Strauss

Some writers are more impressive for their effect on other writers than in their own writing. They are kin to those whose salons are more glittering than their own conversation. Usually this sort of writer is, to me, caffinating, or somewhat intoxicating, but not more. And perhaps that is enough.

Sometimes you have a point that seems fatal to the opposition, in your mind. And then you plunge it in, during a meeting, and feel the squeaking spring inside the blade's handle - and realize it was a trick dagger with a retractable rubber blade... Curses!

thrill

I have that same feeling of pleasure, a little candylike pop, when I see a well-cast sentence or a telling verb, as I feel when I see a beautiful face or catch a cool breeze on a hot day.

pigeon

Cities over time enable justice.

dry

I pass the car wash here on 31st St. Late out, and the yellow cabs and black cars line up to get clean. I pass, window down, past the guys toweling the cars dry and say. I am you and not you. I am like you and unlike you. I am your superior and inferior; I am better and worse. But I am me and not you, here and not there, my own and not yours.

more grip

I mainly associate liberals with movements and conservatives with institutions, but of course this is just a matter of default cognates.

Liberal institutions (unions, legal aid societies) are as prone to ossification, bloat, waste and menacing uselessness as conservative institutions (chambers of commerce, the farm lobby).

Conservative movements (nativism, purification movements) are as prone to populism, classism, duplicity, brake failure and to throwing the baby out with the bathwater as are liberal movements (humanitarian efforts, rights expansion).

The core insight is that none of these works well, but that the alternative (no movements and no institutions; or else only liberal or conservative instances of one or both) would be even worse.

grip

One conservative impulse, which I share, is the sense that nothing is indestructible, many things are fragile, and that much of what holds civil life together is unknown, possibly unknowable. In short, that most reforms are like digging a trench in the middle of a Manhattan street: who really knows what old and necessary steam fitting is down there that had slipped off the planning maps?

The analogy holds for its implication of paralysis, too: we cannot dig recklessly, but often we must dig. To work at civil life is the surest way to illuminate it, even though the trenchwork simultaneously threatens what is in place.

I accept as true that civil life is ever put at risk by both change and sameness, and by about equal measure. The moderate is the muddler; the wisdom we need is that of the muddler; civilizations that succeed muddle through. I hate revolutions and oppression alike, but accept that both are - wretched truth! - occasionally the least evil option.

overheard

A: "That's a lot of water out there."

B: "Yeah, and that's just the top of it!"

retracing eames

Ethics is design: the arrangement of human behavior to address human problems. Ethics is design: an ethical life has the rapture and pinch of life in a great work of architecture, with furnishings and gardens laid out with care.

ceruse

To be seen impartially is to be seen impersonally. To show one's self impartially is grand but bloodless. The most dramatic effect is to show impartial reason atop lively cause; a pale and bloodless face and an elaborately worked body, vital with tensed ability. Thus Elizabeth I; thus the Declaration of Independence.

ride

My eye for detail is weak; that is professional vice.

shorthand

My political views are not unusual. Structurally, I stand for a relatively small and vigorous republic within a democracy. Socially, I stand for an ever-expanding aristocracy within a democracy.

I move in the meritocratic direction, yes, but from a popular foundation - or, better, entirely within a popular whole. I am a small-r republican last and I am a small-r democrat first. The democracy is the means to an ennobling end.

sandbox

That a thought is difficult is no defect. Only when the thought is more difficult than another at least as good is there a defect.

And likewise with a system of thought: that a system is not initially or eventually or internally clear is no argument against it, but only against using in a context that demands ease.

The difficulty of an idea, or the the obscurity of a system, may be the grit that gives the idea traction, or the compaction that gives an idea utility.

tax free

Promiscuity is the poor man's yacht.

Washington

The maintenance by the United States of civilian control, to a high degree, over an apolitical but mammoth military is a most fragile, unlikely, and valuable achievement.

One reason it has been preserved is that it is one of those rare practical things that can actually be addressed by the management of set-piece media kerfuffles and the theater of wise old men. "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."

pug

After all, why is it that I don't fight everybody? Or hardly anybody, and hardly ever, and then meekly? Since I fight myself like a gamecock every day.

pardon my dust

The epitaph engraved on the tombstone of humankind will be "They had language."

more future

The future is a functional litmus test for what is mind rather than merely neural, and for what is affection of the spirit rather than merely animal emotions.

Exactly the part of you that can reason about the future is your mind. The remainder of your neural function is not.

