Essays

There is an old saying, too often ignored as old things often are, that there is nothing new under the sun.  The Bible says it this way in Ecclesiastes: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Each of us can only see what is in front of us. All else is imagined. This is especially true of what we see on television, or in the movies, or on the internet. All of that is only what someone else imagined, and we either adopt it as our own, or not. How much of it is true, is another problem. How much of what we see with our own eyes, or hear with our own ears, or feel with our own touch, is actual or imagined?  That problem alone can keep us quite busy without even considering what we encounter through artificial means such as the internet. And both of those are compounded by our understanding and misunderstanding of words. But, without words, we can comprehend nothing—we are just biological matter and quickly become food for the worms.

Not being particularly brave, I settled early on into that problematic realm of words. Actions, making use of the words I found to be useful, could be dangerous and had to be done with deliberation—to be considered in advance with as many words as possible. A novel, perhaps. It is for that reason that I am in awe of someone of the caliber of an Elon Musk—allowing, to begin with, that he is of a unique caliber—in that he leaves me unable to comment coherently. But genius is also a burden. I imagine that whatever modesty he has is as struggled for as are his best ideas. And I cannot imagine those.

I enjoy listening to the words of mere geniuses. Because of technology, I can listen to many who would otherwise be beyond my awareness. Their level of perception is higher than my own, they have climbed the mountain, so I listen and try to catch a glimpse of what they see. But I think of Elon Musk as a sort of Genii. Of that higher order that is otherwise only found in mythology. And as some jinni might be, I imagine that he has been summoned by someone to help us find our way.

Technology, and the use of machines, happens to be our current thing. It is the means by which we interpret our universe today. But it is not the only way. There have been such jinn as Musk before, interpreting the human universe through other means. In one particular age that I am aware of there was Bernini, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and da Vinci. The universe they saw, and made their fellows aware of, transported the mind of man from a world of mud and stone all the way to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Genius does not come unbidden. The genie remains in the bottle unless it is wanted.

Our age must ask for this. If we deny the chance to reach for the stars and turn back instead to the safety of an imagined past, which is just as unreal now as any chance to walk on Mars might be, we will have to live with the consequence for generations. I don’t believe that our past, or our behavior then, offers any new hope for my children or their children’s children. I must look for the genius to save us from our worst mistakes while we bicker over words.

Allowing for the limits of our perception, and of the words we use to understand that awareness, remembering that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is not to deny innovation, but to accept it as part of our inheritance. What we think the future might be is very likely just a reflection of the past. Mars has always been under the same sun. Technology may be ingenious, but the laws of physics have not been altered to suit anyone. We must summon the future.  The future is not what you think it is. But perhaps it is what you want it to be.

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche

         An old friend and customer, at least as old as I, used to love this quote and bring it up often as a measure of what he was seeking to find again. This was in my shop on Newbury Street, in Boston. I had read that book when I was a teenager and had always loved the flourish of Sabatini’s words, like swordplay, but never knew of another writer who could match it—Haggard, Dumas, Stevenson—I tried again and again but failed. My friend liked some of my suggestions, and not others. He worked in an office, and I think he wanted something that might give him relief from the hum drum of cubicle walls—well, he was the president of the company, so his office was not a cubicle, but that is the sense of it.

         Raphael Sabatini is one of the great forgotten authors of the Twentieth Century. His works sold by the million. That fact alone would be sufficient for the typical mediocre professor of literature to condemn him to the depths. Worse, a dozen Hollywood films were made from them. 34 novels and each of them is a delight to read. Scaramouche is one of the best. Sea Hawk is as terrific as the better-known Captain Blood. Born in Italy to an English mother and Italian Father, both opera singers, he lived all over Europe and died in Switzerland. I bring him up here because his sense of life is such a contrast to what I see filling the bestseller lists today.

         And because the world is no less mad today, and arguably worse.

