The Rebbe on the artist

The primary talent of an artist is his or her ability to step away from the externalities of the thing and, disregarding its outer form, gaze into its innerness and perceive its essence, and to be able to convey this. Thus the object is revealed as it has never before been seen, since its inner content was obscured by secondary things. The artist exposes the essence of the thing he [or she] portrays, causing the one who looks at the painting to perceive it in another, truer light, and to realize that his [or her] prior perception was deficient.

And this is one of the foundations of man’s service of his [or her] Creator.

It is only that the divine power of tzimtzum (constriction) holds the divine life-force in a state of concealment and obscurity, and we perceive only its outer form (i.e., the physical reality).
Our mission in life is that we should approach everything in life from this perspective. That we should each strive to reveal, as much as possible, the divine essence in every thing, and minimize, to the extent that we are able, its concealment...

So one must take great care that secondary and external matters should not obscure the essentials of life and its ultimate purpose.

A person might experience difficulties, trials and challenges in separating the good from the bad. But these are but the means by which to achieve the purpose of life—that his [or her] soul should elevate itself through its positive deeds in this world... So one must never allow the difficulties in overcoming one’s trials, or even the fact that one might occasionally fail and stumble, to overwhelm the joy that one must feel.

Yeats on insight and rebirth

It is only when the intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may live for contemplation and yet keep our intensity.

Michael Eigen on Boundaries

For certain individuals (and perhaps, to a degree, everyone), one's double sense of boundlessness-limits is too much to handle and is a source of unbearable pain. One may try to find a way out, through more loss of I-feeling. This may vary from mild self-anesthesia to a complete loss of self-feeling. In the case of hospitalized patients, we find individuals who could not successfully squeeze into an effective practical self. In the "hospital" of the world, we find others who have done so only too well.

Falstaff vs Hamlet

I would rather be Falstaff or Sancho than a version of Hamlet or Don Quixote, because growing old and ill teaches me that being matters more than knowing. - Harold Bloom

Fast vs Slow Burning

From time to time we need a jolting new experience to ignite our spirits; but the key to success is always what happens the day after the inspiration: Can you maintain it? Hay may light quickly, but it also burns out quickly. Logs, good dry logs, take a while to ignite, but once they do, they can be depended upon to warm you for an extended time. - Simon Jacobson

Here's the scam—multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is not always time effective. It tends to diffuse my focus. Beneath the illusion of control and efficiency is my resistance to be fully present to the details of life. Perhaps it's a lack of appreciation for work in progress that breeds distraction and teases my mind with "more important" things to get to. It's easier to quantify the value of a final product. Can I value a work in progress? Can you think about what you really want out of life? (It should make you smile.) Now think about what it would take to get there. (Exhausting!) Yet if you can't be fully present in the preparatory stages, you won't be fully present even when you arrive. Value the means towards the end. - Rochel Holzkenner

Vincent’s Family (part I)

Vincent reaching out to his mother who’s looking down, continually looking down, mourning her son that died, Vincent I. She’s looking in little Vincent I's direction where the exalted, perfected Vincent I has a halo around his (or in this case, her) head. On the other side is Vincent’s stern, aloof father looking off in another direction as Vincent’s sister Wil, or perhaps one of Vincent’s girlfriends looks up towards him / feels rejected by him. These potato eaters don’t physically resemble Vincent and his family, but their core gestures do.

George Steiner on lessons of the masters

To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one's own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one's inward present their future: this is a threefold adventure like no other.

The Age of Absurdity - Michael Foley

The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfilment. The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture.

At one point in this book Michael Foley laments his own tendency to buy books and CDs in pursuit of some transcendental experience - the books are going to give him arcane knowledge and explain the meaning of it all. Of course, they stay on the shelf, eventually becoming a source of guilt and stress. This is ironic, because The Age of Absurdity comes as close as anyone ever will to giving you arcane knowledge and explaining the meaning of it all.

