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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Mortality

Barbarian Days

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Sports

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Barbarian Days, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, Cancer, family, Joseph Conrad, Medicine, Mortality, Oncology, Surfing, The Mirror of the Sea, William Finnegan

“Things changed after that between me and Mark… I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology — in finding a cure — but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. ‘The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,’ Mark told me. ‘I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit — in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.’ Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.”

__________

From the eighth chapter (“Against Dereliction”) of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

The chapter opens with Conrad, writing in The Mirror of the Sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by too much adulation.”

Keep going:

  • Laird Hamilton reflects on the lessons of the waves
  • An elegy for Sherwin Nuland, author of my favorite book on medicine
  • One of boxing’s great coaches tells how to lose your fear in the ring

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“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanaugh

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

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Aging, Dublin, Experience, innocence, Ireland, Irish Poetry, Monaghan, Mortality, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanaugh, Poem, poetry, Regret, Selected Poems, William Butler Yeats

Patrick Kavanaugh

They laughed at one I loved —
The triangular hill that hung
Under the Big Forth. They said
That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges
Of the little farm and did not know the world.
But I knew that love’s doorway to life
Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved
I flung her from me and called her a ditch
Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms
The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies
On bleached potato-stalks—
What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

__________

“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanagh, which you’ll find in his Selected Poems.

If you ever hoof it to the village of Inniskeen in County Monaghan, Ireland, you’ll find Patrick Kavanagh’s grave among the pale wooden crosses in the village cemetery. According to pilgrims who’ve made the trek, some of the locals will still reminisce about the native son (Kavanagh died in Dublin in 1967). As one resident told a recent visitor: “I knew Paddy. His mother couldn’t read and his father was a cobbler. Paddy was not a good farmer… he paid no heed to his fields.”

Not surprisingly. His mind was on — or perhaps already in — the city. Like many poets of the day, from Yeats to Wilde to Goldsmith, Kavanagh migrated to Dublin, walking the fifty-mile journey for the first time in 1931, at the age of twenty-seven. He would be internationally known within the decade, largely due to his poems about common life “On Raglan Road” and “The Great Hunger”.

It’s clear he scorned the grubby, provincial life of his boyhood, with its emotional and material deprivation, its spiritual nullity. In his poem “Stony Grey Soil”, he levels a series of accusations against the stubborn soil of Monaghan: “the laugh from my love you thieved”, “you fed me on swinish food”, “you flung a ditch on my vision”. (There’s that “ditch” accusation he’s looking to rescind in “Innocence”.)

I’ll let Christian Wiman explain the rest of the poem and its relation to spiritual innocence, in his recent lecture “When You Consider the Radiance: Poetry for Preachers and Prophets”. It’s where I first heard of the poem, and I recommend watching the whole thing. Wiman’s reading of “Innocence” is set to start below.

Read on:

  • “On a Return from Egypt” by Keith Douglas
  • What Kipling’s “Recessional” can teach us about American foreign policy
  • “Instead of an Epilogue” by Kingsley Amis

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David Frum: What Does Secularism Offer in the Face of Mortality?

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Religion

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Afterlife, belief, Cholera, David Frum, fame, family, Genghis Khan, God, Immortality, interview, Life, meaning of life, MeaningofLife.tv, memory, Mortality, Philosophy, Phlogiston, Real Time with Bill Maher, Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, Why Romney Lost

David Frum

Robert Wright: Given the fact that you’re not looking forward to an afterlife, well… maybe the best approach is to just not think about death. But if you do think about it, is there a way you console yourself in the face of it?

David Frum: When you’re younger, it seems a much more terrifying prospect than it does when you’re older. I think we do see it coming and we accept it.

My consolation in my final hours, I hope, will be that I won’t have left anything unsaid. I won’t have left any of the people that I love in any doubt that I love them. That, to the extent of my ability, I’ve made provision for them. That they’ll be secure after I’m gone…

There’s something kind of megalomaniacal about wanting more, wanting our actions to have eternal consequence. I mean, I suppose that’s literally true — if you have a baby, and the baby has a baby, and so on, then yes, your action has an eternal consequence. But we ourselves are going to be forgotten so soon, and those of us who aren’t forgotten are going to be so misunderstood that they might be happier being forgotten.

There are a lot of things that are remembered for ill or even for derision. Whoever invented the Phlogiston theory, he’s remembered — and his work is held up to mockery in science classes from now and for a long time to come.

