Peggy Noonan:

And so the lessons of my War and Peace summer.

Feeling such love for a great work did something important to me. For the first time in some years I felt freed for long periods of an affliction common to many, certainly journalists, the compulsion to reach for a device to find out what’s happening, what’s new. But I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.

Don’t be afraid to visit old worlds. Man is man, wherever he is you can follow.

Sometimes a thing is called a masterpiece because it is a masterpiece.

When you allow a past work of art to enter your mind and imagination you are embarked on a kind of reclamation project, a rescue mission. As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something. You should feel satisfaction in this.

Jesse Singal:

It’s not just that the most successful mainstream progressive journalists / consultants / campaign staffers / activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way that bounces right off both Zapata voters and so many other members of the United States’ linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse non-white population. At this point, I’d argue this sort of identity talk is a prerequisite to get any sort of desirable position in these fields (at least if the position in question entails discussing identity). It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years. 

This style of discussing identity is stifling and elitist and does not reflect how real people talk — it’s an extension of the longtime tendency, shared in very different ways by both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence.

Seamus Heaney:

[W]hatever the possibilities of achieving political harmony at an institutional level, I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.

Put an image to that — the mental frontier as, say, a rocky mountain pass or meadow — and tell me it doesn’t meliorate a harsh, divided, unforgiving thought-life.

But I think there’s even more to it — something that gets at why that physical image is so mentally helpful. The very real act of physically walking that frontier, just walking around and being in the physical world, is part of that melioration. The image helps because it brings you back to what life is really like.

To be online — and, admittedly, though in a very different way, even to be in books — is to be in a thought-world, one that cannot help but continuously divide and extend itself. It’s good and even fun to divide and extend ourselves, to challenge our thinking and grow our understanding. But this is meant to be done a) for bracketed amounts of time, or b) as that perpetual background noise of the conscious and sentient beings-in-the-world that we are.

Books are easy to put down, partly because they are physically put down. Through their narrative — whether fiction or non-fiction — they are also as likely to thrust us, mentally and physically, back into the real world. Books can go wrong, and so can reading them, but they bear this earth-loving propensity. Every minute spent online, however, bears the opposite propensity — it takes you further and further out from the world that houses it.

It seems so simple to say it, but the more that we are online, the less grounded we are or even can be — and the more that that online world will reflect its own reality distinct from the world it started in, the real one it was meant to (constantly) reflect and return to. Instead of reflecting and returning to that real world, more and more we simply occupy one and not the other. And what time we do spend in the real one tends to get short shrift, since the constant thought of what to write or post or react to in that other world is not much better than if we never left it. (Again, books have a decidedly different and positive effect when they are put down.)

There’s a theory about dreams that says that their purpose is connected to neuroplasticity. Put simply, the brain rewires itself too quickly to take eight hours off every day. By keeping our most important senses active while we sleep, it keeps those neurons active as well. For most of us, that means the neurons in the visual cortex. In a way, dreaming keeps the sense perceptions we value most from being hijacked while we’re asleep.

But what if we were capability of hijacking our own visual cortex while we’re awake? And what if we’re increasingly making a world that encourages us to do this? And not just with our sense of “sight,” but our entire sense of “attention”?

Compare the average day of “I wonder what’s going on on the internet” (it would help if you actually called it that, because that’s what it is) to what Mark Doty said after staring at a painting at The Met, a still-life of “a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem”:

And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

Again, this seems painfully, ridiculously obvious, but the longer this live cultural experiment goes on, the more I am convinced that one of the most important things people can do — the most meaningful thing to improve our lives — is to spend more and more time away from those “devices” that transport us out of the only world we evolved to occupy, the only places we were made to be.

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Something I read from Kay Ryan this afternoon (09/02):

I do think that people can get very stuck in detail if their memories are too accurate or, alternatively, they can live in an adolescent misty supercharged half-realm if their memories are not accurate but nonetheless intense, memories which have so ambered with repeated rememberings that they have become simplified, enlarged, and stylized (usually in the directions of Good and Evil).

