Aphorisms and Paradoxes

Portrait of the Critic in Three Stages

Wed, 26 May 2010 21:40:40 -0500

Origins of criticism in vanity. Birth of the critic in the undergraduate classroom, where truth is the podium on which pretentious youth elevates itself above the masses. Criticism as self-congratulation: the critic knows better, is the chosen one who will rid the world of error.
The noble mission of criticism. Maturity and immersion in the cause bring self-forgetfulness out of a genuine desire for a changed society. Passion for the world's potential supplants self-aggrandizement as the critic's motivation.
Self-corrosion. Love of what ought to be, gradually, becomes contempt of what is. The slowness of society to change disillusions the once idealist into a misanthrope, seeing only the world's worst. As acid eats its container, years of acrid words corrode the speaker's humanity.

Criticism seldom changes society for the better, but often changes the critic for the worse.

Against Living in the Present

Mon, 17 May 2010 21:39:51 -0500

Poets exhort us to savor life by forgetting the past and future and living wholly in the present. Yet I find that living in the present is precisely what hinders appreciation. During the week, I live solely in the present. I eat, work, eat, sleep, repeat. My world is circumscribed by my commute; my mind's range is limited by my body's. Do not animals live wholly in the present?

In the weekend's pause, I read a Balzac novel and emigrate to history for an afternoon. I think of the great populace of the dead, see my life in the context of Life, gain depth of emotion through breadth of imagination.

As travelers in foreign countries think fondly of home, we must be conscious of other times to love our home, the moment. Living fully in the present requires living partly in the past.

The Conservation of Ourselves

Fri, 07 May 2010 06:58:36 -0500

People who advocate cutting car emissions, installing solar panels, and cleaning up watersheds to "help the environment" speak naively. They frame conservation as a moral issue—humanity restraining itself for the good of vulnerable creatures and defenseless habitats. Rather, the point of conservation is to keep humanity off the endangered species list. Can overfished rivers feed the future's billions? Can populations drink pollution? Can GDP flourish when, oil gone, we are back to burning candles? In four hundred years, the future may look prehistoric. Picture Europe regressed to the Pleistocene, where twenty-fifth century cavemen scavenge among the ruins of the Uffizi.

Environmentalism is not about saving nature, but saving civilization.

Morning Depression

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:13:25 -0500

My mornings begin with fifteen minutes of depression. Startled from slumber's nothingness by my alarm, I see what I must do today, but not why I must do it. My mind is as calm as a Buddha's, examining my planned activities with passionless clarity, surveying life without yet quite belonging to it. All my business has an air of empty busyness. Toasting breakfast, commuting to work, responding to emails—all normalcy seems a costume of the preposterous.

By the time I step from my shower, my philosophic why? has given way to what order should I run my morning errands? Practicality clouds my clairvoyance, curing my depression not with hope, but a to-do list. Small thoughts rescue me from large thoughts.

Newborn Mortals

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:10:05 -0500

From the delivery room to the morgue is a short walk down the hallway of life. Every mother gives birth to a future death. Obstetricians keep undertakers in business.

Fellowship or Freedom

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:28:04 -0500

Human nature needs both fellowship and freedom, but usually we must choose. The more we encircle ourselves with others, the more we handcuff our will. Ask for help on a project at work, and it will not be done exactly how you want. Marry, and your holidays will be spent at in-laws'. Have children, and you will listen to their music in the car instead of yours. But worship your freedom, and you will be an empty temple. A bachelor's life resembles a widower's. Write, sing, or paint the way you please, disregarding the market's demands, and you will be your own and only audience. Travel wherever you want, whenever you want, and you will go alone.

Fellowship imprisons us, freedom exiles us.

The History of the Present

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:33:21 -0500

There is a paradox in venerating traditions, namely that traditions were not, in their time, traditional. All religious founders were progressive innovators, yet their followers are often conservatives. Politicians look reverently back to the founding fathers, but the founding fathers looked experimentally forward, irreverent toward their own traditions. The historic houses that preservationists praise, disparaging modern construction, were brand new when they were built, their gingerbread trim and bay windows breakthroughs and their architects avant-garde. To worship the past is a misunderstanding, for the past has never existed, only a history of previous presents.

Sea-Longing and Sea-Sickness

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:33:21 -0500

The idea of the sea whets our imagination. The ocean's complexity mirrors the mind's own depths. Just as consciousness conceals the unconscious, the sea's sunlit, glittering surface masks an underworld of mysteries and monsters. How flat and fathomable solid land seems, compared to the murky world beneath the waves. Thus land-dwellers pile onto boats in search of mystical, primordial encounters with earth's liquid wilderness. Instead, many spend the trip puking their lunch over the rail, their stomach in mutiny against their mind's romanticism.

