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noticing when my students are and are not paying attention, when they’re puzzled, when they’re annoyed, when they’re bored. It commits me to answering them as faithfully as I can when they wonder (either openly or covertly) why we do what we do, read what we read, ask what we ask. And I am very glad that I made that vow, because it has prevented me from settling prematurely on easy and facile accounts of my calling as a teacher.
Like the poet Yeats, I often find that thought, and indeed life as a whole, is like a winding stair: you keep revisiting the same points, the same themes, but at higher levels of experience. From those ascending vantage points a given idea, a given feeling, a given perception, is recognizably itself and yet somehow different. One’s understanding of it becomes richer, sometimes in ways that are continuous, sometimes in ways that are revolutionary.
When my students are taking a quiz there’s nothing for me to do, so my hand then drifts toward my phone—or did, until I finally forced myself to stop carrying my phone around; and my twitchiness during quizzes was among the chief factors that pushed me to that decision. That twitchiness—that constant low-level anxiety at being communicatively unstimulated—seems so normal now that we may be slightly disconcerted when it’s absent.
“Interrogate the writings of the wise,” he counsels. Asking them to tell you how you can Get through your life in a peaceable tranquil way. Will it be greed, that always feels poverty-stricken, That harasses and torments you all your days? Will it be hope and fear about trivial things, In anxious alternation in your mind? Where is it virtue comes from, is it from books? Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned? What is the way to become a friend to yourself? What brings tranquility? What makes you care less?
what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “pressure for foresight,” the compulsion (perhaps a better translation of Elias’s German) to look ahead into a future for which we must plan, but which—the future being the future—we cannot see.
the fear that if they make the wrong choices they may not be able to overcome their own errors. And my long experience as a teacher confirms this interpretation.
Horace exhorts Lollius, exhorts himself, exhorts us, to shift our attention from those compulsions toward questions that really and always matter—“Where is it virtue comes from?”—because even by just exploring those questions, even if we fail to answer them, we’re pushing back against the tyranny of everyday anxieties. We’re resisting, or evading, the stresses that a condition of always-on connectivity inevitably brings to us, in large part because when we are so connected we are constantly driven to compare ourselves to others who have made better choices than we have.
in danger of having his mind colonized by anxieties large and small.
as L. P. Hartley famously says at the outset of his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
going to argue here that the sense of defilement is to a great degree evoked first by information overload—a sense that we are always receiving more sheer data than we know how to evaluate—and a more general feeling of social acceleration—the perception that the world is not only changing but changing faster and faster. What those closely related experiences tend to require from us is a rough-and-ready kind of informational triage.
Given that what cultural critic Matthew Crawford calls the “attentional commons” is constantly noisy—there
we also learn to be ruthless in deciding how to deploy our attention. We only have so much of it, and often the decision of whether or not to “pay” it must be made in an instant. To avoid madness we must learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity.
And if the claim that Lafferty’s world prefigures ours strikes you as an exaggeration, I would ask you, dear reader, to remember the next-to-last thing that social media taught you to be outraged about. I bet you can remember only the last one.
So it’s no wonder younger folks don’t have any cultural memory or taste for aesthetic adventure. In pre-school their parents played the most recent kids’ music in the car for them instead of the older music the parents actually wanted to listen to. And at home the kids only watched kid-centric YouTube channels or superhero or Pixar movies instead of suffering through dad’s weird favorite old movies. So when the kids hit elementary school, they only have ears and eyes for whatever was being marketed to their age group that year. The same thing carried forth to junior high, high school, and
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“For the principle and proper work of history [is] to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providentially towards the future.”
“Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” “Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.
You need the personal density that will hold you firmly until, in your considered and settled judgment, it is time to move. And to acquire the requisite density you have to get out of your transitory moment and into bigger time. Personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth.
It is a profound struggle to overcome the gravitational pull of the moment, to achieve escape velocity from presentism.
when you sum together these presentist forces—information overload, social acceleration, pervasive algorithmic marketing, a historical awareness that celebrates progress and escape—it is difficult to push back against them.
W. H. Auden: “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
note the obvious differences Between each sort and type, But we are more alike, my friends, Than we are unalike. I devoutly hope that this is true, and that it is true of those with whom we connect across time as well as across space and social class and race and sex. But I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.
The past that ties us to people in ways that hurt us also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible.
Isn’t this strange mixture of vices and virtues, foolishness and wisdom, blindness and insight, simply the human condition? (And, if we’re going to be honest about it, my condition, and yours?)
