Category: Living

I started writing this blog because I couldn’t not write it.  I kept writing it because I couldn’t not write it.  But last month, I couldn’t write.

I still really can’t.  It’s been an eventful month, though, don’t get me wrong.  I have things to say – I’ve read John McPhee’s 2006 book, Uncommon Carriers, about freight transport in North America, and I’ve read a 1979 assembly of Hericlitus, and I’ve read my son The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White, and my parents gave me Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and I’ve finally finished the second volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.  The ex-girlfriend has ignored my happy new year’s message.  The ex-wife has railed against the existence of our ex-marriage.  My son has gotten more amazing, more loving, more open, and at the same time more curious and more independent and more individual.  My father has gotten better and much worse all at once.  My career has gotten more interesting and more confusing and more wrong and more right all at once.  I have too much to say, too much to think about, and I can’t write.

Tonight, I got to the airport five hours ahead of my flight.  It’s the red eye, as usual, the typical flight every two weeks between the desolate Pacific Northwest and the strange airy desert dust hellscape of south Texas.  I got to the airport early because I had a conference call that started at five thirty Ante Meridian, well before my son woke up, I took the call on my laptop and my cell phone from behind the bathroom door while he slept, and after the call I was exhausted and just wanted to crash in a familiar place, which for me is an airport.  At seven Ante Meridian I opened the door and turned on the lights and put the phone on mute and woke the son up, and made bacon and put a plate of blueberries and pear and while I had one ear on the conference call talking about fixed income asset management which had no chance of being relevant to the people whose savings I’m responsible for, and I encouraged him to put on proper trousers and eat fruit and semi-crispy bacon and color in the star which represented the story I read to him the prior night.  I put on proper trousers myself, and a t-shirt and a sweater, and made myself a coffee, and tried to convince myself that the whole package, of conference call and studio apartment and upcoming flight back to office and flight back in a week and a half, was worth it.  It was, because I put the call off mute and asked a question and it stopped the call and the global megacorp airhead on the other end realized that they weren’t going to get the contract.  The question helped nine million depositors, most of whom have no idea how a bank works.  My son needed to get his socks on.

I asked my friend if she liked horror movies.  It made more sense than the question I asked the global megacorp.  But it was on text, so no one cared.  I hit send and realized I had asked a question that meant a lot but really just cared about whether she responded.  She could say she loved horror movies – which I don’t like – and I still would care.  If she said she loved them and needed me to love them, it would be different.  But she didn’t.  Horror movies aren’t her favorite genre.  My favorite genre, frankly, is probably spaghetti Westerns.  That and romantic comedies.  Sports related romantic comedies.

The ex-girlfriend hated earnest things, but she watched earnest movies – Finding Nemo, Coco – with a kind of desperation.  She craved validation through the exultation of the heroes; I kept finding sympathy with the bit players, with the servants in the background, which queered her narrative.  She hated that.  And now I have a job that exists to help the servants in the background – the ones who don’t know what a bank is for and never will.  And I spent eight hours this morning on a conference call on behalf of the background heroes today that made me realize that there are no heroes any more.  The best we can hope for is service, of those who serve us.  A bad pun.

I had a bad day today and don’t know why.  But for all of that, I woke up to an alarm and a conference call, and an hour and a half later the most beautiful creature on earth stirred and asked me to be quiet.  He was in his bed, next to mine even though mine was empty, he stirred and curled and purred and went back to sleep, and I remembered why I had done everything I had for the past six years, during which I left my wife, during which I torridly joined with the ex-girlfriend, during which I left her and let her leave me.  I thought about why I longed for the voice of the new friend in Maine who called me that night, why I needed this time on my own, this time finally, to read The Arcades Project, why I didn’t want to leave Seattle but didn’t either want to head to San Antonio, why I knew I’d never be able to tell my father what I wanted but knew he’d also understand it all.  It wasn’t really a bad day but it felt that way.

Collapse time and I’m at the airport bar again, hungry.  I ordered the Alaskan Ling Cod fish and chips, along with a couple of dry Gibsons, and the phone rang, silently, letting me know I had missed the calls.  I called the missed number back.  I spoke idiotically, happily, amazed.  She had called me, and her voice was amazing.  It was a voice that let other people tell their story.  I wasn’t sure how to tell mine.  But it was good to hear her voice.

Two hours later, I’m waiting to board the flight to Chicago.  I’m just glad I’m writing again.  I’ll write something worthy of Mark and Viktoria soon.  But tonight, I’m just glad I’m writing.

Everyone has a character of their own choosing, it is chance or fate that decides our choice of job.