This “supercharged half-realm” sounds to me like a description of the way that all too many people are walking around the world without really walking around the world. We’re so often supercharging, simplifying, enlarging, and stylizing our opinions without knowing how far off the ground we are.

Some related things on the significance of having — and finding and cultivating — ideals.

Kay Ryan:

“Odd Blocks”

Every Swiss-village
calendar instructs
as to how stone
gathers the landscape
around it, how
glacier-scattered
thousand-ton
monuments to
randomness becomes
fixed points in
finding home.
Order is always
starting over.
And why not
also in the self,
the odd blocks,
all lost and left,
become first facts
toward which later
a little town
looks back?

I think that speaks as much to meaningfully finding your way through life’s randomness (appreciating the “odd blocks”) as it does to having “ideals,” but I think it’s related.

More to the point, Ryan said in a 2000 essay that we all know ideals are not fully attainable.

Yet one must hold such banners aloft, stitched in gold upon a field of gold. For there are powerful enemy banners …

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Nan Shepherd:

How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? — the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquilise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle — as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

That seems to me to be a perfect combination of Kay Ryan’s necessary “banners” and her beautiful, “odd blocks.”

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The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.

Now, this one sounds to me like an idealized lack of ideals, or something to that effect, which is an idea, and perhaps a phrasing, that I find quite attractive. You could say that this presentation of Christian life and practice is idealized, and I think it certainly is. But for all the eye rolling that “idealists” suffer, another way to think of some idealized good is to see it as something that must and should be worked for.

The writer’s description of Christian community may strain credulity, but it also strains possibility.

---

Vladimir Solovyov:

So-called spiritual love is a phenomenon which is not only abnormal, but also completely purposeless, because the separation of the spiritual from the sensuous to which such love aspires, is accomplished without it, and in the best possible way by death. True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of immortal from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.

Love in its true form, ever both real and idealized, is love that embodies, transfigures, regenerates, resurrects — creates.

---

G. K. Chesterton:

I believe myself that this braver world of his will certainly return; for I believe that it is bound up with realities, like morning and the spring. But for those who beyond remedy regard it as an error, I put this appeal before any other observations on Dickens. First let us sympathize, if only for an instant, with the hopes of the Dickens period, with that cheerful trouble of change. If democracy has disappointed you, do not think of it as a burst bubble, but at least as a broken heart, an old love-affair. Do not sneer at the time when the creed of humanity was on its honeymoon; treat it with the dreadful reverence that is due to youth. For you, perhaps, a drearier philosophy has covered and eclipsed the earth. The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, «Abandon hope all ye who enter here» over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of today have written it over the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, forego for a little the pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green. Unlearn that sinister learning that you think so clear; deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. Surrender the very flower of your culture; give up the very jewel of your pride; abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.

You won’t find much more Chestertonian Chesterton than that!

ABANDON HOPELESSNESS, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!

That strikes me as a perfect banner to hold aloft, “stitched in gold upon a field of gold.”

---

Søren Kierkegaard:

Suppose there are two artists and one of them says, “I have traveled much and seen much in the world, but I have sought in vain to find a person worth painting. I have found no face that was the perfect image of beauty to such a degree that I could decide to sketch it, in every face I have seen one or another little defect, and therefore I seek in vain.” Would this be a sign that this artist is a great artist? The other artist, however, says, “Well, I do not actually profess to be an artist; I have not traveled abroad either but stay at home with the little circle of people who are closest to me, since I have not found one single face to be so insignificant or so faulted that I still could not discern a more beautiful side and discover something transfigured in it. That is why, without claiming to be an artist, I am happy in the art I practice and find it satisfying.” Would this not be a sign that he is indeed the artist, he who by bringing a certain something with him found right on the spot what the well-traveled artist did not find anywhere in the world — perhaps because he did not bring a certain something with him!

