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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.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Wisdom

David Brooks: What Do We Mean When We Say Someone’s “Deep”?

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

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Tags

Aspen Ideas Festival, David Brooks, Depth, ethics, Honor, morality, Morals, speech, The Road to Character, virtue, Wisdom

David Brooks

“I think we mean that the person is capable of experiencing large and sonorous emotions… People who are deep are spiritual. They’ve come to some stable philosophical convictions about fundamental things; they’ve made firmly-rooted moral commitments.

To put it in another way: they have a built a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect they have a permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action they have a commitment to important projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality they have a certain consistency and rigor; they’re not always perfect but there’s a sort of moral demand that pervades everything they do.

The next question is, how long does it take to get depth? When we look at people who we think have depth, we notice that it doesn’t happen all at once. The desires that lead you astray, those things are fast — lust, fear, vanity, gluttony. The things that we admire most — honesty, humility, self-control, courage — those things take some time and accumulate slowly.

It’s an ensemble of settled feelings. It’s not something that happens to people when they’re fifteen.

And these individuals often possess a certain virtue.

And the word ‘virtue’, again, it has pompous connotations. It seems stuffed-up, self-righteous. But all virtue means is that you have your loves in the right order. We all love and desire a multitude of things: love, friendship, family, popularity. We all desire money, to be good shape. And we understand whether we’ve thought about it or not that some loves are higher than other loves — that the love of family is higher than the love of money. If you’ve sold out your family to make an extra buck, you’ve done something wrong.

If the love of truth or friendship is higher than the love of popularity. If somebody tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party, you’ve become popular for a few minutes in that conversation, but you’ve inverted your love. And so being virtuous is not some pompous thing, it’s not some puritanical thing. It’s just having your loves in the right order.”

__________

Pulled from David Brooks’s speech at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival “The Road to Depth: Thinking about What Character Is”. Find these ideas elaborated in Brooks’s new book The Road to Character.

There’s more:

  • Philosopher Ronald Dworkin summarizes a way to value your life
  • Wallace Stegner summarizes his worldview
  • The walk back from the mailbox

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How Will Future Historians Appraise the American Experiment?

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on How Will Future Historians Appraise the American Experiment?

Tags

America, American History, Conversations with History, democracy, Empathy, Freedom, Harry Kreisler, interview, morality, Noam Chomsky, Norman Podhoretz, Patriotism, Philosophy, Wisdom

Norman Podhoretz “People are free to choose whatever view they wish to hold. If it were up to me, all intellectuals would be defending our kind of society. Let me add to this: I think American civilization, as a socio-political system, is one of the high points of human achievement. I compare it to fifth-century Athens. Not in the cultural sense; though we have not done too badly in the creation of artistic monuments, we don’t rank with fifth-century Athens or sixteenth-century Italy or Elizabethan England; but as a socio-political, democratic system we will be seen — if there is a future and there are future historians — as one of the highest points of human achievement, because we have created a society in which more people enjoy more freedom and more prosperity than any human community ever known to human history. And that is not nothing, to put it mildly. I wish everybody recognized that. Many people still don’t.”

__________

Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, speaking in an interview with Harry Kreisler as part of his “Conversations with History” series. You’ll find more substantial reflections like this in Podhoretz’s political memoir My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative.

This statement comes toward the tail end of Podhoretz and Kreisler’s hour-long conversation. The interview covers a lot of ground, and I recommend giving the whole thing a listen, though the next reflection, which wraps up their talk, has a special poignancy. Podhoretz is asked to summarize a lesson for his grandchildren in the context of his own strange intellectual journey from Marxist to founding neoconservative. He replies:

I hope that they would first of all learn to place the kind of value on this country that I think it deserves. Secondly, I hope that they would learn to understand how important ideas are… I would hope that they would also understand the idea that was most eloquently expressed by George Orwell who said something like this: the truth to which we have got to cling as a drowning man to a raft is that is possible to be a normal decent human being and still be fully alive. And I endorse that view with all my heart. I would hope my grandchildren would learn to endorse it as well.

