The Serenity of a Cheerful Mind

The Meditations 

by Marcus Aurelius

We, however must escape to freedom. But this is only possible if we are indifferent to Fortune. Then we shall attain that one overriding blessing -- the serenity and exaltation of a firmly anchored mind. For when error is banished, we shall have the great and satisfying joy that comes from the discovery of truth, plus a kind disposition and cheerfulness of mind.

- Seneca, On the Happy Life, IV.

Marcus Aurelius was steeped in the thoughts of the Greek and Roman stoics who, starting with Zeno, focused on the search for a firm support for the moral life. "How should I live?" was the great and overriding question for them. Following on from Zeno, Epictetus, and Seneca, Marcus Aurelius portrayed in his Meditations the idea that the importance of philosophical inquiry lay in its significance for the moral life. He said, “Always think of the universe as one living organism with a single substance and a single soul.” This leads to the basic Stoic perception that “there is a law which governs the course of nature and should govern human actions.”(Meditations, p 73)

Marcus Aurelius emphasizes several other themes in his notes on life known as the Meditations. Among them are the tenets that underlie the stoic philosophy that he learned from his teachers including a discussion of the importance of your duty both to your own nature and that of the whole universe. It is with these tenets in mind that we see him telling us to accept what is beyond our control (5.8) in his expression of the notion that freedom for man is possible only when he is indifferent to the his fate as decreed by nature. This is consistent with the view of Epictetus in his Enchiridion. Both emphasize that this in the sense that the we are all a part of the whole of nature and recognition of that is necessary to achieve the good. The good which is always the moral good.

The importance of this is seldom clearer than when Aurelius notes the importance of focusing on the present, the "task at hand" if you will by exercising dispassionate justice in the following way:

"Vacating your mind from all its other thoughts. And you will achieve this vacation if you perform each action as if it were the last of your life: freed, that is, from all lack of aim, from all passion-led deviation from the ordinance of reason, from pretense, from love of self, from dissatisfaction with what fate has dealt you." (2.5)

It is acting like this, not in any morbid sense, but with a cheerfulness of mind, as described in the quote from Seneca above, that you will achieve the tranquility of being that is the ultimate form of happiness. But there is more than happiness in Stoicism and honestly that is not the primary goal of the stoic life.

The Good Life

 You know from experience that in all your wanderings you have nowhere found the good life --- not in logic, not in wealth, not in glory, not in indulgence: nowhere. Where then is it to be found? 

In doing what man's nature requires. And how is he to do this? By having principles to govern his impulses and actions. What are these principles? Those of good and evil --- the belief that nothing is good for a human being which does not make him just, self-controlled, brave, and free: and nothing evil which does not make him the opposite of these. (Book 8, Sec 1)

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Martin Hammond (Translator) Published 2006 by Penguin Classics (first published 180)

Preserver of Continuity

The Last Gentleman 

by Walker Percy

“But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.”   ― Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman




Having recently reread Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, I was looking forward to his second foray into the world of the novel. In many ways I was not disappointed. We meet on the first page, an immature Will Barrett, who has spent five years in psychoanalysis; he is a native southerner serving as a “humidification engineer” at Macy’s department store in New York City. An introspective educated man, vaguely aware of his own despair, Barrett is “dislocated in the universe.” Percy’s opening description of Barrett introduces his character: “He had to know everything before he could do anything. . . For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of a man he was or what he must do,".

His paralysis toward commitment to abstract knowledge before making decisions leads Barrett to world pervaded by ordinariness. He despairs of clear answers to his nagging questions about the purpose of life—both for himself and others—but he has some dim hopes that his quest will eventually bear fruit.

One day, as he contemplates his station in life while at Central Park, he opts to become, as Binx Bolling had in The Moviegoer, an observer and not merely the observed. He spots a beautiful young woman, Kitty Vaught, through his newly purchased telescope and sets out to meet her. Smitten, Barrett traces her to a New York hospital, where he discovers that she and the Vaught family are comforting her younger brother, Jamie, who is dying. In a somewhat improbable sequence of events, Will Barrett’s southern charm and gentlemanly pose win over each of the Vaught family members, and he is invited to accompany them back home to Atlanta, mostly as companion and confidant to Jamie as he lives out his remaining days. Barrett agrees, interested as he is in staying as close to Kitty Vaught as possible.