Whether you’re talking about an art or an ideal, or about love or faith: you bring a certain something with you and you discover something transfigured in what you see.

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Richard Wilbur:

A Summer Morning


Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself,
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears,
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of the day.
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and the cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

| The GOP Cowardice Caucus |

In a live, nationally televised address forty-nine years ago this month, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, telling the American people that he no longer had “a strong enough political base in the Congress” to survive Watergate and serve out his term. This August, charges were brought against Donald Trump in both federal court and in Fulton County, Georgia, for his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. At rallies, on cable TV, and in social media, Trump has railed at the charges against him, repeated the falsehoods that led to them, mocked the prosecutors who brought them, and issued thinly veiled threats against judges and potential witnesses. He has taken advantage of free media publicity to rake in millions of dollars from small donors, much of which he is apparently using to pay his mounting legal bills. Nevertheless, Trump still has the backing of more than half of Republican primary voters. Not coincidentally, he enjoys what Nixon, who faced no criminal charges, did not: a solid base of support from Republicans in Congress.

As the editors go on to say, cowardice is the only reason that Republican leaders, and the Party in general, have not rid themselves of Trump.

But is it the only reason? Or is Trump’s support from Republicans more deeply rooted? Perhaps they do not need to rid themselves of Trump because that is who they are now. Maybe he actually represents them.

To repeatedly beat a dead horse: The Republican Party is not really a political party. More than anything else, it is a cult of grievance and personality. It has no positive vision and exists solely to piss off the other party.

As bad as he is for everything in the world, Trump is perfect for them. Just perfect.

Rohit Krishnan:

Because we know how these breaks help people who are lucky enough to take them. By helping them learn new things, but helping them to get time to think more deeply, by taking time to travel and experience life. We know from countless examples how pivotal this “time off” can be in incubating new ideas, digging deeper into existing ones, and acting like the starting gun for a new journey. And yet, for most professionals, taking a substantial break remains all but impossible. It is a lost art, the province of the privileged few.

The remaining question is one of opportunity cost and the benefits. Because the costs are easily visible – a year’s salary or so, gone. The benefits are diffuse, a new passion, a new project, a new way of thinking, inspiration, all hard to either measure or anticipate. Invisible to the naked eye perhaps, but no less real for it.

Robert Pogue Harrison:

It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the generative sources of identity formation, not to mention the creative imagination. It deprives them of spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail. It deprives them of the ability to form images with their eyes closed, hence to think beyond the sorcery of the movie, television, or computer screen. It deprives them of an expansive and embodied relation to nature, without which a sense of connection to the universe is impossible and life remains essentially meaningless. It deprives them of continuity with the past, whose future they will soon be called on to forge.

Sarah Hendren:

[David Gissen’s] case studies offer inspiration for design practice, not so much as a how-to guide, but as a distilled and compact set of provocations for thinking otherwise. […]

Disability, as a lens for understanding, points to the stubborn truth of a universal fragile existence, to the adaptive corpus at work in forming culture and politics and the built environment. This body, and this one, and that one—each with shifting and changing needs—add up to a whole demography of disability made visible, if aided by a curious, indeterminate, and open-handed historian’s approach. […]

… The thought that disability invites is the most ordinary but vital combination of imagination and pragmatism. Code compliance is a legal requirement and valuable as such, necessary for enforcing access. But it’s not a substitute for imagination and commitment, for prototyping with lively disability histories in mind. The precedents are out there, waiting to be rethought, revivified for the present day. …

… a very “aesthetics of infirmity,” a poetics of the body, and nature, and the built environment with needfulness preserved, built in to the future.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s not very linear, so in some sense it’s one of those books that could be adequately appreciated in the first 50 pages and put down. But I liked lingering with it. Maybe it’s that I’m 38 years old, combined with the fact that a baby, a house, and marriage (in that order) are all happening now and not 15 years ago. But the thought of how life is compared to how it could have been is increasingly familiar.