We look at history and remember the people who left behind misery. Genghis Khan remains a celebrity to this day. But how many people know the name of the man who proved how cholera was caused? How many remember the dozens of obscure civil engineers who put in safe and reliable water piping so we wouldn’t have it anymore?

Most of that desire for remembrance, it usually ends up pretty badly.

__________

An exchange from Frum and Wright’s interview last month in Wright’s MeaningofLife.tv series. You can pick up Frum’s newest Why Romney Lost or Wright’s expansive book The Evolution of God.

So, I think the answer is a resounding not much. Though not exactly wrong, the approach is in many ways an exercise in managing expectations.

Though I disagree with a good bit of Frum’s outlook, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, as I do almost all of Robert Wright’s conversations, especially those on his new series MeaningofLife.tv. It’s a program devoted to the big questions, with guests who, like Frum, are leaders in their fields though not professionally or at least chiefly concerned with issues of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

This combination makes for an informal, direct exchange, where intelligent people can make dinner table points instead of polishing well-worn soundbites. As you’ll see in the Frum interview, this is a man who’s thought a lot about these things, though I’m not sure he’s ever been asked a question like “Are you religious?” on camera.

His answer, by the way, is an interesting one. “I’m religious, but I’m not spiritual,” Frum replies, echoing a common though unacknowledged thread in modern reform Judaism. It’s the reversal of that well-worn yawn “I’m spiritual, but I’m…” Well, I can’t even bring myself to type it.

If you want to hear more of Frum, I recommend watching his appearance on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which features a very worthwhile back and forth about why middle class America is falling to pieces.

You can also continue here:

  • Clive James thinks about mortality and the next generation
  • Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and others on the surprising reason we want to stay alive
  • Physicist Alan Lightman writes about the cost of immortality

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Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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birth, consciousness, Crime and Punishment, Epicureans, Epicurus, existence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, General Philosophy, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?, Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, Life, literature, Lucretius, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sam Harris, Saul Frampton, science, To Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die, When I Am Playing with My Cat

Dworkin-Nagel 1

Aggregated here are several attempts to address that simple question. Why do you want to stay alive?

Though they arrive there from different byways, each thinker finally rests on the same idea: the reason why we want to stay alive is, simply, to perpetuate our existence. We want to stay alive to stay alive. Sound absurd, or absurdly tautological? It’s not, at least in my view. The value we place in life has little to do with projected positive experiences — the quivering line graph that registers whether we’re ecstatic one moment, unsatisfied the next. Rather, what we want is to continue the oft-banal experience of merely existing. Read on. See if you agree.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Part II, Chapter 6 of Crime and Punishment:

‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!… And vile is he who calls him vile for that,’ he added a moment later.

In a recent interview with Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, author of the existential mystery Why Does the World Exist?, reflected on the question and offered a level-headed and explicit answer:

Interviewer: Jim, in your work there are some themes that keep reappearing, notably religion and mortality… do you think that perhaps you’re getting a little bit worried about death?

Holt: Actually I think in many ways it would be a good career move for me [laughs], and it would solve almost all of my problems.

I think that life is — and I don’t know what your life is like — but mine sort of hovers around the zero point that separates pleasure from pain and happiness from misery. And every once in a while I’ll get a little spike into the happiness region, but then I’ll immediately go back down close to the zero point, or creep below that into the misery region. Yet I fluctuate around that point. And what I really cherish about life is being conscious. And to me that’s the subjective counterpart to the question ‘Why should the universe exist?’: ‘Why should consciousness exist? Why should my self exist?’

And what interests me is the way that philosophers have tried to take the sting out of death by various arguments that go back to the Epicureans. Lucretius and Epicurus himself said, ‘Well, don’t get so worried about death because your nonexistence after you die is just the mirror image of your nonexistence before you were born.’

And you didn’t worry about not existing the centuries before you were born, so why should you worry about not existing after your death?

The great Thomas Nagel rigorously deconstructed the idea in his magisterial book The View from Nowhere:

People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous, existence.

It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable. This asymmetry is important. If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it.

If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.

Saul Frampton reflects on Montaigne and the question of existence for existence’s sake in his book When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?:

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas — There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune…

But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And, to close, Sam Harris nodded at the significance of life’s most mundane pleasures in a recent online Q&A:

Questioner: Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?