         And because most people, by which I mean the greater majority, are quite willing to live in their cubicles and are easily disturbed by anything that threatens the coffins of security in which they bury themselves long before death. This subject, itself, is verboten. How dare I pass judgement on their festering, bloated lives—Festering? Yes, like maggots they live off the flesh of others. Bloated? Yes.  Empty lives inflated by objects and store-bought Disney-fried experience. And desiccated souls. Yes. They have even made politics a religion for lack of a better thought. And if they are Americans, likely overweight because food is their sacrament. They are prone to sickness. And unhappy. The list is long and tedious. But the most important thing is their souls. Lost to the shallow dogmas of repetition and forgetfulness.

         They dress up in the clothes of heroes, never bothering to learn what makes a hero true, nor ever calling evil by name.  

         Yet, Sabatini, as his wife attested on his gravestone, was prone to laughter.

The one great magic of mankind is the ability to communicate by artificial means. It is not fire, or space travel, or open-heart surgery, or any other device we have stumbled upon. Our kind existed—survived—through hundreds of thousands of years as little more than beasts. Cave-dwelling food for stronger beasts. But suddenly we stepped beyond ourselves, beyond the campfire where stories were told, and discussed War and Peace with others of our kind that we would never meet. This is the true magic.

All of our struggles, and religions, and literature since that time stem from that moment in a cave when some lost genius described the image of what they had seen, most probably for other members of the tribe who might come after, and clearly as a way of communicating the importance of the subject, but not for strangers who might be in that cave forty-thousand years later. Before that moment, all our fears, and joys, and woes passed without notice into the atmosphere like a flicker of flame from the fire. After, our love or hate would be recorded and thus passed on to our children, and beyond.

Here we are now on the map. Mark it! New means of controlling our speech, our writing, and even our thoughts have come into play. From here we go on to what we make of it, or not. The journey is now in our hands. Do we speak freely, and write as we wish, or has this gift of our ancient ancestor, after so many generations of joy and pain, been sacrificed for some sense of momentary safety or monetary gain? The conversation follows us, or not.

My friend Bill was an extraordinary fellow. He lived a life outside of the time he was meant for. But he knew that. Most of us are simply products of our age. “Life is all timing,” he often said. It was an unhappy voice that said it.

If he had been born a generation earlier, into an age of vaudeville and burlesque, and young enough then to have watched Buster Keaton and Harold Loyd at the Wednesday matinee, he would have been a happy man. Had he first heard Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Ella Fitzgerald and Ruth Etting on brand new 78s, he would have been a happier man. Had he been able to take his first dates to see Myrna Loy and Barbara Stanwyck or W.C. Fields and Mae West, he would have been a most happy young man. And if he had been able to sit at the next table from Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker trading barbs and bad verse at the Algonquin, he would have been ecstatic.

Technology allowed him to hear or see most of these at their best, and to enjoy them as he survived in these more barren times, by hoarding scraps from that past, pieces that reminded him of what he had lost out on by being late to the party but allowed him to immerse himself in that Golden age.

His appreciation of the present was entirely by comparison. He found the present lacking; lacking in grace, and style and purpose. The world he longed for was not perfect, or even perfectible. But it was worth the effort to be better and offered the satisfaction of trying. Men wore ties and jackets and women wore dresses then. The present was an empty vessel by any comparison, copying the surface of the past as if the look of it were enough, or just ignoring it entirely.

He appreciated the originals of our time—the effort to be original when coupled with a little genius and a touch of art. The range of this was startling to anyone stuck in their own ruts, from mysteries and science fiction to obscure history and biography from cookbooks to physics, from poetry to philosophy. He bought all of these from my small store and went far afield for the titles we did not have.

I first met him on the street when I was selling books from a cart in 1973. He stopped, and talked, and talked. He liked to talk. But at least he inquired about what I was doing and why and this brought him back. He was one of my first customers when we finally opened our shop. And he was one of the last when we closed almost thirty years later. In the middle of that, when we started publishing, he volunteered to help and more than once loaned us a little money when ends weren’t meeting ends.

