The most important thing is to think clearly, and to adopt whatever practices and disciplines (or, occasionally, lapses in discipline) serve that end.
This statement, which is true, is true only because of the limitations in our notions of importance.
Part of the reason that I've been such an enthusiastic advocate of Girard's theories is that I can see virtually everyone around me living mimetically, because that was how they learned to live.
This way of thinking would have served me well (and did) as a professional maker of theatre, but the means of making theatre in my country have become industrialized, which is the opposite of organic. Organic is from organ, work, a form, like our internal organs, which also exists as a function, and gains its identity from that. The opposite, industry, if you could imagine the pieces of your body for a moment as industries, would be the forms of the organs working in order to serve the others, but without thinking of themselves as part of that larger thing. Each function of the body would think itself very useful, and sometimes essential, for the body, but it wouldn't think if itself as part of that thing that its function served, any more than a worker in a fast-food restaurant would think himself part of the community of people sitting around him and eating. In the second case, the form is from a purposiveness conceived ex ante, not function.
So when an art form becomes industrialized, the roles are preserved, but as jobs. And often those jobs are given according to corporate favor, or to those who more closely correspond to the secondary purposes of the industry. Rather than theatremaking, which would happen even absent any scheme for compensation. (Cf. Demothsenes: "I paid for the staging, while you merely danced in the chorus) rising up into a scheme for sustaining it, the form is created ex nihilio, purposively, by giving a fixed number of people jobs, along with some vague idea of what it was that legitimate theatre should do.
I well remember talking with a NY producer with who employed me for several years as a website editor, and the contempt he appeared to show when I said I would rather play the smallest role on a stage than produce the biggest show on Broadway.
The urge to make all things new runs deep among those of us driven to the hinterlands of things. The useful part of that is the increased incentive to look closely, and try with all the force of your being, to understand what's going on, and how it all hangs together.
To the hardware store to restock some of the kit. Always restock the central bits in the big cities. I've walked a mile and back with luggage on a layover once to visit this hardware chain, as it has the perfect bath brush for travel.
Being the type of person who would walk two miles for a decent bath brush is a a substantial and uncontroversial virtue, I hope. One doesn't always have to whistle Col. Bogey's March on the walk, but it does help.
It's very important to distinguish things said in a rational tone from rational words. this is how the politicians and imitators gain power and influence in organizations. Look at the mechanism of the thought in the words that they say. Does it function?
Notably, the majority of both professional philosophers working now would likely say that, in essence, there is no difference between the two. But I suspect that they've just exaggerated their notions of essence in order to disagree with the concept of essence. Much as people exaggerate their notions of God in order to create something in which it would be much easier not to believe.
If you ever need proof that humans as a whole can be used by inhuman forms, look no further than the industrialized cigarette.
The wise ones open the box, look inside, and then realize that this isn't the best way of using the thing that is wrapped up inside of it. Excellent way of limiting the pensionable years, in an actuarial sense. The vaping is perhaps worse. I carefully avoid those clouds and scents, particularly hereabouts. The ingredients that are advertised and sought out are bad enough, but essentially spraying an unknown industrialized chemical compound into your lungs is the worst idea you could have, short of injecting it directly into your bloodstream.
Calls to mind the LDS 19th c. prohibition on "hot drinks." Especially at that time, there was no telling what it was that was boiling in the percolator -- as Gurdjieff and others pointed out.
(And any point that Gurdjieff and Brigham Young were both making probably merited attention.)
To the museum of the old Republic, also the mausoleum of the President for Life. Fascinating place. Free admission on the first Thursday of the month. Then to the coffeehouse for a couple hours with Pynchon. Bridging the worlds. Two fundamentally different forms of consciousness. And two ineluctable aspects of cognition, developed within the age in the context of each polis.
Divided sky, the wind blows high. (Cf. the two points on the top of the "Non-aligned" monument near the river.)