Harris: It is impossible to eat pancakes there.

__________

Have more to add? Send them my way: john[at]jrbenjamin.com.

The picture is of the headiest pancake breakfast of all time: Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel shooting the breeze at the local diner.

I’ve done this sort of agreement among geniuses thing before:

  • Does the beauty of the Gospels attest to their truth?: Einstein, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thomas Cahill, and Julian Barnes share a surprising conclusion
  • Science as child’s play: Einstein, Newton, Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson embrace the wonder of the natural world
  • The sovereign subject: Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Krauthammer agree that government is the most important subject
  • Can we just assume god exists?: Updike, C.S. Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Anthony Flew see eye to eye on whether faith can trump reason
  • We don’t march: Orwell, Steinbeck, and Einstein rage against militarism 
  • Is your life valuable? If so, why?: Ronald Dworkin, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Campbell, Michio Kaku, and Vonnegut give a counterintuitive answer

Dworkin-Nagel

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Clive James: Mortality and the Next Generation

28 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

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Bill Moyers, Clive James, Edmund Wilson, interview, meaning, Mortality, PBS

Bill Moyers: You quote Edmund Wilson, who writes:

The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant, and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.

Clive James: You know, I believe he was a great man, but I think exactly the opposite. As death approaches, I think more and more of the next generation and their importance. And I just — I just don’t think in the way that he thought.

But that was his limitation. He was a bit of a misogynist, and I’m not. I’m continually astonished by the creativity of human beings and their bravery, especially women. I’ve always been impressed by women’s bravery. They’re on the whole tougher than men… They seem anchored in a way that men aren’t; men are quite often fantasists and idealists. I know I am. It’s my bad tendency, which I have to try and control.

__________

The closing exchange in Moyers’s interview with James on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

You can pick up a copy of James’s excellent, expansive survey of civilization Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts or check out more posts and interviews with the Aussie polymath.

And you can also read more:

  • One of my favorite modern poems “Lessons of Darkness” by CJ
  • A passage from Edmond de Goncourt’s journal, which hauntingly twists that ‘puff of smoke’ image
  • The girl who wasn’t Anne Frank

CliveJames

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Shostakovich and Music as a Protest against Death

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Afterlife, Alan Lightman, Beethoven Quartet, Classical Music, Composer, Dies Irae, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Einstein's Dreams, Fear, Immortality, Julian Barnes, Life, Mark Wigglesworth, Mortality, Music, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Saul Bellow, Symphony

Dmitri Shostakovich

“Shostakovich knew that death — unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom — was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was ‘tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.’ He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. But increasingly, the cautious composer found the courage to draw his sleeve across his nostrils, especially in his chamber music. His last works often contain long, slow, meditative invocations of mortality. The violist of the Beethoven Quartet was once given the following advice about the first movement of the fifteenth quartet by its composer: ‘Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air.'”

“At the premiere, Shostakovich overcame his usual shyness to explain to the audience that, ‘Life is man’s dearest possession. It is given to him only once and he should live so as not to experience acute pain at the thought of the years wasted aimlessly or feel searing shame for his petty and inglorious past, but be able to say, at the moment of death, that he has given all his life and energies to the noblest cause in the world – to fight for the liberation of humanity. I want listeners to this symphony to realize that ‘life’ is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act. This is very important for much time will pass before scientists have succeeded in ensuring immortality. Death is in store for all of us and I for one do not see any good in the end of our lives. Death is terrifying. There is nothing beyond it.’ … [Shostakovich] disagreed with all the composers who had portrayed death with music that was beautiful, radiant and ecstatic. For him, death really was the end and he took that as an inspiration to make sure that he lived his life to its full.”

__________

Paragraphs excerpted from Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the meticulous notes of composer Mark Wigglesworth. A fly-stunning version of Shostakovich’s fifteenth quartet is here.

Both writers cite a further, clarifying reflection from Shostakovich, which MW describes, “In the disputed memoirs… [Shostakovich] talks revealingly about death:

Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear people create poetry, prose and music; that is they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them. How can you not fear death? […] We should think more about it and accustom ourselves to it. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they would make fewer mistakes.

Shostakovich makes the common though deeply misguided assumption that death serves no purpose — that there is not “any good in the end of our lives.” Of course there are individual tragedies which aren’t, in any sense, “good.” But death does the essential business of lending life a clarity and urgency it otherwise would not have. Saul Bellow’s brilliant metaphor, that death is “the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see ourselves,” sets the idea in place: without an ending, albeit an opague one, there is no way to focus on ourselves.