During his stay, Kitty’s sister, Valentine, who has joined a Catholic order of nuns that takes care of indigent children, enters Barrett’s life and coerces him to seek Jamie’s conversion, believing that he alone can ensure that Jamie enters eternity as a “saved” person. Soon thereafter, Sutter Vaught, Jamie’s brother, arrives on the scene. Barrett finds in him a curious but appealing sense of daring and courage. He seems to be someone who has lived life and not merely hypothesized about it.

Sutter and Jamie disappear, and it becomes Barrett’s duty to track them down and return Jamie home—a task made all the more alarming and tenuous when Barrett discovers in Sutter’s New Mexico apartment, along with some helpful maps, a stenographic notebook recording Sutter’s jaded outlook on life and community. Barrett familiarizes himself with the notebook during his subsequent trek, as Percy interweaves excerpts from Sutter’s painful explorations with Barrett’s unfolding search for the two brothers. Percy pushes the reader to diagnose the debilitating malady from which both Sutter and Barrett suffer: an utter sense of homelessness in the world that seems to make errant materialism or suicide the only options for the thoughtful individual. 

Sutter’s notebook contains some key observations. If man is a wayfarer, he never stops anywhere long enough to hear that there is hope that conquers despair, salvation that conquers death. Will’s amnesia is not a symptom but the human condition: Man struggles to make the world anew at every moment; because he is ill-fitted for this Godlike task, it is not ennobling but pitiable. Sutter’s solution involves extremes of emotion and choice, as if they could somehow exalt a man to the stature necessary to reconstruct the world.  Will, however, becomes a preserver of continuity growing from telescopic observer and wayfarer in a Trav-L-Aire named Ulysses, to comforter of a dying friend and agent of salvation for a living one.

Walker Percy takes ample opportunity to observe the passing scene. He wryly comments that though the North has never lost a war, Northerners have become solitary and withdrawn, as if ravaged by war. In sharp contrast, the South is invincibly happy. Will feels most homeless when he is among those who appear to be completely at home: “The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.” Percy presents no simple solution to the plague of homelessness. If Will is to reenter the South and marry Kitty, he wants Sutter with him. Perhaps Will is still a wayfarer, yet in The Last Gentleman he has stayed around just long enough to hear something of the honest truth.

Art in the World of Proust

Paintings in Proust: 

A Visual Companion to 

In Search of Lost Time 

by Eric Karpeles

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many  worlds as there are original artists...

- Marcel Proust, Time Regained

This is one of the best companion books to read and keep by your side as you journey through Proust's magnificent In Search of Lost Time. The author opens with an introductory essay that explains how he has "attempted to reassemble in a single volume the fleeting paintings weaving in and out of a moving narrative, to offer for the first time to the reader of In Search of Lost Time 'a comprehensive and continuous picture'."

To this end he combines color plates for all of the art referenced in the novel along with lucid contextual commentary and relevant quotations from the novel. When a specific work of art is not mentioned he has chosen a representative piece to complement the passage from the novel. The presentation of art works from artists as disparate as Manet  and Michelangelo, Delacroix and Degas, and many others is a feast for the reader's eyes. 

The result of his comprehensive work is a successful melding of art with literature that will please both those who are encountering Proust for the first time and those who know and love his literary masterpiece.

