Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from The Marginalian
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world. The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote: When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself… read article
At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of… read article
The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same). Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of “combinatory play,” that… read article
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.” We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art. Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens when we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, our ancestors sought an organizing… read article
When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists. Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself fragile. One of the cases he relays is that of a bright woman in her… read article
More in literature
A new biography of a comedy pioneer The post Splitting Our Sides appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1899, Edwin Arlington Robinson read Thoreau’s Walking, a work based on an 1851 lecture published posthumously in 1862. Robinson was not impressed by his fellow New Englander. He condemned Thoreau’s “glorified world-cowardice” in a letter to his friend Daniel Gregory Mason: “For God’s sake says the sage, let me get away into the wilderness where I shall not have a single human responsibility or the first symptom of social discipline. Let me be a pickerel or a skunk cabbage or anything that will not have to meet the realities of civilization. There is a wholesomeness about some people that is positively unhealthy, and I find it in this essay.” Starting as a teenager I idolized Thoreau. I read Walden many times and almost everything else he wrote, including the two oversized volumes of his Journals as published by Dover. I still think he sometimes wrote excellent prose (the poetry is refried Emerson, often unreadable) but his hippie ethos mingled with snobbery cooled my enthusiasm, beginning about fifteen years ago. His temperament was chilly. I suspect Thoreau is best read when we’re young and don’t yet understand our civil obligations. In 1844, when he accidentally started a forest fire and burned some three-hundred acres of woods in Concord, Thoreau expressed no remorse and never apologized to his townsmen. In his Journal in 1850 he wrote about the incident: “Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself, ‘Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.’” An impressive act of stiff-necked rationalization. “It has never troubled me,” he goes on, “from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it.” Scott Donaldson in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2007) contrasts Thoreau with Robinson: “Robinson required a commanding and fortified purpose to guide him in the real world. For him, there could be no worthy calling that did not help others. As a poet, he might not serve as overtly as a pastor comforting parishioners or a college professor mentoring students. Nonetheless he wanted desperately to believe that by writing poetry he would do some good in the world. . . .Time and again, as he was shaping his career, Robinson explicitly made the link between a life of poetry and a life of service.” Trying to be a decent human being is a fulltime occupation that starts with our personal relations – family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Grandiose schemes of improvement are delusional. In an April, 2, 1897 letter to his correspondent Edith Brower, Robinson writes: “I am doing what I can for myself and a little for others; and I am very glad to know that I have been to some slight service to them. There are two or three fellows whom I have really helped. I know it; they have told me so; and their actions prove the truth of what they say. And now you—a total stranger—tell me that I have helped you. What more can I ask?”
The post Terra Do Queixo appeared first on The American Scholar.
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world. The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote: When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself… read article