In case that metaphor hasn’t fully absorbed, Alan Lightman’s short story collection Einstein’s Dreams features a fictional world in which people live forever. He characterizes the tragedy of these immortal inhabitants:

[T]hey can do all they can imagine. They will have an infinite number of careers, they will marry an infinite number of times, they will change their politics infinitely. Each person will be a lawyer, a bricklayer, a writer, an accountant, a painter, a physician, a farmer…

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great-great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their father. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own.

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

More:

  • Barnes looks at how his understanding of mortality changed as he entered adulthood
  • Sam Harris puts a fine point on the tragedy of wasted time
  • Neurologist David Eagleman explains how consciousness may transcend the physical brain

Dmitri Shostakovich

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Hooman Majd Talks Human Nature in Style

21 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

≈ Comments Off on Hooman Majd Talks Human Nature in Style

Tags

Aging, Dress, Fashion, Hooman Majd, human nature, humanity, interview, Life, meaning, Mortality, Paradigm Magazine, Philosophy, Significance, Style

Hooman Majd

“I definitely think that I’m my own critic, for sure, and not society. Although it does affect me, how society views what I do. I won’t deny that; I think that anyone who says it doesn’t is lying.

I do think about my own insignificance, sure. I can be interviewed or have somebody write an article that mentions me or whatever. And for a moment you think, ‘Wow, I’ve done something good.’… But then at the end of the day, I know it doesn’t matter. I’m not that significant. Even if I were famous, even if I were better known — either as a writer or as a celebrity — I still wouldn’t be that significant at the end of the day.

But mortality, yeah, you can’t help but think about it from time to time. You certainly think about it in terms of your family. As you get older and you start losing either friends in some cases, to unnatural deaths or disease, or family to old age; it makes you understand you’re getting closer… And it’s a little depressing, sure. It’s depressing.

But you just try to be logical about it, and say, ‘Well, do the best you can while you’re alive. (laughs) And try to enjoy it. Do the things that you enjoy, do the things that you want to do.’…

I’m not so sanguine about the nature of human beings. I’m not sure we’re an animal that’s particularly good… I’m not an anthropologist, but you see things — after so many thousands of years of advancement in culture, in technology, in thought, in theory — and you see people acting the same way they acted ten thousand years ago, before civilization. And you think maybe humans aren’t meant to live in harmony. I hate to say that. I would like to think that we could progress, that our brains could get to a point where we understand that we have to save our planet and we have to figure out how to live together without killing each other…”

Hooman Majd

__________

Hooman Majd, speaking at his home in Brooklyn in an interview with Paradigm Magazine.

A lighter add-on from another recent interview:

Interviewer: You’re definitely looked at as a very cool older guy that younger guys like myself would like to eventually grow up to emulate in terms of your looks and style — what tips can you give guys like me for aging gracefully and staying cool in the process?

Hooman: You’re very kind. That’s very flattering and I don’t want to sound like I accept all that praise, but if I were to accept that praise, I think I’d say be honest to yourself about what you’re comfortable with. There’s nothing worse than forcing yourself into anything — whether it’s an opinion or a political position or clothing — because you feel like that’s what you’re supposed to do. Be comfortable in your own skin. Sometimes you’ll see a guy in sweatpants and a New York Jets sweatshirt and the way he carries himself makes that cool. If I did that, it would be totally uncool because that’s not what I’m comfortable in. That’s not saying all slobs can look cool even if they’re comfortable, but there’s something about the way you carry yourself and the honesty with which you present your image to the world, and clothes and style are just a part of that.

Read on:

  • Dworkin dissects what we mean when we talk about living ‘a life of value’
  • Chomsky delves into the question ‘Is there a universal human nature?’
  • Cornel West preaches: “There must be some standard for human life that gets beyond… fleeting cultures and changing nation states and contingent civilizations and empires.”

Hooman Majd

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Saul Bellow on What It Means to Be a Man in Modern Society

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Community, Eugene Goodheart, Fiction, Herzog, identity, Industry, Life, manhood, masculinity, modern life, modernism, Mortality, National Book Award, National Medal of Arts, Nobel Prize, novel, Pulitzer Prize, Saul Bellow, science, society, Urban Life, Writing, Zachary Leader

Saul Bellow

“For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass.