Exactly that in you that bears on the future is your spirit.

These are not definitions, much less explanations, of mind or spirit, but rather only tests for detecting what is or is not mind or spirit.

But conclusions and assumptions do flow from taking the test to be valid. And I espouse every such conclusion or assumption I have been able to think of. For example, that the mind is part of the spirit. Or that, if it were shown that storing nuts for the winter is not instinctive but a matter of planning, then squirrels have minds.

wait don't cross

Delaying a conflict is often a useful, even necessary tactic, yet delay carries a negative connotation. That should not be: first, because delay stands or falls on the merits of its application; second, because there are other words like procrastinating that are more specific and ready to be saddled with a presumption of fault. The American Senate managed to put off the Civil War for decades with jawboning, callous disregard for the enslaved, and weird political compromises. And, yet, had the Civil War been fought much earlier than it was, the free states, as such, probably would have lacked the political coherence, European diplomatic and commercial heft - and warmaking capacity - to win.

Put short: Retreat is an essential tactic, but stalling is usually cheaper and better than retreat when the reasons for a would-be retreat are already known.

map quest

If a country and its capital looks like this:

P P
P.P
P P

And you split it up like this:

P Z
Z.P
P Z

Then there is going to be trouble, and, folks will be apt to blame that trouble on the inhabitants rather than the divvying unless they have the map continually before them.

10 kilosamars

Generosity must be measured twice: by its distance from doing nothing, and again by its distance from what is needed.

ill wind

The fate of Father Coughlin's influence is a comfort.

hope

The future is that peculiarly human tense.

U.S.A.

It's an old debate: between attaining nobler ends by harnessing human imperfections or elevating human nature. My view is conventionally American, I suppose: siding with Adams and against Jefferson, but eager to co-opt the elevating rhetoric of the latter augments to assist the functional harnessing, and understanding that too frank a public espousal of the former interferes with its progress.

what is truth

On the whole, how people behave is more important than what people believe.

disaster

From a human standpoint, I suppose the properly predominant unit of measure for most crises is net annual migration per capita.

spectre

Student loans are nondischargable in bankruptcy except under the most extraordinary and miserable circumstances. This inescapable debt magnifies risks and anxiety, and constrains. It also engenders sympathy - the thought that not greed but fear drives much that passes for avarice, slavish work, monetary desperation and, yes, probably some of what passes for entrepreneurial spirit and wealth creation, too.

etaoin shrdlu

Some people want to fly an airplane, just once. I want to operate a Linotype machine, just once.

primer

It isn't quite right to say that money corrupts.

Corruption is spoilation. Moisture corrupts iron. Mold corrupts bread. Maggots corrupts flesh.

Money, by contrast, sterilizes. Money neutralizes. Money flattens. Money numbs. Money, above all, connects. (It is almost possible to say that money is pure, abstracted connection in metered, persistent form.)

It is then, after the monetary connection, that something corruptive floods onto the sterilized, neutralized, flattened, numbed object, and it corrupts. Money only prepared the way.

That's why I try to say, not that money corrupts, but that a payment corrupts. Because it emphasizes the hand that conveys the money, because it implies the purpose behind the monetary priming of an object, that, very likely, is about to be shellacked.



(Yes, I know I am pushing analogies too hard. But remember, these posts are partly me horsing around.)

will

I was just saying that conjunctions of law and force work on the will. Imagine being in a good, orderly community and wanting to break into a locked apartment, but an honest beat cop is walking by. The cop isn't doing anything to you, but the combination of law and his presence will work on your will.

Of course, the law doesn't have to be good for the point to hold. Imagine being black in a segregated southern town during the time of Jim Crow laws, and you want to walk into a whites-only restaurant. That honest-but-enforcing-an-evil-law beat cop is going to work the same way on your will. That you might gather courage and step in anyway is a clear indication of just this, and that the tactic of nonviolence might occur to you just then is still further indication of the basic relationship.

What is essential is not the goodness of the law, but the law and force be tightly conjoined: each component must be clear (the law in meaning, the cop in ability) and the conjunction must be tight (no bribes, no unenforced laws). Otherwise, we are not dealing with our will, but only our reason, on the one hand, and our animal fear, on the other.

butter

You will misunderstand laws if you think they restrain action. Laws work upon reason. Only physical force - handcuffs, moats, gravity - restrains action. (The conjunction of law and force, in turn, works upon the will.)