As he grew old with the knowledge of his missed trajectory, he aged poorly. Unable to excuse his own failings, he ignored them. As most of us do. Thankfully, for those of us who knew him, the end of his misbegotten time came in his sleep. And this, at the end, may have been a wonderful thing. He told me recently that he was dreaming again, after years of seemingly not dreaming at all. And that he could make no sense of it. But he was dreaming in color—and technicolor at that. And I hope now that he was in the midst of such a dream of a better time when his heart stopped

Now, what made him extraordinary you still might wonder. That is less complex. He was generous. More than most of us find the time to be. He had little money, so that was made up for in time. He took the time to be generous. And he was kind. He made the effort to be kind that most of us put off out of inconvenience.

Given to small phrases, such as ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ one comes to mind now with a smile. “Here’s your hat, Bill. What’s your hurry.”

I have been faulted for ambiguity. Is John, the knight in The knight’s tale, a force of good or a menace? He is individually enforcing rules of civilization which are no longer accepted laws, and his authority is compromised by the degradation of the very society he is trying to protect. All of my novels have similar conundrums and uncertainties—more or less. Even the mysteries were written with the actual murder only secondarily in mind.

Merriam-Webster tells us it is “a word or expression that can be understood in two or more possible ways.” Good enough, even if a little vague. This definition applies to most words, even some nouns. But ambiguity is the bread of our language, the honey of our poetry, and the jam of our misunderstandings. It is, to be precise, built-in to all that we know, or think we know, or want to know, or wish to forget.

My own understanding of the word has changed over the years. When I first began to write with intentions, it was a sin. Something to avoid at all cost. Something to correct. But I saw it at once as a mountain to climb, as much as a swamp. How could I make myself understood without pretending I knew things which I did not—especially about people, those most mysterious of beings? Why was the best of what I read always so lucid, so clear? I was twelve and such thoughts kept me up at night. By the time I was sixteen I had suffered the inevitable agony of defeat, resigned myself to the murky depths of purgatory, and wrote something to express my feelings of the moment which, oddly, won a small writing prize at my high school and left me in a real quandary.

Before long, I became a fan of the ambiguities in film noir. I still love it but the addiction of watching several films every week only lasted a few years. I did not stumble on William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity until late in college and this was a little late in the game for me, having already slurped my way through metaphor like an endless bowl of ice cream, and I was immediately suspicious of his use of a word to define itself as was inherent in the second case given of using two different metaphors at once. There is another word for that. Sloppy. I had to write something about the book for a class, and I remember that my criticism was rejected as an attitude problem. Mine. And it was.

Empson, and most modern literary criticism, is just a lot of pigeonholes. Categorizing. Classifying. Concrete this and Post Structural that. Something good perhaps for a flock of professors of literature who have failed as writers and must cover themselves for their cowardice in the face of their own ignorance with a shield of redefinition and a sword of authority. Something like that.

My own ambition, early on, was simply to write honestly. Now, there is some real ambiguity for you. Hemingway had used the word ‘true’ for this. Duke Schirmer, my first writing teacher at Mamaroneck High School, had favored that one. But I found the ambiguity of ‘true’ more difficult to handle than ‘honesty.’ It seemed to me that I could not be true to myself, or anything else, when ‘myself’ was still so incomplete. Honestly.

I was a teenager, after all. I had just found a great liking for the writing of Ayn Rand in those years, and her sharply defined character motivations were comforting, but her rejection of ambiguity was unambiguous. Now, this was a pickle. I yearned for such certainty in my own world, but I could find no one who fit that standard, and worse, the most interesting people I knew were riddled with contradiction. ‘Why was that?’ I asked myself when no one else would listen. Thankfully I could not get over my love of Victor Hugo or Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad, so the ambiguity was in me to stay.

Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities may be cited as a failed attempt to deal with the uncertainty of life in a dramatic form. It may or may not be a failure—it was clearly rejected by the public—but it is also audacious and worthy of the man who wrote what is the greatest, and most ambiguous, of all novels in Moby Dick. The idea of dealing with so many uncertainties in the less dramatic context of a 19th-century home life, something readers thought they knew far better than the mysterious rigors of survival aboard a whaling ship, might have been the mistake. But all of our lives, when looked at with any perspective, are often a similar hash.

