We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive.
For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's are, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating.
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This is why Aristotle thought that you can't judge whether a man was "happy" until after he's dead. And sometimes until long after he's died, because it would depend on the actions of, say, his offspring (which would reflect the way he helped raise them).
…Aren’t you excited about the party? What with all the small talk and the rumours and the canapés on a little plate? People are decked out in fine clothes, handbags and shoes, cracking dad jokes while catching food in their mouths with haste and vigour. The kids have been excused. Weren’t they just babies? Time flies, except on the man who drinks his first beer too fast (or our age and you know he’s not just old enough to drink now). As you slip into the party you don’t know anyone, so you make a show of making yourself busy and show nervous excitement. We sit in lounge chairs and chat, pretending the world will never end. Something awful can happen at this barbecue, but the good part never comes. The time passes and eventually you can leave.
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Do you ever get tired of your own skin? Do you ever get tired of your own thoughts? Do you ever get tired of the same conversations, the same news, the same cultural indoctrinations in public discourse? So the magazines, we tuck our innermost thoughts away in drawers, concerned about the rain. We’re good enough to live under the same slight of hand. There are the masks, too, which everybody gets in the end.
I’m pretty good at detecting nonsense. We all feel alone because I think I don’t acknowledge them when I say I feel alone. I’m not the first weak-tailed dandy to have written an essay of despair, but I am a contemporary person, an existentialist who said that humans are built to feel scared and sad but we’re inevitably lonely. And yet, we geniuses have designed a society in which expressing true feelings in public is discouraged. So the masks again, the eyebrows too.
It is not too far-fetched to link the silence at the end of a musical performance with death. In Moscow, on the gravestone of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke is carved a stave with the semi-circle and dot of a fermata, the sign that indicates that a note (or in this case a pause) is to be held. Underneath is written ‘fff’ (one step above fortissimo, meaning very, very loud).
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I can't help but think that if we were to start again with governments we wouldn't have what we've got now. I certainly think that our response to the climate crisis would be better if we took a more anarchist approach.
…I'm on holiday and so reading more, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as actually watching films (I subscribed to Mubi).
I've just finished reading A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion by Frédéric Gros. I really enjoyed other books by him, and so was looking forward to getting into this one after receiving it as a member of the Verso Book Club.
…I almost didn't post this due to one of the words being misspelled, but I think that's part of the charm.
More people need to spend some time learning about Pragmatism which, by way of analogy, is to 'pragmatism' the way that being Stoic is to being 'stoic'.
…I came across a simpler version of this that not only attributes this to Gandhi himself, but misspelled his name. So I created a version using Gemini.
The original list via Wikipedia:
Seven Social Sins is a list by Frederic Donaldson that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi published in his weekly newspaper Young India on 22 October 1925. Later he gave this same list written on a piece of paper to his grandson, Arun Gandhi, on their final day together shortly before his assassination.
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I'm listening to the audiobook of Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene at the moment, read by Jeremy Northam. I think I've read it before, but thankfully I can't remember the ending.
Greene has some great turns of phrase:
…This article by Justin Garson on the American Philosophical Association's blog is extremely relevant to my life at the moment. A few months ago, shortly before receiving a diagnosis of Overtraining Syndrom from a consultant, my GP prescribed me an SNRI deal with both physical and mental symptoms that I was experiencing. I'm still on it.
…This is a good episode of Philosophy Bites with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Summary via my LRF as I'm on the go:
Goldstein defines mattering as being deserving of attention, and her key move is that the attention we're most anxious to deserve is our own. That makes us normative, value-seeking creatures by nature, distinct from other animals. She dates the arrival of these existential questions to Jaspers' Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE), framing them as a luxury that depends on baseline survival being met.
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