Transformed by science. Under organized power.

Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you enjoyed delicious old-fashioned Values? You — you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

__________

An excerpt from the novel Herzog by Saul Bellow. (This paragraph also makes up the entire prologue of Ian McEwan’s Solar.)

In the Spring of 2005, while on his deathbed in Brookline, Massachusetts, Bellow — husband to five wives and father to three sons; perhaps the most decorated American author of all time; winner of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Medal of Arts, and thrice the National Book Award — was drifting in and out of consciousness when he mustered the energy to turn to his friend Eugene Goodheart, present at his bedside, and enunciate an usual question. “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”

Here we know the connotations of “jerk,” a classic street-talking Bellow locution that stamps any foolish, flaky, or infuriating, usually male, character. But what he meant by “man” is perhaps more obscure and certainly more important. To Bellow (and to Goodheart), man meant mensch: an admirable, responsible human being who, regardless of wealth or prestige, would elicit trust and favorable words from those who know him.

Goodheart responded with a prompt but solemn nod. “You were a man.”

Thus, as his biographer Zachary Leader summarizes in the video below, “What mattered at the end… was the life he led as a man.”

More Saul:

  • My favorite passage from Bellow, on the promise of mankind
  • Bellow describes everyday life in Israel (from To Jerusalem and Back)
  • Bellow explains why art matters (from his Nobel Prize speech)

Saul Bellow

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John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

Tags

Aging, Biography, consciousness, Ego, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fatherhood, Growth, Haven Hill, High School, identity, Ipswich, John Irving, John Updike, marriage, Maturation, memoir, Mortality, Parenting, Philosophy, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Selves, Shillington, Writing

John Updike

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

It is even possible to dislike our old selves, these disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill. And my Ipswich self, a delayed second edition of that high-school self, in a town much like Shillington in its blend of sweet and tough, only more spacious and historic and blessedly free of family ghosts, and my own relative position in the ‘gang’ improved, enhanced by a touch of wealth, a mini-Mailer in our small salt-water pond, a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife — flirtatious, malicious, greedy for my quota of life’s pleasures, a distracted, mediocre father and worse husband — he seems another obnoxious show-off, rapacious and sneaky and, in the service of his own ego, remorseless. But, then, am I his superior in anything but caution and years, and how can I disown him without disowning also his useful works, on which I still receive royalties? And when I entertain in my mind these shaggy, red-faced, overexcited, abrasive fellows, I find myself tenderly taken with their diligence, their hopefulness, their ability in spite of all to map a broad strategy and stick with it. So perhaps one cannot, after all, not love them…

Writing… is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial study of the internal life, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Apart from his consistently masterful (and often playful) use of language, the real charm of Updike, at least in this reader’s view, can be boiled down to several factors that don’t exist in another American writer — or at least not in another one of Updike’s caliber. Like his style itself, which constantly bears the marks of a mind at serious play, these attributes exist in relationships that are, in some essential sense, oppositional. His intellect, weighted with a heavy dose of classical philosophy but buoyed by a boyish inquisitiveness; his well-bred WASPiness, clothed in the pastels of New England sans the starch you can smell on the pages of a Fitzgerald or John Irving; his fixation on women, tempered always by the guilt of consistently looking (and usually pursuing) the ones who are — in some sense, and for one reason or another — wrong. Tack all of this atop a Christianity which comprehended doubt, and a cheeriness that could face deep questions, and you have a mind that will always give you something worth seeing – if you can only keep up with such an agile pen.

Looking close at the above paragraph, you’ll recognize all of these attributes. If you do yourself the favor of exploring deeper into Self-Consciousness, you’ll get a better sense of each of them and how they shape the man and his understanding of the conscious and subconscious life.

Read on:

  • Paul Newman reflects: “Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
  • Updike explains why he was skeptical as a young man
  • Updike ruminates on how religious belief is ‘a part of being human’

John Updike

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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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Blaise Pascal Approaches His Horizon

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Atheism, Blaise Pascal, David Horowitz, deism, General Philosophy, memoir, Mortality, Pensées, religion, T.S. Eliot, The End of Time, theism

Blaise Pascal“More than 350 years ago, in the city of Paris, the scientist Blaise Pascal was deathly ill and approaching his horizon. He was still a young man and though wracked with pain was busily taking notes on scraps of paper for what would be his final work…

Pascal was one of the greatest scientific minds that ever lived. Yet, he looked into the eye of the universe and could not find an answer. Without a Creator to make sense of it, Pascal wrote, a human life is ‘intolerable.’