On Reading

In the Vineyard of the Text:

 A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon 

by Ivan Illich

"Modern theories of how the universe came into being tell that an extremely delicate balance was involved. Had certain crucial temperatures and dimensions been even minutely different, the Big Bang . . . could not have occurred. The development of the modern book and of book-culture as we know it seems to have depended on a comparable fragility of crucial and interlocking factors." - George Steiner

"The duty to read -

There are many persons whose nature has left them so poor in ability that they can hardly grasp with their intellect even easy things and of these persons I believe there are two sorts. There are those who, while they are not unaware of their own dullness, nonetheless struggle after knowledge with all the effort they can put forth and who, by tirelessly keeping up their pursuit, deserve to obtain as a result of their will power what they by no means could possess as a result of their work. Others, however, because they know that they are in no way able to encompass the highest things neglect even the least and, as it were, carelessly at home in their sluggishness, they all the more lose the light of truth in the greatest matters by their refusal to learn those smallest of which they are capable."  

- Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, from the preface, p.43.

At once medieval in its sources and modern in its message, this commentary is both one of the text and of reading culture in the modern era. With Hugh as muse and guide, Illich documents the lessons books have taught us before the pages of history are transformed to computer disks. 

O the Mind

 'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.' 

     -   BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

   No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Notes on the Philosophical Investigations

 

Selected Impressions of Wittgenstein

“Words, as is well known, are the great foe of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.” - Joseph Conrad

language games 

With Wittgenstein there is a concern with the actual use of language – what is the problem and how we can illuminate/imagine a method for going forward. It is among other things a process.  Observation precedes explanation and may yield only a description of the reality of a particular situation. (109)  That means we should try to understand that Wittgenstein's own philosophical activity is like bringing words back to regular use (out/above/below the realm of “metaphysics”).

What is the process of trying to understand what it means to know something? Is there any conflict within a language game? There may be infinite variations in our everyday experiences; if so, how can we reach a resolution or should we seek that as a useful goal? 

We should consider the use of comparison and noticing similarities. Sometimes that may bring insight. However the text often provides an invitation to enter into a dialog about the meaning of life and how one might understand the proper end of one's life. (language and dialog)

observation and imagination

I am reminded of “the search” --- “What is the nature of the search . . . The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” - Walker Percy

That is we are not looking for philosophical statements but the reality of what is here in everyday language. One wonders if this is a method for escaping the “everydayness” of life and the seeming incongruity of such a process? (117) One key for escaping the everydayness of life is recognizing the situation of a “fish out of water” and thinking in a way that you may become just that. 

Our imagination may be a tool that allows recognition of just such a situation. (129) I personally am intrigued by the effect on my imagination of listening to music – different effects result from different types of music (Liszt or Ligeti).

Whatever the means you may choose it is important to realize that language can do many things if we only look at the way we use words. We should aim to see clearly if possible. (Observation)

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, p. 1.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, p. 13.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009)

A Mariner's Memoir

The Mirror Of the Sea 

by Joseph Conrad

"The West Wind keeps faith with his brother, the King of the Easterly weather. "What we have divided we have divided," he seems to say in his gruff voice, this ruler without guile, who hurls as if in sport enormous masses of cloud across the sky, and flings the great waves of the Atlantic clear across from the shores of the New World upon the hoary headlands of Old Europe, which harbours more kings and rulers upon its seamed and furrowed body than all the oceans of the world together. "What we have divided we have divided; and if no rest and peace in this world have fallen to my share, leave me alone. Let me play at quoits with cyclonic gales, flinging the discs of spinning cloud and whirling air from one end of my dismal kingdom to the other: over the Great Banks or along the edges of pack-ice - this one with true aim right into the bight of the Bay of Biscay, that other upon the fiords of Norway, across the North Sea where the fishermen of many nations look watchfully into my angry eye. This is the time of kingly sport."

The Mirror of the Sea is based on a collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904-6 .  Early in his life Joseph Conrad earned his keep as a Master Mariner in sailing ships. In his 'Author's Note' to this work, Conrad states,"Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did n not exist .Within these pages I make a full confession not of my sins but of my emotions. It is the best tribute my piety can offer to the ultimate shapers of my character, convictions, and, in a sense, destiny---to the imperishable sea, to the ships that are no more, and to the simple men who have had their day. " 

Conrad's masterful prose reaches poetic heights in these essays.

