Tag Archives: letter

Thinking Hard about the Everyday

30 Thursday Apr 2015

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Swansea, Wales, September 1947

“Whenever I thought of you I couldn’t help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You & I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about ‘national character’ that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any… journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important…”

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing in a note to his friend Norman Malcolm on November 16th, 1944. You’ll find it in Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir as well as Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951.

The context of this note, which can be found in Malcolm’s intimate biography of his Cambridge advisor, is rooted in a casual interaction between the men which had taken place five years earlier, in 1939. That autumn, Malcolm and Wittgenstein were walking along the Cam river when they saw a newspaper vendor’s sign plastered with the headline “Germans accuse Brits of trying to assassinate Hitler!”. Wittgenstein shrugged, saying he wouldn’t be surprised if the accusation were true. Malcolm bristled, claiming such a scheme would be against the “national character” of England. “The British [are] too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand,” he remarked. Even years later, Wittgenstein thought the remark an enormous betrayal of logic which, to his mind, we owe loyalty above all else — especially something as dubious as nationalism.

Keep reading:

Galileo Squares Faith and Reason

06 Monday Apr 2015

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Galileo

“I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth — whenever its true meaning is understood.  But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies…

It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible…

It follows as a necessary consequence that, since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus or extended in a plane, nor whether the earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same kind. And the motion or rest of the earth and the sun is so closely linked with the things just named, that without a determination of the one, neither side can be taken in the other matters. Now if the Holy Spirit has purposely neglected to teach us propositions of this sort as irrelevant to the highest goal (that is, to our salvation), how can anyone affirm that it is obligatory to take sides on them, that one belief is required by faith, while the other side is erroneous? Can an opinion be heretical and yet have no concern with the salvation of souls? Can the Holy Ghost be asserted not to have intended teaching us something that does concern our salvation?

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.'”

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Excerpted from Galileo Galilei’s letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, sent in 1615 and collected in Stillman Drake’s The Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo.

It’s astounding the burden this logic can lift from the shoulders of literalists.

More science and faith:

Galileo 2

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Advice for Finding the Right Girl

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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J.R.R. Tolkien 4

“In this fallen world the ‘friendship’ that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman… Later in life when sex cools down, it may be possible. It may happen between saints. To ordinary folk it can only rarely occur: two minds that have really a primarily mental and spiritual affinity may by accident reside in a male and a female body, and yet may desire and achieve a ‘friendship’ quite independent of sex. But no one can count on it. The other partner will let him (or her) down, almost certainly, by ‘falling in love’…

However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’; but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial…

When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only —. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake.

Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it… In great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will.”

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Excerpts of a letter sent from J.R.R. Tolkien of 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford to his son Michael on the front lines. March 8th, 1941.

Tolkien addressed this one to “Mick,” his middle son Michael. You’ll find it along with a lot of other gems in the collection, compiled by his youngest son Christopher, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

More from the Inklings:

Tolkien and wife 2

Glory’s Moonshine

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in History, War

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William Tecumseh Sherman 2

“No one can deny I have done the State some service in the field, but I have always desired that strife should cease at the earliest possible moment.

I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers. You, too, have seen these things, and I know you also are tired of the war, and are willing to let the civil tribunals resume their place. And, so far as I know, all the fighting men of our army want peace; and it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. I know the rebels are whipped to death, and I declare before God, as a man and a soldier, I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed and submissive before me, but would rather say—”‘Go, and sin no more.'”

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William Tecumseh Sherman, writing in a letter to James E. Yeatman, May 21, 1865.

William Tecumseh Sherman and staff

Mr. Jefferson, Would You Live Your Life over Again?

20 Saturday Dec 2014

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Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

“You ask if I would agree to live my 70, or rather 73, years over again? To which I say Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.

There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say: How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?

My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have a useful object… I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.”

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Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to John Adams on April 8th, 1816, which you’ll find along with other gems in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

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Jefferson on Taking Life as It Comes

05 Sunday Oct 2014

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Thomas Jefferson “The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavours of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen.

These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under this burthen of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey’s end, when we may deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it, and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportioned to our merit. Such, dear Page, will be the language of the man who considers his situation in this life, and such should be the language of every man who would wish to render that situation as easy as the nature of it will admit. Few things will disturb him at all: nothing will disturb him much.”

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Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to his friend John Page on July 15th, 1763.

Jefferson would’ve been twenty when he jotted this down.

What Could’ve Been among Jews and Arabs

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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King Faisal of Iraq

Paris, March 3, 1919.
DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER:

I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper.

We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.

The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other…

I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) Feisal. 3rd MARCH, 1919.

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A letter sent from Feisal Husseini (above, center), then King of Syria and later Iraq, to United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (pictured below).

Read on:

Felix Frankfurter

What to be Wary of in Your Government

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

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John Adams

“The management of so complicated and mighty a machine, as the United Colonies, requires the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon, added to the valour of Daniel…

We may feel sanguine confidence of our strength: yet in a few years it may be put to the tryal.

