Kindle Notes & Highlights
Momentary pleasures of hedonism are distinct from deeper and more lasting satisfaction; and in order to achieve such satisfaction, we need to reflect on who we are and what our lives are for. We cannot be fully human without thinking about what being human means.
The same philosophers who made distinctions between momentary hedonism and deeper satisfaction thought that no matter what material comforts or refinements we enjoy, we cannot attain the good life without some idea of shaping purpose, or conviction of meaningfulness and worth, pervading our moments and activities.
The question for most of us is not how to retreat from the world, but how to retain our bearings within it, and to live more fully rather than just more busily. The temperate answer I want to propose is that we need to alternate periods of energetic activity with relaxed receptivity, directed effort with intervals of goal-less, undutiful leisure.
is easy, amidst the plethora of diversions and options offered by our societies, to lose track of why we do what we do, what we truly want, and what it is about our activities or our lives that we value and love.
True engagement – the ability to give ourselves deliberately and unreservedly to a task or a personal interaction – arises from a clear sense of our own desires, goals and intentions.
it is only if we periodically disengage, that we can become truly and effectively engaged.
We may hold to the subliminal belief that occupation – of whatever kind – is virtuous, and laziness a vice. Or we may be afraid of falling into a Kierkegaardian state of emptiness, or what in early Christianity was called sloth – a vice leading straight to the ultimate sin of despair.
alert receptivity. Allowing ourselves to notice, to be open to our surroundings, is a way of awakening our curiosity in the world outside ourselves.
we need to give some time not only to idle rumination, but to more strenuous self-investigation and introspection – to the cultivation of self-knowledge.
self-knowledge is a virtue, but because its lack diminishes us, and makes us anxious and unhappy. It also – quite crucially – prevents us from orienting ourselves in the world, or making well-founded choices, or knowing what we believe or want.
How can the thing that is ourselves be opaque or mysterious to the thing we are?
In a sense, we are observing ourselves all the time.
we rush ceaselessly through disconnected activities without checking in on our moods or motives, we can lose track of ourselves; in a sense, we lose the ability to experience our experiences.
In our abbreviated digital communications (whether on Twitter or on Facebook), we present and express the most transitory and superficial aspects of our personalities.
We ‘know’ ourselves through the selfies we take of ourselves, and which give us back the visual surfaces of our activities and selves.
our addiction to recording our experiences moment by moment may deflect us from our immediate responses and sensations, and prevent us from experiencing the moment in its non-virtual actuality in the first place.
What we are in danger of losing in our predilection for producing and conveying instantaneous information is the very idea of inwardness, and of understanding ourselves not only in the immediate moment, but through extended time.
In sending intimate disclosures to dozens or hundreds of ‘friends’ in our network, or ‘sharing’ images of ourselves in various states of dress or undress, we lose the habit, or the ability, to contain our experiences within ourselves and come to understand them from within. The silence of quiet rumination can seem to us to be a state of frightening emptiness and stasis.
In our time, as many contemporary psychoanalysts have noted, the failure to understand what is going on within ourselves is likely to come not from repression, but from the scattering and fragmentation of our internal lives – the inability to figure out the connections between our disparate activities, or even to remember them, or to give them personal meaning. This of course mirrors the fragmentation of our external lives, and is greatly exacerbated by digital technologies and the scattering of attention – of mind and feeling – they encourage.
we are to remain internally and intellectually alive, we need to make time not only for introspection but for imaginative exploration – for following our intellectual predilections, say, or our aesthetic impulses, without keeping an eye on the outcome or the specific goal.
because we want to be in the swim, to read what ‘everyone’ is reading, or as a form of high-minded consumerism,
books (good books, that is; books that matter) are the best aid to extended thought and imaginative reflection we have invented.
books that they require us to focus our attention and to slow down our mental time; to follow the thread of thought or argument until new insight or knowledge is reached.
In various studies of such things, the urge to know has been shown to be deeply ravelled with erotic energies, and following its direction and urgency leads to the best kind of reading.
imaginative literature is the art form most capable of encompassing all dimensions of human experience: the outer and the inner world,
To enter a very good, or a great book (the latter are admittedly rare, but there are good reasons why we refer to them as classics), is to enter a world: the world created by the text, and the implicit world of the author’s voice, style, sensibility – indeed, the author’s soul and mind.
Eventually, if we are drawn in, we can have the immensely pleasurable experience of full absorption – a kind of simultaneous focusing of attention and losing our self-consciousness as we enter the imaginative world of the book.
But when we open a book we also enter a conversation between ourselves – a particular reader, with particular responses – and the text. Plunging into a novel or memoir and becoming absorbed in it calls for a certain receptivity, the willingness to ‘listen’ attentively to the voice of the author and the minds of others.
Delving into a book brings us into connection with other worlds and lives.
it is a form of solitude which banishes loneliness. It can offer the consolation of knowing we are not alone, in our pleasures or in our suffering. It is in situations of deprivation that the value of reading – the deep need for books – becomes more vividly apparent.
plunging into the novel assured her that human reality was richer than the constricted world she lived in.
the kind of segmented, bite-sized reading we do on the internet fragments and constricts the ‘space to think’, instead of expanding it; in a sense, it reduces or even rubbishes our mental experience.
the visual arts are thought to be satisfying because they allow us to perceive certain regularities and underlying structures in what is depicted – and the perception of such regularities is important to our understanding of the world. If we cannot see patterns, we literally cannot see – cannot understand what is in front of us.
art reminds us that we are attached to the world through our physical perceptions
Time is the material of music, and part of its meaning; and in order to listen to a musical composition, we have to not only give it the requisite amount of real time, but to submit – give ourselves over – to its patterning of tempo and rhythm, its moulding of temporality.
But she needed to give herself the space for thought in order to really know, so to speak, what she was doing, and to attain a kind of cognitive consonance about her decision – to make not only a well-calculated choice, but one to which she could give her full assent. Once she had given full brief to her motives and reasons, her uncertainty and ambivalence were replaced by a bracing sense of clarity. She knew what she wanted to do.
states of flow, we often lose our sense of ordinary clock-time; a moment might expand as we home in on a detail, or several hours pass as we concentrate on solving a problem.
Purposeful concentration is one of the conditions of flow,
It is possible that states of flow are easier to attain in work that draws on physical skills as well as mental ones, and therefore helps us achieve a kind of mind–body integration.
no area of experience has been affected more dramatically by digital technology than relationships in all their guises – from friendship to sociability to collegiality and, indeed, intimacy and love.
Authentic human contact is the basic foodstuff of the psyche; in its absence, we become internally arid and diminished.
Our pleasure centres light up when our mobile phones signal a message, and we routinely allow virtual communications to interrupt our in vivo exchanges.
Real y patetico...
There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence.
The seemingly endless availability of potential partners, combined with the almost complete lack of restrictions on sexual behaviour, mitigate against commitment;
There are many ways to live; but to live meaninglessly is to miss your life.