Let Food be thy Medicine

On Ancient Medicine 

by Hippocrates

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”   ― Hippocrates

Hippocrates is best known for his famous Oath for physicians, however he also wrote many books of which this is the first - a sort of introductory text. Rather than presenting theory or philosophy he provides practical advice about what medicine works and what doesn't work. It is primarily about knowledge, both of the body and the diseases of the body.

Hippocrates focuses on common diseases, their causes and origins, and specifically mentions the common people as those in whom he is interested. Surprisingly, he highlights the importance of diet, the need to cook meat, and, especially, the use of soups in the diet to moderate the extremes of certain foods.

He compares physicians to pilots who are trying to set a course for health. In doing this there is a discussion of changes in temperature, heat and cold, and the effects on the body of changes in temperature. He also  points out that heat is often a symptom of something else. Most importantly he emphasizes the connection between man and nature:
"Wherefore it appears to me necessary to every physician to skilled in nature, and strive to know, if he would wish to perform his duties, what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink, and to his other occupations, and what are the effects of each of them to every one."(sec. 20)

This relatively short book contains practical recommendations for those practicing medicine in Ancient Greece. In spite of the ancient setting of this text it sounds quite modern in its varied concerns regarding man, nature, diet, and the use of a holistic empirical method when dealing with the art of medicine.

The Pride of the Fisherman

The Old Man and the Sea 

by Ernest Hemingway

“You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?”   ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

"I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures." Santiago is the old man of the title, a poor Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. The other fishermen now call him unlucky, and his great friend, the boy Manolin, has been forbidden from fishing with him any more. On the eighty-fifth day Santiago decides to go farther out than usual, farther than the other fishermen go, in an attempt to find a great fish. On that day he hooks a huge marlin, and the struggle for dominance and survival begins.

This is more than a story of the battle to catch a great fish. When you join the old man in his boat you begin to realize his immense love for the boy, for the sea, and for the fish. It is this and his vision of lions on a beach that gives him the courage to go on and with that persistence the cheerfulness that allows him to continue day after day.

This is the book that brought Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize and ultimately the Nobel. It presents man alone against Nature in the simple style that Hemingway perfected. I first read this long ago and have since experienced other of his novels, but this remains foremost in my memory.

On the Road to Harpers Ferry

The Good Lord Bird 

by James McBride

“He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.”   ― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

With The Good Lord Bird James McBride has written an interesting and often humorous fictional account of John Brown's escapades from the days of "Burning Kansas" to his demise at Harpers Ferry.

The unlikely narrator of the events chronicled in this novel, those leading up to Brown’s quixotic raid at Harpers Ferry, is Henry Shackleford, aka Little Onion, whose father is killed while Brown is in the process of liberating some slaves. Brown takes the 12-year-old away thinking he’s a girl, and Onion keeps up the disguise for the next few years. Onion, while sounding like a typical 12-year-old often makes observations that belie his age, and his fluidity of gender identity allows him a certain leeway in his life. He comments: "I weren't for being a girl, mind you. But there was certain advantages, like not having to lift nothing heavy, and not having to carry a pistol or rifle, and fellers admiring you for being tough as a boy . . ."(p 78)

And in another episode he gets taken in by Pie, a beautiful prostitute, where he witnesses some activity almost more unseemly than a 12-year-old should have to stand. The interlude with Pie occurs during a two-year period where Brown disappears from Onion’s life, but they’re reunited a few months before the debacle at Harpers Ferry. In that time, Brown visits Frederick Douglass, and, in the most implausible scene in the novel, Douglass drinks a bit too much and chases after the nubile Onion.

The stakes are raised as Brown approaches October 1859, for even Onion recognizes the futility of the raid, where Brown expects hundreds of slaves to rise in revolt and gets only a handful. Onion notes that Brown’s fanaticism increasingly approaches “lunacy” as the time for the raid gets closer, and Brown never loses that obsessive glint in his eye that tells him he’s doing the Lord’s work. At the end, Onion reasserts his identity as a male and escapes just before Brown’s execution.