I'm simplifying a complex and detailed argument here. But, in brief, Foley argues (or at least I take him to be arguing) that the modern world has placed two major barriers in the path of happiness - the `culture of entitlement' and the worship of potential. (NB: Foley breaks down the analysis into more categories, but I think there's good reason for thinking that these are the main issues). The culture of entitlement is so much part of the zeitgeist that we can hardly see it anymore - it drives the talentless to obsessively seek fame, spawns a million `self esteem' workshops, and ensures that every thug knows his rights without considering that he even has responsibilities. (And if you think it's just thugs, ask yourself when you last concluded a whinge by observing that `someone' - some unnameable `they' - should do something about it). But it also means that when the world fails to notice our talents or respect our rights - which, let's face it, is most of the time - we feel hard done by. We are all poisoning our lives with a terminal feeling of injustice; all have a chip on our shoulder big enough to overbalance us.

The worship of potential is what causes dowdy frumps to face humiliation on TV for the sake of a swift makeover, hi-tech firms to lay off anyone who looks over 40, middle-aged dads to dress as their toddlers (all bright artificial fibres with toggles on), everyone to love travel even if they have no idea where they want to go, and society in general to become dumbed-down and infantalised (don't want to grow up? Don't bother! Why should you?). It also leaves people with a constant sense that they're missing something, that a better time is to be had elsewhere, so we're constantly on the look out for the next big thing - job, relationship, possession. And it discourages us from making the firm decisions which, in a way, define and develop our characters.

It's probably no coincidence that modern capitalism needs both these things - the worship of potential keeps us wanting the newest thing; the culture of entitlement (`because you're worth it!') makes us believe we deserve it, whether or not we have the money.

Many of our problems are the problems of abundance, so Foley draws extensively on the Stoics, (who were writing for a rich, decadent late-Roman audience with many of the same problems). He also makes considerable use of the existentialists, proto-existentialists like Schopenhauer, and Buddhist thought. Obviously it does no harm to have come across these thinkers already. But for anyone who hasn't he leads you in gently, so the lack of a philosophical background isn't too much of a handicap. Indeed, his prose throughout is clear and accessible (just as well for an age which eschews difficulty!)

Two things really make this book special. One is the incisiveness with which he analyses the modern condition. Time and time again, Foley hits the nail on the head - often to the point of being uncomfortable. I'd come to similar conclusions myself about some of the points he makes here, but I hadn't reasoned them through as thoroughly. So it was sobering to be continually confronted by descriptions of my own behaviour. There I was thinking that my problems were interesting and complex, and lo and behold they're everyone's problems. For a while it made me squirm, but actually it's quite reassuring.

Secondly, there are no glib answers. Yes, Foley makes some suggestions for how we might be happier - consider learning to meditate, allow yourself to daydream more, develop the Stoics' mental habit of accepting whatever life throws at you and asking yourself how you might turn it to your advantage in one way or another. But the main answer is that there is no `answer' - we make our own deals with life. The best thing we can do is come to a clear understanding of just what the main issues are - and that's what philosophy (and this book) can help us with. - modern life is rubbish

Beckett jolted out of his paralytic torpor

For things to change, perhaps a crisis had to occur, as it did on the night of January 6, 1938, when Beckett, having finally returned to Paris after a terrible scene with his mother, was the victim of an acte gratuit: On a dark Paris street, a drunken stranger accosted him with a knife, stabbing him close to the heart. “How lovely it is being here,” Beckett writes McGreevy from his convalescent bed, “even with a hole in the side. A sunlit surface yesterday brighter than the whole of Ireland’s summer.” The proximity to death, soon to be heightened by the war, jolted Beckett out of his paralytic torpor: He sent McGreevy a new poem, beginning “they come / different and the same”—a poem notably unclotted and intriguingly spare. A new chapter was about to begin.