Update: I emailed this excerpt to Noam Chomsky last night, with a question about how to square Podhoretz’s patriotism with Chomsky’s hypercritical posture towards American society and government. He replied:

No society deserves “gushing patriotism.” In terms of material prosperity, the US ranks fairly high. In the 18th century the colonies were probably the richest part of the world, and the US has incomparable material advantages, at least after the indigenous population was exterminated or expelled. Huge resources and territory, incomparable security, etc. One can debate how well the society has done considering these incomparable advantages. Similar questions arise in other dimensions. A true patriot doesn’t gush about how marvelous we are, but evaluates successes and failures and seeks to overcome the failures.

If you liked that, you’ll like these:

  • One of my all-time favorite speeches: Douglas Murray’s ten-minute defense of Western values
  • David McCullough’s perfect answer to the question Why study history?
  • What was the Founding Fathers’ view of human nature?

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The Walk Back from the Mailbox

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Tags

Faith, God, happiness, identity, John Updike, joy, Life, nature, religion, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Wisdom

John Updike 2

“And the other morning, a Sunday morning, around nine, walking back up my driveway in my churchgoing clothes, having retrieved the Sunday Globe from my mailbox, I experienced happiness so sharply I tried to factor it into its components. (1) The Christmas season was over — the presents, the parties, the ‘overshadowing’ — and that was a relief. (2) My wife and I had just made love, successfully all around, which at my age occasions some self-congratulation. (3) It was a perfect winter day, windless, with fresh snow heaped along the driveway by the plow and a cobalt-blue sky precisely fitted against the dormered roof-line of my house. I admired this blank blue sky…

Even toward myself, as my own life’s careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefulness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.

In this interim of gaining and losing, it clears the air to disbelieve in death and to believe that the world was created to be praised. But I inherited a skeptical temperament. My father believed in science and my mother in nature. She looked and still looks to the plants and the animals for orientation, and I have absorbed the belief that when in doubt we should behave, if not like monkeys, like ‘savages’ — that our instincts and appetites are better guides, for a healthy life, than the advice of other human beings. People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled within human institutions — churches, banks, madrigal groups — but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let’s say, the walk back from the mailbox.”

__________

John Updike, writing in the concluding paragraphs of his memoir Self-Consciousness.

More from Updike:

  • On making peace with our past selves
  • On why he was a Christian
  • On why, despite tragedy, he believed the world to be good

John Updike, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1962

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What’s the Point of Reading History if You’ll Just Forget It Later?

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Dale Favier, English History, European History, Facts, history, human nature, memory, Norman Davies, Poland, The Pond Water of History, understanding, Wisdom

Map of the World

“When I was young and foolish, I thought I could learn all of history and have it all available in my head, or at least a lot of European history, or at least a lot of English history. Now I know that almost all this stuff will fall right back out of my head again. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth doing. There is another kind of knowledge building up, a synoptic sense of what people have done and will do, what sorts of organizations have succeeded, what sorts have failed, and some of the common notions of why. It’s all terribly vague and unsatisfactory, and the more you read the more you realize how variable and subjective the notions are, but as it accumulates I find that I’m far less likely to be fooled by the demagogues and politicians of the moment. I’m no better at predicting the future than anyone else, but I recognize the rashness of betting on my predictions better than most. History has a way of wriggling out of what people expect.

And there is a sense one gets for the fullness, depth, complexity of any one place and its people. It’s like looking at pond water under a microscope: suddenly you become aware of the incredible richness and diversity referred to — but also concealed — by a name like “water” or “Poland.”… That, too, is worth knowing: and you gradually obtain the conviction that the parts of the world that have not yet been given thousand-page histories by an Oxford or Harvard don are every bit as diverse and complex. You may not have looked at them yet through the microscope; you don’t know what’s there; but you know that if you did, they would resolve into new worlds and new constellations of sub-worlds. That, I guess, is what you really gain by reading these fat narrative histories: a sense for just how large the human universe is.”