Now, many actions in our world are quite abstract, for example a periodic bond payment. In this realm of abstract action, the law, itself abstract, appears to operates quite directly and to have a force unto itself. And that is a doubly useful appearance: it butresses compliance and simplifies the conditions for action. But the compulsion is still a matter of the prospect physical force and not the law itself: a server room can be stormed, a transmission can be scrambled, a copper wire may be cut, and - since this is hardly a modern issue - a mind may be stopped by a blow to the body.

license

An effective lawmaker cleaves solid constraint as a cutter cleaves a raw diamond: not to destroy it, but to raise a mineral lump to optical might, reliability and subtlety. Law is not force but of force: the result of an operation of reason upon force to plane and facet it. The surface revealed is law, and its work is to refract and focus human reason. There is the possibility of brilliance.

humus

What is important is not that I be free but that I feel free and am able to move about. The social requirement and political commitment of an American is a slant towards freedom, which could only ever be relative. But in absolute terms we are constantly faced with and supported by force, and this is as important as the availability of paths for movement and some degree of open, pathless choice.

In this we are like earthworms. We thrive neither in solid rock nor in open air. What we want is loamy, fertile soil, shot through with variation - pockets of air, some roots and gravel, and moderate variation in moisture. It is in the intercomposition of freedom and force that we live and work and have our being.

yes

The letterform serves the word, the word the phrase, and the phrase the meaning. Yet even the letter's form has its dignity and its own life. So too, the lawyer, a servant, has his own professional dignity and vitality, his inns and bars.

employment

To lack money and time, and to want either - or especially both - is to become a servant. And that is neither good nor bad.

welcome and forgive

There is a knack for accepting thanks elegantly and humbly. A otherwise good person easily muffs it.

And there is a similar knack for accepting sincere apologies.

how

Craft and motion. Declaming for ideals and cultivating a yearning for higher things. These are instruments of worthy might.

double take

On a garbled cell-phone connection with a senior of mine:

Heard: "I'd like to be a call boy for you."

?!

Pause.

Think.

Deciphered: "I'd like to be called going forward."

Aha!

Phew - good.

sidewalk and meeting

Some people resemble their dogs.
Some people resemble their ideas.

wise

Some people have the wise knack for suffering fools not lightly but productively.

african violet

This one won't be very clear. I'm thinking through something.

A fair number of people, especially good people, are possessed of a need to maintain a feeling. A person may need constantly to feel loved, or to feel hope, or to feel meaningful (or important or respected or successful).

And, of course, this is one of the two primary reasons people have pets - to have constant access to the preconditions to a certain, needed feeling (the other primary reason is a desire for fun, stimulating interactions). Typically, the pet owner who needs a feeling personifies more, projects more, and interacts with the pet in a richly interiorized manner. (The pet owner who wants fun tends to get out and play with her dog, or gets into breeding, or otherwise displays a rich external life with the pet.)

But one who needs a feeling usually doesn't have a pet. The feeling is itself cultivated, directly although usually not consciously. (For some people, it will be conscious: "I must maintain my sense of hope" -- this is a complication to the need that I'll come to later.)

This feeling, then, comes to center (or joins the other centers) the orbiting life of the needing person. Just as an eccentric orbit implies a planet's unseen center of gravity, an eccentric life (that is otherwise well-ordered) implies an individual's unseen center.

And that center may be what we are talking about now: a need to maintain a feeling. A life that is all stability and predictability is not best, even if it is ideal, strictly speaking. But there are only so many eccentric forces that a person can productively sustain. The need to maintain a feeling is hardly fatal, and not always even bad. But it always saps the limited momentum of a life, and for that reason, is to be avoided if possible.

I have no need to maintain any feeling. My maladies lie elsewhere. So I am alarmed when someone says -- actually says -- that he or she must have a particular feeling, that this feeling is their lifeblood. I hear addiction, and I fear a gravitation tug that threatens to yank their life entirely out of orbit. But -- and in this respect it is just like an addition -- such an acknowledged need is very hard to counteract effectively, and impossible to counteract (effectively or not) without force and collateral damage. Some people will be too weak to withstand the trauma of the repair, and can only be accommodated in their eccentric revolutions about their needed feeling. It is as if not Juliet, but a potted african violet, were the sun.

diurnal

The transition from day to night, and back again, is as much a part of one's self as some of the aspects more commonly taken to be intrinsic. And not only the transition, but also the sense of what belongs to night and what lives in the day, is impressed deeply. Just think of the richness, the cultural and personal and all-round elegant feeling of - evening.

