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“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
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Edward Weston, Armco Steel, Ohio, 1922
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “The Dream” by Theodore Roethke appeared first on The American Scholar.
Grownups seldom credit children with insight into human psychology, thus treating them as smaller, more annoying versions of themselves. My father had an acquaintance even he knew was a fool. By admitting such knowledge, he was violating adult solidarity. His friend's customary epithet was “That Goofball Herb,” whose reaction to any stimulus, positive or negative, was a juicy, open-mouthed giggle. And yet, somehow, he had even reproduced. At a picnic, we watched as Herb spent half an hour trying to start a fire in a fire pit. Apparently, he was unfamiliar with kindling. Instead, he was throwing matches at logs and had attracted an appreciative audience. We watched as he opened the trunk of his car, removed a gasoline can, emptied the contents on the logs and threw a match. The ensuing “Whoomp!” knocked him “ass or tea kettle,” the American variation on the more colorful British “arse over tit.” He had singed away the hair on his forearms, his eyebrows and eyelashes, and left his face the color of a pomegranate. When people were certain Herb wasn't dead, everyone laughed, which suggests the enduring appeal of slapstick comedy. Best of all the fire promptly fizzled out, but he was back to work within minutes, bringing to mind Proverbs 26:11: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” Herb was a fool. Most of us recognize at least two species of fool – those like Shakespeare’s who are gifted with wisdom and the homelier sort like Herb who are merely foolish. In his lecture on As You Like It, W.H. Auden writes: “The fool is fearless and untroubled by convention [and good sense]—like a child, he isn’t even aware of convention. He’s not all there, but he is prophetic, because through his craziness he either sees more or dares to say more.” Auden blurs the distinction between the two sorts of fool. Herb, as I recall, never manifested wisdom. It's April Fools’ Day, a favorite holiday when we were kids. It gave us permission to tell lies and to feel very un-foolish about it. Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary defines an April Fool as “the March fool with another month added to his folly.” In other words, there’s a continuity to foolishness. It doesn’t recede. The condition is chronic and we learn about it as children. Bierce’s definition of fool, one of the longest in his Dictionary, sounds like H.L. Mencken: “A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent,” and so on. I prefer Rosiland’s exhortation to Jacques in As You Like It: “I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.” [See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]
“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