__________

Dale Favier, writing about his experience reading through Norman Davies two-volume history of Poland, in his blog post “The Pond Water of History”.

By the way: I found this gem on TheDish, my favorite site on the internet. I encourage all of you to read and subscribe.

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Jefferson’s Ten Rules

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Advice, American History, Counsel, Epictetus, grandfather, grandson, happiness, Jefferson's Ten Rules, John Spear Smith, Julian Boyd, letter, Monticello, Patience, Philosophy, Ten Commandments, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Smith, Thrift, Wisdom, Work

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.

__________

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:

  • Meet Thomas Jefferson
  • Meet Thomas Jefferson’s father
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham have an entertaining discussion about Jefferson and his brilliant political rival Alexander Hamilton

Jefferson's Ten Rules

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The Brilliant, Unread Journal of Jules Renard (Part II)

01 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Burgundy, Chitry, Diary, France, French Literature, French Novelists, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, Life, literature, Musings, Novels, Paris, Reflections, The Journal of Jules Renard, W. Somerset Maugham, Wisdom

Jules Renard

No one ever talks about the journal of Jules Renard.

That’s how I began my first post about this journal, and it’s regrettably true. Renard’s journal is rarely cited, nearly impossible to find even on the internet, and virtually unmentioned in lists of the greatest diaries in history. Still, those who are aware of this collection of witticisms and observations know how stunning it is. It floored W. Somerset Maugham when he first fanned through it and it’s flatly described on Wikipedia as, “a masterpiece of introspection, irony, humor and nostalgia.” I recommend you pick up your own copy of the text, which many scholars have suggested is unique in the annals of literary history, as it is the only private work that surpasses the entirety of its author’s published oeuvre. This post features highlights from its second half (1900-10).

For context: when we left off at the end of 1899, Renard was a 36-year-old writer and budding politician, splitting his time between Paris, which he alternately romanticizes and loathes, and his country home in Chitry, a provincial town in Burgundy where he indulges his passion for nature and quiet reflection. A year and a half before, Renard’s father, François, had taken his own life at the peak of an excruciating chronic illness. Jules was the first on the scene, and that lacerating experience has stirred in his mind a latent fixation on mortal questions. In addition, this tragedy propels Jules into a fresh state of mind as the family’s new patriarch: he recommits himself to his political ambitions (he would be elected mayor of Chitry in 1904), while overseeing the workers of his country estate (including its noble foreman Philippe) and cherishing more and more the serene presence of his wife, Marie (whom he affectionately refers to as Marinette).

Beyond that, however, my impressions about the general significance and trends in Renard’s thinking are merely that – impressions, and I think you’ll have a more rewarding engagement with the words if you browse through them at your own pace and without preconceptions. Ultimately there are many adjectives to ascribe to these jottings, through perhaps the most apt word is also that most overused one: beautiful (It’s too heavy to be “pleasurable,” too airy to be “profound”). It’s a beautiful series of reflections which are the product of a patient but swift intelligence, sharp eye, and palpably human heart. I have bolded my personal favorites.

__________

1900

You think about death as long as you hope to escape from it.

The task of the writer is to learn how to write.

My imagination is my memory.

The bird feels nothing when you clip its wings, but it can no longer fly.

At the Exposition from Great Britain, Guitry shows me paintings by, I think, Reynolds. No need to explain myself: the beauty of these works reach to the bottom of the heart. It is painting for lovers. Images of children, little girls, women, leave us with the sadness of not being loved by them.

The best in us is incommunicable.

Time passed through the needle’s eye of the hours.

A dream is only life madly dilated.

To be content with little money is also a talent.

1901

There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.

The poems of our dreams, upon which reason acts, on waking, as the sun acts upon the dew.

