

  • G.K. Chesterton’s defends his faith from cynics
  • Updike and a host of other thinkers reflect on whether we can simply assume God’s existence
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga dissects how evolutionary psychology intersects with Christian docrine

John Updike and Family

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Is a Human Life a Narrative?

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Autobiography, Biography, Experience, Experience: A Memoir, Jules Renard, Julian Barnes, Life, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Amis, memoir, Narrative, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philosophy, Storytelling, Theodor Lessing, Wisdom

Julian Barnes“Perhaps because my professional days are spent considering what is narrative and what isn’t, I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact; where children on the whole grow up to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not), and watch history advance by a tiny cog or two. But this does not in my book constitute a narrative. Or, to adjust: it may be a narrative, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.

My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could ‘write a book’ about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story…”

Julian Barnes, writing in his memoir about mortality Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

“Experience is the only thing we share equally, and everyone senses this… I am a novelist, trained to use experience for other ends. Why should I tell the story of my life?

I do it because I feel the same stirrings that everyone else feels. I want to set the record straight… The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctibly trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending … My organisational principles, therefore, derive from an inner urgency, and from the novelist’s addiction to seeing parallels and making connections.”

Martin Amis, in a section from the introductory chapter of his memoir Experience.

Martin Amis

__________

There’s something spurious about the metaphors we use as shorthands for life. Unsolicited advice-givers and glib bumper stickers will tell you life’s a race. It’s a game. A dance. A journey. A beach.

So could life also be a narrative?

As with other such comparisons, this seems to me to be a half-baked utterance of pseudo-philosophy – an indicator not of life’s simplicity or our grand comprehension, but of our simplicity and of life’s fundamental opaqueness. Life is a ______. There have been forests felled to produce libraries to try in vain to fill in this blank; still we want a noun. Barnes hits on le mot juste when he calls this impulse atavistic. It’s the same reason we call God a Father or a Shepard: without these metaphors we are as stupefied as children.

Though as quick fixes for men with metaphysical headaches, these metaphors do serve to obscure as much as clarify. In a stunning utterance scrawled in his journal in 1897, Jules Renard reprimanded himself at the moment of his father’s death. “I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough,” Renard lamented, “I do reproach myself for not having understood him.” So too I fear will be our assessments as we look back on lives lived as jauntily as if they were dances: enjoyable, sure, but what kind of a party was it?

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves” was the response Wittgenstein gave to Renard’s quandary. Easy for a suicidal genius to say, but what about for the rest of us? Implicit in Wittgenstein is the assumption that we are here to discover truth about ourselves and the world before we leave it; after all, apart from the transcendental, what other “why” could we have? But notice Wittgenstein’s initial qualifier. That trepidation is compacted into the paragraphs from Barnes and Amis above, and maybe it’s actually the essential clause. Perhaps, next time you hear someone say “life’s a _____,” the proper response is to shrug and simply repeat that mad Austrian’s first three words.

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