Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 12

Areopagitica

Few works are more routinely misdescribed than Milton’s Areopagitica, which is almost always said to be a defense of “freedom of the press.” It isn’t. So what is it?

It is an argument, addressed to the House of Commons and House of Lords, against a proposed law mandating the licensing of any book before it can be published in England. Anyone wanting to publish a book would submit it to a governmental censor, who would read it and either approve or deny its publication. Milton thinks this is a terrible idea, for many reasons:

It imitates Catholic practice, with its inquisitors and Imprimaturs and Nihil obstats;it has no ancient or biblical warrant;it would only affect law-abiding people — the truly scurrilous would just print without license and seek to avoid capture;it would not stop the spread of evil and false ideas, which have a long history of moving through even an illiterate population with lightning speed;the job of reading everything submitted for publication would be so vast that the government would need an army of censors;the job would be so tiresome that no one with the wit and judgment to do it well would agree to do it at all;the law would discourage writers, many of whom would scarcely go to the trouble of writing a whole book when a dim-witted or ill-tempered censor could quash it in an instant;it would insult the public by presuming them incapable of making their own judgments about truth and falsehood,and would deprive them of the responsibility of growing in genuine virtue by exercising and testing their discernment.

That last point is expressed in one of Milton’s most famous outbursts of eloquence:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Above all, says Milton, such a law presumes that our possession of the Truth is complete, which it manifestly is not and will not be until our Lord’s return. Those who can add to our store of genuine knowledge and understanding will, inevitably, deviate from current opinion as much as will the mendacious and the mistaken, but the censors will be unable to know in advance which deviations are worthy of praise and which worthy of condemnation.

Thus, concludes Milton, there should be no law in England mandating the pre-publication licensing of books.

But what happens then?

Ah, now we’re getting to the good stuff. First of all, if a book is deeply controversial, the contest between Truth and Falsehood is fought out in the public square:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

(Another famous passage.To Milton’s question, by the way, I would answer: I for one have often seen Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.) And if a book is deemed false, or anyway dangerously false? Well, then, of course it is suppressed:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind — as who looks they should be? — this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that may be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.

Many shall be tolerated, but not Catholicism. Lines must be drawn, and the intolerable not tolerated but rather “extirpate.”

Milton doesn’t explicitly say so, but this would surely be done through the usual legal means in accordance with the laws of England — laws prohibiting blasphemy, for instance, or sedition, or libel (though libel had a rather different meaning in those days than it does today, a topic I explore in this essay). An author accused of crime would be given a fair trial, allowed to submit evidence and to make arguments on his behalf, and so on.

Moreover, while Milton is against government censorship of books, he strongly supports a law requiring that all books to be published are registered with the government. And if they are not?

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next before this, “that no book be printed, unless the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, be registered.” Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.

Burn the book and hang the printer and/or author. And even if a book is properly registered, what if it then “be found mischievous and libellous”? I think we can guess what Milton would recommend. 

Orsinia

More than 40 years ago, I read a little volume of stories by Ursula K. Le Guin Orsinian Tales, all of them written in a realist mode – not science fiction or fantasy – but set in a wholly imaginary central European country called Orsinia. I remember enjoying them. They had a certain mood or feeling to them that I liked. But the details didn’t stick in my mind.

Just this past week. I picked up the Library of America volume called The Complete Orsinia, which contains those short stories that I read all those decades ago plus a novel called Malafrena. And I decided it was time to read the whole thing.

It was an interesting experience. I still feel that the stories have a distinctive mood to them, but I don’t think they’re great stories and I don’t think Malafrena is a great novel. This is not Le Guin at her best.

But the final chapter of Malafrena is extremely interesting and is what makes the novel worthwhile. Le Guin often likes to give her primary attention, as a storyteller, not to the obviously crucial events but to what precedes or succeeds those events. So for instance, one of her best short stories is called “The Day Before the Revolution.” The revolution itself goes undescribed: what we hear about is the anticipation of the revolution and all that has been done to prepare for it. And in that final chapter of Malafrena what we have– though much of the novel is the story of an attempted insurrection, attempted but failed – is a kind of melancholy reflection on that failure and its consequences for a couple of the participants in it. So what the novel seems to care the most about – or maybe it’s just what I care the most about – only appears at the end. I’m not sure how things could have been done differently, though; maybe make that last chapter a short story called “The Year After the Insurrection.”