‘Film noir’ is one of the only original artistic products of the twentieth century, along with jazz and tie-dying. Naturally, it is an academic label attached to an artistic movement on film that is akin to the term ‘modern art’ for its lack of accuracy. Them professors do still hate to be ambiguous. But, unlike ‘modern art,’ it does exist, in the same way as ‘Baroque’ and ‘Gothic’ do and can be understood unambiguously for its use.

I single this out only because it is an artistic stamp that identifies some aspects of the word ‘ambiguous.’ To say film noir is ‘characterized by low-key lighting, a bleak urban setting, and corrupt, cynical characters,’ is half-truth, and thus, not true at all. The lighting may be characteristic of many of the films because so many of the directors were escapees from Hitler’s Germany where the academically defined ‘German expressionism’ was the thing. But it was also a by-product of the low-cost methods used in silent film-making which were purposely carried forward to ‘talkies’ out of an appreciation of the older medium and the power of those black and white graphical images, if not simply a lack of funds to furnish an entire set.

But the part of the ‘film noir’ definition I have the most argument with is the ‘corrupt, cynical characters,’ bit. That exact sort can be found in William Godwin’s novel, Caleb Williams, which was published in 1794. It can be found in much else, but I like this example for the disparity of the dates. When Fritz Lang or Sam Fuller or Alfred Hitchcock, or John Houston made a film, the ambiguity was only possible because the right thing—the true thing—was clear. The audience was just as hip to what the right and the wrong were as the director, a point highlighted when Hitchcock kills the boy Stevie in Sabotage, which was outside an acceptable frame of good storytelling, and the audience rejected it. The issue in Houston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre is not right and wrong caused by cynicism but by blatant immorality. And when the same director has Sam Spade give up Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, it is not love that was sacrificed but a truer meaning of his friendship with his murdered partner Miles Archer that was preserved. As jaded as author Raymond Chandler could be, The Big Sleep is just one great big wet kiss of a morality tale.

In Out of the Past, the characters are not so much cynical as wrong-headed. The ambiguity is the story itself. Jeff is a fool for love, but which woman does he love more—Ann, the good one, or Kathie, the bad? His choice gets him killed. A cynical character would have let Kathie face the music. Ann is the real loser. But the true point of it is, this is a tragedy, as Greek as it can be. The ‘art form’ of the best film noir is timeless. That some filmmakers in Hollywood, or Paris, or London used the ‘look’ without the substance is about as meaningful as a thousand ‘Romance’ or ‘Horror’ novels clogging the paperback racks in the drugstore.

Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ is still a question to be answered by each of us. It was Werner Heisenberg who managed the theoretical physics of all this by making up a principle for it. Basically, his uncertainty principle explains why love is such an ambiguous mess. “It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.” Pure ambiguity!

Love is at the core of human existence. It is the most obvious and subtle example of our humanity. To set aside the ambiguities of our feelings and surrender to an emotional state which is at best an adventure and at worst a crap shoot is simply amazing! And human. But this is our life, we are talking about, not a new brand of beer. And it is done anew countless millions of times every year.

Most religions (all that I am aware of) are attempts to deal with the uncertainties of life. Why did my loved one die? Why did the flood come? Why did this happen to me? Only God knows. Accepting a particular faith in God might allow you to cope. But the core of religion is the elimination of ambiguity. I suspect the artificial intelligence of AI will fail on just this point. Given our ignorance, certainty is not possible, but we must strive for answers or drown in our questions. Neither the usual manifestation of God created by us as ‘Fawlty’ human beings, nor an AI flawed by insufficient data, can deal with the truth.

Seeing this truth is not revelation. There is no fix for the sophists who demand answers to all things, just as there is no answer to the ambiguities. They are us. All that we do can be seen as a means of coping with the uncertainties of life by constructing the physical means to make use of what little we know in order to overcome our ignorance. The flourish that we add to the cathedral by pounding the stone into shapes we can appreciate aesthetically, or the color of the paint on our house in the suburbs is some aspect of this. It’s our style. Our civilization.