Love kills intelligence. The brain and the heart act upon each other in the manner of an hour-glass. One fills itself only to empty the other.

A great shiver of wind passes over the countryside.

It is hailing over the hills. A disaster! But, once the hail has melted, the peasant does not spend time being sorry for himself: he goes back to work.

God, so much mystery – it is cruel, it is unworthy of you.
Taciturn God, speak to us!

A walk through the fields. Each one of my steps raises a friendly ghost, who comes with me. The memory of my father, his smock blown by the wind.
Marinette appears, and the earth is gentler to the feet.

The wind that knows how to turn the pages, but does not know how to read.

At work, the difficult thing is to light the little lamp of the brain. After that, it burns by itself.

Keep going! Talent is like the soil. The life you observe will never cease producing. Plough your field each year; it will bear fruit each year.

I ought to have a tiny portable table, so that I could go out and work, like a painter, under the open sky.

1902

The theatre is the place where I am the most bored, and where I most enjoy being bored.

So long as thinkers cannot tell me what life and death are, I shall not give a good goddamn for their thoughts.

I have lived on all the planets: life is a joke on none.

Those unexplored expanses, always fallow, in even the best friendships.

Weep! But not one of your tears must reach the tip of your pen and mix itself with your ink.

Sarah’s attitudes: she can look intelligent when she is listening to things she does not understand.

I shall end by not being able to do without city life in Paris. I shall acquire an anxiety in solitude. After a day, not of work, but of study, a walk on the boulevards in the evening – those lights, those women, those people – takes the shape of a reward.

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

It’s many days since I’ve felt ashamed of my vanity, or even tried to correct it. Of all my faults, it is the one that amuses me most.

Reverie is nothing but thought thinking of nothing.

Not the smallest charm of truth is that it scandalizes.

A cloud, for Philippe, is a threat of rain. He does not know that certain clouds have no function but to be beautiful.

Philippe does not like to dream: it tires him as much as to do the harvest.

Suddenly I stop in the middle of a field, and this question alights on me like a great black bird: ‘By whom were we created and why?’

Words must be nothing but the clothing, carefully made to measure, of thought.

1903

In my church, there is no vaulting between me and the sky.

When you rejoice over being young, and notice how well you feel, that is age.

Irony is an element of happiness.

A sentence must be so clear that it pleases at once, and that it is reread for the pleasure it gives.

Nature is never ugly.

Philippe. Fresh air and garlic will make him live a hundred years.

He who has not seen God has not seen anything.

If rest is not to some extent work, it quickly becomes boredom.

A butterfly got on the train at Clamecy and traveled with me.

There is nothing as meanly practical as religion.

The falling leaves tumble away on the ground what life is left to them. One of them has the honor of being pursued by my kitten.

One can quickly discover if a poet has talent. In the case of prose writers, it takes a little longer.

1904 

The beggars know me. They lift their hats to me and inquire about my family.

As mayor, I am supposed to look after the maintenance of the rural roads; as a poet, I like them better neglected.

I no longer dare to say: “Tomorrow I shall work.”

The window pane has faults that double the stars.

Ah, yes!, the dream: To be a socialist and make a lot of money.

1905

The simple life. We need a servant to close the shutters, light a lamp, as though a decent man shouldn’t find pleasure in these little household chores.

I have an anti-clerical mind and the heart of a monk.

The cat asleep, well buttoned into its fur.

I am no longer capable of dying young.

In the taste of life, there is something of a fine liqueur.

Little Joseph, Philippe’s young son, died last night.

The sparrows say of us: “They build houses so that we can build our nests in their walls.”

I am very fond of looking at the faces of young women. It amuses me to try to guess what they will be like when they are older.

On Sunday evenings Philippe is bored. He replaces the strap on a wooden shoe and goes to plant potatoes. He walks the dog and weeps for little Joseph.

God is no solution. It doesn’t arrange anything. It makes nothing right.

To what good are mementoes, even photographs? It is comforting that things die, as well as men.