I don’t think Orsinia is Le Guin at her best because I think the stories to some degree, and the novel Malafrena to a considerable degree, are really pastiche. Le Guin started writing Malafrena when she was quite young, and had not, as she herself says, seen much of the world or much of human experience, and so essentially it’s the attempt of a young and very intelligent and artistically sensitive American to write a novel like one by Stendhal or Turgenev. It’s a skillful pastiche, but pastiche all the same. And it doesn’t have the passionate life in it that her later work would have. I think she just had to discover her métier and that was science fiction and fantasy. Those were the genres that released her imaginative powers. If she had stuck with with realistic fiction, I think she would have been a competent writer – she probably would have published novels and stories – but I don’t think she would be anybody that we would be talking about now. She had to find her métier and thank goodness she did.

Mank

In David Fincher’s Mank (2020), Herman J. Mankiewicz, laid up with a badly broken leg and confined to a cabin in the Mojave Desert, writes the screenplay for Citizen Kane. His only companions are a German woman who serves as his housekeeper and physical therapist and an an English woman who types up his handwriting. Occasionally John Houseman drops by to wring his hands over Mank’s lack of progress. Orson Welles shows up once.

Mank is a wonderful movie, but this is not at all what happened. The movie’s screenwriter, Jack Fincher – David Fincher’s father – uncritically accepted Pauline Kael’s claim that Mank wrote the whole screenplay and that Welles, in putting his name in the credits as co-writer, stole Mank’s thunder. The Finchers would also have us believe that Mankiewicz was a man of impeccable leftist credentials, whose dislike of William Randolph Hearst was rooted in Hearst’s support (in the 1934 California gubernatorial race) for the Republican Frank Merrian, who won against the Democratic candidate, the novelist and social critic Upton Sinclair. But, again: It wasn’t like that. Mank is a wonderful film, but it’s almost wholly fiction. 

(Kael’s essay on Kane is the single most famous thing she ever wrote, but it is so manifestly and demonstrably wrong about Welles’s role in the screenplay that — as I noted a few years ago — that essay is silently omitted from the Library of America edition of Kael’s writings.) 

As Simon Callow points out in his brilliant biography of Welles, Mank was “without peer as a screenplay doctor,” but “had more difficulty initiating work.” When Welles approached him to work on a screenplay – topic yet to be determined – Mank agreed only on the condition that John Houseman be brought in as his collaborator. Welles, though he had just had an overturned-tables-and-flung-tableware falling-out with Houseman, immediately agreed. The three of them met several times in Hollywood to thrash out the basic framework of the story.

Then, when Mank was sent to Victorville in the Mojave Desert to write the screenplay, Houseman accompanied him. Houseman was no occasional chastising visitor, he was a constant presence, working through possibilities with Mank and only when a direction was established leaving the screenwriter alone to work.

Moreover, Welles was not wholly absent – as in the movie, when he just calls on the phone a couple of times before a dramatic confrontation with Mank when the screenplay is already done – but rather came to Victorville himself on several occasions. When he wasn’t there, drafts were sent to him in Hollywood, to which he responded with praise, criticisms, and suggestions.

No one ever suggests that Houseman should have received a screenwriting crfedit for Citizen Kane, but he probably should have. But in any case, the screenplay was not Mank’s own but the product of collaboration, especially with Welles, with whom Mank constantly struggled for control over the story. In what Callow rightly says is “one of the most pertinent observations about Citizen Kane,” Welles later remarked that one of the key features of the movie is a “certain tension” in the portrayal of Kane: “One of the authors hated Kane and one of them loved him.”

And one more thing: While Mank may have been an impeccable leftist in 1934, by the time he co-wrote Kane he had moved considerably to the right, and towards isolationism. Moreover, as Callow notes, he came to believe, though a Jew himself, that “the Nazis were right about the over-dominance of the Jews” in Germany – even as he paid to sponsor Jewish emigres from Germany to the U.S. The movie tells us about the sponsorship but not about the agreement with the Nazis.

The real Mank was phenomenally gifted, but was a different kind of person, and a different kind of writer, than Fincher’s excellent movie suggests. I doubt that a movie about the real Mank would ever have been made. 