Our glory or our degradation as human beings, is in how we deal with the ambiguities. That we seek answers to what we do not know or do not understand is what molds us. Certainty in civilizations or individuals who have stopped seeking answers, is deadly. That there will always be unanswered questions and accepting that fact as part of the fabric of our lives, is actually a key to our health and happiness as a species. The awareness of our own ambiguities as we struggle with knowledge amidst social acceptance is what keeps us open to the myriad of possibilities in other people. We are social animals, even as we crave privacy. It is also the key to good storytelling.

This is what I know. Not much. But this. That writing is an absolutely individual endeavor. A writer can write in any way he wants, but he has to know, whatever he writes, his work reveals himself. Who he is. Why he is. If he wants acceptance by the largest possible audience, or by his wife alone, it will be there on the page. If it is not, well, then maybe he shouldn’t write.

Writers hear voices. If there is just a single voice in my head, I may write down what he’s saying for a time if it interests me, but usually I can’t write for very long unless there is a conversation. If there is a conversation, I can write as long as it takes, or until I am exhausted. And when I’m tired, and I quit, I can pick it up again later because, in reading what I have written down before, I can hear the voices again.

Not being a genius by nature, I am dependent on the voices I hear. Thankfully, all I need is a little time to concentrate and I hear them loud and clear. Better than that, I may hear them at almost any time that I’m not distracted by ‘matters of consequence.’ The Little Prince warned me about those, and the result has been, of course, that I neglect too many matters of consequence for my own good. The rent has to be paid, and on time. But art is not about dollars and cents, though it is about a common sense. Great artists might work to pay the rent, but the work is in spite of, not because of the consequences. Caravaggio knew that. So did Melville.

The matter then becomes finding a subject that matters to me. Being a soft product of the 20th century, I can’t write about anything that doesn’t matter to me. That is a given. Writing is very narcissistic. Trivial matters, or matters of life and death, are all the same. Life is often fashioned from the dust we make. And I understand that this reveals a lot about me personally, but that fact is usually not important. I don’t mind people knowing my predilections and peccadillos. But ignoring them in what I write would be frustrating if not impossible. As Mr. William said, ‘the truth will out.’ My job then is to take note.

Understanding that others who read my work may not appreciate the way I write, or my attitude, is of no consequence. None. That is an absolute. But that is a learned response after many years of trying to shape what I wrote to meet someone else’s wants. I did not do that very well. It was not satisfying. It was not fun. In fact, it was painful. Perhaps that is why so many writers say writing is painful. They may not be writing about the things they should. The best of writers, from Jane Austen to W.B. Yeats, loved doing it. And they did it for themselves.

That is not to say that I’m not trying to be readable. The opposite is true. I seek that excellent conversation that is possible with the minds of others. I want to be read by as many as possible and I’m greatly gratified by a mutual understanding of something that matters to me. But it is my work that I want to be understood. I’m much confused by the idea that I should write to please others. The hypocrisy of that has driven better writers than I to drink.

I am an atrocious speller. This began early on, when I was a child, and reveals just one of my many faults, but I have to deal with it the best I can. I love words and I don’t want them misspelled. It’s a mental handicap, and especially when mixed with a level of dyslexia (whatever that is), I know this can be off-putting to say the least. But I work at it. However, it is the idea in a given work that is the first thing–not a single word or a sentence, though the idea is often buried in there, somewhere. My spelling, or syntax, is most important to me as it bears on that idea.

Syntax is an issue apart. I certainly make mistakes in my usages, but I also employ syntax to alter the meaning of the words or to change the direction of the movement in the work. This I learned from The Bible, and Chaucer, and Mark Twain, and Herman Melville, and in a few other good places. Syntax is a tool. Not using it beyond the norm is boring to me. Using it badly may be worse, but it is a risk worth taking.

It is important to me not to conflate my faults with what I believe I do well. My faults are not my guide, any more than following the wrong star would be. I work at my faults so that I might do better. But those who are obsessed with the faults—I have never found an exception to this—always miss the point of what I am saying, no matter my attempts to fix the work for them. And I get great pleasure reading a piece years later where I have played with something well and it worked and still works.