Without its bitterness, life would not be bearable.

If you desire popularity, do not try to be right.

The working man goes to political meetings, the bourgeois to lectures.

The joy of a finished work spoils the work you are about to begin: you now believe it is easy.

The peasant is perhaps the only man who does not like the country and never looks at it.

Old age does not exist. At least, we do not suffer from continuous old age at the end of our lives; like trees, we have, every year, our attack of age. We lose our leaves, our temper, our taste for life; then they come back.

It is enough to have a sumptuous taste of success: no need to stuff yourself with it.

Life is badly arranged. The poor and uneducated should be rich, and the intelligent man, poor.

1906

The clock marching, with its heavy, rhythmic tread – One, two! One, two! – while standing still.

Yes, God exists, but He knows no more about it than we do.

I do not know whether God exists, but it would be better, for His own credit, that He did not.

I have come to the age where I can understand how deeply I must have annoyed my teachers when I went to see them and never talked to them about themselves.

A cat, who sleeps twenty hours out of twenty-four, is perhaps God’s most successful creation.

Today, at last, I look at Paris.
Twenty years ago I did not see it. I had only my ambition. I only read books.
Now I stop in front of the Louvre, in front of a church, at a street corner, and I say: “What wonders!”

Perhaps genius is to talent what instinct is to reason.

An honorable man of talent is as rare as a man of genius.

The page you write on autumn must give as much pleasure as a walk through fallen leaves. 

Imagine life without death. Every day, you would try to kill yourself out of despair.

Laziness: the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.

I may be my age and a mayor: when I see a policeman I am uneasy.

“New poets.” Remember that term, for you will not hear from them again.

Walk in the little wood. Sniff the scent of mowed hay. On the road, a blackbird hops along in front of me as though inviting me to follow it.

God, in His modesty, does not dare brag of having created the world.

The profession of writing is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being thought ridiculous.

The sun rises before I do, but I go to bed after it does: we are even.

The beauty of new things, after all, is that they are clean.

What happens to all the tears we do not shed?

The friends one is very fond of and never thinks about.

In the evening, when Marinette, after a good day filled with work, listens to her children or other youth, looks at one, then at the other, never missing a thing, she is beautiful, she has something holy about her.
With a single glance, she takes in their entire life, of which she remembers every detail.

1907

As I age, I understand life less and less — and value it more and more.

To the young. I shall tell you a truth that you may not like, because you look forward to novelty. This truth is that one does not grow old. Where the heart is concerned, the fact is accepted, at least in matters of love. Well, it is the same with the mind. It always remains young. You do not understand life any more at forty than you did at twenty, but you are aware of this fact, and you admit it. To admit it is to remain young. 

A young man without talent is an old man.

We are in the world to laugh. In purgatory we shall no longer be able to do so. And in heaven it would not be proper.

It is more difficult to be an honorable man for eight days than a hero for fifteen minutes.

The fields of wheat in which partridges have their little streets.

Immense morning sky. Clouds will never be able to fill it.

One must write as one speaks, if one speaks well. 

I want to do things right, and have someone, anyone, take note of it.

I stopped in the middle of a field, like a man suddenly hearing beautiful, solemn music.

Walks. The body advances in a straight line, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.

1908

A window on the street is as good as a stage.

If my books bore painters as much as their paintings bore me, I forgive them.

A cloud sails along as though it knew where it was going.

My life gives the impression of being in harmony with itself, and yet I have done almost nothing of what I wanted to do.

Collectivism — ridiculous! Talent can be nothing but individual.

My ignorance and my admission of ignorance – these constitute the best part of my originality.

Silence. I hear my ear.

When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.

What most surprises me is this heart which keeps on beating.

You sit down to work. For a long time, nothing. You don’t even try. All at once, a sort of breath passes, and the fire catches.

1909

One shouldn’t run down friends: they are still the best thing we have.

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

There is false modesty, but there is no false pride.