Sources: 

Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu  David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles  Robert Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, Revised Edition  

persuasion

Recently I responded to a post by the historian Tim Burke, and today I’m going to return to Tim’s writing. This is from a recent post of his: 

I think public and private institutions are going to slow-roll any shifts in their policies and in the process they’re going to have to abandon compliance as the predominant logic of policy-making. That is not just a change for administrations. It’s also a necessary, maybe even overdue, change in how campus progressives and liberals (students, faculty and staff) think about their institutions. The long intertwining of left-liberal goals and regulatory activity (whether governmental regulations or institutional rules) has made most of us unaccustomed to articulating our motivating values in clear and transparent ways and in trying to tie those values to our voluntary practices and our persuasively-articulated expectations for others. We’ve all fallen into the habit of demanding a policy for this and a policy for that, of insisting that we restrain and restrict, that we require and sanction.

But as administrations have rested on compliance most, they will feel the shock of its loss most intensely. The articulation of values has become unfamiliar for some of us, but for many administrators, it has wholly atrophied into oblivion except as a strategy for placating or as a component of crisis communication. 

The passages I’ve highlighted lead nicely into this post I’ve just written for the Hedgehog Review on trying to get Management to take your side — and the alternative, which, meme-maker than I am, I have called persuasion. 

doubling

When the Beatles were recording Revolver, engineers at the Abbey Road studio invented a new technique called ADT — Automatic Double Tracking: 

[Ken] Townsend came up with a system using tape delay…. Townsend’s system added a second tape recorder to the regular setup. When mixing a song, its vocal track was routed from the recording head of the multitrack tape, located before the playback head, and fed to the record head of the second tape recorder. An oscillator was used to vary the speed of the second machine, providing variation in delay and pitch depending on the change in the second machine speed. This signal was then routed from the playback head of the second machine to a separate channel on the mixer. This allowed the vocal delayed by a few milliseconds to be combined with the normal vocal, creating the double-tracked effect. 

This made it sound like two almost identical voices were singing. Most of the songs on Revolver used it, and not just on vocals: for instance, the lead guitar on “Taxman” is ADT’d. 

But a very similar effect was used decades earlier … in Citizen Kane. When near the beginning of the movie we hear the dying Kane whisper “Rosebud,” the sound of the voice was produced by doubling Orson Welles’s voice using two different periods of reverberation. Double tracking — just not automatic. 

one more round on politics and the university

Re: this 2022 piece from Tim Burke — an outstanding historian and cultural critic whom I’ve been reading for a long time, and both like and respect — I think, first: Is it ever possible to issue warnings about unwelcome right-wing governmental influence without invoking the Nazis? I’d like to see a different historical comparison, just for once. (I think what Christopher Rufo wants is something a little more like the Communist Party’s takeover of Chinese universities.) But Tim has in later posts used other analogies, so I shouldn’t complain.

Anyway, I’m responding to this older post because it seems to me to sum up some ideas, assumptions, and perspectives that I’ve been having to deal with all my career. Tim writes,

This kind of turn can begin anywhere, anytime — like right this moment, here and now — wearing the mask of pragmatism and accommodation: let’s not make waves, let’s not use words or make speeches that draw attention, let’s make friendly connections to state legislators, let’s rename that program, let’s quietly defund that one center. Let’s not grant tenure to that person. Let’s encourage that professor to retire. Let’s look for a leader who is acceptable to interests that really hate the university and its values. Let’s take the money for an independent institute that pushes far-right economic philosophy. Let’s take away some governance from faculty, because they tend to provoke our enemies too much. Let’s compromise. Let’s be realistic.

Change the word “right” in that paragraph to “left” and you have a reasonably accurate account of what happened when leftist academics began their “long march through the institutions” of academe — especially in the humanities and social sciences. (Things are a little more complicated elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll be using “the academy” loosely, to mean primarily the humanities and social sciences and to a varying extent the other disciplines.)

The leftward drift of the academy has been going on for a long time, but it clearly accelerated when the students shaped by the campus activism of the Sixties became professors. Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals is an alarmist screed but the title, at least, has some merit — a fellow professor of English once told me that if the phrase hadn’t been co-opted by Kimball he’d have been glad to own it, and several others around the table nodded agreement. When committed leftists gained a majority in departmental and institutional committees, then they made a point of not granting tenure to that person — the person whose politics might have been slightly to the right of Elizabeth Warren’s — and encouraging the professor to retire who thought that English majors should be required to take a course on Shakespeare, or that maybe the History department should offer some courses in military history. They renamed programs and defunded centers. One of the chief proposals of Ibram X. Kendi was to diminish faculty governance and give the power instead to administration-created “antiracism task forces.” And so on.

