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February 14 - February 18, 2025
‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.’ – WILLIAM JAMES
Art of being wise
Weil, as the scholar Alain Supiot explains, ‘was one of those people who never manage to abstract themselves from the torrent of suffering in which humanity finds itself engulfed.’
Abstract oneself
My favorite example here concerns a former sneaker-firm executive and dedicated Trump opponent named Erik Hagerman, profiled in the New York Times in 2018, where he was presented as a kind of anti-Simone Weil: instead of trying to absorb the whole world’s pain, he’d opted to live as if the upheavals in American public life weren’t happening at all. He consumed no news whatsoever, and when he left his home in rural Ohio to get coffee and a scone from his local café, he wore headphones playing white noise, so he couldn’t hear fellow customers talking politics. Unsurprisingly, conservative news
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Hagerman
‘Beyond the mountains, more mountains.’ – HAITIAN PROVERB
Beyond the mountains
That’s a message we begin receiving early in life: ‘My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing,’ reads one splendid anonymous comment on a Washington Post article by the advice columnist Carolyn Hax. ‘I’m 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that’s worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I’m not interested in burning myself [out] by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.’
Half-assing