So what are we to do? Although Pascal was able to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe better than almost any man who ever lived, and although he solved mathematical puzzles for all time, it is his attempt to answer this question that we most remember him by.

As a mathematician, Pascal invented the world’s first calculator and was a pioneer of probability theory. Using this theory, he devised formulas for winning games of chance that are still employed today. It was only natural that he should attempt to analyze the spiritual uncertainties that surround us in the same clinical way he went about his scientific studies…

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in the region of Clermont-Ferrand in France… After his mother’s death, Pascal’s family moved to Paris and his father, a learned man, took up the education of his prodigy son. By the time he was twelve years old, Pascal had proved Euclid’s 32nd theorem by himself. By the time he was twenty-eight, he had completed most of the scientific work for which he is remembered. In the same year, his father died and his beloved sister Jacqueline renounced the world and withdrew to a convent.

Three years after his father’s death, Pascal had a religious vision, which is as famous as his scientific laws. He called it his ‘night of fire.’ Between eleven and midnight Pascal encountered, in his words, ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and not of the philosophers.’ No one knows exactly what he meant by this, but it has been assumed ever since that he was referring to the actual presence of God and not just the idea of Him. After this experience, Pascal became even more remote, and wrote of his ‘extreme aversion for the beguilements of the world.’ Unlike his sister, he did not completely retreat from the company of others, but began to focus his genius more and more on religious questions and, in particular, the problem of last things.

Pascal’s body was as weak as his mind was strong. Since infancy, he had been afflicted by poor health and as an adult experienced stomach disorders and migraines that blurred his vision and made it difficult for him to work. By the time he reached his thirty-fifth year, he was in such pain that he had to suspend his intellectual effort. In the midst of this agony, he wrote another literary fragment, which he titled A Prayer to Ask God to Make Good Use of Sickness, and returned to work.

To distract himself from his physical pain, Pascal took up the problem of the cycloid, and wrote a hundred-page paper that made significant contributions to the theory of integral calculus. But his main effort was a book of religious philosophy in which he intended to justify the Christian faith. While pain made him so pitiable that his sister Gilberte wondered if his existence could be truly called a life, he went about jotting down his thoughts on scraps of paper, cutting them with scissors and binding them with thread.

As the days of his sickness gathered, neither his failing condition nor his spiritual intensity showed any signs of abating, while his life became steadily more stoic and austere. He gave away his possessions to the poor, and gradually withdrew from the friends who loved him. ‘It is unjust that men should attach themselves to me,’ he wrote in fragment number 471, ‘even though they do it with pleasure and voluntarily. I should deceive those in whom I had created this desire. For I am not the end of any, and I have not the wherewithal to satisfy them. Am I not about to die?’

He was. In June 1662, Pascal took in a family that was homeless. Soon after their arrival, they developed symptoms that revealed they had smallpox. But rather than put them back on the street, Pascal left his own house and moved in with his brother-in-law. Shortly after the move, he was seized with a violent illness, and on August 19 he died. He was thirty-nine years old.

The last words that Blaise Pascal uttered were these: ‘May God never abandon me.’ They reflect how helpless, uncertain and alone this passionate and brilliant and famous man felt as he passed to his own horizon.”

David Horowitz

__________

From David Horowitz’s philosophical memoir The End of Time.

Into this discussion of Pascal, Horowitz sneaks a candid and poignant appraisal of his own life. It’s one of my favorite paragraphs in the book, and it showcases Horowitz’s adeptness in building historical references into larger reflections on his personal life:

As my own death approaches, I weigh the life I have lived against what it might have been. I ask myself: Could I have been wiser? Could I have done more? When I look at my life this way from the end, I can take satisfaction that I mostly gave it my all and did what I could. Perhaps I might have achieved greater heights; certainly I could have spent fewer days in pain. But I have no cause to think that, given who I was, my life could have turned out much better. Considering the bad choices I sometimes made, it could have been a lot worse. It is the certainty of death that finally makes a life acceptable. When we live as fully as we can, what room is left for regret? The poet Eliot observed that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes. Everything falls to the same imperfection. One day, without exception, we will follow the same arc to earth.

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