When Tim tells professors to ask if “the university president who yesterday argued for more attention to the diverse expressions of religious faith within the classroom argue[s] tomorrow for more attention to the case for carrying guns or the case for restrictions on abortion,” he’s assuming that the American university should be a place in which everyone thinks that the Second Amendment (as interpreted by SCOTUS at least) is a terrible thing and that no stance on abortion is conceivable other than abortion-on-demand. After all, for his whole professional life, and mine, that’s been the case: if you had different views on those topics, you certainly kept them to yourself.

The point of Tim’s post, I think, is to say that the political status quo in the academy is what should be, world without end, and any change to it must be resisted. Thus his conclusion:

That is what we now must do. Watch for those who will come forward with the aim of making us easier to deliver on a platter to some future monstrosity, and block their path whenever they step forward. Start building the foundations for a maze, a moat, a fortress, a barricade, for becoming as hard to seize as possible. Time for the ivory tower to take on new meaning.

But here’s the thing: It seems to me that Tim wants is an academy in which people like me — people who are profoundly and passionately anti-MAGA but not doctrinaire leftists1 — are unemployable. Because that’s exactly what the status quo is and long has been. This is an old topic with me, but: I have had a wonderful career, but I have had it only because in this country there are a handful of religious colleges and universities, which (among other things) are more politically diverse than their secular counterparts. No matter how much I publish or where I publish it, my open religious beliefs and social-conservatism-on-some-issues make me persona non grata at almost every university in the country. If the entire American university system had been what Tim wants it to be, I’d have been forced to find a different career.

So even though the prospect of a MAGA march through the academic institutions fills me with absolute disgust, I also think that maybe, just maybe, if academics with Tim’s politics had been somewhat more tolerant of academics like me, it needn’t have come to this. Tim himself has said some really nice things about my work in the past, but I do wonder, if he and I happened to be in the same discipline, he could support the idea of having me as a colleague. (But of course, even if he could, I’d lose the departmental vote.)

Tim tells us: “Ask that your institution write a mission statement, a values declaration, a promise for the future that no matter what happens, your institution stands for democracy, for freedom, for rights, for openness, for truth.” But I don’t think that the humanities departments in American colleges and universities have recently stood for any of those things: they have instead stood for a distinctively Left interpretation of some of those things. (“Openness” certainly never meant openness to me, or any number of other Christian and/or conservative scholars I could name.) A university whose direction is set by Christopher Rufo certainly won’t be concerned with democracy, freedom, rights, openness, and truth — but then neither would be a university whose direction is set by Ibram X. Kendi. And if the choice were between Rufo and Kendi, then we’d all lose — all academics, and all Americans.

So I’m hoping that won’t be the choice — that, or anything like it. I hope that MAGA attempts to conscript and/or control universities fail utterly. But I also hope that strategies to keep universities ideologically unanimous fail. I’d love to see the clash between these two intolerant visions lead to some kind of compromise, some toleration (however uneasy) of diverse political views. Sometimes bad people wear what Tim calls “the mask of pragmatism and accommodation,” but pragmatism and accommodation are genuine options also, in a politically diverse environment, and typically not evil ones. But sometimes I feel that I’m the only academic who thinks so.

1    I continue to be unable to offer a brief description of my politics. Maybe “Christian anarcho-subsidiarist”?

Garth Hudson, R.I.P.

When Charlie Watts died in 2021, I wrote, “This feels like a big one” — and it did, it was. But the death yesterday of Garth Hudson is a bigger one for me personally; I’m genuinely grieving. 

Of all the legendary musical groups of the rock era, The Band is the most difficult to assess. They weren’t around for all that long, and they made some indifferent music. But only Bob Dylan rivals them — and doesn’t obviously excel them — as the embodiment of what Greil Marcus called the music of “the old, weird America,” and what Dylan himself called “historical-traditional music.” Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing. 