The book works as an exercise in point of view and has some memorable vignettes of Brown's escapades while continually emphasizing an obsession that almost borders on lunacy. John Brown was definitely not a nice man and it was not surprising that in spite of, or perhaps because of his reputation, he was not joined by the masses of black supporters that he expected when he attempted his epic raid.

Voices of the Past

Breaking Bread with the Dead: 

A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind 

by Alan Jacobs

“We wanted tranquil minds. We wanted to escape our addiction to the adrenaline rush of connectivity. When Horace advises Lollius Maximus he also advises himself—indeed, the poem may do the latter more than the former. “Interrogate the writings of the wise,” he counsels.   - Alan Jacobs

Having read Alan Jacobs previous book on this subject, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, I found this to be a welcome continuation. Jacobs considers how “information overload and social acceleration work together to create a paralyzing feedback loop….There’s no time to think about anything else than the Now.” As an antidote to this situation he recommends the enriching wisdom that can be discovered through voices from the past, referencing an eclectic assortment of writers and philosophers, including Homer, Horace, Virgil, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Italo Calvino, and others. Jacobs considers how to confront and appreciate what these writers have to offer us within the context of their times rather than through the lens of our present-day circumstances, when “the not-Now increasingly takes on the character of an unwelcome and, in its otherness, even befouling imposition.”

As someone who has read and enjoyed classic texts for decades, I thought his case for needing to expand one’s “personal density,” a term he derived from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow made sense. “We lack the density to stay put even in the mildest breeze from our news feeds,” writes Jacobs. “Temporal bandwidth helps give us the requisite density: it addresses our condition of ‘frenetic standstill’ by simultaneously slowing us down and giving us more freedom of movement.” He advocates seeking out authors who express personally held convictions while also appreciating the ideas of past writers. I would recommend this book along with Jacobs' previous book on "The Pleasures of Reading" to all who believe in the importance of reading the "voices of the past".

An Uncommon Western

            

"Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.” (p. 3)

As we read these lines we begin to think we are in a “Western” novel when John Grady Cole (we aren't told his name until four pages later) walks “out on the prairie”. But is this really a Western novel or some other kind that is merely located in the darkness of the southwest of the United States at the end of the 1940s?

The western as a genre accentuates the American spirit and often includes, in addition to the prairie, a more sinister landscape with its Indian foes, gunfights, rough crossings, along with the darkness of the night in spite of the light of the starry sky. The sinister landscape and more is provided in McCarthy's novel and in a way that makes the western question less important than the relationship of John Grady to the world and his place in it.

D.H. Lawrence, no stranger to the American southwest, noted regarding the myth of the west: “But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust are a sort of by play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

John Grady may be some of these things, a killer only reluctantly, but in my reading of All the Pretty Horses I recognized some of the symbols of the western as it has been mythologized in prose and on film. However underlying the veneer of a familiar genre there is an unfamiliar foundation – that is something that transcends mere sinister landscapes.

Hints of this foundation can be found on the first page; in “the image of the candleflame” and the “dark and cold” that permeates the opening of the novel. We are reminded of this foundation repeatedly as we travel with John Grady on his odyssey into the world of wild horses waiting to be tamed and Mexican culture that tries and fails to tame John Grady.

Just a few of the moments that provide material for the foundation include the following: his Grandfather's tales (p 11); his contemplation of the Pleiades and “the wildness about him, the wildness within” (p 60); “the iron dark of the world” (p 67); “that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague” (p 105); and, “He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.” (pp 256-7)

John Grady has one defense against this mindlessness and all of the difficulties and hardships of the world around him, the world with its foundation in a mystical darkness. That defense is his almost preternatural connection with horses. This is made clear again and again, but perhaps best in his dream:

“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain . . . and in the dream he was among the horses running . . . and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” (pp 161-2)

It is this defense that allows John Grady to become the “horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.” (p 302)

One may wonder what the world to come will be like with its “darkening land” but John Grady will be there. Will it be a new west, home to new western tales? Perhaps, but if the tales are told by Cormac McCarthy they will have a portentous patina that palpitates with a sinister darkness, danger and, perhaps even blood.