Our souls get sick for, our bodies sick from, the sea.

The Deserted End of the Demand Curve

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:45:13 -0500

I prefer for no one else to want what I want. In high school I loved discovering the flaws of attractive girls, because flaws made them more attainable, without making them less desirable. I hoped the competition would be turned off, leaving the uncontested prize to me. Similarly, in traveling, I place a premium on obscurity, favoring second-rate scenery with solitude over first-rate scenery with hordes of tourists. Picking a career, a restaurant, or a neighborhood to live in, I try to follow not my strongest but my strangest desire, the longing that leads to the least crowded enjoyment. The easiest odds of happiness lie not with what we love most, but with what we love most uniquely.

A Hobby is Work for Work's Sake

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:01:55 -0500

To know someone truly, look at what he does when no one is paying him. My wife makes jewelry, my father gardens, I write, my grandfather cleared brush from the woods by his house. Seeking the common core of varied hobbies, I notice in all a devotion of effort toward a self-imposed goal. To accomplish something is every hobby's purpose, but what is the purpose of the accomplishment? We are less interested in the accomplishment than the accomplishing. Hobbies express an entrenched urge to create, to add patches of order to the universe. In our hobbies as in our careers, we stack the world's raw scraps into meaningful shapes—arranging dirt into flower beds, stones into necklaces, words into paragraphs. We curse a Saturday that sees no progress on our projects, not because anyone needs what we produce, but because we need to produce. At work we long for leisure; in leisure we keep working.

The Friendship of Missionaries

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:43:21 -0500

Despite their good manners, I dislike when Mormons knock at my door to sign me up for salvation. Whether the product is heaven or a vacuum cleaner, I am not much for salesmen. Can they know what's best for me, who do not know me? At least Mormons wear starched shirts and neckties to warn me I am the object of their calling. More cunning were the undercover missionaries I knew in college, who befriended people in order to convert them. Friendship and proselytizing are incompatible, for the latter requires molding others into your image, while the former requires leaving them as they are. Genuine friendship means respecting your friends enough to let them be damned.

Counterproductive Passions

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:49:00 -0500

I am a better reader now than when I was in graduate school, because I read with less enthusiasm. I can stay with a book from cover to cover, whereas in graduate school I could scarcely finish anything, because I wanted to read everything. Ten pages in, I was craving the next book. My patience was insufficient for novels, so I mostly read poems and essays. To visit libraries paralyzed me with my options. I sampled tables of contents endlessly, but an excess of hunger prevented me from eating.

I knew a friend in college who behaved similarly toward people at gatherings. Spotting you from across the room, he would curtail his conversation and weave through crowds to greet you, but as he shook your hand, his eyes were already scanning for the next friend he craved talking to. His hand and eyes, his having and wanting, were always out of sync. He liked so many people that he scarcely knew anyone beyond hello.

Too much desire is self-defeating, wildly overrunning the thing it wants. Passions need a pinch of apathy to slow them down to the pace of enjoyment.

A Meaningful Career As a Professor of Meaninglessness

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:39:18 -0500

A paradox of philosophy is that, having originated as the pursuit of knowledge, it has mainly led to skepticism. Aristotle sought rational meaning in nature and humanity, but philosophers since him have steadily given up, culminating in the twentieth-century existentialists who deny the meaning of life, and deconstructionists who deny any meanings beyond the mere wizardry of words.

Yet what do philosophers accomplish by their denials of meaning? They gain for themselves professorship and authorship; they define an idea they can embrace and base their life upon.

Humans are so needful of meaning, we find it even through denying it.

The Beauty of Blemishes

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:22:24 -0500

The more that models nip and tuck toward perfection, the more boring their beauty becomes. Have we not seen blond hair, spotless skin, implanted breasts, and a 24-inch waist before? Like Plato's eternal Forms, perfection has only one cast from which all copies are cut. Beauty is more alluring with a blemish, because imperfections add uniqueness. A beautiful face with an off-centered smile or oddly-dimpled chin says to the eye, there is only one me. Though beauty ought not to have warts, it ought to have texture. Polished beauty has a quality of mass production, while blemishes provide a patch of particularity to which desire attaches more firmly. No wonder Zeus, the Greeks' most amorous god, preferred mortal girls to goddesses.

Materialism is for the Soul

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:45:00 -0500

Everyone seeks their soul's good, even in seeking their body's pleasure. Hedonists hope their material enjoyment will reach inside and touch the marrow of their being. Is this not what saints are seeking, by alternate experiments? A middle-aged rich man in a red convertible, cruising the Amalfi coast with a model half his age, is merely another kind of monk, whose spiritual discipline is indulgence. Every mall is a monastery where the initiates seek beatitude, not by selling everything before they enter, but by buying everything before they leave.