The Luxembourg gardens are nothing but a dome of leaves under which people dream.

Life is neither long nor short: it merely has drawn-out moments.

__________

Jules Renard suddenly succumbed to arteriosclerosis in April of the following year. You can read the highlights from the first half of the journal here, or buy your own copy of the real thing.

Jules Renard

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Confucius, What Would Be Your Top Priority as a Ruler?

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Political Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Confucius, friendship, Government, knowledge, Lunyu, Philosophy, political philosophy, Ren, The Analects, virtue, Wisdom

Confucius

“Confucius said, ‘If you put the honest in positions of power and discard the dishonest, you will force the dishonest to become honest.’

Zi Lu asked about how to govern. Confucius said, ‘Lead the people and work hard for them.’

‘Is there anything else?’

‘Do not be easily discouraged.’

Zhong Gong, currently serving as chief minister to the head of the Chi family, asked about government.

Confucius said, ‘First get some officers; then grant pardon to all the petty offenses and then put virtuous and able men into positions of responsibility.’

Zi Lu said: ‘The ruler of Wei is anticipating your assistance in the administration of his state. What will be your top priority?’

Confucius said, ‘There must be a correction of his language.’

Zi Lu said, ‘Are you serious? Why is this so important?’

Confucius said, ‘You are really simple, aren’t you? A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows cautious reserve.’

‘If language is not corrected, then what is said cannot be followed. If what is said cannot be followed, then work cannot be accomplished. If work cannot be accomplished, then ritual and properties cannot be developed. If ritual and properties cannot be developed, then criminal punishments will not be appropriate. If criminal punishments are not appropriate, the people cannot make a move. Therefore, the noble man needs to have his terminology applicable to real language, and his speech must accord with his actions. The speech of the noble man cannot be indefinite.'”

__________

From parts 12 and 13 of the Analects of Confucius. (There are full versions of the text all over the internet — a good one is here.)

At the end of Book 12, as Confucius discusses friendship with his devotees, the following exchange occurs:

Fan Chi asked about the meaning of ren (Confucian virtue denoting the positive feeling a virtuous person experiences when being altruistic).

Confucius said “love others.” He asked about the meaning of “knowledge.”

The Master said, “Know others.” Fan Chi couldn’t get it.

Zi Gong asked about the way of friendship. Confucius said, “Speak to your friends honestly, and skillfully show them the right path. If you cannot, then stop. Don’t humiliate yourself.”

Which brings up some related reflections:

  • Socrates explains the significance of friendship
  • Epictetus summarizes his path to self-improvement

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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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Talent Is a Question of Quantity

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Effort, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, novel, Persistence, Skill, Talent, Wisdom, Work, Writing

Jules Renard

“Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.”

__________

From Jules Renard’s journal, in an entry from 1887. Renard would have been 23 years old at the time of this writing.

In one of his more cryptic jottings, which appears eight years later in these same journals, Renard wrote: “There are good writers and great ones. Let us be the good ones.”

You can find that epigram, along with other highlights from the first half of Renard’s journals, at the link below. Later this month, I’ll publish selections from the second and arguably more remarkable half of his largely overlooked masterwork.

Jules RenardThe Brilliant, Unread Journals of Jules Renard

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Jerzy Kosiński on How Aging Shapes One’s Outlook on the World

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aging, Experience, Gail Sheehy, General Philosophy, happiness, interview, Jerzy Kosiński, joy, Psychology Today, Sentimentality, wealth, Wisdom, Worldview

Jerzy Kosiński

Interviewer: You have looked at the world from both ends of its ideologies — Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism. Also from both ends of the class ladder. When you first arrived in this country, with no English, you were scraping ships, cleaning bars, parking cars, chauffeuring in Harlem. You were a truck driver and lived in the YMCA. By 1962, in four short years, you became a known author, you met and married a woman who was one of the largest taxpayers in the United States… At which end of your experience of fear or freedom, rich or poor, did you find the greatest sense of being alive?