The important bit, though, now that we're comfortably adrift in in the wasteland of things, is that each of these ways of thinking that dominated the politics of the last century -- whether rooted in the consciousness of present social situation, or aloft with the archetypes of the mind -- in addition to being a certain way of living, is also a way of seeing the world. Any society-wide way of thinking is deeply rooted in its epistemic motive. It's how the people of that time and place looked at the world and developed a vocabulary about it that enabled them to see the world.
The danger, now that we're past ideology and alignment, is that when we discard these ways of thinking, we're also, sub silento, discarding both the underlying epistemologies and the act of particularizing the things in the world. It is possible to live in the world and not notice the world. These politically polarized ways of thinking caused us to look more deeply into the world (I am sedulously avoiding the phrase "things that are the case") and have a more rich and salient experience of life itself. Life was meaningful for the revolutionary, not merely because it was good to do something to help the others, but also because they had to come to some understanding of the world in order to do that, and to come to that understanding, they had to investigate the world more closely, and think about it more carefully.
tl;dr: Freedom from history can also be freedom from experience.
Assuming I can get under sail and past the bar in the coming week (wrecks are always far more likely close to the port -- many's the slip..), I will have survived these rooms. Close traffic, noise, fumes, heat in the first part of it, ventilation too dirty to use. And yet a price roughly equal to much sounder quarters in the past, sometimes in this city. But it's the tourist season, and I had to book late. Oddly, the theatres are closed during the tourist/leisure season, so the coffeehouses had to bear the burden of the evening jaunts. Coffee much more reasonably priced on the western half of the peninsula. (Which is the Eastern half.) Henry James talks about the summer repertory of the Comedie Francaise in Tragic Muse -- deadly classics, staged for the tourists. But apparently, there's a tradition of festival season in this part of the world, and preparing for the fall, when the city will start up again as itself.
Found it impossible to read, think, write. I did manage to lengthen the morning runs, and solidify the practice after firming it up as a daily practice again in the last city -- after the disastrous winter in the country to the south.
"When the water is muddy, I wash my cloak. When the water runs clear, I wash my head covering."
In each engagement, conquer what you can.
Struck by the iconic hotel at the center of the city, a building I've walked past many times, probably every day when I was staying in the older half of the city. It's named for a distant capital, but it's of the place. Much like, perhaps, the Roman theatres were invariably places for stories about Greeks, and The Theatre in early modern London was a conscious appropriation of a Roman/Latin word. The perfection of the great, distant place, sometimes shifted in time as well -- at the center of the present place and time.
From my yeoman's knowledge of local history, there was apparently a time in which local sentiment looked very strongly towards the UK, and its pananthropos -- Shakespeare. But the F.O. couldn't come in on their side against the foes to the south without offending the great power to the east. Additionally, there's the ancient post-reformation shift in trade routes that caused much commerce with the Sublime Porte. Church-bells melted down into bullets, and sold to those suppressing the revolts in the Balkans. Metal has its own story. Much of the steel from the old 9th Ave. El was sold to Japan before the war, and was built into the battleships that the folks from the neighborhood went off to fight.
Motion and becoming. We're born into the middle of the adventure story, and quite likely won't see the credits roll. But do try to mark the changes, and know them.
Consider the principle of sufficient reason in the context of the development of technological infrastructure. Only a broad-based adoption of technology could focus a sufficient amount of resources on the central infrastructure. Perhaps, instead of seeing the end-gadget and the visual images on it, as an end in itself, the point of the whole thing -- also see it as a mechanism used to tap the resources of the end-user towards the creation of centralized infrastructure.
Went to the city's castle -- very ancient, has been held by a few empires over the last thousand years. Extraordinary views out over the plain, which are also visible at the (much smaller) citadel at the opposite end of the insular channel at the confluence of the two rivers. I try to make at least one visit there each time I visit here. I much prefer the castles in Transylvania, though -- there's something very discomfiting about seeing signs for lurid exhibitions of medieval torture devices, given the events of the last fifty years hereabouts -- at least in the northern castles, I'm absolutely confident that they haven't been used for warmaking or carceral purposes for a few centuries. One does get odd vibes. But I suppose I'm peculiarly sensitive. I still wonder a bit why people listen to orchestral requiems as art or entertainment.
