I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth sniffing.
The “golden legend” and the “black legend” are mirror opposites, but they ultimately reinforce one another. The first sees the dictator as the epitome of power and grandeur. The latter sees the dictator as fragile, insecure, and compensatory. Both focus on the dictator’s personality. Together, they lead us back to that certain kind of military history buff and the obsession with “great man” history. Gillray’s cartoons are hilarious, but they imply that dictatorship is a therapist’s problem, to be explained by attention to the Napoleonic psyche. Scott’s Napoleon is more of the same, only less funny. But what of the social and cultural forces that led millions of French men and women to accept, and often enthusiastically celebrate, Napoleonic rule?
Mutatis mutandis and whatnot. Speaking of which, I think this tracks incredibly well with Jonah Goldberg’s recent piece, Bloodbaths, Blunders, and Blowback. As Nick Cotaggio put it, “‘Fake but accurate’ is not a thing.”
This may matter more than anything else this year.
Mary Oliver:
That his methods are endlessly suggestive rather than demonstrative, and that their main attempt was to move the reader toward response rather than reflection, is perhaps another clue to the origin of Whitman’s power and purpose, and to the weight of the task. If it is true that he experienced a mystical state, or even stood in the singe of powerful mystical suggestion, … then he was both blessed and burdened-for he could make no adequate report of it. He could only summon, suggest, question, call, and plead. And Leaves of Grass is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change. All through the poem we feel Whitman’s persuading force, which is his sincerity; and we feel what the poem tries continually to be: the replication of a miracle.
Abraham Joshua Heschel:
“How can I repay unto the Lord all His bountiful dealings toward me?” (Ps. 116:12). How to answer the mystery that surrounds us, the ineffable that calls on our souls? This is, indeed, the universal theme of religion. The world is full of wonder. Who will answer? Who will care? Our reverence is no answer. The more deeply we revere the more clearly we realize the inadequacy of mere reverence. Is it enough to praise, to extol that which is beyond all praise? What is the worth of reverence? Faint are all our songs and praises. If we could only give away all we have, all we are. The only answer to the ineffable is a mode of living compatible with the ineffable.
Finding dignity in politics is like finding jewelry in a sewer system. There’s some there, rest assured; all you need to do is search.
Sounds fun, doesn’t it? I can picture everyone joyfully donning their hazmat suits. 🤓
“Everyone is now chasing power. They are willing to look everywhere for it.”
Call me an old-fashioned luddite (I will smile, nod, and agree), but even a little talk of the practical need — let alone the moral obligation — to consume less, to use less energy, seems conspicuously missing from many of these conversations.
I’d love to see an updated calculation like the one Geoffrey West gave in 2010:
A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.
Kitchen Chalk Talk
Finished reading: Iron John by Robert Bly 📚
What a very, very weird book. And weirdly rich. Some thoughts and quotes here.
Patient puppy dog
Official Backyard Overseer
Happy New Book in the Mail Day!
Celebrate accordingly.