Jerzy Kosiński: At both ends – and in between. As I have no habits that require maintaining – I don’t even have a favorite menu – the only way for me to live was always to be as close to other people as life allowed. Not much else stimulates me. I have no other passions, no other joys, no other obsessions. The only moment when I feel truly alive is when, in a relationship with other people, I discover how much in common we all share with each other. Money and possessions – I care little for the first, hardly for the second – were never necessary to experience life as I live it. As greatly as my wife, her wealth, and our marriage contributed to my knowledge of myself, of America, and of the world, they contributed just so much – no more, no less – as all other moments have contributed to my curiosity about myself, others, society, art – and to my sense of being alive.

Of course I’ve always known moments of loneliness when I felt abandoned, rejected, unhappy – but in such moments, I also felt alive enough to ponder my own state of mind, my own life, always aware that at any moment this precious gift of awareness of the self might be taken away from me. That state of awareness has always been, to me, less a possession than a mortgage, easily terminable.

Interviewer: Do you find you are becoming less dispassionate as you grow older?

Jerzy Kosiński: More compassionate, more attentive to the voice of life and more forgiving of its various failures, in myself as well as in others, but also more critical of a society so cruel to the old, sick, infirm. And I begin to perceive certain periods of my past, like certain skiing tricks I used to perform, as not available to be reproduced by me anymore. From now on, they will reside in me only as memory – and as a play of my imagination. Nostalgia and sentimentality – this is new.

Interviewer: Sentimentality?

Jerzy Kosiński: Yes. Once, I considered it merely a mood undefined. To be sentimental was not to be clear about oneself or others. Now I feel it as a minor but necessary shade, a mixture of regret and of desire.

__________

From Gail Sheehy’s illuminating 1977 interview with Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosiński.

This piece was originally published in Psychology Today with the heading, “The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man,” a hysterically pretentious title that mischaracterizes what is otherwise a candid and illuminating piece. It’s certainly worth a read, and can be found alongside other insightful discussions in Tom Teicholz’s 1993 collection Conversations with Jerzy Kosiński.

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Watch Your Head: Wisdom from a 79-Year-Old Ben Franklin

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aging, America, American Founding, American History, Ben Franklin, Cotton Mather, founding fathers, Humility, letter, letters, Maturity, Old Age, Pride, Samuel Mather, Wisdom, Youth

Ben Franklin

“You mention your being in your seventy-eighth year; I am in my seventy-ninth; we are grown old together. It is now more than sixty years since I left Boston, but I remember well both your father and grandfather, having heard them both in the pulpit and seen them in their houses.

The last time I saw your father [Cotton Mather] was in the beginning of 1724, when I visited him after my first trip to Pennsylvania. He received me in his library, and on my taking leave showed me a shorter way out of the house through a narrow passage, which was crossed by a beam overhead. We were still talking as I withdrew, he accompanying me behind, and I turning partly towards him, when he said hastily, ‘Stoop, stoop!’ I did not understand him, till I felt my head hit against the beam. He was a man that never missed any occasion of giving instruction, and upon this he said to me, ‘You are young, and have the world before you; STOOP as you go through it, and you will miss many hard thumps.’ This advice, thus beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me; and I often think of it, when I see pride mortified, and misfortunes brought upon people by their carrying their heads too high.”

__________

Benjamin Franklin, writing in a letter to his friend Samuel Mather on May 12th, 1784. (Thank you, Mary, for bringing this to my attention.)

The above section is rightly one of the most cited bits of personal writing from Franklin, though the conclusion of this same note is also worth parsing. It reads:

“Let us preserve our reputation, by performing our engagements; our credit, by fulfilling our contracts; and our friends, by gratitude and kindness: for we know not how soon we may again have occasion for all of them.

With great and sincere esteem,
I have the honour to be,
REV. SIR,
Your most obedient and
Most humble servant,
B. FRANKLIN”

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