Whatever the merits of nature and nurture, the directly proximate environment does shape the person. The traffic noise, the chaotic sidewalks, the scents of fried foods, the clouds of secondhand vapes.
Wealthier place aren't marked by these objective phenomena, and their residents seem to have a different general personality. Persistent correlation can indicate partial causation. Though having a lot of money can do other things to protect one's personality from the vicissitudes.
This is perhaps why, during the republic, they looked across the river and built apartments there. (Though curiously, they appear not to have extended the tram lines.) There is a famous local novel about the old architecture of the city, the protagonist, a romantic madman, looks in horror through is telescope at the characterless housing growing on the other side of the river. But there was green space, and planned development, and quiet. These things don't cost that much, except in the context of the band of detritus around urban areas, where square footage is costly, neighborhoods are ad hoc, etc.
One doesn't seek out sane housing for the sake of sane housing, as reasonable as that might sound. The housing shapes the mind, and the sensitive spirit. One turns into a bit of a troglodyte among the detritus, vaping, etc.
To their credit, they make it a point here to build sufficient housing for the population. I've seen this in several post-communist states. Whatever the many sins of the authoritarian state, it publicly preached a strong social ethic, and that ethic has persisted somewhat -- a very valuable residuum.
I can honestly say that I never encountered a law professor who appeared to care more for the object of their study than their own personal social standing. And I was looking rather closely.
That rule obtains in the academy generally -- the exceptions whom I've encountered have almost invariably been in philosophy or the arts.
To be clear, I studied the arts to practice the arts, then found things in the field to be a bit off-target, to use the mildest possible phrase. Then I studied law to practice law, and found the practice of law to be, with similar discretion, a bit corrupt. When, finally, I turned to the academy, it was largely animated by a sense that it was the source of the fact that ideas were no longer guiding things. It would have worked, but as it turns out, if you don't think that there is any truth to be found in the objects of study, there's apparently no need to preserve basic truth and honesty in the interpersonal world. At the end of it, I was basically trying to play baseball in the middle of a fistfight.
Onward. The old texts are still available, and they speak. There's also the possibility of making art at some point in the future, and if I ever find a path past the gates of the law, I'd be able to use those ideas to explain a few things.
The purpose of society is not to preserve and populate the forms of social life and industry. That can be done with a fraction of the population, and if necessary, within a context of near-absolute injustice and corruption, especially when social connections are mediated by technology.
The purpose of society is the answer to a single question: What is it that all of us should do now?
I remember reading Newman's Lectures on the Irish University when I was working at the hardware store on the Upper East Side, just after passing the bar exam. That, and Trollope, preserved some airy spaces in the mind during the hardscrabble days. Which were, of course, shortly to become even more hardscrabble.
Hardscrabbler. Harderscrabble. It's very important to find the right words for things. Cf. I. Berlin's anecdote about Akmatova in the bread line.
Looking at a map of the region in the 11th c. -- with possibly one exception, all of the places that I've visited were cities then. (And I think the one not on the map was in existence then, as well.) Not always under the same names, or in the same country, but still there. Perhaps the norm in Europe.
I have consciously looked for cities that were historical capitals or sees, sometimes in preference to current capitals. The ruins of time...
From the first draft of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, per today's entry in Chambers:
The thoughtless World to majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolise success;
But more to Innocence their safety owe
Than Power and Genius e'er conspired to bless.
And thou who, mindful of the unhonoured Dead,
Dost in these notes their artless tale relate,
By night and lonely contemplation led
To linger in the lonely walks of Fate,
Hark how the sacred calm that reigns around
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
Instill small accents whisp'ring from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.
No more with Reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool, sequester'd vale of life
Pursue the silent tenor of thy doom
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