”It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy…”
Yet another Richard Wilbur poem I simply cannot move past. Must have read it 50 times now.
The reconstructed Virginia on the Kennebec River in Bath, ME, sitting about seven miles north of her namesake’s origin in Phippsburg in 1608. It was the first English ship built in the Americas. Behind me and over the bridge at BIW, today sit two Navy Destroyers in mid-build.
Two things come to mind, one much lighter than the other, but not unrelated.
First the light one. Whenever I’ve seen this ship, usually while driving over the Sagadahoc Bridge, I think of Sam Bush’s “Same Ol’ River”:
I wish that I could be a Pirate
I’d sail the ocean blue
Way before the big liners
Started sailing them too
I’d bury most of my treasures
So I would leave a big hole
And the only real sense of pleasure that I’d get
Is that I’d sail free in my soul
The second thing is a “paragraph” from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. (If you’ve read Sebald, you understand the scare quotes 🙂.) Sebald is sitting in the English town of Southwold and reflecting on the history of naval warefare. It’s a haunting reflection. I put most of the paragraph up on the other blog, but here’s the clinching line:
The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required — from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth — to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. For a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas, moved by the winds that circle the earth, bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, Victory, Groot Hollandia and Olyfan, and then they were gone.
Here’s an image of Willem van de Velde‘s The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay, which Sebald included in black and white in the book:
Finished reading: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton 📚
A very enjoyable read. I don’t often delve into the world of quantum anything, but when I do it’s usually fun. (George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance and Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland are two that always come to mind.)
I love not only how diverse Egginton’s subject is, seen through the distinctive lives of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg (literature, philosophy, and science, respectively), but also how incredibly old it is: the book opens with, and never fundamentally moves on from, Plato’s Parmenides dialogues.
Robert Alter said of the 2500-year-old book of Ecclesiastes and its questionably pious epilogue, which arguably sought to “domesticate Qohelet’s doctrinal wildness,” “It is surely attributing far too much naiveté to the ancient readers to imagine that a few dozen words of piety at the end would deflect them from seeing the subversive skepticism emphatically reiterated throughout the text.”
He goes on:
What continues to engage the moral and philosophical imagination … is the writer who unblinkingly saw all human enterprise as herding the wind, who envisaged the same grim fate for rich and poor, for the righteous and the wicked, and who was led to question whether wisdom itself in the end had any advantage over foolishness.
Far from triumph, there is a leveling effect to be found in the heights of human knowledge. Here’s Egginton:
Standing on the precipice of this very instant, we stare into the abyss of the eternal. Desire for that abyss fuels powerful human impulses: romantic ecstasy; religious fervor; artistic creation; compassion for others; even the courage and conviction to transcend our inclinations and do the right thing, no matter the cost to ourselves. But to believe we can exposit that abyss, that we can package it into the language and logic of space and time—to think we can visualize the impossibly small, the infinitely whole, describe the world before its beginning or after its end, know the fate written in our stars—such pretension leads us astray.
Tell me that doesn’t sound like Qohelet.
I mentioned before that it reminded me of Jonathan Pageau’s “Most of the time the earth is flat.” Pageau ends that (first) piece with this:
Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.
So much wisdom in life simply has not changed in human history. And the real place for it is always right in front of us.
Here’s Egginton again:
We see evidence for the existence of this moral law everywhere, [Kant] said; in the least impressive of our fellows, in the most abominable of men, we can at times glimpse an act of righteousness, a spark of goodness. And when we do, Kant wrote, we can feel our spirit bow down in respect, even if we wish to resist that feeling and remain aloof.
There is a line from Elizabeth Bowen that Christian Wiman has quoted many times and that I think would have made for a fitting end/direction for Egginton’s epilogue:
To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.
(I mentioned somewhere else that Sarah Hendren (@ablerism) has two posts on the book — here and here — that are not only excellent reflections but that probably give a better idea of the book’s contents than I have.)
I think I can relate to yesterday’s piece from Charlie Warzel — and I also find it remarkably unhelpful. Equally unhelpful to me is Alan Jacobs’ response to it. I get the horror show that Jacobs is talking about, but I’m skeptical about the goal, and even the practice, of professor-splaining about “Rorty’s bastard children” and how the occupiers of MAGAworld “don’t actually believe” what they say they believe.
Jacobs is commenting on the first paragraph, but Warzel goes on to make the same point Jacobs makes and, as far as I’m concerned, the same mistake as well. Warzel simply replaces “the truth” with “reality” — MAGA people are “people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality.”
Of course there is a problem with partisan blindness and confirmation bias and propaganda and bullshit. And no matter how many times I say “it’s worse on the right than I’ve ever seen it,” it doesn’t do justice to just how fucking bad it is. I’ve been trying to have sane conversations and to understand the “why” of it all for the last decade. As I recently tried to get at in this post, there is a memory problem on the right. (And yes, there’s a Rortian pragmatism problem, too.) But saying “the truth ain’t got a damn thing to do with it because they clearly don’t believe their reinforcing news feeds” isn’t any more helpful than it is accurate.
To say “they don’t care about the truth the way they think they do” is very different from saying “the concepts of truth and falsehood never enter here because… Rorty.”
Facts may have a small role here, and feelings a very large role — but the truth is still very much in play, even for Trump supporters.
I think of sursum corda every time…
The Bath Swing Band, playing the 1939 song “Undecided”
This makes me think that Doorley and Carter’s Assembling Tomorrow would make a great companion book to Haidt’s Anxious Generation.