Yesterday my team lost and consequently I was unhappy.  (Not least because they were beaten by the team my daughter supports).  I’m not unfamiliar with the experience of losing, which happens often enough.  The top English football teams will probably play more than fifty competitive games in a season and even the very best will lose around ten per cent of those in most years.   But being a fan – in my case, supporting the same team since I was eight years old – dictates that I will be happy when they win and unhappy when they lose.  Their successes and failures become mine, by proxy.  If I were indifferent to my team’s results, then I would no longer be a fan.

This being so, why be a fan?  Why put myself in the position that I allow events over which I have no control – no influence whatsoever – to determine my feelings, my mood, my sense of well-being?  Why risk the possibility of happiness in this way?   To understand my rationale, consider the words of a celebrated former manager of Liverpool Football Club, who once explained:  Someone said to me, ‘To you football is a matter of life or death!’ and I said, ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.  It’s instructive to reflect on why this might be true.

Among the famous schools of classical Greek philosophy, the Stoics were renowned for their claim that happiness was to be achieved by living a virtuous life, and that those who were virtuous were happy, whatever befell them.   They taught that we should strive to cultivate a virtuous character and that if we did then, irrespective of our place in society, the circumstances under which our life passed, and the good or bad luck that we encountered day by day, we would be happy.   Since virtuous actions and dispositions are within our power to choose – everyone has a character of their own choosing, says Seneca – it follows that our achievement of happiness is consequent solely upon decisions we make for ourselves.   Fate might cause us all sorts of problems, but it cannot remove our power to determine our happiness.

This has always been a controversial claim, and not just because of the employment choices that fate allowed Seneca to make.  Well before the Roman Stoics set out the case for being indifferent to fate, Aristotle had noted – in the Nicomachean Ethics – that when external events turn out very bad for us, as was the case for King Priam of Troy, it is hard to see how we can continue to be described as happy.  Aristotle accepts that small pieces of good or bad fortune that are outside of our control clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or another.  It is possible for someone to experience modest bad luck from time to time, but to live an active and virtuous life and to achieve happiness.

However, whether the big events of our lives turn out well or badly for us will have a material impact on our ability to live well and to be happy.  If we enjoy many major strokes of good fortune, they will add beauty to our lives and enable us to demonstrate nobility in our actions; conversely, if many important events turn out badly for us, they will crush and maim our happiness, through the pain they bring us, and because they hinder our ability to act virtuously.   Even in these cases, Aristotle thinks that the noble character of a virtuous person will shine through, visible in the way that misfortunes are borne.

Aristotle’s argument – that we achieve happiness through our pursuit of virtue, but that external circumstances might constrain our ability to live a good life and achieve lasting happiness – has a parallel with the more recent argument that Karl Marx made, that we make our own history, but we do not make it as we please but under the circumstances that we inherit from the past.   The point for both philosophers is that context is material and, therefore, the belief that our destiny and our happiness are wholly within our own control is illusory.

This is a lesson that is easy to forget, especially when for lengthy periods nothing significantly bad happens to us.  When context is persistently benign, we disregard its threat.  Few of us ever undergo a transformation in the circumstances of our lives of the magnitude that King Priam witnessed, and many of us manage to avoid serious episodes of bad luck for decades.   We are thus seduced into forgetting the fragility of our pursuit of happiness.  We might work hard at living well, we might believe that we are happy, but then, one day, things fall apart.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, and irrespective of the virtues we have cultivated for many years, our grasp on happiness is gone, perhaps not lost forever, but certainly damaged irreparably.

My team losing is not a disaster.  The result was bad rather than good news for me, but it did not weigh down the scales of my life.  My sadness will be very temporary, but the reminder is valuable.  Every time my team plays, they risk losing and I risk a modest bout of unhappiness; but every day, my happiness is in jeopardy, for it might be snatched away from me, subject to the vagaries of ill-fortune.  That’s why sport might well be more than a life and death matter: because it reminds us that achieving happiness is never fully in our control, that we are vulnerable to fate, that contingency must be accommodated and borne with dignity.

There’s a further lesson here too, that should encourage us to be suspicious of Seneca’s over confidence.  He believed in his power to isolate himself from fate but, famously, was forced to kill himself at the insistence of Nero, his former pupil, who suspected his involvement in a plot.  A noble death?  Perhaps, but also an unhappy end to a long and rich life.

Aristotle shows greater wisdom, both in his appreciation of the nuanced relationship between the virtuous life and happiness, but also in his reminder of our permanent vulnerability to having our happiness snatched away from us.  We can be better prepared for whatever the future holds if we avoid hubris and wishful thinking.