And then, just now, to see that word typed out - evening - and to feel the interplay between the patent noun and the verb latent: well, the beauty of it. A poem of one word.

and down

I hadn't been on a thrill ride in years, but I took a notion to go to Six Flags, and went with some friends yesterday. And I rode roller coasters: lots of them, intense ones, repeatedly. And today I am down. Not depressed, not unproductive, but attitudinally down. It isn't even an emotion - it is a feeling, in the thinner sense of the word. I suppose this is a hormonal or neural reaction of some kind.

I push myself to include my body in my notion of who I really am, because that doesn't come easily and I think it is just. But on days like today, where there is such an obvious, nonrational physicality to how my body is, and how it is not like me and what I am doing, the push is useless and I can only think of my body as it, not me.

I'll go back to owning my own skin tomorrow, I suppose.

Monday

Arbeit versüßt das Leben. Generally, yes. Though in my view, and in my own life, I might have said: Arbeiten desinfiziert das Leben.

up

Give me a choice between one great book and one great roller coaster, with the other forever lost to me, and I'd choose the book, sure. But give me the same choice ten times, and I'd swap out a couple of the books for the steep drops and cheap thrills.

media

One of the clever Sunday school teachers I had as a child gave her class of 5-year-olds plastic bowls, and sent us to a table on the other side of the room to fill our bowls. On the table were some nice things: flowers, pine cones, feathers; and some bad things: crumpled old paper, lint, and what-not.

The point was, of course, "fill your bowl with nice things" - the bowl being your mind, and the table being your choice of what to think about and watch.

The excercise would be dopey, except that it was directed at 5-year-olds, for whom the transition from not putting lint in your mouth to not putting it in your cottony head runs down a short, clear path. But I can't help watching adults import news-related angst into their lives, to no purpose, without thinking that, folks, if you can't handle the news, and you're not involved in what's covered, you're actually better off, sad to say, with the childish lesson of bowls and feathers and lint.

Q'est

"What is" questions work only with certain, especially inert concepts - even defined statutory creations in law often are unreachable by asking "what is".

• What is mud? That, famously, is answerable: mud is wet dirt.
• But what is an executory contract? That requires a test (and has a superb one, achieved only after decades and by a great legal mind, the Countryman test.)

Laws and modern programming languages have this much in common: object-orientation is not (as a philosophically-minded ancient might guess) a matter of concretizing. It is a matter of abstraction.

And then there is a different branch of objects impervious to the "what is" approach: matters of attitude and manner, or the folkways. These are difficult to get at by any method, but the best I've ever seen is the "clamshell" approach taken in scriptural wisdom literature.

I grew up reading the Proverbs, and having them read to me. They tend to be couplets, and there will be a tidbit, a tad, of insight in the surface meaning of the couplet. But that is just the shell. The couplets will usually be fundamentally parallel, but only in the sense that the two halves of a clamshell are parallel. What is functioning in a good proverb is the asymmetry, which forms a conceptual space, which has a shape and meaning, and that is often wisdom. Wisdom of a sort that could not be expressed with words that got at the object directly. Instead, they enclose it.

It is elegant, and takes only a couple of lines. And of course not every proverb amounts to much, but many are remarkable.

Take a very simple one, for practice:

A righteous woman obtains honor, but violent men get riches.

Not much on the surface (but something - the two genders and two species of human reward were efficiently announced). Focus instead on the asymmetries and the sequencing. (Only the sequencing will tell you which of exactly two possible interior meanings is the primary one.) Get it? (Clue: in our time, we would call the primary meaning feminist.) And can you see what the primary meaning would have been if the couplets were reversed? That is the secondary meaning. And do you see the tension between the primary and secondary meaning? If you do, and you skim the proverbs that surround this one, you'll see how this proverb (better than most of those, to be sure) hooks into the general theme. (You'll also see that there are about twenty puny proverbs for every good one, like the simple one just considered.) And you'll also see, in the tension between those two meanings, just how delicate a morsel -- too delicate for direct words -- can be cupped between the trite halves of the proverbial clamshell.

Now here's a harder one (but like a harder clamshell, it is in altogether better than the easy one I started with. It is also much less asymmetrical -- in the context of proverbs I think of this sort of very slight, very precise asymmetry as producing an acute proverb:

A rich man’s wealth is his strong city; the poverty of the poor is their ruin.

Look for the asymmetry, and take the images seriously. Give it a minute. Wonderful.