Right now, my son is looking for his iPad. After seeing him spend two hours watching train videos and play a game called “Township,” which involves spending large amounts of time loading trains with fruit, I told him “screen time is over” and then hid his iPad. It’s in the main entry hall of this ridiculous house – which appears, for those of you who are interested, in season three, episode one of Ozark, a Netflix series, where a squatter lives in this house and cooks on the same stove I use every night. I hid it behind a random work of art which is leaning on the overwrought concrete mantle of a fake fireplace. I doubt he’ll find it soon, but who knows. While he’s looking, I have a bit of spare time.
Wealth and privilege
I’m living in a Fellini film right now – alas, without the postwar Italian film stars and casual elegance, but with all of the absurdity, including the occasional unwanted bacchanal, bacchanals being particularly ill-suited to sheltering in place. But they happen nevertheless. I’m living in a palace by a lake, but it’s owned by a prince who feels unconstrained by commonplace rules, and every now and again he shows up in his Ferrari, accompanied by friends and family in Bentleys and Range Rovers, bringing platters of barbecue (the southern US equivalent of antipasti, I suppose), and proceeding to celebrate life with boats and jet skis and pool floaters and beer. As he is my patrone, I can only stand two meters away and encourage him, give him advice as to markets and contracts and the correct fuel mix on an inboard engine, and marvel.
My Philosophy: On staying busy being born
According to Michel de Montaigne (Essays I: xix) Cicero was right to say that to study philosophy is to learn to die. He suggests this might be true in two different ways. First, the act of studying involves us distancing our thinking minds from our unthinking bodies, which is in some ways a precursor to the experience of death. Second, wise reflection about death teaches us not to fear it, better preparing us to face the end of life. Both are interesting ideas, although not fully developed in the chapter. This is not one of Montaigne’s better essays, for he quickly becomes distracted from recounting his own acute observations in favour of the citation of endless classical sources. In this instance, the wisdom of the modern is squandered owing to unmerited respect for the wisdom of the ancients.
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Perceptions of loss
There was an entertaining article in the New York Times on Monday about a recent Russian submarine disaster. 17 sailors lost their lives but no one, except of course the crew and the Russian chain of command, really knows why or how. The submarine was designed to dive much deeper than any other manned navy submersible ever built, and had skids designed to allow it to creep along the muddy bottoms of the world’s seafloors where it would… do the kinds of nefarious stuff one might do on the bottom of the world’s seafloors. Experts believe it most likely was designed to search for, and in times of war or tension, cut the cables on the seabed which link continents and countries to one another, or which link the deep sea listening devices across the North Atlantic with NATO designed to listen for other kinds of submarines, or, even in peacetime, simply test the West and its willingness to develop countermeasures.
These Strange Days
Dear Fellows of the ‘Essence of Water’,
I hope that you are all well, staying safe and making the Herculean effort — as I am — not to touch your face. In this time of social distancing, as governments everywhere are taking extraordinary measures to ‘flatten the curve’, I know that we are all affected by this new virus. Maybe your daily routine has changed. Maybe your level of general anxiety has peaked. I know, mine has. Yet, I cannot help but be glad that we — humanity — are suddenly forced to realize the depth of our interdependencies.