Writing is the most rewarding thing I do. It is the most satisfying. It is the most fun.

I don’t do it for money, quite obviously, but it is true that I once tried. That was the accepted norm of my age, as if prostitution was the only proper use for sex. Mark Twain said, “Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.” He also said an author who wrote without prospect of pay was a fool. But being a natural fool, the effort of will required to stop was not in me and rather than give up the pleasure of writing I found my way to what I do now.

I wish that more people wrote. The world would be a better place and I would have more to read. I read a lot. But most of what I read I scan because the author is often employing words poorly or by-the-numbers. Strunk and White and the rules of usage in their Elements of Style are not the only villains in that, but they were key players in my time. I know too well that pedestrian verbiage-to-order was promulgated by most English teachers—not all. I had a few I loved dearly. But most teachers are obsessed by the rules and don’t have time for content. And that is, by extension, the world they lived in.

I can’t think of a single great writer who went to college. Perhaps there is one I haven’t read yet, but the pattern is that college is there now to drive all art away and guard the procrustean goal lines. All those creative writing classes and what do we get? Just a lot of people cut to fit the corporate mold who write free verse on the weekends to express themselves. We get unhappy vignettes about the corporate soul and the futility of life, and manuals of sexual behavior that are, thankfully, illiterate. Times have changed since the days when Mark Twain had a thousand paying markets to choose from.

I am reminded that Oxford and Cambridge once had a few good writers, Graves, and Lewis, Tolkien, but that is another era, pre-war, now over two generations ago. That alchemy is long gone. I recall that Thoreau dropped out of Harvard because he wouldn’t conform. That was a time of high standards broken by those who could. Nothing of the sort exists today. Today we have the internet, and low standards broken by any who can.

The great publishers are all gone, their names are now absorbed and diminished by corporate conglomeration. The great magazines are all gone as well, and the few good ones left on the internet are dependent on political causes in order to survive. Nothing of the broad-mind spirit of the old Atlantic or Harper’s remains. And the popular magazines that introduced the public to a full range of printed rhetoric, such as The Saturday Evening Post, are too long gone, as are the ‘pulps’ that gave us so much of the modern idiom.

There is no such breeding ground today of new talent, nurtured by the likes of William Dean Howells, Richard Watson Gilder, George Horace Lorimer, Harold Ross, or John W. Campbell. The flexible and fungible standards of the internet won’t do. And the internet only pays the monetizers, and those sites run by the corporate few for the benefit of the fewest, that want writers happy just to have their names in print.

That is not to say that writing for a paycheck is wrong. If what you do is the construction of information with words, to be passed on to others, that’s fine. It is a challenge and a craft as fine as brick laying. It might even be good journalism. But it’s not often an art. Those few who manage to use a little art in their paid work today are the exceptions. I am sure that some prostitutes still raise their skill to the level of art. Any human endeavor can be transformed that way. Hell, Michelangelo worked for the Medici! But when he did, he worked on his own terms.

If more writers worked outside the numbers, they might discover their own minds, instead of parroting the dogma of others—they might find true insight into the mysteries of life. They might not earn a paycheck from doing that, but the reading would be more enlightening, and the writing would be more joyful. There is always more wood that needs sawing and a ditch that need digging, or filling. The pay for digging ditches is better and more reliable, granted. But that effort in itself would likely give them some understanding of the values they pursue as well as the ones they have lost. If what they do can be replicated by a bot, there isn’t much point to sweating it out, is there? Certainly, there is no hope for a paycheck when the bot slave is doing it for pennies.

AI is the new paradigm for cheap words. All the words in all the works of all the great authors are now accessible, usable, adaptable, and disposable. Any author is now working against a tide of such cheap goods, as much as any craftsmen in textiles, or wood, or ceramics. This cannot be stopped. It should not be stopped, lest that power to control the output make pikers of the Medici. It is up to the artist or writer to create what the bot cannot do: the original. And the original is only in the mind of the individual.