You have to remember how much the Discourse of the late Sixties was dominated by talk of the “Generation Gap,” how strong the tensions were between the young and the old, to recognize the vital and wonderfully generous thing The Band did when they made an album, Music from Big Pink, that you opened up only to see a photo of the band members with their families: 

It seems like a small thing … but it wasn’t. It was a powerful statement about the bonds that hold us firm to our past, about the people and places we belong to. And their music made that statement even more powerfully, especially in “the brown album” — the one called simply The Band, which I think is the single finest recording of that era. The Beatles were the best group of that time, and created the greatest body of work, but for albums — well, it’s The Band and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and then everything else trailing well behind. Or so I say. Give a listen and discover for yourself. 

Richard Manuel died in 1986, Rick Danko in 1999, Levon Helm in 2012, Robbie Robertson in 2023 — but as long as Garth remained, that musical world seemed still a living world. Now it recedes into the past. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t linked to it — listening to the music of The Band is enough to remind us of that. But for all those guys to be gone now … it’s tough. 

humans

From a handout I’ll give to my class today, though without the accompaniment of the Great Bruce.

Pico della Mirandola, from the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486):

God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought Himself of bringing forth man. Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders. Still, it was not in the nature of the power of the Father to fail in this last creative élan; nor was it in the nature of that supreme Wisdom to hesitate through lack of counsel in so crucial a matter; nor, finally, in the nature of His beneficent love to compel the creature destined to praise the divine generosity in all other things to find it wanting in himself.

From Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), by François Rabelais, Gargantua writes a letter to his son Pantagruel:

And even though Grandgousier, my late father of grateful memory, devoted all his zeal towards having me progress towards every perfection and polite learning, and even though my toil and study did correspond very closely to his desire – indeed surpassed them – nevertheless, as you can well understand, those times were neither so opportune nor convenient for learning as they now are, and I never had an abundance of such tutors as you have. The times were still dark, redolent of the disaster and calamity of the Goths, who had brought all sound learning to destruction; but, by the goodness of God, light and dignity have been restored to literature during my lifetime: and I can see such an improvement that I would hardly be classed nowadays among the first form of little grammar-schoolboys, I who (not wrongly) was reputed the most learned of my century as a young man.

Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored: Greek – without which it is a disgrace that any man should call himself a scholar – Hebrew, Chaldaean, Latin; elegant and accurate books are now in use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration just as artillery, on the contrary, was invented through the prompting of the devil. The whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of very learned teachers and of the most ample libraries, such indeed that I hold that it was not as easy to study in the days of Plato, Cicero nor Papinian as it is now.

Martin Luther, from his commentary on Genesis 3 (1545):

This original state of things shows how horrible the fall of Adam and Eve was, by which we have lost all that most beautifully and gloriously illumined reason, and all that will which was wholly conformed to the Word and will of God. For by the same sin and ruin we have lost also all the original dignity of our bodies, so that now, it is the extreme of baseness to be seen “naked,” whereas originally that nudity was the especial and most beautiful and dignified privilege of the human race, with which they were endowed of God above all the beasts of the creation. And the greatest loss of all these losses is, that not only is the will lost, but there has followed in its place a certain absolute aversion to the will of God. So that man neither wills nor does any one of those things which God wills and commands. Nay, we know not what God is, what grace is, what righteousness is; nor in fact what sin itself is which has caused the loss of all.

These are indeed horrible defects in our fallen nature, to which they, who see not and understand not, are more blind than moles. Universal experience indeed shows us all these calamities; but we never feel the real magnitude of them until we look back to that unintelligible but real state of innocency, in which there existed the perfection of will, the perfection of reason and that glorious dignity of the nakedness of the human body. When we truly contemplate our loss of all these gifts and contrast that privation with the original possession of them, then do we, in some measure, estimate the mighty evil of original sin.

Great causes of gross error therefore are created by those who extenuate this mighty evil of original sin, who speak of our corrupt nature after the manner of philosophers, who would represent human nature as not thus corrupted. For such men maintain that there remain, not only in the nature of man, but in the nature of the devil also, certain natural qualities which are sound and whole. But this is utterly false. What and how little remains in us that is good and whole, we do indeed in some measure see and feel. But what and how much we have lost, they most certainly see not who dispute about certain remnants of good being still left in human nature. For most certainly a good and upright and perfect will, well-pleasing to God, obedient to God, confiding in the Creator, and righteously using all his creatures with thanksgiving, is wholly lost. So that our fallen will makes out of God a devil and dreads the very mention of his name; especially when hard pressed under his judgments. Are these things, I pray you, proofs that human nature is whole and uncorrupted?

things made and in-the-making

A while back I commented on a post by Robin Sloan in which he says this:

Sometimes I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent.