The house-hunt really played into this. As many people will tell you, looking for a house is practically guaranteed to be a stressful experience, especially in a market that remains as chaotic as ours. (Though, has it ever been “easy” for the average person, anywhere, ever? And have I really had it bad, ever?) One of the biggest causes of that stress has to be the multiplicity of imagined lives you can run through in such a short amount of time. Each house found is a house hoped for. From the moment the first image of a house is seen, you start imagining life in it — life in this house, what you might do in this kitchen space and in this backyard, living on this street with these neighbors and in this town. (Oh, and a bookshelf right here.) On it goes, with a mind-blowing amount of wishful imagery and narrative stuffed into any single minute between the offer and the answer.

In seems unavoidable: house-hunting brings on the psychological equivalent of insecurity and regret. (Much like the marketing and consuming industry in general.) But then, this is only a more clearly causal and condensed version of what life tends to bring about anyway.

Take, for instance, Carl Dennis’s poem “The God Who Loves Us“:

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

This is one of those poems that turns on itself in the best way. At some point down the lines, you realize that you, the reader, have actually taken it and yourself a little too seriously. And the more times you read it, the earlier the sarcasm and delightful self-ridicule come in.

Miller expounds on this poem early in the book, and he reminds you just how deep the Rabbit Hole of Unled Lives goes. More diagnostically, Miller highlights what the poem is ultimately getting at: our complete inability to trust our self-analysis of the past.

From the vantage point of life now, you look back on your youth. While you might suffer from the memory of past possibilities, you might also welcome their flattery. The realtor’s loving god allows him to be warmed by the gilded halo of his unmet potential. If, then, he crowns that god with thorns—if he betrays god’s love with his failures—the guilt he suffers is merely the price he pays for keeping faith in his capacities. The more harshly you punish your failures, the more securely you can believe in your exalted potential. You side with your judge and congratulate yourself, righteously and ruefully, on your high standards.

The act of looking back at those past, unled lives is never a fruitful one. It’s an onion-peeling expedition par excellence, one that invites an elusive amount of egotism. And it helps to know this. It helps to catch yourself in the act, to laugh at your ego, and to shrug it off (“…for all you know…”) for the vanity that it is.

[The speaker of “The God Who Loves You”] wants you to let go of the thought that you might be a loving, all-knowing narrator of your own existence. He wants you to let go of the lives you haven’t lived.

. . . as if the value of a life, like the value of a house, could be assessed by looking up comps in the neighborhood. Don’t use that language, the speaker says: it takes you from yourself. Return to your earthbound ignorance and find words for it.

I love that sentence, the utterly relevant imperative of it: “Return to your earthbound ignorance and find words for it.”

The book is chalk full of thoughtful commentary like this on other pieces of art, from poems to books to films. I can’t say that I like all of Miller’s commentary; he sometimes goes to places that I certainly didn’t expect — places, that is, that I still don’t expect him to have gone. But I’m sure they are meaningful for him. (I had a similar feeling in Peter Wayne Moe’s Touching This Leviathan. A lovely book, but with some surprising, idiosyncratic turns.) And in terms of substance, there probably isn’t much in the book that you couldn’t find a way of encountering by spending a good amount of time pondering and rereading Dennis’s poem. But more of the same substance is not at all a bad thing, and it was worth reading through to the end.

The book ends on what I wish it had spent more time with, or at least more time subtly hinting at throughout: the thrill of merely being at all.

Commenting on a character’s walk through a garden in a Thomas Hardy novel, Miller breaks into something that rings not unlike a Pauline doxology:

This has happened, it happened here, and it needn’t have happened at all. . . . For a moment, what might have happened drops away, and we’re left lingering with what has happened in this one radiant world, with snail shells denting our feet, and the descent of music into our neglected garden.