Nobody thinks about everything; nobody can think about everything; our cognitive limitations are such that there will always be a great many topics that we will take no real thought over, but will simply believe what the people around us, for the most part, believe. These views can scarcely be dignified by the term “belief”: they’re more like the intellectual equivalent of ambient noise, always there in the background but never noticed, never brought to consciousness for reflection.
When technology doesn’t promote certain admirable choices, we struggle. We practice triage.
“It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well, could have escaped recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things.”
we all need better strategies for making decisions, because the defaults we have inherited have costs that we are rarely aware of—and one of the purposes of this book is to increase our awareness of those costs.
By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the moment. Our attention thereby becomes more free.
there’s a point at which a hyperdeveloped feature can become a bug.
we are highly selective in what elements of a historical person’s character we are willing to take seriously. We tend to consider only those elements that reflect the dominant concerns of our moment, which are not the only concerns that are relevant to human judgment.
no one should be defined by the worst thing that they ever did.
Consider in this light the Founders of the United States. It seems to me that what we ought to say about them is that they rarely understood the full implications of their best ideas.
It is surely “more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled.”
The question they faced was one, not of good versus evil, but of competing goods.
As the English historian C. V. Wedgwood wrote in the introduction to her great history of the English Civil War, “The highest ideals put forth in this generation of conflict were noble; the men who fought or worked for them were less noble than the ideals, for the best of men do not consistently live on the highest plane of virtue, and most men live far below it.”
In many ways, this is the human predicament: We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas.
If we understand that this pervasive inconsistency, this inability to transcend the interests of people who look or act or believe just like us, is universal, then perhaps—just perhaps—we will be less likely to believe that we are immune to it. We will perceive that nothing exempts us from the same temptations and the same frailty. And perhaps, knowing that, we will be more inclined to forgive such frailty in others, just as we (most of us anyway) forgive ourselves.
Nothing is more intrinsic to human nature than the desire to believe that benefits can and do come without costs, that we can fix certain problems without introducing new ones. We certainly don’t want to admit that to those who would oppose productive change, lest we give them leverage to argue that the change shouldn’t have been made at all.*
But I would be lying to you and deceiving myself if I denied that that mobility came with costs. I have not had the intimacy with family that my parents and grandparents had; I have not known lifelong friendships. When I say this I do not wish my life to be different, but it is good for me to face what I have missed, if for no other reason than to help me find appropriate compensations and consolations.
“until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings.” And this is correct. In the mystery plays of medieval England—which reenacted stories from the Bible—the biblical characters talked, acted, and dressed like ordinary Englishmen. In many Renaissance paintings, biblical figures are dressed like people of the painter’s time and are placed in obviously European, rather than Palestinian, landscapes.
“If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization—there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600.” At any time and place, a biblical character dressed like a Renaissance courtier is significantly less jarring than one wearing a business suit and lace-up oxfords.
For Auden, if Christianity is always and everywhere true, then you have to find a way to translate the Bible’s concerns into the experience of your own day.
He wrote a number of Moralia—moral essays, essays that offered sage advice for good living—but he came to feel that mere precepts were inadequate for communicating to people the best way to live. We need examples of virtue and vice in action in order to see their outlines clearly, and the lives of the Great wrote their examples of virtue and vice in very large letters that all could clearly read. Thus he emphasized that his lives were biographies, not histories, which did not mean that they were inaccurate but rather than he sought primarily to include evidence of character, which might come
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The most durable structures raised in stone by the strength of man, the mightiest monuments of his power, crumble into dust, while the words spoken with fleeting breath, the passing expression of the unstable fancies of his mind, endure not as echoes of the past, not as mere archaeological curiosities or venerable relics, but with a force and life as new and strong, and sometimes far stronger than when they were first spoken, and leaping across the gulf of three thousand years, they light the world for us to-day.
Surely we have lost something vital when we have lost the power to be startled, even offended, by the voices from the past. To say “This text offends me, I will read no further” may be shortsighted; but to read a “great book” from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.
When we speak our thought, we want more than agreement, we want addition: we want our friend to develop that thought, or to push back at it, if ever so gently. We want to get further along in our understanding of ourselves and our world than we were when we first spoke, and that cannot happen through mere affirmation.
Calvino says something very shrewd and very subtle about this: “A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.”
wrestled with the poem on its own terms for years before finally realizing that the experiences of our time actually bring to light something real and true about this great poem that would have been invisible to those among our ancestors who most warmly venerated it.
“we catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught.”
AEH rightly understands the dangers of assuming an easy and immediate kinship with the past—he knows better than to become Schliemann, or even the young Churchill—and that any genuine kinship with our ancestors must be earned through hard mental work. But if what the young Housman says were not true, there would scarcely be any reason to read these works at all.