I like this, but I want to make a distinction between resting from your labors on a particular project and resting from your labors altogether, through retirement or death.

My attitude toward the works I have completed — at at this point that’s fifteen books and a couple of hundred essays and reviews — is that I have never finished anything to my own satisfaction, I have only been forced to abandon it. That’s why I am psychologically incapable of re-reading anything I’ve written. I can retrieve small chunks of it for one purpose or another, but I’ve never re-read anything of mine longer than a blog post. I learned early in my career that revisiting what I’ve published brings only regrets. So: “Fare forward, voyagers.”

Maybe for this reason I am drawn toward the work that is never finished in the sense that it’s never handed over to someone else, never put in a complete form. Take Montaigne’s Essays for instance, a page of which, in a modern edition or translation, looks like this: 

Montaigne published the first edition of the Essays in 1580 – that text is marked by [a]. Then in 1588 He published a second edition with new essays and revisions to the earlier ones: those are marked [b]. He continued up to the end of his life to add new essays and revise the old ones: those most recent changes are marked [c]. Montaigne died at age 59, but if he had lived twenty years longer we might have had further editions of the Essays and, consequently, texts with markings of [d], [e], and [f].

I love this. “Essay” means “trial” or “attempt,” of course, and thus Montaigne’s book by its very nature invites second and third thoughts, second and third trials: iteration that ends only when you die, or if you grow tired of it all and retreat into a life of pure contemplation.

I’m a big fan of contemplation, but I tend to contemplate most effectively when I have a pen in my hand. And a notebook provides endless opportunities to revisit, rethink, fail again, fail better. Though I never re-read my published works, I re-read my notebooks regularly: I consider such revisitations essential to thought, to growth, to intellectual and moral and spiritual maturation.

For me — for my personal wants and needs and satisfactions — my notebooks are the most important writing I do. Then come my essays, and then my books. I think I have written some good books, and they’re made a place for themselves in the world — I’ve sold about 300,000 copies all told, most of those The Narnian and How to Think — but if I had not been in a profession that places a premium on the publication of books, I don’t know that I ever would’ve written a single one. (Maybe a collection or two of essays, though, if I had found any publisher charitable enough to put them out.) It has been good for me to be pushed towards book-writing, but it’s not my natural métier — the essay is. And maybe the notebook is, even more. 

But what about blog posts, like this one? This blog stands at the juncture of the essay and the notebook. Some of these posts are essays, though usually briefer than the ones that get published by other people; others are basically notebook entries shared with the public. What makes a post an essay is completeness: a story told to the end, a train of thought traced to its destination, a pattern of ideas or responses fully woven. Conversely, you can tell that a post is essentially a notebook entry when I say something like “I’ll revisit this idea later” or “Perhaps a topic for a future post.”

In my recent series of posts on the family I was writing on a topic so complex, so nuanced, so difficult that it would have been an impertinence, I think, to issue a finished word. I would dishonor the multiplicity of people’s experiences, the multiplicity of my own experience, by offering anything like a complete statement. So I put some thoughts ought there, related them to one another as best I could, and now I am pausing to reflect. Probably there will be more later. On a blog there can always be more later, and one of the best uses of hyperlinks is to link to your earlier self, even (or especially) when you think your earlier self was wrong about something of left something out.

It’s great to finish (or in my case abandon) something: to tell this story, to make this argument as well as you possibly can, crafting it with all your skill, and sending it out into the world to make its way as best it can. But there’s a place also — and I feel this increasingly strongly as I get older — for the tentative and incomplete, for “I’ll revisit this later,” for “Oh, I forgot this when I wrote that” — for, maybe above all, being corrected by charitable but honest readers and then being able to try again on the basis of what the lawyers call “information and belief.” I am always, and hope I always will be, gathering more information and developing my beliefs. “Old men ought to be explorers.”

two quotations on what exists

From a NYT story on a woman with an AI boyfriend:

Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real. “What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

Iris Murdoch:

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.