beloved

The human willingness to risk brokenheartedness in pursuit of another's friendship or love is one of our most interesting traits.  This willingness bears so much of what is pathetic, but also occasionally what may be noble, or else beautiful, about our race.  And the brokenheartedness itself?  That is rarely pathetic and never directly noble, but usually beautiful, albeit painfully so.

rose

We are built with the capacity to fight.  More even than most capacities, that calls for careful cultivation.  Nothing is worse left in its natural state, and little is more pitiably wasted when simply cut down.

R and his master

No character in R's life's story comes off so badly as the one R worshipped and served. R served in one of his master's many country houses, and in eighty years, the master never stopped by.  The pain of this was the mighty secret to R's unique connection to the wives of faithless husbands.  They and he shared a pain, the pain of abandonment.

The better I knew R, growing up, the more I understood him, the more I knew that this was the trouble for R - that he served an absent master.  R needed only a divine glance, a divine whisper, and he could have taken sustenance from that instant to last him his life long.  But there was no sign.  I used to pray for a sign, not for me, but for R.  I believe this prayer of mine, a prayer over years, was never answered.

My life changed in a series of conversations with R, years ago.  Twice in those conversations, R told me of a moment, in his own old battles to keep faith, when he had decided that he "had figured it out - God loves me, but he doesn't like me."  That is wit, and R had a beautiful wit, but this - this was wit from the depths of pain, the pain of an intelligent and beautiful victim of a divine cruelty. 

"God loves me, but he doesn't like me."  One way or the other, R could only be half right, and that was his tragedy.

W

To be an individual is to be misunderstood, and to be a leading individual is to be misunderstood widely.  For understanding glides along paths paved with belonging.  And to belong is to conform, somehow or another.

To be an individual is, then, is partly to starve for want of others.  But to belong is to drown in others, as ice drowns in water.  Neither the mountaintop nor the sea is good for us - we must live in town.

But there, we must have rooms, apartments with doors that shut.  We must structure ourselves, careful above all to cohere, but to differentiate ourselves into the parts whose individuation matter, then associate in the ways for which belonging is no fatal loss.  (This is the mighty secret of church music, and even in some degree of popular music - it has a strength apart from any excellence as music, being music that binds.)

And then, if we have the talent for it – and this was W– R–'s great talent – we bring others into solitary conversation, and weave the scrim of privacy through which soulful, individual revelations may be shown and known, known as intelligence knows itself to be: the congellation of spirit.

Oh, but hide not your light under a bushel, if light you have!  This was R's great failing, and he knew it, and he spent his life trying to repair it, but ineffectually because the paths to earthly mountaintops were repellent to him.  He tried instead to make his own mountain, but he was not tectonic, he was spiritual.

No candle, by burning, ever raises itself up, but only, slowly, burns itself, down.

fees

Lincoln was an attorney, as everyone knows, and a fine one, as most do.  He was also a great man.  So to read his legal correspondence is really a delight.  He is so clear about where is own interests lie, and about what interests him, as a legal thinker, even as he keeps his clients' interests primary.  One lesson: it is false and foolish to act as if you are not interested in good fees and interesting cases.  It is better to frankly admit where your interests (financial and intellectual) lie, then go on to conduct business fairly, having equipped others to verify that you have done so. 

There are many advantages to this practice: First, modesty: a lawyer is a professional, but also in the business of getting business from businessmen, who will appreciate your not pretending to be above the fray.  Second, reputation: if you help people see where your interests lie, then you go on to act justly and evenly, regardless ofe your interests, they will find it easier to see your integrity, and esteem you for it.  Third, evident strength: stating your own interests plainly is the better part of standing up for yourself, and a lawyer who stands up for his own interests is the better choice to stand for the interests of his clients, too.  Last, opportunity: it will sometimes cost others nothing to advance your interests, even when you didn't know they could: if they are well-disposed, they will advance you in ways that you, not knowing all the circumstances, could not have arranged for yourself.

next

Although it does become easier to be happy as one ages, and even as one grows in strength and ability, so does age discover, year on year, a creeping deadness within.  Regions, once alive, taut and red with life turn, over time, pithy, parched and grey.

καταπληκτική ενέργεια

I'm getting to the point where I am, at times, actually practicing law: actually being a lawyer.

Watson can't

Mastery of a subject is a great source of pleasure, and would not be if it were an end.  It is not; a subject once mastered is a means to use and reflection.

chateau

The logic of trade is not the logic of production or service.  Market price is not based on optimal productive conditions, nor on the best conditions for the service provider.  That which is not a commodity should not be priced solely on market terms.

catalytic

It is a commonplace that it gets easier to be happier as one gets older, up to a point and barring afflictions.  And I find this is true.  I am as happy now as I was in college.  There, then, a correspondence of place and personality, of individual needs and communal abundance, made for a very rich situation.  I flourished, but under full sun, well watered and in ideal soil.  Happiness was nearly pushed on me in quantity then and there: it would have been hard not to be happy, and I didn't try.

And now?  I am as happy, but on far less.  I have become able to break down the components of rocky soil, and steal the nutrients that were locked up.  I take great pleasure in law, for example, and law is rocky soil - it has to be worked on before it opens up.

But you're married you say - isn't that a difference? Of course it is, and that is what I was heading towards.  Marriage is a mutual arrangement for deriving various goods - including happiness - from less than ideal circumstances.  Marriage, in other words, is not a raw input, but a mutual process by which two work upon and build from the raw materials of experience, of life.  We are not hydroponic tomatoes in a greenhouse with fertilized water dripping on us.*  We have to do the work of getting nutrition and living upon and producing from it.  Marriage is not the tree, or the forest, or the fruit: marriage is photosynthesis or digestion.  In this way, marriage is more nearly like one's productive reading and writing - it is not a thing so much as an ongoing parade of action, or if a thing, it is a route or - better - a facility considered together with its action.  Marriage, like a serious course of reading, is a faculty.

The happiness of age is the happiness of marriage is the happiness of - arrangement and matured digestive capacity at work.



* Well, some people - sufficiently wealthy Manhattanites and sufficiently ascetic nuns, for example - are pretty much hydroponic, and the results can be strangely good, just as hydroponic vegetables can be good.  But one does notice that the external system has taken over much of the internal work.

touchy

One wants the familiar boss, not new bosses.

whose and what within

The mind, as if wound with a key, works hard upon the sight of a beautiful, precious little box.  Unless opened.

deep thought

Year 2050: Jersey Shore reunion.

nile

A people are like a person in that they are either asleep or awake.  The difference is that a person is asleep or awake, simply.  But a people are, at any moment, asleep to some things, but awake to others.  And these are like many tides superimposed, as if one sea was of oil and water, and each ebbed and flowed to its own moon.

size

As a practical matter, I try to avoid writing things that are long and technical.  Still, it is lovely to be able to deliver something longer and more precise than anything I've written before.  I think to myself: See there? I can do that!

da capo

One of the benefits of a little looking around for alternatives is that it recasts what one has as a choice, rather than mere a mere given or context.  And this can make holding and keeping and continuing a happier prospect (unless, of course, what one has isn't so good).