- Marjorie Perloff

Ivan Illich out-Marx's Marx

It's not surprising that in the current environment the NY Times obituary would characterize Illich's critique as "watered-down Marxism." In fact, Illich's critique is actually considerably more radical. Marx believed that once the expropriators were expropriated and the state withered away a worker's paradise would ensue. He didn't want to arrest industrialization, he wanted the workers to have control over their destiny. Illich thought the whole project was monstrous, no matter who owned or ran it.

Illich believed that the penetration of systems logic into the lifeworld had to be opposed on an individual basis. One way to do this was to engage in deep compassionate friendships. Another was to be sensitive to and eschew the kind of infernal comparisons technocrats make between people and technologies, i.e., that humans are systems consisting of software and hardware, inputs and outputs. As part of this, he also attacked the technocratic reconceptualization of mankind through new definitions of old words and their former meanings, e.g., the new notion of "life" as some general entity that can be nurtured on some general level, presumably by a technocrat or politician, i.e., the "culture of life." Rather he insisted that life is embodied in and inseparable from biological entities -- that there is no life, only lives. Illich also suggested reading history, especially the writings of key monastics from the 12th century, as a way to defamiliarize oneself the hegemonic power of the current version of "common sense" and so understand that other ways of living and interacting with each other and with the world were possible, and necessary. He sought by such readings to demonstrate that beyond a certain level of institutionalized expertise, most experts and their expert systems are actually counterproductive.

Illich's critique cannot be countenanced these days when the ideology of technical progress has so permeated us that the notion of organ repair kits (from our clones) seems like a good idea. It seems clear now that the desacralization of the lifeworld cannot be stopped. The spark of hope that it might was extinguished by the counterrevolution of the bosses in the mid-70s. The NY Times meekly fell back into line along with just about everyone else. Illich was a conscientious objector to modernism to the last, preferring to let a cancer on his jaw take his life slowly and painfully rather than surrender himself and his dignity to the anti-human ethos of the medico-technologico community.

IVAN ILLICH IN CONVERSATION is an excellent introduction to Illich's radical humanist perspective.

- Panopticonman

William Logan on Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman

In the restlessness of an American identity more familiar as lighting out for the territories, both men stayed put in a country founded on the idea of moving on...[both of their books] are of the most violently original, uncategorizable books ever published by an American poet.

On Modern Western Democracy - Roger Scruton & Mark Vernon

Providing meaning for its citizens is the thing Western democracy fails to do, because it is premised on forging a company of strangers, not brothers. Roger Scruton argues that it is our faint-heartedness in the face of questions of meaning that is the great contemporary failing: we laugh them off as if they are the questions of children.

The limitation of Western democracy, then, comes in 'only' managing to form a company of strangers, and that would be to do with its associated individualism. This finds it difficult to recognise that my own good is intimately caught up with the lives of others: we are prepared to live with others insofar as it's good for me; the test is how far we are prepared to live with others because it's good for others.

That, in turn, brings us back to the issue of meaning, for other-orientation - and the sacrificing of some self-sufficiency and autonomy it implies - is what makes for meaning: it takes the individual out of themselves and so situates their life in something that is bigger than themself.

That other-orientation is also what the terrorist so hideously perverts, since whilst their violent actions take them out of themselves, and so yield meaning, they necessitate the killing of others in the process. In truth, then, terrorism is not other-regarding but self-obsessed - a kind of extreme individualism, in fact, and in that sense thoroughly modern.

Adam Phillips on good writing

Good writing, like good conversation or interpretation in analysis, seems to free something in us. It is as though mobility has sprung from paralysis; but only once we start moving do we realise quite how stuck in we had been...the aim is to recreate fluency.

Wallace Shawn on writing plays

I’m guided by a muse. I don’t choose a subject. I don’t have outlines or notecards. It’s more like a sentence comes to me and maybe a few months later I figure out who said it and why. I don’t pick the subjects. I don’t even know who’s talking. Eventually it’s something. After if it becomes something, I can sort of help it become the essence of what it is.