 

Over the last seven weeks, I’ve been writing my memoir.  As I tell my relatives and close friends about this new endeavor of mine, I get a few distinct reactions.  The majority says: “Wow, you’re brave!  I can’t wait to read it”.  To which I laugh nervously in response to their enthusiasm because, yes indeed, I am pouring my mind and heart on those pages.  And while I am not yet ready to share, I know that the day will necessarily come when I will release my ‘story’ into the world.  “Can’t wait !” V. ironically replies.  But a notable minority reacts differently, not quite daring to ask: “What is so important in your life that you think that people will be interested to read it?”  There is not a lot that I can answer to that.  I say: “Well, one day I’ll be a famous philosopher, and then people will read my memoir of how I got to become who I am…”  That satisfies them, yet it pinpoints how ‘ordinary lives’ are perceived as ‘unimportant’ as a subject of study or interest.  I mean: our memories are important, if only to ourselves and our family, but hopefully as a medium through which the ‘being human’ is captured in all its glorious details.

 

It’s with these observations in mind that I read Peter’s last blog ‘Orality and History’.  Throughout, I felt that memoir writing is – or clearly can be located – in between the written narrative art of history – focused on groups and trends – and the oral traditions of family lore.  Just last week, I spent several days interviewing my relatives – my book’s characters – to try to understand their lives, their motivations, the very impulses that caused them to live and act the way they did. I must confess that I wasn’t as objective and methodical as the oral historian Peter describes.  My questions and my notes were shaped by my own story; the narrative that is currently taking shape.  But I still just tried to make them talk, and it was surprisingly hard to get them talking (especially the men).  Yet we talked about many things that I didn’t know, and I felt – within those conversations – an intimacy that is so rarely present in our lives that when it does arise, we can feel a shift in the air.

 

Most people do not see how precious their life experiences actually are. We take our past for granted: our life lessons as just ‘natural events’ in our lives.  Who would dare to care about how one voted in the Quebec referendum (for sovereignty – 25 years ago)?  Having participated in these conversations just recently, I can understand how amazed Peter is to have met an oral historian – in Maine no less.  Because, a third reaction that I am also getting a lot is: “Oh, I would want to do that too!” but instead of rushing to the computer to work their story out in words, they proceed to tell me all about their lives.

 

I would argue that, for all the people I interviewed recently, none will make the effort to ‘literally’ put their lives into written narratives, yet they all could talk about their lives with a relatively high degree of introspection: even my Grandpa who, at 81, came alive in front of my eyes talking about the car he bought just a few days before wooing my grandmother.  If only we -society – could capture orally what they – everyone – have to say, everyone could then be included in History as we currently understand the discipline.  Because I agree that there are a few missing links between the macro-level – of nation-building for example – and the fact that it took my grandpa to drive the truck that brought the iron beams to the construction sites.  This link – this gem of both my personal and ‘national’ history – I just found out, but even this micro-level is too specific for me to see how ‘the past’ emerged from within the lived experiences of millions of men and women.  It would be a very interesting thing to do, and I wonder – Dear Oral Historian – if that is the goal of your discipline to do something like that?  Could we, by taking/tagging/grouping the oral account of millions of people, ‘hear’ the narrative of our society emerge?

 

Here I am, in the midst of searching my past, interviewing my relatives for their memories, for the moments in our lives when we ‘became’ who we are.  And yet, this formation of our identities cannot be taken in isolation from the History of our society.  And while I do think that I lived a pretty interesting life – at the micro-level -, the real fascinating bits are the ones in which I can see the bigger processes of History appear in my little individual choices.

 

In the end, my life might be only one unique expression of what it means to be alive.  Yet, I capture, abide by and react to norms, habits and the conditions of a much broader social environment.  My reflections, my inner world, is – at once – unique and part of this shared narrative of History, made especially vivid because it so recently unfolded…  I am not sure yet how to link all my ideas and experiences in a compelling – interesting to read – narrative, but the process of discovery itself is awe-inspiring.

 

So, can memoirs – and subsequently the macro-analysis of memoirs – be the missing link?  I believe so! What do you think?

A certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them.  Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities.

Somebody once explained to me that the difference in social attitude that distinguishes North Americans from Europeans, can best be summarised by considering the different ways in which representatives from these two cultures attempt to explain certain feature of their society.  Europeans, it is said, explain the present in terms of the past: “we do it this way because …”, is followed by some history, providing the antecedent causal story.  North Americans, by contrast, are said to explain the present in terms of the future: “we do it this way because …”, is followed by setting out some purpose, the pursuit of which orientates both current and subsequent actions.