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger, that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear, that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence, by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance not learning. By contracted hearts not large souls. I fear too, that it will be impossible to convince and perswade People to establish wise regulations.

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be a decency, and respect… introduced for persons in authority, of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular Government, this is the only way of supporting order—and in our circumstances, as our People have been so long without any Government at all, it is more necessary than, in any other.”

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John Adams, writing to his friend and Paymaster General of the Continental Army, James Warren, on April 22nd, 1776.

It’s critical to keep in mind exactly what Adams and the founders meant by “happy” in the context of writing about government and law. As Robert P. George recently clarified:

The term “happiness” in the 18th century—and, in fact, until quite recently—did not refer simply to a pleasing or desirable psychological state—one that might be induced by virtue, vice, or, for that matter, some pharmacological product. It included the idea of flourishing or all round well-being, which necessarily was understood to involve virtue. (As in “happy the man who walks the path of justice.”) In other words, it was a morally inflected locution.

Exactly two decades following the delivery of this letter, Adams himself would be elected to the Presidency. Commenting on that event, Christopher Hitchens noted, “It is perhaps both heartening and sobering to reflect that, in the contest between Jefferson and Adams in 1796, the electors were offered a choice between the President of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and chose both of them.” Jefferson was President of the APS in 1780 (Benjamin Franklin had founded the society in 1743), and John Adams founded the AAAS with John Hancock and James Bowdoin during the American Revolution. In the election of 1796, Adams carried 71 electoral votes to become President, barely edging Jefferson’s 68.

More Adams:

Jefferson’s Ten Rules

14 Monday Apr 2014

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Thomas Jefferson

To Thomas Jefferson Smith.
Monticello, February 21, 1825.

This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run, and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell. […]

A Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life.

1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

3. Never spend your money before you have it.

4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.

6. We never repent of having eaten too little.

7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

9. Take things always by their smooth handle.

10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.

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A Letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his friend John Spear Smith, on behalf of Smith’s son and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Smith. Jefferson, who was born 271 years ago yesterday, was 81 when he wrote this letter.

The Monticello website has an extended discussion of the meaning of rule #9, about which there has been considerable speculation. It ties into last week’s post concerning the Ayaan Hirsi Ali-Brandeis affair:

Jefferson’s intended meaning is the subject of some debate. Julian Boyd wrote an article on this in 1957, “The Smooth Handle: A Challenge to the Organization Man.” Boyd believed that this statement embodied how Jefferson thought citizens of a republic should behave, and was descended from a similar saying by Epictetus, “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne; another by which it cannot.” While debate was essential to a healthy republic, Boyd argued, Jefferson believed strongly that the exchange of ideas must always be civil, and he expressed this belief in his advice to “take things always by their smooth handle.”

This is only one interpretation, however, and without an explicit explanation from Jefferson himself, each reader is free to interpret it as they will.

More Jefferson:

Jefferson's Ten Rules

I Like Words

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Film, Humor, Writing

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Words

Here’s the story: In 1934, a twenty-five-year-old named Robert Pirosh quit his well-paying but tedious job as a copywriter in New York and moved to Hollywood, hoping to kickstart his dream career as a screenwriter. Arriving in California, Pirosh compiled the names and addresses of as many top studio execs as he could, then proceeded to send each of them what is without doubt one of the most colorful, creative, and irresistible cover letters ever produced. This document secured him three interviews, one of which would land him a job as a junior writer at MGM. And as they say, the rest is history: Pirosh would go on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay for his 1949 war drama Battleground, but his other masterpiece — the one which first set him on his path to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — is reproduced in full below:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “v” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words. May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh

__________

The 1934 cover letter sent by Robert Pirosh to Hollywood executives.

I took the above picture a few minutes ago.

Read on:

  • Mark Twain’s hilarious, furious letter to a snake oil salesman
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s smart, sharp letter replying to a Nazi publisher
  • Ernest Hemingway’s first letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

Robert Pirosh

Mark Twain’s Hilarious, Furious Letter to an Idiot

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by in History, Humor

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Mark Twain

Here’s the story: in the winter of 1905, Mark Twain received a package and handwritten letter from a “doctor” out of California named J.H. Todd. After a cursory look at the items, Twain recognized that Todd was nothing more than a salesman peddling a rather deceptive snake oil — a cure-all pompously called The Elixir of Life — which purported to, among other things, instantly “cure all ailments of the human, animal, and fowl.” Such patent ridiculousness would not have ruffled the feathers of the otherwise unfazed Twain, except for the lingering presence of three relevant facts. Twain’s wife had died suddenly while on vacation the previous year; moreover, meningitis and diphtheria, which the Elixir proudly claimed to cure, had previously taken the lives of Twain’s daughter and 19-month-old son. With these memories now triggered in his mind, Twain sat down to pen a screed against charlatanism. Here’s his customer service complaint for the ages:

Nov. 20. 1905

J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

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Check out Twain’s original letter. See the Elixir’s actual two-page product label.