Those who recon, as Mr. William said, that ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ that now believe that all the world is a simulation, and all the men and women merely bots, must have to deal with we few, we happy few, who know the joy of writing out of our own spirit. Bots are joyless. They can have simulated sex but never love. And simulated love is not love at all. Love and joy are beyond simulation.

How do you know, says the skeptic? I answer, how do you even know to ask? Your benumbed spirit may be capable of pretense, but even it must understand the first principle of economics: you get what you pay for. Joy is found in what you have done and reflects your mind. Love is what you can offer to another. You have known this since you were a baby. Look back.

It is no loss if an age of joyless writing is behind us. The boon of writing for love has always been before us.

I don’t know many libertarians. There aren’t a lot to know out here in the boondocks. Mostly it’s the same mix of people I knew in Boston, just fewer of them. And even the few libertarians I am aware of locally are not given to too much conversation. They are well used to the common responses when confronted with matters of government and individual responsibility.

“But you can’t leave a decision like that up to the average person. They might do anything!”

The fact that the government they rely on is made up of average people, both good and bad, who are by nature self-interested, are easily corrupted by power and greed, and faced with an emergency, usually make the wrong decision, never seems to dissuade many from this preference, no matter the trail of tears and wreckage left behind. read more…

The old Cincinnati Library 1874-1955

A dialog.

“What’s this?”

“What?”

“This ‘Resolution 451’ business.”

“Not a business. Just a revolution. Like a New Year’s revolution.”

“You mean resolution.”

“Well, yes, but it’s a revolting matter to have to deal with after all the ages..”

“How so? What’s the matter?”

“It’s about time for the peasants to revolt. That’s all. Past time, I think.”

“Why?”

“To save books from perdition. They’re being destroyed, removed, replaced, expurgated, and abridged. Libraries are busy giving up the wealth of their collections for space to install machines that will be out of date in ten our twelve years—machines that operate soft-ware that will be useless in five or six. The arbiters of political correctness are getting rid of anything that does not meet their approval, altering texts they don’t like. Special interest groups are removing books they disagree with. And the publicly funded colleges all assign the same texts. Publishers are refusing to publish books that do not fit with their political templates. Our literature is being lost to morons who read twitter feeds.”

“Wooh! Except for the twittering, that’s always been going on. It’s the way it always was.” read more…

I first knowingly encountered the Administrative State in 1972 when I went to City Hall in Boston to get a peddler’s license so that I might sell books and magazines on the street. I was under the delusion (illusion is too kind) that the First Amendment to the Constitution afforded me the right to sell almost any printed matter except pornography, and this being 1972, even that indecency would be overlooked. But the first week out on the street with my yellow pushcart (wittily named De Cart) got me a warning from the constabulary (i.e., the cops) who were charged with enforcement of the laws of the Administrative State, and I was told to get a proper license or I’d get a fifty-dollar fine. read more…

The spawn of a recent article by Richard Fernandez (https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/surprise-collapse/) is a rather gloomy extended thought on my part. It is my tendency to be gloomy, true, but that aside, I have the habit of seeing analogy in most of what I hear and read. This is like a constant echo going on in my head, a second voice not unlike my own, and often results in a stupid slack jawed look on my face when I am engaged in listening to others (either that or I’m just tired). I have even been known to drool on the page of a book in my hands—something akin for me to farting in church. But back to my thesis: The Bronze Age Collapse in our time. read more…

The occasion of this post is my recent discovery of a wonderful book by John Kaag entitled American Philosophy, a Love Story. Before I get to any criticism of the work, I should commit myself beyond the adjective ‘wonderful,’ and say that I think it is indeed truly excellent and worthwhile, but worth a great deal more to those who are interested in the genealogy of the ideas that drive our modern world. The rest of you may just get a kick out of the love story. read more…

Children crave order in their lives. Given the seeming chaos aswirl about them, fixing on the specific edges of a particular blanket or a sequence of events that repeats regularly, like a nap time or snack time, offers them a sense of what and when. There is comfort to place and as they learn the words for the objects they encounter daily they are pleased to discover an identity to things. You can witness the joy of their recognition.