I’m not really persuaded by this story of alleged cultural difference.  Among people I know, conservatism is common but evenly spread on both sides of the Atlantic, and pragmatism, although rarer, also exists on both continents.  Nonetheless, while dismissing the simplistic generalisation, it is worth noting that the character of this social attitude is important, since it helps shape many of our values and major life decisions.   Do we try to stay true to something in our past – whether personal, ancestral or cultural – or is our loyalty tied up with some aims and objectives that are not yet achieved, but that we are working towards?

At one extreme, there are people who believe in fate or destiny: we can but fulfil what was determined for us before we were born.  Our future is simply the unfolding of some genetic or astrological blueprint, from which there is no escape.  At the other extreme is a form of radical existentialism, which says that every morning we start our lives anew, and each choice we make, while it might be influenced or shaped by the past, should be a point of radical departure.   Most of us do not inhabit these extremes: we value the past, and acknowledge its influence on us, but we also want to be free to choose the most important goals that we work towards in life.

I think – indeed, I hope – that I am not greatly influenced by or beholden to the past. I find the study of history interesting, not least because it helps to show – in a precautionary way – the extent to which so much of contemporary life is held tight by the clutch of tradition, and the extent to which so many of my contemporaries are dulled by the ‘anæsthetic effect of custom’ (to borrow a phrase from Marcel Proust).  In the main, many of us, by default, avoid becoming the masters and mistresses of our own destiny, too easily satisfied with keeping the world more or less as we inherited it from our parents.  Today is much like yesterday, tomorrow will be much like today.

I am increasingly tempted by the pragmatist extreme, to want to make the world anew every day.  My conviction is growing that habit is death.   Last January, I visited the Kilauea volcano in Hawai’i, which has subsequently entered a phase of more vigorous eruption (please note, logicians consider post hoc ergo propter hoc to be a fallacy).  The hard, black volcanic rock that covers the lava belt, which runs from the crater to the sea, appears as ancient as the earth itself, but is in fact only thirty-five years old at most.  Walking across this lava, I realised that the earth’s crust is, in places, being made anew every day.  The creation story is still not over.

Living each day without regard for anything that went before seems impractical.  We cannot make everything new every day, just as we cannot re-build a boat at sea all at once.  We need to work gradually, one part of our lives at a time, holding some things stable while other things are changed.   The question is whether we work hard to re-fashion and improve the major things – our character, our values, our friendships, life goals – or whether we limit ourselves to the superficial – our clothes and hair, our phone company, the music in our earphones.

In his writings on ethics, Aristotle – cited above – observes that there are some activities that are valuable in themselves and others that are valuable because they are means by which to achieve a more valued goal.  When we pursue a course of action that leads towards a desired outcome, the outcome is better than the actions that led us to it.   Well, maybe.  There are some cases – simple examples, like queuing to buy a ticket, and life changing examples, like under-going chemotherapy – where no-one would willingly undertake the action unless it held out the promise of a benefit upon completion.  There are many means that are valued only for being means.

But there are other parts of our lives, where the means and the ends are entwined in more complicated fashion, where the pleasure and the value come from the pursuit of the goal as much as from the achievement of the goal.  The pleasures of exercise, or work, of friendship, are not to be found in some elevated teleological purpose, but in the activity itself.  These are goals that cannot ever be achieved, completed, perfected or consumed: they are like the horizon line, ever receding as we make progress towards it; they are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the absence of which detracts nothing from the beauty of refracted light.

To put this another way, the problem with goals or purposes is that either we achieve them – in which case our lives are left bereft of meaning, without challenge and structure – or we fail to achieve them – in which case we are left unhappy.   To be purposeful, in the truest sense, not only do we need to set our own goals, but we need to set some important goals that are unattainable, whose value lies in their pursuit rather than their achievement.   We need to create some of our world anew every day and we need to be sure never to complete it.

The seventh day can only be a fast lane to unhappiness.

 

I went for a walk with Gordy last spring and met an oral historian.  I was impressed; I studied history at university, but it was “traditional” history – reading texts and crafting narratives which attempted to weave a credible story of how it is that events in the past came to happen, with the goal more broadly of understanding the process by which events unfold at any time, including our own, including tomorrow.  Oral history was mentioned peripherally – mostly in discussions on historiography, the study of history as a discipline – but it was almost casual.  Meeting a real, live oral historian was pretty cool, and meeting one with a dog and a child who lived in Maine was mind-blowing; it was like hearing rumors for years that a famous movie star lived in your town, and then you run into Bill Murray and it turns out he hangs out at the dog park, too.  Or to put it in my son’s terms, who’s now reading Harry Potter, it’s like being a muggle but finally getting to meet a wizard and realizing that yes, there are places like Hogwarts where it’s normal to be one.  (Not that that in any way means he’s getting the Hogwarts Castle Lego set for Christmas, mind you.) Continue reading “Orality and history”