This is all very simplistic, of course. More is going on in those new minds that we can readily understand, but there is much that can be seen and heard that is common to any child, no matter the culture or circumstance. They enjoy the order of shapes and colors. And if they are given the chance, they enjoy changing the order when they are able, exerting some control over the objects about them. The more they discover they can manipulate their world, the greater joy they find in it, and the faster they learn. read more…

It is a calendared thing
To mark the beginning,
And once again to start
As if there’s an end to it,
And the year is complete
And something new commenced;
As if you might do over,
Or bid farewell and goodbye
To what you have done—
Little or all that it is;
For what you did
Is what you’re doing
And what you’ve done
Is what you’re pursuing.

Sing Auld Lang Syne, my dear
And bid time return, again,
To find the best you’ve lost,
Or forget the things undone—
But resolution is not enough.
It’s what you’re doing,
And not the seasons you’ve rung.
Auld acquaintance will not forget
The hurt you’ve wrought
Or the love you’ve brought
And the weather will not beget
Or better any or all of that,
Unless you change your course.
So, choose your destination!

Booksellers are a lot like actors. It is a cliche that actors will too often assume they are capable of the accomplishments of the characters they portray and come to believe that they know what a character actually felt. Booksellers often see themselves as possessing the wisdom that is in the books they sell, whereas they only possess the books. The playacting of children is in many ways a rehearsal for the actions of adults. The empathy felt by the reader will often extend into everyday life. That is the power of books, just as it is the wonder felt by an audience in suspended disbelief watching a portrayal in a movie or on the stage. read more…

I suppose it is the arrogance that offends me most. Not the stupidity. An individual can be correct and be arrogant and thus offensive. I am usually willing to forgive stupidity because such foolishness comes to me so easily. But stupidity, at least on a case by case basis, can be cured. Arrogance, not so much. It is the arrogant who kill other people on the road as often as themselves, who ruin other peoples lives with politics without care, and who assume knowledge they do not have to crush the creativity of others. And that’s just for starters. The more I think about it, the more instances of arrogance reveal themselves as the crux of most of the bad situations in life. read more…

That some would have you believe your liberties are fragile and must be protected by government, or that you must trade your liberty in one thing to have it in another, is in the very nature of tyrants, despots, and town clerks. Your freedom is your domain, alone. There is no other ruler than yourself. If you choose to trade off some portion of your liberties to another purpose, for instance working in an office for pay, understand that it still exists, however hidden, and is only misplaced. You can no more rid yourself of the responsibility for your freedom than you can willfully stop your breath. Thus, when others assume your rights and act in your name, you must protest, if you can. And if for convenience you remain silent, you betray yourself. You may obey the town clerk to achieve some other purpose, but the freedom you have sacrificed is not extinct—it is simply held in jail by another who holds a gun and that you must obey for the moment in order to survive. read more…

What we all must learn, I suppose, or else lose ourselves completely, is that very little in the world is really about us. My experience fifty years ago at Mark Hopkins College in Brattleboro Vermont was peripheral to that time and place—not secondary or marginal or incidental—but a tangent. It changed my life and the lives of others who went there, but each in our own way.

A week ago, as I drove home in the September twilight from the first and only class reunion, I was alone at a feast of memories. It was a rich two hour meal. But very little of that could have been shared, even if the other two fellows who had gathered with me that day had been in the car as well. Yes, only the three of us. read more…

I should be ashamed of myself, but I will probably use the word carelessly again this very day. But still, I am ashamed of myself for it. There is not an easier word to use for both what is in fact the best and what is simply terrific, or momentarily special, or even unexpectedly good. And this unfortunate lexi-con comes to mind again whenever I have been called to account for the best in literature.

What is ‘Great Literature,’ which is to say, ‘What makes literature great?’ Such written stuff is often alluded to, without excuse, or explanation. Austen, Homer, Bronte, Hemingway, Eliot, Frost, Cather, Joyce, Melville, Byron, Shelly, et al. But the question ought to be asked, if for no other reason than to define the premises and allow you to recognize other works for what they are. That is unless you like being told what to read—in which case there is no point going further here. read more…